Street Symphony (3 page)

He wasn’t sure whether it was the unusual food that had upset his stomach or Ella, with her too-flowery clothes and man-eater smile, who seemed to wait for him around every corner.
Oh, there you are, Roland. What a smart sweater you’re wearing. Somebody loves you. Isn’t it wonderful here? Don’t you feel inspired!

If he’d known the bathrooms were shared, he’d’ve stayed at home, at the home that was not his home but his daughter’s, hers and Gord’s. And Katy and Jon, his grandchildren, their home too. But not his home. Gord had kindly built bookshelves along the walls of his ten-by-ten cell, and there was a small screen opposite the bed for evenings when he didn’t want to watch TV with the family. He’d paced this allotted space and knew that it wasn’t enough. And the shelves were so close together his art books had to lie flat on their sides instead of standing upright.

“Are you with us, Roland? I was just saying how important it is that older people like you tell their stories. Like Ella, you’re connected with the past.”

Oh, thank you, Jody!
A nice-looking woman, about thirty-five, dressed in jeans and a colourful top, she was heroically trying to drag these five novices into a world of literature that would most likely bar the door to them.
Them
being Iain, a twenty-three-year-old with dramatic intent; Ella, late sixties, the only poet; middle-aged Marina, seeking to recover and record her childhood on the prairies. And then there was Aritha. From Nova Scotia and not a novice, she’d sold two stories online and was now writing a novel. Roland tried not to stare at her neat figure and fine Modigliani face. They were a truly mixed lot. He guessed they were likely the only would-be writers who’d applied to take this course halfway between Victoria and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. The only ones with time and money to spare.

“So Roland, we’ve all read your two pages.”

Iain giggled. Tall and pale, reddish hair brushed up in short spikes. If he wasn’t on drugs, then he had a nervous complaint. Either way, he likely needed help. He’d been working for the owners of the house, and the course was a parting gift from them. He helped with the garden and in the kitchen but joined in the classes and took his meals with the group.

“Perhaps you’d like to contextualise.”

Roland had learned what that meant yesterday morning when Aritha told them why she’d plunged into the erotic mystery genre. The afternoon lesson had taught him the importance of
metaphor
, not to be confused with
simile
. He’d been talking without paying attention to these figures of speech that had likely been dropping from his mouth like ill-placed pebbles all his life. In future he’d be more careful:
Using extra drywall there, Gord, is like putting on two overcoats.

Iain was pointing at him, and Roland hoped there wouldn’t come a time in the next few days when he felt a need to say something sharp to the boy. But the class was waiting.

“I’m writing about a time,” he said, “when there were no cars, when unmade roads were littered with horse shit and my great-grandfather travelled across the Atlantic with his two children in a sailing ship that took several weeks to get from Southampton to Halifax.”

“Fascinating,” Ella said.

“I’d like to say again that everything here is new to me. I’ve spent my life, my working life, in an office or on a building site, and my reading has mostly consisted of specs and plans and, for relaxation, books about art and architecture.”

There was a pause. Were they going to despise him for his practical life, his non-fiction life, his past life?

Then Aritha said, “So, Roland, what’s the point of you?”

He sat back. He trembled. She’d asked a terrible question. By the time her meaning had sunk in, it was too late. The question existed. It settled into his mind like a nail into a shoe. What indeed was the point of him? The point of him now, at this point in time, a lodger, retired, a drag on the market who spent part of every day trying not to be a nuisance?

He looked around at the others, who were staring, not sure whether he’d had a slight stroke or just lost the thread.
Are we engaged in a kind of mutual fraud here? What is the point of any of us?

“So you’re asking me really who is speaking. Whose voice this story belongs to. Does it have to be only one voice? Can’t all the people in the story speak or think for themselves?”

“Ah,” Jody said. “Well, yes they can, but it’s easier for people starting out to fix on one person’s point of view.”

So now I’m a person “starting out”.

“Well then, I’ll choose one of the children, Elsie. Their mother had died, you see, and their father thought he could make a better life for the family in Canada, but it didn’t work out.”

“Poor man,” Ella said.

“You could switch points of view,” Iain suggested. “Next chapter, the father. Then maybe the captain of the ship.”

“There speaks a playwright,” Jody said. “A very interesting idea, Iain. But I think perhaps Roland’s right. It should be the girl’s story.”

They spent an hour going over his little attempt at narrative, and by the time they were done he was exhausted and wondered why he’d signed up for this form of torture. Iain was giggling and sniffing again. Marina had settled into her dream state, and Aritha looked as though spiders were nibbling at her entrails. And then it was lunchtime.

Lentils had never been a favourite. Here at The Grove, they were a staple. It was no place for carnivores. The table was set simply. To save paper and confusion, each person had a cloth napkin and a matching plastic ring. Roland’s were red. He ate the unusual casserole and thought of steak.

Iain leant across the table and said to him, “So we’re the only guys, you and me.”

Roland smiled as he suppressed the unacceptable
and I’m not sure about you
that came into his head, and said, “You’re from Vancouver?”

Jody was talking about the importance of character. Marina was gazing eastward as though she could see across the strait and through the mountains to the flat, golden fields beyond, a place where it was always sunny and everyone was kind. Ella put her napkin down, pushed her chair back and walked away.

“Inspiration,” Iain said with a mean smile.

Roland thought, I can get through this. I will get through this. When he’d rolled up his napkin and put it into the ring, he went outside and walked round the house, admiring it. Nearly a century old, built when masons knew how to use stone, it was a solid home meant for a well-to-do family that could afford a maid and a couple of gardeners. Ted and Ilsa, the young couple who owned it, now did all the work themselves with occasional help. Was it profitable to cater to small groups like this one? Next week, Writing in Mind would give way to a yoga seminar. Fortunately, as far as he could recall, he had never, ever, once mentioned yoga to his daughter.

Back in his room, he checked his laptop for email messages:
I hope you’re having a great time, Dad. Love, Dorry. We miss you.
So was this trip revenge for the time they’d sent her to camp and she’d hated it? He foresaw a decade of courses: Woodworking for the Inept. Music for the Hard of Hearing. Dancing for Elephants. Making Friends with Your Microwave. What about, When Sex Is Just a Memory? He might teach that one himself.

Before he opened the file titled
Sailing to Canada
, he checked the market figures. Volatile! In three years, four years, it would settle down. Time now maybe to invest in cruise lines, as their stock had fallen again. He looked out the window at the great, glowing rhododendron bush beside the wooden gate. Flowers as red as a heart.
Simile
. As red as Kate’s dress when they were in Bermuda that time. Birds in the trees on
that
island as yellow as bile.
I am unhappy here,
he wrote.
I am also unhappy there. I want to have pictures of women on the walls of my house.
His framed prints were in storage, the golden Klimt and the Augustus John Kate hated. He’d parted with his two Pre-Raphaelites and wished he hadn’t.

Once upon a time there was a man, a widower with one child, a daughter. A strong breeze came and swept him up and carried him to a dark tower. I wanted time to write, but my mind withered and Wednesday came and went.
Alliteration there, but did
write
count? Be bold. Find striking images.
The world is a dog and we are its fleas.
That couldn’t be original. He must have read it somewhere.
Out on the Atlantic, the ship heaving, her father and brothers lying greenly in their cabin, Elsie walked the tilting deck and thought about her father, who had suddenly sold their house and become a man who had slipped from his moorings and wept because he was no longer allowed to have cornflakes for lunch. A man who stayed in his room so as not to go down to the kitchen too early for breakfast.

Next morning Aritha read again from her novel. When she stopped, she thanked the others shyly as if afraid of what they might say.

“What did you think, Roland?” Jody asked. She’d warned them early on that when they were critiquing the others’ work, they were to go beyond
like
and
don’t like
and make helpful suggestions. Now she was looking at him, waiting for him to say something credible about Aritha’s first chapter.

“As I told you at the beginning,” he said, “I was a builder. Building I know. Literature I don’t know. But I think I can recognize sound structure, a good foundation. When I see that, I trust that the rest of the house will be solid. And I want to hear more and to see into the other rooms, if you’ll excuse the metaphor, Jody.”

She smiled. Aritha smiled. Gold star for Roland.

“But,” he said, “I would like to point out, regarding the Sebastian character, that men in their sixties and seventies haven’t
necessarily given up on – life.”

He was very glad he didn’t have to say whether he liked it or not, because he thought the sex scene was grotesque and the main character hateful. And right then, while the others were laughing, it came to him, leapt on him, like a tiger onto fresh meat: He’d been smarter than the old guy on the blasted heath, and while he had, much too soon after Kate died and left him desperate, sold their house and moved in with Dorry, he had not parted with the money. “I’ll pay you rent, darling,” he’d said, “until I’ve made a few decisions.” And now he
was
ready to decide. It was only a matter of fighting his way through a thicket of objections.

Thursday’s rule was a stern, “Beware the adverb”. He listened to Marina as she read beautifully, and he easily understood why she yearned longingly for days sadly gone, as her life at the moment was deeply uncertain. Roland wanted to hold her gently in his arms and tell her forcefully that everything would be fine. The best he could do was to sit next to her at dinner and tell her that her book would mean a great deal to many people, although he had no idea if that might be true.

Friday, metaphorically speaking, was a month of Sundays in that it seemed to go on forever. He couldn’t wait to get
home
and begin to get out from under the blanket of kindness that was smothering the life out of him. Phrases came into his head.
Dorry darling, I like living here, but…you and Gord and the children don’t need an old man around.
Too self-pitying, that one.
And besides, the way Gord is renovating the basement is driving me nuts!
If they’d been unpleasant, if his grandchildren had been rude and rowdy, it would have been easy simply to get up and go, to walk out either in a huff or high dudgeon. When he suggested moving out, he would hurt his daughter’s feelings. Her face would crease as it used to do when she was a kid, and perhaps there’d be tears. On the other hand, maybe he valued himself too highly. If he moved out, the whole family might dance about with relief and gladness.

Saturday he woke early and began to pack. Then he unpacked his shirts and underwear, counted his change and went down to the laundry room in the basement. The boy was there watching his clothes tumble around in the dryer.

“You going back to Vancouver after this, Iain?”

“I’m on the road. Don’t really have a place. Kind of living out of my car right now. You know how it is.”

Roland only knew that his own life was a blank in that respect. Due to fate or fortune, he’d always had a bed to sleep in, a place, a family. He wanted to offer the man money but was afraid it would seem patronizing. He could only say, “I’m kind of between homes myself at the moment. Where are you going next?”

“Mexico. I’ve got a grant, three thousand bucks. I need to do some research for the play. I’ll drive down. Find odd jobs on the way. My mom’s moved to St. John’s. New husband. New-found-land.”

Roland saw a movie script: Older man – dammit, he was only seventy-one – goes on road trip with young playwright. They would take turns driving, live on hot dogs and beer and talk about baseball. This guy, this seemingly hopeless man, had something he’d never known: the freedom to do exactly whatever the hell he wanted.

“I envy you,” he said.

After he’d turned on the washing machine, he paused – nay, he
posed
– by the door, but no invitation came. And he laughed at himself for the momentary dream. He spent the next two hours checking out real estate sites online and found three places in Burnaby that would bear looking at. He called an agent and made an appointment. Then he lay down on his hard bed and tried to think of Elsie’s story. What did she wear? Did she think often of her mother? Was her father kind to her? What kind of expressions did kids use in those days?