Sweeter Life (27 page)

The only area of his life where he’d failed at risk management was his friendship with Riley Owen. He had tried to protect his friend, to keep him happy and healthy, especially in those first years after the war. But Riley’s confidence was so shaken, his unhappiness on the farm so palpable, that he seemed to lose the will to do the right thing.

Clarence, a teetotaller, followed his friend into the Wilbury Hotel and tried to cheer him up. Riley would nod and listen and make promises. Occasionally he’d perk up and try something new, like the year he planted a field of pumpkins, or the time he was convinced he’d make it big with eggplants. But he always ended up in worse shape than before, wallowing in his failures. He drank more then, his mood darker and angrier. Sometimes he took it out on Catherine; and Clarence, thinking the alcohol complicated matters, refused to accompany his friend into the hotel anymore. So Riley drank alone, or worse, with men who had even less character than he did.

Clarence, so accustomed to the trade-offs that made life pleasant and predictable, didn’t know how to deal with his friend’s behaviour. It sickened him to see the boy with the golden arm become a slouched and bitter drunk, a man capable of beating a child with a broom handle, of smacking his beautiful wife for trying to intervene. After a while, Clarence gave up on Riley, crossing to the other side of the street if they happened to be walking toward each other.

That went on for the better part of a year, maybe as much as eighteen months. Then one night in early December, he was coming home late from a town council meeting. It was pissing rain, almost sleet, and he saw Riley stumbling along the road by the golf course, without a hat or coat, his pickup likely in a ditch somewhere—it wouldn’t be the first time.

Clarence pulled his truck to the side of the road and opened the passenger door. He knew there’d been more trouble with Hank the past few months. The boy had run off that summer after torching the chicken coop. And the rumour was that Riley was close to losing the farm. So it was pity, more than friendship, that made him stop. It was freezing out there.

Riley slid onto the bench seat without a word, and they drove slowly out to the marsh. Clarence pulled into the parking spot by the house but didn’t turn off the engine; all he wanted was to get home to Ruby and a hot
cup of tea. But Riley turned and in a lumpy-sounding voice said, “Want that glove back yet?” And before Clarence could respond, Riley started to blubber. It was Catherine this and Hank that and what a great big fool he had been, what a stupid, awful man.

In the first lull, Clarence took a deep breath and said, “I’m not sure I want to hear this, Riley. I don’t really know what you want me to do.”

Two nights later, both Riley and Catherine were dead.

Thinking about Riley’s troubles, Clarence was reminded that some things are immutable, or should be. Do your best. Love your kids. Pay your debts. Care for the sick. Stick by your friends. And until recently, he would have added one final, sacred constant: adore Catherine. But sadly, that bright light had faded, especially in the years since Cyrus had gone. The boy had resembled his mother enough that he’d served as a reminder of her beauty and goodness. There had been times in the past when Clarence had cursed the resemblance, but now, with Cyrus gone, Clarence felt some crucial nerve had been severed.

People in town figured it was the cancer that had caused his long, slow decline. And, no question, his health was largely to blame. He felt sometimes as though life were oozing out of him, drop by drop. He was beginning to cut corners on the farm. The yield wouldn’t be as high, but what did it matter? It wasn’t as if they needed the money. He’d mentioned to Ruby at breakfast that morning that he was thinking of retirement.

“Oh, brother. That’ll be the day.”

“Sure,” he said. “Get you one of them condos down by the marina. You’d like that. I know you would.”

She got up from the table, rinsed her teacup and set it on the rack to dry. Without looking up from the sink, she said, “What would
you
do? I don’t know if I could stand it if you were any more miserable than you are now.” She shot him a look. “Giving up never made things better.”

Since breakfast he’d been sitting on the sofa in the barn. Sitting and thinking—that was all he seemed to do anymore. He struggled to his feet and wandered around the orchard a bit, stopping every five minutes or so for a rest. He crossed the yard and began to circle the house, studying the flower beds as though he’d only just noticed them. As he turned the far
corner, he looked in the living room window and saw Ruby crouched beside her table of knick-knacks, her eyes closed, her hands clasping a porcelain figure of Jesus.

The sight of her there, praying like a child, stopped him in his tracks. He was looking into the past at a young girl, long before her parents had moved away or her sister had died or her husband had grown cold and indifferent. He was looking at the present, too, at a woman of fifty-eight years, almost thirty of them married to the same man, a woman who believed in the resurrected Christ, in miracles of love and redemption. But there was the kneeling bride as well, weeping under her veil, weeping in his arms that night in Niagara Falls, and giving him so many years of unquestioning love, honour and respect. This collision of Rubys, her ever-changing face coupled with her perfect constancy, produced an emotion more complicated than he could handle. He turned away from the house and stared across the yard to the barn, wondering what on earth had gotten into him.

FOR TWO SUMMERS IN A ROW
, Janice had flown to Florence with Jonathan Davis. They were attracted by the galleries and museums, especially the Uffizi, but the wine and food were important, too. So was the shopping. On their second visit, they drove to Siena to look at the marble quarries. Janice had already worked with soapstone, alabaster and limestone but knew you weren’t really a sculptor until you had tried your hand at the Carrara marble Michelangelo had made famous. She wanted to see what a piece might cost.

The quarryman, Antonio, liked them immediately—they seemed so young. He knew by the look of them that their purchase would not be made lightly, and he let them look around a bit, took them for a tour of the operation, before he showed Janice a few facts and figures. He had just shipped to New York a block of pure white statuary marble, eight feet high and two feet square, weighing almost a ton. “You see?” he said. A figure on his clipboard had been circled in red pen, a little more than ten million lira. Even with a growing appreciation of how little the lira was worth, the figure made her head spin. Ten million of anything was a lot.

Antonio did some figuring. “Five thousand dollars, U.S.”

That number, so much more comprehensible, was even more depressing. She understood it completely. Carrara was out of her league.

As she was turning to leave, however, Antonio touched her arm and, with a look that was more wince than smile, motioned her into an older section of the warehouse and showed her a misshapen piece that had been sitting there for three years. Altogether the block stood six feet high, but only one of the four sides boasted right angles; the base measured five by seven, the top five by four. And yet the moment she set eyes on it, eyes arguably blurred by the romance of Italy, she saw what she wanted to carve: two wind-blown trees that would lean together and eventually twine. A foundation stone that she and Jonathan might build a life on.

Antonio did some hasty calculations. “This piece—” he tapped the stone with his pen “—
two
tons.” Then, with a grand flourish, he drew a circle on his paper and showed her the clipboard. Five million lira. Twenty-five hundred dollars. In response to her incredulous blinking, he waved his arms at the evidence around her. “Three years,” he said.

She looked to Jonathan, though she knew she would not pass this up. That night she phoned her father and begged him for the money. The next day she gave Antonio a cheque and made shipping arrangements. When Jonathan asked her what she planned to do with her Carrara, she drew the zipper across her lips.

Her silence saved her a painful explanation later on. From the time the marble was moved into her studio in Toronto, she realized she had chosen the wrong image for what she wanted their relationship to be—not a twining of two spirits, not a unity at all, but rather two separate strengths that connect at regular and important intervals for stability and support and, ideally, a passage to somewhere important.

When she broached the subject with Jonathan, he spoke with a frankness that caught her off guard. “People think too much about love,” he said. “What we have here is just another medium for expressing ourselves. I teach, I cook, I play squash, and I live with you. There’s nothing fated here. Nothing carved in stone. We choose what we choose. Bottom line is you’re one of my works in progress, and I’m one of yours.”

After that splash of cold water, she put aside the Carrara and all her
romantic notions. Several months later, she studied the pearlescent mass and gradually began to see a life-sized human figure, a stylized Y that arched backward with arms extended to the sky.

TO CYRUS, THE WORD
changes
could mean only one thing: the chords of a song. When Sonny said, “Let’s run through the changes,” he meant a musical structure, like the one-four-five pattern of your basic blues tune. No other reading came to mind because change was the fabric of their lives—a new town every day, a new hotel, new audience; crossing borders, time zones, latitudes and longitudes; their work itself forever in motion.

But change
was
in the air. On the morning after their concert in Toronto, Ronnie told them about the British tour. “We’ve taken it to a new level, lads. Watch out now. When we return, the press over here will treat you with a new respect. Nothing like a bit of success across the pond to get their attention. And wait till you experience the audiences over there. Jim can tell you—Glasgow and Birmingham and Liverpool—these people love their music.”

Cyrus couldn’t believe his luck. Everything seemed to be clicking into place: his playing, his relationship with Eura and now this. His contentment was short-lived, however. The real face of change greeted him next morning. Eura jabbed him in the side with her elbow and said, “I have something to tell you and it cannot wait.”

He rolled over to kiss her, but she pushed him away. “This good news Ronnie has given us,” she said, “is not so good for me, I think.”

He smiled dreamily. He still couldn’t believe that they had made love. “As long as we’re together, what does it matter?”

She got up on one elbow and looked into his eyes. “I have decided I will quit,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I am quitting. I am tired, you know, of the Jimmy Waters Revival. Maybe I can find a job where I do not feel so much like a fool all the time.”

“You can’t quit, Eura. What about me? What about us?”

She looked away and shrugged, unable to meet his gaze. “Maybe you, too, are needing a change,” she said.

“England
is
a change.”

“And you should go. Maybe you have seen enough of me already. Maybe this has all been a mistake and we should not make it worse.”

“Eura …”

“Maybe it is time that you should just forget about me.”

When he realized that she was serious, he groaned and pulled the blanket over his face. Though England was calling, he already knew his answer. Finding work would be easy; there was no shortage of bands. He might even start his own. But now that Eura had opened her heart to him, he wasn’t about to let her slip away.

Two days later he dropped by Ronnie’s room and told him they were leaving. Ronnie was writing in his day planner. Without looking up, he said, “You shouldn’t tease your old friend, Cyrus.”

“No joke. You’ll have to find someone else.”

Ronnie sat up straighter and gave Cyrus his full attention. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Let me tell you something about Eura, my boy. She is not the sort of woman you share your life with. You are making a terrible mistake. You don’t know her half as well as you think you do.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Cyrus answered. “About her, about me. I’ve been thinking of quitting from day one. I can’t be a sideman forever. I’ve got bigger dreams than that. This just isn’t my scene. It never was.”

“Oh, Cyrus.…”

That tone—of clucking tongue, of shaking head, of wagging finger—he’d been hearing it for as long as he could remember. Only his genuine fondness for Ronnie kept the anger from creeping into his next words. “The timing sucks, I know. But I’ve gotta do this. I’m sorry.”

“I am sorry, too, my friend. But I’ll watch for news of your success.”

O
n a raw March morning in 1981, after a long and sleepless night, Cyrus stood shivering on a westbound subway platform in Toronto, contemplating suicide, weighing its possibilities the way a young boy might heft a stone before a plate glass window. Not that he’d gone underground for that purpose. Suicide was the furthest thing from his mind when he set off that morning. Eura was counting on him. Yet the thought had come to him as he stood there: Why not here? Why not now?

The train blew into the station like a storm of grit and stink, and he tightened his grip on his guitar case and kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. When the cars slowed to the perfect speed, his own image began to take shape in the windows of the passing train—a moving picture, one Cyrus replacing the other at exactly the right moment to create a stationary, if somewhat unsteady, portrait of a man in a green army surplus parka and threadbare jeans, with hunched shoulders and unfashionably long hair.

He recalled Ronnie once pointing to their likeness in the water of a canal and saying, “This is our life, my friend, mere reflections on a world in flux. The more we try to slow it down to inspect it, the more it disappears.” Like everyone else in the band, Cyrus had learned to tune out Ronnie’s chatter. But the image of himself in the train windows, disappearing as the subway
slowed to a halt, brought home the meaning of those words.