Sweeter Life (31 page)

For the better part of two days Cyrus and Eura listened to Ronnie talk. They met him for breakfast at his hotel; they walked up and down neighbourhood streets; they went out to dinner and drove around in his car, and never once did the words stop flowing. He had a plan.

“We’ll call the band ‘Jangle,’ yes? A subtle reference to our young Django here, but, I hope most clearly, a promise of music that will unsettle and excite.”

Ronnie had no interest in the cheap horror of Alice Cooper, or the satanic claptrap of bands like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osborne. Rather he was after something more poetic, more dramatic. “Let us strip the music of its cloak. Take away the sexual pomp and strut, take away the gimmicks and the posing. That Mick Jagger routine is so tiresome. Instead, we will peel away the melody and the rhythm to show the bare beating heart inside.” When Cyrus gave no sign of comprehension, Ronnie said, “There’s a museum in Paris, the Pompidou. Perhaps you know it.”

Cyrus shook his head.

“My dear boy, it is a remarkable building. Imagine: it is built inside out, with its pipes and wires and vents, all its messy inner functions, on the exterior. I see us moving in that direction. Remove pop music’s shiny wrapping and show the blood and nerves inside.”

Cyrus still didn’t understand, but it sounded like something he could embrace. He’d had similar thoughts himself. A return to roots music is how he put it to Eura, songs that come from real life. The prospect of such a thing made the gig at the Laredo seem unbearable, so the next day he phoned and said they were moving on.

For two weeks, Ronnie refused to talk concretely about music. He took them to plays and movies and dance. They went to art galleries and improv clubs. During long candlelit dinners they discussed the state of the world and the nature of love. But what seemed to interest Ronnie more
than anything were the few stories he managed to drag from Cyrus.

“You must tell me about yourself,” he said. “Show me the blood. Show me the nerves. Tell me—” he looked up at the ceiling “—for instance, tell me about that bridge where we first met.”

Cyrus described a young boy dreaming about the future, or lying in the shadows and listening to the creek with his brother; about beautiful April days when pike would cruise up from the lake to spawn, and how Hank would take a pitchfork and spear dozens of them for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of their writhing numbers in a burlap bag.

“The bridge,” Ronnie said, “is a potent symbol. And to hear of you there with your brother brings out the emotional truth of it, does it not? I understand suddenly what it means to you, how it is not a bridge for you at all but a great metalworks poem.” He leaned closer, their faces almost touching. “And what of the brother? Was it ‘Hank’ you said?”

Well, Hank was a different story, one that took many tellings, with false starts and second thoughts and self-censored silences. But over the course of a week, it began to dribble out—their bonds, their fractures, their disparate natures. And in time it all came out—the brushes with the law, the trips to the chicken coop, the fire, the poor guy at the gas station.

Eventually Cyrus began to offer information without prompting. He described how proud he’d been of Izzy for having the courage to leave the way she did. He talked about Janice and Ruby and Clarence, and about his own penchant for exploring and getting lost. He talked about everything but his parents, a story that seemed to defy words.

Eura disliked all this talking. She squirmed when Cyrus started to tell their stories: how they had fallen in love, their first trip to Portland, the dreariness of the gigs over the past few years. To her horror, he even told Ronnie about the tattoos, a transgression she would never forgive.

At the end of his third week in Toronto, Ronnie said, “I have things to do back in New York, I’m afraid. Besides, you now have a job to do here.” He faced Cyrus and rested a hand on each shoulder. “I charge you with a singular responsibility, my young man. Write me the most heartfelt piece of music about your bridge, the bridge where we first met. And as we have discussed, not the bridge itself but the heart inside the bridge.”

Eura raised a more practical matter. “What will we use for money during all of this writing he is supposed to do? He has quit his job.”

Right on cue, Ronnie handed her a cheque for a thousand dollars. “I trust that will be sufficient for this past month or so of inconvenience. While I am in New York I will have my assistant send you a draft for $250 a week as a retainer. It is not a king’s ransom, but if you are frugal, I’m sure you can make ends meet. When I return I will bring the papers that need to be signed. We are on the verge of great things, my friends. Work well.”

He left so quickly that Cyrus didn’t have time to explain he had never written a song before, unless you counted that little ditty he wrote for Eura, and that was only putting words to a B. B. King solo.

JIM RESURFACED A FEW WEEKS
after Ronnie returned to New York, and every newspaper carried the story on the front page. Cyrus barely recognized his old friend in the photo. His hair had been cut to collar length, and his beard was gone, revealing a strong square chin. He’d lost weight, too, and wore a thin white T-shirt, blue jeans and a pair of work boots. He was standing at the gates of a ranch in New Mexico beside a young man who was holding a shotgun.

The reporter explained how he had driven out with the idea of interviewing the famous musician and had been met with No Trespassing signs. Summoning his courage, the reporter walked past the gate and knocked on the door of a tidy ranch house. Just as quickly, Jim and his young friend marched him right back out to the road, where the photographer snapped their picture. To all questions, Jim replied that he was no longer interested in music or fame, and that he had handed over his earthly possessions, as well as all future royalties, to the Worldwide Church of Jim.

Cyrus phoned Ronnie right away.

“This does not surprise me in the least,” Ronnie said. “He has always carried within him the kind of conflict that creates its own spark, its own thunder. It helps to explain his extraordinary success; but his success, I fear, also led to his undoing. It takes a great deal of strength to stand up to something like that. Mark my words, Cyrus. If you do not have your head screwed on, you will lose it.”

Cyrus waited a moment, then asked the question that was gnawing at him. “Are you going down there? You saved him once.”

“From himself. But this is an entirely different situation. Did you look at the young man with the firearm? None other than Jim’s son. And I’ve seen another photo with Jim’s wife in the background, a most formidable woman, believe me. I don’t imagine I could do much in a case like that. Now, what about your writing? Any progress?”

Cyrus searched desperately for a suitable reply. “I’m working hard,” he said at last.

“No doubt, my friend. And it’s going well?”

“I think so. I mean, I’m making progress. I’ll call you as soon as I have something finished.” Then he hung up before he blurted out the truth, that he was getting nowhere because he didn’t know how to proceed. How on earth did you write a song about a bridge?

His lack of progress was not for lack of effort. He rose each morning and played his guitar for hours, stopping only long enough to have lunch with Eura. He played with records, played by himself, laid down chord patterns on his cassette player and tried to come up with catchy melodies, but so far nothing had materialized.

One day, for a change of scenery, he went exploring downtown. He stopped at Long & McQuade and fooled around on a few new guitars, checked out the latest amplifiers. Then he strolled along Spadina, past the El Mocambo, wolfed down some Chinese food at Chungking and bought a pair of black slippers for Eura.

On Queen Street, he walked into a small gallery called the Art Cave. The walls, floor and ceiling were painted matte black; all natural light had been blocked off. Throughout the room there were a few sculptures, and on the wall a handful of oil pastels, each work with a tiny but powerful spotlight trained on it. To his surprise, the largest statue, a stylized human figure nearly seven feet tall, with no arms or legs or head, was the work of Janice Young. According to the small typed card on the wall, the piece was called
Missing Link
and was part of her most successful series,
The Hollow Men
. The price tag was $7,500. A small red dot on the card gave notice that the work had been sold.

Cyrus inspected the statue more closely. The centre of the figure was shot through with a circular piece of Plexiglas about twelve inches in diameter. Inside the Plexiglas, a few items had been suspended: a severed finger with a gold band, a kitschy photograph from the fifties of a couple cutting a wedding cake, a Harmony guitar pick and Wyatt Earp handcuffs.

When he realized what he was looking at, he turned quickly away. After he had regained his composure, he allowed himself to be drawn back to the statue. He circled it and touched it. He leaned close to inspect its every nick and gouge, then backed away to gain perspective.

It was unsettling to see himself on display this way. More troubling still was the implication that Janice viewed
him
as the missing link, that the finger, the photo and the guitar pick were her way of saying there was a hole in her life roughly the size of Cyrus Owen.

Had he read the magazine article carefully, the one from which he had clipped her photo, he might have better understood the nature of her work. “The hollow men,” she had explained to the journalist, “are searching for identity. Nameless, faceless, they carry inside them a fractured history, an archaeological jumble out of which they must piece together a personal narrative. To know who they are, they must first puzzle out who they were. But the past is a sentimental fiction. In the end, only art can tell them the whole truth.”

Unschooled in the nuances of Janice’s work, Cyrus stumbled out of the gallery that day convinced she still carried a torch for him; and when he got home that night, he drank too much before and after dinner. While he was in that woozy frame of mind he did little more than slouch on the sofa with his eyes closed and his guitar in his lap, playing the same chords over and over. All thoughts of the statue had been supplanted by more distant memories of the smell of Janice’s skin and hair, her eagerness and confidence and curiosity. And as his hands roamed the fretboard, a memory rose up to him from the depths: that night on the beach when he told her he dreamed of becoming a musician. To her credit, she didn’t laugh or make a face. “Go for it,” she said. “Don’t waste your time dreaming.” After that, whenever he figured out a new song, he’d drop by her house and play it for her. And when she started to sing along one night, in that surprisingly husky purr of hers,
he felt complete. Later she talked the others into joining the band and found them a place to practise. But of all her many gestures, none compared to that first simple encouragement.

At midnight Eura went to bed, and though he, too, was half asleep, he continued to play till one, two, three in the morning, cycling through the same chords while he let his mind overflow with thoughts of Janice—tossing a football with her father, eating spoonfuls of chocolate syrup straight from the jar. His eyes burned with fatigue, but he couldn’t stop, wouldn’t let go of this feeling of how it used to be. If he went to bed, she would slip away. If he put down his guitar, the emotional thread would be broken and he might never again feel this close to her.

And, then, with his mind and heart swimming in a sea of remembrance, his hand slipped. Just like that, in the monotonous cycle of chords and fingerpicking, his hand slipped and landed where it had no business landing, a tangle of notes that were clearly a mistake but were not. More like a surprise, like finding the face of love where you least expect it, notes he had known and played but not like this, never like this, never so new.

Aside from that one clutch of mistaken notes in the early hours of the morning, he made no further headway. And the more he attempted to move forward, the more Janice faded from his thoughts. When at last he crawled into bed, the rest of the world was beginning to rise for a new day. He clasped his hands behind his head and watched the sunrise paint the ceiling in pastels, already planning what notes he would try next.

TWO WEEKS LATER
, Ronnie asked Cyrus to come to New York to sign the contracts. “It will be good to get away from home and its myriad interruptions,” he said, his voice hushed and confidential. “We will be able to talk more freely. About the music. About everything.”

Cyrus arrived at LaGuardia the next day with an overnight bag and his Harmony. Ronnie laughed appreciatively. “A sight for sore eyes, my friend. I invite you to the centre of the universe and, look, you bring your work.”

Ronnie drove with one hand on the wheel, the other on the radio dial, searching for tunes to discuss. What about this? How do you like that? Couldn’t this have been better? Cyrus made few comments. He had always
had an uncritical approach to music. To his mind, it all served a purpose.

After twenty minutes or so, Ronnie turned off the radio and looked across the seat at him. “You must tell me what you have been working on.”

Cyrus gazed out the side window. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”

“Oh, I like the sound of that. Uncharted waters. And it’s going well?”

“Very slow. To be honest, I haven’t written a thing.”

“Not a note?”

“Well.” He hesitated. “Yeah, I have a couple of notes, but that’s it.”

Ronnie tapped his fingers excitedly on the steering wheel. “Play me your notes. I’d love to hear what you have.”

“In the car?”

Ronnie looked left, then right, and powered up the windows so they were sealed in. “As you can see, we are stuck in traffic on the Queensborough Bridge. What better way to pass the time?”

It seemed so lame, crawling into the back seat to pull out his guitar and play Ronnie the cluster of notes he had literally stumbled on. There were five notes in total, and he played them first as a chord, then as an arpeggio, then in alternating sequence. He played them loud and he played them soft, played them with a syncopated rhythm and then just let the chord ring out and naturally decay.