Sweeter Life (32 page)

Ronnie said, “Yes, I believe I know what you mean. It is quite beautiful what you have there, and no question there is a certain
bridginess
to it. But tell me this: where do you see it going?”

“I guess I’m not sure,” he replied, mortally afraid Ronnie was about to cancel the whole project. “I mean, I play it over and over, and I close my eyes and know it should go somewhere, but I don’t really know where yet.” Ronnie looked at him in the rear-view mirror, his eyebrows raised expectantly, and Cyrus stumbled helplessly on. “What I mean, I guess, is that, well it’s kind of weird, kind of like that game you play at parties when you’re a kid. You know, where they blindfold you and spin you around until you’re dizzy, and then you have to do something like pin a tail on a donkey or find your partner or something like that.”

“What you feel, in other words, is a kind of confusion.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I play that chord, and even though I’m blindfolded,
I know I’m in a strange room, and that there’s stuff around me, most of it useless. But I also know that somewhere in the room is exactly the thing I need. It’s like I can hear it vibrate when I play the chord. So I just close my eyes and play the chord and listen for that vibration. And when I think I know which direction to go, I make a move and, bang, I bump into something hard, not what I was expecting, not the right kind of feeling at all. So I try again and head off in another direction and, bang, I hit something else. It’s kind of frustrating.”

Ronnie’s eyes had widened with every phrase Cyrus uttered. “My boy, that is exactly what I have wanted to express but could not. A music of intimations, that bumps against things in the dark.” As a final note of punctuation, he honked the horn of the Mercedes, one long brassy blare. Cyrus smiled sheepishly, wondering what he’d just said.

The office of RonCon Productions overlooked Bryant Park. Once inside, Ronnie introduced Cyrus to Brent, a young man with a singsong voice. “I’m Ronnie’s ears,” Brent explained. He swept his arm in the direction of a desk that was covered with manila envelopes and demo tapes, both cassettes and reel-to-reel. “Another stack arrived just this morning. Pretty soon
I’ll
need a pair of ears.”

Ronnie led Cyrus into his office and closed the door. It held a large walnut desk, two Morris chairs and a green leather sofa. The walls were covered with gold records and framed concert posters. A moment later, Brent popped in with the contracts.

Before Cyrus left Toronto, Eura had instructed him to sign nothing until he had read every word carefully. She suggested, even, that he not sign anything until a lawyer could look it over. But now that he was sitting in this office, with a friend who was offering to help, with people from all over the world seemingly seeking Ronnie’s attention and stamp of approval, Cyrus wasn’t going to dither. The Laredo was still fresh in his mind. He signed promptly on the dotted line.

To celebrate they went to dinner at Angelo’s on Mulberry, possibly the best meal Cyrus had ever eaten. Afterward they took a cab to Washington Square and walked to Bradley’s. The club was packed, the air thick with smoke. Cyrus loved the swanky tone of the place, the long wooden bar, the
beautiful Manhattanites, young and old and middle-aged, who had left their various high-rent digs to gather in the name of jazz and the city and whatever advantage they could work from the night. He hadn’t noticed the sign out front, and the place was too crowded for him to see the band, but he could hear well enough, the music smoky and playful and rich in sexual innuendo, perfectly in sync with the room. The pianist was especially good, his playing so nutty and off kilter it reminded Cyrus of how it felt to be a kid.

It brought to mind a particular sunny day, in fact. He and Hank were lounging under the bridge, feeling pleasantly bored. With no real plan in mind, Cyrus got to his feet and made his way along the centre of the creek, hopping barefoot from one stone to another, not an easy thing to do because the stones were small and irregular and covered with an emerald slime that felt delicious on the bottoms of his feet. As he made his way along the stream, arms spread like a tightrope walker, he spooked chubs and minnows and frogs. He found evidence of muskrat and raccoon and nearly threw himself into the drink when a large water snake slithered past his foot. When he reached the big drainage pipe at the end of his father’s main field, he turned around again to face Hank and—who knows why he would do such a thing?—raced full speed back along the creek, hardly looking at the stones, certainly unable to plan where his feet would land, never thinking for a second that one false step would break an ankle and spell the end of his summer. And when he collapsed on the bank again, gasping for breath, his brother shook his head in disbelief and said, “What the hell was that about? You mental?” And Cyrus laughed.

That’s how the piano player at Bradley’s struck him, reckless and young and full of life—not the sort of adjectives Cyrus would use to describe Sonny Redmond. “I had no idea,” he said, when their friend joined them at the bar. “You sounded so different.”

“Different music,” Sonny said without inflection.

Cyrus found it hard to believe that Sonny had had this kind of musical ability all along and had chosen not to use it. Cyrus brought everything he knew to every solo, always working at the edge of his capabilities. With Sonny, he realized, there was no knowing how good he really was. It could be he’d never shown anyone his limits.

After the last set, they sat for an hour or so, reminiscing about Adrian’s tea parties, Jim’s endless rants, those dopey church gigs. When the club manager kicked them out, they waited together on the street while Sonny hailed a cab. Cyrus felt frustrated. All the time they had toured together, Sonny, the best musician he’d ever known, had seemed reluctant to give many pointers. Trying one last time, Cyrus said, “Name one person who really influenced your playing.”

Sonny answered right away. “Easy, kid. Before I met Jim, I didn’t know how to play at all.”

“The solo Ronnie’s always talking about?”

“Hell no. His playing was overrated. I mean his words. I had Adrian record every concert so I could chart his raps. Man’s a genius.”

They shook hands then, and Sonny sped off in the taxi. Ronnie took Cyrus by the arm and walked him slowly back to the office. “I’m afraid you will have to sleep on the couch,” he said. “My apartment isn’t really set up for visitors. I’ll call in the morning. We can breakfast together before your flight.”

Cyrus was too wound up to sleep, so he sat with his guitar and watched the sun come up over Manhattan. He kept thinking about Sonny’s revelation. It had never occurred to him that you could learn about music by listening to words, especially the words of a crazy man. But he supposed it was true. The old guy sure knew how to talk, and it
was
kind of musical.

He thought about Jim’s first line always—“I’d like to tell you a story now, if I may”—and heard the lick immediately:

That’s what Sonny had meant when he gave Cyrus that tape to listen to in Meckling. And maybe that’s what Jim was getting at in the trailer when he asked Cyrus to forget about his guitar and talk about love—that there was more to playing than notes and chords.

When Cyrus fell asleep on the couch, he had the same old dream. The moonlight. The stillness. His father stopping to let him jog down the Marsh Road on his own. But this time the dream doesn’t end there. Cyrus keeps running down to the Lake Road, then farther on to Roxy Beach where the sand is as fine as sugar. He continues to run without breaking stride, stopping just shy of the water where the waves have created a border of weeds and driftwood and empty shells. There is no one around. He can hear his own laboured breathing and the occasional cry of a gull. With his hands on his hips, he turns and looks behind him. Watching him is Ronnie, not Riley. Cyrus doesn’t know what else to do. He has run to the very end, it seems, out of land, out of options. Then Ronnie moves beside him, puts his arm on Cyrus’s shoulder and says, “Go on.”

CYRUS RETURNED TO TORONTO THE NEXT MORNING
, his mind abuzz with dreams of the future. There were so many musical ideas he wanted to try, so many thoughts to sort through. But on the bus into the city he realized he had forgotten to buy Eura a present, and that simple oversight filled him with fear. He knew she wouldn’t mind—she hated when he made a fuss over her. What bothered him was the total amnesia. He had forgotten about their life together, how she wept sometimes when they made love, how she sang to him as he washed her hair in the bathtub, how she fed him delicacies from around the world—you must try this, you must try that. He had also forgotten the dark attraction of her tattoo and the seediness of the Laredo and the other low-life clubs they had played. He had forgotten about the tangled grief that led back to Wilbury, to Orchard Knoll and Hank and Izzy and his parents’ untimely death. For almost two full days he had faced entirely forward. Everywhere he looked, he had seen the outline of a new life waiting for him.

Eura didn’t seem that happy to see him. She barely listened to the stories, reacting to news of Ronnie and Sonny as though they meant nothing to her. It was only when they were standing at the sink, washing the dishes after dinner, that she said, “Don’t forget, I know Mr. Ronnie Conger with his big brown eyes like a puppy dog.”

“What are you saying?”

“I am saying don’t think I am a fool.”

“I think you’re a fool for being jealous.”

She glared at him. “You did not even phone.”

“It was so late.”

“It is never so late. You were not even thinking I was alive.”

He put his arms around her and kissed her. “I was. And I was thinking that I love you. You know that.”

His words carried an emotional truth that trumped the falsehood he had uttered, allowing him to believe he wasn’t lying at all. Eura leaned into him more heavily, adjusting her shape to fit his.

“What I know is something else,” she said. “Always I thought that I would be the one to hurt you, you were so young. Now I know the young do not hurt so easily. So I am the one afraid. I am the one who will be hurt.”

They made love that night, and Cyrus would remember it as different from most other times. Normally there was a kind of lassitude to Eura in bed, an inertia he could overcome only with a requisite amount of tickling and tomfoolery. Without laughter, and the lighter spirit it brought her, she would often turn away from what he had to offer. But this night she clung to him ferociously and wanted nothing to do with silliness. The look of determination in her eyes, the brute force of her kisses, everything about her proclaimed this was serious business.

After she fell asleep, he tiptoed to the living room and sat with his guitar, trying once again to squeeze some magic from his five found notes. Maybe it was fatigue, maybe it was luck, but as the night wore on, as the city at last grew still, the notes shook off their fixation with the present tense and began to voice a few quiet suggestions about the future. It seemed to him the most exquisite magic to follow that musical line forward, note after note, chord after chord, and feel the past stirring within him.

Next morning, Cyrus called a keyboard player he knew, Pete Marone, and set up an afternoon get-together to fool around on the new changes he’d discovered. Pete wasn’t the best musician in the world, and he knew it, but that was his saving grace. He kept his playing simple and clean and never got so cozy with anything that you couldn’t talk him out of it. While Pete ran through the pattern, Cyrus improvised—a riff here, a melody there, a couple of
breathless solos. After a few minutes, he stopped. At home the chords had seemed so promising, but when it came to playing overtop them, they sounded flat and uninspiring. A drummer and bass player would help, but still …

Pete suggested they slow the tempo. He played a few bars to demonstrate, not only slower, but longer on each chord, changing not every bar but every two bars, with a soft, pulsing rhythm. Immediately the progression sounded dreamier, the suspensions more pronounced and yet more delicate.

Cyrus leaned back and closed his eyes, the chords sounding so different and beautiful that he was happy to let them ring out on their own. As he listened, a note became evident, the one note that was missing, so he played it, a single ringing note that carried over two full chord changes and decayed into the third. From there other notes presented themselves: half phrases, recapitulations, then longer and more sinuous melodies that felt to him like a green and growing thing, some kind of organic bloom.

Pete flashed him a thumbs-up. “Very cool. What do you call it?”

And Cyrus laughed and said, “ ‘The Bridge,’ I guess. I guess I have to call it ‘The Bridge.’ ”

For the next few weeks they got together every afternoon. Cyrus recorded every rehearsal, and every night he sat down with his guitar and played along with the tapes, letting his mind and his fingers wander until he found something else to interest him. The ideas came rapidly then, from places deep inside, as though some unreachable part of him had thawed. By the end of a month they had a dozen tunes so promising he could scarcely believe he was responsible for them.

Ronnie returned to Toronto in mid-June, and Cyrus made him listen to all twelve tracks, which he did without tapping his foot or nodding his head, his concentration so intense he hardly seemed to breathe. As the tape finished, he opened his eyes and said, “An excellent beginning. I see now why you are excited.”

Just like that, Cyrus’s good mood evaporated. “Beginning? But I’m blown away. This is so me.”

Ronnie nodded. “Don’t take my comments the wrong way. I, too, am greatly impressed. I had no idea you had come so far. But you know, I believe
I have more faith in you than you have in yourself. As good as this is, you have barely scratched the surface.”

“But I’ve never played like this before. It’s all brand new.”

“I agree. It is authentic music, my friend.”