Sweeter Life (44 page)

She sampled the eggs, then took a second taste and a third. Holding her fork aloft like an exclamation point, she said, “Next time use cream. It gives them a velvety texture. And your pan was too hot. You overcooked the eggs. You want something more like soft custard.” In response to his startled expression, she touched his arm and said, “They’re good, though. Really. And anyway, sometimes cooking’s not about food, or I’ve always thought. Is music that way? Are there times when playing your guitar isn’t about music but something else?”

Cyrus hardly knew where to begin. He only had to think of the Harmony,
and hugging that beautiful thing in the darkness of his bedroom, to know it was more than a musical instrument. But even if he could find the words to describe those feelings, they were too personal to share with someone he’d just met. Instead he moved beside her and took her hand in his. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I feel I could walk all night.”

She finished the eggs and told him he could take her home. Then she led him out the back door and along a gravel path, the air so thick with fog that he was soon chilled through, even though he was wearing a sweater.

“Let’s go back and get you a jacket,” he said. “It’s freezing out here.”

“Not at all,” she replied, opening her arms to the sky. “It’s lovely. You North Americans with your central heating are a wee bit soft around the edges. We’re built of sturdier material over here.”

Cyrus nearly laughed out loud at the idea that she was sturdily built. When he tried to put his arm around her, she jabbed him in the side with her elbow and skipped away. “Don’t be trying your fancy moves,” she said, “or I’ll serve you your bollocks for breakfast.”

“I didn’t mean anything. I thought you might want to get warm.”

“I’d just as soon stay cool around the likes of you. A girl could get herself a broken heart if she’s not careful.”

“I’m taking you home, that’s all.” This time when he put his arm around her, she let it stay, and they walked on through the fog, neither of them saying a word.

The path led past the recording studio and down a hill to a wooden gate that opened to a paved road bordered on each side by a thick hedge. A hundred yards down the road they found another gate in the hedge and passed through it to enter another, smaller field. Off to one side stood an oak tree and, chained to its massive trunk, what looked to be a large metal mushroom. When he looked at her with disbelief, she smiled and said, “My caravan.” Then she placed her hand against his breastbone and pushed him back toward the hedge. “I really did like the eggs, and I’m glad you walked me home, and some other time I’d love to sit and talk, but if I don’t go to sleep right now, alone, I’ll be a nutter tomorrow.”

Cyrus dawdled back to the house and didn’t crawl into bed until three. He woke a number of times that night, wondering where he was. Long
before anyone else was up, he tiptoed out to the lounge and, with the first inkling of sunrise touching the sky, dialed the apartment in Toronto, hoping to talk to Eura. But the machine was on, and the tinny sound of his own recorded voice made him ache with loneliness and concern. It wasn’t like Eura to stay out so late, well past midnight, Toronto time.

A few hours later, he and Nigel had breakfast, then carried their coffee to the guitar room where they each took up an instrument, Cyrus the Les Paul and Nigel an old sunburst Telecaster.

“Let me show you the sort of thing I want you to work on,” Nigel said. Then he launched into the chord pattern of “The Bridge,” in particular the clipped arpeggios Cyrus had played beneath the synthesizer solo. “This is a nice little figure you’ve come up with, but listen how great it sounds on the Telly. Did you ever hear anything that sounded more like twanging metal? Now you try it on your Les Paul.”

Cyrus shook his head. “I don’t need to. You’re exactly right.”

They switched guitars. Cyrus tried the part just as Nigel had played it, and knew in his bones it was much better. More than that, the sound of the guitar suggested different ways of extending the line.

Nigel played a few licks over the arpeggios, then held the Les Paul out from him admiringly. “No question,” he said, “these are amazing axes. Always sound like dirt to me. Mud and muck and swamp ooze.”

For the next few hours they fooled around on a variety of guitars. After a quick lunch, they were right back at it. Nigel had a big workbook in his lap, and together they listened to the demo and picked it apart, phrase by phrase, instrument by instrument.

At five o’clock Nigel excused himself. He had to go to London for the evening and wouldn’t be back until the next day. “Sophie will make whatever you like for dinner,” he said. “Or I’ll tell you what: Patrick and Sophie can take you down the road to the Two Poofs. A few pints and a round of darts might do you a world.”

Cyrus tried phoning home, but again there was no answer. He was starting to worry. More than that, he needed to hear her voice and be reminded of the complicated melody of their life together.

When he stepped outside, Patrick was waiting behind the wheel of a
vintage Jaguar. “Sophie will meet us there,” he said with his head out the window. “Went home to change.” Then they sped off in a cloud of dust, the car seeming to fill the narrow winding road. Two minutes later they arrived at a tidy little place with a thatched roof, leaded windowpanes and a bright-coloured sign out front that featured a pair of rotund friars.

Patrick took him by the arm and led him into the back room, where there was a jukebox and a couple of dartboards. Cyrus had never been in a proper pub before. He’d never played darts or had steak-and-kidney pie. Nor had he ever seen people having this sort of fun: these big beefy fellows drilling into the treble twenty while young folk nodded to the rock and roll or, like Sophie, danced non-stop beside the jukebox. Others laughed and talked and seemed like happy drunks, not at all like his father or any of the people he’d seen stumbling out of the Wilbury Hotel or the Laredo. Back home, the idea of going to a bar seemed so uncool. It had never occurred to him that a night of drinks could be uplifting, that a roomful of people bound by smoke and alcohol, music and games and simple chat could seem like one of the secrets of life.

After his third pint, he worked up the nerve to sway alongside Sophie, who danced with her eyes closed and was dazzling in her high-top runners, tweedy trousers and sleeveless undershirt. He couldn’t pretend they were dancing together, because he was sure she hadn’t noticed him. But then, without breaking her rhythm or looking at him, she pressed her body to his and draped her arms around his neck. “Don’t drink too much,” she whispered. “You’ll spoil it.”

He tried to look at her face, but her head was tucked under his chin. “Spoil what?” he asked innocently.

“It. The magic. It’s magic, innit?”

And it was. So was the walk home, the two of them swaying along a dark winding road so narrow in spots that, with arms outstretched, it seemed he could almost touch the hedges on both sides. She pulled him into her pasture. She spread a blanket on the ground, the mist swirling out of the north, and they leaned together, saying nothing, moving hardly at all. When the sun began to burn off the haze, she removed her clothes and doused herself with rainwater from a barrel before scooting into the trailer for her chef’s whites.
She hunched before an open fire and made herbal tea to have with day-old scones. Then they were back through the hedge and along the road to Hidey-Hole, where he tumbled into bed and a deep dreamless sleep.

When he opened his eyes, Ronnie was sitting beside him. The violence of two worlds colliding made Cyrus wince in pain. “I called the apartment,” he muttered.

Ronnie touched the boy’s arm. “She’s gone, Cyrus. Vanished.”

Cyrus knew and didn’t know. He understood completely and didn’t have a clue. Covering his eyes with the palm of his hand, he said, “She wouldn’t go. She has no one but me. She has nowhere but there.”

Then Ronnie pulled a sheet of yellow lined paper from his pocket. “I found this on the kitchen table,” he said.

It was the kind of paper they kept beside the phone for messages. It held very few words, written in her perfect hand.

Cyrus read the message three, four times, and never stopped shaking his head. Ronnie took the paper and placed it on the bedside table. He said, “I bumped up our schedule. The rest of the band arrives tomorrow.”

Cyrus sat upright and swung around so his feet were on the floor. “I have to go to Toronto,” he said mechanically. “I have to find her.”

“She’s gone,” Ronnie repeated. “You should let her go.”

J
anice worked for years on her Carrara sculpture (a month here, a month there), watching with satisfaction as the likeness of a human figure gradually rose out of the stone, and not just any figure but, surprisingly, that of her father, bending backward with arms thrust toward the sky. Unfortunately, the more she worked on the statue, and the more time she spent thinking about her father’s joyful approach to life, his commitment to a better world, the more she began to notice, by contrast, the many shades of Jonathan that were not to her liking. Eventually another and darker truth rose before her, and on their return from yet another trip to Italy, she told him she no longer loved him. There was no one else, she said. She just felt their relationship wasn’t going anywhere.

“I wasn’t aware it had to go anywhere,” he said, his tone distant and superior. And she nodded her head as though that was exactly what she had expected him to say. They discussed the matter for a day or two but not with any heat. He didn’t argue or rage or make rash predictions. That final day, she watched him quietly pack his suitcase and walk out the door.

For the next while she concentrated solely on the Carrara. She slept at the studio, ate at the studio. When she had finished all the hard slogging—the screech of masonry blades and the painstaking effort with mallets an
steel—she started on her favourite part, turning the general contour into a particular kind of beauty with the aid of claw and tooth chisels and a variety of rifflers. She had also settled on a final design. Instead of the one central cavity that characterized her
Hollow Men
series, she had drilled three or four smaller holes no larger than a silver dollar. Each hole would be fitted with a pair of magnifying lenses. Peer through one of the openings and you’d see a bigger and wider world. The surface of the marble would also have letters and symbols, even a few words etched into it—what she had come to think of as “lexical skin.”

The shape of her life was far less encouraging, but at least she was busy enough with work that she had few opportunities to miss Jonathan. Then she suffered an even greater blow: a few weeks before Christmas, her father died suddenly of a heart attack. She returned to Wilbury for the funeral and stayed with her mother until the new year, sliding into a deeper sadness with each passing day until finally, her darkness threatening to overwhelm her, she flew out to the west coast and rented a house on Salt Spring Island. She spent the rest of the winter alone there, walking the tide line and searching the debris for some clue to the future. By April she still wasn’t ready to get back to a normal routine so she returned to Wilbury with the idea that she and her mother might become better friends. But her mother didn’t need Janice’s company or particularly welcome it. When Janice complained about the cool reception, her mother squared her shoulders and said, “I’m making a new life. I suggest you do the same. You only get one kick at the can.”

On Salt Spring, Janice had wondered whether to leave the Carrara unfinished, like her father’s life, and even contemplated having the thing destroyed. But as the sharp edges of her pain slowly softened, she realized that without her father on the planet, she needed the next best thing. So she arranged with Harold Winters, who owned a shipping company in town, to bring her sculpture to Wilbury for the summer. He rented her a bit of warehouse space out by the farmers’ co-operative, where she worked most nights. Most days she drifted about in a fog of remembrance.

She visited her father’s law office and chatted with his former partners, reminiscing about the summer she filed mortgage documents for them. Another day she sat on the steps outside the Three Links Hall and sang her
way through the old set list, or what she could remember of it. She drove to the dock and the arena; she spent quiet afternoons at the library. But her favourite place of all was Lakeview Cemetery, where her father was buried. She’d sit on the small concrete bench near his grave and listen to the birds singing in the pines. She didn’t always think of him when she was there; sometimes it was the peace and quiet she was after.

Eventually, as her fog lifted and her pain began to fade, she realized that her work was the only happiness that remained in her life, the only strength. Because of that, and because it was in Wilbury that her interest in art first came to light, she decided to return the favour. She would offer classes in sculpture and line drawing, hoping to undo some of the damage Velma Fleck had wrought on the artistic temperament of the community and, in return, lead herself back into life. She met with Roger Larry, the director of the Wilbury Recreation Centre, and convinced him to set aside an area of the complex for classes.

It was mainly retirees who showed up the first night, people she remembered from her churchgoing years before and who already had a moderate amount of skill. For their first exercise Janice set up a still life of fruit and a wine bottle. “The bottle and fruit are your subject,” she said, “but you are not allowed to draw them. You can only draw the space around the flowers and fruit. You can draw the wall in the background, the table beneath them, the other objects in the room. You must render your subject by revelation.”

The exercise was odd enough that she assumed there’d be fewer people for the next class. In fact, the room was almost full. This time, she asked them to do paired sketches. “First draw a flower,” she said. “It must be realistic, with petals and leaves and stem. But the mood must reflect your mother, or some aspect of her—the way she used to stand, the way she looked when she scolded you. The other drawing will be the reverse. Sketch your mother in every detail but in such a way that it evokes a flower.”