Sweeter Life (56 page)

Just before Christmas, Doreen called to say that Ronnie had died. “The day you left,” she confided, “he began to fade.”

He briefly debated whether to attend Ronnie’s funeral, but the fact was, he had no money. He’d already signed up for welfare and was thinking seriously about pawning some of his equipment until he could get back on his feet. He wouldn’t be playing anytime soon. He had one more operation scheduled, and quite possibly a few more in the new year.

The night of the funeral, Cyrus went out and spent his last few dollars
in a bar getting “legless” as Tommy Mac used to say. And for the first time in his life, he understood how his father must have felt.

RUBY’S NEW APARTMENT
still didn’t feel like home. She was afraid to use the gleaming kitchen, and the floor-to-ceiling view of the marina always caught her by surprise. There were times she drifted through the spotless rooms and wondered who she was, where she had come from. Perhaps if she’d been younger, she would have found encouragement in her surroundings, the novelty and sheen suggesting that anything might be possible. Instead she looked around her sometimes and thought that nothing seemed real. That was why she’d been going to church more often, not just Sundays but also once or twice during the week, just to sit on her own and while away some time.

One day as she sat quietly in the balcony of the United Church, the choirmaster came in and began to play a piece of music on the organ (“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” she would later discover). At first she listened the way she listened to all music, that is, with only some distant part of her mind. Music was something she didn’t understand, so she rocked her head from side to side. The song’s gentle pulse was reminiscent of their grandfather clock, a steady, measured
tick, tock, tick, tock
, that was pleasant and did not interfere with her enjoyment of being in the church, feeling so clean and starched and proper and, in some indefinite way, closer to Clarence. She was glad that there were things in her life that could remain as they had before, that she could continue to feel the comfort of this place.

Little by little, though, the melody of the hymn began to impress itself on her, not so much the tuneful nature of it, because that was much too fast and complicated for her to make sense of, but just the way it moved,
one-two-three one-two-three
, circling round and round like dancers,
one-two-three one-two-three
, just the way, in fact, that Clarence had whirled her around the dance floor on the night of their wedding,
one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three
, spinning her faster and faster until she was breathless. And that was it exactly, the two of them dancing, her dress billowing out as they circled the room, the guests that night giving them all the space they required to unfurl their joy. And the more she listened to that three-note
rhythm, the more it echoed the sounds of her life, like Clarence counting eleven-quart baskets, a tower of apples that rose shoulder high, like the sound of her shears as she pruned in her garden. It was the sound of her peeling apples and of the farm machinery and the
clickety-clickety
of the train they took out east. It was all there, really, the busyness, the regular routines and cycles of life, the ups and downs, the endless chores and decisions and running around but always in an established pattern that was lovely, that seemed to grow deeper and lovelier with each passing year as though each note of this song represented each day of their lives, sweet and steady and not unexpected, from note to note and step to step, falling in patterns and clear repetitions and connections that fade only to come back again, as though it, this simple life, their simple lives, were the finest art, the work of a genius, and all these little clicking figures and phrases were supported by something larger and more mysterious that reached out to her from across a great divide. She sat and listened now, really listened to this music flowing over her, flowing through her; and as it came to the final four bars, the final ten notes as the music slowed—
one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three … one
—she heard words, too, words bubbling out of the music or out of her mind or someplace between, each one aligned perfectly with the rhythm of that quiet resolution, as though it was a song she had written herself, as though the music had pulled out of her the one central theme of her life: “Loved only Clarence. He loved only me.” And whether the words were strictly true mattered little to her at the moment. They were true enough, a truth that had been observable in the way they lived each day, in the way God’s majesty had been evident to her in every moment of her life.

I
t was Peter Liu at the Two Star who told Cyrus about a possible job opening. Peter’s uncle worked at Dominion Optical, a factory that supplied frames to opticians across the province. “Good place,” Peter said, shaking his head agreeably. His tone, however, suggested it was not the sort of job he would take. He was a businessman, an entrepreneur. He hadn’t come to Canada to become someone’s slave.

Cyrus, who had nothing inside him that approximated an immigrant’s drive to succeed, and whose self-esteem was sinking daily, took the address from Peter, put on the suit Izzy had bought him and went looking for an interview.

The factory stood four storeys high and took up half a city block. It was built as a warehouse for a large distillery, and the rumour was that in 1930, business associates of Lucky Luciano came to this very spot and bought two thousand empty barrels. Now the building housed an army of minimum-wage labourers, women mostly, from China, the Philippines, Jamaica, Trinidad, Senegal and Somalia. There were a few Canadian-born workers, disenfranchised in some way, through lack of education or natural smarts, through deformity or accident or some penchant for making the wrong choices.

The manager at Dominion Optical, Dean Lawrence, knew from
experience the ebb and flow of his human capital, knew that the amount of misery raining down on his workers was much higher than the national average and that among these people, who were as close to the edge as you could get without falling right over, there would be in any given week two or three who would not return, who would succumb to the forces of inertia, bad luck or karma, or simply the recurring nightmare they had been trying so desperately to escape. He knew this. He’d been on the job long enough to know that even when he was fully staffed it was wise to keep his door open. He would always need workers.

There was a policy at Dominion, handed down by the Schlegel family, who had owned and run the business since its inception in 1938 (when they brought their own immigrant energy and expertise to Canada). The policy was this: Give people a break. Make room for the downtrodden and dispossessed. Run a company cafeteria, with wholesome food sold at cost. Make a decent affordable product, so even the working poor could afford to look good. Those who insisted on the designer labels paid through the nose. Their stupidity, and the shameless markup, helped grease the wheels of the enterprise.

Dean wasn’t surprised to see Cyrus Owen walk into his office that April morning and ask for work. The expensive suit, the long hair—appearances meant nothing to Dean or the Schlegel family. It was stories that had built Dominion, and this young man had one. You could see it in his eyes, the way he kept rubbing his misshapen left hand, the way his shoulders slumped forward in defeat when he forgot himself.

They talked for fifteen minutes, enough time for Dean to sense that Cyrus was a good person and, having no education, a failed career and a crippled hand, was suitably qualified to become a Schlegel employee. He was hired on the spot (as it turned out, there was an opening), and the next day Cyrus took his place at a wooden bench, beside a man named Chu.

Chu, with few words, showed Cyrus the basic elements of their job. When an order came in for a certain size frame with a certain length of arm, an order picker walked into the warehouse, selected the required pieces from the shelves and delivered them on a plastic tray to Chu or Cyrus, who then assembled the frames, using the tiniest screwdrivers Cyrus had ever seen.
After the arms had been attached, the tray was set aside and either Gladys or Connie would retrieve it for shipping. In terms of a crappy job, he had expected much worse.

Cyrus, who had never been one to sit and think about things and was even more reluctant to do so now, spent a large part of the day listening to others talk. He heard Sammi’s daily report about the previous night’s action on the dance floor. At least once a day he heard Gladys reciting her recipe for hamburger soup. Most of the time he listened to empty chatter about the lottery. Every week the employees chipped in money, and as the big day approached, their talk became more animated and full of expectations, falling miserably on the morning after. When Chu wasn’t talking about the lottery, he was listing the prizes people had won on the previous night’s
Wheel of Fortune
.

What made the first few months bearable for Cyrus was the sight of Tina in the cafeteria each day, her face a simpler and more youthful version of Eura’s, her brown hair like a massive haystack, her thin, thrift-store fashions struggling to contain her voluptuous contours. She didn’t speak much English and could not have been more than seventeen years old. She was also pregnant, which became increasingly evident with each passing week.

He didn’t know where she was from, and he had no idea what she wanted from life, but he found himself caught up in her joys and sorrows. At lunchtime she would pull baby clothes from a bag and show them to the other women, who would cluck and fuss. She showed them photographs, too—maybe of home or her man or her parents and siblings. The other women took good care of Tina. Most knew from experience what she was headed for, and they pampered her and protected her and even, when she wasn’t aware of it, said silent prayers for her, she was so young. But in those rare moments when Tina was alone, Cyrus observed another and less encouraging side. She would sit distractedly and rub her belly, her face filled with worry.

After his final operation and convalescence, after weeks of physiotherapy, Cyrus was forced to accept that he would never return to music in any professional capacity. He could hold a guitar and, with some pain and difficulty, play a few chords or a simple melody; but the hand simply did not
respond in the required fashion. The doctor told him not to expect much more.

Several weeks later, Cyrus sold most of his equipment, but held on to the Harmony for sentimental reasons, and the National because he loved the look of it in his apartment. He made enough money at Dominion Optical to pay his rent and buy a week’s worth of food. The extra cash from his instruments was for entertainment. His favourite spot, Zeke’s Open Kitchen, had cheap beer and no clientele. It didn’t remind him of Eura or home. If anyone spoke to him, it was about the weather or sports.

Once a week he phoned Janice, or she phoned him, and they chatted casually about the events of the day. For the first time in his life, he had become aware of the world outside music, filling in the dreary hours to and from work by reading the newspaper. He avoided the arts section and anything that reported on the music scene, but was oddly entertained by the political stories, especially those about Pierre Trudeau. (It was amazing that a leader who seemed more interested in ideas than in his constituents could remain so popular.) Primarily, Cyrus was drawn to the scientific articles—a discovery in the heavens, or the latest medical breakthrough. He was reminded that science was the only subject he had ever really liked in school. And with his penchant for wandering and discovering things, he wondered occasionally if he had taken a wrong turn, if he would have been better off doing research or something.

One night at the beginning of July, Janice phoned to say she was coming to Toronto. “A new show of my work,” she said. “I wondered if I could crash at your place a few days.”

Cyrus had gathered from comments over the past while that Janice could easily afford the price of a hotel room. So staying at his place, he knew, was for personal, not economic, reasons. “Don’t expect me to clean just for you,” he said.

“I’m talking spic and span, buster. You’ll be getting the sniff test, the white-glove test, even the dreaded crisper inspection.”

In the end she was hardly in the apartment at all. At the opening, they waved to each other a few times, but Janice was so busy working the crowd that Cyrus spent the night on his own, trying (and failing) to think of something clever to say about her work. It was all too weird for him, this new
direction of hers, like bits of junk stuck together. They left the studio late that night and, in the taxi home, she fell asleep against his shoulder. He decided to save the wine and nibbles he’d bought; neither one of them was in the mood. He fixed her a bed on the sofa.

Next morning they had time for a brief, laughter-filled breakfast. She told him about the latest happenings in Wilbury, filling in the details about Izzy’s purchase of the old place, and how Hank was living out there and turning it into a trailer park. The picture she painted of the two of them, Izzy completely frazzled and Hank wheeling around in a golf cart, was something that would warm him through many dreary hours at the factory. So would the feeling of sitting with her and discovering they could still be comfortable. It was the hallmark of a true friendship, he felt, that they could be apart for months and pick up right where they had left off.

While Cyrus was at work, Janice met with the art critic from the
Globe and Mail
, taped a short segment for the CBC, and gave a lecture at the Ontario College of Art. It was almost ten o’clock that night when she returned to the apartment, looking completely worn out. He smoothed the hair off her forehead and said, “Have you eaten?”

“A muffin, I think. I mean I bought one, but I can’t honestly remember eating it.”

He settled her into a kitchen chair, opened a bottle of red wine, brought out a small tub of dried black olives he’d bought at the Italian grocer down the block and then got out a large bowl, a bag of flour, some olive oil and yeast.