Requiem (3 page)

Nathan’s gallery is close to the market, a modern building with three rooms and great lighting, great space. He and Otto have collaborated this way before. The exhibition I’ve agreed to is scheduled for the last week of November, seven months from now, and it’s true that most of the work is complete, drawings and paintings delivered. But Otto has begun to ask for extra information, details, discussions on individual pieces. I haven’t settled on a title yet, for the catalogue or the show—though it will be the same for both. We’ve tossed ideas back and forth since fall, and both Nathan and Otto are waiting for me to make up my mind.

All of this has become a disturbing weight in my head. But I’m thinking clearly enough to know that the trip, sudden though it might be, has to be a good idea. I need to get away from here, if only for a few weeks. I’m not in the mood for the company of friends—Basil excepted—and I don’t want to fly. It will be better to get behind the wheel and point the car west. I’d drive non-stop if I thought I could stay awake.

I recognize the buildup of energy that has to be released, energy I should be putting into my work.
So
, I argue with myself.
Run away. You aren’t going to hurt anyone
. Again, I have a flash of the old surge through the limbs, a feeling that I should be working on three canvases at once, an urge so strong, I could run in any direction and create while on the move. Until I’d be forced to stop and think, and then I’d start to feel like an imposter. There’s a fragile line between the desire to create and the act of creation. An idea can so quickly lose its lustre—and so easily disappear.

I look down at Otto’s most recent note, lying on my work table.

Would you add half a dozen lines to this, Bin—so we can write up a brief description for the jacket? Send it back as soon as you can. Your own words. We’ll tidy it up and do the rest
.

He has already begun:

RIVERS (working title only, I know, I know)

EXCITING NEW OFFERING FROM CELEBRATED ARTIST

BIN OKUMA

After that, blank space.

Trying to reassure, no doubt. I’m betting that Nathan was in the background when the note was sent out. If I were to imagine conversations between the two men, I’d be weary. Uncertain. About the entire project—dual project, as it’s now become. But they are both loyal; I know this. And now that the momentum is underway, they’ll see the project through to the end. Even with Otto distracted by his new girlfriend.

Twice divorced, Otto readily admits his weakness for phases. The present phase began with dreams of geisha, he told me. And involves all things Japanese, including Miki, who emigrated from Japan a year ago and has now moved in with him. She is teaching him to make
sushi
on weekends, he says, and he’s become an expert. They eat out in Japanese restaurants twice a week, and I’ve joined them a couple of times. A month ago, Miki brought along a friend, a woman who works at the Japanese embassy. I didn’t comment when Otto called me, next day. He has also begun to track down woodblock prints, and attends auctions seeking more. He’ll be travelling to a Buddhist retreat for two weeks this summer while Miki visits her family in Japan. I swear he would turn Japanese if he could. I think of the years I looked into the mirror, never liking the person I saw, wishing to be anything—anyone—but. And marvel at the leap through time. So many Japanese Canadian men of my generation turned away from Japanese women. They made friends with and married
hakujin—
”white” girls. And I found Lena. In Montreal. We found each other.

I should be happy to have the support of Otto and Nathan, happy that the show will take place at all. And it is time for a show. My work has been changing over the last four or five years.
A natural evolution
, Lena told me a couple of years ago.
Look at you. An idea, a shape, a brushstroke, a mood: one begets another, begets another. It’s so organic, so much about form. It’s all about challenge and risk with you, isn’t it?

Challenge and risk. That sums it up. Or did. Because, lately, my biggest worry about the project, the one that has gnawed up the side of me with depressing persistence, is that the spirit of the whole has not been realized. Not on paper, not on canvas, not at all.

There was a time—it now seems long ago—when I cared about all of this.

I did not complete the catalogue description for Otto, nor did I send it back.

I think of Otto at the funeral, a quick pat on the arm, his hand resting on my sleeve. “It will be good for you to finish the river project, Bin. Get it done once and for all. You’ve dragged it behind you long enough. You need to sink into it again. It will give you something to do.”

His use of the word
sink
unnoticed by him, even as it was uttered. He didn’t mean to discourage or offend, I know. But while he was speaking, I could see over his shoulder the rectangular box that held Lena’s ashes, three feet behind him on a polished wooden stand. That was immediately after the service, before everyone assembled to walk through the cemetery’s convoluted paths that led to the “garden” where the ashes were to be interred. There was initial confusion before people fell into some sort of procession. Feet moving in different directions until a leader emerged and order prevailed. Who was that leader? Someone to the left of me, someone from the funeral parlour, perhaps. Voices were subdued, people half-nodded to one another. My brother and sister had arrived, and Lena’s family, of course. They had to be there. They
were
there. It must have been Greg on my left. We were trying to look out for each other. Keep moving. Silently. No obligation to say anything to anyone. Made insensible, insensate, made useless by grief.

I go to the rolltop desk in the corner of my studio and open the long drawer beneath its extendable surface. There’s a small Japanese scroll in there and, beside it, a manila folder with printing along the top edge: FRASER RIVER CAMP / REMOVAL FROM PACIFIC COAST. Lena gathered and compiled the contents. Her signature—familiar, flowing, at a forward slant—is written across the bottom. All the differences between us are blatant in that signature. My own, in comparison, resembles hidden tracks. I take the folder out of the drawer and shove it into my pack. A folder I have not, until this moment, intended to bring. Now it will be with me, whether I decide to look at it or not.

Keep river as your focus
, Lena said, often enough. She repeated it like a mantra. Through the weeks and months and many summers that she, and sometimes she and Greg, accompanied me on my travels.
This is an important project for you, Bin. Keep river as your focus and the work will get done
.

I do a final check of the room from the doorway, glance back and see what I have not been looking for. Along the windowsill, my array of
smalls
, collected over the years. From Long River in Prince Edward Island, a sandstone quill holder, brownish red, plucked in its natural state. A tiny glass whale with jagged flukes from the Saguenay. A palm-sized burl picked up on a trail near the Saco River in Maine. A delicate Bourgault carving of a man in a green toque, from Saint-Jean-Port-Joli on the St. Lawrence. I had settled on a large rock behind the
auberge
in that place and was watching the tide push back the great river. It was a summer night, and a yellow band of light floated above the waterline. The evening was so layered, so exquisite, I sank into it and couldn’t leave. By the time complete darkness rolled up the river valley, all that remained visible was a band of woolly cloud joining west to east. A grove of trees to my right had blackened in silhouette, and Lena stepped out of that blur of darkness and made her way down the slope. She was shaking her head.
Did you forget you were to meet me in the dining room? I might have known
. But she came to sit with me, in the dark.

Here, too, is my tiny clay seaman, his left leg snapped below the knee. Created to sit on the edge of a shelf or sill, he is ruddy and elegant, even with a peg leg. Lena and Greg chose him in a pottery shop in Cornwall while I was sketching outcrops on the lower banks of the Helford Estuary. It was a working holiday for me. We had sailed, embarking in New York and docking in Southampton, where we rented a car. We were almost five days at sea before reaching England, and Greg—who was eight at the time—spent much of the voyage asking about ocean tremors, canyons, earthquakes. He was fascinated, but full of worry, too.
Are we crossing an ocean ridge right now, an ocean trench? Will our ship be lost at sea?
I gave him a compact sketchbook of his own, a blue Hilroy, and he drew pictures of wrecks all the way across the Atlantic. In pencil and ink he created ships with flags, primitive lifeboats, our cabin porthole, spray and blue froth, sailors and pirates, undersea creatures, shark and octopus, giant fish eating smaller fish, a narrow trill of waves inked and glued separately beneath a ship as if in afterthought—or maybe a carefully planned collage. All part of his vision. He also drew a spewing ocean volcano in menacing black and red crayon. Two ships bobbed on rocky waves to the right of the picture. An explanation accompanied:
The big ship is helping the little ship to get by safely
. Someone was often lending a helping hand in Greg’s drawings.

Later, the same afternoon I’d been sketching in Cornwall, we drove the car to Helston and sat on a stone wall at the top of the hill and ate Cornish pasties purchased from a street vendor. That was when Lena and Greg presented me with the clay seaman. But shortly after we returned to Canada, my sleeve brushed the cap of the tiny man as I reached towards the window, and I knocked him to the floor.

Bin, protector of fractured and broken goods
. Lena laughed at my collection of smalls, even when she herself was fractured and broken. Though neither of us knew how broken she was. Nor did we know that the stroke that took her life had already announced its arrival, in the weeks preceding her death.

I
haul things out to the station wagon: Thermos, cooler with the green lid, road map on the passenger seat, camera, a bottle of Scotch in its sturdy cylinder, Beethoven tapes and some of Lena’s Benny Goodmans. Books to read in motels along the way, placed on the floor, passenger side: Ishiguro’s
An Artist of the Floating World
, which Greg has been urging me to read for a few years; essays by Heinrich Böll; Beethoven’s letters. I’ll be lucky to finish any one book completely, but at least I’ll have choice. I give silent thanks to Okuma-san and wonder, as I often have, if without him in my life I’d have come to music, literature, even my own painting, in the same way.

Basil, now certain of an upset in routine, is executing tight circles in the front hall. There’s a blur of shades on his haunches as he hurls himself at the door every time I go outside with a load.

“Hang on, Basil, hang on,” I call out, but he continues to half-whine, half-bark until he hears the words
Get in the car, Basil
, at which he bolts off the steps, stands panting beside the car until the trunk is open and launches himself from a standing start, up and into the back.

Because of his odd body shape, it always seems that he won’t get off the ground, but he ends up inside first try. Low and heavy, three feet long, nose to tail, is my hound with the grand name and the heavy paws. He’ll continue to turn circles in the confined space of the car and won’t stop until we’re past the turnoff to the kennels, a road the two of us know well.

The back has been flattened to give him plenty of room. I’ve thrown in a worn piece of mat, a couple of ragged towels, a bag of dog food, pouches of meat, leash, hide chews, his Kong, a sealed container of water. Most of this is stacked on the floor behind the front seats. There’s more baggage for Basil than there is for me.

I slide into the car and take a last look at the house. And there is Lena at the front door, her face expressionless. One hand rests against the edge of the door as if she can’t wait to push it shut, the other is at her waist. I know the stance; we were married twenty-six years. Didn’t she say, somewhat mysteriously, that the trip had been put off long enough? When? When did she say that? The trip was postponed so many times. But postponements didn’t stop the subject from coming up. It was clear all along that Lena wanted me to go back. Back meaning farther than Alberta, farther than the homes of my sister and brother in Edmonton, where we have always come to a full stop. Back meaning all the way back, through the Rockies and as far as the inland camp on the Fraser River. Or maybe farther still, to the West Coast and the Pacific, where my own journey began.

None of this was surprising, given Lena’s penchant for gathering history. She taught the subject at the University of Ottawa and, in her spare time, filled an entire upstairs closet with the genealogical history of her own family—photos and documents of generations that preceded her. Maybe, if asked, Greg will deal with those covered containers someday. But not now. What twenty-year-old is interested in his parents’ family history?
All in good time
, Lena used to say. Greg might even decide to turn the task over to Lena’s sister and brother. Let them sort it out.

Of course, it is not Lena at the front door. How could she have had a stroke at the age of forty-nine? It’s difficult not to keep asking the question. How could anyone who is not yet fifty have a stroke? What didn’t we know? Why didn’t she tell me what was going on?

The front door is firmly closed and locked, the spare key given to Miss Carrie, who, with her diminutive frame, now emerges from her own house next door and stands at the top of her veranda step. She offers a regal wave in farewell. She has thrown some sort of greatcoat over her back, and its weight tips her forward more than usual. She has one hand on her walker and tilts her eyes upwards as if to acknowledge a neck too fragile to support her head and its thickness of white hair. She has declared, in the past, that she is the same age as the stone house she lives in, though she’s never divulged how many years that is. Ninety-something, no further details. The house was inherited from her late father, a General of the Great War, whom she looked after in his old age. Although he’s been dead for decades, his presence fills the house and she still refers to him as “Daddy.” “Mommy” died ten years before “Daddy.” All of this happened before we moved into the neighbourhood. Miss Carrie doesn’t seem to have much ready income apart from her pension, but she is surrounded by ancient furniture and memorabilia. During the seventies, when we bought our house, she adopted us as family and later became an honorary, close-at-hand grandma to Greg when he was born. Now she’s the only “grandmother” he has. When I phoned last night to tell her I was heading west on a sudden trip, she offered to bring in the mail and keep an eye on things, as she usually does.