Street Symphony (6 page)

The waiter asked if she wanted another. She nodded and smiled. It was an upmarket bar and the man, no doubt an actor in his other life, expressed pleasure that she had come in on that particular evening and had chosen to drink their costly but ordinary wine.

“Nuts?” she asked.

“Certainly, madam,” he replied as he swept up the fragments of her napkin.

The next glass would help her decide. Option two: travelling along the Trans-Canada to Saskatchewan with Marina Harchuk and her handsome, slim, blue-eyed brother, Jim. Telling tales of childhood and love, taking turns driving, they would keep going day and night. So why not take off eastward through the mountains and then the flat, flat-day-after-day-flat, land? The Prairies had always been a kind of joke in her family, but now she longed to see them, to understand what drew people back to them. “Come with us! We’re going home for a month. Marina would be glad of editorial help.” Jody could have her own cabin, take her laptop, keep on with her work. It was nearly as crazy a leap as Roland’s relative going off in a sailing ship to Halifax with no notion of what he would find, or whether there would be pirates or dragons.

Red dress woman now replaced by a woman in a navy suit talking into her cell. Barman knows her. Pours ingredients into shaker and begins to shake it.

“I love him!”

“Sorry?”

“I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.”

The waiter placed the new glass of wine beside her and two napkins.

“Would you like to order from the menu, madam?”

“Not just now, thank you.”

The off-white, ankle-length gown with a nipped-in waist in the closet at home forbade starch and sugar, even from this distance.
I love him too much. I’m prepared to fall into a morass of loving and giving up part of my life and if I think like that is it really love? Oh, for crap’s sake, I sound like a letter to Dear Daphne.

Did anyone in the world care which way this particular cat jumped? Or was it dog? Whatever animal, yes, they did. Dad talked every other day about leading his daughter up the path to happiness. Mom would freak out, far, far out, if Jody told Diamond Bill, as she called him, that she loved him too much and that she needed some stress and misery in her life to make it meaningful, and bliss was only for the good and pure of heart.

Woman in navy suit at bar now stripped of jacket, nose into cocktail glass. Man on her left looking at her with interest.

Stop editing life, she said to herself. And never try to edit poetry again. Ella’s look when Jody told her that
whichever
was not a poetic word had dripped disdain and near despair. However, Jody had regained her editor’s hat when she reread and admired the lines
Whichever day you choose, whatever hour you dare to share with me, beware, for time is a caprice, a goat, that can’t be held – in check.
She felt that it wasn’t poetry, she was almost sure it was nonsense, and yet the words, now inscribed on her brain, had given her a shiver of recognition.

Solitary and confined, The Grove group had, as they relaxed, asked her questions about her own life, and she’d told them she worked for a publisher, guiding words into their proper places on the page, helping writers develop their themes not as a teacher but as a questioning reader. She mentioned no names but let them wonder whi
ch famous writers she had guided into print. All pleasant until the pressure-cooker syndrome had taken over last Saturday night.

Older woman in yellow tatted vest, greenish shirt underneath, long brown skirt, moving not to the lobby, not to the washrooms, but this way, coming this way. Smiling with purpose, carrying her empty wine glass. Sitting down here!

“You look at me as if I’m a ghost. And sitting in this bar, I am a ghost to all these people with their briefcases, their laptops, their importance, drinking, talking, making appointments for tomorrow. They can’t see me. I have no appointments for tomorrow. I’m here because my daughter is attending a conference and I’m the babysitter. I love my grandchildren because I have to, but they’re very hard to manage. I’ve left them watching TV and helping themselves to candy and soft drinks from the little bar. I put all the alcohol in the safe.”

Jody could only say, “Have we met?”

“It was ten years ago. You were giving a talk on the editor’s role in literature.”

“You must be thinking of someone else.”

The woman reached across for the chic blond’s bottle of red and filled her own glass.

“In the public library. Three of us in the audience, but you were good. You acted as if we were a crowd.”

Jody remembered. She shrank. This woman had a manuscript. The novel she’d been writing for forty years was probably above in her hotel room, all one thousand and one pages of it. Nowhere was safe.

“So I’ve watched you looking around. What are you hiding from, Judith?”

A clarifying angel!
I’m trying to run away but am being held back by some kind of moral sense, or is it cowardice? Might as well ask questions as if this intruder were an oracle.

“What do you think about the Prairies?”

“I’m Lorna, by the way. And I used to live out there, but I like big cities, so I settled in Calgary after my husband died.”

I could screw my way to Mexico and then get ditched for a younger, prettier woman or maybe man.

Options: Tell this woman to go away. Move to another table. Talk and listen.

“Are you sure your grandchildren are all right?”

“As right as they’re ever going to be. I’d like to see them taught better manners. Tied to their iPads, Pods, whatever, they hardly look up to say hello. They live in another world. A place full of aliens and ene
mies. Will they ever get used to being among humans?” She reached for the bottle of red again.

“Leave that alone, Mother,” the blond snapped. “And please go back to Rosie and Fergus. You’re supposed to be looking after them.”

“You get on with your work there. That’s what you’re here for.” She turned back to Jody and spoke in a whisper. “Only one thing to say: I never got her to understand this and she’s supposed to be a lawyer. It’s always a matter of who it affects. The decisions you make. Think of your life first, but avoid cruelty. How far can you see down the road? On the Prairies you can see for days. Life is different here. You can’t see far and some days hardly at all.” Then she turned to her daughter and said, “I hope you won’t be too long, Ingrid. I’m tired.”

She walked away. Clearly, her sparse hair was due to chemotherapy and her yellow vest was in fact a smart garment made of thin strips of leather. Jody watched her go. She wanted to move before the woman across the table spoke.

It was too late.

“My mother’s had a near-death experience. She thinks it’s her duty now to offer help and guidance to strangers and family as if she’d had an injection of wisdom or foresight. Let me tell you, she hasn’t. She told my husband he’d be better off without me. Can you believe it?”

“Did he – believe it?”

“I have to finish this before I go.” Ingrid turned back to her papers and poured the rest of the wine into her glass.

The waiter walked by Jody without asking if she’d like another. She felt reproached.

So what were all these people doing here? De-stressing? Some were still working. Some were clearly in no hurry to go home. Had the burly man wearing a jacket with
Hammer of the Antichrist
printed on the back come in to preach? Did they all simply seek solace in wine, comfort in cocktails? Were they hiding from their lives? Very few of them appeared to have come into the bar to enjoy themselves.

Ella was right. Caprice
was
a goat. At The Grove she’d seen her
and Roland coping with the third stage of life. Marina would surprise
herself. Her book would sell because it was human and humane and different from other tales of prairie life. Iain’s energy had reminded Jody that in a few years she would be forty and there was no time to waste. The course had only lasted six days, yet the rhythm, the meaning of her own life had been affected by the words and even the pauses in the daily dialogue with her students. She’d been invaded by their thoughts and hopes and lives and had, on that last evening, felt fear in the face of Aritha’s meltdown.

“Goodnight!” Ingrid gathered her papers and prepared to go back to her family.

Jody smiled at her and nodded, and then she said, “Just the bill,” to the waiter. She looked at him. What did he care if she drank herself stupid? He was young, twenty-five or so, and could have been doing a hundred things other than waiting on these careless people. But in a place like this, the tips were golden.

She sat back, proud of her self-denial, and wondered how far Iain had got on the road to Mexico. Depending on the stops he’d made en route, he could be in San Francisco or beyond. She could never catch him by road, but there were planes. She took out her cellphone and wrote a text:
Have an idea for a play. Coming to CA. Where are you?
Youth would be captured (his), recaptured (hers). Sunshine, adobe houses, ancient history. Her finger was on the Send tab when Lorna’s words came into her head. “Who will this affect?”

The waiter, Robbie, set the bill down beside her. She smiled at him and said thank you.

“Goooal!” The shout startled her. Cheers from the bar, from the tables. The Bruins had scored. Jody looked at the men and women who were cheering a foreign team because the Canucks were out of the playoffs. And did any of them care a jot about how she occupied her days or who she was? No! That was why she was sitting here. For an hour or two, she’d been almost alone in a crowd, social without being sociable. She smiled at them all, the woman at the bar, the laptoppers, the cellphone-skimmers, the fans cheering on the team, and was grateful to them. She wanted to stand up, hush them all and make a short speech about life and love. Instead, she erased the words on the tiny screen and called her mother. “I’ll be there,” she said. It was all she needed to say.

Salvage

When he’d got rid of all that was unnecessary,
Jason began to measure the space. Ten strides along the living room, six across. There was plenty of room for a child, a dog, a fish, a woman. He heard the phone ring but didn’t answer it because he had no answers. He was still acknowledging loss and weighing it against cubic feet of emptiness. His father always said, “What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.” But what Jason had lost was never going to return.

Maybe he had gone a little overboard in his cleansing fury, but the dumpster appeared across the road like the welcoming arms of a plump woman or the Statue of Liberty.
Give me your unwanted,
it had called to him.
I am here for you. I am a perfect receptacle. I deal in detritus.
It was the day after the golden people across the road moved out and the new owner had sent a contractor to tear the heart out of number thirty-two and remake it to his own desires. Jason had never got to know the departed family, only seen them as a foursome, Mom and Dad and two girls, who went out together at weekends and laughingly ran into the house when they returned. Yellow hair. Blond, really. A stunning, picture-perfect group. A week after the funeral, the golden mother had come over and given him a cake and looked at him with tears in her eyes as if they’d been friends. People do take advantage of the distressed.

After dark the evening before, he’d gone across to the dumpster to test its capacity, hauling himself up and leaning over, nearly falling in, feeling sad for those who have to seek some sort of life in such bad-smelling tanks. There was plenty of space. He set the alarm clock for 4:00 a.m., slept a little and then, one by one, dragged the two light armchairs, four dining-room chairs and the quarters of the table across the road. Manoeuvring the objects up and over the sides had been a problem until he figured out a way to stand on the coffee table, haul the things up and tip them over into the void. Crash, clunk. The noise was pleasing and no lights came on in the windows of thirty-one or thirty-five. At 5:30, when the birds were beginning to chirp, it was done. He took the coffee table back into the house with him and plugged in the espresso machine. The bookshelves and their contents remained, and the picture of
histrionicus histrionicus
was still hanging on the wall. It had been there when they moved in. A nice print. He liked it. He felt guilty about keeping the television set, but when he found himself able to concentrate on reading again, that too would go. It had taken him a while to dismantle the bedroom furniture, but what IKEA could join together could also be taken apart. From now on, he was going to sleep in the spare room.

Glad that he’d kept the mop, he swept the floors before he set off for work. At the office, he said nothing about his early morning activities and went to his cubicle, smiling. “Good morning,” he called to Jack, to Gilles, to Mandy. Grouchy sounds came back to him. It was a time for checking the markets. Who was buying what? Jason felt sorry for all of them, weighted down as they were with furniture, family and possibly fish. Gilles glanced at him as he passed, looking him up and down in a quizzical way as if there were signs of derangement about him.

“You okay, Jason?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Just asking.”