Street Symphony (7 page)

His moment of enlightenment had come in the fifth week of abandonment, when dust had begun to gather on the furniture and no one returned to lie on the bed or sit and talk to him. What need had he of a table and chairs? He wasn’t planning to have parties. If anyone invited him to dinner, he would take the hosts a decent bottle of wine and say thank you nicely as his mother had taught him. No need for reciprocal invitations. And sawing the table into near equal fourths had been a therapeutic action.

On his way home that evening, he picked up a salad from the health food store and a loaf of nutty bread. Meals would be like this from now on, healthy and slight. Later, in the dark, after he’d lain down to coax sleep, he got up again, took his flashlight and went to peer into the dumpster. His stuff was still there, edges of it sticking up like skeletal bones through a mess of plaster and shards of wood. He looked at the pieces of their bed as if he could rewind a tape and find Christine lying beside him.
Goodnight, honey.
Even if she’d put her cold feet on his back, he wouldn’t have complained.

He cried out in terror, waking from a dream: The furniture was returning, piling back into the house, throwing itself about, burying him.
Man found beneath chairs, beaten to death with table legs. He had it coming, said the cops.

On the third day, when he was beginning to see some point to the nothingness of his life, his sister turned up. She’d brought him a dish full of baked pasta.

“What in God’s name!” she said. “Where is everything?”

“I’m making a new start,” he replied.

“It looks more like an end.”

“You have to have an end before you can have a new beginning.”

“Christ!” Even when they were kids she hadn’t appreciated his logical take on life.

“I kept the oven,” he said in his own defence.

She put the dish on the counter and sat on the coffee table.

“Jason!”

He waited. Then sat cross-legged on the floor. Ginny’s homilies were never short. Married to a great guy, two kids, a job, and she still had time to make free with advice and food. She was wearing a kind of blue pantsuit with a long jacket that made her look like an official or like what she was, a woman who ran a small textile company with a firm hand. She used makeup well. Handsome in her way. He wanted her to stop staring at him. He wanted her to leave him alone.

“There’s no need to behave like this. You’ve had a shock. It’s a terrible tragedy and I can’t imagine how you feel. We all miss Christine. The boys keep asking if you’re okay.”

He bit his lip. He’d forgotten about the boys, his nephews.

She went on. “But people don’t wreck their homes and behave like lunatics.”

Lunatics were affected by the moon. It would be full tomorrow. He might take time to howl.

“So where is it, Jason?”

If she was referring to his heart, it was dead too. But he said, “In the dumpster.”

She
howled, not waiting for permission from the moon. “Those chairs belonged to our parents. The lamps I know for a fact were high-end. I remember when Christine bought them. You can’t just throw expensive stuff away. It’s a crime. It’s against. It’s against…The bed? Not the bed?”

He looked at the harlequin duck and his plain mate,
histrionicus
squared. The pair were standing on a few twigs and scraps of wood at the edge of a lake against a wavy blue background. What did they need? But then they were birds and he was a human. Ginny was almost in tears, and she was not a crying woman.

“And look at you,” she said. “Did you go to work in those clothes?”

“I bought paint. I’m going to redecorate.” It was a lie. He’d carelessly gathered up his own clothes along with the others. His two decent suits were in a green garbage bag at the Salvation Army depot. If Ginny began to cry, he might cry too.

“Has it occurred to you –” she began.

He knew what she was about to say, and it had. It had occurred to him halfway through the morning while he was arranging to buy five hundred possibly worthless stocks for a man immune to professional advice.

“– That other people could use that stuff if you don’t want it? There are the homeless.”

She looked at him, as if daring him to say that homeless people don’t want beds and chairs unless you could also offer them space. He looked around. It was a small house, a bungalow, easy living all on one level. No need for anyone with a heart problem or a disability to go downstairs to the basement. His trains on their tracks were safe there.

“You have to get the stuff back,” Ginny said. She was standing up, her chin out, her brown eyes set on his face. He couldn’t avoid looking back at her.

“It’s covered in plaster and rubble.”

“There are people who clean furniture.”

“I’d need a crane.”

It was raining, getting dark. The plaster would harden on his late furnishings, making casts of them perhaps. He pictured casts or waxworks of himself and Christine as they had been before that dreadful evening.

“She wanted a fish,” he said. “One of those blue-and-black ones. She was going to work up to an aquarium.”

“I’ll be back at the weekend.” His sister kissed him as she left, maybe conceding that there was some excuse for his actions. “Heat the pasta for half an hour at three hundred and fifty, honey.”

Sound of door closing.
Did she expect the house to be as it had been before when she returned on Saturday? Was she setting him a Herculean labour? No use looking in the Yellow Pages for a genie. He caught sight of his face in the hall mirror. It surprised him. A long, dusty face. His jacket was crumpled. He was in fact dishevelled. He said the word aloud. It was a complex word. Could have been, in his case, dis–shelved. He’d been warned about taking the wrong lessons from Sunday school texts. The words had been translated from one language to another and then another, gathering new meanings the way displaced people who’d lost their belongings were burdened by ill-fitting gifts from strangers. And how often could a man lop off his right hand before he became useless in the world? Obediently, he turned on the oven and put the dish of pasta inside.

Her death had nothing to do with his hobby. Or very little. Christine had driven away in anger and too fast. That was all. Everybody has arguments, don’t they? The phrases from that night’s quarrel hit him like boomerangs:
Aquariums are expensive. You have your trains. We’ll get a dog. What if I’m pregnant?
Ducks afloat on watery debris only had to fear larger predators and hunters. He was afraid his life was beyond redemption.
Redemption. Redeem. I am irredeemable and should have thrown myself into the dumpster.
The blameless furniture was gone, and he was still upright in the world.

He hunted about for a clean pair of pants and a shirt and took off his clothes. He could do laundry. Down in the basement he walked by the engines and carriages set out on the big table. A few weeks ago, if anyone had asked what he wanted for Christmas,
he would have said that what he most wanted was a double O lo
comotive. He flicked the switch, and Blue Arrow set off towards the washing machine while the Rocket went to the siding. The clock on the station said 13:10 as the Arrow pulled alongside the platform. A miniature woman with a suitcase waited but didn’t climb aboard.

“You want to go or don’t you?” he said. “Make up your mind.” He put her into the carriage and the train set off again.

While the washing machine churned his clothes, he hitched the new carriage to the Rocket and watched as it rolled up the slight incline to the tunnel and then along the track to the bridge. Kids playing complex games on their iPads had no idea of this old-fashioned kind of enjoyment. But Bill and Ryan, his nephews…

He sniffed. The pasta hadn’t been baking that long, surely. He ran to the kitchen and opened the back door. It was an acrid smell, a mean smell. What had Ginny put in the sauce? He opened the oven door and released a cloud of grey smoke. The photographs! When he’d taken them off the table, he’d put them in the oven for safety. He took his shirt off and used it to grab the pile of paper. Christine’s face was curling up, reproach in every black line.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m very sorry, love. It was my fault.”

What were you thinking?
she seemed to reply.
I had to be destroyed twice?

Some of the pictures were salvageable. Salvage! He had turned their past into salvage. He switched the oven off. The lasagna was sprinkled with charred paper. It was tepid and probably poisonous at that temperature. But he sat on the floor and
ate it as a penance, charred paper and all. He knew now that he had to suffer in order for the world to tilt back to its proper axis. The word
sorry
was simple, easy to say, a game even, and it was not good enough. He wanted to sit on a chair and put his head on a table. There was no comfortable place left to cry.

Feeling a little ill, he went next door to the Wilsons and rang the bell. Their teenager always needed money. The boy himself opened the door.

“I’ve got a job for you, Mike,” Jason said. “Something we have to do early in the morning. You might want to wear old clothes. If you could come round about six.”

“Okay,” the kid said as if he had such offers all the time, not even stopping to think whether he was being asked to rob a store or bury a body.

It was the trust that turned Jason’s bones to jelly. There was no second thought. No “I’ll ask my parents.” Just a sweet okay – and the anticipation of payment.

“And ask your dad if I can borrow his stepladder, please.”

The question was whether, when he recovered the stuff, he should leave it in the yard till he’d cleaned the muck off it. The table was a goner, but the chairs and smaller items were salvageable, and the bed could be put back together if he could find the instructions. Then he’d have something to show Ginny on Saturday. He spread a tarp on the lawn ready for the return of his rejected goods. He took three antacid tablets and lay on the floor in hope of sleep.

He was woken at seven by the sound of heavy wheels close by. He ran outside in his underwear. The dumpster was being taken away on the back of a flatbed truck.

“I came at six like you said, but you didn’t answer the door,” Mike told him.

“I slept in.”

“Your stuff. I saw you throwing it in there. Mistake, I guess.”

“Crazy,” Jason said. “Thanks, though.” He gave the boy ten bucks for his wasted time.

He folded the tarp and took it back into the basement. What could he do now to propitiate the gods, Christine’s ghost, Ginny? He stared at his trains. At nine he called the office and said he was sick. He
was
sick. The pasta, probably meant to last two or three days, was a weight on his stomach that hurt every time he moved. He began to tape up the rolling stock, piece by piece, in bubble wrap and placed each one in the large box. The stations went next. The tracks could remain on the board. The next owner could rearrange them as he pleased. He held the passengers and railway staff in his hand. Tiny replicas of people rested in a heap on his palm: three women, a man, two kids, a boy with a backpack, a girl with pigtails, the station master, the engineer. His fingers curled round them. Ginny. Her boys, his nephews. Christine’s grieving mother. His own kind father, who called every other day from Alberta to see if he was okay. He set the people down and began to unpack the trains. He’d promised to teach Ginny’s boys the pleasure of running your own railroad before they got sucked into the world of avatars and violence and spent their time, eyes down, tapping at a small screen.

Saturday morning, he went out early to check out the garage sales. By the time Ginny turned up, he had two chairs, a fold-out table, three lamps and a goldfish bowl. “I’m taking a week off,” he said. “If the boys want to come round after school one evening…”

She was looking at the chairs, their soft cushions covered in blue-striped velvet.

“They towed my stuff away.”

Ginny inhaled. He could see her putting on her managerial cloak and regrouping before she said, “You haven’t been answering your phone. Dad’s coming. He’s been worried. He thinks you need company. He’ll be here on Wednesday.”

Jason collapsed. He lost his breath. This was what he’d been holding at bay: sympathy, kindness, even love. It was unbearable. He wept.

Ginny handed him a Kleenex and waited. Then she said gently, “You don’t pick up chairs from street sales, Jason. Bedbugs! We have some spare stuff in the garage. Ted’ll bring a table over and a couple of things and help you put these outside. Tomorrow, I’ll come for you and we’ll go shopping for a bed. Okay?”

“And a fish?” he said.

“And a fish.”

Aquarium

The tank was a narrow upended oblong
about three feet high and one foot across. In the centre was a tree of plastic or maybe real weedy foliage. The fish were swimming quickly up and down as if looking for an exit. Only one, blue with yellow stripes, was making a gentle circuit round and round the “tree”. Roseanne looked at the grubby water. A clear fish tank, its inhabitants gliding lazily to and fro, was supposed to induce calm. Why otherwise were they part of the furnishings of so many medical waiting rooms? This one produced a sense of fret, and a little concern about the restaurant’s kitchen.