Sweeter Life (49 page)

The Young house was exactly the way he remembered it: same wallpaper, same smell of fresh flowers and furniture polish. The guest bedroom, where he dropped his bag, had the same chenille bedspread, the same Andrew Wyeth print above the dresser, the same bookcase with the same books and framed snapshots. To Cyrus, that had always seemed the definition of old age—people who were unwilling or unable to face change and who arranged their world as a fortress against it. But now, as he sat and listened to Janice moving about the room next to him, he felt the appeal of such a fortress. He remembered like it was yesterday how much fun the two of them had had together, making love on this very bed, whipping up a batch of brownies and watching the soaps after school, hanging out at the Three Links Hall and being able to say anything and have her understand. He had half a mind to knock on her door right now and talk until dawn about where they’d been and what they’d seen and what it meant to be who they were. But he was already so tired and drunk, and the pillow was so inviting, that he fell back fully dressed, wrapped himself in the bedspread and let the darkness carry him away.

NEXT MORNING CYRUS OPENED HIS EYES
to find Janice sitting beside him, her hand resting gently on his cheek. “Your sister just phoned, looking for you,” she said. “She wants you to call.”

He closed his eyes again while he reconfigured the who, what, where and why. For a fraction of a second, he had thought he was back home in
Toronto, and that Eura had settled on the bed beside him. When he opened his eyes again, Janice was watching him closely. He took her hand in his and said, “It’s weird, the two of us being in this room again.”

“Is it?” She let her gaze settle on a distant corner of the ceiling. “I think we’ve always been in this room. And we’ve always been at the Three Links Hall and at school and drinking root beer at Stewart’s. Just like, in a way, I’ll always be a student in Toronto. My father will always die. I’ll always be there when Clarence takes his last breath. You know what I mean? It’s all here.” She touched a hand to her belly. “If you could look inside, you’d see it: a jumble of stuff like you’d find in an attic.”

Cyrus didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but he knew one thing: he was still the silent partner, the straight man, and she was the one with all the words.

“I’ll make coffee,” she said. “If you hurry, maybe we can talk a bit before you get pulled too much into the day.”

He showered quickly and phoned his sister, who said Ruby was doing fine, all things considered. It was Hank who worried her. “He’s still asleep,” she said. “And it’s not like I’m tiptoeing around. I wonder if I should wake him just to see if he’s okay.” Cyrus understood the concern. They had talked earlier about how unnerving it was to live with someone who slept only a couple of hours at a stretch. Before he could comment, she said, “I’ve been working out some details for the funeral, and it struck me you might not have a suit with you.”

“Good guess. I don’t own one.”

“Cyrus, even Hank has a suit.”

“Yeah, well, what would I do with something like that?”

“Oh, you know, go to funerals, a wedding or two, maybe a graduation, all the normal milestones you’ve somehow avoided.”

“Don’t act like I’ve missed out on the good things in life.”

“Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t. That’s not the point. You’re going to a funeral tomorrow and you don’t have a suit.”

“So maybe I won’t go. I find that shit kind of gruesome.”

Izzy exhaled loudly, and then said nothing, as though she were counting to ten. Then, in a tone that was calm and matter-of-fact, she said, “Can I
tell you something? If you don’t join us, I may never speak to you again. You understand?”

“But Iz, that religious crap is so hokey.”

“Maybe you should try telling Ruby that. Anyway, I don’t have time for your teenage bullshit. I’ve already called Samuel’s and told them to expect you. If you’re there by noon, they can have the alterations ready by closing tonight. And don’t worry about the expense, it’s on me. This is important, Cy, whether you know it or not.” Then she hung up.

In the music business, it was normal for thirty-year-old men to act like teenagers, and when Cyrus was in his world, doing what he was meant to do, it all felt good and right and natural. It was only when he came back to Wilbury that he felt odd in any way. Izzy never gave him any slack, of course, never considered how hard it was for him to be out of his element. But then she’d never been much of a teenager herself, one moment a young girl, and the next married to Gerry Muehlenburg. She was bitter, he figured. Even so, her words had gotten to him. After all, Ruby’s offer to buy him a suit twelve years ago had led him to the Les Paul and Ronnie Conger, to Jim and Sonny and Eura, to the road up and the road down, and now, with his record half-finished, a road pointed toward the stars. Who could say what surprises this new offer might bring?

Downstairs, the sight of Janice puttering in the kitchen further complicated his mood. For a fleeting moment he saw what it might have been like had he taken Ruby’s cheque and bought that suit, if he’d finished his year of school, say, then gone on to university and married Janice the way everyone would have predicted. Here she was, a healthy mind, a healthy body, the closest friend he’d ever known. They could have had kids and gone on vacations and done great things. And it would have worked out, he had no doubt about that. They had always been great together. And while you could make a case that he’d never been more alive than when he’d been with Eura, he could also say that he’d never been happier than with Janice.

He sat quietly at the table and let her bring coffee, let her fiddle with the toaster and bread, the butter and jam. When she sat facing him, he asked what she’d been up to the past while; and she told him about her art classes at the recreation centre, how liberating she had found the move from
Toronto. She was thinking of relocating permanently, she said. For his part of the history lesson, he restricted himself to professional matters—putting his band together, recording in England with a famous producer.

“That is so great,” she said.

And Cyrus should have been happy, should have been full to bursting with pride and a sense of accomplishment. But he wasn’t.

FOR MORE THAN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
Samuel’s Fine Apparel had been clothing the Wilbury elite—the doctors and lawyers and dentists, the wheelers and dealers like Isabel Owen. You could get Burberry there. You could get Aquascutum and Lacoste.

Cyrus had never set foot in the store (he’d always bought his school clothes at Feldman’s Men’s and Boys’ Wear down the street) and was glad Janice had offered to tag along. Her parents had bought most of their clothing from Ben Samuel. She shopped there too, occasionally, for kilts and cashmere and fine cottons. So Cyrus let her do all the talking and, except for the odd shrug from him now and then, make all the decisions—about the colour, the fabric, the length, the cut. Even so, he didn’t breathe normally until they were back on the street again.

“I guess I owe you lunch for that,” he said. Taking her by the elbow, he led her along the main street to their old hangout Marlowe’s, where they sat in the window booth and had the Teen Special, which unfortunately was a disappointment. The burger was mealy, the fries weren’t real, and the shakes were thin and tasteless. Of course, Junior Marlowe wasn’t manning the grill these days. He’d been dead for several years.

After lunch they drove aimlessly around town, ending up at Memorial Park where they lazed in the sun and took turns pushing each other on the swing. As the day wore on, they spoke more freely, moving gradually from safe and sanitized topics until they were floating freely in the ebb and flow of who they were and what they thought. By the end of the afternon Cyrus was able to breathe another sigh of relief. She was still his pal. She still laughed at his jokes.

At six o’clock they returned to Samuel’s for a final fitting. Even Cyrus had to admit he looked good. When he moved toward the change rooms to
get back into his jeans and T-shirt, Janice grabbed him by the arm. “Leave the suit on. We’ll go back to the house for five minutes so I can change. We should go to the funeral parlour.” In response to his pained expression, she buttoned up his jacket and said, “Come on, pop star. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

Isabel was so happy to see them walk through the door together, and to see Cyrus looking so handsome and respectable, that she rushed across the room to greet them. “My goodness,” she said, “don’t you look swell.”

“Don’t push it,” he warned. “I’m here against my will.”

“That’s fine. Against your will looks good on you.” Then she led them over to Ruby, where they spoke a few phrases of condolence.

It was downhill from there. The very idea of modelling his grief for everyone in town seemed ghoulish to him. He couldn’t get the hang of it. And Janice, not officially part of the family, had made herself scarce, loitering in the wings and smiling encouragement whenever Cyrus looked especially bleak. When Frank Pentangeles walked into the room, however, the whole mood changed.

In most ways that mattered, you could say that Frank and Clarence were good friends, though they seldom moved in the same circles. There had been mutual respect and affection and a long history of shared labour. And fun. Frank loved to tease and fool around. But there was no joking now, no levity. He dragged himself toward Ruby like he was the heaviest man on earth. Then he knelt beside her and wept, occasionally wiping away the tears with the heel of his hand but mostly just letting them flow. The rest of them exchanged uneasy glances, and Cyrus wondered what would happen if Frank couldn’t stop. Worse, this open display of grief had already brought tears or the threat of tears to everyone else in the room—what if they all lost control? What if this contagion of tears spread down the street and along the block, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, until the town lay down in sorrow?

Cyrus should have known better. Frank was many things, sometimes too loud, too sentimental, too emotional for his own good, but he was not a man to lose control. This was a matter of openness. And when he had finished pouring out his grief, he rose, squared his shoulders and walked directly to the open casket where he placed his hand over his friend’s heart, made the sign of the cross, then turned and walked away.

Once everyone had regained composure, Izzy quietly suggested to Hank that he, Cyrus and Janice go and have a drink. “Ruby and I will stay awhile longer,” she whispered. “Then we’ll join you for a nightcap.” When he resisted, she gave Cyrus a look that said she needed his help. Hank had slept most of the day, but even now, trussed up in his suit, he seemed dopey and depressed. It was hard to believe that Clarence’s death had laid him so low.

With a nod of acknowledgement to Isabel, Cyrus got behind the wheelchair and started pushing his brother toward the exit. “Come on, bro. Looking at you in that monkey suit is getting me spooked. Let’s get hammered.”

But no one was in the mood for a drink, and Hank least of all. He glowered darkly at Cyrus and Janice and was unable to rouse himself to even a few words of chit-chat. A few minutes later, he rolled himself into the den, flopped on the sofa and fell asleep in his suit. Cyrus took that as their cue to leave.

At Janice’s they were able to breathe more easily, speak more freely about the evening. Janice agreed the spectacle of Frank’s sorrow had been deeply affecting, but in some ways, the stilted platitudes of everyone else spoke to her most clearly. It was as if they’d been so shaken by Clarence’s death that they completely lost the ability to express themselves and had to lean on stock phrases and sentiments like so many prosthetics.

The biggest surprise of the day, she thought to herself, had been Cyrus’s uneasiness that afternoon in Samuel’s. He had let a small-town shopkeeper and the simple act of buying a suit unnerve him. And while it was true that he lacked the language for such a transaction, she still found it laughable, as though he were a stranger to civilization.

He’d matured in other ways, of course. Back in high school, he’d grow pink and flustered whenever female classmates acknowledged his presence. But that afternoon he’d made wisecracks with the waitress at Marlowe’s, chatted amiably with a young mother at Memorial Park and watched with unmistakable appreciation as women passed by on the street. The idea that the scope of his personal growth over the past decade extended no further than sex, drugs and rock and roll made her bristle with sarcasm, and she was wondering how to broach the subject, when he reached over, placed his hand on her knee and squeezed it affectionately. “You’re even more beautiful than I remember, Janice.”

“Ah,” she said, her index finger held up as a warning.

“Maybe we should go upstairs and, you know, snuggle a bit.”

“Yes, well, we’ve been there before, remember? A long time ago.”

He leaned closer. “But look at us. We both need comfort.”

With Jonathan out of her life, Cyrus was the only person she might conceivably love right now. She never doubted that for a moment. She had loved him almost as long as she’d known him, even when she and Jonathan were together. That didn’t mean she was without reservations. For one thing, Clarence’s death had reawakened her own sense of loss over her father’s passing, and unlike people in the movies, she had never found grief that romantic. No amount of touching would heal these wounds. Only time.

She took his hand off her knee and dropped it in his lap. In response to his inquisitive look, she shook her head.

“Is that ‘No, not right now,’ or ‘No, buzz off’?”

“Not now,” she said.

AFTER BREAKFAST
, Janice took Cyrus out to the warehouse to see her monument. All morning he’d been working hard to show her there were no hard feelings. He was loose and goofy and as talkative as she had ever known him. The effort on his part made her feel better about everything.

When she showed him the sculpture, he circled it repeatedly, running his hand along its contours, at one point even embracing it. “Wow,” he kept saying, “this is cool.” He looked through the lenses. He backed away from it and moved closer again. “What do you call it?”