The second time I went past your house was this spring. I had been avoiding driving by, but it was a sunny day and I felt like I could handle whatever sad feelings the sight of your old place would stir up. I was prepared for that, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw—a brand new, big, ugly house on the site of your little white bungalow. Your house had been knocked down, was entirely gone, not even a single black-eyed Susan left standing sentinel in the front garden.
One night I looked back through my address book and counted up all the places you’d lived (16), and then all the places I’ve lived (17).
Our parents never moved and yet we moved all the time. Maybe one was the result of the other, or maybe, and more likely, our nomadic existence was due to changes in fortune and relationships.
I liked the times we lived near each other in Toronto, when we were in our twenties and early thirties. The city was different then, less commodified, grittier. Artists, not young investment bankers, lived in the lofts, and the loft spaces were big and drafty with no real kitchen and a bathroom down the hall that was shared with bikers and junkies. There were old hotels downtown where one could buy cheap trays of draft beer in the afternoons. Factories had been abandoned but not yet pulled down or redeveloped, and all over the city were the ghosts of the industry that had once fuelled it. I particularly liked the old Inglis plant, with its land bridge over Strachan Avenue. In the late 1930s women munitions workers there built Bren guns and Browning 9-mm pistols.
I remember your basement apartment in the east end of Toronto that repeatedly flooded, and where mice used to swing on the cord to your kettle, and at night you would wake up and hear the sound of live mice eating the dead ones caught in the traps.
I remember the apartment on Palmerston near Queen with the huge kitchen that you painted yellow—the house in Staines, England, where it was so cold that when I visited I had to sleep in gloves and a hat—the upstairs apartment on Oxford Street in Kensington Market that you shared with your old girlfriend and her orange cat, Charles.
We worked at various jobs, lived in our largely crappy apartments with our partners, and devoted as much time as we could to becoming better artists. When we saw each other it was on the fly, between my three part-time jobs or the commitments in your relentless teaching schedule. We would meet for a beer or a coffee. Sometimes we would go to a movie or a play. We would meet and talk about ideas, what we were working on, what we were thinking about and reading, whom we were currently influenced by. We were purposeful, and when I found some of my old letters in your apartment and looked through them, I saw how optimistic and happy I was then and it startled me to meet that youthful version of myself and realize that I had become less happy through the years, not more.
You always liked moving. It signalled a fresh beginning and you would be full of hope for the life that your new place would offer up. Even at the end, crazy as it was to move three thousand miles when you were dying, you embarked on yet another fresh start, renting an apartment in a building where you’d lived before. You spent your last good energies unpacking your stuff, putting books on shelves, and getting your kitchen in order. You had complete disregard for the cancer, didn’t really change anything about your life to accommodate the disease. Everyone—your doctors, your friends, your family—got angry with you for not taking better care of yourself. You wouldn’t do even the simplest of things—drink more water to offset the effects of the chemo. Sure, you’d say, if one of us nagged you about drinking water; but then you wouldn’t do it. You’d agree to everything and do nothing.
You kept working, because you needed the money and because you liked your work, liked to play and teach the piano. You kept up your brutal schedule, working seven days a week, never having regular mealtimes and sometimes not eating for an entire day. You thought you could live to the outside edge of the potential lifespan of the disease—two years—and if that was the case, you had plans to slow down later and then do some of the things you wanted to do that weren’t about working—composing and travelling, mainly.
Of course, none of this happened.
When I look back on it now, I find your giving the disease no purchase admirable. A little foolish perhaps, but mostly admirable. You died on your feet, as it were, and I respect that. I hope that I do the same.
I’m not afraid to die, you said. I just don’t want to.
And when you asked my opinion about whether you should move back out west, I said, “Go,” without any hesitation at all. We still need something to dream on, even when we’re dying. We still need plans, even when we’re out of time. We still need to feel alive.
I called you one day, shortly after you’d flown west, and you were distraught, standing in the middle of all your boxes, exhausted, in the new and empty apartment. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake, you said. Later that day, or the next day, you called back and said your friends had come over to help you unpack and you felt better, that everything was looking good and you were happy.
But when the emergency room doctor called me early on a late November morning to say that you’d been admitted to the hospital with a perforated bowel, he said you’d told him you came back out to Vancouver to die.
Of all the places in Toronto I associate you with, the old Royal Conservatory building on Bloor Street is the one that has the most meaning for me. You went to school there, on a music scholarship at the age of sixteen, to study performance and composition for a year before moving to London to study with Peter Katin.
The Conservatory building, built in the late 1880s of decorative red brick, Medina sandstone, and polished granite, is both ornate and functional, a combination true of a large number of the city’s Victorian institutions. But the most enjoyable aspect of the building wasn’t the imposing facade, but rather what lay behind the Conservatory: Philosopher’s Walk, the winding path that was once an old riverbed and connects Bloor Street to Hoskin Avenue and the university. The practice rooms were at the back of the building, and when I strolled past on a summer night, I could hear notes from different pianos, and voices opening and closing through the windows of the Conservatory. If I were meeting you, I would often sit on a bench on Philosopher’s Walk, listening to the impromptu concerts occurring simultaneously in the air above the grass and street lamps, above the winding path between the trees. The new Conservatory, with its envelope of glass, seems less intimate. There’s no music leaking out.
Death feels a bit like the vanished city, like wandering through a landscape I used to recognize but that has now been radically altered. It was a mistake to think that life was solid ground under my feet, and that every day I would be able to step back down onto the same earth. To have you gone—you, who went clear to the bottom of my world—has thrown everything off balance, has left me wandering like a ghost in my own life.
9
I turned fifty this spring, an age you’ll never reach. I missed getting a card from you, although Cathy sent me a card you would have sent to me, and when I saw it in the mailbox I thought for a second that you had managed somehow to escape being dead for an hour or two and had gone out to buy it for me. The last card I have from you was for my forty-eighth birthday. You said on that card that you were proud to have me as a sister. This surprised me because we usually sent each other mocking messages about getting older. Because of that card, I sent you a sentimental image of several mice for your birthday in May, the sort of illustration we would have liked in one of our children’s books.
Over the years we stopped giving each other presents for birthdays, but you probably would have given me something for my fiftieth. A present from you was always something to be cherished because you chose so thoughtfully. I still have almost everything you ever gave me.
I turned fifty and I had a party. My new house was full of people and everything was a blur of sound. The two dogs came to the party, and I looked over at some point to see them sitting very still on the couch, overwhelmed, their ears flattened back on their skulls by t
he barrage of noise.
I had a party because I felt that my life had been hollowed out and I wanted to fill it back up. I had this idea that the people who came to my house on the night of my birthday would be the people who would go forward with me into the next part of my life. It was a bit superstitious to feel that way, but there’s been a lot of magical thinking going on since you died, for everyone. Mum keeps thinking you’re turning on the radio at her cottage. “Why would he care about turning on the radio?” I ask her. But I’m no better. There was a sundog in the sky on the day of your funeral, and there was one in the sky on my birthday, and it was hard not to think it was you.
Mum recorded your phone message and gave me the tape, along with a CD of you practising Mozart, stopping and starting the same pieces in a way that is so familiar and comforting. Your voice on the phone message is strong and you enunciate every word in case potential students are calling for lessons. In the first couple of months after you died, I used to call your old number and then hang up before a new person could answer. It still feels as though I could just call you, Martin, or that one day the phone will ring and it will be you on the other end. When I was still out in Vancouver cleaning your apartment, and Mum had arrived too, we went to lunch with your Mexican friend, Isaac, and he was telling us how, in Mexico, loved ones leave a bowl of fruit out for the dead, and light a small fire at the front door so that their spirits will be able to find the way home. In the morning, Isaac said, the fruit will still be in the bowl, but if you go to take a bite of it, all the juice will have been sucked out.
Perhaps I minded those tacky solar lanterns disappearing because they were like fires that could have welcomed you back.
10
After you died I started playing badminton again, regularly and with determination. It was our sport when we were young. We played through the week and on Saturdays. One summer we went to badminton camp in Oakville, where we did drills for the better part of the day, then played matches, and then, at the very end, ran five miles.
You were better than I was, partly because you were younger and could play in a lower age category. You were so good that one year you won the Ontario championship for Under 14s. The boy you beat went on to become a member of the Canadian Olympic team. You could have been that good, but you had to choose between badminton and piano, and you chose piano. There’s only so much room in a life for serious pursuits.
I play badminton here at the gym on the army base. Civilians can use this gym and pay per use, and this suits me better than joining a club because I’m often away and don’t have regular weeks.
I play with Anne, who had cancer herself a couple of years ago. We’re evenly matched, although both of us are well past our prime. I’m a good forty pounds heavier than I used to be when you and I played as children, and so I have to rely on careful shots rather than speed. But my body still knows what to do, and sometimes, just for a moment, when I hit a smash or manage to do a graceful drop from the back line, I am inside my sixteen-year-old body again. Perhaps we cleave to the repetition of actions because we’re looking to find ourselves where we once were; and sometimes this body remembers how to talk to that body, through the static of the years.
11
It’s a beautiful summer night, warm, just a little wind. I took the dog for a walk around the block with her bandaged foot. She’s stopped limping, but I can’t let her off leash yet and we’re both bored by her incarceration.
I’m not writing this in my office, a nice square room on the second floor of this house that I don’t seem to use for anything other than storing my books. It has my desk (which is Granny’s old kitchen table) and a chair, a nice view out over the trees of the neighbourhood backyards, but I can’t seem to settle there. When I first moved into this house, that was the room I slept in. I would lie on a mattress on the floor and look out at the dark patch of sky between the houses. Often I couldn’t sleep. Often I woke up not knowing where I was.
This still happens. I wake up and don’t recognize this place as home, don’t recognize this life as my own. I have to shake my head, the way the dog shook her head to clear the fogginess of the anesthetic.
I write from a chair in my bedroom at the front of the house on the second floor. I look down into the front garden and the street. I hear the voices of the men next door on their porch. When the moon is up I can see the cross on the roof of the church across the road.
I have a little table by the chair with a couple of books on it—a notebook with notes that I made when you were dying and shortly afterwards, and a big hardcover book called The Apples of New York, Volume I. Above the table is a framed photograph of two trees on either side of an old stream bed. I took this photograph about thirty years ago and gave it to you, and you hung it in every house you lived in, often over your piano.
The photograph is from Exmoor in England. It’s from a short walking holiday we took when we were young. Even though the film quality isn’t good and the sky has completely washed out to white, I can remember that day, distantly, in the same way that I suppose one day I’ll remember you. I remember that it was sunny, that the sky was blue, that we were walking through the moor and were full of the energy of youth and we were happy. I don’t know what you remembered from that photograph, and I wish now that I’d asked you.
The stream bed is the path. The stones are bare, but look slick with moisture. Maybe it was early in the morning and the world was still damp with dew. There are banks on either side of the stream bed, overgrown banks of tangled vegetation that probably cover stone walls. The two trees grow out of, or behind, those banks, and their branches reach out through the air above the stream bed and entwine with one another, creating an arch through which I can see the green fields that lie before us.
12
We travelled a lot together when we were young. When I was in my early twenties, I went to live in England. It was my plan to spend a year there, writing a novel in a disciplined way, and if I could do that, I felt, I could dedicate my life to being a writer.
It wasn’t a bad plan, really, inspired no doubt by tales of the American and British writers who went to live in Paris in the 1930s. It seemed romantic to be heading overseas to become a novelist, even though my situation was a great deal less romantic than Hemingway’s or the Fitzgeralds’.
I went to live with Dad’s mother in Forest Row, a sleepy little village filled with the elderly at the edge of the Ashdown Forest near East Grinstead. It seemed a good fit as Granny was getting old and wanted someone in the house to keep an eye on her, and I had very little money, not enough to pay the rent on lodgings of my own. I lived with Granny for free, in exchange for doing errands for her and some light cooking, and generally making sure that she didn’t have a fall and lie, undiscovered, in the house for weeks.
The house was Dad’s childhood home. It had a name, remember—Ashcroft—and it was a large, Tudor-style house on an acre of grounds, with a massive green hedge at the front that flopped over and lay in the front garden like a great, green whale. You never spent much time in that house, just the odd afternoon for the obligatory visit when we were over in England as a family. Granny did not particularly like children and we were often bored there, escaping the house whenever possible to go up the road to the Ashdown Forest and kick a ball through the bracken.
I slept in Dad’s old room, which was part of the attic, a room full of angles and corners. There were three large windows that opened out over the garden and I would sometimes sit on the sill at dusk, smoking, one leg dangling outside because there were no screens on the windows; they simply opened out into the soft English air that often smelled of burning leaves.
The bed was cold and damp. I was never warm enough in England, even in good weather. I remember in your house in Staines you used to place hardcover books upright at the end of the bed to hold all the bedclothes up. Otherwise, when you were lying on your back, the weight of the blankets and eiderdown were too great.
I slept i
n Dad’s room, and I had the dining room, which was directly underneath, as my study. It too overlooked the back garden. It had a dark blue carpet and an old sideboard that rattled when I walked past. I wrote at the massive oak dining table that was no longer used to eat from as Granny now had her meals on a tray in the living room. I wrote with my back to the garden so I wouldn’t be distracted and I faced a large oil painting on the far wall of Dad when he was a child. In it he was meant to be sitting on a bench, but he had one leg stretched towards the floor and I could tell he was in the process of trying to escape while the painting was being made. It was much more distracting to look at that painting than it would have been to gaze out the window at the garden.
Nocturne Page 4
