The Blue Guitar

by Ireland Ann

  Swoosh went prefolded napkins and a chipped butter dish into the garbage bag. This was the original stove, circa 1969, and ditto for the fridge, both softly aerodynamic and kept rigorously clean and in working trim. The burner coils were sausage-like, style of the day. The set of etched juice glasses were fished out of detergent boxes. No way brother Felix would be interested in any of this subpar loot, living in Powell River with snooty Leah and their kids.

  As Toby tossed things into cartons and plastic bags, he felt himself move from sadness into an inchoate anger: why did the old man deliberately deprive himself? Cereal bowls were filled with those toggles that held bread together; jars that once held peanut butter were packed with elastic bands. So ostentatiously frugal, as if to buy something new or to toss something old was a moral failing. Lucky thing Jasper wasn’t on hand to witness this. He had a sore spot about what he called “The German Thing” and would find all this neatness and thrift creepy.

  Toby knew what was coming next when he swung open the closet door. First, he unhooked the straw broom made by the blind and set it in the corner of the kitchen. When the boys were still at home, they had regular chores and a monthly calendar indicating who did what and when. Taped to the inside of the door now was a sheet of paper ruled into columns that itemized duties from washing shutters to floor waxing and laundry. Along the top were printed dates, and tick marks noted job accomplished. A bustle of vacuuming occurred two days before Klaus entered Lakeview with his plaid suitcase. Last Thursday he’d flipped the mattress, the same mattress that Toby would soon drag down to the curb.

  He roamed the house, plastic bag in tow, swinging open cupboards he’d never dare open in the presence of his secretive father. His gut clenched with each potential revelation: surely somewhere he’d discover inklings of the old man’s real life, the one he’d left behind — the German life.

  Instead of crispy air mail envelopes he found bundled socks in a drawer, and tucked next to them a list: “5 pair black, 2 pair white, 4 pair dress.”

  No yellowed letters from Klaus’s own father, a Luftwaffe pilot turned owner of a popular seaside resort — just a dried-up avocado pit set into a jar on the dresser, toothpick running through its midsection.

  Toby stood at the entrance to his and Felix’s bedroom at the rear of the house. This was the only room that had noticeably changed: bunk beds replaced with a sofa bed and next to it the cabinet hi-fi that used to be downstairs. The meagre stash of LPs dated back to the early 1970s — Strauss waltzes, Beethoven’s Fifth, and Klaus’s favourite, Yma Sumac, the Inca Princess, whose soaring voice filled the house during weekend breakfasts.

  The old Yamaha guitar stood in its cardboard case against the wall. Toby sat on the sofa, unsnapped the case, and pulled out the instrument, noting a hairline crack near the bridge. Dry winter days had taken their toll. He had to wrench the plastic pegs to get them to turn on the headstock. The strings felt stiff and dead, untouched for years. Tuning the best he could, he started in on that old chestnut, “Spanish Romance,” the first real piece he’d learned. This room was his safe haven, and he’d practise here for hours, often beginning when he heard Klaus’s car swing into the driveway. By the time Toby made it downstairs, Klaus would be cooking dinner and news from the visit to “your dear Mama” would have been forgotten.

  Toby won that guitar-shaped clock hanging on the wall at some dopey talent contest when he was in junior high. They were always so proud of him, Mama and Papa.

  The day she died, last December 25, Toby was basting the turkey when he got the call, Jasper hovering, fussing over internal fowl temperature.

  Karen wasn’t always off her rocker. For years she’d been a real mother. That’s what Jasper forgets when he calls her existence “tragic.”

  What was that smell? Toby hesitated at the entrance to the bathroom, though he knew without looking what it was: medicinal aroma of old country shampoo imported by specialty shops. Not that Klaus had much hair left to work with. Toby imagined Jasper snickering, “The man keeps a well-scrubbed scalp.”

  Does Klaus ever complain of loneliness?

  Never. He likes to say that he expects little from life, so he is never disappointed.

  Four

  Luke is up in arms, barrelling through the office like a banana republic generalissimo. He’s convinced that the board of directors is staging a mutiny, which is partially true, if Jasper has his way. The man’s nattering on about “strategic information” that should be in his hands by now. Jasper hides a smile. At this point the best ammunition is secrecy. As Luke dances through the office, lifting file folders willy-nilly, Jasper keeps his focus on his work, while Rachel, an intern from a community college, fixes her gaze on her monitor and taps randomly at computer keys.

  Luke plants himself in front of Jasper’s desk. “I demand full accountability.” Thin blond hair is glued to his scalp, and his suit looks a size too small, the current fashion.

  Jasper glances up. “If you can’t get hold of yourself, then I must ask you to leave.”

  Rachel’s mouth drops open.

  “What?” Luke hisses.

  “I’m asking you to leave. Now.”

  No one says this to Luke, chairman of the board, and it catches the man off guard. His face pinkens several degrees, then suddenly he is gone, shiny loafers clacking down the hall.

  Rachel tells Jasper he is God.

  Possibly, but Jasper is shaking so hard he can’t speak.

  The church smells of melted candles and damp boots. A pigeon roosts high in the rafters, and with luck it won’t wake up once the concert gets underway. Is it true that pigeons can’t shit midair? The small audience files in, buying tickets at a table set up at the entrance, presided over by Tess, vice-chair of the Toronto Guitar Society. She doesn’t recognize Toby — it’s been too long. It was Tess who arranged his first recital in this same church when he was a pipsqueak carrying a borrowed concert-grade guitar.

  Squinting into the rows of pews, light filtered through stained glass, Toby wonders which of the more grizzled audience members were present then. He’d ripped through Villa-Lobos, Bach, and Albéniz, not a groundbreaking program, but he was barely eleven years old. When he finished the recital, grinning his head off, he saw his parents and Felix in the front row clapping like maniacs, yet it was Tess who led the standing ovation, tears streaming down her face. In those days her skin was pale, her hair red and bushy.

  Toby hesitates at the door of the church, reluctant to stride into his own storied past. Yet this evening it is not Toby who will step onto the liturgical stage, and this audience is scarcely two dozen, given the viral scare. He buys his ticket, and Tess barely lifts her eyes as she slides it across the table. This is a relief and at the same time a disappointment. He finds a seat at the end of a pew close to the front. Its shelf is crammed with prayer books and hymnals, a reminder that music is only the building’s hobby. He flips open the program and reads off the list of composers — all Italian and he’s only heard of half of them. Most were born in the 1970s or later.

  It’s been years since he’s made his way to a guitar concert. He used to go to everything and they’d often wave him in for free, understanding that such a talent needed to be exposed to a range of performance styles. He’d pretend to ignore the nods and whispers, the discreet finger pointings. Not many like Toby popped up in a generation. He’d angle a spot near the front of the hall, aware of being watched, and this watching never seemed strange or intrusive. He knew from the beginning that he would be good, very good.

  Tonight he might as well be invisible. A new crop of students files into the front pew where they’ll get an unobstructed view of the artist’s hands and face. These hands belong to Antonio Conti who, just a year older than Toby, saunters onto the chancel, guitar tucked under one arm while enthusiastic applause erupts from the small crowd. Without fuss Conti sits on the low chair, tunes, pushes back his cuffs, and begins.

  He plays with a scrumptious tone, a Mediterranea
n bel canto full of glissandos and arpeggios that lift the man half out of his seat. Toby feels his own shoulders relax, his breathing grow deep. Conti manages to be romantic as hell, hovering on the high notes, unrolling rubatos that make Toby smile at their succulent corniness, yet there is also perfect control, no buzzes, no unruly snaps.

  This is my drug, he thinks, the opposite of grim Teutonic passion. He may be his father’s son, but he’s never going to list the socks in his drawer, never going to stack tuna fish cans for recycling. The sound fills him with a depth charge of emotion, and he’s startled to find himself close to weeping. Conti’s mouth drops open, then squeezes shut as the phrase lifts and falls. Toby’s program drifts to the ground. He knows now he will perform at Conti’s master class the following day, that this man must hear what he can do. At the same moment he decides he will not tell Jasper.

  During intermission, Tess barely glances at him as he slides another twenty bucks across the table in return for a copy of Conti’s latest CD. Sprung from silence, the small audience is boisterous, pressing open the heavy church doors for smokes and a hit of unconsecrated air.

  “Put me down for the master class,” Toby says.

  “We’re full up,” Tess replies, slipping the bill into a cigar box. “You may attend as observer but not to perform.”

  Toby rolls his shoulders back; it is these young men shooting past in their skinny jeans who are the cause of this fullness. “Can you make room?”

  “No, I cannot.” Annoyed, she finally looks at him, thinking, he’s familiar, some crank she’s had to deal with in the past.

  Toby waits for her to put it together: he’d stayed with Tess’s family for two weeks while his mother made the transition to Lakeview. They gave him a hook on the back of a door for his clothes and the hide-a-bed to sleep on. Tess’s daughter used to practise trumpet while the son smoked pot in the cellar and offered Toby his first hit of Ecstasy, the drug that is. Their freezer was stocked with ice-cream bars and Hungry Man Dinners.

  “I know you,” she says, brow furrowing.

  He smiles. “Toby.” Waits a beat. “Hausner.”

  Her reaction is instant: she bounds to her feet, leaving the cash box unattended, and grabs his ears. “Toby Hausner! Look at you!”

  He flushes with pleasure, then steels himself for the flurry of questions — where have you been all these years? what have you been doing? — but she just keeps looking at him with a broad grin and yanks his ears until he fears they’ll snap off.

  “Of course you’ll play for us tomorrow,” she announces. She’s been around musicians so long that her speech is oddly cadenced, filtered through a dozen mimicked accents. Tonight it is faintly Italianate.

  “Un-believable!” she says, stretching out the word. Toby beams under the warmth of her gaze. Her lean face has weathered well. “It is the Second Coming,” she adds with a fresh burst of enthusiasm, then scrambles for a pen to add his name to the list.

  “Hardly that,” Toby says, but he smiles. Something is returning, his old world, and he doesn’t know whether to flee or celebrate.

  “Where is my dear Angus?” She looks around the dark church and finally beckons to a burly man who huddles in the corner talking to a pair of older audience members.

  Angus is her husband, the founder of the Society, and ex-officio everything, having taken a turn as president, secretary, videographer, and fundraiser. Seeing her wave, he lumbers over, and Toby notes there is considerably more grey in his beard now.

  Fixing his eyes on Toby, he says in a booming voice, “Is this who I think it is?”

  Toby races home before intermission is over, too revved up to hang around for the second half of the program. He can manage a couple of hours of intense practice before Jasper returns from his board meeting.

  Jasper rolled out of bed this morning, ranting before his feet hit the floor: “The board orders me to balance the budget while they spend months labouring over mission statements and strategic plans. They’re supposed to fundraise, a fact they conveniently forget.” Moments later, in the middle of shaving, he poked his head out of the bathroom and announced, “It’s Luke or me, something they must understand.”

  When Toby dared to ask, “Is the man really so bad?” Jazz glared at him as if he was nuts. Had he not been listening these past months? Did he not understand the concept of the Gathering Storm?

  Returning to the empty flat, Toby decides he’ll work on a bravura Paganini sonata for tomorrow’s performance: why not charge fearlessly into Conti’s home territory — la bella Italia? No one accuses Paganini of being a great composer, but he’s a riot to play. Stepping off the streetcar and veering into the familiar lane, Toby sees that the clinic is dark except for a single light that blinks to life as he passes. One of the iron street lamps is dead, its bulb shattered by a rock. An angry patient has been turned away: no OxyContin for your headache, Jack.

  Jasper’s switched on the porch light so that Toby might easily fit key into lock: Jasper the Anticipator.

  Play the same passage many times, changing tiny elements. Accent the second beat, then the first, diminuendo just before pickup to the new phrase. Dampen the bass note. Do it all backward.

  Eat me, the mushroom demands, placid little fungus.

  But I’m only practising, Toby insists, keeping an eye on the clock and the hour of Jasper’s return — hardly entering some cyclone that will require rescue.

  To memorize is not a mysterious process: stuff a sock in the sound hole so the strings make dull clinks. Don’t depend on notation, the visualized map of marks on a page. He pencils in fingerings so the score becomes even more of a hatch work. He played this same piece in master class a dozen years ago, dazzling the guest artist who’d flown up from Savannah. Gabrielle Someone, a young woman with huge hands. The episode is shaky in his mind: didn’t they snort a line in her hotel room afterward, view of the CN Tower lit up at night?

  Upstairs, Polly the bull terrier thwacks her tail against a wall. She’s apt to take a bite out of somebody one day and slurp gratitude the next. Jasper says the girls need to bear in mind that Polly is animal, not human, and must set limits, advice they happily ignore.

  Toby left the window open a crack so he’ll have warning when Jasper comes waltzing up the path, giddy with post-meeting wine.

  Grab an apple and a Sprite for fortification. The fridge stinks from something hidden under a layer of foil. Toby’s taste buds function; the nose hasn’t gone AWOL.

  Right-hand fingers sink into the strings: place, pressure, release.

  Jasper and his crew are drinking wine and eating tapas at the usual place near the institute. The joint is otherwise empty, so the solo waitress hovers, swabbing down menus with Vim and a damp cloth. Hygiene is very big these days. She clears her throat, then stops, mortified, as Jasper’s administrative assistant drops a napkin over her salad, anticipating particulate matter. An early indicator of the virus is a neck flush. Victims display it when they’re feeling fine, then note, appalled, as it spreads from pulse point to pulse point: wrists, temples, the crease behind the knees. Easy to dismiss: who wants to believe that a blush is prelude to neurological chaos? Jasper gets patients after they’ve been sprung from hospital and the first stint of rehab, which means they are the lucky survivors. Time to get their brains up and running, add memory where it has been scoured clean.

  Toby sets his instrument down when he hears the four quick steps up the stairs to the front door. He snaps off the light and dashes into the bathroom. The bed is carefully mussed, as if he’d just left it to take a whiz. He’s punched a dent in the pillow, head size.

  Five

  Fashion masks are the latest things. Girls glue plastic butterflies and dollar store insects onto theirs; boys add superhero stickers. Toby left his at home, wrapped over the gooseneck lamp: forget breathing through gauze. The epidemic has spiked: orange alert due to a rogue infector who jaunted about asymptomatic but is now known to be sixteen years old, female. She swept throu
gh the transit system coating handrails with viral sweat and is now quarantined at East General, surrounded by medics decked out in chemical suit regalia, busy draining fluid off her brain. It’s a horror, Jasper says, but we must keep things in perspective. This is nothing compared to the polio outbreaks of the 1950s.

  Toby shows up at the Conservatory for his master class, striding past a warning sign posted on the front door (do not enter if you suffer from any of the following symptoms …), marches down the corridor feeling a prickly dryness in his eyes. It’s a massive Victorian building, solid but creaky with age. A second poster curled at the edges diagrams the progress of fundraising for the reno — stuck, it seems, at two and a half million. An open door reveals a class of students working at electronic keyboards with headphones clamped to their ears. Everyone seems better dressed than they used to be in the old days.

  Toby used to practically live in this place and knew all the office staff by name. He speeds past the glass doors, not in a mood to be recognized. Retaining focus before a performance is crucial; what used to come so naturally now takes a studied effort.

  Master class runs in room 108, and he spots Tess hovering at its entrance, directing traffic and checking names off the list. Her glasses are set low over her nose, and she waves at Toby. “You’re up third,” she tells him. “Make it snappy. We’re ready to roll.”