The Blue Guitar

by Ireland Ann

  She’s always been bossy, and he slips by her, ignoring the pump of disinfectant lotion sitting on a table. Last thing he needs is to slime up his hands and watch them pucker dry; playing requires a degree of moisture. He sits to one side of the room, guitar case tucked between his knees. Did Tess look at him with just a hint of concern? For all she knows, Toby might be out on a day pass, about to start speaking in tongues or to noodle through some incoherent improv.

  He has done these things in public, or so he has been told.

  Musicians make their way into the studio, nodding at each other in muted recognition. Several cast a glance at Toby, wondering who he might be.

  Toby stares back with his blank game face. He spoke not a word to Jasper about this performance; he’s headed for a makeup class with Guitar Choir, story goes. A small lie to prevent a familiar anxious look from crowding his lover’s face.

  He reaches to touch the crease at the side of his nose, dabbing enough sweat to moisten his fingertips. Nerves turn skin to parchment. This jittery anticipation is so familiar, something he’s missed and even craved without realizing it. He feels fully alive on this hard chair, coiled energy, all he can do not to bob his knees up and down.

  A couple of dozen folding chairs contain participants and observers. Up front is a music stand plus a footstool and two more chairs — one for Conti, the other for the performer. Most, if not all the other musicians, will be senior students from the Glenn Gould Professional School or the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. Behind, a Steinway baby grand perches like a raven, wings aloft. Overhead ventilation ducts create a distracting racket, but if you switch them off, airs turns to gravy.

  Conti isn’t immediately recognizable as he strides in, guitar case plastered with airline stickers. He seems smaller than last night and rounder, his features less distinctive. Conti hasn’t bothered to shave, which gives him a sleepy look. He removes his leather jacket and tosses it onto the piano lid, zipper skidding across its buffed surface. Tess grimaces, knowing there will be complaints, for the guitar isn’t seen as a serious instrument by certain members of the Conservatory faculty — too troubadour or folksy, hint of the coffee house or plantation. Conti makes a joke that no one understands, though they titter nervously, two dozen young men and a couple of women. Tess strolls over to confer about the program, and after a moment Conti glances up. His eyes find Toby’s and he nods.

  Has he been warned, and if so — how? Others turn to look: Toby must be somebody, but who?

  Focus. Don’t let them unsettle you.

  Setup for a master class is simple: the student’s name is called and he performs a piece of his choosing. This is followed by a half-hour public class where the guest artist offers critique and suggestions, and, with luck, praise. Toby’s performed in many such classes. He understands that it is possible to temporarily fool the body, and that to appear outwardly calm is to invoke inner calm. He sits very still in his chair with no nervous throat clearings, no last-minute sandpapering of nails.

  First up is a skinny kid wearing a shirt buttoned to the neck. He passes Conti a score, then jumps into a piece by a modern Brazilian composer without waiting for the audience to settle down. Conti perches on the edge of his chair, feet planted firmly on the floor, watching the boy’s hands intently.

  There is a smattering of applause when the kid finishes, then Conti launches in, first by acknowledging the student’s phrasing and dynamic range. “But left hand is so tight, like a claw. You must be strong, yet one hundred percent flexible, like the octopus.”

  He demonstrates a relaxation exercise, first clutching a ball, then letting it drop without changing position of the hand.

  The next performer is built like a football player, muscles popping under his shirt. He lowers himself stiffly onto the chair as if still smarting from last night’s workout and announces that he will perform Conti’s own transcription of a Granados piano work.

  The maestro smiles, enjoying this display of flattery.

  The youth plays with his sausage fingers, mouth twisting into tortured expressions as he moves through the tricky piece, his body at odds with the delicate, even nuanced sounds that rise from his instrument.

  Pretty damn good, Toby thinks, but not scary good. What he is — what they all are — is very young.

  Conti says, “You must isolate the difficult sections.”

  The performer nods his shaved head; he’s heard this advice a thousand times.

  Conti gets the boy to try the opening section over and over, focusing on the syncopated rhythm while Conti taps out the beat. When the kid fouls up, the teacher reaches over and raps his muscled thigh. “Feel it in your body!”

  The boy reddens, loses track of where he is, his old way of playing not yet subsumed to the new. Conti drags his chair even closer so that the two men brush knees, and then, on the seventh or eighth try, the kid nails it.

  Relieved applause. Any one of them could be up there.

  “Toby Hausner, you’re next,” Tess announces, peering at him over the top of her glasses.

  He picks up his guitar and makes his way to the front of the room.

  I don’t have to do this, he reminds himself. He could blow them all off and head for the pub across the street, afternoon jazz and a banquet burger. When he was a teenager, he didn’t understand this. He didn’t know there was a choice.

  Conti clasps hands over head and yawns loudly. “What will you play for us?”

  “Paganini.” Toby passes over the weathered score, an accordion fold-out, six pages long. He will play by memory, as is the custom.

  The maestro smiles, lowering his arms. There are deep shadows under his eyes after a sleepless night in an unfamiliar hotel room. “I perform this on my new CD. It is all about touch, yes?” He turns to the audience, making a lesson of the remark. “Your fingers must go like the wind, maybe good wind, maybe bad.”

  A sprinkle of nervous laughter greets this witticism; if a person plays exceptionally well here, he might be invited to the guitar festival in Milan where Conti presides as artistic director.

  Conti flutters his fingers poetically and adds, “Paganini composes this as a challenge to perform at an important concert. You know he was fantastic guitarist besides fiddle player, and a wild man.”

  Toby chooses his moment and takes charge of the stage, waiting for the rustles and throat clearings to subside. Time slows, divides into cells. Toby maps out the first dozen bars in his head, hearing each note ring with precision before he sets hand to fretboard.

  Silence.

  Now.

  No, not yet. Someone is whispering, then a pencil drops and rolls across the floor.

  He places his hands over the frets and sound hole, when someone screeches a chair leg.

  Toby lowers his hands, flexes, takes another breath, hears nothing but the purr of ventilation, then begins to play.

  The piece paws open and it’s alive or dead from the first note. Pure sensation — think of uncircumcised skin or newborn rabbits. Toby snorts at such images. He sneers at any image whatsoever; there can be nothing besides the movement of sound through space and time. Soft and velvety turns brittle with a tilt of the wrist; command of tone has always been his forte. Coming up is the presto section, which must go as fast as humanly possible: hold on to your hat. Paganini was a born show-off. Toby stays inside the silky legato until the last possible moment, then lifts his right hand, making the audience wait until he is good and ready. Pause, then fingers snap across the fretboard, nailing chords and runs. Clear sailing from here to the end of the section, then retrace back to the opening theme.

  Except he falters.

  His fingers speed on, working via muscle memory, but they have a mind of their own. His actual mind scrambles as it chases his darting hands. Cheekbones tighten, sweat strokes his brow: maestro have pity.

  Breathe.

  Finally, Conti starts to sing and conduct with one hand, working Toby back into the piece, and within a few se
conds he’s found his way and presses on to the end.

  But focus lifted for a microsecond, floated overhead, untethered, mind searching for the recognizable world.

  Conti asks, “Your name is Hausner?”

  “Yes.”

  “So hard for German people to achieve true bel canto.”

  Toby’s head jerks up. “Is that all you have to tell me?”

  The man smiles evenly. He is used to a certain deference. “No,” he says, then adds, “I believe you are really an artist, but —” He holds up a hand. “You are not a hundred percent prepared today.”

  Tess chirps from her front row seat. “You should have heard him play when he was a kid.”

  Conti studies Toby. “But you are not such a kid now.”

  Pry open the lid of his coffee cup and let out a yelp: slashed finger from the ragged edge of plastic. Toby watches with dismay as a sizz of blood appears on the tip of his index finger where skin squeezes frets. Race to the bathroom of Tim Hortons and run cold water over the injured finger for a full ten minutes, the ganglia of nerve endings tying off, retreating. Blood colours the water crimson, then pink, then less pink, until finally it runs clear.

  Conti said, “You must over-prepare, then set the piece aside for a week or two.” But who has the luxury of time?

  At home Jasper presses the wounded finger to his lips. “Will you still be able to play?”

  “Sure,” Toby says.

  “Things are moving very quickly with you.”

  Toby tugs his finger away. “After years of slow.”

  Pained look. “Is that what you call our lives together, Toby? Slow?”

  To a romantic there might be something ecstatic in the idea of a breakdown. Toby knows that his shipwreck caused only pain, though he’ll point out that he never heard voices that were not his own, nothing borrowed from radio waves. It was a function of overwork, ecstasy minus key proteins and water.

  After the Paris episode, where he was rescued by his worried father, Klaus, and taken home, Toby landed in the halfway house where a man called Jasper worked. Every Monday, Jasper corralled Toby to fill out his PAS, personalized activity schedule, the chart that broke down each day into segments: brush teeth, dress, make bed, attend day program. Toby would grumble at the tedium of it all, yet it was reassuring to tick off tasks of normalcy. The schedule saved him, he will admit on certain days, for it turned out that life skills were just what he was missing. It was the lack of such skills that had landed him in hot water, forgetting to eat, wash, take a crap. He’d fallen into abstraction.

  Six

  Jasper’s Thursday night group is a tough crew: passive-aggressive types who nod along in agreement, then ignore every aspect of the document they create together. Sometimes he’s fooled, thinking he’s getting through as he watches them dutifully take notes, but they have no intention of compliance. One is Ashok, survivor from the virus in its first round, an Emergency Room physician who’s become Mister Genial, bobbing his head in agreement to every suggestion, born to please. Hard to believe he was once sewing up the entrails of trauma victims, a finger pressed to some essential artery. He’s almost mended physically, just a little residual swelling in the brain that will take months to heal.

  “First we devise —” Jasper scribbles on the white board “— a set of modules for personal hygiene. Who will start us off?”

  A voice ventures, “Brush teeth?”

  Jasper writes this down, marker squeaking in the institute’s activity room.

  “Next?” he prompts, staring encouragingly at the physician, a handsome man whose salt-and-pepper beard is impeccably groomed. “There is the business of getting dressed, yes? Making sure tops and bottoms follow in logical sequence — no wacky plaid and floral combos.”

  This always gets a titter.

  Jasper waits, but there are no more volunteers. “We break each task down into its components,” he says, and waits a beat for someone to pitch in.

  At last a voice pipes up: “Underwear.”

  “Socks,” says another.

  “Pantyhose,” says Amy, a cop suffering from a terrible concussion.

  “Excellent,” says Jasper, scribbling these suggestions on the board. “How about trousers, skirt, shirt, or blouse …” The list is dauntingly long. Everyone here suffers short-term memory loss.

  When Toby takes on one of the Bach partitas, he breaks the piece down into its smallest sequences, learns each in turn, then pulls it together. He says he’ll start with a single note, even less — sometimes the silence before the note begins.

  “Brush your nose,” Ashok calls out. “Blow your nails! We will assemble all clothing into a pile and burn it!” He flops back in his chair, out of breath.

  Jasper stiffens. Sometimes this happens, a fizz of resistance to the labour of reconstructing what was once second nature. The man is angry at himself, at the disease, at what he’s lost.

  Jasper stays calm and reassuring, making sure the session doesn’t get derailed by the outburst. “Humour is a tool against fear,” he tells them.

  Everyone has turned to stare at Ashok whose large brown eyes blink. “First we brush our nose, then we direct attention to footwear,” he calls out again, though this time with less fervour. “Feet are alive, amphibious.” His face darkens. Mr. Genial is taking a break. “This class is folly,” he adds, touching his throat as if coaxing the words out of his larynx. Then Ashok jumps to his feet where, struck by a wave of vertigo, he sways and grabs the back of his neighbour’s chair. Everyone is alarmed now, waiting for Jasper to take charge.

  Approaching the doctor, Jasper gently lifts the man’s elbow and guides him out of the room, down the hall to an empty office.

  “Sit down, please,” he says, and doesn’t let go until Ashok is safely seated. Then he pours water into a paper cup and places it in the doctor’s shaking hand. Crouching so that their faces are level, he asks, “May I leave you here for a short time?”

  Ashok nods bleakly and drinks. Water dribbles down his chin. Poor man isn’t ready for any of this, the class and the unfamiliar surroundings. He should be back in the residential rehab facility. Jasper will write this in his report.

  He leaves his client and returns to the activity room, shutting the door behind him. Everyone is sitting exactly as he’d left them, notebooks on laps, and Jasper gets the idea that no one has uttered a word in his absence. The teenager squirms, moving his sneakered feet in circles on the polished floor. He’s J.J., ex-gang member whose memory loss is a result of a bullet raging through his prefrontal cortex. He’s lucky to be alive but will dispute this.

  Jasper forces a sprightly tone. “We’ll pick it up from where we left off.”

  The rest of the session won’t go well. This group can’t learn in fragmented segments. Concepts must be blended together in a single uninterrupted time period.

  “Righto,” says Jasper. “We’ve gotten dressed, brushed our teeth. What next?”

  “I don’t want to be here,” rises a lament from the other side of the door. This is followed by muffled conversation, a sharp protest, then the door pops open and Luke enters with Ashok trailing behind.

  Everyone in the activity room sits up straight. Finally, something interesting is happening.

  “Can you tell me why this man has been ejected from your session?” Luke demands.

  Jasper takes a deep breath. “Ashok hasn’t been ejected. He appeared to be upset, so I suggested he take time out.”

  Luke forms a tight, unconvincing smile. “Is this normal protocol?”

  Jasper won’t stoop to arguing in front of clients. “I did what seemed appropriate under the circumstances.”

  A dozen pairs of eyes follow him, then Luke.

  “I would suggest it’s the business of this group to engage each client according to his or her needs,” Luke says, seizing Ashok’s arm. “Why don’t you take your seat, Doctor?”

  Ashok seems uncertain, so Luke adds, “I’m sure you have a great deal to con
tribute.” Sharp glance toward Jasper. “Dr. Mishra is head of ER at York Central.” Accent on “is.”

  Jasper returns his gaze. “As I’m well aware.”

  “Dr. Mishra worked on the front lines.”

  This is true. Jasper read the referral.

  “He’s one of our city’s heroes,” Luke adds, performing an actual little bow toward Ashok, who looks baffled by the gesture.

  Jasper cuts in. “Let’s continue our review of morning tasks.” His marker hovers over the board as Ashok shuffles to his chair and sits down. “Shall we turn our attention to breakfast?”

  Luke reluctantly leaves, but Jasper knows he hasn’t heard the last of it.

  One of the early symptoms of Toby’s mother’s illness was her odd way of repeating phrases. “I read an interesting article about knitting with dog hair,” Karen would say, then immediately add, “I read an interesting article about knitting with dog hair.” She started to wear double layers of clothing and even sported false eyelashes times two.

  “I am a foil to your father,” she stated. “A foil. To your father.”

  No one would argue with this. The more rigid Klaus proved himself to be the more dramatic her response. Karen was the one who taught Toby to stand on his head. This was during the period when he was cutting classes and sneaking out to get high.

  “Open your heart,” she commanded, hiking him up by the ankles.

  He complied, hoping to save her by strict obedience.

  “Pop goes the weasel!” she said, laughing when he tumbled to the floor during that first effort. He laughed, too, relieved that she’d said it only once.

  The more vague their mother grew the more organized Klaus became. He took over her old jobs, shopping, cooking, signing the boys’ report cards, and meeting with their teachers. They resented him for all this. The way they saw things Klaus had tucked their sweet mother into a cradle of fragility.