The Blue Guitar

by Ireland Ann

  He inhales sharply.

  “When you play, it feels dangerous, and I want nothing less from music.”

  He drains his glass, feels his insides burn. Her hand curls over his and lifts it to her cheek. He feels her excitement. She wants to be part of the ride.

  Across the hall, Trace switches on the hourly news in French. Spatter of gunfire and sirens — the rest of the world screams from inside a radio no bigger than a slice of bread.

  Lucy tilts her head so he won’t notice the beginnings of a double chin. Women try to protect him from signs of age; they don’t want to frighten him or incite pity. Women like Lucy run through fire to rescue their boys. His own mother disappeared when the saucepan erupted with flames, and Felix found her huddled in a corner of the yard, pointing a fire extinguisher toward the compost.

  She touches her lips to his fingers, then slips one into her mouth and bites down gently. “You’ve been eating potato chips,” she observes.

  “What are you doing?” He jolts upright in the bed.

  “Don’t worry.” She reaches to turn off the lamp, and the room snaps into sepia. She is aware of light and shadow and he is the camera.

  “What are you doing?” he repeats.

  She ignores the question.

  In the museum’s nursery she lifted the child’s mirror and stared at herself. Each glance offered an opportunity for self-improvement.

  Without danger there is no beauty — isn’t that what she meant? Without danger there is only the earnest plucking of amateurs — and he has never been an amateur.

  “I can’t do this,” he says, beginning to swing his legs over the side of the bed.

  “You have all of tomorrow to prepare for the final.”

  “There’s still a couple of spots I’m not sure about.” He knows this sounds lame.

  She looks at him with arched eyebrows.

  “I messed up the Villa-Lobos this afternoon,” he says, which is true. “Something I played perfectly for a month.” He lifts his arms dramatically. “Vanished.”

  “You’ve worn the thing down to a nub.”

  It’s possible to play a piece so much that it stops making sense. He slips into his sneakers, discreetly wiping his finger on the sheet. “I have to get it right before the day is over.”

  She smiles. “Of course you do.”

  He’s wasting precious time. That section, played immaculately a hundred times, capsized for no known reason. Don’t over-think what the body knows so well.

  Lucy hears the door of the pod open and pictures Toby waiting impatiently for the elevator. She can still taste him on her tongue, salty sweet, remnant of barbecue chips. The radio is silenced, and she hears Trace leave her room and make her way to the kitchen.

  She reaches for a comb that she drags through her hair. A glance in the mirror shows a flushed face and smeared mascara. Hard to believe that mere days ago she was preparing bagged lunches each morning, composing nutritionally rich sandwiches that the twins would let fester at the bottom of their rucksacks, and doing her best to wedge practice time between catering jobs and phone calls from ticked-off vice-principals.

  That life, her so-called real life, feels like a dream.

  By the time Lucy reaches the kitchen, Trace is pouring boiling water into the teapot.

  “I read his palm,” Lucy says.

  “Whatever.”

  The girl is embarrassed, maybe even disapproving.

  Lucy begins scooping crumbs off the counter into her cupped hand; someone around here has to attend to domestic chores. “What do you make of me competing against people half my age?”

  Trace looks up and says, “I think you’re brave.”

  “Really?” This is just what Lucy needs to hear.

  Twenty-Two

  Potassium slows heartbeat. Eat one banana in the morning, then another an hour before walking onstage.

  Beta blockers? Your heart will still thrum, but your hands can’t shake. The drug increases concentration, but it’s a fuzzy focus at the core, a sort of tunnel vision.

  One more thing: never look directly at the judges. This is hard, because they will be looking intently at you, noting the way you move — points for presentation and artistic impression.

  The four finalists have been invisible all day, confined to quarters. Tomorrow they will stride onstage for the last time, but now they have gathered for supper with their colleagues.

  “Last year I was one hundred percent convinced I would win,” Javier says in elegantly accented English. “But taxi crashes into an autobus on the way to the performance, so I was late and in extreme rush. No good.” He shakes his head in sad remembrance.

  You could draw a map of Argentina on his starched shirt cuffs. In Buenos Aires a maid takes care of laundry. Her name — he would be surprised by the question — is Adelita.

  “So we all play Villa-Lobos?” Trace asks with an elaborate yawn. “Reckon I should glance at the music.” She hauls herself out of the chair while the espresso machine roars. “Anyone got a copy?”

  Someone does and hands it to the girl who chews on a string of licorice as she reads through the score. Toby watches this performance. He isn’t fooled for a minute. She knows the piece backward and forward. They all do.

  Lucy sits at the other end of the lounge engaged in ardent conversation with the other dismissed contestants. This is how the room has divided itself tonight. The ones left behind huddle in one corner, chatting, while in the other corner the select few who will head into the final heat stare at the floor and speak in nervous bursts. They are different breeds, though everyone tries to pretend that this is not so. It comes down to the rhythm of heartbeat, that elemental.

  Only Marcus roams around the suite, a beer can tucked in his pocket and his hair sticking straight up.

  Toby flexes his hands, fire hands that will burn through tomorrow’s program. Practising has gone well today; the vapourized section of Villa-Lobos returned just in time.

  Someone has ordered in Chinese, and it arrives in cardboard cartons with tiny pillows of soy sauce. Trace snaps open a pair of wooden chopsticks, then another, and passes them around. For a moment the room falls silent as aluminum lids are pried off the containers, paper napkins unfolded.

  Jasper would be horrified by the lurid General Tao’s chicken balls, slick with grease and sugar, but Toby dives in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back to the wall.

  Trace drops beside him, her plate loaded with rice and vegetables and bony fish.

  “No Chinese restaurants on my island,” she says. Her heart-shaped face slides into scalp, no boundary of hair, and the vein at her temple pulses with each chew. “No Chinese people, period, except the brothers who own the marina.” She peers at a frill of brown fungus before popping it in her mouth. “Back home one of my best friends is a quad. You heard of Guillain-Barré syndrome?”

  Toby has not.

  “Quite the horror. Now her arms and legs don’t work, so sometimes I feed her. One day she goes, ‘Trace, how come you’re avoiding the tomatoes?’ And it hit me that I was feeding her like I feed myself.”

  Her small ears nestle close to her head, lobes implanted with tiny silver stars. “It’s not as easy as you think to feed someone,” she says, then plucks a piece of glistening chicken off his plate. “Let’s try.”

  Toby pulls back, half laughing. “I don’t think so.”

  Briskly, like a mother with a small child, she aims the chopsticks toward his mouth. All that’s missing is airplane noise.

  He protests, “I’m not at that stage yet.”

  Klaus fed Karen every day at the home. She’d sit at the table in her wheelchair, bib tucked under her chin while he’d cajole, “One more bite, liebchen,” tipping a spoon to her mouth.

  “It’s an experiment in giving up control,” Trace says.

  “I don’t want to give up control.”

  “That’s just the point. Nobody wants to.”

  He lets the wooden sticks slither b
etween his lips, just this once. She watches as he chews, and after he’s swallowed, she prongs a flowerlet of broccoli and tips it into his mouth. When a kernel of rice lodges on his cheek, she brushes it off before he can get to it. This is what a mother does — no, this is what a lover does.

  Suddenly, Toby can’t wait to get onstage. Momentum surges, a mighty storm brewing. Whatever he’s eating is ammo, is blood juice. He’s tasting himself.

  “Enough?” Trace says, lowering the chopsticks. Her eyes are wide open.

  “Listen up you buggers on the smart side of the room!” It’s Marcus, who stands on a chair holding a can of beer aloft. “We want you geniuses to know that it’s a hell of a lot more fun at our end. Seriously, we drink to your good fortune, but remember —” he tilts the can to his mouth and says “— you’re playing for all of us.”

  There’s a distinct pong of “boy” in Marcus’s dorm room — so reminiscent of the twins’ lair at home. Lucy crouches on the carpet and tucks her legs into a half-lotus, a position she proudly manifests due to rigorous yoga training in the past six months. Half a dozen competition dropouts have made their way here after supper, and it was Marcus who poked her in the ribs and urged, “Join us in the lads’ clubhouse.”

  She smiles now, a bit too cheerily, and chastises herself, for she has as much right to be here as any of them. More right, if you take into account the fact she made it to the semis, a sore point with some of these guys, but their fragile egos will repair.

  The Bosnian guitarist whose name she never remembers cranks open the window and blows cigarette smoke into the courtyard. He’s wearing a fringed buckskin vest picked up at one of the souvenir shops downtown. Eyeing Lucy, he offers a meaningful nod, which she mirrors, though she has no idea what they’re communicating. Armand, of all people, lights up a monster joint and passes it around. Tex draws in, coughs, and passes it to Lucy, who inhales and instantly feels a jolt in her head. It’s been a while. Because of the twins, she and Mark stay clear of the stuff, allegedly to set a good example, not that it’s done a bit of good. The sense of disembodiment that follows the toke is pleasant, and she wonders how many of life’s pleasures she and Mark deny themselves because of the boys. Noisy sex for one.

  She’s the only woman in the room — what else is new? Why don’t more females play classical guitar? One of life’s great mysteries. Tilting her head backward until it taps the wall, Lucy bathes in the familiar testosterone bath.

  Tex, sitting on the crowded bed, tunes his instrument. No one pays attention when he starts playing. Instead they keep yammering in varied accents about the finalists and judges (“Javier, he holds back until the finals …” “Portia, I play for her in Aspen. She loves dramatic phrasing …”). But one by one voices drop off as Tex launches into the simple “Pavana” by Luis de Milán, the Renaissance composer. He plays with fluid accuracy, each chord hovering before dipping into the next. Any musician in the room could play this piece in his sleep, but for them the race is over and finally they can listen without fear or dismay.

  As Tex crunches the final chord, Marcus reaches for his own instrument and points to his backup parked in the corner. “She’s yours,” he tells Lucy.

  Her mind scrambles as she unhitches the case and flips open the lid — what might she play? The Bosnian eyes her and performs another of his enigmatic nods. After a quick tune-up, she rolls into good old “Malagueña” — soulful and redolent of Andalusian cafés, not that she’d know, having never visited Spain. Mark keeps saying they’ll go, and last year she even booked a flight, then Mike was sent home for tagging the cafeteria wall and they decided it was unwise to leave the boys on their own for a week, even with Mark’s mother in charge.

  This backup guitar has a fatter fretboard than she’s used to and the entire instrument feels boomy, aching to sprint ahead. Lucy plays while sitting cross-legged on the floor, not the most brilliant position as the instrument rocks on her lap, but something lovely and unexpected happens as she enters the middle section. Tex joins in, improvising a harmonic line, then Marcus adds bass, padding out the sound. Competition nerves melt away as they sprawl on bed and floor. This is why they come to international events — to play together when the day is done and nothing is at stake. This is where joyous music happens, not on the stage where they are pierced by light and judges’ stares.

  Someone passes around a bowl of chips, and nimble hands dive in. Lucy feels the music rise inside her, untethered and sentimental, almost lustful. She half shuts her eyes and slows down the phrase, feeling the other musicians follow.

  Tex passes his guitar to Armand who, without missing a note, continues the harmony, but with a sharper tone. They could be gypsies hunched around a roaring fire, caravans looming in the shadows. The joint comes around again, and the baby-face Quebecker slips it between Lucy’s lips.

  If the twins could see her now, as she is, really is, not their mama.

  It’s past midnight when Lucy reaches the women’s pod. She coasts down the hallway, slightly stoned, a sensation that makes her feel detached from her body. Is this how the twins feel when they smoke up? Small wonder they sneer at her warnings to quit.

  Despite the late hour, Trace’s light is on and she’s going over the same phrase again and again, a tortured renegotiation of every detail. It must have hit her that she has to appear onstage tomorrow, the world’s eyes bearing down.

  Such a relief to be free from that stress, Lucy decides. Yet a tiny voice nips at the edge of her mind: If only it was me stepping out there, audience filling the hushed auditorium …

  She pauses outside the girl’s room, and the music stops. There is a light clank of instrument being propped against the chair, then the door opens and Trace stands before her, wearing boxer shorts and a man’s undershirt, showing thin, bare limbs.

  “You should be sleeping,” Lucy says, aware of a thickness in her voice.

  “I can’t.” Trace grips her own elbows, collarbone shooting forward under the loose top. “Every time I lie down I start to freak out.”

  “You’re bound to be on edge.”

  “What if mess up tomorrow? Everyone will say I’m too young, that I shouldn’t have made it this far. Do you think I’m too young?” Without waiting for an answer, Trace keeps chattering. “So I got thinking that I’ve been playing the rondo all wrong, putting in those sforzandos because I thought they were cool, but they’re not cool. They’re stupid, and it interferes with the rhythm, which is what my teacher told me, but I thought I’d be all dramatic and everything —”

  Lucy steps forward and wraps her arms around the girl. She feels the brittle cushion of her body, that shaved head tentatively pressing into her shoulder. So different from the twins who dive into her arms like Spitfires — and that’s when they’re feeling friendly.

  “I’m fucking scared,” the girl says. Her breathing is off kilter, too shallow and fast.

  Lucy rubs the girl’s prickly head. The boys, as newborns, chirped like fuzzy chicks, the thumb-sized depression of fontanel pulsing in their soft skulls. You kiss the most vulnerable part; it beckons, needing your most tender care.

  Twenty-Three

  Miranda and Jill from upstairs should deal with this pyramid of dog shit. Jasper scoops the feces into a plastic bag and ties a knot, then notices the rat, or what’s left of it, that their yappy pooch, Polly, attacked a day earlier. That makes two rodents spotted in twenty-four hours. He hopes this doesn’t signal an infestation. The corpse lies prone, nearly hidden in the crabgrass in front of the row house. Crouching over its remains, Jasper prods delicately with the trowel. Its skull is intact, eyes opaque, teeth bared. The abdomen is torn open, and a trace of entrails lies like a dried umbilical cord. Brownish fur, underside a light colour. The Norway rat will creep through any space bigger than half an inch — smaller than the width of your baby finger. Cellars here are porous, as crumbling masonry competes with the shifting sands of lake soil. He glares at the clinic’s rear door where graffiti blazes despit
e earnest removal attempts. Their dumpster is shut, as per regulations, but rodents have advanced olfactory skills. Jasper suspects a scary birth rate, lured by medical waste. He pushes the tip of his fedora back, remembering not to touch his eyes.

  Abruptly, the back door of the clinic springs open and three men and one woman step into the sun. Working their cellphones, they hasten toward a red SUV parked illegally in the laneway.

  “An obvious gap in screening protocol,” one of the men says in a self-important tone that Jasper immediately recognizes.

  Luke.

  Pull the cap over brow, but not in time.

  “Jasper!” The man stops in his tracks and sings out the name: long lost friend.

  Jasper must look like a retiree, yard work in the middle of the day, and he uses the trowel to hoist himself up out of a crouch. These khaki shorts aren’t exactly flattering, nor is the Bacardi Rum souvenir T-shirt.

  Luke gives him the once-over. “I didn’t know you lived here,” he says, natty in chinos and fitted jacket.

  The rest of the crew hangs back and smiles in that way people do when they aren’t sure if they’re going to be introduced.

  “We were just —” Luke sweeps a hand toward the clinic.

  “Checking screening protocols,” Jasper finishes.

  “Part of a schematic overview of all neighbourhood health units in the downtown core.”

  “I know,” Jasper says. His initiative, the result of many meetings with the ministry. He organized the approach, created the checklist, and contacted administrators to book time slots. These people waiting in the wings are from the Ministry Task Force.

  “So this is where you reside,” Luke says, scanning the row of attached houses.

  Reside — a Luke word.

  Jasper reaches for the small of his back, which seizes up at such moments. An ad for his position at the institute appeared in today’s newspaper. It now requires a master’s degree and competence in computer programs he’s barely heard of.