The Blue Guitar

by Ireland Ann

  “I’ve come,” he says, choosing a simple phrase.

  But she’s wagging her head. “Why do you keep pursuing me, chasing after me like some kind of crazy stalker man?”

  He steps backward, nearly tripping over his suitcase.

  She’s not finished. “I try to be polite all these times and tell you nicely, but I guess I got to spell it out. I’m not your girlfriend and never have been.” She’s pointing now, finger stabbing the air. “I saw what was going on all those years, you sniffing around. Those cards I sent weren’t enough for you. Don’t you understand I had a job to hold on to? Past tense. What awful thing did you tell them to get me canned?” Her voice rises a notch with every sentence, and her speech tumbles out as if she’s been holding it in for days, months, maybe years. She tugs the towel off her head, revealing the springy hair he knows so well. “You leave me and my daughter alone!”

  He’s stepped into a raging ocean. Any minute the wave will roll back leaving ripples of gleaming sand.

  “You take advantage of my friendship, make me feel bad,” she says, shaking the towel in front of him.

  “I don’t want to make you feel bad,” he stammers. “I love you.”

  She wags her head again, and that kind face has transformed into a mask of anger. “I’m calling the cops if you don’t haul your sorry ass out of this building. You got me sacked. You’re no friend of mine!”

  She gives him one last look, exasperated, as if she’s talking to a child who won’t mind, then shuts the door and pushes the deadbolt across.

  Klaus is breathless, chest squeezing tight. Inside, she’s moving around, talking to someone — maybe the TV. He drops onto the edge of his luggage, suddenly exhausted, sapped of will and desire. His brain isn’t working right. Something in there has splintered.

  “What’s wrong, grandpa?” A boy of maybe sixteen stands in front of him, baggy jeans falling off his backside. “You’re looking woozy, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I’m perfectly all right,” Klaus tries to answer, but the words catch in his throat.

  The boy pulls out a cellphone. “Someone I can call to bail you out?”

  Klaus staggers to his feet. “I made a mistake.” Hearing himself speak, he gains a whisper of confidence and tucks his fingers under the handle of the suitcase. “Where might I find the elevator going down?”

  “Only one way to go,” the boy says, pointing down the hallway. “You be on the top floor here.”

  He should have phoned first — that’s what a gentleman would do, not just turn up on her doorstep like a refugee. He’ll try again in a day or two, bring flowers and chocolate. He’ll think of something. Klaus caught a glimpse of the front of her apartment, family photographs lined up just so on the wall, a small piano, and patterned curtains blanking out the sunlight. Wasn’t that an upholstered chair in the corner? He could set his feet on the stool while they discuss the upcoming provincial election. She will be happy for his company, a man to cook for.

  Almost convinced, Klaus heads toward the elevator, suitcase wheels tracking the carpet in his wake.

  Trace knows what will happen if she wins: her dad will quit his job on the boats and drive her to concerts while her mum will keep teaching at the island school. A person can make good money playing solo gigs — ten grand a year. Maybe twenty. She’ll stay at hotels, eat at restaurants, maybe even teach a bit.

  Sometimes she gets nervous and has to pretend not to be. Don’t smile, she warns herself, or you’ll look like a cretin. Manuel Juerta gives her an actual wink as she sets up, adjusting footstool, et cetera. He remembers how she played in his room, and she holds that private concert in her hands now, a moment of perfection waiting to be re-entered. Before hitting the stage she made herself puke: better to play with an empty gut. They love the way she looks up here, so young, not exactly girl, not exactly boy. They watch her lithe body as she gets ready to play, that cropped scalp smooth and perfect, like an egg, an extraterrestrial egg.

  Where she lives, the rocks are covered with moss and lichen as they tumble into the sea. She goes barefoot, even at school, where they let her, because of her gift.

  Silence bundles the auditorium, and she lifts her hands and begins to play.

  Twenty-Six

  “How long do they take?” Trace moans. She crouches by the wall of the lobby where she can watch people file out of the hall. Somewhere five judges are starting to confer, and the very idea makes her feel sick. “How long?” she repeats.

  Armand hovers like her personal bodyguard. “Sometimes twenty minutes,” he tells her. “Other times they argue behind closed doors and an hour goes by. One year, in Seville, they took two hours.”

  She tilts her head back and moans again.

  This is what she wanted, right? To get off the island and take her music into the larger world. The moment she stepped onstage she felt the hall pulse like a new planet waiting to be born, then it began, the performance of her life. But it went by so fast, too fast to be spun into memory.

  Audience members aim smiles her way before dashing to the snack table, tucking in to cheese and crackers like a shipwrecked crew.

  Trace hasn’t eaten for eighteen hours. She’s a heron, very still and alert.

  “You played beautifully, my dear,” a frizzy-haired lady says, palming a Triscuit and cheddar.

  Trace thinks, I’ve forgotten how to smile like a normal person.

  “Very impressive,” a man in a jean jacket tells her as he squeezes past en route to the bar. She can barely nod. Armand reaches out and slaps her on the shoulder. He’s finding her nervousness funny. She’s not even going to try to fake being casual, not like Javier and Hiro, who stand surrounded by their fans, probably saying just the right thing, being charming and handsome. Meanwhile the judges are comparing notes in some closed room, deciding their future.

  “Where is our friend and colleague, Toby?” Armand wonders aloud. He hails Marcus and Salvatore, who dart past, gulping beer from plastic cups. “Have you seen Mr. Hausner?”

  “Haven’t set eyes on him, mate,” Marcus says. “What did you think of his performance — train wreck or total bloody genius?”

  Salvatore’s eyes focus first on Trace, then Armand. “Toby Hausner is scary,” he says in a soft but clear voice.

  “Music should be scary,” Marcus insists. “Who wants to listen to some pussy strumming? When that man plays, you don’t nod off, though there’s no way he’ll win this thing, not a fucking chance.”

  Trace feels a rocket of excitement. so Toby is out of the game. Marcus would know. He may be lurching around now, wasted, but he’s a big deal back in England and still can’t believe he didn’t make the cut, a massive calamity.

  Javier breaks into the gathering and captures Trace’s hand, then lets go with a sharp squeeze. “I predict a fine career for you,” he says before disappearing back into the crowd, the vents of his jacket flapping. Ten out of ten for presentation.

  Trace is decked out in wraparound pants from Tibet, black shirt with sparkles, and lots of mascara. It was Lucy who painted on the dark lashes and brows to give her face “definition from afar.”

  Armand’s voice rumbles in her ear. “The Argentine musician is spooked by you, but of course he cannot show it.” Armand likes knowing things; it’s all the power he’s got left. “Your life can change in a heartbreak,” he adds, snapping his fingers.

  Heartbeat, he means. Maybe she likes her life the way it is, kayaking between islands at dusk, jamming with Bo in his cabin and playing concerts at the community centre. She can smell the old wooden building now, wet timber and coffee brewing as the audience files in, each face known to her since she was born.

  Manuel Juerta stretches his arms over his head and yawns. At the same moment something in his neck cracks and he lets out a gasp of pain — not the old problem again. He was forced to take a year off performing a decade ago.

  “We have reached an impasse,” Jean-Paul says, tossing his pen onto the table.r />
  The judges have taken over the volunteers’ lounge, eating leftover pizza and drinking warm cola.

  “She’s so young,” Jon Smyth says. “None of us has heard her — or of her — before this week. We don’t know what she’s capable of.”

  Manuel massages his neck. “I only know what I hear with my ears and see with my eyes. Unfortunately, I do not have the gift of forecasting the future.”

  The other judges cast their eyes toward the ceiling at this recital of Manuel’s favourite theme. He’s right, of course, but he is also wrong. They are in the business of creating futures.

  Portia leans forward, skirt tugging her knees. “There’s not one competitor we can dismiss out of hand.”

  Sober nods greet this statement. It is what they have been arguing for the past forty-five minutes.

  “Yet we must not be tempted to invoke a tie,” Portia adds.

  “I am not so sure,” Visnya says. “Perhaps it is a suitable compromise.”

  “No,” Portia insists. “Our constitution forbids it.” She glances at Jean-Paul, who is supposed to know these things.

  He lifts an official-looking file folder but doesn’t venture to peek inside.

  “A tie means no one wins,” Portia says, then reaches for the pitcher and pours herself a tumbler of water. “Proof that we haven’t executed our duty.”

  When Jean-Paul fails to agree, she jumps in again. “So we run with the safe choice? Because we know he won’t shame us — or himself?”

  “There are two safe choices,” Visnya points out.

  “Or go with the girl, the exciting unknown?” Manuel says, ignoring his colleague, the Bosnian musician.

  He has the grace to blush when Portia glances his way, though he might easily remind her that they’re all compromised: Jean-Paul taught Javier at summer school; Visnya has taught Hiro and Javier at a European conference; Portia thinks she tutored Toby Hausner in a master class many years ago. It is why they are so nervous about this girl from a western island; they don’t understand how talent may flourish so far away from their tender care.

  “She gets better each round,” Manuel reminds them.

  No one can argue with this fact.

  “We still have four choices,” Jean-Paul tells them in a world-weary tone. “Until we agree that at least one must go.” His eyes flutter shut for a moment.

  Manuel thinks, That stepdaughter is giving him grief.

  “And of Mr. Hausner, what do we decree?” Jon Smyth inserts. He skids his palms back and forth across his bony knees.

  There is a short silence, then everyone starts speaking at once, a clamour that only dies when Jean-Paul raps the table with his cup. “We understand that this young man is the most important talent but —”

  He needn’t say more. They all heard how Toby Hausner played like a virtuoso but disastrously lost focus — and pulled off a brilliant recovery at the end.

  “So we return to the process of elimination,” Jean-Paul says.

  Portia clears her throat. “If I may be allowed to suggest a useful mechanism.” She looks around, making sure they’re all attentive. “We write on a secret ballot a list of our top three contenders.”

  “That always produces a compromise winner,” Jean-Paul objects. “Everyone’s second choice wins. Is this what we want?”

  “What we want is to finish up here,” Manuel says. He is thinking of the poster taped to the wall of his office at the conservatorio, the great Spanish painter’s sombre vision of the ancient guitarist, a man who forgets to eat, whose skin and instrument are tinged blue with discarded dreams.

  “Speak of the devil,” Larry whispers to his cabal of defeated musicians, and they freeze as Hiro, the Japanese finalist who just played a superb but perhaps too-measured program, shoulders through the lobby crowd. The slightly built man stands in front of them now, nodding and smiling, pretending he hasn’t noticed how conversation collapsed with his arrival.

  Hiro escapes as soon as he can, and the group, made up entirely of musicians who didn’t make it past the first cull, returns to its impassioned critique.

  “He was holding back,” a French guitarist says.

  “A respectable performance,” disagrees a Uruguayan. “No major mistakes.”

  “If you don’t count missing an entire bar in the gavotte.”

  The lobby bell rings. It is time.

  At this moment Manuel is crouching outside the auditorium building, buried to his calves in autumn leaves gathered by the janitor in preparation for disposal. He presses the phone to his ear, but Lucia’s voice keeps cutting out.

  “… back at the hotel,” she says faintly.

  “Eric is back working at the hotel?”

  “… particular care …”

  “What particular care?” Manuel squeezes the phone, as if to pump it into action. But she disappears in his hand, an evaporation of voice. “Eric is released from prison?” he shouts.

  A dim “yes” greets this question, followed by a crackle of speech, impenetrable.

  Then suddenly, clear as day: “Manuel, take a pen and paper.”

  “Pen and paper,” he repeats, searching in his conference bag. “Yes, I have this,” he cries, retrieving the recital program and a pencil stub.

  Nearby, two young guys are toking up and whispering in French. He saw them inside earlier with their scruffy leather jackets. They’re students of Jean-Paul.

  Lucia bellows instructions. He must compose a shopping list: fine-point marker pens, age-defying emollient oil, tampons, pantyhose in assorted sizes, the usual hygienic tubes and jars.

  He scratches the names of these items on the margins of the program, adding more as she rattles them off, feeling not irritation but relief. So he is to be welcomed home, after all. The virtual conservatory floats away, cut free. The job in California recedes. It never existed. His real life is always back on the island.

  “Manicure scissors, not the cheap ones. Manuel, do you hear …?”

  Javier has lost his studied air and chatters non-stop to Hiro in the corner of the lounge. Whatever happens, they are brothers, are they not? He has just parsed every second of his own performance and waits for Hiro to do the same, but Hiro hardly listens. His smooth face rests in the country of waiting. Javier yammers on about how Asians have special powers of concentration while Hiro’s eyes squeeze shut — until finally they hear it, the amplified chime.

  Javier stops mid-sentence. The waiting is over.

  Toby huddles outside the exit door, smoking. As ash drops onto his lapel, his mind is spinning: what happened in there? He played the living crap out of the program. His hands still sting and he’d let in the whole damn army: Jasper, Klaus, some woman called Ramona.

  A bell rings from within. It is time.

  He drops the cigarette, grinds it with the toe of his shoe, and enters the lobby.

  Jean-Paul takes the stage and taps the microphone. Where has their Cuban friend taken off to at this crucial moment? A hiss of feedback greets the audience members as they hasten back to their seats for the long-awaited announcement. Jean-Paul feels their excitement, the burr of anticipation.

  Manuel arrives, nick of time, short legs trotting up the stage stairs, waving both arms above his head. Boisterous applause greets the tardy entrance. His colleagues — Portia, Jon, Visnya, and Jean-Paul — stand under the competition banner at centre stage, trying not to look irritated by his display.

  Manuel approaches the microphone, pink and wheezing from his dash. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he makes a show of wiping his brow: the Maestro sweats, the Maestro is human.

  Portia beams. They love him out there. With Manuel pinned to her virtual conservatory, she’ll coast into the presidency of the federation. Sticking out of her bag are three hundred flyers she got Jean-Paul’s secretary to print up — her proposal laid out on official letterhead.

  “The envelope please,” Manuel booms.

  It is a joke. There is no envelope.

  “W
e choose a winner because we must,” Manuel continues, a hand pressed to his chest as his breathing settles. “You could say music is not a contest and you are right.” His colleagues nod agreement. “But we find this year such an exceptional performance that we — I — have no hesitation in making this proclamation.”

  Javier and Hiro take seats to the side of the auditorium. Javier buttons his jacket and tugs his cuffs so that they show just the right amount below the sleeves. Pat down hair, sniff his own cologne — suddenly Javier finds himself praying for the first time since his sister lay in a hospital bed near death. Hiro sits with erect posture, palms pressed to knees. Destroy mindless hope in its tracks. If he wins, then he will float up to the stage and accept the prize, offer a formal Japanese bow. And if not, nothing has changed. He is the same man, winner or loser. He stares straight ahead, unaware that he is barely breathing.

  Trace remains standing at the back of the hall in a sort of trance as Manuel Juerta’s words bombard the auditorium. In twenty-four hours she’ll be paddling her kayak out to the point and this will all have disappeared.

  Armand, who is seated, turns around to smile and offer a goofy wave.

  “She plays with such intensity,” Manuel continues, “displaying a deep but understated spiritual dimension, coupled with a high degree of technical expertise.” He is reading off an index card.

  Wait a sec — she?

  Her skull seems to crack open. Everyone turns around to look; there’s only one “she” left in the game. Trace’s knees begin to crumple. Thank God for the wall — and what a din. They’re clapping like maniacs, stomping feet, yips of approval.

  Oh, my God, she mouths, and for a moment she wants to run straight across the continent to the cabin her parents built with their own hands, unsheltered from wind and rain, because they believe in braving the elements. But instead she straightens and inhales, feeling air swoop into her lungs, a welcome puff of buoyancy, and she’s smiling her head off, Tibetan pants flapping against her calves as she races up to the stage.