by Annabel Lyon
David had chosen Bach’s first sonata for violin and harpsichord, BWV 1014.
After three weeks, she phoned him to say it wasn’t possible. He laughed.
“No, listen,” she said.
They met at the empty loft of a colleague, a neurosurgeon, who had a concert grand in his penthouse high above Gastown. The colleague was on rotation somewhere. The Yukon? The view was of the container port.
She tried. She played. He listened. They played together.
“Huh,” he said.
* * *
—
Her replacement would be a UBC music student. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” David said. She returned the keyboard for a full refund. So it really was over, except for twice. Once that time in the loft with the view of the container port—that was in March. Once in September. He had been miserable about that second time, she could tell. She understood with a certainty born of absolutely nothing that she had been replaced, but he wasn’t ready to admit it. So teeth and nails, tooth and claw, marks for him to have to explain to Alice or whoever.
* * *
—
The concert was in November. Sara made a large donation with her expensive ticket and sat towards the back, but Alice found her anyway.
“There’s a reception after, backstage, for Claes. You must come. Is that the dress?”
So David had told her about the dress.
Sara smiled. “No. That would have been mutton dressed as lamb.”
Alice beamed at her, and turned to greet other significant donors. She was tiny and electric and smelled of vanilla, orange, and smoke.
Sara read the program. David’s bio was lengthy and immodest, likely written by his publicist. How she had laughed when he revealed he had a publicist. How annoyed he had been! His photo was a few years old. Well, they were reaching that age. The undergraduate accompanist had a mass of dark curls and leaned one milk-fed cheek on her open palm, guilelessly.
Once the audience was seated, the CEO of David’s hospital gave a short speech thanking the University and the audience for their generous patronage, and extolling the considerable talents of their own Dr. Park and young Ms. Takasz. The lights went down and the two of them walked onstage. The accompanist had pinned back a tress of hair from each temple so the curls would cascade down her back but her face would be visible in profile. She wore a strapless black floor-length gown. David in his dinner jacket acknowledged the applause, then stepped back so she could get to the piano, murmuring something as she passed that made her smile. She sat and smoothed her skirts. They looked at each other, he nodded, and they began to play.
Sara understood within a few bars what the Bach could sound like, was supposed to sound like; that sad beauty was a kind of food. She also understood that David Park and his accompanist were fucking each other senseless as often as they possibly could. Not a message—Sara thought in spite of herself—Bach was often asked to bear. The glass of Malbec appeared. Allow, consider, dismiss. Atoms moved in orbits, as stars did. Somewhere in the cosmos of her heart a particle collapsed into itself, leaving a black hole the size of a pinpoint.
That’s enough, Sara told herself.
Her eyes fell on the glossy blue-black head of Alice Park, fifth row centre, unmistakable even from behind. She sat flanked by President Singh—Sarah knew him from five years of campus Heads and Directors meetings—and a tall, silver-haired man Sara didn’t recognize. Alice was watching, too, even as Sara was. She was getting it full in the face.
* * *
—
At intermission, Alice again sought out Sara, who was standing—unobtrusively enough, she had thought—in a corner of the lobby, studying a poster board of upcoming events. Rain streamed down the glass wall that separated them from a patch of old growth forest, high above the black November ocean. They were truly at the edge of the world.
The woman would not go away, so Sara congratulated her on the lovely evening, and they hugged again like old friends.
“I wanted to introduce you to Claes, but he’s disappeared.” Alice put a hand on Sarah’s arm and leaned close. “I think he’s nervous. He’s hiding in the bathroom.”
“Maybe it’s his prostate.”
Alice’s laugh tinkled.
Sara smiled. “It’s the premiere, isn’t it?”
“He’s probably helping Zena set up the piano, come to think of it. Stay here, I’ll get drinks.” She was gone to the bar, not the lineup but the open end where the staff came and went. A word in someone’s ear and she was back with two glasses of white wine. “Cheers.” They touched glasses. Sara lifted the rim to her lips but didn’t drink. It’s acid, it burns. Alice knew she was an alcoholic.
“Zena,” Alice said. “Such a find.”
“A wonderful talent. And David’s in fine form tonight.”
“Isn’t he?” Alice sipped again and looked at the room. She waved at someone across the lobby, a cute finger-wiggle and a wrinkle of the nose. “God, I’ve forgotten his name. Bruce, Bryce, something. He’s a vice president at Bank of Montreal. David practiced like a dog for this.”
“It’s important to him.”
Their eyes met.
“Come backstage, after.” Alice patted her arm. “Please.”
* * *
—
So the tall, silver-haired man next to Alice was Claes deWinter. Sara had seen him fidget during the Beethoven—dig at his scalp with a single fingernail, look at his watch. Now he sat slumped as though dreading what was to come.
Zena Takasz began the piece standing, leaning into the body of the piano to strum the strings from the inside. David played a brief motif on the violin that he manipulated into a loop via a foot pedal hooked to an amplifier. There was some business with corks and a cloth, some muffling, some zizzing sounds, a crescendo as the loops piled on each other, even snatches of Zena vocalizing into what must have been a microphone hidden inside the piano, her head all but invisible to the audience as she whispered and beseeched. The piece was interminable. By the end—met with a standing ovation—David and Zena were both sweating and breathing hard.
“Extraordinary,” the woman next to Sara said.
They watched David conduct the composer to his feet. Claes deWinter turned and bowed to the audience. He had a broad smear of a Dutch face and seemed modest. He smiled and raised a hand in acknowledgement, then quickly resumed his seat.
Hardly had the ovation stopped when Alice was by her side and leading her upstream, against the departing crowd, to a door by the stage. “I was afraid you’d run away.”
“You know me too well. But I’m looking forward to meeting Claes.”
“Fuck Claes.” Alice smiled brilliantly. “I want you to meet Zena. Your replacement.”
Allow, consider, dismiss.
“Alice,” Sara said, but they were at the dressing room door.
Inside were champagne and flowers and laughter and too many people and David running a cloth over his violin’s strings. Sara took Alice’s hand from her arm and went to kiss his cheek. There was a smell coming off the cloth, something sweet that she knew. Rose, something? She stopped his hand to lift the cloth to her face.
“Eau de cologne gets the rosin off,” David Park said. “It’s the alcohol.”
Rose, jasmine, mimosa, leather.
“I told you to get rid of that,” Sara said. “It was going to be for Mattie. I told you to get rid of it.”
“Here we are.” Alice was back with the girl. “Here’s our Zena. This is Sara Landow, who I’ve told you so much about. David’s old friend.”
Zena was young and terrified. David closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them wearily. But they were in a different story. Their loves and lusts and pains and games were not Sara’s, not at this moment. “I told you to get rid of that bottle,” she said, loudly enough this time for th
e people around them to fall silent. “That was Mattie’s.”
“It’s not the same bottle.” David looked bewildered. “I bought this three months ago. I’ve been using this brand to clean the rosin. It’s like a good luck charm.”
“After that first bottle.” Sara was aware of hissing through her teeth, literally hissing. “The one I told you to get rid of. I don’t care that you gave your stupid wife the stupid Shalimar. But that one—”
Some responsible adult took Zena’s elbow and led her away from what was obviously going to be a scene. Claes deWinter stepped into the space she left. He really was absurdly tall and ugly.
“I have the pleasure,” he said.
So there were introductions, and then somehow the fire went out. David went to see to Zena, and Alice went, too, and Sara was alone with the brother of the murderer who had given his name to the dress she had had her sister cremated in. She hadn’t lied to David. The ashes of the dress were in the urn with the ashes of her sister. She’d given her, at the end, her stark black love.
“Come, Sara,” Claes deWinter said. “I like the bar out front better.”
* * *
—
They sat at one of the two or three tables set up in a corner of the lobby next to the bar. They were alone. The barman had been wiping down the long counter when they arrived, but he assured them that there was another event going on in the Centre, a showing of student films in the cinema annex, which wouldn’t let out for another hour at least. The bar was definitely open.
Claes deWinter ordered a carafe of Bordeaux.
“Did you rescue me or did I rescue you?” Sara asked.
He studied her frankly. “Who is Mattie?”
Sara nodded. “I had a sister who died.” She ran a fingertip down the stem of her empty wineglass. “The perfume was a gift I had bought for her birthday but hadn’t had a chance to give to her yet. After her death, I didn’t know what to do with it. I asked David to get rid of it for me.”
“Ah.”
The wine came. The barman poured two glasses and withdrew.
“Proost,” Claes said.
“I was having an affair with David at the time. Alice knew, almost from the start, I think. Tonight was supposed to be her revenge. Because David’s sleeping with his pianist now. I didn’t know until tonight. She wanted to hurt me with it.”
“Honestly, this is not my picture of Canadians. But it’s all very exciting. How did your sister die?”
“It was ruled an accident. She fell and hit her head.”
“That is too sad.” Claes nodded. “And yet I would say sometimes death is preferable. My brother Paul is at La Santé in Paris. You know La Santé?”
“The prison.”
Claes nodded.
“Your brother, the photographer. He’s still alive?”
Claes made an elegant gesture, evidently. “You know his story?”
Sara sipped her wine. “I do.”
Sara sipped her wine. Just like that.
“I had the dress for a while. La petite noir. I was never brave enough to wear it in public, though Mattie did once.”
“Three or four times a year I travel from Rotterdam to Paris to visit him. I take the train and make a weekend of it. I see a concert, go to a museum, buy some clothes, visit my little brother. Drugs were his downfall, but he is clean now.”
“Your English is excellent.” Sara sipped again. She wondered if Robert was clean now.
“I never understood my brother’s work. Such a talent to waste on what—fashion photography, Vogue? He could have gone anywhere, done anything. He might have gone to Indochina as a photojournalist. The war brought opportunities for men like him.”
“Did he understand your work?”
He held out the carafe. Sara nodded. He refilled her glass and then his own.
“I taught music history at that time. My specialty was the sixteenth-century Flemish motet. So I would suspect that no, he did not.”
“When did you start composing?”
They paused to watch a young couple dart across the lobby towards the cinema annex. A cold swirl of night air eddied after them, and they laughed loudly as the girl shook the rain off her hair. The lobby was silent again when they were gone.
“After Paul’s scandal. After my divorce. It had to come out of me somehow, I suppose. I was secretive about it for the longest time. I still find nights like tonight difficult. I expose the most intimate parts of myself to strangers.”
“So do the musicians,” Sara said wryly.
Claes shook his head. “Art is a hierarchy. Myself, the composer, I go at the top. The musicians are less important.”
Sara thought about that.
“How is your brother now?” she asked.
“He has become very spiritual.” Claes held up the empty carafe until he caught the barman’s eye, then placed it back on the table. “Simple, in a manner of speaking. He is awed by simple things. Sometimes I think he is very holy. Sometimes I think the privations of prison have salted his brain. He asks what I eat for breakfast. Coffee and pain au chocolat, I say. Pain au chocolat! His eyes go big, like a baby’s.” Claes makes his eyes go big. “So beautiful! he will say. Pain au chocolat!”
“What does he eat for breakfast?” Sara was conscious now of having to articulate her words against the effects of the wine.
“Do you know, I have never asked him.”
They talked through the next carafe, as the barman served the students who began to emerge from the annex. Soon the lobby was as crowded and noisy as David’s dressing room had been, and the carafe was empty, and it was time to leave.
“You mentioned a divorce,” Sara said as they rose. “You never remarried?”
“Never. No, you will let me take this and I will give it to Alice.” The bill. “It’s the least she can do for us, yes?”
They retrieved their coats from the coat check and she let Claes help her into hers. “You have yet to praise my composition,” Claes said. “All this time I have been waiting.”
“It was lovely.”
“You didn’t understand it.”
Sara shrugged.
“That’s fine.” He didn’t seem unhappy. “I hear things on a different plane from most people. A higher plane I will say, yes? I am a sad old slouching divorced Dutchman, but I have this one gift that no one can take from me. I can reach one finger out of this world and into the next, which is more than most people. That gift makes my life meaningful.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sara said very softly, but he didn’t hear her over the noise of the happy students.
They shook hands and said goodbye. Claes spoke to a red-vested usher, who let him into the now-locked theatre so he could make his way back to the party in his honour that they had abandoned an hour ago. Sara stepped into the raw, rainy night towards one of the taxis idling at the curb. The windshield wipers smoothed the rain from the glass. As she got in, the driver spoke into his earpiece in a language she did not understand before putting the car in gear. She lifted the back of her wrist to her nose for the last breath of the scent she had applied earlier that evening—quiet notes of osmanthus flower and tea. Literally the last breath: by the time she inhaled for a second hit, even that was gone.
No matter. She would have the driver stop on the way home so she could get another bottle of Bordeaux. Her night was not over yet.
CHAPTER TEN
June 2018
The phone rang again. It had been ringing for days. Saskia answered, finally. “Yes.”
“Saskia? Saskia Gilbert?”
Saskia waited.
“It’s Sara Landow.”
* * *
—
They arranged to meet the next afternoon in a hotel bar downtown. Sara was there when Saskia arrived, drinking red wine. Saskia ordered tea. Sar
a had a tremor. Saskia had a headache. After saying hello, they didn’t speak until the waitress had left.
* * *
—
They went for supper at a Cambodian place Saskia knew: spicy soup, plastic booths. The kind of place where you didn’t bother to take your jacket off. Student food, hangover food. “You look rough,” Sara said softly.
“I don’t sleep well.”
“Neither do I,” Sara said.
* * *
—
They went back to Sara’s apartment, up in the sky there in Yaletown, near the library. She had some lovely things. The celadon dish on the console in the front hall where she left her keys and coins. The mid-century teak sofa. The astonishing array of perfumes that she kept like condiments in the door of the fridge. The vials of Zoloft and clonazepam and Seconal on the bedside table, next to the phone dock and the hand cream and the wrist brace and the night guard and the brandy.
* * *
—
They went back to Saskia’s parents’ house. They looked at photos, and Saskia showed Sara Jenny’s clothes, which filled her closet. She’d gotten rid of pretty much everything else.
* * *
—
They arranged to meet at a hotel bar downtown, a different one. Sara knew a lot of these places, expensive and anonymous, where if you were wearing nice clothes you could drink a little too much and no one would remember you.
* * *
