Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  This was her kitchen.

  Morley’s mouth opened, but no words came out. It closed, then it opened again. She seemed to be trying to say something. Dave nodded, trying to encourage her, as if they were playing charades. Her mouth kept opening and closing, opening and closing, but no sound came out.

  Then without saying anything—not one word—Morley turned around and walked out of the house. She got in her car and backed out of the driveway.

  Dave said, “She’ll be back in a minute.”

  Bert said, “I think I should be going.”

  Carl said, “Me too.”

  Dave said, “Maybe if we could just get the power on before she comes back.”

  Morley wasn’t back in a minute. She wasn’t back for nearly an hour.

  When she did return, she walked across the kitchen and opened the freezer door. About a cup of water trickled onto the floor. She let out a muffled sob.

  Dave helped her empty the freezer. They deposited plastic bags of food in an assortment of neighborhood fridges. “They’re all within easy walking distance,” Dave pointed out helpfully.

  When they had finished unloading the fridge, Morley went into the living room and met Jim Scoffield’s two friends. They were still sitting at her coffee table. They had a naphtha gas camping lantern resting on the arm of a chair and were playing cards in its garish light. When Morley came in the room, one of the men looked up and said, “Are there any subs left?”

  The renovation took six weeks to finish.

  Dave worked on it alone until the middle of the next week. He reconnected the electricity on Tuesday, but when Morley came home she got a shock when she tried to open the refrigerator, which, unfortunately, was the first thing she tried to do. So he shut the power off again and rechecked everything and turned it on the next morning. Everything seemed to be working fine until Sam came home from school and showed them how he could turn the microwave on with the TV remote.

  There was a thunderstorm that night. Morley became increasingly agitated with each lightning flash. She had read stories about women washing dishes at the kitchen sink and whammo! they get hit by lightning. Cows, golfers, people in boats—why not her kitchen? She didn’t trust the wiring.

  They called an electrician to finish the job: a methodical and trustworthy man. It was the electrician who spotted the lead pipes running into the upstairs bathroom, and he said, “If you want to have them replaced you might as well do it while you have the walls down.”

  So they had the plumbers in and had the entire upstairs bathroom redone, and downstairs, where the back wall was, Morley had one of those bay windows put in, which is something she has always wanted. She has a herb garden going in the window space.

  It was six difficult weeks and they had to get a new vacuum because the old one got clogged with plaster dust, but the upstairs bathroom is lovely and so is the bay window with the plants in it.

  Dave was admiring the plants two weeks later, standing in front of the window and looking out into the yard, enjoying the new view. You can just see the alley over the back fence. He was standing there staring out the new window and into the alley when Ted Bescher drove by in his TR6.

  But it is a beautiful window . . . and Dave likes it, especially in the evening when the light is soft. In the morning too, especially Saturday mornings, when the kids are still in bed. It’s lovely to sit in the kitchen together—the sun drifting down on the coriander, Morley and Dave sipping coffee and reading the paper. They were sitting there one Saturday morning in October, two months after the renovation was finished, when Morley stood up and walked over to the counter to make some toast. She turned and smiled at Dave and said, “Don’t you think it would work better if we could plug it in at the table? So we wouldn’t have to get up and walk across the kitchen every time someone wanted toast?”

  The Razor’s Edge

  It was about ten years ago that Dave came home from a visit to Cape Breton with his uncle Jimmy’s electric razor. He didn’t steal the razor—his aunt Elisabeth, Jimmy’s wife, Jimmy’s widow, gave the razor to Dave. Elisabeth, who is eighty-seven years old, lives alone in Halifax, in a rambling wooden house on Chestnut Street, a stone’s throw from the university.

  Elisabeth, who Dave tries to visit every time he is in town, has been parcelling out Jimmy’s possessions to relatives for twenty-five years. On previous trips and trips subsequent to the electric razor, Dave has walked out of Elisabeth’s with a wooden-handled hairbrush, a wool jacket, a thick black-and-gold ballpoint pen and a stuffed duck.

  “This used to be your uncle’s duck,” Elisabeth said, as she handed it to him.

  Dave stood dumbly by her door, holding on to the duck, his suitcase at his feet. What else could he say except thank you? What else could he do except march up to airport security with a duck under his arm?

  They X-rayed it.

  “It seems to be dead,” said the security guard as he handed it back.

  So many years have passed since his uncle Jimmy’s death that Dave has wondered if some of the stuff he has lugged away from Elisabeth’s wasn’t in fact his uncle’s. After twenty-five years you had to wonder if Elisabeth might have acquired some of these things since his leaving—at church sales perhaps, or maybe at Frenchies. It was entirely possible these things she was handing out weren’t Jimmy’s things at all. But whether they were or whether they weren’t, it didn’t really matter. They were heirlooms just by virtue of the way they had arrived in his life, and Dave could hardly drop them in a garbage can at the airport. So each time Elisabeth handed him something, Dave thanked her earnestly and dutifully lugged it home. Which is why he has a stuffed duck on the shelf in his bedroom closet. That’s where he put the hairbrush and the electric razor too—on the shelf in his closet, out of the main current, but not out of the river of his life.

  Dave’s father, Charlie, was from a family of five children. Elisabeth is the last one of them left. Visiting Elisabeth is one way Dave can still visit his father, one way he can still reach out to Charlie. Elisabeth’s children, Dave’s cousins, have been trying to get her out of her house and into a home for almost a decade, ever since she began boiling all the tap water before she’d use it. Elisabeth started this a year or so before her eightieth birthday. At first, she only boiled drinking water, but now she boils everything. She boils the water she is going to cook in before she boils it for cooking. She boils her bath water. She has two power bars in her bedroom and eight electric kettles in a row. It takes her an hour to fill a tub.

  “It’s poison,” she says, “but you can boil the poison out if you’re careful.”

  Aside from her thing with the water, Elisabeth seems eminently capable of caring for herself. And her dramatic good health has given Dave pause about her water boiling.

  The razor spent five years squirreled away at the top of Dave’s bedroom closet in its zippered leather case. One Saturday afternoon Dave was looking for a sweater and found the razor instead. He took it over to the bed and unzipped the leather case, and he found himself staring at this . . . this beautiful thing. It didn’t look at all like an electric razor. Not at all. It looked more like a piece of decoration pried from an Airstream trailer, or a part shaken off a milkshake maker. It was a black-and-silver, torpedo-shaped, art deco relic. It was sleek. It was . . . Uncle Jimmy’s.

  Dave plugged the razor in. To his great surprise, it worked. And in that instant, the vibrating piece of antique chrome became his razor. In that instant Dave knew that Uncle Jimmy’s razor would imbue the morning ritual of shaving with a new pleasure—the pleasure of continuity. The pleasure of touching the past.

  Things are seldom that simple.

  The first morning, Sunday, was simple. But the second morning, right in the middle of the job, the razor’s motor cut out, leaving Dave staring in the bathroom mirror with the razor clinging to his beard like a leech.

  The last thing you want to do if an electric razor freezes on your beard is try to pull it off. There is
no telling what might happen if you do. You have to be clever about these things.

  Well, first you have to take a moment to panic.

  You imagine yourself hunching into the nearest emergency room, the razor dangling from your face and some smart-alec intern grabbing it and grinning. You imagine him saying something like This might hurt a bit.

  So you don’t go to the hospital—you work at it yourself. After Dave had fiddled with the razor for a few minutes, he got it back to life by twisting the electric cord and holding the razor at a careful angle. Nothing to it. If he held the cord in the correct position the razor worked fine. So shaving became a two-handed job: one hand to hold the razor, the other to twist the cord. As long as he got the angle right, the razor behaved.

  This worked fine for a couple of years, but all the twisting and turning eventually took its toll on the electric cord. The razor got crankier and crankier, and one morning Dave finally got fed up. This is ridiculous, he thought.

  He headed off to the basement with Uncle Jimmy’s razor. He was going to fix it.

  There are many satisfactions in this beautiful life, but one of the great satisfactions, up there with great meals and great friendships, with love and afternoon naps, is fixing something that is broken.

  The devil himself could slide down the basement stairs when a man is engrossed in fixing an electric razor, scratch a match on a wooden beam, smile and say, Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you, sir. But I thought you’ d like to know that upstairs in your living room there is a woman waiting for you. And she knows all your secret desires and all your secret wishes. All of them, sir. You might say she is the woman of your dreams. If you would just put that screwdriver down and follow me up those stairs you could make her acquaintance. Sir? Surely you would like that. There could be no harm in that. Surely. I know you would like to meet her. For she is part Hayley Mills from the original Parent Trap. And she is part Audrey Hepburn from Wait Until Dark. And she is also part Lisa Bonet from that movie that was censored, and I don’t think you have seen the uncut version of that film. Have you? Sir? The part with the chicken blood? Well that’s the part that is playing upstairs. Right now. In your living room. Sir. And your family won’t be home . . . for hours. That’s all arranged. Sir.

  The devil could puff on his cigarette and say all that, and oh yes, some men would go. (Even some family men would go.) But not if they were fixing something. If they were fixing something you know what they would do—they would wave their screwdriver absentmindedly in the air and say, I’ ll be up in a minute. I am just about done here. But they wouldn’t be up in a minute, because you are never just about done when you’re fixing things.

  Dave took the back off the electric razor. The simplicity of it was what startled him. All he found inside was a tiny motor and some vibrating teeth. He had expected . . . more. With the back off, it looked like a toy razor. There were some little blue-coated condensers and a few other wiry odds and ends, but that was about it.

  Everything was so small, Dave wasn’t sure how he was supposed to repair it. He found a loose connection and tried to glue it into place, but that proved unsatisfactory. He was worried about electrical arcing, so he covered the join with electrical tape. When he plugged the razor in and it didn’t work at all, he thought, there’s nothing to lose. So he got out his soldering gun and resoldered every connection he could see. Then he replaced the electric cord with one he removed from an old tube radio, and he soldered that. He covered all the joins with more electrical tape and by the time he had finished there was so much solder and so much electrical tape, he couldn’t get the chrome cover back on. But the razor was working.

  So he got a roll of duct tape and wound the whole thing around with duct tape, and he was back in business. It was a different kind of shave. Since he now had to be careful about electric shock, he could no longer grip the razor manfully. He had to hold it with his fingertips. It was by no means as elegant as it had once been—he wouldn’t let anyone else in the bathroom when he was using it—but it was functional, and it was Uncle Jimmy’s, and he had fixed it himself, and that gave him a certain pleasure.

  He still had the chrome case. He intended to get it repaired one day. When he could find someone to repair it. When he had time to take it to them. In the meantime, he was worried about dirt fouling the circuitry, so instead of the leather case, he kept the razor in a Ziploc plastic sandwich bag.

  He used it every morning and even took it with him when he went away. He had it in his suitcase when he rushed out the door at quarter past six one morning, horribly late for the seven o’clock plane that he was supposed to be taking to New York City. Danny Kortchmar’s daughter was getting married at noon. The wedding was a three-hour drive from Kennedy Airport up the Hudson River. It would be close, but if he made it to the plane, he’d make it to the church. Danny used to play guitar with James Taylor, among others, and Dave and Danny went way back.

  As Dave squealed out of his driveway, his bag bouncing on the seat beside him, a tie crammed in his pocket, he glanced at the clock on the dashboard and began to calculate exactly what he had to do to make his plane. It would be tight. But if everything went without a hitch he might make it. He would make it. He’d make it. He was going to make it.

  It is always like this with Dave and airports—always. He is always late, egregiously late. He never arrives an hour before a flight. Half an hour is too early for Dave. Those are airport rules, and Dave doesn’t play by airport rules. Airport rules are for everyone else. Dave thinks he is better than airports. He thinks he can cheat time; he thinks he can outplay time. He thinks he can get more out of time than time is going to give him. Airport time, anyway.

  As a road manager Dave was responsible for moving bands and their equipment around the country, getting them from hotels to arenas and from dressing rooms to stages on time. This was something, it turned out, he was very good at. He was able to instill a sense of schedule into a collection of individuals whose body clocks often ran in time zones that have yet to be discovered. Now he manages to open his record store, the Vinyl Cafe, more or less on schedule every morning, compared to, say, Kenny Wong, whose cafe keeps more quixotic hours. But put an airplane ticket in Dave’s hand and the equation alters.

  Morley has more than once pointed out that his recurring inability to conform to airport expectations is classic passive-aggressive behavior.

  Dave dismisses this.

  “You are so wrong,” he scoffs. “You have to have something against someone to be passive-aggressive. I don’t have anything against airports. What could I possibly have against airports? Why would I have a thing about airports? One airport, maybe. But all airports? That’s completely nuts.”

  He got so agitated the last time she brought it up that she vowed not to mention it again.

  But look at him. Six-fifteen a.m.—forty-five minutes before an international flight—leaning forward over the wheel, squinting at the cars ahead of him, weaving in and out of traffic. He never drives like this. Forty-five minutes to go, and he thinks he is okay. And what is he repeating over and over to himself?

  I’m going to make it. I’m going to make it.

  Maybe he will. He has done it before.

  But this is a Monday morning, and Dave is not used to Monday-morning driving. Monday-morning driving is bleary-eyed, bad-tempered commuters struggling to hold on to the weekend. Monday-morning driving is coffee splashing out of coffee mugs, bran muffins crumbling onto laps. Monday-morning driving is lost sunglasses. And Monday-morning driving is . . . traffic jams.

  Dave was a good five miles from the airport and doing fine when the traffic began to slow. A few minutes later he crested a hill and all he could see was brake lights forever—cars slowing and cars jerking to a stop and cars stretched out in front of him as if they were never going to move. Ever again.

  Anyone else would have given up. But Dave was not about to give up. Not Airport Dave. Airport Dave didn’t even think about quitting.
He swung onto the shoulder and bounced five hundred yards along the gravel to the next exit. If the freeway was blocked, he would leave the freeway. He would bypass the traffic. He would go cross-country. He followed a semi-trailer off the highway and into a landscape of low-rise warehouses.

  A hundred and fifty years ago, settlers heading west were completely enveloped by the tall grass prairie. Big bluestem grew so tall that men on horseback had to stand in their stirrups to see the horizon. More than once a careless traveller who swung out of his saddle never saw his horse again. Sometimes all you could see of the wagon ahead of you was a canvas cover bouncing through the purple gayfeather, like a sail on a distant sea. Like a prairie schooner.

  The two-storey warehouses that surrounded Dave were just as confusing. He had no clear idea where he was heading as he roared through the acres of flat buildings. And when the streets became long arcing curves, he completely lost his bearings. He tried to use the sun to navigate. He craned his neck out the car window desperately searching for a descending plane to give him a clue.

  When he screamed into the airport parking garage fifteen minutes later, he left a trail of blue smoke.

  He had twelve minutes until his flight was scheduled to leave. He was still muttering I’m going to make it as he slammed the car door behind him.

  He had to check in, clear customs, immigration and security. He had to make it to his gate. But if there were no more hitches, he believed he could do it.

  He was running for the terminal now, his tie half out of his pocket, his suitcase bumping against his leg. He was going to carry it on with him.

  Maybe he was going to make it.

  But when he burst through the automatic doors, he found himself smack in the middle of the terminal. This was the international terminal. He didn’t know it well. Which way should he go?