Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  All the aliens are from El Salvador, a spokesman said. Charged on two counts of smuggling and extortion was William Minton, aged 47, van driver.

  Do you see what I mean? With what voice can such a news item be appropriately interpreted? I do not know, anymore, how a newspaper should be read. In the entrails of old pianos I can far more easily decipher signs and portents. Take these high-school uprights in a music room littered with gum wrappers. Here are the bass strings of a tired Baldwin, copper wound, slack with the day’s depredations.

  Today a senior (math major, but with wider aspirations) was assigned to a wrestling bout with Chopin, but slipped into hard rock. Thunder was what he gave voice to — it can be told in the dislocation between the metal core and the metal wrapping of the strings, a guttural warble of agony. His classmates predict a brilliant future: strobe lights, groupies, sold-out concerts, a fortune. Tonight he is shooting heroin into his veins in the washroom of a dive on Dorchester Street. (I read it in the configuration of strings, and also in the flotsam of staff-room conversations.) That is the way of the untuned world.

  It is wise not to care too much.

  I do all that is humanly possible, note by note. Beyond that, there is nothing one can afford to take seriously. Sheer folly. One has merely to consider the vagaries and fashions of history, to peel back two centuries and look in on the court of Weimar. The A on Bach’s clavier is vibrating at only 435 beats per second. So scholars have deduced. Today 440 beats per second is standard. Fashions change without rhyme or reason, history adjusts, old revolutions take on the glow of sanctity, new ones are blasphemous.

  If I am tuning for an Early Music Consort or a Bach purist, I have to adjust the pitch downwards. Back to the “authentic” A. The “real” A. The A, some would say, as Bach and God intended it to sound. But such purists must play for a small audience of like-minded aficionados, for their music sounds slightly flat to the ear of the modern concert-goer. It offends. Some people may even walk out of the auditorium because the performance grates on them unendurably and they feel impelled to take compensatory action — in the same way that few can refrain from straightening a picture hanging crookedly on a wall.

  Modes change.

  Renoir did not like the work of the young Matisse; Matisse did not understand Jackson Pollock. Nonconformist troublemakers in England became the Pilgrim Fathers of hallowed memory. Today’s illegal alien is tomorrow’s Resistance hero. This fashion or that fashion, what difference does it make?

  There are other pianists and conductors who lean away from the 440 norm, but in the opposite direction. Their quest is for a “brighter” intonation: the A at 442 beats per second. And some, defying convention, outraging the conservative ear, reaching for the most brilliant colours of sound, crave an A that is febrile with speed, 445 beats per second, a dizzy note, on tiptoe.

  Do not dismiss these micro-changes as anything less than cataclysmic. Nor as having any more meaning than the length of this season’s skirts.

  When I was five, my father was already famous and my mother was mostly distraught. Later she escaped. She made a quantum leap into banality, which is the true secret of happiness — a second marriage, a very ordinary life, other children. Naturally she does not care to see me, a revenant from that earlier bad time, and I do not blame her at all. I understand.

  She taught me two things of importance: that the limelight is a very bad place to be; and that, in dealings with luminaries, it is preferable to be in a position where you can tell them to go to hell.

  But when I was five my mother had not quite learned these lessons herself. We were visiting the home of a concert pianist, a friend of my father’s. The two men had a way of discussing things, as friends, that sounded like violent battle to the rest of us. The rest of us were in the kitchen: the pianist’s wife and son; my mother and me. Both women had nervous ways: their eyes were unnaturally bright, their lips trembled a little when they spoke, their hands shook when they reached to restrain us. I knew these ways.

  At the vehement height of the living-room discussion, the mothers fell silent and sipped their tea in mute prayer. The pianist’s son and I, already far advanced in the art of making ourselves invisible, crouched under the table, and between the legs of the table I could see the grand piano and the piano tuner. His face was rapt as he tapped and listened, tapped and listened. Once, while the verbal wars raged, he looked up and said: “Would you two old volcanoes please shut up. Unless you don’t give a damn if I can’t get the pitch right.”

  He was calm and reasonable. Never for a second did it occur to him that all power was not his. My mouth fell open. I waited for mayhem. But my father and the concert pianist were as kittens in the piano tuner’s hands. They apologized. They wandered out to the garden.

  Magic, I thought. Black magic.

  The piano tuner does not make value judgments, the dogmatics of pitch are not his concern. Wars are fomented around him, but he takes the requested frequency of the A as a given and tends to the pianos of orthodox and heretic alike. It is difficult for him to follow why the critics rage and the performers imagine a vain thing. He turns his back and cups his ear toward his tuning fork.

  He does not care for the limelight, he works backstage. Composers, performers, and conductors come and go, they rant and rave, they have to stamp the world with their egos. There are far too many of them. They all entrust their lives and their reputations to the skill of the piano tuner, they are utterly dependent on him. When they cringe in pain, those high-wire walkers, when catcalls or critics inflict savage wounds, the piano tuner shrugs. They make their own fate. Those who stand in the stage lights must burn. Their curtain falls.

  In the wings, life goes on much the same.

  I wanted to shake Felicity. By the time I realized what was happening, I wanted to shout: Get off the stage! But it was too late. And in any case she would only have said, bewildered: It was an accident. I thought I was in the wings. I turned round and the spotlight caught me.

  9

  “We’re safe here,” Felicity said. “For the time being anyway. Until we decide what to do.” She moved the kerosene lamp across the table, a soft shuss of metal over pine, and a puddle of light fell on the dish of oranges and grapes. “Have some. And more wine.”

  He would have preferred his Scotch, or else beer, but was for some reason hesitant to mention it. She refilled his glass and he sipped, thinking: The Scotch is in the car. I could get it.

  But these shadows and loops of foggy light made him passive. Mildly uneasy. He was snagged in Therese’s candlelight dinners, the strain of special occasions, the obligations. Memories of wakes pulled at him; in his mind the dear departed gathered, he saw the flower-massed niche, the tapers flickering, the sleeper gift-boxed in mahogany, present and not present.

  He glanced toward the other room where the torn woman, an arc of mysteries, huddled on the bed in a dead sleep. But she lay beyond the lamp’s amber bloom and the darkness surrounding her lapped out at him between washes of light.

  “Why don’t you have electricity?” he asked edgily.

  “I prefer it this way. I come here to escape. No phone either.”

  “Oh shit,” he said. “Therese.” He drained his wine at a gulp.

  “Where’s the nearest?” And when she raised a blank eyebrow, added irritably: “Telephone, telephone. The nearest telephone.”

  “You’ll have to drive back into L’Ascension. About ten kilo-metres. We came through it, remember?”

  “What the hell will I tell her?” He flinched from Therese’s martyrdom, from the bruise that her mournful non-reproaches would inflict. “She’ll think I was …” He pushed back his chair — the wooden legs gave a little screech of exasperation against the wide pine boards — and paced jerkily up and down the room. “What a joke. The one time I’m innocent. She’ll never believe this.”

  “You can’t tell her,” Felicity said sharply. “You can’t tell anyone.”

  They stared at each o
ther.

  “Listen.” Felicity picked up the lantern. Gus was pacing about. “Stop it,” she said, and stood in front of him. “Listen to me. This is a crazy thing, what we’ve done. A crazy thing.” They stood trapped in the cocoon of light. “It’s not like sneaking some extra liquor across.”

  Gus sighed.

  Under stress, Felicity noticed, he had an odd little gesture of running the pads of his fingers across his cheekbones, tracing the eye sockets, the length of his nose, the curve of his lips. Over and over. As though checking that everything was still in place.

  “If we’re caught,” she said, “it won’t be like not declaring a case of Chivas Regal. This is serious. A crime.”

  He said slowly, his fingertips sprinting around his face, “But not wrong.”

  “Oh please, don’t get noble. You have no idea what it costs to be noble.”

  “But what else could we do?”

  His submissiveness, the docile fatalism, produced a kind of vehemence in her. She swept around the room opening and closing things (the dresser, the casement window), the lantern swinging wildly from her left hand.

  Jesus, Gus thought, as the lunatic tongues of light slurped at corners, at ceiling, at the dark doorway beyond which the unknown woman burrowed into her dangerous secrets. “I’m going to get my bottle of Scotch,” he said. “It’s in the car.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake.” Felicity put the lamp back on the table with a mild thump. “Sit down.” She refilled their glasses with excessive energy so that a quick tidal arc of white wine whispered across the table. In spite of herself, she was arrested by the way the light caught the lip of the spill. Seymour would have done that well, she thought. In an earlier period. She drank quickly, several mouthfuls. She took a deep breath. Go easy, she warned herself. She knew she was too intolerant of slow thinkers.

  “Listen,” she said again, gently, offering patient rationality like Camembert with the wine. “Instinct is instinct. It’s not noble, it’s not right or wrong.” Index finger dipped in the puddle of wine, she drew tangles. “But we’re not shackled to it afterwards. There’s a space. And after the space, one can reassess.”

  Gus’s mind glazed over. He had no visa for the country of talk. In school, when a teacher had said: Look, it’s simple, self-explanatory, but if anyone is unsure of exponential … he would slip through classroom walls to where everything waited — girls damp with willingness, cars asking to be driven, the best deals, the way to live. This woman reminded him of schoolteachers. She was a talking machine. She could be blinked away.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that various humane avenues are open.”

  Blink, blink.

  But her voice hummed on. He had a sudden craving for an uncomplicated anxiety — such as smelling of another woman’s perfume. He focused on Felicity’s tanned shoulders, smooth as butter, and tried to go back to that distant moment when she had been simply a blonde in a blue Datsun and he had thought of licking her neck. Had explored a fleeting fantasy of being holed up with her in the same motel during a freak blizzard. Or of being alone with her in a cabin in the woods. He remembered something he had once plucked from a fortune cookie: Be careful. Your wish may come true.

  Suppose he leaned over and dipped his tongue into that dimple beside her shoulder blade?

  Her dimple glared.

  “These are our sensible options,” she said. “I could drive into L’Ascension and get a doctor and the priest. The priest can approach the local chief of police. It’ll go better for us that way.”

  Gus was aware of an inner disturbance, the Niagara of wine hitting a deep lake of Scotch.

  “I don’t mean we’d get off scot-free,” she said. “But we’ll be forgiven. Humanly speaking. And probably legally.”

  “The falls,” Gus said, and then blinked at the words, astonished, wondering where they had come from, what they meant. He followed their trail and saw a man in a rubber dinghy bouncing around lightly as fluff at the lip of the Horseshoe Falls, all the tourists screaming, leaning out from the railings, offering helping hands and panic. A rope and a lifebelt are thrown, but the man moves sluggishly, apparently stunned, stupidly peaceful, rushing on to the fatal drop.

  “That really happened,” Gus said earnestly. “I saw it on TV.”

  Though what it had to do with now, and them, he could not say.

  Television, she thought with exasperation. It figures. And irrationally: He watches every kind of junk. He has the attention span of a five-year-old. He’s drunk. He’s dangerous.

  “We have no idea why those people were smuggling themselves over the border.” She spoke slowly, with exaggerated emphasis. “Compassion, it’s instinctive. We don’t have to be martyrs to it. It’s not a very intelligent emotion.” She began pacing again. “A doctor and a priest. Beyond that, we don’t have the right to take the law into our own hands.” She opened the dresser doors, closed them. “We don’t have the right.”

  And when he said nothing, she closed a door with particular sharpness. “It would be arrogant and it would be stupid,” she said.

  But then, Gus thought, isn’t everything we do? Isn’t it preordained?

  Once, he remembered, as he lay between conjugal sheets, a chaste space of years of mistakes running down between the pillows, the fragrant fog of the day’s indiscretion had risen like a mist and settled into the rift between Therese and himself. He could not even remember the perfume-wearer’s name, though he had filled it in on a form that very day. Some youthful slip of a housewife, with a baby asleep in a corner crib. It was frightening the amount of yearning lurking behind suburban walls. So available. As easy as knocking on doors with an offer of Whole Life or Term and a set of premium tables.

  He had got as far as listing assets on the factfinding sheet, and then he had said, “I need to know what coverage you already have. If you could tell me which policies —”

  “I’ll get them,” the young housewife said. “Just a minute.” And disappeared into the bedroom.

  She had reappeared in panties and bra and a smog of perfume. She must have doused herself in Essence of Need, he thought, and felt awkwardly tender. She tipped her long legs all the way up and back and he could have drowned in her.

  In the act of mortal sin he often asked himself: Why is this wrong?

  But clearly it must have been, or she would not have lain there on the rug, when it was over, with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Oh Jesus,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” She shook her head and went on crying and made some gesture of despair that brushed his arm like an injured wing.

  Reassembling himself in her bedroom, he had seen the atomizer on her dresser. My Sin by Lanvin. He had bought a bottle, later, to take home to Therese; he reached under his pillow to touch it. He could present it and presto, her hurt and the indictment would vanish. Maybe.

  “I tried it out,” he could say. “I wasn’t sure if you’d like it. I wanted to keep it a surprise but I suppose you guessed when you smelled the bedroom.”

  He had lain there knowing he was not going to give Therese the little gift-wrapped box, wondering why. Perhaps he was simply better, more practiced, at living with guilt than with cheap salvation. He never deserved absolution.

  But also, in his helpless and destructive way, he felt heavy with — well, for want of a better word, with love — for both women. For Therese and for the girl crying on her living-room carpet, a bruise on his memory. He could not, somehow, violate that fleeting encounter by denying that it had taken place. Could not commit double sacrilege by negating her smell, not even to lessen his wife’s humiliation, which he must atone for some other way.

  He had reached across the chasm of bedding and touched Therese’s cheek. It was streaked with tears. So much sadness, he grieved, and turned to take her in his arms. Across far too many barricades. She stiffened and turned her back to him.

  He wondered if remorse and compassion were tumescent for all men,
or only for those trained by the Christian Brothers to keep morbid score of lusts for release in the orgasm of confession.

  He had given himself up to the distress of the blood-throb that would have to wear itself out, unused. It was almost pleasurable. A tiny payment to be entered in his vast ledger of debits.

  “Stupid,” Felicity said again. “And perverse. A kind of moral arrogance.”

  “Yes,” he sighed. No matter what one did.

  “We’d need to be perfectly clear about one thing: it would be a lifetime decision.” Like giving birth to a retarded child, she was thinking. “You can’t unmake that kind of burden.”

  He realized: She’s trying to convince herself, to extricate us. He watched her anger with idle fascination, as one watches a fly struggling in the arms of a cobweb.

  “Don’t you see?” she asked. I’d be painted into a corner, was what she thought. Locked inside one frame forever.

  He picked up the lantern and went into the bedroom, sleepwalking, to see if spells could be broken. He stood beside the bed. Felicity, watching from the darkness, thought: Rembrandt, The Nativity. That match-flare of epiphany in one corner of a canvas of darkness.

  Gus was bred on miracles. The ankle bone of Brébeuf, salvaged from Iroquois-flayed remains, had rescued an aunt from epilepsy. His own mother had warded off a fourth miscarriage with daily prayer and the clasping of an anointed linen handkerchief blessed at Ste Anne de Beaupré. Gus himself owed the recovery of a lost wallet to St Anthony, could attest to the powers of his St Christopher medal, and owed the non-pregnancy of a secretary to the special intervention of saints in the seventh week. He was as intimate with manifestations of the divine as he was with mortal sin.

  He did not, consequently, resist the notion that the torn dress spoke to him. In times past, as he well knew, men had been commanded by wounds, by the voluble mouths of stigmata. The black rents addressed him in a whisper, clear as thought: Have mercy on us, they said. Do not abandon us.