Sweeter Life

by Tim Wynveen

  “From himself. But this is an entirely different situation. Did you look at the young man with the firearm? None other than Jim’s son. And I’ve seen another photo with Jim’s wife in the background, a most formidable woman, believe me. I don’t imagine I could do much in a case like that. Now, what about your writing? Any progress?”

  Cyrus searched desperately for a suitable reply. “I’m working hard,” he said at last.

  “No doubt, my friend. And it’s going well?”

  “I think so. I mean, I’m making progress. I’ll call you as soon as I have something finished.” Then he hung up before he blurted out the truth, that he was getting nowhere because he didn’t know how to proceed. How on earth did you write a song about a bridge?

  His lack of progress was not for lack of effort. He rose each morning and played his guitar for hours, stopping only long enough to have lunch with Eura. He played with records, played by himself, laid down chord patterns on his cassette player and tried to come up with catchy melodies, but so far nothing had materialized.

  One day, for a change of scenery, he went exploring downtown. He stopped at Long & McQuade and fooled around on a few new guitars, checked out the latest amplifiers. Then he strolled along Spadina, past the El Mocambo, wolfed down some Chinese food at Chungking and bought a pair of black slippers for Eura.

  On Queen Street, he walked into a small gallery called the Art Cave. The walls, floor and ceiling were painted matte black; all natural light had been blocked off. Throughout the room there were a few sculptures, and on the wall a handful of oil pastels, each work with a tiny but powerful spotlight trained on it. To his surprise, the largest statue, a stylized human figure nearly seven feet tall, with no arms or legs or head, was the work of Janice Young. According to the small typed card on the wall, the piece was called Missing Link and was part of her most successful series, The Hollow Men. The price tag was $7,500. A small red dot on the card gave notice that the work had been sold.

  Cyrus inspected the statue more closely. The centre of the figure was shot through with a circular piece of Plexiglas about twelve inches in diameter. Inside the Plexiglas, a few items had been suspended: a severed finger with a gold band, a kitschy photograph from the fifties of a couple cutting a wedding cake, a Harmony guitar pick and Wyatt Earp handcuffs.

  When he realized what he was looking at, he turned quickly away. After he had regained his composure, he allowed himself to be drawn back to the statue. He circled it and touched it. He leaned close to inspect its every nick and gouge, then backed away to gain perspective.

  It was unsettling to see himself on display this way. More troubling still was the implication that Janice viewed him as the missing link, that the finger, the photo and the guitar pick were her way of saying there was a hole in her life roughly the size of Cyrus Owen.

  Had he read the magazine article carefully, the one from which he had clipped her photo, he might have better understood the nature of her work. “The hollow men,” she had explained to the journalist, “are searching for identity. Nameless, faceless, they carry inside them a fractured history, an archaeological jumble out of which they must piece together a personal narrative. To know who they are, they must first puzzle out who they were. But the past is a sentimental fiction. In the end, only art can tell them the whole truth.”

  Unschooled in the nuances of Janice’s work, Cyrus stumbled out of the gallery that day convinced she still carried a torch for him; and when he got home that night, he drank too much before and after dinner. While he was in that woozy frame of mind he did little more than slouch on the sofa with his eyes closed and his guitar in his lap, playing the same chords over and over. All thoughts of the statue had been supplanted by more distant memories of the smell of Janice’s skin and hair, her eagerness and confidence and curiosity. And as his hands roamed the fretboard, a memory rose up to him from the depths: that night on the beach when he told her he dreamed of becoming a musician. To her credit, she didn’t laugh or make a face. “Go for it,” she said. “Don’t waste your time dreaming.” After that, whenever he figured out a new song, he’d drop by her house and play it for her. And when she started to sing along one night, in that surprisingly husky purr of hers, he felt complete. Later she talked the others into joining the band and found them a place to practise. But of all her many gestures, none compared to that first simple encouragement.

  At midnight Eura went to bed, and though he, too, was half asleep, he continued to play till one, two, three in the morning, cycling through the same chords while he let his mind overflow with thoughts of Janice—tossing a football with her father, eating spoonfuls of chocolate syrup straight from the jar. His eyes burned with fatigue, but he couldn’t stop, wouldn’t let go of this feeling of how it used to be. If he went to bed, she would slip away. If he put down his guitar, the emotional thread would be broken and he might never again feel this close to her.

  And, then, with his mind and heart swimming in a sea of remembrance, his hand slipped. Just like that, in the monotonous cycle of chords and fingerpicking, his hand slipped and landed where it had no business landing, a tangle of notes that were clearly a mistake but were not. More like a surprise, like finding the face of love where you least expect it, notes he had known and played but not like this, never like this, never so new.

  Aside from that one clutch of mistaken notes in the early hours of the morning, he made no further headway. And the more he attempted to move forward, the more Janice faded from his thoughts. When at last he crawled into bed, the rest of the world was beginning to rise for a new day. He clasped his hands behind his head and watched the sunrise paint the ceiling in pastels, already planning what notes he would try next.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Ronnie asked Cyrus to come to New York to sign the contracts. “It will be good to get away from home and its myriad interruptions,” he said, his voice hushed and confidential. “We will be able to talk more freely. About the music. About everything.”

  Cyrus arrived at LaGuardia the next day with an overnight bag and his Harmony. Ronnie laughed appreciatively. “A sight for sore eyes, my friend. I invite you to the centre of the universe and, look, you bring your work.”

  Ronnie drove with one hand on the wheel, the other on the radio dial, searching for tunes to discuss. What about this? How do you like that? Couldn’t this have been better? Cyrus made few comments. He had always had an uncritical approach to music. To his mind, it all served a purpose.

  After twenty minutes or so, Ronnie turned off the radio and looked across the seat at him. “You must tell me what you have been working on.”

  Cyrus gazed out the side window. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”

  “Oh, I like the sound of that. Uncharted waters. And it’s going well?”

  “Very slow. To be honest, I haven’t written a thing.”

  “Not a note?”

  “Well.” He hesitated. “Yeah, I have a couple of notes, but that’s it.”

  Ronnie tapped his fingers excitedly on the steering wheel. “Play me your notes. I’d love to hear what you have.”

  “In the car?”

  Ronnie looked left, then right, and powered up the windows so they were sealed in. “As you can see, we are stuck in traffic on the Queensborough Bridge. What better way to pass the time?”

  It seemed so lame, crawling into the back seat to pull out his guitar and play Ronnie the cluster of notes he had literally stumbled on. There were five notes in total, and he played them first as a chord, then as an arpeggio, then in alternating sequence. He played them loud and he played them soft, played them with a syncopated rhythm and then just let the chord ring out and naturally decay.

  Ronnie said, “Yes, I believe I know what you mean. It is quite beautiful what you have there, and no question there is a certain bridginess to it. But tell me this: where do you see it going?”

  “I guess I’m not sure,” he replied, mortally afraid Ronnie was about to cancel the whole project. “I mean, I pla
y it over and over, and I close my eyes and know it should go somewhere, but I don’t really know where yet.” Ronnie looked at him in the rear-view mirror, his eyebrows raised expectantly, and Cyrus stumbled helplessly on. “What I mean, I guess, is that, well it’s kind of weird, kind of like that game you play at parties when you’re a kid. You know, where they blindfold you and spin you around until you’re dizzy, and then you have to do something like pin a tail on a donkey or find your partner or something like that.”

  “What you feel, in other words, is a kind of confusion.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I play that chord, and even though I’m blindfolded, I know I’m in a strange room, and that there’s stuff around me, most of it useless. But I also know that somewhere in the room is exactly the thing I need. It’s like I can hear it vibrate when I play the chord. So I just close my eyes and play the chord and listen for that vibration. And when I think I know which direction to go, I make a move and, bang, I bump into something hard, not what I was expecting, not the right kind of feeling at all. So I try again and head off in another direction and, bang, I hit something else. It’s kind of frustrating.”

  Ronnie’s eyes had widened with every phrase Cyrus uttered. “My boy, that is exactly what I have wanted to express but could not. A music of intimations, that bumps against things in the dark.” As a final note of punctuation, he honked the horn of the Mercedes, one long brassy blare. Cyrus smiled sheepishly, wondering what he’d just said.

  The office of RonCon Productions overlooked Bryant Park. Once inside, Ronnie introduced Cyrus to Brent, a young man with a singsong voice. “I’m Ronnie’s ears,” Brent explained. He swept his arm in the direction of a desk that was covered with manila envelopes and demo tapes, both cassettes and reel-to-reel. “Another stack arrived just this morning. Pretty soon I’ll need a pair of ears.”

  Ronnie led Cyrus into his office and closed the door. It held a large walnut desk, two Morris chairs and a green leather sofa. The walls were covered with gold records and framed concert posters. A moment later, Brent popped in with the contracts.

  Before Cyrus left Toronto, Eura had instructed him to sign nothing until he had read every word carefully. She suggested, even, that he not sign anything until a lawyer could look it over. But now that he was sitting in this office, with a friend who was offering to help, with people from all over the world seemingly seeking Ronnie’s attention and stamp of approval, Cyrus wasn’t going to dither. The Laredo was still fresh in his mind. He signed promptly on the dotted line.

  To celebrate they went to dinner at Angelo’s on Mulberry, possibly the best meal Cyrus had ever eaten. Afterward they took a cab to Washington Square and walked to Bradley’s. The club was packed, the air thick with smoke. Cyrus loved the swanky tone of the place, the long wooden bar, the beautiful Manhattanites, young and old and middle-aged, who had left their various high-rent digs to gather in the name of jazz and the city and whatever advantage they could work from the night. He hadn’t noticed the sign out front, and the place was too crowded for him to see the band, but he could hear well enough, the music smoky and playful and rich in sexual innuendo, perfectly in sync with the room. The pianist was especially good, his playing so nutty and off kilter it reminded Cyrus of how it felt to be a kid.

  It brought to mind a particular sunny day, in fact. He and Hank were lounging under the bridge, feeling pleasantly bored. With no real plan in mind, Cyrus got to his feet and made his way along the centre of the creek, hopping barefoot from one stone to another, not an easy thing to do because the stones were small and irregular and covered with an emerald slime that felt delicious on the bottoms of his feet. As he made his way along the stream, arms spread like a tightrope walker, he spooked chubs and minnows and frogs. He found evidence of muskrat and raccoon and nearly threw himself into the drink when a large water snake slithered past his foot. When he reached the big drainage pipe at the end of his father’s main field, he turned around again to face Hank and—who knows why he would do such a thing?—raced full speed back along the creek, hardly looking at the stones, certainly unable to plan where his feet would land, never thinking for a second that one false step would break an ankle and spell the end of his summer. And when he collapsed on the bank again, gasping for breath, his brother shook his head in disbelief and said, “What the hell was that about? You mental?” And Cyrus laughed.

  That’s how the piano player at Bradley’s struck him, reckless and young and full of life—not the sort of adjectives Cyrus would use to describe Sonny Redmond. “I had no idea,” he said, when their friend joined them at the bar. “You sounded so different.”

  “Different music,” Sonny said without inflection.

  Cyrus found it hard to believe that Sonny had had this kind of musical ability all along and had chosen not to use it. Cyrus brought everything he knew to every solo, always working at the edge of his capabilities. With Sonny, he realized, there was no knowing how good he really was. It could be he’d never shown anyone his limits.

  After the last set, they sat for an hour or so, reminiscing about Adrian’s tea parties, Jim’s endless rants, those dopey church gigs. When the club manager kicked them out, they waited together on the street while Sonny hailed a cab. Cyrus felt frustrated. All the time they had toured together, Sonny, the best musician he’d ever known, had seemed reluctant to give many pointers. Trying one last time, Cyrus said, “Name one person who really influenced your playing.”

  Sonny answered right away. “Easy, kid. Before I met Jim, I didn’t know how to play at all.”

  “The solo Ronnie’s always talking about?”

  “Hell no. His playing was overrated. I mean his words. I had Adrian record every concert so I could chart his raps. Man’s a genius.”

  They shook hands then, and Sonny sped off in the taxi. Ronnie took Cyrus by the arm and walked him slowly back to the office. “I’m afraid you will have to sleep on the couch,” he said. “My apartment isn’t really set up for visitors. I’ll call in the morning. We can breakfast together before your flight.”

  Cyrus was too wound up to sleep, so he sat with his guitar and watched the sun come up over Manhattan. He kept thinking about Sonny’s revelation. It had never occurred to him that you could learn about music by listening to words, especially the words of a crazy man. But he supposed it was true. The old guy sure knew how to talk, and it was kind of musical.

  He thought about Jim’s first line always—“I’d like to tell you a story now, if I may”—and heard the lick immediately:

  Ba-dwee

  Ba-dweedee

  Ba-dweedee-oh

  Dweedee-dum.

  That’s what Sonny had meant when he gave Cyrus that tape to listen to in Meckling. And maybe that’s what Jim was getting at in the trailer when he asked Cyrus to forget about his guitar and talk about love—that there was more to playing than notes and chords.

  When Cyrus fell asleep on the couch, he had the same old dream. The moonlight. The stillness. His father stopping to let him jog down the Marsh Road on his own. But this time the dream doesn’t end there. Cyrus keeps running down to the Lake Road, then farther on to Roxy Beach where the sand is as fine as sugar. He continues to run without breaking stride, stopping just shy of the water where the waves have created a border of weeds and driftwood and empty shells. There is no one around. He can hear his own laboured breathing and the occasional cry of a gull. With his hands on his hips, he turns and looks behind him. Watching him is Ronnie, not Riley. Cyrus doesn’t know what else to do. He has run to the very end, it seems, out of land, out of options. Then Ronnie moves beside him, puts his arm on Cyrus’s shoulder and says, “Go on.”

  CYRUS RETURNED TO TORONTO THE NEXT MORNING, his mind abuzz with dreams of the future. There were so many musical ideas he wanted to try, so many thoughts to sort through. But on the bus into the city he realized he had forgotten to buy Eura a present, and that simple oversight filled him with fear. He knew she wouldn’t mind—she hated when he made a f
uss over her. What bothered him was the total amnesia. He had forgotten about their life together, how she wept sometimes when they made love, how she sang to him as he washed her hair in the bathtub, how she fed him delicacies from around the world—you must try this, you must try that. He had also forgotten the dark attraction of her tattoo and the seediness of the Laredo and the other low-life clubs they had played. He had forgotten about the tangled grief that led back to Wilbury, to Orchard Knoll and Hank and Izzy and his parents’ untimely death. For almost two full days he had faced entirely forward. Everywhere he looked, he had seen the outline of a new life waiting for him.

  Eura didn’t seem that happy to see him. She barely listened to the stories, reacting to news of Ronnie and Sonny as though they meant nothing to her. It was only when they were standing at the sink, washing the dishes after dinner, that she said, “Don’t forget, I know Mr. Ronnie Conger with his big brown eyes like a puppy dog.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying don’t think I am a fool.”

  “I think you’re a fool for being jealous.”

  She glared at him. “You did not even phone.”

  “It was so late.”

  “It is never so late. You were not even thinking I was alive.”

  He put his arms around her and kissed her. “I was. And I was thinking that I love you. You know that.”

  His words carried an emotional truth that trumped the falsehood he had uttered, allowing him to believe he wasn’t lying at all. Eura leaned into him more heavily, adjusting her shape to fit his.

  “What I know is something else,” she said. “Always I thought that I would be the one to hurt you, you were so young. Now I know the young do not hurt so easily. So I am the one afraid. I am the one who will be hurt.”

  They made love that night, and Cyrus would remember it as different from most other times. Normally there was a kind of lassitude to Eura in bed, an inertia he could overcome only with a requisite amount of tickling and tomfoolery. Without laughter, and the lighter spirit it brought her, she would often turn away from what he had to offer. But this night she clung to him ferociously and wanted nothing to do with silliness. The look of determination in her eyes, the brute force of her kisses, everything about her proclaimed this was serious business.