Sweeter Life

by Tim Wynveen

  Sal’s eyes brightened with understanding. “I get your drift there, Jack. We also got a thing called the Rumpus Room. Could be just what you’re looking for.”

  “Yes,” he said, “a most excellent idea. I would like, if it’s available, to transfer our little party to the Rumpus Room.”

  “Oh, it’s available, but it’s gonna cost ya.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

  “I’ll still need the cash up front. Five hundred for the room, plus your incidentals, your drinks, the girls, any extras you might be looking at.”

  “Yes, yes, my friend, lead us to the Rumpus Room.”

  Ronnie was playing a big hunch and hoped he wouldn’t regret it. But he had a feeling this group of young men was the real thing. His chief concern was Cyrus. On the road with Jim, he had been laid-back, standoffish. Yet so far, on this night of revels, he had been right in the thick of things. Ronnie would have to keep his fingers crossed.

  The Rumpus Room was a small apartment devoid of all but a few sticks of furniture. The living area was covered, wall to wall, with mattresses and pillows. The walls were covered with music posters, the windows, too. For mood lighting there was a choice of black light, strobe, or the eerie glow of the appliances from the kitchenette.

  Out of the dull red glare of the club itself, the girls looked to Ronnie’s eye rather pale and bedraggled, but no one else seemed to notice. It took them no time at all to shed their clothing and tumble together in the middle of the floor. Ronnie pulled the single kitchen chair to the side and sat with Ginger on his lap, observing his boys at play.

  “You want to do it sitting?” she purred.

  He was scarcely listening to her, his attention focused on the ten glistening bodies on the living room floor like so many sardines in a can. He couldn’t be sure who thought of it—he hoped to God it was Cyrus—but someone started barking, which brought a similar cry from all the others, even the women.

  Ronnie turned to Ginger. “My dear,” he said, “I am afraid I am rather boring company tonight.”

  She shrugged carelessly. “For you it is better to watch.”

  “Well, no, not exactly. But, I confess, there are some things I do truly love to see, and this spectacle before us is one of them.”

  ASIDE FROM RONNIE, who throughout the night had been a model of restraint, the whole crew was physically and emotionally drained when they left the club. Ronnie knew better than to attempt conversation. He hummed quietly to himself as he drove them home, Cyrus last of all. As he pulled the Mercedes to the curb outside the apartment, the sun was beginning to rise.

  At each stop along the way, Cyrus had felt his spirits sink lower. He hadn’t phoned Eura to tell her he was going out to dinner. When he thought back to the whole dismal unravelling of the evening, he felt sick to his stomach. He had played so well, given it his all and felt the familiar emptiness that followed a high. Then he had simply lost control.

  Ronnie got out of the car to open the trunk. As Cyrus lifted out his guitar, Ronnie gripped his shoulder and said, “Do not feel too bad for Eura. This had nothing to do with love. I would even suggest it had not much to do with sex but was an innocent discharge of energy, like a crack of thunder or a flash of lightning across the sky. It may frighten us sometimes with the power it unleashes, but it is meaningless.”

  “I feel dirty.”

  “For that I would suggest a long hot shower.”

  Cyrus tiptoed into the apartment and set his guitar in the living room. He had a scalding shower as Ronnie had suggested. Then he crept to the bedroom door, wondering if he had the nerve to crawl in beside Eura. But the sight of her, hugging his pillow, made him ache with regret. She had spent the night looking at photographs. Some were scattered on the bed; some had fallen to the floor. Those that he could see were from their days with Jimmy Waters—a visit to Mount Rushmore, a tour of the nickel mine in Sudbury; a truck stop in the middle of the night during one of the innumerable breakdowns of the bus.

  He knew then that he was losing her, or more accurately, abandoning her. She needed so much, not just love but patience and understanding. She needed a partner who wasn’t needy or demanding but rather a healer. For a long time he had been happy to play that role, to tend to her and see her through her many crises. But now there was a spirit moving inside him, and it was big and mysterious. It crackled with electricity. Even if he had wanted to turn away from it, he wasn’t sure he had the strength. It was the bright jangled chaos of the future calling.

  He fell asleep on the couch, a pillow clamped over his head to keep out the morning light. When he opened his eyes, it was a little after noon, and Eura was kneeling on the floor and watching him, her face a few inches from his. To see her this way, still puffy with sleep and wearing one of his T-shirts, gave him hope that nothing had changed between them. But her first words shattered that illusion.

  “You do not love me anymore.”

  “Eura,” he said, his voice clogged and craggy from his night’s debauch, “how can you say that?”

  “You go out all night with Mr. Ronnie Conger—I do not even want to think of the places he can take you—and you do not give me a telephone call to say you won’t be home for dinner, or home for tea, or home to sleep in the same bed …”

  He reached out to her but she reared back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have phoned.”

  “I am sorry, too,” she replied softly, staring down at her bare legs. “I am sorry I was not strong enough to say no to you. Saying no was all I had left. Holding on to the way it was—” she touched her breastbone “—here, keeping it safe forever.”

  “Eura …”

  “It was better then, saying no, because even when I was so unhappy, I could know I was at least living in faith. As long as I said no. But you wanted only to hear me say yes.”

  He sat up now, his head throbbing, his stomach sour. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Of course not,” she snapped. “If you understood, we would not be having this stupid discussion. If you understood, I would not feel—” She stopped abruptly, hugging herself.

  “Feel what?” he said. “Maybe you would not feel what?”

  She rubbed tears from her cheek and said, “I gave up everything when I said yes to you. And now I am losing you and will have nothing.”

  Cyrus felt a stillness come over him, a righteous calm. “Wait,” he said. “You think I haven’t made sacrifices? You think it didn’t kill me to play those Holiday Inns when I could have been touring England and Europe and making records? You don’t think I gave up everything to be with you?”

  “The Jimmy Waters Revival. This is nothing. You were better off away from those people.”

  “Oh, yeah, I was living the good life with you, all right, at the Laredo. Don’t you understand? Music is the only thing I’ve ever cared about my whole fucking life.”

  That sentence hung before them like a crystal, clear and hard and mesmerizing, its refracted meanings shining every which way. To Eura, it was the confirmation of everything she had suspected. To Cyrus it was the sudden transformation of a hundred nameless feelings into a statement of principle. Then Eura covered her mouth with her fist and walked slowly back to the bedroom. She closed and locked the door.

  At five Ronnie phoned to invite them to dinner. Cyrus accepted half-heartedly and relayed the information to Eura. After a few moments of silence, she snuffled indelicately and said, “You go.”

  He leaned his forehead against the door. In a careful tone, he said, “He’d like you to come. And I would, too.”

  RONNIE WAS SENSITIVE to the fact that there might be tensions in the air and was prepared to assume any persona—master of ceremonies, confidant, friend, adviser, referee—whatever was required to keep Cyrus functioning at full power. The boy still had a lot of work to do, and Ronnie’s sole focus for the next while was to keep everything on track. If pushed to it, he would not hesitate to sacrifice Eura to the greater good.


  As it turned out, the mood in the apartment was more encouraging than expected. He had pictured Cyrus fawning over Eura, punishing himself for whatever unspeakable acts he had committed or imagined. Instead, there was a chill in the air, which Ronnie found bracing. Eura drifted about the rooms with a weak and hollow expression, like someone who had lost all hope; Cyrus’s movements were tight and jerky and full of steam.

  They drove downtown with the windows open, Cyrus sitting in the back. It was a beautiful evening, full of sultry promise. You could see it in the way people strolled down the street. Gone was the hunched and hurried gait of Canadian midwinter. In its place was a lazy sashay, all hips and shoulders and no particular place to go. With a note of false cheer, Ronnie said, “I was thinking Chinese. Something a bit lighter than the feast we had last night. Did he tell you about it, Eura? My God, we made pigs of ourselves.”

  She stared blindly ahead. “I am glad to hear. Lately he forgets to eat. He will make himself sick if he is not careful. This is something you should watch, Ronnie. He is not so good at taking care of himself.”

  Cyrus nudged her shoulder. “Like you’re any better.”

  “I will always survive. I had more than one life before I met you.”

  “But you weren’t always happy.”

  “Who is always happy? Besides, happiness, I think, is overrated.”

  They ate at Chungking, and Ronnie kept the conversation as light as possible, which wasn’t easy. Cyrus and Eura seemed unwilling to say much to each other. As a result, Ronnie spent most of the meal telling them about Jim’s latest antics. He now had his own radio show, which was broadcast from New Mexico. It was becoming a hit, syndicated in every major U.S. city, including New York. There was talk of cable TV.

  “I would be happy for him,” he said, “if only I didn’t feel that every time he opened his mouth, he was tarnishing his legacy. That woman is not helping matters any. The son, too. They are taking advantage of him.”

  Eura poked at the food on her plate—she did not understand this cuisine, more suitable for cows and pigs—and said, “He has always been crazy. I do not see that this could be different.”

  Ronnie spoke with the utmost gravity. “There is so much difference I hardly know where to begin,” he said. “When I think of what he has given the world, what he still has to give, and to hear him go on this way.” He leaned forward confidentially. “It is hard to believe it is the same man making these radio broadcasts. He speaks like the living dead. And the way they parade him around those open-air meetings like some wild-eyed John the Baptist—it’s absolutely shameful. Something dreadful has happened to him. I wonder at times if he has been brainwashed.”

  Cyrus poured himself some green tea and said, “Did anyone ever understand what he was talking about?”

  “Not fully, of course, but in part. The questing soul, my friend. Whether he applied his talents to the language of music or the music of language, he brought joy to the world. Now he has turned everything upside down. Instead of filling life with magic and miracle, he empties it. At these open-air meetings, which are terribly well-attended, people gather with records and tapes, which they pile into a mound and set ablaze. Did you see the article in Time magazine? Jim has been taken up by the Bible thumpers, calling for an end to ‘godless rock and roll.’ ”

  “He said that?”

  “Not in so many words. His ways have always been hard to decipher. I believe he is talking about a more general proscription. In his own words, ‘a time of terrifying silence’ that he hopes to usher in.”

  “Whoa,” Cyrus said with a mock shudder. “Heavy.”

  Ronnie twisted his mouth into a frown. “I am afraid I find this too upsetting to make light of it.”

  “Then why waste your time with us?” Eura asked, not at all kindly.

  “I have called and left messages. They won’t even let him speak on the phone. And honestly, what I have observed on TV is not encouraging. Even if I had a few hours alone with him, I doubt I could reach him.”

  He waved his hands in the air and said he would talk no more about Jimmy Waters. Then he spoke of people he had met in New York, in particular a set designer named Raoul Dupree. The idea, Ronnie explained, was to make Madison Square Garden feel as intimate as a theatre. The hard part would be to create a few icons that were larger than life, both physically and emotionally. To that end, Raoul would need a tape. Ronnie suggested it was time to record a demo, which pleased Cyrus a great deal.

  As they left the restaurant, Cyrus suddenly remembered Janice’s sculpture. “I have a friend,” he said, “an artist. I forget how you just put it, how we need something big and weird. Her statues sure are that.”

  Ronnie laughed. “Tomorrow promises to be a delightful day. We will find ourselves a cozy little demo studio in the A.M., and in the P.M., we will set off in search of these big weird statues your friend has made, shall we?”

  PETE’S BROTHER-IN-LAW had a studio called High Fidelity, on Queen Street West near the psychiatric hospital. It didn’t have the best gear or the most welcoming space, but the price was right. From there it was a short drive past Portuguese grocery stores and restaurant supply depots until they came to the Art Cave, where Ronnie immediately cornered the gallery owner. “My good fellow, you had a show not too long ago that featured a piece by Janice Young. I don’t suppose you’d have the number of the artist’s agent.”

  The man was short and plump, with beady eyes and a handlebar moustache. “Acts as her own agent,” he said.

  “Well, then, how might we reach her about a commission?”

  The man disappeared into his office and returned with a telephone number and an address. “I wouldn’t bother phoning,” he said. “She never answers. And even if she did, she’d make some excuse not to see you. If I were you, I’d just drop by the studio. But don’t tell her I said so.”

  Janice rented space in a warehouse on King Street. Ronnie and Cyrus tried several doors before they found one that would open—and stepped directly into her workroom. She was hunched over a marble sculpture that looked to Cyrus like a big, warped slingshot. She wore plastic goggles and a small white mask over her mouth. She was holding a chisel.

  In one series of movements she straightened, flipped up the goggles and pulled off her mask. She was dressed in white coveralls, which accentuated the red of her hair. “Can I help you?”

  Cyrus still had her picture in his wallet, the one he’d clipped from a magazine; but he wasn’t prepared for the sight of her. The last time he’d seen her, her face was rounder and fleshier and not as finely articulated, as though she’d been sculpting it herself and was only half finished. This face, with its more prominent cheekbones and jawline, the hair chopped to a graceless tangle of orange spikes, was one he didn’t know, one that had lived and worked without him. Looking at her now, he felt a kind of panic, as if he had returned from a decade of travel to discover he had left a tap running or the stove on or the door unlocked.

  Recognition dawned in her face, the flicker of surprise that in an earlier time would have become a headlong rush into his arms. Instead she merely raised an eyebrow and said, “It’s you.”

  “It’s me. Been a long time.” He hugged her and breathed in her smell, all dusty and warm and slightly sweet, like a gravel road in summer. Her awkwardness in his arms made him feel sad and nervous. Remembering himself, he backed away and said, “This is my friend Ronnie. We were just at the Art Cave.”

  “And Bernie told you where to find me.”

  “We promised we wouldn’t rat on him.”

  She made tea, but the presence of her unexpected guests shone an unforgiving light on each step of this familiar process. Her kettle was covered in dust and paint flecks and bits of solder; her cups and teapot were chipped and stained. She was afraid to think what she must look like. She’d been working since eight that morning without a break and could feel the dust coating her face. She could taste her own empty stomach.

  More th
an once she had imagined seeing Cyrus again and how she would present herself—and it was never like a scatterbrain. She hated the act that some artists used to avoid responsibility, claiming they didn’t understand taxes, say, or politics, or how to cook or clean or perform any of the daily duties that constituted a normal life. She was suspicious of those who retreated into the world of their creations and let everything else slide. That wasn’t being creative but immature. Now she was afraid that she was no better than the rest.

  She might have relaxed a little if she had seen herself from Cyrus’s point of view. He noticed nothing about the kettle or teapot. In regard to her physical appearance, he was thrilled to have had the opportunity to see her at work, if only for a moment. Granted, that first glimpse of her face had filled him with loss, but the picture of her bending over her marble, goggles on, a fine mist of perspiration on her forehead, made up for that. It was all he needed to know about her past, an image so real and full of implications that it easily filled the gap inside him labelled “Janice.”

  They stood around her workbench, chatting awkwardly about old names, old faces. He told her that he’d been to one of her shows and had followed her career as best he could. She’d seen him play, she said, years ago. “With that guy who told the weird stories. In San Francisco, of all places. Jonathan and I had flown out for my first show in the United States. It was like a sign, you know? Both there at the same time. Long way from Wilbury.”

  It hurt to think she had come to hear him play but not to say hello. Worse, he couldn’t bear to think about this other man. He wanted her to be happy, and to all appearances she was. But he didn’t want to know about anyone called Jonathan. She, too, shied away from more personal questions, and they soon ran out of easy things to say. That’s when Ronnie stepped forward. “You are no doubt asking yourself why we would drop by so unexpectedly.” He explained to her what they were planning and that they would like to commission a few pieces for the show.

  She listened attentively, occasionally shifting her gaze to Cyrus. When Ronnie finished talking, she touched Cyrus’s arm. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you would ask. You know, I generally don’t give much thought to my audience. I don’t know who they are or what they like, and I don’t want to know. But secretly, I’ve always wanted you to like my work, Cy. I wanted you to think it worthwhile. So it means a lot.”