The Musician

by Douglas Gardham

  Maybe it was Mila.

  The big door and lock loomed in front of him again.

  Why did he always come back to Mila? Grief? Did it ever give up?

  It’s not Mila! He all but shouted to himself. He looked back at the note.

  It wasn’t the note’s message that filled his head. It was the padlock. The padlock had a keyhole, and that keyhole seemed to stare at him like a single eye that could see right inside him. Where there was a keyhole, there was a matching key, and he was certain he could find it if he really wanted to. What would he find?

  The note came back into focus, as if to warn him of his thoughts. It ended with “Call if you want,” as if the decision were really his.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  CHAPTER 20

  Friday, July 13, 1984

  “Hello?” said the sweet voice Ethan recognized from the night before.

  “Hi,” he replied.

  “Ethan?” The voice resonated with familiarity he couldn’t miss.

  “Yes,” he answered, “this is he.”

  “You called,” said the woman, her voice rising in pitch, sounding surprised. Before he could reply, she added, “I’m glad you did.”

  “Your note gave me the option,” Ethan said, excited upon hearing the woman’s voice.

  “Yes, I did,” she said.

  Ethan waited for more and was about to speak when the woman went on.

  “This is not easy for me. It’s not what you think.”

  “And what do I think?” Ethan asked, his words sounding terser than he intended.

  “This goes against all I believe in as a—” She stopped, causing Ethan to wonder what she hadn’t said and whether he should have even called.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  He was all but certain what he was about to hear. It’s Mila, he imagined the voice saying. I’m surprised you had to ask. He could feel the invisible strength of an undertow pulling his feet out from under him, threatening to sweep him into the open ocean inside his head. He could feel the heavy wood door and the padlock. The giant black eye of its keyhole stared him down, daring him, beckoning him to step forward. Oh, come on, Ethan. You know it’s me.

  He pushed back hard, as if his back were against the door, his legs locked, holding the door from opening.

  The note was still in his hand. He raised it. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” it said.

  Then why are we talking? he thought.

  “What was that?” the woman asked, her voice jarring him from the heavy padlocked door at his back to the phone in his hand.

  “Who is this?” he asked again, his patience thinning.

  “You don’t know?” asked the woman, avoiding his question with her own. Her voice was quieter.

  “No,” he said, picturing the woman at Benny’s looking down at him. There was something between them outside of his attraction to a pretty woman, but what it was, he couldn’t figure out.

  “I knew the note was a mistake,” said the woman.

  There was an audible click in the line. She’d hung up.

  He still didn’t know who she was.

  CHAPTER 21

  Friday, July 13, 1984

  Ethan was flustered by the short-lived phone call. There was probably more there than he wanted or needed to deal with right now. There were some big messes lurking behind some pretty faces. Beware of the beauty, he thought, wondering where he’d heard that before. Curiosity had driven him beyond his better judgment in making the call in the first place. He likely was lucky she’d just hung up.

  It was almost four o’clock by the time he was back standing in the kitchen again. He’d showered and found his right elbow bruised and a little swollen. The right side of his ribcage hurt when he took a deep breath, as did his back when he bent forward. His tailbone was tender, but sitting down didn’t seem to bother him. The bump on his head was still sensitive but almost gone. It was amazing he’d escaped without more serious injuries. He looked at the phone on the counter and, to his disbelief, considered calling her again.

  Before he could decide, his mother walked in the front door, carrying a brown paper bag of groceries.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said cheerily upon entering the kitchen.

  She looked tired. Worry had aged her prematurely during his months in the hospital. Though she never acknowledged it, he sensed she’d prepared for the worst—that her son might never recover. Every day, it seemed, she treated him like a gift that God had returned to her, making allowances for his varied comings and goings she never would have before. He found when she was around now, all the problems of his world seemed fixable; that had not always been the case.

  “Yeah,” he replied, sticking both hands in the front pockets of his jeans, “I suppose I owe you an explanation.”

  “Not if you don’t want to,” his mother answered matter-of-factly, setting her brown leather handbag, along with the bag of groceries, on the extended counter that often served as the breakfast and lunch table. There was a small black-and-white television on the corner nearest the wall—a new addition prior to his return. A silver antenna stretched toward the ceiling. The new TV had been a surprise, as before, TV had always been forbidden at mealtime. It was another of his mother’s adjusted rules.

  Ethan leaned against the speckled gray countertop and took a glass from the cupboard beside the sink.

  “The fence guy—Al—ran out of work,” Ethan said, “and chose to tell me just as he dropped me off.”

  “That’s disappointing,” said his mother. “What kind of notice is that?”

  “It’s none, and that was my point,” Ethan said, pushing the lever on the water faucet. He rinsed his glass and then filled it and turned to face his mother. “He tried to stiff me for a week’s pay. Said he’d send it to me. I didn’t buy it.”

  “Good. You stood up for yourself,” she said, moving in beside him to wash her hands in the sink. “Any preferences for dinner? Your father won’t be here. Your sister’ll be late.”

  Ethan shook his head, but he was hungry.

  “So what are you going to do?” his mother asked, opening the refrigerator and pulling out a head of lettuce and some celery. Whether he liked it or not, salad was on the menu.

  “We’re going to move in together,” he said, surprised at how quickly the news came out of his mouth. Each time he said it out loud, it seemed more real.

  His mother set the vegetables on the countertop and turned to look at him. “Who is moving in together?” she asked, her face tightening and her lips shrinking to a thin line.

  Ethan knew at once what his announcement must have sounded like to his mother. He remembered Sydney’s response.

  “The band,” he replied, smiling. “We agreed last night.”

  “Oh really, and how are you proposing to do that? You don’t have a job.”

  “We haven’t got that all figured out yet,” he said, a little surprised by her frank reproach to his idea. She’d always been suspect of new things she didn’t know about or understand. “But we will. A band that lives together becomes more than the sum of its parts.”

  She returned to the head of lettuce on the counter and pulled off the plastic shrink-wrap. “And Aristotle is the new name of your band,” she said, placing the lettuce under the faucet with one hand and turning on the water with the other.

  “Not quite,” he said, unable to keep the smile off his face, as he wasn’t about to get anything by a schoolteacher who taught English. “Too much to live up to.”

  His mother reflected his smile with a fake one. “You’re gonna find rent is like that too.” She snickered.

  Ethan was surprised by her wit; she looked tired, but she was on it. He knew his plan sounded crazy. His mother obviously thought the same, but that was okay. This crazy wasn�
�t the institutionalized crazy she’d lived through. This was the crazy behind every dream that sat outside the boundary of normal expectation. But the more he thought about it, the more it didn’t seem that crazy. It wasn’t much different from a group of college kids renting a house off campus, and most societal standards deemed that quite acceptable. There would be challenges, but anyone living together had those.

  “You can laugh, but I think you’re missing my point,” he said, not as comfortable as he’d have liked to be with the reality of his mother’s point. “The Release has talent, but that’s not enough. We have to become more than just four people playing a bunch of songs. You should have seen us last night. We rocked the place.”

  “Can you get three salad bowls down?”

  Ethan pulled three glass bowls from the shelf above his head and set them on the countertop beside his mother.

  “Greg’s the only one with a job, so we really—”

  “Whose idea is this?” his mother asked, interrupting.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who thought you should move in together?”

  “Me. I did,” Ethan said, preparing to defend his idea. “Why?”

  “Because it doesn’t sound like you. Sounds like Greg.”

  Of the band members, his mother really only knew Greg. It was no secret she didn’t like his influence on her son. On several occasions, she’d commented that Greg had never once contacted Ethan in the hospital. “What kind of a friend is that?” she’d asked. It wasn’t the only thing that bothered her about him.

  “Just so you know, Greg was the one least excited about the whole thing,” Ethan said.

  His mother didn’t reply for a moment and pulled open the refrigerator door. “What’s the timing on all this?” she asked with a tomato in each hand.

  “As soon as we can find a place. Sydney started looking today.”

  His mother rinsed the tomatoes and pulled a knife out of the cutlery drawer. “You haven’t looked at any places yet, have you?”

  “No, we only agreed to the idea last night,” Ethan said, feeling defensive. He’d thought his mother would be glad he was trying to get on with his life and out of the house. Figuring his mother out was nearly impossible.

  She put the rinsed tomatoes on the cutting board and set the knife on the counter beside them. She slid open the door on the breadbox. “Burgers okay?” she asked, taking out a package of buns.

  Ethan nodded. “We’re gonna look closer to the city,” he said.

  “The city,” he thought, sounded more mature and businesslike, a demonstration of his seriousness to make a go of the band. He wanted to imply they had more worked out than they actually did.

  “Not around here?”

  “We need to be closer to the action.” He was building a case for what he thought they needed to do. “Part of the downtown music scene.”

  He had a picture in his head of what the place might look like, remembering the apartment from the Three’s Company sitcom—a sofa in the center of the living room, surrounded by their equipment. He smiled, thinking of a recent episode with Jack tripping over the couch.

  “What are you thinking?” his mother asked, sounding a little more interested in the idea. “An apartment?”

  “Yeah, something like that. We really haven’t talked about it.”

  His mother opened the refrigerator again and pulled a box of frozen hamburger patties out of the freezer. “How many?” she asked, one part of the conversation weaving into another.

  “Two,” Ethan said before thinking about how hungry he was. “No, make that three. I’m starved.”

  “You haven’t eaten, have you?”

  “I thought about it and had some orange juice,” he answered, watching her reaction. “I made a couple of phone calls. I don’t know where the time went.”

  “Getting out of bed after one o’clock didn’t help,” his mother said. She wasn’t angry.

  “That’s true.” He didn’t have the nerve to say it had been closer to two. “I talked to Randolph today. Remember? From the hospital?”

  His mother stopped trying to separate the frozen hamburger patties when he said Randolph’s name. She handed him the frozen stack. “If you want three, you can pull them apart.”

  “I was wondering when you’d ask.” He laughed. He pulled a table knife from the cutlery drawer and pried apart the frozen disks. His mother took a Teflon fry pan out of the drawer below the oven and placed it on the stovetop.

  “Such a thoughtful son,” she said. “You could have offered, you know.”

  She switched on the burner and, out of habit, sprayed the pan with Pam. She then turned and looked at him. “You know, the four of you might want to consider a house.”

  “How so?”

  “You could likely rent a small house for the same amount as a four-bedroom apartment—if you can even find an apartment that big.”

  Ethan listened. He hadn’t thought much about living arrangements, but a house made sense. They would need space to rehearse.

  “We’ll be talking tonight,” he said, pulling apart the last two frozen patties, which he handed to his mother. “It’s a good idea.”

  The four frozen disks started to sizzle in the pan. His mother tossed the salad. “What kind of dressing do you want?”

  “Thousand Island,” he replied, and he decided to tell her about the previous night’s show. “You know, Sydney and Gus are unbelievable musicians. Sydney came up with this new beginning to ‘American Woman.’ We’d never rehearsed it, but it was incredible. She knows how stuff sounds before we play it. She brought new life to a killer song.”

  “You expect me to know what you’re talking about,” his mother said, shaking her head.

  Ethan kept talking. “I hate to say it, but Gus is a much better bass player than I could ever be. I don’t know how he plays so many notes. His fingers hardly look like they’re moving.”

  His mother pulled a spatula out of the drawer and flipped the burgers in the pan.

  “What’s cool is Gus has made Greg pick up his game.” Ethan watched as his mother raised her eyebrows and frowned. She wasn’t about to change her opinion of Greg.

  “Get what you want for your burgers,” she said, pulling the hamburger buns out of the package.

  It was his turn to open the refrigerator, but he kept on about their night at Benny’s.

  “The crowd liked us too,” he said, searching for the ketchup, mustard, and relish. He put the condiments on the counter beside the plates. “The place was full when we ended.”

  His mother nodded as she served him his salad. Ethan thought to mention his jump and the woman, but then his mother spoke. “Well, you’ve answered my note from this morning.”

  He smiled and didn’t say any more. He didn’t need to; the rest was in the past now. He was setting a course for the future and didn’t expect her to understand; he wasn’t sure he did. He couldn’t know how hard it would be.

  PART 3

  AFFANNATO

  And I’m here to remind you

  Of the mess you left when you went away

  It’s not fair to deny me

  Of the cross I bear that you gave to me

  You, you, you oughta know.

  —Alanis Morrisette, “You Oughta Know”

  I stole this from a hockey card,

  I keep tucked up under

  My fifty mission cap, I worked it in

  To look like that.

  —The Tragically Hip, “Fifty Mission Cap”

  CHAPTER 22

  Thursday, October 25, 1984

  “Where’s the fucking milk?” Greg shouted from the kitchen. He was mad.

  No one answered, at least not that Ethan heard.

  “I bought a fuckin’ carton!” Greg said.

  Ethan couldn’t belie
ve it. He hadn’t been in bed three hours. He could barely move. Greg no doubt was still coming down from whatever he’d imbibed that night. Hard drugs and alcohol were an extracurricular he’d picked up in Boston that had come to light now that they were all living together. He was doing tequila shots with a girl who had been dancing in front of the stage when Ethan left the bar.

  Try as he might, Ethan couldn’t keep drugs from the band or out of Greg’s hands. They were bad news—end of story. But Greg used Ethan’s prescribed medication against him whenever the subject came up.

  “Doesn’t count?” Greg had retorted when Ethan had confronted him and defended his own drug use by saying that doctor-prescribed medication didn’t count. “You might get yours prescribed, but I gotta get mine off the fuckin’ street. Give it a fuckin’ rest.”

  Greg had then shaken some white powder from a Ziploc bag onto the glass inlay of the coffee table in their living room. With the edge of his American Express card, he had portioned a small amount of powder from the pile into a line, and then he’d lowered his head to the tabletop and snorted it up his nose.

  Ethan hadn’t liked Greg’s response. Orap wasn’t a choice if he didn’t want to live in the hospital. He was likely stuck with it or something similar for the rest of his life. Orap was the brand name drug for pimozide, intended for patients with delusional disorders. Dr. Katharine and her colleagues prescribed it as the best solution to allow him a return to normal life. Part of his stay in the hospital had been to figure out a dosage that would minimize the depressive effects of the antipsychotic drug while stabilizing his ability to cope with the world. Ethan never mentioned his spells to anyone after leaving the hospital. His medication was a requirement to live in the outside world; he wondered whether Greg’s self-medicating was too.

  Ethan wasn’t about to let drugs or anything else break up the band. Sydney smoked and made no bones about her dislike for Greg’s habits. Gus didn’t seem to get perturbed about anything and often smoked a joint after an intense rehearsal. “Whatever gets you through the day” had become Ethan’s motto. He did his best to ignore the drug habits.