Читать книгу A Certain Mr. Takahashi - Ann Ireland - Страница 5

When I was sent upstairs after singing a sudden brilliant chorus of “God Shave The Queen”, Colette knew what to do. My bedroom was on the third floor facing the street, so it was natural to perch on the sill and look out at what I was missing. The laughter of children echoed louder and gayer than ever. Across the road, Yoshi Takahashi’s black Thunderbird lay sleekly in the driveway. He had already been out once during the day and had returned packing a mysterious blue box.

Suddenly, there was my sister, Colette, on the sidewalk, calling up through the funnel of an empty toilet-paper roll.

“Je-ean!” she sang, a clear soprano.

Delighted, we chatted, finding much to say from the new perspective. After a time Colette got a crick in her neck so, hold on, I tossed a blanket out the window, then a pillow. Spreading both on the cement she lay down, delicately resting her head on the pillow. It was nearly perfect. Soon I devised a system of passage: the long string from my kite was knotted around the window frame and tied to a basket, and before long I was lowering comic books, MAD magazines, pencils, and paper, anything to keep her with me. For a time we were quite silent, like two children lying side by side on the rug solemnly colouring.

Then I had a brief, sharp thought. Was she lying there hoping Yoshi would emerge from his house, perhaps to mail a letter or put out the garbage? Would he see her lying there and wave her over for a visit? I, of course, would be trapped above, able to do nothing but watch.

There were three short tugs on the string. I hoisted up the basket and unfolded the little note.

“I have a plan!” it said.

I nodded and looked down. Colette had pushed aside the blanket, pillow, and magazines and lay awkwardly sprawled on the bare pavement. We waited for a car to pass.

Sure enough, this being a “family” street, the first car slowed down, animal-like, and the driver leaned out the window.

“You okay?”

Not a sound. Not a muscle stirred.

“Hey, kid, anything wrong?”

The car nosed its way to the curb. Sensing the moment, Colette stood up slowly and, like a sleepwalker or a ghost, slid inside the house. All done with exquisite control. Meanwhile, from my bleacher seat I was clapping and laughing my guts out. Colette counted to twenty or so — until the car had taken off down the street—then came out again. Once more she fell crumpled on the sidewalk, to await the next victim.

Suddenly, to my horror, the yellow door across the street swung open. Yoshi stepped outside, a thick score tucked under an arm, and turned to lock the door. He skittered down the cement stairs two at a time in his bright red sneakers, watching Colette all the way.

She snapped to a sitting position, palms flat against the pavement.

“Hello, how are you?” He waved the score in the air.

“Fine, I’m fine!” she returned. Her back was twisted so I could only hear the smile in her voice.

For a moment I was sure she was going to get up and follow him, a sleepwalker still, into the black Thunderbird.

Leaning out the window of my crow’s nest I began to signal wildly: “Hello, hello!” but my salute was collared by a gust of wind and vanished without a trace.

Soon the car door crunched shut, and the Thunderbird cruised lazily down the street like a black beetle, sunlight glinting off its rear window.

Colette began gathering up her things, making a little pile of the blanket, pillow, magazines—everything I’d ferried down. She didn’t send them back up in the basket. Instead she hoisted them inside the house like a sack of laundry, leaving only a comic book to flap on the curb.

Sun and street noise blast through the windows on the west wall. The Bowery is waking up.

Jean winds around the loft, blinking in the sunlight. Her bare feet pick up bits of dust and straw from the unswept tatami. She is cradling a bowl of steaming tea in her hands. As she passes the open window a summer breeze floats in, rippling the light cotton of her kimono. Someone below tosses a bottle to the pavement where it shatters noisily.

She stops for a moment. Lying on the low table is a sheet of paper torn from a pad. It reads:

Jean: The enclosed may be amusing. Please promise you will be there.

“I am not yet Okakura–I am

But his ghost shaped by the sound

Of your prayers.”

Love, Colette.

Jean kneels to read the enclosed clipping. She slips the tea cup under the table onto the little shelf.

“THE IRREPRESSIBLE SAMANTHA KRAUSS”

This headline is strung over a smudged photo of Sam, their mother, who is perched on a low stone wall. A striped sailor shirt stretches across her ample bosom. Her features are blurred but recognizable.

Between teaching sessions, Victoria’s pre-eminent vocal teacher, Samantha Krauss—or Sam Hopper-as she is known to intimates, is very much a family woman.

“In my next life I’m going to be the world’s best housewife!” she declares, and passes her guest a potent Bloody Caesar. We are sitting on the patio of her delightful new home, designed by renowned Vancouver architect, Derek Arthur. Very much on Miss Krauss’s mind these days is the gala celebration she and her husband, Martin Hopper, plan to commemorate their move into the new home. After twenty years in Toronto they made their Western odyssey last year.

Mr. Hopper, raised in London, is a former student of the Viennese cellist Leopold Auer, and plays cello in the Styles-Hopper Quartet, in addition to his duties as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Music—

Etcetera. Jean settles into a loose half-lotus and skims on:

“This party serves a dual purpose,” Miss Krauss explains. “Besides being a celebration of Mr. Arthur’s magnificent achievement, my husband has a very special announcement to make.” This statement is accompanied by a mischievous smile. “We are about to start a new chapter in our lives … ”

Jean’s eyes glaze over. It’s the first she’s heard of any announcement. She squirms and flexes her toes, trying to bring some life to them. She feels faintly disappointed that her name wasn’t mentioned—“arriving from New York City is daughter Jean …”

“Please promise you will be there,” writes Colette, natural as can be. Damn sure she’s pulled it off.

It was exactly six weeks ago. Jean’s twenty-second birthday.

“Let me take you to an off-Broadway show,” her friend Reuben had insisted. The show was only so-so, but afterwards they strolled through the crowded streets laughing, trying to remember the songs, cooking up new, sillier lyrics.

“Where do you want to go now?” he asked.

“CBGB’S,” said Jean instantly.

The cab dropped them at the entrance on Bowery, which was pulsing with loud music and a mob of underage teenagers fighting to get in.

“Sure?” asked Reuben. His hand slid to his pocket.

“Yes.”

The sign on the front screamed in foot-high letters: “MAX

ROMEO AND THE WILD SINS OF MEXICO.“

“Okay, let’s go in.” Reuben pushed the door open.

A fat man perched on a stool slid a hand out.

“Five bucks, kids.”

Reuben paid up, and they pushed their way through the mass of twitching bodies toward the stage area.

The band was pounding a syncopated Latin rhythm as Max Romeo, dressed in baggy white ducks and a Hawaiian shirt, belted into a hand-held mike. Sweat poured from his hair onto his hands. Jean watched, transfixed, almost missing Reuben’s urgent gesture.

“I see two chairs!” he mouthed into the racket.

An elbow dug into her ribs, and she bounced off a glassyeyed girl who was shaking green sparkles out of her hair.

Reuben had clamped his hands over the back of a couple of folding chairs.

Jean bopped over to him, tipping side to side with her hips, sliding her sneakers over the wet floor.

Just for an instant she worried, “Will this destroy my ears?” Then, to hell with it, she cakewalked into his arms, forcing him to dance with her. His paint-stained fingers meshed with hers as he allowed a quick vamp around the table. Then he shouted near her ear, “I’ll get beer!”

She nodded.

As he disappeared into the crowd she hung tight, watching the band and keeping an arm hooked through the chairs.

Max Romeo was beautiful—all sharp lines and slippery skin, his pelvis a Mexican jumping bean trotting all over the stage. She scanned the audience that pressed near him, bruising the lip of the stage with their hips and sweat. There was no room to actually dance. Instead, people hopped in place, except for a group of cool loners who leaned to one side, smoking and sipping tepid beer.

Suddenly Jean’s eyes riveted on the spot directly beneath Max Romeo. The stage lights had picked out two shapes from the others. The couple had their backs to her at first, but soon spun so their profiles jutted into the smoky haze.

The man was older than the woman, his thick hair sprinkled with grey.

The floor began to shift under Jean’s feet.

“It can’t be,” she whispered, the dense air hugging her nostrils.

He was dressed all in black. Small and wiry, he moved in neat, quick snapshots. The woman was thin, taller, and danced with self-conscious gestures — an arm lashing toward the ceiling, her neck whipping back and forth like a snake.

Jean felt a soft pressure on her elbow. Reuben. Without looking, she groped for the cold beer.

Reuben followed her stare.

“Isn’t that the famous pianist... ?”

“Yes!” she snapped, before he could fill in the words, the name.

There was an explosion as the drummer thrashed his high-hat, his teeth clenched around a wad of gum, and Max Romeo bent and squirmed and finally shrieked into the mike, sending the room into a frenzy of vibration.

The couple was hidden in the activity, lost in the wave of bodies that rushed the stage. Frantically ducking the sea of elbows and shoulders, Jean backed against the wall.

With a final cymbal cheer, the song was over.

The room gasped for breath.

Then Jean saw them again. A flash of black and red as the young woman fell exhausted into the man’s arms. Laughing, he held her there, rubbing the small of her back and, at the end, lifting her head so he could reach her lips.

Jean felt the beer toss out of her hand onto the front of her jeans. A welcome splash of cold.

“Are you okay?” Reuben was right there.

“No,” she said. “We must go.”

Six weeks ago. Jean forces herself to run the scene through yet again, a government agent studying the moment of connection, the passing of secret information.

First there is the thatch of black hair falling over the broad moon face, the collar open and loose, the arm reaching up to Colette’s neck, touching—no, caressing—her skin. The tenderest laugh imaginable.

Could she have been mistaken in the dim light, the murky air of a bar on a hot evening?

She’d know his profile anywhere, and Colette’s—two in the world she’d never mistake. The light stamped them into a grey cut-out on the wall.

It was a crazy ride, Colette. There’s still a breeze in the air; you can’t deny it.

He landed in our neighbourhood like a gymnast from an Elysian trapeze, carrying the smell of jasmine, green tea, and five years of our lives.

The windows were wide open. It was late October, and the streets were littered with fiery maple leaves and remnants of the Sunday paper. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 suddenly crashed into our house—through the walls, into our living-room-vibrating our tender eardrums. It came from the grandest of pianos — Yoshi Takahashi’s. His tightly manicured fingers dashed over the keys, sinking, then springing with athletic bounce to the next chord. Our new neighbour. There were hints of his good looks—our mother’s smile and overheard conversations—and we even saw him once as he dashed the short distance from his black T-bird to the yellow door of his house, 115 Dundeen Square. Our neighbour! World famous, not quite thirty years old, and perhaps (dare we imagine?) lonely in a new city. Did he speak English? We asked around. Some. He spoke Music, the word that was still a mocha cream in our hearts, a bleeding centre of dissolving sensuality we were so eager to swallow.

One Sunday afternoon in the winter, when no one was home but us, we opened the living-room window wide so the air blasted a clear current from his house to ours, then cranked up the hi-fi so it filled the sub-zero wind with the latest Rolling Stones—and he knew we were hip. We were in this together, Colette, not a dime’s worth of separate thought between us as our eyes gleamed anticipation. We plotted to meet him.

“Let’s bake a cake!” I cried in a moment of inspiration.

“We can take it over as a welcoming gift.”

“What kind of cake?” Colette eyed the pantry shelf.

Gripped by a sudden, delicious image I scooped out two boxes of Betty Crocker mix and dropped them on the counter.

“A piano cake!”

It took hours mixing and baking, then cutting one layer of Devil’s Food cake into ladyfingers for the black keys. The other layer we shaped into the piano body - baby grand, aerial view. White cake became the white keys, and everything was glued and glazed with icing.

“It’s beautiful!” we sang, staring at our shiny sculptured feat, a Liberace-lush edible piano. Yet when it came time to wrap it in foil and hunt up an Eaton’s box the proper size, I was suddenly seized with terror. Who were we after all? Twelve and thirteen years old, ungainly adolescents with a pagan offering to our chosen god. Colette urged us on, seeing no obstruction to the unfolding drama. He’ll slam the door in our faces, I imagined. Or laugh. Or bow politely, then press the door shut in our faces. Oh, Colette. Oh, Jean. We hugged each other breathlessly before setting out to the cool cement walk.

He wasn’t home.

Funny, the car was there. Perhaps he was working. We didn’t quite know what to do, though I was vastly relieved. Colette wanted to take the box home and go back later, but no, I said, let’s just leave it on the doorstep with a note. Okay, what shall we write? I pulled out a piece of paper, flattened it against Colette’s back, and printed: “PLEASE EAT THE PIANO. Jean & Colette (your neighbours).”

Was that good enough? All right, Colette said, and we stuck it under the box and left it on the mat. Later in the afternoon we looked over and the box was gone.

“He’s taken it!”

“Maybe he’s eating it right now!”

The thought of him at that moment crunching down on our home-baked cake incited giggling, a fit that lasted on and off till bed-time. We knew we were stepping into the shallow water of a miracle.

Later, another evening, we had tickets to his concert with the symphony. Tickets that came from a benevolent relative, pleased to see our excitement for the “classics”. The music we half listened to; it was the spare shape of him there, balanced against the gleaming black Steinway with his dark eyes focused artfully inward that we clung to, our heads pressed against the brass rail of the second balcony. Each time he tossed his head or plunged his arms into the black-and-white nest of keyboard, Colette jiggled my elbow.

“Look at him!” we squealed, sometimes so noisily that our neighbours, serious music students following scores, scowled, even put their fingers against pinched lips. What did we care!

When it was over and he had bowed, accepting with gracious humility the shouted “Bravos” and accompanying ovation (in which we participated lustily and I felt hot tears, leakage from my inner self, brush down my face), we headed for the greenroom. We were determined to meet the Dream head on. In the corridor, our heads bobbed up and down in the sea of adults.

“I see him!”

“He’s coming out of the room!”

“His hair’s drenched in sweat!”

We watched as, one by one, he shook hands with friends, vague acquaintances, strangers. Up close his face was large, moonlike, and dark. We could see grey hammocks of fatigue slung under his eyes. It was our turn. With red, beaming faces we introduced outselves.

“We live across the street from you. Remember the box of cake . . . ?”

Then there was the explosion, and Colette and I were at the centre. His strained face broke into a delighted smile as he gathered us into his kimonoed arms.

“Ahhh. The piano cake girls.”

What a beginning! Our smiles stretched to breaking and rocketed off our faces into the world. He told us to stay back so he could drive us to the party at his house. Moments later we were there, dropped from the everyday blandness of our household into the exotic temple of his world, a house paved in white carpets, with huge pillows on the floor like beds, wine and cigarettes, the laughter of musicians, the heady smell of success-and us. We were whisked to the middle of it, as if he’d been waiting all along.

What colour is betrayal? muses Jean. Purple?

She packs her suitcase, tossing in underwear, a toothbrush, a change of jeans.

She passes again Colette’s short note fluttering on the table, ghost of Okakura, the handwriting spidery and familiar. And passes, too, inevitably, the cello standing in the corner, its side swung toward her.

“Off again in such a hurry?” it mutters.

When she doesn’t reply, it adds, “The humidity’s terrible. Can’t you hear my pegs creak in the night?”

“Yeah, I hear them,” says Jean, stuffing a handful of socks in her suitcase and looking around for her toilet kit.

“It’s been over a month.” A sigh. “I’m nothing like this. A sculpture? You could at least dust me from time to time.”

“Shut up!” says Jean.

She could lock it in the case and shove it in the closet. That might shut it up.

“Poor old neglected thing,” she says, with a hint of bitterness. Has she ever gone six weeks without picking up the bow?

She folds a blouse into the suitcase, pats it down, then sighs heavily. Grabbing the chamois that drapes off a tuning peg, she wipes it over the rosewood soundboard. Hardly dusty at all. She can almost hear the purr of contentment. This annoys her. She feels slightly queasy, almost motionsick, as she flips the instrument around to swipe its underside. She shakes the chamois and tosses it into the open case. Before she knows it, she’s tightening the bow and passing the horsehair over a knob of resin. She unscrews the endpin and sticks it into a crack in the floorboards. Then she drops the bow on the string and draws it across tentatively.

A muted sound, like an infant crying two floors away.

She cocks her head, listens, and does it again. Then her left hand springs to the fingerboard, and the sounds turn into a familiar transcription: a Bach partita. Her fingers nimbly follow the old pattern, and the bow stabs at the proper angles.

She plays ten or twelve bars before stopping in disgust.

“What crap!” She glares at the instrument before propping it up against the wall again.

Her fingers work by habit: might as well be raking leaves. How long since she’s actually listened? Might as well be a civil servant plowing through scores of documents and procedurals.

She slides the suitcase toward the door, ready for a hasty exit in the morning.

Colette doesn’t know Jean has quit playing. No one in the family knows. Jean wonders how she’ll tell them.

One day, the last summer the family was together at the cottage, Sam said, “Let’s go pick raspberries.”

“Sure,” we said, thinking of pie and waffles.

Then Father called, “You stay here, Colette, and help me bring in the dock.”

When we got to the field, the farmer gave us each pails that fastened around the waist.

As we picked, Sam did the talking.

“Your father and I aren’t entirely happy about your plan to go to New York.”

I started to pick too fast, squishing berries as I slid them off their stems.

“Martin isn’t sure that you’ll like it there. The city is extremely competitive … ”

“I know that!” I snapped.

She sighed. “And apart from anything else, it’s expensive. If you really want to get away from home, how about Queen’s? That’s where I went. You could come home weekends.”

I didn’t say anything. A bee tried to get up my sleeve.

Finally she came out with it: “Your decision doesn’t have anything to do with Yoshi, does it?”

He was living in New York, had been for months.

I slammed the berry into the pail. I was making a terrible mess.

“No!” I was furious. Did she think I would place my future on the line — my career, the next chapter of my life — for him? A childhood infatuation?

“That’s not the reason at all!” I cried.

Maybe he’d given the name “New York” a shimmer. Like Hemingway or Piaf in Paris. A certain aura. And sure it would be easier to keep up with his doings if I could check out the papers every day. But what was the chance of running into him in a big city like New York? Would our paths intersect? Pretty damn unlikely. And would I look him up on my own? I didn’t know yet.

“For music, New York’s still the place,” I said.

Sam sighed. “I want to be sure of your motives. And sure you’re sure.” Her pail was filling efficiently. “If I knew you weren’t on some wild goose chase after that man I’d feel a lot better. So would your father.” She gave me a hard look. “Even Colette is worried.”

“I’m not chasing anyone,” I said. “I just want to play the cello.”

I even believed it.