Читать книгу The Ann Ireland Library - Ann Ireland - Страница 15

Right hand “m” finger feels as if it got stuck in a crankshaft, thanks to the Montreal humidity. It’s an old problem, going back to the day when staff dragged Toby onto the baseball field for first-base duty. The halfway house was very keen on sports participation. Then some bozo popped the ball to right field where Toby made the heroic leap, landed on his butt and hand, and felt the ominous crunch of ligament. He flexes the finger now, gauging degree of loss of flexibility. He is walking along the buffed corridor of the university building past groups of competitors who huddle in excited chatter. They all seem to know one another. Didn’t we meet in Aspen? Brussels? Houston? Barrueco’s master class? They hail one another in a mishmash of accents, ignoring Toby who tries to look as if he knows where he’s going.

No one is watching, a novel sensation in a competition. He tells himself it is freeing, rather than unnerving. The hall steers left, and he follows the rich fragrance of coffee and baked goods until he reaches the cafeteria with its bistro-style tables. For a moment he stands in the doorway and scans the noisy room. A group of competitors has taken over several tables at the far end, their instruments propped against chairs or lying underfoot. Toby left his own guitar in the locked dorm room. He nods at them, but the gesture is unseen, yet that one glance tells him everything: they are unspeakably young, starting with that baby-faced boy sporting a soul patch and a girl with a shaved head. They might take him for being one of the judges. That’s why they’ve turned to stare and are whispering, trying to figure out who he is in the classical guitar firmament.

Toby throws back his shoulders under the vintage Aerosmith

tour shirt. The room’s concrete walls are painted yellow with windows running down one side, open on this warm day. It’s Indian summer, last gasp before winter closes in. Toby grabs a tray. Because this is Montreal, buttery croissants and salads sprinkled with watercress and crumbled chevre fill the glass shelves — no sign of crap sliced bread or troughs of gravy growing skin. Jasper would approve. Pictures of the Laurentian Mountains decorate the walls alongside sepia-tinged photos of Old Montreal. The girl serving hot dishes sports a neck tattoo and a chain mail bracelet.

“Bonjour,” Toby tries after clearing his throat.

She glances up and nods, acknowledging this triumph of linguistics, then says in perfect English, “You here for the guitar festival?”

“Yes.” Suddenly, he wants to tell her all about it. “I’ve entered the competition segment.”

“Fantastique! I hope you will win.” Then she slides a piece of cake onto his tray, waving off his protests. “You must eat sugar for energy, yes?”

Women always want to feed him. They spot his waif-like form and start scouting for calories. He grabs a fistful of cutlery and paper napkins and pays the cashier, another languid beauty, another neck tattoo.

In Paris the musicians jockeyed to sit with him, even older guys: they all wanted to catch some of what was roaring off him, a sensation that now seems remote. He strides to the table in the corner, holding his tray high, offering an enigmatic half-smile. The musicians glance up and see his white tag. White signals competitor. Yellow means judge and blue indicates exhibitor, one of the guys selling instruments or sheet music in the salon.

A man with a thin face and not much hair pulls out a chair. “Join us, my friend. I am Armand Stolz from Frankfurt.”

Toby reaches over with his free hand to shake Armand’s, then hears the flurry of introductions. He repeats each name in turn, knowing he’ll forget them in an instant. Everyone’s keyed up, a mixture of jet lag and nerves. The small tables feature candles set in the middle, currently unlit. Toby catches a chair leg with his foot and drags it in, manoeuvring around the bulky guitar cases.

“Hausner? So you must be German also,” Armand says, genial in his open-neck shirt and pressed jeans. Crow’s feet around his eyes indicate he’s not so young.

“That’s right,” Toby says, blowing into his coffee. “Another Kraut.” Right away he wishes he could suck back his words. “German heritage on my father’s side but born here in Canada,” he clarifies, then realizes he’s trying to wiggle out of this very heritage. Klaus, when bombed on schnapps, makes dumb-ass Nazi jokes, trying to dispel any imagined tension. When he’s not drunk, he’ll moan, “Why do they reduce hundreds of years of German history down to twelve?”

Armand’s smile tightens. He knows what’s going on.

Toby attacks his salad, peeling back the wrapper. Someone across the table is tittering. The cafeteria doors burst open, and a group of army reservists dressed in fatigues enters and marches toward the food trays without speaking, like monks on retreat. Their convention includes seminars in civil disobedience and emergency disaster management. Toby spotted the schedule posted in the entrance of the building.

Without thinking he polishes the tines of his fork on a paper napkin.

“Fastidious,” Armand notes, turning to the others. “Definitely German, yes?”

Trace, the girl with hair shaved close to her skull, sits with her feet drawn up on her chair, resting chin on hands. She’s built like a boy, no chest to speak of, sharp features, no hint of makeup. Half a dozen beaded necklaces decorate her long neck, and at the hollow point where neck and sternum meet, a tattooed rose winks.

“Aerosmith?” she says, reading his shirt. “Joke, right?”

“Absolutely not,” Toby replies, mouth full of lettuce. He eyes her back. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

Jesus. “How long have you been at it?”

She squeezes her knees. “Since I was nine.”

“This your first competition?”

“Not counting Kiwanis.”

How good can she be? Toby wonders. Then he remembers how good he was.

“Where are you from?” He feels like an elder statesman, drawing out the next generation.

“Gulf Islands.”

“What gulf?” Geography isn’t Toby’s strong suit. Jasper claims that he slept through school, thinking only of music. As proof, he’ll ask him to recite the periodic table, and Toby will say, “The what?”

“Off the B.C. coast,” she tells him. “I live on the smallest island that has actual people, Martin.” She pronounces this Mar-teen, the Spanish way.

“Lucky you,” Toby says, letting his gaze wander around to take in the others: a Japanese guy wearing a toque, a Russian, a Brit, a blond woman whose name he missed.

“Lots of goats and hippies,” Trace says. “The most beautiful place on earth. I miss it already.”

It turns out she attends a private arts academy on the mainland instead of a regular high school. She tells Toby this in a voice that pretends not to care, yet she soon lets him know the academy holds a rigorous entrance audition. “Like one in fifty makes the cut.”

Toby was like this at her age, craving attention and at the same time brushing it off. “Can’t wait to hear you play.”

“Really?” She’s pleased.

This is where she should echo the sentiment, but it takes time to learn competition etiquette.

Larry is from Austin, a skinny guy who doesn’t seem faintly Texan until he opens his mouth and speaks. He’s a vegetarian; so much for stereotypes.

“Vegan,” he drawls. “Makes me popular with the good old boys.” He rests his thumb on his belt buckle, which is shaped like a Fender Telecaster.

Toby guesses he put himself through college playing cover tunes in a bar band, one of the brotherhood. Toby played the Yonge Street strip before he was old enough to drink.

Larry peers at his registration package, leafing through the competitors’ bios until he spots Toby’s name. “You’ve been away a piece.”

“Eleven years.”

Larry whistles and waits for an explanation, but Toby doesn’t volunteer one: no point in revealing weakness to this lot. They’ll hoover it up, then wait to see him crack.

“I have played in twenty-one competitions,” Armand announces.

“How many have you won?” Trace asks.

Armand gazes sternly at her. “Young lady, I have earned one participation in semifinals, and this is my aspiration, to achieve that level again.”

“One semifinal in twenty-one tries?” Trace doesn’t disguise her astonishment.

Armand gives her a doleful look while Hiro, a guitarist from Osaka, giggles. He sports a metallic toque worn over spiky hair and moves with a self-conscious grace, tilting his head just so, adjusting his collar. Toby studies him, the smooth skin, grey linen shirt. Queer? Too soon to be sure, and there are cultural differences to consider.

Toby bolts down his food. When he’s on edge, he can’t taste anything and it’s a struggle to get it down. But food is fuel, a necessary stoking of the furnace, and it prevents death — a fact he once notoriously forgot.

The cadets pull half a dozen tables together at the other end of the cafeteria and sit with their legs swung out, boots too big to fit beneath. Their voices pitch low, as if they’re on a secret mission. Armand eyes them and pulls up his collar, pretending to hide. Toby’s the only one who laughs, who gets the joke. The other guitarists chatter about the judges, preferences known and rumoured, and possible prejudices: one is a sucker for the lyric line and lush tone, while another craves brash modern dissonance with flamenco trimmings. Information is ammunition.

“What you must understand,” Armand insists, slapping the table with his palm, “is that even a fantastic guitarist can have a bad day. So if you genius people make a mistake onstage, I will be waiting in the wings.”

“Juerta’s here,” Larry says, referring to the eminent judge. “He’s not going to be put off by a few wrong notes.”

“A few wrong notes,” Armand interrupts, “is a catastrophe if —” he lowers his voice “— you cannot instantly recover.”

A short silence follows this remark as each musician imagines himself flubbing onstage, spotlight burning.

“Those of us who have been around these events for years, the judges understand how we play, what we can do,” Armand says, then leans back, hands clasped over his trim belly.

Toby calculates — twenty-one competitions. The man’s been at it for years. He must be well over thirty. Unlike most competitions, this one is open to all ages.

Toby’s name, briefly known in classical guitar circles beyond Canada, means zip to this lot. Whatever reputation he once enjoyed has long since disappeared into the ether of flamed-out early promise. It will happen to many of these characters, too, though such a possibility is far from their minds now. They trade news of master classes attended, guitar gods glimpsed in the hallways, luthiers who use traditional fan bracing versus radial. There had been a day when Toby was in the thick of it, and he wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and waits for all this to feel different, more how it was.

At the far end of the table a woman with tangled blond hair smiles at him. When he meets her gaze, she glances away, then back again. Shy? Perhaps. What he can see of her face intrigues him: she must be at least forty and is dressed with some care in a yellow blouse and silver necklace.

“Where are you from?” she mouths.

“Toronto.”

She points to her chest and mouths back, “Me, too,” then indicates an empty chair next to her. Toby picks up his tray with the remnants of lunch and joins her there.

“Another refugee from the virus,” she says in a too-bright voice, then holds out her hand. “Lucy Shaker.”

They shake, and he sees milky skin under the framing hair and violet rings under her eyes.

“I know you,” Lucy says.

“What?” Unsettled, Toby looks down. Here goes — the moment he’s been fearing.

“I heard you play years ago.”

He recovers, memory spinning. “Where?” he asks, hoping it wasn’t that final recital in Toronto at the Women’s Art Association, the show he’s mostly forgotten. Legend goes that he interrupted his playing to rant to the audience, then launched into an improv that went on so long that everyone tiptoed away, leaving the rented hall almost empty.

“That church nestled inside the Eaton Centre,” Lucy reminds him.

Little Trinity, an urban marvel rescued from the developer’s wrecking ball, surrounded by a shopping mall. Toby smiles in relief: that concert was a triumph, broadcast on CBC Radio for its Young Artists series.

“I played Boccherini,” he recalls. “The Grand Sonata by Sor and a set of Tárrega.”

“You were just a boy.”

“I was fifteen.”

The table has gone quiet as other competitors eavesdrop.

“You were amazing,” Lucy says. “In a world of your own.”

“Still am.” That old self can seem remote one moment, then reappear in dazzling Technicolor the next.

She waits a beat before asking, “Did you ever stop playing?”

“Never.” He senses them leaning in, wanting to hear more. Most are too young to realize that a life contains detours, more detours than highways.

“But you didn’t perform?”

“That’s right.”

He feels their attention burrow in and is grateful when Lucy notes his discomfort.

“What number did everyone draw?” She turns to the group, still speaking in a brittle voice. She’s referring to the lottery that determines in what order they will play in the preliminary round, a two-day marathon that will weed out most hopefuls.

“Fifty-one,” Toby volunteers.

“Out of sixty?”

“Afraid so.”

Lucy winces in sympathy.

“The judges will nod off,” Toby says, though he doesn’t actually believe this for a minute. His performance will shake them out of their torpor.

“Budapest guy number one,” Hiro offers in uncertain English. “He finish early, then practise second round. Lucky guy.” He nods several times, confirming this opinion.

“If he goes to a second round,” Armand points out.

A cloud passes over the crew as each member enters the possibility of being cut before the real competition begins. Months of work, travel expenses, cocky assurances to those back home …

“I can’t worry about it,” Toby says, feeling worry creep in, anyway.

“Their ears will be numbed by repetition,” Larry adds.

Lucy turns to him and asks, “And you?”

“I drew six.” Larry smiles smugly, as if this were an achievement, not merely luck. Drawing an early number gives him ample time to work up his program for the semifinals. Everyone must play the same compulsory pieces plus the killer Mark Loesser sonata composed especially for competition. Finally, each artist gets five minutes to strut a favourite from his own repertoire.

Lucy turns to Trace. “And you?”

“I pulled twenty-something.” Her studied indifference is a cover.

No one thinks to ask Lucy what number she drew.

Armand checks his watch. “Important technique workshop in five minutes. Myles Boyer demonstrating cross string ornamentation.”

The institute is topsy-turvy, and before Jasper can even hang up his jacket, Rachel, the intern, hands him a stack of papers striped with her highlighter pen. Someone wheels in a monitor so staff can watch the morning press conference. It’s Dr. Steve Rabinovitch issuing the latest statistical report and — surprise, surprise — their very own Chairman Luke stands on tiptoe at his side, offering a sober face to the camera. The disease may be gearing up into another round as the virus mutates. They aren’t front line here at the institute: Jasper and his staff sweep up after the parade has gone by, caring for survivors after discharge from hospital and the first run of rehab. Despite the fraught word epidemic, there have been fewer than eighty cases confirmed in total.

Jasper can’t contain a snort when the camera lens flies past Luke. Look at his tidy blond hair and moustache and the way he nods whenever the good doctor makes a point. Luke is small but muscular — a ferret, Jasper decides. Soon as the cameras switch off, Luke will pull out his phone to issue directives that counter every decision they’ve made the week before. Sirens wail up and down University Avenue. Someone is making a fortune flogging latex gloves and surgical masks.

“Hey, Jasper,” Rachel says. “He looks just like you.”

Jasper glares. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

She’s not the first to note the resemblance. It was Luke himself in that first board meeting who hung back when the others left and confided to Jasper: “We’re much the same, you and I. Bodes well for our future working relationship.”

Soon after, the freshly elected chair fired off a memo declaring that the institute must “prioritize its goals” and “the executive director’s role must be redefined within the new context.” That would be Jasper, and so he found himself thrown into the contest of his professional life.

Now he looks around at his staff members, who quickly avert their eyes; Chairman Luke has got them thoroughly spooked.

Slurp of cereal. Kettle whistles. Toilet flushes from down the hall. Someone farts. Elaborate humming. Please, not that song from The Titanic … is it possible to hear too well?

Toby, lying on the narrow dorm bed, tosses an arm over, but Jasper isn’t there, and his bare hand slaps against drywall.

Laugher from the other side of the door: his roommates are bustling into the day. He feels a rush of panic, but it quickly subsides as he recalls that this lot plays in the preliminary round today and he’s not up until tomorrow.

That must be Hiro keeping his door open a crack so they can all hear as he charges through the allegro at breakneck pace. An old trick. Kid wants to scare them, make them question their interpretations: will the judges be impressed by such a transparent display of technique?

Sure they will.

But Toby won’t be swayed. A more nuanced approach is also effective. There is no finish line, no stopwatch.

Except there is.

At twenty minutes they cut you off, a guillotine chop midway through your soul-baring adagio. Not for the first time, Toby thinks — why the hell am I doing this? Hiro lets out a cowboy whoop when he reaches the end of the piece and gives his soundboard a smack — giddy up. Toby rises from the bed, clad only in his underwear, and stumbles into the hallway, rubbing his eyes.

Each man gets a Spartan bedroom with a cot, a single shelf, and a desk. The shared kitchen doubles as living area. Toby grabs a thin but clean towel off the pile and pads down the hall toward the communal bathroom.

When he returns, his roommates have disappeared into their cells, starting to rip through arpeggio and scale patterns. Still undressed, Toby draws his guitar onto his lap and starts to tune.

Back home, Jasper insists on a morning routine of tea, fruit, and whole grain cereal, the proper balance of nutrients and electrolytes. Today Toby will grab a sugary cinnamon bun from the cafeteria and a double espresso. Meanwhile, Guitar Choir is meeting at the church to run through the Thanksgiving program, and no doubt Pamela and Matthew will duke it out for conducting duties. He twists the tuning pegs, easing a set of new high-tension strings into flexibility. By tomorrow’s performance they’ll be perfect. Glance out the window to the courtyard where the Hungarian guitarist is pacing the flagstones, hands clasped behind his back. He’s due to play in twenty-five minutes.

Howl of anguish inside the pod: Larry.

“Fucking Montreal humidity!”

Toby holds his guitar tightly to his chest: too damn easy to get pulled into the drama of others.

“What is the difficulty?” Armand calls back.

Excitement drills through Toby: another man’s calamity might protect him from his own.

“My soundboard split!” Larry cries. “And I’m booked to perform in an hour.”

“Let Uncle Armand take a look.” There is the sound of footsteps, and a door pushes open, followed by a series of taps as Armand inspects the damage.

“I believe I can fix this small but unfortunate problem,” he says. “We use temporary adhesion.”

“Yes?” Larry frets. “How?”

“I will press sides together —” A grunt of effort is followed by a click, then tense silence.

Toby leans forward in his seat.

“Better now, yes?” Armand says.

“Maybe,” Larry says, hardly daring to hope.

“And because I am organized German, I will obtain a tube of glue from my suitcase.”

A friendship is being sealed along with the busted soundboard. Toby lays down a chromatic scale with crisp articulation. He won’t allow a hint of longing or loneliness to enter the room.