The Blue Guitar Page 7

  Lucy lets her dressing gown slide to the floor. Under it she wears an old T-shirt and a pair of Mark’s boxers. A man walking a dog on the sidewalk below glances up at her, and looks quickly away.

  Then the phone rings. It’s Mr. Hyke, vice-principal at the twins’ high school.

  “Am I speaking to Mrs. Dickie, Charles’s mother?”

  “Lucy Shaker,” she corrects him, not for the first time, and feels her stomach lurch.

  “I have Charles here in the office,” Mr. Hyke proclaims in his plummy voice. “Perhaps he’d like to tell you why.”

  She reaches for her mug of cold coffee and sets the photos on the window ledge. Charlie comes on, his voice pitched so low she can hardly make out what he’s saying.

  “What’s up, Charlie?” she asks.

  “I seem to have forged this person’s signature.”

  Silence.

  “Keep going.”

  “I seem to have forged this teacher’s signature on my skip sheet.”

  There is muttering in the background, a correction being issued. Lucy is pretty sure she catches the word seem spoken with inflection.

  “Mr. Hyke says I’m suspended. Just for a day.”

  “Hang on. You forged whose signature?”

  “Leftko. Mr. Leftko.”

  She never remembers teachers’ names. “And he teaches …?”

  “Math.”

  Charlie bombed math. On his midterm report he’d received a single-digit mark.

  “Then you better come home,” she says, choosing a tone of weary patience but actually feeling a wave of panic. When will she practise? For each day missed, a notch of technique slips from her fingers. “Put Mr. … the vice-principal back on.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it, Charlie.”

  A few seconds of transfer, background of PA announcing the track meet, city finals. Imagine, Lucy thinks, having sons who enter track meets.

  “Hyke here.”

  “Will this suspension go on Charlie’s academic record?”

  “I don’t know who else’s.”

  The rage nodule leaps up her brain stem and settles like a pulsing coin behind her eyes. “Has he apologized to the teacher?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Good,” she says firmly. Someone has taken charge of the matter.

  She dresses quickly, pulling on jeans, a blouse, and a pair of Mark’s sneakers. Now she’ll have to hang around all day and monitor Charlie, making sure he doesn’t fool with his PlayStation or run off to the park for a toke. Not for the first time, she envies Mark as he issues a soft warning into the hushed museum room: “Please stand back from the painting.”

  She can hunker down at the computer and do the books for her catering business. Not a chance of practising now, not with the mood she’s been zippered into. Who’s she kidding — pretending to be a serious musician in her forties puts her on a level with those women in floppy hats who set up easels by the riverbank.

  Charlie will arrive in half an hour, dumping his pack in the front hall, ranting about the uselessness of school and how teenagers have no status in society. He will glare, daring her to contradict these obvious truths.

  One of the boys in Uncle Philip’s pictures sprawls outdoors on a wrought iron bench, leg swung over the opposite knee, hand resting on his inner thigh. He stares into the camera, lips parted, showing even, small teeth. The boy wears only a vest, tossed open to display a smooth torso. His genitals are more or less hidden by the leg position, but he looks as if he might shift any minute — this is the magic of the pose, the source of its tension. In another shot the boy appears to be emerging from a bathroom or sauna, towel slung over one shoulder. Is he scowling? Hard to tell, the lighting is so bad. His complexion is pitted, unless that’s just dust on the lens. Uncle Philip needs to spring for a digital camera and Photoshop. The next picture is more intriguing: a boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen, crouches naked on the dirt floor of a shack, his baseball cap twisted sideways. He’s smiling, and the smile is friendly and unforced. The pose is unselfconscious, the small genitals hanging like baby fruit. Behind him a woman, possibly his mother, reaches for something high on a shelf.

  Lucy shuffles the photographs and stares at them again. What kind of life does Uncle Philip lead over there with these boys, their skin glistening as if oiled? Her own body, she must admit, has seen better days.

  Is it so strange to search for beauty?

  That’s hardly the point, she reminds herself.

  Charlie kicks open the front door on the dot of the half-hour, drops his pack, then begins to bustle about the kitchen below, at the same time popping a basketball, an activity that makes the whole house shake. The racket is pure theatre. He’s proclaiming that he is in no way ashamed of the day’s mishap. In fact, it’s a bonus, because he gets the remainder of the day off. He knows she’s up here; he’s waiting for her to come down and issue the predictable lecture, which he’ll mouth word for word in tandem.

  The computer monitor displays a breakdown of prices for the job on Saturday, dinner for eight, three of whom are lactose intolerant. Before each job she determines to earn a higher hourly rate, but somehow it never ends up that way. The twins, Charlie and Mike, hover in the kitchen as she carves the elaborate garnishes that are her specialty: olive rabbits, radish flowers, tomato roses, carrot daisies embedded in aspic, and the boys will say, not inaccurately, that it’s this manic attention to the “crap no one eats” that squeezes her profit margin. You can say that about Baroque embellishments, the mordents and trills that decorate the musical line. Yet it is precisely because they serve no purpose but to please the eye that she fusses over her food decorations. She snaps photographs of the spreads before delivery and mounts them in a portfolio to show prospective clients.

  Charlie launches into singing “Stairway to Heaven” in his newly developed baritone voice that still thrills him, and drums on furniture until the microwave dings. He’s slid a pair of chocolate chip cookies in there, liking the way they go soft and gooey, chocolate oozing onto the glass trivet. Lucy knows he’s wondering why she isn’t there laying down the law.

  She won’t mention the photographs to Mark, because he’ll want to see them, and Mark is a literal sort of man. He’d insist on shredding them into tiny pieces right away, ensuring they didn’t turn up in recognizable flakes scattering down the street.

  “Disgusting old goat,” they’d agree. Then they’d fret over whether Philip had approached the twins in a creepy way during one of his visits. That might explain Charlie’s nosedive at school. And why did Uncle Philip suddenly grow this family feeling after years of nothing more than a UNICEF card sent at Christmas? The visits started three years ago, coinciding with his trips to Thailand, but also with the twins’ free fall into puberty.

  “Hey.” Charlie stands in the doorway of her study, gangly five feet eight inches, shaggy hair, ancient Pixies T-shirt.

  She looks up, pretending to be surprised.

  “I suppose you’re pissed off,” he says through an elaborate yawn.

  “I suppose I must be.”

  He squints, suspicious. “You don’t sound very.”

  “Other things are on my mind at this moment, Charlie.”

  He snorts, knowing better. “Hyke way overreacted.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Lots of kids forge signatures. It’s practically a religion at my school.”

  He waits for her protest. When it doesn’t come and she merely taps out a code on the computer, he slaps the wall. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to guilt me by not responding.”

  “I thought I was trying to print out a menu.” She clicks “select all,” then “print,” and waits for the machine to spit out pages.

  Their jeans land in sculpted heaps on the floor, surrounded by key chains with industrial-sized links. When the twins were small, they slept in bunks and tortured each other with hand-held lasers. Now they sleep in futons at opposite sid
es of the room, though Mike keeps threatening to move to the crawl space in the cellar. Mark nixed the idea because the furnace is on its last legs and quite possibly leaks noxious fumes. The boys love fire. They are always lighting incense or dollar-store candles, then sitting in the darkened room listening to spacey electronic music. Lucy wasn’t born yesterday. She knows they smoke pot in there and blow the smoke out the open window, even in the depths of winter. No wonder the heating bill is sky-high. She picked a glass tube off Charlie’s desk one day: a crack pipe? Confronted with the evidence, he rolled his eyes and said, “Mum, it’s a vapourizer.”

  “A what?”

  Lucy loves it when the boys swoop on her, lifting her high in the air and twirling her about. Somehow she’s morphed from being an intimidating mother into this cute miniature Mum, and she never fails to squeal with feigned alarm.

  She cleans the house, but not often these days. “My practice time is sacrosanct,” she likes to say, and watches everyone, except perhaps Mark, roll his eyes.

  Why waste precious moments scrubbing and dusting? They’ll only mess it all up, grimy fingers stippling a route along the walls and down the stairwell, clustering around light switches. Her anger as she sprays toxic cleanser and starts to mop contains a heavy overlay of martyrdom, which no one notices. It is, after all, not her actual body they trample over in their mud-caked boots, just floorboards and linoleum, symbolic value nil.

  The ideal level of tension while playing guitar is four out of ten. Her teacher for the past year is Goran, a Serb from Sarajevo, once a respected performer, who escaped the city’s siege with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder, hence his teaching career. He likes to lean back in his chair in the conservatory studio and say, “Tell me, how tense now?”

  “Seven?”

  “I think maybe is nine today. You must feel your spine awaken, like a serpent.” He’s been studying Kundalini yoga to deal with the trauma of his country’s civil war.

  Ten

  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 o
nly 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.