All My Puny Sorrows (7 page)

I said goodbye to Julie and drove around the city for a while wanting and not wanting to drive past the old house on Warsaw Avenue, trying and not trying to remember those years of marital happiness.

Dan, my second ex, the father of Nora, raised Will as his own while Will’s biological father, my first ex, was in the States embracing volatility, and we both really felt like we’d gotten things right this time around after crappy first marriages, that at long last we’d resolved the agonies of unfulfilled romantic yearnings and were finished with bad decisions. Now we’re engaged in a war of attrition but mostly, like modern lovers, through texts and e-mails. We have very brief truce-like moments at times when we’re either too tired to fight or somehow simultaneously feeling nostalgic and full of goodwill. Sometimes he sends me links to songs he thinks I’ll like or essays about waves or whatever, the universe, or apologies for a million things and sometimes he gets drunk and writes long scathing diatribes, litanies of my failures—which are legion.

The words “nothing bad has happened yet,” a lyric from a Loudon Wainwright song, knocked around in my head while I cruised past the house on Warsaw Avenue. This was the house where I started writing my teen rodeo novels which did okay for a while, well enough to help with the mortgage payments and
buy groceries. There are nine of them so far. The Rodeo Rhonda series. But it’s time for Rhonda’s world to change, according to my publisher. More teenagers live in cities now and can’t relate to barrel racers and broncobusters. My editor is being very patient with me these days while I work on my “literary book.” She said she’s quite happy to wait for Rodeo Rhonda number ten while I “expand my oeuvre.” The new owner was in the process of painting a thick layer of austere white over the original red and yellow that Dan and I had painted it years ago on a goofy whim when we were broke but happy and fearless and oh so confident in our love, our future, the kingdom of our newly minted family and our unshakable footing in the world. The fence hadn’t been repainted yet, it glowed a cheerful yellow in the dusky light, and I could still make out the decals that Nora had stamped all over it, sweet images of frogs and cars and half moons and blazing suns with happy faces. A little metal sign we’d bought on some family road trip that said Beware: Peculiar Dog Lives Here was still screwed to the gate. Sometimes people say at this point: I don’t know what happened. I don’t know where we went wrong.

I went to Nic and Elf’s house and parked in their driveway. It was finally dark. I watched Nic through the window for a minute as he sat, also in darkness, staring at his barely glowing computer. It was time for us to talk about Elfrieda, our nightly conference that would leave us no closer to a solution but would at least reinforce our solidarity in the cause of keeping her alive. We sat in the living room among piles of music books and Mandarin novels, Nic’s latest fascination, sipping herbal tea from the last of their clean cups, and exchanged thoughts like: She seemed slightly more upbeat today, more willing to engage in conversation, didn’t you think? Well, yeah, maybe … What
about that fresh cut? That fall? Do you know, is she taking her meds? She says she is but … The nurse told me today that we weren’t supposed to bring her food from the outside, that if she was hungry she was supposed to get out of bed and walk to the communal eating area at regular mealtimes. Yeah … but she won’t. She’ll just starve. Well, they won’t let her do that. No, you’re sure? Hmmm …

We still hadn’t heard back from the “team” of psychiatric home care workers and were beginning to wonder if it actually existed. We wanted to know how often the team would be able to visit or how much it would cost. We agreed that the cost didn’t matter and Nic said he’d call the contact person again the next morning from work and I offered to try once again to meet with Elf’s psychiatrist, which was like trying to meet with the head of the Gambino family. I wasn’t even sure if he existed. Or at least, I said, I would talk to one of the senior nurses who was familiar with Elf’s case history, and basically beg anyone who would listen not to let her go home until we had this other plan in place or until she really, seriously had turned a corner, as they say.

And what about the tour? I said.

Fuck the tour, said Nic.

Yeah, I said. I agree with you. But we’ve got to deal with it. She’s worried about letting everyone down.

I know. Nic stood up and grabbed a piece of paper off the piano. Messages for Elfrieda, he said. Jean-Louis, Felix, Theodor, Hans, Andrea, I don’t know half these people.

Have you told Claudio?

No. No … He’s been leaving messages though. The Free Press wants to do a profile for a music anthology, and
BBC Music Magazine
wants to do something as well. Ha!

Nic returned to the table and leaned his chin on folded hands. His eyes were bloodshot. His whole face seemed kind of bloodshot. He smiled, because he was brave.

Tired? I asked.

Epically, he said.

He got up to put on a record, vinyl was his thing now. He liked the step-by-stepness of it, the process. He held the record the way people hold records, not with his fingers but with his palms. He blew on it. The music was a soft whisper, one acoustic guitar, no voices. When he came back to the table he asked me to look at his eyes.

They’re seeping, he said. Like I have an infection or something.

Pink eye? I asked.

I don’t know, he said. They always seem to be running, just clear liquid, not pus. I lie in bed and all this liquid dribbles out the sides. Maybe I should see a doctor, or optometrist or something.

You’re crying, Nic.

No …

Yes. That’s what they call crying.

But all the time? he asked. I’m not even conscious of it then.

It’s a new kind of crying, I said. For new times. I leaned over and put my hands on his shoulders and then on the sides of his face in the same way that he’d held his record.

We sat quietly for a while then Nic told me Elf was supposed to be doing a run-through in three weeks, two days before the opening. I said there was no way she would be ready and he
agreed because all she talks about is not being able to do the tour, and the sooner concerned parties got the news the better. Then I told him to just call Claudio, he would deal with it, the way he’s always dealt with it.

I’ll phone Claudio if you want, I said.

Well, maybe we should hold off a bit.

I think he needs to know now.

Listen, I know what Claudio will say, said Nic. He’ll say, let’s wait and see. He’ll think she can come out of it again, like she did last time. He’ll say performing saved her life and that’s what it will do again.

Maybe.

And maybe he’s right and she should be pushed a little bit and she’ll be okay.

Yeah, I said.

But … she obviously doesn’t have to do the tour if she doesn’t want to do the tour, said Nic. It doesn’t matter in the big picture. I’m just saying that she might suddenly decide she really wants to do it and then …

Yeah, so we shouldn’t cancel now, I said.

Nic’s head fell to the table, slowly, like a snowflake. His arm was stretched out beneath it, his empty palm in the shape of a little cup.

Nic, I said. Hey Nic, you should go to bed.

We did then what we always did at the end of our talks. We sighed, rubbed our faces, grimaced, smiled, shrugged, and then we talked about a few other things, like the kayak that Nic is building from scratch in his basement, and his plan to finish it soon and in springtime carry it on his head down to the river which is only a block away and paddle upstream to somewhere,
that will be the hard part, and then drift downstream all the way home again.

I left him sitting at his computer, his face lit up like Boris Karloff in the ghostly funnel of the monitor’s light. I wondered what he was looking at. What sorts of things do you google when your favourite person in the world is determined to leave it? I got into my mother’s car and checked my phone. A text from Nora in Toronto:
How’s Elf? I need your permission to get my belly button pierced. Pleeeze???? Love you!
Another one from Radek inviting me over. He’s a sad-eyed Czech violinist that I met when I was walking with Julie on her delivery route the last time I visited Winnipeg. (He was actually the reason
why
I accompanied her on her route. She had mentioned that she delivered mail to a really handsome European guy who also seemed lonely and desperate. Like you, Yoli, she’d said.) He had come to Winnipeg to write a libretto. But who hasn’t? It’s a dark and fecund corner of the world, this confluence of muddy waters, one that begs the question of hey, how
do
we set words to life’s tragic score? Radek and I don’t speak the same language, not really, but he listens to me patiently, comprehending, well, I don’t really know what—that if he sits tight for an hour or two listening to me ramble on about my failings in a language he doesn’t really understand he’ll eventually, inshallah, get laid?

Just now I’m worried that “get laid” is a term no longer used but I’m too ashamed to ask Nora for an update. I’m at an age where I’m stuck between two generations, one using the term “getting laid” and the other “hooking up,” so what are you supposed to call it? I sat in the little kitchen of the attic apartment Radek is renting on Academy Road and talked to him
about Elf, about her despair, her numbness, her “hour of lead” as Emily Dickinson puts it, and my house-of-cards plan to make her want to live, and about futility and rage and the seas on the moon named Serenity and Cleverness and which one would he prefer to live next to (Serenity) and did he know there was a glacier somewhere in Canada called Disappointment and that it feeds into Disappointment River and that the Disappointment River empties into the Disappointment Basin but that there is no Disappointment stopper in the basin? And Radek nodded and poured me wine and made me food and when he walked past me on his way to the kitchen to stir the pasta or the rice he kissed me on the back of my neck. He is very pale with black wiry hair that covers his entire body. He jokes in broken English that he is not quite fully evolved and I tell him that I admire him for not burning it or ripping it all away like North Americans who are terrified of hair and fur in general. Body hair is the final frontier in the fight for the liberation of women, Radek. I’m so
exhausted
. He nodded, ah, yes?

When he gently placed the pasta on the table, he said, I have seen your sister play.

What? I said. You have? You never told me that.

In Prague, he said. And I am not surprised.

Surprised by what? I asked him.

By her suffering, he said. When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and
people afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.

I thought about his words for a while, his old European charm, and the way he talked. Maybe we could fall in love and move together with Will and Nora to Prague, and my life would become less like my life and more like Franz Kafka’s. Will and Nora could study tennis and gymnastics and Radek and I could go to operas and ballets non-stop and become intense and poetic and revolutionary.

I would put her in the same category as Ivo Pogorelich, or perhaps Evgeny Kissin, he said. She understands that the piano is the perfection of the human voice.

She has a glass piano inside of her that she worries will break, I said.

Yes, he said. Maybe it already has. And she’s barely holding the pieces in place before it shatters. I think I fell in love with her just suddenly that evening. I wanted to protect her.

Oh, great, you’re hot for my sister? He laughed and said no, of course not but I figured he was lying. So much for my Prague fantasy. Well, I thought, Prague obviously hadn’t been a barrel of laughs for Franz Kafka anyway, so never mind, never mind!

Do you want more wine? he asked. What was she like as a child?

All she did was play the piano, I said. And petition for things.

Ah well, if there is one thing you’re going to do in life it may as well be playing the piano, said Radek. But you must have other memories, no?

She learned French when she was really young, I said, and sometimes that’s all she spoke and sometimes she’d stop talking for long periods of time like our father. She had different
nicknames for me: Swivelhead, Mayhem. She tried to pretend that our Mennonite town was an Italian village in Tuscany or something by renaming everything and everyone. All the streets, everything. She became obsessed with Italy. When our old Mennonite relatives came over she’d address them as
signor
and
signora
and offer them espressos and grappa. People made fun of her. It was a bit embarrassing for me too.

Ah, but she was only creating excitement, said Radek, yes? Being funny and sophisticated!

Yeah, I can see that now, I told him, but at the time … you know. A town like ours is not the best place to work on your comedy routine. Our house was once shot at.

What? said Radek. Because of Elfrieda?

I don’t know, I said. We never found out. A lot of people made fun of our dad too for riding his bike all the time and wearing a suit every single day and reading books. That made Elf cry. She would get really angry. She would fight with people, mostly with words, trying to defend him. When she went away to Oslo to study music she sent me tapes of herself talking about her life in the city, and then she was studying with some guy in Amsterdam and after that a woman in Helsinki. I listened to the tapes over and over in the dark and pretended she was there with me. I had them memorized, every inflection, every breath, and I talked along with her, over her, even her little chuckles. I had memorized it all.

Radek poured us each another glass of wine and said he was thinking of something Northrop Frye had said about the energy it takes to get out of a place and how you must then move forward on that momentum to keep creating, to keep reinventing. Would I agree?