My Life Among the Apes (11 page)

AT THE SUPERMARKET I BOUGHT a chicken, vegetables, strawberries, yogurt, chocolate, coffee, toilet paper, and a handful of purple asters, which I arranged in an empty pickle jar on the kitchen table. She held my arm as we walked to the naturopath, where I sat in the waiting room for almost an hour. While the chicken was roasting we played gin rummy, Tilly checking to make sure I counted the points correctly. We ate together while she told me, as if I might have been anybody, about dinners on the town with Harry, about the swanky place with the jazz band they went to every year for their “anniversary.” It’s possible my mouth hung open while I listened. I don’t know what I might have said if she hadn’t suddenly bent over from a bowel spasm.

The leftovers went into the fridge, the pots got washed and herbal tea made. At the Strand I had bought a copy of
Larry’s Party
because I knew that it was a novel about a decent, non-cheating man. Tilly said that Harry had done voices and accents but I read in a straight monotone. Still, she liked the book, at least until she fell asleep, breathing heavily, a line of drool dangling from the corner of her mouth.

It took me ten minutes to find a taxi in that part of Brooklyn at night. I was grateful to fall into the back seat, close my eyes, and feel myself moving away from that woman.

I COULD ONLY IGNORE THE filthy apartment for so long. I vacuumed the heavy curtains, beat the rugs on the little iron balcony, scrubbed the floors, the bathroom, the kitchen. I shampooed Tilly’s wig and gave it a blow dry. All the time I gritted my teeth, sure that I would explode if she said even one thank you. But she never did, only suggested that I put new liners in the kitchen drawers.

We went by cab to the Cancer Center in Brooklyn Hospital, where the doctor talked to me as much as to Tilly, who wasn’t taking a lot in. And that was how I spent a week, ten days, arriving in the late morning and staying until after dark. My apartment became a place to sleep. My brief bohemian life felt like something I’d read about in a novel.

For a few days I ignored Sarah’s calls. When I finally answered she screamed at me long distance. “What exactly is going on? Tell me you didn’t murder that woman.”

“No such luck,” I said. “Turns out she’s left town. Won’t be back for months. So I’m going to miss her.”

“Good. Maybe now you can enjoy yourself. It would be nice if you called after school to say hi to the kids.”

But I forgot to call. I was playing gin rummy and getting my ass kicked, as Tilly put it, having one of her more lucid moments.

I WASN’T WRITING ANY POEMS or making it to the workshop. Jackson and I met every second or third day for a meal, a late night drink, or just to lie sleepless in bed.

We were in an Indian restaurant on First Avenue. I said, “You have an old lady for a girlfriend, and not even much of her.”

“I don’t think this is doing you good,” he said. “You look exhausted. You’re not doing anything for yourself. And you’re right. I’m not getting much of you.”

I didn’t have a smart reply or even a defensive one. I pushed the bangan bharta around on my plate.

TILLY GREW WEAKER. STRONGER PAINKILLERS made her more comfortable, but put her into a drowse. She leaned against my arm to get to the bathroom. She ate rice and Jello in bed.

Three nights in a row I fell asleep on the sofa and never made it home. On the third morning, waking in the same clothes, my skin feeling sticky and my mouth as if filled with porridge, I knew that Tilly would have to return to the hospital. She was still in her bedroom, presumably asleep. I picked up the telephone and called the daughter in Portland.

“Do you know what time it is here?” she said. “It’s like five in the morning.”

I couldn’t have cared less. “When can you get here?”

A long pause. “If I can get a seat I should be in by eight or ten p.m. your time.”

When I hung up I saw Tilly standing in the doorway, her nightgown unbuttoned. She said, “I made my own bed, I know. But I want to remember the good part. I want to remember Harry. Don’t take that away from me.”

It’s the other way around, I thought. But all I said was, “Why don’t we give you a bath. So you’ll look nice when your daughter arrives.”

We spent the day as usual. I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner, although she had almost stopped eating. We tried to play gin, but she couldn’t concentrate. I read chapter after chapter of
Larry’s Party
, not knowing how much she was taking in. She was in bed when I looked up from the book and saw that she was asleep, her tight mouth in a grimace.

I went into the living room and sat in an armchair. Eventually I, too, must have fallen asleep because I was roused by the sound of a key in the lock. Blinking, I saw the daughter come in with her small wheeled suitcase. She was maybe forty-five, with the same tulip-bulb nose as her mother.

“I phoned the hospital,” I told her. “They know she’s coming tomorrow.”

I stood and picked up my bag. I thought to ask her why she hated her mother, whether it had anything to do with Harry. But I didn’t have the energy. She brushed past me to the bedroom and I went out the door, closing it behind me.

It was late but I walked to the subway anyway. In the bright car, people were half-awake, probably on their way to night-shift jobs in the city. I got home, showered, put on new clothes, gathered up the ones I’d been wearing for three days and carried them down to the battered garbage bins under the porch outside. Then I walked around the corner and saw that Café Orlins where I used to go and write was still open. I took a table against the brick wall and ordered a coffee. I thought of calling Jackson, but decided to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I took my pen and notebook out and laid them on the table. I knew that I wouldn’t write anything. I just wanted them there.

Dreyfus in Wichita

MICHAEL SPEARMAN, MUSIC AND SCIENCE teacher of Beth Shalom Hebrew Day School, located in a former Toronto car dealership, was eating his leftover cold stir-fry when he read the following sentence:

As a demonstration of its sympathy for the disgraced French captain, Alfred Dreyfus, the citizens of Wichita, Kansas elected Miss Sadie Joseph, a Jewess, as its Carnival Queen for the year 1899.

The book was a cultural history of nineteenth-century travel, of no use to the students of Beth Shalom, which only went up to grade nine; but, like many books in the school library, it had been donated in a carton of garage-sale leftovers. The basement — which housed the library, the science lab, the music room, and the furnace — had a fur of mildew growing between the cinder blocks. Down here, at least, Michael could think and dream and feel the quiet thrumming of disappointment in himself.

Reading the words again, he let the fork drop into the plastic tub. The thrumming became something else, grew louder, surged through his body, and roared into his ears. All he could do was stand up and begin to pace the room, manoeuvring around the battered music stands, the cellos abandoned on their sides. It was such a beautiful idea, what had come to him. Had he really found the subject through which he might finally release his dismally unused talent? For here, in this one sentence, was everything. A small town, in a period of tremendous change (the first motor cars, telephones, electric lights) and with brilliant period music to draw on. A story not of a great historic event itself, but of a small side-drama in a place far from the centres of power in which the largest themes might find expression. A heroine, hardly old or experienced enough to know herself, yet with intelligence and hidden resources, a girl on the verge of womanhood (with a marvellous soprano voice) who finds herself the absolute focus of attention of the town that is her world.

And what a great name! Sadie Joseph. So lovely in its ordinariness. The roaring in his head quieted just enough for the ideas to come pelting down. Sadie would be the daughter of the proprietor of the local dry-goods shop, the pivotal role around which circled equally important characters. The mayor looking for a way to survive a financial scandal. The idealistic Protestant schoolteacher who speaks of the Dreyfus case and so becomes the catalyst for the events. The president of the Honourable Men of Kansas Society, Wichita chapter, with his racist grudge against Mr. Joseph and secret lust for Sadie herself. The young Jewish store clerk who is Sadie’s unofficial fiancé and dismayed by her sudden celebrity. The mayor’s son, decent and handsome, home from Harvard Law School, whose love for his father conflicts with his hatred of injustice. (Naturally he too must fall in love with Sadie). The jealous girl, who had previously been assured of the crown and the mayor’s son for herself. The story would need somebody to tell it, an outsider, say a reporter from the big-city newspaper who arrives with a pen dripping cynicism but finds a chance at redemption for himself ...

So much came to Michael during that lunch break that he could hardly record it all in the copybook he pulled from his desk. When the afternoon class stormed down the basement stairs he was still scribbling frantically and did not even hear them.

MICHAEL HAD GROWN UP IN the eighties, witness to the death of punk, the rise of the pop superstars, MTV. He played in garage bands with his friends, thrashing their way through covers of early Elvis Costello and the Clash. But he continued his conservatory piano studies and in the school orchestra played the viola. He had to keep secret his fascination for Broadway musicals, sneaking out to see the bus-and-truck shows that came to the Royal Alexandra Theatre on King Street. At home he hunkered in the living room listening to his parents’ collection of 33 1/3 rpm records:
Show Boat
,
Carousel
,
Annie Get Your Gun
,
Cabaret
.

His old garage-band friends went to work for law firms or studied internal medicine or joined the family condominium-development company. Michael’s music degree only got him a job at Sam the Record Man, so he went back for a year of teacher’s college and spent nine months substitute teaching in the public school system before he got the job at Beth Shalom. He met a woman during the intermission of a local production of
Company
, a frizzy-haired animal rights activist named Frida Yaffe who spoke French, Hebrew, and German, baked bread, and played clawhammer banjo. She disliked musicals but had won a free ticket while listening to CBC Radio. They lived together in her flat on Major Street and then bought the tiny house on Manning, near the cheap Korean restaurants. When tests finally revealed that her eggs were sterile, her melancholic nature deepened. Over the years they acquired two dogs, a cat, an African Grey Parrot, and a plastic bathtub of turtles, all of them rescued. The floorboards projected splinters into bare heels, the second-hand furniture wore out and was replaced by more second-hand furniture. They held on stubbornly to a certain idea of living, like ever-aging students.

MICHAEL WORKED ON THE SCORE, the lyrics, the book, when he could. Every holiday, including Yom Kippur, and of course the summer months. Over time he conceived a threeact structure and settled on the more traditional Broadway approach of a book with dramatic songs rather than the pseudo-operatic sung-through show. The first number had to be muscular but lyrical, a hymn to the sweetness of small town life that was about to be turned upside down. Then the narrative would start without delay with a scene of Sadie’s boyfriend telling her she ought to enter this year’s contest for Carnival Queen because she was the prettiest girl in town and the most talented, with her nightingale voice. Of course she would resist: “You forget, Nathan, what we are and how this town sees us,” to which he would reply, “Ah, Sadie, that doesn’t matter. Don’t we have friends? Don’t people like us? Doesn’t the mayor himself shop at your father’s store? It’s almost the new century, Sadie. We’re part of this place now. We belong here just like everybody else.”

It was more work than he had ever imagined. Nine ballads, seven rhythm numbers, three specialty songs. Solving one structural problem caused three more to spring up — solos running back to back, characters acting against their motivations, the first-act curtain closer requiring too complicated a narrative set-up. If it hadn’t been for Frida he might have given up. She would bring him a mindstimulating herbal infusion and, kissing him on the neck, say, “Drink up, Wolfgang. Nobody said it was easy to be a genius.” After a week or two, he would find another little revelation, a small breakthrough — the completion of a signature melody, the finding of a contrapuntal rhythm, a lyric that would say in five words what he’d been struggling to voice in pages of dramatic scene.

After eight months he could see the shape of the thing and, after another eight, some genuine dramatic moments and real musicality. It took a year to bring the rest up and ten months more of further discarding and ruthless revising. More polishing before he could score each of the orchestral parts — violins, violas, cellos, basses, the brass, woodwind, and percussion, and also mandolin, banjo, autoharp, and mouth organ.

Michael was now forty-two. He felt relieved and humble, but also twitching with anxiety. Now that the work was done, what was he supposed to do with it? It had been easy to daydream in the basement of Beth Shalom Day School, but if there was one thing Michael knew about himself, it was that he had no entrepreneurial push.

Lying on their futon at night, Michael said into the dark, “What good is my musical if it never gets heard? It’s just paper. But I don’t seem to have the right kind of ambition. I want it to be performed — on Broadway, too. I just don’t have the strength to do anything about it. Or even believe it could happen.”

“You give up too easily,” said Frida. Her frizzy hair had already begun to silver at the edges; she had map lines around her eyes. She’d grown thinner, too, and had been shocked by the onset of diabetes. “Do some research, Michael,” she said. “Make a plan. You have to think of this as a direct action. Make some noise, sweetheart. Otherwise, nobody’s going to hear your songs.”