Nocturne (7 page)

I’m on a train, riding through the flat southwestern Ontario landscape in the early morning. The sun isn’t up yet, but the horizon is tinged pink with the promise of it. The clouds are low, dark streaks over the fields.

There was a beautiful sunrise on the December morning that you died. I woke early in your new apartment that day and just lay there in the dark for a while before getting up. Mum had arrived by then and I had given her your bed. I slept on the divan in the living room, in a sort of propped-up position that was not as uncomfortable as it had seemed it might be. Sleeping in the front room was noisy because Hastings Street was right outside the window and
there was always traffic moving up and down it, day or night. I liked waking early in your apartment and lying in the dark looking at your books in the bookcases, your pictures stacked against the walls. Your possessions were comforting, familiar. I had woken to these same objects many times over the years, in all of the places you had lived.

After you died, when I was coming back to your apartment to clean it out, I was looking forward to seeing your space with your things as you had arranged them. But there had been an infestation of bedbugs in your building in my absence, and your landlady had sprayed your apartment, and to do that she’d had to move everything away from the walls, so that your stuff was just a piled jumble in the centre of each room. All the careful placement of your items, that delicate arrangement, gone.

The sunrise was visible from the hospital corridor windows on the walk to your room in the ICU. I remember stopping at the windows for a moment before continuing in to see you, and just watching the deep red of the sky. That afternoon, after you died, the sky was the same colour over the mountains on the way out of the hospital. It almost felt as if time hadn’t advanced at all, that the hours between the sunrise and sunset had never happened.

When I stood at the window that morning, watching the sunrise, I knew that you were going to die that day. The doctor had said to us the afternoon before, “We need to think about letting him go.”

This sunrise isn’t quite as good as that one. Maybe the cold air over the mountains helped to stain the sky such a dark red that morning. Here, the space above the fields is infused with pink, a smudge of colour over the dark trees.

I’m on my way back from a reading. The book we went to Paris to research is finally out and I’ve been travelling around to promote it. Maybe you would like it, Martin. I’m not sure, because you never read my books. I don’t know why. You kept all my reviews, though. I found them after you died. I asked you several times why you didn’t read my books, but you never gave me a real answer. In the last few months you did make an effort to right this, by starting one of my novels, but you only got to page 54.

My novel was by your bed in your Vancouver apartment when I got there. I guess you were still trying to read it. The objects in the orbit of a bed are the objects most in use, and that was certainly the case with you. The space around your bed was strewn with books, papers, your cell phone and charger,
clothes, a glass of water. Everything you needed, every night, close at hand.

I used to be upset that you didn’t read my books, but it no longer matters. I understand that it cost you to be a child prodigy, that starting piano so young and having an art that was public meant that for years, you felt people only liked you for your music, and not for yourself.

Two women are sitting behind me on the train. They’ve been talking the whole time, crazy talk. “I used to have a lot of friends before my head injury,” one of them says. The other one counters with, “Do you know what the leading cause of death for women in Canada is? Urinary tract infections.” I love every crazy sentence that comes out of their mouths. I love their absolute belief that they’re being ripped off, and that everything that happens to them is someone else’s fault.

The sun is up now, Martin, and the fields are gold and green, and the trees mass green at the edges, and the train lurches forward, and the sunrise has evaporated, and this day is fully underway.

You were practising three piano pieces during the fall you were dying. The first was the
Menuet antique
by Ravel, the piece you told Mum was like a prayer.

The
Menuet
was the first of Ravel’s compositions to be published. It was a piece written in youth, when he was twenty years old. Like you, Ravel was an owl rather than a lark, preferring to work at night, and often taking long walks in the dark. He liked the darkness so much that he had the shapes of stars cut into the wooden shutters in his house, so he could imagine the night sky during the daylight hours.

Music was his only intimate and he never married or, apparently, had lovers. He embraced the loneliness
of being an artist, or fell into it so far that he couldn’t climb back out again. It always amuses me when people refer to this way of living as a “choice” because it certainly doesn’t feel that way. To turn towards creative work is, by necessity, to turn away from human society. It is not really a choice; the drive to do this, the pull, comes from somewhere outside oneself. I feel this, and I know that you did too. And clearly Ravel, for all of his sixty-two years on earth, felt it as well.

Debussy’s
Suite bergamasque
was written from the poems of Paul Verlaine. The famous third movement of the piece, called “Clair de Lune” (Moonlight) was taken from the following poem, written in 1869, which I know you have read:

Your soul is a select landscape

Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go

Playing the lute and dancing and almost

Sad beneath their fantastic disguises
.

All sing in a minor key

Of victorious love and the opportune life
,

They do not seem to believe in their happiness

And their song mingles with the moonlight
,

With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful
,

That sets the birds dreaming in the trees

And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy
,

The tall slender fountains among marble statues
.

Debussy wanted his music to be an emotional experience, to be about the emotions, and this is what you wanted too. You said to me, more than once, that you were tired of people going about their day trying not to feel, being afraid of emotion, and that what you wanted your music to do was simply make people feel something.

Fauré’s
Theme and Variations
is sombre, and even though the piece leaves that shadowy place and escapes into one variation after another, it always returns to that darkness. It is not hard to see why you chose to play it, why you chose to let it speak for you.

These were the pieces that kept you company that last fall, that you gave your failing strength to, and that you tried to perfect. This is where you put the knowledge of your impending death. This is what you gave yourself over to, and what held you up during those final few months.

It wasn’t bad company to keep.

At the end, in the hospital, we borrowed a CD player from the nurses’ station so that we could have
music playing for you while you lay sedated and hooked up to the ventilator. Your friends brought in CDs that they thought you’d like, and every morning Cathy and I took a couple of CDs from the collection in your apartment. We rotated through them. The music played day and night in your room, most of it piano music. All three of the pieces that you had been learning to play that fall were there, performed by different pianists, none of them, frankly, sounding as good as you.

We thought the music would be a comfort to you, but I wonder now if it wasn’t a torture instead. The sound would have let you know that people were in the room with you. Sometimes we’d put on a particular CD and you’d thrash your head around as though you were trying to communicate something, although it was impossible to know what that might be. Either one of two things, I guess—that you liked the music, or that you wanted us to turn it off.

Your two CDs were reissued after you died. Now Mum and Dad are at work putting out your live recordings. There will be three discs, released in chronological order. The first one will be ready in a week or two. This would please you, I think. The first disc is solo piano and has you playing Chopin, Ravel, and your own composition, “Winterscapes.”

When you were first diagnosed and I went to your house in Toronto to see you, we went for a walk around the block. We laughed about your prognosis because it seemed so unbelievable.
I don’t want to die
, you said. “But you’re not dead yet,” I said. Nobody knew then how shockingly fast it would all go. Now I drive by your old neighbourhood often, right past
those streets where we walked. If I look quickly, out of the corner of my eye, I can almost see us there. You, stopping to light a cigarette. Me, bending down to pat a dog.

On that visit, you gave me two file boxes to take away with me to our parents’ house, which, in your panicked state, you suddenly thought would be a safer place to keep them than at your own house. One box contained your compositions, and the other was filled with recordings of your live performances.
Guard them with your life
, you said—because they
were
your life, all the meat of your years in those two boxes that I could lift together and place in the trunk of my car.

You were always trying to compose, but there was never enough time. Your ideas and the notes for your ideas carried over from year to year, with little or no advancement. “Winterscapes,” which will be on that first live CD, was written more than ten years ago, when, miraculously, you had a few days in Montreal and could sit and watch the snow fall outside your window and were moved to write a piece about that. But you still had plans to rewrite it. This was on your list of
Things To Do Before I Die
.

“Winterscapes” was about the loneliness of winter. In your introduction to the piece when you
performed it, you said it was about
somebody sitting by a window and looking outside, and becoming quite entranced by what they see, which causes them to look inward
.

You made your living teaching and accompanying and examining, all work that was done piecemeal, so that you were constantly stringing together your part-time jobs, and eventually this meant that you worked all the time. There was no day off in a week. There was no time to reflect, gather your thoughts, write down a phrase, and then another. There was no time to compose, which was what I’m sure you would say you really wanted to do.

But you were a good teacher, a natural one. After you died, cards came in from so many of your current and former students, all of them saying how encouraging and supportive you were, how patient and kind, what generosity of spirit you had.

One former student wrote, “I credit Martin for my success in piano, but more importantly, my enjoyment in playing the piano. During the many years of piano lessons, Martin was not simply my piano teacher, but he was also my friend.”

Your own notes on music were both direct and comprehensive. You advised that
Thinking of where you want to clear the pedal (instead of put the pedal
down) often works well
. And you offered the simple thought,
If you’re having trouble with the fingering, think of the music
. You dismissed various “methods” for playing the piano—high wrists, low wrists, curved fingers, flat fingers—saying that
music is far too varied to have one solution
. Of Rachmaninoff’s
Variations
you wrote,
This builds, but also changes gradually (is it necessary to produce the sense of building, or is it better to play each variation to the utmost of its character?)
. For the first movement of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
you decided that the
entire movement keeps shifting back to minor chords, therefore do not make the major chords too bright
.

A lot of the composers you admired, and the writers I admired, had functioned, in their time, without much money. They lived in drafty apartments, nursed one coffee all afternoon while writing in a café because it was warmer than where they lived. They were inspired to create, but underneath that was always the struggle to earn enough money to pay the rent, to get by. You and I were no different in that respect. It’s always been hard to earn a living, and sometimes it’s been brutal. It surprised me, when I became a writer, to discover that many writers these days come from money, have an independent income, or are supported by someone else.

But that was never the case for you or me. And for you perhaps it was harder because the nature of your work meant that you were required to work day and night. I remember trying to make a date to meet you for a beer when you were back in Toronto, and the only time you had free to meet, when you would have a couple of hours to spare, was Sunday night at 10 p.m.

In the list of what you wanted to work on, written down in a red hardcover notebook that you kept with you all through that last fall, you had this:
Cello Sonata, Musical, Dance for Two, Pieces in Montreal—for starters, then a lot more things
.

The “Cello Sonata” is little more than a few bars, written in your trademark light pencil markings, in your composition notebook. “Dance for Two” is really the only completed piece of music, and I know you would have kept tinkering with it, but we have had to count it as finished. Your friend Bernie, and Mum, worked from the almost impossible-to-read manuscript and transcribed a final version. We had the first two bars carved onto your tombstone.

“Dance for Two” was the only finished piece for your musical. You said to me, more than once, that you thought the musical was the most perfect art form. You were excited to be writing one. Initially,
you had asked me to collaborate with you. We had always talked of working together one day, but we also thought there would be more time, that we could just keep putting off that day because it would still be there when we wanted it to be.

When you went into the hospital in Toronto for a couple of days at the end of September, that first time, for a bowel blockage that needed hydration and morphine to fix it, you asked me to work on the musical with you. The morphine, and the relief from the pain, had put you in a good mood. You were happy, full of creative spirit. You had been writing poems about the dawn each day at the hospital, and making notes about your musical. “Okay,” I said. I already knew the story of the musical because you’d told it to me numerous times. “I’ll write the words for you.”

Oh, but I want to do the words
, you said. And we laughed, because although it seemed like a good idea to work together, in reality you didn’t want to give up any control over your project.

I thought later about what you said, Martin, about the musical being a perfect art form. I can see what you mean, although I would choose a sonnet over a musical as the perfect form. A musical is all plot points, each song detailing a specific decisive
moment in the narrative, or relaying key information. There is no nuance, no description, all the atmosphere is done with props. It’s character and feeling, how we tell stories to one another—“this happened, and then this happened next.”

Your musical was going to have two acts. The main story was of a developer and a politician who were in league to exploit a town and its citizens. The developer owned a factory where the male lead (Jack) worked. There were safety issues at the factory and at the end of the first act Jack loses his life on the job, and returns in the second act as a ghost. He is in love with a young woman (whose name keeps changing in the notes you made). Jack comes back to her as a ghost, but she can’t see him. She lobbies against the politician and developer because of Jack’s death, and she is able to stop their corrupt plans for the town.

You had names for almost everyone, and ideas for their songs. Adam is the developer. Trixie is his girlfriend. She is a hairdresser. You were going to have a scene in the hair salon with a chorus of women sitting in chairs, singing,
Trixie, Trixie, will you cut my hair …

The politician is named Tim, and he is backed by a chorus of men, thugs, known as the Morrissey Boys. There’s a doctor, simply called “Doc.” She’s there to preside over Jack’s death, but you had no songs
sketched out for her yet. When she first appears on stage, she asks the audience how they are feeling.

You had most of Adam’s solo worked out by the time I came to see you in hospital that first time. You sang me the tune, with the lyrics, snapping your fingers to the beat.
I am Adam. / Get down on your knees. / I am Adam. / I do what I please
.

“Dance for Two” is a song without words. It opens the second act, or closes the first one. I can’t remember now what you wanted. But I do know that the dance is performed by Jack’s lover outside, at night. You imagined that the dance would take place on a bluff overlooking the moonlit water below. But that would have been hard to stage, and I think that was just a slippage from childhood. We grew up near the bluffs in Scarborough. We often rode our bikes to the bluffs when we were children, or sat on the edge of them as teenagers, smoking and drinking. You walked back to them a few times when you were ill and staying at our parents’ house. They were always compelling: that strict three-hundred-foot drop to the lake, the crumbling sandstone cliffs. Once, as children, we dared our wildest friend to ride his bike off the bluffs. He began pedalling in the middle of the park towards the drop, and I remember his hurtling flight across the grass, how his bike soared, spectacularly, right out
past the edge, hung in the air for a moment and then dropped straight down. He snagged on some tree roots about sixty feet below and had to be rescued by the fire department. His bike was a tangled twist of metal at the bottom of the cliffs.

I think that you were Jack. When you told me that your main character was going to die after the first act, I said, “Well, then, how can you have a second act without him?”

I know
, you said.
It’s a problem. But he has to die
.

It’s what you hoped, I suppose, what we all hoped—that somehow you would come back as a ghost, that you would find your way home.

You wrote a song for your female lead to sing after her lover died. In all your other notes for the musical, you interspersed words and music, notes dashed down and words scrawled on top of them. But in this song there are only words, and they are written out neatly, in stanzas, like a poem.

Jack, where are you—where have you—where have you gone?

I’m inside of you, and you’re inside of me
.

But where have we—where have we gone?

Where are we now?