A Singing Tree (Part One of Six)

 

A SINGING TREE 

                                                  A novel by Margaret Gunning                                                                         

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” 
- Goethe

 PROLOGUE:  THE LESSON

     Sweating.  My left hand is sweating as it slips on the delicate neck of a gleaming hollow sculpture made of fine, sweet wood.  I remember it all from thirty years ago, the dark smell of sap, the peppery scent of the rosin, the echoing halls of the convent as I crept up the stairs to my lesson.  In my right hand is a vibrating bow, quivering with uncontrollable nerve impulses.  It taps against the music stand involuntarily, releasing a tiny cloud of sweet-smelling dust.

     My bow is smoking.

     Seven minutes late.

     Eight minutes late.

     Nine minutes late.

     Not that I am counting.  I need the bathroom.  Maybe I’ve made a bad mistake.  Maybe this is a mid-life crisis.  Maybe I should go out and have an affair instead, like everyone else does.  Then –

     The door of the studio pops open and a small blob of mercury pours into the room.  In spite of my anxiety I immediately like everything about him:  the miniaturized body (like a slightly spread-out version of the actor Joel Grey), the exotic facial bones which suggest the deeps of Old Europe, and those dangerously alive black eyes. 

       He stops.  He stares.  He isn’t seeing the surface of me at all, but in-seeing the deep pattern of my anxiety, the feverish buzzing and burbling in my upper chest.  “Relax, it will be beautiful,” he murmurs in a slightly embarrassing tone of European intimacy.  My shoulders slowly sag; up to now I had no idea they were up so high.  Suddenly I want to cry.  I have forgotten everything I ever knew about music.  I’ve had a massive stroke, like Patricia Neal, and must be completely rehabilitated.  Help me, doctor.  Give me your worst news.  I can take it.

     I shoulder the instrument.  The musical magician beside me reaches over and pries my stiff blue fingers off the neck.  “Let go!” he commands.  Let. . . go?  “Drop your arm.  Instrument will not fall.”

     Panic churns in my solar plexus.  I see a mass of splinters and strings on the floor.  Slowly, I force myself to unclench, then shakily lower my left arm.

     The violin wobbles dangerously, precariously, then gradually settles into a pre-ordained place between my shoulder and my chin.

     “Aha, beautiful!  You see how it works.  Now we can start,” he gleams, looking as if he can barely restrain himself from dancing. 

 HARRIET SMITHSON

      I thought she would never let go of my neck.

     The woman had a death-grip on me, was in fact throttling me silly with clenched, bloodless fingers.  She seemed to think that if she loosened her hand even a little bit, it would send me crashing unceremoniously to the floor.

     No, that’s not the way!  My whole body is uncomfortable.  If only she’d quit squeezing.  Where is Zoltán?  I’ve picked a tardy teacher; tut-tut, that won’t make the overly-punctual Lucy very happy at all.  She’s already tapping her toe, having serious second thoughts.  I have never been played before and feel callow as a virgin in this madwoman’s hands.

     Lucy impulsively named me Harriet Smithson when she brought me home from the music store in  Vancouver only a few days ago.  Ah, such a dreamer.  So I am to be named after Hector Berlioz’s impossible lover, the inspiration for his fantastic symphony.  His idee fixe.  Lucy has plenty of fixed notions herself, and hides her deep romanticism behind the pursed lips of a schoolmarm.  But she isn’t fooling me; soon she will hold me over her heart.  I will breathe with her, and involuntarily vibrate.  And from the deeps of her being she will play me. 

     Yes, I am Harriet Smithson, but in another sense I am more than Harriet.  We violins think with a collective mind. Lucy’s daughter Kate might compare us to the Borg on that silly old TV series, Star Trek.  I prefer to think of violins as bees in a seething hive, working cooperatively to make a universal honey.  In literal terms I am a Sandner like Lucy (and the irony of buying a violin with the same last name is not lost on her).  But I could just as well be the Strad that Gil Shaham caresses into eeming, pullulating life.  I .might be Perlman’s joy, delicately fingertipped with all the excruciating skill of a masterful lover.  Or I might be Natalie MacMaster’s lovely old fiddle.  Instead, I am Lucy’s instrument, Lucy’s new voice.  I am also Lucy’s soul, but thank God she doesn’t realize that yet.
     It stands to reason.  Any fiddlemaker knows that a well-loved violin takes on the character of the person who habitually plays it.  Zoltán Molnár’s dark and battered old instrument is warm as a Hungarian June, brimming with sunlight and sorrow.  There are dusky dregs in it which express the inexpressible, and perhaps even keep Zoltán from going completely mad from the extreme complexity of his psyche.

     How do I know all of this?  I brought the two of them together in the first place.  I was the matchmaker.  Of course neither of them knows this, or ever will. That silly fool Lucy was all signed up for lessons with somebody else, a perfectly competent young Asian instructor named Tony Tang, when she suddenly had an irresistible urge to wander into the music school which was just down the street from her home.  I will confess that I put that urge in her breast.  The place was warm and welcoming, full of an intense creative bubbling.  Faith, the fair-haired, radiant middle-aged woman behind the counter, took down all the particulars, then called to the back room:  “Zoltán!  A new student.  Come and meet Lucy.”

     “I’m forty-two years old,” she blurted.  The small dark man with eyes like glistening black cherries looked vaguely puzzled. Obviously he didn’t care to know how old Lucy was and was slightly embarrassed to find out.

     “I’m forty-two and I haven’t played in thirty years.”

     “Good.”  Lucy wondered if she had heard him right.

     “I wonder if you’d be willing to teach me.”

     “Of course.”

     It was as simple as that.  Of course I will teach you.  “It will be great adventure,” said the diminutive Old World professor of music who had so generously taken her on.  When Zoltán was out of earshot, Lucy anxiously asked Faith, “Is he kind?”  She burst out laughing, a sound like a great burst of bells.  “He’d better be,” she said.  “He’s my husband.”
     So there they were, Zoltán and Faith, the dark one and the fair one.  Lucy’s new musical parents.  Fortunately she didn’t realize this on a conscious level, or the poor woman would have fled the scene as fast as she could, run-run-running out the door like the Gingerbread Man on fire.

     I was there when Lucy took lessons as a child.  I was in a different body then, a much cheaper one, only a student model; but I still looked like a deliciously curvy young woman, all slicked up with a glamorous golden coat of varnish.  I stood by and made squeaking noises as little Lucy bravely sawed away.  Only I knew what the child had to endure at home between those lessons.  The convent with its still darkness and its varnish-smelling music rooms provided Lucy with the only sanctuary she ever knew.  Sister Dolorosa was doing more than teach her the rudiments of playing.  She was throwing her a lifeline made of wood and hair which it would take her thirty more years to recapture.

     Some may find this offensive, but we violins have no false modesty, so I must be honest and tell you this.  If I am the body of a vibrating wood-woman, then this bow over here is my lover.  It is as male as I am female, and that’s why Lucy is having such a hard time with it.  It is too alive, too much like a fleshly weapon made of embarrassingly organic things like wood and hair.  It skitters in her hand, refusing to cooperate, because Lucy has always been squeamish about sex.  There, I’ve said it.  It’s not that she doesn’t like sex (and forgive me for this digression – but believe me, violins know all about such things).  She likes it plenty, but won’t allow it to affect her in her core where she truly lives.  She always holds herself away, and for good reason.  At forty-two, and given her awful history, she still isn’t ready.  But in a sense, the violin is hardly important at all.  It’s only a lens to look through, a portal to step through into the next phase of her life.  The poor woman has no idea how significant all this is.  Zoltán knows, but is keeping it to himself.  He is not so easy to read, though smug Lucy already thinks she has him all figured out.

     Lucy needs control.  With me, and with my marvelous “beau” Hector, she has no control.  She has no idea how to marry us, to help us make love to each other and give birth to the music.  We will both have to endure a lot of frustration until we reach a state of bliss, which is what we violins call it when the old wood sings and the hair of the bow is on fire.  Will it ever happen?  This woman is no Itzhak Perlman; her hands are all the wrong shape, for one thing, and her right arm quivers and falters as if she has never held a ritual phallus before.  I know what she keeps in her bottom drawer ;  unlike me, it needs batteries, and it vibrates plenty.  So Lucy will have to overcome a lot of false modesty in order to wield Hector with the proper elan..

     This is a hopeful sign:  Zoltán heard something in Lucy’s painful, initial squeaks and groans (which were even more painful to me).  It was the sound of a voice that had been silenced for thirty years.  Like the legendary Annie Sullivan, he senses something in his student which badly needs to be tapped.  He knows that if Lucy does not learn to play this instrument with something like competence, her heart will be broken.  Zoltán does not want this to happen, for already he likes Lucy and recognizes that she has an uncommonly good heart.  Like his own heart, it is perforated many times with the scars of deep damage; it doesn’t matter a jot that the source is completely different.  Survivors recognize one another, and communicate in a place beyond words.  That place is where the music truly happens.

     Trust me.  I am a violin.

  LUCY’S JOURNAL

     I did it:   I survived my first lesson.  I feel the need to set the memory down here on these pages before the crowd of initial impressions slides away from me.

     It’s still late-summery and warmish out, so I walked over to Allegro Music School from our condo, and was already gushing sweat from the humidity as well as a certain feverish anxiety.  The place is sandwiched in between a coin laundry and a pizza palace in a particularly unlovely part of Coquitlam.  But at least I didn’t have to commute all the way into Vancouver for lessons, which would take me the better part of an hour.

      I lugged Harriet into a dark and stuffy studio at the end of the hall and I waited.   Right away, I thought to myself:  this is nothing like the convent.  For one thing I was facing a giant state-of-the-art computer system, and those didn’t exist back in 1964 when Sister Dolorosa tried to teach me some rudiments of playing.  But I am afraid of computers.  Hell, I had never felt such fear in my life, and wondered for the hundredth time what I was doing torturing myself like this, when the study of music had always led me to the brink of disaster.

     The rosiny woodsap smell of the gleaming new instrument vividly evoked the Ursaline convent in Chatham (the “Maple City”), where I first took my lessons.  It called forth the austerity of the nuns in their fusty black habits and the glum, staid conservatism of Ontario in the 1960s.  I could practically hear the clop-clop of Silverwood’s milk horses delivering glass bottles door-to-door, and feel my starched white petticoat standing up stiffly under a navy blue pleated skirt.  From behind closed doors I could hear the gruesome sound of sawn strings played wildly off-pitch.  My body involuntarily shrank to pre-pubescent stature as I stood there dripping sweat, tapping my toe, waiting for the legendary Zoltán Molnár. 

     When he finally popped through the door, reminding me of a very short version of Kramer on “Seinfeld”, I was struck by how small he is.  And reassured.  The little boy is abundantly evident in a man somewhere in his fifties; I can almost see the dotted outline within the borders of his pint-sized adult body.  He literally can’t tower over me or intimidate me physically in any way, because he is so diminutive and merry-looking, the charming Old World twinkle being a genuine layer of reality which obscures a much darker heart.

     And how do I know all this?  Zoltán doesn’t realize this yet, but I am a detective of sorts, someone who writes for a living (all right, I have a straight job too; a person has to live).  My best friend Monika Kurelek, a fellow detective, likes to talk about her hidden life as a spy in the guise of an innocent woman, forever taking feverish notes on the human condition and parlaying the information into short stories and novels (and sometimes even cheques).  It’s wickedly fun stuff.  But when I bounced these rays of perception off Zoltán, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being divined in turn, though in a much more subtle way.

     He calls it “watching body language”.  Not that he would ever wilfully make anyone uncomfortable, for Zoltán is full of an innate courtesy and respect.  But these deep-reaching scanners are a bit scary for someone who is used to doing the scanning herself.

     And oh, the questions.  He had to ask them, to try to determine how much musical knowledge was left in a woman who had been away from the formal study of music for literally thirty years.  But it was horribly hard on my pride (which can be overwhelming) to be asked and asked, and every time come up empty.

     “Now please tell me, names of strings.”

     (Frank, Joe, Keith, Louis. . . I went completely white, blank-screen, and was literally unable speak from the giant ball of anxiety jammed in my throat.)

     “I give you hint,” he kindly said.  “Gee, I don’t know. . . “
     “G.”

     “Then next string.  Another hint.  Count five, starting with G. . . “

     I put down the violin, held out my trembling hand and began to count off, G, A, B, C, D. . .
     “D.”

     “Perfect.  And you used left hand.  Violin hand.  Very excellent sign.”

     “It is?”
     “For one who is right-handed, yes.”

     It took about ten minutes of our precious half-hour lesson for me to figure out the rest of the strings.  Why didn’t he just tell me?  “Because if I tell, you forget.  This way, you remember forever.”

     ABCDEFG. . . I felt like a child again, starting with the raw basic alphabet of notes.  GFEDCBA. . .

     “Can you do this?” he asked, holding up his left hand in the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, second and third fingers apart.  I imitated him easily.

     “Wonderful.  You will have no problems.”

     “But can’t everyone do that?”
     “Hardly anyone.  Now, you play.”

     But I can’t.  What does he want?  A scale, starting with G.  Wild fumbling.  A mis-step.  Then the fingers of my left hand begin to find the way.  Yes, yes, it goes here.  No, that’s flat.  Correct the pitch.  I know this!  Excitement pounds in my chest.

     “You’re pretty good,” he said casually, and I blushed all the way down to my shoes.  “And now, you play music.”

     He grabbed his bow and, Zorro-like, began to jab in a fencing motion at the keys of the computer.  The sight was too amusing, Old World colliding with a rarefied future.  Apparently Zoltán was one of these people who “got” computers, understood them completely with no effort, like my daughter Kate who was apparently born knowing.  After a buzzing, whirring moment a sheet of paper began to curl out of the printer. 

     It was a piece of music:  “The Rose” by Amanda McBroom.  “No,” I said.  “I’m not ready to actually play anything.  I barely know what I’m doing.”

     Zoltán didn’t say a word, just stood there gleaming at me like some kind of exotic dwarf from The Lord of the Rings.  His silence was as dense as fruitcake.  I knew I had to try.  I took a deep breath (violin is a wind instrument, impossible to approach without a lot of air), and played.

     Of course it was awful.  I could barely read the notes (my reading skills were almost completely atrophied, kept alive only by singing second soprano in my church choir; and even there I fake it, singing mostly by ear).  But I sawed away bravely, the quivering bow bouncing and skittering in my hand  When I had finished murdering the familiar old song, Zoltán’s hand shot out like a zap of lightning and struck the bow hard.  It didn’t drop.  He looked pleased.  I felt like I was in the middle of a Star Wars film, Luke Skywalker taking Jedi lessons from Yoda (and Zoltán looked just enough like Yoda, or perhaps E. T. , to fit the part).  Do , or not do.  There is no try.  Play the piece, and don’t drop the bow.  I will make a Jedi out of you, a trembling middle-aged woman with a willing spirit and a cracked heart.  I felt like Helen Keller saying her first strained, agonized word, breaking through a kind of thick-layered emotional autism with a great smash.

     “I’m playing the violin!”  I squeaked in delight.  “See you next week,” said the most unlikely miracle worker I have ever met, beetling out of the studio door with an air of unstudied nonchalance.

 KATE

     I can’t believe this.  Mums is really sick.  She never gets sick, physically anyway, and I can’t get used to the fact of her being so weak.  I hate to be reminded of the old days, when I had to do everything for her, even though there was nothing physically wrong with her.  Sometimes she was just too drunk, or befuddled on Mellaril or whatever else she was on, to function well at all.

     All that stopped about five years ago, but ever since then, Mumsy has been too invincible for her own good.  I can see her strutting around being Superlucy, clean and sober at last, triumphing over her depression and her divorce and all that horrible mess from her childhood.  Kicking the world’s ass every day.  And now she takes up the violin.  Come on, Mums!  I said to her.  You played when you were a little kid.  Why do you want to remember all that?  Didn’t your Dad push you and push you, trying to squeeze genius out of a kid with only a modest amount of talent?  And what about all the shit that was going on then, the stuff everyone pretended wasn’t happening at all?

     Mums is the most bullheaded person ever invented, with the possible exception of Brian who won’t, on pain of death, use a condom no matter what I tell him.  So Mums is taking violin lessons now, and comes home in a daze every time, murmuring “Zoltán this” and “Zoltán that”, as if she’s in love with him or something.

     She’s writing a novel, can you believe it?  After years and years of slogging away at her craft, turning out newspaper columns and magazine articles and book reviews, she’s finally working on a book of her own.  And that’s on top of her shit-job as a legal secretary, which she’s really good at but which is obviously way below her standard of intelligence.

     So now her poor overstressed body is trying to tell her something.  She began throwing up last night and this afternoon her temperature went up to 104.1.  Stress, Mums, that’s what it is, too many accomplishments all at once.  “Climb Every Mountain” should be her theme song.

     I bring her soup on a tray and all she says to me is, “God, now I can’t practice.  What will Zoltán think?”  Imagine.  She’s sick unto death and still wants to play that freaking violin.  I’ve heard her scraping and squeaking away, and it’s awful.  I played flute for one year in junior high, and bad as it sounded, at least it couldn’t make those godawful shrieks and groans.  She’s had three lessons and thinks she should play like – what’s the name of that guy?  He’s an Israeli, and had polio as a kid so now he can’t walk.  Mums dragged me to a concert he gave once, and cried all the way through it, murmuring over and over to herself, “Magic fingers. . . magic fingers. . . “  until I wanted to die from embarrassment.

     Monika came by this afternoon and left a big bunch of flowers from her garden sticking out of the mailbox.  It amazes me how those two are connected.  Monika doesn’t even know yet that Mums is sick, not consciously anyway.  It reminds me of all her AA friends, her “war buddies” as she calls them, who always show up magically during a crisis point (Mums doesn’t know it, but she really does lead a charmed life).  People just walk onto the scene to rescue her.  Pisses me off a bit sometimes, but that’s the way it is – the pull of her personality is that strong.  I’ve never met anyone so tough and so fragile at the same time.  People say “like mother, like daughter” – but I hope to God I won’t have to go through the shit she did trying to find herself, become a whole person.  I wasn’t sexually abused or anything, so maybe it won’t happen to me.  And I refuse to even start drinking.  I saw what it did to Mums.

     If I can just get her to stay lying down, it’ll be a major victory.  She hates illness, or weakness of any kind, and says it’s for “mortals”, with that attitude of tight-lipped scorn.  What a woman.  But she’s my mother, and I guess I owe her a little something for giving birth to me.  When I brought up her soup at dinner time, she looked up at me and said, “Kiss me, Kate.”  What’s not to love?

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     Fever.  The scorch of it is nauseating, turning limbs to water and bones to powder.  A surreal, sustained humming noise fades in and out of my consciousness, and the walls appear to be breathing.

     I hate the bone-rotting, aching, shaking sensation of a fever, its capacity to suck me completely white.  Monika’s flowers have an unnaturally heavy, almost fruity scent, and each color has a tone, so that every time I look at the bouquet a strange chord sounds in my head.  I saw Kate’s aura when she brought up my soup, all pale yellowy-gold and streaming out in pure beauty, but I didn’t think it was polite to mention it.  I guess I have auras on the brain ever since Zoltán told me mine had a crack in it.

     I’ve worked with Elsie for five years now, and she’s the most eclectic therapist I’ve ever met, a sort of exotic Gestalt psycho-naturopath.  But it took her a couple of years to divine the crack in my energy field, the great split right through the core of my chest, which traces the fault-line of past damage.  And it took Zoltán all of two lessons to find it.  In fact he literally felt it – I mean felt it with his hands, which took the temperature of the air all around me.  What a weird little gnome, more psychic even than Monika, who has done psychometry and mediumship professionally and claims she can hear musical frequencies in some people’s auras.

     Anyway, that’s why I can barely control the bow.  I can’t get violin off my brain, as sick as I am.  I have fever dreams of playing.  I see Itzhak Perlman’s face contorting with extreme sensual bliss, the face of an overgrown infant or a dirty-minded archangel.  I see Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg almost writhing to the music, and am forced to realize how innately sexual this instrument is.  Even the paltry vibrations I’m able to raise are sensuous, rippling gently against my face and neck like a lover blowing a fine stream of air against my skin.

     Every so often I have to get up and stagger to the bathroom and try to vomit, when I know there is nothing left down there but a bit of bile.  I know what this is.  It’s violin fever, something deep in my psyche which is telling my body:  No.  You can’t do this.  Violin?  Forget it.  It is forbidden.  Your father decreed it:  if you couldn’t play to his standards, then you would not play at all.

     Elsie would call this an “interject”, something forced on me from the outside, which became deeply lodged like an infected splinter under the skin.  You can’t.  I will make you sick, do you hear me?  Wildly sick, sick unto death!  But I have been part of a highly personalized resistance movement for some years now.  It is what helped me survive when Andrew didn’t.  I’ve coped with his death for sixteen years now and still sometimes feel that the wrong person died.  To lose half your soul – your alternate self- is excruciating, dislocating.  I tell myself my brother is with God now, at total peace.  But at times the Christian platitudes really get to me, even though I know my faith is central to my existence.  He may be with God, but I’m down here in the muck and the mire, struggling, struggling to be born and born again with a temperature of 104.1.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

      I have been silent for three weeks now, sleeping in my case.  Do you want to know what violins think about when they’re not being played?  We fantasize, just as human beings fantasize.  I fell into deep reverie and had a long erotic dream that I was being played by the brilliant Russian virtuoso Maxim Vengerov.  Dear God!  Maxim is one of the most passionate artists who ever touched old wood.  My molecules came unstuck and I screamed exultantly with life, my frail wooden bones recalling with joy the surging sap of the tree from which I was taken.  That’s what we are – just pieces of trees, those mute wind-dancers who sway to the pulse of all nature. 

     Then I woke up, and realized Vengerov the mad Russian will never come within three rooms of me.  And I am stuck with Lucy – oh, don’t think for a minute that I don’t love her!  Of course I love her.  She is my new self, my alter-ego, and a compelling personality.  The great cracks in her soul are fascinating to me, and she has yet to find out that they are her greatest strength.

     She tries.  I like her brave attempts, but the way Hector skitters wildly along the surface of my strings is annoying, even downright abrasive, like sandpaper on the tender flesh of a young woman’s body.  Once in a long while the bow straightens out and makes decent contact and I have some kind of voice, ever so briefly.  I can fool myself into thinking that a real violinist is playing me, but only for a second.  Oh, forgive me – did I say “a real violinist”, as if Lucy has no hope?  She certainly has the mind of a violinist, a hairsplitting ear, and fast fingers (though too short, especially that poor, nearly-deformed left pinkie).  What is lacking is heart, which is strange because Lucy usually has more conviction than any three people put together.  She is afraid that if she really draws the dark vibrating passion out of my belly, her own passion will be released at long last.  And that scares her half to death.

     Lucy is quite sick right now, with a high fever, but her body is only expressing a terrible intrapsychic conflict.  It will take some time for her to work this inner war through to its conclusion.  Zoltán, God bless him, has his finger on the pulse of her disorder.  So she is understood:  the first crucial step towards a profound healing.  Right now she is too weak even to take me out of the case to saw away at the Wolfahrt etudes that Zoltán prescribes like antibiotics for her more serious bowing ills.  She is afraid she will lose the embryonic progress of those first few lessons.  She won’t, so I don’t worry – at least about her musical progress.  But she can’t get to an AA meeting or her church, where she refills the cracked vessel of her soul with different varieties of divine grace.  She’s down pretty far right now, quite dry, and on the verge of breaking into her emergency reserves, which she has had to tap into plenty of times during the last several years of diligent work on herself.  Lucy is just plain tired, a weary, lonely footsoldier way out there on the far edges of the battlefield.  Zoltán would like her to find rest in this instrument; he is a way-station, an oasis in her desert, full of exotic cactus blooms and brilliant, brief, unlikely flowers.  His deeply floral nature is one of the things that attracts her to him.  Lucy the queen bee must bumble around in his dizzy pollen, fall drunkenly into the nectar, and learn to buzz the way her soul is aching to buzz.  And I am the one who has been chosen to give throat to her longing.

MONIKA

     First I did her horoscope.  Lucy is pretty resistant to what she calls “all this New Age stuff”, now that she’s gone Christian (and I honestly wonder sometimes what she sees in any kind of religious establishment, even a supposedly “liberal” wing like the United Church).  But she sort of said yes.  At least she didn’t say no.  And I could tell she was burning with curiosity about this crucial next phase of her life.  She has just ditched therapy – no, maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. She’s been seeing this woman named Elsie for five years now, a sort of exotic Gestalt shamaness, and just a little while ago Lucy sensed a dramatic shift in her energy (it was just after that terrible viral illness that laid her low for three weeks), and decided the therapy was over.  Sort of.

      She’s taking violin therapy now, a new twist.  Her horoscope (or “horror-scope” as she insists on calling it) indicates a new and startling presence in her life.  It’s as if she has been struck by lightning.  Lucy’s an Aquarius with Scorpio rising – a bad enough combination, except that the full moon was also in Taurus when she was born.  All these are fixed signs, each of them stubborn as cement blocks.  But also strong.  Sometimes I can’t believe what Lucy had to endure as a child, with that drunken psychotic father whom she also loved more than life itself.  There’s a big fissure in her aura left over from the extremes of the abuse.  She’s hoping to heal it with music, and that’s a good choice; she wants to throw a rope across the abyss and pull the raw edges of the hole together snugly, so that everything fits together as if it was never apart.  It might be hoping for too much, because Lucy in a sense is meant to be cracked, so all that white light can shine through her and illumine other people who need it.

 Just try explaining any of this to her.  “New Age claptrap,” she’ll mutter, claiming complete skepticism about it all.  Yet when I talk about her birth chart, or her numbers, she listens.  With wide eyes, and insatiable curiosity, she listens.

     We met for the first time three years ago at a spiritualist convention when she was going through a really difficult passage of waffling around, trying to find a meaningful “way”, a spiritual direction.  This was just before she found Falconridge United Church in Coquitlam and went all ga-ga over Jesus like some fanatical born-again type.  And she claims that I’m odd.

     We fell into step naturally, even though in some ways we couldn’t be more far apart.  Though she calls me “sister”, I don’t look like her at all; she’s small and slight and fair, and I’m big-breasted and dark, a real Ukrainian mama.  Lucy is both the most mercurial and the most earthbound person I have ever met.  She vibrates with a keen and painful nervous energy, but something deep in her core ties her to the soil.  It’s that Taurean sensuality, the laden grace, the deliberateness and innate musicality which is going to eventually turn her into a fine amateur musician, if she can only learn to pace herself and wait.

     And this Zoltán.  I’ve only heard about him second-hand, so I don’t know for sure.  But I think this is one of those rare connections that was fated to be.  She has told me stories, like the time she couldn’t control the bow; it was skittering all over the place, barely making contact with the strings, and Lucy  (who had played fairly smoothly only a week before) was getting more and more frustrated and angry.  Then Zoltán gestured for her to put down the violin, and with a slightly frowning look like a doctor about to make a diagnosis, he began to feel the air all around her body like a mime outlining an invisible wall.  Lucy was freaked.  He wasn’t touching her, wasn’t even coming near enough to be really invasive, but it seemed so strange.

     “What’s this all about?” she asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

     “I don’t know, there is something. . . something here” (he pointed to his chest) “like a cold spot, a cross running through. . .”

     “How do you know?”
     By now she was getting that silvery feeling in her solar plexus that tells her she is in the presence of a “sensitive”. 

     “I read the aura.”  (And Lucy is thinking:  Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more.  The nuns in Chatham never told me anything like this.)

    “There is something.  It runs from here to here,” Lucy gestured across her chest as if she were wearing a big diagonal Miss America banner.

     “Yes, exactly,” Zoltán said.

     “It’s a sort of . . . crack. . . in my energy field.  I know that sounds strange.  It took my therapist more than two years to figure out what it was.”

     “Is affecting playing.”

     “Dear God.  Will I have it forever?”

     He shrugged, but his brow looked a tiny bit puckered, and Lucy picked up on it right away.  This doesn’t happen with beginners, apparently, this skittering and shaking; usually they squeak and groan horribly, like they’re about to saw the instrument in half.

     We met for coffee the other afternoon and I was kind of shocked at her physical appearance.  She was so pale she was almost green.  (Lucy has a silvery glint of green in her blondish hair, greenish-blue eyes and slight olive undertones in her skin.)  She was at least eight pounds lighter, which with her wispy body size she can’t really afford.

     Her unfashionably-wide tortoiseshell glasses looked huge on her pinched face.  “I feel like I’ve been through an ordeal,” she said.

     “You have.  This is the sickest you’ve ever been in your adult life.  I can tell.  Your psychic energy is way down.”

     “But why, Monika?  Ever since I first started throwing up I’ve wondered if this is a signal that I’ve gone too far, that I have to stop.”

     “Stop?  Stop, when you’re at the beginning of the most significant phase of your entire life?  Remember, Mars is entering Scorpio. . . “

     “Oh, piss on Scorpio.”  Lucy can be quite blunt, for a Christian.  “What I mean is, maybe picking up the violin again is just too much for my psyche to withstand.”

     Secretly I was thinking:  You can sure tell this woman is pre-shrunk.  “It must be triggering memories of your father.”  I lit a cigarette, brushing off Lucy’s involuntary look of disapproval.

     “It is.  Sometimes I can even smell him, hovering around nearby.  Oh God, why the violin?”
     “Because it’s your instrument?  Once in a long time, your Dad had to be right about something.”

     “He was right about a lot of things.  He said I’d never really get away from him.  Ever.”

    ‘So you’re busy trying to make that curse come true?”

   “Maybe.”  She gulped her tar-black, tall Americano, a double shot of espresso with just a little bit of hot water.  How could a woman who is as high-strung as a hummingbird take on so much raw stimulant?  That’s an alcoholic for you.  “Zoltán will have to unmake the spell,  I guess.  He’s such a gypsy figure, he may be the only one who can.”
     “Tell me what it’s like to have a male violin teacher, after all those horrors at home.”

     “If he weren’t so short, I think I would have bolted.”  Lucy blushed a bit.  She gives away far more of herself with her face than she realizes.  “But he’s nice.  His vibes are nice, do you know what I mean?  Respectful.  Calming, even.  I don’t know why I get so keyed up and lose control of the bow.”

     “You’re always keyed up.  You were born in the Year of the Horse, and in your case it’s a racehorse.  And this bow you’re wielding is a weapon, an instrument of aggression.  Too bad you’re not a Sagittarius.”  I took a drag, and Lucy’s eyes rolled in disdain as she sucked down more caffeine.

     “Not in Zoltán’s hand.  It’s more like Cupid’s bow, an instrument of love.”  I guffawed.  Lucy reddened a bit.  God, she can be funny when she comes off that godawful intensity for a minute.

     “So Zoltán’s good with a bow.”
     “Are you kidding?  He’s the Sultan of Swat.”

     “Do you think he’d make a good lover?”
     “Monika!”
     “Seriously.”

     “Unequivocally, yes.  No one with fingers like that could be ignorant of the needs of a woman’s body.  I’ll bet Perlman’s wife goes around smiling all the time.”

     “Lucy, you’re the very devil.”

     “But you’re worse.  You shouldn’t even have asked.”

     “How’s the novel?”
     “Oh God.  How’s yours?”
     “I asked you first.”

     The reason Lucy and I are such a lifeline to each other is that we share the same terminal disease – the “gift” of writing, which causes a constant drone of discontent within our rather mundane daily lives.

    “It’s coming, I guess.  God, Monika, this time I have to finish.  Two abortions are enough.”
     “Maybe the third attempt will be the charm.  I did your numbers, remember?  You’re a three.”

     “The unholy trinity.”

     “You can say that again.  You know, you have an awful mouth on you, for a Christian.”

     “Goddamn right I do.  But you’re still thinking in those same old stereotypical terms.  Christians don’t swear, don’t make love. . .”

     “They do, but they don’t enjoy it.”

     “No – they enjoy it, but they make sure they feel really guilty about it afterwards.”

     We both bawled with subversive laughter.  When we said goodbye I hugged her, felt the same stab of envy that she’s so thin when my body burgeons all over the place, but also picked up a scream of grief deep in her fractured soul.  Dark pain is welling up for her now, the pain of a small child who was horribly used, and I almost hope she goes back to Elsie, at least for a little while.  God, Lucy is proud, proud to the point of disaster.  I’m glad her violin teacher has psychic ability, for surely it will magnify Lucy’s very real but embryonic clairsentient gift.  One solar plexus can call to another; it’s a kind of vibration, a mutual resonance.  Take care of her, Zoltàn.  She means a lot to me, and to a lot of other people.  And she still has such a long way to go.

  ANDREW

     I wish I could tell Lucy just one thing:  that not having a body is a real kick.  I’ve never seen anyone worry so much in my life about someone whose problems are totally resolved.  Lucy still stews about me, even though I’ve been free now for sixteen years.  But I still hang around when I’m needed.  I think Lucy even knows this on some level.  Lucy feels a warm spot just above her head, on the left-hand side, her “sensitive” side.  Then she says to herself, “oh, you goof, come off it, I have the Lord Jesus Christ in my life and I don’t need all this New Age crap.”  She keeps trying to be evangelical and single-minded about her beliefs.  She’s about as single-minded as I was, cracked right down the middle.  But that was “then”, the time of the body.  This is “now”, the timeless time.

     Lucy keeps looking for me in other people.  All it takes is a chance resemblance, either corporeally or in character structure.  If you play the flute, particularly jazz, you’re automatically in.  Beard and long hair?  Perfect.  Right now it’s David Lukasiewicz, her oboe-playing surrogate brother, who’s nearly as mentally screwed-up as I was when I was stuck in that poor schizophrenic body for thirty-one years.

     My heart goes out to Lucy.  She keeps on trying to resolve things.  I love her and feel for her, but I wish I could tell her that only death resolves life (and even then, at a very steep price).  She’s a tough little customer, resilient as hell, just like she was when we were kids and hiding out in the closet under the Indian blanket while Dad got over one of his boozy rages.  But relenting has never been one of her strong points.  I was forced to surrender everything when that fire took my body; how can I convey to Lucy that it was the best thing that ever happened to me?  Like everybody else, I worried about the afterlife, whether I’d be punished or exalted or lose my identity or reincarnate as a stink-bug or something.  Then when the time came and I faced the mysterious Source, the message it wordlessly conveyed to me was this:  “Andrew, you’re free.  You can do anything you want to.  It’s completely up to you.  Break your ties with the earth and come with me, or hang around a bit during your timeless time.  Either way will be fine.  Just suit yourself.”

     I decided to hang around, mainly because Lucy was going through such hell.  I couldn’t stop her from overdosing or slashing her wrists or landing herself one more time in the loony ward, then (finally ) detox.  All I could do was continue to “be”, which means “believe”.  Lucy and I were so aligned in life that my just hanging around helped keep her from self-destructing.  The ultimate irony is this:  I know from experience that Lucy won’t be completely healed until the moment she is released from her earthly body.  But because she’s a brave little cuss, she’ll keep on finding ways to repair herself as far as she can.  The moment she hoisted that violin under her chin and began to play, she grabbed back a huge chunk of her soul.

     I don’t know what I think of this violin teacher that Lucy is so stuck on.  Maybe it’s jealousy, but I think he’s a little too sure of himself.  His method seems completely non-linear and right-brain-oriented.  Lucy’s a writer in her soul, and her left brain also needs tutoring.  And what’s this “feeling-her-aura” stuff?  It could freak her out completely.  He came to the right conclusion, of course, but there’s something strange about his aura – too purple, like it’s almost shading into black.  Lucy needs brightness in her life, not more darkness.  This Zoltán is as psychologically complicated as Lucy herself, and that could screw her up big-time.  She is in danger of getting entangled.  I’ve seen her do it time and time again, in that chaotic marriage of hers, and with other men.  Lucy needs to learn this:  I am I; you are you.  We’re not Siamese twins.  Life is essentially a lonely business.  Only the afterlife frees you from the hell of earthly individuality; that’s why it’s called “heaven”.  It’s more a state of being than a place, and I’m there.  I’ve made it to the Shining Side.  Lucy, are you listening?

LUCY’S JOURNAL

        At the AA meeting:  I never expect things to “happen” when I go to my Friday night group.  No, I shouldn’t say that.  The Healthy Livers group has changed my life dramatically, given me a framework, a reason to live, a sense of spiritual stability, a. . . Trouble is it bores the piss out of me.  AA has been the most refining, disciplining experience I have ever undertaken.  And it has nothing to do with sobriety, which is hard enough to maintain (though I’ve done it without a slip for more than five years now).  It’s the forced listening to all these tedious people who don’t have an ounce of imagination or verbal clarity, the sitting there numbly in silence while they stumble and grope painfully for the right words.  Get to the point! I want to say, knowing I could do a better job myself.  Well, I am a good speaker, but in AA circles I’m considered “too intellectual”.  (One of our unofficial slogans is “Check your brain at the door”.) 

     But I love these people; they’re my war buddies, the salt of the earth.  Medicine doesn’t always have to taste good, does it?  I need this, to maintain a mental and emotional balance which still seems frighteningly fragile.  My musician friend David is absolutely fascinated by my involvement with AA and would like to sit in on a meeting or two out of sheer curiosity, even though he doesn’t drink (or smoke or swear or dance or even screw,much).  But I’ve never taken him to one, not even to the “cakes” that celebrate my sobriety birthdays, because even if he never said anything I know he’d be analyzing the whole thing in his head and passing critical judgement.  I could hear it in a way, hear the million little wheels in his head turning and turning like those “gyres” in the poetry of Yeats.

     Anyway, at the meeting on Friday I saw Susan and John and Linda and Lloyd and Cindy and Real and Arthur the perpetually-boyish schizophrenic and Manny the big loveable bear, hugged them all, felt safe, then settled in for an hour and a half of self-disciplined listening.  But someone suddenly plopped down in the seat beside me – a man I knew I’d seen before, maybe even hugged before (but at an AA meeting, a hug is about as intimate as saying “hi”). 

      He’s tall and somewhat heavyset and has a great head of greying dark hair and a marvellous salt-and-pepper beard.  Also the most incredible pale, crystal-grey eyes like those gorgeous half-wild husky dogs that are partly wolf.  Feral eyes.  He turned to me, extended a big warm hand, said, “I’m Rafe Williams” (I did remember the name from somewhere.  Oh, maybe I heard it once and mentally compared it to the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams), and astonished me by tacking on, “You look great.”

     I blushed all the way down to my roots.  But I had dressed up a bit for the meeting, was wearing snug black jeans, a push-up black bra and a black-and-silver sparkly top that almost made me look bosomy.  (I can dream, can’t I?)

     “I talked to you at the round-up last year,” he said.  “Gave you and Manny a ride home, remember?” My heart was speeding up embarrassingly, and an exceedingly warm spot in my chest was creeping ominously south.  I smelled him:  healthy male flesh with a soupcon of English Leather cologne.  I have always been driven wild by the smell of leather.  It’s almost a fetish.  I wondered if he smelled my Opium body-spritz.  (Lucy, settle down.  You’re 42 years old.)

     His pupils were dilated in the unmistakeable biological look of attraction.  So I couldn’t con myself that he really wasn’t interested, as I do when sexual attraction frightens me.  Suddenly a whole relationship flashed before my eyes:  going out with him, kissing in a phone booth during a rain storm, going back to his apartment, the sex, the engagement ring, the. . . baby?

     “Who’s speaking tonight?” I asked to get my tongue unstuck from the roof of my mouth, trying to calm my maddeningly rabbiting pulse.

     “Andy K.  Twenty-four years of continuous sobriety.”

     “Holy shit.”

    “No kidding.  Took me seven years just to get two in.”

     “Really?  When’s your cake?”

     “End of next month.  Be there or be sqare.”

     “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”  Yes, I am attracted to you too.

     Before Andy K. spoke, there was the essential alcoholic ritual of reading “How it Works” from Chapter Five of the Big Book, and it must have taken a full twenty minutes to get through the three pages because the woman up there, a Sandy W., couldn’t read.  “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has through. . . through. . . thoroughly followed our path,” she began in a slow thick voice, and I knew we were in for the long haul.  A couple of times during the reading, Rafe and I made eye-contact for a split-second and tried not to giggle.  God, he smelled good, as if he had been working in the outdoors all day.

     Andy K.’s story was the usual tale of high times followed by slow degradation, and I disciplined myself to listen, forced myself to realize that his story was also my story in a different guise.  Andy was a longshoreman with tattoed arms and a gravelly voice, a bristled bullet-shaped head and a florid, beefy, veinous face.  (He was probably the only person in the room who looked like he might be an alcoholic.)

     He spoke for nearly forty minutes, and I hung on to the underlying message of hope in his talk, wanting to jab myself with a pin to keep awake.  Then he absolutely astonished me when he began to describe a reunion with his also-recovering son after fifteen years of estrangement, and broke into uncontrollable sobbing.

     It was at that moment that Rafe did a very strange thing.  Very discreetly he reached over and squeezed my hand – just briefly, not seductively at all.  I squeezed back, my eyes tearing up.  Rafe cleared his throat.  Andy coughed, apologized, thanked everyone for his sobriety and went back to his seat with his head down.

     I’m in love.  I’m in love with a construction foreman, for God’s sake:  Mr. Nature, Grizzly Adams, a man with whom I have absolutely nothing in common except a profound will to live.   Rafe’s gratitude at being spared a horrible alcoholic death shines through his skin and glows in his flashing, husky-dog grin.  As we were standing around having coffee and yapping about our sobriety after the meeting, he asked me if I was going to Julie’s three-year cake next Wednesday.  “Wanna go for coffee first?  Pick you up at seven.”

     What confidence.  What maleness.  I felt almost offended, as if I should be evading, avoiding, playing hard to get.  But I am, after all, forty-two.  “Yes,” I blurted, probably turning several different colors in quick succession.  Rafe smiled like a wild wolf.  I ached to reach out and touch his hair. 

     The last thing I ever expected when I joined AA was to meet men.  I walked in the door to save my bloody neck.  Kate was only twelve then, Michael and I were still together (though just barely), and Silverbrooke psychiatric clinic in New Westminster had installed a revolving door  marked “Lucy Sandner”.  I was in a state of fear so profound that my body looked frozen stiff; John R., who was later to become my AA “father”, said he was afraid to hug me for fear I’d crack.  I was terrified to go on drinking (40-ounce vodka bottles in the bedroom closet are sort of a bad sign, like all those beer bottles stuffed under the mattress), and equally terrified to stop.

     The first meeting was surreal.  Michael pushed me out of the car, practically with his foot, and said “Go!” like someone shoving a reluctant parachutist out of a plane. 

     What I couldn’t comprehend was all the laughter:  was I in the wrong room?  Here were a whole lot of healthy-looking, casually-dressed men and women in a sort of festival atmosphere, with a big birthday cake up at the front on the table by the podium.  (It was George N.’s one-year cake, and at that point I was so addled I thought it was his “belly-button birthday”.)  “Oh, are you new?  Welcome!”, people kept saying to me.  I was tempted to look behind me to see who they were really talking to.  Surely they couldn’t have meant me, under a dank cloud of almost unbearable shame.  Some tried to hug me and changed their minds when I stiffened up; a few went ahead anyway, cracking my rigid spine.

     I wasn’t capable of laughter then, but I noticed that George N. had all the wit of a standup comic, making his nightmarish escapades sound downright funny (which I thought was in extremely poor taste).  He did a riff on some of the more common AA acronyms:  GOD stands for Good Orderly Direction, FEAR is Face Everything and Recover (or Fuck Everything and Run, which I liked much better).  Then he got to SOBER, which he translated into:  Son-of-a-Bitch, Everything’s Real!  I couldn’t laugh, but quietly got a pen and pad out of my purse and wrote it down so I could put it in my journal later on.

     John R. was sitting next to me.  During the smoke-break, we talked.  “Good, you’re taking notes.  New, aren’t you?  Good stuff.  I’m John.” 

     “Nice to meet you.”  I’m sure I had the voice and face of the walking dead.  I hadn’t had a drink in almost twenty-four hours, the longest I’d gone in months.  John R. looked serious, like he never smiled, but I was later to find out that he smiled a lot; his expression merely reflected grave concern for my fragile, taut, emaciated condition.

     “Here. . .” He nipped up to the front, quickly paid for a new Big Book and slid back into his seat.  “Take this home with you.  It’s all you need.”
     “All you need is love,” I thought to myself, watching people hug like they hadn’t seen each other in years.  Love reverberated in this room, frighteningly.  I didn’t deserve it.  I wanted to hide.  To die.  But my feet had other ideas, walking me in here somehow.  Somehow.  “You will live,” said the will to live.  I obeyed, like a knee-jerk, though wretchedly.

     When the second half of the meeting started, the chairperson asked, “Anyone here for their very first AA meeting?”  John R. nudged me.  I shook my head, but my knees lifted me to my feet  involuntarily.

     “Could you tell us your name, dear?”  (Don’t call me “dear”, you asshole!)

     “I’m Lucy and I’m an alcoholic.”  I sounded glum as a frog.  The room burst into spontaneous applause.  Great.  I was being applauded for admitting that I was a loser.

     “Come on up and get your chip,” the chairperson announced, chirpy as Guy Smiley on Sesame Street.  Chip?  I wasn’t hungry.  Poker chip?  What was going on?  Leaden legs carried me up to the front.  The chairperson handed me a small aluminum coin with “One Day at a Time” embossed on it. On the other side, it said, “To Thine Own Self Be True.”  Profound.  I clutched it like a magic talisman, tears spurting over the rims of my eyelids, bouncing off the chairperson’s shoulder as he hugged me with a crunch of bone.

     “You’re the most important person in the room,” he murmured to me fervently.  “Don’t take the first drink. . . and keep coming back.”  It was said with deep and total sincerity.  Little did I know that within a few weeks I’d be saying the same thing to other people who were new, with equal sincerity.

     Before I left that night, Manny, a big snuggly bear of a man whom I later found out had serious brain-stem damage from a drunken car crash twenty years ago, spilled coffee all down the front of my clothing (he’s famous in AA for his legendary coffee spills, along with his generosity).  Running for paper towels, he nearly collided with me on the way back, began to vigorously wipe my front, suddenly realized it wasn’t such a good idea, then exclaimed, “Sorry! Sorry!  Hey, you’re new, aren’t you?”
     I nodded my head feebly.  He smiled broadly and hugged me, hard.    

      In scalding black coffee, my baptism. 

LINK TO PART TWO:  A Singing Tree (Part Two of Six)