Thursday, October 10, 2024

A Singing Tree (Part Five of Six)

 

LUCY’S JOURNAL

     David seems to be settling down okay now, or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.  He does sound a bit flat on the phone.  But he’s never exactly been Mr. Expressiveness.  I suppose I shouldn’t hover over him the way I do, as if I am merely a minor character in his psychodrama.  I’ve always been envious of his life as a professional musician, one of the highest callings there is, while I dick around with trying to write a novel, keep my small family liferaft afloat and play the violin “as a hobby”.  That’s like learning CPR as a hobby, if you ask me.

     Anyway, we’re soon heading into the depths of summer and a complete break from lessons in August while Faith and Zoltán slip away somewhere and  - .  Well, it’s none of my business, is it?  The frisson of the recital has left me already and I see ahead of me the ton of technique (not to mention theory) which I will need to learn if I am ever to be an even passably-good amateur violinist.  Zoltán feeds it to me in bearable snippets, but there are so many things I have yet to master, and perhaps never will.  “Patience,” he says to me in his lazily sensuous accent, his eyes silvered with amusement.  Yes, and I want it right now.

     It was a little depressing to see Rafe in the Empire Cafe the other day with a 25-year-old newcomer to the program, all fluffy blonde hair, feverishly earnest blue eyes still moist from crying, and big tits straining under a transparent white t-shirt.  A baby bird fallen from the nest.  Of course in AA these things can be completely platonic, but I notice the women wear the t-shirts anyway, just in case.  I even know people who go to AA dances strictly to pick up chicks.  The newly-sober are the neediest people in the world, and predators know it. It’s nearly as low as the story I heard from a sponsee who was in Riverview for years – about how men cruise the hospital grounds at night in their cars, hoping to find female patients who will exchange sexual services for cigarettes.

     I know the thing (fling, or whatever it was) with Rafe is over, fizzled-out due to lack of any common interests at all, besides staying sober.  (And I sometimes think that even a reasonably-bright chimp could understand the principles of AA.)  It was a kick while it lasted, but unsatisfying.  The closest thing to empty sex that I have ever had.  Why is the companionship and communication always so much better with men you absolutely know you will never sleep with?  Like David, or even Zoltán.  Of course they have demons, but you don’t feel responsible for sorting them out. 

     Demons.  I suppose we all have them.  Kate’s doing better.  She has her camp-counselling job back for the summer, which is good because she seemed to enjoy it last year.  I have no idea how to handle the aftermath of an ordeal like hers if the person who experienced it doesn’t want to talk about it.  I’m forever trying to correct the mistakes my parents made, and one of the worst was the entrenched alcoholic “no-talk” rule.  I don’t want that to be my legacy to Kate, who sometimes throws it in my face during arguments that all her problems stem back to my alcoholism, my mental illness, etc. Etc.  While it’s true that for a long time I was the agent for damage, a damage that goes back for uncounted generations (and just where did it start?), some years ago I made a conscious decision to become the agent for something else.  Change. Hope.  Grace. Growth.

     Don’t be fooled by how good those words sound.  It’s one of the dirtiest jobs in the world, but the alternative simply isn’t acceptable to me any more.

     David wants me to come to the summer pops concert this weekend – “Scary Hits” or something like that – “Night on Bald Mountain”,  “Danse Macabre,” “March to the Scaffold” from Symphony Fantastique by Berlioz, that sort of thing.  (I just love the part where the guillotined man’s head hits the basket – thump on the tympani!)  I think they should have saved it for Hallowe’en.  It’s one of those concerts that’s meant to get kids (and their thick-witted parents) interested in "classical” music.  David wouldn’t have anything to do with it if it weren’t real music, unlike those Reader’s Digest homogenized albums of “Classics” which are the aural equivalent of eating an entire carton of Kool-Whip at one sitting.  But it’s still bleeding chunks, hokey excerpts.  “The Mozart Quartet in F Major,” David said on the phone.  “Did you ever hear the oboe part?  Now that’s scary.”  Good God, is he getting his sense of humor back?

      Monika. I must phone Monika. I’ve been having really strange dreams about a mutilated old Barbie I had when I was only around eight years old.  It just keeps turning up in my dreams, like an unwanted child.  Andrew kept hiding it, burying it in the back yard, singing the hair off with a lighter, making little nooses and hanging it from doorknobs, that sort of thing.  The ultimate Barbie sabotage came when I found a shoebox covered with hieroglyphics under my bed.  Lo and behold, inside it was Barbie, all wrapped in strips of old bedsheet which had been saturated in my mother’s Chanel No. 5.  Mummified.  Ah, my childhood!  And that was one of the more normal things that happened.

     Probably the worst of it was the demonic possession stuff which made such a deep impression on me that I carried that particular delusion (or whatever it was) into psych wards all across this great nation of ours for years and years.  Every time I’d get sick (and it was strange how I’d have 2 and 3-year-long periods of being strong and relatively well), that feeling of “someone or something” taking over my body would come back.  Sometimes I think the whole problem was that Andrew was a complete flop as an exorcist, though pretty good at deeply instilling a firm conviction in me that I was “possessed”.

     What a wholesome activity for teenagers, eh? – penning ourselves away in Andrew’s stale-smelling, tobaccoey bedroom, smoking a ton of dope, then sitting in his rotating office chair in virtual darkness while he circled all around me yelling out incantations to try to make the “demons” leave my body.  “Get out of my sister!”, he’d yell.  He sincerely wanted to help me and tried his best, but left me “holding the bag”, so to speak.  Odd that he was the one who went so irretrievably insane, while I came back.

     I’ve found out over the years that you can’t bring this topic up with anyone or they get all freaked.  Even therapists. I’ve had whole sessions where the shrink sat there with his mouth open, trying to believe the things that I was telling him.  And God help you if you try to go to anyone in the United Church with this “problem”.  They’ll forget the 1,249 references to demonic possession in both testaments of the Bible, and chalk it all up to some sort of delusion on your part which you have to “come to terms with” (i. e.  “shut up about this!  You’re making me nervous.”)  Much as I greatly admire the responsible and enlightened stance my church takes on social issues, it’s shit-scared of the deeper theological stuff and sanitizes it all very carefully, trying to make all the wild irrational happenings of the Bible fit in neat slots of “explanation”.  A person could go nuts reading the Bible, and I’m sure many have.  It’s deep waters, all right – all the worst and the best of the human condition laid bare, intertwined with totally inexplicable supernatural events which if taken at all literally could tip a sensitive person over the edge.  And isn’t that what “having a demon” is all about?

     I suppose I could find a fundamentalist church which could “cure” me of all this immediately.  I’m sure I could go to an evangelical service and have fits and see visions, fall down on the floor in ecstasy, and have some fat male patriarchal figure in a white suit “cast out my demons in the name of Christ”.  Then I’d belong to them completely, I suppose.  I’d learn to hate gays and submit to men and condemn all young women who are driven to have abortions to the everlasting flames of Hell.  Maybe the United Church is made up of people who have decided to live with their demons, so much so that they don’t even call them by name any more.  If so, then I guess I am in good company.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

     My Lucy is more than a little depressed.  I can tell by the way she drags the bow across my strings, mechanically playing arpeggios and scales to try to make up for all the technique she missed in her first year.  Zoltán was secretly very impressed with her progress during that year; in particular she picked up the fundamentals of fingering very quickly, but now she has hit a wall and doesn’t know how to get past it.  She tells herself that this feeling of a stone in her chest is the result of taking on the burden of all her friends’ problems – David’s angst, Monika’s flat joyless mood, the lady she knows at her church who is dying of cancer, the AA friends who have slipped, slid or even just disappeared.  She tells herself it is the nothing-mood of summer and hopes for fall to reinvigorate her.  She tells herself it is “hormones”, the early biochemical nudgings of menopause.  And it’s true that her “cycle” is now more of a cyclone, moody and unpredictable, coming whenever and wherever it wants to, bleeding her dry, then staying away for too many weeks, causing Lucy to brood about cancer.

     Or she concludes it is her past, the cracked crystal of her childhood which will always leave a profound residual ache.  She knows all the well-meaning self-help books and strategies for “healing” are just the best guesses of people who don’t really know how to do this at all.

     At her worst times Lucy almost persuades herself that she is not musician enough to even approach an instrument as difficult as the violin,but she could not be more wrong. 

The whole problem with Lucy is that she does have the sensibilities of a musician.  She has the hypersensitivity, the drivenness, the perfectionism coupled with impatience that has driven many a talented person over the edge like a stampede of possessed swine, before they could even begin to fulfill their potential.  Does she also have the doggedness and iron self-discipline?  This is the acid test.  Musical sensibilities come in a package, and single-mindedness is very much an ingredient.  This means developing the focus to keep on working even when there are no appreciable results for a long period of time.  Some would call this “doing it on faith”.  Scales and arpeggios are not much fun to play and Lucy’s bow appears to turn into lead when she plays them.  Sometimes she wonders why she even bothers, but this is akin to her questioning of life itself, whether it has a point, and whether she might not be better off facing the end like her terminally-ill friend.  What eventually short-circuits that line of thought is the realization that what we call “death” isn’t the end, that it is merely a change of form, and that to throw back the Creator’s most precious gift is a sin with massively heavy consequences. 

     In her deep past Lucy has experienced the kind of depression that numbs the spirit and paralyzes the mind, so she tends to dismiss these cyclic passages as “bad patches”, grey and bleak but not soul-destroying.  Yet she perhaps accepts them a little too readily, as if there is nothing she can do about it.  Zoltán would like to free her from her own bleakness, with music as the key.  And I am the agent, the means, the fuse, the wick, the conveyor of the Light, an incandescent insistence that yes, yes, life is inherently worthy, full of so much juice and so much joy, stronger than death, stronger than depression, stronger than anything.  Lucy has a short memory and too easily forgets her tremendous capacity for enjoyment of living, her lust for life.

     I know it lies coiled tightly within her, waiting to explode.  These wilderness times are perhaps the only opportunity she gives herself to rest.  “Illness is the only acceptable form of meditation in Western society,” her friend Monika likes to say, quoting some current health guru.  Lucy gets depressed every time she tries to meditate and would rather go on one of her 90-minute walks or even try to lose herself in playing me.  What’s the best way to manage? she asks herself . To face everything that’s wrong and collapse, or just keep running?  Or do I transcend it all, the way Zoltán seems to have done?  (Seems, for her beloved teacher is no stranger to depression himself.)

     Her best gift, some would say her only gift, is her ability to persevere even under the most adverse of circumstances, and even under the worst test of all – the constant abrasion of the everyday.  Real heroism is daring to laugh when all isn’t well, embracing life’s sweet, subversive pleasures without waiting for everything (or anything) to be solved.  And since for Lucy nothing will ever be solved (especially since she has an uncanny knack for unearthing more problems), this practically guarantees that she will be forced to draw on her gift for the rest of her life.  How can she believe that she is anything but blessed?

 CASSANDRA MARTIN

     No one had a bloody clue what to do, least of all me, and except for Roger the English horn player I’m probably closer to him than anyone else (though he and Rog probably spend most of their time together talking shop).  All through this -  I don’t know what to call it  - this “episode”, a little voice in my head kept saying, “Do something, Cass.  Do something.”  What was I supposed to do – pin him down bodily on the floor and make him put his clothes back on?

     The only time I’ve ever heard of something like this happening to anyone is in a mental institution.  I swear he should probably be in the hospital right now but after he sort of came out of it, he reassured everyone that he was “fine, just tired”.  Only a few of us saw him, thank God, but you know how word gets around, especially among musicians.

     He always gets to rehearsal ahead of practically everyone else to warm up and diddle around  with his instrument and stand so everything will be just so.  But tonight something was definitely “off”.  I got there extra-early to practice the fiercely-difficult flute solo in Daphnis et Chloe and saw him wander in with this strange, removed look on his face.  Not distressed.  Not upset.  Just sort of remote.  (Not that “remote” is so unusual for David.)

     Probably only four of us saw this, but he stood there completely still for a moment, and then began to unbutton his shirt.

     I could’ve said something, should’ve said something, but I didn’t.

     In half a minute or so I realized with an awful sinking sensation that he wasn’t going to stop there.

     He took his shirt off, carefully hanging it on the back of his chair, stepped out of his shoes and very calmly began to unbuckle his belt.  And I know I should have said or done something then, but I was completely paralyzed, as were the rest of us who were probably all praying as hard as I was that Maestro Sergionna wouldn’t suddenly appear and drop his baton in shock.

     Same routine with the pants.  Folded carefully over the back of the chair.  Socks off next, one at a time, then, finally, yes, his underwear.  Say something, Cassandra.  Do something.  I exchanged terrified glances with Don the 2nd clarinetist but we were both immobilized by shock.  And then he got down on the floor and curled himself into a fetal position beside his chair.

     Then, thank God, Rog came in and said, “My God.”  He went right over to him (as I probably should have done long before) and began to call out to him loudly, “David.  David, come on, David, I think you need some help here.  Come on, David, let’s get these clothes back on you, okay?”

     It didn’t take long for him to sit up and respond.  Grabbing his underwear, he began to get dressed again just as calmly and methodically as he had got himself undressed.  Rog came over to me and we had a small, hushed, panic-stricken conversation.

     “Do you think I should take him to the hospital?”

     “I don’t know.  Have you noticed him acting strangely lately?”

     “No, he just seemed quieter than usual.  He hasn’t missed a rehearsal.”

     “At least you’d better drive him home.”

     “I don’t know.  Should he be left alone, do you think?” – etc., etc.  And then David walked up to us as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

     “Uh, David – “

     “Something wrong here?”

     “Um, listen David, maybe I’d better give you a lift home.  You look tired.”

     “No, I think I’m fine.”

     “David, don’t you realize. . . “

     “I need sleep, that’s all.  It’s sleep deprivation.  But I can still play.”

     “Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”

     “I just need a good night’s sleep.”  He yawned.  People were trickling in.  The four of us in the room exchanged a glance which silently telegraphed, “Don’t talk about this”  - at least not openly.  And don’t tell Sergionna.

     And that’s how the situation will stay unless someone does something.  Zoe absolutely freaked when I told her about it.  “That’s it,” she said.  “This proves that my baby will be nuts.”  As if that’s all she can think about.  I really do care about David and even though he played fine and seemed OK by the end of the rehearsal, I know better.  He’s having a breakdown and no one seems to be able to do a damn thing to help him.

     What is it that pushes people to this point?  They’re carrying these megatons of emotional baggage for years, even decades, and then - .  There’s a shift in the tectonic plates, and – earthquake.  Complete collapse.  Yet he’s still functioning.  It’s almost macabre.  And so is the way everyone is pretending it isn’t really happening.  Did we all come from dysfunctional homes, or what?  I knew musicians were sick, but I didn’t think they were that sick.  Is there some kind of see-no-evil code in our society which allows something totally unacceptable to continue?

     Zoë says I analyse everything too much.  Zoë says I should be more concerned about the baby, about the fragile genes she’ll inherit.  Zoë says David might be a bad influence on the baby and maybe we should be thinking about moving away.  Moving away!  What about my career?  Does Zoë think I can just casually get a job as a professional flutist in Medicine Hat or somewhere?  Doesn’t she realize how many years, decades, it has taken me to build my career to this point, the master classes, the competitions won and lost, the contacts made so I won’t be completely forgotten?  No, we can’t move.  But it could be we’ll have to talk to David, at least if he is receptive to being talked to.  It’s quite possible the man belongs in a mental institution even though he’s walking around looking more or less normal on the outside.  He can still play, but he’d still be able to play while having his leg amputated.  That’s how far he can dissociate himself.

     He needs a good shrink, of course, so he can sort out all this guilt shit around Leslie, as if he has anything to do with her fragile state.  Some people are just born that way, David, and you’re not exactly Mr. Strength yourself.  Lately it looks as if you’ve been forgetting to eat and sleep.  Do some people push themselves towards breakdown, so they can finally have all this out and stop lugging it around with them?  I suppose we should have him over for dinner some time to talk about his exact role here, but Zoë would freak.  She’s gotten awfully strange during this pregnancy, sort of flighty and unpredictable, and I’ve had no luck at all getting her to quit smoking.  So I’ll have a smaller baby, she says.  It’ll be easier to pop out.  I mention the possibility that the child could have a smaller brain and she tunes me out completely.

     I’m thinking of Sage for a name.  Zoë says “we can’t name our kid from the spice rack”.  But Sage is so soft and lovely, and suitable for either sex.  Sage. . . Artemis. . . Martin.  All right, Artemis is a goddess, and I said I wouldn’t do that.  I thought of Astarte to begin with, but Zoë vetoed it.  She wants to call it Damon, which is too much like that horror-movie character from The Omen.  I want to avoid anything trendy as it’s likely the child  will go into the arts, and it’s hard enough making it in this field without being saddled with a hokey name.  (Speaking of. Zoë  used to be called Susan.  She legally renamed herself when she finally got away from her father.)  Zoë keeps wanting to inflict that last name of hers on the kid and I honestly don’t know how anyone could spell it.  I’m the main breadwinner here, we’re sort of married, so shouldn’t she acquiesce to using Martin as a last name?  Double-barrelled names are so cumbersome anyway, and they don’t work at all in succeeding generations where you’d end up with four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two last names.  We’ve got to be practical here.

     As for David, I’ll have to keep an eye on him.  I’m still thinking I should do something.  What?  Corner him in a room and tell him, “David, I think you should be committed”?  How can you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, or who’s already so far gone that he doesn’t even see that there’s a problem?

 KATE

     Something very weird is happening with Mums and this friend of hers, this David.  There was a message on the answering machine when I got home the other day that made my hair stand on end.  It went like this:

     “Lucy.  She’s gone, Lucy.  There was nothing I could do to save her. Please come.”  The voice was thick and hoarse and sounded desperate.  I didn’t even know who it was until Mums finally got home, listened to it and said, “Oh my God, it must be Leslie.”  I tried to get her to explain who Leslie was (one of her AA rehabilitation projects?), but she was flying all over the place, trying to find her keys, her coat, her other shoe.

     “Is this someone from AA?”

     “No, it’s David’s sister.  She’s been in the hospital lately and something must’ve happened to her.  I have to go to him.”

     “For God’s sake, Mums, why does it always have to be you? Doesn’t he have any other friends?”

     “I’m sorry, kiddo, but this is an emergency.”  We’d had serious plans to hang out together that night, make some popcorn, watch a video.  So much for that.

     “Yeah, but your whole life is an emergency.”

     “Kate, that’s not fair!”

     “Well, what’s the point of all this ‘recovery’ stuff if all your friends are so totally fucked up?  Is it your responsibility to try to save them?”

     “It’s my responsibility to love them.”

     “But what about me?”  I knew I sounded whiny and petulant, like a little kid.  But geez.  It wasn’t long ago she had to rush this David character off to emergency for “accidentally” cutting himself.  Doesn’t he know how to dial 9-1-1?

     “You know I love you.  David’s going through a rough patch right now and this is going to hit him awfully hard.  I need to be there for him.  I promise we’ll do the movie tomorrow night.”

     “Great.  You watch.  Someone’ll fall off the wagon tomorrow night and you’ll have to be there to hold their head while they puke into the toilet bowl.”

     “I don’t do that, Kate.”

     “But practically.”

     “I promise.  Tomorrow night.  Don’t wait up.”  Then she flew off.  I swear she enjoys this emergency stuff because it gets her blood up, like the old days when everything was a crisis.  She’s still addicted to chaos.  After she left I did the only thing possible under the circumstances – invited Brian over (I hadn’t seen him in nearly a week and he’d scored two joints from somebody at work).  Renting the movie turned out to be a bit of a waste because we were sort of busy, but at least I wasn’t lonely.

     Then about one o’clock the sound of a door slamming brought me out of my stupor.  Brian was still lying there on the sofa comatose.  But Mums didn’t even seem to notice, she was so pissed off.  “Jeez!”  she was saying.  “All the way to Kitsilano for this.  Is he out of his freaking mind?”
     “How’s Leslie?” I asked, trying to be helpful.

    “Oh, Leslie’s fine.  It’s David who should be institutionalized.”

     “Is he okay?”
     “’She’s gone, Lucy.  She’s gone,’ he says.  ‘There was nothing I could do to save her.’ I said something like, ‘David, Leslie has had problems for years and years.  You know something like this would happen eventually.’  And he gives me the blank look of all time.  ‘Leslie?’ he says.  ‘No, she’s still in the hospital.  It’s Stanzi.’  ‘Stanzi?’  ‘You know, Constanza, the cinnamon tabby.’”

     “The cat.”

     “The cat.  Apparently she got out and dashed across the street and was hit by a van.  David saw it happen.”

     “Well, that’s pretty traumatic.”

     “It gets worse.  He brought her out in a box.”

     Brian, rousing himself, broke into stoned laughter.

     “I said I didn’t want to see her but David insisted.  He was absolutely beside himself with grief.  I asked him what he was going to do with the body and he said he’s thinking of having her cremated.”

     At this, Brian totally lost it.  Then the rest of us started laughing too.  It was awful but that’s what we did.  There’s nothing more hilarious than somebody else’s tragedy.

     “What’s he gonna do with the ashes?” Brian guffawed.  “Bury them in the litter-box?”

     “Never mind.  Stanzi’s in kitty heaven now,” Mums said, wiping her eyes, “which is more than I can say for David.  Not that he’s alone in the world.  I mean, he still has Fanny and Clara for company.”

     “Fanny and Clara!  What, no Anna Magdalena?”

     “Those cats mean a lot to him.”

     “Obviously.  Will there be a memorial service?” I said, trying to keep the mood going.

     “I’ll sing ‘Memory’,” Brian helpfully offered, setting us all off again.

     There must be a 12-step program out there for people whose friends are a total mess.  Mums complains about it all the time but the situation doesn’t seem to get any better.  I think fucked-up people are attracted to her because she managed to get so much better, and they want to know her “secret”.  There isn’t one, except hard work and courage, but these people all want it the easy way, as if they can siphon emotional strength directly out of her veins.  I know what it took Mums to get herself better and there were no short cuts.  If you’re to believe the books, I’ll end up with all sorts of emotional problems myself from being an “ACOA”.  I’m just glad she’s not drinking any more, glad I more or less know what to expect when I come in the door.  But I wish she had better judgement in her choice of friends.  She still picks people who echo the way she used to be, as if she just can’t quite let go of the chaos.  Doesn’t she feel she deserves a bit of peace?

 DAVID’S JOURNAL

     I could have sworn I saw her the other day when I was out walking.  Heard the sound of a voice that could only be her, and then I saw her running towards me as if in slow motion.  Then I saw the red van turning the corner, heard the squeal of brakes being applied too late, felt myself lurching forward – Stanzi!  Stanzi! The awful sight!  The driver apologizing, almost crying, and hearing myself say to him,  “Look – look what you’ve done!”  Cradling her broken little body in my hands.  Dear God.  He offered to pay for a “replacement” and I told him to get lost.  Will it be this way every time I go out?  Will I keep seeing things to remind me?  Hearing her voice?

     People are acting funny around me now, as if they’re afraid I’ll fall apart at rehearsal or do something bizarre.  They ask about the cuts.  It’s nothing.  It’s just that I seem to cut myself every morning when I shave, probably because I’m just not sleeping very well.  Haven’t slept well in a couple of months.  Losing Stanzi has made everything infinitely worse.  Fanny and Clara are grieving.  Clara hasn’t eaten in three days and she’s thin to begin with.  Fanny howls out the window, a primal and most uncatly noise, trying to bring her back.  But gone is gone.  Fan won’t even let me pick her up.  She writhes out of my arms like a snake.  I can’t stand having anybody near me either.  Everyone wants to tell me what to do.  Even when Lucy came over she was full of advice.  “Did you forget to shave today?”  “What’s that smell – did something go bad in the garbage?”  “My God, you’ve got nothing in the fridge! Are you trying to starve yourself to death?”  And she didn’t want to look at Stanzi, even though I couldn’t stop looking at her, opening the box again and again and again.

     All I have left is my instrument, and I practice at night now and try to sleep during the day.  Sometimes I kind of lose track of what time it is.  Must have spent fifteen minutes standing in my closet today, unable to decide whether to wear the blue shirt or the brown shirt – the blue shirt or the brown shirt – the blue or the brown – the blue or the brown - .

It’s exhausting how many decisions you have to make in a single day.  Even ordering a cup of coffee is an ordeal.  Skim milk or whole milk?  Skim milk or whole milk?

     When we were kids, we used to tell each other everything.  I never needed a best friend, and she didn’t either, because we had each other and it was absolutely magical.  Lucy thinks she knows how it used to be with us.  She talks about her brother Andrew who went crazy and died.  But I swear this was different.  This was like finding the lost half of my soul.  We had a language no one else spoke or even knew existed.  I know how it must have looked.  Some of the kids at school even made jokes about it – crude, horrible jokes.  But they’d never known what this was like, this absolute understanding, this melding of souls.  How many people experience that much intimacy in a lifetime?  Who were they to say it was unhealthy?  And when they sent her away – is it any wonder she got so sick? Who else understood her?  She must have felt completely abandoned.  And she’s never been the same.  She went someplace where I couldn’t follow. Now I think I know what it must have been like for her.  The world is too ugly, grotesque and riddled with loss.  Everyone makes their own reality.  What other way is there to survive?  Lucy talks about how love is stronger than anything, even stronger than death, but I think the world spins on raw greed.  The sensitive are crushed like insects.  They end up in a twilight world, full of drugs that are supposed to “help”, punished for their poetry, poisoned on their own gift.  If this is what comes of their strengths, what hope for their weaknesses?

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     It’s getting to the point where it’s not safe to listen to my answering-machine messages any more.  Every day seems to bring its bombshell:  like the other morning when I had a message from Cassandra Martin, one of David’s two queer ex-girl-friends.  “I have a message from David Lukasiewicz,” she stated rather primly.  “David would like to know if you’d be able to take the cats while he’s away.”  (Away?  Away where?)  “If you can only take one cat he’d prefer that it be Fanny, because Clara may need special treatment for her eating disorder and might have to go into the clinic for a few days.  Please let me know when you can pick them up as soon as possible.”  I’d never had much to do with Cassandra, though I did meet her once and thought, “Waif.  I see why David likes her.”  The skinny big-eyed type.  I wasn’t looking forward to calling her to let her know that our Manx Max would eat another cat and looking after even one of David’s neurotic little pussies would be out of the question.  But I did need to know what was going on.  I didn’t like the sound of that “away”.  Like a sick or wounded animal, was he going to run off somewhere and hide himself in the woods?

     “Hello, Cassandra, it’s Lucy.”

     “Oh, thank God.  We’ve been having the hardest time placing these cats.”

     “Placing. . . “

     “I’m afraid Zoë and I can’t take them in because they set off Zoë’s allergies.  There’s also that – what’s it called?  Toxoplasmosis?  You know, that thing a pregnant woman can get from a cat-box?”

     “Where is David?  How is he?
     “Oh, on a leave of absence.  He had a ton of holiday time accumulated anyway.  He just had to go away for a while and begged me not to ask any questions.”

    “Is he. . . you know. . . “

     “There’s not much I can tell you.  Stanzi’s death affected him terribly, we’re heading into our fall season and I think the stress just got to him.  Maybe he went on a little trip.”

     “Do you think he’s in any danger?”

     “I’m not at liberty to say.”

     “The problem is, we have a cat already and he’s – “

     “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

     “He’s very territorial, not to mentioned spoiled rotten.  Our condo isn’t very big and-“

     “Do you know of anyone else, then?  The problem is, David had to leave right away so he had a friend bring the cats over to our place.  They can only stay here on the most temporary basis because of Zoë’s condition.”

     I racked my brains.  “Kate’s boy friend loves cats,” I said, thinking of the way Brian howled at the story of Stanzi’s tragic end.  “But I’d have to talk to him about it first.”

     “Oh, could you?  It’d be such a big help.  I have to admit I’ve been concerned about David’s health lately and I really think he needs some time to himself.”

     “So long as he’s okay.”

     “Well, at least he’s doing something.”

     “Yes, I guess so.”  (Why do I take these things on?  Why does it always seem to fall on me?)  “I’ll call Brian and then give you a call back,” I heard myself say.

     Of course then Brian had to try to persuade his parents to let him temporarily adopt two traumatized creatures he’d never seen before, as a favor to his girl friend’s mother who sweetened the deal with a $50.00 incentive (but he did seem pretty eager to take them in; Brian was good with animals and small children).  Then of course it fell on me to go pick up the cats and get them safely to Brian’s.  I got to meet the fabled Zoë, a bizarre-looking white-skinned creature with a pierced eyebrow and a rose tattoo on her shoulder, spiky black hair, blue fingernails and lips, and a round jutting belly (I’d say about six months along) that looked as if it had been grafted on to her gaunt, gangly body.  David’s turkey-baster baby.  She was chewing gum and smoking at the same time and making bitchy remarks while Cassie struggled to get the cats into a box.  I hated to see them go through more trauma when they had already lost their “sister” and – temporarily – their Dad.  But there was no other way to do it.  The two of them howled all the way to Coquitlam.  I could tell that Brian’s parents weren’t thrilled to see me, though Brian and Kate were in their element, fawning and crooning over the two of them who sniffed everything warily, sure that this latest development would lead to no good.  I instructed Brian in how to administer Clara’s appetite-stimulant drops.  She’s a beautiful cat really, smoke-colored, slim as a snake, with exotic greenish eyes.  A designer cat.  Fanny is a sort of white angora, like a sweater on legs, and David must have been brushing her religiously every day to keep her coat that immaculate.  Never mind.  Brian will make a big fuss over them and a lot of attention is just what they need at the moment.

     And now for David.  Has he bolted?  Is he wandering the streets muttering to himself, or has he gone to visit Leslie in Toronto?  He has no other “people” as far as I know. Neither chick nor child.  No, that’s not strictly true.  I wonder if impending fatherhood has filled him with anxiety, enough to push him over the edge?

     It must have taken him something to dump September, the “band’s” busiest time in preparation for the new season.  As for me and Kate, it’s back to the grind, school, work, lessons, writing the damned novel, and down to earth with a thump with Harriet – back to the drawing-board, scales and arpeggios and Kreutzer etudes which I can only play at a miserably slow pace.  “Speed and intonation!”  Zoltán cries.  “Make them fun!”  How can I tell him arpeggios are about as fun as a dental-hygiene appointment?  I know they’re necessary to fill all the monstrous gaps in my technique.  It’s all part of the process, but where is the romance?

     “You are worried,” Z. stated at our last lesson.  Not a question.

     “A friend of mine is. . . “ I waved vaguely.

     “It is mental?”

     “I suspect.  How did you – “

     “He will be stronger.  Soon.”

    “He’s a musician.”

     “Yes, I know.”  When he makes statements like that it unnerves me.  “He will discover his real strength.”

     “He has this sister. . . “

     “Yes, she lives in the east.  She is stronger than he is.”  Part of me wondered, “where do you get off, you little Hungarian pipsqueak, making these arrogant suppositions about people you don’t even know?”  Another part had mental goose-bumps and almost didn’t want to hear any more.

     There was a silence.  Then:

     “Raff,” he said.

     “Raff.”  I swung up Harriet and began to play the Cavatine with a slight deepening and brightening of tone.  Perhaps all this sorrow is good for my playing. 

     I know an elderly woman named Sandra who is dying of brain cancer, and somehow this disease has focused her, burnished her bright, lit her from within in a way that seems to intimidate some people terribly.  What do you mean, there’s nothing they can do?  Her dying is an affront.  Everyone is looking for someone to blame for her ephipany.  I am beginning to see the phenomenal cost of real spiritual growth.  I hope all this applies to David.  I pray he won’t have to self-destruct in order to purify himself.  There are better ways.  I know of them.  I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, and that shadow carries the awful whiff of the psych ward.  It was my crucible, though of course I didn’t know it at the time.  At the time it was a swim through sludge, like being trapped in a sewer.  Jean Valjean has nothing on me, let me tell you.  But like Valjean, I escaped, or was set free.  I don’t understand it, but I did have the good grace to accept it.  And so the chaos was over, and a new sort of life began.  It strikes me that it would take an awful lot for David to abandon his cats, however temporarily.  Is this his shaman’s journey, his ritual of purification?  The trouble is, the wilderness can kill you if you stay out there for too long.  God in all her loving kindness can burn like a merciless laser, slicing away the tumors of grief without even the blessing of an anaesthetic.

LESLIE LUKASIEWICZ

      Mama and Pa just about had a fit when I told them I was getting my own place.  “But you’re not well enough!” Mama exclaimed, maybe worried that the key organizing activity in her life (taking care of me) was being taken away from her.  But I just don’t think I need taking care of any more.  The new combination of meds is working really well, with no side effects except a mild euphoria, which frankly I welcome after everything I’ve been through.  I’m sleeping reasonably well and my short-term memory is coming back.  I know people are still taken aback by the whole idea of “shock treaments”, but then they’ve never been so immobilized by depression that they found it hard to draw their next breath.  I remember standing in front of my closet for fifteen minutes every morning thinking, “This dress or that one?  This dress or that one?  This one or that?”, when it really didn’t make any difference at all which one I chose.

     Something happened with this last round of treatment, some mysterious shift in the chemistry, and I’m beginning to feel like a human being again.  Food tastes better, I’m putting on some much-needed weight and I really want to get back to my teaching as soon as I can.  “Ach, she could’ve had a career,” I can still hear Pa saying, adding under his breath, “What a waste.”  To him, anything less than the highest pinnacle of success is a total write-off.  But I’m just beginning to  reassess myself professionally and I’m coming to the realization that teaching is a calling unto itself, a valid way to convey the joy and vitality of music.  Pa can’t let go of the idea that his little girl won’t be pounding the keys at Carnegie Hall.  David made it – well, more or less, though Pa wanted a violinist and won’t ever let David forget it.  But even that isn’t enough.  My father is this big walking blob of unfulfilled ambition.  I don’t like to lay blame here but I don’t think his attitude contributed anything very positive to my mental health, to say the least.

     I think about David quite a lot these days and I know I owe him a letter.  But some kind of chasm opened up between us at a certain point and we’ve never quite been able to bridge it.  I remember how it was between the two of us when we were young and I wonder if he has found a way to deal with it all.  He has always seemed like the strong one, but he lives a monastic sort of life, alone with his oboe and all those cats.  I wonder if our childhood just warped him in a slightly different way than it did me.  Who’s to say why it is that one person in a family cracks up and another one doesn’t?  Maybe I cracked up because I “could” – because I could sense some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how flickering and dim.  Maybe I knew it was the only way I could eventually reclaim my life for my own.  Psychiatric institutions are nasty but they can serve as a sort of crucible, a place to begin rebirth.  Maybe so much wiring had to be redone that I basically had to start all over again, razing the structure to its foundation.  I was lucky in that I survived.  I don’t blame David at all for the things that happened back then – we were just a couple of neurotic kids pushed almost beyond endurance, and all we had was each other.  We created a world, impenetrable by anyone else, full of tenderness and hilarity, and it was the only release either of us ever had from Pa’s bullying and Mama’s incessant, dithering concern.  If there was damage along the way, then maybe that was the price we had to pay for surviving our childhood.

     I think Mama secretly resents the fact that I’ve regained my powers of decision and can begin to call the shots in my life once again.  Her sickness is that she can’t let go of my sickness. Living apart from them will help.  Lately I’ve had calls from friends I haven’t seen since university.  (Psychosis really cramps your social life.)  Someone remarked to me the other day, “You know, you’ve finally got some color in your face.”  Yes, that’s it – a blush of health creeping back into my formerly bloodless life.  Though it’s tempting to become a professional invalid, another sort of life is beginning to make itself possible, even probable, if I can only keep putting one foot in front of the other.  There may be deeper meaning and purpose in my going crazy – I hope it redeemed David in some mysterious way, or at least saved him from cracking up.  Maybe I went crazy for both of us.  But as seductive as madness can be, health is ultimately stronger.  Health wants me back, and I am more than willing to let it take me.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

     I am only eight years old, and for most of that time I sat in a glass display-case unplayed.  Now I am in my second year of vibration, my molecules deliciously disturbed in a way which shivers my strings and mellows my wood.  Is it the experience of being played, only? – or could it be a slight change in the level of Lucy’s skill?  For whatever reason, even though I am female and nowhere near the level of adolescence, my voice is changing.

     Three times in a piece, perhaps, just for an instant, Lucy forgets herself, or gains enough courage, and a new resonance pops through, a sound in three layers:  a sheeny bright surface, a vibrant middle and a foundation warm as wood-grain.  These true notes come almost by accident, though Lucy longs to sound that way all the time.  Her usual tone is greeny and sallow, sometimes almost grainy, too thin in the upper register, too thick-tongued in the lower, like a recording of a human voice on the wrong speed.  But when these magical tone-pops happen, the violin even feels different in Lucy’s hands.  For a split-second, I become alive.

     Is this Lucy’s first hint of the reward that is coming her way if she stays with this instrument for the rest of her life?  She still goes through crisis-points when she wonders what she has undertaken here, and whether it might not be easier on her mental health just to quit.  But something always intervenes.  Her friend Sandra from church, the one who has the cancer, invited her over for tea one afternoon and tacked this on to the invitation:  “By the way, I’d be delighted if you’d bring over your violin.”  It threw Lucy into one of her famous tailspins at first:  no, I don’t sound good enough, it’s too soon, I’m not ready, I should wait a year – and then it occurred to her that her friend probably doesn’t have a year.  So she toted me over and played me as well as she could, with the usual hesitations, bow-slips, hasty pitch-corrections and greenish, amateur sound.  But her friend knows enough about music to catch those tone-pops, those tiny flashes of enlightenment, the breakthrough of what will one day be my true voice if Lucy can only stay with it.  “Never apologize for how you sound,” Sandra told her firmly.  “If someone criticizes you, keep this in mind.  You can do something they can’t do.  You can play the violin.”

     No one had ever spelled it out in those terms before, which is probably why Lucy broke into gooseflesh at her words.  She was thinking to herself:  I can play the violin.  Shakily.  Imperfectly.  Everything, everything needs refinement and improvement.  Still, I can play.  I can do what others cannot do, perhaps because they never dared.

     Lucy dares.  It is the whole reason she is still here.  It’s the reason she still gets up in the morning even when her native tendency towards depression wants to enclose her like a hand.  She gets up.  She eats.  She walks.  She plays.  She puts words on the page, not knowing if anyone will ever even see them.  It is a form of devotion.  Faith and persistence are close cousins.  At conception, some force must have endowed her with a keep-on gene, perhaps to counterbalance that other awful gene which reads, “Die.”

     When her time comes, Lucy would like to die like her sick friend, her face turned toward the light.  But there are a million miles of living ahead of that mysterious crossover, sweaty, tedious, straining, boring, trying, outrageously ordinary living.  Did I say she had a keep-on gene?  There is another, deeply encoded, only activated recently in her middle age, which reads, “Make your own meaning.”  For meaning is the real essence of life, transcending even purpose or worth.  Those who know this can survive anything.  Some wait for meaning, and generally speaking they wait forever.  Some, of course, run out of patience and give up.  And some learn to create it, summoning it up out of the muck and murder of reality.  These are truly blessed, though what drives them to try is almost always appalling misfortune, mistreatment and loss.  The oyster brings forth the pearl not to make a beautiful gem, but to survive laceration.  Is this why Lucy grabbed back the most potent symbol of her youth (in fact, of her oppression) – as a means of healing more powerful than any $90 per hour Gestalt session?  Will my gold strings and blonde hair draw transforming mercy from her cracked heart, like hidden waters welling from the pitiless severity of the wilderness?

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