A SINGING TREE
A novel by Margaret Gunning
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.- Goethe
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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,
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.
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?
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.
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
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
“There is something. It runs from here to here,” Lucy gestured
across her chest as if she were wearing a big diagonal Miss
“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.
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
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
“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)
