Wednesday, October 9, 2024

A Singing Tree (Part Four of Six)


 HARRIET SMITHSON

    I vibrate.  Yes, I vibrate.  And when I vibrate, I sing, and when I sing I talk to Lucy’s soul.  But it is a higher vibration.  Lucy is right when she suspects Zoltán is Gypsy; he has the perception,and the scars to prove it.  Lucy should never think she is alone in feeling persecuted.  Zoltán was persecuted for having brown eyes and black hair.  There is a little curl to this hair and sometimes Lucy with her latent psychic gift can see him as a little boy. And she has to fight the urge to brush that curl back off his forehead, as a mother might.

     God knows how he survived.  A combination of wilyness and luck.  But he lived to pass on the basic teachings, as well as some higher vibrations of his own.  Let me give you an example.  The other day he felt she was ready to begin lightening her still-leaden bow.  “You know the Humoresque?” he asked.

     “Which one?”  Lucy could think of at least two or three.

     “The Dvorák.”

     “Ah!”  Then she began to sing a song she learned from an old childhood 78 r.p.m. record:

     “Like a bike but so much cuter

      Is my tiny two-wheeled scooter

      And I ride it ‘round and ‘round each day.

      Though it has no engine on it

      Once I place my feet upon it,

      Merrily I’m on my way.

      When I grow older,

      I may be bolder,

      And I’ll think of aeroplanes and auto-mo-biles. . .

      But right now while I’m outside,

      I’m satisfied to guide and ride

      My tiny little scooter with two wheels!”
      Zoltán laughed with delight, his dark eyes all a-silver.  When Lucy sees him in such merriment it is as if small bells are ringing on a horse’s harness.  Then she sees steam rising from the horse.  She sees a husky man lifting a child, and hears the little boy say a word which she doesn’t understand.  Then the small boy in the big man’s lap is holding the reins.

    “Now you try.”  Lucy comes back to the room.

     She assayed the piece, and naturally it sounded like a clumsy frog hopping:  Dump.  Ta-dump.  Ta-dump.  Ta-dump.  Zoltán never stops her, just passes into a dreamy deep-listening state which is picking up every single fumble-fingered mistake.

     “Is one way,” he said kindly, and Lucy tensed herself for the coming criticism.  “But you are too much influence by this small song from childhood.  There is this way also.”  And he lifted his instrument.

     Lucy listened, struck dumb, as out poured a graceful but highly unlikely Gypsy dance tune.  The emphasis was completely different and the piece danced with light feet.  In the middle section, when the mood changes to a moment of sorrow, Lucy could see a man in mid-life who remembers his one true love, long-lost, a beautiful dark girl with silver earrings.  Then it was back to the now slightly defiant-sounding Gypsy tune.

     “I have never heard it played that way before in my life.  It’s a revelation.”

     “Is how I play.”

     “You opened this piece right up for me.  Where was this interpretation hiding all this time?”
     “You hear Americans play it.  Or Canadians, even worse.  They play it like frog jumping.”

     Lucy burst out laughing.  Dump  Ta-dump.  Ta-dump.  Her frog even had a wooden leg.

     Zoltán loaned her a blue-covered book called World’s Favorite Easy Violin Pieces (“Oh, easy for Leonardo!”, as Dylan Thomas said about his Easy-Hobby Games for Little Engineers), which included the Humoresque in a simple enough form for her to practice.  She immediately violated copyright by photocopying it, then saw other gems which she was sure she was ready to play – Schumann’s melancholy, nostalgic Traumerie, Saint-Saens’ The Swan, Offenbach’s Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman, and even Bach’s most primal melody, Air on a G-String.  Then while Zoltán was out of the room she rifled through his CD collection and found Music Minus One accompaniments for these pieces.  She’d show him.  She was stealing music now, sneaking it, cheating.  It was wonderful.  In no way could she keep up with the orchestral accompaniment, but it didn’t matter.  She didn’t play the Bach properly on the G-string at all (in fact it should have been retitled Air on G and D Strings),but broke out in goose bumps regardless from the unimpeachable greatness of the music.  Even Lucy couldn’t ruin it.  I’m sorry to sound harsh, but she is still like green, raw wood, full of bend and sap but almost unusable for crafting anything.  You can’t make a table from a sapling.  The tree simply has to grow some more before it can become useful.  She knows.  On the days when she is ready to throw me out the window, something grounds her, some sacred tradition.  Perhaps it is even a memory of her father, so eager to play in his impoverished boyhood that he made his first violin out of a cigar-box.  This is a hard one for Lucy who has had to unhook from him so completely in order to thrive.  But she remembers, as one remembers the good moments from a war.  Zoltán is not the only one who was imprisoned in his childhood.  You don’t have to be in Poland in the 1940s to experience a concentration camp.  But out of that nest of death sprang life abundant.  Lucy, whole and shining, though still full of holes.

    She plays the Schumann (her favorite; too bad he didn’t write much for me), forcing her left hand to vibrate, sometimes forgetting herself and doing it right, pulsating like new wings, butterfly wings drying in the sun.  Schumann, being generous of soul, forgives her for the mistakes.

    LUCY’S JOURNAL

     Long, long phone conversation with David last night.  He sounded slightly swacked.  My God, is that man a mess.  He thinks Zoë’s pregnant already but I sense there’s something funny going on.  This is like Peyton Place with perfect pitch.  He has obviously been seeing her but when we talked and talked, he hedged and hedged, driving me absolutely nuts. I wanted to say to him, “Are we best friends or not?”  Then I realized we are best friends, and it jolted me because I always felt that place of honor was reserved for Monika, my closest female friend.  But David, bless his dear little pointed head, seems to touch a deep chord of melancholy in me these days.  Something resonates.  I realize with a wheeling giddy sensation that I am now approaching a year’s worth of musical instruction, and I am nowhere near where I want to be.  As I write this it’s April already, the gash of the miscarriage is healing steadily, and steadily too the Coquitlam rain drones down.  David thinks I’m stupid to expect great results in a mere year:  “Give yourself five.  Even then, always consider the fact that you started terribly late.  (That was his word.  “Terribly” late.)  Don’t aim too high.  You just don’t have the flexibility any more.  Even intonation will suffer with age.  And another thing. . . “  Blah, blah, blah. I wish he had a mute button.  And what does he know about it – this haute-bois honker, blasting a laser stream of air through a reed-opening so thin I swear he must have brain damage by now.  Maybe that explains it.

     Weeks, and even months whip along, frighteningly fast.  At the same time my job drags its ass in the usual just-bearable way.  Monika seems in an awful slump and is smoking more.  If life could only be more like a novel, elegant and compact, multi-hued threads of story neatly braided together, instead of this clueless sprawl of details.  I meander and blunder like I’m in a field of bumper-cars.  “Don’t feel so misunderstood,” David snapped on the phone.  He’s one to talk.  He’s right, of course.  No one is capable of understanding anyone with that many contradictory layers of personality.  But maybe he’s telling me from long and bitter experience, from his own chronic disappointment, not to expect understanding.

     Someone in church the other day asked me, “So when are you going to play for us?”  Good question.  I haven’t lost my virginity yet.  I quake inside when I think of the prospects.  Recitals come up in June and Zoltán has a certain canny something-up-my-sleeve look, like a cat with a plan, a juicy bird in his mind’s eye.  Then another stress:  my father’s birthday.  It’s always a bad one.  And I realize again with a thrill of shock that I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.  I cut myself off so completely during those years of unutterable hell that communication between us is now completely dead.  Michael’s parents are still in touch with them, at least peripherally.  Or so Michael tells me, when he tells me anything at all.  He does call Kate regularly and usually talks practicalities with me.  Financial stuff, mainly.  I can’t believe I once centred my life around this man.  A good man, to be sure, but I believe my sickness overwhelmed him.  Sometimes I yearn to tell him, “Look, I’m different now,” but I’m afraid he’ll say something too honest, such as, “Yes, you’ve changed your obsessions.”

     I’m also shocked to realize I haven’t even mentioned Rafe.  I don’t know if it’s  a Puritanical attack of conscience or not, but I am thinking of breaking it off.  “It feels too good?” David commented acidly.  (But this is why he is my best male friend.)  That’s it:  it feels good with virtually no effort, because the fact is we don’t have what you could honestly call a relationship.  He smells good and stirs me to sexual depths I’ve never felt before and when it’s all over he smokes in bed and picks his toes and I wonder what in the world I am doing with this man.

     Even Kate notices it.  “The thrill is gone,” she wailed in B. B. King-esque style when she saw me chopping vegetables with murder in my eyes.  All my life I’ve dreamed of a sort of biological relationship where the passion is perfect and the commitment is nil, and now I have it; therefore, it isn’t a dream any more.  And therefore, it’s ruined.  Now it’s part of grubby, toe-picking reality.  I don’t love him.  Sometimes I wonder if I even like him.  I think the only thing he’s ever read is the AA Big Book.  He’s one of those program fundamentalists.  And smokers taste awful, all over.  Maybe Monika should have a go at him?  She could use the estrogen lift, I think.  And the bad taste wouldn’t matter.   Like eating peanut butter – fine so long as you both do it.  They could lie in bed with the sheets pulled up to their chins and puff away, like Bogie and Bacall.

     If I could combine Rafe’s libido, David’s sensitivity and Michael’s stability, I might just have the perfect man.  (Should I throw in Zoltán’s sense of mystery?  His scent, spicy as those Speculaas Dutch cookies shaped like little windmills?  Don’t think about it.  Such dark chocolates are forbidden to my tongue.)  My luck, this composite wouldn’t be able to stand me.  I might just be staring at Frankensteinian aspects of myself that still frighten the daylights out of me.  Zut alors.  I must play Harriet, who misses me.  Who sings no matter how she feels.  This is the right attitude.  Through war, through hell and exasperating moments of high heaven, even through the obscene boredom of a relatively-happy life, there is one throbbing constant, this dark-throated, long-lashed enigma, this music. 

    CASSANDRA MARTIN

    I wish I knew what the hell is eating at David.  He seemed more sour-faced than usual last time we talked at the cafe, and even our wonderful news didn’t get the reaction I’d hoped for.  “That’s nice,” he said blandly, as if he’d had nothing to do with it.  “But aren’t you excited?” I said.  “It happened so quickly!  I thought it might take a year or something.  You know how some couples try and try and nothing happens.”

     “Maybe Zoë’s unusually fertile,” he commented flatly, gulping his tall decaf latte as if it were medicine or something.  It’s the end of the season and we’re heading into summer doldrums, and David’s such a workaholic that maybe slumps like this are inevitable.  But he still has his students (most of them really gifted), his reedmaking and instrument repairs.  God, he did miracles with my flute that time when the valve was sticking.  All this tinkering should keep his nimble fingers out of mischief for the summer.

     He didn’t even want to talk about Zoë who’s in a snit of her own, complaining about the acne and the overactive bladder and the bump that already shows through her slinky black bodysuits.  I can barely even feel it.  But that will change.  Zoë’s so skinny that in a few months she’ll probably look like that picture in Le Petit Prince of  the python who swallowed an elephant.  All David wanted to talk about was his sister Leslie (who always reminds me of that character in The Glass Menagerie – Laura, isn’t it?  The one with the club foot.  I swear David’s family is Tennessee Williams with a Slavic accent.)  She’s back in hospital, having delusions again.  Self-mutilating in grotesque ways.  Biting herself.  I didn’t want to hear about it.  For some bizarre reason David seems to feel responsible.  Can you help it if she has a chemical imbalance?  I asked him.  I mean, look at me.  I’ll be on meds for the rest of my life, and I never grew up with the Nazi regime David had to live under, his father pushing him past the point of endurance.  Then there was his mother’s avalanche of smotherly affection, which only reflected her own bottomless need.  I am amazed he didn’t turn out like David Helfgott, gibbering away to himself from beyond the fringe.  But for some reason Leslie went crazy instead.  There’s one in every family, absorbing all the toxins from the environment.  Almost Christlike, in a way, how that happens.  They try to take on the sins of the whole clan.  Usually they die, as a sort of human sacrifice.  But the similarities to Jesus don’t end there.  Everyone claims to love the person in question, yet when push comes to shove they treat them like absolute shit, abandoning them at the crucial moment.  (I can just hear the crowd yelling “Crucify him!”) And just as with Christ’s death, the sacrifice never works to redeem the whole rotten family system, which generally becomes sicker than ever.  And they can never figure out why that one person went crazy and died.  Surely it had nothing to do with them!

     I never knew this much shit would get stirred up in me from hearing David talk.  This is stuff I haven’t thought about for years.  I think he goes too far with the guilt thing anyway.  He went on and on about how talented Leslie was.  I think his father may have been secretly disappointed that David didn’t pursue piano.  Leslie did, but she was only a girl, and a fragile one at that.  Wonder if that thug of a father got after her or something. 

     In any case, she was too frail for a career, which takes real toughness of mind and an ability to not give a shit about what anyone thinks.  Half the people I know don’t even think I work.  They think it’s “art” and I live on air or something.  Else why would they keep asking me to play flute solos at weddings and funerals and things like that, with no thought of paying me?  “You have to give off an air of professionalism,” David says.  They don’t ever ask him.  Maybe they know they’d get farther asking a block of stone.

     I wish David would consider medication.  He’s biting his nails again, and looked paler than usual even though it finally stopped raining.  It would be nice if our daughter-to-be could have some sort of a stable father-figure, even though it’s entirely up to David how involved he wants to be with raising her.  And of course we’re not asking for any money.  Zoë’s father is quite well-off, though you’d never think it to look at her.  “What if it’s a boy?”  Zoë asked me the other day when I kept on referring to the baby as “she”.  It never really occurred to me.  Probably he’d turn out to be some neurotic little

wuss with Coke-bottle glasses and a perfect sense of pitch.  Woody Allen had a son, didn’t he?  But look what happened there.  God, what messes people get themselves into.  I’m so glad I had all that therapy.

     So now, if I can get Zoë to kick cigarettes and at least cut down on her night life, and maybe start eating a little better (she doesn’t want to get fat, which is about as likely as David cracking a smile), we should have a sane and healthy summer ahead of us.  Maybe I should learn how to knit.

 KATE

     Mums is going crazy again.  This time it isn’t even a guy.  I mean, that was sort of refreshing, my mother having a boy friend, and for a while it seemed we could relate to each other on sort of the same level.  She’d sneak in really late with this guilty look on her face.  It was cute.

     But I think she’s reverting back to that men-who-needs-‘em mode of hers, giving Rafe the cold shoulder while he keeps on phoning her and phoning her and tagging along after her at AA meetings like a faithful puppy dog.  I think she just sort of got tired of a man with a great body and an empty crater where a mind should be.  Why doesn’t she go out with that friend of hers, that David?  Maybe he’s gay or something, or kinky, who knows.  Musicians.

     No, this time it’s Zoltán and his big announcement that he thinks Mums is ready to play in her first recital in June, which is not that many weeks away.  It’ll commemorate the end of her first year of lessons.  Though to be honest I really don’t think she sounds all that good.  At least she’s better than when she began all that scraping and groaning a year back.  Her vibrato, such as it is, reminds me of an 84-year-old Russian baritone, a really schmaltzy sort of uncontrolled wobble.  What do I know about violin?  Exactly nothing.  But I’ve got Grade 7 piano and can tell what’s music and what isn’t.  Mums really plugs away and once in a while that violin of hers – Harriet, she calls it, probably after that old TV sitcom with Ricky Nelson in it – hits a certain note and she has something approaching a decent tone.  In another year, who knows.

     But here she is in a genuine lather over this concert she’ll be playing in – with a bunch of little kids, most of them technically way more advanced than she is.  Probably she’ll wear a frilly white blouse and a navy blue skirt and black patent-leather shoes and give a little curtsy at the end of her performance, like she did when she was nine.

     So now all I can hear through the bedroom door are the strains of Offenbach’s Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman.  She has a really sudsy orchestral accompaniment on CD and she isn’t exactly playing in time to it, either.  Too much rubato.  Mums is a rubato sort of personality.  I’ve already heard the piece approximately one million times and she still has three weeks to go before her Big Moment.  “Oh, I’m not ready,” she moans to herself, when secretly I think she was dying for Zoltán to ask her to play. 

     Now she’s preoccupied in an entirely different way, so fat chance of me talking to her about anything important, except violin. And I could really use someone to talk to right now when Brian and me are having all these problems.  I think he sort of went into a depression after the baby thing, even worse than mine actually where I couldn’t stop crying for about six weeks.  Brian just gets sort of quiet and it reminds me too much of how Dad used to be with Mums before they broke up.  No juice flowing, no communication at all, except sex which just isn’t what it used to be, mainly because Brian is now totally paranoid about getting me pregnant again.  I have a diaphragm and I’m really religious about using it even though I hate that spermicide stuff.  “If it happens again, we’ll keep it,” he says to me, scaring the hell out of me.  He thinks it’s like a puppy or a kitten or something – “I’m keeping it,” like that little boy with E. T.  I don’t know how anyone can raise a kid, even under the best of conditions, which these aren’t.  In fact they’re practically the worst.

     And I’m not at all sure yet what I’m going to be doing for the summer.  I know I should look for a job but there just doesn’t seem to be anything too inspiring out there.  I might end up being a camp counsellor again like last year but I don’t know if I can stand to listen to two solid months of giggling and squealing and dirty jokes.  And that’s from the other counsellors, never mind the kids.

     Or Brian and me could travel.  Mums would probably kill us.  Brian has been to Mexico and all over and he says it’s perfectly safe to hitchhike.  It’s not like I’d be on my own or anything, but I can just hear Mums screaming, “no you’re not”, before I can even explain my plans to her.  Wasn’t she ever young?  At my age she was practically married already.  Running away from abuse.  What they call a “jail-break marriage”.  Not that my own childhood hasn’t been traumatic.  Sometimes I think I’m like the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors that I keep reading about, still having nightmares and depression even several generations later.  God, the amount of damage one penis can do, one small hunk of human flesh in the wrong place and at the wrong time.  And Mums is one of the lucky ones.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

     Can a violin detect drops of sweat leaking from a clammy human hand?  Yes it can.  We can even pick up on the less-obvious signs of distress, like a certain odor, a nimbus of anxiety hanging like a swarm of bees around a person’s head.  Poor Lucy.  She doesn’t know yet what I smell on her.  Naturally enough she was nervous – it was her first recital.  Zoltán had to almost physically twist her arm to get her to agree to play at all.  But when dawned the big day she felt a curious mixture of delirious anticipation and sick dread.

     The anticipatory side of her decided to ask David if he would like to attend her first performance.  Of course he begged off.  Lucy is showing progress, God knows; the way she plays me now is a quantum leap of improvement over the stiff-armed sawing of a year ago.  But to attain the golden sound David holds in his fine-tuned ear as acceptable for violin would take a lifetime, and a lifetime Lucy hasn’t got.  What she has is scraps – scraps of energy left over from her dull but draining job, her worries over Kate and Monika and David, and her indefatigable attempts to write a masterpiece novel or just any sort of novel at all.

     Lucy sometimes tries to live too many lives in one, or to cram in too much experience in as short a space of time as possible, as if she is sure she will die young and has to somehow get it all in.  “Is killing you,” Zoltán flatly told her after running his black-grape eyes over her at the end of a gruelling lesson.  Zoltán reads energy patterns with those eyes, or with the surface of his skin or by some other method, unanalyzable.  He could sense the level of her anxiety over this recital but also knew she was much more ready than she consciously knew.  And he told her exactly what to play:  “Anything.”  Immediately Lucy thought of the easiest piece in her repertoire, something she had long been playing on her own (with the delicious thrill of thinking, “Zoltán doesn’t even know about this”).  It was an easy arrangement of the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman – simple yet sensuous, a gondola-rocking, lazily erotic melody evocative of endless sundrenched Venetian afternoons.  Oh Lord, how Lucy tried to bring it to life.  I could feel the physical effort involved in her attempts to transfuse my inanimate wood with the pulse of life.  Zoltán continually cautions her not to try so hard – this isn’t a resuscitation effort! – but Lucy still appears to do everything with last-ditch intensity.

     So she practiced like a fiend for weeks, with a schmaltzy recorded orchestral accompaniment playing in the background (hiding, she hoped, a multitude of flaws).  Kate got a little sick of hearing it.  Lucy even forced herself to watch her still-stiff self in a full-length mirror as she practiced, noticing how right Zoltán was in his comments about her continuing rigidity.  And thus, that rigidity grew somewhat less.  Then she did something extraordinarily brave – she taped herself and listened to it carefully.  By carefully, I mean avoiding the very real temptation to retch at her rawness of tone.  I was happily surprised to find that along with the multitude of things she found wrong, she did notice she was doing a few things right.  As the result of this listening, she forced herself to tighten up her embryonic vibrato, which up until that point had sounded like an elderly contralto wobble.  Her sound is gradually getting younger, but it is only because she is finding the courage to be rigorously self-critical.

     Then she did something even nervier – she played the piece for a few friends from her church who had come over to her place for tea.  A captive audience!  She knew that if she could survive one play-through with these kind and (thankfully) fairly musically uninformed souls, she could make it through her big moment on Saturday.  Then she went out and bought herself a new dress for the occasion, remembering David’s advice:  “Presentation is important.  Always look as professional as you sound.”

     Lucy was fairly far down on the program, a surprise to her, as Zoltán said his less-advanced students usually played first.  It was no surprise, however, that most of the students who played ahead of her were kids.  The audience was made up of proud parents, a few aunts and uncles, and Kate.  Kid after kid got up on the little stage and essayed pieces technically far in advance of Lucy’s simple Barcarolle. But she noticed something about most of them – a strange dearth of musicality, a lack of maturity, which meant that their performances consisted of playing a series of notes.  And as even Lucy realizes, that’s not what music is.  She was also surprised to find that tonally, she was the best one there.  Bad as she sometimes sounds to herself, she is improving, due to a precise ear and a passion for good sound.  All those hours, nay, years of listening to the best violinists in the world have both tortured her and instilled in her a deep feeling for what good violin sound is.  Some of the others don’t yet have that awareness; some never will.

     When she completed her three-minute ordeal a huge wash of relief bathed her soul; then she allowed herself to enjoy the quite enthusiastic applause.  Zoltán mentioned to the crowd that she had started violin only a year ago, then added, “Now you know best time to start.”  Lucy sat there glowing as in the warm bask of post-orgasm, realizing she had broken a kind of barrier.  Kate snapped a picture of Zoltán with his arm around Lucy (they are exactly the same height) in which they grinned like conspirators, or at least very good friends.  Lucy put the photo in her violin book, where she looks at it often, wanting to remember and savor the intensity of that one sweet moment.

     So now will come the lazier season of summer, and what remains to be seen is how she will sustain her level of commitment, her passion.  What pulls Lucy down sometimes is the dailiness of life – the endless small routines, the tiresome bodily functions, meals to prepare, messes to clean up – and practicing is part of that dailiness, the discipline.  She tries to find the glory in it when some of it is about as inspiring as cleaning a toilet.  There is nothing I can to do help her here, as virtually everyone, with the exception of a few real prodigies, must learn in the same tedious, repetitive way.  So Lucy brushes her teeth, does the laundry, practices; grocery shops, eats and sleeps, practices.  She breathes in and breathes out.  Sometimes her soul thinks it can remember a timeless time, a bodyless time, a life free of the bondage of the material world.  But a violin is quintessentially material.  It’s part of what keeps Lucy anchored.  She thinks of her hero Thomas Merton in the Trappist seminary enduring years of disciplined prayer and ascetic living, and practices, hoping that if she honors the practice, inspiration will some day

follow after.

  DAVID’S JOURNAL

     3:52 a.m.   Can’t sleep.  Haven’t slept all week.  If I do sleep, dreams of Leslie force their way in. 

Oboe is all that is left of my objectivity.  Playing transports me

 to a better place.  Very little

 understanding of this in the real world.  Thus I am viewed very strangely.  

To me, it is the rest of the

 world that is strange.  Leslie underwent another course of shock treatments last week.  ECT, they call

 it.  Give it three initials and it’s respectable,

 and no longer barbaric.  Did she go crazy for all of us? 

Lucy had a crazy brother Andrew, but he died.  Do they all die?  Lucy thinks he’s still around, a guiding

 presence.  Is she out of her mind too?  

Will Zoë’s baby be as crazy as all the rest of my family, a

 defective gene which I will inadvertently pass along?  Need to keep focused.  Must practice.  My

 students all thick as planks.  Drank too much the other night; lost a couple of hours, a complete blank. 

Must watch it.  Am behaving like Lucy before her so-called

 epiphany.  No cohesion any more.  None of

 my students learning anything. 

I cannot instill a burning desire to play the oboe.  Weight down to 158. 

Lucy wants to be my mother.  Or maybe to mother

 the whole world.  Must find the source of all this.  In

 six more months my son will be born.  What sense is left?

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.  This is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and think.  My

 skin is still prickling all over and my scalp is on fire, as if I’ve had some sort of electric shock.

     Last night I had to take David to Emergency after what looked to me like some kind of botched suicide attempt.  He’s denying it all over the place, of course.  No, he says to me, I wasn’t trying to off myself, I was just making reeds and the knife slipped.  He has this knife, see – God, this is so bizarre – it’s razor-sharp, quite heavy, and shaped sort of like a miniature hatchet, meant to grind down oboe reeds to the proper paper-thinness.  What I’d like to know is what he was doing making reeds at 4 o’clock in the morning in the first place.  Told me he couldn’t sleep.  Actually it was on my answering machine, this strange disembodied hollow voice saying, “Lucy. Lucy.  You have to come.  There’s no one else.”

      Normally I would have slept right through it.   But something made me wake up when the phone rang and go to the machine.  My stomach turned over.  I couldn’t get him to make any sense at all on the phone but he kept on saying, “There’s blood all over the place,” which threw me into a panic.  “For God’s sake, call an ambulance!” I told him.  But he wouldn’t.  “You have to come.” 

     “David, it’s at least a 45-minute drive.  What did you do to yourself?” 

     “Just a cut.  But I need you here.  There’s no one else.”

     “David, are you sober?”
     “I swear I am.  I need you here.”

     So I got in the car at 4:12 in the bloody morning, got to his place about 5:00, and found him sitting there in his studio in a pair of black silk boxer shorts (the man never ceases to surprise me), with a big piece of black tape holding his leg together, looking dazed.  Apparently he had been making reeds because he couldn’t get to sleep and dropped the goddamned knife on his right leg, where it stuck, the end of the blade lodged deep in the flesh of his thigh.  He pulled it out and sat there watching it bleed for a while (he swore it didn’t hurt, not until later anyway), panicked, called me, then recovered himself sufficiently to try to stop the bleeding with a piece of duct tape.  I swear I’m not making this up.

     Somehow or other I put clothes on him, got him calmed down (slipped him a 25-mg. Mellaril which put him in a meek state almost immediately), and got him into Emergency where I had to do quite a bit of explaining.  Surprisingly, maybe because of the Mellaril, David was able to hold himself together enough to appear almost normal, while they asked him all sorts of questions and sewed his thigh back together with what looked like black fishing line.  I think maybe they were considering putting him in the psychiatric ward, that is until one of the doctors mentioned, “There’s no beds” (triggering a hideous flashback of what it used to be like for me to spend night after night after night on a cot in Emergency waiting for a goddamned bed in psych.)  At one point a nurse asked me if my friend had been depressed lately and I wasn’t sure what to tell her.  Is he any more depressed  these days than usual?

     Round about 6:30 a.m. I dropped him off at his place where he plunged into an immediate deep sleep, cleaned up his bloody mess of an apartment (I never thought one of the responsibilities of friendship was cleaning up their spilled blood), fed the cats, drove home, noticed it was already time to get up and started my day, such as it was, in a state of total frazzle.  When I phoned him this afternoon he seemed calm, a little too calm for comfort, practically acting like the whole thing didn’t happen.   I know that’s everybody’s favorite coping device, but I’m sorry, it just doesn’t cut the mustard with me.  I kept asking him how he was feeling and he acted as if  I was speaking a foreign language.  “A little sore.”  “No, I don’t mean that!”  Men are supposed to be from Mars but I think this one is from Pluto or something, he can be so far removed from the world of feelings.  I know bad things have been happening with Leslie but that’s hardly anything new.  Just try to get him to talk about any of it now.  What bothered me most is that he didn’t feel there was anyone else he could call.  Is he that lonely?  Or am I that big a sucker for someone in pain?  Or (the most likely possibility) both?

  ANDREW

     If people knew all the advantages of being dead, there might very well be a huge rush on knives, guns, hoses to pipe carbon monoxide into the car, and so on.  The supreme irony is that, while it’s pretty sublime to be dead, human beings always want to hang on to life – for dear life.  Anyone who has been even remotely successful at living will hold onto life beyond reason, beyond quality, beyond even hope.  And that’s only right, for being “alive”, being deeply mired in a ponderous bag of flesh, is a gift beyond price.

     Believe it or not, even with all the freedoms of being dead, there are things I miss about the bag of flesh.  The senses.  Naturally we have music over here, but it’s different.  I miss blowing into the flute, the  sense of my breath creating a sound that has the power to move other people.  I miss ordinary things like sweating and cooling off.  I miss the visceral joy of laughter, the really helpless kind where you’re falling out of your chair at the absurdity of it all.  The disembodied retain their sense of humor (since humor is, after all, divine), but sometimes we miss the helpless, teary-eyed, belly-shaking laughter of mortality.

     I’d laugh over Lucy, or I’d cry, but I prefer to watch, with a degree of perspective far beyond anything she’ll attain in this life.  Detachment isn’t her thing.  It never was mine, either, until I passed over.  God, what a relief it can be to be free of the flesh!  The schizophrenia is gone, for one thing.  The pigs have been driven over the side of the cliff, Biblically speaking.  I’m no longer burdened with the faulty wiring that caused such bent thoughts, such paranoia.  I can see clearly now for the first time.

     I can pull back and back and back from the spiderweb-network of my sister’s complicated life and see the entire picture, all the circles within circles that make up her sphere of influence.  I can see, quite literally see, warm red-velvet ties of love from Lucy’s big cracked heart to her daughter Kate, to her best friend Monika, and even to this poor befuddled David who doesn’t even know yet that what he wants isn’t to die, but to live in an entirely new way.  (This is also known as being “suicidal”.  How differently we view things here.)

     I can see compassionate waves rippling off Lucy like the subtle wake of a dropped stone, lapping gently up against the ones she so loves and hates, her AA comrades, her beloved violin teacher, her friends at church who with all their human limitations have a kind of Quakerish dignity, and a quiet respect for Lucy based on all she has lived through, and all that she is today.  How wrong she is to feel so misunderstood.

How many lifetimes it takes to grow up.

     Lucy and Kate share a secret philosophy that binds them together – the “I’m- surrounded-by-idiots” syndrome that makes them feel they are head and shoulders above anyone else they know, at least in intellect.  Maybe they have a point, in that high intelligence doesn’t grow on trees.  But it’s very isolating.  Some of the less intellectually-endowed types Lucy hangs out with (and secretly makes fun of) are light-years ahead of her in wisdom, patience and kindness.  She’ll have to come back a few more times, for sure, though the very idea of reincarnation would cause her to sniff:  “Well, where does that leave the Kingdom of Heaven?”

     How I wish I could get it across to her, breathe it into her ear, what Jesus was trying so desperately to convey during that ludicrously short time in his bag of flesh.  He was trying to pitch the unpopular notion to his rather thick disciples that heaven and hell are not “places” so much as states of being; that they depend on the purity of one’s connectedness (or lack of it) with God.  Not only that – these states can be willed, decided upon, chosen.  People do it all the time.  I did.  I chose my own hell, made my own prison, tailored to fit me perfectly, aided and abetted by “circumstance” which is only another aspect of our own selected lessons.  If people had any idea to what extent they create their own circumstances, they’d shriek with shock.  Lucy is masterful at creating hell and is now becoming fairly adept at reversing the process, but has not yet quite caught on as to how to create bliss.  Yes, create.  She can make heaven happen for herself any time she decides she is ready.  Moreover, her creation of the Kingdom of Heaven in her own heart and mind will have an extravagantly healing affect on all the people she bumps up against, embraces, loves and hates.  They too will one day decide to “go to heaven”, or discover that “heaven” is ripe and ready to burst within their own hearts.

     The closest Lucy comes to bliss now is gamely playing pieces which she knows are one step beyond her, Rubinstein’s schmaltzy but lovely Melody in F or Raff’s Cavatine, losing her towering ego in the totally enthralling process of making music.  She will forget she is an “incest survivor” (and oh, how unfortunately humans have branded themselves with these all-too-limiting labels) and an “alcoholic” (yet another poison tag).  She will even forget for an instant that she is a human being who sweats and farts and cries and bleeds and digests and excretes.  She will taste the fact that an incandescent dove made of pouring vaporous light nests in the grubby, gutty cave of her mere physical being, and come to the profound realization that she is more angel than ape.  Already.  Not after she dies, but right now.  The Kingdom of God is here, Lucy!  - right here – and now I see Jesus pointing at her chest, his beautiful earnest eyes blazing with fanatical passion, while Lucy looks as startled as if she has just received a huge electric shock.  Which she has.  If I can’t get the Jesus-message through to her, perhaps her violin can, for the violin is a subtle spirit, full of subversive power and haunting persistence.  That persistence is important.  If Jesus could be so gut-stubborn that he flatly refused to die, why should any of us even believe in the concept of death?  To think we die – what a joke!  The last laugh will be God’s!

 ZOË

     I am fat.  No, I mean I am huge.  Cassie keeps on at me about how I should be gaining more, but it’s still only early in the second  trimester and I’m already up seven pounds.  I have this thing like a canteloupe sticking out of my stomach, this growth, unbelievably hard and firm.  I always thought a pregnant stomach would feel like jelly or something.  The womb isn’t such a soft place after all.

     We haven’t decided yet if we want to find out the sex.  Why should gender even matter?  Cass is supposed to be such a feminist but I thought “feminism” meant gender equality, not the superiority of the female.  (Isn’t that just reverse sexism?)  I’m sure David would like a son but Cassie tells me he’s in a bad depression now, and I’m thinking, Great.  Just what we need.  Everyone knows depression is genetic, and I had a great-aunt who killed herself at menopause (“accident” my ass), so does that mean I’ll pass depression along to this porr innocent munchkin growing in my gut?  Little No-name will get it from both sides.

     And that’s another thing.  Names.  David might insist on having some sort of a say here and want to call him Dmitri or something (he has a cat named Constanza, after Mozart’s wife, for God’s sake).  And what about last names – Zwierzchowska-Martin or Martin-Zwierschowska?  And will any of this be legal?  How will the poor little bugger handle all that when he tries to write his name in school?  (I got away with Susan Z. for a very long time.) 

     Come to that, if you’re a purist, it should be Zwierzchowski for a boy.  I’m proud of being Polish (well, half) and I don’t want to knuckle under to Cassie’s idea of just giving him “Martin” for a last name, plain as a slice of Wonder Bread, though easy to spell.

     The babe will be born in December, a Sagittarian like Cass, and who knows how the two of them will get along, being so similar in temperament.  And David – just what role is he going to be playing here?  We should have figured all this out before we even decided to do it, but maybe then we never would have gone ahead with it at all.  Better sense would’ve prevailed  Or we’d have adopted a little Somali baby or one with multiple handicaps that no one else wanted.

     Maybe we should’ve just bought a dog and let it go at that.  Trouble is, this place doesn’t allow pets.  When I said that the other night Cass threw an absolute fit and slammed the door.  This baby should be creating a special bond between us but we hardly ever even have sex any more.  I wonder if she still has a secret thing for David?   All her mother-hen instincts have come surging to the fore since he developed this depression.  Maybe I should start working on one.  Might be a way to get a little attention.  I guess the old scars on my wrists don’t count.

     Another thing that bugs me now.  Cass keeps giving me books.  I think it’s a subtle hint that she secretly believes I’m going to make a rotten mother unless I “know myself”.  (But isn’t this kid going to have two mothers?  Why does all the burden fall on me?  Cass of all people should know that biology isn’t destiny.)  She wants me to increase my “self-awareness”and become all introspective and maybe even go see a therapist, for God’s sake, which Cass did for years, and look how much good it did her.  The latest book is called “MOTHER LOAD:  Detoxifying the Mother-Daughter Relationship” , and it’s all about how your only chance of being a good mother yourself is to sort out all the “mother issues” from your past.  It has a checklist for symptoms of “mothering deficiency” which if anything makes me feel sort of sorry for my mother, fucked-up as she was.  Dying of ovarian cancer at age 43 couldn’t have been much fun, now could it?  And she was sick for so many years that it was no wonder she couldn’t take care of us.  Yes, she “neglected my emotional needs”.  Yes, she was “in denial”, pretending the stuff with my Dad wasn’t happening (and the alcoholism, and the psychological abuse, and so on, and so on).  Does it ever occur to the authors of these books that the only way you can fucking survive an environment like that is to deny that there’s anything wrong?  People do what they have to do to get through the day.  I drank and drugged for ten years and was carving up my arms with a razor blade and Mum acted totally oblivious, even in junior high when I grew a pot plant on my bedroom windowsill and went out with married men.  But I got through the day.  I got through.  I’m down to a pack a day, haven’t used in a whole month and only have a few beers when Cassie drives me absolutely bananas with her self-help schemes.  So I’m doing okay.

     At least I think I’m doing okay.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I think:  Jesus God.  I’m gonna have a baby.  A baby!  Will it take one look at me and hate me?  What if it has two heads or a brain outside its skull or something?  And why David for a father?  At first he seemed like a good choice – a close friend of both of us, intelligent, physically fit, tall, nice-looking after a fashion, musically gifted.  Now he’s having some sort of an el foldo emotionally and I’m starting to wonder what sort of genetic baggage we’ve dumped on this kid.  What about the “father load” (which nobody ever writes books about because they’re too busy shagging their mothers)?  Maybe it’s too overwhelming a subject to even touch.  And no wonder.  Look what happened when sexual abuse came out of the closet.  The False Memory Syndrome Foundation!  The Patriarchy Strikes Back!  A whole movement to underline the very thing our mothers were telling us all along:  “Sexual abuse doesn’t happen.”  And look how popular it all became. 

     God bless our mothers.  They’ve always been so far ahead of their time.

   MONIKA

          Haven’t seen Lucy in an age, and wonder whose turn it is to call.  We have to get together to talk about the dreams I’ve been having lately.  Extremely bizarre.  I want to pray to whatever there is, “Send these back.  They’re not doing me any good.”

     First it was about Kate, but in the dream she was only about eight years old and was dragging around a threadbare, frail old doll with shreds of hair and no eyes, that looked like it dated back to ancient Sumeria or something.  Kate stopped at a wishing well and made a wish, but instead of dropping in a penny she threw her doll into the well.  Then realizing what she’d done, she tried frantically to get the doll out, first using a stick, then finally hitting on the idea of lowering the bucket.  But when she pulled the bucket up, it was overflowing with blood that had something alive in it, writhing and squirming around.  She screamed fiercely and I woke up with that scream reverberating in my ears.

     Several months ago something happened with Lucy and Kate, but she’s not talking about it and I’m not asking.  Sometimes it has to be that way in a friendship.  You have to know when to advance and when to retreat.  It’s a sort of dance and I suppose it goes on even when you dance away from each other for awhile.

     The Kate dream was awful enough, but then I had an even weirder one in which Lucy’s friend David was being marched along blindfolded to a guillotine.  There was a huge crowd waiting for his supposed execution, but instead of putting his head in the guillotine he stuck his right leg in there.  I woke up just as the blade was rushing down to lop it off.  There was this fair-haired, frail-looking woman standing beside the guillotine crying, “Mercy!”, and I couldn’t tell who it was.  She reminded me of Laura in Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie”.  I can’t make sense of this one at all.

     What probably bugs me the most is that I’m beginning to feel like a character in Lucy’s movie – her life just seems so much more, how shall I put it, colorful than mine.  I’m even dreaming about her friends and loved ones, for Christ’s sake.   (When I die, will her life flash before my eyes?) I have a life.  It’s pretty basic, but I have one.  I see clients, I meditate, I go to the clubs, I practice my yoga, I try to cut down on smoking and lose weight.  These last two are more than hobbies; they are the central organizing principles of my entire life, it seems.  What I “shouldn’t” be doing.  What I “should” be doing is finding a partner, even someone like Lucy’s Rafe who appears to have wafted back into the beautiful dream from whence he came.

     I wonder however if you “find” a partner at all.  Couldn’t it be equally possible that they find you?  And what about these women who try and try and never get anywhere?  I even came close to putting a personal ad in the Georgia Straight, but better sense prevailed.  I’d probably draw every sick fetishist in town like a veritable magnet.    If it’s meant to happen. . . or so the philosophy goes.  But just what is meant by “meant”?  Are we talking predestination here, a Providence that’s all set up for you even before you take your first breath?  Jesus, I’m beginning to sound like a Presbyterian schoolmarm here.  Which might be okay, because then I could give up sex.  After all, as Lucy says, it might lead to dancing.

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