The adrenaline always kicked in about 10 minutes before 10 — showtime. The little bar would be full, the tables covered in beer bottles, the room swallowed by cigarette smoke as thick as fog. It was all part of the charm, waiting for the band to climb onto the little stage. The anticipation was almost as intense as watching a new lover undress for the first time but the Mickey Roberts Blues Band, unlike some women, never disappointed. Fiery guitars and big thumping bass lines and the syncopated drums would take him places, get him moving, give him goose pimples. What had it been, three, four decades since the first time he took a seat in the back of the 12 Steps Bar & Grill and discovered their brand of blues? It was raw but tasty and addictive and transformative. Man, he came in there any night they were playing, usually four nights a week, three weeks in a row, several times a year, and nothing else mattered. Not what was happening at the paper, not the shallow balance of his bank account, not whatever drama was playing out with a lover. Here with these four or five guys, he would lose himself. Every woman he met, it was their initiation.
“There’s this band playing tonight, Mickey Roberts, you know ‘em? I thought we could grab some dinner and catch a set or two.”
Yes, women came and went, jobs and bosses came and went, problems confounded and aggravated, but the band was there, various combinations, a new drummer, a different guitar player, but somehow the band worked its magic, distilling the blues to its essence, and on those nights in the smoky bar, it was all that mattered. And if the woman he was courting didn’t get it, it was a good indication she wouldn’t be getting him. Music was life, it was his heartbeat, the bass and the drums pumped the blood from the head to his feet, the guitars were the brains, the melody, the soul, the travel agent that booked the flight and away you went. How could anyone not “get it?”
And when there was no women in his life, well, a few evenings listening to the band to the last set, sometimes wandering with them to Chinatown and finishing the evening over fried crab or steamed pork with Chinese sausage and cold beer, was as good as it could get. Trouble was, of course, when he went home and picked up his guitar and strummed a few basic chords, it sounded shit and he would put it aside in disgust, sometimes for months. What was the use?
He discovered with Annie he was behind the curve. Most of the workshop knew her and wanted to impress her. It turned out she was a vedette, a well-known French writer and former radio host, now out of work and looking to write a screenplay.
She, the Paul Theroux of Quebec in a minor key, wrote travel — acerbic, critical, arrogant and determinedly feminist. Her books were not just travelogues, they were dissections from a feminist perspective, her audience small but respectable.
She could speak in paragraphs. There were no circumlocutions peppered with “like, you know, oh my God, really” that was the increasingly common lingua franca of those weaned on the digital nipple.
Her English writing was not as strong. She had problems with syntax. But she sure knew how to talk, a perfect radio voice, didn’t need to come up for air. The workshop basked in her celebrity while he basked in his ignorance of it and her smile.
Evan was busy. Keeping the bank balance inflated meant working nights as an editor at The Gazette and editing a film magazine during the day and working on a play. He had two nights off a week and one of them he was teaching. Danielle was pissed at him for working so much but Danielle was often pissed at him and now, when he locked himself in his office in their renovated rowhouse in Mile End to work or jumped in a cab to go to the paper, he found his thoughts focusing on Annie. Danielle seemed to be less relevant by the day. He was being a bastard but he couldn’t help himself. He was hooked like a trout. She started to sneak into the songs he liked to write on the guitar late at night, thoughts he couldn’t speak he could sing.
“What’s that all about?” Danielle asked, as he picked at the Yamaha, verses floating up from his subconscious.
“Just a song,” he’d say. He didn’t really know where the songs came from or why but he knew what they were about. He had come to terms with the reality of his lacklustre musical talent. He was never going to be a guitar player. But he could write rhymes and in the guitar there were melodies that offered themselves. In the guitar and the songs he was writing was escape. Poetic? Doubtful. Poignant? At least to him. Addictive? Absolutely. No editors or publishers to intrude. His songs were his own and TV and movies and magazines and who was hot and who was not, mattered not a damn. He just kept cranking out songs. It was a disease.
Evan thought it was only fair to make a night or two of it when he had an evening off so he took Danielle to her favourite restaurant, Paris Beurre, where she liked the sweet breads and he did the giblets. They shared a little wine and soon she was on his case.
“You hardly have any free time and you book a lunch with Allison, you don’t even ask me what I’m doing next week.”
“I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. He was tired. The long shifts on the desk were killing him. But not as tired as this argument over why he didn’t spend all his free time with her. “It’s next week for Chrissakes.”
“I hate that fucking job,” Danielle said, twirling her wine glass, something she did only after she crossed the line from sobriety to anger. It usually took two glasses and a bit. “You never asked me about it, you just took it and I have to spend all my nights alone.”
He wanted to tell her if she had friends she wouldn’t have to be alone but he didn’t. He could be an asshole but he didn’t want to be cruel.
“Nothing is written that I have to check my work choices with you. I love newspapers. It was a great chance to get back in.” He could’ve said he used to love newspapers ‘cause where he was working was a far cry from what a newspaper used to be. He remembered when he started out as a feature writer. There was a day desk and a night desk. Editors took the time to talk to you. Writers had the time to research, write and rewrite. The newsroom was thick with cigarette smoke and the clack of typewriters and the jangle of phones. Now the only noise was your heart thrumming from caffeine as you raced to push the pages out, no time to talk to anyone.
“Look, the lunch is next week, can we just enjoy tonight?” Evan asked, knowing there was no chance.
“Sure, if you say so,” she said, talking with the glass hung on her lower lip, another sign she would soon be radioactive. “Let’s always do what Evan says, what Evan wants. My feelings have no importance. It’s always about you. Why should you care that I spend every night by myself.”
“Make some fucking friends,” he said. And he was off. God, he was tired of this. “My criminal lunch is not until next week. This is my night off, we’re out at a great restaurant. Can we just be here now, kind of thing?”
“Of course, Mr. Evan, anything you want, isn’t that the rule? You want to work nights, who gives a shit Danielle is home staring at the walls? You want to have lunch with Allison, Danielle can just go screw herself. That’s what I have to do anyways.”
“You know what? You can go screw yourself,” Evan said, standing, reaching into his pocket. “Sit here and argue with yourself.” He dropped five twenties on the table. Inside he was laughing at the gesture, too clichéd to make it into a script, he would’ve told the workshop. “Have another bottle of Bordeaux. I’m going to enjoy my night off.”
He left Danielle at the table, sipping wine. Yeah, Annie had him hooked.
Thought about her all week and after the second session he skipped down the stairs to track her to where her bike was locked. Seemed to take her a long time to get that lock pacified.
“How about dinner? We could discuss your script,” he said. They both knew he didn’t give a shit about her script.
Staring at the bottom of the glass, wondering if he should pour another finger or two, he remembered she probably ate the salmon, that’s what she usually ate and that he let her do most of the talking and she was fine with that. She talked about her radio adventures in a little Radio Canada studio that was without air or natural light, a magazine she worked on without a budget or readers, a little television that she worried showed her age flagrantly, her books which sold poorly but paid the bills thanks to grants and lecture fees and a lot of travel.
She liked flying, the airlines pampered her, the hotels pampered her, she hobnobbed with ambassadors and consular officials and here and there a head of state or two. But she was used to that, she said, shrugging. She was born to upper echelon public servants, raised in the good life in various embassies and consulates in Italy, the Soviet Union, Colombia. Had a full-time travelling nanny who taught her three languages. She was raised on a set of sterling silver spoons.
“I don’t tell too many people that,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I usually say I learned Spanish and Russian and Greek travelling. But it was my nanny. She had worked all over and spoke to me in a different language every minute.”
“Must’ve been nice. You stay in touch?”
“No. I don’t know where she is. I went off to college out west and my father died and I guess my mother let her go. I guess she’s dead now. I don’t know.”
In a way they were both orphans, his parents irrelevant, hers dead, and they had left the Mother Corp., the CBC, behind. Evan had checked out of the chattering classes two decades ago. He had produced a current affairs show on CBC radio for a few years and found it a mad rush to fill airtime, one guest as good as another, with minor variations, shovelling coal into a giant tireless locomotive, a constant chattering machine. Where else but live radio do you have to worry about two seconds? Maybe when you’re launching a space shuttle.
She still liked the radio microphone, the platform from which to add her pennies to the deluge of endless opinion that increasingly filled low-budget, no-budget radio and TV. He had seen the sausage being made and had lost the appetite for it. He saw no reason to spoil hers.
No, she wasn’t full of herself, a rare trait among media types, at least not that night in a dark corner of a little French bistro he frequented when the occasion called for a dark corner, candlelight and a bottle of wine. Romance was his drug, one of many, not the least destructive, and the crash and hangover was right up there on the Richter scale. But he was ready to go all in. Sharing a moment, a table, a bed, it was all good. What else was there, except for maybe finding the groove on a new song?
“I can tell you’re a journalist,” she said. “You’re asking all the questions and I’m the radio host, doing all the talking.”
Evan filled her in on himself, mindful the clock was ticking and Danielle was at home, waiting. Yes, he started working newspapers when he was in his 20s and went on to make documentary films and edited magazines and produced public radio and wrote a few feature films and stumbled into the theatre after he went back to work at the paper.
“I write songs, too, for fun, on the guitar, four-chord stuff,” he said.
“Do you perform?”
“No one would want me to, believe me.”
Evan told her he preferred editing stories to writing them. How many words had he written in his 25 years of banging on a keyboard? He preferred the control room to the studio, being in the audience to being on the stage, singing songs around the kitchen table to no one or for Danielle. Performing held no temptation.
Annie and he seemed right then, with only an inch remaining in the wine bottle. They were a perfect media match, they knew a lot of the same people. “How come we never met before?”
He didn’t want the night to end. Here was the future, he told himself. How could they fail?
The recession had high-priced men all around him falling like trees in a forest being clear cut, while businesses held tight to women over 50. They were in no danger of getting pregnant, their kids were grown and they worked cheap. Free Trade deals were a bonanza for the venture capitalists and the factory owners. Promises that free trade and the flow of goods would create jobs were bullshit. Unions were decimated, factories emptied, salaries slashed, men found themselves at McDonald’s, drinking $1 coffees as their wives went to work. The gender over 50 was being put to pasture.
But Evan was hanging in, making enough to give the impression of being a successful artist. Staying in shape by wrecking his back on the squash court, lifting some weights, riding his bike. To him, he was scratching and clawing to hold onto everything, each play a nightmare, the magazine a brothel, the newspaper an assembly line where they kept cranking up the speed. His dalliances with the women that had succumbed to his charms — or had he succumbed to theirs — had shown he had market value. But Evan saw the cracks in the tent poles holding up his facade. He was under no illusion. A good storm could wash his life away.
Then, inebriated enough to ignore he had a woman waiting at home and knowing there would be lies to tell, they went for a walk around the block, just to be together, to avoid ending the evening. It almost seemed he should take her hand. He wanted to, but he didn’t. But he knew. He wanted Annie. And she wanted him. He could feel it.
He drove Annie and her bike home, sat in the car as she wheeled it through her front door and waved to him.
“I went home and smoked a cigarette in the backyard,” Annie told him later. “I knew my life was going to change.”
The next week after the workshop he had to pick up his cat, Fritz, boarded at his son’s house. Evan and Danielle had flown to Nova Scotia to visit his father. The old man spent his time in front of the TV or the newspaper and resented leaving his armchair so Evan spent much of the time thinking of Annie even as he slogged through the rain and the mud of the Bay of Fundy at low tide, his clothes stuck to his skin, his mind stuck on her while Danielle waited and watched from the car. She didn’t like getting wet.
The tides in the Bay made the world tilt but she didn’t care. He marched through the red ooze, hoping wind, rain and cold would cleanse his guilt or clarify his confusion. All it did was saturate his clothes.
The trip had been dark; there was little to say to Danielle and less to say to his father who was riveted to Murder She Wrote and a string of antiquated shows and whatever sport was on in the evening.
“I have my breakfast and then I take my blood pressure pills and go back to sleep and then I read the papers and I like my programs that start at one so there’s no point coming before 4 o’clock,” his father told them.
Hmm, if only he had known that before he dropped $4,000 on airplane tickets, rent-a-car and hotel. All he wanted to do was get home. Really all he wanted to do was see Annie. He felt like a two-faced, lying asshole, which made sense ‘cause he was. He took comfort yelling into the wind: “You’re seriously fucked up.” But the great Bay of Fundy didn’t give a rat’s ass. Somehow, he thought of Annie as a last chance at happiness with a woman. Someone to grow old with.
He wanted an end to Danielle’s anger, drinking, neediness, condemnation. Yes, she loved him, but the price was high. Annie had a life, a career, had it together. She would be the final piece of the great puzzle of his life. There would be happiness there. He deserved it, didn’t he?
Annie was again fiddling with her bike lock when he asked if she’d like to drive over with him and pick up Fritz, maybe have a bite and then he’d drop her and her bike home.
“Sure,” she said.”
In the narrow hallway of his son’s apartment, Fritz came to him, about 18 lbs of furry Maine Coon, as faithful as a dog. Evan lifted him up, his hand under his butt and hoisted him so he could rest his front paws on his shoulder and purr in his ear. Sometimes he liked to wrap himself around his neck like a collar and ride around on his shoulders.
“When I saw your big hands on Fritz, I knew I wanted them on me,” Annie said many times, a wistfulness in her voice. She loved his hands, always worried when he wasn’t wearing gloves. “Your hands are so warm,” she said over and over again. “I love your hands on me.” And she had no problem taking his hands and placing them exactly where she wanted.