Sweeter Life Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2002 TIM WYNVEEN

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2002 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Random House Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Wynveen, Tim

  Sweeter life / Tim Wynveen.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36625-2

  I. Title.

  PS8595.Y595S94 2002 C813′.54 C2002-901709-2

  PR9199.3.W97S94 2002

  Sweeter Life is a work of fiction. Most names, places, characters, and events are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. In those few instances when the author mentions real persons and reported events, it is within a similarly fictionalized context and should not be construed as fact.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To Penny and Terry

  We talk because we are mortal. —Octavio Paz

  And because we aren’t gods,

  or close to gods,

  we sing.

  —Donald McKay

  Another Gravity

  Fling the emptiness out from

  your arms

  into the spaces we breathe: maybe the birds will

  feel the thinner air with a more inward flight.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke,

  The Duino Elegies

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Silence

  Words and Music Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mind and Heart Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Nerves and Blood

  Acknowledgements

  { SILENCE }

  Imagine the scene in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952. John Cage, that most puzzling of American composers, has come to the Maverick Concert Hall for the first public performance of what will become his most famous, and infamous, work. He is forty years old, with angular features and dark hair and a dazzle of laughter in his eyes. He is pretty much unknown outside a small circle of intellectuals, and, even among that select group, some question the value of his work. His Music of Changes, for example, based on the random toss of coins, created more confusion than pleasure when it debuted the previous year.

  But picture him there at the Maverick in a dark checked suit, with a white shirt open at the collar. He stands serenely backstage, tapping neither his fingers nor his foot as the crowd files into the hall.

  They have come on this overcast summer evening to support the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund and are prepared for an evening of challenging music. The performances will vary, with works by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Pierre Boulez. Cage’s newest composition, 4′33″, will be the second-last selection on the evening’s program, followed only by The Banshee, written by Henry Cowell. The young pianist David Tudor is the featured performer.

  Cage is pleased with the choice of venue. The back of the hall opens on the surrounding forest, and he can feel the humidity of the summer night and hear the occasional breeze sweep through the trees outside. He is so excited by the possibilities that, when the concert begins, he pays little attention. Instead he thinks about sources and directions, where his music has come from and where it is likely to go. He knows he will be asked how he came to write a piece such as 4′33″, and he wonders how better to explain that time, not pitch, lies at the heart of music, seeping into our consciousness with every pulse of our mothers’ blood, and that time, the sad half of Einstein’s universe, is what we are born to sing.

  When Tudor walks onstage, he is holding Cage’s handwritten score and a small stopwatch. He sits behind the grand piano and arranges his music. Grave and graceful, he lowers the fallboard, the double-hinged cover that protects the keys, then clicks the small button of his timepiece. He sits motionless. He makes no sound. After exactly thirty seconds, he clicks the stopwatch and raises the fallboard to reveal once again the eighty-eight keys. He fills his lungs with air. He takes a moment to compose himself.

  The second movement begins in the same way, with the lowering of the keyboard cover. This middle movement is much longer and requires Tudor to turn the pages of the score. He pays no attention to the growing uneasiness of the crowd. Again he makes no sound.

  A third movement and still he sits, silent as a mime, dark with concentration. The nervous muttering in the hall grows to a howl of outrage by the end of the piece and Tudor’s departure from the stage after exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. And remember, the audience is comprised of people who cherish the arts, who relish the cutting edge. Even so, they believe, almost without exception, that Cage has gone too far.

  The creator hears something quite different that day. Instead of silence, Cage notices the sound of wind in the trees, the complicated rhythms of rain on the roof, the audience chattering like small birds. And he is pleased. It is the embodiment of an idea that came to him a year before.

  On a whim, he had dropped by a Harvard lab, their anechoic chamber—what others referred to as “the dead room.” It was, he’d been told, a scientific marvel, a chamber of utter stillness. In that muffled womb of sculpted foam and baffles, he hoped to experience a silence both perfect and profound. Instead he heard two distinct sounds that day, one high and one low: the thrumming of his nervous system and blood, he was later told, a lesson that would change his music entirely and lead him to 4′33″.

  Because life knows nothing of silence. Between nerves and blood a song will emerge. Between mind and heart a life will flow. Between words and music a story will unfold.

  { WORDS and MUSIC }

  ONE

  Seagulls huddled in a field, querulous and surreal in the misty morning light. As a tractor approached, they rose into the air in waves, a reluctant cloud of grey and white flecked here and there with yellow beak and black stripe. When they settled moments later on the freshly tilled soil, they knew immediately that something important had passed among them, that the earth beneath their feet had been altered, made new again.

  The wind gathered strength off the lake, scattering the last tatters of fog and dancing the branches of the willow where red-winged blackbirds sang of springtime and distant travel. Beneath the tree, near the edge of the irrigation pond, Cyrus Owen sat with his Labrador retriever, Blackie, and waited for the sun to clear the top of the corncrib by the barn. That would be the signal to head back to the house.

  Cyrus, a nineteen-year-old farm boy, was lean and muscular from his share of chores. His s
houlder-length blond hair danced in every gust of wind, his eyes never straying from the tractor as it crossed the field. There was an edginess about him, a youthful intensity that some might call a sense of purpose.

  To watch him as he sat there—really, to see him anywhere, at school, at home—you would never notice that he was born without a ring finger on his left hand. It was not a big deal for him anymore. He had long ago worked out most of his difficulties, both physical and emotional, and seldom gave it a thought. Even so, as a matter of habit, he tended to stand with his left hand in his pocket, or to sit with his fist stuck between his legs. It wasn’t a conscious thing on his part, but a residual pose from a more insecure time in his life.

  He sat that way now, on a tree stump, his left hand nestled in his lap. He had come to the old place looking for inspiration, a word on the breeze, say, a pattern in the clouds. But there was nothing, or perhaps too much to make sense of. The house had pretty much gone to hell, rented to a meaty-looking biker with a thunderous Harley and a gaunt, freckled girlfriend. The barn was unpainted, showing great gaps in its weathered sides. The coop had burned down years ago. And there was the pain, same as ever, that it wasn’t his father but Benny Driscoll working those fields, using that tractor.

  Cyrus scratched the dog behind the ear and Blackie leaned his head back, nose pointed to the sky, his tongue lolling. The dog had fetched without fail, marked innumerable trees and fence posts, and sat now with the one who didn’t kick him, the one who didn’t smack his nose with a rolled newspaper, the one who talked to him and played with him and lifted the edge of the covers at night to let him crawl into bed. Cyrus wished he could be as content as Blackie to sit and let the world roll by. How easy it would be to have no special feeling for the future or the past, to take things as they were and never expect more.

  He reached down with his right hand and picked up a large stone, one that covered his entire palm. He squeezed it rhythmically, an exercise he had read about in a magazine (as though it was physical strength he needed just now and not courage). His problem, what had him huddled out here before sunrise, was that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do with his life; or rather, he had decided but didn’t know if he had the nerve. He had tallied lists of pros and cons, worked out rough calculations, expenses, elaborate economies of favour and obligation that might see him through a rough spot now and again—but he still hadn’t made the leap.

  As the tractor reached the far end of the flat, black field and made a wide turn back toward the seagulls, Cyrus got to his feet and, with a grunt of frustration, heaved the rock, watching it smack the muddy bank and then roll below the duckweed and out of sight. Right on cue, Blackie struggled up and padded toward the pond. There, leaning carefully over the bank, the dog lowered its head beneath the surface of the water. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds passed, until the dog began to tremble with the strain, a quiver that gradually became more pronounced and centred itself near the neck and shoulder area.

  “Black,” he called to the dog, “cut it out now. That’s enough, Black.”

  And when the old Lab lifted its head from the water and backed slowly away from the pond, Cyrus laughed, a single quack. The dog, shuddering like an Olympic weightlifter, had its jaws clamped around the stone, which it carried over and dropped with a thud at Cyrus’s feet.

  The boy winced at the thought of his own teeth grinding on stone, and said, “You are one stupid dog.” Then he pulled up the collar of his faded denim jacket, scant defence against the chill wind, and he and the dog walked slowly across the fields, climbing all the way up to a small orchard on the ridge. From that vantage he turned once again and looked down at the scattering of poor farms along the Marsh Road, with the lake waiting on one side, and on the other the deeper reaches of the marsh itself. Finally, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, he followed the dog along the lane to the large brick farmhouse that was now their home.

  Upstairs in his room he picked up his guitar, an old Harmony archtop, and folded himself around it, breathing in the perfume of wood and lemon oil and, above that, the slightly sour tang of the pickup and strings. Quietly he fingered a few of his favourite songs, melodies he could count on to lighten his mood. He should have known better than to go out to the old place. Even at the best of times, it made him feel like a stranger in his own life.

  When it was time for school, he found Ruby Mitchell sitting at the kitchen table with tea and toast, not really listening to the CBC. She was still in her housecoat but had her face on, such as it was. She was not his mother but his aunt. Most times that scarcely mattered.

  “You were up early,” she said.

  Cyrus looked at the wall clock and then back out to the rolling rows of apple trees. “Went down to the marsh with Blackie. Needed to do some thinking.”

  She took a tiny bite of bread, marvelling that he could stand to be outside with a light jacket and nothing but a thin T-shirt underneath. It was April, but the wind still carried the memory of winter.

  The voice on the radio rumbled on about Nixon and the Paris Peace Talks, the Calley trial; and Ruby rose slowly and turned the damn thing off. Too depressing, really, an entire history of loss. All those young boys. All that bombing.

  “I have to shop,” she said. “I could drive you into town.”

  He made a grumbling sound and stared down at his well-worn Keds. “I’m up. I’ll walk. Maybe it’ll clear my head.” Then he grabbed an apple and moved to the door. But before he could make his escape she touched his shoulder, turning him around until she was looking into his pale blue eyes.

  “Whatever it is,” she said, “will work out.” She slipped a folded piece of paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. Running her hand through the cool silk of his hair, she said, “Isabel’s coming for dinner. Try to be on time. I think she wants to give you the benefit of her sisterly wisdom.”

  They both laughed at that, and he promised to be home for dinner. He was down the steps and halfway across the lawn before he dug the paper from his pocket. It was a blank cheque with her signature. Not from the farm account—those cheques were always calculated to the penny—but from her personal account, her “mad money” as she liked to call it, as if she had ever had an irrational moment in her life. Wrapped around the cheque was a sheet of her memo paper, wildflowers all along the border.

  Buy yourself something nice for graduation. Don’t want you looking like a farmer.

  Love,

  Ruby.

  He looked at the house and shoved the cheque back into his pocket, trying to imagine himself in a new suit and tie. Then he turned and walked into the wind, his shoulders hunched, his head down.

  RUBY WATCHED CYRUS scoot out the door and away. Then she slipped into the laundry room off the kitchen and peered out the low windows to see her husband, Clarence, moving around in the packing shed, looking worn out before the season was even properly underway. A brush with cancer was reason enough to feel tired and anxious, of course; but now he had something else to worry him. He was suddenly convinced that this boy who wasn’t his son had decided against a life on the farm.

  Ruby had guessed as much the moment she set eyes on Cyrus wriggling in his mother’s arms. He was a softy, a cuddler and a dreamer. But Clarence, even with his college education, his history books and fancy magazines, never had a clue. That it had taken him all this time to recognize the fact gave Ruby no satisfaction. She was not one to gloat about such things—her gift for divination, her natural grasp of the heart’s varied languages. Rather, these talents made her more understanding of a husband torn by competing terrors: one, that Cyrus would someday soon walk away from the farm; the other, that he, Clarence, out of his love for the land and the solid kind of life it could provide, would say something, do something, to make this boy stay where he didn’t belong, deflect him from whatever true path might be revealed to him.

  This fear of terrible mistakes, of stepping beyond one’s rightful duty, was something Ruby well understood. They had
all made enough mistakes for one lifetime. And Clarence would be the first to admit he had made his share. It was laughable, when she thought about it, a man perfectly attuned to the slightest fluctuations in weather, to the rhythms of the agricultural life—and really such a sweet and intelligent man, who nearly every week had a thoughtful letter in The Wilbury Gazette—yet so completely out of sync with the nature of his loved ones.

  Oh, he tried his best. Ruby had lost count of the times he had come to her seeking forgiveness, guidance, some key to the inner workings of family life. And no question, things had changed for the better. How could they not? They had all been caught flat-footed in the beginning. No time to prepare. No option but to just grab hold of each other and run like heck. In fact, it was only now, with Cyrus nineteen years old, that she and Clarence were becoming the kind of parents they should have been from the beginning. Small consolation for Isabel, who had bolted at the first opportunity. And no help at all for poor Hank.

  Just the thought of Cyrus’s older brother made Ruby clutch the locket around her neck and close her eyes, remembering the Owens’ lopsided house, the barn, the chicken coop that stood partway into the field. She remembered a day she had visited, had to be ten, twelve years ago. Riley was plowing concentric circles around the coop, and Catherine, Ruby’s younger sister, a tiny wisp of a thing, stared into the distance and said, “There are times, honest to God, when I could tear down that coop with my bare hands.”

  It always hurt to see Catherine that way, the stooped shoulders and jittery leg, and Ruby knew very well her brother-in-law was to blame, not the chicken coop. For all his hard work, Riley often went at things in a complicated way. Most men did. It was what made them, at heart, so untrustworthy. And Riley’s fixation with that coop was a perfect example, she believed. Oh, no question, men like Clarence and Riley had only the best of intentions, but they too often attached meanings to life that no one else could decipher, causing no end of suffering for those who loved them. Ruby didn’t trust ideas or images or even figures of speech. Painting and poetry and philosophy—they all seemed to her a kind of madness, the kind of dizzying distraction that could only lead to trouble. She felt that people had lost their way in a multitude of reflections, when all they needed was to embrace the true and unequivocal love of Jesus Christ our Saviour.