Leaving the World (52 page)

This rant was delivered in a very loud voice. It silenced everyone around us. All eyes were upon me. Before I knew what was happening, Vern was throwing some money on the table and hustling me out the door. Again he steered me by the arm as we hit the cold. He said nothing, but the lifeguard grip had become that of a cop making an arrest. We turned left up 8th Avenue.

‘There’s always a taxi outside the Palliser,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry. I’m really . . .’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

‘I messed up in there. I . . .’

‘Stop,
please
,’ he said, the tone more worried than angry.

‘All right, all right. Just get me home and . . .’

‘I don’t think you should be left alone.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘That’s not my reading of the situation.’

‘I can handle things.’

Vern said nothing. He just gripped me tighter and pushed me forward. The wind was now cruel, grating any exposed skin. We made it to the Palliser in five minutes, by which point my fingers had so stiffened that it pained me to bend them. There were three cabs outside the hotel. Vern bundled us into one of them and gave the driver an address on 29th Street NW.

‘I live just off 17th Avenue SW,’ I said.

‘We’re not going there.’

‘You hijacking me?’ I asked.

Vern said nothing, but leaned over and locked the door beside me.

‘Trust me: I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle,’ I said.

‘I did once.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘Why?’

He stared down at his hands and spoke slowly.

‘My daughter had just been committed. More to the point, I had signed the papers committing her. After that I went on a seven-day bender. It ended with me jumping out of a moving car. I was hospitalized for three weeks. I broke my left leg. I cracked three ribs. I fractured my jaw. They also put me in a psych ward. I ended up losing my job. It was awful – and I’d rather not see you go through something like that.’

‘I’ve done the psych ward already.’

He registered that with a quiet nod – and we said nothing until we reached 29th Street NW. The cab pulled up in front of a modest split-level bungalow. Vern paid off the driver and got me inside. As we crossed the threshold he hit a light. We were in a hallway – and one which looked like it was last decorated in 1965. There was faded brown floral wallpaper, an old antique coat rack, a side table covered with two lace doilies. (Does anyone still use doilies?) He took my coat and hung it up and told me to make myself at home in the front room.

‘You want to stay with rye?’ he asked.

‘Rye works,’ I said.

The front room was decorated with the same wallpaper and had heavy mahogany-toned furniture similar to the coat rack and the table in the hallway. Again lace covered the headrests on the oversized armchair and the sofa. There was a venerable baby grand piano covered with sheet music and a pair of Tiffany lamps on two end tables. But most conspicuous were the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, all heaving with music texts and thousands of CDs. The CDs were all alphabetized, with little dividers noting major composers. There was also a serious stereo system covering two shelves and two large floor-standing speakers.

Vern came in carrying a tray, on which stood two crystal whiskey glasses, a bottle of Crown Royal, an ice bucket and a small water pitcher. He set the tray down on the coffee table.

‘This room is amazing,’ I said.

‘Always strikes me as rather ordinary.’

‘But the CD collection. There must be over a thousand discs here.’

‘Around eleven hundred,’ he said. ‘The rest are in the basement.’

‘You have more?’

‘Yes. A few.’

‘Can I see?’

Vern shrugged, then pointed his thumb towards a doorway off the living room. He opened it, flipped a switch and I followed him down a narrow set of stairs into . . .

What I saw completely threw me. Because there, in this completely finished basement, was shelf after shelf of CDs, again meticulously organized in library style, with a high-end stereo system connected to two massive speakers. One oversized leather armchair faced these speakers. There was also a large trestle table and a high-back swivel chair, strewn across which were papers, books, a laptop computer – and behind which was a shelf on which rested the entire
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
. The basement felt like both a serious musicological shrine and something of a command center. If Dr Strangelove had been a classical music fiend he would have felt most at home in this subterranean cavern.

‘Good God,’ I said. ‘It’s extraordinary.’

‘Uhm . . . thanks,’ Vern said.

‘Did you buy all the CDs?’

‘Uhm . . . around a quarter of them. The rest . . . well, ever heard of the British magazine
Gramophone
? Or
Stereo Review
in the States? I’ve been reviewing for both of them for around fifteen years.’

‘And this is where you write your reviews?’

‘Yes . . . and also work on . . .’

Again he broke off, not sure if he wanted to share another piece of information with me.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I’m writing a textbook.’

‘But that’s fantastic. Is it commissioned?’

He nodded.

‘Who’s the publisher?’

‘McGraw-Hill.’

‘The biggest textbook publisher in the States. I presume it’s a music textbook?’

‘It’s sort of like the
Oxford Dictionary of Music
– but aimed at high-school students. Potted histories of major composers from Hildegard of Bingen right up to Philip Glass.’

‘How did you land such an amazing gig?’

‘I wrote them a long letter, explaining my background, my teaching experience, my degrees, my writings for various magazines – and also included a pretty extensive outline. Never expected to hear anything from them but, out of the blue, I got this call from an editor there named Campbell Hart. Asked me if I would come to New York to meet him. Even offered me a plane ticket and a hotel room for one night if I’d make the trip. Hadn’t been in New York since . . . Jeez, since I was a university student back in the late sixties.’

‘Where did you go to university?’

‘Toronto – and the Royal College of Music in London. But that was a long time ago.’

Now it was my turn to look at him carefully to see if he was being on the level with me.

‘What were you studying at the Royal College?’

‘Piano.’

‘You were accepted there as a pianist?’

‘It’s ancient history.’

‘But . . . the Royal College of Music
in London
. You must have been some pianist.’

‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ he said.

He started turning off all the lights, then escorted me back into the living room.

‘You ready for that rye?’ he asked.

‘Please.’

‘You want water back or some ice?’

‘No – I’ll take it neat.’

As he poured out two fingers for me I noticed just the slightest tremble in his hands. He handed me the glass, then slowly measured out a small amount for himself, fussing over its size, making certain it didn’t exceed a specific amount.

‘I like your house,’ I said.

‘I haven’t done much to it.’

‘But it’s very solid – and the furniture is so late nineteenth century . . .’

‘My mom would have liked to have heard you say that. She picked it all out.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She was a music teacher in a high school here in Calgary.’

‘Was she your piano teacher?’ I asked.

He nodded slowly, then followed this with a small sip of his rye.

‘She must have been so proud of you when you got into the Royal College of Music.’

He fell silent and downed the rest of the whiskey in one go. Then he stared down into his glass for a very long time.

‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ I asked.

He shook his head and started fingering his glass while furtively glancing at the bottle of Crown Royal. It was clear he so wanted another drink – but had to limit himself to just one.

Finally: ‘I had a full music scholarship to the University of Toronto. While there I studied with Andrei Pietowski. Polish émigré. Brilliant and very demanding. He thought I had “it”, that I was going to be the next Glenn Gould. He even had me play for this Austrian pianist named Brendel when he came through Toronto. Brendel was living in London. He had connections at the Royal College. I got a full scholarship there. That was 1972.’

‘And then?’

‘I arrived in London. I started at the Royal College. And . . .’

Another of his fall-silent moments.

‘You want another rye?’ he asked me.

‘Sure,’ I said, holding out my glass. He splashed a few more fingers of whiskey in it. Then, with two distinct globules of sweat rolling down his face, he poured out another finger of rye into his own glass. As soon as he’d done that he stood up and disappeared into the kitchen with the bottle.

When he returned he said to me: ‘If you want another top-up it’s by the sink. If I start going for it, tell me not to, OK?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

There was a slight quiver to his lips as he raised the glass. Once he had downed the shot in one go, he shut his eyes tightly, an anxious glow of relief filling his face. He put the glass down.

‘In London I had a breakdown,’ he said. ‘It happened around a month after I got there. I’d been assigned by the Royal College to this big-cheese Viennese guy named Zimmermann. Tyrannical, exacting, never kind. I was his star pupil. He told me that two weeks into our “collaboration”, as he called it. He thought I was so good he insisted we “immediately try to scale Everest”. “So what if you fall, Canadian,” he said in this thick Viennese accent. “I will be the one with the rope to pull you back up again. So come now, we scale Everest.”’

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘The Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven. It’s number 29 – the last sonata and the most taxing. You can’t approach it lightly. It’s fiendish – and perhaps the greatest exploration of the infinite musicalness of the piano that has ever been composed. I went to the library. I got the score. We started to work on it during our three one-hour sessions each week. Zimmermann was – as always – scathing. But that was part of his strategy as a teacher, and I always responded to it. I aimed to please.’

‘And he was pleased?’

‘By the end of the second week, he told me: “You will be playing the Hammerklavier on the concert platform within eighteen months. You
will
scale Everest.”

‘The next day I was working alone on the scherzo in one of the soundproof rooms at the Royal College. Third movement, bars 3 to 8. Suddenly my fingers froze. They literally stopped dead over the keys. I couldn’t move them, I couldn’t move myself. I don’t know what happened. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain and rendered me immobile. Another student found me there an hour later, catatonic, unresponsive to anything he said. They called an ambulance. I was admitted to a hospital. I stayed in that unresponsive state for about four weeks. Finally, my mom – who flew over to be with me – agreed to let them try electric-shock treatments to bring me back. The shocks worked. I came back.’

He fingered the whiskey glass again, so wanting another drink.

‘But I never played the piano again,’ he finally said. ‘No, that’s a lie. I played the piano all the time. Because once Mom got me repatriated to Canada and I started to function again, I did start teaching piano . . . in Hamilton, Ontario.’

‘Why Hamilton?’

‘I spent around six months in a psychiatric hospital there when I got back. There was a shrink in residence who specialized in my sort of manic depression, and my consultant in London had once worked with the guy, so it was decided to send me to him. That’s where I met my wife, Jessica. She was a nurse on my ward.’

I really didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We fell silent for a few moments. Vern kept fingering his empty whiskey glass.

‘I’ve talked too much,’ he said.

‘Not at all.’

‘I don’t have much in the way of company, so . . .’

‘How did you and Jessica get together?’

‘Not tonight. I’ve already bored you with the half-story of my life.’

‘It’s hardly boring. Anyway, you shouldn’t be apologizing to me when I’m the one who caused the scene on the street, in the bar, in the cab . . .’

‘You had just cause to do that, given that it was a year ago today.’

Now it was my turn to stare down into my whiskey glass.

‘You’re well briefed,’ I said.

‘It’s a small place, the Central Public Library.’

‘You saved my ass tonight.’

‘There was no choice in the matter.’

‘Still . . . you did that. For me. And I’m very grateful.’

‘I just know what that first anniversary is like. When I had to commit my daughter Lois . . . it was April 18th 1989. And since then . . .’

Silence.

‘Her schizophrenia is of a type that never seems to be cured. Even if she wanted to be let out of the institution where she’s lived since then, the state wouldn’t let her. She’s considered a danger to society. And that’s that.’

Again his index finger began to rub incessantly against the whiskey glass.

‘What sort of meds do they have you on?’ he asked.

‘Ever heard of Mirtazapine?’

‘It’s been my constant companion for the past five years.’

‘That’s a long time on one drug.’

‘I sleep because of it. That’s something I didn’t do for years.’

‘Oh, it does make you sleep.’

‘How many milligrams are you on?’

‘Forty-five.’

‘I’ve got a spare room top of the stairs to the right. It’s even got its own en suite bathroom.’