The Delusionist (6 page)

Days passed while Cyril waited for the cops to show. They didn't. His mother didn't see Darrel that Friday, nor did Darrel show on Sunday. She didn't say anything about it. Was she secretly relieved? Did she realize it was for the best? Cyril hadn't told anyone what he'd done; he could scarcely believe it himself. When he'd returned the pistol Gilbert had noted the missing bullet and Cyril said he'd fired at a crow in the cemetery.

Another week passed. If Darrel had said anything to Cyril's mother she was doing a good job of keeping it to herself. He watched for clues but she was unreadable; apparently she had interior rooms opening onto ever deeper rooms, where memories resided like refugees in a labyrinth. When Paul and Della took Cyril aside and asked what had become of Darrel he tried not looking shifty and said who knew, ask mom, and when Paul did just that she looked out the window at the cemetery and after a moment of silence, during which Cyril tensed in fear, she said, “He's gone, like everyone else.”

Growing cocky with relief, Cyril resumed turning the tins of Chef Boyardee at the
IGA
so that entire rows looked to the right, or half the row looked to the right and half to the left, or he alternated stacking them upside down and right side up, prompting Norm to ask if he was a retard. Cyril crossed his eyes and said yes. Norm got Barnes, the manager, who regarded Cyril's handiwork and after a moment's cogitation asked if Cyril liked his job.

“Not really.” Dizzy at his own brazenness, he asked Barnes, “Do you like your job?”

Barnes had a crewcut, a belly that strained his white shirt, a five o'clock shadow that looked like iron filings, and yet was not unintelligent or utterly without a measure of charm. Cyril had often seen him joshing with customers, especially the ladies, who seemed to find him curiously engaging despite his pallor. Barnes barked a laugh and shook his head and said, “No one likes their job, kid. Except maybe Hughie Hefner. Stack 'em straight or quit.”

Barnes was perfectly at ease with his station in life, an ease which Cyril envied. That was the thing about adults, or most of them; even the dumbest seemed to have dealt with the issues of women and money and career. Produce Manager Norm spent his day spritzing lettuce and celery and yet he also had a wife and a kid and a house and—even Cyril had to admit—a sort of a life.

FIVE

CYRIL GRADUATED WITH
a 2.5 Grade Point Average, his A+ in Art and his A in Phys. Ed. compensating for the C minuses in Math and Chemistry. His mother urged him to go for a plumbing apprenticeship but he didn't like the idea of putting his arm down toilets or up pipes. She suggested electrician but the very thought of watts and volts and amps agitated his nerves. As for welding it was haunted. Carpentry, she said, and he shrugged meaning maybe, and then devoted the summer to a series of drawings for his art school application: eight postage stamps, two feet by three, of Stalin. In one Stalin was dancing like a dervish, arms out, head tilted, eyes shut, the cancellation mark functioning like lines of motion accentuating the sense of spinning, a detail about which he was rather proud even though it had been a lucky accident. In another he was sitting with his legs straight out, wearing a diaper, a gigantic infant biting the head off a man clenched like a lollipop in his fist. Some of the pictures were pencil and some were coloured chalk. He liked the dry quality of chalk because Stalin was a creature of sand and grit and dust, his soul smoke. The last drawing, as yet unfinished, was still on the easel. It showed a laughing Stalin on a swing, wearing baby shoes, kicking out his pudgy bare legs, bonnet on his head. It echoed a memory of being on a swing with his father pushing, one of the few times Cyril recalled his dad laughing loudly and without restraint.

That summer he went to see
Moulin Rouge
starring Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec, fascinated by the crippled artist and his suicidal capacity for absinthe. He saw
The Moon and Sixpence
on
TV
and admired the expat painter Charles Strickland's brazen drunk indifference to everything, including the man who wanted to buy his work. What confidence, what clarity, what perverse defiance. Then there was a film on Van Gogh in which he eats a tube of paint. Cyril had no desire to eat paint, but he envied those three men their focus and energy, their drive and direction; they knew who they were and where they were going and nothing was getting in their way. They did not merely accept their calling, they pursued it, ran it down like wolves. He found an autobiography by Salvador Dali, a man who was as eccentric as surrealism itself. In it Dali pours honey down his chest so he can study the flies that come to feed. One morning after his mother left for work and Cyril had a few hours before his shift at the
IGA
, he got the honey from the cupboard ready to do his own Salvador Dali. Unfortunately, it was creamed honey, solid. He carved some from the jar with a knife and smoothed it over his chest and lay back in bed with the window open. He heard lawn mowers and the opening and closing of hearse doors in the cemetery. Finally one fly came bumbling in and landed on him and got stuck, one wing whirring pathetically. Eventually another fly circled and got stuck, then a bee, then two more flies. Cyril watched them buzz and struggle. Now what? Was this Existential? He took a shower, still not quite sure what the crazy Spaniard was on about, and wondering if this lack of understanding was a lack of artistic vision.

With just a week to go before the art school entrance interview, Cyril came home from his shift at the
IGA
one evening and discovered all eight drawings missing. He found his mother watching
TV
.

“ . . . My drawings  . . . ”

“They're gone,” she said.

“I kind of noticed that. Where have they gone to?”

She shrugged and kept her eyes on Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen. Cyril watched her watch, then abruptly started searching. The fireplace was clean. The pail under the sink was empty. He went out and looked in the garbage can: nothing.

“Draw flowers or fruit,” she said when he came back in. “People like flowers and fruit. They put them on their walls. Do some nice sunflowers and I'll buy them.”

Cyril searched the closets, the attic, behind the furnace. From downstairs he shouted up through the main floor. “I worked hard on those, ma!” He pounded back up the steps and into the living room.

On the
TV
screen the wooden dummy's jaw clacked mockingly up and down. “Why do you have to keep him alive?” she asked.

“I'm going to miss the application deadline.”

“You know what he did.”

“Are pictures that powerful?”

“He starved us.”

Cyril was stymied. “I worked hard on them  . . .” He heard how hollow his words sounded.

“Three million.”

“They were mine.”

She was wearing a black cardigan and smoking a cigarette—a habit she'd maintained after Darrel left—feet in their hen-feather slippers on the grey Formica coffee table next to the
Province
and a stack of
Reader's Digest
s. She turned back to the
TV
. “Better you get trade.”

“You hate me.”

“You are my son.”

“You still hate me.”

She turned her head slowly like a tank turret and aimed her gaze at him, her eyes wet but tearless, her voice steady. “I love you.”

“It's revenge. You're getting back at me.”

She swivelled her gaze back to the
TV
.

“I'll draw them again.”

“Draw, don't draw. Just don't let me see.”

The interviewer frowned at the picture Cyril had drawn that very morning, torn from his sketchbook and mounted on poster board. The man took up another of the same subject, a be-robed owl whirling dervish-wise, wings out, head tipped, eyes closed. There was a copy of the giddy Stalin on a child's swing, wearing a bonnet, a soother in his mouth. He'd intended to redo his entire Stalin series but was afraid his mother would destroy them again. He'd got onto owls for no other reason than that Gilbert had bought a stuffed one from the St. Vincent de Paul as a joke and named it Elvis.

“You handle a pencil reasonably well,” admitted the interviewer, a pale man with lank brown hair, a posh British accent, and nicotine-stained fingernails.

Cyril started to explain what had happened but the other interviewer, a fat man in a black turtleneck, black beard, and black crewcut, seemed in no mood for explanations. He pooched out his wet, red lips then sucked them back in. “Impatience is the mark of the amateur.”
Ama-toor
.

“Not uninteresting though,” allowed the first. “Intriguing, actually.”

“Makes me want to scrub my hands with bleach,” said the fat one. “And there's no colour. Nowhere do I see colour.” He sorted through the drawings with his thick-fingered hands. “Drawing and colour are not distinct. As one paints, one draws. Can you tell me who said that?”

Cyril could not.

“Cezanne. When colour is richest, form is most complete.”

“Many fine artists have worked in a limited palette,” said the first.

The other was unimpressed. “Adolescent,” he said, pointing to Stalin in the bonnet. He turned his profile to Cyril, indicating that the interview was at an end.

“That's a tad harsh, Glen.”

Glen gazed at the door as though longing to obey the
EXIT
sign above it. “Alistair, dishonesty serves no one.”

Alistair clasped his hands on the desk and looked seriously at Cyril. “Why do you draw?”

“It's as if there's always something waiting at the end of the drawing,” he said. “Something surprising.”

Alistair nodded vigorously.

“The question,” said Glen, turning his gaze from the exit sign back to Cyril, “is whether you've got any vision worth evolving. Otherwise you are merely a draughtsman.”

“Draughtsmanship is important,” cautioned Alistair.

“But without vision it is merely a trade,” said Glen.

“My father was a draughtsman,” said Alistair. He nodded encouragingly to Cyril. “There's a call for draughtsman in the building industry. Have you considered draughting?”

That September he moved into the top floor of an old house with slanted ceilings and a view of rooftops and downtown, the closest thing to a Parisian garret the city had to offer. He continued stocking shelves at the
IGA
and with the rest of his time he drew, occasionally venturing into colour, doing oil pastels of the city at night while listening to the traffic, the sirens, the shouts, the occasional crump of a collision or crack of a gunshot.

He imagined Connie living here with him. She could hang her swords on the wall, he'd help her rehearse her lines, and she'd pose for him. He phoned her house once but her grandmother just kept repeating, “
Je ne connais pas. C'est vie pas bon, pas bon  . . . 
”

Then Paul showed up one evening. This would have been awkward at the best of times, but the fact that he was drunk made it worse. Paul was erratic when he drank and tended to say even more vicious things than when sober, but this time booze had put him in a maudlin mood; he looked old and tired and troubled; he'd never had many friends and it was terrifying for Cyril to realize that after a lifetime of enduring Paul's sarcasm he was turning to him. It was a first, and Cyril wasn't sure how to act.

Sensing Cyril's unease, Paul reverted to form. “This place is a hole.”

Cyril was almost grateful. “Nice to see you, too.”

Paul raised his middle finger and kissed it. “Any time. Got anything to drink?”

“Tap water.”

Paul sneered then drew a flask from his suit coat, swigged, and was halfway through twisting the cap back on before he paused and tilted it toward Cyril.

“What is it?”

“Chinese tea. What difference does it make?”

Cyril drank. Whisky. He suppressed a grimace and passed it back.

Paul gave it a shake to see how much was left then gulped the remainder. “She's miserable.”

At first Cyril thought he meant Della. Then he understood. “Ma?”

He nodded heavily. “Misses him.”

“Dad?”

“Darrel,” said Paul, shaking his head in disgust.

“What does she say?”

“Doesn't have to say anything. I can see it in her face.”

Cyril guiltily changed the subject and asked after Della.

Paul gestured as if to say who knew. “Swimming, volleyball, archery.”

Cyril could see Della, tall, strong, focused, shooting a bow and arrow.

“Next it'll be lacrosse.”

Paul wore glasses with thick black frames and a short-sleeved button down white shirt and narrow black tie. Mr. cga. Paul looked up suddenly. “I miss the old man.”

“Me too.”

“You knew he was a party member?”

“No.”

“No?”

Paul's tone angered Cyril. “How could I? No one ever told me anything. You guys all made sure of that.”

Paul shrugged and looked out the window. “Okay, okay. I'm not here so you can gripe. That's why they left Lvov and moved east, to Kiev. To be closer to the centre. Closer to him, the great man. Everyone wanted to be near him.” Paul yanked at his tie loosening it. “He was a god. The new god. And the old man was a believer. He believed it all. The people, fed and happy and singing.” He grew quiet, adding, “Dad loved to sing.”