The Strangers' Gallery (28 page)

The reactivated doorbell rings—or
bongs
since Anton fixed it, a sound more like a wooden spoon hitting a stainless steel bowl than a bell—and I answer the door to find Young Conrad, as I like to refer to him, our twelve-year-old newspaper boy, looking for bread pans for his mother. Though Elaine has been gone for almost two years, her relationship with the neighbours seems to live on. She was a bread maker and left behind a large collection of bread pans, along with almost everything else. Young Conrad wears an earring in the lobe of his left ear, another in the helix of his right, and has his hair dyed grey. Last year, in an act of collective sympathy, he and his classmates had their hair cropped to the scalp to match the head of a classmate who was returning to school after chemotherapy treatment for leukemia, and their picture had been in the weekend paper. Unlike most children his age, who, the psychologists tell us, actively begin to distance themselves from their parents and other elders, begin to heap scorn on them, in fact, Conrad has taken the opposite tack. In the spring, he decided to extend this act of sympathy to his family. He had his head shaved again to match his father's bald one, though all his classmates had grown their hair back, and then dyed it grey to match his mother's when it did grow back.

But Conrad is no ordinary twelve-year-old. He is the very opposite, in fact, of his stereotypical older brother, whose main interests are cars, girls, music, drugs, and sex, who drives a ten-year-old Camaro worth about a thousand dollars in which he's installed a stereo system worth ten thousand dollars, paid for with a full-time job, with employee discounts, at Future Shop. No doubt Conrad's future will be far away from this shop.

“How are
you
feeling today, Mr. Lowe?” he says to me. He has been talking to me like this since he was six, like an insincerely empathetic adult, but he only sounds insincere because he isn't an adult. He is a four-foot-ten, ninety-pound preteen dressed in oversized clothes and costume jewelry who requires a willing suspension of disbelief, and I don't know whether the grey hair helps or not.

Mr. Lowe is feeling a bit low, a bit gloomy, a bit melancholy, Conrad, I think of saying. To tell the truth, I feel the dreaded
longing
coming on.

At the breakfast table this morning, Anton told me, apropos of what I can't recall, that there is an asteroid called Eros, discovered about a hundred years ago, which at a certain point in its orbit comes closer to the earth than any celestial body except the moon. Is there anything he doesn't know? I wonder. Or does he just make these things up? Perhaps he also told me, and I missed it, that Eros is at that very point in its orbit right now. That might be the reason I'm feeling this way.

Yes, to tell the truth, I fear if Conrad were Elaine standing there in front of me now, having had second thoughts—no, not about us, but about her bread pans or some other forsaken material thing—
I would put my arms around her and welcome her home. I would lead her right upstairs to our old bedroom and remove her clothes, get under the goose-down duvet and curl up together in a comforting, dual fetal position in semi-sleep, my hands around her breasts and my Sunday stubble gently massaging her back, her most erogenous zone, as I only indirectly found out. We would make love, drift away, awake, make love again, stay in bed the rest of this dark dreary day, the rest of this dark and dreary month, with Anton van Eros performing DJ duties on the turntable downstairs. Slowly working his way through my vinyl—no agitating classical-jazz crossover music, but a long-chain medley of lulling andantes and adagios—he would lull and lead us through the whole month of December: the days getting shorter and colder; the shadows lengthening; the sun sinking lower and lower in the sky, barely registering on the bedroom blinds; the tiresome Christmas shopping passing us by. On, on, through the twelve days of Christmas, the shadow on my face lengthening into a ticklish Father Christmas beard.

After I find the bread pans and bring them to the door, over Conrad's glistening, grey head, I see Miranda, in a hooded yellow raincoat in her driveway across the street, struggling to remove a large white box from the trunk of her car. It looks like a whole trunkful of white boxes, in fact, but surely not Christmas gifts just yet. Young Conrad the Empathetic turns his head to see what I'm staring at just as Miranda drops the box, and he rushes to the rescue, arms and bread pans swinging. The bottom-half of the box—the top is still in her hands—has hit the car bumper and tipped over, spilling bright oranges out into the dark December afternoon, like magic Halloween balls out of a magician's black hat. They roll slowly down her driveway, into the gutter and on down the street. Conrad chases after them, picks them up and puts them in the bread pans he's laid on the sidewalk.

I put on my raincoat and walk across the street to help, but Miranda and Conrad have already collected most of the oranges. I hand her two more oranges and she lays them in the open box on top of several other boxes in the trunk. Fundraising fruit, I realize now, grapefruit and oranges from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, sold only on Sundays. She buys them a few weeks before Christmas every year to make fruit baskets for gifts, even one for me.

I spot one last orange beneath the Japanese hedge, and when I pick it up and hand it to her, her voice rings with the single word
honeybells
. It sounds like some kind of coded message. I am struck, disturbed, but surely not for the first time, by the thought of just how beautiful she is, her face glowing like a round pale translucent fruit, not a honeybell but a honeydew, beneath the black branches of the trees in the rain, a Madonna in a hooded yellow cloak by one of our modern-day Madonnieri. Then, as the orange moves from my hand to hers, it becomes the apple handed to me last week at the supermarket checkout by a deathly pale young woman in a black coat, which fell to just inches above a pair of ankle-high red sneakers with yellow stars. She had streaked hair, orange and green, and silvery rings, pins, and studs in every part of her face except her ears: her eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips, and between her lips—in her tongue. I was buying a half-dozen apples, three different kinds, which I like to keep in my desk at work, and when the sales clerk activated the counter conveyer belt, one of them, a pale yellow Golden Delicious, rolled out of its thin open plastic bag onto the floor.

“Eve,” I said, “thank you,” as she courteously picked the apple up off the floor and handed it to me. I thought it was a good joke on the spur of the moment, but perhaps not, now that I think of it, for I was easily old enough to be her father. She didn't smile or say a word, though her mouth was open and her pierced tongue—a small silver dagger or barbell—was visible between her lips and teeth. Her stern expression, however, may not have been intended for me. Her face, topped by the electric frizz of her hair, looked as if it were wired into a permanent, steely-eyed frown.

Conrad has carried the four boxes of fruit, two at a time, into the house and said his goodbyes.

“I think we got all of them,” I say to Miranda, but she is distracted now, smiling and looking past me as if I'm not even there, her small hand waving like an activated compass needle toward my house. I turn to see Anton standing in the window and waving back. I am struck then by a second thought, as certain as the first, as disturbing as the first, though in a very different way. This one is not exactly an epiphany, either, just something that has been in the back of my mind all along, and has now moved forward. Anton and Miranda have become lovers. Marooned in this magnetic field and feeling, simultaneously, like some invisible but yet conspicuous obstacle to attraction, to desire, I think, congestedly: of course, of course, stupid, stupid me, too stupid, as they say, to come in out of the rain.

When I do come
in out
of it—“the strange English tongue,” as Anton sometimes refers to it, reflecting exactly how I feel—Anton has settled into his seat in a coach on “The Transcontinental,” an imaginary train on a musical journey from cbc Radio-Lotus Land to the fatherlands, motherlands, and cultural capitals of Old Europe: Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Berlin. Our host-cum-conductor, a European émigré to Canada, seems afflicted by a permanent homesickness, and one that goes far beyond mere nostalgia and geography. It seems to have afflicted Anton as well, and he takes this trip every Sunday without fail. Indeed, he has become more than enamoured of this Old World voice; he is bewitched, entranced, hypnotized. It has an incantatory quality and the tone of a lament—a sweet lament, an uplifting elegy, a soothing reverie. It is a journey not just out of place but out of time.

Like the mythical Odysseus, our genial conductor has strayed far from his fatherland and stayed a long time in the province of the Lotus-Eaters, but, like Odysseus again, he has resisted eating the fruit of the lotus, and is not afflicted by a dreamy forgetfulness. On the contrary, he wants to return to his native land, and he wants to take us time-travellers with him. It is a dreamy remembrance that haunts him, and, like Miles Harnett, he has not forgotten a single thing.

He introduces today's special passenger, Fritz Wunderlich, “sweetest of the German tenors,” almost a wunderkind, in fact, who, he says, was very good at songs expressing “a certain kind of longing.” I listen attentively, curious to find out just what kind of longing this might be. But before Herr Wunderlich has a chance to sing, our host describes his tragic end—at thirty-six, on the night of September 17, 1966, while staying with a friend in Heidelberg. He had been unable to sleep, full of that certain kind of longing, perhaps, and got up to get a book from the library. He neglected to tie up the laces of his shoes, trod on one of them, fell forward, grabbed the handrail rope on the stone stairway to catch himself, but it came away from the wall and he fell headfirst down the stairs and onto the flagstone floor below. Fritz's first song expressed a longing so intense he might have been yearning for his earthly home,
das Vaterland,
from beyond the grave.

We
are
somewhere in Germany, a nation that had given excessive love of fatherland—though
love
, in this case, must be the wrong word—a bad name. “A small town,” our conductor informs us (Heidelberg, perhaps), “not much to see: a picture gallery, a small museum, half a palace, and then you are through with the entire thing and can enjoy yourself.” His solemn, lugubrious voice belies a dry, or “d-wry,” sense of humour, as Anton unintentionally but appropriately pronounces it. For our host, enjoying yourself means avoiding the tourist sights as much as possible and spending your days and nights at concerts and recitals, with before-and-after visits to cafés and restaurants. He can recite by heart entire concert programs and café menus from another lifetime, another century, another age.

With Smetana's
Ma Vlast
,
“
My Fatherland,” blasting a path before us, and our conductor philosophizing endearingly en route, we roll on into Czechoslovakia, his fatherland as well, but one which he and his Jewish family had to abandon in 1939 when the Germans occupied it. We move through his beloved Bohemia, once “the conservatory of Europe,” through its meadows and groves, up Die Moldau, with a pit stop in Prague, his birthplace seventy-five years ago. We press on through Poland, home of “the Pole”—Chopin, I assume he means—and on toward today's final destination, Moscow, or Moskva, as he pronounces it. He talks about the old kingdoms, the old empires, the old regimes, the old fatherlands, the nationalist composers of Russia and Bohemia who changed the face of nineteenth-century music.