The Ann Ireland Library. Ann Ireland
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the curtain.
His buttocks clench as he strides onto the stage.
Trickle of applause from the sparse audience.
Doused with light, he leaves the cool forest to emerge into a sun-drenched meadow. The wooden floor feels springy underfoot, and when he spots the padded bench waiting downstage, his heart jumps, a sci-fi horror that threatens to burst out of his chest.
Jasper stands next to the window of client room B on the upper floor of the institute. A teenage girl called Moxie tips back and forth on her chair and refuses to talk. She’s been sent over from Eating Disorders for a life-skills orientation. Her hair is dyed albino — think of the ammonia leaking into her porous young scalp. Moxie’s days revolve around not eating, and one of Jasper’s tasks is to help structure her time so that a range of activities will offer the promise of a full and interesting life.
Jasper gazes down at the city boulevard with its hot dog stands, groomed civic gardens, and a godawful sculpture of one of the province’s founding fathers perched on a concrete plinth. It is possible, Jasper knows, even inevitable, to be two places at once, his world and Toby’s, which is both blessing and curse. At this moment Jasper has no choice but to imagine his lover as he approaches the bench in Montreal, sweat soaking through his laundered shirt.
“You okay?” Moxie finally asks.
The comment startles Jasper. “I am quite all right.” She must have spotted the flush of excitement on his cheek. He wishes he could say that it isn’t every day you play your heart out for a team of international judges — you with your twig limbs and sunken chest can’t know about the ecstasy of the artist. But perhaps Jasper is mistaken. Moxie is a devoted and tireless sculptor of her own body, and there is elation as well as fear in those overly bright eyes. The artist is never understood by conventional citizens.
Toby reaches the bench where, clutching the neck of the guitar, he bends deeply from the waist toward the unseen audience. At the back of the hall a door clicks open, letting in a sleeve of light — Lucy, with two other competitors have come to watch.
Toby adjusts the bench to its proper height. The guitar fits with its waist on his raised left thigh, the footstool cranked as high as it will go. He launches into the tuning dance, popping harmonics, checking one string against another as heat bears down from the spotlight, changing the strings’ pitch. At the same time he listens to sound reverberate in the hall, gauging acoustical brightness and rate of decay.
First up is the Tárrega, which begins slowly, then builds to a hectic middle section. Important not to think ahead and thus infect the early part with intimations of anxiety.
He lifts his hands and peers into nothing; plenty of time to gather the sound in his head before beginning.
Moxie is seventeen. Jasper checks her chart. No, eighteen. Lives in an Iranian community in Thornhill, north end of the city.
“My parents don’t know what to make of me,” she says in a voice tinged with pride.
Literature professors in pre-revolution Tehran, the couple now runs a mail-order office supply business.
“They believe they’re modern,” Moxie goes on, “but they want to control my every move. I freak them out because I have actual friends.” She brushes aside that haunting white hair, such a contrast to the olive skin. That’s when Jasper spots the raccoon rings under her eyes and the taut cheekbones. Her teeth are almost transparent, enamel scoured by gastric acid, and he guesses the girl is bulimic as well as anorexic. She could die of this horror.
Toby enacts a bit of flim-flam near the end of the piece. Not exactly a wrong note, more of a fudging through a tricky transition. Only people who know the work intimately will guess, which means everyone in the hall. Key thing is to continue and not break the spell. He dabs the Vaseline and rubs it into his fingertips, a slick wakening of the flesh.
Someone coughs, another blows her nose. Judges take the opportunity of the brief break to rustle papers and make notes.
Toby holds his hands over the strings, a signal for silence, then launches into the next piece, feeling it soar as his fingers anticipate each nook and cranny.
On the upper floor of the institute, Jasper leaks a relieved smile. Moxie is diligently writing down a list of leisure-time activities, most of which involve text-messaging or downloading music. In her dreadful thinness there is beauty, but one mustn’t speak of this, though it’s what she loves most in herself, even as it frightens her. Her delicate wrist sweeps across the page, and the crown of her head is almost bare, for the malady causes hair to fall out. Does someone kiss her there? Jasper wonders. A boyfriend, a sister, or perhaps the mother who hovers in constant worry.
Spanish composers are Toby’s specialty, and he’s proud of this, given his Teutonic ancestry. It is unexpected, this proclivity toward the romantic and glissando passages.
Next up is the final piece of the compulsories, a wicked tour de force by Toronto composer Jay Krehm. His “Pounce in E-Flat” is a competition favourite because it runs the gamut of virtuoso techniques, including a series of polyrhythmic whacks on the soundboard.
Toby retunes, basted by the spotlight, while the judges scratch so many points for tone quality, for artistic merit, for presentation — and technique.
Jasper claims to love this piece, but then he makes a point of loving anything difficult and up-to-date. Toby’s hands shake — too late to pop beta blockers. This is the treacherous moment, just before attacking the opening bars. He looks up at the audience that he can’t see and forces a smile: he’s a message in a bottle tossed into an invisible sea.
Moxie blithely continues to print in capital letters the story of her life. After school she’ll Skype the boyfriend in Peterborough that her parents disapprove of. Before rising each day she’ll write down her dreams. “I have astonishing dreams,” she insists, waiting for Jasper to pursue this, but he doesn’t.
The first minefield in the Krehm pops up: a barre chord that crosses all strings but one, and that one is in the middle of the fretboard. Toby lays down his index finger, leaning into it, and luck swarms in. The notorious bar passes with just a hint of string buzz. Quickly, he creates a new memory that supersedes the old; it’s music’s great gift of temporality.
The middle movement is a hailstorm to be played, according to the composer’s instruction, “as fast as possible.”
Hold on to your hat: Toby dashes into the flamenco-styled rasqueados that lead up to heroic slaps on the soundboard.
Bravo, Toby. ¡Olé!
“Know something?” Moxie stares at Jasper with her sunken eyes. “Everyone thinks I’m making myself puke, but that’s not true. This is the way I’m supposed to be.”
“I’m not your therapist for the eating disorder,” Jasper reminds her. “We’re here to concentrate on life skills and organizational issues.”
No wonder she sniffs with contempt. She’s finishing up her list and has managed to write “homework” in the slot just before “bedtime.” Her high school marks have been in the doghouse, she confesses.
Scheduling saves us; without it there is no way of living inside time, feeling its edges. Toby claims this is what music does, creates bar lines and distinct phrases and rhythm, pressing time into a logical sequence. He likes Jasper to believe that music is a steadying influence, both feet on the ground, but Jasper isn’t fooled. It’s a parallel universe reached via a homemade rocket.
Krehm’s middle movements are ultra-short: one is thirty seconds long, the other less than a minute, both percussive, sounding like cutlery jiggled in the drawer. In the final movement, regulation length, comes a passage of great tenderness and retro-charm, played in creamy tosta tones over the sound hole — the composer’s nod to tradition. Toby starts in, but he’s going way too fast, caught up in the wild ride of what preceded. The judges must be scratching their heads: is this an interpretative oddness, or a misstep?
Jasper feels his shoulders tighten