A Feast of Brief Hopes Read online

  “The next thing I knew I was in my cousin’s car and we were somewhere in Missouri on the road back to Montreal. When I got home, they put me in a hospital on the recommendation of a doctor from Albuquerque who, unbeknownst to me, had treated me for a week and a half in New Mexico. My regret from the whole experience is not merely the loss of Vincenta, though I don’t think she could have stood me for long, but the loss of those paintings that I did in the desert heat, my head boiling, and my soul coming apart before man and God. Someone stole every goddamned one of them and to this day I have no idea where they went. I went back there in 1982 to see if Vincenta was still around and to see if my paintings were still up on the landlady’s roof. The place had almost disappeared. I asked and no one, not even the old people, remembered the woman I had loved or my time painting there until every ounce of vision in me was spent. I suspect my work that probably patched someone’s roof ended up heating someone’s home on a frigid desert night.

  “As you can see, I recovered, but I could never paint objects again. Things of this world, even things we cannot bear to look upon, are of love. But we never recognize the love that is present in the world. We only see what we want to avoid. We are frightened animals. When I was released from the care up on the Mount, a friend from art school introduced me to Jean Paul Riopelle who showed me that the conversation between the artist and the world could still be as intense but need not be about things, and from then on, I painted only one thing — a cow jumping over the moon. That was after my third breakdown. I have had five more since.”

  There was silence in the rotunda. Eden stepped back from the microphone and began to weep. The novelist and the Director stood and stared and did not know what to do. No one comforted him. A lone pair of hands, mine, broke the silence and began to clap. Others joined me. The clapping turned into a symphony of cheers and in a rare moment of Toronto exuberance, the invitees chanted Eden! Eden! as if a chorus crying for a lost beauty that would never come again. The party continued.

  As the reception line of Rosedale matrons and anxious art world climbers cleared I stepped up to Eden to speak to him, but the novelist who spotted me for the minor poet that I am hustled him away just as I extended my hand. The painter did not recognize me. I was just another face in the crowd who had heard the story of a suffering artist. But I remembered it. That is why I own “The Girl in the Blue Skirt,” and its companion painting, “Old Man with a Stick.” I hung them on my wall the evening they arrived to keep as my secret. Two of Eden’s missing works were mine, and they were the missing pieces in the puzzle of his biography. The tap of my hammer woke my three-year-old. I heard her stirring in her tiny cot.

  “Are you still awake?” I asked.

  “I can’t sleep. Tell me a story.”

  “How about something shorter?”

  “Tell me a nursery rhyme about a cow.”

  “Okay. Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such a sight, and the dish ran away with the spoon. Now go to sleep.”

  “Thank you,” she said and shut her eyes. “I can see the moon and the cow,” and she smiled because it was true to her in a way that could no longer be true to me.

  Early in the new century, I opened The Globe and Mail one morning while I was wedged in a crowded subway car’s back corner, and read of Patrick Eden’s passing. His obit was as tidy as the information in a reference book — cold, clinical, accurate and factual. It was not the man who was being remembered but the trail the man had left behind, the works that had been caught on a wind and carried beyond the artist. I took the obit out of my desk drawer and re-examined it that night I opened the package and set the two small, framed canvases up on my desk before hanging them on my wall. I did not know who or what I was searching for. And then it dawned on me.

  Patrick Eden had transformed not only the art world in English Canada but the way English Canada sought to express itself, in much the same way that the Group of Seven and his teacher, Arthur Lismer, decades earlier, had transformed the whole question of who we are and how we picture ourselves in our collective imagination.

  I wished I had done that. The poet in me, the failed poet who has never been prepared to make that kind of sacrifice for his art, admires those who could. Patrick Eden was one of them. And as I studied the old man with his cane, probably shouting obscenities at Eden in a language that Eden could not understand, I saw a fragment of something larger. That girl in the blue skirt, I realized, was not merely a woman turning her back on a young man she wanted to love and had to deny, but a link between two worlds, two ways of seeing. She was the key that unlocked the abstract vision to a whole nation that had never looked at life that way before, or at colour, or at that uneasy beauty that dwells in the troubled heart and has no way of declaring itself. Had she not turned her back on Eden even as he stood there pouring his love into every brush stroke in a desperate attempt to explain the tragedy of his own heart, someone else would have found a way to express that new vision that reached beyond the things of this world and leapt into the starry spheres.

  So there she is on the wall of my tiny home office, a girl walking away, breaking a young man’s heart, and changing that young man in a way that made him change things he did not realize he could alter. He is the cow jumping over the moon, that strange blur passing across the pale sky of gallery walls, defying logic to achieve the impossible.

  When Everything Changed

  Nobody likes a winner unless the guy who is winning is doing it for them. And that never happens. So, when the ship comes in, it is not supposed to be carrying anything. Victory has got to be hollow or it’s worse than losing. It’s like the story of the Mary Celeste. Boat found at sea. Boat empty. What’s up? Nothing. Good. Tell me more.

  Hank, for example, could have won the lottery. Then everyone would have just cause to hate him. But Hank wasn’t a gambler, either in body or at heart. Hank was an academic. Academics aren’t likable in their own right. People suspect they know too much and are suspicious of them. They say things — because I’ve heard them — like “well, if he’s got a PhD why hasn’t he made a million dollars?” And they think his lack of success is hiding something.

  Hank always looks haunted. I suspect he feels haunted as well. He knows there’s something he’s got to know and everyone has told him he should spend his career trying to figure out what it is.

  He used to tell me what it was like to cobble together a job as an academic. It wasn’t easy. One year he worked part-time at five different colleges and universities. He rode all over the place. He got a letter one day and he called me because he was really excited about it. He said he’d been offered a job by a university in Ohio. Ohio wasn’t a long way away, but the great thing was that he’d been offered a job teaching Creative Writing, though it was out of his field.

  Hank was an Anglo-Saxon specialist and loved to quote “The Battle of Maldon” to me when we talked most of the night because we’re both insomniacs. It used to get me down when he quoted it because it is about everyone getting wiped out. But that wasn’t the point, Hank would tell me. It was about courage and hanging in there when everything seemed to be lost because something deep inside, a gut feeling or just a noxious obsession kept saying that it wasn’t time yet and that things would work out. Insanity and perseverance come from the same place. I’m sure of that.

  The job in Ohio seemed like a good thing. He’d even gone out and obtained boxes from the liquor store to start crating his books. Then he phoned the chair of the department on the Tuesday morning because the letter had arrived late on the Friday before a long weekend. Hank was ready to sign on and he’d just gotten through telling the Chair of the department how much he was looking forward to joining them.

  The Chair was silent for a long moment before he told him that he wouldn’t be joining the department. Hank had gotten the job because he was the only person to apply for it. He was to be a circuit professor. I’d never heard the
term. A circuit professor. Hank wanted to know more but it wasn’t worth knowing. He was about to be hired to go around the various prisons in the northern part of Ohio and teach in those prisons. Hank said he saw the cover of Jack Henry Abbott’s book flash before his eyes. The last person had quit the job because they’d been stabbed several times during a prison riot. It seems the university in Ohio hadn’t put that in the ad.

  Well, I said, you could look on the bright side. Let’s say you’re teaching guys on death row. You might not have to mark their final assignments. Hank wasn’t impressed.

  “Hey, where’s Bobby? He owes me his project.”

  “Don’t you know? They fried him last night.”

  So, Hank continued to ride the buses and his neck got worse and worse and started to crack every time he turned to look out the window. The crack was so loud I could hear it on the other end of the phone.

  “C’mon,” I said, “you could be in an office like me. You could be doing something mind-numbing like spreadsheets and proposals for projects the psycho boss will cancel before you even get the thing from the printer. You could be wasting your life on a treadmill with nothing to show for it, not even a cap and gown and some graduate photos your students email you at the end of June and tell you they’ll never forget you until they pass you by in the supermarket three years later and pretend they don’t know you because they are aware you are still riding the buses to low paying gigs.”

  “Very funny,” Hank would say. “Yes, very funny.”

  Hank was getting grey through the temples. He didn’t look right. He told me he kept re-reading Beowulf.

  I told him I’d left my boring office job one day for a position in retail with a large hardware company and that my psycho boss had put out word on me that I was crazy. “It could be worse,” I told him. Hank’s head was still wrapped around the Anglo-Saxon world, and things don’t get much worse than that.

  Years went by, and for Hank I suspect a lot of countryside went by. And now I can’t bring myself to talk to him.

  I hate the guy.

  There was this little out of town college he kept teaching at three days a week. He’d be up at the crack of dawn and then home well after midnight and everyone told him he was crazy to be working for them. Hank used to say he liked it there. It was like going away every day. There was a lake nearby. He’d sit at the bus station and wait for the late express to come and collect him, and sometimes it wouldn’t and he’d be stuck, and he’d sit there all night and just stare at the lake and he’d tell me when we spoke that staring at that dark lake was like Nostradamus staring into his bowl of milk or water or whatever it was because he could see the future there.

  So when a Persian Gulf potentate dropped a bundle on the little college that was so far away I couldn’t imagine what Hank saw in it, it went on a hiring spree and Hank ‘arrived’ as they say.

  He went out and bought the biggest mother of a house he could find and he said he’d just rattle around in it because real estate there was a fraction of the cost of the city where we all lived.

  That’s when I started hating Hank.

  I pictured him sitting there basking in all his crap and day after day the sun would be shining on his pile and he’d go to work happy and live to a hundred.

  The gang we used to hang out with agreed with me.

  His other friends started hating him as well. We suffered with the guy when we thought of him on the bus and stuck way out there in all kinds of weather. We really thought he was a good guy standing out at a bus station in the middle of the night with the snow pouring down his neck and a shiver going through him. That was guts.

  A big house wasn’t guts. I mean, what did he do to deserve it? The rest of us worked hard too. And besides Hank is a long-distance call now and the hardware retail business is not what everyone thinks it is. It is not what I thought it was. I can spend my money other ways.

  Neither is Hank’s world according to him.

  He left a message on my answering machine not long ago. It took up a lot of chip space until the generic voice guy from the Midwest US who presides over my calls when I’m out drowning my lousy life in a bar cut him off.

  Hank was saying what colour he’d painted this room and that room. He sounded like Martha Stewart. He sounded as if he was about to go out and stencil the driveway or something. He said c’mon up and visit me. Come and have a holiday because the sons of bitches you work for won’t give you the time of day to relax and I’ve got a fridge full of beer. He sounded generous. I hate generous.

  I don’t want to be grateful to someone just because God dropped good fortune on them. Gratitude is a terrible thing and I won’t thank the man who told me that. I don’t want to call a guy who is thinking about paint. I want to leave him alone with his paint. I don’t want to hear that he’s finally happy. That isn’t the way I picture Hank.

  I want to hear stories that will make me pour myself another beer and say geez. I want to listen to people whose lives are more boring than mine, whose girlfriends have also left them and whose families won’t speak to them either because they could have done so much with their lives and haven’t. I don’t want to hear that some guy finally pulled it off and the change was for the better because that means that happy endings are possible and we all know that’s a load of shit.

  I want to pick up the phone late at night and hear the sound of weary sighs, the sound of someone coming home dog tired and ready to say that’s enough because the world doesn’t respect intelligence, energy and perseverance. And in Hank’s case, he can go to hell.

  With My Hat On

  There is only so much you can hide beneath your hat. I used to get yelled at when I was at school for leaving my hat on. In the cafetorium when I was just trying to eat my lunch, the monitors — old guys who were washed up teachers from long ago — would walk up and down the rows of benches, and if they didn’t like you they’d knock your sandwich on the floor and you’d go hungry. They were bastards. But if they really didn’t like you they’d go after your hat. They went after me, especially, because I had my hat on. They’d say: “Hey kid, take the goddamned hat off!” and they’d karate chop me from the front to the back of my head, and knock my hat off peak first. I hated that. Then they’d go for the sandwich. The sandwich was no loss, but when the hat hit the floor I always thought my brains would fly off with it.

  There is only so much you can hide under a hat. The Principal always thought I had drugs in the seams. He’d stop me in the hall, order me to take it off, and roll down the inner band to see if there were pills, or powder, or something there. Then he’d shove it in my face and say: “Lafitte, one of these days I’m gonna nail you, you little sonnuvabitch.” He never nailed me no matter how often he made me de-hat. I wasn’t into drugs. I was into holding my breath.

  If you hold your breath long enough, you get high. Try it. I’ve been doing it for years. I’m pretty sure I’ve killed as many brain cells holding my breath as people who drink heavily. The only difference is that people who drink a lot don’t gasp. They just keep on drinking. They pass out, too, sometimes, but they only really hurt themselves if they do it on an empty street on a cold night. Like my Dad did when I was two. Then it is really dangerous. Me, once I hit the ground, the breathing thing kicks in, and I’m back on my feet and ready to go. If you fall down drunk, you don’t get up so quickly. Holding your breath is way better.

  On accounta my name, I wear Pittsburgh Pirates hats. I’ve got a collection. I usually wear the classic one, black with the big gold P on it, because my name is Peter and people like to call me Pete, but I tell them they wouldn’t say that to the guy at the pearly gates, and I deserve as much dignity as he does. I get Pete anyways because they say I’m no saint for passing out all the time. I’ve got a white one with a short peak like they used to wear in the 1920s, and I’ve got a round pill-box French cop one with the yellow lines around the outside, and Stargell stars sewn on the back by my grandma because she used to say I
was a star. When I was younger and went to a special school because they told me it was for people like me and I don’t see the difference, they used to tell me I was special. I’m not special anymore. They tested me. I’m some sort of fucking genius at mathematics, though they refuse to show me a math book because they’re afraid I might solve the problems of the universe, so they just keep knocking my hat off. I hate that. I’ve said that already. But I hate that because my brains might come flying out. I’m full of brains. I just don’t use them.

  There are people who are lucky not to be special. They knock my hat off too. One day a guy in my class, I think his name was John, walked home with me. He was really down. He kept saying: “Man, you’re so lucky. You don’t have to succeed at anything, and no one expects anything from you.” I thought, though: “I expect something from myself. I expect to be happy. I expect to be left alone.” But John just kept walking and talking the whole time. His face was like he’d gone to sleep because when I looked over at him his eyelids were almost down, and he kept staring at the snowy sidewalk where his next step would land. I said: “I’m not lucky. I expect to be left alone.” He stopped and looked at me, and just said something under his breath like, “you fuck,” and walked away. John hanged himself from the baseball cage at the back of the schoolyard that night. I’m sorry for John. I’m sorry for all the people who leave me. I don’t really want to be left alone. I just want to be able to keep my hat on.