A Feast of Brief Hopes

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

A Feast of Brief Hopes

Bruce Meyer

Copyright © 2018, Bruce Meyer and Guernica Editions Inc.

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Michael Mirolla, editor

David Moratto, Interior and cover design

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017955485

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Meyer, Bruce, 1957-, author

A feast of brief hopes / Bruce Meyer. -- First edition.

(Essential prose series ; 144)

Short stories.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77183-240-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-241-0

(EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77183-242-7 (Kindle)

I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 144

PS8576.E93F43 2018C813’.54C2017-906455-XC2017-906456-8

Wisdom has built her house,

She has hewn out her seven pillars;

She has prepared her food, she has mixed her wine;

She has also set her table;

She has sent out her maidens, she calls

From the tops of the heights of the city:

“Whoever is naive, let him turn in here!”

To him who lacks understanding she says,

“Come, eat of my food

And drink of the wine I have mixed.

Forsake your folly and live …”

—Proverbs 9:1–6

Contents

Long Shot

Girl in the Blue Skirt

When Everything Changed

With My Hat On

A Feast of Brief Hopes

The Day I Was Born

Instruction

Elsie

Mercury Row

The Good Old Days

Visitors

The Cards in Her Hand

Catchers

Chance

T & C

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Long Shot

They’d changed. A group of my former professors had invited me back to give the annual alumni lecture. There was a fragility to them that I hadn’t remembered from my days as a grad student. They’d grown older. Some of my favourites had passed away. The city where I had spent my doctoral years was still an industrial town. I knew I was back in my old stomping grounds as I approached the bridge that spanned the harbour. The shock of nostalgia comes when things, preserved as they were, no longer seem familiar.

As we finished lunch I was invited to visit the anatomy lab by the chair, Bob Thurson. The idea made me feel ill.

We walked the length of the campus to the science building. All the way there, my host spoke to me about how much he admired Rilke and how he was moved when he read my discussion of the poet in my most recent book. “I love what Rilke said about nightmares and monsters,” he said with his head turned to me face on. The sidewalk was heaved and uneven because it was late March, and I was afraid I would make a misstep. He noticed that I was wary of my balance. “Ear trouble?” he asked.

I said: “Yes. It runs in the family.”

“I will show you where the problem is,” he said, nodding and making a mental note of what he would demonstrate for me.

“You know,” he added after a moment of reflection, “life is an incredible thing. We’re all incredible things, machines, biological units … whatever you want to call them. Did you know that over ninety percent of all conceptions spontaneously abort themselves? There is a code to life. Everything has to play by life’s rules or life doesn’t work. Most of the time a woman isn’t even aware that she has passed off a conception that was not working by the rules. You, me, the folks we just had lunch with — we’re all long shots that came through. Ever bet on the ponies?”

I said: “Yes. I like to play long shots, and most of the time I never win.” I thought of the Kentucky Derby a few years back when a big long shot surprised everyone and came in by a nose. A friend of mine won a bundle that day because, like me, he is a poet who can’t get beyond the poetry of life.

“Everything works by the rules,” Thurson repeated.

In the lab, students were seated at benches along the outer walls. Some were probing pieces of pink, rubbery material in trays of liquid. Others were turning over grey and brownish-red objects in their hands and talking to each other.

We took off our coats in Thurson’s office. A glass wall separated us from the lab, but we could observe everything that was going on among the students with their specimens. The benches in the middle of the room were stacked with cubes of plastic and inside the cubes there were blue, yellow, and orange objects floating in translucent space. Eyeballs stared back at us. Ears floated and appeared to be listening, and a severed nose looked as if it was about to inhale.

Thurson handed me a white lab coat just like the ones the students were wearing, and I did up the front buttons. As I buttoned it, I remembered I was wearing my best tie. I tucked it inside my shirt. I was afraid it would get splattered in anatomy.

He told me to grab a pair of rubber gloves as we entered the lab. I fought and tugged before they snapped into place around my fingers.

Our first stop was a white plastic dish pan like the kind my wife and I used every night to do the pots that were too greasy to put in the dishwasher. The room stank of formaldehyde which smells a bit like dishwater before the rosy sunlight smell goes out of it. It is a smell just sour enough to be unpleasant and just sweet enough to remind one of summer.

“Don’t you just love the aroma of the place,” Thurson said, beaming. “I smell that every day of my week. It locks in freshness.”

He reached into the dish pan and pulled out a cold, grey tangle of worried matter that held together in his fingers.

“Hold out your hands.”

I cupped my hands the way I held them in church when I lined up for a wafer from the priest. It was a fresh brain.

He drew a long pencil from the breast pocket of his lab coat and started to point out the various features. “The frontal lobe … and this is the pituitary … and here’s why you get ice cream headaches as the referred sensation travels up the nerves from the mouth … and here is why you suffer from migraines.”

I was holding in my hand not only a human brain, but everything the brain’s owner had known. I wondered if it still contained all its experience — the joy and nervous fear of the first time the person made love, the memory of streets it had known, the tide lines of conversations, and dreams it had made for itself when it was dead to the world in sleep but still part of life.

And was it part of life now?

Was it aware I was holding it?

Could it be thinking?

I thought better than to ask him these questions, but there was one thing I wanted answered.

I said: “Where do our dreams come from?”

He smiled. “I could say they come from somewhere beyond us, but that’s not true. They come from this part at the back.”

I imagined someone sitting in their own brain, as if they were seated in the last row of an empty movie theatre and trying to make out the details on a distant screen as the images flashed out of sequence and the dreamer tried to make a story of them.

“Would they still be there, in there?” I asked.

“Ah, no, no, we don’t ask such questions in here. This is a place of science. You’ll have to take that one back to the English or Psychology departments. And even they won’t have an answer.”

“Just testing,” I said.

“Test all you want. What we want to know is how things work.”

I laid the brain back in its bath. It almost floated for a moment, and I felt, though I could not say I knew, that it wanted to come back into consciousness before it was submerged again.

We turned and on the counter behind us was a blue, yellow, and red bonsai encased in Lucite. “These are the blood vessels of the brain. The red ones are blood in and the blue ones are blood out.”

“What are the yellow ones for?”

“Those are the vessels that feed the nerves.”

I said: “How did you make this?”

“We took a brain just like the one you held. We shot latex into the arteries, and when the latex dried we submerged the brain in a bath of acid. The tissue melted away leaving only this beautiful structure.”

It reminded me of lone oaks I passed in farmers’ fields each winter morning on my way to work, an outline of branches and twigs casting a shadow in the drifting snow of the dawn’s light. This arbor vita of stems and branches had lost all the dreams and thoughts that had once inhabited it. That upset me.

“It is sort of sad,” I said.

“There is no room for sadness here. We are clinical. We are objective and detached. That’s the difference between the sciences and the arts.”

“Does it ever get lonely, I mean, just thinking about everything from a distance even when you are up close to it?”

He laughed. “No. That’s when we turn to you guys. That’s when we read poetry. Love poetry. The poetry of the soul.”

“Ah, so you do believe in the soul.”

“Only in poetry.”

Our next stop on the tour was another counter where a human head, in Lucite of course, had been sawn in half.

Thurson said: “I understand you have sinus problems,” which I do, and I nodded. He showed me the sinus cavities. He explained what the doctor had done when he straightened my deviated septum. I saw the tongue still bedded in the mouth as if it wanted to speak. I was fascinated.

Then he turned the half head around.

I said: “My God, that’s my old super! I knew him! His name was Bill Howard. On summer evenings when I was writing my thesis, I used to join him up on the roof of our apartment building. We’d sit up there, have beers, watch the sunset, and stare beyond the steel mills and smoky factories, beyond the harbour and the bridge. He said he was leaving his body to science, and here he is.”

My host’s face turned red, and he closed his eyes. “You have just committed the absolute sin of anatomical studies. You have personified a specimen. You have not only told me his name, you have given me his life story. Now, I can’t use him to teach because I will look upon this head as the person you describe and not as an intricate piece of biological marvel. We’re going to have to get another head now. Do you know what you’ve done? I’m going to ask you to go into my office, take off the coat, throw the gloves in the yellow hazardous waste bin, and leave immediately.”

I apologized to Thurson, but I had crossed the anatomical Rubicon, and I did as he asked, grabbed my coat and walked off to the library.

I saw my breath in front of me as I hurried along the slightly jumbled and slanting slabs of sidewalk that would be torn up by the spring and put back together in their correct, level, pattern. I knew the story would get around before evening about me being tossed from the lab. I felt embarrassed, but the questions would not go away.

I thought about Bill Howard.

Bill had led a rough life. He smoked because he said it was one of the things he did best. Cancer killed him.

We sat on a wide strip of metal flashing with our backs against the housing of the building’s A/C unit. Every now and then, the motor would spring to life, shooting a column of hot air above us, and we’d feel the vibration through our spines, and look at the beers propped on our knees, and watch how the meniscus of our brews danced in the brown bottles.

He would turn to me and say things such as: “Yep, it’s a hard life.”

Off in the distance, ships were passing in and out of the harbour beneath the black bridge that spanned the passageway. Transport trucks flowed over the arch from one side to the other, and the sunset, in one rare moment on a good evening, would poke through the spans and struts and break the sunlight into an intricate web on the bay.

“That’s life for you,” Bill said as he pointed to the pattern with the lit tip of his cigarette.

Bill turned away from me. His eyes searched for something in the distance. I remember his profile.

The stars were just appearing in the dark side of the sky, but the afterglow was alive. A warm wind caught his curly grey hair. The hair and its curls remained part of him, even in death.

The last time we sat up there and put back a few beers, I looked at him in profile and I knew he was holding that moment in his mind because that was the day the doctors told him he did not have long to live.

He flicked his cigarette ash onto the pebble and tar surface of the roof, and said: “You know there’s stuff that never leaves you. You keep it right up here.” And he touched his index finger to his temple. “Right up here. You remember nights like this.” And we clinked our beer bottles.

And as I looked inside his head, he was more than a piece of anatomy. He was a long shot that had come in. I mean, what are the chances of finding an old friend, or at least the part of him I remembered, in a maze of scattered and dismembered pieces? What are the odds? If they are terrible, I’d probably bet on them.

Students in the lab stared into their microscopes, or turned over hearts and minds, to ask the same questions Dante, Rilke, and my friend the long-shot bettor asked when he put his ten dollars down at the window. What do I believe? I’m not sure, but I’ll bet on it.

I had looked inside Bill Howard’s mind. In there, in the winding grey matter channels, I wondered if there were still flashes of his wife and his daughters smiling at him just before he lost consciousness in the cancer ward, the cigarettes he had lit as he sat on the roof after long, hot summer days of vacuuming hallways and cutting the grass and bushes around the apartment’s street-front.

I admit it is a stupid idea, but there, inside the store rooms and closets of his brain, I thought I could see the image of my former self sitting beside him. I was looking where Bill was pointing beyond the towers, steel mills, and factories to an ore freighter riding high and empty toward a vanishing point in the afterglow.

“Do you see it?” he says. “That one, almost gone?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I can.”

Girl in the Blue Skirt

When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet. I was not a very good one when I tried, and my appearance said everything unpoetic that could be imagined. But I tried. I sent my work to little literary magazines where other struggling poets announced their presence to a world that never read little literary magazines. In the back of one I saw a notice that a woman in London Ontario was starting a chapbook press and was looking for work by new poets. I sent her some of my poems, and soon she wrote back to me a very kind letter that she would publish my first cry of presence in the literary world, a little collection of poems I had titled Tongue Twisted.

When the book was finally finished, the publisher, a tall, blond English woman named Sheila, asked me to come down from Toronto to give a reading to a poetry club in a library basement in London. Sheila was a very pleasant person to whom life had not been kind, yet she bore her sadness with elegance and charm, and she collected young poets with a motherly care. I was invited to sleep on her living room sofa and after the reading we would go to the home of a famous poet for a party he was throwing. He had read my little book and wanted to meet me.

The party was in a large old house on Wendat Street not far from the university campus where the host was a professor. The walls were painted in a variety of bright colours which made some of the professors appear even drabber than they must have seemed in class. A small, bespectacled, moustached man with a soft voice and a pale brown cardigan noticed me standing in a corner with a bewildered look on my face and came up and introduced himself. “Hi. I’m the host here, I think. I’m Jared Rooney but just call me Jary. And you are?”

“Delighted to meet you,” I replied in somewhat of a state of awe. I had studied his work in my English classes and suddenly the poet had leapt off the page. I forgot to say my name but added: “I wrote Tongue Twisted that Sheila launched tonight at the library.”

“I’ve read it. Very good work. I wanted to be there but as you can see …” and he pointed his hand with the glass at the gathering. “Come into the dining room and get a drink.”

As we entered the dining room someone grabbed Jary by the arm and shuffled him off but not before he called over his shoulder: “Help yourself. We’ll talk in a little while.”

I stood perusing the table and the array of drinks and snacks laid out when a painting over the buffet caught my eye. It was a large canvas, slightly abstract but with a tremendous energy about the brush work. A cow was jumping over the moon but as it passed the craters and seas the animal was transformed into a blazing meteor. The comet that the cow became reminded me of objects I had seen in the prints of William Blake. A balding, grey-haired man with a very rumpled corduroy jacket and a large, full glass of something amber in his hand came up and stood next to me as we stared at the canvas.

“Think it’s any good?” he said, his speech slurred as he rocked from foot to foot and pointed with his drink.

“I do. I love the energy of it. There’s a nursery rhyme core to the painting but the use of vibrant colour and the break with object form suggests that there is something raw and elemental and almost absurd about the cow and the moon and the distant earth which is almost the colour of the moon. It says something about where the imagination can take us.” I wanted to sound knowledgeable, but I had the feeling I had just blown it and that my poseur pretentions to artsy talk had been revealed. He stood back and glared which unnerved me.

“Ha! That’s my man. You’re right. You’re brilliant!” He hollered across the room, “Jary, this boy is a genius! He loves my painting. See how lucky you are to own it?”

I knew Rooney cringed because his shoulders went up but he did not turn around. He was deep in conversation with a white-bearded man named Earle Birney to whom I was introduced later that evening.

‘You painted that?” I asked. He must have been amused at the note of incredulity in my voice.

“I, young sir, am not only a painter. I am a genius as you have more or less approximately pointed out.” His voice grew louder. “This young man, ladies and gentlemen, knows the value of a good work of art. He is worth a stack of all you two-bit little sonnuvabitch critics who can’t tell your ass ends from a railway station!” He leaned close to me and whispered: “They can’t tell what’s coming and going and it’s a good thing they aren’t asking for dinner.” He laughed loudly and put his arm around me. I laughed too because it was a funny line and it said something that seemed true to me. Critics should watch what they eat.

Jary’s wife came over to us, likely with the intention of quelling the storm she thought might break at any moment. She spoke to me. “Pat has you admiring his work. I like it too.”

“What do you know about liking it?” he asked her, his arm now heavy around my neck and beginning to squeeze me too tightly.

“I have it in a special place in my household,” she replied with tact and dignity. She turned to the painter. “Someone called for you a little while ago and said they needed to see you downtown this evening.”

“Was it you?” he asked, leaning into my face.

“No, I just got here and met you.”

“That’s right. I have no idea who it would be. My friend here and I are just discussing what makes that painting brilliant. Tell her.” I repeated my explanation as best as I could remember it.

“See!?” he said, his head rolling back as he stared down his nose at her. A tweedy professor from Jary’s gathering broke off and came over.

“I’m heading your way, Pat, and I’ll give you a ride but you’ve got to come now.”

“The bother of it,” he said, squeezing me tighter, “just when I make a new friend, a good friend, a fine friend, a friend who knows a good work when he sees it and isn’t comparing me to Riopelle, what do they do? They shuffle me off.” He downed the contents of his glass. “Hey young sir,” he said as he raised my hand into his and shook it until I thought it would come away from my wrist. “Don’t forget me. Promise? That’s a pal.”

As he was escorted out by the professor, I turned to Jary’s wife and introduced myself and explained what I was doing at the party and that I was Sheila’s new author.

“Of course, I know who you are,” she said and hugged me warmly. “I’ve already read your book and you have to autograph it.”

“And who was that gentleman painter?”

“He’s wonderful when he’s not drinking but a terror when he is. That was Patrick Eden.”

Young men are hardwired to want to go in search of paradise. It is the one thing that reassures them that the perfection they possess at that uncertain age might last forever. Paradise when one is twenty-one and full of the impetuosity that comes from having just completed a bachelor’s degree can be a grail that appears and entices in many forms: women, curiosity, drink, places, leader-figures, and even, though I hate to say it, profitable occupations. None of those things, of course, last; but don’t tell that to a poet when he is young.

As I got older, I continued to maintain a passionate liaison with poetry but was constantly pulled in the opposite direction by the need to earn a living. I chose the bank. Banks will always be there even if my intense dislike of them is shared by just about every other human being. And I thought that banking wasn’t that different from poetry. Both are about organizing abstract concepts, and both are about using systems. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. So had Robert Service. So had Raymond Souster who I got to know through poetry circles in Toronto. Banking was the perfect place to hide the social imperfection of writing poetry.

I got married, had children, and rose in the eyes of my financial peers to the point where they could trust me with my own branch. But when the economy started to tank and client after client in my office complained to me about the drop in their savings, I became very jaded about money, especially about investment funds. I began to write more poetry, not that it helped, but it gave me a release. I also started taking what little I had left over at the end of the month and buying art in on-line auctions as an investment. The prices for such things dropped as people became more desperate.

One evening I bid on two small canvases that caught my eye. They were by the painter I had met that evening at Jary Rooney’s home. The item description read: “Own a little piece of Eden.” I liked that. It said something Blakean to me. The starting bid was laughably low. No one bid against me.

In one canvas, an old man with a sombrero stands outside an adobe house. He is leaning on a cane. His face is a smudge, but he is staring directly at the painter, as if challenging him. What is even odder is that the protruding beams of the house, the tree in the garden behind the dwelling, even the rocks that clutter the street, are casting shadows. The man is not. The painter is saying the man has no soul.

The other canvas is more brightly lit. An adobe home sits front and centre in the frame. There is a yard, and walking across the yard is a woman, perhaps a young girl. She is carrying a basket, but it appears to be a heavy load. She is wearing a bloused white top and a blue skirt. The painting was sold under the title “The Girl in the Blue Skirt.” The girl’s back is turned to the artist. She is walking away.

I bought these paintings because I knew their story. The night they arrived in the mail, I set them up on my desk after the kids were in bed and my wife was taking a long bath with candles and a bad novel. I wanted to stare at them. I wanted to look into those two canvases and try to understand just what happened in the Pueblo village more than seventy years ago. The girl in the blue skirt has turned her back on the artist and is walking away. I want to look into her indifference to see whether it is rejection or suffering that makes her shun him. Eden has taken great pains with the brushwork in that one painting; such pain of detail suggests that the moment is more than real. It is a mirror in which the future can see the past. And the other canvas with the man in the sombrero and his smudged face? I can almost see a fingerprint where his face hovers in the bitter midday sun of that small village. I can hear the crickets screaming out their pain in the dry silence that is penetrated by a dreadful longing, a dreadful desire to shout until that silence is broken. What the artist is painting are two almost coincidental moments that transformed his life. Those moments also transformed Canadian painting.

Reference books on Canadian painting tell Patrick Eden’s story with typical dispassion. Born in Montreal into a wellto-do family, he attended university there in pre-law studies before dropping out against his family’s wishes to become a painter. (Some of the books say he was disinherited for his refusal to follow their plans for him.) In Montreal, he studied with a number of well-known painters of the time, among them Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven.

One summer in the Thirties, he packed a few canvases, his oils and his brushes, and hitch-hiked to the American southwest where he hoped to fall in with the painters of Taos New Mexico and the community of artists there, the most notable members of which had been Frieda and D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett. He never made it to Taos. His money ran out about sixty miles from his goal after he had taken a ride down the wrong road. In a small Pueblo village he set up shop, hoping to paint and sell enough canvases to make the final leg of his journey. The southwest adventure failed, though the books do not say why. One source stated that he was retrieved and brought home to Montreal by a cousin after he suffered a nervous breakdown. On his recovery he refused to do object painting again until he painted the flaming cow that hung in Rooney’s dining room. He fell in love with a noted Quebecois actress who introduced him to Jean Paul Riopelle and the revolutionary Quebec painters of the Forties who turned their back on the old ways of seeing and decided to invent an artistic and political destiny all their own. Refuse Global. Eden, at first, joined them in their cause but later fell out when bouts of drinking and violence led to more hospitalizations for depression. Each time he was admitted for treatment, he emerged a newer, stronger artist, almost as if the period of incarceration and care was a living death from which he would be reborn.