All My Puny Sorrows (10 page)

I went out into the hallway. He apologized for phoning me but said that neither Elf nor Nic were answering their phones or e-mails and he had to go over the details of the tour with Elf and there was still a contract to be signed.

Do you know where she is? he asked.

Not exactly, I said. Hey, aren’t you in Europe?

Yes, Paris. Listen, Yolandi, is it because she is doing her four-day meditation or is she on a kayaking trip with Nic?

I think, yeah, maybe …

The meditation thing?

Yeah.

Yolandi, please tell me everything is all right. I know Elf is unsteady as performance approaches. Is she well? Is she keeping it together? You know you can talk to me.

Um, maybe, I said. I’m not entirely sure.

You’re not sure? he said. Well, does Nic know how she is? Yolandi, this tour is months in the making. She has to be ready in less than three weeks.

Probably Nic knows, yeah, I said. A nurse came up to me and told me that cellphones were not allowed on the ward. I motioned to her that I’d be off the phone in a second, sorry, sorry.

Are you in Toronto? said Claudio. Elf said you’d moved.

Well, yeah, I did, I said. It was for Nora, so she could dance.

Ah, beautiful! Are you liking it?

It’s okay.

And Will? Where did you tell me he was studying?

New York.

Incredible! said Claudio. Please give them my regards.

Will do, I said. Thank you. I think I have to go though, I’m so sorry.

Not at all. Elf’s scheduled for Toronto on the eighth I think, said Claudio. She’ll probably have time for dinner.

Oh, that would be really great! I said. Yeah, I’ll see her then. The nurse glared at me from her desk and I turned my back to
her. Hey listen, Claudio, I’ll find out where Elf is and get her to call you. My mom will know. Probably.

Yes, please do, Yolandi. I really must talk to her. I apologize for seeking reassurances from you.

No, no … don’t apologize.

You know what’s happened in the past, he said. I am sensitive to Elfrieda’s
nervosa
 …

Yeah, we appreciate that, thanks.

Do not thank me, he said. Oh and don’t forget that there’s the rehearsal two days before the opening …

The nurse was beating a path over to me now. Got it, I said. Where are you again?

Paris, said Claudio.

Paris, I said. For a second I stood dreaming of love.

I hung up and went back into Elf’s room.

Booty call? she said.

Ha, yeah … I said. Hey, so are you missing your piano at all?

Elf looked out the window. Nic is dealing with that. I’ve already told you I can’t—

You have almost three weeks. Maybe …

Yolandi, why are you …

I’m not doing anything, Elfrieda.

The cellphone-hating nurse came into Elf’s room and said okay, two things: One, no phones on the ward. I’ve told you before. And two: No outside food. I noticed you brought her a sandwich. We want Elfrieda to eat with the other patients in the dining room.

Elf and I stared at her.

Elfrieda, said the nurse, can I get you to promise me that you’ll come to the dining room for dinner this evening?

Uh, well, said Elf, I mean I can … I’ll try. I’m not sure about you getting me to promise, though. She laughed.

I see, said the nurse. Is that a challenge?

What? No, said Elf. Not at all. I was just …

She was just joking around, I said.

Okay, that’s great, said the nurse. We like jokes. Jokes are a good indication that you’re feeling better, right?

Neither Elf nor I spoke. We couldn’t look at each other.

If you’re well enough to make a joke then I think you’re well enough to join the others for dinner, right? said the nurse. Isn’t that how it works?

I, uh … said Elf. Perhaps?

I guess so, I said.

I’m not sure, said Elf. I fail to understand the correlation between—

Yeah, yeah, I said. Dinner. I glanced at Elf.

Indeed, said the nurse. So, no cellphones? She was looking at me. No outside food?

Righto, I said. I gave her two thumbs up and smiled broadly.

The nurse left and Elf and I followed her with imaginary gunfire, blasting away with M-16s the way we did when we were girls and the burgermeister came to our house to tell our parents what Jezebels we were. We stopped firing and looked at each other.

Do you remember when you rescued me in my bedroom? I said. When I was naked and wedged between my bed and dresser?

Elf nodded. You were practising somersaults.

Do you remember when we went skateboarding in the hospital tunnel and those asshole boys locked me in the morgue and I was missing for like six hours and you were the one to
find me all curled up on that stainless steel thing where they do autopsies?

Elf smiled and said oh no, don’t talk about those days.

Why? I like to remember them, Elf. I like thinking about you rescuing me.

Yoli, moaned Elf. Talk about now. Keep talking to me about Toronto, she said. She had tears in her eyes.

I told her that I was in the process of having my tattoo removed. Dan and I have the same one. We had them done by a biker in Winnipeg’s north end in our early days. And that having it removed now hurt more than I thought it would, but under the circumstances I was enjoying the pain and welcomed it. It felt like atonement of some kind. The biker who gave us the tattoos was a member of the Manitoba Warriors and lived in a house with a reinforced steel door that only opened from the inside. But wait, she said, then how did he get in? I don’t know, I said.

I told her that I’d paid him twenty bucks and a bag of weed to get the tattoo and that I had to pay a thousand dollars to have it removed, and that it would take at least a year and a half because you only got a tiny bit of it removed at each session so that it wouldn’t leave a big crater in your flesh. I told her the laser felt like an elastic band being snapped hard against my back about a hundred times. I had to wear goggles. Afterwards they put Polysporin on it and a bandage and gave me a mint and told me not to shower or exercise for two days and to continue putting Polysporin and fresh bandages on it twice a day for a week. I didn’t bother with any of that.

I turned around in my chair and lifted my shirt so that Elf could see the fading imprint of my tattoo. It was a jester, an
old-fashioned harlequin. As I recall, it had meant, I think, that Dan and I together would slay hypocrisy and the duplicity of the world with jokes and magic. She smiled again and closed her eyes. She said it made her sad. I said it made me sad too, but happy. I went on about Toronto, about the kids, each anecdote taking on the shape of a circus tent in my mind. I talked about my hapless love life, about the e-mail I’d received from Finbar the hotshit lawyer telling me that he was calling it off, my life was too intense, too troubled, my family was nuts, I was too emotional. He was bailing, or pulling the plug, or cutting me loose, something watery like that. Throwing me back like one of those fish caught for sport alone and not for keeping.

Then out of the blue, like that volcano in Pompeii, Elf asked me if I’d take her to Switzerland.

“
THERE WAS SOMETHING
, I suppose, like a wild waterfall in the headlong, broken, plunging quality of Mary’s life. I stood and gazed at it roaring through the streets of Paris, visible only to me.”

Which is what Richard Holmes says about Mary Wollstonecraft when she’s in Paris “covering” the French Revolution. It’s in his book
Footsteps
, in which he follows difficult artistic people through their lives—though long after their deaths—and tries to figure them out, and therefore himself. I’m currently reading it desperately as though somewhere in its pages are contained
the directions to hell’s only exit. It was my father and my sister who constantly beseeched my mother and me to read more, to find succour for life in books, to soothe our aches and pains with words and more words. Write it all down, my father would say when I went to him in tears about god knows what little injustice and here, read this, my sister would say chucking some tome at me when I asked her questions like, Is life a joke?

Well, Elf, no. I won’t take you to Switzerland.

Please, Yoli, I’m asking you to do this one last thing for me. In fact, I’m begging you.

No. And don’t say
one last thing
. That’s so morbid.

Do you love me?

Yes! Which is why!

No, but Yo, if you truly love me …

Does it work that way? Don’t you have to have a terminal illness?

I do.

You don’t.

I do.

Well, no, you don’t.

Yolandi.

Elfrieda! You are asking me to take you to Switzerland to be killed. Are you out of your fucking mind?

Yoli, said Elf. She was whispering. She mouthed the word
please
and I looked away.

Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and
laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?

I remembered something I’d read, after my father’s suicide, in Al Alvarez’s book
The Savage God
. It had to do with some of the writers and artists who lived, and killed themselves, under Russia’s totalitarian regime: “And, as we bow in homage to their gifts and to their bright memory, we should bow compassionately before their suffering.”

I asked Elf if she was thinking at all of reasons to stay alive or if she was only trying to figure out an exit. She didn’t answer the question. I asked her if those forces were constantly battling it out in her mind and she said if they were then it was a lopsided fight like Rodney King versus the LAPD. I asked her if she had any idea how much I would miss her. She looked at me. Her eyes filled up with tears. I shook my head. She didn’t speak. I left the room. Then she called my name and I stopped and said, What.

You’re not a slut, she said. There’s no such thing. Didn’t I teach you anything?

I went to the nurses’ station and asked to speak to Janice. She came out of a little office holding tubes of paint and rolls of paper. Art therapy, she said. People love it. Yeah? I said. It’s easier for a lot of our patients to express themselves with these—she waved the tubes around—than with language.

She took me into a little room with a gurney in it and a calendar and a chair that wasn’t ripped. She pointed to the chair and I sat in it and she came over and put her hand on my shoulder. I took big breaths. She asked me how I was doing. I shook
my head for such a long time. Just sat there with my index finger pressed to my lips, locking in the words, the way my father used to, staring at the calendar that was still in March when it should have been April and shaking my head. I wondered if she’d offer me a tube of paint and a piece of paper. She didn’t move her hand from my shoulder. Finally I asked Janice about the pills. I asked her what was in them. What was the active ingredient? Do they give her the impression that there is meaning to life or do they flatten her to the point where she doesn’t care if there is or isn’t? Or do they enhance what is already in her mind and make it all right so that Elf could conceivably jump out of bed some morning and say hooray, it’s true, there is no meaning to life but it’s okay and now that I really know it and have had it confirmed and can stop searching for it I can go on living!

Janice told me that she didn’t really know. She told me that it also didn’t make much difference because Elf was refusing to take them anyway. Yeah, I said, she either takes an awful lot of pills at once or none at all. Janice was trying to make me feel better now too, so she patted me on the shoulder and then told me to go home and sleep.

I said I’d go say goodbye to Elf first but she told me just to go and that she’d tell Elf I’d be back soon. I was staring at the calendar and Janice followed my gaze and then walked over to it and flipped the page so it was showing the right month.

She said well, we’ve taken care of that now and I said, Yes, thank you.

I took the stairs to the basement by accident—two, four, six, eight—and ended up locked in a tunnel. I walked for a while and pushed on several doors but none of them would open. I wondered how long it would take before I was found. I checked
my BlackBerry but couldn’t get a signal. I saw footprints painted on the concrete floor. I followed them. They brought me to another locked door. I sat down in the tunnel and held my plastic Safeway bag in my lap. I looked up at the large pipes hanging from the ceiling of the tunnel. Then I took out my manuscript and held it in my hands for a while. I snapped the elastic holding it together a few times and put it back into the bag. I wondered if I would starve to death in the tunnel. Irony. Elf would feel bad, no? Jealous? A taste of her own medicine?

I got up again and walked in the opposite direction to the footprints and found another door. It was locked too. I went back to where I’d been sitting, following the footprints again, and then beyond that to a fork in the tunnels. I turned right and walked a while until I came to another door and I pushed on it and it opened. I was in an industrial kitchen or maybe I was in the morgue. Everything was made of stainless steel and the whole room hummed and shone. I walked through this room and through another door and straight into the emergency ward waiting room. A cop stood guarding something, I’m not sure what it was, but he told me to wash my hands. I told him they weren’t dirty and he said that he had to ask everyone to wash their hands. He pointed at a makeshift handwashing stand. I asked him if he could hold my bag then for a minute while I washed my hands and he nodded and took it. I washed my hands very slowly, very thoroughly, and while I was washing I looked at the cop holding my manuscript in his hand. It felt safe there. I wanted to leave it with him but I dried my hands and took the bag and thanked him for holding it and walked out to the wrong parking lot in search of my mother’s car.

Occasionally I sit in my mother’s car and grip the steering wheel as hard as I can until my knuckles go white and I breathe out the word
Ellllllfffff
. I’d punch a hole through the windshield if I didn’t think I’d break my hand. And if it wouldn’t create a big insurance nightmare, and a wicked draft in the winter. As a kid I used to go out to my bike and sit on it while it was in its stand going nowhere and I’d try out new swear words. I’d mutter them quietly under my breath, over and over, until they lost their sting and became ridiculous like Elf’s one-time mantra of love. This car thing is similar to that. It feels like a controlled experiment. My own mobile laboratory of rage. If I can say things over and over they’ll eventually lose their meaning and my anger will disappear. Elf, what are you fucking doing? I feel safe in the car, alone and protected. I can see people milling about in the parking lot but they can’t see me. Well, they can but they think I’m insane so they look away which is the same as being invisible.