STILL IN VAUDEVILLE
The ideas came all the time. It made talking to people hard. The only thing he could control was how much attention he paid, but he liked to pay a lot of attention because sometimes the ideas were very good.
He had read somewhere about a retired jockey who opened a bar called “The Home Stretch.” He laughed out loud at the image of the tiny man perched on the shoulders of a customer sitting at a crowded bar. High, in his left hand, was a tray of drinks. The way he was crouched on the customer’s shoulders suggested he had just set down the man’s drink and was ready to leap to the shoulders of the next patron.
Sometimes he saw them as stills and sometimes as films and he had little control over that.
He saw another image of the same wee barkeep: there was a line of half a dozen men heading out the door and he was on the shoulders of the last one with a quirt raised high, going to the whip down the stretch. Each of them gave the impression of hurrying away and there was a large clock above the door showing five minutes past 2:00.
Then the same man again, still short, but older and horribly obese, sitting on the shoulders of the last patron at the bar. The patron was bowed under the ex-jockey’s weight but held the half-empty beer glass to his lips.
The bus lurched to a stop and he tumbled into the woman beside him. He pushed himself up straight, looked at the woman, waiting for her to look back so he could smile and apologize, but she just pulled her bag in tighter against her side and stared across the aisle. Beyond the fluorescent glare of the bus interior, it was 7:00 AM, still fully dark, and he could make out little more than the wash and fade of passing traffic and the woman watching herself in the window. Her face was pinched, lined, drawn by worry and fear. He drifted, imagining her in the scene, a little drunk but just enough that she still believed the night could end well.
It was a short walk to his studio but he couldn’t recall stepping from the bus or climbing the stairs to the third floor loft he shared with two other artists. He regretted that there wasn’t time to paint all the scenes he had imagined but decided to start with the first. He chose browns and grays and blacks with rich reds from the jars beside his easel. The ex-jockey’s face took shape. His head was shaved right to the skin and he had small ears that barely break the contours of his face, but a large nose juts from the man’s face like a rough stone kicked free of hardscrabble dirt. He used a narrow-bladed palette knife to sliver away excess acrylic, closing the gap between the ex-jockey’s eyes. The barkeep’s feet were bare beneath worn dress pants. His suspenders looped up over a white dress shirt with sleeves rolled past the elbows and a bibbed apron draped his pants and shirt. One eye drooped almost closed and none of those in the room paid him any attention except for a solemn customer in the corner signaling for another drink.
He stepped back to examine the image, frowned, made two deft strokes and the customer, no longer serious, had a tilt-a-whirl grin.
He touched the spot where his stomach ached but it had eased a little since the morning.
It was a scene from the 1920’s or 30’s, but not Gatsby’s world. The men were grimy and unwashed in slouch caps or no hats at all and work boots with the soles loose at the edges. They were coming from mines or factories and there was no time for talk. They stared into their glasses, or at the bottles lined along the wall, or at the floor – it was grim determined work to drink the day down.
*
He was late getting home but the kids were still up waiting. He stood just inside the door, shook the snow loose from his hair and watched it turn from clump to tiny puddle at the toe of his boot. There was something there – a shape, the faintest blush of colour, a feint and shimmer – he could almost see it, but not quite yet. It would come to him – it almost always did. When he looked up, his wife was watching him from where she stood at the kitchen sink, washing the supper dishes. She shook her head, smiled, and gave a quick chin lift to indicate that the kids were upstairs waiting for their story. He went down the hall and slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her forehead.
“Hey, crazy mama, long day?”
“Long enough. You paint something?”
“I got the jockey painting finished.”
“Do you like it?”
“Too much. Not sure I want to sell it yet.”
“Might be good to paint something you can sell.”
“I was thinking that myself. On the other hand, I’m an artist.”
She slapped him with the wet dishcloth. “Your kids are waiting on a story and it’s 10:00 and they have school in the morning, so you better get up there.”
They had heard him come in and were sitting at the top of the stairs, all of them blonde like Sandra and pixie-featured like him. Ben, the oldest, nine, then six-year-old Zoe and three-year-old Amos. Sandra had said he could name the third child, thinking they would never have three, but he held her to it when Amos was born, calling back to a different time and place, of home-made fishing poles, one-room schoolhouses, and ink-dipped pigtails.
He gave them all hugs at the top of the stairs, none of them yelling or shouting, sleepy but wanting their story. They followed him into the bedroom he shared with Sandra. He lay back on the bed and they curled in around him like kittens.
“A bird flew into my window this morning.”
They looked at him solemn and wide-eyed.
“The bird had a message tied to his leg, and he sat there without making a sound or flapping his wings while I unwound it.”
“What did it say, Daddy?”
His siblings turned on him.
“Would you wait, Amos? What do you think…he’s not going to tell us?”
Mark shushed them all and pulled Amos a little closer.
“I slowly unwound the paper and when I had it completely unwound I saw that it said BUY ONE PANZEROTTI GET ONE FREE UNTIL TUESDAY AT PAVOROTTI’S. I looked up from the message to the bird, but he just shrugged and said ‘A bird’s gotta make a living.’ Then he continued. ‘I come from the King of Waverly with a message for any that will hear it. We are in great danger and in need of help from the brave and the willing.’
“What kind of bird was it, Daddy?”
“Who cares what kind of bird it was, Amos, it was a bird.”
“It was a grackle, Amos. Do you know the grackles? They look a little like crows, but they’re smaller and at certain angles their head glows shiny purple. Do you know the ones I mean?”
“I think I know it, Daddy.”
He shifted a little and changing position eased the ache, low in his belly.
He continued the story of King Waverly’s mystical country that existed in another dimension that could only be reached by a long underwater tunnel. This episode ended with him coming out of the tunnel and falling 20 feet onto a dune of hot sand, barely conscious and wearing only his boxers. The bird was waiting for him.
He wasn’t sure where he was going with the story and hoped he could figure something out by the next day. He clapped his hands.
“OK, guys. That’s it for tonight. Time for bed, let’s go. C’mon.”
He stood, gathered Amos up into his arms, and shooed Ben and Zoe down the hall in front of him.
*
The latest ideas he couldn’t shake were a mix of text and colours. They meant something but he wasn’t sure what. The colours were abstract and so were the words. The phrase “You can sell real cynicism if you paint it yellow” had stuck in his head, and he had chopped the sentence up and layered it on top of primary colours in a thick enamel. Words, no matter how random, had meaning for people. Give people a set of words and they would tell their own story. The phrases just kept coming to him: “I was a licorice-whipped whitey.” “I want you to love e.” Nothing quite made sense but at the same time they resonated for him. They struck him as funny or perverse but always with some underlying meaning that was a little out of his grasp. He figured if he painted them, the meaning would get a little closer.
*
He told Sandra about them when he got home that night and she was quiet for a long time.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t like them.”
“They sound like good ideas, Mark. You always have good ideas.”
“Then what?”
“Who will buy them?”
There was another long silence.
“You mean, nobody will buy them.”
“I guess I do.”
“What would you like me to do? Paint flowers and fruits and sell them by the dozens to tourists?” He waited.
“Sometimes.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know you can’t. I just wish that sometimes you could.”
*
That night he didn’t sleep at all. It happened sometimes that the ideas came so fast they didn’t have time to turn to dreams, and he watched them like movies until the sky began to turn from black to purple and then a burnished blue on the horizon. His night was filled with fruits and vegetables: a cabbage pretending to be the moon pared piece by piece as the moon went from full to a silver sliver in the sky, green beans on a tightrope wire, onion trapeze artists, artichoke, pomegranate, and peanut constellations. He couldn’t shake them, and he put aside the text and colour project he had half-finished and spent the next three weeks working on fruit and vegetable watercolors.
*
Something was wrong. It wasn’t just that he was working too hard and not eating or sleeping right. That was true. That was always true when he got caught up in a project. But the stomach pains weren’t going away. His Ehlers-Danlos had been diagnosed when he was 14, but it had always been a simple inconvenience, bruising easily, healing slowly. What had bothered him most was his skin, pale and translucent as melted wax. He had always known that he was likely to die young, that people with his form of Ehlers-Danlos rarely reached old age. He also knew that the first signs of serious trouble were abdominal pains.
But the series of paintings was almost done and Christmas was a week away. Maybe it was just the same kind of aches and pains everybody got as they approached forty.
Christmas Eve he found blood in his crap. He had been looking for it because the stomach pain wasn’t getting any better and might have been a little worse. Couldn’t go to the hospital on Christmas Eve, though. They tobogganed at Green’s Hill in the afternoon, but the first climb back up the hill left him cramped and gasping. He watched from the top of the hill until the light had drained from the western sky and he couldn’t tell his family from the others through the gathering gloom. By the time they were home and the neighbors began to drift in, he was feeling a little better. The crowd played, guitars, fiddles, a banjo, a couple of harmonicas, laughed, ate and drank until well past midnight. Ben, Zoe, and Amos huddled at the top of the stairs watching, long after they were supposed to be asleep. He had snuck away early and left Sandra to put out the kids’ presents after all the guests had left.
He made it to Boxing Day, but by then the pain was worse, and he was passing lots of blood. They were standing together in the kitchen finishing up the dishes from breakfast.
“I think I need to go to the hospital.”
She didn’t look up from the sink. She just stopped scrubbing the bowl and stood leaning over the dishwater. Her hair hung down so he couldn’t see her face.
“I thought there was something. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I was afraid to.”
She turned to him then and they hugged beside the sink, her wet hands leaving prints on the back of his shirt. She cried and he held her and cried a bit too. He felt a little better after. Not quite as scared.
“Do we need to call an ambulance or can I drive you?”
“I think it would be OK to drive but we should probably go soon.”
“I’ll get Lauri to come and watch the kids. Do you want to talk to them?”
“What could I say that wouldn’t scare them?”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s wait then.”
She nodded.
*
The doctors saw him right away. A 39-year-old man with Ehlers-Danlos and blood in his stool got moved to the front of the line. It didn’t matter, though. They told him he had had a series of small ruptures and then in the last day or so a couple of more major tears. His insides were shredded like wet Kleenex and there was no way to repair the damage. It wouldn’t have helped to come in sooner; there was nothing they could do when it got like this. They could control the pain, but he had hours, a day at the most.
*
They had said everything they needed to say and it hadn’t been a lot. They hadn’t kept much from each other. He had never pretended he didn’t need her or love her, and he had always known that without her, he had no home. She had always known that, too. He wouldn’t see his children again, but he couldn’t think of that because it hurt too much. And he wouldn’t be there when they needed him, and he knew there were times they would need him, but he couldn’t think of that because it hurt too much. And they would grow into magical creatures even he couldn’t imagine and so would never know, but he couldn’t think of that because it hurt too much. And he wouldn’t sit on the porch again and feel the breeze blowing down Rockwell, but he could think of that because it had been so good.
And the ideas kept coming. Who would have guessed that? They kept coming in pictures and in words and in sounds and in colours he had never imagined. They whirled and danced and drifted. It was like being trapped in a brilliant sandstorm and he was lost in ideas. His best ideas ever.
*
Mark Marsters was a gifted artist from the Ottawa area and he died of Ehlers-Danlos at 39 years old. Many of the paintings described in the story are actual works of art. Mark is missed by a handful of friends and family, but I suspect if we could imagine the work left unfinished or never started, Mark would be missed by all of us. The story is imagined but Mark was real.
