Golden Ears
Jonah stared at the leather recliner and imagined she was still sitting there, listening to the Urlicht movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, her eyes closed, a shock of reddish brown hair tucked behind each ear. He pictured himself running his fingers along the curved outlines of those perfectly shaped ears, and as the sad music played in his head he felt his heartbreak and desire flaring up again. And remembered his promise.
He snapped out of it. The chair was empty, of course. She was long gone.
His car keys and house key were on the top shelf of the equipment rack, beside the envelope on which he’d scribbled her hospital room number—by now he’d memorized it. He took the keys, then hesitated, still not sure if he should stay home and forget the promise, forget her. If keeping his word would be a mistake. Hadn’t he made enough mistakes already?
They’d met at work. Her name was Crystal, and for most of that spring she’d been delivering the mail while he’d been sorting it—they were scheduled to switch in the summer. He’d found her friendly and achingly pretty, had figured she was out of his league even before he’d heard she had a boyfriend. All of which had only fueled his fantasies. And was there anybody in their department, male or female—Toni was openly lesbian—who hadn’t fantasized about her?
But it wasn’t until she’d asked him about his “fancy equipment” that their relationship changed from a strictly working one to something else entirely.
“The sound must be awesome,” she’d said in the dead of a Friday afternoon, after she’d come back from her last run. Their supervisor had gone home early, and Toni was finishing the week’s cataloguing behind the partition on the far side of the mail room. As long as they kept their voices down, they’d be out of earshot.
“I guess Toni talked to you,” Jonah said, caught off guard by the compliment.
The other day Toni had found him leafing through the copy of Hi Fi Review he’d borrowed from the pile of magazines waiting to be catalogued. She’d asked him if he was an audiophile, and he’d told her he’d just bought the CD player shown on the cover—“The Digital Age Dawns with a Bang,” the tagline had read.
“So what kind of music do you like?” Crystal asked.
“Classical,” he told her.
“You mean Beethoven and symphonies and stuff like that?”
She was looking at him intently. It was intoxicating.
“That’s right,” he said. “The romantic period, starting with late Beethoven. Not so much the earlier composers.”
“Uh-huh,” she responded. Then she smiled.
On Monday she came to work with dark semicircles under her eyes—one of them might have overlapped a bruise, but Jonah couldn’t be sure. He’d assumed she was about his age, in her mid twenties. That morning, though, she looked ten years older.
During the break after her first delivery run she noticed him looking at her and smiled again. It was a weak, rather forced smile, but her shiny red lipstick made it stand out. When the refreshment truck arrived he offered to pick up her coffee.
“Double cream and triple sugar,” she said, giving him the money.
Her hand was trembling when she took the coffee from him five minutes later. If not for the plastic lid, she would have spilled it on her jeans.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“So you like romantic music,” she said.
“I like Rachmaninov and Mahler the best,” he told her. “Do you like that kind of music, too?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“You probably heard it already. Like in movies.”
“Which movies?”
“Brief Encounter, Death in Venice. Lots of others.”
“Never heard of those,” she said. “What’s your favourite record?”
“My all-time favourite? I guess it would have to be Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Georg Solti conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.”
“Resurrection. Sounds religious.”
“To me it’s…inspiring, especially the last movement.”
He watched for her reaction, concerned he was coming across as pedantic, that he was blowing it, but she seemed to be waiting for him to elaborate.
“It almost makes me believe we can actually rise up from the dead and that the trouble we put up with in life is worth it, because we’ll get rewarded in heaven in the end.”
“If we’re good.”
“Right. Only if we’re good.”
“Maybe you could play the record for me,” she said. “On your system, I mean.”
At first Jonah couldn’t believe his ears.
“I’d like that,” he answered. “I’d like it very much, but….”
“You’re wondering about my boyfriend?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry about him. I’m not seeing him anymore.”
The dark bruise-like spot under her eye distracted Jonah. He wanted to question her about it, but the feeling that this would be too intrusive, that it would somehow jinx the inroads he was making, held him back.
“When?” he asked, struggling not to sound too eager.
She suggested the following Friday, and that was how their first date came to be.
He would have taken his car, a secondhand Datsun his father had gotten him for his eighteenth birthday, but the transmission was acting up and he had to wait until next payday to get it fixed. She didn’t seem put off, though.
After work they walked to a nearby Chinese restaurant. Over pork dumplings and egg drop soup he told her he was an only child, that his parents had infected him with their love of classical music when he was a kid, treating him to Toronto Symphony Orchestra concerts at Massey Hall and the Nutcracker ballet at the O’Keefe Centre. They’d died in a traffic accident a year and a half ago, he went on, and their house had passed to him. So had a little money, enough to cover his hi-fi expenses if he stuck to a stringent budget. He confided he’d had a girlfriend, stressed that he’d cut all ties with her after he’d caught her cheating on him. Crystal in turn talked about her dream of becoming an actress, how she’d worked as an extra in movies and TV shows and hoped to find an agent. Her parents had moved to Vancouver in ’78, and she’d been with her last boyfriend since then. He was an unemployed musician in the process of starting up a band, or trying to. He was also the one who’d first told her she ought to be in show business.
“He got tired of waiting for me to make it big,” she said. “I told him it was going to take time. I told him I wanted to learn about acting and save up for lessons. But he said what for, you’re already learning for free because you’re acting every day, it’s part of life. He said we had better things to do with the money.”
“He didn’t help you at all?”
“Didn’t lift a finger. And that’s just one of our problems. Was one of our problems.”
“Don’t be discouraged,” Jonah said, feeling a powerful urge to kiss those too-red lips. “I bet you’ve got what it takes.”
She broke into another smile, bashful but radiant.
“That’s so sweet of you,” she said.
