The Clarion

© Nina Dunic, 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The clarion / Nina Dunic.

Names: Dunic, Nina, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230168671

        Canadiana (ebook) 20230168809

        ISBN 9781778430282 (softcover)

        ISBN 9781778430299 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8607.U537 C53 2023 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

Edited by Diane Schoemperlen

Cover and interior design by Megan Fildes | Typeset in Laurentian

With thanks to type designer Rod McDonald

Invisible Publishing is committed to protecting our natural environment. As part of our efforts, both the cover and interior of this book are printed on acid-free 100% post-consumer recycled fibres.

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Toronto

www.invisiblepublishing.com

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

everything

always

for douglas

MONDAY

I adjusted my tie upward, firming the knot, tightening its snug grip on itself. Satisfying. But the knot was too high; I loosened and pulled it gently down again, and it relaxed, expanded. I enjoyed the adjustments; ties were among the last male adornments left. These long silk trimmings bound around our necks, just for a stripe of colour on our chests. Everything else being ordinary and every other day being the same, the adornment meant I was not those things today—ordinary or the same. I wore a tie to every audition and I took my time adjusting it, looking in the mirror, breathing.

More than twenty years ago I had come home from school and Grandma was sitting there in the kitchen, talking with my mother, her big hands on the table, veined and rough and strong. Her profile was absolute against the pale wall; she had a sharp nose, sharp jaw—face shapes from when life was quieter but harder. I knew her as a solid woman complicated by wincing, dark grey eyes, as if she was a little bit shy, a little unsure, even as she was calmly efficient in all things. The trumpet stood between them on the table. It was tarnished, a fragmented gold colour, an entirely incongruent and absurdly upright object in the pale green kitchen. It took me out of the moment, coming home from school, the sharp smell of coffee in the room, the cool mint colour of the walls.

I liked to remember that scene with my grandmother because it was grounding. My audition was at three o’clock. I always woke up a little strange on the morning of an audition—I’d done it often enough that the more violent shakes of performance anxiety had left my body, but I still felt heightened. Faint electricity, silvery and light, running through my limbs, little sparks fading in the corners of my mind. And I still remembered the scene from more than two decades ago: the schoolbag on my back dropping behind me, soundless. Too shy to have attention turn to me, I did not like to interrupt adults. Later I learned the trumpet should never stand like that, but should rest in its case. Grandpa had fought in the war and bought the trumpet when he got back, teaching himself to play. He was dead now and it would go to me, my grandmother said. My sister Stasi did not want it.

I remember I was stunned by the twisting gold metal in our kitchen—machine-like but elegant, a muscular beauty—and what followed was years of learning, playing, performing and trying. Trying very hard, often. But it was not in my nature to try hard for things, to arch myself, to reach for something; I felt sometimes I was misshapen by all this, the auditions and the trying. Maybe as a child I felt a bit of dread. Or maybe, years later, I’ve coloured the memory with how I feel now.

I caught the bus and sat close to the back, my case resting across my lap. The bus was almost empty. I didn’t want to walk to the subway; the sidewalks were patchy with small islands of ice, and I had slipped the day before. I didn’t fall to the ground, just that sharp wobble that got my blood up.

I sat facing a young woman on the bus; she had one glove off and she was inspecting her nails. She looked at them closely, then from a distance, removing her second glove, taking a minute with her other hand. Her nails did not seem to be painted and I could not tell what she was looking for. Her eyes flicked over to me, sharp and narrowing, and I turned away embarrassed—I was not welcome, even as an observer, in her world. A cold flash ran through me. I realized she was pretty, but she was mistaken, I did not stare at pretty people: too often their faces had turned hard and bored. Outside the bus I saw a group of teenagers on the sidewalk, laughing, followed by another group of teenagers, plodding. It was just after two o’clock. They were out on the streets, liberated and drifting.

I had rehearsed the songs, mostly in the mornings. At night I sometimes played them again, a little looser. But I had also rehearsed my thoughts—lined them up, walked through them—a way of aligning how I felt. You should know the purpose. Yours and everyone else’s. When you stand up to play a piece, you should know why you’re there, why the audience is there, what it feels like to play it, what it feels like to hear it, and everything that came before—who wrote it, when, and why. That was the way I approached it and always had. But I knew others who did not approach it this way and, disoriented, I saw that they were still very good, even better than me. But it was the only way I knew how to do it.

My purpose today was to get the job—get paid, stay the winter—be energized, vigorous, interesting for them. Their regular trumpeter had gone to Europe for the season; I didn’t know anything about him, we had never crossed paths. The job was two nights a week in the west end at an expensive restaurant with modern Mediterranean cuisine—but younger, edgier than most restaurants in the area—and the live band was prominent on the website. It was a draw. I wondered about the clientele. The pay was good and I knew they would be auditioning several players—probably Ollie, if he was still free on Friday and Saturday nights, probably Erick. Ollie was impressive physically, tall and bulky in the shoulders, with a strong and interesting profile. On trumpet, he was brash, elbowing others aside; some people liked that. He would be the one in my way.

The bus stopped and picked up a stooped old woman. She wore a nest of scarves tied around her head and neck; briefly I imagined her tying them carefully before she left the house, like me. But her small face peered out, uncomfortable on the bus, impatient for her journey to be over—a sad and tired figure. I looked away from the woman. I knew that seeing her would change how I felt, and I needed to feel a certain way for this.

The clientele at the restaurant would be trendy, I guessed—dressed up for the night. The women would have large bracelets and red lips, and the men would be trim in dark colours. Their purpose would be to have an authentic experience. They were dining out and would take pictures and video, but the music would be a moment they couldn’t capture as well on the phone—the sound was never right—so they would feel it was something elusive and important. I wasn’t sure what they would know or care about the music itself. The short set list I’d been sent included a holiday song; OK, it was November, it made sense, but I hoped they didn’t get too heavy with them. Once holiday songs hit the grocery stores, I don’t think anybody wants to hear the cover that night over dinner, unless it’s pulled way back, way down. Circling around it, almost unrecognizable. Otis Redding’s White Christmas—that way.

I was auditioning alone, no band, they said; I would be auditioning for the restaurant owner. Performing for someone like that, I knew the trumpet itself would not be the focus, it would be me. How I looked and carried myself, how I felt about myself. And that was the tricky thing, wasn’t it—I felt good about myself when I wasn’t thinking about it, but now I would be thinking about it, and that would turn it all inside out. The others who were good at it, the practised uncaring—the suspicion they were not comfortable either but good at lying, better at lying—I was pushing against that slowly seeping resentment of those who were better at lying.

Those were not helpful thoughts, and I knew that already; I knew almost everything about this but still I would cycle through the same things—knowing something does not make it stop. The bus was pulling into the subway station. There was a subtle twitching under my skin, light

currents of adrenaline starting to circulate; performance, self-consciousness, trying to remain inside my body, inside the moment, while my mind was pulling me out. I saw myself from the outside, saw how others might see me. Old turns. I breathed, a full push from my lungs.

The old woman was still standing near the front of the bus and I got up and stood behind her. My legs felt loose but still good. Sometimes it was the legs that bothered me more than anything. I focused on the pattern of her scarves—she had many, unmatching: green with a yellow pattern, dark blue and black, red and purple, red and yellow, mostly stripes, sometimes curving lines or florals. The case was a pleasing weight in my hand as I stepped off the bus and walked through the station—my expensive shoes clipping against the concrete, a hard sound with purpose—and jogged lightly down the steps into the subway, my legs loose and good.

I stood on the platform, conscious of my posture and keeping straight-chested. The subway track was a dark tunnel disappearing around the corner. I wasn’t in the mood to look at other people, but I did; it was better if I pressed myself to see them. It pulled me back into the moment. A couple stood ahead of me, not talking to each other: the man was looking at his phone, the woman’s face was lifted toward the screen that showed headlines. He was wearing dress pants and shoes, with a long coat, black. He had a good profile, elegant. But he also had a goldfish mouth, a reverse scoop turning sharply down at the edges, making him seem vaguely dissatisfied—and dull. The woman wore tall boots, black, narrow-heeled; a striking silhouette against the platform’s long stretch of beige tile. Her coat was navy blue, and her thin blond hair brushed the tops of her shoulders. She read the headlines impassively, lips pressed together. She may have been dull as well—a mid-level manager somewhere bland, somehow tied up with the goldfish guy. She glanced back at him briefly, but he did not look up from his phone. She started to rummage in her bag.

The tunnel rumbled as a train approached; I looked along the tunnel’s curve and saw that the train was mine. It pulled in and slowed to a stop, sighing. I walked in, glancing around for seats, then sat by the window. We started to move through the dark tunnels. There were a few people around, but most had their backs to me. One woman sat so close that if I looked at her it would have been a confrontation; we kept our eyes several feet apart.

People-watching my whole life—at first, I thought it was a shy kid’s way of understanding who to be, how to belong. Watching the other animals to run with them, something like that. When I was a kid, a neighbour’s dog had a litter of puppies and I’d spent afternoons sitting with them in his yard; most of them ran, all chaos and energy, but some of them watched. Now it was deliberate for me. It’s how I pulled my mind off its circular track; left alone, my mind would gnaw only on itself. An audition, anxieties on loop. My thoughts darted quickly, hurried along by the quick-moving blood in my arms and legs; I needed something else to think about.

I wondered about the restaurant owner. Who was he? A money man or an art man? I had to assume the latter, as there were better ways to make money than paying a live band two nights a week. A music lover, a man of taste—maybe from the old world. An immigrant or the son, thinking art was more than an adornment, it was life itself, a grasp at meaning beyond ordering boxes of meat and endless cycles of dishes. I could get along with an owner like that. And I had already recognized the drummer from the band photo—it was Boris. I had known him socially some time ago, five or six years back, when I used to go to bars with a few musicians and their friends, when I was trying out the community. I respected how he played.

I watched stations slide past.

I remembered Boris’s face was sclerotic, ancient acne scars so catastrophic he may well have been disfigured as a young man, a good reason to hide behind a drum set, to smash things. But there was no anger in his movements—I remember he had great, loose arms, played calm and thoughtful, relaxed, standing somewhere behind the moment and not asserting himself, letting the rhythm slide through him instead. I respected that.

It was my stop. I stood up and waited at the doors before they pulled open. The station and platform were green and white, cleaner than where I had got on.

A young man was also getting off the train ahead of me; he had a bulky backpack and salt-stained shoes—a college student maybe. Or a courier. A nervous traveller who carried half his life with him. I heard my own shoes again, clean cracks of sound against the platform tile; I walked slowly, deliberate, solidifying my legs against the sparking nerves. Any time my thoughts were interrupted I felt a great pull, like suction—back toward that tingling fear. Auditioning, performing, people carefully looking at me and me carefully pretending they weren’t. My delicate refusal of self-consciousness. The inner tumult to reach it.

I surfaced from the subway and stood on a street corner surrounded by a bank, a restaurant, another restaurant, and a bar. A lot of competition here, on the corner at least. Orienting myself, I knew I’d have to cross, turn right, and walk only four or five minutes.

There were some fears I would have to dispel quickly.

My first fear: I would walk in there and introduce myself and somehow stumble or confuse my words. That rarely happened and, when it did, people forgot quickly. It’s the last impression that matters, more than an early stumble—just deliver a good shake and a genuine smile before you leave. That was the moment. And the smile is always easy then because I’m relieved at the end, washed away by the rush of release.

Another: I would mess up the performance. I snuffed this out quickly because I never have—not once. There were notes brashly played and phrases that did not end how I wanted, how was best, but not here. Remote imperfections were nothing to a restaurant owner, who was likely not a musician of any kind, let alone a trumpet player. The instrument itself was alien to them; my expensive shirt and shoes were already more important. My confidence. Minor slips could be eclipsed by confidence—a truth that turned my self-consciousness elsewhere.

The last fear: they would not care. It was rare, but I had to fight this fear the hardest. I’d only been to two auditions where they did not care—both managers, trying to organize a shoot and an event—but those auditions struck deep. I bored them when I walked in, I bored them when I played; they didn’t stand up to shake my hand, their smile was a grimacing pullback of skin on their face. Remote and bloodless, a cold white moon for me to perish on. I could take almost anything but one of those again. Why did any of us do this—find our instruments, relearn how to breathe, learn to read the scribbling language on the page, play it again and again and again and again? And again. Why any of that? In a world of wars and disease and death. This was something that mattered in a way that also didn’t matter; we were supposed to be together in it—in believing it might matter. The people who did not care were a humiliation, showing a cold truth.

Salottino. I had walked a few steps past the door before seeing the sign. The salt on the sidewalk crunched under my heel as I turned back for the entrance. The outside brick was painted black and the letters were red; the name was across the glass in cursive letters and, smaller, just above the door. Number 889 in gold