All My Puny Sorrows Read Online Free PDF Page A

her eyes never left the keys except when theyclosed in rapturous ecstasy for a second or two and then the pace of the music would change and Elf would open her eyes wide and fling herself at the piano like a leopard onto a snake, a savage assault as though the piano were both her lover and most mortal enemy.
    She did eventually come home again from Norway and a bunch of other places. She moved back home with my parents and stayed in bed and cried for hours at a time or stared at the wall. There were dark circles around her eyes and she was sombre, listless and then strangely exuberant and then despondent again. By that time I had moved away from East Village to Winnipeg and had two kids with two different guys … as a type of social experiment. Just kidding. As a type of social failure. And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master (and fail at mastering) the art of being an adult.
    I’d visit my parents and Elf, with my little kids in tow, Will was four and Nora was a baby, and I’d lie in the bed next to Elf and we’d look at each other and smile and hold each other while the kids crawled around on top of us. She wrote letters to me during that time. Long, funny letters about death, about strength, about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and the intricacy of despair on pink stationery in coloured felt-tipped markers. Then, after a few months, she slowly got her health back. She started playing the piano again and doing a few concerts and then she met a guy, Nic, who adored her and now they live together in Winnipeg, which means Muddy Waters, number one on the Exotic City Index—the coldest city in the world and yet the hottest, the farthest from the sun and yet the brightest, where two fierce, wild rivers meet to join forces and conquer man. Nic took piano lessons from Elf for a few months. That’s how theymet, but Nic admitted later that the only reason he took piano lessons from her was so that he could sit next to her on the little bench and have her gently place his fingers on the keys. He even bought her a new piano bench, although as soon as she saw it she commanded that he rip off its soft padding—What the heck is
that
doing there?—as if playing music is about comfort.
    Nic loves Elf’s odd requests, each one is like a holiday for him. Nic is a very precise guy. He believes in textbooks and manuals and recipes and hat and collar sizes. He can’t stand the wonky looseness of “small,” “medium” or “large.” When Elf suggested he learn to play
around
the notes he almost lost his mind to bliss and the craziness of it all. And he’s not a Mennonite, which is important—in a man—for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to harvest her soul and shackle her to shame. Nic is a medical scientist. I think he’s trying to rid the world of stomach parasites but I’m not exactly sure. My mother tells her friends he’s working on a cure for diarrhea. She’s skeptical of cures. And Nic, she’ll say, I
do
see dead people. And I converse with them. They’re as alive to me as the living, perhaps more so. How does “your science” explain that? Nic and Elf always talk about living in Paris because there’s some kind of lab there where he could work and because they both love to speak French and argue politics and wear scarves all year round and console themselves with old-world beauty, but so far they’re still here in Muddy Waters, the Paris of the Northwest Passage.
    Elf has beautiful hands, not ravaged by time or sun because she doesn’t go out much. But the hospital has taken her rings. I don’t know why. I guess you could choke on a ring if you decided to swallow it, or pound it against your head for severalweeks non-stop until you did some damage. You could throw it into a fast river and dive for it.
    How are you feeling right now? Janice is saying.
    If I squint across the room at Elf I can change her eyes into dark forests and her lashes