Every Note Played(10)
They had sex morning and night, more often than she brushed her teeth. She spent her days memorizing Bach and Mozart and her nights memorizing the shape of him, the first and last notes of every day played on each other’s body. They were passionate, insatiable for piano and each other. Nothing else existed. She’d never been happier.
She knows this is her history, the early chapters in the biography of her life, yet she feels utterly disconnected from it. She remembers that first year with Richard, yet these memories, these snapshots of body parts tangled up in bedsheets, feel as if they must belong to someone else, a character in a book she read long ago.
The thought of Richard even kissing her now is revolting, that she ever desired him crazy, that they were married surreal. Yet it all happened.
She watches Grace listening to Matt, smiling, flirting, enamored, and wonders what their narrative will be. She hopes her daughter fares better in love and marriage than she did. Don’t repeat the mistakes I made.
Could Karina have seen the red flags through the thick haze of lust at twenty? Was there any way to predict all that would unfold? Possibly. Richard was always a bit of a narcissist, a fragile egomaniac, a selfish prick. She na?vely thought these were the character traits of any talented, ambitious man. The price of admission. She respected his dedication to piano and admired his confidence. Looking back, she can see that his dedication was desperation, his confidence was arrogance, that he was always a house of cards.
Still, in the beginning, their relationship was intoxicating and held the promise of a great love story. In the end, it was dog shit. Till death do us part. That’s a man-made rule, too. An unreasonable one, she thinks. Everything begins and ends. Every day and night, every concerto, every relationship, every life. Everything ends eventually. She wishes she and Richard had ended better.
The playlist in the coffee shop, which had been a steady stream of pop songs—Ed Sheeran and Rihanna and Taylor Swift—switches abruptly to Thelonious Monk.
“Mom, listen. You used to play something like this when I was little. Remember?”
Karina stares at Grace with her mouth open, shocked. Grace had to have been three or four. “Yes. I can’t believe you do.”
“What kind of music do you play now?” asks Matt.
“Classical. Mostly Chopin, Mozart, Bach.”
“Oh, nice.”
“How come you don’t play this?” asks Grace.
A million reasons.
“I don’t know.”
Grace looks up and away, at nothing in particular, and listens. The song is “?’Round Midnight,” a late-night loungy ballad that makes Karina feel as if she should have her hands around a gin and tonic instead of a pumpkin-spice latte. She imagines the keys under her fingers as she plays along with her mind’s ear, the motor plan unfolded like an old family recipe, still legible after so many years. She feels the notes vibrating in her heart, and she’s swept up in an intense longing, approaching something close to sorrow. Regret. She listens to Monk playing jazz, and her heart fills with regret.
A smile enlivens Grace’s face, and her eyes brighten. “I love it, don’t you?”
Karina’s cheeks flush pink again. She nods.
“I do.”
CHAPTER SIX
In the languid, not-quite-conscious moments before Richard opens his eyes, newly familiar black notes dance across crisp white sheets of paper behind his lids. He hears the sound of the notes as his mind sees them, ascending arpeggios that call him like a siren to his bench. He opens his eyes. A ribbon of bright white light slices through the midline of the drawn heavy drapes of his bedroom. Another day.
He instructs the fingers of his left hand to play scales on the fitted white sheet, his morning ritual. His daily exam. He studies this symphony of simple movement, the sequential, rapid lift and drop of each finger like a sewing-machine needle, the machinery of tendons, knuckles, veins, and muscle, no less miraculous and essential to him than his beating heart.
Satisfied, he gets up, pees, and walks into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, resisting the impatient pull of his Steinway for the moment. Sitting naked at the kitchen-island counter, he sips hot coffee through a straw while vaguely studying his feet. He commands his toes to wiggle. They comply. Bending his neck and curling his upper torso down, he stretches his lips to meet a powdered doughnut in his hand. His left shoulder has started to lock, limiting the vertical mobility of his arm. He tries not to dwell on the advancing paralysis that this new symptom likely predicts. Maybe the disease will stop there, in his left shoulder. He could live with that.
As he alternates between doughnut and coffee, he allows his thoughts to peer down the rabbit hole and imagines the impact if this disease doesn’t stop there. He pans around the room, his field of view narrowed like a series of close-up shots in a horror movie—the cabinet knobs (most already out of reach), the coffeemaker, the sink, the refrigerator-door handle, the light switches, his phone, his computer. His piano. He’ll have two paralyzed arms. No hands. He won’t be able to feed himself, scratch his head, wipe his ass. He stares at his piano as he sucks up the last drops of coffee. Maybe the disease will stop in his shoulder.
Finished with coffee and doughnut, he wants to lick clean the dusty white sugar covering his fingertips but instead wipes it onto the bare skin of his thigh. He’ll continue brewing coffee throughout the day, but only for the invigorating aroma it diffuses throughout his home. More than a cup gives him the shakes.