Every Note Played(15)
This is the loss he’s imagined in microscopic detail from the first hints of this disease, the one that guts him through his center and keeps him from sleeping and makes him want to swallow a bottle of pills and end his life now. Because without the piano, how can he live?
Yet, this isn’t the loss that has him suddenly stunned and panic-stricken, unable to swallow his own pooling saliva. He’s thinking about Maxine again, and he’s revisiting their good-bye hug. He can still feel her body in this remembered embrace, her breasts pressed against his chest, her wet cheek on his shoulder, her breath on his neck. He can feel the apology, the tragic love story in the memory of that hug. He let go first. Maxine quickly followed his lead, slipped out of his arms, and left his life. He wishes now that he’d hung on a little longer.
He’s about to lose his left arm. Three months ago, he hugged Maxine for the last time. Could that be the last embrace of his entire life?
He swallows hard, but he chokes on his spit, and the coughing quickly turns to crying. Kathy offers him a tissue. Humiliated, he takes it. But then again, he decides he doesn’t care. What hasn’t she already seen in this room? He sputters, coughs, cries, and drools through three more tissues, then collects himself just enough to find his voice.
“I need a hug.”
Kathy sets the tissue box aside without hesitating and stands in front of him. Richard rises to meet her, and she wraps him in a firm embrace. He’s dousing her sweater with his tears and runny snot, and Kathy doesn’t flinch. He hugs her with his left arm, pressing her into him, and she responds, hugging him back, and their contact creates a human connection that feels as vital to him as the air he can still breathe.
He can’t name the element at first. The connection isn’t about hope. It doesn’t contain sympathy. It’s not made of love.
It’s care.
Richard exhales and doesn’t let go. Kathy stays with him.
This is care.
CHAPTER EIGHT
While her neighborhood still sleeps, Karina is standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, waiting for Elise. The cold air crowds her, penetrating her clothing, and she wishes Elise would materialize so Karina can get her blood moving. She hugs herself as she watches her exhales, white puffs that lift and disperse into the sky as if returning to the clouds. Realizing that she’s standing beneath one of the towering oak trees lining her street, she shifts her position a few feet to the middle of the road. She tilts her face toward the sky, searching for warmth from the sun, but it hasn’t risen yet. The door finally opens, and Elise emerges.
“Sorry. I couldn’t find my gloves.”
They fall in step and walk wordlessly through their tidy neighborhood of landscaped yards and two-car garages, still-darkened windows adorned with school-made ghosts and witches, front porches hosting impressively carved jack-o’-lanterns, pots of green and purple kale, and golden hardy mums. Without stopping, Karina plucks a Tootsie Roll wrapper from the street and pockets it. Karina and Elise won’t break into conversation until they reach the reservoir. Anxious to get there, Karina walks a touch faster. Without questioning, Elise keeps up.
They’ve been walking together one morning a week for three years. Although only recently neighbors, Karina and Elise met at a faculty dinner at the New England Conservatory of Music twenty years ago. Richard had just accepted a highly coveted teaching position in the piano department. They’d moved from New York City because of this prestigious job offer, from the jazz scene at Smalls and 55 Bar, the network of rising musicians Karina jammed with and loved, the steady gigs she played on weekends, and a promising footing in the career she dreamed of.
She didn’t realize this at the time, how one-sided the move would be when she agreed to it. She’s often wondered how much Richard understood before they packed up and left. Not being from this country, she simply assumed Boston would have a significant jazz culture. Surely, she would find other hip clubs, other talented artists, other opportunities for expression and hire. Boston loves the classical concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Pops at Symphony Hall and the Esplanade. Bostonians are fanatically loyal to the rock and pop music of hometown bands such as Aerosmith, the Dropkick Murphys, and New Kids on the Block.
Jazz in New York, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, and even Chicago is considered a renegade and revered art. There is no jazz scene in Boston. The musicians who play at the handful of jazz clubs in town are one-night guests. They come and they go. They don’t live and breathe here. Even before she’d unpacked their dinner plates, she realized this devastating truth and hated herself for being so na?ve, so easily duped, as if she’d been promised sushi at a Mexican restaurant and never even asked to see the menu.
Elise was Karina’s beacon of hope at that first faculty dinner. A bassist and professor of contemporary improvisation, Elise talked about ragtime and Wynton Marsalis and African jazz. She’d recorded an album with her students the previous year, a campus production, not exactly Blue Note, but still exciting. Karina couldn’t wait to connect with her again, to ask her about playing somewhere, anywhere, maybe auditing one of her classes, possibly even teaching, but Elise was missing from the next faculty dinner. She’d been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and had taken a leave of absence to undergo treatment.
Then Karina became unexpectedly pregnant with Grace, and Richard left New England Conservatory for what became an endless year of touring, so there were no more faculty dinners. Over time, Karina forgot about Elise. She retreated into the intensity, responsibility, and loneliness of full-time motherhood, resigning herself to living in Richard’s immense shadow, darker, lonelier, and far more inescapable than the pre-dawn sky of a grim November morning.