Every Note Played(17)
Jazz improvisation is a speech without a script. It’s twelve notes and doing anything she pleases. There are no rules, no boundaries. Verbs don’t have to follow nouns. There is no gravity. Up can be down.
And it’s collaborative. She hasn’t played jazz with anyone since before Grace was born. It shatters her heart every time she realizes how many years it’s been. She could remedy this by taking Elise up on her offer. What if someday was today? Her breath goes shallow, and the wind off the reservoir chills the sweat on her forehead. She’s too out of practice. It’s been too long. A runner laid up for years with an Achilles injury can’t simply show up at the Olympic trials. Karina imagines playing with such practiced and accomplished musicians, and the fear of her certain and overwhelming inadequacy locks her life’s greatest wish in a box.
“So I need to come clean,” says Elise. “I visited Richard.”
Karina stops walking, every muscle’s action suspended, stuck in stunned betrayal.
Elise pauses several steps ahead and turns around. “Roz from the Conservatory called. It was nice of her to remember me. She organized a bunch of the staff who knew him from his teaching days, and we all went over. I felt like it was the decent thing to do.”
Begrudgingly satisfied with this explanation and fueled by curiosity, Karina starts up again. The two women walk side by side.
“So how is he?” Karina asks, a reluctant toe edging into muddy water.
“His arms are completely paralyzed. That was upsetting to actually see.”
The previously dormant pit in Karina’s stomach, planted months ago, sprouts roots. This is really happening. Aside from not being able to open the bottle of wine, he’d looked and acted perfectly normal when she last saw him in July. She’d been holding on to the possibility that his diagnosis was a rumor or a mistake. She still hates him, but palpably less than she did last year, and hasn’t wished him dead since before the divorce. She wouldn’t wish ALS on anyone, not even Richard. She kept waiting to see a correction in the newspaper, his tour back on, that the reports of his imminent death had been greatly exaggerated.
“I’d planned on giving him the stink eye for you, but his arms were just hanging off his body like dead branches, and there was his piano in the room with all of us trying to pretend it wasn’t there. None of us mentioned it. It was too sad.”
Richard without the piano. A fish without water. A planet without a sun.
“How did he seem about it?”
“His spirits were good. He was happy to see us all. But you could tell he was trying really hard to be positive, like he was performing.”
They continue walking in silence, and soon the silence fills with sound—the muffled steps of their sneakers on the dirt path, softened by a bed of brown pine needles and then the crunching of dry, brown-paper-bag oak leaves; Elise sniffling; the huffing of their exhales.
“Does Grace know?” asks Elise.
“Not unless someone else told her. I would know if she knew. No, honestly, I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure he had it until this very conversation.”
Grace. She’s in the middle of midterms. It would be cruel to break this news to her right now. She might get distracted and fail her exams. And why hasn’t Richard told her? Of course he hasn’t told her.
“Maybe I should go see him again,” says Karina.
“That’s your Catholic guilt talking.”
“No.”
“Remember what happened last time.”
“I know.”
“Seeing him is not good for you.”
Richard always seemed invincible to Karina, as if he could conquer anything, and he did. He was an unstoppable force that awed and intimidated her and, at times when she was most vulnerable, trampled her. Now he’s the vulnerable one, and she can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to sit at the other end of the table.
“Yeah, but—”
“What are you hoping for? Tuesdays with Morrie?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s still Richard, honey.”
“Believe me, I know who he is.”
“Just don’t get hurt.”
“I won’t,” Karina says, her voice utterly void of conviction.
CHAPTER NINE
Karina is carrying a foil-covered plate of pierogi in one hand, a $50 bottle of red wine in the other, and several months of unrelenting guilt down Commonwealth Avenue. It’s a gunmetal-gray November morning, raining hard, and she has no hands for an umbrella and four more blocks. She picks up her pace, almost running, and the wind whips the hood off her head. Damn it. She has no available hand to pull it back on.
The weather hits her like an assault, and since she’s the only pedestrian in sight, the attack feels personal. Raindrops pummel the aluminum foil like machine-gun fire. The bitter-cold wind stings her face raw. Rain soaks through her socks, pants, and hair, chilling her skin like a punishment. She blames Richard. She wouldn’t be subjected to this misery if he hadn’t provoked her. Of course, she reacted. Just as she always did. It’s as if she were programmed to respond to him, an unthinking and immediate ouch to his pinch.
It was already raining when she left the safety of her house, and she knew she wouldn’t likely find a parking space within four blocks. She could’ve waited another day. Tomorrow’s weather forecast is cold but clear. But she made the pierogi last night, and she needs to make at least this one thing between Richard and her right, clean up her side of the street, deliver her penance, and be done. Carpe diem. Weather be damned.