Every Note Played(32)
Five to 10 percent of ALS cases are familial, caused by a collaboration of genetic mutations. Conspiring DNA. Without genetic screening, the quick and dirty test to identify ALS as familial is the diagnosis of ALS in two other blood relatives. There is no ALS on either side of Richard’s family tree. He’s the only bad apple, rotting on a withering branch. So he doesn’t have familial ALS. This is the single satisfying part of his why line of ALS questioning because it means that Grace is safe from this hideous monster. Or at least as safe as anyone else.
His form of ALS is called sporadic, caused by something other than or in addition to the DNA he inherited. He must’ve exposed himself to something or done something to cause this. But what? Why did this happen to him? He’s not a vet and has never been a smoker. Both, for reasons no one understands, increase a person’s odds of developing ALS. Did he have some degree of lead poisoning, mercury toxicity, or exposure to radiation that led to this? Did he have undiagnosed Lyme disease? Could Lyme trigger ALS? There is no scientifically based evidence to support any of these speculations.
Was he too sedentary? Maybe too many hours sitting at a piano bench causes ALS. He pictures the warning labels printed on all future Steinways: NEUROLOGIST’S WARNING: PLAYING MAY CAUSE ALS. Obviously not.
He grew up in the seventies and eighties, when processed foods were all the rage. Maybe his ALS was caused by consuming too many chemical preservatives or additives or saccharin. Maybe it was a dietary deficiency, a lack of some necessary vitamin at a critical age. He ate and drank almost nothing but bologna, Doritos, and Tang in 1977. Is that why he has ALS? Did he drink too many cups of Kool-Aid? Did he eat too many Steak-Umms, Twinkies, and bowls of Lucky Charms?
Maybe ALS is triggered by a sexually transmitted disease, a virus yet to be identified. Are virgins safe from ALS?
Who gets ALS? From what he’s witnessed at the clinic, the answer is anyone. He’s seen a twenty-five-year-old medical student, a sixty-five-year-old retired Navy SEAL, a social worker, an artist, an architect, a triathlete, an entrepreneur, men and women, black, Jewish, Japanese, Latino. This disease is as politically correct as they get. It has no bigotries, allergies, or fetishes. ALS is an equal opportunity killer.
Why did a forty-five-year-old concert pianist get ALS? Why not? He hears his mother’s voice: Don’t answer a question with another question. But this is the only answer he can find.
Only when the playing from the next room stops does he realize that his jaw has been clenched. God, how can Karina stand it? The music begins again, but this time, it’s Karina playing, showing her student what the piece is supposed to sound like, what’s possible given those same notes. Her playing is beautiful, a soft blanket calming his agitated nerves. He gets up and walks to the slightly open door to hear her better.
Why did Karina stop playing piano? Teaching kids half-hour lessons after school doesn’t count. Why did she give up on her career as a pianist? He pretends as he often does when he first flirts with this particular why that he doesn’t already know. Unlike the ALS whys, this why has at least one verifiable answer, one that he’s never admitted aloud.
As students, she was inarguably more talented and technically proficient than he was and might’ve stayed the better player and had his career and more, but she abandoned classical piano for improvisational jazz. It was heartbreaking for him, disgusting even, to watch such God-given talent go misdirected, unappreciated, wasted. Granted, he’s more than a little biased, but to him, Mozart and Bach and Chopin are gods, and their sonatas, fantasies, études, and concertos are timeless masterpieces, every note divine brilliance. Playing them on a world stage requires education, talent, passion, technical precision, and endless hours of disciplined practice. Few people on the planet can do this. Karina was one of them. He finds jazz sloppy, incomprehensible, unlistenable, played by mostly untrained amateurs in dive bars, and he never understood how it moved Karina’s soul.
His admittedly snobbish preference for classical music aside, her singular pursuit of jazz was a doomed decision, and he told her so, many times, which probably only glued her faster to it. If a stable, well-paying, and respectable career in classical piano is a fringe endeavor, then a sustainable life playing jazz is akin to landing a job on the moon. The only shot in hell a jazz pianist has of making it is to play with the very best, to develop and nurture and elevate her playing with the other elite musicians called to do this rarest of things. Karina needed to be where these musicians were—in New Orleans, New York City, Paris, or Berlin.
After Curtis, he and Karina lived in New York. She found a regular gig playing with a phenomenal saxophonist and drummer at the Village Vanguard, which paid squat but made her so happy. She was at the beginning of something real and possible, and they both felt it. Who knows what might’ve happened for her had they stayed?
Instead, he relocated them to Boston, accepting a coveted teaching offer at New England Conservatory, a faculty position he sold to her as necessary for his career, a job that, as it turned out, wasn’t so necessary, as he readily left it barely two years later for a life of touring. He knew that moving to Boston put the brakes on Karina’s momentum and was potentially cheating her out of her life’s dream, but he never admitted this to her. And he knew this not just in retrospect, but while they were on the train from Penn Station to Boston’s Back Bay. And he said nothing. Looking back, this was possibly the most selfish thing he’d ever done.