Every Note Played(63)

Just like all those years ago, he aches for her to speak to him. He’s never told her that he’s sorry for cheating on her, for hurting her, for stealing that smile from her lips for so long. But he is sorry and hopes that she somehow knows this, that she can sense the regret and apology in him the way he can sense this new joy in her. He wants to hear her voice tell him that she’s okay. He wants to be forgiven. He wants.

The syringe is emptied. Karina refills it with a second helping. As she’s reattaching it, her warm, gloveless hands touch his bare, concave stomach, and although from her perspective, her hands are in the business of feeding her ex-husband through a PEG tube, for Richard, the touch feels intimate, personal, human.

At first, embarrassed, he hopes she doesn’t notice that he’s hard beneath the bedsheet and his boxers, but then he hopes she does. Every day he wakes to morning wood and can do nothing but wait it out. He hasn’t masturbated since his left hand left him in October. He purposefully no longer imagines anything sexually desirable during this daily rise and fall. But now, as he’s unexpectedly turned on, he imagines Karina touching it, touching him, and his desire is excruciatingly urgent, building in his penis, his heart, and his mind, silently begging for her to notice. He wants her to lie down next to him, to kiss him while stroking him. He wants to be a man and not a failing body in a bed. He wants to be touched, to be loved, to come. It’s been so long. He wants.

She finishes the syringe, flushes the tubing with water, and caps the MIC-KEY button. She lowers his shirt, pulls the covers up to his chest, and stands.

“Okay, you’re good until ten. You want the TV on?”

He stares at her, unblinking.

“You want anything?”

He smiles. If only he had the strength to tell her.

She hesitates, eyeing him quizzically. “Okay, I’ll check on you in a bit.”

She leaves the door to the den cracked open. He sits in bed and stares at the open door, listening to the sounds of her making her own dinner in the kitchen, wanting.





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


Richard sits in his wheelchair in the living room where Karina left him about a half hour ago, where he’ll stay until Karina or the next home health aide moves him. She parked him in a rectangular patch of sunlight, angled toward the windows, as if a warm and sunny view of Walnut Street is supposed to make him feel more optimistic, less trapped. He knows she’s well-intentioned. He watches the blithe movement of squirrels and birds. Everything alive moves.

He hears Karina sneeze three times. She’s been fighting a cold for the past week, staying away from him as much as possible so as not to infect him. She’s in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. Triggered by the torturously delicious smells of coffee and bacon, saliva pools in his mouth. He gurgles on it and swallows over and over, trying to push the gluey liquid down, struggling not to choke. A string of sticky drool descends over his bottom lip and lands on the cotton towel draped over his chest like a bib for this very reason. He turns his head left and right, but the spiderweb of drool won’t break. He gives up.

He shifts his focus away from the sun and animated existence and instead looks upon his Steinway. Eighty-eight glossy black and white keys. God, what he wouldn’t give to touch them.

Ten feet in front of him.

A million miles.

He stares at it with agonizing desire and apology, as if he’s broken a sacred promise, a marriage vow. He imagines the action of each key, the blending colors of sound, music coming into existence, birthed through his body. He imagines a series of ascending arpeggios, and they become the sound of Karina’s laugh.

His piano. The relationship is over. He’s still working on letting it go. It’s not you, it’s me. Taking the blame doesn’t change a thing. They are divorced, rejected and abandoned, reduced to pitiful statues collecting dust in the living room.

Careful not to tip his head even slightly downward else it flops forward, chin to chest, unable to right itself, he stares at his legs, his feet angled toward each other, pigeon-toed, and he suddenly resents Bill for arranging his feet in this unmanly way, a body position that speaks uncertainty, meekness, submission. Then he laughs at himself, as if anything about an emaciated man dying of ALS in a wheelchair could possibly communicate machismo, as if anyone but his piano were in the room to judge him. Bill dressed Richard’s feet this morning in thin wool socks and black loafers. Shoes on a man whose feet will never again walk this earth. The irony and tragedy of wearing shoes make him want to cry. He can’t stand to look at his feet. Literally.

Instead, he studies the rubber flesh of his flat right hand, limp and lifeless; his curled, distorted left hand, no longer possessed by him; both placed on pillows over the arms of his wheelchair in exactly this position by Bill over an hour ago. Richard’s entire body is a costume discarded, the party over. He returns to what used to be his elegant left hand and commands the fingers to straighten, knowing they won’t. He changes tack. Please. His limbs are petulant children, unreachable through begging, bribery, ultimatums, or sweet talk.

He tries to imagine the war beneath his skin; the invaded countries of his neurons and muscles overwhelmed, decimated; the neutral territories of bone, ligament, and tendon rendered useless by the horrific destruction surrounding them. His entire body is detaching, unzipping from his soul.

He turns his head ninety degrees left, then right, testing himself, relieved that he can still do this. Once his neck and voice are paralyzed, he’ll be reduced to eye-gaze technology and a computer-generated voice for communicating. He opens his eyes wide and pinches them shut tight. Good. When he can no longer blink, he’ll be locked in. He doesn’t want to die, but he hopes he dies before that happens. Maybe that won’t happen.