Every Note Played(7)
“So you canceled your tour.”
“How did you hear?”
“The Globe said it was tendinitis.”
“So is that why you’re here, to check on my tendinitis?”
He’s baiting her, asking her to spell it out, to say the three letters, and her apprehensive heart beats too fast again. She brings the goblet to her lips, avoiding his question and her answer, swallowing a mouthful of wine along with her real reason for being here.
“I used to think you sometimes canceled for the attention.”
“Karina, I’m abandoning several thousand people over the next three weeks who were all planning on spending an entire evening paying attention to me. Canceling is the opposite of calling attention.”
Again, they lock eyes, and the energy exchanged is somewhere between an intimate connection and a showdown.
“Of course, it did get your attention.” He smiles.
He sticks his nose into his goblet and inhales, then drains the remaining gulp. He looks over the bottles on the counter and pulls a soldier from the back row. He fits the hood of the opener over the top of the neck and begins to twist, but he keeps losing his grip before making any progress. He lifts the opener off the bottle and examines the top, rubbing it with his finger. He wipes his hand on his pants, as if it had been wet.
“These hard-wax-capsule corks are a bitch to open.”
He repositions the opener and tries and tries, but his fingers keep slipping and have no command over the twisting mechanism. Without thinking much of it, she’s about to offer to do it for him when he stops and hurls the bottle opener across the room. Karina ducks reflexively, even though she was never in danger from the object’s trajectory.
“There it is,” he accuses her. “That’s what you came to see, yes?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know.”
“You happy now?”
“No.”
“That’s why you came here. To see me humiliated like this.”
“No.”
“I can’t play anymore, not well enough, and I won’t be able to ever again. That’s why my tour was canceled, Karina. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“No.”
She stares into his eyes, and standing squarely in the windows of his rage is pure terror.
“Then why are you here?”
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Look at you, suddenly a model Catholic, concerned about right and wrong. With all due respect, my dear, you wouldn’t know right from wrong if it fucked you up the ass.”
She shakes her head, sickened by him, disgusted with herself for not knowing better. She stands. “I didn’t come here to be abused by you.”
“Oh, there you go, carting out that word. No one’s abusing you. Stop using that word. You’ve brainwashed Grace. This is why she won’t talk to me.”
“Don’t blame me for that. If she’s not talking to you, maybe it’s because you’re a prick.”
“Or maybe it’s because her mother is a vindictive bitch.”
Karina takes the bottle he couldn’t open by the neck and smashes it against the edge of the counter. She drops the broken bottleneck and steps away from the expanding puddle of wine on the floor.
“That one smells like cherries,” she says, her voice shaking.
“Leave. Right now.”
“I’m sorry I ever came here.”
She slams the door behind her and runs down the three flights as if she were being chased. She had such good intentions. How did that go so wrong?
How did it all go so wrong?
Rage and grief assault her from all sides, and her legs suddenly feel loosened and drained, powerless to continue. She sits on the top step of the front stoop, facing the beautiful view—the joggers on Comm Ave., the pigeons in the park, the spires of Trinity Church, and the blue glass of the Hancock—not caring who sees or hears her, and sobs.
CHAPTER FOUR
Richard sits down at his piano for the first time in three weeks, since August 17, the day his right index finger gave up the fight, the last of his right-handed fingers to fall deaf to his wishes. He’d been testing it daily. On August 16, he could tap his right index finger ever so slightly. He clung to this accomplishment, pathetically celebrating this movement that required massive mental and physical effort and that looked more like a feeble tremor than a tap. He placed his entire life’s hope on that finger, which eight months ago could dance across the keys of the most complex, athletic pieces without missing a beat, striking each note with just the right amount of force.
FORTISSIMO!
Diminuendo.
His index finger, every finger of his right hand, a finely calibrated instrument. If he made a single mistake while rehearsing, if one of his fingers lacked confidence, strength, or memory and stumbled, he’d stop instantly and start the piece over from the beginning. There was never room for error. No excuse for his fingers.
Eight months ago, his right hand held five of the finest fingers in the world. Today, his entire right arm and hand are paralyzed. Dead to him, as if they already belong to a corpse.
He picks up his lifeless hand with his left and places it on the keys, setting his right thumb onto middle C, pinkie on G. He feels the cool sleekness of the keys, and the touch is sensual, seductive. The keys want to be caressed, the relationship ready and available to him, but he can’t respond, and this is suddenly the cruelest moment of his life.