Every Note Played(8)
He stares in horror at his dead hand on the beautiful keys. It’s not simply that his hand is motionless that makes it appear dead. There’s no curl to his fingers. His entire hand is too straight, too flat, devoid of tone, personality, possibility. It’s atrophied, flaccid, impotent. It appears fake, like a Halloween costume, a Hollywood prop, a wax prosthetic. It can’t belong to him.
The air in the room thickens, too solid to breathe, and he can’t seem to remember how to inhale. A wave of panic slips through him. He places his left fingers on the keys, arm extended, wrist up, fingers curled, loving the keys they touch, and he inhales sharply. He heaves air through his lungs as if running for his life while his desperate eyes search the keys and his two hands for what to do. What the hell can he do?
He begins to play Brahms I, actual notes with only his left hand, the right-hand notes with his mind’s ear. He played this fifty-minute concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood last summer. Eighty-seven pages memorized and played as near to perfection as anyone ever has. Some nights the music is well played and applauded, and other nights, the music is transcendent. He lives for those transcendent nights.
That evening on the lawn, the entire orchestra was more than simply a cover band for Brahms. They were an open conduit, breathing life into the music, and he felt that ecstatic, energetic connection between his soul, the souls of the other musicians, the souls of the audience on the lawn, and the soul of the notes. He’s never been able to adequately describe the equation or the experience of this alchemy. Using language to convey the magic of Brahms would be like using a wooden classroom ruler to measure the speed of light.
While playing solely with his left hand, he closes his eyes to lose sight of his immovable corpse hand, and this cut-and-paste, mind-body performance is satisfying to him for a bit. But then he’s rocking his torso back and forth, an unshakable habit criticized by many of his teachers as being either distracting or indulgent, and accidently knocks his right hand off its position on the keys. His entire dead arm dangles from his shoulder like a dropped anchor, heavy and painful, likely dislocated again.
He uses it. The pain in Brahms I, the gravitas, the longing, the loss, the battle in the stormy first movement, like walking into war. The haunting solo played by his left hand. The lonely memory of the melody playing in his mind. The agony in his shoulder. The loss of his right hand.
He dares to wonder what part of himself he’ll lose next. His gut and his mind agree.
Your other hand.
He wails aloud and strikes the keys harder with his left hand while he still can. He loses the sound of the melody in his memory and can now hear only what is real, vibrations produced by hammers and felt and strings and vocal cords, and the absence of the right-handed notes feels like a death, a loss of true love, the bitter end of a relationship, a divorce.
It feels just like his divorce. He lifts his left hand high above the keys and hesitates, stopping the piece just before the crescendo of the first movement, his heart pounding in his shoulder and in the sudden silence, the unfinished song, his interrupted life. He curls his left hand into a fist and pounds the keys as hard as he can as if in a street fight as he weeps, betrayed and heartbroken all over again.
CHAPTER FIVE
It’s Family Weekend at the University of Chicago. Grace insisted that it wasn’t necessary for Karina to come. Karina already knew what the campus looked like, Grace argued. They’d bought sweatshirts and Tshirts and bumper stickers and coffee mugs from the campus store last year. Karina sees Grace’s dorm room and roommate and gets caught up every Sunday when Grace FaceTimes her. Karina thought Grace seemed a little too invested in her opposition to the visit, as if protecting her privacy or independence or some big secret. But Karina could not be dissuaded. The airfare was reasonable, and she was missing her daughter.
They’re at Common Grounds, a homey hipster campus coffee shop, and the big secret is sitting next to Grace, one hand on his triple-shot latte, the other on Grace’s thigh. Matt has overly styled brown hair, a shadow of a beard, and blue eyes that become amused whenever he talks. He’s clearly crazy about Grace. And although she’s trying to play it cool in front of her mother, Grace is crazy about him, too.
“So Grace says you’re an amazing pianist,” says Matt.
Karina holds her pumpkin-spice latte midway between her lips and the table, suddenly unsure of which way she was going with it. She’s caught surprised, moved that Grace would describe her this way. Brag even. Richard is the amazing pianist, not her. Or maybe Matt simply has them confused. Or he’s kissing up to his girlfriend’s mother.
She sets her cup on the table. “No, that’s her father. I’m just a piano teacher.”
“She’s amazing,” says Grace, assertively correcting her mother. “But she gave up her career to stay home with me. This is why I’m never getting pregnant. I’m not wasting my education on raising some kid.”
“Some bratty kid,” says Matt, smiling.
Grace playfully shoves his arm, squeezing his biceps before letting go. Karina sips her latte and licks the foam from her lips as she watches them. They’re definitely having sex.
Karina and Grace are close, but they don’t discuss such things, a trait seemingly passed down from Karina’s mother, like her green eyes and proclivity for waking before dawn no matter how exhausted she was. Karina had exactly one conversation with her mother about sex. She was twelve and forgets the wording of what she asked, but she remembers her mother’s response as she washed dishes at the sink, her back to Karina: “Sex is how babies are made. It’s a sacred act between husbands and wives. Now go bring the towels in off the line.” End of story, forever.