She stays another hour; then I kick her out so I have time to practice for a little while before I have to go meet Jamie for our next session. Not that I’m looking forward to it; playing piano for Jamie is a form of torture that should be abolished by the Geneva Convention.
Jamie and I have decided—over a sequence of increasingly acrimonious texts—to practice four days a week. Which means that over half of my weekly evenings are dedicated not to hanging out with friends or working on personal projects, but to having my ego punctured by Jamie Larson over…and over…and over again.
It’s temporary,I tell myself as I cram my body into the glutted subway, squeezed in between an off-duty MTA employee and a pair of teenagers who are making out as if being stuffed into this human hot dog rotisserie isn’t the least erotic situation imaginable. Just ten days until the end of term, and then we have two weeks of blissful winter break before Stockholm.
It should be easy. Itwouldbe easy, if Jamie didn’t seem determined to sabotage the whole thing.
“Thanks for showing up on time again,” I say later on, when Jamie arrives in the practice room only one minute past the hour. I mean it sincerely, although judging from the snarl that twists his lips, he takes it as a jab.
I go to stand up from my chair, and realize a beat too late that my right foot has gone to sleep, like I’ve stepped on a bed of needles. I stumble, my stack of sheet music toppling out of my arms and scattering across the laminate floor.
“Shit,” I mutter, crouching down to collect it. Inside my shoe, I curl my toes tight then flex, trying to force the movement through muscles that feel like they’ve gone heavy and numb.
“Are youdrunk?” Jamie accuses me.
“No.”
He takes a sharp step closer and leans over, literallysniffingme like he’s trying to ferret out the dirty sock in a basket of laundry. “You smell like vodka.”
“It’s gewürztraminer, and I’m not drunk. I had two glasses with dinner.”
Hot tears prickle behind my eyes—goddamn it. My leg couldn’t have done this when Cessy and I were back in the dorm watchingChristmas in Connecticut? Or better yet, waited until the middle of the night, when I wouldn’t even notice? Nope, instead my foot has decided to fuck off right before I’m supposed to play Rachmaninoff’sFantaisie-Tableaux.Which, in addition to being played with/in front of Jamie Larson, involves generous use of the pedals.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey…are you…” He very gingerly touches my shoulder, and I recoil, shoving myself up to standing with the arm of the chair.
“I’m fine,” I snap. “My foot fell asleep while I was sitting there waiting for you to show up. Can we just get started already?”
He hesitates a beat longer than I expect. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “Sure.” And then, because some chivalrous changeling has clearly taken over his body, Jamie crouches down and collects my sheet music, handing it to me without meeting my gaze.
I snatch the pages out of his hands and limp over to the closest piano, plopping down a bit too clumsily onto the bench. I circle myankle a few times, trying to coax some kind of feeling into my foot that isn’t that horrible pincushion sensation, to minimal effect.
The practice is miserable. My foot stays a dead weight for most of the three-hour session; by the end, it’s still all but incapacitated. I know my half of the piece was riddled with mistakes; my mind couldn’t stay focused. The world has condensed down to that stupid leg, an unignorable harbinger of what’s to come.
This is how it ends, after all. This is what I have to look forward to, sooner rather than later: A deteriorating body. Pain. And music, my first love, torn forever out of reach.
Three Years Ago
“Let’s play from the coda one more time,” my mother said.
I flipped through my sheet music to the right page, then arched my back, cracking out the tension that had accumulated there after the hour-plus of practice before my mom joined me. I glanced back at my mom, but she hadn’t even touched her own music yet; she was staring at her flute with a tiny frown settled about her mouth, like it was a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out.
“Mom?”
She startled, like she’d been caught doing something wrong. “What? Oh.” She flipped back through her pages. “Sorry about that. I’m ready when you are.”
I counted down, and we resumed.
The piece was neoclassical, by a Japanese composer best known for his film and TV compositions, although this one—a flute solo with piano accompaniment—was always meant to stand alone. The piano part, while not technicallydifficultin the same way that some classical pieces can be, still required a lot of concentration.Enough to make the piece feel almost more like a duet than a flute solo.
The flute part was stunning, a soaring bird cresting over the rest. The piece made me feel like I ought to be on an ocean somewhere, riding the swell of deep blue waves. Like I wanted to take flight.
But then the flute went silent.
“What happened?” I asked, but I knew the answer before my mother even told me. It was written in the crease of her brow, the wan pallor of her skin, the slight tremor to her fingers as she lay the instrument down.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m sorry, Goldie. I just…I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
My mother used to be this unstoppable force, a goddess in an evening gown whose music had the power to lure entire audiences under her spell. As her lupus got worse, it was like being a frog in a pot of boiling water. You didn’t really notice the difference until moments like these, when suddenly you were snapped out of time and into a harsher reality. And then you could see how much she’d really changed.
