CHAPTER THREE
As Karina walks a little over five blocks to Commonwealth Avenue, she’s barely aware of her surroundings—sparrows nibbling on crumbs of a dropped muffin beneath a park bench; a fierce dragon tattoo covering the bare chest of a skateboarder; the aggressive whir of the board’s wheels as he whizzes by her; a young Asian couple strolling hip to hip, hand in hand; a breeze perfumed with cigarette smoke; a baby wailing in a stroller; a dog barking; the alternating choreography of cars and pedestrians at every intersection. Instead, her attention is held inward.
Her heart races faster than required for her walking pace, making her anxious. Or maybe, likely, she was anxious first, and her heart rate responded. She speeds up in an effort to synchronize her external action with her inner physiology, which only makes her feel as if she were rushing, late. She checks her watch, which is utterly unnecessary. She can’t be early or late when he doesn’t know she’s coming.
She’s worked up a sweat. Stopped at the next corner, waiting for a WALK signal, she pulls a tissue from her purse, reaches under her shirt, and blots her armpits. She digs around for another tissue but can’t find one. She wipes her forehead and nose with her hands.
She arrives at Richard’s address and stops at the base of the stairs, looking up to the fourth-floor windows. Behind her, the spires of Trinity Church and the sheer vertical glass of the John Hancock building rise above the rooftops of the brownstones on the other side of Comm Ave. He has a lovely view.
This street in the Back Bay is especially posh, housing Boston’s Brahmins, cousins to their neighbors on Beacon Hill. Richard lives on the same block as many of Boston’s elegant and elite—the president of BioGO, a Massachusetts General Hospital surgeon, the fourth-generation owner of a two-hundred-year-old art gallery on Newbury Street. Richard makes decent money, exceptional for a pianist, but this address is way out of his league, probably his version of a midlife crisis, his shiny red Porsche. He must be mortgaged to the hilt.
She hasn’t seen him since Grace’s high school graduation, over a year ago now. And she’s never been here. Well, she’s driven by twice before, both times at night, both times ostensibly to avoid traffic, purposefully rerouting from her preferred course home from downtown Boston, slowing to a crawl just long enough to avoid instigating honks from behind her, barely long enough to capture a quick blur of high ceilings and a nonspecific golden glow of a home inhabited.
She resents that Richard got to be the one to move out, to start over, fresh in a new place. Memories of him haunt her in every room of their once-shared home, the rare good as unsettling as the common bad. She replaced their mattress and their dinnerware. She removed their framed wedding picture from the living-room wall and hung a pretty mirror there instead. It doesn’t matter. She’s exactly where he left her, still living in their house, his energetic impression left behind like a red-wine stain on a white blouse. Even washed a thousand times, that brown spot is never coming out.
She could move, especially now that Grace has gone off to college. But where would she go? And do what? Her stubbornness, that impenetrable bedrock of her personality, refuses to give these questions actual consideration beyond calling them nonsense. So she stays put, frozen in the three-bedroom colonial museum of her devastated marriage.
Grace already had her license when Karina and Richard separated, so she was able to drive herself over to her father’s “house.” His bachelor pad. Karina walks up the stairs to the front door of his brownstone, and her mouth goes sour. At the top step, her stomach matches the taste in her mouth, and the word sicken grabs the microphone of her inner monologue. She feels sick. But she’s not sick, she reminds herself. Richard is.
The sour in her stomach turns, fermenting. Why is she here? To say or do what? Offer pity, sympathy, help? To see how bad off he is with her own eyes, the same reason drivers rubberneck when passing the site of an accident—to get a good look at the wreckage before moving along?
What will he look like? She has no reference point other than Stephen Hawking. A hand puppet with no hand in the body, paralyzed, emaciated, unable to breathe without a machine, his limbs, torso, and head positioned in a wheelchair like a little girl’s floppy, cotton-limbed rag doll, his voice computer generated. Is that what Richard will look like?
He might not even be home. Maybe he’s in a hospital. She should’ve called first. Calling somehow seemed scarier than drumming up the nerve to show up at his front door unannounced. Part of her believes that she caused his illness, even though she knows that such thinking is narcissistically absurd. How many times has she wished him dead? Now he’s dying, and she’s a despicable, hellbound, horrible woman for ever wishing such a thing, and worse, for having derived sick pleasure from it.
She stands before the doorbell, torn between following through and turning around, passionate counterpoints creating a quagmire of indecision, pushing and pulling her from within. If she were the gambling kind, she’d put her money on leaving. She breaks through her inertia and rings the bell, surprising herself.
“Hello?” asks Richard’s voice over the intercom speaker.
Karina’s heart beats in her tight, acidic throat. “It’s Karina.”
She tucks her hair behind her ears and pulls at her bra strap, which is sticking uncomfortably to her sweaty body. She waits for him to buzz her in, but nothing happens. Opaque white curtains cover the windows in the door, making it impossible to see if anyone is coming. Then she hears footsteps. The door opens.
Richard says nothing. She waits for him to look stunned that she’s here, but that doesn’t happen. Instead his face is motionless but for his eyes, which hint at a smile, not exactly happy to see her, but satisfied, right about something, and her heart in her throat already knows that this visit was a disastrous idea. He continues to say nothing and she says nothing, and this nonverbal game of chicken probably takes up two seconds, but it stretches out in agonizing slow motion beyond the boundaries of space and time.
“I should’ve called.”
“Come on in.”
As she follows him up the three flights, she studies his footing, assured and steady and normal. His left hand slides along the banister, and although it never loses contact, the banister doesn’t appear to be assisting him. It’s not a handicapped railing. From behind, he looks perfectly healthy.
It was a rumor.
She is a fool.
Inside his condo, he leads her to the kitchen, dark wood and black counters and stainless steel, modern and masculine. He offers her a seat on a stool at the island, overlooking the living room—his Steinway grand, a brown leather couch, the Oriental carpet from their den, a laptop computer on a desk by the window, a bookcase—sparse and tidy and singularly focused. Very Richard.
An army of at least two dozen bottles of wine stands at attention on the kitchen counter, an uncorked neck and a puddle of red at the bottom of a goblet in front of him. He loves wine, likes to fancy himself a connoisseur, but typically indulges in a special selection only after a performance or in celebration of an achievement or a holiday or at least with dinner. It’s not even noon on a Wednesday.
“These were from the cellar. This 2000 Château Mouton Rothschild is exquisite.” He pulls a glass from a cabinet. “Join me?”
“No, thanks.”
“This”—he waves his hand back and forth in the air between them—“unexpected visit or whatever it is needs alcohol, don’t you think?”
“Should you be drinking so much?”
He laughs. “I’m not tackling all of these today. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
He grabs a beautiful black bottle with a golden sheep embossed on it, already open, and pours her a generous glass, ignoring her answer. She sips, then smiles out of obligation, unimpressed.
He laughs again. “You still have the discriminating palate of a farm animal.”
It’s true. She can’t discern the difference between an expensive bottle of Mouton and a jug of Gallo, nor does she care, and both traits have always driven Richard mad. And true to patronizing form, he’s essentially just called her a stupid pig. Karina clenches her teeth, biting back the comment that will leave her mouth if she opens it and the urge to throw $100 worth of his precious wine in his face.
He swirls, smells, sips, closes his eyes, waits, swallows, and licks his lips. He opens his eyes and mouth and looks at her as if he’s just had an orgasm or seen God.
“How can you not appreciate this? The timing is perfect. Taste it again. Smell the cherries?”
She tries another sip. It’s okay. She doesn’t smell cherries. “I can’t remember the last time we shared a bottle of wine.”
“Four years ago, November. I was just home from Japan, wrecked from the flights. You made golabki, and we drank a bottle of Châteaux Margaux.”
She stares at him, surprised and intrigued. She has no memory of this evening, so readily and fondly retrieved by Richard, and wonders if it simply wasn’t significant enough to her to hold on to or if the memory faded, crowded out by too many other experiences that didn’t jibe. Funny how the story of their lives can be an entirely different genre depending on the narrator.
They lock eyes. His look a bit older than she remembers. Or not older. Sadder. And his face looks more defined. Although he’s always been thin, he’s definitely lost weight. And he’s grown a beard.
“I see you’ve stopped shaving.”
“Trying something new. You like it?”
“No.”
He grins and takes another sip of wine. He taps the rim of his glass with his finger and says nothing, and she can’t figure out whether he’s deciding which of her buttons to push or showing restraint. Restraint would be new.
“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.