CHAPTER EIGHT
While her neighborhood still sleeps, Karina is standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, waiting for Elise. The cold air crowds her, penetrating her clothing, and she wishes Elise would materialize so Karina can get her blood moving. She hugs herself as she watches her exhales, white puffs that lift and disperse into the sky as if returning to the clouds. Realizing that she’s standing beneath one of the towering oak trees lining her street, she shifts her position a few feet to the middle of the road. She tilts her face toward the sky, searching for warmth from the sun, but it hasn’t risen yet. The door finally opens, and Elise emerges.
“Sorry. I couldn’t find my gloves.”
They fall in step and walk wordlessly through their tidy neighborhood of landscaped yards and two-car garages, still-darkened windows adorned with school-made ghosts and witches, front porches hosting impressively carved jack-o’-lanterns, pots of green and purple kale, and golden hardy mums. Without stopping, Karina plucks a Tootsie Roll wrapper from the street and pockets it. Karina and Elise won’t break into conversation until they reach the reservoir. Anxious to get there, Karina walks a touch faster. Without questioning, Elise keeps up.
They’ve been walking together one morning a week for three years. Although only recently neighbors, Karina and Elise met at a faculty dinner at the New England Conservatory of Music twenty years ago. Richard had just accepted a highly coveted teaching position in the piano department. They’d moved from New York City because of this prestigious job offer, from the jazz scene at Smalls and 55 Bar, the network of rising musicians Karina jammed with and loved, the steady gigs she played on weekends, and a promising footing in the career she dreamed of.
She didn’t realize this at the time, how one-sided the move would be when she agreed to it. She’s often wondered how much Richard understood before they packed up and left. Not being from this country, she simply assumed Boston would have a significant jazz culture. Surely, she would find other hip clubs, other talented artists, other opportunities for expression and hire. Boston loves the classical concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Pops at Symphony Hall and the Esplanade. Bostonians are fanatically loyal to the rock and pop music of hometown bands such as Aerosmith, the Dropkick Murphys, and New Kids on the Block.
Jazz in New York, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, and even Chicago is considered a renegade and revered art. There is no jazz scene in Boston. The musicians who play at the handful of jazz clubs in town are one-night guests. They come and they go. They don’t live and breathe here. Even before she’d unpacked their dinner plates, she realized this devastating truth and hated herself for being so naïve, so easily duped, as if she’d been promised sushi at a Mexican restaurant and never even asked to see the menu.
Elise was Karina’s beacon of hope at that first faculty dinner. A bassist and professor of contemporary improvisation, Elise talked about ragtime and Wynton Marsalis and African jazz. She’d recorded an album with her students the previous year, a campus production, not exactly Blue Note, but still exciting. Karina couldn’t wait to connect with her again, to ask her about playing somewhere, anywhere, maybe auditing one of her classes, possibly even teaching, but Elise was missing from the next faculty dinner. She’d been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and had taken a leave of absence to undergo treatment.
Then Karina became unexpectedly pregnant with Grace, and Richard left New England Conservatory for what became an endless year of touring, so there were no more faculty dinners. Over time, Karina forgot about Elise. She retreated into the intensity, responsibility, and loneliness of full-time motherhood, resigning herself to living in Richard’s immense shadow, darker, lonelier, and far more inescapable than the pre-dawn sky of a grim November morning.
While she never planned on being a mother, she loved Grace fiercely from the moment she was born and couldn’t imagine choosing the kind of life Richard was living—gone for weeks at a time, devoting his days and weeks and years so singularly to his career. Even when he was home, he’d practice for eight to ten hours a day. He was there but not there.
She couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from Grace, of missing any milestone. She wanted to witness her daughter discovering the world—the magic of seeing her first rainbow, the feel of a dog’s fur and tongue, the silky sweet taste of vanilla ice cream. Karina wanted to be the person Grace saw when she awoke from her naps, who hugged her when she cried, who kissed her a hundred times a day. She couldn’t abandon this enormous, precious love, this gift. She loved Grace more than piano.
And if she chose Grace over piano because she loved her daughter more, then Richard must not have loved Grace at all. This is the script she wrote and read to herself for years. He must be some kind of selfish monster to not love his own daughter, and she hated him for it. She built this case against him, black-and-white and indefensible. But now, looking back, she admits to herself that her conclusion was too extreme and not necessarily true. Love isn’t measured by the number of hours a person logs. For the first time, she wonders if his affairs started before or after she began hating him.
At some point, she can’t locate exactly when, she abandoned any possibility of a career in jazz piano. The goal became too implausible, childish, foolish. She thinks about it now as she walks, the vague dream of that intended life she never lived, and it feels like a comet she’d once seen long ago blazing across the night sky, witnessed for the briefest breathtaking moment and then gone for another hundred years.
While Karina was raising Grace and resenting Richard, Elise beat breast cancer, joined the faculty at Berklee College of Music, divorced her husband, and started dating her radiologist. They married and four years ago moved from Boston to the suburbs, directly across the street from Karina. Kindred spirits reunited. Karina still marvels at this serendipity, and her Catholic mind can’t help but wonder if God led Elise here for a reason.
As they walk past Oak Hill Cemetery, the date returns to Karina’s consciousness. Today is November 1, All Saints’ Day, a national holiday in Poland. As a child, she would spend the entire day at the cemetery with her family. Everyone did this. Having lived in the United States her entire adult life, this tradition now seems a bit morbid and creepy, even in comparison to Halloween, but she always liked it. She remembers the white votive candles placed on the raised gravestones, dots of light sprinkled around her as far as she could see like stars spread across the universe.
She remembers her family gathered, her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins telling stories of those who’d passed away. She savored the stability she felt listening to those stories, in being connected to that history, a single bead strung on an infinitely long, uniquely beautiful necklace. She loved hearing how her grandparents on both sides met, courted, married, had children. She remembers studying their names etched on the gravestones, imagining the lives she barely and never knew, and that double-edged feeling of importance and insignificance, of fate and random chance this still generates, that every moment of those four lives had to unfold exactly as it did or she wouldn’t be here.
They reach the dirt path along the reservoir and begin the three-mile loop. Here they’ll begin chatting, as if they’re finally out of earshot of their neighbors, their words safe among the trees, the Canada geese in the water, an occasional jogger, dog and dog walker.
“How was school this week?” This is always Karina’s first question, inviting the conversation that both inspires and tortures her, like a recovering addict asking for a sip of wine.
“Good. I’m loving that new student I told you about, Claire. She’s got such a great ear, and she’s so totally open to listening and failing. You’ve got to come hear her play. There’s a class show in two weeks.”
“Okay.”
“And we’re planning the student trip to New Orleans. You should come this year.”
“Maybe.”
Karina won’t go to either. Elise invites her to all kinds of shows and classes and guest lectures and every year to the New Orleans trip, and Karina declines it all. Her excuse used to be Grace. She couldn’t go because Richard was out of town, and she was needed at home. Now that she’s divorced and her excuse is at the University of Chicago, she has to come up with some other reason. She’ll be too tired the evening of the class show. And maybe she’ll plan a visit to see Grace the same week Elise and her students are in New Orleans. The thought of being immersed in the jazz scene in New Orleans, that magical hodgepodge of Delta-blues guitar riffs, brassy ragtime horns, and sultry French Gypsy music is too painful for Karina to stomach. Every girl loves a wedding unless the groom is the lost love of her life.
“And maybe one of these days, you’ll come play with us, please.”
“Someday.”
Elise plays bass in a contemporary improvisation band called the Dish Pans with faculty from Berklee, New England Conservatory, and Longy, mostly in bohemian restaurants and hipster bars that have a rotating roster of live music. Someday is always Karina’s reply, and she’d like to believe that it’s true. While she plays and teaches piano almost every day, she’s restricted herself to the classical music of Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart. The dots are already on the page, and she plays them with the obsequious reverence of a Catholic priest reading from the Bible or an actor quoting Shakespeare.
Jazz improvisation is a speech without a script. It’s twelve notes and doing anything she pleases. There are no rules, no boundaries. Verbs don’t have to follow nouns. There is no gravity. Up can be down.
And it’s collaborative. She hasn’t played jazz with anyone since before Grace was born. It shatters her heart every time she realizes how many years it’s been. She could remedy this by taking Elise up on her offer. What if someday was today? Her breath goes shallow, and the wind off the reservoir chills the sweat on her forehead. She’s too out of practice. It’s been too long. A runner laid up for years with an Achilles injury can’t simply show up at the Olympic trials. Karina imagines playing with such practiced and accomplished musicians, and the fear of her certain and overwhelming inadequacy locks her life’s greatest wish in a box.
“So I need to come clean,” says Elise. “I visited Richard.”
Karina stops walking, every muscle’s action suspended, stuck in stunned betrayal.
Elise pauses several steps ahead and turns around. “Roz from the Conservatory called. It was nice of her to remember me. She organized a bunch of the staff who knew him from his teaching days, and we all went over. I felt like it was the decent thing to do.”
Begrudgingly satisfied with this explanation and fueled by curiosity, Karina starts up again. The two women walk side by side.
“So how is he?” Karina asks, a reluctant toe edging into muddy water.
“His arms are completely paralyzed. That was upsetting to actually see.”
The previously dormant pit in Karina’s stomach, planted months ago, sprouts roots. This is really happening. Aside from not being able to open the bottle of wine, he’d looked and acted perfectly normal when she last saw him in July. She’d been holding on to the possibility that his diagnosis was a rumor or a mistake. She still hates him, but palpably less than she did last year, and hasn’t wished him dead since before the divorce. She wouldn’t wish ALS on anyone, not even Richard. She kept waiting to see a correction in the newspaper, his tour back on, that the reports of his imminent death had been greatly exaggerated.
“I’d planned on giving him the stink eye for you, but his arms were just hanging off his body like dead branches, and there was his piano in the room with all of us trying to pretend it wasn’t there. None of us mentioned it. It was too sad.”
Richard without the piano. A fish without water. A planet without a sun.
“How did he seem about it?”
“His spirits were good. He was happy to see us all. But you could tell he was trying really hard to be positive, like he was performing.”
They continue walking in silence, and soon the silence fills with sound—the muffled steps of their sneakers on the dirt path, softened by a bed of brown pine needles and then the crunching of dry, brown-paper-bag oak leaves; Elise sniffling; the huffing of their exhales.
“Does Grace know?” asks Elise.
“Not unless someone else told her. I would know if she knew. No, honestly, I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure he had it until this very conversation.”
Grace. She’s in the middle of midterms. It would be cruel to break this news to her right now. She might get distracted and fail her exams. And why hasn’t Richard told her? Of course he hasn’t told her.
“Maybe I should go see him again,” says Karina.
“That’s your Catholic guilt talking.”
“No.”
“Remember what happened last time.”
“I know.”
“Seeing him is not good for you.”
Richard always seemed invincible to Karina, as if he could conquer anything, and he did. He was an unstoppable force that awed and intimidated her and, at times when she was most vulnerable, trampled her. Now he’s the vulnerable one, and she can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to sit at the other end of the table.
“Yeah, but—”
“What are you hoping for? Tuesdays with Morrie?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s still Richard, honey.”
“Believe me, I know who he is.”
“Just don’t get hurt.”
“I won’t,” Karina says, her voice utterly void of conviction.