Contrary Motion Page 8

  I remember that the nightshirt she sometimes wears is a castoff from her father.

  “I thought you liked your dad,” I say.

  “He’s himself all the time—and I like that. He doesn’t worry about anything—but I hate that about him, too. And when he didn’t worry about hurting my mom, I really hated that about him. But they’re apart now, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it matters,” I say. “Everything matters—more and more all the time, that’s what I’m starting to feel.”

  She smiles at this, though I don’t know why, but I’ll take her smile because it makes me feel as if we’ve almost broken through.

  “Whitaker is keeping his distance,” she says.

  “Nothing to make amends?”

  “No, the weird thing is, he’s acting like he’s mad at me, like I’ve done something to him. He doesn’t get back to me like he used to. He’s sort of icing me.”

  “Maybe he’s embarrassed.”

  “That’s not what it feels like.”

  “So are you, I don’t know, going to the appliance committee or whatever it is?”

  “I’m not sure. Doing something formal feels risky. I might go to this senior partner in our group, who’s an asshole, but I think he hates Whitaker. Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you, this partner wants me to go to Denver a week from Monday to oversee a document production because one of his senior associates is crashing and burning and can’t do it.”

  “Sounds like a good time to wangle a favor out of him.”

  “This is one of those situations where the longer you wait, the more suspicious it looks when you say something.” She seems to ponder this. “It’s weird,” she says. “I think I became a lawyer like some women take karate—so no one could mess with me. And now I’m getting messed with.”

  “But you know how to fight back.”

  “Well, I think he’s icing me to let me know that he can make things hard for me. And his defense isn’t bad: he’s getting over his divorce. I don’t talk much about my personal life at work, so he doesn’t know if I’m seeing someone. We work closely. We’ve gotten along pretty well. He thought we had something. He takes a chance, kisses me, and when I get mad, he apologizes and leaves.”

  “But he kept going after you said no. You had to push him away.”

  “He trapped me with the chair, but that left no marks, and he had to stand somewhere. I’m the one who probably hurt his neck pushing him away. It’s a fucking hopeless ‘he said, she said’ situation.”

  “But he’s your boss. Some kind of abuse of power, right?”

  “Not necessarily,” she says, with an unbecoming curl of her mouth. It seems we’re role-playing: she’s doing to me what some defense attorney would do to her. “Yes, he has power over me,” she continues, “but it’s only an abuse of power if what he’s done is abusive, and that goes back to his story, which, as I said, is a good one.”

  “Unless it’s always abusive to come on to a subordinate.”

  Cynthia snorts. “You’re about to turn millions of office relationships into rape cases.”

  “So he wins?”

  Cynthia takes this moment to shift her position in the bed. She turns on her side facing away from me and uses the pillow as a pillow.

  “Why’d you do that?” I ask.

  “What?” She turns her head to face me.

  “Make an argument against yourself. Persuade yourself you’re in a bad situation.”

  “It’s just the truth.”

  “Actually,” I say, “I do that to myself sometimes. Maybe that means we’re made for each other.”

  She barely smiles at that, and I remember a half hour ago, lying on my back with her half kneeling, half crouching over my hips, reaching to take me and put me inside of her, but it was clearly no use, and the position, with us both looking at what was happening, was mortifying to me beyond words.

  I roll toward her now and let my nakedness touch where she is bare under the hem of the T-shirt. I hug her from the side, which she allows.

  She’s my lawyer—a lawyer apparently taking the Fifth on the question of whether we’re made for each other. And she’s also a party to an ongoing humiliation that makes me want to run from this room, but I lie with her, because I live here, and because I think love is possible with her.

  At the very least, I did fall in love with the person I thought she was when we started dating, and I can’t bear the idea that I might not always feel that love because of how self-conscious I’ve become with her, which is not her fault. Of course, I love you is always shorthand for something complicated. I’ve heard that love is really just a commitment to stop second-guessing the other person, to stop asking yourself if you should be with this person, so you can just embrace the person and make them happy. But what if it’s myself I’m second-guessing too much?

  She reaches over and turns off the bedside lamp.

  Surprisingly, I’m not ready to stop talking. She’s never been quite as open with me as she has been tonight, and that gives me a sliver of happiness. After a dark minute, I hear myself ask, “What was her name?”

  “Whose name?” she murmurs, letting me know that she’s intent on sleep.

  “Your roommate.”

  “Oh. It was Anna. We don’t keep in touch. She took a leave second semester and never came back. She was a little mixed up about things.” She sighs. “Good night, Matt.”

  10

  WEDNESDAY IS ANOTHER cool day threatening rain. Though it takes me a disturbing amount of time to get started, I finally practice in the late morning, still fighting the buzz that’s been coming and going. Then I’ve got business to take care of in the afternoon.

  First, scruples be damned, I’m going to see my GP, ostensibly for a routine physical, but really because I want to make a play for a Viagra prescription. Then I’ll be heading out to Elmhurst for the hospice gig. I’ve thrown in the towel on being all-natural in bed, because I’ve started dreading physical intimacy with Cynthia, which is not likely to improve my performance or our relationship. And I suspect this fear has also infected my camaraderie with the harp. My unseemly dilly-dallying this morning—I actually cleaned my bathroom—suggests I’m afraid of practicing. My old associations between the harp and sex make it difficult for me to confine a sense of having lost my touch to the bedroom only. Not practicing enough will of course be fatal in many ways.

  So I pack the harp into the Volvo for later and drive to the old Rogers Park neighborhood to see the talkative and baby-faced Dr. Hands. Unfortunately, the visit will be totally out of pocket. Since the divorce punted me from Milena’s health plan, I’ve been resisting insurance through the American String Teachers Association, economizing until I really need it. Depending on how much the Viagra prescription is, it could be time.

  Contrary to every cliché about brusque and indifferent doctors, Dr. Hands chats with backyard-barbecue length and familiarity, which means he’s always running behind. Today I learn about his support for President Bush, what camps his children are headed to this summer, and his wife’s favorite wine. As he does every visit, he tells me, “no offense,” that classical music is not his thing. I embarrass myself by having tied the hospital gown his nurse gave me in the front rather than in the back, but otherwise the exam is routine and his palpations, peerings, and listenings turn up the expected: my blood pressure is still aberrantly low, and my prolapsed mitral valve—the cause of my heart murmur, which allows a bit of blood to slosh backwards with every contraction of my left ventricle—doesn’t sound worse.

  “You look a little worn out, but nothing that’s showing up in your vitals,” Dr. Hands concludes.

  The room is windowless, the walls painted forest green. A poster of the mountains in Grand Teton National Park adorns the wall across from me. I’m perched on the examination table, feeling like a child, with my feet dangling and tissue paper rustling under my ass.

  I stare at a mountain and let fly. “One more thing, Doc,” I s
ay. “I have certain psychological problems that I don’t want to burden you with, but—”

  “Psychological problems?” he asks, with vaudeville intonation.

  I keep my gaze on the snowy peak. “Anyway,” I continue, “long story short, would you be willing to write me a Viagra prescription?”

  I blush horribly.

  He rocks back and forth for about four beats, looking down at the top of his fancy tablet computer on which he takes all of his notes with a little stylus. He’s about five years older than me, but he seems younger. His sweep of sandy brown hair swells as if pumped with air.

  “You’re kind of young for that,” he finally says, looking up. “Usually…” He smiles fatuously. “Look,” he says, changing his tack, “it’s a pretty serious drug, and with your low blood pressure and dizzy spells, you’d risk fainting every time you took it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’ll lower your blood pressure even more. Plus your heart murmur. I just haven’t seen enough data on this stuff and heart irregularities—”

  “Doc, I’d much rather be unconscious but functional than the other way around. You know what I’m saying?”

  He purses his lips, looks past me. Then he reengages, lowering his voice. “Ah, maybe it’s the divorce, you know, getting used to dating again?” He holds his computer like a kickboard and squints at me.

  “It’s always been bad,” I say, lowering my voice, too, though of course this wasn’t true with Milena. It occurs to me to mention my father’s death, as if to explain everything, but I’m afraid I’ll start crying. I’ve been disturbingly dry-eyed about my father, but thinking about losing him and my impotence at the same time threatens to send me over the edge.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” he says, “but right now I can only recommend some talk therapy.” He reaches out and slaps my left biceps. “Sorry, guy.”

  —

  I park illegally, nearly sticking out into an intersection, and stare up at the third-floor left unit, where Milena and Audrey and I used to live and where I had erections to burn. There’s the front porch, with its brick pillars, where we grilled burgers and salmon steaks and kabobs and drank daiquiris, where I gave Audrey more than a few bottles and showed her a cicada up close on her first birthday. “Bug right there,” she said astutely, not late-to-speech like I was. I can see through the walls where my harps used to stand, all the way to the kitchen where Milena and I tended to have our fights.

  Near the back of the apartment was also our bedroom, where, for a few years, we tried to sustain our undergraduate ways, smoking pot and listening to Brian Eno and Pink Floyd (from before they hit it big: More, Obscured by Clouds, Meddle), making love almost whenever we were both awake and in bed, never mind the time. I remember falling asleep with her head on my chest, listening to Another Green World. I had never been able to fall asleep while touching someone, and even with Milena I only did it a few times.

  A few blocks away is Touhy Beach, where we played checkers on the jetty and, on several occasions, indulged our short-lived but intense mutual interest in public sex. Milena somehow turned my self-consciousness completely inside out. But maybe there was no place to go from there, and overall the move from Evanston to Rogers Park was like transplanting a flower from Tahiti to Chicago. Things eventually withered when my ambition turned desperate and Milena’s bourgeois needs grew ascendant, but for a time I was happy with her, sitting around, saying almost nothing, eating pizza turnovers and drinking RC Colas, and sometimes it seems I have never really been happy before or since.

  What a fool I was for blowing it with Milena! That’s all I can think until I finally tear myself away from the place.

  Now in the proper mood to confront a building full of dying people, I take Lake Shore Drive to the Ike and cruise toward Elmhurst, my hands getting clammy.

  The Golden Prairie Hospice is a sprawling one-story complex with gray-stained cedar siding, ornamented with about twenty peaked roofs. The overall impression is of houses that were once separate—like balls of cookie dough on a baking sheet—but which have melted together to form one large building. I park, remove the harp (my backup, a smaller Lyon & Healy 85P, because it’ll have a less overwhelming sound in a patient’s room than my concert grand), and get it rolling across the fresh black asphalt. The wind blows in cool gusts. A sign on a parking lot island says you can’t smoke outside in this area. The long covered walkway from the lot to the front door also has a high peaked roof, with exposed beams supporting it. The point of the airy space, I guess, is to avoid the impression that you’re entering a crypt.

  To open the automatic door, I gently press a round aluminum button emblazoned with the crude outline of a blue wheelchair-bound figure, then pull my harp into a vestibule where an empty wheelchair sits pushed into a corner between a bucket of driveway salt and a green snow shovel with a bend in the handle. Another button admits me to the heart of the building, where I have my eye out for a receptionist, but there is none—not even a station where a receptionist might receive. Straight across the shallow lobby, two French doors open into an area a wall plaque labels “Great Room.” At one end of this room, flanked by tall bookshelves, is a monumental, nearly Citizen Kane–scale fireplace. Arrangements of living room furniture anticipate semi-intimate gatherings, à la the Marriott’s lobby. The people here—wherever they are—are dying in style: no linoleum hallways or buzzing fluorescent lights.

  I stand still in the lobby with my harp and my gear and I listen. The building is so quiet I hear my own surprisingly quick, shallow breathing. My stomach twists. It was easy to keep my head down and just live when I was like a cyclist unaware of drafting behind my father. Now that I’ve looked up to find him gone, the frightening awareness of my own mortality blows silently but bitterly in my face, a headwind I’m not ready to brave without the shield of some major accomplishment or a close companion.

  Just as I begin to hope that no one is here and I can leave, Marcia appears, coming down the corridor.

  “Our angel has come—hooray!” she says. She bops her head to the side and throws her fists weakly into the air. “Come on back to my office,” she says, “and I’ll tell you some unpleasant things before you set up and play.”

  Her office is also set up like a living room, with two small couches, armchairs, lamps, and end tables. The large windows look like the old-fashioned, multipane variety, but they’re really just single rectangles with a beige vinyl grid pushed against them to make the glass seem partitioned. There’s a writing desk facing the wall in a corner, but no big desk behind which she might preside, benevolent and official, when family members park their dying for the last time.

  We sit in two stiff armchairs, and she asks me if I want something to drink.

  “No, I better not.”

  “I was just thinking water or a Coke.” She laughs.

  I smile my hapless tight smile, as if my face were stretched across a loom. She’s bringing out my desire to say the right thing, which of course leaves me tongue-tied.

  “Ah, I see,” she says to herself. “Well, now, Matt, are you ready for this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Good. Not knowing is very good. Let me just go over some things and then we can get you set up.” She runs a ringless left hand through her hair, tucking it back behind her ear. “Now, you’re an excellent musician—wonderful—but when you’re playing at our hospice, you might think of yourself more as a nurse giving medical care. I know that might sound strange, but I hope you can see that it’s about the clients and their families, not your performance.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Music, especially live music, has amazing therapeutic properties. It lowers blood pressure, it releases endorphins. You’re like a morphine drip to these people, believe me. How does that sound, being a morphine drip?”

  “It sounds great. I’ve always wanted to be—or have—a morphine drip.”

  “Being and having, n
ot so different in this case, Matt. What you do for them you’re doing for yourself—that’s the secret here. That’s how we get through our days with a smile on our collective face. All right, rule number one: Listen. Listen to the nurses and the family and the client to find out what would be best to play. Some people want hymns, some people hate hymns; some want their favorite songs, some need songs they can’t recognize, and so on. Then, as you play, watch the client and use common sense. If the client is getting agitated, maybe the song is calling up a bad memory—or maybe the client needs something. It’s okay to stop and ask if the client would like you to call a nurse or play something different. Rule number two: Keep your hands washed. Leave the room if you have to sneeze. Don’t come if you have a cold—don’t get any more colds, Matt. They’re inconvenient.” She smiles. “We don’t want your germs to finish someone off, understand?”

  “Killing someone with my germs is my worst nightmare,” I say.

  “As well it should be.” She peers at me, recrosses her legs.

  It takes all my effort to keep my eyes on her eyes during the recrossing. Maybe she’s ringless because directing a hospice suggests a level of soulfulness and moral seriousness a guy might not feel he could live up to. I think, Just my type! My head wobbles slightly and I chuckle.

  Her look turns quizzical. “Can I ask you something, Matt?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you psychologically stable?”

  All the molecules in the room rearrange themselves, departing from, then reassuming the shapes they were in before, as if they all decided to make a break for it but then realized that would be pointless. I don’t know if her comment was prompted by the extended eye contact, or my chuckle, or every move I’ve made since we’ve met. I don’t know if she’s wholly serious, either.

  “I think I’m almost too stable,” I venture.

  “This is going to work.” She smiles. “One way or another, this is going to work.”