Frank woke up in post-op to the sound of music.
Was he alive? He struggled against a tangle of tubes and bandages. A Demerol drip jabbed into his wrist tethered him to the hospital room, to illness. Where was Carmen?
The music surged and contracted. Piano music. From M. Fleischman’s room across the hall—that big family, that noisy bunch from this morning. It was coming through the walls. Shining through the walls, like a bright light, hurting him. He squeezed his eyes shut. He felt a ballooning ache in his chest and something about to cleave.
Was this it?—this body’s betrayal, this stupid sorrow and rage, those lonely final hours before his surgery spent hosing dog shit off the sidewalk and opening the mail? Frank gasped. A nurse hurried to his bedside.
The music swelled. Something in the back of his throat seized, then released. He was flooded with warmth. He relaxed. The last notes fell away, and Frank lay between the chrome rails of his hospital bed, glittering.
He was alive.
Frank covered his face with his hands and wept. He wept for joy, and for all the years he hadn’t felt anything.
The nurse returned with the surgeon and his wife and daughter, Mazy.
Carmen stroked his hand. “Bobo.”
Carmen. Cariña. He would tell her more often, what she meant to him. Listen better. Take an interest in her garden. Spend more time with Mazy, too.
“They got it?” Frank said, weakly.
Mazy leaned over the rail and hugged him, hard. “You are going to live forever.”
“We were quite successful,” the surgeon said, with brusque efficiency. “Unfortunately, most of the cells in our bodies have a lifespan, and are going to die. The only cells that live forever are called cancer.”
The next morning, Frank kicked at the bedsheets and assorted paperbacks and demanded to be discharged early. He had so little remaining time.
“Mrs. Fleischman said it was Chopin,” Carmen said. “Happy?”
Carmen pushed Frank’s temporary wheelchair down the hall, past the cafeteria. At the end of the corridor was a bronze bust of the hospital’s benefactor. Someone had pressed peas into his eye sockets.
Mazy would have laughed. Lately, she’d been posting videos online for followers, filming herself brushing her hair or squeezing paint out of tubes into little heaps. Mazy was twenty-seven, a Yale-trained artist. Frank and Carmen supported her. She could be a genius but she had no confidence.
“Pay me back when you’re famous,” Frank told her. “No, the only thing I really want back is your pretty smile.”
* * *
Chopin. So that’s what had made him want to get out of bed. Frank listened to Étude Op. 25 no. 12 in C minor on repeat. From the window, he watched the neighbor lady in her red nylon jacket walk out to the mailbox with her limp and her schnauzer. She waited as the dog squatted on the sidewalk. Right on time. But the music—the music transformed the scene into a whirling loveliness, like falling snow. There was a rhythm to living, Frank thought, a sweet back-and-forthing. Her limp was regal, even; part of a deep mystery. Frank could feel the lilt of her expectation that something maybe exciting had arrived.
“Bobo, you don’t even play the piano,” Carmen said.
He couldn’t read music, either. He spread pages of sheet music over his desk. Frank was recovering remarkably well, the doctors said. They encouraged him to do restful things like helping Carmen in the garden. Frank had retired from project management when he got sick. He didn’t want to rest. He wanted vertigo.
Sunday afternoon, he sat with Carmen, his wife of thirty-two years, in the living room of their house in Chelsea, just outside Boston, where nothing much had changed. The ginger Persian rubbed herself between Frank’s ankles and collapsed on the faded rug. Carmen arranged cut flowers in a vase. She was Colombian, and had been raised in a wealthy family of five sisters in Venezuela and moved to Texas as a young woman. There, she met and married Frank, they had Mazy and moved to Boston. She taught history and Latin American studies at Suffolk University. Frank’s family were Southern Baptists. The hymns at church, he remembered, sounded remote and old-timey.
The store clerk who sold him the Complete Chopin Études asked if Frank was a fan of the Romantic composers. Was he giving a concert? Frank just wanted to sit in his chair, play the recordings and follow the notes. He scribbled annotations in the borders: molto allegro con fuoco means very cheerful with fire. The music stirred some vague hunger, but he did not know what to consume. One night, he pulled Carmen’s body into his. He felt under her nightgown, calibrating his movements to the sparkling arpeggios in his imagination.
Carmen sighed and rolled away. “Qué loba. You’re always somewhere else.”
He scoured the internet for musicology theses: “In a music-induced state of flow, a person is self-transcending, self-forgetful, and disoriented in time and space.” Was that what happened to him in the hospital? Chopin composed twenty-seven études while still in his twenties. He was only thirty-nine when he died, ill and weak his entire life. But Frank was strong. Frank had always seen living as a series of puzzles you solved, and the only one that stumped you was death. Was there some deep mystery at the core of everything? The music had re-enlivened him. As long as it was working, he didn’t need to know how.
In a few weeks, Frank had exhausted the grace period in which everything he did was for his wife a precious occasion for gratitude. He couldn’t just listen to music and mope, she scolded, he had to do something with himself.
Frank made a pitcher of iced-tea and sat on the front porch with the cat in his lap. Some weeds had pushed up around the corners while Carmen had been tending to him. Frank surveyed his wife’s backside as she pruned the azalea bushes. Carmen had her garden and Mazy and her Colombian sisters to fuss over. What did Frank have? Carmen was always cheerful. She wrote bad nature poems and didn’t care. When Frank met her, she was curvy and beautiful and still had her aura of wealth. Now, thanks to him, she was squarely middle-class. Her skin was blue-veined and translucent as a wilting iris, and she wore flowing clothing over her ample figure. She had accepted all this.
He turned up the volume of his favorite Chopin étude, performed by his favorite pianist, Vladimir Horowitz.
“It sounds like ocean waves,” Carmen said.
It wasn’t about the ocean. Frank paused the recording and explained. “It’s abstract. It’s not about anything,” he said. An étude was a study: a composition of virtuosic difficulty to refine a performer’s technique. “People say it sounds like the ocean because people are dupes. Always reading into things, looking for signs, Holy Virgins on grilled cheese sandwiches.”
“Dios mío. Él está tragado,” Carmen muttered. She stood up, shook the dirt from her gloves. “Know who else was crazy about music? Stalin.”
“Now I’m Stalin?”
“It’s true. At school they taught us about the Soviets. Our countries were friendly back then. Anyway, there was a very accomplished pianist, this lady, and Stalin loved her playing. They forced her to make him a recording in the middle of the night. He gave her the Stalin Prize. She sent him back a letter and told him off, and gave the money to a church. Everyone thought he would kill her, but he didn’t.”
“Well, Vladimir Horowitz is the most accomplished pianist of all time. He was a depressive. Sometimes they had to push him onto the stage. He had breakdowns and could hardly play. A critic said he was like a precious antique vase that cracked.”
Carmen pulled off her gloves and rubbed her temples. “I’m going to crack. Bobo, I need a break. Why don’t you go see Mazy.”
Frank pushed the cat off his lap. All these flowers. Every season they just died, over and over.
“See that ugly yellow thing by your foot?” Carmen said. “Pull that up.”
* * *
Mazy’s studio was in a brick industrial building in New Haven. Frank thumbed through stacks of her old paintings. Everything was very clean. She’d set up some lights and reflectors in the corner and clipped her phone to a tripod. The walls were empty and her easel was turned to the window. On her work table was a large sheet of glass, her palette, covered in untouched blobs of dried paint. She had once won a big scholarship.
“Why aren’t you painting?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
Frank offered to pick her up from her doctor’s appointment and take her back to her apartment. “Why don’t you come with me later to the symphony?”
“I don’t need you to do that.”
Frank waited for her in the parking lot. Mazy glared at him as she slid into the passenger’s seat. They were silent as he drove.
“What did the doctor say?”
“Nothing. He just wrote a prescription. I’m not going to take it.”
“You should take it. It will help you. How often do you feel anxious? Do you often feel flat or uninterested in the things you used to love?”
“You don’t listen to me. You don’t listen to Mom.”
“I—honey, I don’t like seeing you like this. I want to see you happy.”
“You know what, Dad? You know what I told the doctor for family medical history? I told him I think you might be on the spectrum. You don’t even know it. It’s all about you. What you want.”
Frank pulled up to Mazy’s apartment and she got out of the car without saying good-bye.
She’d left the prescription form and medical questionnaire on the seat. Frank read her answers. She had checked many boxes yes. The questions sounded so clinical. He’d asked her the same ones.
Frank drove to Boston. In streets and stores, he hallucinated music. Nothing else was as radiant. The people and objects were dumpy and literal. He stepped into M. Steinert & Sons on Boston Common and plunked a few keys. He drove to Boston Symphony Hall.
Frank sat in the darkened auditorium and studied the program notes. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Part 1: The Adoration of the Earth. In the original ballet, Nijinsky choreographed the ballerina to dance herself to death. The lights came down. A solo bassoon slithered uneasily through the hush. Frank noticed the bassoonist’s thinning hair, a sheen of sweat. The string section swayed like a cloud of wasps, bows slashing. The fluitist’s thin rib-cage heaved. Gongs thrashed and stilled. It was like a murder. They had all performed it—death, the end. They’d pushed right up to it but survived.
When Frank returned home, he found a note from Carmen on the counter. She had gone to stay at a colleague’s for a few nights, and then she would fly from Logan to Orlando and on to Bogotá. Frank would be on his own for a while. No, he may not call. Please water, she wrote, if he could find the time.
Frank had no time, and nothing but time. Cherishing some idée fixe—he thought she loved that about him. Alone in the house, he abandoned himself to decadent tendencies he’d moderated for Carmen’s sake. He bought a brocade robe and a pair of velvet slippers. He ate with his fingers from plastic tubs, oily, pre-prepared things stuffed into grape leaves. He installed a new stereo system and played it at full volume. He carefully watered the peonies each day. Carmen wouldn’t leave. She would come back to him.
Frank read Shostakovich’s memoirs: “Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope.” The composer’s biographer added, “Even Stalin, a butcher, knew that. There was only the question of life or death: how did the leader like your opus. I stress: life or death—literally, not figuratively.” The compression of life was dizzying, Frank thought. The abruptness of its ending nauseated him. Dictators who imagined themselves immortal were deposed, their statues dragged from plinths with chains. The benefactors got peas in their eyes.
Frank put on his headphones and went out for a long walk. He waited for the music to exalt him. He saw a punctured bike tire in a yard, a dog turd mittened in mold. He passed alleyways, family pets, herb gardens, children’s toys, mailboxes, an old woman smelling a leaf. Everything was slowly peeling, shedding, shaking apart at the core. But the music was a fossil he could hold in his hand, a captured compaction of all these lost and broken pieces. It had lodged in a vast cavity of longing Frank did not know he contained.
Maybe Chopin felt confined within his broken body, and knew he’d always been too close to death to show off. Maybe the étude was about the ocean. The glittering top notes were cresting waves shredded by wind and sunlight. Chopin cast himself into the ocean, and his body rolled and sank. He forced himself into the darkness, to be with the others. Not the admirers, but the ones who could look at the end, at being nothing and meaning nothing. Those ones had nearly died, the performers, practicing his music until it lost all sense and left them exhausted and empty. And the audience, the everyday world watched, and let them try to unmake it, and felt something deep and unmistakable, then continued on with their days.
Frank sat down in the middle of the road and closed his eyes. Gravel bit into his palms. He heard cars approach and pass. Someone stopped, a door slammed.
“Get out of the road,” a man called. “What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?”
Frank turned off the music. He listened. He rose from the ground and walked silently home. Through the gate, up the flagstone path lined with flowers. Strands of music floated through his head like ash.