At Curtis, music ruled, not athletics. Every girl there was attracted to music, and even better, to musicians. Like a seed waiting for healthy soil and sunshine, Richard’s confidence around girls blossomed at Curtis.
That first day of Technique class, Karina was wearing a lavender scarf wrapped around her long brown hair. He remembers her big green eyes and pale skin, her plump bottom lip distracting him from the lecture as he imagined how soft it would feel to kiss it. Then she spoke, called upon by Sherman Leiper. He can’t remember the question, but he can still remember the sound of her answer in that Polish accent, her perfectly charming broken English. He sat there captivated, fascinated, turned on, jealous that she wasn’t speaking to him. Her voice was a melody of exotic sounds and intonation, a song he wanted to learn.
He loved the melody of her voice, but it was her fearlessness that he eventually fell in love with. At eighteen, she’d left her country, her family, her first language, everything she knew. Although his story was less dramatic, he felt a kinship in this. They had a common independence, a sense of no return, that music would be their savior, that everything was riding on this education. Curtis was Richard’s path to freedom and fulfillment, and he found Karina on that same path with him, matching him stride for stride, holding his hand, smiling next to him. Their mutual passion for playing the music of Chopin and Schumann bled into a passion for each other. Their relationship at Curtis was heady and intense, their days and nights consumed in classes, lessons, practice, and sex.
Richard sighs as the bitter memories rise up from the shadowed corners of his mind, dialing into vivid focus. He’s surprised they held back from intruding for as long as they did. It’s hard for him to visit those old, happy memories of Karina without every horrible memory demanding equal viewing. In good times and in bad. The good and the bad—insoluble elements, prime numbers, oil and water. His good and bad memories of Karina don’t blend, balance, neutralize, or cancel each other out, and he’s stuck holding both, perfectly intact.
Videos from his memory bank play—their first coffee date in the student lounge, the first time they had sex, the last time they had sex, watching her play piano, which was always feeling her play piano, her green eyes loving him when he got his first big break, playing with the Cleveland Orchestra, her green eyes hating him at the dinner table after they moved to Boston, the morning Grace was born, Karina’s surgery, the day everything he believed unraveled—and too many emotions run through him. He’s happy, in love, betrayed, heartbroken, overcome with lust, disgust, rage, regret. The release he needs is laughter or crying or screaming or possibly all three, which would be fine if he were home and not on a bench in the Public Garden. The people walking by will think he’s nuts. He feels a little nuts.
He needs to get Karina off his mind. He’ll walk back home now. Walking will consume all of his mental energy and focus.
He’s standing next to the statue of George Washington when the laxative kicks in. A massive cramp seizes his large intestine, followed by urgent pressure, a five-day-late freight train barreling into the station, right now. The pain and fear of losing control keep him pinned in place, unable to move. But he must. He’s three blocks from home.
A few steps onward and the cold air against the sweat on his forehead makes him feel clammy, sick, as if he might pass out. He’s not going to make it. He has to. He reinstates his pep talk. Keep going. Five days of stagnant waste are now in motion, insisting on evacuation, and the struggle to walk combined with the struggle to hold it all in brings tears to his eyes. Keep going. Keep. Going.
Through sheer will and some kind of a miracle, he reaches his front step. The urge to shit is now screaming full tilt, a peristalsis of feces and water churning inside him, pressing downward. He won’t be able to hold it in much longer.
Dipping his chin to his chest, he summons all of his strength and pours it into his voice.
“Launch voice control. Call Beverly Haffmans.”
The phone rings and rings and rings and rings.
“Hi, you’ve reached Beverly Haffmans. Please leave a message after the beep.”
“Beverly, it’s Richard Evans, your neighbor. I’m at the front door. Are you there? Open the door if you get this message. Please. I need to get in. . . . End call.”
Shit. Where did she go? He presses her doorbell with his chin. No one answers. Unable to think of what else to do, he tries calling her again. The phone rings once and goes straight to voice mail.
“End call.”
He literally held his shit together with the promise to his body that he would relieve himself when he got home. He can’t pull down his pants, but he imagined soiling himself in the privacy of his own bathroom. Now that he’s on the stoop, he has no reserve left. His bowels have run out of patience and composure, and he swears he can feel the pressure in his eyeballs.
He has nowhere to go. Public restrooms aren’t an option. He has no hands. He could call 911, the lesser of two humiliating options. Wait. He remembers his other neighbor.
“Launch voice control. Call Peter Dickson.”
The phone rings twice.
“This is Peter.”
“Hi, Peter, this is Richard Evans, your neighbor. Are you home?”
“No, I’m in New York. What can I do you for?”
“Nothing, never mind, thanks.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yup. I gotta go. End call.”
He remembers the key in his pocket. In his fucking pocket, and he can’t reach it. He turns to the street to look for help. A young woman is jogging on the sidewalk, approaching his stoop.
“Excuse me!” he yells from the top step, unable to walk down fast enough to meet her, unable to wave his arms.
She notices him. Thank God. She removes an earbud and slows down.
“Can you help me get my key out of my pocket and open my front door for me?”
Her face closes off, scared. “Sorry,” she says quickly, and jogs away without looking back.
“Wait! Please!”
She practically sprints down the street. He can only imagine what he looks and sounds like—a sweaty, bashed forehead; his arms hanging; his torso bent over; his voice monotone and creepy. He’d run, too.
No one else is on his side of the street, and his voice is too weak to reach the dog walker he sees in the park. He looks down at his phone. It’s 12:20, over an hour until Melanie arrives. He won’t make it. Maybe they can send someone else, someone now. Yes!
He activates the voice control on his phone. A wave of pain and pressure rolls through him, doubling him over at the waist. He knows this is his last chance. He can barely speak.
“Call Caring Health.”
It rings three times.
“Hello?”
“This is Richard Evans. Can you send someone out right now? I can’t wait for Melanie. It’s an emergency.”
“Richard? This is Karina.”
What? How? His voice, his slurring, sloppy, barely audible monotone voice. Caring Health. Karina.
“Sorry, I . . . I—”
“I’m in the city. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Please just leave me. Melanie will be here at one thirty.”
“Shut up.”
In the pause that follows, the last kicks and screams of their mutual dread settle into surrender. They’re in Richard’s bathroom. She could leave him here. But for some reason that she doesn’t yet understand, she’s not going to, and so it’s not worth discussing.
She unclips a device labeled BlueAnt from his coat collar, lifts his phone up and over his head, and places both on the vanity counter. She then unzips his winter coat, unsealing the stench that had been trapped beneath the insulating layers of down and weather-resistant outer shell. She covers her nose and mouth with her hand, an utterly ineffective shield against the noxious odor that is quickly saturating the air in the room.
She flashes to a summer afternoon when Gra
ce was two. Armed with nothing but the innocent intention of retrieving a beach chair from the car, she popped the trunk and was assaulted by the putrid, violent stink of a forgotten diaper filled with poop, baked in eighty-degree weather for several days. The smell emanating from Richard right now is similar but far worse. She removes her useless hand from her face and gags.
About to take a deep breath as she would before attempting anything potentially painful or scary—striking the first key of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a recital a million years ago; pushing in concert with the labor contractions that delivered Grace; picking up the phone today, knowing it was Richard calling—she thinks better of it. Taking a deep breath now would mean consuming more of this aerosolized cesspool. Instead, she lifts the top of her sweater and hangs it over her nose, creating a mask, and breathes short, timid breaths through the woven fibers.
She looks up and finds herself accidently eye to eye with Richard. His thin, clean-shaven cheeks are wet with untouched tears, and his eyes, ever formidable in her experience, submit to her gaze, humiliated, apologizing, holding an expression so stunningly uncharacteristic of him that she can’t look away. He closes his eyes and keeps them shut, likely unable to bear being seen like this, and she’s grateful for the curtain between them, that he’s not able to see the tears welling in her eyes.
While music, especially live music, can easily overcome her—the swell of the notes, an overwhelming awe of the artistry before her, the sorrow in the story of the song—she never cries for the crying. Raised under Russian oppression, she’d seen more than a lifetime’s worth of weeping before she could tie her own shoes. At a young age, she learned to pretend that nothing bothered her, to dam up any tears of pity or compassion with great, impenetrable walls. She watched dry-eyed as scrawny toddlers wailed in the bread line where she stood dutifully for over two hours every day after school; as Mr. Nowak, who lived across the street, was hauled off to prison in front of his hysterical wife and six crying children for stealing a pig’s head from a neighboring farm; as her mother wept while Karina packed her suitcase, leaving for a six-month job as a nanny in Switzerland, knowing that six months was a lie and that the nanny job was simply the plausible excuse necessary to obtain a passport, a way station on the way to school in America, and that she might never see her daughter again.
So it unnerves her that Richard’s tears have somehow found a wormhole. She clears her throat, attempting to shake it off, reorienting her focus toward the task at hand. She unbuttons and unzips his jeans, grabs the waistband of his pants and boxers at both hips, and, in one hard yank, pulls them down to his knees.
It took her longer than five minutes to get to Richard’s front stoop. She was only about a mile away when he called, but parking took several additional minutes. Some of the wet, runny shit that had dripped down his legs has already dried, his coarse black hairs poking through like weeds in droughty earth. A substantial heap is in his underwear, and the rest is stuck like cake frosting to his ass and balls. More than she bargained for.
“Okay, can you balance on one foot?”
“I’m too tired. I don’t want to fall.”
“Hold on to my shoulders.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, right. Here, lean against the wall behind you.”
She holds him firmly by his bare waist, and he shuffles back a few steps until he’s flush to the wall. She squats down in front of him.
“Lift.” She taps his left shin with the palm of her hand.
His shoes already off, she tugs the pants and boxers down and off one leg. In doing so, she slides his leg through the soiled clothing, and now his entire leg is smeared with shit. A substantial hunk of it falls out of his boxers and onto the bathroom floor. The white wall behind him has been painted brown by his rear end. Good God.
“Switch.”
He lifts his right foot, and she drags the pants and boxers down, threads them over his socked foot and off. She looks at her hands and wishes she hadn’t—Richard’s shit on her right thumb, across her knuckles, beneath her freshly painted nails, pressed into her neatly trimmed cuticles. Her sweater mask has fallen off her nose, but she doesn’t want to touch her sweater with her contaminated hands, so she leaves it. The stench, the mess, her hands. She wretches twice.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She can’t pause now to clean herself up or she won’t be able to finish. She has to keep going.
“Lift.”
She peels the left sock off, then the right. She stands and grabs the bottom of his crewneck and tries to pull it up and over his head, but his arms won’t cooperate, and he’s stuck, a puzzle she can’t solve.
“You have to go one arm at a time,” says Richard.
She wrestles his left arm through the hole, then the right, then his head. He’s now totally naked, smeared with shit and tears and shame.
She runs the shower. Richard steps in. She grabs the sponge on the tub’s edge and saturates it with liquid soap.
“I’m good like this. Melanie can do the rest.”
“Shut up.”
As she begins to wash him, to touch his shoulders and chest and stomach, she has the split-second recognition that, although much bonier than she remembers, this is Richard’s naked body before her, a body she has loved, kissed, hugged, held, spooned, sucked, fucked, avoided, despised, resented, cursed, hated. A comprehensive menu of memories and feelings related to this body, inappropriate to this bizarre situation, scrolls across her consciousness. She refuses it, ignoring his body’s history, and focuses instead on the impersonal job in front of her. The sponge, the bum, the soap, the leg, the water, the penis, more soap, the balls, the sponge, the other leg.
Finally, the water circling the drain is clear. She leaves him there, goes to the kitchen, finds a trash bag, and returns to the bathroom. She locates a clean segment of his pants and, fashioning her hand like a pair of tweezers, transfers his trousers into the trash bag. She does the same to the socks, boxers, and shirt, then knots the top of the bag to seal off the smell. Even though she’s sure she didn’t touch any poop, her hands feel contaminated again. She washes them thoroughly in the sink under the hottest water she can stand and then washes them again.
She returns to the shower and shuts off the water. Richard steps out of the tub, and she dries him with a clean towel. They then walk wordlessly to his bedroom. Without input or direction, Karina finds his clothes and dresses him.
There. It’s done. They look at each other now.
“Holy shit,” says Karina.
Richard laughs. She didn’t mean to be funny, but she’s too adrenaline buzzed to remain straight-faced and joins him. They laugh deep, hard, sighing cackles, and the release feels good. It’s been a long time since she’s been on the same side of joy with Richard.
“I’ll wait until Melanie gets here,” she says, realizing that it’s now almost 1:30.
“Okay.”
She follows Richard into the living room and sits next to him on the couch. He turns the TV on by stepping on a remote control taped to the floor. He surfs a few channels, finds nothing of interest, and shuts the TV off. They sit side by side in silence, waiting for Melanie, and the lack of anything to say or do stretches on well past uncomfortable, feeling somehow more awkward than the shit show they just endured in the bathroom.
“So what were you doing in Boston?”
“I had a doctor’s appointment.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t ask what for or if she’s okay. She doesn’t blame him. Pandora’s box is better left locked shut.
“I was just leaving the parking garage when you called.”
She was at her annual gyn physical, not due to be in that office again for another year. What are the odds that she’d be barely over a mile away and available when he called? She looks around the room—the piano, the wheelchair, the desk and chair, the TV and coffee table. She looks at him.
“How long does Melanie stay with you?”
“Abo
ut an hour.”
“Does anyone else come here to help you?”
“Someone comes in the morning, usually Bill, for an hour and a half. Then another person comes at night to help me with dinner and get ready for bed.”
“So about four hours a day?”
“Yeah, about that.”
She thinks about the twelve or so waking hours in each day when he’s alone with no help and all the trouble he could get into. What if he falls? What if he’s hungry? What if he chokes? What if he shits his pants on the front step and is locked out of the building?
“You need a lot more help that that.”
“I know. I don’t work anymore. I can’t afford it.”
She thinks about the stairs and that wheelchair. This situation is untenable.
“You’re selling this place.”
“My realtor says I have it priced too high, but I don’t want to come down or I’ll lose money on it. Suppose it doesn’t matter. I have a huge mortgage. It won’t free up enough cash.”
She doesn’t point out that leaving here might be more about living somewhere without stairs than the potential for liquidity. She knows his father and his brothers. His father won’t help, and his brothers can’t. It’s too bad his mother isn’t still alive. She would be here for him. His agent is in New York City.
“Is there a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You can’t go on like this.”
Isn’t that exactly what she said to him when she finally asked for a divorce, but with an I instead of a you? She pinches her mouth shut, trying to withhold what she’s about to say next, thinking that maybe if she makes it past this moment, if Melanie walks through the door and takes over the conversation, then she won’t say what she’s about to say.
She looks at Richard, and he nods, and she can’t tell if he’s agreeing with what she said or what she’s thinking, believing suddenly that he can read her mind. This is nuts. She can’t do this. She can’t say what she’s about to say. She’d have to be a masochist, an idiot, insane. Elise will call her crazy for sure. She can’t undo all that has happened by saying what she feels compelled to say.