Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

“You’re a bit strange yourself,” I say. “In a good way.”

  “Yes, well, there’s another thing you really need to know: the client’s metabolism will have a tendency to match the tempo of your playing. We call this entrainment, and you need to be careful with this. If you play rhythmic music, especially a song the client recognizes, the client’s heart will try to keep up with you. If the person is actively dying, trying to let go, your music might actually keep that from happening.”

  “Not a good thing?”

  “I’m afraid not. On the other hand, I’ve also seen a harpist calm a panic attack by meeting the client’s anxiety with intense music and then bringing him to a quieter place.”

  “Nice.”

  “Very risky, very difficult. All right, let’s talk about your first client, Mrs. Rosemary Fennelly.”

  She goes on to tell me that Rosemary is eighty-three, a widow, mother of two children, grandmother of six, and she’s dying of pancreatic cancer.

  “No hymns for Mrs. F.,” Marcia says. “Not happy with God right now. She likes snappy thirties and forties stuff. Anything with a guy, a girl, and a dance floor. Do you think you can manage that?”

  “I brought a little bit of everything,” I say lightly, starting to relax. Her suspicions about my sanity notwithstanding, Marcia is positive and friendly, the place does feel homey—or at least is not depressing in a predictable way—and the residents are apparently still firmly tethered to life’s delusions. Maybe I can deal with this for an hour or two, and at least for once I’m not behaving like a selfish schmuck. If only Milena could see me now.

  Marcia escorts me down a broad hallway lined with “cottages.” Each door is a few feet wider than normal and appointed with a welcome mat and a porch-light sconce. A sign under each sconce reads “Oxygen in Use.” Several doors are open and I can hear TVs set to various channels, one featuring the caustic questioning of Judge Judy; another sounds like a Pokémon episode. As we approach Rosemary’s cottage, number 17, I hear a disco beat coming from inside.

  Marcia knocks and calls out, “Hello.” I leave my harp beside Mrs. Fennelly’s welcome mat and follow Marcia into the room. Mrs. Fennelly is lying on the bed and a man sits in a recliner facing an open armoire in which a TV plays The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The audience members dance in front of their seats, some stylin’ in the aisles.

  “Hi, Gerald,” Marcia says to the man. “This is Matt, our new harpist.”

  Gerald kills the TV with a remote and slowly rises and extends his hand. He’s graying and dressed like someone who works at Cynthia’s law firm: penny loafers with tassels, wine-colored shirt, tie and suspenders. I say, “Hi,” and we shake, but he doesn’t make eye contact or speak, easing back into his recliner without having stood up completely.

  The room is almost as nice as Milena’s new house, with hardwood floors, two alcoves at an angle to the rest of the room, the one closer to the door with a small kitchen table and chairs, the other featuring a loveseat under a bay window, with the armoire resting between. An inert overhead fan is suspended from the peaked ceiling.

  “Good afternoon, Rose,” Marcia says warmly to Mrs. Fennelly. “This is Matt, your one-man band.”

  Mrs. Fennelly is turned toward Marcia and me, but she is unresponsive. It’s even hard to tell if her glassy eyes see us, and her slack mouth also suggests no one’s home. Patches of her frizzy white hair are gone, and her puffy face has a greenish cast. The skin on her thin arms appears pleated. Unless there’s a pillow under the bedcovers, her belly is distended, and her ankles and the tops of her feet, which stick out of the quilt, are swollen. A pillow has been placed under her calves to raise both heels from the mattress. A musty urine-like smell—something I’ve never quite smelled before—pricks the air.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to speak as if she were fully sentient. She blinks, possibly in greeting. I look to Gerald, who I assume is her son, but he has folded his hands over his stomach and peers down his chest like he’s assessing a poker hand.

  “Thank you, Matt,” Marcia says quietly, touching my arm, and she slips out of the room.

  “Okay, then,” I say, still addressing Mrs. Fennelly. “I’ll bring in my harp.” Each word I say to her has become quieter, as if her stillness is entraining me.

  As I carry in the harp, her eyes stay unfocused, her mouth slack. The smell is now something I can taste. I quickly tune and open my book of Fifty Great Years of Movie Songs to “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” but wonder if Marcia was joking about Mrs. Fennelly’s preference for swinging dance numbers. Throwing caution to the wind, I finger the opening bars to no reaction. I play the song.

  I move on to “Forty-Second Street” and “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” During the shuffle, Rosemary finally moves, twisting her spine slightly and bringing her hands up to her chest, which actually causes me to miss a note. Her fingertips fidget there for a while—some knitting-like movement I can’t figure out while I’m playing. Is this agitation? A cry for help? The son’s eyelids are getting heavy. I try something slower—“It’s Only a Paper Moon”—hoping it might be calming, and Mrs. Fennelly and her son close their eyes, as if they’re trying to guess the answer to a question. In another minute, I have put them both to sleep.

  I play “I Only Have Eyes for You” as a love song for Mrs. Fennelly. I play “Evergreen” because the line about the easy chair references the son’s seating arrangement. I play “Born Free,” though as I get into it, it starts to seem like ironic commentary on Mrs. F.’s condition. Lying in sprawled positions that remind me of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, the Fennellys remain stubbornly asleep—though the son stirs once during “Born Free” in a way that suggests maybe he’s wondering what I’m thinking.

  At last, I stop, lean my harp forward, and listen to their breathing. Gerald respires regularly and quietly, laying down a basic beat. Mrs. Fennelly solos in a wild and halting manner: her breathing seems to stop for ten or twenty seconds before she takes two or three more or less consistently spaced rattling breaths. I notice a small black sore on the edge of her left heel.

  I pack up and tiptoe out of the room before she can die. The corridor now feels relatively cool. There are a few visitors moving about the hallways. I think of my father, not on his exercise mat of death, but in a psychiatric hospital, on his back, on suicide watch, pumped full of meds, maybe wondering if he would ever make it out, feeling the responsibility of seven children and a wife, knowing there was something seriously broken about him. A thought wobbles into view like a butterfly, alights between my eyes: If I stay impotent with Cynthia and blow this audition, will I lose it like my dad did?

  I tell myself I’m all right, despite the fact that it feels as though someone is standing on my chest. My breath gets short, and dizziness descends like a cloud of nerve gas. My hands saddle the harp’s neck, precisely where my Aphrodite is cracked back home, and I lean my cheek against the wood. My knee bones dissolve. I breathe deeply, trying to control the dizziness. I console myself with the fact that it’s just dizziness and not a nervous breakdown, and then wonder if this is a nervous breakdown.

  A nurse (I’m guessing from her shoes) passes me in the hall. The harp’s neck hides my face, but I speak to the sound of her passing: “I need to lie down.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry, is there a place I can lie down? Right away? Otherwise, I’ll vomit.”

  “Oh dear,” she says in a way that makes it impossible for me to tell how my problem rates on her scale of concerns. I can tell, though, that she’s not used to having a strapping, squared-off guy like me turn out to be a dizzy pantywaist. She touches my arm, but I don’t dare shift my head to look at her.

  “It’s not that I’m freaked out,” I say, though it’s uncomfortable to speak in this state. “I just get dizzy sometimes.” When I stop speaking, I sense she is gone. An instant later, a curved plastic basin rises toward my face.

  “Here you go,” she says. “Come this way.”

 
Having an ergonomically correct vomit receptacle on hand steadies me somewhat. I take the basin from her and carry it at the ready as she guides me down the hallway to an unoccupied cottage. The door’s creak echoes in the room, which is furnished exactly like Mrs. Fennelly’s. All the blinds on the half-dozen windows are open and the room glows with sunless light.

  The nurse leads me to the bed, which is fitted only with a mattress cover. Despite a flash of concern about having my shoes on, I lie down, place the basin an arm length away on the mattress, lower my cheek to a caseless pillow with my head turned from the windows, and hold still. As the nurse leaves—I still haven’t seen her face—I say thanks. She comes back and drapes a blanket over me. I say thanks again and, breathing minute by minute, sink into shallow sleep.

  After some time, I open my eyes and focus on the door to the bathroom in this cottage. I can’t sleep here. My gig is over. I need to be elsewhere.

  I sit up and feel a negotiable amount of dizziness. I stand and lurch toward the bathroom. I splash lukewarm water on my face and pat my cheeks dry with a scratchy paper towel, then raise my eyes to the vanity mirror but see only a dark square. I flick on the light and find that the door to the medicine cabinet is not a mirror but varnished wood. I suppose by the time you’ve moved here, you don’t want to see your face. Then again, it’s disconcerting to expect your own eyes and instead see something that looks very much like a casket lid. I peer more closely, into the grain, and wonder if somehow this is a special mirror for examining one’s second face.

  Not right now, I say to myself.

  11

  AFTER I GET back from the hospice, I restore myself at Big Tony’s Pizza with two large pepperoni slices and a quart-sized syrupy fountain Coke and spend Wednesday evening and all of Thursday indoors, willing away dizziness, teaching two students, and practicing with the focus of a very frightened man. But suddenly, in one of those unexpected, life-saving shifts, it’s not the harp I’m afraid of but rather the scene in Mrs. Fennelly’s cottage, and I seem able to improve on almost every piece I touch.

  On Friday morning, the music for Moncayo’s Huapango arrives in the mail. While listening to a recording I bought on Amazon, my fingers and I look over the score, and we find that it requires tenacious dexterity. I set aside four precious days to learn it. I’ll need to start playing through every piece at least two or three times a day, to get all twenty-five into my hands simultaneously. But first, I must go to the harp factory to fix this buzz.

  As I roll the harp past T.R.’s garden, I’m hit with a lot of changes I haven’t been noticing. If you’ve ever been trapped in a refrigerator only to have the door flung open just before you black out, you have some sense of what a Chicago spring feels like. There’s a dogwood in bloom and red and yellow tulips and blue-purple hyacinths. The mercury has vaulted into the seventies, and small puffy white clouds hang in the blue sky. As I drive west on Cermak with all the Volvo’s windows open, maple seeds propeller down.

  Chicago happens to be a global hub of harp manufacturing, including the big kahuna, Lyon & Healy, and a smaller, scrappier operation, Aphrodite Harps, run by Stanley Nowak, a third-generation harp builder. Stanley’s factory is a long, low brown-brick building, with glass-block windows topped by transoms that are levered open. I park in the back and walk around. From the street, the only indication that musical instruments are made here are two folk harps drawn facing each other on the rusty gray steel door one step up from the sidewalk.

  I head inside, and beyond a tiny vestibule is an open room with a hodgepodge of worker stations. A man in black shorts, T-shirt, and a leather apron, with his white gym socks pulled over his calves, is using a piece of equipment to shave a small metal part, sending sparks into the air. Another man etches something into a neck plate. Two others are clamping a neckless, stringless harp onto a rack padded with skanky purple carpet. They barely glance at me before returning to work. An old caged gray fan, as tall as a sunflower, blows air. Sunlight slanting in from the high windows illuminates enough dust to make the air seem as thick as water, but no one’s wearing a mask. A tape player broadcasts Capriccio Espagnol, which happens to be on the St. Louis list. Maybe these men would rather listen to something else, but Stanley’s shtick is to be totally focused on the artistic ends of harp making.

  Through a wide doorway to the left is the much larger woodworking room, with all the saws and planing machines and gluing vises. But I go to the right, past a time clock labeled with a hand-lettered sign in Polish, and into another small dingy room, where the only woman in the shop—Stanley’s sister Marge, heavy in a collarless shirt, with a nimbus of gray hair—sorts neck hardware in a long case.

  I used to love everything about this place, where meticulous attention shrinks the world to the piece of wood one is carving, the hole one is drilling, the eyelet one is inserting. It resonated with a positive sense of my robothood—that I could play with something like perfect concentration and mechanical precision. I used to imagine that if I were ever injured, the ambulance should bring me here instead of a hospital, both for physical repair and psychic rehab. But since my divorce and my troubles with Cynthia, I’m more worried about the downsides of robotic behavior: moving herky-jerky through the world, holding myself too tensely, projecting a disconcertingly blank affect to conceal my inner hijinks.

  I go through one more door, and in the quiet showroom, with its low dropped ceiling and rec-room paneling, I find Stanley and his second-in-command, Carl. Stanley is a short, sleepy-eyed man with lead-gray hair combed straight back and huge hairy forearms that he proudly displays year-round in untucked, short-sleeve dress shirts. Carl sports bushy sideburns and aviator glasses with a classic tape repair between the eyes; his long brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Shaped uncannily like a bowling pin, Carl towers over Stanley, bringing out the bowling ball in Stanley’s physique.

  “Matt, take a look at this,” Stanley says in greeting. He leads me to a new harp. “Sit down, tell me what you think. It’s just wood and metal until a musician plays it.”

  “And glue,” Carl says, smiling and extending his hand, which I shake. “A lot of glue.”

  “Sit,” Stanley commands. “It’s tuned.”

  I sit and play some Symphonie fantastique. The bottom of the soundboard is unusually broad and curved and gives the instrument a deep, clear sound.

  “Sounds great,” I say.

  “Consider it, Matt. We’re going to do everything we can to make your harp right, but you deserve a new instrument, huh?”

  I play a few more licks with an expression of consideration on my face, but I’m impatient to get my harp diagnosed. “Should I bring it in?” I ask.

  “Of course,” Stanley says, tight-lipped.

  Carl and I lunge and march, respectively, down a back corridor to the parking lot where we fetch the cracked concert grand.

  “Jesus!” Stanley exclaims, as Carl wheels it in. “At least get a new cover, for the love of Pete!” The fluorescent lights of the showroom are particularly revealing: along the pillar, where I grip to lift the harp, the golden mustard color has darkened into a sort of sweat-stain brown. No wonder Vikram went nuts over it. But a new cover is $450 and there’s no way I can spend that much money on something I don’t absolutely need.

  I play a bit to demonstrate the buzz. Carl winces, then gets to work. He clips a small pickup to the soundboard. A wire runs to a boom box–sized electronic tuner with an oscilloscope, set up on a music stand. He begins tuning, lines rippling and coalescing across the screen, reminding me of an electrocardiogram. I think of Mrs. Fennelly’s heart clenching and unclenching in time to what could very well be, at any moment, her final dance number. As sounds go, the heartbeat is almost too beautiful and terrifyingly fragile to be believed. It seems a sort of cosmic joke that something so essential makes a sound that isn’t constant but leaves and comes back, over and over.

  After Carl tunes, he replaces the two metal disks that pinch the sixth-octave C string
into sharp or flat. He tightens a few screws in the neck plate with a tiny Allen wrench. The buzz persists. Finally, he says, “I think we need to open it up.”

  Stanley motions with his head, and I follow him into his office. The place is small and tidy, with a metal desk, a few file cabinets, and a table to the right that’s covered with binders and wood samples. Rows of eight-by-ten glossies of Nowaks, harps, and harpists cover the walls. I take a seat in a low-slung vinyl chair, while Stanley climbs into a high-backed executive chair, the headrest of which rises well above his head.

  “Matt,” he says in a tired voice, “just let us finish the job, okay?”

  “Finish what job?”

  “I’m saying, you leave it here, we have a little accident. You call your insurance company. Damaged in transit. It’s standard.”

  “I can’t do that,” I say. At the same time, I’m thinking, Maybe I can do this.

  “Sure you can. It’s standard business practice. That’s what insurance is for. You did have an accident, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like it’s destroyed.”

  “Maybe not to some numbnuts adjuster, but if it’s no good to you, a musical artist, it’s basically totaled, am I right?”

  “I’m not sure it’s totaled,” I say. “I’ve got an audition, I can’t be switching harps right now. Plus I’m dating a lawyer who defends insurance companies.”

  “Do I do things right?” Stanley asks, raising his prodigious forearms and his voice. “Look at me. I do things right. You want a good harp for the audition, you have to do what it takes. The harp you just played is available—that’s not a floor model. We made it for a lady in the Houston Symphony and, long story, but now she’s not taking it.”

  “How much is it?”

  “I take a thousand right off the top. Eighteen nine. You heard how it sounds.”

  I lower my voice as if the office is bugged. “How much would I get…”

  “It wouldn’t cover everything. Insurance would pay out ten, maybe eleven thousand.”