Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  “All right,” I say, “I want you to be happy. And I’m not going to ask you whether you’ll be happy with Steve—”

  “Matt, don’t do this,” she says.

  “Please just hear me out,” I say. “Talking to you is the only thing worth doing right now, okay?”

  This gets a tortured sigh, but she doesn’t hang up.

  “I’m thinking,” I continue, absolutely clueless as to how to proceed. “What I’m thinking, just for my information, because we never got a chance to talk about it, I just want to know…if you think we made a mistake. Splitting up.”

  Her breath catches, and I realize how amazingly cruel I’m being. But before I can backpedal, she breathes out, “Sometimes.”

  “I think so, too,” I say. “I really think—”

  “But I just want a nice, simple life,” she says. “You know?” She sniffs. “Normal.” She allows this word to hang between us. “I’m not like you,” she says, and a sort of composure settles on her. “I don’t need to be someone. I like who I already am.” She pauses.

  “And I don’t want to feel guilty for holding you back,” she adds.

  “You never held me back,” I say. “Never.”

  “If you think that, you’re forgetting everything,” she says quietly. “And that’s why I can’t go back to us.”

  A hot-cold feeling crawls up my neck. “I’m not talking about going back, Milena.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “It would be different. It would have to be.”

  “I can’t deal with the ups and downs, all the second-guessing and worrying. And Audrey can’t, either. She needs, we need, something stable. We can’t be jerked around anymore. And I love Steve. I can talk to him, and he’s focused on being with me.”

  “But is he going to make you happy?” I ask.

  “You didn’t make me happy,” she says fiercely.

  “But I used to. Right? I loved you. I feel better with you than anyone else, ever, in my life.” This is the truest thing I’ve ever said, and she might even believe it, but I’m afraid it sounds like a weirdly self-centered thing to say right now.

  Silence.

  “But I know why you didn’t always feel it,” I persist. “St. Louis is my last audition. I promise. It’s my last best chance, and if I don’t make it, I’m done.”

  “You are so full of shit,” she says determinedly.

  “I’m telling you, if I blow it in St. Louis, I’m getting a job. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry for what happened to us. Think about Au—”

  “I think about Audrey all the time,” she says.

  It was stupid for me to bring up Audrey in this way—a bad, old argumentative habit that doesn’t take into account our new difficult reality with her.

  “I told you not to do this to me,” Milena hisses. “I told you I’m engaged!”

  Then, without another word, we both hang up, quietly.

  —

  You know things are bad when you find yourself looking to dying people for some kind of lift. Maybe I’m getting used to the place. Lately, when the Alzheimer’s woman honks at me, I honk back, which pleases her, and I look forward to talking with Michael. In any case, on Wednesday, after four hard-core hours of audition practice, I head out for my hospice rounds, stopping first at Richard’s cottage. He’s sitting in his recliner watching TV, but he clicks it off as soon as I intrude my smiling head.

  “Hello, Richard,” I say.

  “Hello,” he says in his breathless voice, no smile breaking his Muppet lips.

  I set up, then launch into some classical stuff, and he takes this opportunity to unhook his oxygen tubes from his nose and from around his ears. He dabs the corners of his eyes with tissues and runs other tissues over the tubes, giving the nubs that sit in his nose the most attention. There’s a deep red groove on his left cheek where the tube has been resting. He blows his nose several times. The man’s beyond pretending the music does anything for him. After about ten minutes, he lifts his hand, and I stop playing.

  “I need to use the restroom,” he says. He gets out of his recliner, holding his oxygen tube in his hand, casually, like a cowboy with a rope, then he shuffles forward. He reaches the edge of his bed, and he bends over and puts his hands, one on top of the other, on the bedpost. His breathing has become labored: with each in-breath he drops his jaw slightly and on the out-breath he purses his lips as if blowing through a straw. His right arm shakes.

  I watch him and do nothing. This might be his typical resting spot on the way to the bathroom. Maybe because he carries some vestige of fatherly authority, I don’t know how to enter his space. I’m only sure of what to do here as the harpist.

  He looks about to keel over. I stand up and take a tentative step toward him.

  “Could you get a nurse, for Christ’s sake?” he says.

  I do, and when I come back with her, he has sunk down right where he was standing, kneeling with his arms and face on the foot of the bed. The nurse speaks quietly to him and I see that he’s wet himself. I carry the harp out and then I come back for my gear, my trips delaying the nurse’s care for him. When I’ve finally gotten everything out in the hallway, the nurse closes the huge door behind me.

  Nothing I can do but head on over to Michael’s cottage. I run into Marcia, and she tells me he’s been more lively.

  “That’s great,” I say.

  “Well,” Marcia says, “sometimes you see a burst—right at the end.”

  Michael is awake, but, if it’s possible, he’s even more gaunt than the last time I saw him. He gazes at me too steadily, his head too still.

  “Good to see you, Michael,” I say.

  “You don’t look good,” he says as I set up my harp, his voice even thinner than it’s been. I’m stunned that he can see me at all, that he can still speak.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I just screwed something up.”

  He barely raises his eyebrows to invite more.

  I tell him about Richard’s accident, confessing my paralysis and how stupid it now seems.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he says with surprising harshness.

  This catches me off guard, and I can’t think of what to say.

  “Kidding,” he says weakly. “Didn’t get along with my father, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wall,” he says. At least that’s what it sounds like. He raises the fingers of his right hand an inch off the sheet.

  “Wall?”

  His eyes consider and then seem to cancel what he just said, whatever it was. He seems about to speak again, then reconsiders. Finally: “Too tired to say. Would kill me.”

  He smiles. His eyes flicker at me, then drift away. His arms on the top sheet are as stiff as bed rails, inanimate, and I remember Charles embracing my arm as he moved against me on T.R.’s couch.

  I am a father, I think and, strangely, it feels as if I’m realizing it for the first time.

  Michael looks away from me. “Didn’t always treat people right,” he says, apparently following his own thoughts. Is he confessing or complaining?

  “Hey, Michael,” I say softly, not sure he’s speaking to me but trying to formulate something supportive if he is, “sometimes people—”

  “Play something you want to hear,” he says, suddenly turned toward me, in a louder voice, as if I’ve asked him. “I don’t care.” His expression doesn’t match his words—it’s too still—which is eerie.

  “I could do that,” I say.

  “Good,” he says. “They live twenty minutes away. Schaumburg. You want their phone number?”

  “Whose?” I ask. He’s losing it. “Your parents’?”

  “Schaumburg,” he says, and he smiles broadly—the biggest smile I’ve seen from him—and his eyes finally lock on mine. “Now leave. I have to rest up for my big day.”

  —

  Thanks to my disastrous phone call to her earlier in the week, an extra layer of frosty awkwardness envelopes Milena and me as
we sit with Audrey in the therapist’s impeccably decorated Lincoln Park office for Audrey’s first appointment. Dr. Oliver is a well-put-together woman in her fifties. She wears earrings that are surprisingly long and dangly, and they swing a fair amount when she speaks in her animated voice. The effect is hypnotizing and I wonder if her look is some way of distracting or taming her young clients.

  After some brief chitchat, Dr. Oliver explains that therapy is going to be about helping Audrey develop some “practical skills” to handle “challenging situations.” Audrey is solemn and attentive, utterly transfixed by her therapist.

  “Everybody gets worried,” Dr. Oliver says to Audrey. “Everybody gets upset. Everybody has to figure out what to do when that happens.”

  Her practical approach surprises me a bit. I’m used to thinking of psychological problems as mysterious and deep-seated, treatable, if at all, only through intense exploration and analysis.

  Dr. Oliver asks Audrey if she’s okay so far, and Audrey nods. Then she asks Audrey if she’d be okay with sitting in the waiting room while she talks with Mom and Dad. Audrey says, “Yes,” and Dr. Oliver escorts her out. While they’re gone, Milena and I sit in the most awkward silence I’ve ever experienced with her, each of us sitting perfectly still.

  “Okay, let’s talk process,” Dr. Oliver says, breezing back into the room.

  She will meet once a week with Audrey alone and there will also be some meetings with the three of us and possibly with Milena and me separately. Audrey will have some leeway to say things that won’t get back to us, but a lot will be shared with us.

  “Divorce is hard on you and it’s hard on Audrey—we can’t get around that,” Dr. Oliver says. “How you treat each other matters—a lot—but Audrey is her own person, with her own personality tendencies. She needs to cope with whatever her life brings her, and I’m going to help her develop the tools to do that.”

  Milena nods and coughs daintily. I glance at her but her eyes are trained on Dr. Oliver. Milena draws her bangs to the side with her middle finger. I don’t understand why gestures like that make me want her as much as I do. What is the practical way for dealing with that?

  “How does this sound, Matt?” Dr. Oliver asks, with an extra insistence in her voice. I must have missed something she said.

  “Yes, sounds good,” I say. “Thank you.”

  —

  I listen to my excerpt compilation tape and look over scores, but I can’t practice: not even someone as indulgent as T.R. can stand harp music at 4:00 a.m.

  My stomach churns; my head feels unconnected to my neck; the sun rises and slowly finds its way through the window. I have a series of abject, intricate, and ultimately stupefying thoughts and feelings about blowing the audition, playing brunch at age seventy-five, lying erectionless with an anonymous woman who sits on the bed dealing out a hand of solitaire on a TV tray. It gets to the point where I want my head to explode, just to get it over with, to see if there’s some relief on the other side. I remember what Dr. Oliver said about taking practical steps to deal with being upset, and with this in mind, I decide to deal with the buzz in the sixth-octave C string. Knowing it’s unfixable ought to be the last straw, and then I can go ahead and completely lose it.

  So as soon as the harp factory opens at 8:00 a.m., I take it in. Stanley is visiting a new wood supplier, but Carl is lounging around the showroom, looking bored. His gut and ponytail are especially droopy today. “Do you want to wait for it?” he asks, and I say, “Why not,” because he seems eager to get down to business.

  And sure enough, in an hour he’s regulated the whole thing and tightened up some stuff—and again the buzz is entirely gone.

  “Son of a gun,” I say, playing some pristine licks. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Well, your harp is probably still trying to settle down from when you dropped it. Maybe it’s done, maybe this doesn’t hold. Hard to say. When’s your audition?”

  “Starts a week from today.”

  “Hmm. Well, they’ll have a tech on the premises, right?”

  “They should.”

  “It’s your call. You could talk to Stanley. If you’d left it today, he’d’ve probably gone ahead and broke it, for the insurance. He couldn’t stop talking about what an idiot you were. But look at your karma.” He gestures toward the instrument with both hands.

  I ask if I can sit down at the new harp Stanley wants to sell to me. Playing the two side by side, I notice how the string spacings in the upper octaves are a little different. The tension is different, too. I wonder if that would screw me up at some crucial moment. I’d practically have to take out a loan even to rent this thing—that’s how close I’m shaving it—unless I give up even my already embarrassingly nominal contribution to the Montessori tuition.

  “Can we put this off a while longer?” I say.

  “I’ll tell Stanley you’re still interested.”

  When I get home, I stand the harp in its spot, unshroud the same dirty cover. I look the harp square in the column and say out loud, “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”

  23

  ON SATURDAY, AFTER I drop off Audrey, I come home to a voicemail from Marcia, asking me to call the hospice as soon as I can. Maybe she wants to have a little talk about how I failed Richard on Wednesday, though that wouldn’t account for the urgency.

  “It’s Michael,” she says when I call. “He’s very close. He asked for you this afternoon. He wants you to play for him. Matt, I know this is a big imposition, but I have to tell you, there’s just no family here. No visitors lately. His parents don’t get along with him or each other, and I’ve been trying for days to get in touch with his sister in Oregon, and she just called back. She’ll never make it in time.”

  He could be dead by the time I get there, or it could be a long night. Just in case, I call Rhiannon, a harpist right out of grad school, who has subbed for me at the Marriott before, and she gladly takes my brunch, which will also help with audition practice time. I quickly pack a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, and a water bottle for supper in the car. I haul ass out to Elmhurst with my 85P, all but choking on my sticky sandwich. The sun is low enough to make an oppressive glare as I drive toward it.

  The hallways of Golden Prairie are relatively busy with people on their way out or chatting near the Great Room. They’ve put in a good chunk of time with their dying loved ones, and now they’re probably thinking about an Olive Garden to overeat their stress away. I don’t blame them. When they see the shrouded harp roll by, they look at me as if I’m bearing some arcane death-related instrument, which, I suppose, I am.

  Michael is frozen-looking, with his glassy eyes half-closed. His lips are drawn together but open, as if he’s about to blow a small bubble. All the muscle is gone from his bony arms. His forearms and his upper arms are the same thinness. There’s no panic in his expression, but his hair is partly standing up and partly sticking to his forehead, as if he’s been tossing and turning. The septum of his nose hangs prominently, and his jaw is even more narrow and tapered, like the snout of a wolf. A young nurse with a serious plump face is sitting on the edge of his bed.

  “Knew it would come to this,” Michael manages in a timbreless voice as I carry in my stool and my black shoulder bag. “Have to die to get a date.”

  The nurse tears up. She pats his arm and slips out.

  “Hello, Michael,” I say. “It’s good to see you.” This feels wrong to say, but I do mean it: it is good to be with him now.

  He stares back at me, emptied out yet poised.

  “What would you like to hear?” I ask. I sit down to the instrument and pull it back on my shoulder.

  “ ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” he says.

  “Really?” I say.

  He barely nods, no smile.

  I start the song, and he closes his eyes. I know enough to speculate about what the lyrics mean to him, just as I tried to imagine my father’s response to the meditation CD. I play it softly, to spare Mic
hael’s nerves, but that only makes it sound more sad.

  I play some Britten—the Interlude from Ceremony of Carols—on a hunch he might like it, and he seems to lose consciousness. I remember Marcia telling me that otherwise-unresponsive patients can still hear, so I press on, playing the tunes I tried the first time I came to Michael’s room.

  Then, wallowing further in nostalgia and grief, I play “If” and “Green Is the Colour” by Pink Floyd, thinking of Milena, and “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” because my father once surprisingly let slip that he liked that song.

  After a good hour and a half, I stop to shake out my hands. Michael has begun to take ragged breaths. Maybe this is it. I decide to play the entire audition sequence for St. Louis from memory, but very slowly, with spaces between the notes, so Michael’s metabolism won’t be affected. The room darkens as I play. The nurse comes in to check on him and turns on a lamp behind me.

  Increasingly, his unresponsiveness helps me realize one of my twisted desires: to do my part in a relationship without having to suffer my partner’s scrutiny, as if my partner is an unconscious instrument, a freedom I desire most during sex.

  I keep expecting someone to show up, his parents, the resigned man I saw leaving his room weeks ago—someone. Maybe people didn’t treat him right and vice versa, so this is how it ends.

  I continue playing, with an almost absurd slowness. I finish the whole audition repertoire and start over. My right shoulder starts to throb. Then a sharp pain strikes above my shoulder blade, just downhill from my neck, forming a knot as hard as a stone. My left arm is getting heavy and twitchy, my bony ass is turning to concrete. In the huge spaces between notes, I can hear Michael’s breathing, irregular, with long pauses.

  I stop and stand and shake out my whole body and jump up and down as quietly as I can. My muscles seem to fill with blood again. Everything loosens and aches. But it’s like opening a fist that you’ve squeezed closed for a long time: you actually have to try to keep it from closing again on its own, so I sit down again, clenched over the harp, and enter a sort of drugged equilibrium in which I accept that this is the only thing I do.