The Distance Between Us

by Noah Bly

  And so I play piano. This is my prayer, my meditation. My dance, my canvas, my poem. I sink my fingers into the keyboard just as innumerable pianists before me have done, and I seek clarity and absolution in strict, intricate counterpoint, escape and redemption in melody and chordal structure. I will fail, of course, just as I do every time I play, but that’s beside the point, I think. The soul of music, to a true musician, is the fabled face of God: it’s not really meant to be seen, full-on, by the naked human eye. But I’ve had glimpses of that ancient, lyrical soul, again and again, and each glimpse has earned me a profound moment of grace, a transcendent instant outside of time—and an absolute, if temporary, relief from my burdens. So I persist, vainly, in trying to remove all the veils, until nothing is left but blinding, eternal glory.

  Did I say earlier that I don’t believe in God?

  Well, I lied. I do believe.

  But the God I bow down before does not answer prayers. It does not sit on a throne, it does not traffic in locusts and plague, and it does not care a whit about you, or me, or your Aunt Juanita, or your cat. It cares only for the earsplitting peal of the trumpet, the hum of the low “E” string on the bass, and the shocking thud you feel deep in your gut when someone strikes a bass drum behind you. Wind instruments, and voices and strings and brass, and perhaps occasional birdsong are its angels; concert halls and recording studios are its churches and its synagogues.

  Music is my God, of course. A god with no country, a god with no bible, and a god with no conscience. And I have given my life to it.

  And what does that make me?

  Nothing, really. Nothing at all.

  I am nothing but a very angry, lonely old pagan worshipper, with uncommonly gifted fingers, a crippled wrist, and a broken heart.

  Unbidden, the famous second movement from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata fills the room. I let it come out unchecked, let it pour through me like clean water from a faucet. It saturates the house, then the yard, then the neighborhood; it drowns downtown Bolton, and southern Illinois, and the entire Midwest. It floods city after city, and continent after continent, and sends every would-be Noah scurrying for his ark and galoshes before I finish. But as soon as the last notes sound, the tap is turned off. The water reverses its flow, the sun reemerges, the earth dries itself again in a single second.

  Just as if the magnificent, grief-obliterating flood I created with my own two hands—and the skill and training of a lifetime—had never happened.

  My wrist is a nightmare of fire. I let my head fall forward on my chest, and all my anguish and loss returns with the physical pain, and the silence.

  “Jesus, Hester.”

  I jerk in surprise on the bench. Alex is standing in the doorway, watching me. I have no idea how long he’s been there.

  I somehow muster a response. “Alex. I didn’t realize you were home.”

  “Where else would I be?” He gives me a lopsided grin. “No one else wants me around.” He takes a tentative step into the room, and his face becomes solemn. “What was that song you just played?”

  I close the keyboard lid and sigh. “Something of Beethoven’s. An Adagio.”

  He puts his hands in his pants pockets. “It was …” He stops, searching for words. “That was gorgeous, Hester.” He shakes his head. “Really. It was unbelievable.”

  I rise to my feet and try to hide the shooting pain in my forearm. “Thank you for saying that, dear. It is a lovely piece, isn’t it?”

  He nods, but then steps closer and examines my face. “You hurt your wrist again, didn’t you?” He searches my eyes. “Oh. Your meeting went bad, too.”

  I blink at him. “Dear God. Am I that easy to read?”

  “Sort of.” He falls into step beside me as I move toward the kitchen. “And now you want a cocktail, right?”

  I grimace. “No. I want at least a dozen cocktails, Nostradamus.”

  As we walk through the living room, the fear of losing my home assails me again. My lawyer tried to comfort me today by telling me I could always buy another house if I lost this one in court, but he doesn’t have any idea what that would do to me.

  I’ve lived here my entire adult life, raised my family here, slept and breathed and dreamed and cried here. And I intend to die here as well, when the time comes. I know every square inch of this place; every hallway and every corner triggers a memory that otherwise would be irretrievable. The music we’ve made here as a family, and the love we shared together, is part of the walls and the floors.

  I mean that literally. If you cut into the wood of this house with a knife, I would bleed in sympathy, like a stigmatic. How could it be otherwise?

  This is where I first learned what the word love really meant. This is where Arthur and I began our life together, and watched our squalling infants lurch and stumble their way into maturity, one after the other. This is where Paul sat beside me on the porch after my mother died, and cried with me, and stroked my hair as if I were a little girl. This is where Caitlin asked to paint my portrait for her art class, and actually danced around me in surprised pleasure, like a sprite, when I said yes. This is where Jeremy stood on the kitchen table for my fiftieth birthday and sang “God Save the Queen” at the top of his lungs while Arthur squirted him from across the room with the dish sprayer.

  This is where Paul and Jeremy, indignant and stuttering, attempted to explain to me why a pet turtle they’d stolen from a neighbor’s house was entitled to political asylum. This is where I found Caitlin asleep on the living room floor with her head resting on a chessboard, and Arthur snoozing next to her with an open thesaurus on his belly. This is where the boys dressed as sumo wrestlers for Halloween, and then as Starsky and Hutch, and once (most notably) as Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni.

  This is where I cooked everything from sloppy Joes to ratatouille to beef bourguignon for my ravenous and finicky children. This is where on any given day of the year I could walk in the front door and be greeted by the living, breathing melodies of Vivaldi, or Haydn, or Mendelssohn, or Copland, expertly played on a cello, or a French horn, or a violin. And this is where Arthur removed all my clothes by the fireplace in our bedroom one unforgettable New Year’s Eve, when we had the place to ourselves. He refused to hurry, and his fingers traced, for many hours, the flickering shadows cast by the fire over my bare skin.

  And I will not give it up. Not to Arthur, not to anybody. Arthur gets a new wife, and a new chance at life after our divorce. I will be damned if he gets this house, too. It belongs to me.

  This is my home. I don’t know who I am without it.

  CHAPTER 17

  So Jeremy was waiting for me when I returned home from work one cold February afternoon, a little before sunset. As I pulled into the driveway I saw him on the edge of the roof again, not wearing a coat, and hugging himself for warmth.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” I muttered to myself in the car. “Bless his pointed little head.”

  I pulled up in front of St. Booger, turned off the engine and stepped out into the inch or two of fresh snow on the driveway.

  “Welcome home, Hester!” Jeremy called down.

  I glared up at him without answering. Before I could get into the house, our next-door neighbor (doddering old Edith Schumaker, who has since died of lung cancer) opened her front door and hailed me, hobbling out on her porch with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

  “He’s been up there quite a while, Hester,” she said in what she intended to be a whisper, but came out as a shout. She was nearly as deaf as Beethoven. “I was getting ready to call you at work, but then I saw your car pulling into the driveway.”

  “Thank you, Edith.” I raised my voice and spoke with exaggerated mouth movement, so she could read my lips. “He’s just getting a breath of fresh air. It’s nothing to be concerned about.”

  She shook her head. “Damn fool’s going to get himself killed doing that sort of thing. It’s probably icy up there.”

  She was loud enough for
Jeremy to hear her.

  “Hi, Edith!” he bellowed. “Come on up and we’ll go dancing! And by the way, you look sexy as hell!”

  Edith waved her cigarette at him and blew a plume of smoke into the air. “You be careful up there, young man!”

  “No worries!” he responded. “Trust me! I’m like a mountain goat.” He paused for a moment, then began to bleat at the top of his lungs.

  Edith shot me a worried look and I felt myself flush with embarrassment.

  “He’s fine,” I reassured her. “You go on back inside now, before you catch your death of cold.”

  “BAAAA!” Jeremy bawled. “BAAAA!”

  I bid Edith an abrupt goodbye and made my exit, sensing something unusual in Jeremy’s mood, a brittle edge to his voice I hadn’t heard there before. I rushed by St. Booger and almost fell in the driveway en route to the porch.

  “Oops! Easy does it, Hester!” Jeremy scolded. “You’ve only got one good wrist left!”

  “Shut up, you idiot!” I barked back at him.

  “BAAAA!” he replied.

  The house was cold and dark as I made my way up the stairs. Jeremy usually had the fire going by the time I came home, and the thermostat turned up where I liked it, but that afternoon he’d neglected to make the place more comfortable. God only knew how long he’d been up there. I passed by Arthur’s and my bedroom on the first landing at a pretty good clip, and sailed by Arthur’s office on the third floor, but when I finally reached the attic apartment, I was seriously winded.

  I ground to a halt in the attic hallway to catch my breath. When I saw what awaited me there, my hand went to my throat.

  Jeremy’s apartment, normally neat as a pin, was in ruins. The rugs had been ripped to shreds and flung throughout the place as if by a mad bird, the wallpaper in the hall itself had been clawed from the walls and was balled up by the kitchen door, along with the sheets he used as a screen to block his view of the staircase. I glanced in the living room, and all of his albums (he had hundreds of them) were shattered on the floor, mixed in with buckets of black soil from all the plants he’d upended. And in the kitchen he’d been hurling dishes into the open refrigerator, apparently, because there was a tremendous pile of broken pottery inside it, spilling out in an avalanche at its base.

  He must have been tearing the place apart for hours.

  I picked my way gingerly through the wreckage in the kitchen, to the open window by the table.

  Jeremy was prepared for my arrival; he was facing me and smiling when I poked my head out into the cold air.

  “Hello, Mother.” He sounded utterly rational. “It’s good to see you.”

  This semblance of sanity alarmed me far more than anything else could have. His demeanor was jovial, his speech polite and measured. But underneath all the surface lucidity was a fever of some kind, and I could feel the heat in his gaze.

  “Jeremy.” I took a slow, ragged breath, and then another, waiting for my heart to slow. “What is it this time, dear? What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” he cocked his eyebrow. “Whatever do you mean?”

  I threw up my hands. “Oh, my mistake, then. You’ve just been rearranging your apartment, is that it?”

  “Oh, that.” He chuckled. “I had a bit of tantrum earlier, that’s all. But I’m all better now.”

  It was bitterly cold up here; even given that the attic apartment was always hot, the warmth from the house behind me couldn’t compete with the freezing wind pouring in through the open window. Jeremy was dressed in black slacks, a pair of brown slippers, and a white button-down shirt with long sleeves, and his face and hands were shivering and blue from the cold. The temperature was plummeting as the sun sank lower in the sky.

  “Jeremy. You must come inside.” I leaned forward to plead with him. “Please. We’ll talk about whatever is bothering you once you’re warm again.”

  “You worry too much, Hester.” This had become his standard line whenever I found him up here. “It’s not good for your blood pressure, you know.”

  “My blood pressure will be just fine when you stop being a fool,” I snapped. “You’re going to get frostbite.”

  He bent forward and put his hands on his knees to peer into my eyes. “It’s no good, Mother. I can’t bear it any longer.”

  The forced jollity was gone from his tone, replaced by something distant and lonely. My heart twisted in response.

  “Bear what?” I whispered.

  “This.” He made a circling gesture with his hands, indicating who knows what. “All of it. I mean, what’s the point?”

  He cleared his throat and fought to control his trembling lips. “Day in and day out, it’s the same thing. For all of us.” He played with a button on his shirt. “Do you see what I mean? We get up, we go to work, we make music or whatnot, we interact with other people. Then we come home, watch the news, read a book, stare at the television, whatever—then we go to bed, either alone or with someone else, and we dream, and the next day it starts all over again.”

  He shrugged, thinking. “And that’s it, really. That’s all there is. I mean, sure, we do other things, too. We sweat, we shower. We eat and shit. We fall in and out of love. We swear at the mailman for dropping our magazines in the snow, and we hug the kids for doing their chores, and we argue about where we should eat for lunch on Fridays. We whack off or hump our brains out when we’re horny, we drink booze when we’re edgy, and some of us even pray before we fall asleep at night, even though most of us know for a fact it doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but he wasn’t finished.

  “Just hear me out, okay, Hester?” He waited for my nod. “It’s not bad, but it’s not good, either. There’s joy sometimes, but it’s always, always unclean, muddied up by pain and waste and grief. And today I woke up, and realized that I’ve had thirty-three years of that sort of thing, and I don’t want to play anymore, that’s all.” He sniffed. “It’s a stupid game, with no rules and no referee. And no matter what I do, it’s going to end the same way, so why bother playing at all?”

  My tongue felt numb in my mouth. “Tell me what happened today, son.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing, really. Shanda Cartwright threw a little hissy fit this morning in rehearsal that pissed me off royally, but it wasn’t a big deal by itself.”

  Shanda was the flute instructor at Carson, and she had the brains of a toadstool.

  “You let Shanda put you in this kind of a snit?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. I couldn’t care less about her. But while she was going off about this and that petty irritation, it suddenly occurred to me she was just a symptom of something much, much worse.”

  The sun was almost to the horizon, now; it looked as if it were caught in the upper branches of an oak tree across the street. It was orange and red and stunning, and I watched it for a moment, distracted and moved—in spite of where we were—by how beautiful it was.

  My nose was running and I swiped at it with a hanky I had in my coat. “What was she a symptom of, dear?” I had to keep him talking, it was the only thing that ever calmed him down.

  “Futility. Stupidity.” He searched for more words. “Blind, unthinking existence, I suppose.” He straightened. “Take your pick, but it wasn’t pretty.”

  “Oh, God,” I sighed, relieved to be back on familiar ground. “In other words, you’re complaining about having too much talent and brains again?” I slapped the windowsill for emphasis. “When in God’s name are you going to grow up?”

  Every other time we’d done this routine, this strategy had brought him back to himself. I would simply shame him into seeing how childish he was being, and the crisis would be averted, yet again. I had no reason to believe this time would be any different.

  But this day, he didn’t get angry, or defensive. He didn’t flinch, or stiffen, or show any outward sign of resentment or embarrassment. He just smiled at me.

  Did I mention he had dimples on his cheeks when
he smiled? They were small and tight, like two little staples, one on each side of his mouth.

  “Oh, Hester,” he said. “My problem isn’t a lack of maturity. It really isn’t.” He paused. “It’s cowardice.”

  I shivered. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple, really.” He took a small step backward, closer to the edge. He was only about a foot away from it now. “I want out, but I don’t have the balls to do it myself.” He locked eyes with me. “So will you help me, Mother?”

  My blood was ice. My skin was the same temperature as the wind, my face was as blank and immobile as St. Booger’s.

  “I will not.” I forced the words out past frozen lips. “Come inside this instant, and stop talking nonsense.”

  There was compassion in his expression. He was examining my features closely, as if he hadn’t seen me in a very long time. “I want you to know this has nothing to do with you. Or anybody else, for that matter. It’s just life I’m tired of. That’s all.” He cocked his head at me. “Can you please help me out?”

  I put my foot up on the chair next to the window in the kitchen and began to climb out on the roof. He took another step backward, but I didn’t stop. I had been overtaken by a sense of urgency, and I knew I had to get to him right away.

  He was only inches from the edge when I cleared the window and had both of my knees on the roof.

  He smiled again. “That’s my girl,” he said. “I knew I could count on you.”

  I rose to my feet, knees popping. The wind blew my hair around like a fan, and I blinked away tears from the coldness of it. “I want you to come inside with me, son,” I whispered.

  He sighed. “No can do.” He put his hands in his pants pockets. “All I need is a little nudge, okay?”

  I was about five feet away, and I took a step toward him to close the gap.

  He watched my slow progress, unconcerned. “Do you remember the Chopin piece I always asked you to play for me when I was a kid?” he asked, for no reason I could think of.