by Barry Rachin
"No, she's all right. I just prefer Peter." A month passed. Sometimes when she was caring for her elderly clients or later in the evening after Marie settled her children down for the night, a fleeting snippet of brass music would come to mind. An etude from Kopprash's melodic studies in B flat or one of Brandt's melodic tunes. She could hear the soft, sinewy tone of a brass horn deftly weaving through the intricate passages. One eerie difference however: now each fragment was tied to the next from beginning to end. In the absence of Peter Marsoubian's defective heart and worn out lungs, the music became a perfectly constructed, seamless whole.
During the three weeks since Peter took sick, Marie called the hospital regularly to check his progress. 'Mr. Marsoubian’s in stable condition' was the standard reply. Stable condition. Such a dry, clinical phrase. In this brief span of time, the symmetry of her life had been defaced, the delicate balance altered in a subtle way. She could have blamed the hard-drinking negro woman; the new client found fault with most everything Marie did and collected petty injustices - imagined and otherwise - from one visit to the next. But that was more a symptom than the root cause of Marie's lassitude.
"What room is Peter Marsoubian in?" Marie was on the third floor of the cardiac unit at Beth Israel Hospital.
The nurse gestured with a flick of her head. "Three eighteen. Last one on the left."
Marie went slowly down the hallway which smelled of alcohol and antiseptic solutions. An orderly wearing green scrubs went by pushing a wheelchair with an elderly man whose bushy, unkempt hair kept falling down in his eyes. Through an open door at the far end of the hall, she could see Peter sitting up. Next to the bed, a heart monitor tracked his vital signs with computerized precision. A transparent tube of nasal oxygen hung from his neck.
"Hello, Peter." Out of the corner of her eye Marie could see the steady, clocklike drip of the IV solution. Peter turned his head slowly. His face relaxed in a groggy smile. "You had a heart attack."
"Yeah, a real good one," Peter qualified. Marie pulled a chair up next to the bed. "For a while there ... " He let the words trail off.
"When can you come home?"
"Heart muscle’s permanently damaged. I can't even stand up without help." Running his fingers through the thinning, wispy hair, he sighed heavily and looked away. "Next week they're shipping me out to a nursing home for a month, maybe two."
"But the heart will heal," Marie insisted. "You were sick before and got better."
Peter shrugged. "The damage’s permanent," he repeated. "A portion of the muscle’s dead."
"And after the nursing home, what then?"
"I come home." Peter moistened his lips and continued tentatively. "I was hoping you might come back to work for me."
"I certainly don't want to stay where I am now." Marie told Peter about the cranky black woman with the rotten kidneys. "She asked me to wash her windows the other day and I said that it was against the rules. We're not allowed to wash windows."
"But you wash my windows."
"If I like a person, I'll wash their windows." Marie folded her heavy winter coat neatly across her lap and pressed her bare knees together. "Or then again," she added, "maybe I won't. The choice is mine to make."
Peter sat up, semi-reclining with a dreamy, melancholy expression. He had lost weight; his complexion was sallow. He sat hardly making an indentation on the mattress - a thin, dry, wafer of a man. "So you will come back to work for me when I return home?" Peter pressed.
"Didn't we just have this same conversation two seconds ago?" Marie said with mock severity. The conversation lapsed. There was no reason to talk; the silence felt good, cleansing. Since childhood, Marie had acknowledged an uneasy truce with words. She preferred a short, clipped speech with a bare minimum of verbiage. Leave the fancy talk to those with facile tongues. Perhaps it was a defect of temperament, a flaw in her genetic makeup, but she could sit for hours in a room full of people without saying more than a few dozen words and come away feeling perfectly garrulous.
Marie glanced about the room. On the bedside table were four things: a folded newspaper, the old man's toothbrush, the brochure from Tanglewood and a tarnished, silver mouthpiece. "What's that for?" Marie asked indicating the mouthpiece.
Removing the blue, oxygen cannula from his nose, Peter Marsoubian reached across with his free hand and grabbed the mouthpiece. Placing it to his lips, he blew a long sustained drone - more an atonal buzz than any distinct note. The sound reminded Marie of a duck call. Peter buzzed the mouthpiece again, tightening the corners of his lips and causing the pitch to rise several notches. "When nobody's around, I buzz for five to ten minutes to keep my lip up." He replaced the mouthpiece back on the table. Perhaps the exertion had tired him. Peter was breathing more carefully now, as though air was a pricey commodity. He took small and economical drafts - shallow, measured breaths that rose slowly, laboriously from the belly into his chest.
Marie excused herself and went out in the corridor where, with characteristic restraint, she blew her nose and blotted some moisture which had accumulated on her cheek. Stay outside of the circle of craziness. Don't step over the invisible, thin line.
Marie took a deep breath and went back into the room. Locating the Tanglewood brochure on the bedside table, she checked the listing of summer events before turning to the encapsulated map on the back page. In a voice that was cautiously enthused, if not completely steady, she read, "West on the Mass Pike past Framingham and Westboro. Continue almost to the New York border. Shortly after the Stockbridge exit, take route forty-one North to - "
