I end up walking two miles. I walk on the crowded streets, among people even, even though I have to go so slowly now. I browse in a clothing store, find two T-shirts for Nate—he’s growing, I’ve noticed his clothes tight on him when he comes to my bed to hug me goodnight—and a dress for me maybe, and then ultimately decide not to buy anything at all. It’s more like a dress rehearsal for actual shopping, for the patience of actual shopping. I’m going through the motions, I’m moving. It’s important for me to move. And so I return home, listening to another podcast, trying to gauge the dull ache in the back of my head, my neck, to see how it’s doing, thinking how strange it is to be walking around listening to a podcast instead of lying in bed listening to a podcast, unable to think clearly enough to do more than lie down and listen and let the voices keep me company.
12
My tentative experiments in normalcy have me hopeful for the first time since everything began. The brain-squeezing pressure that I had after the blood patch has begun to subside, and even though the more that front-top headache recedes, the more the familiar back-of-skull headache resurges—even though I still feel foggy and in more pain as the day goes on, even though I still need to rest—all of this feels like some kind of progress, some kind of change, which feels better than the purgatory of being suspended in time, in bed, waiting out the pain.
One afternoon I find myself at the piano, rifling through a book of Rachmaninoff preludes until I find one that seems familiar. From the looks of it, I must have tried to learn it a million years ago: The score has my fingerings and dynamics markings on every page, but I don’t remember ever performing it. It was probably something I’d attempted on my own, for fun, after the conservatory, unmoored without my old teacher, who likely never would have encouraged me to study it, with my small hands.
I decide to sight-read it. It’s beautiful, in that way of Rachmaninoff preludes, but it’s the kind of piece that’s a struggle the entire way through, a melody with inner voices against a triplet accompaniment, a struggle against time. You have to fight with it to make it sound smooth and not plodding, or at least to make it not sound like you’re playing two against three the whole time, which of course you are. You have to make it delicate and balanced, despite the wide jumps in the left hand that make it hard to control the tone, the inner voices in the right hand that sometimes carry the melody and other times are more a part of the left hand’s story.
In a way, its beauty comes precisely from this struggle. This difficulty is the entire point of the piece, and to really play it, you can’t ignore that difficulty. You can’t make it smooth by glibly smoothing it over. Or, you can; but then the point is missed, then it’s just a melody that’s pretty and flows past you and then is gone. To really play it, to really understand it and make someone else understand it, you have to embrace the struggle of it.
Lots of pieces are a struggle for me, because of my too-small hands, and, after decades away from the kind of training I used to do, because of my rusty technique, my out-of-practice-ness, and no-longer-refined ears. And now of course because of this leak. But I try to remind myself to go as slowly as I need to, to keep the sound layers straight, to keep this part in front and that part behind, to remember where that jump starts and where this arpeggio lands, and so I go slowly and try to let the struggle be a struggle, to let myself be patient with it.
As the sound fills the room, I hear the buzz of the window whenever I hit a certain G, the cats jumping from the counter, the kids down the street playing ball outside. I keep making mistakes, but I try to be okay with that, to be patient with it, because that’s the struggle, and because I’m reading music, I’m sitting up, I’m playing. And then I arrive at my favorite part, about halfway through, the part with these heartbreaking open sixths in the right hand, its mysterious, somber melody, and it surprises me when I get there, I’d let it sneak up on me, and I find myself weeping as I realize, I’m sitting up, I’m playing, and my head doesn’t hurt, and my arms are moving, and my fingers are moving, and I’m thinking, and my brain feels less foggy, and I can do this, I can still do this, I am doing this, and the weeks and weeks of not being able to do anything finally reveal themselves to me as a hiding place for a giant repository of
