Limbo (15 page)

They didn't make women like that in Wisconsin. I adored her. If she'd told me to practice with thumbtacks pushed into my fingertips, I'd probably have obeyed.

She was somewhere in her thirties and dramatically beautiful, and when I looked at the man she'd married—a bulbous old fool of a violinist who spent most of his energy attempting to seduce his undergraduates—it was clear she was in no danger of falling victim to anybody's charms. Her career as a performer had come to an end because of chronic back pain; she often walked with a cane. On particularly bad days, she stood through the lesson. On worse days still, she paced, her breath coming in hard little puffs. I left the studio feeling as if my own pain was nothing but an excuse, a symptom of my own lack of focus. I resolved to work harder. I ate lecithin like gumdrops. I got another round of cortisone shots, swallowed aspirin until my ears rang, renewed my prescriptions for anti-inflammatories and then lied to the doctor about the side effects: abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss. I even visited the acupuncturist, but by the end of my third semester, I couldn't shampoo my hair properly because I couldn't keep my arms raised
above my head that long. Instead, I slapped the shampoo on my head, then stood directly under the shower stream, hoping the force of the water would drill the soap into my hair.

Fortunately, I could keep my arms at waist level while I was playing the piano, but other problems were cropping up: holding a pencil to take notes, gripping a knife to cut meat, lowering something down from my high closet shelf. Trying to run scales, I slurred notes hopelessly, and there were times my hands grew so numb I had to look to see where they were. When I spoke to my parents on the phone, the receiver kept slipping out of my grasp.

“Fine, everything's fine,” I said. “Just dropped the phone.”

And then there were the problems I was having with, well, my legs. Who had ever heard of such a thing? My legs weren't nearly as bad as my arms, but if I walked too far too fast, they'd start to burn, and when I jogged, it took several days to recover. Pain up and down my shins, along the insides of my legs from ankle to knee, sometimes across the top of my feet, particularly my right foot. Sometimes, this foot didn't quite want to pull up after I'd take a step, and this mystified and embarrassed me.

Now I was truly frightened. Was I psychosomatically ill? I made another appointment with the sports medicine specialist I'd been seeing at Johns Hopkins. He injected my
wrists and elbows with more cortisone and had me fitted with new wrist braces I was supposed to wear while I was practicing, writing, cutting up food. Then he sent me to another specialist, a neurologist, who had me walk around the exam room so that he could
evaluate my gait
. He asked me to close my eyes and touch my nose. He pricked my feet with pins and asked if it felt dull or sharp.

“Your right foot gets tired?” he said. He thought about it for a moment. “Which foot do you use to work the pedals on the piano?”

“The right, mostly,” I said.

“Try using your left foot instead.”

I felt stupid for bringing it up.

 

In December 1983
, I headed home to Wisconsin for winter break. There, for the next three weeks, I took my health seriously. I forced myself to take a break from the piano—no cheating, no short sessions, nothing. I wore my wrist braces every day. I washed down the anti-inflammatories with milkshakes and big, starchy meals, trying to console my stomach. Mornings, I slept late; afternoons, I visited relatives; nights, I watched videos with friends. I spent a week out at Grandma Krier's farm, sleeping beside her in the old double bed just as I had when I was younger. She had sent a check to Rome in November, after my mother had first told her about the problems I was having.
Any day now, she assured me, a Mass would be said for my intentions. Any day now, I should be feeling better.

And by the end of my vacation, I could report, truthfully, that I did feel much better than I had. I was sleeping through the night again; my arms and legs no longer woke me with their buzz and burn. I could walk all the way from her house to Great Uncle Joe and Aunt Eleanor's, a quarter mile down the road, and sit in their living room quite comfortably, admiring their Christmas tree.

“Take it easy,” my mother pleaded with me as she drove me back to the airport. I promised I would, and I kept that promise. Back in Baltimore, I took the bus to my part-time job at the theater. I practiced no more than two hours a day. But within a few weeks, all my symptoms had returned. I couldn't keep up with my piano lesson preps, and in March, I withdrew from ensemble. I relied on the braces more and more, not only at the piano, but taking notes, raising and lowering my cereal spoon, anything that required repetitive motion. By now, my injuries were common knowledge, impossible to conceal, and when midsemester grades came due, my teacher told me that the time had come to stop making excuses.

“I understand,” I said, forcing myself to look unconcerned. We'd just spent yet another lesson on music theory, because I hadn't been able to prepare that week's assignment.

“No, you don't,” she said. “I'm giving the A you would
have had, if it weren't for all this.” She waved her hands at my braces.

“Thank you,” I said.

“
Don't
thank me,” she said. “
Listen
to me. If this doesn't resolve itself soon, you'll need to rethink your major.” She gave me a hard, keen look that wasn't without sympathy. “There's a good music therapy program at Hopkins,” she said. “I had a student several years back who transferred, graduated on schedule, got a job working at a clinic somewhere. A good job. Something with autistic children. I could make a few calls.”

It had been a long time since she'd talked to me about the master instructor, held up his difficulties as an example, reminded me that all it took was heart—an omission that seemed particularly telling, for his comeback performance was only a week away. You couldn't open up the local paper without seeing something about it. There were posters up on every bulletin board. There'd been an interview on public radio. Did she think I'd lost my drive? Did she think I wanted to settle down and raise puppies? I couldn't believe that she, of all people, was suggesting I become a teacher.

“That will not be necessary,” I said. I spoke as firmly as I could. “I'm going to get better.”

“Of course you're going to get better,” she snapped. “But when? Because you don't have two, three, five years to
wait. If you're going to have a career, things need to happen for you now. You've already lost a semester, and frankly, I don't foresee any improvement.”

I left the studio furious, determined to show my teacher she was wrong. Who was to say I wouldn't recover? Who was to say this wouldn't be just one of many marvelous anecdotes I'd tell some day, after I became successful, after I'd demonstrated the power of positive thinking? The master instructor's public radio interview had been filled with such marvelous anecdotes. He was practicing hard these days, getting ready; I sometimes sat outside his practice room door to listen. I figured that if I couldn't practice myself, the next best thing was hearing somebody else at work, following along with the score. I got permission to sit in on friends' lessons. I spent hours in the listening lab, memorizing concertos and symphonies.

Susan offered to teach me how to hypnotize myself. Her father, a psychiatrist, had taught her how to do it, and she hypnotized herself before performances so that she wouldn't feel nervous. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, I sat with my eyes rolled back in my head, suggesting affirmations to my subconscious.
My wrists feel warm and good. My hands are powerful and strong
.

 

On the night
of the master instructor's comeback performance, I walked to the symphony hall alone. Months
earlier, I'd splurged on a single orchestra seat, and now I kept my hand in my pocket so I could feel the ticket between my fingers. For once, I wouldn't be scrounging for a ticket, worrying about whether or not I'd get in and where, if I did, I would sit. It was a warm April night, and I wore only my Peabody sweatshirt over a loose, flowing skirt, cotton tights, and lace-up boots, a dozen cloth bracelets on my wrists. My hair had grown long and, since leaving home, I'd learned to wear it straight. Tonight, I'd pulled it back with a ribbon. I wore earrings and perfume. I'd fussed in a way that I almost never fussed, and I'd left early so I could be there to watch the concert hall fill up.

All day, my mouth had been dry, the way it always got before my own performances. In a sense, this was my own performance; at least, this is what I had come to believe. For if everything went well, I would understand that my own pain had been but a momentary setback, something that would pass. I had prayed over this and fasted over this and now I believed it with all my heart. I wasn't expecting a miracle—no. Just a wing-brush of God's compassion, an easing of this terrible uncertainty I felt I could no longer bear. Tonight, I would finally have an answer to the question I'd been asking for months: do I still have a future in music? And so I was going to the concert. I would listen with an open heart. I would drink the notes into my aching arms like medicine.

“If a child asks his father for bread,” I reminded myself, “will he hand him a scorpion?”

I arrived just as the doors were opening. The crowd pressed forward, catching me with it, sweeping me inside on a wave of bow ties and black dresses and pearls. By the time I found my seat, the orchestra was already half full, and when I turned around, I saw the crowds surging into the balconies. Good concerts give you chills; great concerts give you chills before they even begin. It was clear that this was going to be one of the greats, a night to remember. When the lights came down and the master instructor stepped onto the stage, a collective
ah
! rose from the audience, a single exhalation of joy. The applause didn't build; it simply arrived like a good, hard rain, continued as if it could go on all night. A few people shouted
Bravo
! but the master instructor lifted his hands a little—
please, please
, he seemed to be saying—and then seated himself at the piano, where he waited for the crowd to settle down. Still, the applause drummed the air. The conductor grinned like a schoolboy. People all around me, strangers, were exchanging nods and smiles.
See
, we all were saying to each other,
there he is, he's back
. I reminded myself of the old priest's analogy. Even I could see, now, that all those years of misery had had their purpose Without them a moment this sweet, this grand, could never have existed.

At last, the conductor raised his baton. We all leaned for
ward. The concerto began. But ten minutes into the first movement, the clean lines of the master instructor's melodies started to blur. People behind me murmured uneasily; heads moved side to side. The conductor gradually slowed the tempo, but by the time the master instructor had arrived at the cadenza, I could see very clearly how his right hand was refusing to articulate, how the fourth and fifth fingers kept knuckling under. Still, he lumbered along, a Herculean effort, until he reached the bitter end only slightly behind the orchestra. His face was slick with sweat as he rose, clutching his right hand with his left, as if to wring out the pain. The applause sounded different than it had before. It rose into shrillness and kept on rising, an unpleasant, pitying sound. Again and again, the master instructor bowed—helplessly, automatically, unable to creep away—and I saw in his rigid expression something of my own face, my own determination, my own belief that, with enough will, enough faith, anything was possible. Here, standing before me, was a ghost of the best future I might hope for, an endless cycle of hope and despair, false starts, comebacks that were never fully realized. And even that, I knew, was far more than would be my portion. The master instructor had been trained by other master instructors since his childhood; he'd developed his injuries at the height of a young, but brilliant, career. My own career had barely begun and, to be fair, I had never been any kind of
genius. I was yet another talented student, one of hundreds, full of heart.

I stood up and began climbing over people's knees, desperate to escape. Outside, the air had cooled; the streets were steaming, surreal. I walked like somebody in a dream, not heading anywhere in particular. Men called to me, a nagging fugue that waxed and waned:
Hey baby, hey sweetheart, nice legs, like to see what's between 'em
. For the past two years, day or night, alone or with other women, I had not once stepped out from behind the Conservatory walls and not heard that same ugly music, a variation on the same theme I'd heard from the wrestlers in high school. An embellishment of what I saw on TV, in movies, in slick magazines. The flip side of the Church's focus on female virginity, chastity, purity. In the past, I'd always assured myself that I was above
all
such imagery. Church or street, Madonna or whore, I was, after all, an artist. It had nothing to do with me.

Except that it did. Or at least, from now on, it would.

Hey baby, hey sweetheart. Show us your tits
.

Who would I be without the piano? Legs and arms, a body, a face—all of it without meaning beyond the dull physical facts?
Your body is God's temple
floated into my head, a reflex like a sob, but the words meant nothing. They rattled inside my emptiness like stones dropped into a can. I would have to stop playing the piano, I understood
that now. I would leave the Conservatory at the end of the school year. As for the Catholic Church, I realized I'd left that long ago; I'd merely been clinging to the shreds out of fear, obligation, habit.
Let it go
, I told myself and, amazingly, I did. The whole anxiety-ridden knot of it floated up out of my hands and into the sky, carrying my music along with it.