When my surgeon, the stranger who would soon know parts of me no one else had ever touched, told me I had to have a bypass immediately, one of the questions that went through my mind was “Does this mean my chest will be cut open?” I didn’t ask this out loud. Of course, I knew the answer.
Getting to a patient's heart requires that the chest is
cauterized and cut open at the same time with a tool designed to do
both at once. Once the skin is open and peeled back, a rotary saw is used to
cut through the sternum. Imagine how the ribs must feel, once the tension is
released and they open up for the first time! Imagine how strange the patient
must look once the ribs are cranked open, the arms flung down off the table, and--if she is a woman--her breasts flopped unnaturally, drooping abandoned toward opposite sides of
the room.
I admire those who know in advance all the details
they are in for and still show up at the hospital. Though my
curiosity got the better of me, and I started watching videos
of bypass surgeries as soon as I got home from the hospital (what would I have done without YouTube I have to wonder), had I known the details of my surgery before, I can only
imagine the nightmares.
If open-heart surgery happens “on pump,” which is still usually the
case, especially with grave emergencies, the patient's heart is stopped, and two cannulas connect the body to the heart-lung machine. The cannulas become the vein and the artery through which blood circulates
out of the body, into the pump, back into the body, over and over again as it
bypasses the heart and lungs. Her heart and lungs have been stopped and machines are doing all the work; Essentially, for that time, the patient on the operating table is dead.
***
One Sunday, after I had been working with Ran for
more than a year, and had been at his apartment through the afternoon drafting
the letters I would go home, type up, then later that week send out to people who would likely be
just as surprised at getting a real physical letter as they were to get
compliments and heartfelt advice from someone they didn’t know, or at the most only
knew of, Ran told me he needed to go take
a bath. He was headed out later and needed to get ready, wash off the day, put
on some good clothes, but I was welcome to stick around and play the piano.
In my memory I reconstruct this scene and hear him
telling me that he’s going to see a Hitchcock double feature. I want to give
him the gift of that: to write for him a night of film noir on the town. I’ll
make it a Sunday night of Tippi Hedren in The
Birds, Janet Leigh in Psycho, and
Ran Blake, Boston piano man extraordinaire in his navy blue trench coat, leaning
forward, hands on his knees, chin in his hands, sitting in the dark theater in
Brookline, surrounded by friends, right at the edge of his seat. Melanie
Daniels is making her way across the bay when a gull pecks her on the forehead,
destroying her carefully coiffed hair, warning us of what’s to come, even if
for a moment we are fooled into thinking that handsome Mitch, who rushes to
her aid when she gets to the dock, just might be able to save her. And Marion Crane—heart pounding, hands
gripping tighter around the steering wheel than they've probably ever gripped anything
in her life (even her lover), drives in the rain with all that money, trying
so hard to find a way out of her mundane life, and all-the-while repeatedly meeting her guilty conscience in the rear-view mirror. And Ran's absolutely loving every minute of it, even though he knows the dialogue and soundtrack by heart
and has known for years how the stories will end. How Melanie will get attacked
by birds, but get to keep her man, while poor Marion’s blood will keep swirling right on down
the drain, no matter how much you wish it wouldn't, and all that money gets nice and soggy in the swamp while Norman stands there watching the last bit of the car disappear into the muddy water.
No matter how many times he’s seen them, Ran will
watch enthralled. Will completely devour the discordant notes of their celluloid bodies and lives. Because other than his worship of the ear and the piano, for him
there was film noir—its shadows, its twists, its heaviness, its sounds. It was the achy foundation of so many of his compositions, the moody thread
connecting his days, the shape of his black composition bag that became his
graphic trademark, the theme of the infamous musical and art soirées he
organized in various spots around Cambridge and Boston. And, of course, it was
the perfect companion to Jack Daniels (Ran introduced me to whiskey served neat,
which I still love, though sometimes I wonder if I stop to drink it as often as I should).
And once the
birds seem to have mellowed out and Norman Bates is sent away, Ran and his fellow movie
goers will get up from their seats, walk out of the theater, and head on to Khao Sarn at Coolidge Corner for a late dinner and rounds of toasts and conversation. Melanie, Mitch, Marion, and Norman will come and go between the miang kum, the pad thai, the ginger fish, the coconut drinks with umbrellas, the sticky rice with mango. Like all the other places in Boston that open their doors wide for him, Ran is well-known at Khao Sarn. The owner of
Khao Sarn has even hosted pre-noir-event parties there.
***
Before heading off to get ready, Ran suddenly suggests we have our first piano lesson. We had been talking about
it for a while, but the two of us had been so busy, we hadn’t gotten around to
it. While I played, he would listen. He would leave the bathroom door open slightly so
he could hear me and respond. It was time for me to begin my worship of the
ear, my own praise to that small puckered, curly-qued, dried apricot thing that
quickly becomes bizarre if you ever really stop to look at it protruding from
the side of someone’s head. He was convinced he could teach me to train my
ears. Convinced my apricots, which I was certain were tone deaf, had that power too.
I had played piano as a girl for years—he knew that—but no more than in that
slavish, route way that begins when a child is forced by one or both parents to
sit in front of sheet music and plunk out the notes one by one, while getting
smacked, chastised, occasionally praised but often goaded (depending on the
disposition of the particular teacher and the vicissitudes of the day). “What a
wonderful sight-reader you are!” my first teacher with his fantastically fat, broomy,
gray mustache told me, before commenting on my deplorable rhythm as I sat there
trying so hard with back straight, wrists up, fingers precisely, classically curled. A good
sight reader: I was proud. I'm sure I shared this with my mother when I got
home. And later I was even a decent player. By the time I was in high school, friends heard me and were impressed. But that
was about it. Nothing more. There was emptiness about it. I wouldn’t have said
that at the time. Wouldn’t have known HOW to say that, wouldn’t have even
realized there was a problem, but later, when I encountered the music of Ran
Blake, Keith Jarrett, and George Russell; as I fell deep into the heavy down-noted
chords of Thelonius Monk; as I stepped through the fissures they created and
basked in the music on the other side, I knew the difference. I had never really
played at all. Chopin’s preludes and waltzes by route, stiff memorization
didn’t count. I was a great imitator. Nothing more.
And now Ran was telling me to play for him the first notes of
George Russell’s “Strastusphunk.” His words were something along the lines of: Just start. Work it out. And do it completely by
ear.
To be continued ...
To be continued ...
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