Cage Match

Yesterday I gathered all of Helen’s long red hair up from the marble floor and snipped it clean off with a pair of kitchen scissors. It was getting long enough to draw attention. I told the children it was cornsilk. Who knows if they bought it, but they left me alone after that, and anyway I am sick with longing. Now the piano just looks how a piano looks.

She fits inside the piano as though she were born in it. Beats all when you consider how she got there. She fell sixty stories straight into the living room. Sixty!

The children looked up and saw her shadow falling and closed their eyes and I said “uh,” and then I closed my eyes. When I opened them I saw that I had caught her in my arms, which were outstretched, held open in the shape of a cradle. Down she went ker-swoosh into my cradled arms which nearly snapped in half and definitely would have broken had I not been so full of longing.

But then out of longing I trapped her in the piano.

The piano is a Steinway. People think music can’t loom. I assure you, it can. “Who are you?” I asked her. She said, “Helen.” I said, “I don’t know how much longer I can live without you, Helen.”

Paul maybe doesn’t get the looming as much because he’s deaf as a doornail. He doesn’t play nor can he hear music unless he gets down on the ground and puts his ear to the marble floor. Meanwhile I sit at the piano every night. I sit at the bench and hover my hands over the keys, an inch above the keys at most. The children laugh. They don’t get it. What is so funny? I am full of longing and I imagine playing the piano with a supreme longing that is beyond what they can even conceive of.

Since music is forbidden I imagine music, and I imagine that music is the swell of love.

I hold my hands over the keys and I imagine love pouring out of the piano as a river and I imagine love as limestone through which the river is carved. I imagine love until the piano shakes. The children gape. Then, without fail, they put their grubby unimaginative hands on me and weep. But not with longing, which is beyond them. “Oh, dear,” they say. (They don’t know my name.) “What is that funny cornsilk-looking stuff sticking out of the piano?” They are afraid. Fear also looms. It leaves a dampness on the glass of the glass room that Paul has made for us.

Helen is in the piano now, right now as we speak, and Paul has no way of knowing. Unless I invoke one of the rules of knowing. He does not know what we know, which is that Helen is right now reaching hundreds of her invisible arms through the strings and holding the million green piano hammers down one by one with her teeth. She’s like a wild animal trapped in there, bending the music into a rage.

One day all the music Paul can’t hear will come pouring out of him and fill the little glass room in one long howl. Tears will run down my face into a bowl. Paul will stand there steaming like a bull and strike a match against his own heart.

“Why did you do it?” (Paul writes on the glass.)

I assume he means about the deafness.

One night when we were just married I set off a baking soda bomb in the bed while he slept. I don’t know why. Who knows why? He was deaf as a doornail after that.

“Because you made the room out of glass!” (I write back.)

He is clearly shocked.

So am I.

I always thought I loved the room precisely because it was made of glass. River and limestone and ash and such. Flames now threatening to reveal Helen, still trapped inside the piano.

“Because I am full of longing,” I write.

Paul climbs up on top of the piano to escape the fire of his heart and opens the bones of his rib cage one by one. Something we know and possibly have seen before will now fly out of Paul.

What will it be? He has invoked one of the rules of cages. Children, close your eyes. Don’t let it be a bird! Don’t let it be a bat! We’ll make him blind. We’ll take the light out of his eyes and throw it inside. Don’t let it be that.

Don’t let it be that.

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