You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Read Free Book Online

information mostly unsusceptible to literal deciphering. The moods they evoked were a wordless form of knowing that could leave a person feeling stupider than before he’d been awash in them.
    The same pained piano tones traveled the air of the house repeatedly and without apology, like a series of farts produced by an old sick dog whose smell’s effect on others is the least of his worries. The sound threatened Karl’s delicate numbness. With no place to go, he came down the stairs, went for the door, and heard the word “Chopin.
    “He composed that nocturne one winter on Majorca, do you know Majorca? I could show you on the map, let’s go to the rec room and I’ll show you. Or if you have to go out now that’s fine. A world map, think about it, a map of the world. The entirety of the planet color-coded on a big piece of paper, every inch of land parceled into nation-states, ‘landscape plotted and pieced,’ as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, who was just a boy when Chopin died, and he died quite young, late thirties. He got sick as a dog on Majorca, off the east coast of Spain, the same latitude as Wilmington, approximately—cold, in other words, in the winter, and him holed up in a Carthusian monastery—the Carthusians, interesting sect, hermits living together in humble clusters—very poor heat retention in these monasteries and who knows why Chopin chooses this place seeing as he’s famous across the continent, all the hotels booked I suppose. The great composer’s deep, bronchial cough resounds off the monastery’s stone walls and the island’s doctors come one by one to see him. On Christmas day he wrote to a friend, ‘The first doctor said I was going to die. The second said I was dying. The third said I was dead.’ It’s good to have a sense of humor in these situations, and a companion, which in Chopin’s case was George Sand. This was not a homosexual relationship, George Sand was a lady writer who took the name of a man and sometimes dressed in men’s clothing. She had two children, they came along. His great French piano was held up in customs so he was composing on a tin can by all reports. You’re Chopin and you’re on Majorca and you’re composing your nocturnes and your scherzos while running a fever and coughing up blood into this piece-of-junk musical instrument with your cross-dressing girlfriend’s two kids fighting over a doll at your feet, now that’s what I call genius.”
    Larchmont Jones was thin but had lately begun to bloat. He leaned in the doorway between the living room and front hall of the house, with his gray goatee, French-cuffed yellow monogrammed dress shirt, pressed khakis, slip-proof loafers with decorative leather tassels, and tight yellow knee socks to help the circulation, to which the calf muscle, Jones had once informed him, was crucial, an ancillary pump, a second little heart on the lower floor of the establishment. Every day now people wearing dress shirts arrived in Karl’s life to impede him. Jones looked tired. His face was gray and red. The darker skin beneath the eyes was gathered in loose bunches like dusty drapes resting on a carpeted floor. Thin, frameless spectacles held the puffed-out end of his nose. He was neither pleasant nor well. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong,” he said.
    “What?”
    “On the Chopin. I’m, you know, going for supreme delicacy, but uh.”
    It might be worthwhile to mention at this time that just when Karl had cut short Stony’s imitation of him, complete with hat, he’d begun to feel a new kind of energy—let’s call it energy —in his limbs and head. “I feel different,” he’d already said to himself several times on the drive home and in the shower, reprising a famous line from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television program. “I’d say you’re within a thousand kilometers at most of supreme delicacy,” he said now to Jones.
    The older man raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment of his