You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Read Free Book Online Page B

as it is I’m not good at both. I pushed your mother to move to a bigger house, even after she got sick, but it eventually doesn’t feel right, someone’s leaving this world and you’re trying to get them to move to a bigger house. Now I guess you and I are stuck here, locked in mortal embrace so to speak.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He sat up straight on the piano bench in right profile and cut his right eye toward Karl. “Should I dare?”
    “Dare what?”
    “Play the second theme.”
    “You could be sodomized by the second theme.”
    Jones played what seemed to Karl a loud, fast, random group of notes with both hands.
    He knew Jones kept a permanent record of every aggression and would repay each in triplicate with any of his own far more various and refined modes of attack, often long after the fact, perhaps posthumously. Karl didn’t care. A beautiful not-caring was happening to Karl; he knew he wasn’t in charge of it and didn’t care about that either. Things were really and truly changing, whether for the better or the worse hardly mattered.
    Jones brought his head in close to the piano and set about extracting its keys with tongs. Valuing speed over precision, he worked fast, broke off half a key, tossed it behind him, moved on. Karl minded this tremendously. What was he doing here? He was investigating the way in which he didn’t mind it all that much, or didn’t mind it enough, or, given the fatalistic passivity with which he greeted the fact of it in his life, minded it an unacceptably large amount and still did nothing.
    Jones was on his umpteenth go at the furious middle of the song. Karl understood this song. It described a life, in three parts. Melancholy prevailed in part one, the protagonist limping along in waltz time beneath its onerous weight. In part two, forces of oppression outside him were met by forces of resistance within him, giving rise to a violent battle. Part three, though almost identical to part one, depicted not melancholy but calm acceptance, the satisfaction of having spent one’s soul on a fight and discovering it still in one’s possession, damaged perhaps but amplified as well. Or on the other hand maybe the return to the sad waltz in part three showed how sadness not only always defeats all struggles against it but erases them, carries on as if they hadn’t happened, except in those dreamy moments when one contemplates a new struggle, whereupon the dim memory of the previous struggle and its irredeemable cost extinguishes the spirit of struggle, resigns the protagonist to preserving the very limited energy remaining to him for the purpose of continuing to limp along under the weight of the sadness until on a merciful day it crushes him.
    Karl removed himself to the side of the room farthest from the piano, where the entertainment center was located. He ranged around in and among machine-smoothed and varnished black wooden shelves, the flat-screen TV, the receiver, CD player, MP3 dock, turntable, two enormous speakers, each with its woofer and subwoofer; he drifted past a great assortment of CDs, DVDs, and LPs; he wandered near those godless pews, the soft leather couch, love seat, and matching recliners on which were strewn the sacred texts, the TV guides and leisure sections of local and national newspapers.
    Jones said, “Two hundred and ninety-eight laps around the couch is a mile, I’ve paced it off. A little exercise at your age wouldn’t hurt, while you still can. I’m having trouble concentrating on the Chopin with you over there restlessly walking around. I thought you maybe were going to help but instead you’re hindering. Shall we play a little bit of pool on a Saturday afternoon? I’m capitulating, in other words, to the desire to play pool. Philistinism wins another victory over art at 218 Dreyfus Road here in West Egg. Not that pool isn’t a beautiful game with a rich history, and I don’t in any way mean to underestimate the value of relaxation, a