Eat Cake: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

are poking and prodding, and right before they put me under I say, ‘Doc, will I ever play the piano again?’ And the man looks at me with contempt. Contempt! He says, ‘I wish you guys could come up with a new line.’ Like I’m taking up his time by even asking.”
    “That’s terrible.”
    “So I say, ‘You have to understand, this is how I make my living. I play the piano.’ And he tells me to lie still. Some other kid, I swear to you not a day over sixteen, comes in calling himself the anesthesiologist. He comes at me with a mask and saying I should start counting backwards from one hundred. By this point I’m irate, and I say, ‘Bring a piano into this operating room at once and I’ll show you who’s kidding around!’ My old wrists are splattered all over the gurney, of course, but I would have rallied them for one last round of ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”
    I could hear the nurses gasping in the background, they were laughing so hard. My father had an audience, a full house. He washigh on Percocet and surrounded by nurses and had his daughter’s undivided attention. “So the doctor says, ‘What’s the opening chord for “Rhapsody in Blue”?’ and I say, ‘C sharp minor, you jackass.’ And then he blinks at me. It’s three in the morning and I swear to you, Ruthie, until this instant the guy had been completely asleep. He tells the junior anesthesiologist to hold off for a second. He asks me who I play and what kind of piano I like. It turns out this guy has a Beckstein in his living room. Some rich surgeon who can probably just barely pick his way through ‘Chopsticks.’ A Beckstein! Such a waste. But now his heart is in the game, and he says he’s going to make a real pianist of me yet. He says I’ll be playing Rachmaninoff when he’s through with me. He thinks I can’t play the Rach.”
    I was wondering if he actually could play Rachmaninoff when all of a sudden my father was quiet, and the quiet alarmed me.
    “Dad?”
    Then I heard Gina’s voice again. She said that my father could tell me the rest of the story when he got here, that he needed to get some sleep.
    “Ruthie?” Gina said.
    “Ruth,” I said.
    “Ruth, we’ll check in with you after the doctor comes by and let you know when your father is going to be discharged. Then you can come pick him up.”
    I closed my eyes and tapped the earpiece of the phone against my forehead a couple of times while Sam watched with real interest. “Could we speak privately?” I asked the nurse.
    “Sure.”
    “I mean, not in front of my father. Could you go to another phone?”
    “Your father is out like a light. I can’t believe he stayed awake this long. He isn’t going to hear anything we say.”
    Was it possible to fall asleep so quickly? Again I saw him, small in the bed, his arms swallowed whole by his casts. I tried to picture myself inside the cake, and when that didn’t work, I tried to picture my father inside the cake, casts and all. That seemed better. “How important is it that he come to stay with us?” I said. “I don’t want you to think I’m a monster, but my father and I aren’t close, and my mother lives with us, and my father and mother
really
aren’t close, and it’s going to create—”
    But Gina stopped me. “It’s not my business to pass judgments one way or the other, so let me just speak medically here. Your father is old enough that going into a nursing facility is probably going to be hard on him. A lot of people his age go in seeming pretty young and they just don’t come out. His chances for a full recovery are going to be better if he’s with family. His chances of not winding up with some problem he didn’t go in with are going to be better. Now, if you can’t do that, you can’t do it. Only you know the answer to that question. If you have to put him in a facility, you’re going to have to think about the cost. I don’t know what your father’s financial situation is, if he has