Free Monica by CD Reiss Page B

back to work. Executives drifted in and out to hear me. Eddie even showed up for fifteen minutes.
    The phone had been face down on the baby grand piano; the sheen of it let me know when the glass lit up with a call or text. But I wouldn’t pick it up. I was in the middle of something. Only when I was done did I check it.
    —I want to see you—
    The text had come ten minutes earlier, when I was in the middle of recording Forever. It was based on a poem I’d written while Jonathan was in the hospital, and I was so angry I imagined myself in an eternal, raging battle with death.
    I couldn’t take a text. We were trying to get the last two words right. Forever fuck . It had to sound like a powerful curse, but be muddled, and on key, and gravelly and transcendent, all at the same time. My feet hurt and the foam egg carton pattern on the walls seemed inverted, my brain and eyes were so exhausted.
    I couldn’t possibly take a text, even from my husband.
    —Where are you?—
    Ten minutes later.
    —You were supposed to be out two hours ago—
    I scrolled through his texts. Jerry and the sound team packed up. I was going to have to deal with this. I had my career. Jonathan knew what it entailed. He didn’t have the right to harass me while I was recording.
    I took a deep breath and called him from outside.
    “Hi,” I said. The parking lot behind the studio smelled like sweaty asshole and stale cigarettes.
    “You’re out?” Jonathan asked.
    “Just finished up.”
    “I have a surprise for you when you get home.”
    Home. A house in the hills that already had too many painful memories. Medications. Falls. Fights. He’d been sick and pissed. I loved him. I’d never leave him. But some days, I felt like we were coming apart at the seams.
    “The guys were going to dinner. I’m a little hungry.”
    He paused. The silence seemed eternal, and though I imagined him staring into space with the phone at his ear, when I heard a car door slam, I knew he hadn’t been inactive.
    “Jonathan, it’s—“
    “Stay there.”
    “Not tonight, I—“
    “This sounds to me like you’re telling me no.” The calm, arrogant dominance in his voice was like a slap in the ass because I hadn’t heard it in six months. “For the sake of clarity, goddess, when it comes to me, that’s not in your vocabulary. I don’t hear it.”
    I said yes sir with all the sarcasm of a spoiled adolescent, and immediately regretted it. Luckily, my husband had already hung up the phone.

JONATHAN
    This shit stopped tonight.
    I parked in the back and went into the building. There were a couple of doors ajar, behind which I could hear the laughter and mumblings of men. I heard her three down, her voice humming, piano strings getting hammered one by one, slowly.
    I slipped into the engineering room and looked at her through the window.
    She sat at the keyboard, scribbling something onto a notebook, then considering the keys again, back straight, neck as long and white as a swan’s, ebony hair braised and twisted to the top of her head. A goddess. She’d waited. I don’t know what would have happened with us if she hadn’t.
    The engineering booth was empty and dark, and I watched her like a movie. I saw her bite a fingernail. Close her eyes. Tap a finger, then suddenly burst out with a word in one long note. It was you . She hit three keys, then three different keys, sang the word again, in a different register, and wrote it down.
    It was as if I hadn’t seen the length of her neck in months, nor the delicacy of her wrists. I knew every inch of her skin, every curve of her body, yet, that day, when she’d said no to me, I anticipated the prospect of showing her why that wasn’t going to wash any longer with no little delight.
    I went back into the hall, closing the engineering room door behind me.

MONICA
    His scent cut through the dank musk of the studio before the sound of the door closing reached my ears.
    “Hi,” I said without looking up from my