The Artist's Loving Hand

“Speak now.”

               Marta tried to take a deep breath. The air in the hearing test booth was stifling. She’d been fighting claustrophobia while the tones had sounded in first her good ear and then much more faintly in her bad one. When they had begun testing her bad ear, she’d at first thought there was some technical difficulty, that the machine had died, because instead of the steady stream of beeps and clicks she’d heard the first time, this test seemed to be mostly silence. She tried to study the doctor’s face through the thick glass, but her expression had remained poker-player blank.

               Marta took another breath and said, “I’m here.”

Of course she was there. What a stupid thing to say. But the booth had a way of absorbing everything, not just the noises from outside. She felt like the only sound was her heartbeat, and it was getting faster and louder. She could smell her own deodorant and shampoo and the sweat that was starting to run from her armpit down her ribs. She hated this state of hyper self-awareness. She hated this smothery feeling. She hated how little she could hear.

She gulped air again.

               “You all right? Feeling short of breath?” the doctor asked through the headset.

               “I’m ok. How much longer are we going to do this? Can I get a break?”

               The doctor glanced down at her control panel again. “Almost done. Tell me how your own voice sounds to you.”

               “I can understand myself. It’s just very quiet.”

               “One more set,” the doctor said.

               Marta closed her eyes and willed herself to not be dizzy. She waited. And waited. She knew the tones began softly and got louder, but she heard nothing at all for several beats. She studied the doctor’s face again: nothing. No hint that she was failing or passing. No sympathy. She’d never seen a face that blank outside of a funeral home. At last, the whiny pitch was audible, and Marta raised her hand to indicate she could hear it. More sounds, higher and lower, louder and softer, with terrible gaps in between.

               “All right. All done,” the doctor finally announced. Marta came out of the booth and the doctor showed her to a chair next to the computer desk.

               The doctor studied the screen for a moment. Then she swung it around so they could see it together. There were graphs and numbers. Marta didn’t understand any of it. The doctor said a lot of things, but the only phrase Marta remembered was:

               Profound hearing loss, right ear, due to Meniere’s disease. Most pronounced in low register.

               “This confirms the diagnosis,” her doctor began. “The vertigo and tinnitus alone were pretty good indications, but this feeling of fullness you describe, and this level of hearing loss, they confirm it.”

               Marta nodded.

               The doctor swung the monitor back towards her side of the desk. “Do you have any questions?” she asked while she typed. She didn’t look at Marta when she asked this.   

               “My mother had it. In her twenties. They did a pretty invasive surgery. Drilled a hole in her skull, behind her ear, and did something to the little bones. It left her completely deaf on that side. Will I have to do that?”

               The doctor shook her head. “No, we don’t do that one much anymore. We can give you steroid injections, through the eardrum. It’s an in-office procedure.”

               Marta felt a dangerous little bubble of hope in her chest. “Do they work? Will they stop the progression? Will it help my hearing?”

               The doctor pushed her rolling chair away from her keyboard. She pulled her glasses from her nose and rubbed the bridge, squinting. She finally looked Marta in the eyes. “I’m so sorry. The hearing is gone. It’s not coming back. And you may lose all of it in that ear. The injections are mostly to stop the vertigo. The drugs can actually speed up the hearing loss.”

               When Marta was seven years old, she had asked for piano lessons. In no time, she was playing two and three-part Bach inventions, pieces with intricate melodies and ripples of interwoven voices. At ten she took up the violin, screeching her way through “Turkey in the Straw” and then Stravinsky. At twelve, she’d started taking lessons from a professor at the university, because she’d passed everyone else in the school orchestra. And then the marching band. And her piano teacher’s other pupils.

               She had spent the last five years in music school, hours at the piano and in lessons and theory classes. She had given up friends and a real college experience so she could practice. She had let the boy she loved get away from her because he didn’t understand that you had to practice 8, 10 hours a day to get good. She was going to be a music teacher. She had no backup plan.

               The doctor was talking again, and Marta tuned back in. “…the injections don’t work for everyone, but there’s good reason to hope they’ll be effective for you. We’ve had great success with them, especially for the vertigo.”

               Vertigo. That word had meant little Marta three months ago. Then her first attack had hit her. She’d been driving from one school to another for her student teaching hours. She was on I-65 southbound, surrounded on three sides by semi-trucks. She’d been staring at the bumper of the truck in front of her for the last few miles with growing concern. The bumper seemed to be loose, rocking from side to side, a bit like a metronome. The rocking had gotten faster, the arc of the movement more severe, and Marta tried to merge into another lane, certain the bumper would fly off at any moment and come crashing through the windshield of her little Volvo sedan. But when she turned to check her blind spot, Marta realized the whole world was tilting at crazy angles. The distortion was in her vision, not the truck’s bumper.

She had slowed from eighty miles per hour to an ugly, skidding stop in the shoulder. Ten-thousand-pound trucks zoomed by, shaking her whole car. Marta looked ahead at the horizon as it tilted back and forth to vertical in one direction, and then the other. She just managed to open her door before she vomited onto the gravel. She sat in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel as the carnival ride of the attack made her spin and spin.

Blue lights flickered in her rear view mirror. Marta groaned. The officer was screaming at her to roll down her window, but she couldn’t decide which way to move her hand. She vomited again, straight into her lap. The officer threw open her door. “Had a little too much to drink, have we?”

Marta turned to him. The stink of his aftershave filled her senses. Skin Bracer. She’d know it anywhere. Her father used the same brand.

“Help me,” she screamed.

It was then the officer saw her eyes, impossibly fast horizontal movements of both eyeballs. Marta heard him say something into his radio and the squawked answer. He pulled her from her car and the sensation of falling was immediate. Tears streamed down her face. “Help me,” she whispered as her body seemed to fall for miles, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

That was vertigo.

Tinnitus was another matter altogether. Roaring, screaming, high-pitched whines like emergency notification test signals. The noise inside her skull downed out everything else. She crumpled in panic, shoved in an ear bud, and cranked up the volume on her phone. Steady, incessant rain sounds on a white noise album were the only thing that soothed her. That and the Valium her doctor prescribed. You know they’ve given up on you when Valium is the answer.

The injections helped. The vertigo stopped, almost immediately, when the doctor pushed the steroid through her eardrum for the first time. The tinnitus abated in the next few days. But her hearing was suddenly much, much worse. After the injection, Marta found herself marveling at what she missed. In a parking lot, she stood behind a van, waiting for another car to pull out. The van suddenly collided with her knee, and she was so stunned she didn’t move. She’d never heard the engine start. She punched the rear window and the van had stopped. The little old driver was shaken; he had to be a hundred. “Did I run into you?!” he’d screamed when he saw her at last. Marta had just nodded and then ran into the drugstore, her eyes streaming. On walks around her neighborhood, she was startled each time a car passed from behind. She never heard them approach.

And her music. At first, things seemed out of tune. Then she realized she couldn’t match pitches with her voice. Her teachers were kind, gentle with her. “Maybe it will improve with time. Let’s see how you’re doing in two weeks. Take a break.” But two weeks later, the music was still horribly off. When she went to her student teaching assignments, the chatter of the children and their banging music, the xylophones and drums, it had all grated on her ears like never before. She couldn’t handle the chaos that had once filled her with joy.

Marta applied for a medical leave from school. She called her parents and asked them to bring her home. She was afraid to drive on the highway again.

She sat in her childhood bedroom, thumbing through old yearbooks and photo albums. There she was at seventeen in a silver sequined jumpsuit, conducting the marching band at homecoming. Here she was at seven, seated in front of her piano, her legs dangling.

“Beethoven went deaf, you know,” her father said when he found Marta still in her pajamas at four in the afternoon. “He would put a pencil in his teeth and then put the point of the pencil on the sound board of the piano so he could sense the tone through the bones in his skull. He still composed when he lost his hearing.”

Marta nodded sadly at him. How could he understand? She felt like a broken butterfly, like her wings had been shredded and the only thing she had been born to do was fly.

Marta’s mother was more pragmatic. “You’ve been sitting here in this room for three weeks. It isn’t healthy. We’re getting out of here today and you’re going to shower and comb your hair and put on real clothes.”

Marta had shaken her head. “I don’t feel like it.”

“And I don’t feel like watching you give up,” her mother answered.

There was no arguing with her mom. The woman was a force of nature. She’d been hit with this illness at twenty-six. She’d had to give up her job as a court reporter, a job she’d loved, and had gone to work as a secretary in a law office. She was stone deaf in one ear, but it didn’t slow her down.

Marta felt weak. Her mother was so much stronger, so much more resilient.

They went to lunch, a sad affair with salad and no dressing, because Marta was supposed to watch her salt intake to help with fluid buildup in her ear. Her mother had chatted, trying to distract her, but all Marta wanted was to crawl back into bed where the mattress felt like a life raft.

“Can we go home now?” she asked when her mother had paid the bill.

“One more stop,” her mother answered.

They drove through campus, Marta holding back sobs at the sight of the music building where she’d spend so many hours, played so many songs, sang her heart out with the choir. They pulled into the parking garage attached to the art museum.

“Mom, I’m not sure I feel like walking so much. I still feel kind of woozy and sick—”

“You will walk as far as you’re able. I can get you a wheelchair if you need it. Come on.”

No arguing.

Marta liked paintings and sculpture, but they weren’t her favorite thing. She didn’t pay much attention to the announced exhibits and hadn’t made much time for the museum before. Her mother walked slowly next to her, patient with Marta’s cautious pace, on the side with her good ear so she could talk to her, but she wasn’t saying much.

They came to the special exhibit space.

Van Gogh.

Marta was surprised. An exhibit this big should have been on her radar. Surely, she didn’t miss the announcement that a real Van Gogh collection was coming to her school.

But there weren’t any original paintings here. This was one of those projection shows, with the art thrown onto the walls and floor with music. You walked through the art here and saw it two stories tall, not in the little confines of a gilt frame.

Marta tensed. She’d heard people talk about these exhibits, about how even healthy people experienced vertigo and nausea from the intensity of the big, moving images. “Mom, I don’t think—”

“We’re not here to think. We’re here to look. Here. Sit down.” She pushed Marta onto a bench in the center of the room.

The walls were covered in trippy images, meaningless blobs of color like a muted kaleidoscope. Atmospheric “music” played, the kind they used in spas. Marta hated it. There was no melody, no meaning to the little tones and murmured notes. Like a hearing test, in surround sound.

Then the music changed. Gentle strains of violin and an answering cello filled the space. Marta knew the piece, Handel’s Keyboard Suite in D minor, Sarabande. The tones were a little off, but her brain corrected the distortion. She felt her muscles unclench and took a deep breath. The walls lit up with huge images of wheat fields in swirling strokes, the thick paint’s texture so vivid she could almost feel it. Van Gogh’s brilliant yellows, his sunflowers fifteen feet tall. Then the bouncy tones of a Schubert piano piece and Van Gogh’s whimsical portraits of children, their cheeks in blushes, round flesh made with round strokes, paint thick like plaster.

Then came the atmospheric Camille Saint-Saens piece, Aquarium, with the delicate piano in high register and the twinkle of glockenspiel, the ghostly soprano strains of violin, and Van Gogh’s Starry Night huge, all around her. Marta gasped. The stars with their unreal halos, the movement of the painting, which was made literal here with the video, it was precisely the effect she’d experienced during her vertigo attacks. Only here, it was lovely. If her mother had told her they were coming to see this, she would have dug in her heels. She would have said no, she would have worried it would make her have another attack. But Marta breathed. She sighed. The Flower Duet, that delicate song for soprano and mezzo, played.

“He had Meniere’s, too,” her mother said softly.

“I think so,” Marta agreed.

“Historians debate the cause of his mental illness, why he cut off his ear. But when someone like you sees this painting, someone like you who has seen what you’ve seen, suffered, too, there’s no doubt. There’s no debate.”

Marta remembered that Don Mclean song, “Vincent”:

Morning fields of amber grain

Weathered faces lined in pain

Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

               Soothed. Marta was soothed. That was the word.

               But there was another lyric dancing around on the edge of Marta’s awareness:

And when no hope was left inside

On that starry, starry night

You took your life as lovers often do.

But I could have told you, Vincent,

This world was never meant for one

As beautiful as you.

Marta’s mother grabbed her hand and squeezed. “Look at all this beauty. All this joy and sorrow and loveliness he captured. He was so troubled but saw all of this. And made us see it, too. Think how long he might have lived, if the treatment you have had been available to him.”

Marta nodded. They stayed through three cycles of the show, taking in the music and the paintings. Marta stood up at the end, her legs shaking. “I’m ready now,” she told her mother.

“You know what I was thinking about the other day? Your right ear is damaged. My left ear is dead. Good thing because we can still walk side by side and hear each other. We can put our good ears together.”

“That’s right.”

They walked back to the car. “Time for the next step, baby girl.” Her mother tossed her the keys.

Marta nodded, got into the driver’s seat, and gripped the steering wheel. “That’s right,” she said again.