And I didn’t know which was more terrifying:
That we didn’t know what had triggered the fit.
Or that we didn’t know what made him come out of it.
If there was a next time, would it last longer than six hours? Like six months? Or six years? Or . . .
I didn’t voice any of these fears to Matt, because I knew he wouldn’t have any answers either. It became the great unspoken, looming over everything.
Without my having to nag him, Matt voluntarily dialed back his work schedule. A bit. He decided the problem was simply stress, and that natural medicine—pumping up his exercise regime—was his best option. He made more time to participate in the noontime pickup hoops game at Alumni Gym that locked Dartmouth professors, students, and administrators in mortal basketball combat. He was coming home with bruises and scratches to show for his enthusiasm.
Otherwise, the greatest risk to his health was that I might mother-hen him to death about his eating. I did my best to rid the house of corn syrup and insisted we add kale smoothies to our dinnertime regime, as if the whole problem with Matt’s diet was that it wasn’t trendy enough.
Matt actually liked them.
Morgan? Less so.
“Daddy was the one who got sick,” he moaned. “Why should I be punished?”
Otherwise, I slowly allowed myself to believe that impending doom might not be shadowing me at every turn, and we stumbled around finding our new normal.
It was early Monday evening, two weeks postfit. With Morgan at swim practice and Matt still at work, I was in the kitchen starting dinner, singing, something I only did when I was sure I was alone, when it didn’t matter if I was horribly (and unknowingly) off key.
Music had actually been what got Matt and me together. Like a lot of math types, Matt was a naturally gifted musician for whom playing piano seemed somehow intuitive. I was a singer from the cradle on, taking voice lessons as a child, doing all the musicals in high school, then becoming a member of a popular a cappella group in college.
When he was in grad school at Princeton and I was a young reference librarian in nearby West Windsor, New Jersey, he was a last-second emergency fill-in accompanist for a community choir I had joined.
I had noticed him before our holiday concert because, let me be honest, he was hot. His lifelong basketball obsession had given him a chiseled physique, plus he had these puppy dog brown eyes that I could just tell served as a window to a lovely soul.
After the show, in which I had a solo, he shyly approached me and told me I had the most gorgeous soprano voice he had ever heard. Then he said he was missing his family in North Carolina and asked, in this adorable country twang of his, if I might sing his favorite carol, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” while he accompanied me.
“What key?” I asked.
“Just pick one,” he said.
I sang; he played, transposing on the fly, perfectly and beautifully. Matt didn’t merely strike the keys; he caressed them, coaxing a sound out of the piano that made me wonder what else his hands could do.
It was probably a good thing a small crowd gathered around to listen, because otherwise I would have jumped him right there.
Romance ensued. I assumed music would continue to be a large part of our relationship, and of my life in general. Until, around the time I turned thirty, I started having trouble with harmonies. Then it was melodies. Before long, I was struggling to even match pitches. It was mortifying.
Finally, I went to an audiologist, who gave me the devastating diagnosis: bilateral otosclerosis, a progressive hardening of the stapes, the tiny bone in the middle ear that transfers sound from the eardrum to the inner ear.
What’s more, my stapes bone was pressing on the nerves of my inner ear, causing more damage. It was an extra layer of hell that made my hearing loss more severe and eliminated numerous treatment options, including surgery. And it was only going to get worse.
We had just gotten married but were still childless, so I tearfully told Matt if he wanted to leave me—because he didn’t want to raise a baby with a woman who might not be able to hear it cry, or spend his old age with a woman who might not be able to hear him at all—I completely understood.
“Brigid,” he replied gently, “how many times do I have to tell you I’m only with you for your body?”
One joke at a time, we somehow made it this far. And now here I was, pounding flat some chicken breasts, climbing to a fortissimo in “Ave Maria,” when I turned and jumped about six feet.
Matt was sitting at the kitchen peninsula.
“Jesus, Matt,” I said, my hand to my thumping heart.
“Oh, please don’t stop,” he said.
I huffed at him, my way of saying I wasn’t engaging in this again, the why don’t you sing to me anymore, you sound beautiful / no I don’t argument.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, glancing toward the clock. It was quarter after five. On Mondays, Matt normally stayed at the office until it was time to pick up Morgan from swimming at six.
“I wanted to talk to you while Morgan wasn’t here.”
“Okay, hang on,” I said, putting down the mallet I had been using and washing my hands.
Then, as I dried them on a dish towel, I stood directly across from him.
“What’s up?”
“You remember that alum, Sean Plottner?”
“The rich one.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“What about him?”
“He offered me a job this morning,” Matt said.
“Really? To do what?”
“Research. And only research. No teaching. No grubbing for grants. No faculty meetings. I would work for his company, Plottner Investments, in New York.”
“New York,” I said, trying not to immediately freak out over the prospect of tearing Morgan away from the school he loved and the only home he’d ever known.
“That part might be negotiable. But I’m still not taking the job. Or at least I don’t think I am.”
“Okay,” I said, a little mystified. “Then why do you look like you’re Hamlet and it’s deep in act two?”
“Because of what the offer was.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“He started at five hundred thousand.”
“A year?” I said, dropping the dish towel.
Matt nodded. It was four times his current salary.
“To do research.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of research?”
“Exactly what I’m doing now. He would set me up in a lab with the same equipment. But I’d be doing it for him.”
“You said he ‘started at’ five hundred. Did it go down when he realized how ridiculous that number was?”
“No, it went up,” Matt said. “When I didn’t immediately accept the offer, he doubled it.”
“Doubled it?” I said, because I was sure I must have heard him wrong.
“A million dollars a year,” my math-savant husband confirmed, in case I was incapable of doing the calculation.
“Oh, Matty,” is all I could think to say.
“I still don’t think we should take it.”
“Why? Because of New York?”
“No, because . . . I don’t get the best vibe from Plottner. He’s basically just another Wall Street guy.”