Augusta Played (34 page)

“Not as long as she's been your wife.”

“Well,” Norman said, suddenly angry, “why the hell not?”

“Don't get offended, Norman,” Richard said, hastily. “It's not that I'm not turned on by your wife. Obviously I was. Gus is a lovely girl, God knows. But look at that,” he said, turning around and pointing first at Gus and then at Birdie, both more or less bare-breasted. “There is class, and then there is something which is definitely not class but has a value of its own which unfortunately Birdie doesn't recognize and which is very hard to come by in the world of classical music, which is, I'm sorry to have to agree with Birdie about this, all class.” Richard thought highly of his ability to talk his way out of a dangerous situation. He stopped for breath—and had an afterthought. “Unless you go for divas,” he said, “and they tend not to have Birdie's accommodating nature.”

Then Norman looked at Gus's shining breasts, so infinitely vulnerable, sweet, pure and sad, and a dark cloud of the most unbearable despair rolled in on his heart, as if it might rain there forever. He felt he had lost her—if not to Richard, then to some part of herself that would rather be bold before all the world than merely happy with him; and he felt he could not handle this, not then, not there, and goddammit to hell anyway, and—and—“You've been humping Birdie?” he asked.

“Of course,” Richard said.

“Why, you bastard,” Norman said, and he hauled off and socked him, “take that. For my father.”

Richard landed on the floor. Looking up, he said, hurt, though more by the fact than the effect, “But your father knew! That's why he said I had to come through with the engagement for Birdie!”

The Joint crowd was counting. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” Richard sat up.

Elaine, mobilized by Norman's left hook, had raced on stage and was now kneeling beside her husband. “Poor Richard,” she crooned, “poor Richard.” With her arms around him, she looked up. “Would you like to hit him again?” she asked Norman. “It's all right with me.”

But it was not all right with a certain guest in the audience: Mario.

Mario, furious at what Norman was doing to Gus's big moment—stealing it—had also found his way to the stage, running down the aisle from the rear and leaping over the footlights. “You're crazy,” he said to Norman, “man, are you crazy! What's wrong with you, always slugging people?” Every time Mario met this fink, he was taking a swing at somebody. Well, he, Mario, was older, wiser, and most ger-manely, bigger now, and enough was enough. “Are you coming off peaceably, or do I have to drag you out of here?” (He thought he might make Italian Westerns someday.) However, all the time he was delivering this ultimatum, Mario kept his eyes averted from Gus, feeling that he had no right to look at her naked in public. When he had seen her on her honeymoon night, it had been in private.

“You,” Norman said. “What is this?” And he landed an upper right on Mario's jaw.

She had read about a topless cellist—why not a topless flutist?

She put down her flute, took off her brooch, blouse, and brassière. Norman did not notice. She picked up her flute.

The audience whistled. Birdie was miffed.

Norman and Richard had resumed their argument.

“The explanation,” Richard was saying, “must be that Birdie must have gotten the message you left with me. I told her I was going to get her a dance engagement. Incidentally, I thought you knew that. Why else did you say that about Lully?”

“Let me get something straight. Do you mean you really never were making it with my wife?”

“Not as long as she's been your wife.”

“Well,” Norman said, suddenly angry, “why the hell not?”

“Don't get offended, Norman,” Richard said, hastily. “It's not that I'm not turned on by your wife. Obviously I was. Gus is a lovely girl, God knows. But look at that,” he said, turning around and pointing first at Gus and then at Birdie, both more or less bare-breasted. “There is class, and then there is something which is definitely not class but has a value of its own which unfortunately Birdie doesn't recognize and which is very hard to come by in the world of classical music, which is, I'm sorry to have to agree with Birdie about this, all class.” Richard thought highly of his ability to talk his way out of a dangerous situation. He stopped for breath—and had an afterthought. “Unless you go for divas,” he said, “and they tend not to have Birdie's accommodating nature.”

Then Norman looked at Gus's shining breasts, so infinitely vulnerable, sweet, pure and sad, and a dark cloud of the most unbearable despair rolled in on his heart, as if it might rain there forever. He felt he had lost her—if not to Richard, then to some part of herself that would rather be bold before all the world than merely happy with him; and he felt he could not handle this, not then, not there, and goddammit to hell anyway, and—and—“You've been humping Birdie?” he asked.

“Of course,” Richard said.

“Why, you bastard,” Norman said, and he hauled off and socked him, “take that. For my father.”

Richard landed on the floor. Looking up, he said, hurt, though more by the fact than the effect, “But your father knew! That's why he said I had to come through with the engagement for Birdie!”

The Joint crowd was counting. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” Richard sat up.

Elaine, mobilized by Norman's left hook, had raced on stage and was now kneeling beside her husband. “Poor Richard,” she crooned, “poor Richard.” With her arms around him, she looked up. “Would you like to hit him again?” she asked Norman. “It's all right with me.”

But it was not all right with a certain guest in the audience: Mario.

Mario, furious at what Norman was doing to Gus's big moment—stealing it—had also found his way to the stage, running down the aisle from the rear and leaping over the footlights. “You're crazy,” he said to Norman, “man, are you crazy! What's wrong with you, always slugging people?” Every time Mario met this fink, he was taking a swing at somebody. Well, he, Mario, was older, wiser, and most ger-manely, bigger now, and enough was enough. “Are you coming off peaceably, or do I have to drag you out of here?” (He thought he might make Italian Westerns someday.) However, all the time he was delivering this ultimatum, Mario kept his eyes averted from Gus, feeling that he had no right to look at her naked in public. When he had seen her on her honeymoon night, it had been in private.

“You,” Norman said. “What is this?” And he landed an upper right on Mario's jaw.

(Mario had grown but he was irremediably the fine-boned Renaissance beauty-filled living Davidic sculpture he had been since childhood.)

“What the hell is going on?” Jock said, sending Norman to the floor with a single punch.

“It's a madman!” Elaine screamed, getting her first good look at Jock. She grabbed him around one leg, holding him either so he couldn't hit Norman again or because it was the most magnificent male leg she had ever seen, she wasn't sure which.

Birdie went over and pulled Elaine's hair. “You leave him alone,” she cried, “that's my accompanist!” Birdie felt the least she could do was come to Jock's defense, after he had helped her out of the piano; and she felt terrible for having got him into this, and she felt Fate had been unkind to her, making her such a dizzy dame that she thought she had a dance concert to give when she didn't, and she hated herself for being dumb. She yanked Elaine's hair all the harder.

Norman, Richard, and Mario were rubbing their respective jaws.

The Joint crowd was cheering for Birdie. The Juilliard kids were rooting for Elaine. The guard gave the usher five bucks to keep his mouth shut and left. In the fifth row center, Phil and Dinky stirred, as if after long hibernation.

“Look,” Phil said to Dinky, as the situation began belatedly to make itself known to him (he was stoned). Until now, Phil had been listening to the music with his eyes closed. As he surveyed the scene, his plump face took on an expression of, for want of a word, mingle-ment: there was a flush of fellow-feeling, the lost pathos of Ocean Parkway, the pride of being needed again as in the old days, irony at the counterculture's being called to the rescue of straight culture, but in his present spaced-out condition, no single one of these registered so prominently on his features as did the confusion of them all.

Dinky said, slowly, moistening her red-glossed lips, “We'd better go help him, hadn't we, Philip?” And she led Phil by the hand to the stage.

“Hello, Norman,” Phil said.

“Dinky Ledbetter!” Birdie exclaimed. “I'd know you anywhere. I know your mother.”

“Shhh,” Dinky said, putting a finger to her lips and shaking her head. This seemed, at the time, to Dinky, the most sensual act she had ever performed, and she prolonged it. And prolonged it. “They call me Kinky Dinky,” she whispered, mostly to herself.

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” Beneath her own spectacular bosom, which no one had ever thought of as functional, Birdie became aware of a swelling maternal impulse, a burst of emotion impromptu but by no means superficial. “Your mother says you never even visit her.” Perhaps too, Birdie was relieved to find someone besides herself who deserved scolding. “Don't you know there's chic inside like there's chic outside? You probably forgot everything she taught you.”

“That's not true,” Dinky said. “And I can prove it.” She began to take off her clothes…extremely languidly, because she had smoked enough hash before coming here to slow all the clocks in the universe by about twenty-five hours and in her mind there was no urgency—she had twenty-five hours to go before it would even be now.

“Not bad, huh?” Phil said, watching Dinky.

She was wearing a black lace bra.

“A little exophthalmic for my taste,” Richard said.

“So who asked you?” Phil said, forgetting that he had. “I don't know who you think you are, but I'll tell you something. I don't even know who you
are
, but I'll tell you something. That girl and I are making a fortune off the sexual revolution. So think about that, all right? Just think about that.” Phil felt just exceedingly angry, and this annoyed him be cause anger interfered with the smooth cosmic flow of God-beamed energy sluicing through his veins and flushing the Atman-soul with its regenerative fluids.

Then Richard saw Mario take out his penknife—did Mario plan to stab Norman? did he plan to clean his nails? Mario had not made up his mind—and that, unlike Phil's speech or Norman's insults, Richard did understand. “Oh my God,” Richard said, “it's you.
You're
the one.”

“One what?”

“Sidney Gold sent you to take care of me, didn't he? I should have known. You look Italian.”

Instantly, Mario jerked the penknife up; the tip of the blade was against Richard's handsome throat.

Gus kept playing; Tweetie kept singing; Tom kept reciting; the Synthi, although Dieter had retreated to the white back wall and stood there, soundlessly sobbing, went on and on—

But for everyone else, that knife was the focal point of the stage, the Chekhovian moment of inescapable realization, when the gun hung on the wall in Act One goes off at the end of Act Four. Unreasonable though it seemed to him, Norman, watching Mario hold the knife to Richard's throat, felt a certain cold point midway in his own chest that was like a frozen light, fire like ice, an ice-cold point of incandescent glow like the tiny bulb in a refrigerator.

Swift as a magician, Mario turned the blade flat against Richard's throat, indenting the flesh with the lightest, most graceful touch, a flick that refrained from becoming a nick. “I am Italian,” he said. “You better watch what you say, mister.”

“I knew it, I knew you were Italian.”

“Big deal,” Mario said to Norman. “He knows I'm Italian. This guy could go far with a brain like that.”

“It's the blue eyes that are misleading, but so you're a blue-eyed Italian. Well, you're not going to get away with it,” Richard said. “Your boss may be powerful politically but he's not the only one who is. I have friends. Isaac, Yehudi—they can get to people at the top. You just better tell Sidney Gold to lay off me.” Never in his life had Richard been so just plain sore.

People began to relax. This was not
The Sea Gull
.

Even the confusion had begun to dissipate, as it became clear both on stage and off that nothing more untoward could happen, having already happened; and the audience continued to shout and laugh, but by now, they were entertaining themselves.

“I doubt seriously if my father ever had to lean on you very hard,” Norman said.

“A dead conductor,” Richard said, “is not likely to be overlooked in this day and age. In Lully's time, maybe.”

“Don't worry,” Jock said to Richard. “If the kid tries anything, I'll take care of him.”

“And while we're on the subject,” Richard continued, as if simply being on stage had supplied him with his usual concert-performance rush of confidence, control, and calm, “how dumb do you think I am? It wasn't a baton, it was a tactus rod, and he didn't drop it, he smashed his foot beating time with it.”

“Same difference,” Norman said. “Who the hell is this?” He indicated Jock.

“My accompanist,” Birdie said. “Jock the—”

“I get it,” Norman said, “I get it.”

“Yeah,” Jock said. “Well, that's fine. Only tell this lady here to let go of my pecker, will you?”

Elaine still had her arm wrapped around Jock's leg. Blushing, she backed off, backing into her two children, who had come to save their father from Mario. Jeffrey didn't know what Jock meant; however, Jeremy, having had the benefit of Richard's advanced notions of child-rearing, did, and in response he bit Jock on the leg. The other leg.