Page Turner Pa (9 page)

He cleared his throat. "Pamela's a very nice woman," he said, adding as an afterthought, "clearly she adores you."

"She's always lived through me. A typical stage mother, really." They turned left, onto a side street. "Was your mother like that?"

"No, no. My mother was a very simple woman, very self-effacing. Oh, she encouraged me, took me to my lessons and came to my recitals and all that. And yet I always wondered whether she cared much, in the end. Then she deposited me into Joseph's hands, and he held the reins from there."

"And your father? You never talk about your father."

"My father was irrelevant," Kennington said simply. "He disappeared early. He doesn't signify."

Sidling past a truck that was taking up most of the street, Paul said, "Sometimes I wonder if my mother even has a clue as to what's going on between us."

"Better that she doesn't."

"But I get so tired of being careful! Of making up stories, and talking around things."

"It's important that you do, though. For her sake."

They had arrived at the Ricordi. Paul turned, looked at Kennington with disaffected curiosity. Then they went in. In the classical department, he hurried to the piano section, where he dug out Kennington's first recording. "This was made in London, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Paul, please put that back. You're embarrassing me."

Paul waved the CD in Kennington's face, waved his own face in his face: younger, of course, and wearing glasses rather like the ones Paul wore now.

"What did it feel like, making it?"

"I was a kid. That afternoon Joseph had shown me how to shave."

"Had you ever been to Europe before?"

"I'd never been out of America before. Please put it back. Thank you."

"Was anyone else in your family musical?"

"They say my great-grandfather wrote 'Home on the Range,' but someone stole it from him. Hey, I thought—"

"Look, here's your encores disc! I love this record. What's the most encores you've ever played in concert?"

"Eight, I think."

"Where?"

"Was it Lyon? Lyon."

"What were they?"

"I'm not sure I remember—"

"Please?"

"Okay, let's see. The first, I think, was a Chopin waltz. And then I did Godowsky's transcription of 'The Swan.' That one was very moving for me because my teacher—"

"But that's not on the encores disc."

"True. As I was saying, Godowsky was important to me chiefly because—"

"By the way, I think this picture of you is the best anyone's taken."

"Probably."

"Whereas the best cover without a picture of you was on your Schubert record, without a doubt. Let's see if they have it—"

"I know what it looks like. Anyway, it's out of print."

"Oh, look at this. What do you think of four-hand repertoire?"

"It's fine."

"What do you think of repertoire for the left hand?"

"It's fine."

"I tried playing one of those Saint-Saëns études for the left hand once. What would you do if your right hand got mangled in some horrible accident? Would you start playing left-handed?"

"Probably I'd breathe a sigh of relief and retire forever. So do you want to buy anything?"

"All of
your
CDs I already have. How about you?"

Kennington shook his head. They left.

"I'm hyperventilating," he said on the street. "I'm not used to such youthful energy."

"You don't mean what you just said about retiring, do you?" Paul asked.

"Remember, I'm the man who stuck his hand into a garbage disposal. Like in
Carrie.
"

"Why did you do it?"

"I was angry, and tired. I've never much liked public life, only playing. Playing—it's hard to explain."

"But playing
is
public."

"And there lies the dilemma of my life. I have the wrong personality for my talent."

"Better that than to have the wrong talent for your personality."

They turned a corner. Down Via dei Condotti Pamela waved colored bags at them.

"Remember what I told you," Kennington whispered. "Be careful."

"Oh, I will," Paul said, grabbing Kennington's arm and squeezing hard.

 

Before dinner, they made one last, and as Paul realized later, horribly ironic, touristic expedition: they went to see the Bocca della Verità, or Mouth of Truth, into which Pamela remembered watching Gregory Peck insert his hand in
Roman Holiday.
A fourth-century manhole cover, roughly carved into the shape of a human face, the Bocca now hung in the portico of the little church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.

As usual, Paul read from his guidebook. "In the Middle Ages," he told Pamela and Kennington, "it was used for a sort of trial by ordeal to see if people—particularly wives suspected of unfaithfulness—were telling the truth. It was thought that if anyone told a lie while holding their right hand in the open mouth the terrible stone jaws would close, cutting off their fingers."

"How awful," Pamela said.

Paul shut his book. A string of couples, mostly Japanese, had formed a queue to the Bocca's left. One after another the wives put their right hands into the mouth; one after another the husbands took their pictures. Sometimes, in the click of the snapshot, the women would wince, as if they feared that what they were hearing was really the snap of jaws.

When there was a lull, Pamela asked Kennington to take her picture, which he did. "Now yours," she said.

"No, no," Kennington said. "I don't like being photographed."

"Oh, come on," Pamela pleaded. "Just one."

"Mom, when someone doesn't like being photographed—"

"But this isn't an album cover. It's just one little snapshot. Come on. Please?"

"Mom—"

"Okay, okay," Kennington said, and stepped over to the Bocca.

"Good," Pamela said. "Now stand there. Put your hand in, that's good. And be careful. Your fingers are more valuable than other people's."

"Hurry up, will you?"

"Hush, Paul, I just need to frame the picture ... fine. Now tell a lie."

"A lie?"

"So we can see if the legend's true."

Kennington winced. "A lie ... I just can't think of one. Okay, how about this? I love being a pianist. I love my life as a pianist."

The flash erupted. He winced.

"Oh, Richard. Playing it safe, are you? But who can blame you?"

Her face came into focus. He removed his hand.

"H
OTEL BRISTOL.
"

"Maestro Kennington's room, please."

"I'm sorry, sir. He isn't back yet. Would you like to leave a message?"

"No, no. I've already left one. Just make sure it was slipped under his door. Joseph Mansourian."

"Yes, sir."

"He didn't happen to say when he'd be back, did he?"

"No sir."

"All right. Thank you. Good night."

"Good night."

 

Kennington, who really was in his room but had left instructions not to be disturbed, aimed the remote control at the television, flipping from station to station until he found CNN. Next to him, on the bed, Paul made paper airplanes.

"Tell me about Miss Novotna," he said.

"I'm not really the person to ask," Kennington said. "The truth is, I don't know her very well, given that she's supposedly responsible for my career."

"But how can that be? You must run into each other all the time at parties."

Kennington smiled. One of Paul's many naive notions was that adult life consisted chiefly of parties.

"My guess is that Olga's a very old-fashioned person, in a lot of fundamental ways. And I am too. So we made a sort of unspoken agreement to steer clear of each other after the Chopin, I suppose because the whole thing embarrassed us. It thrust us into an unnatural intimacy."

"What else can you tell me?"

"Well, you know she's from Texas, right?"

"I heard that."

"Novotna's the name some impresario gave her in the forties, I guess because he thought you had to have an Eastern European name to have a career. And then she did have something of a career, until she met Kessler." He looked across the bed at Paul. "You are aware that she was Kessler's lover, aren't you?"

"Of course. I've even asked her about it. She gave up her career for love of someone greater."

"As if she had any choice in the matter."

"What do you mean?"

"Kessler had a huge ego. He couldn't bear anyone horning in on his glory. The only people he allowed around him were either muses or toadies. You know two of his children killed themselves," Kennington added.

"No, I didn't."

"It's true. So Olga quit playing and became his mistress full-time. Twenty, twenty-five years they were together. Mostly in Paris, though they traveled all the time. And during this whole period he never divorced his wife, and even went back to her periodically, all of which Olga put up with. Then when he died—you know he died quite suddenly—it turned out he hadn't made a single provision for her in his will. Everything went to the wife, who, as you can imagine, wasn't particularly inclined to make a little allowance for Olga." Kennington sighed. "After that it was too late for her to go back to playing. So she moved to San Francisco and started making her living teaching brats like you." He mussed Paul's hair.

"God," Paul said. "Where did you learn all of this?"

"Common knowledge." Kennington switched the television to the BBC. A long sheet of waxy paper was now worming its way under the door: a fax, no doubt from Joseph, who was nothing if not persistent. Already Kennington's bureau drawer was stuffed with faxes and little pink message slips, all of them urging him, he was sure, to call so that he could be chastised for having failed to show up at Signore Batisti's dinner.

Getting up off the bed, he picked up the fax and stuffed it, as well, into the bureau drawer.

"Aren't you going to read it?" Paul asked.

Kennington shook his head. "I'll read it later. What say we take a walk? It's beautiful out."

Reluctantly, Paul got up and put on his shoes. Out of the hotel they strode, up the Via Veneto and into the gardens of the Villa Borghese. "Mr. Mansourian must be a wonderful manager," Paul said.

"The best in the business."

"You must be very grateful. He's done a wonderful job by you."

"Has he? I thought I'd done the wonderful job."

"I didn't mean you hadn't. I only meant—" Paul grimaced. "Damn. I didn't..."

"It's okay." And he wondered, not for the first time, whether Paul's real purpose in this affair might not have been to obtain some sort of official introduction to Joseph. Kennington was famous, after all, and as Joseph was forever warning him, people always tried to take advantage of the famous, a cynical pronouncement against which, in the early days of their relationship, he had protested. Yet time and experience, instead of proving him wrong, had proved Joseph right, even about Joseph, whose own motives in souring a teenage boy against the advances of humankind could hardly be called altruistic. Above all else, he'd wanted to keep Kennington from leaving him.

They crossed a playground and entered into the forested region of the park. After nearly a week, Paul remained a muddle to Kennington. Even as he pestered, he intoxicated. Even as he annoyed, he beguiled. He could drink in sensation and pleasure with the gusto of a Pater, then suddenly lapse into a crabbed, almost clerical meticulousness. Nonetheless it was difficult for Kennington to resent his interruptions, which were frequent, or his insensitivities, which were slashing, because they reminded him so much of himself at the same age; also because he knew that these lapses derived not from inherent selfishness, or greed for attention, but rather from that extreme lassitude of self-knowledge for which he suspected his mother to be in no small part responsible. Though he was not an only child, his brother and sister were so much older than he was that he had ended up being raised in what amounted to a bubble of worship. It was into Paul alone that Pamela had sunk her store of hopes and ambitions: slipshod, hasty constructions, inclined to leakage or collapse, yet for all their shoddiness, as richly invested with pathos and intensity as, well, as the finest things Schubert ever built. For sadly, it is not only to the beautiful and the sound, Kennington knew, that people devote their souls.

Another word, now, about Kennington's own amorous career: because his work required him to travel in such a comparatively limited orbit, almost all the men with whom he'd had affairs over the years had been musicians. Not only did they know exactly who he was before they met him, they often admired, or loathed, him intensely. And the result was that he found himself, time and again, in bed with people who knew enormous amounts about him, yet about whom he knew absolutely nothing, a disturbing imbalance that often led him to question the veracity of their attraction. Were his invitations accepted because of what he looked like (itself, he admitted, a rather degraded criterion), or because of who he was? Even in Paul's case, he never felt quite certain. He had been tricked with sex before. The last time had been in New York, the previous spring. Joseph was at the ASOL convention, which he liked to call the asshole convention, and Kennington was taking care of Sophie. One afternoon he was walking her in the park when a young man met his glance; followed him back to Central Park West; finally, after twenty minutes in a holding pattern, introduced himself, explaining that he rarely did this sort of thing, then plying Kennington with exactly the sort of erotic dialogue he could not resist; only later, when they had gone back to Joseph's apartment, and were kissing on the sofa, did the young man suddenly pull away. "I'm sorry," he said, sitting up. "I'm afraid there's something I haven't told you. I know who you are."

"Who I am?" Kennington repeated.

"Yes. You're Richard Kennington. I recognized you from the minute you started looking at me in the park. You see, I'm a piano student myself, at Mannes. And when I realized that
the
Richard Kennington was cruising me, I thought, how can I say no? The only problem is, I'm not physically attracted to you. I hope you don't mind. I like guys in their twenties." He grinned. "Maybe we could just talk instead?"