Pinball (14 page)

While he ran his bath and soaked in it, he listened to a popular music station on the radio, and in the course of twenty minutes heard two of his singles. He liked the anonymous climate of the hotel, with its peeling wallpaper, cracked and yellowed bathroom tiles, and overstarched towels with torn edges. He felt safe. Yet the White House letter made him recall one hotel, only three blocks away, in which he had also felt safe—in the company of a girl he’d picked up simply because she’d liked his music.

It was a year ago, and then, as now, it was hot and humid. The Great White Way of Broadway teemed with restless Saturday-night strollers, and he’d stopped in front of a record shop, one of the city’s largest, and stared at the
window, which was filled from end to end and top to bottom with copies of the latest Goddard album cover. Then he went inside where a crowd of buyers, mostly teenagers, were lined up at a counter waiting to listen to his records through stereophonic earphones. On the wall above, GODDARD was spelled out in foot-high fluorescent letters. He was about to leave when he noticed a soft, fresh-looking girl listening to one of his records at one of the turntables. It was not her youthful beauty, partially hidden under the earphones, that made him want to know her, but the serene, almost unearthly expression on her face. Her eyes were closed. Her body swayed ever so gently to what she was hearing.

The machine stopped, and she awakened from her meditation. Just as she was about to play the record again, a salesman stepped over and removed it from the turntable. “C’mon,” he said, “give others a chance. You’ve listened to it four times already. Either you buy it or you don’t.”

The girl looked at him pleasantly, as if she were under a spell. “I guess I don’t—not today,” she said.

Osten approached her. “Do you like Goddard?” he asked, pointing at the record.

“I love him,” she said as she focused on Osten. “I could listen to him for days.”

“Then why don’t you buy it and listen to him at home?” asked the salesman.

“No bread,” she replied sweetly as she got ready to leave.

“Wait,” said Osten. Handing money to the salesman, he picked an album up off a stack and handed it to the girl. “A gift,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “But you don’t even know me.”

“I sort of do,” said Osten. “We both like Goddard.” He started to walk out of the store.

Record in hand, the girl walked beside him. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Jimmy.”

“I’m Debbie,” she said. “Where are you from?”

“Out of town,” he answered.

“Same here,” she said. “I’m just in for the day.”

“When do you have to leave?” he asked.

“The last bus is at midnight.”

“Do you want to have dinner?” he asked, trying to sound casual. “We could buy some stuff in the deli on the corner and take it to my hotel.”

“How far is that?”

“Two blocks.”

“It’s okay by me,” she said with total unconcern.

They bought sandwiches and potato salad and ate watching TV. As Osten opened a beer, the girl reached into her bag and took out a syringe, a needle, and a small packet of white powder. “You want some?” she asked on the way to the bathroom.

“No, thanks,” he replied, adding, “you should be careful with that.”

“I only have to be careful without it,” she said and giggled.

Through the door he heard her set things down on the washbasin and flush the toilet. After a short span of silence she came back and stretched out on the bed. He sat next to her and studied her silky hair, the fine contour of her neck, the outline of her small girlish breasts under her blouse.

She watched him stare. “You’re sweet,” she said. “So sweet. Even your voice is sweet. What’s wrong with it?” She looked up at him, the pupils of her eyes shiny and dilated.

“A few years ago,” he said, “I had little calcified deposits in my throat. They scraped them off and, as a result, I kind of coo.”

“It sounds fine,” she said, “as long as you don’t have to sing.” She laughed softly.

He then changed his tack. In his natural voice, he said, “But when I want to, I do sing—in my own voice. You see—I’m Goddard. I’ve sung all those songs.” He pointed to the album on the table.

“I believe you,” said the girl sweetly. “I’ve already met five Goddards. I believed every one of them.”

Her cheeks were flushed; she stared at him, her gaze unsteady, and he stared back. Then she reached for him.

He made love to her, aware that he could hurt her and that in her narcotic trance she might not feel it. Yet her passivity excited him; he felt free to do what he pleased. The girl responded by clinging to him like a child. All his efforts to bring her to orgasm failed and she seemed only vaguely aware of his lovemaking. Afterward, they took a bath together and dressed. As Osten turned to switch off the light on their way out of the room, he heard her fall to the floor with a thud. Thinking she had passed out, he propped her against the wall and splashed cold water on her face and neck, but she didn’t move, and when he leaned close and looked into her eyes, she stared back at him without blinking. She was dead.

At first, it seemed inadmissable: how could death step between them this way—without warning, cutting off the girl’s life as if it didn’t matter at all, as if it were a crude synthesizer suddenly unplugged from the source of energy! And what was the meaning of life, if it could be so quickly, so arbitrarily and senselessly snatched away?

Then Ostern panicked. He was terrified at the thought of summoning the police and being dragged by them to a precinct house crowded with muggers, pimps, and whores. There was no way he could explain the girl’s death anyway, he told himself. He had no idea where she had got the stuff she took or how much she had shot into herself. And what would he say when the police asked him who
he
was, how he made his living, why he was staying in that particular hotel, where he had met the girl, whether they had had sex? His sperm was still in her; the police might say she had died during their lovemaking, or even that he had killed her.

He froze at the thought of what his presence here, and his unclear role in the girl’s death, would mean to his father, and of his father’s horror over the sensational headlines and their impact on the image of Etude Classics, the family business and his father’s single most cherished possession. Even worse, he recoiled at the thought of having to explain to the world who James Norbert Osten
really was. What would the discovery of the real Goddard and the ensuing hysteria of the media do to his father? To him? To his music?

Carefully, he took a towel and wiped his fingerprints from all the surfaces he had touched in the room. By the time he finished, his mouth was dry from fear and his heart was hammering. Leaving the girl’s body propped against the wall, on his way out, he turned off the light and locked the door. With Goddard’s record under his arm, he descended to the hotel lobby and walked slowly out to the street where his thoughts calmed down and he felt safe again.

If the White House letter awakened in him the memory of the dead girl, it was because he felt tempted now, as he had been tempted then, to enjoy someone who could be drawn to him as much for himself as for his music. Sitting in the tub, he continued to think about the anonymous letter writer. At the University of California at Davis, where he had gone to school and where he was still enrolled as a postgraduate student, anyone who wrote so well and so analytically would have been either an English or a psychology major. Was the woman who wrote it young or old? Was she the wife or daughter or secretary or mistress of someone prominent? And if she wanted to—or had to—hide who she was, why did she write her letter on the White House stationery and send it to him in an official envelope?

The letter implied that she knew why he had chosen “Goddard” for his name. That stunned him. How could she? If she chose to write again, she said, she would “write more about that and other such derivative matters.” What clues had she learned from his Mexican songs about which her letter had given only vague hints? And why had she waited until now to write to him—she had obviously been researching him for a long time. Above all, in view of the fact that she had spent so much time analyzing him, why didn’t she ask to meet him?

Perhaps she had important White House connections. But even if she did, he was not impressed. Politics and power in themselves had never meant much to him; one was like the art of blowing glass, the other like the act of smashing it. His father, many of whose values he had taken as his own, saw politics as the source of most of mankind’s evils and proudly maintained that of all the arts, music was least influenced by political considerations.

Osten looked at the White House envelope. It occurred to him that in music, the term “envelope” had to do with attack and decay—the start of a note, its growth, its duration, and its diminution and termination. It was quite different from reverberation and echo, which were much in use in the new musical technology, in which synthesizers invaded and changed the space of sound’s natural envelope. How clever was this writer? he wondered. Was the impressive White House envelope, as well as the letter inside, a subtle declaration of war on the envelope of Goddard’s voice—an attempt to agitate him and create echoes and reverberations? Was that what she wanted? And if so, what was in it for her?

As he put the envelope down, he realized that it bore a remarkable piece of information: the postmark was not Washington, D.C., as he had assumed, but New York City, somewhere on the West Side to judge from the zip code. Did she want him to notice that?

The more he thought about her, the more it annoyed him that he didn’t know who she was, for then, at least, he could imagine going after her, tracking her down, beating her at the game. The image of the dead girl returned. She could never have written or even understood the White House letter; she had been far too simple.

Quickly he dried off and dressed, picked up the envelopes he had to mail to Nokturn, pocketed the White House letter, and threw all the other letters and papers into the incinerator chute down the hall. Leaving the hotel, for the fourth time that day he found the porter asleep.

Osten decided, since he would be east for a while, to drive out to visit his father. Having called first to say when he thought he might arrive, he rented a car—choosing for fun, as he always did, a model he had never driven. Since having become Goddard, Osten rented almost everything he used, except for music equipment, which he always bought with cash and always Kept in one place. Renting had become practically an art to him, something he enjoyed and kept on perfecting.

To avoid ever having traceable personal papers lying around, he did all of his business out of cheap hotel rooms, and when he was in New York he frequently sublet apartments for short periods, making it impossible to accumulate possessions that could lead people to him. In this country whose greatness once rested on the ability of its people to buy—often carelessly—what it produced, the best that could be said for it now, in its inflationary phase, was that what was once bought was now either for sale or for rent.

Osten drove past the Goddard Beat, the West Side disco that was named after him. He had visited it only once, a little over two years ago, and he remembered the night vividly. He had been somewhat curious to see what the famous Goddard Beat was like, but more curious by for to know how he—Goddard—would feel being there, alone among strangers, known by no one, yet known to everyone. The disco was frequented then by a mix of people—Columbia University students, Juilliard students, and many black musicians and their groupies from nearby Harlem.

The place was reverberating with rhythm, and Osten entered hesitantly. Two rock bands performed at the
Goddard Beat, alternating every hour, playing mostly the biggest and newest Goddard hits. As he walked through the crowded rooms, Osten turned to watch the band on stage go at his latest big single. In the act of doing so, he was unexpectedly tripped by a couple dancing past, and losing balance he went crashing into a small side table, knocking over two glasses and a bottle of champagne and causing the table’s occupants, a thickly built black man and a willowy black girl, to overturn their chairs as they jumped up to avoid getting wet.

“Hey, you motherfucker, look where you’re going!” roared the man, his suede slacks soaked with champagne, as he spun and challenged Osten.

“It wasn’t his fault,” said the girl, brushing the droplets off her velvet jump suit and calmly placing the empty bottle in the ice bucket beside the table.

“Oh yeah?” said the man, still furious, pushing Osten away. “Then who in the fuck—”

“Stop it, Paul,” the girl said sharply as she stepped between them. “Couldn’t you see the guy didn’t mean it?”

As other patrons, ignorant of what had happened, turned to watch, hoping for a fight, Osten held out his hand to the black man. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I’d like to pay for another bottle.”

The man seemed on the verge of slapping his hand aside when the girl intervened again. She quickly shook Osten’s hand, then sat down as if nothing had happened. “It’s all right,” she said, “it could happen to anyone.” She looked up at him and smiled politely, and he noted how expressive her eyes were.