Pinball (26 page)

After each emotional setback with Donna, each new estrangement, Osten would return to the White House letters. He read them over and over again, and they always left him more puzzled and uncertain than before.

He was in one of these deep and uncertain moods on the day he received the fifth and last of the letters.

“Surely I have convinced you by now that I not only respect your double existence, but also consider it absolutely essential to your creativity. You are right to shield yourself from all those who, if they knew who you were, would seek to alter the conditions of your life as well as
the form of your art. Probably that includes almost everybody.

“I recently spent some time studying Chopin’s letters and in them I learned that he saw his work as emanating from a soul apart, inviolable to the influences of the outside world. He wrote the following to one of his most intimate friends: ‘It is not my fault if I am like a mushroom which seems edible but which poisons you if you pick it up and taste it, taking it to be something else. I know I have never been of use to anyone—and indeed not much use to myself.’

“At another time, in another letter, he compares himself to an ‘old monk who had stifled the fire in his soul and put it out.’ And shortly before his death he wrote: ‘We are the creation of some famous maker, in his way a kind of Stradivarius, who is no longer there to mend us. In clumsy hands we cannot give forth new sounds and we stifle within ourselves all those things which no one will ever draw from us—and all for lack of someone to mend us.’

“Is that how you think of yourself? If you do, don’t anymore. Let me assure you that I love Goddard for his music—in other words, your soul—and that if by accident we ever meet, I know I will unfailingly detect the soul in you without a note of music to assist me, and I will love you for it even if you turn out to be another poisonous mushroom, or an old monk, or a broken man with no one to mend him.

“I’m sure you need to remain who you are and I respect you for it. I hope you’re also tempted to want to know who I am. I’m a drama and music student, and though I would love to know you, in order to convince you of the sincerity of my feelings for you, I have decided for the sake of your music—for Goddard’s sake—to make this my last letter. I wish you well. Good-bye, Goddard. Goodbye, my love.”

So she was not a White House staffer but—if he could trust the postmark—a New York student of drama and music who possibly used Capitol Hill connections to obtain White House stationery in order to make her letters
stand out. But why, Osten wondered, would she send him five intriguing, intimate letters, as well as those sensual photographs, if she never intended to make herself known to him?

He studied the photographs again and again for hints that could lead him to her. His eyes traced the exquisite, harmonious, almost austere, lines of her body, searching in vain for the slightest clue to her identity. Eventually he realized that something about one of the photographs kept evoking in him the curious sensation that he had seen it before—long before he received it from her. Peering intently at the picture and letting his associations flow freely, he discovered at last that his sense of
déjà vu
stemmed from the picture’s composition. Somewhere in his past he had seen a picture of a woman—a woman he could not recall—taken from the same weird angle, but he couldn’t think of where he had seen it. It wasn’t a picture of Donna, he knew, or any of the women he had dated in California, or of the perky Mexican waitress at the Hotel Apasionada who had tried to seduce him while she served his breakfast by showing him photographs of herself in the nude. It was possible, of course, that the White House woman had set the camera and arranged herself in such a way that the picture would appear composed, but this was unlikely. Osten knew enough about photography and picture taking to realize that for a shot like this, the camera had to be so close to the floor that even an experienced model could not tell without looking through the view finder what part of her body would be framed by the lens. What if the Polaroid on the tripod reflected in the mirror was a deliberate ploy? What if a skilled photographer had set up these shots with an eye to calling maximum attention to the girl’s beautiful calves and thighs and buttocks and then had ducked out of range of the camera? Was that photographer—and not Goddard—the one for whom the girl had posed so intimately?

Although Osten still couldn’t pinpoint the other photograph he had in mind, or the person in it, he had a feeling it was of someone he knew.

The more convinced he became that he had seen a similar picture, the more unable he was to place it in his memory. Then, just as he was about to abandon the mental search, memory sprang into motion and in a flash he visualized the photograph that resembled the one he held in his hand. It was a picture of Vala Stavrova!

Moreover, it was his father’s favorite photograph of her. On one of his infrequent visits to the apartment he had seen it on his father’s night table in a spot once occupied by a portrait of Jimmy’s mother, Leonore.

The photograph, taken before she met his father, portrayed Vala dressed in a long-sleeved black leotard, desperate to look like a silent film star or a Soviet ballerina as she reclined voluptuously on an old-fashioned chaise longue. In order to attract attention to and glamorize the shape of her calves and thighs, the photographer had taken the picture from an unusually low angle and had manipulated the composition and cropping to exaggerate the effect even further.

The angle, composition, and cropping of Vala’s picture and of the picture of the woman before him were identical. Was it possible, Osten wondered, that both photographs had been taken by the same man? It was a long shot, but Osten had nothing to lose by pursuing it. He would ask Vala for the photographer’s name, then find him, and somehow learn the identity of the faceless nude.

Lest he arouse Vala’s suspicion, Osten decided not to make a point of phoning her about the picture, but to wait instead until a better moment presented itself. In the meantime, he had another strong lead. If his White House correspondent was, as she said, a music and drama student, her various musical references, her knowledge of the music of Lieberson and Pregel, and particularly her digressions on the life of Chopin, might be traced without too much difficulty to courses in the history of music she might have taken recently. Since all of her letters to Goddard had been mailed in New York, it seemed logical to check out the Juilliard School first and to begin his
inquiry with Donna, who not only was a student there but who, from time to time, audited music courses that interested her at other New York schools.

Casually, Osten asked Donna to find out whether the music of Goddard Lieberson and Boris Pregel was taught at Juilliard. Both men, he explained, had been close friends of his family, and he would like to be able to tell his father that their music was not forgotten. After looking through recent catalogs and making a few phone inquiries, Donna told Osten that as far as she could tell, Lieberson and Pregel were not included in any major curriculum in New York, though their music might come up in special graduate seminars. He then asked her offhandedly whether she knew of any course that devoted sufficient time to the life of Chopin to include a study of his letters. His father, he explained, loved to discuss all aspects of Chopin’s life, and Osten always felt like a cipher when the subject came up; there was one letter in particular his father had referred to several times in which Chopin compared himself to a mushroom. Did Donna have any idea where he could find out about such things?

Amused, Donna told him that by coincidence, just a few weeks ago, one of her history professors had read that very letter in a piano literature workshop.

Barely able to hide his excitement, he then asked if he could sit in on classes with her from time to time in order to bone up and impress his father. Surprised and pleased by his unexpected interest in her world, which up to then he had avoided, Donna volunteered to take him with her to the next piano literature workshop.

The following day, in the hope of extracting from Vala the name and whereabouts of the man who had taken the provocative picture of her, Osten stopped by his father’s Manhattan apartment on the pretext that he had to look up something in Gerhard Osten’s library for a term paper he was writing. He chose a time when he knew his father would be in his office at Etude Classics.

The maid went off to announce him and, returning a moment later, led him to the exercise room which contained body-slimming and muscle-firming devices as well as two steam cabinets. The room had been a birthday present to Vala from Osten’s father. Wrapped only in a chiffon robe, through which Osten could see the outline of her breasts and the darkened patch of her groin, Vala slowly pedaled an exercycle while a series of gauges in front of her monitored her speed, her blood pressure, her pulse, the distance she pedaled, and the number of calories she burned up.

Embarrassed by her state of undress and still bothered by the memory of the Mood Undies, Osten told her he would wait in the library. He started to leave, but, amused and flattered by his discomfort, she insisted that he keep her company until she had completed her required mileage. Angry with himself for finding her physical presence disturbing, he sat down on the bench and made an effort to be casually friendly.

Vala had lost weight. He noticed how slim and shapely her midriff was, how smooth her lightly tanned skin. She had let her hair grow, and it fell in abundant waves over her shoulders down to her breasts. Even without a touch of makeup, her dark eyebrows and lashes brought out the blue of her eyes and the delicate pink of her lips.

After asking him about his studies, she launched into the subject of her own progress as a figure skater. She was a natural, she said. Every time she skated at the rink in Rockefeller Center, crowds gathered and people took photographs of her, and she had received several offers to appear in films from producers who had seen her there. But, she added with a languorous sigh, all that attention only angered Gerhard and made him jealous and suspicious. As she slipped out of her robe and stepped into the steam cabinet, she asked Osten not to repeat what she had just told him. He promised not to, and a few minutes later he politely turned his face away when she emerged and—with full awareness, he knew quite well—took several steps naked to the closet to grab a fresh robe. She told
him to wait while she showered, and as she closed the bathroom door, he went into his father’s room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and picked up from the night table the photograph that had brought him there.

The instant he glanced at it, he knew he had been right: the similarity between Vala’s pose and that of the White House nude was uncanny.

“What do you think of it?” asked Vala. He turned around and saw her standing there in a gauzy peignoir.

“I think—it’s beautiful,” he answered, looking at the photograph in his hand.

“I don’t mean the picture, silly; I mean this,” she said, indicating the peignoir. “Your father bought it for me on our honeymoon, in Paris.”

“It’s lovely, Vala,” he assured her. “It makes you look—like Olga, in
Eugene Onegin.”

“Olga! That’s not nice, Jimmy!” Vala made a sound of reproach, and then recited Pushkin’s description of Olga:

“A
lifeless round face
Of a pretty Vandyke Madonna,
Like that of this stupid moon
On that stupid sky!”

Osten felt himself flush. “I didn’t mean that, Vala,” he said. “I meant—just the Madonna, that’s all! But tell me,” he asked, “who took this picture? It’s simply great!”

“You don’t really want to know,” said Vala. “Like a boy, you’re embarrassed.” Pretending she wanted to refresh her memory of the picture, she sat down next to him, and as she leaned over his shoulder to look at the photograph, she pressed her breasts into his back and let her hair fall against his cheek.

He asked her again in his casual tone who the photographer was, and Vala, still playful, asked, whispering huskily in his ear, why he was so curious to know. Even Gerhard Osten, she said, who was jealous by nature, had never asked her that. Was Jimmy, she teased, by any chance jealous of her photographer?

Afraid that if he pursued the matter recklessly he might not get her to tell him the truth, he did not ask again, but smiled good-naturedly and returned the picture to its place on the night table. Feeling that he was about to get up and leave, Vala stretched over, leaning on him, to retrieve the photograph, and studying it again, reminiscing, she said that this was how she looked when she arrived in America from the Soviet Union. Although her hairdo may have seemed provincial to New Yorkers, she said defensively, the best hairdresser in Leningrad had styled it for her just before she left.

Osten remained silent and continued to stare at the picture appreciatively until at length Vala blurted out coquettishly that the man who took the photograph had been in love with her. Their love had ended long before she ever met Gerhard, she assured Osten, but they were still good friends. She moved closer, pressing against his back and thigh, and he knew that if he were to displease her now she would never tell him who the man was. As he waited for her to speak, inhaling her perfume and sensing her excitement, her nearness began to excite him too. He turned toward her, put one hand on her shoulder, and gently drew her closer, until her head rested on his shoulder and her hair tickled his face. A blush appeared on Vala’s cheek and spread over her neck; her breathing quickened. She was still holding the picture between them, but she restrained herself long enough to set it back on the table before framing Osten’s face with her hands and bringing it close to hers. Then her lips parted and she looked into his eyes, and he saw how beautiful and innocent her eyes were. If he had ever disliked her, he thought, he didn’t dislike her now.

Just as he was about to surrender to the moment, Osten thought of his father, whose lips, blue with age, had kissed her only hours before, and whose hands, dotted with brown spots, had held her as Osten was holding her now. A vague dread passed through him, and he gently disengaged himself and got up. Without a word, she also got up and wrapped her robe more tightly about her.