Pinball (36 page)

In the time between her leaving the Old Glory and his own departure for Kreutzer’s in the evening, he always felt aimless, overcome by a dull fatigue, a sort of inner stillness in which all hope that his life might change seemed to ebb away. Alone, he would pace back and forth in the parking lot, studying each of the slabs of concrete as if they were pieces of a domino; or he would go back to his room, and as a gleaming twilight enveloped the lot, the adjacent field, and the charred buildings beyond, he would stand at the window watching the beginning of the night.

Even while he was working, the memory of Donna would not leave him, and the hours he spent at Kreutzer’s were simply a long tunnel through time, leading him to, or, it seemed to him often, separating him from Donna’s arrival the following morning. The thought that someone might come along and take her away from him was his constant fear, even though he knew—and told himself so a hundred times every night—that there was no way he could ask Donna to share her life with him. What could she possibly want of him? His age alone offered no prospect of reversing, or even delaying, the obvious outcome of his life.

And yet he wanted her. He wanted her because she
was young and because he was not; he wanted her to need him, and through her desire—even if it were only for a borrowed moment—to see himself once again as a man worthy of love. His longing was also sexual, for only by physically possessing her, could he ever hope to gain—even at the risk of humiliation and rejection—a sense of being himself again.

Each night after work he would drive across the bridge to Manhattan and go from one after-hours bar to another, from one adult club to the next, like a stray cat, alert to every sound, killing hour by hour the time that separated him from Donna.

In the morning, his quest for her sealed behind a conventional smile, he would greet her with a simple handshake and a friendly kiss on her cheek, then go directly to the pieces they would work on that day. Never once did he let his tone betray how agonizing it was for him to maintain this cool indifference.

As the time approached for her departure for Warsaw, Donna became more and more disturbed. In a mere matter of days she would be competing in a foreign country before an audience of strangers and a panel of judges whose cold, unbiased assessment of her playing would influence the whole future course of her life.

Her cushioned existence at Juilliard—where she had always had a strong sense of being worthy of attention—was now threatened. In the real world, she might well come up against failure, even disgrace, and it seemed to her that neither her family nor her friends—of whom she had few enough to begin with—could understand her entrapment, much less give her comfort and advice. She knew that Domostroy could give her that, yet, as if to hurt her, just when she needed to know how he felt about her and her chances in Warsaw, he had chosen a self-imposed coolness as his way of being with her.

Preoccupied with these thoughts one morning, she sat down at the piano and, in preparation for strenuous
exertion, unbuttoned the top of her blouse and loosened the belt of her skirt. Without looking at him, she began to play the great A-flat Polonaise, remembering to hold back any unnecessary exuberance in the opening phrase but then exploding into life in the next four quavers with such strength and passion that the sounds which seemed to radiate from under her fingers sent quivers and vibrations to the farthest corners of the vast ballroom.

She stopped halfway through the piece, thought for a while, and then started to play the
Etude in Thirds.
Domostroy watched her left hand and recalled one of the first lessons he had given her. He had told her that because the main melodic lines in most music written for the piano were in the high register—meant to be played by the right hand—many pianists, even extremely accomplished ones, involuntarily treated the left hand as important only when it carried the melody; they tended to slacken the thrust of the left hand when executing slow notes with it while at the same time playing notes at double or triple the speed with the right hand. Handling such a passage now, Donna showed that she had taken the lesson to heart.

Breaking off, she moved easily into ‘The Wish,” the gay, subtle mazurka, the words of which, “If I were the sun in the sky, I would not shine except for you …” she had often heard Domostroy quietly humming.

Again she stopped midway in the piece and switched, this time to the Waltz in F Major, which, because of the feline shifts in the first three beats of its principal eight-quaver motif, had been nicknamed ‘The Waltz of the Cat.

She stopped once more, then closed the piano. Wordlessly she folded her arms and laid her head on them, hiding her face from him. She could hear the sound of Domostroy’s heels echoing on the parquet floor as he got up and walked over to her.

He restrained his impulse to sit next to her, denied himself the luxury of inhaling the scent of her body. Instead, he remained standing and leaned against the piano.

“Why did the cat stop waltzing?” he asked.

“I don’t feel like playing,” she said.

“Why not”

“What’s the use?” she whispered in a resigned voice, her face still hidden from him.

“The use? To play well,” he answered softly.

“For whom?” She spoke into her arms without looking up.

“For others. For those who, like me, want to hear you,” he said. “To give them pleasure. To make us feel something that, without you, we might never be able to feel.”

She straightened up, and when she looked at him he saw that she had tears in her eyes.

“I don’t care about the others,” she said through her tears. “They can’t live my life for me or think my thoughts.” Her lips trembled, and tears rolled down her cheeks and fell on her blouse. “Why, Patrick? Why?” she asked in choked tones.

He moved closer until he was standing next to her. In the bright shaft of light that fell on her from an overhead spot, she looked like a statue made of liquid bronze.

“Why—what?” he asked.

“You used to care about me,” she said in a small voice, “and you don’t anymore. Why?”

He gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder, no different from a buss on the cheek.

“I care about you—more than I care about anyone—or anything else,” he said very slowly, still in charge of his feelings.

She raised her head and turned toward him. Full of light and tears, her eyes seemed pure green. She bit her lip and said, almost in a whisper, “You care, yes. But I thought when I first came here—you were in love with me.

“I still am,” he said, removing his hand from her shoulder.

He turned and walked a few paces away from her, stopping in the shadow, afraid that she might read the
emotion in his face. “I love you, Donna. More every instant I’m with you.”

“Then … why didn’t you … haven’t you”—she fumbled for words—“ever asked me to stay with you? You must know how I feel about you!” she burst out.

He walked back to the piano and stood facing her.

“If I haven’t, Donna,” he said, “it’s because I was afraid that one day, when you were strong and secure, you might look back and think I had used you when you were frightened and weak and dependent on my help.”

He halted, then gave in to his own truth. “As long as I’m not your lover, you know I love you for more than just your beauty.”

She stood up, glanced around, and silently, calmly, took the pin out of her hair and let the thick, shiny mass fall over her shoulders. Then, with her back to him, unhurriedly, as if executing a long and docile musical passage, she unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped the side of her skirt, took them both off, and lay them on the piano bench. She stepped out of her shoes, then her panties, and turned to him.

He thought she would come to him, but she didn’t. Naked, the shaft of light cascading down over her shoulders, breasts, and thighs, she swept her clothes off the bench, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. The doleful, madly lyrical sound of the Scherzo in B Minor grew and grew until it flooded the huge ballroom with
al, that Slavic mood of hopeless rancor.

Looking at her and listening to her play, Domostroy knew that what he had been waiting for would finally happen. The moment seemed now subject only to his wish, yet he felt himself making an effort to postpone it, fearing that when it came, he might become impotent, or, like the men she had talked about in her life—passive, eager to please, unable to impose or receive. Instead, after letting his gaze wander over her body, he stared at her slender hands and her supple wrists, and he watched her fingers, suddenly stretching whole tenths with ease, expanding to summon a third of the keyboard, so strong and quick and mobile that it seemed as if they were free of
her arms, moved at last by the same spirit that made her breathe.

Domostroy knew that to overcome the sense of in-wardness and achieve lucidity needed to produce harmonious sound, the player had to be perfectly at ease, coordinating his own physical rhythm with the flow of the music. The slightest stress affected the player’s hands, wrists, and shoulders and hampered the performance, diminishing the quality of the sound, harmony, rhythm, and melody. Now, he could hear, the longer Donna played, the more tense and uncertain of herself she became.

His sexual impulse on edge, he forced himself to concentrate fully on her playing, noticing that everything about her—her hunched shoulders, her rigid neck, the stiff movement of her legs, her soundless sighs, even the way she lifted her hands from her lap to the keys—indicated anxiety, a sense of doom, defeat, surrender. Within minutes, her music was as out of breath as she was. Hie energy seemed to have gone out of her playing; the sound that had been flowing through her from within had lost its buoyancy and seemed to come only from the music sheet over the keyboard, as separate from the pianist as she was from the instrument she played.

If she were to leave for Warsaw right now, he thought, her inner turmoil would destroy any chance she might have of winning or even placing high in the competition. He knew that no amount of warming up, no physical or mental exercise alone, could ever remove such deeply implanted disquiet or free her from her stage fright long enough to win.

He moved toward her, a player himself now, reaching for the keys, in full expectation of what he was about to do and longing to do it, but filled with fear that his touch might go awry and spoil the very first measure, out of which the entire piece would have to flow. He must try now to do what every pianist tries to do at the start of a concert—let himself be moved by an impulse coming no longer from his hands or wrists or arms or shoulders but, rather, from the deepest place within him, his soul.

He stopped and stood only inches behind her, but
she went on playing as if she were not aware of how near he was. And even though he stood so close to her that he could feel the warmth of her body and smell her scent, it seemed to him that he was standing away from himself, and that by touching her he could bring himself back to his own reality, which for so long now he had been afraid to confront alone.

Reaching out, he touched the nape of her neck and pressed his fingertips gently against her skin. A ripple ran through her, but she continued to play. Her flesh was firm to his touch but as he pressed harder it seemed to soften, and he wondered whether its initial resistance had come from her or from some weakness in his tactile sense, some failure to judge how much force to summon through his own hands and arms and shoulders in order to caress her. He slid his hands over her shoulder blades, and her shoulders and torso shifted subtly in response. As she kept on Slaying, his familiarity increased with each gesture, and he grew more secure in his movements, until he felt the tension within him dissolving, his inhibition dissipating, and he knew that only his clothes remained an obstacle to the full freedom of his contact with her. Now that his sense of himself was no longer a blur, he could delightedly stroke her neck and shoulders and spine with the fingertips of one hand while he undressed himself with the other.

Naked, he brushed his chest and belly against her back, and she shivered and leaned back in order to meet his pressure, and then her hands were no longer steady on the keyboard. She stopped playing, and uncertain what to do with her hands, she turned and faced him. He took her by the shoulders and held her steady, as though he were afraid she might topple over, and an overpowering sensation of need and anguish rose within him. All that mattered to him now was to infuse her with his presence and to make his being incarnate with hers.

Gently he turned her around to face the piano, and she placed her hands on the keys and began at once to play “Spells,” a sweet, sad song by Chopin. The ten-bar phrase of the strophic melody brought back some of the
words which he had sung as a boy listening to his mother preparing for her own Chopin concert in Warsaw:

When I sing with her, I’m in awe;
When she goes away, sorrow without measure;
I want to be merry
And I cant!
Without doubt,
These are spells!