Pinball (4 page)

When he felt her prompting and hurrying him, he was tempted to restrain her. He always took the initiative, and tended to establish dominance over any woman who in the heat of lovemaking strained insistently to bring about his orgasm, which she seemed to need as a proof both of his arousal and of her control. To him, his own climax brought a definite end to his excitement and stemmed, temporarily at least, the flow of his passion.

Andrea reached over and turned off the light beside the bed, and in the darkness, in the midst of the music pounding from the speakers, Domostroy allowed himself to become engrossed in the images of her he conjured up, sensing her body with every part of his—until he was jolted by what seemed like a man’s whisper, uneven in its tone, almost like a cough. He strained to hear the sound, which seemed to come through a hole in the ceiling or high up on the wall. Realizing that the noise had thrown off his concentration, he made a strong, conscious effort to regain it and gave himself entirely to the task of lovemaking.

Andrea began to play more forcibly with him, to fondle, finger, stroke and caress his body, and he was about to yield to her, to make her scream and toss and
fight as if he were splitting and tearing her, when the sound came down to him again, no longer a whisper, but a deep voice with a Latin accent.

“C’mon, José, what did you say, man? Say it again, man …”

Then the voice was gone and the music returned. Frightened, hot and wet, his heart pounding, Domostroy pulled out of the girl. “Who was that?” he asked, grabbing for the spread and covering them both with it.

“What? Oh, that!” She sprang out from under him and turned on the light. He watched her smooth back her hair and study his perplexed expression. “They,” she said, flavoring the word with mystery and laughing, “are probably taxi or truck drivers. Every once in a while, usually in the middle of the night—by electronic miracle—my tuner picks their voices up as they talk to each other on their citizens’ band radios.”

The voices interrupted her again. Chattering, they seemed to be talking for the sake of talking and of having someone to listen to.

“Really, I’m telling you, man …”

“C’mon, José, you know what I mean …”

Soon the voices dissolved again in the music.

“You’re shivering,” she said. Then she laughed again. “They frightened you, didn’t they?”

“I guess they did. Weird. But it’s also cold as hell in here. Can I turn on the heat?”

“You can try, but the valve is stuck. The super has never come to fix it.”

He walked from the bed to the radiator casing under the window. Consciously keeping his back to her, he squatted down, opened the metal flap, and tried to turn the valve. But it was stuck tight, and although he assaulted it several times, he couldn’t get leverage. The valve wouldn’t budge. As he crouched on the cold floor with the draft from the window blowing in on him, he began to shiver and, feeling awkward and embarrassed, he mustered all his strength and leaned with both hands on the valve. He felt it give, and then he heard it snap off under his weight. As he pitched forward, a jet of scalding
steam shot from the opening, barely missing his lower arm and thigh. In catapulting backward to get away from it, he fell over a chair and went sprawling under a table. Vaporizing steam began to fill the room, obscuring its contours. Near him he heard Andrea laugh, but he could only barely distinguish her nude form as she rose, ghostlike, in front of the brilliant haze of the lamp near the bed. Then, he could not see her at all. In the white steam he, too, stood up and groped his way toward the hissing valve and the window above it. He and Andrea kept calling to each other, then—soaking wet, covered with thin, warm rivulets of water—they collided, only to cling to each other. Finally, Domostroy found the window and opened it. A wave of cold air rushed in, sending them both back to bed, shivering and laughing as they huddled together under the blanket. Minutes later, when the built-up steam had run out of the radiator, the air cooled and the fog lifted. Like a garden after a rain, the ceiling of the room, the walls, and the furniture were all dripping water.

“Storm’s over,” said Andrea, “I’ll put a towel over the leak.” And without pausing, she asked, “Why do you think I went to bed with you? Because I’m in love with you, or because I want to use you?”

“I hoped it was because you needed me,” said Domostroy.

“Really? You mean you don’t mind being used?”

“I can handle it. Being used comes with a clear motivation.”

“What about love?”

“Love does not. And it doesn’t fit in with the trappings of my life.”

Located in the South Bronx, a twenty-minute drive from Manhattan, in the old days Kreutzer’s had attracted a fairly chic crowd who went there to hear some of the country’s best saloon singers. Domostroy recalled a period some twenty years ago—it was about the time when he’d finished his studies and
The Bird of Quintain,
his first
work, was being performed by major orchestras—when he used to take dates to Kreutzer’s for an evening of great music, elegant dancing, and good Italian cuisine, served in the club’s famous Borgia Room. Also during that time, Kreutzer’s, like so many other clubs, used to discriminate against blacks. Unable legally to prevent black patrons from entering the premises, the manager would seat them at the least desirable tables, well back in the room, and then tell the waiters to ignore them until they either left of their own accord or provoked a disturbance by complaining too loudly, in which case the management would call the police—always friendly to the establishment—and have them thrown out.

One evening, dressed to the teeth in a silk-lined vicuna coat and tails and accompanied by a glamorously attired date, Domostroy arrived at Kreutzer’s well before the scheduled time for the floor show. In a heavy East European accent, with urgency in his voice, he asked the captain to set up the two best tables in the house for a dozen of his distinguished United Nations friends, whom he had invited to dinner. Prompted by Domostroy’s generous tips, the staff flew into action setting up the club’s best silverware and linen with vases of fresh flowers on two center tables.

The room soon filled to capacity, and to the great delight of Kreutzer’s management, a number of press photographers, alerted by Domostroy, arrived to take pictures of the international dignitaries.

Just as the show was about to begin, a commotion at the entrance proclaimed the arrival of Domostroy’s guests. The captain and a fleet of waiters rushed to the door to greet them and lead them to their tables; the photographers in attendance set their cameras and flashes at the ready. As the new arrivals proceeded through the aisles of tables to take their places, the manager, captain, and waiters discovered to their horror that the distinguished guests they had been anticipating so eagerly were black and, judging by their dress and speech, were Americans—from Harlem. As the Negro men and women sat down and raised their glasses of champagne, the photographers
snapped their photographs, and the following morning the picture of these blacks prominently seated in Kreutzer’s appeared in most of the city’s newspapers. The papers remarked, tongue in cheek, that, of all the big New York nightclubs, Kreutzer’s still took the lead in attracting the smartest clientele in town. With that, Kreutzer’s color barrier was broken, and the club was never the same again.

That was more than two decades ago. There was no one at Kreutzer’s now who could remember—or would even care to remember—Domostroy’s place in the club’s history. Just as Domostroy’s looks and fortune had changed since then, so had the looks and fortune of Kreutzer’s. As the South Bronx deteriorated, fewer and fewer Manhattan patrons wanted to risk their safety traveling there, and without them the nightclub could not maintain its luxurious standards. Eventually the place changed hands and later on became a dive, with rows of pinball machines, a jukebox, and electronic video games filling what once had been the polished dance floor. To attract customers and make the food seem palatable, the Oboe d’Amore Room still offered nightly entertainment, but these days it consisted of a seedy opera singer, an occasional combo of local rock players, a female stripper who could no longer get decent bookings in Manhattan clubs, and—four days a week—Patrick Domostroy, accompanying or backing up these acts on a Barbarina organ, an electronic spinet with a panel of preset tone selectors to provide the sounds of most major instruments, including piano, accordion, saxophone, trombone, guitar, flute, and trumpet, as well as a rhythm section and a mixed chorus.

When Domostroy first saw Andrea Gwynplaine walk through Kreutzer’s, he had felt a moment’s anguish, aware of an impression she made on him, of his need to impress her. But he’d had no expectations, and when she came over to him, handed him a letter, and humbly
asked him to read it, he was surprised to the point of disbelief to have her so suddenly reverse his whole frame of thought.

He looked up and saw Andrea staring at him. She edged closer, piled up the pillows and cushions in a heap, settled back, and ran her hand through his hair.

“None of the articles I read about you explained why you called your first work
The Bird of Quintain,”
she said. “Why did you?”

Domostroy wasn’t sure whether her interest was genuine and he hesitated before he answered her.

“In the Middle Ages,” he said, “a quintain was a practice jousting post with a revolving crosspiece at the top. At one end of the crosspiece was a painted wooden bird and at the other a sandbag. A knight on horseback had to hit the painted bird with his lance and then spur his horse and duck under the crosspiece before the heavy sandbag could swing around and unseat him. I thought the bird of quintain was an apt metaphor for my work—and for my life as well.”

“None of the articles I read mentioned a wife, children, or a family,” she said.

“I have none,” said Domostroy.

“Why not?”

“I lost my parents early in life. Then music took my time and energy. To compose music was, for me, to belong to everyone, to speak every language, to convey every emotion: As a composer, I was the freest of men. A family would have imposed on my freedom.”

“And what about sports and hobbies?”

“Never had time for much.”

“Except for sex, according to
Hetero.”

“Even sex only on occasion.”

“Which occasions?”

“When I have a partner. I don’t play solo.”

“Who were your favorite partners?”

“Women friends—artists, musicians, writers.”

“Who are your partners now?”

“A groupless groupie now and then. A jazzed-out jazz songstress, Those are the only women I share these days.”

She eyed him sadly. “It looks as though these days love is all you compose. Don’t you mind not sharing your life with a woman of your own?”

“I don’t. After all—I’m being shared as well.”

“Would you mind sharing me?” she asked, stroking his flesh.

“With whom?”

“With my lover. A rock star.”

“He fills your need. You fill mine.”

She laughed. “I was just joking. I don’t have a lover but—aren’t you in the least possessive?” she asked.

“I am—of new experience. Of time passing.”

“Then pass it with me. Finding Goddard.’

“Why do you want to find him so badly?”

“Obsession. I also badly want to own a Tudor mansion and to fill it with original Pre-Raphaelite paintings. But—long before that—I want to know Goddard.”

“Of all people—why Goddard?”

“Why not Goddard? He’s a public figure, and I’m his public. I have a legitimate right to know all there’s to know about him.”

“And he has a right to hide his name, his face, and his life.”

“Not from me. I don’t separate him from his music.”

“But he obviously separates himself.”

“Too bad for him,” she said, and she leaned back, giving Domostroy another chance to marvel at the smoothness of her belly.

“Tell me, Patrick,” she said later that week, “have you ever been completely free with a woman?” She was lying seductively on the bed near him. “I mean free to share with her all that’s alive or perverse or just plain spontaneous in you? To lay her any time, any place, once or twice, many times—or not at all? To let your instinct
guide you to discover all that you want to know about her and yourself, all that you want to touch and take and taste in her?”

“I’m free with you,” he said.

“If you are, it’s because you’re, not in love with me. Because you have nothing to lose by being yourself.”

“Surely you don’t want your kept man to fall in love with you,” he said, laughing off her remark. “‘In love, money shared increases love; money given kills it,’ says Stendhal, and he’s right: Think how obstreperous I could become if I started to resent your obsession with Goddard!” said Domostroy.

He stopped speaking and began inching closer to her again, until he pressed tightly against her.

Andrea took her knowledge of sexual matters as seriously and studiously as she did her music and drama studies. She was concerned about the ill effect on women’s health of the birth-control pill, as well as of the other available products—the IUD, the diaphragm, even spermicidal jelly—and was proud to advocate instead the cervical cap, which she would insert with great care, quite unashamedly, right in front of Domostroy.

She routinely bought a number of magazines and tabloids devoted to the fast-changing fads concerning sex and the mores of intimacy and regularly visited some of the more sophisticated shops dealing in sexual aids, costumes, and novelties. Her closet was a veritable pleasure chest of sexual and, as Domostroy noted with some wonder, bisexual hardware.

She was, he knew by now, an efficient lover, forever anticipating and coaxing and satisfying his needs, as if she had somehow been able to research not only his sical career but his sexual appetites as well. She liked to bring him just short of the peak of his excitement and then separate herself from him—under the pretext of changing the tape in the stereo set or getting something to drink.

She would often surprise him then by coming back to
bed, not naked as she had left it, but in various costumes. Once she dressed up like a punk performer, all in black: steel-studded leather collar, tight red leather jacket and short leather skirt, elbow-length leather gloves, and red high-heeled knee boots that clung to her feet and calves. Another time she emerged from the bathroom heavily perfumed and looking like a stripper, with a platinum wig, dark eyeshadow, and thick red lipstick, wearing only a black lace brassiere, lace panties and garter belt, silk stockings, and stiletto-heeled shoes whose leather straps wrapped around her ankles. One night she disappeared in an instant and reemerged with no makeup on at all—with every inch, every pore, every orifice of her body fresh and clean, her hair silky soft, wearing the simplest cotton dress and sandals. With each change of dress and appearance, her manner changed as well. One minute she would be so aggressive as to suck the strength out of him; the next, totally submissive, letting him sap her energy and use her body in whatever way he wished. But no matter what she wore or how she looked, there was always an aura of sensuality about her, at once vulgar and delicate, demure and shameless, so real, so overwhelmingly manifest, that he felt subject to it as he might to a figure of authority or a contagious illness.