Pinball (41 page)

Even before her return, Domostroy had watched television news clips of the competition, including shots of Donna’s astounding victory, and he had read numerous newspaper accounts of it. In contrast to the chilly demeanor of the other competitors and the aura of rigor that permeated the recital hall, Donna, from her first appearance
on the stage, had been herself, entirely at ease, more spirited and more lissome than any other player, but also the most finished as an artist and the most dependable; and from under her fingertips music had emerged that was just as lusty and exciting and immediate and emotionally charged as she was.

From the start she had dominated the piano—and the audience and judges—with the astounding dynamics of her musical stride, her thorough knowledge and control of the score, and her rare ability to convey her feelings fiercely and directly to her listeners.

He had watched and heard her play Chopin’s Seventh Etude in C-sharp Minor, one of Chopin’s greatest, most nostalgic works, but also the longest, most complex, perhaps most difficult cantabile for the left hand ever written. In her hands the etude’s two melodic themes, two voices—the impulsive male, the soulful female—had been brilliantly distinct, as reluctant to fuse as to separate, passionate in their remote keys, hushed in the quiet interludes, then culminating with classical precision in the immense breadth of the dominant theme. As he listened he recalled a time when she had played this etude for him and he had recited Chopin’s words of advice: “One’s aim is not to play everything with an even tone. The property of a developed technique is to combine a variety of shading.”

In Warsaw, Donna had not forgotten her lessons at the Old Glory. He had seen how composed she was when the computer tallied the votes of the jury and declared her the clear winner, how graceful and dignified she remained in accepting her prize. He had admired the tact and wisdom of her short speech and been profoundly touched by her brief mention of
al; she had said it was a quality she felt she shared, through the music of Chopin, with all the people of Poland. He had seen and read about the reception given her at
elazowa Wola, the composer’s birthplace, and about the open-air concert she had given in the shipyards of Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, where she was surrounded by thousands of working men and women who cheered her as if she had come out of their own ranks to win the coveted prize.

Then he had met her at the airport, amid the incredible hullabaloo the media staged for her arrival, and had driven her, tired but excited, straight to the RCA Building to tape the talk show he was now watching.

The show’s host made a gesture of invitation; Donna rose, and the cameras followed her as she walked to the center of the stage and sat down at the grand piano. While she played, the camera angles alternated: there were images of her hands on the keyboard, close-ups of her face, long shots of her body, and close-ups of her feet on the pedals.

As he watched Donna play on the screen, watched her calm, studied movements and her perfect poise, he thought of the other side of her he knew. He remembered her as his lover, who after piano practice had run to him desperate in her need. He thought of her, her cheeks flushed, taking her clothes off with a moan on her lips, then helping him undress, throwing off the pillows and bed cover, pulling him down onto the bed, sinking to his groin, her hands and mouth on him, twisting and straining and stretching, until he would lay her down like a baby with a fever, and prompted by her clenched teeth, her thrashing legs, the shaking of her hands, her sudden cries, her rumpled hair, the look in her eyes, her flailing body, he would spear her with all his strength, his feelings flowing into her from the center of a persona that seemed no longer his own—from an archaic self, a self without a name, whose existence he knew of but could not identify. He remembered her in what seemed like a sensual trance, wrapping herself around him, clinging to his shoulders and thighs as though an inch of space between them would create an unleapable chasm. Then her lips and tongue would seek his mouth, and she would scream and cry at his every movement. After recoiling in an orgasm, she would rush back to him, pleading for more, drenched in sweat, weeping; she would hug him, only to disengage herself, almost brutally, and then, biting her tongue, her eyes cast down, her fists clenched, she would hit him again and again on his face and chest until, in order to defend himself, he would pin her down, his arms on hers,
his knees over her shoulders. She would stop for an instant, and then, pleading, grabbing his hips, she would crawl under his legs and bury her head between his thighs. At her climax, screaming and crying, her orgasm ripping through her, she would strain under him, her breath ragged, her lips dry; she would not let him pull away from her but would cling to him, quaking, refusing to stop, urging him to move against and inside her, to restore the tension she felt slipping away, to prolong the release that was already fading.

On the television screen, Donna finished the short piece, bowed gracefully to the audience, and then went back to chat again with the host. She was his final guest, and at the end of the show the two of them got up and waved at the audience, their silent image quickly obliterated by a beer commercial. Domostroy finished his Cuba Libre, gave his place to a standing customer, and stepped away from the bar.

At the billiard table two pool sharks argued over a point of strategy. In a telephone booth, a drunken middleaged woman, screaming incoherently into the receiver, caught Domostroy’s curious glance and, furious at him, kicked the door shut. Next to the billiard table three youths apathetically fought star wars on the screen of an electronic computer game, and in a space adjacent to the bar an elderly black couple hesitantly tap-danced to the rock from the jukebox.

It was late, almost too late to do anything but go to sleep, and he wasn’t sleepy. By now, back at her Carnegie Hall studio, fatigued by her TV performance, Donna must know that he would not be coming to be with her, that she would sleep alone.

Once again, he thought of the note Donna had sent him from Warsaw: “If you haven’t guessed it yet, I love you. If I am reluctant to admit it even to myself, it is because I am unsure as to where I stand in your life.”

His decision not to see Donna weighed on him like a heavy cloak. The awful events at the Old Glory had stained his reputation; the gossip columns had brought back the past in allusions to his unsavory conduct. Even his music
had come, once again, under attack, being described as derivative and unwholesome with a tendency toward disagreeable dissonance. It was obvious that his presence would not benefit Donna’s public image, and so he decided to leave her alone. She had to be alone, in order to go from one success to the next, as she undoubtedly would; just as he, a witness to failure—which might one day still befall her, as it might any artist—had to remain alone, in his own refuge.

He had nothing to do, nowhere to go. He could always take the car out. He’d heard about an artist’s loft in Soho where a group called A Better Way to Love held after-hours encounters—but it was raining, and he dreaded driving all the way downtown with his windshield wipers on, their measured sweeps reminding him of a metronome.

He turned to a pinball machine, a popular model called the Mata Hari, its ONE TO FOUR CAN PLAY and GAME OVER signs still flashing from the previous game. Hie Mata Hari’s lighted glass panel portrayed a scantily clad woman reclining voluptuously on a sofa and triumphantly handing a document to an elderly gentleman. The picture’s caption read, “The secret map, Baronl” Domostroy’s eyes lingered on the woman, young and slender, the curves of her body delectably smooth and sensuous.

He dropped a coin into the slot. Where GAME OVER had been a second before, BEGIN GAME now began to flash at him. He pressed the button, and the first ball popped up into the shaft, but for a moment Patrick Domostroy could not make up his mind whether to play it or not.

Jerzy Kosinski has lived through—and now makes
use of—some of the strongest direct experience
that this century has had to offer.

TIME

To appreciate the violent, ironic, suspenseful, morally demanding world of Jerzy Kosinski’s novels, one must first acknowledge the random succession of pain and joy, wealth and poverty, persecution and approbation that have made his own life often as eventful as those of his fictional creations.

He was born in Poland. The Holocaust of World War II claimed all but two members of his once numerous family. During the war, sent by his parents to the safety of a foster parent in a distant village, he eventually found himself fleeing alone from place to place, working as a farm hand, gaining his knowledge of nature, animal life—and survival.

At the age of nine, in a traumatic confrontation with a hostile crowd, he lost the power of speech. After the war, reunited with his ailing parents he regained his voice in a skiing accident.

During his studies at the state-controlled Stalinist college and university in Poland he was suspended twice and often threatened with expulsion for his rejection of the official Marxist doctrine. While a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, he became an aspirant (assistant professor) and grantee of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the state’s highest research institution, where he specialized in the study of individual versus collectivity and the sociology of American family life. Attempting to free himself from state-imposed collectivity, he would spend winters as a ski instructor in the Tatra Mountains, and summers as a social counselor at a Baltic sea resort.

Meanwhile, secretly, he plotted his escape. A confident master of bureaucratic judo, Kosinski pitted himself against the
State, which had already refused to grant him and his parents permission to emigrate to the West. In need of official sponsors, and reluctant to implicate his family, his friends and the academy staff, he created four distinguished—but fictitious—members of the Academy of Sciences to act in that capacity. As a member of the Academy’s inner circle and a prize-winning photographer (with many exhibitions to his credit), Kosinski was able to furnish each academician with the appropriate official seals, rubber stamps and stationery. After two years of active correspondence between his fictitious sponsors and the various government agencies, Kosinski obtained an official passport allowing him to study in the United States under the auspices of an equally fictitious American bank “foundation” and to pay for his ticket to New York in local currency. While waiting for his U.S. visa, expecting to be arrested at any time, Kosinski carried a foil-wrapped egg of cyanide in his pocket. His punishment, had he been caught, would have been many years in prison. “One way or another,” he vowed, “they won’t be able to keep me here against my will.” But his plan worked. In December 1957, following what he still considers the singularly creative act of his life, Kosinski arrived in New York able to—as a result of his sociological studies—read and write in English without any difficulty, though only with a rudimentary knowledge of spoken American idiom. “I left behind being an inner emigré trapped in spiritual exile,” he says. “America was to give shelter to my real self and I wanted to become its writer-in-residence.” He was twenty-four years of age—his American story was about to begin.

He started his life in the United States as a part-time truck driver, moonlighting as a parking lot attendant, a cinema projectionist, a photographer, and a driver for a black nightclub entrepreneur. “By working in Harlem as a white, uniformed chauffeur I broke a color barrier of the profession,” he recalls. Studying English whenever he could, he perfected it well enough to enroll as a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and obtain a Ford Foundation fellowship. Two years later, as a student of social psychology, he wrote
The Future Is Ours, Comrade,
a collection of essays on collective behavior—the first of his two nonfiction studies. An instant bestseller, it was serialized by
The Saturday Evening Post
and condensed by
Reader’s Digest
He was firmly set on a writing career.