Stolen Pleasures (5 page)

So he stayed away from his friends, who were also David's friends. For almost two weeks he eluded any knowledge of that interview. He gave lessons to his students in his own apartment or in their homes, and in this time it was as if he were seventeen again, living again that period of himself. He felt as if he were instructing them without having learned anything himself first, and he hated his students for exacting more of him than he was capable of giving. Again
he was in that age of self-derision and yet of great expectations. A celebrated musician would recognize him and prove to everybody, once and for all, Berger's genius. After every lesson his armpits were sticky and he would have trouble in civilly saying good-bye.

On the evening of the twelfth day he drove across the bridge to visit the Van Grundys. They were still at supper, Van and his wife and the two kids, eating a kind of crusty lemon dessert, and they made a place for him to pull up a chair. He had coffee and dessert with them, and joked with the boy and the girl, finding a lift in the children's slapstick humor, the upside-down, inside-out humor, and in the midst of it he turned his face to Van Grundy at his left, the smile of his repartee with the children still on his lips, the hot coffee wet on his lips, his spoon, full of lemon dessert, waiting on the rim of his bowl—all these small things granting him the semblance of a man at ease with himself—and asked, “Well, did Torres flip out over Davy?”

“You don't know?” Van Grundy replied. “He told everybody as fast as if it were good news,” raising his voice above his children's voices demanding the guest's attention again. “Torres kept interrupting. Every damn piece Davy played, Torres didn't like the way he played it. What's the matter you haven't heard? Something like that happens to a person he's got to spread it around, along with his excuses, as fast as he can.”

The coffee he sipped had no taste, the dessert no taste. “Is he going to Palermo anyway?”

“Oh,” said Van Grundy, stretching back, finding his cigarettes in his shirt pocket, offering one to his wife by reaching around behind the guest's chair, “he won't go to Palermo now. He can if he
wants to, he's okayed as a pupil, but since Torres isn't throwing down the red carpet for him he won't go as less than a spectacular. You know David.”

“Even if he doesn't like old Tommy anymore he can learn a thing or two from him, if he went,” Berger said, sounding reasonable, sounding as if all his problems were solved by bringing reason to bear.

“He's already taken off for Mexico City. A week ago. He's going to study under Salinas down there if he can get that cat to stay sober long enough. Say he's always said that Salinas was better than Torres. He's stopping off in Los Angeles to ask a rich uncle to subsidize him. He was going to do it anyway to get to Palermo on, so now he'll need less and maybe get it easier. Hasn't seen his uncle since he was twelve. Got a lot of nerve, our Davy.”

“What did you think of that Rivas woman?” Van Grundy's wife was asking, and he turned his face to hear, regretting, for a moment, that he heard her, usually, only with his ears and not his consciousness. He had known her for ten years now, she had been the vocalist with a combo he'd played string bass in and it was he who had introduced her to Van Grundy. A pretty woman with short, singed-blond hair and an affectation of toughness. “Rivas?” he asked.

“Rivas, Maruja Rivas. The album we lent you. Last time you were here.” The smoke hissed out from between her lips, aimed into her empty coffee cup. “Don't tell me she didn't mean anything to you.”

“Did you play the record?” Van Grundy asked.

“I can't remember borrowing it,” he said.

 

THE LAST STUDENT was gone. He had come home from the Van Grundys' to find the first student waiting on the apartment steps, and he had put aside the record on a pile of sheet music and there she had waited in the silence of the confident artist. He had noticed that proud patience of hers when, in the streetlight that shone into his car parked before the Van Grundys' gate, he had looked for the album and found it on the floor, under the seat, where David had slipped it so he could sit down. After she had waited for so many days, she had waited again until the last student was gone, and when he picked up the album cover, the racy cover with orange letters on purple background and the woman in the simple black dress, there was that unsmiling serenity again.

He turned his back to the record going around, half-sitting on the cabinet, chin dipping into his fingers, elbow propped in his stomach. He cautioned himself to listen with his own ear, not Van Grundy's, but with the first emerging of the guitar from the orchestra, the first attack on the strings, he found himself deprived of caution. His head remained bowed through all the first movement, and at the start of the second he began to weep. The music was a gathering of all the desires of his life for all the beautiful things of the earth, the music was his own desire to possess that same fire, to play so well that all the doors of the world would spring open for him. Wiping his nose with his shirtsleeve, he sat down on the sofa.

With the cover in his hands he watched her as she played, though he knew that the photo was taken while her hands were still, the left-hand fingers spread in a chord, he watched her, the pale face and arms against a Spanish wall of huge blocks of stone and a gate of wrought-iron whorls. Her hair was olive-black, smoothed
back from the brow, the face delicately angular, the black eyebrows painted on, the nose short, straight, high-bridged, and the lips thin and soft and attuned to the fingers that plucked the strings. He knew the sensation in the lips, the mouth wanting to move over the music as if it were palpable. Concierto de Aranjuez, and the fine print on the back of the cover told him that Aranjuez had been the ancient residence of the Spanish kings. “I believed myself in some enchanted palace. The morning was fresh, birds singing on all sides, the water murmuring sweetly, the espaliers loaded with delectable fruit.” Why did they quote some Frenchwoman back in 1679? He knew the place without any help. The memory of another Aranjuez came to him, the party he'd played for last summer down the Peninsula, the sun hot on the pears and the plums even at six in the evening, and the shade waiting along with everything else for the cooling night. He had played all night under the paper lanterns of the brick patio, and tiny bells were tied to the trees and tinkled in the night's warm winds, and, early in the morning when all the guests were gone, that party-thrower, that divorcée with a dress the color of her tan, had told him her checkbook was in her purse and her purse in her bedroom, and he had awakened at noon in a sweat from the heat of the day and the fiery closeness of her body. He had phoned her in the evening from the city, but she had spoken to him as to an entertainer who has already been paid and who says he hasn't. Years ago it would have been a pleasure and a joke. He had known a lot of women briefly like that, but for some reason—what reason?—that time had hurt him. Was it because it had shown him the truth, that he was no more than an entertainer, not artist but entertainer, one for whom the door was closed after
the woman had bathed away his odor and his touch. The music from the fingers of that woman on the album cover caused the ache of his mediocrity to flare up and then die down. For that Madrid woman went in everywhere and took him along. The great went in doorways hung across with blankets and they went in the gates of palaces, and everywhere they were welcomed like one of the family, and everywhere they took you along.

The record went around all night, except for the hours he himself played, and he had more cups of coffee and, along about five o'clock, stale toast with stringy dark apricot jam which he did not taste as he ate and yet which tasted in his memory like a rare delight that he could, paradoxically, put together again easily. His shoes were off, he was more at home than he had ever been in his rented rooms anywhere, and the woman with him was like a woman he had met early in the evening and between himself and her everything had been understood at once. The disc went around until the room was lighted from outside and the globes drew back their light into themselves, and water began to run through the pipes of the house.

He heated the last of the coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and pushed up the window, and through the clogged screen the foggy breath of morning swept in. What was morning like in Madrid? What was her room like, what was she like with her hair unbound, in what kind of bed did she sleep and in what gown?—this woman he had spent the night with.

He tipped his chair back against the wall and the thought of David Hagemeister struck him like somebody's atonal music. Now in the morning, whose silence was like the inner circle of the record,
there returned to him the presence of David, but the discord was not a response anymore from his own being, the discord was in David himself.

Davy's mother must be up by now, he thought. One morning he had brought the boy home at six, after a Friday night of played duets here and there, and she was already up in a cotton housecoat, dyed yellow hair in curlers, having tea for breakfast and not a bit worried. She was the kind who would have sent him to Europe at seven by himself because he was the kind who could have done it fine. Carrying his cup to the phone in the living room, he sat on the sofa's arm, and after he had dialed the number he pulled off his socks, for his feet were smothering from the night-long confinement.

“Edith, this is Hal Berger. Did I wake you?” his voice as thickly strange to himself as it must be to her.

“I was just putting my feet in slippers.” Her voice sailed forth as if all mornings were bright ones. She always spoke on the phone as if her department manager at the Emporium picked up his phone whenever hers rang, a third party on the line listening for signs of age and apathy.

“Where's David? Somebody said he's zooming down to Mexico,” massaging the arch of his pale foot.

“He's in Nogales. It's on the border.”

“What's he on the border for?”

“He's waiting for some money from me.”

“What about the uncle in Los Angeles?”

“He gave him supper and twenty-five dollars to come back north on and buy himself a new pair of cords. He went to Nogales, instead, wearing the same pants, and sent me a telegram from there.”

“You sending him something?”

“Yes.”

He began to subtract several dollars from the substance of himself, and anxiety was left like a fissure where the amount was taken away. But then why phone her a quarter to six in the morning, rushing his voice at her with its big, benevolent question? “Send him an extra fifty for me,” he said, “and I'll drop you a check in the mail to cover it.” Overcome by a great weariness, he hung up.

He lay down on the sofa. His shirt stung his nostrils with the night's nervous sweat and he tried not to breathe it. In the Nogales Western Union the boy would pick up the check, the total drawn from the days of his mother's captivity behind the counter, drawn from the hours of Berger's teaching, but since it had come to him, this money, then was it not his due because he was David Hagemeister? Poor Davy H! Maybe the boy would be always on borders, always on the border of acclaim, waiting for something to come through and get him there. But once in a while, as he grew older and envious of those who had got across the border, he would hear somebody great and lose all envy. It might be, he thought, that this Rivas woman wasn't as great as he thought she was, but he had needed, this night, to think that she was great.

His crossed arms weighting down his eyes, he fell asleep to the sound of someone running lightly down the carpeted interior stairs, some clean-shaven and showered clerk running down into the day.

I
N THE MIDST of several friends drinking Danish beer from tall Mexican glasses, in an apartment of red Naugahyde furniture and black shag rugs, right at the moment when the hostess, who had been a Las Vegas showgirl, was leaning over to laugh something in his ear, right at that moment he threw himself off the couch and onto the rug. The others, his wife among them, thought that he was faking a fit to comically demonstrate the effect of the hostess's bosomy proximity or her words in his ear, although that sort of fakery was utterly foreign to his shy, gracious, reflective person. Then, because it
was
foreign, they realized it was an act beyond his control. Those who were sitting near him got out of his way and stood back with the others, who had also risen, and his wife fell to her knees at his side.

For several seconds he lay rigid, eyes up, a froth along the lower edge of his neat, blond mustache, while his wife stroked his face and fondled his hands. The others walked around in a state of shock, conversing with mourners' voices. Someone asked her if he had ever
done that before, and she said, “No, never” and repeated it to the first question asked by the young doctor who, summoned by the hostess from an apartment upstairs, knelt down at the other side of the now limp man.