Pinball

  Her interview ended when the pack of press people disappeared to cover the arrival of a plane bringing back the bodies of American servicemen killed somewhere in Latin America.

  Accompanied by her family and a few friends from Juilliard, Donna moved slowly toward the boarding gate, still looking for him. He followed behind, hidden by a group of beefy East European bureaucrats who were marching in a block toward the gate. When she had given up hope that he would get there in time to see her off, she said good-bye to all the others and reluctantly moved to pass through the security checkpoint. Then he stepped out and waved, and like a child surprised by a gift, her expression changed. She ran to him and hugged him, and while her mother watched in embarrassed wonder, mildly disapproving, and her little sisters giggled and gazed wide-eyed, Donna kissed him lingeringly on the neck, on the eyes, on the mouth, and he, now oblivious of the stares of her family and the other onlookers, let himself kiss her too, his arms around her, his mouth on hers.

  Then it was time to go. She pulled away, and looking only at him while waving at her family, she walked through the gate and down the long passageway. He watched her until her tall silhouette was swallowed up inside the corridor that led to her plane. Smiling and giving a modest nod to her relatives, he turned and started for the exit, but after a few steps he was accosted by a short bespectacled woman in thick-soled sneakers and a broad-brimmed hat with straw flowers on it. “Excuse me, sir,” the lady entreated, her pale watery eyes magnified by thick lenses. “Wasn’t that beautiful young lady you just kissed somebody famous?”

  “Not yet, Madam,” Domostroy replied patiently, “but she will be by the time she comes back.”

  “I thought sol” the woman cried triumphantly, flashing her dentures. “I thought so,” she repeated. “I can always tell a famous person!”

  IV

  Andrea had agreed to meet Osten again that night for dinner. In the afternoon he went to his bank to cash a check, and while he was there he started for the safedeposit vault, thinking that he would examine the White House letters once more for thoughts and phraseology that might prove revealing But he changed his mind, deciding that he would do better to take the automatic minisensor tape recorder with him.

  He met Andrea at the Stage Fright, a cozy restaurant near Lincoln Center, known for its good menu and handsome staff—all actors and actresses who worked there between engagements. In an organza blouse and close-fitting silk skirt that outlined her body, with her hair falling in long waves over her shoulders, Andrea looked stunning, and once again he thought how much taller and better proportioned she was than the nude in the photographs.

  They talked about Donna’s departure for Warsaw, which they had both seen on TV Then, as if to distance him further from the memory of Donna, Andrea told him about Donna’s affair with Dick Longo, the porno star, and the story made Osten laugh even though he felt a twinge at discovering the identity of the well-endowed man from Donna’s photo album.

  Seized by the need to be close to her, Osten told Andrea that after meeting her for the first time in Juilliard’s cafeteria he had been curious to know whether she was dating anyone steadily And now that he knew her a bit better, he admitted to wondering whether there was someone as important in her life as Donna had been in his until recently.

  For a moment Andrea looked somber. Then she said she had no boyfriend. Most of her time was taken up by her studies, and many of her weekends she spent with her parents in Tuxedo Park, the place where she had grown up, which held only pleasant memories for her. Maybe one day, she said, he might drive up there with her to swim in their pool under some of the oldest oak and cedar trees in the state.

  The more they relaxed with each other, the happier he was that he had not read the White House letters again in order to study the words and phrasing in them. This way he could listen to Andrea without ulterior motive, lost in the enjoyment of her clear, well-articulated ideas and the pleasant sound of her voice—so different from Donna’s speech, which, owing to her upbringing, he had found somewhat mannered.

  “Why didn’t you ask Donna about me?” Andrea asked matter-of-factly. “I’m sure she would have come up with some old school gossip,” she added as an afterthought.

  “Much as I liked your looks,” he said, “at that point I wouldn’t have risked making Donna jealous.”

  They stared at each other in silence.

  “After you and I spoke briefly in that cafeteria, though, I began to think about you often,” Osten went on. Then a memory stirred him, and he said quietly, his eyes downcast, “I started to see you—in front of me—even when I shouldn’t have.”

  “When?” she asked in a low voice.

  “When I was making love to Donna,” he said, meeting her stare again. “I would close my eyes and feel I was with you. I couldn’t stop myself. There you were—like a premonition.”

  “A premonition … of what?” she asked, subdued by his frankness.

  “Of falling in love,” he said, and only after hearing his own words did he realize how simple and direct his desire was. “With you,” he added, reaching out and gently putting his hand on hers. He felt her pull away. “That’s the first time I’ve touched you,” he said softly, almost apologetically.

  “I like you, Jimmy Osten,” she said slowly, weighing each syllable. “A lot. I liked you even when you were with Donna. I was a bit jealous of her. I felt—and hoped—that there was no real energy between you two. That you were together but not with each other, as far apart as black is from white. I’m glad it’s over. Glad for you, and—why lie?—for myself, for us.”

  They soon had no more to say of how they felt about each other. Instead, he asked her to tell him about her life, and he listened, enraptured, while she talked of her flying lessons, her forays into skydiving, her experience of reviewing music for Soho Sounds, the avant-garde rock music paper, and most of all, her hopes of becoming a producer of Broadway plays and musicals.

  The evening flew by. Driving Andrea home, he noted that she sat as far away from him as possible. He took it as a signal that she was not yet ready for further intimacy, although all during dinner he had given her every indication of his desire.

  He respected and even admired her reserve. Taking his cue from her, getting out of the car to escort her to the door when they arrived at her building, he left the engine running.

  “Aren’t you coming up?” she asked, her voice again perfectly matter-of-fact.

  “Isn’t it too late—for you, I mean?” he stammered, suddenly uncertain of himself.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I don’t have any classes tomorrow. What’s more, I’m an insomniac! ‘Macbeth has murdered sleep,’” she quoted.

  While Osten parked the car across the street, she waited for him at the front door. In the car, his gaze fell on the bag containing the tape recorder. He hesitated. His instinct told him to forget about it. Not since his time with Leila had he been so eager to be with a woman, and he recoiled from the idea of treating Andrea as though she could be an accomplice to someone as perverse as Patrick Domostroy. Furthermore, Osten noted, nothing she had said to him so for sounded remotely similar to any of the thoughts or phrasing in the White House letters.

  Still, in that split second before slamming the car door, he thought that if there was the slightest chance that Andrea was the letter writer, he had to know it, and he quickly and unobtrusively grabbed the tape recorder out of the bag and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he rejoined Andrea.

  As he climbed the stairs, feeling acutely conscious of her nearness, he regretted that he couldn’t be honest with her and simply tell her who he was and why he had to conceal his identity.

  He liked the orderliness of Andrea’s apartment—the well-chosen antique furniture, the neatly arranged notebooks, the family photographs in silver frames, the dusted shelves of books and records. She got out a silver box that held a plastic bag of pot, a packet of papers, and a little cigarette-rolling contraption.
As she was showing him her collection of antique perfume bottles he came and stood behind her; then, with a step forward, he took her by the shoulders so that their bodies touched. He turned her around to face him. She hugged him gently, looking into his eyes for a moment, and then went to open a bottle of wine, talking to him over her shoulder all the while, saying that although she needed more sleep than most people, she had great trouble getting enough of it. She then asked him if he’d like to put on a record, adding, jokingly, that she had a few Domostroy records in case he’d care to refresh his memory of that composer. As he bent down to look at her record collection he quickly hid the tape recorder behind a pile of albums. Its automatic timer would activate it the following morning.

  He glanced through her records, noting with pleasure her complete collection of Goddards. He was tempted to play one, but decided against it and went over and turned on the radio instead.

  She brought the joints and wine, got out an ashtray and a silver roach holder, and sat on the bed next to him, sinking into a bank of pillows and tucking her legs up under her. They began to smoke, and the smoke drifted slowly about the room.

  “Speaking of the devil, have you ever met Patrick Domostroy?” he asked, watching her closely.

  “No, I haven’t” she said, “but I know a few things about him.” She seemed so at ease that he felt she was telling the truth. She sipped her wine and passed him the joint. “My parents met him a number of years ago in Tuxedo Park. He used to date a woman writer who lived near them. Is he an interesting person?” she asked, gazing at him. Then she laughed. “Not that I expect you to be objective on the subject!”

  “I’m not.” He laughed too. “Even my father, who never says anything bad about anybody, doesn’t think much of Domostroy’s way of life.”

  “How about his music?”

  “My father calls it overly visceral,” said Osten, “rudimentary and premeditated. He attributes these qualities to Domostroy’s unnatural preoccupation with sex.”

  She seemed genuinely interested. “What kind of sex?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Osten, “but I remember some years back—I was just out of high school, I guess—when Domostroy horrified all the guests at a party of my father’s with a filthy story about Chopin.”

  “I wonder if he told such stories to Donna,” said Andrea, laughing.

  “She wouldn’t like it. She idolizes Chopin.”

  “What was the story?” Andrea asked.

  “Everybody knows that Chopin was into sex—George Sand and all the rest, right? But because he had tuberculosis, many of his adoring contemporaries said he couldn’t help it. They put him on a pedestal and used his disease to excuse his peccadilloes. According to Domostroy, to preserve Chopin’s good name—or what was left of it—his fans kept a whole body of letters, memoirs, and other written accounts from being made public. But Chopin’s more objective contemporaries wrote about the composer’s relationships, and these documents were preserved in archives and libraries. They’ve been gone over by many critics and historians, including Domostroy himself.”

  “Why would Domostroy do all that research?” said Andrea.

  “I guess in order to write a book about it, now that he can’t compose anymore, and possibly to prove his own point—which, I gather, is that fucking around is one way of getting rid of one’s chaos, isolation and timidity. And for a genius that’s good for art! I read a few books on Chopin myself, and I found out some strange things about him. Chopin was involved with a certain Marquis de Custine, and with Custine’s rather slimey circle of friends.”

  “Was Custine as bad as that other marquis?”

  “The Marquis de Sade? Hard to tell. De Sade made up most of his sexual antics, but Custine didn’t have to: he and his friends—Chopin among them—acted theirs out.

  ‘It was Custine who had turned his spectacular villa into a scene of perverse doings where Chopin was often the piece de resistance—though he didn’t resist very hard.

  “Domostroy claimed—in all seriousness—that excessive sex prolonged, or even engendered, Chopin’s artistic life. It combated his insularity and routine. It made him less withdrawn. According to him, the disease kept Chopin’s temperature so high that he was in a constant state of sexual heat, and any sexual activity raised his body temperature even more—enough to kill some TB bacilli, so that his body’s resistance to the remaining ones was strengthened! Supposedly, after an orgy, Chopin actually felt better and was therefore able to go on writing music and performing and, of course, go on fucking around! All of which he did—without any consideration at all for his sexual partners, many of whom he no doubt left with TB—before heroes, the most infectious disease going! Pretty sick, isn’t it?’

  “Fucking around? Or suffering from TB?” asked Andrea gaily. “You obviously love all these literary rumors. You must be awfully good in your field.”

  They had finished the second joint. As if their movements had been choreographed, they moved toward each other. His hand slid under her hair and he embraced her neck; her arms encircled his shoulders. Gently, he laid her down next to him and, leaning on one elbow, looked into her face. The marijuana made her eyes shine so that she seemed to be daydreaming. The mood of his earlier longing for her reasserted itself and, as memories of watching her passionately from afar turned into present thoughts, he tenderly swept the hair off her cheeks and neck, and lowered his face to hers, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her neck and her shoulders, but not yet her lips, giving her the chance to kiss him first and start him on a chain of events from which, once it began, there could be no pulling away.

  She did kiss him on his lips, first slowly, then more rapidly, her tongue touching his, pushing, then pulling back, her mouth pressing on his, her hands behind his head, bringing him closer as she slid one thigh under him. He was engulfed in her now, with one hand on her breast, the other kneading her thighs, lifting her skirt, his fingers feeling the heat of her groin, the moisture of her flesh.

  Still kissing, reluctant to stop touching, they started to undress, twisting and entwining their bodies. She slipped out of her blouse and let him pull off her skirt and panties, and with her bare feet she rolled his pants and shorts down to his ankles so that with his own feet he could free himself of them.

  She was naked now, open to him. As he glanced down the length of her body, the drug took hold of him and the image of the faceless White House nude came between Andrea and him like a transparent curtain. Dimly, before he took her, he realized that, similar as the two women were, there was no proof in the photographs that the woman either was—or wasn’t—Andrea. But all that mattered now was the relationship that he was about to initiate by entering her flesh with his own.

  Osten woke up around noon. Andrea was still asleep. He got out of bed and went quickly into the bathroom, being careful not to waken her. He felt queasy and he had an awful headache; the pain in his temples began throbbing from the glare of the bathroom light. The pot had not agreed with him, either because he was not used to smoking so much or because it was stronger than the stuff he occasionally smoked in California.

  He dressed quietly and got ready to leave. Andrea’s face was turned away from him. He would let her sleep. He crouched down in front of the shelves and reached behind the records. Instead of removing the tape recorder—his initial reaction—he reset it.

  In spite of his headache, he felt exhilarated. Even though he only vaguely recalled what had taken place during the night with Andrea, he knew that he had been at ease and happy in their lovemaking. He remembered her saying how free and abandoned he made her feel, and later, when the pot had raised them to frantic, passionate heights, he knew he had gone further with Andrea than he had ever dared to go before with a woman.

  He went to his apartment and took a long bath, and while he soaked he recalled after some effort that Andrea had talked a lot about her fascination with the occult. He also remembered something about automatic handwriting. With both of the
m high on pot and lovemaking, in a cloud of incense, and with one small candle for light, she had made him write something with his eyes closed. Almost in a trance, in a silly, abandoned mood, he had written—what? He could not recall. Was it his name? A phrase from Macbeth? He remembered Andrea saying that his handwriting would tell her more about his thoughts than he ever could.

  He had found Andrea as natural as Leila, and fun to be with—full of delightful contradictions: a serious student of drama, bright and well informed about music; at the same time, she was a believer in magic and astrological signs, charmingly naive.

  She had played him her favorite records—mostly Chick Mercurio. That had amused him, for it made him remember that when Coddard’s first record went on the airwaves and hit the record shops, its spectacular sales promptly topped the sales of Chick Mercurio and the Atavists, the most popular punk rock group of the moment, and nudged them out of the number-one position on all the charts. A few weeks after that Osten had read in the papers that Chick Mercurio had gone berserk. The New York police had picked him up with enough heroin in him to supply a platoon of addicts. He was hospitalized, and tales of his sordid sex life filled the columns of the sensational press for several weeks. As a result, Chick Mercurio and his group disappeared as rapidly as they had emerged.

  That was some six years ago, and if Andrea still played the Atavists, she obviously did not spend much time keeping up with the changing tastes of the country. At least she listened to Goddard too, he told himself, something that Donna never did.

  And even though Andrea was mainly a drama student, with music as her minor subject, Osten was impressed as much by her thoughts about musical form as by her physical beauty. She was a firm believer, she had said, in musical innovation, and she felt that Western instrumental music was impoverished in terms of pitch. She believed that only the new electronic equipment and sound could lead to real rhythmic and melodic freedom—perhaps to the rediscovery of new values of intonation.