Pinball Read online

  “Even if I could come across one of them, would anybody who has remained silent all this time break that silence—for me?” He shook his head.

  She was adamant. “Find one before you say no! And persuade him—or her.” She paused and waited for him to react, but when he did not, she continued. “If you say you’ll try to find him, I’ll do anything I can to help you. Anything, Patrick. I’ll pay you in cash now what you make in six months at Kreutzer’s. And I have enough money for us both to live on. It all comes from my family.”

  The prospect of living with her and of ready cash—his car needed repairs—was overpoweringly tempting.

  He got up and walked around the room. “How long have you thought about all this?” he asked.

  “About meeting you?”

  “No. About finding Goddard.”

  “For a year or so.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not”

  “I didn’t have the right connections. Until recently, I was afraid to approach you because I didn’t think I had anything to offer that would interest you.” She paused, and a sly smile spread across her lips. “I read just about all the crap written about you since you first played in public long before I was born. Then, just as I was about to give up my research on you, I came across a most revealing article. It was written years ago—but it spoke of your true inclinations, and it gave me hope that you might not be indifferent to me after all.”

  “Was it my cover profile in The New York Times magazine?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t.” She laughed mischievously. “It was in Hetero, ‘the magazine of the morally liberated’—though not exactly a moral majority publication. Have you read it?”

  “I might have at the time,” he said. “There was so much nonsense published—”

  “The article was written by one Ms. Ample Bodice,” she interrupted, “a one-armed porno star who moonlights as a reporter of the sex scene. In it, Ms. Bodice described a weekend at the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a private club in the Catskills for ‘sexual seekers,’ where she ran into Patrick Domostroy. She said you were there with a sinuous young thing who behaved like a sex slave. Throughout the weekend and the various ‘sexually imaginative’ activities that supposedly filled it, your little leather-and-lace girl kept changing from one costume into another—sometimes looking pubescent, sometimes whorish, sometimes like a coed—each costume perfect, down to the smallest detail of dress and makeup. And not once did she repeat herself.” Andrea stopped and waited for him to react. She moved and sat directly across from him, her calves crossed, her thighs spread wide, her flesh on display. She watched him calmly, as if he too were on display, with nothing hidden from her scrutiny.

  “You’ve come a long way—from composing great music and giving sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall to living at the Old Glory and working as a stringer at Kreutzer’s, a pinball joint that tries to pass for a nightclub! A long way! Wouldn’t you like to change all that?”

  “That ‘long way’ happens to be my life, and I don’t complain about it,” he said, wishing he could deflect Tier argument. “And don’t be so quick to knock pinball joints!” He assumed a lighter tone. “After all, Earle Henry, the man who invented the pinball machine, also invented the jukebox. And where would your precious Goddard be without jukeboxes?”

  Andrea disregarded him. “All I’m saying, Domostroy, is this: become as inventive in life as you once were in music—and, apparently, in sex—by working for me. Help me find Goddard. You won’t regret it: I too can play sex slave and wear kinky costumes, you know.”

  “I’m sure you can—but I’m wrong for the role of the master,” said Domostroy, standing up abruptly to get his jacket and leave.

  She walked over to him and put one hand on his shoulder; with the other, she unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off his shoulders so that it fell to the floor. Then she stretched to her full height and stared at him, forcing him to look her in the eye. She knew she had won him over.

  “Money will be only half of your payment,” she said. “And this”—she nudged him with her thighs and glanced at the bed—“will be the other half. At least you won’t be wasting your time playing pinball joints anymore.”

  “But wasting it, instead, on Goddard!” he said.

  “You won’t be wasting it!” She laughed and kicked off her shoes. Her hands slid down to her waist, and she slipped off her skirt and pantyhose and unbuttoned her blouse, letting it fall from her. As she lay down naked on the bed, another of Domostroy’s records dropped onto the turntable.

  While she waited for him to speak or react, her fingertips began to brush and circle her breasts, then move slowly to her belly and below, to stroke and rub her thighs. Standing there under her gaze, he felt clumsy and ill at ease: here he was, trying to save his dignity while trading his middle-aged wisdom and experience for sexual favors from a young woman. He would have preferred to undress her. Now, instead, it was she who was watching him, as if with a magnifying glass.

  Before his last record ended, he switched to the radio, already set on her favorite station.

  The mechanics of undressing further distracted him, and for a moment he sensed a loss of arousal. Afraid that she would notice it, he pretended he had to sit down to take off his pants, and he remained sitting, with his back to her, while he removed the rest of his clothes. Then, still hiding his now limp flesh, he crawled over to her and began stroking her shoulders, kissing her neck, bringing his body slowly over her belly while keeping one hand between his thighs, lowering his head to her breasts, kissing, licking, and rubbing her nipples with his lips and tongue. He was aroused again.

  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?”

  “Whe
n 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?”