Pinball Page 4

  “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.

  At first, given the lengths she went to to excite him, he suspected her of pretending, of acting parts, of creating a sexual masquerade in which he became both audience and participant while she remained merely an instrument of his amusement and pleasure. But later in their lovemaking, as he listened to her rapid breathing and watched her shapely breasts rise and fall in rhythm with the excitement building up in her, as he felt her heartbeat speed up and heard her lose her breath and cry out as she raced into orgasm, he realized that she liked sex just as much as he did and that all of her efforts to bring him to the peak gave her as much pleasure and excitement as they gave him.

  “When I want to have a man, he could be the hunchback of Notre Dame,” she said. “His looks, his age, his business just don’t matter. Only his mind matters—and I don’t care if it’s crooked. I must get to him as he really is. When I do—and no holds are barred in the process—I feel free, safe, abandoned to all that pleases him, to all that pleases me. It’s natural with me, and to have it I’ve gone after every man I ever wanted. And I’ve always gotten him. Always.” She rested her chin on his shoulder. “Except for one: Goddard. And getting him is only a matter of time now.”

  “I remember this guy,” said Domostroy pensively, “who for years, every day, rain or shine, dressed in filthy rags, used to stand on the sidewalk in front of Carnegie Hall and sing well-known arias from operas. His voice wasn’t bad, and God knows it was strong—it carried for a block—but when he sang, his face turned bright red from the strain, and he grimaced, showing toothless gums. People passing by were so put off by his appearance that they paid no attention to his voice; they thought he was insane. In all those years of singing opera, he only inspired discomfort, even fear. In a way, Goddard is the reverse of that man; we don’t see him—we only hear his voice—and therefore we wish to know who he is.”

  “What if,” said Andrea, “Goddard has rebelled so strongly against rock’s dependence on visual hype, on the looks and gestures and personal lives of the big stars, that he’s decided to literally remove himself from it? Suppose he thinks that by hiding his own face, he is saving the face of rock?”

  “He must have a very strong reason for hiding,” said Domostroy. “It has to be something much more than a mere publicity gimmick. And it costs him a lot of money, too!” He paused. “Some years ago, six million people sent for tickets to Bob Dylan’s rock tour—and there were only six hundred and sixty thousand seats. Don’t you know that if Goddard were to give one live concert tomorrow, say, in New York, or Los Angeles, or any big town, hundreds of thousands of his fans would storm to it, no matter what the ticket price? If he would come out of hiding, any TV network would give him millions for just a single performance, and any Hollywood film studio would triple the TV figure for the rights to his life story.” He hesitated. “So why doesn’t he? Maybe he’s a cripple, so hideous, so unsightly that he has to stay out of sight?

  Andrea looked at him skeptically. “He’s probably just allergic to people,” she said. “Hideous or not,” she added, “we still have to find him. I still want to know him.”

  She waited for Domostroy to respond again, to press her against him, and when he did not, she took his hand as if it were an object and pushed it inside herself, twisting it until his fingers were moist all over, then withdrawing it and slowly raising it to his mouth while the fingers of her other hand spread his lips apart. His tongue felt and tasted her moisture before it combined with his own.

  Her voice floated dreamily. “One day, when I know who Goddard is, I’ll show up in front of him and surprise him with the truth about himself!”

  “What if he already knows the truth?” said Domostroy.

  He had accepted her offer and taken her money, worth six months of drudgery at Kreutzer’s, all paid in one lump, in cash, in bills so crisp he felt he was the first to use them.

  But he didn’t know where to begin to crack the nut she had tossed him. Even at the height of his popularity, when he had been composing and making records and performing regularly in public, Domostroy had been, after all, a creative artist and, as such, relatively detached. His connections in the music business had been limited mainly to the staff of his own publisher, Etude Classics. Since then public interest in classical records had diminished, and profits had fallen to the point where Etude could no longer maintain its own safes and distribution arms. For the last several years all Etude records had been distributed by Nokturn Records, a large Manhattan-based company devoted primarily to rock music. Because of this recent affiliation, Domostroy had met, on various occasions, a few executives and employees of Nokturn, but he had not come to know any of them well.

  His other professional associations consisted mostly of lawyers he had hired over the years to advise him about his contracts. He had never even had an agent, preferring to act on his own behalf, and he only consulted his lawyers from time to time, usually when, as it was often the case, he was derided and smeared by irresponsible, inaccurate and biased journalism, and they advised him to sue for libel the paper, magazine or publisher
of a scandalous book about him and his work. As a firm believer in uncurbed freedom of the press and, for decades, an activist of the American Civil Liberties Union, he always refused to follow their prompting.

  As for the rest of the music world, the composers, performers, impresarios, managers, and media executives, though he had known them all in his heyday—he had served two terms as president of the musicians’ and performers’ union, sat on the board of the New York Chamber Soloists, and been active in the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the National Academy of Popular Music—he rarely communicated with any of those people now.

  If he was to find Goddard through such regular channels, he would have to try to comprehend the music industry as a whole and then to decide which part of it, or which individuals in it, could help him in his search.

  The irony was that if he were living in a totalitarian state—as he once did—dealing with a monopoly run by a single leader or party, he would only need to befriend or seduce someone in a position of privilege—or insinuate cleverly to others that he had done so—in order to gain access to any information he wanted. It would be far easier to find the button that would open all the doors in a closed, one-party, totalitarian regime than to find the one closed door—the one leading to Goddard—in an open, freely competitive American society.

  Besides, just as he would not ever enter into a public dispute with his slanderers or ask the courts to intercede on his behalf when he was viciously libeled by the yellow press, as a free-wheeling self-employed artist, Domostroy had always mistrusted the federal and state government as well as large companies and conglomerates. They were so organized and bureaucratized that they allowed the individuals who made them up to display, as proof of their adherence, only those parts of their personality that coincided with their colleagues’ personalities, never those that showed the individual in question to be truly an individual.

  Thus, rather than look for assistance from within the music industry, Domostroy was inclined to seek help from someone who, like himself, acted as a free agent, whose access to the world of music was unhampered by corporate or collective considerations.

  Sidney Nash was such a man. A freelance journalist, not yet thirty, he had for almost a decade been successfully covering the complex world of corporate musical America. His recent study on the intricacies of the music industry, Music to Their Ear: The Record Business in America, had won him a Pulitzer prize, and his major book, Moonlight Sonata: Music, Self and Profit in American Society, was already considered a minor classic and a model of journalistic inquiry and documentation. Owing to his meticulous research and his innumerable contacts, nothing in the modern music business was a secret to Nash.

  During his late composing days, Domostroy had known Nash pretty well and had been an object of the young critic’s admiration, but he hadn’t seen Nash in several years. He knew, however, that Nash, typical New Yorker that he was, preoccupied largely with his interests of the moment, would still be willing to stop to take a call out of the past. Also, Nash would understand better than most people the reasons for his old friend’s prolonged absence from the city’s success-oriented social scene.

  Nash told Domostroy to meet him that evening at the Fuzz Box, a popular showcase club in Greenwich Village where he had to catch a new punk group. When Domostroy arrived there, four kids with gaudily dyed hair were into their frenzied finale on the tiny stage. Nash, alone at a table, spotted him and waved. In spite of his big income and his growing popularity, Nash hadn’t changed. He still looked like a dissipated graduate student, with his hornrimmed glasses, baggy tweed suit, and polyester wash-and-wear shirt that made him sweat.

  He stood up and greeted Domostroy affectionately, like a prize student seeing his favorite old professor after a number of years. Remembering that Domostroy liked to drink Cuba Libres, he ordered one and another beer for himself. He also rolled a joint, which he held under the table when he wasn’t pulling on it.

  After they had inquired about each other’s health and well-being, Domostroy went straight to the point.

  “I need a favor,” he said. “I’m working on a project with someone in the record business, and she wants me to find out whatever I can about Goddard. The truth is, I haven’t the slightest idea how to go about it.” He sounded apologetic and embarrassed.

  Nash gave him a forgiving smile. “What does she want to know?” he asked.

  “Anything I can find out,” Domostroy blurted out awkwardly. “As long as it’s more than what’s known generally.”

  “What’s known generally,” Nash said, spreading his arms, “is his music—and nothing else. Doesn’t your friend know that when it comes to Goddard, more is less? Hasn’t she heard that he’s the man who isn’t there?”

  “Of course she has,” said Domostroy. “She just thought that with my contacts … you know … people like you …” His voice trailed off.

  “I see,” said Nash. “Well, all I can give you are the facts,” he added with a sigh. “As you must know, from the day WNEW first began to play him, Goddard has sold more records than any other pop star. In six years he has produced six LPs, each of which has stayed at the top of the charts for many months. Four of them became platinum, selling over a million albums each. In addition, he’s probably had at least a dozen single hits, including six gold ones that grossed over a million dollars each.” He sipped his beer. “What can I say? The guy wants to be a mystery.”

  “You’ve never met him?” Domostroy asked meekly.

  “Not likely,” Nash said with an amused smile. “He’s a very well-guarded secret. The largest entertainment conglomerate in the country, American Music Limited, created Nokturn Records not only to manufacture and distribute Goddard’s records but expressly to guard his secret, to protect his invisibility—not to mention the shareholders’ investment in him and his music.” He paused. “Keep in mind, we’re not just talking cheap hype. We’re talking big money. Record sales in this country equal the combined grosses from films, television, and all professional sports, and Goddard is the biggest grosser in the business! Ever! Now—did you know all that?”

  “I did,” said Domostroy. “I read it in your article in the Times.”

  “Good for you. Then you also know that in rock, nothing succeeds like excess. That’s why as long as Goddard’s records are selling that way, nobody is about to crack through Nokturn’s hype and invite Goddard to dinner. That is,” he corrected himself, “they can invite him—by writing care of Nokturn Records—but I have a hunch he won’t show up!” He signaled the waitress and ordered more beer and another Cuba Libre for Domostroy.

  “What do you think of his music?” Domostroy asked.

  “It’s good—maybe the best. Bigness has always eaten up greatness—but not his. He just keeps getting better. Granted, you can hear influences in his work, but he’s coherent, always plugged into the best. He knows what he’s after, and out of all the shreds and borrowing from elemental Latin and domestic folklore he’s come up with the finest pop sound we’ve ever had. Don’t tell me you don’t like him!”

  “Not much,” said Domostroy.

  “Generation gap,” Nash replied, teasing him. “Or jealousy, perhaps? How many really coherent works of art are there?”

  “What about his lyrics?” Domostroy asked defensively.

  Nash began to roll another joint. “As for as I’m concerned, his taste in lyrics equals his taste in music. Look at a song like ‘Out of Rock.’ What other pop star would sing words by William Butler Yeats?

  Out of rock

  Out of a desolate source

  Love haps upon its course.

  Or how about ‘A World Ends? Imagine anybody else setting a magnificent poem by Archibald MacLeish to music!” With fervor he began to recite:

  “A world ends when its metaphor has died.

  An age becomes an age, all else beside,

  When sensuous poets in their pride invent


  Emblems for the soul’s consent

  That speak the meanings men will never know

  But man-imagined images can show:

  It perishes when those images, though seen,

  No longer mean… .

  And that’s the single that sold millions! That’s hard to beat, don’t you think?” Nash asked.

  “Maybe so,” said Domostroy, “but what about a song like ‘Acne Lady’? All the cute wordplay on pharmaceuticals: Blondit, Nudit, Moisture Whip, Lush Lips. Or that other one—‘Pornutopia Is Utopia’—where he says, ‘Procreation is creation, contraception true deception, masturbation—sex probation.’ You don’t think that’s pretty silly?”

  “If it is, so is the culture that daily promotes all that stuff,” said Nash. “Goddard is obviously making fun of it, Domostroy! What’s more, that’s the stuff his young fans understand. You may not like it, but that’s probably because of your age. Keep it in mind—”

  “I mind keeping it,” said Domostroy. “Childish jingles on TV and in all the jukeboxes don’t make growing old any easier for me.”

  “Be fair, Domostroy. Musically and in terms of lyrics, Goddard is the culmination of all his rock ‘n’ roll predecessors—Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen—as well as of what’s best in funk, soul, reggae—and, of course, the influence of such master saloon singers as Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. In Goddard’s music you can hear the whole vocabulary of Karlheinz Stockhausen and electronic gizmos—from the Sound City To’anna and Pianomate through the Hammond, the Moog, the Buchla, all the way to the ARP, the Putney, the Synthi, and the Gershwin. You name it, he’s played it!”

  Domostroy listened carefully. After a pause he said, “I still can’t believe that in this free-wheeling media-crazy society, no one can find out the identity of our most popular music star!”