Pinball Page 7

  Domostroy tried to put her at ease. He ordered drinks for the two of them, and as she sipped hers, and blushed with shame, he playfully said that he was the one who should feel insecure, faced with someone as young and attractive as she was. Slowly then, she began to open up. She talked about herself and her studies, told Domostroy how a fellow student who was a fan of his had first recommended his music to her, and confessed that through his music she had discovered emotions in herself she had not been aware of before.

  As the evening wore on, he tried to sort out his feelings about the young woman. Should he prolong their time together and eventually take her to bed, or should he leave her and join a group of his friends who were having a birthday party for a young, apparently very sexy French cellist they thought he would like. The party was being held at the Rainbow Room, a nightclub high atop the RCA Building.

  Domostroy was prone to these moments of conflict over unimportant matters—where to dine, what to wear, whom to call for a date, how long to stay at a party. His literary friends chose to read into his chronic indecision a Jekyll-Hyde syndrome; his friends who believed in astrology saw him simply as a typical Gemini, forever torn between pairs of conflicting impulses.

  He could, of course, take his Michigan fan to the Rainbow Room, introduce her to his friends, and then take her back to her hotel; or he could go alone to the Rainbow Room, meet the French cellist, make arrangements to take her out in a day or two, and then go back and spend the night with his out-of-town visitor.

  He tried to assess the situation in terms of responsibility. Was it fair for him to take her to bed, treat her as if she were a thing, an image of youth and purity that he could use to shore up his self-esteem?

  On the other hand, he reasoned, she saw him as the artist who personified maturity, creation and many lively though now forgotten public controversies. And since she had created her concept of him in order to satisfy herself, she had made him a part of herself; but that image controlled her as the drug controlled the addict who sought it out. Yet by seeking him out, wasn’t she declaring herself able to decide on her own that she wanted to keep him as the source of her obsession—to become his lover and take him to bed as if he were an object, a thing created purely to satisfy her own needs?

  The girl must have sensed his restiveness, he thought, for she glanced at her watch and said she had taken up too much of his time. She thanked him once again, then went on to say that she had a confession to make: perhaps she was wrong to tell him this, she said, but the reason she had wanted this meeting so much was that she was suffering from acute myelomonoblastic leukemia, a degenerative disease that attacks the bone marrow as well as the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes, and according to her doctors—and all the books she had read on the subject—she would be dead within the year. Inasmuch as she was sure to be confined to a hospital for the final stage of her illness, she had decided to forgo her normal timidity and do everything she could, while she was still able, to meet Patrick Domostroy, the person who had most enriched her life.

  He looked at her carefully. Nothing in her looks or manner indicated the ravages of disease; on the contrary, she seemed almost glowing with health. He told her that in this day and age she might very well be cured of her illness and live for many years, even outlive her family and friends. Or, her life might be stopped in its course not by leukemia but, say, by a car accident. Only chance stands up to the predictable in our lives, he said; chance, in the end, provides man’s only excuse, and therefore his comfort in the face of the irrational.

  He watched her as he spoke, noticing how soft and unblemished her skin was, how thick and shiny her hair. Her breathing seemed perfectly even, and when, under the pretext of picking a bit of lint off her collar, he touched her neck and cheek, her skin felt dry and cool.

  He had the feeling that she was not ill at all; that she had invented her illness to justify her visit, as well as to make him feel sorry for her, thereby exciting his interest in her and inducing him to stay longer with her than he would with any other visitor who had nothing to offer him but youth, innocence, and naive admiration. And so he became determined not to play into her hands, but to extricate himself then and there. He called for the check and while waiting for it, quickly inscribed to her all the scores and albums she’d brought with her. Then he politely escorted her to the elevator, kissed her gently on the cheek, and said good night.

  Minutes later, the high-speed elevator in the RCA building flew him to the Rainbow Room, sixty-five floors above the lights of Manhattan.

  During the months that followed, in the busy course of his life—writing music during the day, going out at night, traveling, performing, seeking out women with imagination and men with wisdom—he forgot all about his Michigan visitor. When one day a lawyer from an Ann Arbor firm called him, mentioned her name, and suggested that Domostroy must have known the young lady very well, Domostroy became annoyed. He asked what could possibly have led the man to such a conclusion. After a short silence, the lawyer apologized for having been presumptuous and then went on to inform Domostroy that the young woman had just died—the victim of a fatal blood disease—and to the surprise of her family and friends she had bequeathed all she owned to Domostroy. Ironically and touchingly, all she owned of any value consisted of a collection of Domostroy’s sheet music and record albums, which the composer had so cordially signed for her several months before when she visited him in New York. The lawyer told Domostroy that she referred to that visit in her last testament as the most moving experience of her short life. Did Domostroy know, the lawyer asked, that his fan had spent most of her meager savings on that trip?

  “No performing artist who’s any good can dispense with fans altogether,” Domostroy said to Andrea. “Listening to Goddard’s records, I have the distinct impression not only that he sometimes needs a real audience, but also—” he paused “—that he occasionally has one—in a live performance. That would rule him out as a psycho, a hermit, or an elephant man.”

  Andrea looked up in disbelief. “Did you say live performance?”

  “Yes. A girl I talked to at the Goddard Beat suggested it, and I think she may be right. The way Goddard pronounces words and times certain phrases in his latest album—and the sheer energy of his performance—convinces me that he must have sung some of the songs in public prior to recording them.”

  “Would Goddard risk a live performance just to test his songs?”

  “Not his songs. Himself.” He leaned over her. “Like every popular singer, Goddard knows that singing in a recording studio is a bit like singing under a shower. Instead of hearing your own voice, you hear the resonance created by the shower stall. The same with saloon singers; they know that performing in a cramped nightclub is not like performing in Carnegie Hall, or the Kennedy Center, or Madison Square Garden. A large live audience forces the singer to sing at the highest pitch of his ability, to give a performance in which his energy has to top the collective energy of the audience. When he makes a studio recording, a good singer will attempt to imitate his own live performance, recapture the aliveness of it, and even use a tape recording of it as a cue.”

  “But where could Goddard give live performances without being recognized through his voice?”

  “Any big town, actually,” said Domostroy. “Half of today’s young singers do everything they can to sound like Goddard—and many of them succeed. The last thing anyone in the world would expect would be to see Goddard performing in public. And besides, no one knows his real name or what he looks like.”

  “Where do you think he might have performed?”

  “Perhaps a Mexican town—near the U.S. border,” said Domostroy.

  “Why there?” she asked, stunned.

  “South of the border, Goddard would probably attract no more attention than any other young American with a guitar on his back. In any square or sidewalk cafe he could sing and play—and study his impact on a live audience—without much danger of revealing himself.�
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  “Then why wouldn’t he try Paris—or Amsterdam—where they all know and play American music too?” asked Andrea.

  “For a good—personal—reason, I suspect. Of the seven songs in the newest album, two are adaptations or paraphrases of Mexican folk songs, ‘Volver, Volver, Volver’ and ‘El Rey,’ which Goddard sings in English except for a few Spanish lines. The other day I went to a Latin record store on Broadway and bought the Mexican originals, and when I compared them to Goddard’s adaptations, I discovered that some of the Spanish phrases Goddard sings are not in the originals. Goddard wrote them—in Spanish?”

  “I know those songs,” said Andrea. “They seem more sentimental than most of his stuff.” She started to sing “Volver, Volver, Volver”:

  “My love is restless

  to come back;

  I’m walking towards madness and

  while all is sadness

  I want to love

  and I’m dying to return.”

  Then she asked, “What do the Spanish lines he wrote say?”

  “In ‘El Rey,’ they follow right after these original lines:

  With money, or without money

  I do what I want …

  And I keep on being a king,”

  he intoned. “In one he speaks of being lonely, ‘like Del Coronado’; haunted like ‘the useless warships—on the border—I cross to see her.’ In the other song he talks about ‘hiding and singing—in El Rosarito—where she comes back—and comes back—and comes back—each time—her last time.’ He also talks about being ‘weary of peace and quiet … the price of loving,’ and he says that ‘lovers who part commit a crime of passion.’”

  Andrea was getting excited. “Are there any more clues?” she asked.

  “I think there might be. On the last band of the album, Goddard cleverly interlaces motifs from three Schubert pieces: ‘The Town,’ ‘By the Sea,’ and ‘The Double.’ He repeats the somber chords of ‘The Double’ over and over again, only to interrupt them by changing, in a final series of chords, to a cleverly interwoven though intrinsically different harmony that is clearly Arabic in nature—as if, after all his monotonous hiding, Goddard—‘the double’—had suddenly revealed himself—or his true feeling!” Domostroy was silent and pensive for a moment.

  “Arabic?” asked Andrea.

  “Arabic,” he answered. “As recognizable in music as the arabesque is in filigree work or fancy embroidery.”

  “Well—go on!” said Andrea.

  “There’s a U.S. Navy shipyard just a few miles from the famous old Hotel Del Coronado and the border between San Diego and Tijuana. Maybe Goddard was there for some reason, and perhaps he was anxious to communicate what he felt to someone—someone, I think, whom he loved. Maybe he didn’t have time to compose a piece that would properly express his feelings and instead hastily latched onto some popular Mexican songs, to which he added an Arabic motif and new lyrics—his secret message.”

  “A message for a woman?”

  “Why not? And if he sang for her in Spanish, she was probably Mexican. He could have met her in the Hotel Del Coronado. Many Mexicans visit it when they go to San Diego, having passed those haunted ships at the border. Then, who knows? Maybe she was engaged, even married.” He paused. “If she was, the only way he could see her without raising the suspicion of her family or the other man in her life would be by performing in public places—cafés or restaurants. In your letter,” he said, pursuing his own suppositions, “we ought to ask him if it was his Mexican love who attracted him to those Mexican songs and inspired him to change their original lyrics. If we’re on the wrong track, and he invented all that Latin stuff by simply attending El Festival Latino at the Village Gate in New York, he’ll dismiss the idea as your fantasy. But if not, we may have hit the bull’s-eye.”

  “Speaking of bulls,” said Andrea, now in one of her reflective moods, “did you know that a lot of Americans from Southern California routinely go to see the corridas in Tijuana?” Without waiting for him to reply, she continued, “I’ve seen bullfights in Spain, and you know, they never struck me as a macho duel between a brave matador and a ferocious bull. Somehow, I always saw the bull with his huge dangling black cock as the essence of maleness, and the matador as a female in courtship—a pirouetting, fancily attired maiden pretending she’s hunting, but who is, in fact, eager to be caught, enticing and provoking the male, letting him brush against her seductively in each pass, her cape as red as if it were already soaked in the blood of her deflowering, of her goring, by the bull. And only when the bull is finally too tired, or too fed up with the pursuit, with his feet square on the ground and his head down low, only then does the matador, like a rejected woman out to punish her now spurned lover, raise his sword and plunge it down into the world’s most vulnerable spot—the male heart.”

  Occasionally Andrea spoke about her family. She said that her grandmother, a stubborn old lady, had been so proud of her beautiful thick hair that for years she had refused to cut it. To the despair of the rest of the Gwynplaine family—who considered it unseemly for an old woman to wear her hair long—it eventually reached well below her waist. Then Andrea, still a very young girl, had decided to take it upon herself to teach her grandmother a lesson. Late at night she would sneak into her grandmother’s room when the old lady was sound asleep and thin out her hair with scissors, leaving all the wispy cut-off hair scattered about on the pillows. Assuming that her hair was falling out because of its length and weight, Andrea’s grandmother panicked, and in an effort to save what was left, promptly had it cut so short that it barely covered the back of her neck.

  Andrea also told Domostroy about a trick she used to play on her dates when she was a high school senior. She would let a boy lure her into his room and start to fondle and kiss her passionately. Then, when he wasn’t looking, she would nonchalantly bend down and remove from her bag a feminine hygiene tampon soaked in red wine and toss it high and hard enough in the air so that it hit the ceiling and remained attached to it. The boy would stare horrified at the oozing ball of cotton and the red droplets falling from it onto the floor—his face registering irrational male fear of handling anything soiled by menstrual blood—and he would apologize profusely and take her home untouched.

  Listening to these and other, similar stories, Domostroy sometimes wondered if Andrea would ever play pranks on him; and although he frequently found himself struck by her insights, he was baffled by her as well.

  Late one night he had to leave Andrea—already asleep—and drive to the historic Passion Play Church on Long Island to play for an early-morning requiem mass. But about ten minutes after leaving her apartment he realized, to his dismay, that he had forgotten his wallet. He went back and tiptoed his way through the apartment, careful not to disturb Andrea, only to find that the bed he had shared with her was empty—she was gone. He wondered where she would go—alone—in the small hours of the morning, and why she would lie to him, telling him to wake her up for breakfast when he came back.

  At the church, the coffin stood at the head of the center aisle, and as he played, Domostroy couldn’t help glancing at its black presence and thinking of the dead man inside, a reminder to the living that they were merely the next link in the chain of the dead. Instead of upsetting him, the thought cheered Domostroy. Confronted by death, he was happy to be around to accept life’s other ultimatums.

  When he got back to her apartment later that morning, he found Andrea asleep in bed, as if she had never left it at all. Hurt by her betrayal, he woke her up and asked her how her night had been. Stretching and yawning, reaching out to kiss him good morning, Andrea said that for once she had slept through the night really well. Enjoying the heat of her young, firm body, he let her hug and kiss him and, reluctant to confront her, said nothing about his surprise night visit.

  At another time, she told him that she saw herself, spiritually, as half man, half woman. From time to time, she said, she liked to dress up as a man and
make the rounds of Manhattan’s lower West Side gay bars and discos in the company of some of her male friends, a group of punk rock musicians.

  She said that her fascination with male sexuality had begun when, as a teenager, she fell in love with a boy who was actively bisexual. She would accompany him on his clandestine prowls in search of a male lover, at times even offering herself as bait to lure sexual partners for him. In return, her boyfriend would let her watch him make love with a man. It had come as a revelation to her, she said, that watching the two of them seemed to arouse not the female in her, but the male. In such moments she always wanted to make love to her boyfriend and to satisfy him as another male would, a male he was in love with, and when she made love to him, she fantasized about having a penis of her own—a replica of his.

  Andrea prided herself on being an accomplished sexual tease. Often, in the middle of the night, when she was unable to sleep, she would select a man’s name at random from the telephone book, dial the number, and in a husky voice introduce herself as Ludmila, or Vanessa or Karen, saying that she had just woken up and that to put herself back to sleep she needed “a sexy talk.” If the man hung up, she would dial another number and repeat her introduction. She would ask the unsuspecting man to introduce himself to her, conning him into a long conversation—and more than that. Watching Domostroy in bed next to her, she would gauge by his reaction the impact of every word she uttered.

  “I want you to be free with me, baby,” she would whisper into the phone, “as I am now with you. I want you to touch yourself where I touch myself. You want me to start first? I will—because it excites me. I like your voice—it makes me feel you so close. Let me guide your hands—to where you want to go—yes, that’s where I want you to touch me. Now, touch yourself, and as you do, think that your hands are mine, touch it again—and again …”