Pinball, Page 2

But he was lonely. He had no mends. Most of the people who had been his friends when he was on top assumed that success and failure ran parallel and were therefore not supposed to cross paths, and because he had once felt the same way himself, he could hardly burden them now with an explanation of his failure, making them feel guilty of their own success or uncertain of their own talents and place in society. In their eyes, he knew full well, his current way of life—particularly his way of making a living—represented not just failure, but failure with something of the contemptible, ridiculous and grotesque about it. He could never persuade them of the truth: that even though, by chance, he had reached the bottom, he was, by choice, comfortable sitting on it.

  Often, long after everyone at Kreutzer’s had gone home, he would get into his car and drive over the Third Avenue bridge to Manhattan. At dawn, the long avenues opened before him like lines of music stripped of notes. He would park in a deserted street where no sound broke the silence and sit and imagine that one day the well of his music, now as empty and soundless as the avenues of the huge city, would fill up again. Until then, he knew that he had to live each moment, making sure that the significance of it did not escape him.

  Thus, owing not only to the circumstances of his career but to choice as well, Domostroy had come to fashion his life as if he had always lived it only in the present. He chose for companions people who, because of their age or upbringing or taste, neither recognized his name nor cared that he had once done things to make it famous. Their judgment of him, like his of them, depended only on how he presented himself in any number of chance meetings, never on knowledge of his past. He avoided the company of those who were informed about his composing career and who might seek to convince him that his past accomplishments far outweighed his diminished popularity, his recent musical sterility, his failure to achieve lasting financial success, and his present obscurity.

  He had gradually succeeded in turning his private universe into a well-guarded fortress, and up to now he had kept out anyone who might disturb the peace he found there.

  On the way to see Andrea, Domostroy played his favorite tape on the car’s stereo. His mood was often determined by music, as if the waves of compression and dilation in the air around him influenced the pitch of his emotions. He perceived himself in terms of how he felt, not just in terms of who he was. In this age of video he often felt that he was an anachronism, trained to respond with his cochlea, not his retina; a creature of sound, not of sight. He speculated that, as mankind’s insecurity about its overcrowded physical world increased, so did its dependence on concrete space that could be seen and measured, and hence on visual art that portrayed it, from television to photography.

  But Domostroy was guided by the auditory, and his art was music, which enlarged his spiritual world by demolishing boundaries of time and space and by replacing the myriad separate encounters and collisions of men and objects with a mystical fusion of sound, place, and distance, of mood and emotion. His spiritual ancestors included poets, writers, and musicians, especially those who, like Shakespeare’s pair of lovers, could “hear with their eyes.”

  The two-hour tape he was now listening to contained about a dozen musical pieces, or fragments of pieces, some of them only a few minutes long. These pieces, selected over the years, were ones he trusted to ease him into a desired emotional state.

  By learning to give himself up to the proper music, he had become expert in the process of self-induced reflex. He could trigger in himself a variety of mental states: anticipation, tranquility, enthusiasm, sexual hunger, and in his composing days even the need to compose music. In “Life’s Scores,” his last published interview, he had said: “Composing is the essence of my life. Whatever else I do provokes in me a single question: Can I—would I—should I—use it in my next score? Whenever I hear my music played, I feel as though my whole life were at stake and that a single wrong note could mess it all up. I have no children, no family, no relatives, no business or estate to speak of; my music is my sole accomplishment, my only spiritual cast of mind.”

  Only once in a while, recalling his creative past, did Domostroy wonder what had happened to the essence of his life. Had the music critic of the influential Musical Commentary who had once accused him of composing himself into “radical isolation” been right? Was his music really so bleak and naked that it would one day tempt its creator, as another critic had once suggested, to cut his own throat?

  Domostroy remembered when, also some ten years earlier, he had appeared on Tuning to Time, a TV talk show. The other guest on the show was a foreign military leader who was living in exile in Florida. Although until his exile the leader had been backed by the United States in a war that had lasted for years, his country—and his cause—had eventually been defeated. “We still have a minute, gentlemen,” said the TV host cheerfully at the end of the program, and he turned to the military leader. “Tell us, General, after such a brilliant career—what went wrong?” Had the question been addressed to him, Domostroy would have panicked and not known how to answer. The military leader, betraying no emotion, casually glanced at his diamond-studded watch, then at the smiling host, then at the appreciative audience. “What went wrong?” he asked. “First, I was betrayed by my allies. Then I lost the war. That’s what went wrong.” To a military man, a lost war was the sufficient, obvious explanation for his life’s failure. But what wrong note was sufficient to mess up the life, of a composer and make him lose, in the prime of his life, the will to compose?

  Domostroy parked the car in front of a renovated brownstone. Once inside, he ran upstairs and was out of breath by the time he reached the apartment on the fifth floor. He waited a minute for his heart and lungs to calm down, then he knocked. Andrea opened the door and let him in. She hung his jacket in a closet that was full of her dresses and coats and asked him to sit down on the low, oversized bed-couch, made up with a multicolored spread and flanked on one side by a table with a radio on it and on the other by a TV set. The room was comfortable, although sparsely furnished, and the few pieces were, he knew, fine antiques, complemented by several excellent copies of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and, on a separate table, a large collection of antique perfume bottles.

  The kitchen and the bathroom were both at one end of the room, seeming to steal space from each other, and he watched as Andrea moved about the tidily arranged apartment to fix him a drink. She was dressed simply but expensively in a silk blouse and a voluminous skirt of fine wool.

  The day before, when he had seen her for the first time at Kreutzer’s, he had managed to take in her youth, her formidable presence—expressive eyes, wide mouth, soft wavy hair, shapely rib cage, long legs. He had been aware instantly that she awakened in him a need, not for her exactly—not yet anyway—but perhaps for someone who looked like her. Perhaps, like a chord sounded from his past, she had simply awakened a longing for the feeling of wanting a woman.

  “I didn’t believe you would actually, show up,” she said, giving him his drink and perching on the table next to the couch. “Last night at Kreutzer’s, handing you that note, I felt like a Band-Aid.”

  “A Band-Aid?” he asked, uncertain.

  “An aid to the music band, a groupie!” she said and laughed.

  She slid lightly onto the couch, her drink in hand, and leaned back against the table, facing him, her legs stretched in front of her so that her shoes were only inches away from his thigh. “At Juilliard, where I study drama and music, lots of students are into your stuff. They say you’re a pro.”

  “A pro, with no new record in years, and all his old ones in the Memory Lane department.”

  “Not all!” she said. “Last month Etude Classics presented the Juilliard library with a gift of all its finest recordings, including every single one of yours.”

  “It’s good of Etude to keep my masterpieces in print—and to get rid of them as gifts.”

  Andrea got up and went over to some shelves filled with books and records on one side of
the room. Slowly, one at a time, she pulled out all eight of Domostroy’s records and stacked them on the record player. Then she started the machine, announcing in a confidential disc jockey drawl, “Tonight’s program, ladies and gentlemen, will be devoted to the complete works of Patrick Domostroy, the distinguished American composer, the National Music Award winner.” As she sat down on the couch again, she brushed against him, and he caught the scent of her hair.

  The music came to them from two large speakers placed on wall brackets at opposite ends of the room. As always, when he listened to his records, he was surprised by his own music, by the sounds he had once been able to hear only with his inward ear. Once again he was uncertain of his reaction; he could never decide whether he liked his music or not. Rather, he identified with it, knew each note, each phrase; he recalled how long—and where—he had worked on it. He even remembered his reactions to each piece when he first heard it in a concert hall, then on the radio, then occasionally on TV; and he remembered as well the anguish of waiting for each record to come out, the not-to-be-uttered expectation of success, and then the further anguish of waiting for the reviews.

  “Don’t you feel good about being a composer?” she asked, looking at him intently.

  “I don’t compose anymore,” he answered.

  “Are you ever going to give another big concert?”

  “No more big concerts,” he said firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “I lost my following,” he said.

  “But—why? They used to love you.”

  “They—the critics, the audience—changed, and I didn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around.”

  “You’re still a recording star,” she said. “Your records touch more people than any concert would.”

  He felt her eyes on him, pleading, as soft and inviting as if she were a child, and he was tempted to kiss her.

  “If my records touch you—can I?”

  “Do you want to?” said Andrea, and she leaned back on her elbow and faced him. As she did so, her breast brushed against his hand.

  “Only if you want me to.”

  “What makes you think I don’t?” she asked, inching closer, her lips parting.

  As he faced Andrea, he pondered what to do. He recalled a time in Oslo, during one of his European concert tours, when a young woman reporter interviewed him over dinner and then came back with him to his hotel. She asked him if she could spend the rest of the night in his room rather than drive all the way home, and although he found her tempting, he was perplexed, for during the whole evening she had not been the least bit flirtatious. He announced in the most straightforward way that his room contained only one bed, and she said that sharing it with him wouldn’t bother her one bit, for as a girl she had often shared beds with her friends. Given that gratuitous admission and the Scandinavian reputation for sexual openness, Domostroy felt confident enough to tell the young woman that all through dinner he had imagined the two of them making love in a variety of ways and that he was therefore pleased and anxious to share his bed with her, as well as everything he had fantasized.

  The woman became indignant. “I think you have this all wrong,” she said. “All I asked was to share a bed with you, not you with the bed. For me,” she said, “sharing your bed would be like going swimming with you. When swimming, you don’t talk about it; you don’t ask each other whether you like to swim or whether you prefer swimming on your back or stomach. You just swim. Making love is the same way. Why don’t you try thinking about things that way!”

  Angry, she left. As for her lesson, it was lost on Domostroy, who as a boy had almost drowned and ever since had been afraid of water.

  “What makes you think I don’t want you to touch me?” Andrea repeated. “After all, I came to hear you at Kreutzer’s and slipped you that note about how much I liked you, didn’t I?” She shifted again, and now her breath was on his neck, her breast against his chest.

  In an instant he could cover her with his body, but he did not move. “Have you been with other musicians?” he asked.

  She looked at him quizzically. “Been with?”

  “I mean—”

  “You mean slept with. Sure. I’m a music student, remember? What about you? Don’t you fuck the girls who hang around Kreutzer’s?”

  He sat up and moved away from her. “You weren’t just hanging around. You came with a purpose.”

  “I did,” she agreed. “To know you.”

  “But—you already knew my music; wasn’t that enough? Music doesn’t make demands. Composers do.”

  “I don’t mind your demands.”

  “You don’t know me!”

  “I know myself.”

  “Would you come to see me if instead of what I am, I were, say, a piano tuner?”

  “Piano tuners don’t interest me. Patrick Domostroy does.”

  She moved closer. Her hand rested on his thigh, and pulling him to her, she gently kissed his earlobe.

  When he didn’t respond, she pressed her breasts against him, then kissed him on his neck. He shivered lightly and reached for her, an excitement surging through him, propelling him toward her. Suddenly she stopped and pulled away, and his yearning subsided.

  “I won’t pretend that sex with you is all that excites me,” she said, her eyes searching his. “There’s one thing you—and only you—can do for me.”

  A slight discord was growing between them. “What is it?” he asked, fearful that she might ask him for money.

  “I want you to introduce me to Goddard!”

  “To Goddard? Which Goddard?”

  “The Goddard. The one and only.”

  “Goddard the rock star?” he asked, feeling lost. He could see no connection between himself and the world of headlines, success, money, and popular music that Goddard’s name evoked.

  “That’s right,” said Andrea. “I want to meet Goddard. In person. That’s all I ask.”

  Domostroy had to smile. Was she joking? Behind her slick facade, the girl was peculiar. “Is that all?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Yes” she said, “that’s all. Find out who he is. Better yet: find him. I want to meet him.”

  For a moment he felt disillusioned. Her girlish confidence annoyed him. So that’s what she needed him for. An older man helping a young woman to fulfill her adolescent fantasy.

  “What on earth makes you think I can find Goddard?” he snapped.

  “Why can’t you?” she asked, looking at him. “Aren’t you a name too?”

  He became impatient with her. “Look, for five—or is it six?—years,” he said, “Goddard has been the biggest recording star in the country. Yet he’s still nothing but a voice and a name—a complete mystery. Nobody has ever seen him or managed to find out the least bit of information about him. Nobody! And since the day his first big record was played on the air, every magazine, newspaper, TV and radio station, every professional, and every dilettante in the celebrity business has tried. But nobody knows any more about Goddard today than they did when he started. And you want me to find out who he is?” He laughed. “Are you sure you know who I am?”

  “Of course, I do!” she said, also annoyed. “And also that you could find him. You could—but only if you wanted to badly enough. If you felt it was worth it to you, you could track Goddard down,” she said emphatically. “All you have to do is want to find him. I’ve researched you,” she said, “and I found out a great deal about you. I know you won the National Music Award for Octaves, and that both the Music Writers Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts voted your music for Chance, the best film score of the year.”

  “What else?” asked Domostroy, a part of him pleased by her childlike belief in his power.

  “Also, that for some twenty years or so, you were known all over the world and that in those days, you knew every big shot in the music field and the arts. I saw photographs of you with pop singers, business types, movie stars, TV anchormen, dress des
igners. I read the resolution the composers, lyricists, and performers of MUSE International drew up to honor you when you finished your second term as president of that association. They said you had shown an imaginative and protective sense of responsibility toward musicians all over the world; and that the fruits of what you had achieved would extend for into the future. Well, if you did all that for them then, don’t you think they would do you a favor now? All you’d have to do would be to call, ask a few questions, and follow a few clues, to Goddard. Don’t you see?”

  He was impressed by her breezy rundown of his past success and her thoughtful disregard of his stalled career.

  “It’s not so easy to call people I used to know years ago and say I’d like to use them!’ he said softly, trying not to discourage her. “Don’t you think that all the reporters, disc jockeys, columnists, commentators, and musicians in the country would give just as much as you would to find out who Goddard is? What makes you think that all I have to do is phone a few old acquaintances and say, This is Patrick Domostroy. Tell me, who is Goddard?’”

  “I’m not that naive,” she said, ready to appease him, “but surely, somewhere out there are people who really do know who Goddard is, and where he is and what he looks like—and what he eats and whom he fucks and what he takes or smokes or shoots to get high. There must be a fair number of them—his family, relatives, friends, lovers, record company bigwigs, tax accountants, IRS agents, attorneys, clerks, secretaries, doctors, nurses, music technicians. No matter how great—or cunning or clever or rich—Goddard is, he could not have made it all alone! Look, every serious musician can tell that only one ear—yours!—wrote every one and all of your musical pieces! Yet, because, to guard the integrity of your work, you hand picked your own music-editors, that radical scandal sheet went after your entire reputation by alleging you didn’t write your music alone! Can’t you see there had to be people who helped Goddard? And who work with him now? All you have to do is find one of them. Just one!”