Pinball (25 page)

That couldn’t be Leila, he thought, and a sense of entrapment came over him. He hastily read the second letter. It analyzed his music in still greater detail, with two full pages devoted to the Mexican songs and his changed lyrics and a third page citing phrases in his music inspired by the music of Pregel and Lieberson. The analysis was nearly faultless. It had to have been written by someone with profound musical knowledge, extensive education in modern music, and—far more important—uncanny intuition.

He was fascinated by and fearful of this White House woman. If he were ever to meet her, he wondered, how could he possibly protect himself from such sensibility and avoid being unmasked by her?

If only he had an idea of who she was, he told himself, he would telephone her that minute and pretend to be Goddard’s manager or collaborator. He would call
her bluff and feed her a thousand false clues. Not that she would believe him, necessarily, for he knew from reading the gossip columns how many people went around claiming to be Goddard, his music collaborator, or his lover, or his manager, or even his coke dealer.

Three weeks later, when he had abandoned hope that she would write him again, Osten called Blaystone about another matter. “The President is after you again,” Blaystone jokingly announced. “There is another letter from the White House.”

Osten gave instructions to have it delivered by the already tested Blaystone personal delivery service, and when he had the letter in hand lie raced to his apartment to read it. As he unfolded the neatly typed pages, several color Polaroids fell out. His hands trembling, he picked up the photographs one at a time, as if they were alive. The woman in the pictures was lying naked on a large bed, and the poses left no doubt as to what she was doing when the camera caught her. He could see, in a couple of the shots, a self-timing Polaroid reflected in a mirror. Looking for a clear shot of her face, he went avidly through the pictures a second time only to realize that not a single photograph revealed the woman’s face.

Before reading the letter, he examined the photographs for a third time. She seemed to be in her mid-twenties—much younger than he had guessed from her letters—and her body was so perfect that it seemed to have acquired, on its own, a right to be nude. It seemed to palpitate and blush; it was firm but not hard, shiny with sweat yet cool by virtue of its faultless shape, as tempting in its purity as in its self-defilement.

He felt aroused by her, and his desire seemed to emanate not from him, not from his brain, but—like a sound from an instrument the timbre of which he did not recognize—from the pictures. He promised himself that he would go after her and find her and make her give
herself to him as readily, as openly, as sweatily as she had given her body to her own hands before a camera.

Anxious to know her name and her whereabouts, he turned to the last page of the letter and saw to his dismay that it was, like the previous ones, unsigned. Then, disenchanted and angry, he started to read it from the beginning.

Still not knowing anything about the White House woman, he felt deserted by her, much as he had once felt deserted by Leila Salem. Ironically, the two of them were the only women in his life who had understood and accepted him as he was—though Leila knew only Jimmy Osten, and the White House woman knew only Goddard—yet he could not be close to either of them.

He had tried often to bring Donna closer and involve her in his life and thinking—almost as if he were preparing her spiritually to meet Goddard in him. But to Donna, most of the rock recording artists, with the exception of a few talented nightclub singers, sounded phony, the products of studio equipment and commercial hype. Possibly because she and Osten had met at the Goddard Beat, the most “in” place for such music, she invariably singled out Goddard—the man and his music—as the prime example of exploitive rock and ersatz music. Everything about Goddard, she maintained, was kept deliberately vague, from his voice to his gut-level sincerity, from his makeshift lyrics to his simplistic rhythmic intensity.

Above all, to Donna, Goddard was an aleator, a musical dice thrower, who sought musical meaning in nihilistic spontaneity and depended for his effect on free-wheeling macaronic improvisation—not for his music’s sake, but for the sake of his audience, whose mood was as inconstant as the random throw of dice. He was also a cheap crowd pleaser, she claimed, who capitalized on being both a musical show-off and a personal no-show; and as for his crass invisibility act, it was no more interesting or original to her than the exaggerated visibility of other rock stars.
Both extremes, she concluded, were nothing but manipulative devices used by the big record companies to mine the music market, to con and coax the masses of ignorant whites and underprivileged blacks into accepting disco and rock and punk music as their sole emotional expression and the antidote to their spiritual impoverishment.

How different Donna’s perceptions were, he thought, from those of the White House woman, who had written in the latest letter: “By steadily improvising and developing new rhythmic and melodic values, you have become a descendant of the greatest of the performing virtuosos—Bach, Liszt, Beethoven—who knew that, in music, improvisation is synonymous with the’ search for meaning. For centuries music has been essentially a physical—as well as a symbolic—separation between composer and performer, and between performer and audience. You will be remembered as the first artist to generate true thrall and spontaneity in an audience by fusing composer and performer and then withdrawing from them both, leaving listeners hypnotized by a pure musical experience.”

According to Donna, rock and disco had failed to produce any music of lasting quality. They had merely reduced popular music to its crudest and lowest common denominator—tortuous rhythm, sexual pantomime, and idiotic “kiss, kiss, don’t miss”-type lyrics. She emphatically agreed with Ralph Ellison, to whom commercial rock ‘n’ roll music was “a brutalization of one stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.” She felt that the bigger the rock music business became, the more it led to the suppression of better music—the best in jazz, for instance—as greedy record companies weeded classical music and much of the superior pop music out of their catalogs so they could budget more promotional funds to keep the rock and disco industry booming.

“As a result, what prospect does a black instrumentalist have of ever being recorded?” she had asked him angrily. “Just look at what happened to that CBS record series featuring black composers from the eighteenth century to the present. After ten or twelve records were
published, the series was ended, that’s what! Has Etude Classics, for instance, ever recorded a black composer? Or even a black instrumentalist? Has it, Jimmy?”

Alluding to the fact that Etude Classics were now distributed by Nokturn Records, which was to her a mass producer of musical trash, Donna also pointed out that Osten and his family belonged to the capitalist class, the top one percent of the U.S. population, who owned half of the corporate stock, a third of the bonds, all the municipals, and over ninety percent of the total trust of American assets. These were the people who, in her eyes, controlled all the corporate assets and resources of the country—while she and her family came from the exploited masses, from the very bottom of the lower half of the population, all of whom held barely five percent of all the personal assets of the country.

Aware of Osten’s extravagant spending habits and the way he threw money away on frequent trips between New York and California that struck her as completely unnecessary, Donna assumed he was a spoiled child supported totally by his rich father and she openly disapproved of both his dependence and the source of his father’s fortune. As much as she and Osten had in common, she implied, they were divided by an economic gulf so great that nothing—not even music—could bridge it.

She often mentioned
My Life in Bondage,
the memoirs of the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who said that slaves loved spirituals, the precursors of the blues, only because they reflected the fear, despair, and pain consistently felt by these uprooted people. What spirituals once had been to the slaves, Donna said, rock had become for black performers and black audiences; while it helped to loosen their Protestant restraints, it also underscored their anxiety by seeming to reconcile what they, the descendants of slaves, knew could never be reconciled: the white man’s order with the black man’s chaos, the white man’s wealth with the black man’s poverty. Though rock lyrics often recalled spirituals and seemed loving on the surface,
they were sexually antiseptic, exploitive, and as spiritually needy and loveless as the black man’s existence in the white man’s culture.

Listening to Donna, Osten felt his innermost convictions, one after another, being distorted. Her words forced him to repress—even during their lovemaking—his dream, however faint, of one day sharing himself entirely with her. Through all of their most abandoned moments a single thought worked on Osten like an isolated musical phrase: if Donna ever learned the truth about Goddard, she would have to reject him utterly, and no amount of lovemaking, tender or violent, spontaneous or calculated, could return her to the fervor she felt for him now.

In the meantime, what she felt for him now was actually invalid, owing to what she did not know—and could never guess—about his life.

When they were in her Carnegie Hall studio, Donna frequently played Domostroy’s records, often when she and Osten were making love. They put her in the mood, she said, and she’ dismissed Osten’s dislike of the composer as a simple case of male jealousy.

Reluctant to discuss Domostroy as a man, Osten focused instead on his music, always being careful not to sound too knowledgeable. He didn’t deny, he said, that as recognizably weird as Domostroy’s music was, it was also not easily categorized and that some of it might even be considered original. Then he told Donna stories about Domostroy that had been passed around in the music-publishing business.

As a hoax, an unknown musician from Los Angeles once plagiarized
Octaves,
Domostroy’s best-known work, which when initially published had won the National Music Award, the nation’s highest musical honor. To embarrass
Domostroy, the plagiarist submitted it under a fictitious name and another tide to all the major music publishers in the United States—including Etude Classics, which ten years earlier had initially published
Octaves.
As the plagiarist had expected, all the publishers—including Etude—rejected the work, calling it chilly, episodic, something less than a musically satisfying whole. To the humiliation—and fury—of Gerhard Osten and the amusement of everyone on Tin Pan Alley, Etude’s own editors not only failed to recognize the work as
Octaves,
but they rejected it out of hand, as nonpublishable, at the same time commenting in their letter to the plagiarist that certain elements in the work brought the music of Patrick Domostroy to mind! Didn’t the hoax, Osten asked Donna, only go to show that
Octaves
was what Wagner had called “soulless pen music”—a mediocre if not inferior work from the start, which had managed to get published and honored more thanks to some of Domostroy’s unholy social contacts, than merit? And what about the press allegations that under the guise of needing editors for various drafts of his musical manuscripts and galley-proofs Domostroy secretly employed dozens of young musicians, many of whom were his sexual escorts as well, but who, in fact, would occasionally write his musical trebles for him?

Donna vehemently disagreed. To her, she said, the hoax indicated that even ten years after its publication
Octaves
was still ahead of its time, too original to be assessed objectively, and she reminded Osten of
Time
magazine’s suggestion, that to prove that very point, Domostroy hadperpetrated the hoax himself. By now, she said, every hip kid in the music business knew that the charges of a cover-up of his musical helpers were trumped up by the headline-hungry New York radical tabloid which hated Domostroy’s guts for being visible, flamboyant, active and vocal on the other side of the political fence. To her, these vendettas said worlds about the state of the music business in which a serious, highly-idiosyncratic composer, because he was also a moral odd-ball, could be publicly lynched by the bunch of musical hit-men jealous of his popular success.

Donna’s preoccupation with Domostroy continued to pain Osten. Since their meeting at Gerhard Osten’s party, Donna had never concealed her interest in Domostroy’s music, which she found fascinating in its thematic inventions and technical innovation, and now Osten blamed himself for ever letting her meet the man. In complimenting Donna so cleverly on her performance, Domostroy had managed, it seemed, to secure for himself a permanent niche in her psyche, and it troubled Osten when she told him that she d been impressed with the composer’s straightforwardness and intelligence, and would like to invite him for a drink and listen to him some more. By caring so much for Domostroy’s music that she could ignore the man’s sinister character, wasn’t Donna unwittingly demeaning the role played in her life by Jimmy Osten? As far as she knew, Osten was a man without creative talent whose tastes in music she did not share, and whose music—even though she didn’t know it was his—she abhorred; yet she still shared her body with him, perhaps only for lack of any other meaningful link.