Pinball (28 page)

“Of course I didn’t tell her,” said Andrea. “But there was nothing wrong with talking about your music. Lots of Juilliard students are familiar with it.”

“And what did Miss Downes have to say about my music?” he asked.

“She didn’t get a chance to say anything because Jimmy Osten, her boyfriend, came to pick her up, and she stopped talking.”

“Ah, yes,” said Domostroy, “little Jimmy Osten!”

“Do you know him?” asked Andrea.

“Not well. But his father has been my publisher for years, and visiting him, I occasionally run into Jimmy. He was so quiet and withdrawn as a child that nobody paid any attention to him. He’s grown up now, and still nobody does.”

“One body does,” said Andrea. “Donna’s.”

“What do you expect? She’s about to become a concert pianist and must be in need of a music publisher. Keep in mind that Jimmy’s father, a rather sweet old goat, owns Etude. But his kid seems like a cold fish to me—with no feelings.”

His words annoyed Andrea. “How do you know he has no feelings? Did Donna tell you that at the party?”

“She didn’t have to,” said Domostroy. “The night I met Donna, Jimmy and I had a little argument about music, and even though he got furious with me—or with her for agreeing with me—he couldn’t bring himself to say
so. Such a suppressed little cock!” he laughed. “Or is he a cuckoo?”

“That’s unfair,” she said. “Why make fun of him just because he has a voice defect?”

“Who cares about his voice? I’m talking about him.

O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering voice?
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery!”

he recited. Wordsworth.

“You amaze me with your trivia. Besides, Jimmy’s hardly an invisible thing! He’s definitely good-looking,” she said. “Beautiful smile. Gentle eyes. Silky blond hair. And he seems sentimental.” She halted, then said snidely, “But let me tell you a little story about your nigrescent venerator, Donna.

“A couple of years ago a guy named Marcello used to hang around Juilliard. Marcello was white, built like a beachboy—tall and lanky, polite, always smiling—and he never made a move to date anyone. Yet he kept hanging around with that very big, and believe me, very obvious thing of his tucked in his jeans, as if he were keeping a vigil, as if he were waiting for someone he hadn’t met yet, and we couldn’t figure out who it could be.

“Some of the girls—and I was one of them—fell for his looks and his manners. We fantasized about Marcello’s innocence, hoping he was still waiting for his ideal love to come along and lead him gently to bed. But he kept his distance. Finally, after we had all given up on him, he found his true love, Donna Downes! A real slap in our white faces. Donna was an honors scholarship student—and the winner of just about every piano award there was—including the Elisabeth Weinreich-Levinkopf Piano Prize. Before we knew it, Donna and Marcello started going steady, and eventually our jealousy died down as we got caught up in our own studies, lovers, and commuter trains.

“Then something unexpected happened. A friend of mine said he was convinced that our Marcello was, in fact,
the porn star known as Dick Longo, who had played in hundreds of ‘sin-ematic’ porno loops, special videotapes, and stag films, that were being shown in the peep show theaters around midtown.

“The next day my friend took me to one of the Times Square video sex emporiums where, in the privacy of the peep booth, we examined all the outstanding features of Dick Longo in
Organ Playing
, one of his naughtier sexcapades. There was no doubt about it: Longo was Marcello. I promptly bought a copy of the film, and the next day I invited all the girls who had once liked him so much to view my acquisition. Imagine their excitement at seeing him in all the splendor of his well-endowed parts.” Andrea paused.

“What about Donna Downes?” asked Domostroy. “Did she know all along who he was?”

Andrea raised her hands in a shrug. “All I know is that Donna came to the screening, and as the rest of us watched the extended antics of naked Dick Longo—and of his very out-standing ‘longo’. On the screen, we also kept an eye on her—watching him. Well, I’ll say this much for the inky jade—not a twitch of her face indicated that she was surprised by what she saw, and none of us dared to ask whether she had known before that day that she was being fucked by the most overexposed porn stud in the country. Anyway, after that, our Black Orchid went right on dating Marcello for several months. Obviously it was to spite us.” She smiled mischievously.

“Or because she was in love with him,” said Domostroy.

“In love? With a porn stud?” Andrea laughed. “She couldn’t have been, not if she cared for the Jimmy Osten sentimental type. Jimmy couldn’t be more different from Dick Longo!”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Domostroy. “Pornography and sentimentality go hand in hand. They both lie about sex. But tell me more about Jimmy and Donna.”

“There’s not much to tell,” said Andrea. “For a biracial barcarole, they seem to be doing fine. We all wonder, though, whether the Bantu Queen doesn’t ever long for the Dick of bygone days.” She smiled wickedly.

“Now, that’s unfair,” said Domostroy, mocking her previous tone, “making fun of Jimmy just because he might not measure up to Mr. Longo.”

“Maybe he does,” laughed Andrea. “Maybe Jimmy has women all over the place. He’s often away, I know. Apparently he can’t stand his young bolshevik stepmother and I gather the dislike is mutual. Actually, he just got back into town.”

“But tell me—does Donna seem happy with Jimmy?” asked Domostroy.

“I can’t tell. Just now the frail sister is in a state of nerves over whether or not to enter the Chopin competition in Warsaw. She’s obviously tempted. And we all know what winning in Moscow did for that other Juilliard graduate—Van Cliburn!”

The image of Donna Downes in an evening dress bowing before the formal European audience stirred Domostroy’s fantasy. How he would like to be at her side in Warsaw—a city where he had studied—the master with his apprentice, the lover with his mistress, calming her on the way to the concert hall, listening critically to her playing one last time in a practice room before she went on, making certain that her favorite piano was properly positioned on the stage, listening breathlessly to her performance, then wrapping his arms around her in the moment following her triumph.

“You like her, don’t you?” asked Andrea.

“Donna Downes?” he blustered.

“Yes, Donna Downes.” There was no malice in Andrea’s voice.

“I like her looks. Show me a man who wouldn’t!” he said, pretending he had already dismissed Donna from his thoughts.

Andrea studied him brazenly. “Do you think Donna would make a compliant apprentice in one of your sex clubs?” she asked.

“From what I’ve seen, Donna Downes is anything but compliant,” he replied. “Ask Jimmy.”

“I’m asking you,” she said, and when he did not answer she continued. “What if the nefarious cyprian were
to submit to you?” She spoke in measured beats. “After all, Donna is already a slave—of the white man’s music. As a onetime master of that music, aren’t you already her potential master?” She paused and stared hard at him. “Think what a sensation your black slave would be in Poland, playing the Grande Polonaise, at the Chopin piano competition!” She let her words sink in. “Why don’t you call her, Master?” she intoned like a sultry sex kitten.

“Gladly,” said Domostroy in a purposely playful tone, “but if I do, can I count on you to keep Jimmy away?”

“That might not be too difficult,” she said mischievously. “The way the golden neophyte looked at me in the cafeteria, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he asked me to go out with him.”

“If you do go out with him,” said Domostroy, “just be careful of what you say! Remember who he is and that Nokturn, the company that publishes Goddard, is also the distributor for Etude, owned by his father. The music business is like a company town; “all these people are socially interconnected, and some of them might even know Goddard.”

“You still haven’t said whether or not you plan to call Donna,” said Andrea.

“Does it really matter?”

She waved her hand. “It just might. What would you say if I went after her myself?”

“Well, well. I wouldn’t have suspected you of being into women,” he said.

“Sexually, I can be into anyone, anytime,” she said ominously. “But she just better stay out of my way.”

“Out of your way?” Domostroy was annoyed. “If Jimmy likes you, Donna’s hardly an obstacle. And if he doesn’t—”

“Who said Jimmy? Look, I can tell you like her, and I don’t want that black clit hanging around you, is that clear?” she said. “Until I know who Goddard is, you and I mustn’t lose touch, must we, partner?” A thin smile of mockery played on her lips. “Even though you are back at the Old Glory, I want to know you are standing by.”

“As a one-night stand?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” he said, pretending he thought she was still joking, “that if I were Donna, I wouldn’t fall for you.”

Andrea sensed his mood. “But you’re not Donna,” she said. “It’s bad enough for her to be black, poor, and a woman at that. But she’s also insecure as an artist. And so our sooty dame is a sexual changeling—and a hot one at that. She’d do anything to be loved. To feel needed. To become equal—even if only in the eyes of her lover.” She was baiting him. “As a woman, I know more about that minx than you ever will. I’ll bet you anything I could have the black pearl in my bed in a minute.”

“As a man, though, I know more about Goddard than you do,” he said, restraining his anger, “and even if he’s a veiled Arab sheikh, I doubt if he would fall for a crude American dike.”

What Andrea had said about Donna triggered in Domostroy a memory of a woman he had known some years before, whom he had still not forgotten. He’d been at the height of his popularity as a composer and performer, and probably because his name and likeness were part of the steady media diet, a movie company had asked him to play the part of a Russian composer in an epic Hollywood film. Convinced that such an experience could only stimulate his imagination and be useful to his art, Domostroy had accepted.

Parts of the film were shot on location in Spain. At the same time that Domostroy and the other featured players arrived in Seville, a contemporary music festival was about to begin there, in the Hotel Alfonso XIII, a spectacular relic of Spain’s architectural past. Some well-known artists and composers would be participating in the festival, and Domostroy realized with regret that his shooting schedule—from eight in the morning until late afternoon or evening—would cause him to miss many of the major group and solo performances.

One day in the costume trailer, as he was dressing for his next scene under the watchful eyes of his barber, his
stand-in, his makeup man, and the costume supervisor, Domostroy noticed a young woman outside. He recognized her as a member of the prop and costume unit and realized that she was absorbed in reading a souvenir program of the music festival.

He had seen her several times before—she was pretty, with pale skin and delicate features—and he had been aware of her shyness, her fear of catching his stare. This diffidence put him off, and the woman, taking his aloofness as rejection, had avoided him. But he liked her looks and was particularly taken by her way of dressing; each day she wore a different dress, and each dress seemed to change her appearance, almost to the point of altering her personality.

Later, when he spotted her eating alone in the cafeteria, Domostroy sat down across from her and asked her which of the festival events she planned to attend. Pleased by his interest, the woman answered his question and then went on to tell him that what fascinated her most about the festival was not just the music, but the presence of so many composers. To her, a shy person, composing seemed removed from actual life, and she had always wondered whether composers might be shy people too. Were they jealous, she wondered, of the performers, arrangers, and other aggressive nibblers at their work who were often more acclaimed and better paid than the composers themselves? She had just read an article in which a French psychologist claimed that musicians, who are by nature absorbed by and lost in music, are also more capable of emotional and spiritual fusion than other people—of being at one with their sexual partners. She said that she had always wanted to know just what sorts of events or mental states it took to inspire a composer to write music.

In spite of her preoccupation, or obsession, with the mystery of how music was created, she said, she had never known a composer, nor had she ever met one socially. She hoped that the Seville music festival, so well attended by composers, might give her a chance to meet at least one of them.

“You’ve already met one,” he said, attempting to put
her at ease. “Me. Unless you think I’ve got a future in film acting!” he joked.

She looked at him. “Of course I knew you were a composer, Mr. Domostroy. And I know your music. It’s just that I met you under such ordinary circumstances!”

“Ordinary?”

“Well, yes. There’s no mystery in our meeting.”

He was taken aback by her frankness. “You mean there’s no mystery for you in our meeting now because you’ve met me before? Because you’ve seen me on the set of this movie?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” she protested, her face flushed. “It’s because you already know who I am, what I do, and,” she hesitated, “even how I look—under such ordinary circumstances.”

“You are still a mystery,” he said. “I don’t know anything about you. But I like your looks a lot. Tell me, do you really look any different under other circumstances?”

She hesitated before answering. “I do,” she said shyly. “I like clothes. I like dressing up—changing myself a bit.”

Taking a chance on what he had only suspected about her, he asked whether her preoccupation with clothes and costumes—as evidenced by the way she dressed every day—was the reason for her choosing a job with the film company’s wardrobe department. At this, she recoiled and blushed to the base of her neck, and he quickly followed up by asking her if she had ever tried on various historical costumes. She glanced around, as if in panic that someone might have overheard him. Then, breathing quickly and still flushed, she started to rise as if to leave, but he stopped her by gently putting his hand on her shoulder. He told her that he liked her and hadn’t meant to offend or upset her. It was just that, since the first time he had seen her, whenever he imagined her—was it the composer in him?—he imagined her in disguise, in different costumes. When the woman was calm again, she asked him what sorts of costumes he had envisaged and he said that it depended on his fantasy—at different times he might see her as a violinist, a nurse, a go-go girl, or a society debutante.