Stolen Pleasures (4 page)

She went up the stairs and into her room, closing the door. She sat on the bed, unable to stop the trembling that became even more severe in the large, humble bedroom, unable to believe that he would resort to trickery, this man who had spent so many years
revealing to others the trickery of their minds. She heard him in the hallway and in his room, fussing sounds, discordant with his familiar presence. He knocked, waited a moment, and opened the door.

He had removed his shirt, and the lamp shone on the smooth flesh of his long chest, on flesh made slack by the downward pull of age. He stood in the doorway, silent, awkward, as if preoccupied with more important matters than this muddled seduction.

“We ought at least to say good night,” he said, and when she complied he remained where he was, and she knew that he wanted her to glance up again at his naked chest to see how young it appeared and how yearning. “My door remains open,” he said, and left hers open.

She closed the door, undressed, and lay down, and in the dark the call within herself to respond to him flared up. She imagined herself leaving her bed and lying down beside him. But, lying alone, observing through the narrow panes the clusters of lights atop the dark mountains across the channel, she knew that the longing was not for him but for a life of love and wisdom. There was another way to prove that she was a loving woman, that there was no fatal flaw, and the other way was to give herself over to expectation, as to a passion.

 

RISING EARLY, SHE found a note under her door. His handwriting was of many peaks, the aspiring style of a century ago. He likened her behavior to that of his first wife, way back before they were married, when she had tantalized him so frequently and always fled. It was a humorous, forgiving note, changing her into that other girl of sixty years ago. The weather was fair, he wrote, and he was off
by early bus to his mountain across the bay, there to climb his trails, staff in hand and knapsack on his back.
And I still love you.

That evening he was jovial again. He drank his blackberry wine at supper; sat with her on the sofa and read aloud from his collected essays,
Religion and Science in the Light of Psychoanalysis,
often closing the small, red leather book to repudiate the theories of his youth; gave her, as gifts, Kierkegaard's
Purity of Heart
and three novels of Conrad in leather bindings; and appeared again, briefly, at her door, his chest bare.

She went out again, a few nights later, to visit a friend, and he escorted her graciously to the door. “Come back any time you need to see me,” he called after her. Puzzled, she turned on the path. The light from within the house shone around his dark figure in the rectangle of the open door. “But I live here for now,” she called back, flapping her coat out on both sides to make herself more evident to him. “Of course! Of course! I forgot!” he laughed, stamping his foot, dismayed with himself. And she knew that her presence was not so intense a presence as they thought. It would not matter to him as the days went by, as the years left to him went by, that she had not come into his bed.

On the last night, before they went upstairs and after switching off the lamps, he stood at a distance from her, gazing down. “I am senile now, I think,” he said. “I see signs of it. Landslides go on in there.” The declaration in the dark, the shifting feet, the gazing down, all were disclosures of his fear that she might, on this last night, come to him at last.

The girl left the house early, before the woman and her son appeared. She looked for him through the house and found him at a
window downstairs, almost obscured at first sight by the swath of morning light in which he stood. With shaving brush in hand and a white linen hand towel around his neck, he was watching a flock of birds in branches close to the pane, birds so tiny she mistook them for fluttering leaves. He told her their name, speaking in a whisper toward the birds, his profile entranced as if by his whole life.

The girl never entered the house again, and she did not see him for a year. In that year she got along by remembering his words of wisdom, lifting her head again and again above deep waters to hear his voice. When she could not hear him anymore, she phoned him and they arranged to meet on the beach below his house. The only difference she could see, watching him from below, was that he descended the long stairs with more care, as if time were now underfoot. Other than that, he seemed the same. But as they talked, seated side by side on a rock, she saw that he had drawn back unto himself his life's expectations. They were way inside, and they required, now, no other person for their fulfillment.

T
HE BOY BESIDE him was full of gin and beer and wine and the pleasant memory of himself at the party, the great guitarist at seventeen, and he had no idea where he was until he was told to get out. His profile with that heavy chin that he liked to remind everybody was Hapsburg hung openmouthed against the blowing fog and the cold jet-black ocean of night.

Berger had no intention of forcing him out, but to command him to get out was the next best way of impressing his disgust on his passenger. “I asked you when you got in, friend, if you had money for the bridge toll and you haven't answered me yet. You want to get over this bridge tonight and into your little trundle bed, you look for that two bits because I'm sick of paying your way wherever we go and getting kicked in the fact for a thank-you. What the hell did I hear you say to Van Grundy? That you got bored by musicians because all they could talk about was music?” His breath smelled of cheese and garlic from all the mounds of crackers and spread he had eaten, not the kind of breath to accuse anybody with.
“And that meant me, of course, because I'm what's known as your constant companion, that meant old ignoramus Berger. For a guy who's got all the famous relatives you're always bragging about—big dam builders, big mummy diggers, big marine commandants—you ought to be able to come up with a miserable nickel once in a while.” He held out his hand for the coins that David was searching for and found.

“What the hell.” David gripped his guitar between his knees again, settling back uncomfortably. “You sore because they wanted me to play?”

He shifted into low to start the car again. “You don't know what anybody wants, you're too busy playing all night.”

The boy waited a minute, then sprang the big psychological question with a rare timidity in his voice: “You sore because it's me that's going to play for Torres tomorrow?”

“Jaysus Christ, I'm sittin' next to Freud here!” he cried, disgusted.

They went on in silence over the long bridge. The deputy at the toll gate reached out his hand to take the coins that Berger pressed into it with his gray-gloved fingers, suede driving gloves to keep his hands warm so that he could commence to play soon after entering a room, but David wore no gloves, came with cold, thin hands into a room and played slickly, charmingly, his first number and afterward blew on his fingers to impress upon the audience how cold they were still and how much they had accomplished even so.

Along under the neons of the motels, assured by the rainbow lights and the traffic signals that the time had passed for his abandonment on the bridge, the boy spoke again, “Listen yourself, I'm
not the one who's destroying himself, you worry about yourself. Some day you're going to explode, a hundred different colors and a sonic boom. Big little David, folks will say for miles around, got too big for himself. God, you slaughtered that Purcell. If you play that for old Torres he'll ask for a change of rooms after you're gone.” He unloaded now all the complaints accumulated against the boy—criticism of his teacher-companion that David made to friends: “Berger could be the best, good as Tomas Torres, but he doesn't look the part, hasn't got the urbanity, short you know, big shoulders, like a wrestler's that don't fit him, big face, and the way he telegraphs his mistakes to you before he makes them, like ‘this hurts me worse than you, dear audience.' But the best, really the best, could have been the best, but came to it too late, a jazz musician until he was thirty, still got the mannerisms of a jazzman in a nightclub, smiling at the audience, smiling at himself. You can't do that with a classic guitar. He's good all right but he should have come to it at eighteen, twenty, then he would have been great.”

“Things come back to me!” Berger was shouting. “For a man of few friends, like you say I am, they come back to me!”

He drew the car to the curb, leaned across the boy to open the door. “Get out here, man. From here it's just a mile to your mother's place. I'd take you there but it's a mile out of my way.”

“Under the green-blue motel neon, David stepped out to the sidewalk, knocking his guitar case against door and curb and hydrant.

“You're doing it to yourself,” said David again, warningly.

“You keep knocking that guitar around like a dumb bastard with a normal IQ!” he bellowed, slamming the door.

He went through the amber lights of intersections as if they were red and he was drunk. Somebody else on the verge of fame, somebody else awaiting the encircling arm of the already great, sent him, Berger, over the edge, down into the abyss of his own life. It was not fame he wanted for himself, he would never have it now, anyway, at thirty-seven, with all the faults that David had so meticulously listed for everybody. Not that, but what? The mastery, the mastery, play without telegraphing the errors, play without the errors, play with the mastery of the great yet indifferent to fame if it came. Palermo was nothing, that mecca of all the world's guitar students where Torres, old Torres of the worldly jowls, laid his arms across the jaggedy, humped young shoulders of the most promising. The photos of the students in the guitar magazines made him laugh. They came from everywhere to study under Torres at the accademia, they stood around the silk-jacketed Tommy like fool disciples: a middle-aged woman with a Russian name; a young curly-locks guy from Brazil, making hot amorous eyes at the camera; a stiff-elbowed kid from England who looked as if he stuttered; and the girls with their big naïve eyes and their skirts full to make it easier to part their legs for the correct position of the guitar. He saw them gathering in the hallways of some musty building in Palermo after school, saw them descend the street into the town with the stiff-swinging walk of youth attempting youth, and he had no desire to be among them, to be twenty again and among them. The older he got the less he wished for a new beginning and the more he wished for a happy ending. But sometimes, as in these last few weeks, the wish for that beginning laid him low again like a childhood disease.

Before his apartment house he let the car door swing heavily open and lifted his guitar case from the back seat. The slam of the door reminded him that there was something else in the car that ought to be brought in, but unable to recall what it was he concluded that it was nothing stealable and went up the stairs in his neat, black, Italian-style moccasins, wishing that he were lurching and banging against walls. Not since he fell down somebody's stairs six years ago, cracking a vertebra and breaking his guitar in its case, had he taken a drink, not even wine, and he had taken none tonight though everybody was awash around him, but he felt now that drunkenness again, that old exaltation of misery. Sick of black coffee after a dozen cups through the night, he found a cupful in a saucepan, heated it to boiling, poured it into a mug, and willfully drank, scalding the roof of his mouth. He opened his mouth over the sink and let the black coffee trickle from the corners, too shocked to expel it with force, bleating inside: To hell with all the Great, the Near Great, the Would-be Great, to hell with all the Failures.

From the windowsill he took his bottle of sleeping pills, put two on his tongue, drank down half a glass of water. He dropped his tie on the kitchen table, his jacket on the sofa, stepped out of his moccasins in the middle of the living room. He put on his tan silk pajamas (Who you fooling with this show of opulence?) and crawled into his unmade bed. At noon he was wakened by a street noise and drew the covers over his ear to sleep until evening, until the boy's interview with the Great Tommy was over.

At four, moving through the apartment in his bare feet, in his wrinkled pajamas, he tore up the memory of himself that early
morning as he had once, alone again, torn up a snapshot of himself that someone had thrust upon him—a man with a heavy face in the sun, hair too long and slick, a short body and feet small as a dandy's. For with no reminders he was the person he fancied himself. But, dumping coffee grounds into the sink, he realized suddenly that the jawing he had given the boy had been given as a memento of himself, something for the boy to carry around with him in Palermo, something to make him feel closer to Berger than to anybody else, because Berger was the man who had told him off, a jawing to make him love and hate Berger and never forget him, because it is impossible to forget a person who is wise to you. If the boy never got to first base as a guitarist, then the jawing lost its significance, the triumph was denied to Berger. It was on David's fame that he, Berger, wanted to weigh himself. Jaysus, he wailed, what kind of celebrity chasing is that? He smelled of cheese and bed and failure, sitting at the table with his head in his hands. The interview was over an hour ago and now he would hear from friends the words of praise, the quotations from Torres, as if these friends of David had been there themselves to hear the words drop like jewels from his lips, all of them closer to God because they were friends of him who sat up there in God's hotel room, playing music to enchant God's ears.