Augusta Played (32 page)

He was gone by the time Birdie came home. Birdie reflected bleakly how day by day her much-loved apartment was becoming emptier. It was a process of divestment of persons. First Sidney; now Richard. So soon? She knew he planned to go, but not so soon. Even the Fabergé was gone from the bathroom cabinet.

Birdie changed from her outdoor winter clothes into lace the color of new snow on a sill, stopping at the dressing table to check her face in the three-way mirror. Under the makeup, her cheeks were red from the winter wind; the tip of her nose glowed daintily, like an extremely feminine version of Rudolph's. She touched up her powder and returned to the living room. Everywhere, she thought, looking around—Désirée pillows. But what good were Désirée pillows to her now? Then she found the note on the memo pad.

CONCERT. Concert! Oh, she thought: Oh, oh! She thought how sweet and clever it was of Richard to leave it there for her, the way they had traded so many other notes; he really was a romantic something. TOWN HALL. Town Hall! That showed you it did make a difference when you had a classy contact like Richard: this would be the highlight of her career, the culmination, the top spot from which she could retire gracefully, knowing she had made it not only out of the chorus line into neon, but out of neon into the world of real art. Town Hall was the perfect place—close enough to Times Square to bring in the old crowd from The Joint, far enough away to take on the aura of classicalism and professional seriousness she was aiming for. She should have known Richard would do the right thing; he was a
conductor
, after all. Birdie thought about calling him and thanking him but then she decided to wait until after the concert; thanks would embarrass him, he being basically shy like Sidney and herself. Furthermore, she fully intended to blow his mind with the exceptional beauty and versatility of her audacious performance.

“Audacious” was Birdie's favorite word of late; Sidney had said she was audacious. Poor Sidney! Birdie wished him well and hoped that his thing was not giving him too much trouble.

For Birdie wished all the men in her life well, and assumed they wished well to her—making that assumption was exactly how she had always coped with her very deep doubt about men's intentions toward her. If some part of her said, concerning anything a man did: Whoa, this should be thought about, another part of her knew that that was absolutely precisely what should not be thought about. Was this note for her? But Richard adored her! He would not leave her in the lurch!
Of course
the note was for her.

She looked again at the note. FRIDAY. No time specified—that must mean ten o'clock. Ten o'clock was when every performance Birdie had ever given had begun. MEDIEVAL ASS. Some sort of association; maybe they ran Town Hall. It had a medieval look about it. BALAAM'S? Birdie couldn't quite figure out what that meant, though she thought she might have come across the word in
Time
magazine once. Richard's mind tended to drift anyway.

FRIDAY… That didn't leave her a whole lot of time. She'd better get her act together pronto. She put Mantovani on the phonograph, to get herself into a good semi-classical mood. Mood was everything, when it came to interpretative dancing. Then when she was in a mood to rehearse, she used the snow-white telephone to call her accompanist, Jock.

71

T
HERE
WAS
a hush in the city only a few selected folk were sensible of; for them, the city was holding its breath. The subway whizzed along its tracks, but silently. The automobiles hauled their passengers from street to street, but made no sound doing it. Planes took off and landed, trucks picked up and delivered, motorcycles did the dance of the weaver's shuttle through the loom of traffic, doors opened and slammed, dogs barked, people shouted hysterically at one another, and not one of these sounds violated the hush, which had a texture like that of a rose petal…as swiftly rippable as fabric unrolled from a bolt but, while it held, so smooth and simultaneously so various it was like a topographical map of the emotions, showing ups and downs in different colors, a hush in which even a heartbeat was an event felt rather than heard. It was a hush of anticipation. It was the kind of silence only great music is capable of, holding all voices tacit in a Grand Pause before the final
prestissimo
.

72

A
COLD,
CLEAR
December night.

Gus caught a cab on Broadway for Town Hall. She flagged it down with Tweetie-Pie, who was coming along in his cloth-draped cage for good luck. Her hands were full.

She carried Tweetie's cage by the brass circlet at the top with one hand, and in the other she had her flute case and her music.

Every star in the sky was as bright as if it had just been polished with a soft rag and a squirt of Pledge. Bits of mica mixed in the sidewalk pavement glittered like rhinestones in the frosty starlight. There are nights when all things blur into one another, outlines dissolve and what seemed to be one thing turns out to have been another; this was a night when all the edges were ice-sharp; Gus felt as though her mind could encompass the universe at a glance, pinpointing every item of interest in it, including her own position. She was wearing a long black skirt and a white Edwardian blouse with a high neck, long sleeves, and drapery over the bodice, and she had to hitch up her skirt as she climbed into the cab. On the collar of her blouse she wore a cameo brooch that her mother had given her, since her parents couldn't be present. Her thick honey-rich hair was swept up off her neck. She would have felt like a princess on her way to a gala concert, if she had not been going to give the concert. As it was, she felt, climbing into the cab, as though she were mounting the scaffold. Her mouth was ominously dry.

All day she had chewed her fingernail nonstop, until Norman asked her if nibbling cuticle could wreck her embouchure. She was thankful he was not with her now; she didn't want him backstage with her while she warmed up. Norman would arrive later with Tom and Cyril, and Dieter, who was nearly as nervous as she was. Dieter was bringing the synthesizer—a Synthi, he called it—for his piece; he was to wait backstage, in the wing opposite Gus, until time to join her on stage.

The way Gus dreamed her debut, the first half would go wonderfully. Norman would come backstage during the intermission to report that the Critic, the Critic with a capital C, was smiling. Bravo for Bach
et al
. Gus would have lost all her nerves by now; she'd be eager for the second half of the concert to begin, and when it did, she would sail through the Schubert. Then she would knock ‘em dead with Dieter's piece.

First, however, before any of this could begin, she had to meet with the pianist, and she wanted to get to the hall early and alone.

At the hall she played arpeggios and set up her gear, conferred with her pianist and fretted once again over the fingering in Dieter's piece. As the time approached, she suddenly became strangely sleepy; she felt altogether drowsy and couldn't stop yawning. The pianist said it was a natural reaction. “Nerves,” he said. The explanation was comforting but she wondered how she was going to play if she didn't wake up.

Somehow it happened—the people came, the lights dimmed, the moment arrived, all without her doing anything to start it or being able to do anything to stop it. From the spyhole in the curtain she could see Norman and Tom and Cyril in the front row. The Critic, the one with a capital C! Then, a row back, Richard. And Elaine, who had no doubt come to keep an eye on Richard. And two little boys who must be Jeremy and Jeff. And farther back, some of the kids from Juilliard. (Julie Baker was on tour: she had a student's typical luck there.) Some of Norman's colleagues. His blood-brother from Flatbush, Phil Fleischman, and Phil's girl, Dinky. Gus saw Mario take a seat in the back. It wasn't bad for a flute debut—about fifty or sixty, and the most important one was the Critic with a capital C. There was only one problem: How was she going to walk out there?

In the first moment of facing an audience, there is a sense of having stumbled into the wrong room; this is not your usual place, this is not where you are accustomed to be. Only a minor part of the world is a stage, and you are used to standing on the part that is not the boards. You feel disoriented—there has been a mistake; you, foolish person, are dreaming with your eyes open. Perhaps if you close your eyes, this confusion will be as good as gone, and space and time will reassert their normal roles. Gus felt as though she moved on stage through a cloud of utter stillness, an invisible mist that muffled her mind's perception of sound and distance—in short, a fog.

She raised her flute.

Her mind awoke.

As soon as she began to play, the sleepiness wore off and she became more alert than she had ever been in her whole life. This alertness was of a twinned nature. On one level, she was thinking only about what she had just gotten through, what she was playing right then and what was coming up that might be difficult to handle, and this level occupied all of her conscious mind; but there was another level too, not subterranean or subordinate or subconscious, but in a sense superior, a mind above the mind she consciously exercised. It was as if she had been dreaming for years—she realized at once that the past two years had lapsed in a kind of waking dream. She had been active, studying, practicing, walking, talking, but all of it had been only a preparation for this conclusion, for this wide-opening of all her intelligence to the one experience that counted, sound. Structured sound. All her life had been bent to the one task of negotiating musical notes as finely as possible, and to do that now was to redeem herself from all that was flat and static in her soul, was to recover herself from the alternative life of death-in-life, that world which appeared to be moving with such purposeful swiftness but which was getting nowhere and was in reality as still and lifeless as a computer. The mind undelivered from its death-dealing hostages by the power of love was not a ghost in a machine but a machine in a ghost, a figure with only a flickering semblance to the human shaping of sense and spirit that was what touched the heart and left you full of exquisite, nearly unbearable longing in the middle of the night when you dreamed, wakefully, of life at its highest pitch, its fullest expression.

Gus felt now as though each note she played was a drop of rain in the parched regions of the inmost world where humans are reluctant to go, being diffident and unbrave; and she felt as though each note was a star like the stars in the sky she had seen while standing on Broadway, and out of her flute, as she played, stars fell, tumbling onto the stage, red and white and blue and yellow stars, according to the keys she pressed. She was knee-deep in imaginary stars.

This was love, this lifting of the eyelids to sound, and for feeling this and for being this she would be ransomed forever from the black giddiness of despair, the silent falling down endless steep corridors without walls or exits. She would walk through the earth in a glory of concentration and everything she touched would sparkle, transfigured by her wakefulness into light-pulses of activity, of calling and welcoming, of showing forth and being glad. Every brook would be an arpeggio. Every tree would be a symphony, a choir with alto doves and soprano wrens and a coloratura nightingale. Every note played with perfect intonation would reverberate even to the time after time, when nothing else lasted, and shed a white light like the ash from a dying coal, a radiance that no future could eradicate because it existed not in the realm of the touchable but in the spirit, where what has been goes on forever by definition, by the purest and most irrefutable of definitions. For Augusta had made music so much a part of herself that it had become something outside herself—an outself, a laser-like projection of the spirit in a continuous curved line, a trajectory alphic and omegic, and this process is always a kind of prayer, a rendering of the self to the wholly other. It is like building a kingdom and throwing the doors to it wide open.

73

I
T
WAS
ten to ten. Birdie breezed past the guard at the stage door.

The guard didn't know what on earth a platinum blonde in a raincoat with a record tucked under her arm was doing entering Town Hall with a man in a raincoat and a phonograph tucked under his arm, but he was not about to ask. The fellow in the raincoat looked like the “after” half of a Charles Atlas ad, and the guard was looking forward to a peaceful retirement with the New Year. Night after night, for most of the nights of his life, this guard had sat next to this door, and nothing extraordinary had ever happened; if it was about to happen now, he fully intended to ignore it. The raincoats puzzled him, though. It wasn't raining.

In the wings, Birdie threw her raincoat off. She was wearing the costume she'd worked on for months, waiting for this night to materialize. It was a show-stopper. Newly freed, her tailfeathers sprang to admirable dimensions. Nonetheless, Birdie did not go in for garishness à la Ziegfeld, and she kept the rest of her costume classically simple—nearly nonexistent, that is, since the point was to display the evocative flow of movement, if not the flow of evocative movement. When you had a soul as artistically bright as a Klieg light, you did not need to signal the fact tackily. This was not a strip show, after all; this was art.
Not
high art; Birdie didn't fool herself about that, but it was darn serious semi-classical art, and she was going to give her one shot at it all she had. Reluctantly she comprehended that someone else was already on stage and that despite her frenzied last-minute rush she would have to wait for whoever it was to end. She took deepbreaths, trying to relax; she fluffed her feathers, getting set. Her transparent heels were four inches high. Her G-string was sewn of iridescent sequins, and her tittie tips, as Richard had fondly referred to them, were pasties in the shape of baby chicks, matching the beauty spot that adorned her chin. Birdie considered it vital that everyone on this most special of special occasions should identify her with her signature. It had taken her two hours to make up her face, coating each lash on the lower lid four times individually with beads of mascara and drawing new lashes with a pencil, gluing two strips of false lashes to each upper baby-blue lid; and now her violet eyes, which shuttered and opened with a doll-like click whenever she blinked her weighted lids, gazed curiously at the cloth-covered cage near the stage entrance. She whisked the cover off, and, whether it was because the luster from her platinum wig was so brilliant, like the sun rising over his swing bar, or because he heard Gus's playing on stage and took that as a cue to do his bit, Tweetie-Pie began to sing. In clear, loud notes he trilled, like a piccolo counter-pointing Gus's flute. “Oh,” Birdie said, clapping her hands, “isn't he cute!” She held the cage up by the ring at the top to get a closer look at the canary inside.