Blind Date (2 page)

“Not here? Where is he?”

“You must sit down,” pleaded the girl. Levanter sat down, and she moved closer and embraced him tenderly. “But if I tell you the truth about Frecky, will you love me just the same?” she whispered. She could no longer hold back the tears.

“Of course I will. You and Frecky are all I have!” exclaimed Levanter.

“Now you have only me,” she sobbed, “because Frecky — Frecky is dead.” She covered her face.

He was about to pretend to faint when the younger girl ran over to him and pulled at his sleeve. “I can play it better than she did,” she said. “I'm a better actress!”

Levanter smiled. “We'll see. I'll give you a tryout. Are you ready?”

The girl jumped up and down excitedly.

Levanter repeated his routine. “Frecky, Frecky, where are you? Where is Frecky, my dear little dog?” he exclaimed.

Under the critical gaze of her older sister, the little girl began to panic. She searched for words.

“Frecky, Frecky!” continued Levanter. “I'm home. Come here right away!”

She hesitated, then came closer, focusing her gaze on Levanter. “Frecky won't come,” she said tensely. “He's in our bedroom. Upstairs.” She stressed each word.

Levanter frowned. “You were supposed to tell me that Frecky was dead. Instead, you said he was upstairs. You forgot your lines.”

“I didn't forget my lines,” said the girl firmly. “If I'm your wife, I love you too much to tell you just like this that Frecky is dead. So I'm telling you he's upstairs. You'll go upstairs and find Frecky
there — dead! Now can I be an actress?” she asked, tears forming in her eyes.

Levanter attempted to distract her. “If you are going to be an actress, you must learn not to cry when you are not acting. People won't believe that an actress really cries. They'll think you're just acting.”

The girl stopped her tears and smiled.

“All right, you two,” said Levanter, embracing them both, “let's see whether you are good storytellers. Tell me about your mother. Maybe someday she will play with us. Start with her name.”

“My mother's name is Pauline,” said the younger girl. “She is a famous pianist. Ever since she was a little girl, my mother wanted to play the piano.”

When Levanter went down to the hotel lounge the next afternoon, Pauline was there. Her daughters were playing near the table. As soon as they saw him, they asked him to make up another game. Levanter promised to play with them after he talked with their mother.

He introduced himself to her, and she responded courteously, inviting him to sit down. After a short exchange about children, skiing, and resorts, he complimented her on her performance the previous evening. She thanked him.

“You're very talented,” said Levanter. “I admire that.”

“My piano teacher warned me that insufficient talent is nature's most cruel gift.” She laughed.

“My mother was also a pianist — and she used to say the same thing! Who taught you to play the piano?”

The children came over and begged him to play another game, but Pauline gently sent them away. He asked about her musical training and she began to talk about the teachers she had studied with. Levanter was only half listening, until he heard her mention a Russian name.

“That's the name of a professor my mother had at the Moscow conservatory,” he said. “In fact, she even told me she was his mistress.”

Pauline reflected, a mischievous smile on her face. “My professor was the only pianist in his family,” she said. “It must be the same man. He was probably about thirty when he taught your mother in Russia, and he was in his sixties when I studied with him in England. If he were my lover too, would I be linked to your mother?”

“Yes, and if I had been my mother's lover,” said Levanter, “I then would be linked to you.”

Her eyes met his, but she said nothing. Then she lowered her glance.

“It's too bad you don't play the piano,” she said. “You have beautiful hands — the hands of a pianist.”

Levanter's mother was twenty years younger than her husband and twenty years older than her only son. She and her husband had emigrated from Russia and settled in Eastern Europe shortly before Levanter was born. A tall, slender woman with delicate features, she had a fair complexion that contrasted with the lustrous black hair that billowed around her long neck.

When Levanter was in high school, it was his mother, not his friends, who arranged most of his dates. Any time she met a pretty girl — whether it was someone who came backstage after a recital to ask for her autograph or someone who was simply sitting beside her on a city bus — she would ask her to tea to meet her son. In each case, the young woman would report to Levanter later, his mother had been so charming that probably no one — not even a married woman — could resist her invitation.

If Levanter happened to meet a girl on his own and bring her home, his mother would praise the girl politely at first and then begin to point out her faults. One girl was undoubtedly beautiful and graceful, she conceded, but not quite clean. Another, she admitted, was elegant and pleasant to talk to, but not in any way physically attractive.

As Levanter's father aged, a heart disease forced him to retire early. He withdrew almost entirely from social life into the seclusion
of his room and his study of ancient languages. Levanter's mother, still young and attractive, continued to be active socially and often came to the parties her son or his friends gave.

Eventually, Levanter's father suffered a severe stroke and had to be hospitalized. Every morning, the nurse on duty telephoned Levanter's mother to report on her husband's condition. From his room, Levanter could hear the phone ring in his mother's bedroom and then, almost immediately, the sound of her anxious voice. One day, the ringing went on and on. Levanter jumped out of bed and, without even putting his bathrobe over his naked body, ran to answer it. He was picking up the receiver when his mother rushed into the room, her skin wet from the shower, and took the phone from him. She made no attempt to cover herself with the towel in her hand or to reach for the robe hanging over the foot of her bed. As she listened, she stood erect, facing Levanter, who had sat down on her bed.

She hung up the receiver and told Levanter his father's condition remained unchanged. Then she dried herself and lay down on the bed, just inches away from him.

Levanter was aroused, and he was afraid to stand up because he would be embarrassed if she noticed. He did not move. Attempting to appear at ease, he reclined a bit, only to feel her thighs against his back. Without a word his mother reached for him, and without a word he responded.

She pulled his face to her neck, her shoulders, then her breasts. She held him at her nipples, then slid partially under him. As he began caressing her body with his tongue, she pushed herself farther under him and gripped his shoulders, pulling his body upward. He ceased to be aware of anything but his need for her and entered her, eager and abandoned.

Levanter and his mother remained lovers for years, although she continued to find women for him. They were together only in the morning. By sleeping in the nude and making love with him only when she had just awakened, his mother never undressed especially for him. She never allowed him to kiss her on the mouth and,
despite her animated discussions of the sexual proclivities of other women, always insisted that he caress nothing but her breasts.

He never talked with his mother about their lovemaking. Her bed was like a silent, physical confessional: what happened between them there was never talked about.

Once Levanter left Eastern Europe, he could not return, and the authorities would not permit his mother to travel abroad. But when she had had several unsuccessful operations for cancer and all the doctors agreed that her end was imminent, she was allowed to meet her son in Switzerland. They had been separated for twenty years.

Levanter waited in the arrivals building and watched as the passengers came through immigration. He noticed a nurse and an airport steward pushing a wheelchair with a small, shriveled woman wearing an ill-fitting wig. This was not what he was expecting and he started to turn away when the woman raised a frail hand and waved at him.

He ran toward her. She embraced him and looked hard at his face. He kissed the hollow cheeks and loosely fleshed hands, trying not to cry. Her wig slid sideways. Levanter, pained to see that she was bald, held her closer. He commented on her perfume, and she was pleased that he recognized it after so many years. She whispered that she had met a beautiful young woman on the plane and had arranged for the three of them to meet for tea one day.

The day never came. The excitement of preparing for the journey, the stress of the trip itself, and the meeting with her son took all her remaining energy. On the second day in Switzerland, she collapsed. Her awareness waned and she began to fear that she would not regain it; she asked the doctor and nurse to let her spend her last moments alone with her son.

She gestured for him to lie down beside her, and he obeyed. The arm that reached toward him was covered with bluish patches around veins which had been pierced by repeated injections. Yet as she touched him, her face took on the indulgent transfixed expression that had been so familiar to him. She guided his hand through
the opening in her robe and when he stroked her breasts, her eyes glazed over, as if her thoughts were miles away.

Just before Pauline left ValPina, Levanter invited her to visit the underground lake of St. Leonard. The lake had been discovered when a huge boulder was displaced by a rockslide in an earth tremor that shook the valley just after the war.

When they arrived at the narrow opening to the rectangular cavern, the custodian, a young man in a sheepskin coat, seemed surprised to see them. Although the fifty-foot-deep lake was a popular tourist attraction, visitors seldom came to St. Leonard in the winter because the cavern was too cold. He sold them tickets, and they followed him into the grotto, leaving the daylight behind.

The narrow walkway was lit by dim electric bulbs. They reached the edge of the lake, but could not see the far end, a thousand feet away. The custodian untied one of the three boats moored to a rock and steadied it as first Levanter and then Pauline stepped in and sat down.

Levanter started the boat moving with one powerful pull of the oars. They glided noiselessly into the shadowy space, breaking the still water and upsetting the reflection cast upon it by the bulbs attached to the rock roof. In seconds, the lights of the mooring site disappeared as Levanter rowed around a curving wall of rock. The cave opened before them, revealing massive walls of limestone, iron, and marble. Elsewhere, nature surrendered these raw materials to man, but here they seemed appropriated solely for nature's own use. Levanter had the sense of intruding in the domain of an artist who worked hidden from the world.

A school of albino fish flashed in the translucent waters around the boat. The custodian had told them that salmon were brought in; after weeks of being deprived of natural light, the fish lost their orange coloring and turned chalk-white.

Levanter folded the oars, and the boat floated slowly. They were in the center of the cave, hardly moving. The light that reflected in the water seemed to be shining up from below the surface. Pauline's shadowed face looked unfamiliar in the strange half-light.

“If the mountain above us collapsed and cut us off here —” she began. She waited for him to finish her thought.

Levanter said, “We would just wait here together until they came to blast away the rocks.”

“For how long?” she murmured.

“A few days, I guess. Maybe more. It would depend on how much rock fell over the entrance.”

“What would we do while we waited to be rescued?”

“Talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“About ourselves,” he told her. “Possibly for the last time.”

“Then this could be our last talk,” she said, huddling down in the boat, drawing her long fox coat tightly around her.

“It could,” he agreed. “Still, this cave has brought us close to each other.”

The fish darted from under the boat, their white bodies glittering in the faint light.

“A baseball player I once knew,” said Levanter, “fell in love with a teen-age waitress in a small town where his team sometimes played. Soon the girl was in love with him too. Each time he came to town, they would lock themselves in his hotel room after the game and make love until they were exhausted. Some months later, he was bought by a major-league team and became a big star, playing only in large cities.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Pauline asked.

Levanter smiled. “This is how we get close to one another. Besides, you're a performer, like him. In any case, the baseball player didn't get back to that town for a year. When he looked for the waitress, he learned that she'd become a hooker. He went to the club she hung out at and asked her to come to his hotel room. She said she didn't like him anymore and refused to go with him. He thought she was teasing, so he assured her that he wanted her then as much as he had always wanted her — it was simply the circumstances of his life that had changed. Again she said she wouldn't go, and when he offered to pay her, she said no money
would make her sleep with him again. This time he believed she meant it.”

The boat bumped against a rocky ledge. Levanter set it gliding again. Pauline's attention was on him, but she said nothing.

“Later in the evening,” he went on, “the baseball player called the owner of the club. Using a made-up name, he claimed to be an old customer of hers and promised to pay double the regular price if she could be sent to his suite. He left the door unlocked and waited in the bathroom. When she knocked, he shouted for her to take the money from the dresser and make herself comfortable. Seconds later he ran out and locked the door. Once again he told her that he'd always loved her. She threw the money at him and started to dress. He put his arms around her. As she tried to struggle free, he reached into a drawer for his gun. She laughed at him. She died of two bullet wounds. After a short trial, he was acquitted.”