Heart and Soul (11 page)

What amazed me more than anything was that I actually had fun. I felt like we were all dancing together out there onstage, me and David and Wolfgang and Ludwig and even the audience. One big celebration of beautiful music. It made me want to weep. It made me want to make love, to anybody, to everybody, and especially to David. If I raised my arms from the keyboard, I believed that I could fly.

When we were done, there was insanity from the audience. People were pounding their feet on the floor and whistling and carrying on, total pandemonium. I stood beside David, bowing and laughing like some nut, and now I could allow myself to look for my group, not that it was hard. Corny, all dressed up, was yelling, “Bess! Bravo, Bessie!” and I didn't know then that he would never once miss a concert when I was in New York except when he had his angioplasty. And Max Goldberg, the hook-and-ladder man with a stammer and a talent for cooking—he was on his feet and cheering with a face the color of his truck. And Jake and Angie, Pauline and Mumma, Angie with her upper lip sticking out halfway to the Bronx from crying. I blew them kisses, and still the noise went on and on. We must have played six encores. The last time we came out onstage, David walked over to my bench and sat down beside me. The audience went silent like somebody threw a cloth over the birdcage. We played a duet, “Sheep May Safely Graze” by Bach. After the last notes had died away, there was no sound for what seemed like a long time. Then again, the explosion of applause and shouts. This is how the famous tradition got started, on that very first night. From then on, we finished every concert that way, side by side at one piano, with that beautiful quiet song from God.

Our manager, Mr. Balaboo, somehow talked his way backstage and he was waiting for us, worrying as usual. Mr. Balaboo's job was to worry and he was very good at it. The moment I became his client, he started fussing over me, whether I ate enough of the right things, whether I was getting enough sleep.

“Bess-dahlink,” he said. (I was always Bess-dahlink, like it was my name.) He held my hand in his tiny dried-up fingers. He looked a little like a monkey, small and wiry, with his wavy gray hair sliced down the middle in a perfect part. “That was an extraordinary performance. It must have taken a great deal out of you. How do you feel? Are you all right?”

“I'm so fine, Mr. Balaboo. I've never been so fine in my life.”

“I want you to start doing yoga,” he said. “I've hired an instructor for you beginning first thing Monday morning. It will help to keep you relaxed.”

I was tempted to tell him that all I needed to keep me relaxed at this point was a regular roll in the sack, but I just gave him a careful hug. Even I knew you didn't bear hug somebody like Mr. Balaboo.

“Are you ready?” he asked. “The lounge is packed.”

“Come on, Bess,” David said. “This part's a performance, too.”

The rest of the evening is pretty much a blur, but I still remember a few details. David pressed me through the well-wishers to the bar area of the lounge, where Professor Stein was chatting with some of the world's finest musicians. These people were the famous performers I'd always looked for in the first tier boxes when I talked my way into concerts as a student. They were all there, even Isaac Stern. But the funny thing was, I only had eyes for my old teacher. He was standing there with his purple nose like a beacon and his crooked teeth sticking out, grinning at me. I went straight into his arms and whispered into his ear, “I'll love you forever for sticking with me.”

“I'm so glad for you, Bess.”

Then he introduced me to the others, who were smiling at our display. First Mr. Stern kissed my hand and I got to tell him how much I appreciated that he hadn't let the wreckers tear down Carnegie Hall. He introduced me to the others, who were very flattering.

Shmuel Litvak, the violinist, said to me, “You must be pretty tough to put up with David.”

“Other way around, Mr. Litvak,” I said. “I've been a challenge.”

“Don't scare her off,” David said.

“Well, then, Mr. Angst, this beautiful creature must have reformed you.”

Before I could ask Litvak for details, the crowd shoved us apart and I caught a glimpse of my troop standing near the door. Corny, like an overstuffed sofa in his green suit, was gaping at Isaac Stern. Angie probably knew who he was, but none of the others had a clue. Max barely noticed me he was so busy staring at the film stars who were friends of David's. I excused myself and went into the tangle of Angie's, Pauline's and Jake's arms, burying my face in Jake's shoulder, smearing my makeup and crushing my dress. Once I got that out of the way, I kissed my mother.

“Bess, you were wonderful,” she said. “I'm so proud of you.” She looked like a million bucks. Maybe a billion, in a navy suit. She had a new short haircut, very chic.

“I can't take the credit for what happened tonight,” I said to Mumma. “Here's the person who can.”

“What did I do?” David asked, squeezing through to do the two-kisses routine on Mumma and Angie. I introduced him to Jake and Pauline.

“What did you think of her?” he said to them, but I noticed he kept glancing at Jake.

“She was like an angel,” Pauline said.
Uh oh,
I thought.
Here we go.
“But both of you,” she went on, “the music poured straight out of your hearts like liquid gold. It made me weep with rapture.”

Angie glanced at my face and stuck out her hand to David. “Thank you,” she said simply, and then said it again. I knew she meant thanks for making the impossible happen, for her, for me. But she was odd with him, I noticed. Stiff, and she didn't know what to call him. It was a weird situation, him paying her way at school. He'd recently given her a clothing allowance, too, which she'd refused to use. I had ahold of Jake's arm. It took me a while to realize that his elbow was trembling. I guess I had thought it was me.

“You okay, Jake?” I asked.

“I'm excellent,” he said. I supposed a certain shakiness was reasonable under the circumstances, considering his old buddy had just hit the big time. Still, a few quick phone calls were all the contact I'd had with him for weeks.

“We have to make a date,” I said. “I don't know what's going on in your life.”

“Sure, Stallone,” he said. But then David swept me off with apologies and that's the last I saw of any of them.

There was something different in the way David held me as we walked to the limo. His hand was firm against my hip, pulling me close, keeping our strides in step. A few people still hung around, wanting conversation, a handshake, some contact with our success, but David marched me through them all without losing his grip on me for one second. I could feel myself getting even more stirred up than I already was. It turned out that a successful concert was always sexy, at least for me. I guess I just didn't know what to do with all the emotion that came from the fear, the music, the applause—and my body's natural response to most strong feelings has always been, Let me throw off my clothes and fuck. After this first concert, I was absolutely crazy with sexual energy. Either David picked up on my hot vibes or he was in the same state himself. He didn't keep me waiting long. We tumbled into the backseat of the limo (smoked windows, thank you) and grabbed each other and started kissing like we were trying to swallow each other whole. We were supposed to go to a party on Central Park West but pretty soon David asked Phillip to turn around and take us back to the apartment. By the time we pulled up to David's building, we were both halfway naked and the top of my gorgeous satin dress was crumpled around my waist. We rearranged ourselves, said good-night to Phillip (or maybe we didn't), and got in the elevator. Inside there was a little old gent with a cane and a dapper hat. David and I were breathing steam. He held me in front of him to hide the evidence, and his erection was rubbing up against me through my dress. And all the time the dapper gent was passing the time about it being unseasonably mild for February.

“Global warming, perhaps,” David said. I vaguely remembered having had the same thought just yesterday.

“I'll say,” I agreed. “It's about a hundred and ten where I'm standing.”

We finally got to David's apartment but what we didn't make it to was the bedroom. He had the rest of my clothes off the second the door closed behind us. I tried to pull his off too but he wasn't in the mood to wait. So I was completely bare and he was mostly dressed and all it took for both of us was a couple of shoves right there against the door. I'd say that the first round was a record for speed. But we weren't finished by a long shot. We were both so crazed we still hadn't said a word to one another. We sprinted into the bedroom, where it was dark except for the lights from the city glittering outside the windows. David ripped the blankets off in one move and tossed me on the bed. Pianists have enormous upperbody strength, but I was still surprised at how strong he was, like I weighed no more than a puff of air. I spread my legs for him, holding them apart with my hands to open myself to him, wide, wider. He stared at me for a second, whispered something in French, and lowered himself on me. His body was long and lean and almost hairless. He kissed me everywhere, and now it was as if he couldn't stop talking, telling me how beautiful my breasts were, how long he'd waited. Now and then he'd lapse back into French and even my name sounded like music.

I don't know how we had the energy for that night, after the weeks of exhausting buildup to the concert and then the grand event itself. I guess we were just so totally pumped. We kept at it all night long, as if the hunger we'd been storing up all that time could never be satisfied. Instead of sleeping in between, we played the piano for each other. I asked him for the Bach Prelude in C because there was no more perfect piece of music ever written. I told him the way he played it made me feel like I was floating on clear moonlit water.

Sometime around three in the morning, after he'd made me come so many times that I couldn't stop trembling, he got up on one elbow, pushed my damp hair off my face, and said, “Bess, I love you so much I don't even think I'm sane anymore.”

I lay back and let the cool air from around the windows slip over my sweat-drenched body. “It's just because of tonight,” I said. “The concert.”

“No. I've been trying to talk myself out of it for weeks. So many dreams I've had about doing these things with you. You amaze me all the time. There is no one like you.” He traced my breasts with his finger, then lower to my belly and lower still, exploring me outside and in. I couldn't believe that I could possibly have anything left, but I could feel myself getting aroused again. Then he kissed me and said, “I want you to love me, Bess.” Even with all the evidence I'd been throwing his way, he still didn't know for sure.

“I do,” I said. “I do love you.” It made me wild to say it after all this time, finally, out loud. I started laughing and then he started laughing. Then there was a whole long stream of French with kisses thrown in for punctuation and we started all over.

T
he next morning, which was about an hour later, I woke up first. I lay there thinking,
Who
did you say gave a successful concert at Weill Recital Hall without passing out?
Who
did you say heard David Montagnier declare his love? I had to let it all sink in for a while. Then I got up and stood next to the bed and stared down at David. He was sleeping on his back with one arm across his chest and the other thrown straight out like he was reaching for something. I got about ten minutes' worth of uninterrupted staring during which I memorized all the details, including the two small scars by his left knee and scattered beauty marks just below his navel that looked like the stars in a constellation. As if my eyes were conducting an orchestra, Tchaikovsky's
Serenade for Strings
was pouring through me, leaving waves of skin prickles up and down my arms and under my hair. But then David stretched, clenched his fingers, and opened his eyes.

“I knew you were watching me,” he said. He didn't even sound groggy. He just woke up into a fully functioning person, not like me, who needed a portable IV of caffeine to get myself moving from point A to point B.

“Not,” I said.

“I was only pretending to be asleep.”

“That's why you were snoring loud enough to wake up everybody in Staten Island,” I lied, Staten Island being almost in the state of Florida, at least as far as people in Manhattan are concerned. He grabbed for me but I spun away. Not a chance he was going to get a kiss out of me before I'd even brushed my teeth.

“I'm borrowing your toothbrush,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “I'm at your service and under your spell.”

While I was in there, I poked through his medicine chest. Sometimes you can find out a few things about a person, but his was almost empty. Two containers of Advil for the typically stiff and sore musician. Half a dozen bottles of expensive aftershave and cologne, mostly unopened. I figured they were gifts from admiring lady friends, who were now irrelevant as far as I was concerned. Antibiotics with a year-old expiration date and another prescription I didn't recognize for something called Desyrel, take as directed. It pleased me that there was only one toothbrush, which I used. I pretty much scoured the inside of my mouth. Then I wrapped a towel around me and went out to find David making coffee in the kitchen. When I got within range, he snatched a corner of the towel and yanked it right off.

“Hey!” I yelled.

“Ah, you look much better now,” he said, and kissed my shoulder.

“I won't be naked unless you are, too.” He'd thrown on a T-shirt and jeans.

“I'm the host,” he said, working his way down my spine with his fingers.

“I thought you were in my service and under my spell,” I said, and made a halfhearted attempt to undo his jeans. I have to admit there was something sexy about being bare when he was dressed. We did some serious kissing. But I was weak from lack of sleep, no food, and a whole night of sex. I wrenched myself away and went to track down a shirt.

“Is that Jack in the photograph, with you in your bikini?” David asked. He had made a couple of omelets, which did not live up to my idea of French cuisine. We pigged them down anyway.

“Jake,” I corrected him. “Yeah, Angie took that one at Jones Beach.” I was flattered that David had paid attention, that he almost got Jake's name right.

“He's also in love with you,” David said.

It was hard not to laugh. “Jake's my oldest friend.”

“That may be so. But he eats you up with his eyes.”

“You're a madman,” I said. “Very sweet, but nuts all the same.” I didn't want to say Jake couldn't be in love with somebody he'd had a contest with to see who could save the biggest scab. But it pleased me to think that David was so dopey with love that he could imagine such a possibility. The corners of David's mouth suddenly looked like commas so I figured I'd better change the subject.

“What's playing in your head?” I asked him. “Right now.”

“Ah.” He closed his eyes. “Beethoven Sonata, Number Thirteen, E-flat. The adagio movement. And you?”

“Beethoven.
Moonlight.
Second movement.”

His eyes opened wide. “Not truly, Bess.”

I crossed my heart. “I swear.” It seemed too incredible, out of all the millions of notes written over the centuries, that our inner ears would be tuned to the very same composer. And Beethoven, who for all his tantrums could hand over such perfect moments of sweetness and calm. It made sense, I guess. Both of us were reacting to weeks, months, of trouble and aggravation, which had somehow evolved into this morning of quiet happiness. I went to sit in his lap. He buried his face in my hair.

“My old piano teacher, Mrs. Fasio, used to give me a gold star when she was happy with my work,” I told him.

“I'll be your gold star,” he said. The hands were wandering.

“My thought exactly,” I said.

We holed up in David's apartment for three days, with the phone turned off and the message machine blinking Morse code as in:
How can you possibly not pick up? We are the media calling. We are the world calling.
There was plenty of rolling around in the sack, but we also spent a lot of time at the pianos. It was what made us happy, it was how we talked when there weren't any words and we were sexually used up. Tenderness was Ravel and Mozart, passion was Beethoven and the Russians, and laughter was Mozart again, and there were so many others. Sometimes we played duets, mostly Schubert, so we could sit side by side, our bodies fused. It was all a discovery and it seemed as if we'd never get tired of it.

We didn't say so, but I knew that both of us wanted to ride this beautiful ice floe until it melted away under us. The world wasn't going to leave us alone for long and we knew it. But there would never be another time like this—our sensationally successful debut wrapped in the same few days as the birth of our love affair. When we were hungry, we called downstairs for food delivery. The newspapers appeared outside the door and when certain magazines were due on the stands, David got the porter to pick them up for us. This was more than enough outside world for us.

Two mornings after the concert, David lay in the tub drinking his high-test espresso while I perched on the edge and read him the good news from the
Times
Arts section:

Bess Stallone, David Montagnier's new partner, has the physique of the youthful Sophia Loren and the musical sensibility of the aged Rubinstein. The combination was enough to send New York's luckiest recitalgoers into transports. It can't be easy for any newcomer to balance the brilliant musicianship and crowd-pleasing charisma of Mr. Montagnier, but this young woman holds her own and more …

David started laughing. God, that happy sound I would do almost anything to inspire, except I was never sure exactly what was going to do the trick. The piece went on to rave over specific aspects of the program. It wasn't totally accurate, but hey, I wasn't about to quibble. Then David took his turn, reading to me with damp hands from
The New Yorker
, in “The Talk of the Town”:

For those who thought Valentine's Day was simply a strategy to subsidize the greeting-card business, think again. This February fourteenth saw the debut of a brand-new Queen of Hearts when Bess Stallone was unleashed on the music world at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall. As David Montagnier's new partner, this pianist dazzles the ear and the eye simultaneously, evoking the strapping sexuality and musical genius of the young Jacqueline DuPre.

“Jesus,” I commented. “It's hard to tell if it was the music or the tits.”

“Clearly a combination of both,” David said, and reached out to haul me into the tub with him. We made quite a splash.

But the next evening, the porter delivered
The Listener
along with our Chinese takeout. We'd gotten so confident that we ate half our dinner before we bothered to see if there was a review. Finally, I got curious, especially since
Ears
, which is what musicians called it, was the oldest and most influential of all the arts publications. There was a nice photo of both of us looking intense at our keyboards and a short article. I started reading it to David while he cracked open a fortune cookie.

David Montagnier has either lost his musical judgment or he's simply head-over-heels in lust. How else to explain his choice of Bess Stallone to replace the resplendent Terese Dumont?

I looked up at David. “Uh oh,” I said.

“Give it to me,” he said. “We don't need to hear any more of that.”

“Oh, come on, David,” I protested. “I'm a big girl. I can take it.”

He actually made a grab for it, but I snatched it away and went on. Look, they couldn't all be raves:

The most subtle thing about Stallone's performance was her dress, which allowed the first ten rows a tantalizing peek at what purports to be a tattoo on her left ankle. Not one for delicacy, she led Montagnier on a romp through the Ravel, trampling dynamics and nuance along the way. Montagnier backed her up in a slavish demonstration that only made more poignant the unforgettable memory of his and Dumont's sensitive collaboration on this piece nearly a decade ago in Alice Tully Hall…

David's face had gone white. “Bess, throw that away.”

“No, I've gotta get used to this kind of stuff,” I said, and kept plowing through, too dumb to realize I could have read it to myself later on.

The Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D major at least, showed vague signs of human intelligence, and certainly no one can quibble with Ms. Stallone's technical proficiency. Overwhelmingly, however, the impression remains that David Montagnier has traded in Audrey Hepburn for Courtney Love.

I looked up at David. “Ooo, that's pretty good. As it happens, I
like
Courtney Love.”

I jumped as David came over and snatched the magazine out of my hands. His eyes narrowed in the hunt, as if they were looking down a scope at the crosshairs. “August Nardigger. He used to review art for the
Times.
”

“Then he's probably trying to make a name for himself in music by being clever and nasty,” I said. “Anyway, he's entitled to his opinion.”

“Read under the lines, Bess. This is about social class. Audrey Hepburn, my ass.”

I smiled. “First of all, it's ‘between the lines,' and second, you can't say ‘my ass' with a French accent. It doesn't work.” I was trying to be lighthearted about it, but I could see that David was really fuming. I had never seen his face like this, all twisted into a knot.

“I'm going to put in a call to Balaboo,” he said, heading for the phone. “Someone needs to tell this snake you don't be so cruel at someone's debut performance.” He started to get up to make the call but I got to him in time to grab the phone. I held it in the air behind my shoulder and stared him down.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked him. It seemed a pity that this was how we were going to reenter the world. After a few seconds of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, David just sort of deflated. He plunked back into his chair. I sat in his lap and stroked his hair. “Don't tell me you've never gotten a rotten review,” I said.

“Of course, but this is different. This is your first…”

I kissed him to shut him up, a little one, then a bigger one. “Forget it, David. If I don't let it get to me, why should you?”

“I'm going to remember this Nardigger,” he said, melting just a little under the warmth of the kisses.

“We'll take out a contract on him, but can we do it tomorrow? We've got important business.” I kissed him some more until the muscles in his face relaxed and pretty soon we were back in the bedroom again. Then he fell asleep but I propped myself up and looked out the window. Snow had begun to fall outside. Snowflakes swirled and billowed into fantastic patterns against the gray light. I could hear heat rising with a cozy hiss from the radiators along the floor. The world was invisible and we were safe in bed with the blizzard dancing silently on the other side of the glass. I reached down and laid my fingers across David's wrist where his pulse was beating steady and quiet. I didn't ever want to move from that bed and all I could think was, Okay, God, you might as well kill me right now because it's never gonna get better than this.