Heart and Soul (12 page)

O
bviously, we couldn't stay in our cocoon forever. Eventually, Mr. Balaboo showed up in the lobby and explained to the doorman that he wasn't leaving until we let him come up. His scalp was fire-engine red under that perfect part and his pocket handkerchief looked like it had had a nervous breakdown.

“Please sit down, Mr. Balaboo,” David said, and poured him half a glass of wine even though it was only eleven in the morning.

He took a tiny sip, and looked at us with a sigh. I had to check to see if his feet were touching the floor. He was so dainty you wanted to stick him on a shelf with your other china figurines. David was always being nagged to change management, but he stayed with Mr. Balaboo because he was a gentleman in a world of sharks. I had to keep restraining myself from kissing him on the head, he was that adorable.

“The calls are coming in so fast I can't keep up,” he complained. “You have to make some decisions.” Mr. Balaboo kept his eyes off my outfit, which was one of David's tuxedo shirts and a pair of gym socks. I went to find a robe. Then I stood in the doorway while they talked about dates with premier orchestras—Berlin, Montreal, Philadelphia, Cleveland—and offers of recording contracts.

The blizzard had cleared, leaving a blue sky that was almost painfully bright and turning David and Mr. Balaboo into black cutouts against the window. Antonio Vivaldi was doing his best to drown out the discussion with his winter music inside my head and all the time I was staring at the two silhouettes and thinking, Where the fuck are you, Bess? I mean, give me a break, they're talking Charles Dutoit here, conductor of the Montreal. I knew I would never have been invited to play with them without David, but that was exactly the way I wanted it. At least with David I had half a shot at staying conscious to enjoy the ride. By the time Mr. Balaboo left a couple of hours later we had a master plan and real soon after that I found out what it was like to become public property.

So this is what our days were like. We practiced together a minimum of four hours a day and then usually had a taping session at the recording studio for our first CD. David wanted me to move in with him, which I pretty much did, although it bothered me some. I'd been living on my own for a few years, and David felt like micro-managing every detail of my life. He gave half my clothes away to Goodwill and dragged me back to Bergdorf's. It's fine to be able to afford great clothes, but those price tags made me want to vomit. Also that manicured man who had looked at me like I was a Seventh Avenue hooker came sliding over to get my autograph on a store catalog. I almost signed it “Up your ass. Regards, Courtney Love,” but of course, David would have chucked me out the window.

So first it was the clothes, then he made me get my first physical exam other than the usual Pap smear, which I had always been religious about, that is, if you can relate religion to a situation where you lie on a table like a dinner plate with your crotch served up as today's special. Anyhow, David's doctor told us I was strong as a horse, which was no big surprise. The only thing was some fluctuation in my blood pressure, which probably contributed to the fainting. He gave me a prescription and told me to use it before my concerts, and I have to say it reduced the sparkles in front of my eyes. Or maybe it was the power of suggestion. Either way, I was happy.

David took charge of my diet, too. He thought I was consuming too much sugar and fat. I explained that Krispy Kremes were part of my body's essential building blocks and that I would start to go downhill fast without them, like with palpitations and unsightly hives and probably even gout. He bought me these dog biscuits from the health food store that I was supposed to eat for energy. I did it, but made him pay by howling like a moon-crazed hound. David hated ugly sounds.

Still, I was pretty good-natured about all this. I was so grateful to him that I would probably have swallowed cement straight out of the mixer if he told me to. Furthermore, I was crazed with love. However, there was that morning he overstepped. I was minding my business, brushing my teeth beside him at the bathroom sink, and David started in on my brand of toothpaste and how it was too abrasive or some such bullshit. Now, I had been a Colgate girl all my life, and there was simply no way anyone was going to malign my toothpaste. We got into a huge tug-of-war with my Total and next thing we knew, I had emptied almost a whole tube on David, decorating him like a birthday cake with stripes and circles. I have to give him credit for laughing.

Anyhow, the point is, it was a little crowded psychologically, suddenly living hip-to-hip with a personality as gigantic as David's. There was also the issue of money in that basically I was a kept woman. It should have bothered me more, I suppose. I know it tortured Angie to accept money from David, grateful as she was. But in my bones I believed that I was exactly what David needed, and every day there was some new thrill. Take, for instance, the morning we had just finished an exhausting practice session and we looked at one another across the pianos and both said at the very same time, “Bach never played anything the same way twice.” What
is
that? I never got used to it, that spooky telecommunication between us, and got delicious prickles down my back every time it happened.

There are lots of debuts you have to get through to make it in the music world, and some of them have nothing to do with tickling the ivories. Every time you talk to a reporter or a benefactor for a concert hall or even a lowly fan, you'd better know how to handle it. I didn't have a clue; I mean, me with the mouth. So what I tried to do was keep it shut and watch a master, i.e., David. We did a couple more concerts, one at Alice Tully and another at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a place that shocked the hell out of everybody by being fabulous because it was in—horrors!—Newark. Afterward we'd be mobbed backstage and even out on the street an hour later. Dozens of people would wait, hoping for autographs. I took my cues from David. You did a general kind of smile and only shook a hand if one got stuck right in front of your face. It was always risky—the chance of getting your fingers mangled by some enthusiastic cruncher. You tried to keep on with whatever conversation you were in the middle of, which for me meant nodding a lot, since half the time I didn't even know what people were talking about. I mean, couldn't a person just say, “God, you really touched me,” instead of “I found your music simply transmogriphobicalistic?” Usually, I figured it was supposed to be a compliment and said, “Gee, thanks.”

After the first few performances, I began to see some of the same people show up. I always kept tickets available for Angie, Mumma, Jake, and Pauline, obviously, but they couldn't make it to every concert. And I always saved Corny a ticket. He'd come in that green suit, carrying something delicious from the neighborhood—cannoli, fresh figs, once even a big smelly sausage. He told me he always knew I'd need those multiplication tables he'd made me memorize because one day I'd be making big money. Corny had good musical sense, often picking out the best bits of the performance to comment on. It made my heart ache a little to hear him say, “You did good tonight, Bessie.” I mean, it might have been nice to have an actual proud father hanging around.

There was Mrs. Edelmeyer, who thought she was a great concert pianist who had just never been discovered. She pretended she was my best friend, always winking at me and telling her companions things like “Bess and I prefer to play Bach with
emotion.
” It was sad, really. David found her beyond annoying, but I couldn't bring myself to blow her off. There was Vernon, a young man with a deformed mouth and liquid brown eyes that looked at me with such total love it always made me melt. He would take my hand—always gently—bow and make some shy remark about what pleasure I'd given him that evening. After a while I got so I couldn't keep track of which faces belonged to which country. Mrs. Edelmeyer really confused me once by showing up backstage in Milan. I didn't know
where
the hell I was.

Then there were the people with money and connections. David would introduce them to me and I would be charming, i.e., if they spilled champagne down my cleavage, I would make every effort not to use the “f” word. These were the types who shelled out enough money to keep the music playing year after year. I'm not above slinging the shit if it means tuning the pianos and paying for plane tickets so a hundred divine fiddlers can get to New York from Vienna.

The bottom line was it became clear to me pretty early on that the most successful performers were the ones who could pull off the self-promotion. You could be the most talented musician on the planet, but if you couldn't smile at the people with clout, you were screwed.

David started taking me out to dinner in fabulous restaurants but we still always ate alone, unless you counted the maître d' and the waiters who were always hanging around looking for tips and soaking up David's glory. I'd watch the staff in sympathy as they scurried around. At least they didn't have to do it on Rollerblades.

I was also now included in some informal jam sessions. Like when the Cleveland was in town, for instance, a half dozen musicians would troop over to David's after their Carnegie Hall gig and mess around. You'd think it would be the last thing anybody would feel like doing, but I guess music is a kind of sickness, like nymphomania. We'd put away a lot of wine and play quartets, mixing it up with a weird collection of instruments, sometimes a French horn standing in for a cello or a clarinet for a violin, whoever was around. It was a tremendous amount of fun, and I could hold my own in those situations since chamber music had always been comfortable for me. But the big test came later that summer when we were invited to a party in Southampton.

For those of you who don't know, for instance if you've been domiciled on a distant galaxy for your entire life, there are two distinct Long Islands. There's the part I come from, which is closer to “The City,” i.e., the only city, the Big Apple. (If a New Yorker lives in Great Britain, when he says “The City,” he is not referring to London.) People who live in Manhattan don't differentiate between people from Nassau County, Long Island, and from the neighboring boroughs and suburbs. We are collectively known as “bridge-and-tunnel,” which I assure you is not meant as a compliment. Then there's the other Long Island that includes the towns between West Hampton and Amagansett. (Montauk, my favorite, doesn't count because it's too far out and only has Dick Cavett. Or did. I think he sold his house for the price of a small continent.) You walk along Main Street in East Hampton and you might as well be on Madison Avenue. Same face-lifts, same bodies buffed by the personal trainer who gets to use the guesthouse twice a week, jewelry up the wazoo, and underneath the summer dresses, two-hundred-dollar swimsuits with labels that say, “Do not immerse in chlorine,” which pretty much rules out the backyard pool.

My experience with the Hamptons crowd was limited to years of waiting on them in restaurants. Some were obnoxious and cheap, some were kind and tipped generously. Whatever; they weren't my people and I was pretty nervous at the idea of mingling with that set out on the East End. Furthermore, David and I were invited for overnight. I assumed that meant we wouldn't be sleeping in the same bed or even the same room. What if they stuck me with some fancy Park Avenue heiress as a roommate? This prospect prompted me to ask David an important question. He was tossing clothes into his suitcase at the time.

“So, David,” I said, sitting on the bed to watch him pack. “Do those socialite women fart like everybody else or do they get their assholes done over? You know, to prevent the unexpected.”

He blinked and then started to laugh. “I wouldn't be surprised,” he said. “They get everything else surgically modified.”

Sometimes I said outrageous things just for the joy of watching David laugh. He was pretty tired of people being awed by him. But this time, he knew there was anxiety behind the raunchy question. He tossed a pair of cotton socks into his bag and sat down beside me. “Are you dreading this?” he asked, slipping his hand under my hair to find the back of my neck.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We don't really have to do it.”

I shook my head. “I'm gonna have to dive in one of these days. Might as well be near a good beach.”

I slept late and thought up enough delaying tactics so we didn't leave until after lunch. It was a perfect Saturday afternoon in mid-June. David suggested that I wear a new pale green linen pantsuit and stood surveying me like I was something he might want to buy in a store window.

“Let me braid your hair,” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

He came over and started fussing with it. I could tell he knew what he was doing so I sat down and handed him my comb.

“You're doing a French braid,” I said. “Does everybody in France get born knowing how to do that?”

He let his hands drop to my shoulders and I could tell by his voice that he'd gone somewhere else.

“David?” I twisted my head to look at him. He had an expression on his face like he was listening to the Schubert Fantaisie in F minor, so sad and beautiful. I couldn't bear to say anything.

“I used to braid my mother's hair for her before she went to bed. It wasn't often that we'd be alone together. Sometimes playing duets when everyone was out. Those were happy times for me…”

Did you ever hear a heart breaking? I knew that was what I was listening to so I turned around in the chair and put my arms around his waist.

“What happened to her, David?” I asked him.

He didn't answer for a second. “She died,” he said finally. “I had a few precious hours with her long ago, and now she's dead.”

I held him without speaking until I felt his body kind of stiffen. “No more gloom,” he said. “This is going to be a happy day.”