Heart and Soul (20 page)

“You were happy I lost our baby?”

“I was ecstatic,” he said.

I was on him, fists pounding at his chest. He grabbed my hands, his face like chalk, his eyes sick and dark. “We were so close to perfect,” he said. “We were better than Vronsky and Babin, better than any of them. We could have made a contribution.” He held my hands up in front of my face. “These fingers are God's instruments! You dragged them through shit!” He squeezed them hard, twisting.

“You're hurting me. David, stop.”

But he only tightened his grip. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. Suddenly David started to shake. He dropped my hands and held his own up beside his face as if he didn't trust what they would do. I've never seen anyone tremble all over like that, so that it was visible to the naked eye.

“David.” I didn't dare touch him.

He didn't say another word, just gave me one more look with some tortured stranger's eyes and left the apartment. I never saw him again.

I
t took me a while to pull myself together. I don't know how long I sat on the floor where my legs had crumpled under me. Then my hands started to throb real bad. I didn't want to look, but I made myself and saw that they were already starting to swell. I got up, filled the kitchen sink with water, dumped in all the ice cubes from the freezer, and started soaking my fingers. I must have been thinking something, but I don't know what it was. I don't even know if I was feeling anything, except maybe shock. It was hard to stand there by the sink with my knees all wobbly. I finally had to drag a chair over because my legs just wouldn't hold me up.

Gradually, my head began to clear. It was just a really bad fight, I told myself. We'd get past it after a while. We'd lost a child. We'd lost our relationship, or maybe misplaced it. We were each trying to find our way through our own personal crises. On top of that, the concert life takes a tremendous toll on performers. Look at that two-piano pair from Belgium—nobody knew to this day what became of them. They simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Look at Moskvy and Nordstrom, Terese, wherever she was, and poor David Helfgott. What made us think we'd get off scot-free?

By then my hands had turned into blue lumps. I took them out of the water, wrapped them in towels, and stood staring out the window. The smell of lemon hung in the air. I thought about David's face and what I saw in it before he left—the rage, yeah, but also the terror and despair. I phoned Mr. Balaboo, which was quite a trick. I had to use my pinky.

Then we waited. Hours dragged by without a word from David. It got dark, and a cold November rain started falling. We paged Phillip, but he hadn't heard anything. Nobody had. At midnight, Mr. Balaboo called the police. Ordinarily, they make you wait longer before they consider somebody missing, but given David's prominence and what Mr. Balaboo called his “fragility,” the cops went into action. We insisted on complete secrecy, and got it, at least for those two terrible days.

They checked out the hospitals, the hotels, the bus terminals, the airports, and train stations. Finally, first thing the following morning, they tracked him to a twenty-four-hour rental-car office in upper Manhattan. He'd taken out a four-wheel drive after midnight and asked for a map of New Jersey and points south. I didn't believe a word of it.

“He went north,” I said. “Get Phillip.”

“You can't go anywhere, Bess-dahlink,” Mr. Balaboo said. For the first time in history, the part in his hair was uneven. It looked like jagged lightning across the top of his head. “You should be in the hospital.”

I'd refused to go for X rays if it meant leaving the place that tied me to David, even if the thread was stretched to the snapping point. “I'll pack my hands in ice and wrap them in plastic bags. We've got a cooler: Come on.”

I was wild to get out of there and follow David north to the mountain house. I knew he was there. The police got in touch with their buddies upstate. One cop car followed along behind us at a discreet distance.

Mr. Balaboo kept trying to get me to wear my seat belt, but then I couldn't rock back and forth. I felt if I didn't move, I'd go out of my mind. The one thing I did do was keep on popping the Advil Mr. Balaboo said I had to swallow to reduce the swelling. As it was, my fingers felt like they'd just been unloaded from the banana boat.

It was noon by the time we got to the road that led back to David's house. I could see tire tracks in the mud.

“It could just be the police,” Mr. Balaboo said. “They must have gone up there right away.”

I didn't say anything, just kept rocking as Phillip took us up the long drive. It had been raining there, too, and ice caked the edge of the track. There were patches of snow back in the woods. A couple of police cars were parked in front of the house but no sign of an SUV. I couldn't get out of the car. I started crying.

“I'll go on in, shall I, honey?” Mr. Balaboo said. “You just stay here and rest a while.”

“Oh, God,” I said. I swear the only thing that kept me from going nuts was the back of Phillip's head. I stared at it and for some reason it comforted me.

They were in there for what seemed like a long time. When Mr. Balaboo came out, he was holding an envelope, just a plain number 10. He got in the car and handed it to me. It had my name on it in pencil in David's handwriting.

“Is he in there?” I asked.

“No. This was on the piano.”

“You'll have to open it for me,” I said.

Mr. Balaboo slit it carefully along one side and handed me a piece of paper from a pad David always kept by the piano. He'd used it to jot ideas about the music when we were working.

The writing was so faint I could hardly read it. The press never knew about this letter. But there was one, and here is what it said:

Dearest Bess,

You made me completely happy. I'm just too tired. Forgive.

D.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, please. Oh, no. Oh, please.”

Mr. Balaboo sent Phillip inside to get me a double shot of something. Whatever it was, I guess it kept me sane. Only just.

They started dragging the lake, but they didn't find him. In the afternoon they located the SUV farther north, at the boat landing on Black Bear Lake. It didn't take them long after that. I imagined him on the surface like the candles he had sent drifting into the dark for my birthday. I imagined his face luminous in the night, floating, then dipping under and the light going out.

I don't remember a whole lot about the next few days. Phillip and Mr. Balaboo drove me back to the city and put me in the hospital. Phillip became my bodyguard. He was fierce about keeping the media and almost everybody else away from me. Angie and Jake came. Pauline and Mumma with—believe it or not—Dutch, in one of those handicapped vans. My father didn't say much, just hung out in the corner of the room, reading the cards on my flowers and looking uncomfortable. Professor Stein brought me chocolates and sat by my bed and let me cry. He also showed me an article that said Mr. Balaboo told some nosy reporter who was looking for dirt on David to “fuck off.” I didn't believe it but Professor Stein swore it was true.

When I got out, I went straight to my old apartment on the West Side. I just couldn't face those two pianos at David's. I was so grateful that I'd kept my little hole all those months, and even more grateful that I'd never had the phone service switched off. There were three messages: (1) a solicitation for the Friends of Carnegie Hall; (2) Angie saying Oops, she'd dialed the old number by mistake; and (3) David playing the Bach Prelude in C major that he knew I loved more than anything. He didn't say a word. I knew he had sat at the piano in the woods and told me everything he felt in his heart the best way he knew how. I saved that tape, of course, but no one else will ever hear it.

M
y baby was gone, David was gone, and now the music, too. They had taken it with them, leaving silence inside my head for the first time in my life. I was nothing, a blank, a zero with eyes. I sat inside my apartment with the lights out and the shades drawn and stared at the television with the volume off. But only cooking shows—everything else freaked me out.

The dead zombie part was the easiest to bear. But then the pain would hit like a car crash. I held a pillow to my chest to keep from splitting open. I was losing pieces of myself, like a spider who was having its legs plucked off one by one.

I did some pretty crazy shit during those first weeks. For instance: My hands were slowly healing. You would think I'd have been relieved, but I couldn't stand that the bruises were disappearing. They were where David had touched me last, and sick as it sounds, I never wanted them to go away. So one day when I didn't think I could take the misery one more second, I grabbed the Manhattan yellow pages and slammed them down on my left hand. It felt like fire was shooting up my arm. I sat there crying with relief that some other agony was giving grief a contest.

I was lucky that Jake showed up just then. I didn't answer the door, but Angie had given him a key and he let himself in.

“What the fuck, Stallone?” he said, taking in the book and my ugly hand.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Jesus, Bess, your fingers. Couldn't you think of something else to trash?”

He went to the freezer for ice but there wasn't any. So then Jake just picked me up and carried me out. On the way to the emergency room, he called Mr. Balaboo on his cell phone. I wasn't even curious how Jake had his number, but I found out later that there was a kind of network in operation. Mr. Balaboo showed up with the doctor who'd been treating my hands. The upshot was that they wanted to put me in the hospital, i.e., mental ward. I knew I'd better come up with some instant stability or I was doomed.

“I lost it, I admit it,” I said. “It won't happen again.”

“How do we know that?” Mr. Balaboo asked.

“Because I'm promising.”

“You're promising you won't pull this exact trick and I believe you,” Jake said, “but what else have you got up your sleeve?” He knew me so well.

“What do I have to do to stay out of here?” I asked.

The doctor was one of those glamorous orthopedic types who treats the New York teams. He gave me his stern look, which I guess was supposed to intimidate me but it only made me want to pop him in the nose. Since I didn't wither properly, he addressed the rest of his comments to Mr. Balaboo as if I wasn't in the room.

“Does she have anyone who can stay with her?”

“We can hire someone,” he said.

I shook my head at Jake. No way. So he jumped in and saved my ass. “Sure,” Jake said. “Her sister can. And I can. And her mother. We'll rotate. It'll work out.”

I started crying again, but nobody seemed to think that that called for an immediate injection of Thorazine. Not that I would have minded.

They sent me home. Jake stayed overnight on the tiny couch with his feet hanging off the end. Pauline was a peach for loaning him out and volunteered to take a turn. I just didn't think I could cope with the tragic attitude.

So for the next three weeks, Angie and Jake and Mumma hung out with me in that dark hole. Mumma was the hardest, but I do remember something she said that stuck with me, in the dark when we were falling asleep, which was maybe when it was easier to confide things.

“I think I know the way you felt about David,” she said. “The love of your life, that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering where this was going.

“Your father took my breath away.”

I didn't know what to say. The way she said it was like it was in the past, but I didn't really want to know. I guess we both fell asleep. Mumma wanted so desperately to make it all better that she kept making suggestions. But I didn't want to go to a concert or a movie or back to Rocky Beach to see Dutch or the guys at the firehouse. I didn't want anyone coming to visit. She even offered to take me to mass at St. Patrick's. It tired me to have her around even though she meant well, but it just wasn't fair to ask for more time from Angie and Jake.

They were perfect. Angie was a gentle, loving shadow, holding my hand, slipping me a plate of food without fuss, and climbing into bed with me when she heard me wake up crying in the night. She never initiated a conversation, never turned on the TV, just waited for signals from me. She washed my hair, she rubbed my back, she taped my hands, she lived up to her name and then some.

Jake was more difficult, but looking back I realize he was nudging me out of my miserable rut. He didn't ever ask if I wanted to do something. He just announced.

“Put on your jacket, Stallone. We're going to see the sky.” Having no choice made it easy. I obeyed. We would go to the park and watch the jet trails. I remember once the sun was going down and there were pink streaks in the sky. Pink against blue. Jake saw the way I was staring.

“What?” he asked.

“Blue for boy, pink for girl,” I said.

“You had a double whammy, Stallone. Everything's going to remind you.”

“Forever?”

“No,” he said. “For a while.”

I remembered how devastated he was when he lost his mother. “Your mom was one cool dude, Jake,” I said.

“You got that right.”

“You still miss her?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Does it still feel like you're going totally crazy?”

“No,” he said. “That passes.”

“What am I supposed to do to help it along?”

“You're doing it. One foot in front of the other.”

The pink had deepened into soft purple. “Thanks,” I said, and leaned my head against his shoulder.

“No sweat. Come on. We're going for pizza.”

“In a restaurant?” I asked, panicked.

“You can do it.”

So I did it.

My baby-sitters had stayed with me for a month when it was decided that I wasn't going to do any more finger crushing. Although I hadn't gained any of the twenty-five pounds back, at least I'd stopped losing weight. I was slowly weaned, with members of the trio gradually leaving me alone for longer stretches. The big event was getting through a night on my own. The phone rang a lot. Once I had Angie on the line when Mumma called. Then the second I hung up from them, Jake called. It made me laugh, which I think was the first time since David died.

“Is that a laugh?” Jake asked.

“I guess so,” I said.

After we hung up, I figured he'd phone the other two right away to tell them.

Mr. Balaboo and Professor Stein came to me after four months to ask if I would like to start playing again. The great Dr. Glamour-puss said it was okay, they explained. In fact, that it would be good therapy.

“No,” I said.

“Your fingers need the exercise,” Professor Stein said. I let him smoke his cigars in the apartment and the place was filled with a blue fog.

“There have been many inquiries,” Mr. Balaboo said. “People want to hear you.”

“You guys been rehearsing this or what?”

Mr. Balaboo looked a little sheepish but not Professor Stein. “Just exactly where do you see music fitting into your life, Bess?” he asked.

“It doesn't.”

“Well, that's a tragic waste,” he said.

“The world will get along just fine without Bess Stallone's stirring rendition of the
Waldstein
Sonata,” I said.

“Get along, yes,” Mr. Balaboo said. “The world can get along without a lot of things—starlight, Picasso, perhaps even chocolate…”

I didn't answer.

“Forget it,” Professor Stein said to Mr. Balaboo.

“For now,” Mr. Balaboo said.

I broke out a bottle of wine and that cheered them up. Mr. Balaboo smoked another cigar and I even took a puff. Lung cancer didn't scare me. Living did.

My first day out on my own, I walked down to Tower Records to pick up a CD I'd ordered. It was David's first and had only been released in Europe, so it took a while to locate it. Otherwise, I had them all. I'd somehow lost track of the fact that Christmas was two weeks away. There were so many people on the streets and so much noise. Inside the store, they were playing holiday selections by somebody singing half a tone flat. It was like she was dragging her fingernails across my skull. When I got out of there, I was totally wiped out. A cab pulled up to the corner; so I slid in.

The second I sat down, we got rear-ended. Not a huge jolt, but enough to send me banging into the seat partition. The driver spewed some choice words in Spanish and got out to check the damage. I got out, too, and stood on the corner trying to get my knees to stop quaking. There was an African-American man waiting for the light, holding the hand of a little girl who was maybe his granddaughter.

“You okay?” he asked.

“A little shook up, but okay,” I said. I'm Cinder-fuckingella, I wanted to tell him, and my prince wasn't supposed to die.

He gave me a sympathetic smile and then winked to tell me he didn't quite believe me. It was the wink that did it. Kindness—it was a killer. I turned away to hide my crumbling face and started up Broadway. I couldn't wait to get back inside my cocoon.