Page Turner Pa (3 page)

"No, no one's taking me out."

"But I came with my mother, and I haven't got a ride home. I couldn't—"

"That's fine."

"Not that I don't want to. Of course I want to ... only how would I—"

"Paul!"

"Well, you could take a taxi. I'd be glad to—"

He turned. His mother was striding toward them, flanked by the Mosses.

Instantly Kennington drew back, drew away.

"Darling, I'm so proud of you!" Pamela said, filling the air with her scent of cola and perfume. "You were wonderful!"

"Mom, please—"

He looked over her head for Kennington. From where he'd stood Diane Moss pulled a camera from her purse.

"Say cheese!"

"Cheese!" Pamela said.

A flash went off. For a moment its reddening waves blinded Paul, who blinked, signaled with his arm. "Wait!" he almost called. But the darkness had picked up Kennington, and carried him away.

He still held the music. What was he supposed to do with the music?

"Honey, are you all right?" his mother asked.

"Fine," he said. "Excuse me, will you?" And he went off to ask the stage manager where to leave the scores.

M
ISS OLGA NOVOTNA
(née Higginbotham), eighty-six years old with flame red hair, liked to claim she'd been responsible for Kennington's career. "This was almost twenty-five years ago," she told Paul as they drank tea in her apartment on Russian Hill. "I'd been asked to serve on the jury of the Chopin, and Kennington was one of the competitors. He couldn't have been much older than you are now. And when he performed—well, I was overwhelmed. It was as if Chopin had been waiting for this young man to be born. So you can imagine my astonishment when a few hours later, still aglow from his performance, I found that he had failed to make the semifinals." She raised a jeweled hand to her neck. "My back went up, Paul. I tell you, my back went up."

"What did you do?"

"I said to my fellow jurors, if you eliminate Richard Kennington, you eliminate me. I resign from this jury."

"And you walked out?"

"I never judged the Chopin again. Of course they laughed at me. Oh, they regretted it later, when he got the contract, and was famous overnight. Vindication is sweet, my dear! Never forget it."

"Who won that year?"

Miss Novotna shrugged. "Who remembers? No one that matters. Take it as a lesson, Paul. Mediocrity rewards its own, but talent will always out. Now play
Bydlo,
and remember, hard at first, then soar, as if the cart is rising into the heavens."

Paul played. In his mind he was Kennington—the young Kennington, from his first album cover—losing the Chopin. For weeks now, ever since his page-turning debut, he'd been trying to learn as much about Kennington (Richard!) as he could. Unfortunately information proved scarce. All he knew was what he'd gleaned from magazines and liner notes: that Kennington had grown up in Florida (teacher Clara Aitken, herself a pupil of Dohnányi); that he'd started performing at fourteen, made his first recording at sixteen ("one of the few piano prodigies,"
Gramophone
magazine said, "to survive the difficult transition from
wunderhind
to superstar"); that he lived (alone) in New York.

When his lesson ended, Paul gave Miss Novotna a rose that he'd brought in his satchel. "And now you are off to Italy," she said. "Oh, my dear, how I envy you."

"I'll send you a postcard from every city I go to."

"Italy! I remember it as if it were yesterday. The Pergola, the San Carlo." She shook her aristocratic old head. "Well, you are young, and you deserve it—and yet age has its pleasures too. Remember that as you make your way. I went through it all with Kessler. First they crown you a young king, and then you turn thirty and find you can do no right with them, and then when years have passed of struggle and disappointment, suddenly you find yourself an old man, and the crown on your head again. Horowitz went through it. Kennington may be going through it now."

Paul became brave. "Tell me more about Kessler," he said.

She lifted her hands in a gesture of questioning. "What's there to tell? The music says more. That was why I stopped playing. Because he needed me in order to write. And if I hadn't, you realize, Paul, there would have been no Second Symphony. There would have been no Third Symphony." She folded her white arms atop the table. "The feminists will say I had no business to do it, and I'm sure in principle they're right. And yet a world without that music ... well, it simply can't be imagined, can it? Whereas what contribution I might have made..." She laughed bitterly.

"But you were a great pianist."

"No, no. I might have been..." She closed her eyes. "Every great artist is a vampire, Paul. Remember that. They will suck you dry."

"What an amazing life you've had, Miss Novotna. It's like a novel."

"I often thought of writing one. And now Kessler's biographer sends me nagging little letters every other week. What was Kessler's opinion of York Bowen, Miss Novotna? Do you happen to have the program from the 1961 Maggio Musicale, Miss Novotna? Is it true that Kessler left sketches for an opera based on
The Good Soldier,
Miss Novotna? Oh, she bores me! But speaking of boredom, this old lady has probably tired you enough for one day. Now go, go to Rome." And she patted him on the behind.

"Thank you. Good-bye."

"Say
ciao
to the Campidoglio from an old friend," she called, while the surly-looking maid held the door open.

Out on the street, the sun warmed the top of Paul's head. He tried to absorb Miss Novotna's final advice for future use and contemplation; and yet the troubles of thirty can mean little to one for whom twenty is still an unimaginable horizon. Nor can the fate of a woman who gave up her career for love of someone greater seem very real to a boy who has never touched, never kissed, another body.

Well, that's that, he thought, as he climbed on the bus to the train station. The last piano lesson. The last bus ride home from a piano lesson. Very possibly the last time he'd see his old teacher, whom he loved dearly. At the thought of her dying, a quiver of loss registered in his bones. His heart broke a little. It was interesting. Though Paul possessed the full complement of emotions, most of them were as yet untested. Now, in a controlled way, he flexed the muscles of grief; imagined himself attractively mournful at Miss Novotna's funeral; planned the oration he'd deliver, the music he'd play: Schumann, of course; and maybe that Brahms intermezzo she loved so much...

At the station, as was his ritual, he bought a candy bar. Then he threw it away uneaten because candy bars were one of the desperate consolations of his adolescence, and his adolescence, which he had loathed, was as of today officially over. How interminable they had seemed to him, those years, a kind of endless Sunday afternoon of the soul, every shop locked and shuttered! Now he could luxuriate in the contemplation of past miseries from afar. He could bask in that calm that descends when one thing is over, the next has yet to begin, all is potential and thus harmless; yes, for the moment Paul sits still and tilting, a rider atop a stopped Ferris wheel below whom the world spreads out its unexpected symmetries. That was then, it says. This is next. There is no now.

On the train he got hungry, and regretted having thrown away the candy bar. It seemed extraordinary to him that the flight to Rome left in less than twenty-four hours, that in twenty-four hours he'd be in the air. And how remote this landscape of tract houses and chain motels seemed from the imagined vantage point of the plane! Through the sooty glass of the window, the lights of the houses seemed as pregnant with imminent loss as those on Christmas trees. He looked upon them with generosity. These days he was looking upon all kinds of things with generosity that until recently he had thought base and ugly. Just a week ago, for instance, having cleaned out his locker and taken a long-rehearsed final glance at the band room, he had gotten on his bicycle and pedaled away from his high school for the last time. In the dusk sky an orange lozenge of sun melted. Knowledge of lastness made the grim architecture almost beautiful. "Yes, you are beautiful, too!" Paul said to the high school, which regarded him with bemused indifference, hardly distinguishing his presence among multitudes.

It would have been pleasant if Paul could have stayed a long time in that caesura, that bountiful sway atop the Ferris wheel. Such calm is rare in any life, and grows rarer as one gets older; in some cases it never comes at all; in Paul's case it was destined to last only the length of the train ride.

When he climbed down onto the platform, his mother's station wagon wasn't there. Several other cars waited in front of the depot. Pamela's just wasn't one of them.

He sat on the curb. How strange, he thought. She's always on time. She must be packing. Meanwhile the last of the cars took on its passenger and drove off. Paul was alone. As a child, not being picked up had been one of his animal terrors. Whenever his mother had been late to fetch him he'd sat in the school library and imagined twelve-car pileups. Now once again he imagined twelve-car pileups, in which case the trip to Italy would have to be canceled, he would have no choice but to go on living in this country of his childhood: this country which, because he was fleeing it forever, he could forgive, but which if he had to remain in it, he sensed, would never forgive him.

He shut his eyes. To that demigod that promises (falsely) to fulfill the selfish wishes of the young, he prayed that his mother might be spared until they got back from Italy.

A few minutes later, as if in answer to his prayer, head-lamps bloomed in the dark. He recognized the familiar trim of her station wagon, stood up, climbed in.

"What happened?" he asked.

Pamela had on her dark glasses. She sat huddled over the steering wheel, shoulders hunched, her hair held back with a rubber band.

"Mother?"

She didn't move.

"He's not coming," she said.

"Who?"

"Your father."

"Not coming where?"

Switching off the ignition, she laid her head against the steering wheel. "God, it's just like him. Waiting until the day before a trip to spring the news."

"I don't understand. What's happened? Dad's not coming to Italy?"

"Your father is having an affair," Pamela said. "Is—has been for years. It all came out this afternoon. I had the feeling he's just been bursting to tell me. So now the plan is that you and I go off to Italy by ourselves like nothing's happened, while he and the woman shack up stateside, nice and cozy—"

For air, Paul rolled down the window.

"The bastard."

"Mom—"

"The fucking bastard."

"Don't say that!"

She beat her fists on the steering wheel.

"Mom—"

All at once she switched on the ignition, pulled fast out of the parking lot.

"Where are we going? Careful!" She had raced a yellow light.

Veering onto El Camino, she drove up to a motel, its red
VACANCY
sign brazen in the dark.

"Mother, we can't stay in a motel. I have to pack."

"He named the business after it," she said. "Because it was where they met on their lunch hours all those years. That's why he named the business Summit Printing. The bastard."

She started crying.

Through the windshield Paul read the words
SUMMIT MOTOR LODGE
in green and white neon.

He said nothing. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for this moment. Still, some instinct told him to reach out a hand and steady his mother's shoulder. She flinched it away. Probably she understood that if he wanted to comfort her, it was not for her sake at all; it was because he could not bear for her to show weakness in his proximity.

Finally she opened her purse and took out a tissue.

"Well," she said.

"What are we going to do?" Paul asked.

"What are we going to do? Go. You think I want to stick around here and watch? He's the past."

Paul shut his eyes.

She reversed out of the Summit Motor Lodge parking lot and headed into traffic. "Yes, in the end I'll probably be relieved," she said. "In the end I'll probably decide it was for the best."

Paul stayed quiet. A few minutes later, they were pulling into the familiar driveway. "Is he here?" he asked.

She shook her head. "He won't come back until after we're gone."

They went in through the garage. Under Paul's feet, the floorboards were reticent. The doors creaked. The kitchen kept to itself, like a beaten child who fears reprisal.

Suddenly he no longer enjoyed looking forward. He simply wanted to be in the future, remembering misery, instead of in the present, remembering having looked forward to joy.

Taking a dish of sugar-free Jell-O out of the refrigerator, Pamela sat down at the kitchen table and started a crossword puzzle.

"Aren't you going to pack?" Paul said.

"In a minute," Pamela said. "Honey, you know everything about music. Composer Maurice—"

"Ravel," Paul said.

"Ravel," Pamela repeated. "Yes, that's fine. Yes, that'll fit in perfectly."

F
ORTY SOME ODD HOURS LATER
, in his hotel room in Rome, Paul opened the letter his father had slipped inside his suitcase. "It's okay for you to hate me," Kelso concluded, "as long as it motivates you to take care of your mother. Remember, I won't always be her husband, but you'll always be her son, so make sure she doesn't do anything you'll regret."

After he'd folded the letter in eighths and stuffed it inside his jeans pocket, Paul opened the window. A soppy world confronted him, the air colorless and woolly in the damp. Nearby, in her own room, his mother slept off jet lag and grief. He himself wasn't tired at all, even though he hadn't been to bed in what felt like days. So he took his old umbrella and went out walking.

It was another long-rehearsed moment that would only come once: his first walk, alone, through the streets of Rome. And yet like most longed-for things, the Pantheon was simply there, sinking wonderfully into the mist. Inside, the rain seemed to fall in slow motion through the oculus. A camp of vagrants, complete with dogs and guitars and blankets, sheltered under the portico. He listened to the ground bass and trill of rain.