Pinball (11 page)

“A few weeks later a second letter arrived, and this time, with uncanny insight, she speculated as to what sort of musical composition I was working on—its length, its mood, my sources of inspiration for it—and everything she said was mystifyingly close to actual fact. Again the letter was signed only with a phrase of Chopin’s—a different one—and now I knew, this was by design, not oversight.

“Other letters followed—all signed with Chopin phrases—in which she continued to speak about my work, but also included more and more reflections about her own feelings and desires, and in time the letters became specific regarding her sexual thoughts and fantasies. She would describe in graphic detail scenes of the two of us in bed together, complete with dialogue—what I would say to her and how I would say it; what she would reply; and the exact positions of our bodies at every step along the way. With uncanny insight she would speculate with surprising accuracy about the entire range of my sexual desires—from those I would admit to freely to those I would never dream of confessing, much less pursuing.

“In most instances she was so close to the heart of the
truth about me that I began to believe she had extrasensory perception. Worse, I feared that my mystery correspondent might be someone I knew or a friend of someone I knew—a past mistress, a casual lover, an associate, or an acquaintance. And yet I was certain that I had never come across anyone so lucid—or so obsessive.

“For the successful pursuit of both my creative efforts and my sexual fantasies, I came to rely completely on her letters, as if she were the vital force in my life. For months, each time a letter arrived, I was convinced that she would reveal herself in it so that we could at last meet, so that I could tell her what she had come to mean to me. But she never did, and after about a year the letters stopped. I felt at first as if my brain’s lifeline had been cut without warning. Then I started to comfort myself with various theories: that she was old and ill; that she had died; that even if she were alive, she must be—however brilliant—neurotic, unstable, probably schizophrenic. Finally I reduced her to banality—imagining her as physically plain, or ugly, maybe a bit repulsive—and in time, I shut out the memory of her altogether.

“Some years later I participated in the Musical Weeks festival at Crans-Montana, a Swiss resort favored by artists. The honorary guest at the festival was a woman pianist who was considered, in spite of being only in her twenties, one of the world’s greatest piano players, and who, because of her unusually good looks, was a special favorite of the public and the media. I had heard and seen her play several times, and each time I had found myself positively distracted by her sensual appeal.

“On the last evening of Musical Weeks, I was seated—along with several other guests—at the head table with the pianist and her husband, a youthful businessman. During the meal I noticed that the pianist would glance at me furtively; at one point I even caught her staring. Intimidated by her beauty, as well as by the presence of her husband, I managed to exchange only a few remarks with her—on the subject of the artist’s need for both seclusion and public exposure, which seemed obvious to
the two of us, but appeared as a contradiction to some of the others at the table.

“At one point I left the table to go to the men’s room downstairs, and on the darkened staircase I heard a woman behind me calling my name. It was the pianist. ‘I want to apologize, Mr. Domostroy,’ she said, ‘for staring at you during dinner.’

“‘I was flattered,’ I said. ‘I have wanted to meet you for a long time.’

“‘You have already met me—even before tonight!’ she said, moving closer until her face was under the light. Once again I felt the full force of her beauty.

“‘I’ve heard you play, but I don’t think we’ve ever met,’ I said.

“‘Not in person,’ she said, and she put her hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve written to you, though, she said, ‘many times. I didn’t sign my letters. I closed them instead with musical notes.’

“I felt my body jolt. My heart was racing. ‘From “The Wish,” a Chopin mazurka,’ I said, and I started to recite the lyric to the musical phrases she had sent.

If I were the sun in the sky,
I would not shine except for you;

If I were a bird of this grove,
I would not sing in any foreign land;

Only for all time
Under your window and for you alone.

“Overpowered by the memory of her letters, and by the images they conjured now that she stood in front of me, I took her arms and drew her toward me, then locked my hands behind her back and put my face against hers. ‘I loved your letters,’ I said. They made me think about you constantly and wait for you more anxiously than I’ve ever waited for anyone. That was five years ago. Five years! Think what those years might have been had we met then.’

“She took my hands in hers. ‘I looked at your hands at dinner,’ she said, ‘and thought of the time when I’d have given the whole world to feel them on my body. I had such a crush on you, on your music, on everything about you. I watched you on TV, read about you in the papers, went to every concert you gave. All I wanted was to have you fall in love with me.’

“‘If you had only introduced yourself, you would have succeeded,’ I said. ‘I was in love with the woman who wrote those letters. I dreamt continuously about her and about the life we could have together. I would have given up everything for a new life with her.’ I drew her toward me, buried my face in her hair, pressed her body against mine. She swayed in my arms. ‘I still would,’ I said. ‘I still love her. Tell me what you want me to do so that we can be together.’

“She hesitated, not looking at me, and reminded me that she was married.

“‘Do you love him?’ I asked.

“‘Love? Perhaps not, but I care for him,’ she said. ‘And we have a child.’

“‘We could still be lovers,’ I urged her.

“She turned her face away from mine. ‘I wrote you once that I was in love with you. I still am,’ she said, ‘but if I had to hide my love, I would feel I was perverting it, turning what’s natural into something shameful.’

“‘Then why hide it?’ I asked, holding her tighter. ‘I don’t want to lose you again.’

“She freed herself from my embrace and said, ‘My husband loves me. He has been very generous. Without his support I couldn’t have become who I am. I can’t leave him.’

“As she turned to go, I blurted, ‘Please write to me again.’ Then she was gone, and the next day she and her husband left Crans-Montana.

“I was left at first with the thrill of knowing that I had held in my arms the woman I loved, and only later did I become aware of my loss. As I waited for her to write, I fantasized about her more and more, always imagining her naked, making love to me in clandestine meetings—after
her concerts, in big anonymous hotels on New York’s West Side; in out-of-the-way hotels in Paris, Rome, or Vienna; in motels in Los Angeles; in private rooms of the secret sex palaces in Rio de Janeiro.’ But she didn’t write, and I began to spend hours on end reading and rereading her old letters. During these periods I would despise myself—my music, my whole existence—because I’d failed to have her the only time I’d had the chance. The sight of a telephone filled me with pain, but I dared not call her. Like a desperate schoolboy in love with his music teacher, I made elaborate plans to follow her, to arrange things so that we would accidentally run into each other, but I always abandoned these adolescent designs out of embarrassment.

“A few months ago I learned that her husband had died in an automobile accident.”

“Really?” Andrea asked, casually reaching for a hairbrush. “Then why don’t you get in touch with her?”

“What for?”

“To be with her.” She brushed her hair slowly, letting it fall on her shoulders and neck. “You’re the best part of her past.”

“But she isn’t the best part of mine,” said Domostroy in a voice deliberately calm. He got up and stretched. “Anyway, she wrote to me when I was a composer. All I compose now are letters—somebody else’s.” He chuckled, then reached for Andrea and laid her down on the bed. He covered her breasts with her hair and gently smoothed it out over her nipples.

“How soon after that meeting with the pianist did you stop composing?” Andrea asked the next day in an emotionless voice.

“A year or so,” said Domostroy. With a smile he added, “You might say creation petered out as abandonment set in.”

“Aren’t you still in love with her?” Andrea asked.

“Not with her. Only with her letters,” he said. “Which
reminds me, your first letter to Goddard went out last night. I mailed it in an official White House envelope, one of a few I’ve saved as souvenirs over the years. They’re embossed inner envelopes, the kind you get wedding invitations in. They’ve never been postmarked or. addressed.

“Where did you get them?” Andrea asked.

Domostroy looked at her before he answered. “Each time I performed in Washington, I got congratulatory notes enclosed in them from a fan of mine, who was then an adviser to the President. If any fan letter ever reaches Goddard, that one surely will.”

“He’ll probably think I work in the White House.”

“Perhaps. Or that you’re the wife or daughter of one of the country’s big bosses—who, like Goddard, maintains invisibility. That will make him despair of your ever abandoning your own anonymity, but you can be sure it will also make him keep his eye peeled for the next White House envelope, and the one after that.”

“What will be in those?”

“More of your perceptions about him, his music, his life—maybe some photographs of you to show how beautiful you are.”

“Should we let him know what I look like so soon?” she said, and then she promptly answered her own question. “Maybe they could be shot from a distance or taken with my face turned away.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said.

“If I’m not signing the letters, I shouldn’t show my face either. Isn’t the face the body’s signature?”

He smiled. “Do you have lots of good pictures of yourself?” he asked her.

“Not many.” She paused and added, “Hey, maybe we could take some! Sexy ones. I could even undress for him.”

“Another good, idea,” he said, then added, “but I wonder if he’ll resent your posing for another man.”

“Of course he would,” she declared, “so we won’t let him know. Can’t we arrange the shots so that he would think I used a self-timing camera?”

“I guess so. What purpose do you think the pictures should serve?” asked Domostroy.

“Purely to excite him. To make him aroused by the very sight of me.”

“You think of everything, don’t you?” he said, impressed.

“Someone has to,” she said, “because, Patrick, if Goddard has kept his secret from the world all this time, he’s got to be smart. That means we have to be smarter, right? I think we must also make sure that there are no fingerprints on my letters to him—or on the photographs. If he does become interested in me, I wouldn’t put it past him to check for them, and we don’t want him to check me out before I’ve checked him in, do we?” She rolled her eyes and burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Domostroy asked her.

“After all this,” she said, “what if Goddard turns out to like men?”

“If he does,” said Domostroy with a wide smile, “you two will have something in common right from the start.”

They lay naked, sunning themselves on the roof of her brownstone. Stretched out next to him, her head propped up on a folded towel, Andrea was asleep. He watched a single drop of sweat gather on her neck, roll onto her breast, stop at the nipple, run sideways, and with not a single wrinkle to stop it, roll down the smooth, dry surface of her belly.

He then looked at himself. Streams of sweat poured out from small pools that had formed between the folds and wrinkles of his skin. Unable to stand the heat any longer, he put on his trunks and got up. The steaming streets of Manhattan stretched out below. A faint breeze brought the smell of tar, and on the Hudson a nuclear aircraft carrier, escorted by a flotilla of tugs and pleasure boats, was on its way toward Ambrose Light, the folded wings of the planes on its flight deck catching the sun like an open accordion.

“I don’t believe you about the White House stationery.” Andrea’s voice caught him’from behind.

“Why not?” he asked without looking around.

“All that mail-inside-mail stuff sounded fishy,” she said calmly. “So I did some checking. They don’t use double envelopes in such cases at the White House. You lied, Domostroy. Now, why?”

“I thought the envelopes might benefit our cause, not the truth about how I came upon them.”

“Truth is not supposed to benefit,” she said. “Truth just is.”

“Then I have merely withheld it,” he said, still watching the aircraft carrier.

As he said it, for a moment he wondered: had he also withheld his life’s truth from himself? Would his life be better served if instead of enlisting in the service of the young woman behind him, he were an enlisted man, one of the crew of that aircraft carrier? To remain truthful to himself, shouldn’t he be adaptable, as changing as was the life of music, where it made little difference that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was, right up until the War of 1812, “To Anacreon in Heav’n,” a London supper-club drinking song? Or that Chopin’s majestic Polonaise in A-flat Major had reached masses of listeners for the first time in
A Song to Remember,
a vapid movie about the composer’s life, and also as “Cheek to Cheek,” a swing version of its leading melody?

“So how about trying the truth, Patrick? How did you get those envelopes?” Andrea persisted.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” said Domostroy. “Over a decade ago, I taught musical syntax at the drama school of one of the Ivy League universities. Among my students was one whom I—quite frankly—liked a lot, and when she applied to become my assistant, I hired her on the spot.”

“So much for impartial hiring practices in Academia,” interjected Andrea. “I bet the same goes on at Juilliard.”