Pinball (16 page)

“Indeed it was,” agreed Domostroy. “My mother’s grand piano. She was a concert pianist.” His eyes met Donna’s. “You are as articulate as you are beautiful, Miss Downes,” he said. “Are you a dancer?”

“That’s enough, Domostroy!” said Osten.

“I’m not a dancer, Mr. Domostroy,” Donna said calmly. “Though I like to dance.” She pointed at the grand piano behind them. “That’s my Kaffir now.”

“Then by all means,” said Domostroy, studiously disregarding Osten, “play it!”

“Donna, let’s go!” said Osten. “He can’t order you around,” he added, almost snarling.

“As long as I’m ordered to
play,
I don’t mind,” said Donna, her eyes returning Domostroy’s challenge as she went and sat down at the piano.

There was a hush, and the guests opened a circle around her. Gerhard Osten, arm in arm with the blond woman Domostroy had left in his care, walked over to his son. “This is hardly the time for dancing,” he said quietly.

The blond woman leaned over and, squeezing the older man’s arm, said, “But, Mr. Osten, that might be fan!”

“Don’t worry, Father,” said Osten. “Most of the guests here wouldn’t know how to dance!”

His father cleared his throat and smiled nervously. “Jimmy, I want you to meet Miss Vala Stavrova,” he said.

Osten and the woman shook hands.

Domostroy, standing next to Osten’s father, put in, “Miss Stavrova is originally from Russia—the country of classics!”

“Yes. But I love dancing rock ‘n’ roll,” said Vala Stavrova in a high-pitched voice. “Is she a rock singer?” she asked, pointing at Donna.

Donna started to play, and the sound of Chopin’s Scherzo in C-sharp Minor filled the room.

“Remarkable,” said his father, watching Donna play. “Incredible, in fact. Who is she?”

“Donna Downes, Father,” said Osten, speaking low. “I introduced you to her.”

“Of course you did. Where’s she from?” asked his father.

“From New York,” Domostroy cut in.

“Where did she learn to play like that?” asked Gerhard Osten.

“Donna is a student at Juilliard,” said Osten with finality, hoping to silence the conversation.

“I would never have expected her to play Chopin!” his father continued.

“Why not?” asked Domostroy, leaning toward him. “Have you forgotten, Gerhard, that Chopin and Liszt were the favorite composers of the black pianists in New Orleans and Sedalia at the end of the last century?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” said Gerhard Osten, “because I never knew. Interesting. What do you think of her?”

“I think she’s a beauty,” Domostroy answered, his gaze still on the pianist.

“I mean her playing.”

“So far, quite competent,” said Domostroy, “but she hasn’t come to the hard part yet—the switch from chords to finger work. When Chopin wrote the piece, he knew that most pianists would never make the switch in time, so he called for an improvisation.”

They listened. When Donna came to the difficult running passage of the scherzo, her left hand skimmed
brilliantly up four octaves, then gently lifted. She executed a split-second break between one beat and the next, settled into an avalanche of quavers, hesitated, then came rolling back down the four octaves, separating each note from the next with metronomic precision.

“She’s a gifted Chopinist,” said Domostroy. “You’d never guess it from her looks, would you?”

In Osten’s car on the way back to Carnegie Hall after the party, Donna asked, “Did you like the way I played?”

“I’m not good at judging friends,” he said. “But everybody seemed to love it. My father—”

“Your father told me how surprised he was that I played Chopin,” she said. “Did you hear him? In fact, everybody told me how surprised they were by it—meaning that black and Chopin just don’t match! Only Patrick Domostroy told me that I played the piece like a professional—including that impossible free-time passage that Chopin marked in the score with an X.”

“You better watch out,” said Osten, “Domostroy looked as if he’d like to score an X on you.” He pressed down on the accelerator and they speeded up. “I didn’t like the way he talked to you.”

“He said I used the soft pedal exactly the way Chopin indicated.”

“How?” asked Osten, a bit annoyed by her enthusiasm.

“My own way!” she said and laughed. “To encourage free interpretation, Chopin never marked the use of the soft pedal. He said fingers, not a pedal, created a pianist’s touch. Chopin was the first pianist who understood the distinct and separate physical attributes of each of the fingers. Domostroy also said that I even managed to evoke Chopin’s
al.”

“What’s
al?”

“A spiritual enigma—pain and rage smothered by melancholy—an emotional trademark of Poles, or any people oppressed for long periods of time.
al permeates all of Chopin’s work. Domostroy said that because I’m
black,
al will probably color all of mine as well.” She hesitated. “What kind of man is Domostroy? You obviously can’t stand him.”

Osten shrugged. “I guess he’s a bit off—like Chopin.”

“Chopin was a great composer and a virtuoso performer,” Donna reminded him. “His music is all that matters.”

“Let’s say Domostroy leads a double life,” said Osten. “He lives alone in a shut-down ballroom in the South Bronx; at night he plays in some crummy Mafia-run pinball dive; and in the wee hours, when everybody else is in bed, he prowls the streets in that old jalopy of his.”

“Why?” she interrupted.

“Why what?”

“Why does he do it? Maybe he has a reason.”

“He’s obsessed, that’s the reason,” said Osten.

“So was Berlioz. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written his Fantastic Symphony. So were Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner. So were a lot of other talented men.”

“Domostroy is a sex nut,” said Osten contemptuously. “I once read an old
New York
magazine profile of him. They called him the Jekyll and Hyde of the music scene. At night he drives around in disguises—you know, phony mustache, goatee, big hat—and stops off at all kinds of odd places—underground couples parties, secret societies, encounter sex clubs. Once he was followed for hours by New York City police detectives who, after he had made some fifteen stops in such strange places, took him for a dope pusher and gave him and his car a thorough search and found nothing but some of his old music sheets! They were furious for the time they lost! He’s like some sort of satyr, off on a perpetual witches’ sabbath.” He paused to let her react to what he had said, but she kept stubbornly silent. “Even during his heyday, Domostroy used to go for the mondo weirdo: the freaks, the psychos, the whores, even the sex changes. I think he even photographed them—as a hobby. I hate to think whom he goes after—and whom he gets!—now that he’s nobody. No decent piano bar or nightclub will have him anymore.”

Again Donna did not react.

“You saw Vala, the Russian bimbo he brought to the party. That’s the kind he goes for,” he said sullenly.

“Your father certainly seemed to like her,” Donna remarked.

“My father knows absolutely nothing about women,” said Osten. “My mother was his first and only love. He married her after cutting in and dancing one tango with her. And he couldn’t even dance! Since her death, all he cares about is music. To my father,” he said, “every Etude recording is a flashing meteor, lighting up the musical firmament and then blazing away into the future. He sees himself as the great custodian of true art. And who knows? Maybe he is.”

Looking out the side window, speaking as intimately as if she were speaking to herself, Donna said, “You must love your father a lot, Jimmy.”

Without taking his eyes off the road, Osten said, “I love him more than a lot. I would do anything to keep him happy.”

Somehow, it was easy for long periods of time to pass between visits to his family home on Long Island. Now, as he left the city in his rented car, he realized that it had been two years since his last drive out and two years since he had met Donna. A recently completed stretch of highway shortened his trip by nearly an hour, and he arrived at Wainscott much earlier than expected. He drove up a private road lined with birches, their trunks black at the base and veined above like marble columns, and stopped at the house, a white mansion with tall, many-paned windows in its facade. He parked his rented car in the driveway between two brand-new automobiles, noting their personalized license plates: ETUDE for his father and VALA for his stepmother of less than two years.

The main door was open, but Osten hesitated and then rang the bell before entering the house. In the hall he ran into Bruno, his father’s Viennese valet and chauffeur,
who had been in service since the death of Leonore Osten, Jimmy’s mother.

“Herr Jimmy, how are you?” muttered Bruno, forcing a smile that revealed uneven tobacco-stained teeth. Bruno’s rare moments of genuine warmth were reserved for Gerhard Osten and his youthful second wife. “Your father and Madame are on the side veranda,” he concluded stiffly.

Before Osten spoke, he coughed to bring on his altered voice. “Thank you, Bruno,” he said.

As he crossed the hall, which was dominated by a life-sized marble statue of Bach, he braced himself for the stress he inevitably felt in the presence of his stepmother. He could never think of Vala as a relative, and being with her made him uncomfortable.

The veranda was flooded with sunshine and with the sound of Handel’s
Israel in Egypt
playing on the tape deck. His father and Vala sat reading, and when they saw him, as if on command, they both put down their newspapers. Smoothing his flat white hair and clutching at his back, his father stood to greet him. Vala quickly buttoned up the front of her housecoat.

“Hello, Father. How are you, Vala?” said Osten, stepping forward and hugging his father. Embarrassed, Gerhard Osten stepped sideways, freeing himself from the embrace, and then uneasily patted his son on the shoulder. Vala raised her hand, as if offering it to him to kiss, and, awkwardly, Osten stepped over to shake it.

“How have you been, Jimmy?” asked his father, sitting down and indicating a place at his side. When he had scrutinized his son’s patched jeans, blue work shirt, and faded suede jacket, he said to Vala, “He looks like a cowboy, doesn’t he?”

Vala smiled. “But, darling, Jimmy is a cowboy,” she said in her whining voice. Even though she had come to the States at age sixteen, some ten years before becoming Mrs. Osten—during which time she had been married and divorced somewhere in Colorado—Vala had lost none of her Russian accent. Still a trifle plump, she was nevertheless quite pretty. Her slightly enlarged pupils, framed
by dark eyebrows and thick lashes, gave her watery blue eyes a thoughtful expression.