Pinball (23 page)

The terrace was almost full, and hearing the audience’s applause as he stepped up to the console, he felt disoriented, not even knowing where to look for Leila. Only when he sat down and began to turn the switches to activate the microphone and amplifiers did he see her, sitting alone at a table near the exit. Her bodyguards must have remained outside. Osten caught her stare, and a hot flush rose to his face. He smiled, and she smiled back and waved to him like a schoolgirl. He was tense and his mouth felt dry, but he began to involve himself with the keyboard, checking the tempo, volume, and balance while his fingers glided from one note to another, until he had the full attention of the audience.

Still tense, but composed, Osten announced into the mike—first in Spanish, then in English—what he was going to sing, purposely omitting to mention the two Mexican songs. As he spoke, he saw Leila lean forward to
hear him better, a smile and a look of utmost concentration on her face.

The audience applauded again, and as they did he made certain to insert into the microphone head a voice rate changer, which would keep him from sounding too much like Goddard. Then he started to sing. In accompanying himself, he used the full range of possibilities offered by the Paganini, at the same time carefully steering away from the Goddard repertoire.

Accustomed to local amateur singers and mediocre combos, and unprepared for a forceful voice and the rich sound of a modern electronic organ in talented hands, the Mexicans went wild that night over his unusual renderings of a dozen well-known songs. They clapped, screamed, whistled, and banged the table tops; they stood up, sat down, and stood up again, hugging and clutching each other, cheering him on as if he were a rock idol. Their reaction soon silenced even a group of loud-talking American tourists who, although convinced that no good singer would ever bother to perform in a dump like the Apasionada, at least sat quietly for the rest of the performance.

During the applause Osten activated the Paganini’s tape bank and set it to a recording of the two Mexican songs, for he was fearful that he might become too nervous in Leila’s presence to sing them. By the time the audience had finished clapping, his mouth was no longer dry. Now his blood was racing, and he began to play and sing the first song, ready at any moment to turn off the mike and switch to tape and lip-sync.

As the tender music and the sad lyrics of “Volver, Volver, Volver” filled the room, the waiters stopped serving and most of the audience sat frozen, a number of men and women humming the familiar tune along with the singer. Osten glanced at Leila, and the look she sent back reflected a mood as sad and tender as that of the song. She inspired him, and soon all the rigidity fled from his shoulders and the tension in his breathing was gone. He sang effortlessly, his voice encompassing a whole spectrum of sweet sound and feeling and conveying it lovingly to the farthest corners of the terrace. The audience was enthralled;
Leila’s eyes glistened with tears. When he came to the refrain, the Mexicans, who knew the lyrics as well as they knew the alphabet, realized that he had written his own words in Spanish, and a new wave of frantic applause swept the room.

He paused briefly, his gaze never leaving Leila’s face, then he broke into “El Rey,” which the audience knew as well as they knew the first song. Once again they hummed the refrain, listening as they did to his altered lyrics, and at the end they went into an uproar.

As the audience cheered and a few of the young people gathered round to take a look at the console, he switched it off and got to his feet. Hot and sweaty, he made his way to Leila through the appreciative crowd.

She looked alluringly girlish in her white-lace Mexican peasant dress, and flushed and excited, almost joyous, she extended her hand to him, and her entire body bent forward with it. “Listening to you play and sing,” she said, “I felt so spontaneous!”

He held her hand tightly, all the while shielding her from the crowd, who pressed up against them and kept complimenting him on his performance. Then he moved her from behind the table and led her to a screened-off part of the café that was closed for repairs. He pulled out a chair for her beside a dusty workbench, and she sat down facing him as he leaned against the workbench. They looked at each other, a silent pounding passing between them. He sensed her presence in him as securely as if they had been together for a long time.

“I’m glad you came,’” he said at last.

“So am I,” she said, her voice deep with emotion.

Restraining himself, he inched closer to her. She sensed his mood, recognized his advance, but did not move. Again he inched closer. Again she acknowledged his movement with her eyes.

“The bodyguards?” His voice was husky.

With a movement of her head she indicated that they were out in the lobby. Gently, he took her hands. They felt cold. She rose and he saw her lips trembling. He noved his hands up behind her shoulders and brought her
closer, until only the narrowest sliver of space separated them.

“I love—I loved your voice,” she whispered, her eyes on his lips.

“I love you,” said Osten, burying his face in her hair. Feeling her body tense, afraid that she might pull back, he muttered words to keep her where she was. “Tell me—what you’re thinking.”

“About what?” she asked, her hands weightless on his neck, still reluctant to embrace him.

“Anything.” The closeness of his face to her neck triggered a shiver through her.

“My favorite songs,’ she began. “Thank you for singing them for me. You made me cry.”

His hands moved down her back and rested above her hips.

“You were so—inspiring,” she said, combing her hands up through his hair. “In the best musical tradition.” She sighed as he kissed her earlobe and pressed her closer. She nuzzled her cheek against his, and with her hands on his back she pressed against his chest.

“Whose tradition?” he whispered as he moved his thighs against hers. Wedging his knee between her legs, he impaled her on his thigh. She moaned and swayed away from him. Tenderly, he pulled her back.

“The tradition of the best,” she whispered back. “You’re a master singer. As good as anybody established.” She was spacing her words with kisses and swaying back and forth on his thigh. She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, but still avoided his mouth. Then she sighed and brought her pelvic bone down on him with her full weight, twisting herself sideways, torn between the need to feel him deeper and the fear of letting go.

“I was told many times I imitate him too much,” he whispered.

“So what? You’re stronger than he is. Ahead of the tradition,” she said. At that moment, torn no more, she took his head in her hands and pulled him against her. Her eyes closed, her body riveted by orgasm, her lips
cold, her tongue searching, she kissed him on the mouth, and he responded breathlessly, tense at first to the point of breaking, then rigid no more as the well of his emotion opened up like a desert spring, sudden, fresh, and tumultuous.

Before meeting Leila, he had had a number of affairs with older women. Because they had their own lives to worry about and would not pry into his, he preferred them to the young and unattached women who were free to follow him anywhere. Most of these older women were suburban housewives—in New York, in the Midwest, in California—some of them comfortably married, some separated from their husbands, others divorced and looking for the next suitable husband. What always troubled him about these liaisons was that the women invariably saw him simply as a clean-cut youth—an incarnation of the typical TV soap-opera juvenile with a little of the beachboy thrown in, or possibly their image of a budding astronaut. To those versed in the theories of women’s liberation, an affair with a younger man was merely one of many options newly available to them—like getting involved in local politics or possibly even running, against great odds, for a political office. Some of them were only following the advice of a renowned authoress who counseled: when in doubt, take a lover or redecorate your homes.

Young, unmarried girls were nearly as difficult for him. Though they might offer richer possibilities for a lasting relationship, most of them viewed him solely as a potential husband. They all seemed to follow the same scenario: the gentle entrapment of Mr. Right. This began with their prying into his life—which they perceived as a necessary condition for both openness and closeness. They wanted to make certain that he was still single; that he did not have a live-in girl friend; that he intended at some not-too-distant time to settle down with one woman, as opposed to, say, joining up with a bunch of swingers; that
his financial prospects—or, since he was still a student, the financial prospects of his family—were good; that he could be easily domesticated and made a father soon; that his personality was flexible enough to share everything with a wife; and that he had never been in love—really and truly in love—before.

The scenario always grew more complicated by the end of the first week of the relationship. After taking the girl to dinner, he would promptly receive a corny, printed thank-you card with a hope-to-see-you-again-soon note, a phone call signifying “what next?”, or an invitation to dinner in her apartment. This last was almost always followed by a night of lovemaking, breakfast in bed, and the suggestion that they save a weekend soon to visit good friends of hers in the country or go with other friends of hers to the beach.

In terms of sex, the gentle entrapment scenario passed through succeeding stages: exotic drinks along with unguarded language, discussions of secret sex fantasies, showers and long baths together, an out-of-the-blue bump-and-grind striptease, offers to share porno reading matter and try out some of the more acrobatic positions pictured there, and banquets of oral stimulation.

He had long since come to abhor the uniformity of social posturing and the artificiality of sexual maneuvers; without exception, all of these young unmarried women had touched the keys of his life much too lightly ever to strike a chord.

Having failed to find any lasting comfort within the narrow boundaries his secret life set for him as a lover, Osten came to rejoice more and more in the unlimited possibilities offered to him in the realm of music. Of all the arts, he decided, music imitated most faithfully the flow of man’s life—to the point of being inseparable from it; rhythm and melody seemed to support and fit man like his own bone and skin. As powerful as religion, music gave ritual to life. It transformed man’s feelings, clarified his emotions, and paced his thoughts.

Until Osten met Leila, music had been his only passion.

What astonished him about Leila was how natural she was, how free of restraints. There was not a trace of cunning or coquetry or pretense in her; indeed, the most seductive thing about her, in Osten’s mind, was her guileless admission of the longing she felt for him.

By contrast with his American conquests, Leila’s passionate honesty about her love for him was matched by a sexual hesitation that suggested inexperience. Even though they were never free to go to his room and shut the door, there were opportunities when, in the screened-off area next to the Apasionada’s café, they could have made love stretched out on a lounge chair or leaning against a windowsill, well hidden behind the draperies. But they did not, simply because Leila did not seem to know how. He found this facet of her nature so endearing that he risked upsetting her by speaking to her about it. Blushing, she explained that in the Arab tradition in which she was brought up, the punishments for engaging in illicit sex were so great that it was quite common for both men and women to be totally inexperienced sexually when they married. Married at an early age, she said, she had always remained Ahmed’s faithful wife.

She also made Osten aware that, even though her parents were Christians, as an Arab and the wife of an Arab, she was bound until death by
ird,
the specifically female honor that depended on the rigidly enforced code of Islamic sexual conduct. As opposed to
sharaf,
the code of male honor, which was flexible because it included all behavior,
ird
was as absolute as virginity, and the sole purpose of a woman’s life was to preserve it until her death. Once a woman lost her
ird
as a result of having illicit sex with a man who was not her husband, she could never regain it. In the conservative circles to which Leila’s husband’s family belonged, a woman’s loss of honor could only lead to punishment. According to Islam, because the
sharaf
of all the men in a family was affected by their women’s obedience to the
ird,
loss of honor by one woman affected a number of families: the woman’s own, as well as the families of her brothers and her husband. And in the case of such a loss, the only means of restoring family honor to all concerned was by punishing the guilty woman.

Thus, Leila’s bodyguards became almost a symbol of Osten’s relationship with her. Each time she returned to hear him perform, they were with her, their faces impassive, standing at the rear of the restaurant or behind the door to the bar or patiently following Leila and Osten if they walked into the hotel’s small garden. Because of the bodyguards, she could never go with him to his room or drive with him in his car. She always had to pretend—to them and to the others in the hotel—that she was befriending the young American who performed on the Paganini only because she was impressed by his compositions and because she was keenly interested in electronic instrumentation, which was far removed from Arab tradition. In the course of three or four visits, the pattern of their lovemaking emerged with painful clarity. Their intimacy was confined to guarded meetings of the eyes, kisses stolen behind a wall or screen, hands held nervously under their table, sudden brushes of a thigh, or shoulder, the slightest of which jolted them both.