Читать книгу Stolen Pleasures - Gina Berriault - Страница 7

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

THE BOY BESIDE him was full of gin and beer and wine and the pleasant memory of himself at the party, the great guitarist at seventeen, and he had no idea where he was until he was told to get out. His profile with that heavy chin that he liked to remind everybody was Hapsburg hung openmouthed against the blowing fog and the cold jet-black ocean of night.

Berger had no intention of forcing him out, but to command him to get out was the next best way of impressing his disgust on his passenger. “I asked you when you got in, friend, if you had money for the bridge toll and you haven’t answered me yet. You want to get over this bridge tonight and into your little trundle bed, you look for that two bits because I’m sick of paying your way wherever we go and getting kicked in the fact for a thank-you. What the hell did I hear you say to Van Grundy? That you got bored by musicians because all they could talk about was music?” His breath smelled of cheese and garlic from all the mounds of crackers and spread he had eaten, not the kind of breath to accuse anybody with. “And that meant me, of course, because I’m what’s known as your constant companion, that meant old ignoramus Berger. For a guy who’s got all the famous relatives you’re always bragging about—big dam builders, big mummy diggers, big marine commandants—you ought to be able to come up with a miserable nickel once in a while.” He held out his hand for the coins that David was searching for and found.

“What the hell.” David gripped his guitar between his knees again, settling back uncomfortably. “You sore because they wanted me to play?”

He shifted into low to start the car again. “You don’t know what anybody wants, you’re too busy playing all night.”

The boy waited a minute, then sprang the big psychological question with a rare timidity in his voice: “You sore because it’s me that’s going to play for Torres tomorrow?”

“Jaysus Christ, I’m sittin’ next to Freud here!” he cried, disgusted.

They went on in silence over the long bridge. The deputy at the toll gate reached out his hand to take the coins that Berger pressed into it with his gray-gloved fingers, suede driving gloves to keep his hands warm so that he could commence to play soon after entering a room, but David wore no gloves, came with cold, thin hands into a room and played slickly, charmingly, his first number and afterward blew on his fingers to impress upon the audience how cold they were still and how much they had accomplished even so.

Along under the neons of the motels, assured by the rainbow lights and the traffic signals that the time had passed for his abandonment on the bridge, the boy spoke again, “Listen yourself, I’m not the one who’s destroying himself, you worry about yourself. Some day you’re going to explode, a hundred different colors and a sonic boom. Big little David, folks will say for miles around, got too big for himself. God, you slaughtered that Purcell. If you play that for old Torres he’ll ask for a change of rooms after you’re gone.” He unloaded now all the complaints accumulated against the boy—criticism of his teacher-companion that David made to friends: “Berger could be the best, good as Tomas Torres, but he doesn’t look the part, hasn’t got the urbanity, short you know, big shoulders, like a wrestler’s that don’t fit him, big face, and the way he telegraphs his mistakes to you before he makes them, like ‘this hurts me worse than you, dear audience.’ But the best, really the best, could have been the best, but came to it too late, a jazz musician until he was thirty, still got the mannerisms of a jazzman in a nightclub, smiling at the audience, smiling at himself. You can’t do that with a classic guitar. He’s good all right but he should have come to it at eighteen, twenty, then he would have been great.”

“Things come back to me!” Berger was shouting. “For a man of few friends, like you say I am, they come back to me!”

He drew the car to the curb, leaned across the boy to open the door. “Get out here, man. From here it’s just a mile to your mother’s place. I’d take you there but it’s a mile out of my way.”

“Under the green-blue motel neon, David stepped out to the sidewalk, knocking his guitar case against door and curb and hydrant.

“You’re doing it to yourself,” said David again, warningly.

“You keep knocking that guitar around like a dumb bastard with a normal IQ!” he bellowed, slamming the door.

He went through the amber lights of intersections as if they were red and he was drunk. Somebody else on the verge of fame, somebody else awaiting the encircling arm of the already great, sent him, Berger, over the edge, down into the abyss of his own life. It was not fame he wanted for himself, he would never have it now, anyway, at thirty-seven, with all the faults that David had so meticulously listed for everybody. Not that, but what? The mastery, the mastery, play without telegraphing the errors, play without the errors, play with the mastery of the great yet indifferent to fame if it came. Palermo was nothing, that mecca of all the world’s guitar students where Torres, old Torres of the worldly jowls, laid his arms across the jaggedy, humped young shoulders of the most promising. The photos of the students in the guitar magazines made him laugh. They came from everywhere to study under Torres at the accademia, they stood around the silk-jacketed Tommy like fool disciples: a middle-aged woman with a Russian name; a young curly-locks guy from Brazil, making hot amorous eyes at the camera; a stiff-elbowed kid from England who looked as if he stuttered; and the girls with their big naïve eyes and their skirts full to make it easier to part their legs for the correct position of the guitar. He saw them gathering in the hallways of some musty building in Palermo after school, saw them descend the street into the town with the stiff-swinging walk of youth attempting youth, and he had no desire to be among them, to be twenty again and among them. The older he got the less he wished for a new beginning and the more he wished for a happy ending. But sometimes, as in these last few weeks, the wish for that beginning laid him low again like a childhood disease.

Before his apartment house he let the car door swing heavily open and lifted his guitar case from the back seat. The slam of the door reminded him that there was something else in the car that ought to be brought in, but unable to recall what it was he concluded that it was nothing stealable and went up the stairs in his neat, black, Italian-style moccasins, wishing that he were lurching and banging against walls. Not since he fell down somebody’s stairs six years ago, cracking a vertebra and breaking his guitar in its case, had he taken a drink, not even wine, and he had taken none tonight though everybody was awash around him, but he felt now that drunkenness again, that old exaltation of misery. Sick of black coffee after a dozen cups through the night, he found a cupful in a saucepan, heated it to boiling, poured it into a mug, and willfully drank, scalding the roof of his mouth. He opened his mouth over the sink and let the black coffee trickle from the corners, too shocked to expel it with force, bleating inside: To hell with all the Great, the Near Great, the Would-be Great, to hell with all the Failures.

From the windowsill he took his bottle of sleeping pills, put two on his tongue, drank down half a glass of water. He dropped his tie on the kitchen table, his jacket on the sofa, stepped out of his moccasins in the middle of the living room. He put on his tan silk pajamas (Who you fooling with this show of opulence?) and crawled into his unmade bed. At noon he was wakened by a street noise and drew the covers over his ear to sleep until evening, until the boy’s interview with the Great Tommy was over.

At four, moving through the apartment in his bare feet, in his wrinkled pajamas, he tore up the memory of himself that early morning as he had once, alone again, torn up a snapshot of himself that someone had thrust upon him—a man with a heavy face in the sun, hair too long and slick, a short body and feet small as a dandy’s. For with no reminders he was the person he fancied himself. But, dumping coffee grounds into the sink, he realized suddenly that the jawing he had given the boy had been given as a memento of himself, something for the boy to carry around with him in Palermo, something to make him feel closer to Berger than to anybody else, because Berger was the man who had told him off, a jawing to make him love and hate Berger and never forget him, because it is impossible to forget a person who is wise to you. If the boy never got to first base as a guitarist, then the jawing lost its significance, the triumph was denied to Berger. It was on David’s fame that he, Berger, wanted to weigh himself. Jaysus, he wailed, what kind of celebrity chasing is that? He smelled of cheese and bed and failure, sitting at the table with his head in his hands. The interview was over an hour ago and now he would hear from friends the words of praise, the quotations from Torres, as if these friends of David had been there themselves to hear the words drop like jewels from his lips, all of them closer to God because they were friends of him who sat up there in God’s hotel room, playing music to enchant God’s ears.

So he stayed away from his friends, who were also David’s friends. For almost two weeks he eluded any knowledge of that interview. He gave lessons to his students in his own apartment or in their homes, and in this time it was as if he were seventeen again, living again that period of himself. He felt as if he were instructing them without having learned anything himself first, and he hated his students for exacting more of him than he was capable of giving. Again he was in that age of self-derision and yet of great expectations. A celebrated musician would recognize him and prove to everybody, once and for all, Berger’s genius. After every lesson his armpits were sticky and he would have trouble in civilly saying good-bye.

On the evening of the twelfth day he drove across the bridge to visit the Van Grundys. They were still at supper, Van and his wife and the two kids, eating a kind of crusty lemon dessert, and they made a place for him to pull up a chair. He had coffee and dessert with them, and joked with the boy and the girl, finding a lift in the children’s slapstick humor, the upside-down, inside-out humor, and in the midst of it he turned his face to Van Grundy at his left, the smile of his repartee with the children still on his lips, the hot coffee wet on his lips, his spoon, full of lemon dessert, waiting on the rim of his bowl—all these small things granting him the semblance of a man at ease with himself—and asked, “Well, did Torres flip out over Davy?”

“You don’t know?” Van Grundy replied. “He told everybody as fast as if it were good news,” raising his voice above his children’s voices demanding the guest’s attention again. “Torres kept interrupting. Every damn piece Davy played, Torres didn’t like the way he played it. What’s the matter you haven’t heard? Something like that happens to a person he’s got to spread it around, along with his excuses, as fast as he can.”

The coffee he sipped had no taste, the dessert no taste. “Is he going to Palermo anyway?”

“Oh,” said Van Grundy, stretching back, finding his cigarettes in his shirt pocket, offering one to his wife by reaching around behind the guest’s chair, “he won’t go to Palermo now. He can if he wants to, he’s okayed as a pupil, but since Torres isn’t throwing down the red carpet for him he won’t go as less than a spectacular. You know David.”

“Even if he doesn’t like old Tommy anymore he can learn a thing or two from him, if he went,” Berger said, sounding reasonable, sounding as if all his problems were solved by bringing reason to bear.

“He’s already taken off for Mexico City. A week ago. He’s going to study under Salinas down there if he can get that cat to stay sober long enough. Say he’s always said that Salinas was better than Torres. He’s stopping off in Los Angeles to ask a rich uncle to subsidize him. He was going to do it anyway to get to Palermo on, so now he’ll need less and maybe get it easier. Hasn’t seen his uncle since he was twelve. Got a lot of nerve, our Davy.”

“What did you think of that Rivas woman?” Van Grundy’s wife was asking, and he turned his face to hear, regretting, for a moment, that he heard her, usually, only with his ears and not his consciousness. He had known her for ten years now, she had been the vocalist with a combo he’d played string bass in and it was he who had introduced her to Van Grundy. A pretty woman with short, singed-blond hair and an affectation of toughness. “Rivas?” he asked.

“Rivas, Maruja Rivas. The album we lent you. Last time you were here.” The smoke hissed out from between her lips, aimed into her empty coffee cup. “Don’t tell me she didn’t mean anything to you.”

“Did you play the record?” Van Grundy asked.

“I can’t remember borrowing it,” he said.

THE LAST STUDENT was gone. He had come home from the Van Grundys’ to find the first student waiting on the apartment steps, and he had put aside the record on a pile of sheet music and there she had waited in the silence of the confident artist. He had noticed that proud patience of hers when, in the streetlight that shone into his car parked before the Van Grundys’ gate, he had looked for the album and found it on the floor, under the seat, where David had slipped it so he could sit down. After she had waited for so many days, she had waited again until the last student was gone, and when he picked up the album cover, the racy cover with orange letters on purple background and the woman in the simple black dress, there was that unsmiling serenity again.

He turned his back to the record going around, half-sitting on the cabinet, chin dipping into his fingers, elbow propped in his stomach. He cautioned himself to listen with his own ear, not Van Grundy’s, but with the first emerging of the guitar from the orchestra, the first attack on the strings, he found himself deprived of caution. His head remained bowed through all the first movement, and at the start of the second he began to weep. The music was a gathering of all the desires of his life for all the beautiful things of the earth, the music was his own desire to possess that same fire, to play so well that all the doors of the world would spring open for him. Wiping his nose with his shirtsleeve, he sat down on the sofa.

With the cover in his hands he watched her as she played, though he knew that the photo was taken while her hands were still, the left-hand fingers spread in a chord, he watched her, the pale face and arms against a Spanish wall of huge blocks of stone and a gate of wrought-iron whorls. Her hair was olive-black, smoothed back from the brow, the face delicately angular, the black eyebrows painted on, the nose short, straight, high-bridged, and the lips thin and soft and attuned to the fingers that plucked the strings. He knew the sensation in the lips, the mouth wanting to move over the music as if it were palpable. Concierto de Aranjuez, and the fine print on the back of the cover told him that Aranjuez had been the ancient residence of the Spanish kings. “I believed myself in some enchanted palace. The morning was fresh, birds singing on all sides, the water murmuring sweetly, the espaliers loaded with delectable fruit.” Why did they quote some Frenchwoman back in 1679? He knew the place without any help. The memory of another Aranjuez came to him, the party he’d played for last summer down the Peninsula, the sun hot on the pears and the plums even at six in the evening, and the shade waiting along with everything else for the cooling night. He had played all night under the paper lanterns of the brick patio, and tiny bells were tied to the trees and tinkled in the night’s warm winds, and, early in the morning when all the guests were gone, that party-thrower, that divorcée with a dress the color of her tan, had told him her checkbook was in her purse and her purse in her bedroom, and he had awakened at noon in a sweat from the heat of the day and the fiery closeness of her body. He had phoned her in the evening from the city, but she had spoken to him as to an entertainer who has already been paid and who says he hasn’t. Years ago it would have been a pleasure and a joke. He had known a lot of women briefly like that, but for some reason—what reason?—that time had hurt him. Was it because it had shown him the truth, that he was no more than an entertainer, not artist but entertainer, one for whom the door was closed after the woman had bathed away his odor and his touch. The music from the fingers of that woman on the album cover caused the ache of his mediocrity to flare up and then die down. For that Madrid woman went in everywhere and took him along. The great went in doorways hung across with blankets and they went in the gates of palaces, and everywhere they were welcomed like one of the family, and everywhere they took you along.

The record went around all night, except for the hours he himself played, and he had more cups of coffee and, along about five o’clock, stale toast with stringy dark apricot jam which he did not taste as he ate and yet which tasted in his memory like a rare delight that he could, paradoxically, put together again easily. His shoes were off, he was more at home than he had ever been in his rented rooms anywhere, and the woman with him was like a woman he had met early in the evening and between himself and her everything had been understood at once. The disc went around until the room was lighted from outside and the globes drew back their light into themselves, and water began to run through the pipes of the house.

He heated the last of the coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and pushed up the window, and through the clogged screen the foggy breath of morning swept in. What was morning like in Madrid? What was her room like, what was she like with her hair unbound, in what kind of bed did she sleep and in what gown?—this woman he had spent the night with.

He tipped his chair back against the wall and the thought of David Hagemeister struck him like somebody’s atonal music. Now in the morning, whose silence was like the inner circle of the record, there returned to him the presence of David, but the discord was not a response anymore from his own being, the discord was in David himself.

Davy’s mother must be up by now, he thought. One morning he had brought the boy home at six, after a Friday night of played duets here and there, and she was already up in a cotton housecoat, dyed yellow hair in curlers, having tea for breakfast and not a bit worried. She was the kind who would have sent him to Europe at seven by himself because he was the kind who could have done it fine. Carrying his cup to the phone in the living room, he sat on the sofa’s arm, and after he had dialed the number he pulled off his socks, for his feet were smothering from the night-long confinement.

“Edith, this is Hal Berger. Did I wake you?” his voice as thickly strange to himself as it must be to her.

“I was just putting my feet in slippers.” Her voice sailed forth as if all mornings were bright ones. She always spoke on the phone as if her department manager at the Emporium picked up his phone whenever hers rang, a third party on the line listening for signs of age and apathy.

“Where’s David? Somebody said he’s zooming down to Mexico,” massaging the arch of his pale foot.

“He’s in Nogales. It’s on the border.”

“What’s he on the border for?”

“He’s waiting for some money from me.”

“What about the uncle in Los Angeles?”

“He gave him supper and twenty-five dollars to come back north on and buy himself a new pair of cords. He went to Nogales, instead, wearing the same pants, and sent me a telegram from there.”

“You sending him something?”

“Yes.”

He began to subtract several dollars from the substance of himself, and anxiety was left like a fissure where the amount was taken away. But then why phone her a quarter to six in the morning, rushing his voice at her with its big, benevolent question? “Send him an extra fifty for me,” he said, “and I’ll drop you a check in the mail to cover it.” Overcome by a great weariness, he hung up.

He lay down on the sofa. His shirt stung his nostrils with the night’s nervous sweat and he tried not to breathe it. In the Nogales Western Union the boy would pick up the check, the total drawn from the days of his mother’s captivity behind the counter, drawn from the hours of Berger’s teaching, but since it had come to him, this money, then was it not his due because he was David Hagemeister? Poor Davy H! Maybe the boy would be always on borders, always on the border of acclaim, waiting for something to come through and get him there. But once in a while, as he grew older and envious of those who had got across the border, he would hear somebody great and lose all envy. It might be, he thought, that this Rivas woman wasn’t as great as he thought she was, but he had needed, this night, to think that she was great.

His crossed arms weighting down his eyes, he fell asleep to the sound of someone running lightly down the carpeted interior stairs, some clean-shaven and showered clerk running down into the day.