Page Turner Pa

by David Leavitt

  The risk inherent in such single-minded devotion to success as Paul exhibited, Kennington concluded then, was that it could so easily flip-flop into an equally single-minded devotion to failure. This he had seen happen too many times. In his universe there orbited various odd satellites, former prodigies who had never quite managed the transition out of childhood, and forgotten competition winners playing recitals to half-empty houses, and teachers at obscure music schools who made careers out of Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand because they had maimed themselves trying to play like Horowitz in their youth. Most were socially inept; many were pickled in drink. Kennington wished he could show these people to Paul; and he also wished he could prove to his young friend the vacuity of the notion that this polarity of success/failure must form the backbone of any artist's life. The truth is, it must not—and yet how hard to resist the siren scream insisting otherwise!

  So he ruminated. At times Paul drove him so crazy with questions that he wanted to break off with him altogether. At other times he longed for the boy with an intensity that resulted in him saying and doing all sorts of things he later regretted: suggesting, for instance, that maybe he'd go with him and his mother to Florence, or allowing a conversation in which each of them was building a dream house to verge into a conversation in which they were building a dream house together. This sort of game was unwise, especially when you were playing it with an eighteen-year-old who has not yet learned to distinguish the fancy of the moment from the truth of all time. Still, for his own pleasure, he kept giving in. There was more than a touch of sadism in his surrenders. Also love.

  And that was the greatest mystery of all: how to account for the sensation of uncorrupted, even childish joy that intermittently stole upon him in Paul's company. One night he hadn't been able to sleep from the intoxication of it, and rising from his bed, had walked the empty city, across bridges and through alleys over which laundry swayed, until at dawn he found himself witnessing a sylvan scene: a group of eight boys—provincials, probably, in for a night at the discos—shaving and brushing their teeth at one of those public water spigots that punctuate the Roman landscape. Each had an Invicta backpack, from which he extracted a clean white towel, a toothbrush, a cake of soap. Together, as Kennington had never been together with other boys: he could have watched them for hours.

  Another of his evenings with Paul and Pamela: not yet sleepy after dinner, the three of them had gone to see West Side Story at an English-language movie theater in Trastevere. Through narrow streets they had hurried, until they reached the Pasquino, which was located off a vine-covered alley. Most of the seats were broken. The paint was peeling off the walls, which gave off an odor of wet dog. Initially there was some tension about the seating arrangements, which resolved itself only when Kennington sat in the middle, Pamela on one side of him, Paul on the other. Paul took his hand. He could feel the fine antennae of Pamela's blouse brushing against his arm. The movie started. At first he had trouble concentrating. But then he relaxed into the warmth of it, the easy familiarity of it. They watched peacefully until, in the middle of "America," the film broke, the lights went up, a hand pulled away from his own. "It's hot," Paul said, rolling up his sleeves as the old man who had taken their tickets emerged through a door in the screen bearing a tray of melting chocolate bars. "Bonbons di gela'," he incanted. "Bonbons di gela'. Acqua, coca, aranciata."

  The movie started up again. From her side Pamela pressed closer. It was halfway through "I Have a Love" that the wrenching noises started—like gears being forced, Paul would later say. "What's that?" Pamela whispered.

  "I don't know." And then a breeze was freshening the fetid theater. "Look!" Paul said. "Look up!"

  Kennington did. The ceiling was parting in two, the spreading aperture revealing a band of stars: some primitive form of air conditioning.

  Haltingly the noise of gears continued. The sky widened. It was purple and smoke gray, and Kennington was thinking how much it resembled the chalkboards in his elementary school, when a screech sounded, and something fell: all at once a cat was sitting on his lap, perfectly poised, its eyes lurid in the gloaming.

  For a nanosecond he and the cat gazed at each other. Then it hissed, rearranged its legs, and disappeared into the outer darkness.

  They did not laugh. Instead the stillness of amazement claimed them as Marni Nixon sang through Natalie Wood's lips, and a plane passed across the moonlit sky: a streak of light so fine it might have been meant to underline some message written on that chalkboard of an evening. At that moment, however, none of them could have said what the message was.

  9

  TUSHI'S YOUNG MAN was bored. He had been sitting for close to an hour in Joseph Mansourian's living room, playing Tetris while his lady love gave succor behind closed doors. Not that he minded waiting; indeed, Tushi's indispensability to her friends was one of the traits he found most admirable in her. The trouble was that tonight they had a nine o'clock reservation at a restaurant where you had to book two weeks in advance. If she took too much longer, the young man realized, they might miss the reservation entirely, which would be a shame, as he was currently in the midst of his internship at Mount Sinai and therefore obliged to eat more dinners at the hospital cafeteria than he cared to.

  To distract himself, he got up from the leather sofa where he had been stationed. Joseph's living room was generously proportioned, with crown moldings and high ceilings. The floors were of polished parquet, overlaid with Persian rugs. Behind double-swag curtains Central Park spread out in all its verdant amplitude. A little alcove where Joseph kept his CD and record collection fronted the piano, which the young man, not able to play himself, now approached with some timidity. Photographs were arranged atop the lid, most of them featuring a long-haired dachshund and a short-haired man at various stages in their growth. The latter he took to be Kennington: Kennington, the source of Joseph's tribulations, and their emergency visit. According to Tushi, Joseph and Kennington had been together for more than twenty years, even though they never had sex anymore, and both of them slept with other men. She knew. Over time, they had both gotten into the habit of confessing to her, so that she needed constantly to keep track of what was a secret and what was not.

  Abandoning the piano, the young man returned to the sofa, where he flipped through a copy of New York. To his chagrin, he was starting to feel a little exasperated, a little—well—miffed. Love troubles, of course, he understood: he'd had his own. Even so, when he was having love troubles, it had never occured to him to summon a friend to his bedside. Instead he'd simply gotten drunk and watched Nick at Nite. And this, in his view, was the right, the proper, course of action. Joseph's behavior, on the other hand, did seem to him (dare he say it?) typically homosexual: an ignorant assessment, Tushi would have chided, given that up until now his experience of homosexuals had been pretty much limited to the emergency room, where once he had treated a guy with a lemon stuck in his rectum. When the young man had asked how the lemon had gotten there, the guy had replied, "I fell on it in the shower." Life really was a mysterious and wonderful business.

  A door opened. "Sweetheart, I'm so sorry," Tushi said, hurrying toward him. "Joseph's in a terrible state. It took forever to calm him down."

  "Don't worry, I'm endlessly resourceful." (Did that sound resentful?)

  "You have the patience of a saint." Tushi embraced him. "Well, we'd better get going."

  "I hope he's okay." The young man picked up her coat and kissed her forehead.

  "He'll make it through, I think. I promised I'd call in the morning. Help me on with it, will you?"

  He did, after which they headed out the door to the hall. "Free at last," she said as they rode down in the elevator, and she kissed him back. "Oh my darling, how lucky I am to have you!"

  "How lucky I am," the young man echoed. Then they walked through the foyer to the sidewalk, where the doorman hailed them a cab.

  It was raining a little. Riding downtown, Tushi traced the progre
ss of water down the window with her finger. Of course, the young man was dying to ask her what had happened. Only the desire not to seem nosy held him back.

  "The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror," she said after a moment.

  "What?"

  "Virginia Woolf, from her diaries. Don't worry, I didn't write it." She took a tissue from her purse. "Still, I'm inclined to agree. I mean, doesn't it all seem rather tragic? They reach fifty, and suddenly they start collecting saltcellars, or breeding Dandie Dinmont terriers. Anything to ease the loneliness."

  "Is that Joseph's problem? Loneliness?"

  "I've always believed that childlessness is biology's revenge on homosexuals."

  "But Joseph's not alone. He has that boyfriend."

  "Who makes him suffer more than anyone."

  "Why? What's he done?"

  "Nothing very unusual, so far as I can tell. He's in Rome, and won't say when he's coming back. And he's refusing to answer Joseph's faxes. Also, he never showed up at some tony official dinner, and hasn't called to commiserate over Sophie's—the dachshund's—death. From all of which Joseph concludes that he must be having an affair."

  "Why?"

  "It's a pattern that goes back years. They've been together since Richard was very young, a boy, practically. You know Richard's father abandoned his mother when he was a baby. And it's bound to get worse before it gets better, isn't it? After all, Richard's about to turn forty. It's the age where you become terrified of missing out before your youth is over. Whereas poor Joseph's at that age where you're frightened of growing old alone." She pulled her hair back over her ears. "I keep telling him he should move on, find someone he's more suited to, but he won't hear of it. He says he can't imagine life without Richard."

  "Even if they don't have sex?"

  "Sex, my darling, is often the least important part of a passion. You'll learn that when you get older."

  The young man was silent. He didn't like to be reminded of the difference in their ages.

  They arrived at the restaurant. "Well, isn't this lovely," Tushi said a bit cynically, gazing at a fountain that rose up in the middle of the room.

  "Lovely," the young man repeated. Then they sat down, and he said, "Tushi, do you ever worry about my being so much younger than you are?"

  "Of course."

  "And yet I can't imagine us ever ending up in a situation like Joseph's."

  "What, you mean with me keeping a stable of gigolos, and you using it as justification to go to bed with every adoring young woman that comes your way?"

  "It's interesting," the young man said, "how automatically you assume Joseph's role."

  "Of course I do. I'm the older one." She touched his hand. "But the problem in their case isn't only age. Richard's champing at the bit. He wants to be free."

  "Whereas I want to be enslaved." He leaned closer.

  Smiling, she sipped from her water glass. "What are you telling me, that you'd like me to tie your wrists to the bedposts?"

  "I wouldn't mind."

  "Well, isn't this interesting." She squeezed his hand. "You really are a filthy little boy."

  The waiter brought their menus. As he studied his, the young man tried subtly to rearrange his erection, which was pressing painfully against his thigh. "Ooh, black fettuccine with lobster and fresh peas," Tushi said. "Doesn't that sound good?"

  "Wonderful," the young man answered. "Everything with you sounds wonderful."

  Under the table, he guided her hand to his erection. She hardly blushed. "Or maybe the spaghetti alia chitarra. Yes, tonight spaghetti alia chitarra might be just the thing."

  "You are a terrible woman," he said, and no longer thought of the man they had left behind: the griefs of strangers are easy to ignore. But Tushi did. Even as she pushed and prodded, she thought of Joseph, lying in his bedroom while darkness bled through the window. "Memory banks," he'd said. "What a mysterious phrase that is, as if memory were a river." And so it was on a riverside that she saw him now, his pants rolled up to the ankles, trailing his long legs as he reached down to sift through the silt and sand and mud that was his own history. And what might he dredge up before daybreak? Something that would help him? She hoped so. But she couldn't guess.

  10

  PAUL WAS SITTING NAKED in the armchair in Kennington's hotel room, shower water dripping from his neck into the cleft of his chest. He was staring at Kennington, who was on the bed, reading the Herald Tribune.

  It unnerved Kennington, the way Paul stared. Periodically he would glance over the serrated edges of his paper, and there they would be: those eyes, always open too wide, like the eyes of a child kept up past its bedtime; and indeed, like a child kept up past its bedtime, something in Paul seemed to be resisting tonight not only the need to rest, but to grow.

  Finally Kennington put down the paper. "Paul," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "Why are you staring at me?"

  "Staring at you?"

  "That's right."

  Quiet. "I guess I'm trying to memorize your face," Paul said. "In case I never see you again."

  "And what makes you think you'll never see me again?"

  "Well, the day after tomorrow we leave for Florence."

  "True."

  "And you head back to New York."

  "Also true."

  "Unless—"

  "Unless what?"

  "Well, unless you've given any thought to the possibility of coming with us. You mentioned the other day you might."

  "Did I?" Kennington returned to his paper. "I must have been in a delirium. Roman fever or something."

  "Oh."

  "Not that I wouldn't like to. It's just not realistic. After all, I haven't been home in more than a month. The mail in my apartment must be piled up to the ceiling."

  "How important is mail?"

  "Important enough. Then there's Joseph. His dog's been sick."

  "Well, he's only your manager—"

  "Plus I have to practice. Remember what Von Bülow said ? If you don't practice for one day, you know it. If you don't practice for two days, the critics know it. If you don't practice for three days, the public knows it. As it stands I haven't touched a piano for a week."

  There was little Paul could say in response to this observation beyond a slightly peeved "of course." Kennington turned the page.

  After a moment Paul stood up and started getting dressed.

  "Are you leaving?" Kennington asked from behind his paper.

  "We're supposed to meet my mother in half an hour for dinner, unless you've decided that's not realistic, either."

  "Okay, okay." Climbing out of bed, Kennington started dressing too. "I can't help but observe that you're not your usual perky self this evening," he said, as they headed out of the hotel and toward Piazza Barberini. "Is something on your mind?"

  Paul was silent for a second. Then he said, "I'm sorry, but I'm disappointed about Florence. After all, you're the one who brought it up, and when you did, you sounded so enthusiastic that I assumed you were really serious about it. That after my mother left, maybe we could even travel on together a little bit. Alone together."

  "Sounds wonderful."

  "But not wonderful enough to do."

  Kennington laughed. "Oh, if I had a dollar for every wonderful thing I haven't done!"

  "Then why don't you do it? I'll give you a dollar."

  Kennington shook his head. "Certain patterns are too expensive to break."

  "Even for just a few days?"

  They were waiting for a green light, Paul gazing at him imploringly.

  Then the light changed. They moved on.

  "So what happens next?" Paul asked.

  "Next? I go back to New York. You go to Florence. And in the fall you'll start at Juilliard."

  "And will we see each other?"

  "Of course we'll see each other."

  "But yesterday you said you'd be away most of the fall. You said you had to go to Germany in Oct
ober, then Japan—"

  "For me that's nothing. I'll be home a lot more than I usually am, and when I'm there we can see each other all the time."

  "But you haven't even given me your phone number."

  "That's only because I'm almost never there. It's better if I call you—"

  "I hate this," Paul said suddenly. "The way you're describing it, you get your tour, and your apartment, and you don't go to Florence, and you get me whenever you call. Whereas I get nothing."

  "Is that what you're in this for? To get something?"

  Paul didn't answer. A car roared down the narrow street, forcing them up against the wall.

  They continued walking.

  "So will Mr. Mansourian go with you to Germany?" Paul asked after a few seconds.

  "No. He doesn't usually travel with me these days. San Francisco was an exception."

  "He is a homosexual, isn't he?"

  "Yes. Why do you ask?"

  "Because of the way he acted toward me in San Francisco."

  Kennington twitched a little. "And how did he act toward you in San Francisco?"

  "Oh, you know ... the way you did here."

  They had reached the Trevi Fountain, where Paul dug in his pockets. Kennington, quiet, watched the arc of a coin as it spiraled over the green water.

  Then they crossed the street and caught a taxi. They had an appointment to meet Pamela at a pizzeria that the Romans called "the morgue" because of its marble tabletops. Alone under fluorescent light she waited for them, looking oddly intimidated in her new pink Valentino suit. From the ovens one of the pizzaioli, his T-shirt smeared with tomato, stared at her, while nearer by the pretty girl at the cash register was wearing the same Valentino suit, albeit in green instead of pink. Along with what looked like a pound of gold.

  "Sorry we're late," Kennington said, kissing Pamela on the cheek as he sat down.

  "Oh, don't worry. I've been having a wonderful time, watching those chefs throw that dough." She clasped her hands under her chin. "Pizza making really is an art, isn't it?"