The Prodigy: 2014 Edition - The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd - Number 4

by Noel Hynd

  The clown walked halfway down the block with obvious deliberation. The visitor appeared to know exactly where he or she was headed. Geiger was startled when the figure stopped right across the street.

  The clown turned and faced Geiger’s building, looking up almost directly at the second-floor window so carefully that Geiger felt as if he were the intended audience. Then the clown turned into a street musician. He mounted the violin, which was as white as his face, at his shoulder. He made the motions of playing.

  Geiger cocked his head.

  Strange! He couldn’t hear anything.

  Fascinated, Rolf reasoned that the clown was going through the gestures of playing, but was not really creating any music. Who knew? The city streets saw many strange things at night. This was no weirder than a lot of others, though it did have that unnatural aura around it.

  The bizarre display went on for a minute, this soundless near-hypnotic mime show with a vanilla violin. The minute seemed to Geiger like a very long stretch of time.

  And who, Geiger wondered, was the intended audience?

  Amused slightly, Geiger smiled. He lifted his gaze. He saw a three-quarter moon hanging in the sky above the buildings across the street. Then he looked back down to the sidewalk and the clown was gone.

  Geiger knew he had not dreamed this. As he scanned the block, he couldn’t find the clown a second time. The apparition had vanished as strangely as it had appeared, though Geiger did note some sort of vagrant sitting down the block, smoking on the doorstep of another two-million-dollar property. But the clown had left one thing behind: a notion in Geiger’s head.

  Recalling the vision of the polka-dotted clown, Geiger felt a name form at the forefront of his mind. Umberto. The clown was Italian and his name was Umberto. Re Umberto. King of Italy.

  “Well, who knew?” He shrugged. The clown looked like a refugee from a production of I Pagliacci, Geiger mused. So why shouldn’t Geiger have assigned him a nice Italian name?

  Umberto. As red, white and green as a fresh, cholesterol-laden cannoli.

  Geiger tried to assimilate all that he had just seen. But his mind felt foggy. His body felt sleepy. The night felt bumpy. Sometimes there was no explanation for what one saw on the streets of New York. Searching for explanations was a waste of time.

  So, why bother? Geiger finally pushed the shade back into place, blocking the light and the city out of his bedroom. He climbed into bed beside Diana. He felt the warmth of her sleeping body and pulled her to him. He thought about how much he loved her and how precious she was to him.

  She responded slightly and her body moved to his. He put an arm around her and started to enjoy a relaxing descent into sleep.

  She kissed him lightly and he thought again of how much he loved her. It was a reassuring notion. It was the last thought in his mind as he drifted comfortably off to sleep.

  Ten

  Diana Stephenson, the most important woman in Rolf Geiger’s life, was from Northern California, where her father had been a lecturer in music at Stanford and her mother had been in real estate. An only child, she had been a gawky adolescent. She went to schools for gifted children, but remembered them more for her lack of popularity than for their curriculum.

  She had a long graceful body with a bright beautiful face. Brown eyes that were always alive. Though she had yet to see her twenty-sixth birthday, her shoulder-length brown hair was touched with a tiny bit of gray, as if at one point some extreme shock or trauma had touched her.

  She read a lot. She listened to a lot of music. She was very plain for the first sixteen years of her life, had no serious boyfriends, no inseparable female pals. Other kids in her classes, when they had nothing else to do, made fun of her.

  First for being so plain. Next for being smart.

  Then something happened. She blossomed.

  The awkwardness of the teen years suddenly gave way to grace. Features that had been ordinary evolved into beauty. She learned tricks of style and makeup, jettisoned her glasses, and got a better haircut.

  Some of the boys who used to tease her now called her and wanted her company. She turned them down. Girls who had once ridiculed her now wanted her help in homework and social advice. Simultaneously, she finished first in her high school class, and blew out of California to Wellesley.

  There she developed a niche. She was a smart, pretty, well-spoken loner. A little quirky. She taught herself the flute well enough to play in a chamber music quintet. She read pop French novels in her free time, minored in art, and majored in music appreciation. She began to write about it and soon sold articles professionally.

  She was first published in a jazz magazine in Boston. Then the Boston Phoenix hired her to cover the music scene in Eastern Massachusetts. The pay was so-so, but the perks were great.

  She scribbled with style. Once she was sent to a country and western bar that functioned for wayward cowboys in Brookline.

  “My dog came home, the bank returned my farm, and my boyfriend gave me my virginity back,” she wrote at the top of her review. “I have just listened to a dreadful C and W band in reverse.” Diana, the world soon learned, had a tongue as sharp as her intellect.

  She kicked around Boston for a couple of years after Wellesley, then married an aspiring actor named Gary who was short on talent but long on charm. He led her to New York, then to Los Angeles. He had trouble finding work. He encouraged Diana to act or model, but she wasn’t interested. She fell out of the orbit of music review. She worked as a waitress in SoHo and then again in Sunset Plaza in Los Angeles. She was very pretty by this time, but adrift.

  Gary discovered cocaine and developed a temper. He hauled off and belted Diana one night. An hour later, she moved out of their crappy apartment in North Hollywood, drove overnight to Palo Alto, and crashed on her parents’ doorstep. Literally.

  “Oh,” her father said when he discovered her the next morning. “You’re back.”

  “I’m back.”

  “I’m not surprised. What’s new?” He hadn’t seen her in a year. The early stage of Diana Stephenson’s life was over, and so was an unlovely first marriage.

  While living at home, she worked evenings in a sports bar, putting her beauty on a paying basis. Halter top and short shorts. Her tips were astronomical and when customers got out of line, she flashed a fake wedding ring at them.

  She barely spent a penny. She earned her master’s degree from Berkeley and headed back to New York, looking to write music criticism for anyone who would hire her.

  Any music. Bluegrass. Alternative. Classical. She knew it all. Along the way, she went to a Rolf Geiger concert. She was bowled over. The looks. The charm. The attitude. The playfully disrespectful way he could pirouette from Brahms to U2 then back again.

  She wondered what made him tick, and decided she would find out and get paid for it at the same time. That meant an interview. It took two months, but she finally wrangled one.

  The interview happened in New York. She had gone to talk to Geiger after a concert at Carnegie Hall. She had been working on a freelance article about him and was trying hard to peddle it to The Atlantic, a periodical which had not treated him kindly.

  Rolf wasn’t giving interviews in those days. He was living alone and carrying on a full calendar of recitals. He was also trying to escape the long shadow of his mentor, Rabinowitz.

  At the time, Rolf was weary of being skewered in the press. Yet he liked the way Diana looked. So he granted an interview to her, partially to see what she would do with it, partially to have someone to speak to after a recital, and partially because he thought she was as sexy as any women he had ever met.

  Rolf found her easy to talk to. Diana could converse readily on a wide range of subjects, ranging from the New York Yankees to the art of Edward Hopper to the music of Hank Williams Sr. In the interview, she allowed him to open up and explain himself. Rolf liked her, right from the start. He quickly realized that they were both isolated loners.

  Diana
was one of the first people he had ever met who also knew that Don’t Worry, Baby was actually written for the Ronettes as a follow-up to Be My Baby, an obscure bit of sugar-fix cultural trivia that escaped most musicologists.

  “Very few people know that,” he commented during their first chat.

  “I know a lot about popular culture,” she said. “Classics blending with pop. That’s why I’m the perfect person to profile you. You’re also fascinated with both,”

  “But I know more than you do,” he said. She laughed.

  “You might think so,” she said. “And I might even let you think so.”

  “Who was the first to sing Are You Lonesome Tonight? before a live audience?” he asked.

  “Al Jolson,” she answered correctly. “In 1928.”

  “Very good,” he allowed. “Now name the most recent two-sided hit by Elvis Presley and give me the year.”

  “Flaming Star and Wooden Heart. Nineteen sixty-one.”

  “Impressive. Are you as good on the classics?” he asked.

  “Try me,” she teased.

  “How did Chopin die?”

  “Slowly. Of tuberculosis.”

  “Very good. What was the relationship between Chopin and the French sculptor, Auguste Clésinger?”

  “There were two,” Diana answered. “Clésinger was the son-in-law of George Sand, with whom Chopin had an affair. He also molded Chopin’s death mask in Paris in 1850.” Rolf blinked.

  “Wow! What nineteenth-century pianist did George Bernard Shaw meet and pronounce, ‘Nobly beautiful and poetic’?” he asked next.

  “Clara Schumann, wife of the composer, Robert Schumann,” Diana answered, “and herself a better technician at the keyboard than her frequently clumsy husband.” She smiled. Rolf laughed.

  “Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Diana said. “Plenty. And I won’t tell you any of it.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  She knew a lot of odd stuff and, as a journalist, knew how to pull it together. He liked that, too. So he let her hang around for a few longer interviews, discussing at some length some of the dichotomies of his life, how he wished to be taken seriously as a musician, knew he had a great gift, but couldn’t resist having fun at the same time. He let her watch him practice. When her article was finished, he asked her to join him for dinner sometime when he was in New York.

  She declined. He kept calling. She continued to decline. He called some more.

  He reasoned that somewhere a beautiful woman like Diana must already have an appreciative boyfriend. So he gave up.

  The Atlantic printed it prominently, emblazoning a picture of Geiger on the cover of the magazine. The photo was a hot, sexy shot from a 2004 recital in Stockholm. In it, Geiger, his flowing dark blond hair illuminated like a halo by friendly backlighting, intently played Liszt at a baby grand while wearing blue jeans, a pink formal jacket, and a black velvet bow tie.

  He was as gorgeous as a hot fudge sundae. Within the magazine, under a similar photo, Geiger was quoted as saying, “I have fun dressing goofy and playing loud music.”

  He also named Little Deuce Coupe as one of his favorite pieces of music, right up there with Die Meistersinger. The title on the article, which was also on the cover of the magazine, was The Prodigy Grows Up. Or Tries To, Real Hard. Honest!

  “The title was the editor’s title, not mine,” Diana explained when Rolf called her to congratulate her on the placement of the work. “I wanted to just call it, Fingers.”

  “I couldn’t care less about the title,” he said. “I called to ask you to dinner again” A slight change of tone, and,

  “You don’t give up, do you? Not ever?”

  “Not if I want something. Tell me your favorite restaurant.”

  “It’s called Le Rossignol,” she answered. It was a test.

  “The one in Boston or the one in Washington?” he asked. “I don’t know one in New York by that name.”

  “The one in Boston.”

  “Say ‘yes’ for Friday night,” he said. “I’ll do the rest.”

  “Okay,” she said after long thought. “All right. But we’re in New York, not Boston, so you can choose any restaurant.”

  “I already have,” he said.

  Friday night arrived. Geiger arrived with a car, a driver and two dozen roses. The car took them to La Guardia. A private plane took them to Boston. Another car took them to Le Rossignol on Newbury Street. The restaurant recognized him and gave them their best table.

  “You certainly know,” she said, “how to impress a woman on the first date.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I know you know,” she answered.

  The article led to other assignments. The next time they had dinner together, she slept over at his place. Three months later, she had moved in with him. Then came his big tour of 2005. He made a fortune and was reviled by the critics.

  Now they shared a gracious eight-million-dollar town house in Manhattan. Meanwhile he had stopped performing and had no idea in which direction to take his life. He only knew that he had found a special woman and eventually, with her, he would find that direction again. He felt, and she felt, that anything they had could be taken away from them. But as long as they had each other, they could survive or even recover. They were a rare couple in love without qualification.

  At this point in their lives, as Geiger got used to the idea that he would soon return to a tour of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, it was difficult for either him or Diana to image that there could be any force in nature—known or unknown—that could drive a wedge between them. But then again, the unknown, the forces that lurk just outside day-to-day reality, always constitute a special terror.

  Eleven

  The Monday following his dinner with Rolf, Brian Greenstone was in his office early, busy with a calendar and a globe.

  His client’s tour would be anchored by mega-dates, he had decided. New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, Tokyo. Paris. Munich. Rome. He tentatively prepared a twenty-four week calendar which would allow Geiger to plan an average of two dates a week, using these cities as the focal points of the tour. Greenstone e-mailed the top classical promoters in each city, suggesting the possibility of a concert date by Rolf Geiger.

  Within minutes, his e-mail account was cluttered with incoming responses. The promoters in each city were adamant on wanting Geiger for the dates proposed. Concert halls or stadia could be arranged easily. The promoters requested information on how to contract for the dates and what deposit would be necessary. The World tour had its first shape and agenda.

  Geiger stopped by Greenstone’s office in the early afternoon. Greenstone’s inner office was paneled by dark wood and deep leather chairs with theatrical, concert, and classic-film posters, all of them flamboyantly autographed by one of Greenstone’s clients. Included was one by Rabinowitz from when he played Covent Garden, and one by Geiger when he had played Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.

  “So, we’re off to a good start?” Geiger asked.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Greenstone said.

  “There are a few other details,” Geiger explained. “I want these dates to be accessible to everyone. I want to make sure that whenever possible the cheapest tickets are maybe only fifteen dollars. The balance can be made up by the wealthy people who’ll pay more to sit up close.”

  Greenstone rolled his eyes in would-be annoyance. Such requests were rare from most clients, but they were de rigueur from Geiger, who liked to be ‘accessible’ to all his fans, even if it kept his concert grosses lower than they might have been. If he ever became too rich, Geiger maintained, he would only have to spend undue amounts of time giving the money away. It was also not unusual at a Geiger recital for a pair of cheap rows to be positioned right through prime real estate at the center of the orchestra, rather than in—as he referred to it—the ‘nosebleed section’ way up in the rafters. At other times
, the cheap seats were sprinkled randomly through the house.

  “The usual quixotic pseudo-democratic Rolf Geiger price scale,” Greenstone chided good-naturedly. “I’d already thought of this idiocy of yours, so don’t even mention it.”

  “You get ten percent of the money I make as well as the money I don’t make,” Geiger answered. “That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  “Bloody populist,” muttered Greenstone. “For the matrons who have to sit with unwashed young people, you are both admired in principle and rebuked in practice. Accountants and business people consider you a Bolshevik. We would have you executed if we weren’t getting fat on your concerts, recordings and deplorable T-shirts. We don’t know whether to love you or hate you.”

  “Try both.”

  “I do. Every day.”

  “Fine with me,” said Geiger, keeping the banter going.

  Claire, Greenstone’s new assistant, entered the office bearing a just-received fax. Claire was young and pretty. She had shoulder-length dark hair and jewel blue eyes. She wore a simple blouse and a red skirt several inches above the knee. Like most young women who encountered Geiger, she could barely take her eyes off him.

  “Have you met Rolf Geiger?” Greenstone asked her. Then quickly seeing the way she was looking at the pianist, Greenstone answered his own question. “No, apparently you haven’t, but you would certainly like to.”

  “Hello,” Rolf said to her, rising and accepting her hand in greeting.

  “Hi,” she answered, mildly embarrassed by Greenstone’s introduction. She handed the fax to Greenstone.

  “Claire just graduated from Smith this past June. She’ll be working here as my assistant until she engineers a revolution, has me decapitated, and takes over the place later this month.”