by Noel Hynd
He stopped screaming. His heart was thundering. There was fear all over her face too.
Rabinowitz was gone.
For several seconds, once he started to calm, she looked at him. His eyes spun like marbles, searching for the danger that had been there seconds earlier. He couldn’t find it.
“Rolf?” She finally said. “Wake up! Wake up!”
“I am awake.”
“You couldn’t have been.”
“I was awake,” he said, sitting up against the wall. “And I saw him. I saw him in the dark!”
“Who?”
“And I felt his body next to mine.” He looked her directly in her eyes. “I saw his face,” he said.
“Rolf, who?” she asked, her own fear evident.
“Rabinowitz,” he said. A long pause as he read the skepticism in her eyes. “He’s here,” Geiger said. “Rabinowitz is in this house! His ghost!”
“Rolf. This is crazy. And you know it.” He searched for proof. He couldn’t find it.
“I know I heard something,” Geiger insisted. “I heard Isador Rabinowitz playing Chopin on my piano. And I saw him. He’s here. Or his ghost is here. That’s why I hear him playing.”
“Rolf. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re scaring me.”
“I’m scared too,” he said softly.
“Rolf,” she said patiently. “Calm yourself. You and I are the only ones in this house. There is no ghost here, and we are both safe and secure.”
His breathing steadied and he listened to her. He wanted desperately to believe. He put a hand on her arm and tried to absorb her calm. Several moments passed. The terror seemed to lift.
But from downstairs he heard the piano again. It struck up a mazurka. A pair of supernatural hands played Chopin with brilliance and cunning. Amazing harmonies and modulation, a piquancy within the rubato that would have been the envy of Chopin himself.
“See?” Geiger whispered. “See! He’s doing it again!”
“Doing what?”
“Playing! Listen!”
The music thundered. It was as big as the night, as dark as the worst evil a man could imagine.
“Rolf,” she said, “there’s nothing there. There’s nothing happening downstairs.”
“There’s music! Rabinowitz is playing.”
“I don’t hear anything,” she said. She shook him. “And you don’t either.”
His eyes went wide as saucers. The music down below stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Geiger’s eyes wandered over Diana’s shoulder, only to find that there, within his home, visible under the electric lights of the hallway, the silent figure of the late Isador Rabinowitz climbed the stairs.
Rabinowitz, or his ghost, was bold and vivid, not translucent at all, substantive and immaculately groomed and dressed, beaming with the same embalmed smile that he had worn for the latter years of his life.
Geiger began to scream again, and he screamed until the specter retreated. It was only a few seconds, but it seemed much longer.
Still no eyes. Just empty sockets.
Like the music that she could not hear, the vision of Rabinowitz was not something Diana could share. She looked exactly where Rolf was looking and did not see anything.
Which didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It only meant that she couldn’t see it. The contact, it seemed, remained one of mentor and protégé.
Rolf Geiger lifted his voice to the heavens and screamed like he had never before screamed in his life. And he would not stop. As Diana cradled his head and held him tightly, the world’s finest living concert pianist howled like a man coming out of a delirium trauma.
Even though he had closed his eyes and refused to look at the specter at the top of his stairs, in his mind Rolf was still seeing the cunning face, the mad-staring wolfish expression and deathly features of his onetime mentor.
He screamed and cried until he fainted, and Diana laboriously dragged him back into the bedroom and returned him to bed.
Fifteen
Over the next several days, as late March gave way to early April, Rolf Geiger’s nerves were on a sharp edge. Something had changed within him and around him, he knew.
Something within him said to keep moving. So he went for long walks during the day and early evening and sometimes even during the night. He started his hikes in his own neighborhood and sometimes ranged all the way down to SoHo, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, or Chelsea. On these lengthy journeys, he was often lost hopelessly in thought and reflection.
Once, in a maze of wandering that bordered on the dangerous, he strolled all the way up to Columbia University on West 112th Street and Broadway to visit a well-known candy store. The owner recognized Geiger. He made a huge fuss over him.
Geiger responded courteously. He autographed a candy box and further promised the proprietor a specially signed black-and-white picture which he did later send. Rolf bought half a pound of butter crunch. Then, bag of candy in hand, he wandered through the university campus for half an hour before starting back to mid-Manhattan. By the time Geiger arrived home, he had knocked back the entire bag. He had taken a six-mile hike, just for some candy, instead of sitting down to practice at the piano. Was there not a world tour in the planning stages?
One press photographer spotted Geiger on his walk and snapped several shots of him, following him in Central Park while Geiger did his best to ignore the man. The photos would appear the next day with the caption referring to Rolf as the “reclusive piano prodigy.”
Rolf spent enormous amounts of time on small inconsequential things. Reading fan mail, for example. Repairing a faulty electrical switch in his library was another small task which newly obsessed him. In contrast, the big things, such as his devotion to music, he dropped altogether. The entire day after Rolf had his 5 A.M. encounter with the spirit of Isador Rabinowitz, he did not touch the piano. The same absence from practice occurred again the second day. And the third.
While the long walks through Manhattan were the new order of the day for Rolf, Diana continued meeting her own professional obligations.
She attended her evening art classes. The lesson that week for Maurice Sahadi’s four students was sketching a handsome male nude, something none of the female students missed. But Diana could not give her full attention to this. She was constantly calling home to see if Rolf was okay. When he answered the phone, he politely responded that he was fine.
Almost as bad was the staring, empty look she saw on his face several time when she watched him unaware. Again, this was something that emerged in the hours after “the encounter,” as she now thought of it. It was as if he were listening to a distant symphony, did not like the way it was being played, but was helpless to tune it out.
“The encounter.” Or, “the imaginary encounter.” Whichever it had been.
Once, in the evening, before a fire in the living-room hearth, she went to Rolf and snuggled into his lap. Then she leaned forward and whispered in his ear.
“A penny for your thoughts, Tiger.”
“I love you very much,” he said. She kissed him.
“Then what else is on your mind?” She asked. “Please tell me.”
“I’ve never before so much thought of the piano as a weapon,” he said cryptically. “But it exists also as an instrument of fear and terror. That’s how I see it now. Sometimes.” She considered his words. Her deliberation lasted almost a minute.
“Tell me what you mean by that,” she finally said.
“The piano. A weapon,” he said. “Fear. It makes perfect sense. Music can raise any emotion. Including fear. Musicians make music, no one else. The piano is the tool.”
“Uh-huh,” she answered. He had the faraway look again, the one she didn’t like.
“So, if music can raise an emotion,” he proposed, “do you think it could also raise a spirit? Or a soul?”
“An emotion and a soul are not the same thing,” she said.
“No? I find them similar,” he answered.
She let it
go. It was a scary time for Diana Stephenson. Funny ideas were creeping into her head, too, from somewhere. For example, this was the first time in her life that she had ever considered the possibility of coming home to find someone she loved dead. Perhaps she was picking up odd vibrations from 112 East Seventh-third Street, too, just as Rolf asserted he was. It was as if a little unseen voice were maliciously whispering bad things to her.
Might she be better off, she wondered, with a different man? Rolf had an artist’s temperament, including the occasional arrogance and volatility that went with the territory.
Diana was a beautiful young woman. Intelligent and strong. If she moved out and was available again, there would probably be hundreds of attractive men who…
She stopped herself in mid-thought.
All of this was nonsense. She was here with Rolf because she loved him and wanted to be here. He was exciting and good to her. He loved her and told her so frequently. He was unselfish and contained none of the brutality that characterized so many men. If he were having emotional problems dealing with the passing of Isador Rabinowitz, it was her mission to be there for him.
Even to think of leaving was nonsense. Yet, Rolf continued with his own brand of nonsense—insisting adamantly that he had seen the ghost of Isador Rabinowitz in their home.
The subject of the ghost came up several times over the course of the ensuing days. Rolf maintained that he knew what he had seen and that “it”, meaning Isador Rabinowitz, was frequently there. Not in the flesh, maybe, but surely in spirit.
Rabinowitz was much the way he had been in his lifetime. Rolf still insisted that he occasionally heard the piano come to life, with no one in his library and no one at the keyboard.
“Sometimes I’m sitting right there in the library and it starts to play,” Geiger said out of the blue one evening. “It just starts to play. La da. La da dee da. Can you imagine that?”
“No. But I think you imagined something, Tiger,” she answered.
In continuing the discussion, hoping to purge it with daylight, she in turn had said all the right things. Diana had been in the house for all those times and had seen and heard nothing, she reminded him. No ghost. No music.
She even insisted that it had been she who had switched around the sheet music on his piano, though she didn’t remember having the Pictures at an Exhibition out and atop the piano.
“Of course, you can’t remember that,” Rolf had insisted. “Rabinowitz made that switch. You didn’t.”
“A dead man made that switch? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Yes. I know what I saw,” he said. The logic and the conversation went in circles. So did a few other things.
Rolf’s language became sprinkled with the odd obscenity, something he had rarely done until these recent and troubling times. Diana remembered how he had complained about old Rabinowitz’s purple tongue and how he found it embarrassing and distasteful. Now the odd curse flew easily and readily from Geiger’s mouth as if thrown by a foreign tongue.
Something else also made little sense to Diana.
As confusion ran rampant in her mind, elements of involuntary suspicion replaced it. Again, it was as if some foreign agent were putting alien thoughts in her ear. She began to consider the nature of Geiger’s long, unexplained absences in the afternoon. It occurred to Diana that another woman might be involved.
The absence of sex in her relationship with Rolf smarted doubly for Diana. There was that artist’s model she and her fellow students were drawing at night at Maurice Sahadi’s studio.
The model was highly attractive. He was a dark, muscular man from Wyoming, who was proportioned both handsomely and generously. He was just beginning to make a name for himself in New York as a model in print ads. Diana returned home from a few hours of sketching this body on Mondays and Thursdays looking for more than a shower before going to sleep. Some raw physical lust would have fit into her evening just fine.
But Rolf was uninterested. Somehow, viewing a ghost managed to have a depressive effect on an otherwise healthy libido.
Yet over the course of another ten days, Rolf became alert again and seemed to return to earth. The shadow of Rabinowitz withdrew, and Rolf maintained that the ghost had not visited again, even though the piano—to his mind, at least—still played the occasional phantom few bars from time to time. It sounded like someone sitting down to practice, then changing his mind, getting up, and angrily leaving the room. Better still, Rolf started to tinker—just tinker—with the piano again, sort of as if he had been waiting for a reservoir to fill up again and now it had.
To signal that the “recovery” was well under way, Rolf reached for Diana’s hand one afternoon when Mrs. Jamison was out for an hour. He pulled her to the sofa in the living room.
“I want you,” he said. “Right now.”
“You want to go upstairs?” she asked after a few kisses.
“No. Here on the sofa is fine.”
He made love to her without even completely undressing her.
Uncharacteristically, he said little to her while having sex. His conquest of her was fast and vigorous, which she did not mind. And yet, on the downside, the lovemaking seemed almost forced. Not routine, but not as intimate as usual.
If she looked at it the wrong say, it was almost as if it was a physical release for him more than intimacy or an act of affection. Had it been an act of affection she wondered, or a male act of staking his claim or reestablishing dominance?
And then there were his hands, which for some reason, he chose to keep firmly on her shoulders and almost upon her neck while he was on top of her. It was a strange bit of positioning and almost scared her. Like his newfound love of profanity, this almost seemed as if it were coming from somewhere else.
But she put aside her thoughts. Despite everything, there on the sofa, he had led her to a series of spectacular orgasms, just minutes before Mrs. Jamison had come back into the town house. So, straightening out her skirt and her hair, still enjoying the rush of excitement that came from the suddenness and spontaneity of their act, still feeling as if she had been joyously ravished by a man she loved, why complain?
Also exciting was the easing of Rolf’s mood.
Diana had been playing with the idea of their getting away for a few days. To anywhere. Just to get out of the city and away from that house where “the encounter” had occurred.
She had thought he would nix the idea. But when she proposed a short trip, that same evening, he welcomed the notion.
“Where to? And for how long?”
“Ever been to Nantucket Island?” she asked.
A moment’s thought. “Yes. But it was a while ago,” he said.
“Interested? You and me? For the weekend?”
His smile was the first one in days that looked almost right. His first since the master had purportedly visited.
“Sure. Great idea. Make the arrangements,” he said.
“Thanks, Tiger,” Diana said. “And welcome back.”
“Back from where?” Rolf asked, not understanding. He shrugged. He still didn’t understand. But some cloud had lifted, or appeared to have lifted, at least temporarily.
Rolf spent about an hour in the library that evening playing exercises on the piano. His touch on the keyboard was crisp and filled with authority. That was a good sign, too. The house was filled with music again. This time there was no question as to the provenance of the finger work on the keyboard.
Outside, on East Seventy-Third Street, in the darkness of the rarely used stone stoop across the street, the watcher had again materialized.
With gloved hands, he still puffed on the carcinogenic Lucky Strikes. He watched the lights go on and off in the windows of 112 East Seventy-Third Street and he smiled to Diana or Rolf whenever they looked his way on the street.
Both of them had by now recognized him from the funeral of Isador Rabinowitz, and both had come to the same conclusion. He was a classical version of a Deadhead. I
n conversation with Rolf and Diana, the old man said that he had been present at all of Isador Rabinowitz’s concerts for as long as he could remember. But now with Rabinowitz dead, his attention shifted to Geiger. He was a fan. That was all he was in life now, he said. A diehard fan. Rolf had seen the type many times before. And he was wary of them. Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon, had been an adoring head case, also.
He was mildly demented, they concluded, perilously fixated, but not dangerous. He looked to be too frail to obtain a weapon, much less point one and use it. So occasionally, because he looked so forlorn, they gave him food. Better to befriend him than make him even crazier.
“So, you’ll come to some of the dates on my tour?” Geiger asked the watcher one morning.
“The first ones. Definitely the first ones,” the man said.
“Not going to travel to Europe and Asia with me, are you?” Geiger asked. The old man shrugged.
“No. But I can watch your place here while you’re gone.” Geiger looked at him carefully.
“Yeah. Great idea,” he said without meaning it.
There was something in the watcher’s remark that Geiger did not like, yet he let it go. In the same way, he let his newly converted “number one fan” remain there on the block, despite the fact that the New York City police one day offered to make the man move.
“Better that I know where he is than where he isn’t,” Rolf said. And so the watcher was left to his sentry duty. There, as the days passed, he maintained his solitary seemingly meaningless vigil.
Abruptly, Geiger’s kindness was rewarded with a slight change of logistics. The watcher moved closer to Rolf’s home and took up a position on the sidewalk directly across from Number 112. He settled into his new location and now seemed to be waiting for something.
Sixteen
Thirteen mornings after the appearance of Rabinowitz’s ghost, mid-way through an April that was proving to be gloriously balmy, Rolf Geiger phoned Brian Greenstone’s office. Claire put him through to his agent.