Duet

by gay walley

  “Hi,” the young man said seductively. He fanned curly eyelashes at Oskar.

  “Hi,” Oskar responded, coldly, and then turned around.

  “Late night,” the young man called out.

  “Yeah,” Oskar said, thinking he could take him on if the kid was after his wallet.

  “What are you doing down here? Looking for someone?” the kid asked. Oskar had noted that this young man’s denim shirt was scruffy but his jeans were unusually tight.

  “No,” Oskar said.

  Why should he tell this kid about himself? It was odd but Oskar found in some way he could never get rid of that Germanic stiffness. A certain formality. How dare this guy interrupt his private solitude?

  “I’m looking for friends,” the kid sidled up next to him, smiling, insinuatingly.

  “Oh,” Oskar said. “Doesn’t seem that busy a place to find any.” The kid was appraising him and annoyingly not getting lost. “Where are you going?” Oskar said. “I’m walking alone. If I had wanted to be with someone, I would have been.”

  “Okay okay,” the kid said but didn’t go away. “I’m used to walking. I’m a dog walker.”

  “Well I’m not a dog,” Oskar said and then thought, A dog walker?

  “Where are you a dog walker?”

  “In the village.”

  “Do you go to NYU Film School?”

  “Hey, you’ve heard about me? I can’t believe it. No, I don’t go to NYU. I just tell people that so they feel safe about me. Why? You have a dog?”

  “Impressive,” Oskar said. “You mean you lie.”

  “I look at it as reassuring them,” the kid snorted, then smirked again, and really Oskar was very sure that this kid was a real jerk and perfect for blackmailing. He probably picks up guys here and then blackmails them too. He’s the one.

  “What type of dogs have you walked?” Oskar asked, just to not make any mistake.

  “All kinds. Why? You got a dog?”

  “Yeah. I have a shepherd puppy. Any experience with those?”

  “You’re kidding,” the kid said. “I used to walk two shepherd puppies, To Be and Not to Be. Can you believe those names? They were adorable. And they had a very bizarre owner. I should tell you about her.”

  “I have no desire to hear about the owner. But someone who lies…” Oskar said, walking now with the boy toward a dark place that the massiveness of the Con Ed building kept in shadows. Who knew which one was leading whom toward the empty place, maybe it was erotic for the young guy, or maybe for Oskar, “…would be very capable of blackmail. Just one more notch up the scale.”

  The kid jerked his head up, a little frightened. Who was this guy?

  “Ah,” Oskar said, “I see I am not misjudging.”

  “So what?”the kid said arrogantly. “We all do what we gotta do, man.”

  Oskar said to himself, How right you are. He just hated these guys who live off others. What the hell do they contribute to anything? He looked at the kid who was really not much taller than his shoulder and the boy smiled, again, seductively. He thinks he’s got me, Oskar thought. Fuck him.

  And Oskar, who worked out every day on a heavy punching bag, threw a punch at this kid and it felt so enlivening, so righteous, so right, in fact, that he threw another one and was ready for another one but the kid went down, after the second punch, as easily if he was a doll. He just lay there. He had blood streaming out of one eye, one hand trembled reflexively.

  “Get up,” Oskar ordered. It felt as if they were the only two people on earth. Had New York just receded into the night? How had they managed to land in a Nevada landscape? Oskar could actually hear the silence, and looked around to check. All he saw was one rather dull streetlamp a block away.

  The kid did not get up. Oskar bent down to help him and could see that he was out. Oskar took his pulse. None. The kid was not breathing. Good God, what kind of punch was it? Maybe the kid had a heart attack out of fear. Now what? Call the police? Go to prison for manslaughter. Oskar thought for only a millisecond and then carefully got out his handkerchief. He rubbed where he had punched the boy, checked around for any samples of his own hair, and methodically, surely, turned around to walk back up Fourteenth, leaving the boy there for the garbage trucks and meat trucks and god knows what else which drives by in the morning.

  Well, Duet didn’t have to worry about that one. Neither did some hapless gay man. Or some attractive dog, for that matter.

  Oskar remembered one of his girlfriends telling him that her shrink said that if a man has all his feelings, he would kill someone. Turns out it’s true. Oskar couldn’t honestly say he felt the least bit guilty. He remembered a line in some movie or novel that the funny thing about killing was how easy it was. Strangely, surprisingly, he felt empowered, like a vigilante. But where did it come out in him, this violence, this rage? Suddenly the game theory he had studied in college came to him. Tonight was the classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma. It is in the nature of the strong to vanquish the weak.

  The more he walked, and now he was among people again, coming out of bars, mostly college kids, the more he felt oddly renewed, younger, wired. It would be great to have sex now but he wasn’t the prostitute type. And he never called Duet spontaneously. She was sensitive, she might pick up something was not right.

  He looked round at the girls coming out of the bars and truth be told it would be too much work to pick one up. How could he go through banal conversations while he felt this strange intense elixir in his veins?

  He walked past his doorman, Hi Miguel, took the elevator, took a quick look in the elevator mirror. No change, he noted, rather like how he had been struck there was no sign of losing his virginity on his face when he was thirteen. He entered his apartment quietly. Madonna, his chef, was asleep. Oskar got into his bed and picked up Jim Thompson. He still felt strangely alive, as if he could do anything, as if he was about to start reading about himself in the book. These types of events happened in novels all the time. Maybe Oskar was just a fictional character in his own life. Maybe we all are.

  The only thing that Oskar did differently was not go into his office for three days. Each day he had four newspapers delivered to him. This he did even before the encounter, so each morning, after Madonna served him his watermelon, toast and coffee, he followed the reports on the murder carefully. The Post and the Daily News ran it in their police notes. Was it a heart attack? No comment. Oskar was nervous when his phone rang, but it was just friends, old girlfriends, his son.

  However, as he stayed home those three days, he could not help pondering the odds – and improbabilities really – that he was the moving force in what happened that night. The homicide rate for 100,000 people, he knew, was 007.4%. And the odds of the victim knowing the perpetrator was 0047.2%. But the sheer miscellany, the randomness of the dogwalker and Oskar finding one another in that dark spot in New York at three in the morning could never be quantified. It was, Oskar told himself again and again, destiny.

  Eventually, the papers stopped mentioning the murder. And when Oskar finally ventured out for his first tennis game that week, he found that when he was playing, he didn’t think about the murder at all. What had changed was that now he knew, like a character in literature, he could do anything. Be Humbert Humbert in Lolita or be a criminal in Robbe Grillet’s The Voyeur. He could be whatever he wanted. Anything was possible.

  Fifteen:

  The next morning Duet woke up with Mahler on her mind. That was because she now found herself standing, in the afternoon, outside the Mahler Society townhouse, clutching her piano music, music she had written. She was going to give a small performance for the society’s President and three of his staff. The President of the Society was known to be a successful litigator, who was obsessed with Mahler, Wagner and Nietzsche. The VP of the Society, a man who owned many magazine businesses, a multimillionaire, was also obsessed, had given up owning his media companies, taken out his money, and now taught classes on Mahler at musi
c schools. Both men had written umpteen books on Mahler’s work and life.

  Duet looked up at the maple trees on 84th Street and asked for inspiration and then climbed the very well scrubbed stone steps.

  The secretary brought her into a large old fashioned room with a portrait of Mahler, with his intense expression and Trotskyite eyeglasses, which was hanging over the fireplace. There were photos of conductors who had become Mahler experts, such as Leonard Bernstein and Bruno Walter. No photos of Mahler’s beautiful unfaithful wife.

  In came a rotund older man, with a lot of energy, followed by a tall, Giacometti-thin aristocratic older man and then a woman who was also not young but had a pretty upper class Brahmin face that masked its feelings with poker finesse. After shaking Duet’s hand, Maurice, the President, said, “Sit down, relax.”

  Duet sat, but could not relax. Would they laugh at her? Would they think she was a fool?

  “It’s unusual that a young woman would be so interested in Mahler, since especially your letter says you are not a professional musician. And of course he did write a little bit on the piano but did not dedicate himself to any serious work for the piano,” Maurice continued.

  Jack broke in – “I think there is one piano piece he did in his student days.”

  Maurice looked annoyed and said, “It’s probably not worth very much. Student work rarely is.”

  Jack countered, “What do you mean? We all listen to Shubert’s young work and –“

  “Well, Shubert is another story. He was only twenty-two when he died –“

  And Duet wished they’d stop bickering so she could get this masochistic spectacle of hers over with.

  They quieted down and turned to her. “Do you want us to read the music,” Maurice asked, warmly, “or do you want to play it yourself?”

  It would be cowardly to say, Read it.

  She nodded toward the enormous, pristinely polished piano. She was so frightened now, that she had lost the power of speech.

  She sat down, straightened the chair. Maurice piped up, “Do you want someone to turn the pages?”

  “No,” she answered in a quivering voice, “I know them by heart.”

  He chuckled in delight. The axiom is true, she thought, people do like to feel superior to one another. They knew she was in excruciating fear.

  She had a brief second where she remembered that Rudyard Kipling was so repeatedly abused when farmed out to relatives as a child that when his mother finally reappeared and entered his bedroom for the first time to kiss him good night, he flung up his hands – to protect himself from the anticipated blow.

  She straightened herself up before the piano, and began to play. Mahler, to her, had two signatures: these sharp almost hammering cataclysmic sounds, coupled with the most profound heavenly movements that were slow, and that emulated real feeling. She began her first piece, which was full of percussion, since Mahler used percussion to symbolize the heartbeat in his music. The men nodded as she played and she could tell simply by the air in the room that they were listening attentively.

  Then she switched to her second piece which was a single movement based on the last movement in the third, and she played it very simply, told herself to take her time, so as to really capture the sound between the notes. When she finished, she finally looked up at the three and they were all smiling. Genuinely.

  Maurice jumped up, glowing. “Young lady, this is magnificent.” He also thought her sensual and delicate looks were a bit magnificent, but he kept that to himself.

  Jack asked, “Any more?”

  Duet answered, “At home. I didn’t want to be presumptuous about your time.”

  “We would love to have you be so presumptuous,” Maurice said, walking round and round his chair. “We have a meeting coming up in a month. Would you like to give a concert? We will publicize it and a lot of people will come. It will be a treat for musicians and music lovers alike.”

  She nodded, thrilled. A new world. She was entering a new world.

  The woman asked, “I have never heard the name Duet before. It’s lovely but why has it never been used?”

  “My parents,” Duet answered, with a touch of tightness, “loved music.”

  “What did you think?” Maurice asked. “They would call her Solo?”

  “Actually I know a dog named that –“ she smiled.

  Jack began, “Arpeggio would be a nice name.”

  “There is an Arpege perfume,” Duet said.

  “I love that perfume, “ the woman said …

  “Well, maybe there should be a Duet perfume,” said Maurice, extending his hand. “Anyway, we love the Duet solos, so to speak. We are honored you shared them with us. We will do all we can to help you.There will be many serious and renowned musicians at the meeting, so maybe they will be able to take your music to other venues.”

  She nodded. She had accomplished something.

  And in a few minutes, she was back out on the street. The sun was beautiful and she felt happy, proud of herself. She called her mother, not answering, her father, not answering, and left messages. Then she wished she had a man to call. Oskar. They didn’t have that kind of relationship where she called him out of the blue. David! David had just returned to Massachusetts so she dialed him, although with a touch of disappointment. He was whom she always turned to but she didn’t seem in love with him enough to change her life to be with him. She liked him.

  But as for love. Maybe she would have to accept that it was not her fate. Maybe she couldn’t have that. Maybe this was all the happiness she could achieve. And it isn’t that bad, she told herself. It’s lonely, but it’s rich with imagination and possibility.

  When she got home, she did what so many people do who are sad about being alone: she fell asleep. To Be and Not to Be settled themselves in next to her. Well, this is a kind of solidity, me and my dogs. When she woke, it was night time. She checked her blackberry. No messages. Then she checked her pc. An email from Maurice that had gone into her junk folder.

  “I must say you seem intelligent, personable, artistic, interesting, accomplished, sweet. So I just wanted to send you these commendations and thank you again for sharing your work. I would be delighted to invite you for dinner or lunch, whenever you have the time.”

  That was kind, she thought. She quickly typed back that she worked in midtown and would be happy to meet after work for a bite any time. He responded also immediately and set it up for the following Tuesday.

  That’s when the phone rang.

  “Golf central calling,” David said. “So it went well huh?”

  “Fantastic, unless they were pretending.”

  “They probably fell in love with you.”

  “Two old men and one old woman.”

  “So?”

  “David, believe it or not, I think they liked the music.”

  “I do believe it, honey,” although she wasn’t sure that was true.

  “David, why do you think we’re not a couple?”

  “Maybe because we know we’ll end up as one.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “We will be,” he said.

  “But we don’t sleep together.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” he said. “That will all work out. We just have to find a way to be in the same city.”

  But it rang false to her, hollow. A man is in deep when he is in love with you, as a woman should be when in love with a man. She should be wanting to see him. But she doesn’t. She just likes knowing he is there. The same seemed to be true for him.

  “I know you’ll always be with me,” he said, “because I’m so easy going. I’m the only person you could get along with.”

  “But what do you like about me?” she asked.

  “You’d let me play golf all the time.”

  She probably would. What if she lived with him and just played the piano and was safe in his loving her as who she is? What would be so damn wrong about that.

  That’s
when she got an email from Oskar.

  “Saturday night. City Crab. I know you like that place. 8 pm sharp. After my tennis game.”

  And it was that contact that gave her the frisson. Damn, she thought. “Okay you guys,” she said to the dogs, “let’s celebrate. Put on your dancing shoes.”

  And she grabbed the leashes.

  Sixteen:

  The next day, her email box was full of introductions and congratulations. Maurice had sent a memo out to the Mahlerites, and in this day of instant tracking of people over the internet, she received a flurry of emails in less than twenty-four hours about her first performance. A man making a film on Mahler wrote to see if he could include her music. A cellist interested in seeing the score itself and transposing it for a trio. The pretty older woman who wrote the Mahler newsletter which went overseas said perhaps, who knew, Duet might get asked to perform in England and Vienna. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?

  Duet wrote back, Yes.

  Vienna. Where her grandmother was from.

  She picked up the phone and dialed.

  Daisy’s raspy Austrian voice. “Hallo?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Dahling, vhat are you doing? Are you alright?”

  Duet could see her grandmother in her black slacks and turtleneck and all that gold and heavy stoned costume jewelry. She could also visualize her grandmother’s apartment with its Danish furniture, left over from her grandmother’s marriage to the French journalist. That marriage went the way of all her grandmother’s marriages. The married couple came to not be able to stand each other. “I didn’t realize he vas such an idiot.”

  Duet told her grandmother about the Mahler story.

  Daisy listened then blurted out in her raspy voice, “I never really liked Mahler. Too heavy. I like Mozart.” Duet cringed. “I know, I know,” her grandmother continued, “on this we don’t agree. I gave you the Magic Flute. You never even listened to it. Now, on the other hand, I find Alma interesting. All these affairs. A true Viennese. Only Americans are interested in fidelity. I think she must have been beautiful. And only sleeping with geniuses. That is interesting. Who can explain that?”