Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

  Uncertain of what it was that had prompted him to leave her, she followed him to the library and watched him as he looked through several books, replacing one after another in the shelves. To detain him, Vala asked him whether he still wanted to know who took the picture of her, and before he could answer, she went right on, as she so often did, and said that the picture had been taken by Patrick Domostroy—her old friend—who introduced her to Gerhard Osten the same evening she met Jimmy and Donna.

  Osten was really perplexed now. Was Domostroy connected with the White House letters? Could he have photographed the nude woman?

  When Osten examined the White House photographs with a magnifying glass and a fingerprint detection kit, he was astonished to find that the only fingerprints on them were his own. Was the absence of fingerprints accidental? he asked himself, or was the writer of the letters so determined to keep her identity secret that she had wiped all her prints off the photos?

  Next he took the Polaroids to a photo lab and while he waited, had each one blown up to the size of an opened newspaper. The enlargements brought out more than ever the mysterious, thrilling beauty of the girl’s natural proportions, and the longer he stared at her, the more entranced he became by the bewitching purity of her abandonment. Her long, full hair, which obscured her face in all the photos, also seemed in many of them to be artfully arranged over her shoulders in such a way as to conceal the contour of her shoulder line. The thought that she might remain forever faceless and anonymous maddened him, and he began to examine methodically, obsessively, her neck, her breasts, the line of her belly, the shape of her thighs, hoping to discover a birthmark, a blemish, anything that he might one day match up in a body of flesh and blood.

  He noticed the unusually large aureoles of her breasts. He had seen such aureoles only once before, on a former lover, a housewife who was six months pregnant at the time. But there was nothing in the shape of the White House nude to suggest pregnancy.

  On a surprise visit to his father, Osten managed to get a minute alone in the bedroom, where with his camera he quickly took a picture of the photograph of Vala. The next day he had it developed and enlarged and compared it with the enlargement it resembled. Even though Vala was dressed and the White House woman was naked, and even though the two women were photographed in entirely different settings, when he placed the pictures next to each other, the similarity in camera angle and pose was unmistakable. Still, as unlikely as it was that two photographers would be moved to capture their models from exactly the same bizarre, almost perverse angle, it was, he supposed, plausible.

  While considering these matters, Osten had something else to worry him. Donna had told him that she was getting up her courage to contact Patrick Domostroy. She wanted to ask him to listen to her play and to analyze her technique. This, she said, would help her in making up her mind whether or not she should compete in Warsaw. The International Chopin Piano Competition was held only once every four years, so if she did not try this year, she said, she might not get another chance.

  Osten was convinced that Domostroy would take any such opportunity to make a play for Donna, for at the party where they had met, Domostroy had shown all the signs of being attracted to her. It occurred to Osten also that Donna might inadvertently provide Domostroy with information that would betray Goddard’s identity. Yet, he had to admit, he had no good reason to tell her not to contact Domostroy. And, after all, unless she had guessed more about him than she had ever revealed, what could Donna possibly say to Domostroy that would give him away? As far as Osten knew himself, he never talked in his sleep.

  In the meantime, he went to Leitmotiv, Inc., the best-stocked store in New York for surveillance, security, rescue, and detection equipment, which supplied well-to-do private eyes as well as wealthy Americans, Latins and Arabs mindful of their safety. He bought a voice-activated microminiaturized tape recorder that would record nonstop for twelve consecutive hours and a parabolic microphone designed to pick up, amplify, and record sounds from as far away as one third of a mile.

  In the hope of finding the White House woman before she found him, Osten became a frequent visitor at Juilliard and carefully studied all the women in the piano literature workshop in which Chopin’s letters had been discussed.

  Using the White House photographs as a yardstick, he quickly eliminated all those whose figures were patently at variance with the figure in the pictures, and eventually he narrowed the candidates down to about six. From that point on, the photographs were of little help. They told him that his White House letter writer was white, but nothing more. Everything else about her—height, weight, size, identifying marks—was obscured by the way she was posed, by the play of light and shadow on her body, and by the angle of the camera, which either foreshortened or extended the length of her limbs. Nevertheless, on further observation, at least three of the six likely candidates appeared to be relatively close in physical type to the woman in the photographs. The only way to be sure that one of them was the woman he was seeking would be to examine her intimately—not merely her body, which might resemble a dozen others, but also her mental environment, her musical knowledge, her taste, her thoughts and associations. Even then, the process would not be easy because all his suspicions were tenuous at best. What if the resemblance between the two photographs was accidental? What if the woman he chose to question turned out to have no connection to the White House or to anyone working there?

  Then he realized the greatest problem of all: if one of these Juilliard women was the person who had written to him, would he, by inquiring too obviously about things she had said in her letters, be falling into a trap that she, or someone behind her, was setting up for him? Would he be letting her know that he was Goddard before he could be certain that she was his White House correspondent? Was he prepared to take such a risk—and of all places at Juilliard, a veritable beehive of music-business gossip? Furthermore, if he asked any of the women out in order to talk to them, how could he justify to Donna this sudden interest in her schoolmates—in the event that she found out about it? Was he prepared to risk losing Donna to find the White House woman?

  That Patrick Domostroy might have taken the woman’s picture made for additional complications. Even if Domostroy had taken the pictures, he might still not know what use the woman had put them to. And, if questioned, why would he reveal her identity to Osten? On the other hand, if Domostroy had taken the pictures and known why he was taking them, then either the woman was a tool in his hands, or he a tool in hers, and any attempt by Osten to question him would automatically arouse suspicion. If he went to Domostroy and began to ask him things that only Goddard could know from the letters, wouldn’t he be declaring himself as Goddard? Was he prepared to take such a chance with Patrick Domostroy, a morally bankrupt man and open himself to blackmail?

  During his visits to the Juilliard piano literature workshop Osten found one of the three of his women candidates particularly interesting. Her name was Andrea Gwynplaine. She was a classmate of Donna’s, so it took only subtle prompting to get Donna to introduce him to her one day in the school cafeteria, his favored spot for studying the looks of his White House nude candidates.

  At first Andrea seemed to Osten to be a bit taller and perhaps more slender than the White House nude; on the other hand, he knew that the odd angle of the camera would have distorted her figure. Osten thought he could see the slightly angular line of the nude’s thighs in Andrea’s body even though the natural wave of Andrea’s hair did not match the hair of the nude. The more he thought he might have identified the woman he was looking for, the more excited he grew over the prospect of exploring Andrea’s mind, for if she had written the letters to Goddard, her mind was infinitely more exciting to him than her body.

  How different Andrea was from Donna, he thought. Donna was statuesque, her carnality ostentatious; Andrea was feminine and stylishly mellow. Donna’s dark color, as if defying light, seemed to come out of her and stop with her, but Andr
ea’s flesh, radiant as the light that fell upon it, was lambent to his eyes. In manner, Donna was decisive, self-assertive; Andrea was simply vivacious. Donna commanded attention; Andrea attracted it. And finally, the remote chance that Andrea might be the White House woman filled Osten with longing for her. He no longer desired Donna.

  In his imagination, he had come to see the letter writer as the woman he had always wanted to have, the woman he had almost found—and lost—in Leila. Was it possible that he would realize her in Andrea?

  He had to remind himself to move cautiously. If Andrea was his faceless nude, under no condition must he tip her off as to who he was, for if she had written the letters he had received, she was obviously hoping at every moment to be approached by Goddard, and any sudden interest shown in her would put her on her guard.

  Yet he wanted to know her. He was drawn to her not only because she might have written the extraordinary letters, but also because Andrea was in herself enticing. Still, there was one persistent thought that made him recoil from her: the thought of Patrick Domostroy.

  If Domostroy had taken the photographs of the White House nude, and if the nude was Andrea, then Osten had to face the possibility that a man he disliked intensely was a friend of this beautiful woman, possibly even her lover, at least intimate enough to have taken highly compromising photographs of her in a state of sexual frenzy. Osten himself wanted intimacy with Andrea so much that, to clear an emotional path to her, he decided he would have to take risks in order to resolve whether or not she was the faceless letter writer, and if so, whether Domostroy was the man who had photographed her.

  III

  Once all the letters were sent, everything was up to Goddard. Trusting Domostroy’s instincts about musicians and his assurances that the letters contained sufficient clues to lead Goddard to her, Andrea hoped Goddard would waste no time, and to make room for him Domostroy left her apartment as they had agreed he would and moved back to his room in the Old Glory.

  He was greeted there by the stale smell of old leather and by layers of dust, and he spent all of his first day back cleaning his quarters, checking all the fuses and alarms, and resetting the dozens of electronic Rat-Away devices whose high-frequency sound kept the unfriendly rodents at a safe distance. On his second night home, he pulled the dust cover from the grand piano in the ballroom and, improvising arrangements of Goddard’s Spanish songs, played himself into a drowsy state. He had expected to feel empty and bereft away from the comfort of Andrea’s apartment, but to his surprise, as the days passed he actually felt elated, as if by being alone again he was suddenly free to embark on another journey, of whatever sort he might choose.

  Meanwhile, Andrea waited for Goddard, or someone representing him, to show up. She scrutinized the behavior of everyone around her, and she called Domostroy at odd hours, asking him to meet her in hotel lobbies, coffee shops, or museums in order to discuss her findings and suspicions, always taking the greatest pains to make sure no one followed her.

  Domostroy could not tell whether she did this because she was bored without a lover to keep her company, or because she wanted to keep her hold on him. Even though he was content to be on his own again, living by himself, listening to good music, reading a lot, and playing four times a week at Kreutzer’s and looking for other jobs in between, he promised to be on call to help her whenever she needed him. In return, she said, she would spend a night with him from time to time.

  Soon after he moved out, they met once in the music rooms of the Metropolitan Museum. As they passed among the display cases filled with musical instruments, Domostroy found himself wanting her again. In her loose blouse, tight jeans, and high-heeled sandals, she was the image of a seductive coed. Caught between his craving for her and his contempt for his own sexual dependence, he knew he was by no means free of her.

  “How’s life at the Old Glory?” Andrea asked.

  “Fine, but I miss you,” he said flatly.

  She dismissed his words and stopped beside a collection of ancient lyres.

  “Now that’s something for you,” she said, pointing at one of the strangely shaped instruments and reading the label. “‘The Kissar, an African lyre. In Central Africa, the bodies of lyres were made from gourds, coconut shells, or, as in the ones you see here, human skulls; sometimes the arms were the horns of a gazelle.’” Domostroy recoiled at the sight of the skeletal face of the Kissar. The top of the skull was sliced off, and skin was stretched over it; locks of human hair were stitched around the crown for decoration, and for resonance the bottom of the skull was tightly wrapped in thin dried skin.

  Andrea followed the line of his stare. “Judging by the color of the hair, the owner of the skull was white. Too bad for him,” she remarked calmly. “By the way, speaking of white men and African gazelles, I found out that you have another admirer at Juilliard—Donna Downes, a black pianist. You never mentioned that you knew her.”

  “I met her only once—and very briefly—at an Etude party,” said Domostroy. He remembered Donna well, and he had always regretted that he had let time and events neutralize his memory of her. He wished he had followed his initial yearning to go after her. “How do you know that she’s my admirer?” he asked.

  “Donna sat down with me in the cafeteria yesterday, and—surprise, surprise!—she had an Etude Classic of yours in her small black hand!”

  “Her hand may be small and black,” said Domostroy, “but it’s certainly big on a piano.”

  “Though not as big as her tits,” said Andrea. “Anyway, I asked our coconut woman what she thought of you.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell her that we know each other,” he snapped. “Remember our plan. Until we hear from Goddard, no one, but no one, must know—”

  “Of course I didn’t tell her,” said Andrea. “But there was nothing wrong with talking about your music. Lots of Juilliard students are familiar with it.”

  “And what did Miss Downes have to say about my music?” he asked.

  “She didn’t get a chance to say anything because Jimmy Osten, her boyfriend, came to pick her up, and she stopped talking.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Domostroy, “little Jimmy Osten!”

  “Do you know him?” asked Andrea.

  “Not well. But his father has been my publisher for years, and visiting him, I occasionally run into Jimmy. He was so quiet and withdrawn as a child that nobody paid any attention to him. He’s grown up now, and still nobody does.”

  “One body does,” said Andrea. “Donna’s.”

  “What do you expect? She’s about to become a concert pianist and must be in need of a music publisher. Keep in mind that Jimmy’s father, a rather sweet old goat, owns Etude. But his kid seems like a cold fish to me—with no feelings.”

  His words annoyed Andrea. “How do you know he has no feelings? Did Donna tell you that at the party?”

  “She didn’t have to,” said Domostroy. “The night I met Donna, Jimmy and I had a little argument about music, and even though he got furious with me—or with her for agreeing with me—he couldn’t bring himself to say so. Such a suppressed little cock!” he laughed. “Or is he a cuckoo?”

  “That’s unfair,” she said. “Why make fun of him just because he has a voice defect?”

  “Who cares about his voice? I’m talking about him.

  O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,

  Or but a wandering voice?

  No bird, but an invisible thing,

  A voice, a mystery!”

  he recited. Wordsworth.

  “You amaze me with your trivia. Besides, Jimmy’s hardly an invisible thing! He’s definitely good-looking,” she said. “Beautiful smile. Gentle eyes. Silky blond hair. And he seems sentimental.” She halted, then said snidely, “But let me tell you a little story about your nigrescent venerator, Donna.

  “A couple of years ago a guy named Marcello used to hang around Juilliard. Marcello was white, built like a beachboy—tall and lanky, polite, always smiling—and he
never made a move to date anyone. Yet he kept hanging around with that very big, and believe me, very obvious thing of his tucked in his jeans, as if he were keeping a vigil, as if he were waiting for someone he hadn’t met yet, and we couldn’t figure out who it could be.

  “Some of the girls—and I was one of them—fell for his looks and his manners. We fantasized about Marcello’s innocence, hoping he was still waiting for his ideal love to come along and lead him gently to bed. But he kept his distance. Finally, after we had all given up on him, he found his true love, Donna Downes! A real slap in our white faces. Donna was an honors scholarship student—and the winner of just about every piano award there was—including the Elisabeth Weinreich-Levinkopf Piano Prize. Before we knew it, Donna and Marcello started going steady, and eventually our jealousy died down as we got caught up in our own studies, lovers, and commuter trains.

  “Then something unexpected happened. A friend of mine said he was convinced that our Marcello was, in fact, the porn star known as Dick Longo, who had played in hundreds of ‘sin-ematic’ porno loops, special videotapes, and stag films, that were being shown in the peep show theaters around midtown.

  “The next day my friend took me to one of the Times Square video sex emporiums where, in the privacy of the peep booth, we examined all the outstanding features of Dick Longo in Organ Playing, one of his naughtier sexcapades. There was no doubt about it: Longo was Marcello. I promptly bought a copy of the film, and the next day I invited all the girls who had once liked him so much to view my acquisition. Imagine their excitement at seeing him in all the splendor of his well-endowed parts.” Andrea paused.

  “What about Donna Downes?” asked Domostroy. “Did she know all along who he was?”

  Andrea raised her hands in a shrug. “All I know is that Donna came to the screening, and as the rest of us watched the extended antics of naked Dick Longo—and of his very out-standing ‘longo’. On the screen, we also kept an eye on her—watching him. Well, I’ll say this much for the inky jade—not a twitch of her face indicated that she was surprised by what she saw, and none of us dared to ask whether she had known before that day that she was being fucked by the most overexposed porn stud in the country. Anyway, after that, our Black Orchid went right on dating Marcello for several months. Obviously it was to spite us.” She smiled mischievously.