Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

  “When was that?” asked Domostroy casually.

  “About a month ago.”

  “A month ago? Are you sure he didn’t meet her earlier?” he blurted before he could stop himself.

  “Of course, I am,” said Donna. “It was right after Jimmy asked me to find out whether Juilliard taught the music of Goddard Lieberson—whose name I knew because of his connection with CBS—and of another composer whose name escapes me …” She halted. “I know,” she said, “Boris Pregel, a contemporary of Lieberson’s Do you know their work?”

  “Yes, I do. I even knew them.” Domostroy’s heart pounded with excitement. “But go on with the story,” he said, afraid she might lose the train of her thought.

  “Well, actually Jimmy wanted to know whether Lieberson and Pregel were taught in music courses anywhere in the city. I checked through all the course catalogs, but they weren’t—not this semester anyhow.”

  “Is that so?” said Domostroy, encouraging Donna’s talkative mood. “I didn’t know Jimmy was so musical.”

  “Oh, yes. He is, surprisingly. He also asked me to find out if any New York music school offered a course in Chopin’s life. I guess he did it for my sake.”

  “And did you find him such a course?” asked Domostroy.

  “Yes, I did. Piano Literature, given right at Juilliard. I took Jimmy to the next couple of lectures.”

  Domostroy felt lost. First, according to Andrea, Jimmy Osten studied at the University of California at Davis. Karlheinz Stockhausen had once been a visiting professor at Davis and had exerted considerable influence there. One of his students later became the creative light of ELMUS, an ensemble which, with the help of digital electronic instruments, developed music of an unusually high energy level, particularly in terms of percussion. Some of Goddard’s melodies and arrangements, Domostroy remembered, bore striking similarities to ELMUS’s music. And now here was Osten, who had gone to school right where ELMUS originated, hanging around Andrea, the girl who was the bait for Goddard, asking questions about Pregel and Lieberson and Chopin letters! The only reason Osten would want to know about Lieberson and Pregel would be if he had seen the letters. By now Domostroy had no doubt that there was a direct link between Osten and Goddard. Otherwise how would Osten know exactly what was in the letters to Goddard? Did he know Goddard personally? Was there a connection between Goddard and Etude Classics? Was there some way Jimmy Osten—with the authorization of his father or someone at Nokturn—could get to read Goddard’s mail before it was delivered to Goddard? Then Domostroy thought, What if Goddard never received the letters? What if Jimmy Osten had intercepted them and then gone out to look for the White House letter writer on his own?

  And now another thought started to trouble him. Why would Osten, who had gone after Andrea only a month ago, now claim to her that he had noticed her three months ago? Was it so she wouldn’t connect the time of their meeting with the time Domostroy had mailed the first White House letter? And why would Andrea unquestioningly believe his claim and repeat it? Could there be a conspiracy between Andrea and Jimmy Osten? On the other hand, how could Osten possibly suspect—if he did—that Andrea was the White House woman? Could Osten be Goddard’s emissary? And if he was, who had been so clever as to send him to spy on Domostroy and say that he was spying on Donna instead? And unless Andrea had given everything away, Osten would have no way of connecting him, Domostroy, to the White House letters. Finally, as improbable as it seemed until now, could Osten be Goddard?

  “What are you thinking about?” Donna asked, interrupting his thought process.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, hesitating. “It’s just that from my old days with Etude, I always think of Jimmy Osten as such an innocent kid.” He paused. “What’s wrong with his voice, by the way?” he asked, still uncertain.

  “Some years ago he had a tumor removed from his throat” said Donna. “His father told me it was serious surgery. It left Jimmy’s larynx scarred and permanently altered his voice.”

  “In any case,” Domostroy went on, “I didn’t think Jimmy was the type to spy on people.” He paused, then attempted once again to sound detached. “Has he ever spoken of Goddard?” he asked.

  “Goddard Lieberson?”

  “No, Goddard, the rock star.”

  “Very seldom. And if he likes him, he hasn’t said so. Even though he and I met at the Goddard Beat, he knew how I felt about rock.”

  It now occurred to Domostroy that Osten could have written music and even lyrics for Goddard. After all, ghostwriting was not limited to literature.

  “Given Jimmy’s family background,” he asked, “do you know if he’s ever written music or played any instruments?”

  “Jimmy is into writing, not writing music. Musically, he’s very naive,” said Donna. “As for his piano playing—well, his mother taught him to play a bit, that’s all.’

  Reassured by her tone that she had told him the truth and was not herself connected to what Domostroy began to perceive as Osten’s conspiracy, Domostroy then asked, “Do you suppose Andrea Gwynplaine put Jimmy up to spying on us?’

  “Could be,” said Donna pensively. “I wouldn’t be surprised; she thrives on intrigue.”

  Domostroy pretended to reflect about that. “What kind of person is this Andrea Gwynplaine?” he asked.

  “Beautiful,” said Donna. “Bright. From an old Tuxedo Park Mormon family. They were once very rich, but she says they no longer are. Apparently, that’s why she’s studying drama. She wants to be a Broadway producer so that one day she can make millions on her own and put her family, and herself, back where she thinks they belong—at the top of society.”

  “That’s quite an ambition,” said Domostroy. “Is she talented?”

  “Let’s say she’s devious,” said Donna, adding with a smile, “and in drama that’s talent.”

  “Devious? In what way?”

  “In a mean kind of way,” said Donna. She hesitated. “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  “Don’t tell me if it’s a secret.” He could see that, at the moment, she was torn between these two sides of her nature.

  “It’s no secret,” she said. “I’ve already told you what she and her friends did to me that time they invited me to watch Marcello in a porn film. Well, there was another incident, even worse. Andrea engineered it.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, underneath all the talk about her fine old Mormon family,” said Donna, “Andrea has a real taste for what’s sick and kinky. Especially, I gather, when it comes to sex. She used to date Chick Mercurio, the leading member of the Atavists, and soon after Chick made the cover of Rock Stars magazine, he was busted for drugs. Then awful stories about his life started to come out in the press, and no one would book him for concerts anymore. He was finished. It was from reading all the stories about Chick that we came to realize that even though she wasn’t mentioned in them, our sweet Tuxedo Park debutante had been into some very strange doings while she’d been dating him. And I don’t mean taking ludes, drinking beer with a straw, painting her nails black, wearing rubber garter belts and leather jackets; I mean sex with chains and whips.” Again she hesitated. “Andrea apparently enjoys hurting and humiliating people.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” interjected Domostroy, “as long as her lovers enjoy the theatrics of it and nobody gets harmed.”

  “Some were, though,” said Donna. “About the same time Andrea was going out with Chick Mercurio, she started dating Thomas, an investment banker—young, good-looking, New England family, pinstripe suit, vest, the whole Wall Street thing. Well, dear Thomas showed Andrea only the best—the best theaters, the best restaurants, the best parties—but she complained to her friends that he bored her stiff and that he was just as unimaginative in the sack as he was everywhere else. One day he invited Andrea and some of his friends to his fancy Park Avenue duplex for drinks, and Andrea happened to use his private bathroom upstairs, instead of the guest bathroom. There, in a
drawer, poking through his things she came across several porno magazines folded open to the classified pages—full of sexual personals. Thomas had circled several ads from sexually dominant women who spelled out their sexual specialties and professional services in great detail, and in his precise handwriting he had written cryptic comments in the margins alongside! While he entertained his friends in the living room, Andrea snooped around his bedroom until she found a golf bag full of implements that would have delighted de Sade and Sacher-Masoch. That discovery freaked her out because, as she told her friends, in his sex with her, dear Thomas had always adhered rigidly to the faith, you might say—his position strictly missionary. Feeling outsmarted, to teach him a hard lesson, Andrea embarked on an elaborate plan. She asked Chick to photograph her, naked, in a wig and high boots, with her hair straight down over her breasts and a leather mask over her face—and she placed the picture in several of the sex magazines Thomas bought. She included a typical blurb—’Mistress Valkyrie: The Balcony of fantasies, fetishes, and other pleasures. Only the refined should apply’—and gave a post office box number. She ran the ad for several weeks and waited, and at last, among the many replies she received from interested clients, she found one—long and sincere!—from Thomas pleading for an appointment. The joke might have ended there, except that his letter was rather graphic. It contained descriptions of his fantasies and of the rather unusual sexual activities he said he needed for release and fulfillment, and he volunteered to pay generously for them.

  “Andrea decided he would pay indeed, and writing to him as Valkyrie she told him that before they could meet privately, he must first pass a submissiveness test, which, for her own professional safety as well as her client’s pleasure, she required of all her potential customers. For bait she enclosed a Polaroid photo of herself—cut off at the head—posing in the typical skintight patent-leather costume of the sexual dominatrix. She ordered him to dress in a tuxedo and go to the Till Eulenspiegel, a seedy midtown hotel, at midnight the following Saturday. There, on the mezzanine level, he would find an empty niche behind a heavy green drape,—her favorite Balcony, she said—and he was to stand in it with his face to the wall and wait for her. She asked him to write back and promise that he would obey her instructions, and Thomas replied, assuring her that he would.

  “In the days that followed, Andrea kept going out with Thomas as usual, not once letting him suspect what she had discovered about him.

  ‘The next Saturday at midnight, Andrea arrived at the Till Eulenspiegel with Chick Mercurio and a group of her punk friends. They all went up to the mezzanine without making a sound and gathered in front of the green drape. As Mercurio readied his camera, Andrea—dressed in her extravagant leather costume—put on a leather mask and went into the niche, drawing the drape behind her. There was her dear Thomas, dressed in evening clothes and smelling faintly of cologne, his hair neatly combed and his face turned to the wall, waiting to meet his new Domina.

  “Andrea—that wretched bitch—told everyone exactly what happened next. Towering like an Amazon on her high-heeled boots, she hugged him roughly from behind and dug her gloved hands into his chest. Whispering harsh but sensual epithets in a slight German accent, she bit his neck, kissed his earlobes, and pressed her leatherclad body against his, and soon he was moaning with excitement and begging her to let him turn around and see her. But she ordered him to stay facing the wall. She slowly loosened his belt and, caressing him inside his pants with her gloved hands, she let his pants and shorts work themselves down to his ankles. She kept playing with him until he started whining and pleading with her to make him submit in any way she chose. When she had him aroused—and very visibly so—Andrea quietly pulled the drape open and stepped out, exposing poor Thomas to her dear friends.

  “Only when he heard the shrieks and guffaws of his live audience did poor Thomas turn and see that he was on display and was being photographed, but by then it was too late for him to do anything but reach down and pull up his pants. As he did so, he realized that among those laughing hardest was Andrea, his haughty girl friend, got up in the skintight outfit he knew so well from the photograph she had sent him.”

  A faintly nauseous feeling swept over Domostroy. He regretted ever having met Andrea, ever having let her lead him around. How stupid he had been to go along with her scheme and submit to her sexual manipulation. For her sake he had done everything he could to make Goddard curious about the beautiful woman who wrote such intriguing and perceptive letters, curious enough to take up the challenge and go after her—and be trapped. Little had he, Domostroy, known that Andrea had already carried out one such scheme—including even a faceless photograph—all on her own, for nothing but sadistic kicks. What, Domostroy wondered, had she in store for him now? And what place in her intrigue was Jimmy Osten, Andrea’s newest slave, playing?

  He winced. Knowing what he now knew about Andrea, the best thing he could do would be to forget the whole affair. He had his own life to live, and he couldn’t care less who Goddard was.

  When Domostroy was with Donna he was careful not to do or say anything that might reveal his feelings for her and thereby throw her off balance. He knew she needed to concentrate completely on preparing for the Warsaw competition. Several times in her piano sessions with Domostroy, panicking at the thought that in Warsaw she would be competing with the best young Chopinists in the world, she threatened to withdraw from the competition, but each time Domostroy calmed her down and convinced her that, if only for the sake of the experience, she had to go to Warsaw and perform there with all the artistry she could muster.

  As the date of her departure approached, Donna began to come every morning to play for him, and he always behaved as if he were her teacher, concerned only with honing his student’s talent and developing her confidence to display it to others. Whenever he caught in her gaze the slightest need of him as a man he took great pains not to betray how much he wanted her.

  But then he noticed that his feigned detachment unsettled her, and he could tell that she was waiting for his feelings to change; this was particularly evident in the days following the unexpected intrusion of Jimmy Osten into the Old Glory. One day not long after that event, she gave Domostroy two photographs of herself. On one she had inscribed, “Dear Patrick, know that I’m always with you”, on the back of the other she had written words he had once used in speaking to her: “Since I met you, I think of beauty as being you, not of you as a beauty.”

  Under his tutelage she played better and better, making the old ballroom reverberate with magical sounds. At times her sheer virtuosity and certainty of touch made Domostroy think of a remark of Schumann’s: “A good musician understands the music without the score, and the score without the music. The ear should not need the eye, the eye should not need the ear.” The more he listened to her, the more he became convinced that she could do very well in Warsaw, and given a lucky selection of pieces for the finals, she might even place second, third, or fourth.

  If he doubted her chances of winning first prize, it was principally because he suspected most judges of inverse prejudice—of being afraid that if they awarded the first prize to a black, they would be silently accused by the public and the other contestants of having acted out of a desire to rectify a system of social injustice many centuries old, not out of impartial judgment of musical talent

  But he also doubted whether any other young pianist could match Donna’s energy and bravura when it came to playing Chopin. As he sat and watched her play, he had the eerie impression that in these few weeks she had unconsciously been doing battle with the restrictions history had placed on her race and was determined now to throw them off, all by herself, through the power of her art. Could there be, he wondered, another pianist competing in Warsaw whose ambition matched such a sense of purpose—or such a desperate need to have it accomplished?

  In the time since Donna had begun working with him, her fingering had improved remarkably. At times her fingers seemed t
o float over the keyboard like delicate seaweed timidly swaying in the incoming tide; at times they fell upon the keys, as harsh as sea coral. He noticed that now, when she played Chopin’s Etude in A Minor, she actually reverted to a technique used by Chopin himself—sliding the long third finger over the fourth and fifth, particularly when her thumb was elsewhere and the third finger could play a black key. Under Domostroy’s careful scrutiny she was also striving to avoid any unnecessary hand movement; in the smooth, sustained phrases, she now played as many notes as she possibly could without shifting her hand, and when shifts were required, she effected them with maximum ease and always made them coincide perfectly with breaks in the phrases. He was astonished at her musical intuition and at the freedom with which, as if she were a ragtime pianist, she could alter standard fingering when the need arose. He marveled at her precision when, in order to counteract the plodding angularity inherent in the mazurkas of a rigid musical era, she would use to the fullest all the exotic accents provided by the chains of side-stepping dominant sevenths; and he was impressed by how free she made herself with the sharpened fourth, the accented bass, the unexpected triplets, and the continuously repeated onebar motifs.

  To illustrate to her that speed was not the only means of achieving pace, and tempo never to be gauged by a stopwatch, alone, Domostroy made her listen to various recordings of the finale of the B-flat Minor Sonata, one of the most difficult of all Chopin passages. Although Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz each took precisely one minute and ten seconds to play it, Donna agreed with Domostroy that Rachmaninoff’s version sounded faster and more dynamic. Domostroy concluded the lesson by telling her that if, as Beethoven remarked, tempo was the body of performance, then the black musical tradition of ragged time, and the boogie and blues of the Harlem pianists, of Duke Ellington, Luckey Robert, Fats Waller, and, much later, her father, Henry Lee Downes—must make her aware that, in the end, it would be her interpretation of Chopin’s dynamics—her phrasing and pedaling—which together wouldcreate the impression of pace. As he spoke, he realized to his own astonishment that, just as musical genius had displaced Chopin to a period far ahead of his time, Donna’s musical talent had displaced her, guiding her instinctively back in time, until she exactly matched up with the genius of the Pole.