by Sally Mandel
“Maybe you wanted me to be a firefighter,” I said.
“You had it in you to be a good one,” he said.
Well, that was a surprise. “You’re serious,” I said. He didn’t answer just kept on stuffing envelopes.
“You don’t think making music for millions of people is useful?”
“You never listened to me, that’s for shit sure,” he said.
“That’s it, isn’t it, Dutch? You just couldn’t stand that I went and did what I wanted.”
He looked up at me now. His eyes were faded versions of what they had once been. “You were just like me,” he said.
The son you always wanted, I almost said. But at least I’d got a hint. I’d stepped outside his reach and that wasn’t something he could forgive.
“Only a little like you,” I said, and stood up. Jake and Mumma were loading the dishwasher. I had the feeling they were steering clear until Dutch and I had finished. I went into the kitchen, grabbed Mumma from behind, and gave her a hug. “Time to go, Jake,” I said.
On the way to the wildlife preserve Jake said, “You’re quiet. What’s up?”
I looked out at the condominiums that had crawled almost to the water’s edge. “It’s kind of amazing actually. I don’t care about him anymore.”
“Dutch?”
“He used to get to me like nobody else. It would wake me up in the middle of the night and even make me puke sometimes, I’d get so crazed. I wasted a lot of time on that bullshit.” The gulls were wheeling over the beach. They looked clean and free. “He’s pretty much history. Not relevant, if you know what I mean.”
He smiled at me. “I think so, yeah. That’s good, Stallone, because there was a long time you kept hoping he’d turn into Father of the Year.”
We drove in silence, passing through the ugly commercial area and into the preserve, where the dunes rose steeply on either side of the road. We pulled into the parking lot and up to the trail house where Jake worked.
“Come on,” he said. “Exercise time.”
“It’s nice sitting here.” I really didn’t feel like doing anything, and to tell the truth, the sight of the water was getting to me. When I allowed myself to glance at it, I thought about David going under.
“You’re looking at the side of a building. Water view’s the other way.”
I didn’t answer him.
“Oh,” he said, getting it. But he came around and opened the door.
“Time to move your sorry butt.” And time to move on. He didn’t have to say it for me to hear what he meant.
The pinewoods stretched back away from the beach. As we walked along the narrow path, there was the smell of warming earth that meant summer wasn’t far off.
“Remember when we were kids,” Jake said, “we’d see colonies of terns out here, maybe three hundred at a time? Well, forget about it. The drainage pipes finished that.” He stopped to tear out a bush.
“Hey, what’re you doing? That’s pretty.”
“Multiflora rose. It’s too invasive, chokes out a lot of good stuff. And that’s garlic mustard—we don’t know where the hell that came from. But there’s good news, too.”
“Well, thank God for that,” I said.
“Remember when the canals came in and the landfill squeezed out the salt marsh over toward Rocky Beach?”
“Yeah, no more frogs.”
“Or clams either. Here’s where we’re planting new sea grass.”
“It looks like hair transplants,” I said.
He smiled. “Same principle, I guess.” The wind suddenly kicked up. The sound in the dry grass sounded like distant waves of applause. It made me ache.
He stopped to point at a tangled pile of twigs heaped on top of a pole. “That’s our newest osprey nest,” Jake said. “There’s three chicks. Our raptor program allows us to tag the parents and put radio transmitters on …”
I was smiling at him. He stopped and laughed. “Carried away?”
“It’s good, Jake.”
He swept his arm around. “So you like my office?”
“You’re a lucky man.”
His face was tanned already, and even the hairs on his wrists where he’d turned up his cuffs were bleached by the sun. A tingling like a tiny lightning bolt shot up from my crotch to my nipples. It stopped me in my tracks as if I’d never felt it before in my whole life.
“What?” Jake said.
I shook my head. I’d never believed that people are only turned on by their true loves. But that was when the one I loved happened to be alive. This was a whole different story, with David not here to defend himself against any possible infidelity on my part. It seemed so totally disloyal to be having sexual feelings for someone else. Then there was Pauline, of course.
“How’s Pauline?” It just slipped out.
Fortunately, Jake hadn’t noticed me eyeballing his very fine body. He’d never been much clued in to how women reacted to him anyway. Not like David, who was well aware that any woman he came within six feet of was dead meat.
“Fine. Her students are great. See this stuff?” He ran his hand across the broomlike top of a plant. It looked like a weed to me, but the tender way Jake touched it, you’d think it was the hair on the head of a newborn baby. “It’s called phragmites. For years we thought it was an enemy invader but now we find out it fights pollutants.”
“Sucks them right out of the air?” I was concentrating, trying to distract myself from that buzz between my legs.
“No, deep root system that flushes the soil. Are you tired, Bess? Maybe we’d better start back.”
“Yeah, okay.” Actually, I was exhausted. Jake led me onto a wider path where we could walk side by side.
“This circles back to the parking lot,” he said, and tucked my hand in his arm. “I’ve been listening to your CD,” he said.
“Which one?” David and I had just managed to finish the second before he began to fall apart.
“First. I like it more.”
“Why?” I was curious. Jake had no musical training at all. I suspected my CDs were the only two classical items in his collection of bluegrass and country stuff.
“The second one sounds rushed or something. Nervous. Except for that Ravel piece. That’s a beautiful cut.”
I was blown away. “How’d you get so smart?” I asked. In my opinion, La Valse was the only decent track on the whole thing. The rest of it, David had been like a demon, whipping me and the technicians into the fast lane and never letting us out. It was not a restful thing to listen to and it sure as hell hadn’t been relaxing to record.
We continued along in silence through the short pines, except it wasn’t exactly silence. Somewhere along the path, I began to hear music. I wasn’t even aware of it at first. When I noticed that Jake was looking at me funny, that’s when I realized I was humming “The Happy Farmer,” the same little piece by Robert Schumann that Amanda Jones had played at the school recital back when I was a scabby-kneed brat. Jake understood the significance somehow, although I don’t remember discussing how I never heard music anymore. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
“Beautiful day,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. By the time we got back to the car, the memory tape in my head had played fragments of a few of the pieces I’d learned over the years, but almost chronologically. I guess I was starting over again.
Chapter Twenty-One
That day was the beginning of a new musical life for me. I didn’t realize it at first. I was too busy worrying about feeling sexed up. But the next time Mr. Balaboo called to tell me someone wanted me to perform, I didn’t go into cardiac arrest.
“Bess-dahlink? You there?”
“Yeah. I’m thinking,” I said.
“You are?” He couldn’t believe it.
“What’s the gig?” I asked.
“The Copland Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra. With the Muhlenberg Orchestra.”
“The end of next month.”
“Hm.” The Copland was interesting because it didn’t totally qualify as a solo, at least not in my head. There would be other instrumentalists onstage. The pianist plays, the clarinet plays, there’s a conversation going on. “I’d be doing an Argerich,” I said, referring to Martha Argerich’s dislike for solo work. “It’s not much time, but then nobody’s around the end of July. It’d be low-key.”
“Ah, yes, that’s probably true,” Mr. Balaboo agreed, but there was something in his voice.
“Did you cook this up, Mr. Balaboo?”
“Perhaps Harold Stein and I gave it some thought.”
I imagined the two old guys sitting in a cloud of the professor’s cigar smoke, plotting which piece in the vast solo repertoire would be the least likely to scare the crap out of me.
“Let me think about it.”
“Certainly. Take all the time you need. I don’t have to tell them until Wednesday.”
That was two days away. “Gee, thanks.”
We hung up and I poured myself a cup of chamomile, which I figured might calm me down. Bourbon would have worked better. I sat on the bed, hugged my pillow, and tried to imagine myself onstage. Without David. I knew one of the violinists in the Muhlenberg. He often got drunk at our postconcert jam sessions and played jazz riffs until somebody kicked him out. I liked him and he was a good solid musician. But I hadn’t practiced since my injury, which was almost seven months ago. I stretched my fingers out and studied them.
“Think you could handle it?” I asked them. Then I called the concierge at David’s apartment and told him I needed access right away.
I hadn’t been in there since David died except to clear my stuff out—which Mr. Balaboo mostly took care of anyway. I stood outside the door with my heart doing a tap dance, pretty much the way it had that first time I came to audition with the Scaramouche.
“Fuck it,” I said to myself, and went in. Everything looked exactly the same. The lawyers in charge of David’s trust had told Mr. Balaboo that the apartment would sell more easily if it was furnished, especially given David’s fame. Somebody had gone to contract on it but had been turned down by the co-op board because he only had a mere twenty gazillion dollars. A married couple passed the board but wound up getting divorced instead of moving in. Since then, there’d been a few nibbles but nobody really serious. So here I was, back in a time warp, staring at dust motes instead of David. I figured, Okay, I’ve gotten this far. Might as well truly torture myself. I went into the bedroom and sat down on David’s side of the mattress. I couldn’t feel him there, the way you can where somebody actually lives. The place seemed hollow, as if it was some historical site and we should hang velvet ropes around the rooms. But then my heel caught on something under the dust ruffle. I leaned over and pulled out a white T-shirt. The first thing I thought was, great housekeeping. Then I buried my face in it. David. I could feel him then all right. I could taste him and smell him, that lemon smell. I’d read an article that a person’s odor can sometimes reflect extreme changes in body chemistry. Anxiety has a smell and so does depression. All I knew was that suddenly that familiar lemon scent made David seem real and so the loss did, too. Once I started crying, I didn’t think it was ever going to end. I curled up on the bed with David’s T-shirt, which seemed to be all I had left of him.
Fortunately, I’d drunk about a gallon of tea before I got there, so pretty soon I had to go to the john. I forced myself to shove the T-shirt back under the bed where I felt it should rest in peace, peed, washed my face and went to the piano. I spent half an hour doing warm-ups. It was discouraging to say the least. Everything I asked my fingers to do, they said, “Huh?” like it was all news to them, those exercises they’d done a couple million times. But after an hour, I could feel them limbering up. Then I started working through some music, getting reacquainted with old buddies like the Bach Partitas and a Schubert Sonata. By the time I quit, my spine was ready to crack in half, but now I couldn’t wait to play again. I sat for a long time and watched the day fade over Central Park. “Okay, David,” I said. “I’m gonna try.”
Mr. Balaboo somehow kept the media off me. I didn’t want the added pressure of them making a huge deal out of this concert, as in “Grieving Bess Stallone Returns to Concert Stage All Alone.” As it was, the closer we got to the date, the more I started to think about how I hadn’t performed solo since I teamed up with David, and we all know how pathetic those earlier gigs turned out. I tried to take deep breaths and focus on the music.
I chose the same dress from my first appearance with David at Weill. It had to be taken in here and there, but it seemed like a lucky charm. I’d insisted on being slated before intermission instead of at the end of the program. As it was, I had to warm my icy hands in the sink while the orchestra played the Festive Overture by Shostakovich. Then it was my turn. When I walked out onstage, there was this huge sound from the audience, a roar that went on and on. It got me choked up and instead of the old terror and loneliness, I felt embraced out there, at home. Music was what I did, what I loved.
I hit a clinker toward the end of the first movement. Everybody does it. There’s no such thing as a perfect performance. For a few scary seconds, I saw sparkles in front of my eyes. But then I thought, Oh hell, if I go down, I’ll just pick myself up and start playing where we left off. It made me feel free, and it made me grateful all over again for David. And for the first time since he died, I was almost happy.
They don’t usually allow anybody backstage during intermission when there’s a soloist performing, but Mr. Balaboo had got them to make an exception. It was a rowdy bunch. Corny, in a truly outrageous yellow suit, brought me flowers and told me he’d never been so proud of me. Vernon was there, speechless but with liquid eyes reading poems of adoration. Mrs. Edelmeyer came all alone for once. She took my hands and said, “You’ve brought me so much joy, Bess. Thank you for coming back. Thank you.” I put my arms around her and we had a good long squeeze. But then Jake and Pauline and Angie and her adorable and brilliant boyfriend Ben showed up. Ben was grinning from ear to ear—first of all, just being with Angie tended to make him do that, but second, he’d never been backstage before. And Pauline was overcome. “It was so beautiful, Bess,” she said, “but I can hear the heartache in every note.”
Jake laid his hand on my cheek for a second. “Good going, Stallone,” he said. I felt that little tingle again, and thought, Oh shit, what sickness is this? I remembered him twisting the brush out of the soil in one quick motion. As strong as he was, I also knew how gentle he could be.
The musicians were there, too, David’s friends. The sight of them made me feel his absence like a slug in the gut. They asked me to join them in their box for the rest of the concert, but I had to get out of there. I needed to be alone with my memories of David, all the best ones, and we’d have this night together. It really was his triumph, too.
So now I was in demand as a soloist. I didn’t rush into it. After all, I’d been playing two-piano stuff exclusively for almost two years so I had plenty of brushing up to do. Professor Stein wasn’t teaching anymore, but offered to give me his impressions after I’d worked through a piece.
Mainly, he was too busy with his new girlfriend, a cellist, no surprise there. Robin didn’t give a shit about the cigars and even let him stink up the bedroom. If you didn’t have asthma before you stuck your nose in his place, you were wheezing by the time you left. But Harold Stein was one happy old dude.
I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the music. I practiced six hours a day, which is huge for any musician, and I started playing all over the world. If you look at my CDs from that period, the live in-concert ones, it’s like Around the World with Bess Stallone—Bess in London, Bess in Amsterdam, Bess in Berlin, Bess in Madrid, Bess in fucking Sri Lanka. I’d got rid of that old cell of an apartment on West 78th and bought a one-bedroom in David’s building.
I told myself I was doing it to be close to Carnegie Hall, and if you believe that one, you’d better stay away from used-car salesmen.
But I’d made it through the first miserable year without David. God, those firsts were brutal. The first my birthday, the first his birthday, the first goddamn New York City Marathon that David and I had seen approximately three minutes of on our way to a rehearsal. Everything was an anniversary. But even on an ordinary day, I could be walking down Madison Avenue looking in a store window and suddenly I’d feel like somebody suddenly jammed a baseball bat into my stomach. I’d double over and groan, the missing him was so intense. Those moments became less frequent as time passed, but on the anniversary of his death in November, I locked myself in the apartment and went to bed. It was strictly fetal position for twenty-four hours. Then once that was behind me, there was a sense of relief. I’d never have to go through those firsts again.
So I racked up the frequent-flyer miles and got richer from giving concerts and cutting CDs and making appearances all over the world. I got to see myself on the front cover of a lot of magazines in funny-looking languages. I’m not quite sure why, but I got to go to the Academy Awards. What I didn’t get was laid. When you’re famous, your sex life becomes everybody’s business … well, duh, just ask Bill Clinton. There were some pretty attractive candidates—you’d laugh if I told you some of them—especially the rock stars and the movie actors, but they’re still alive, sometimes just barely (as in drug abuse), so I won’t go into it. But hard as it might be to believe, given my prior history, I steered clear. I figured that life had finally beaten those overactive hormones into submission.
But then I got a surprise. A biggie. Goddamn it, but life is one strange ride. I was minding my own business, attending a combination New Year’s Day and engagement party for Angie and Ben at a funky joint on the Lower East Side. All their friends were there—wearing black, of course, because the management throws you out of those downtown joints if you’ve got color anywhere on your person. I’d just gotten back from a trip to Tokyo so I was pretty spaced out. At the particular moment Jake and Pauline came over to say hello, I was hovering somewhere over the Pacific. I took one look at Jake from thirty thousand feet up and realized, Uh oh, I’m into this man. A guy I’ve known my entire life, who’s practically a brother—well, okay, setting aside one-and-a-half rolls in the sack in the distant past—and someone who is totally committed to my oldest girlfriend. Thank God it was dark in there because I felt myself turning pink as a smoked salmon. It was simply too ridiculous. When Jake hugged me, my blood started pumping overtime. I squirmed out of his arms in a big hurry, pretending I couldn’t wait one more second to snag a passing cracker with caviar on it. The place was kind of a dive—Angie’s choice—but since I was paying for the party, I figured we might as well have great food.