by Noel Hynd
“My primary interest is music, my performance as a musician,” Geiger said. “There will be low-cost rows interspersed with the expensive rows in many halls. The five-hundred-dollar seats underwrite the ten-dollar seats. “
“You’re still making a fortune,” Baumann said.
“It’s legal, you know, Bill,” Geiger finally said. “Why doesn’t your paper cut the costs of a daily print edition to fifty cents to bring truth and knowledge to a larger audience?”
“Not analogous,” Baumann insisted. “We’re trying to stay in business.”
“Rolf, do you think you could have done a tour like this when Isador Rabinowitz was alive?” someone else asked. Geiger looked at the man.
“What are you asking?”
“Well, Rabinowitz was not only your mentor but your harshest critic. Wouldn’t he…?”
“There’s no relation between this tour and the death of Isador Rabinowitz,” Geiger explained. “I’m in my late twenties, and I was weighing the possibility of a tour like this while I was in Italy a few weeks ago. This is the time I want to do this tour.”
“Do you think you’ll be more at ease now that Rabinowitz is gone?” asked Ken Oster of New York Magazine. Oster, too, had found the shrimp tray and reloaded a plate.
Geiger felt a certain impatience building within him. He looked to Diana again. She winked at him, and his nerves eased slightly.
“No more questions involving Rabinowitz,” Greenstone said.
Geiger glanced around. Mercifully, there were no more hands in the air.
“Is that it?” Greenstone asked hopefully. Julie Byers raised her hand again.
“Mr. Geiger, is Isador Rabinowitz still a presence for you?” she asked. Brian Greenstone was angered by the question. Particularly the wording of it.
“Julie, didn’t I just ask…?”
“It’s all right,” Geiger said. He turned back to Julie Byers.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” he said. “Presence, how?”
“I don’t mean a physical presence, obviously,” she said. “I mean his memory.”
“I think about him, yes. But I have to play my own music and define myself as an artist.”
“And you’d even dare to challenge him by playing some Chopin?”
The question disquieted Geiger. He gave it some thought, then a thorough answer.
“Rubinstein played Chopin too. Rubinstein redefined Chopin with a more direct approach and then Rabinowitz reinterpreted him once again. I’ll play Chopin my own way, which is probably closer to the way Arthur Rubinstein played him than the way Isador Rabinowitz played him. But it will be my way. No one owns Chopin.”
“But you’ll play mostly Beethoven?” came another question. “Why? Anything specific?”
“What can I say?” Geiger said. “My name is Rolf Geiger. I like the German composers. Ludwig wrote great stuff. I can’t explain much more than that.”
He got the laugh. Geiger surveyed the room. A final question emerged from someone he didn’t know. She was a petite, intense, dark-haired woman. She identified herself as Anita Zwerdling from Rolling Stone.
“Would it be correct to say that this is the landmark tour for you?” she asked. “The tour that your critics have always been asking for?” He thought about it.
“I think you could say that,” he said. “But it’s the grand world tour that I’ve always wanted to do. The greatest music of the greatest composers. Even Chopin.”
“Thank you all for coming,” Greenstone said, ending the press conference. “Catch me now or call my office if you have further questions. My new assistant, Claire, can help you also.”
The press conference was over and, for the first time in his life, Geiger discovered that he was soaked through with sweat from meeting the press. There had been much about the questions—and their implications—that had bothered him.
“Hard to believe, Rolf,” Greenstone said in a whispered aside when they had a moment away from all other ears. “All that you’ve accomplished in music, all the originality and expertise that you’ve brought to your instrument, and still these people come in here to rip you.”
“I’m not serious enough for them,” Geiger said. “Well, maybe this tour will change that.”
Diana joined Rolf. He put an arm around her.
Then, before he could make his exit, Julie Byers, one of the more hostile reporters, stopped him near the door. She had brought two recent CD’s and a felt-tipped pen. Geiger patiently autographed both before leaving with Diana.
The next morning, the spin from the press conference was clear. The headline on the first page of the Arts section in the New York Times would foreshadow other write-ups to follow.
A HIGH OCTAVE SURPRISE! ROLF GEIGER
ANNOUNCES WORLD TOUR IN THE FALL.
HE’LL ASPIRE TO BE ‘FINEST PIANEST EVER.
Fortunately the general public received the news of the tour with a more favorable impression than the press and musicologists. Switchboards were swamped with early demands for tickets.
In Zurich, where a first box office was set up first, all tickets were gone in fifty-two minutes. It was a new record for a classical sellout in that city. Curiously it was a city where Isador Rabinowitz had lived for five months during World War II. He had always hated the place and had never sold out a recital there. Some of the old man’s friends conjectured that upon the Morningside Heights, in the crowded old cemetery where Rabinowitz had been buried, presumably for keeps, the departed maestro was rolling in his grave.
Others disagreed: they said he was probably kicking at the lid of his coffin, he would have been so angry.
Fourteen
Mezzaforte.
Mezzaluna.
Mezzanotte.
Midnight.
Several midnights later, in fact.
Geiger was home, trying to sleep. There had barely been a peaceful night since the funeral. Odd associations kept flitting through his semi-waking mind, darting like malevolent fireflies. Geiger rolled in his bed. His arm went out and he sat up when it couldn’t find Diana. He opened his eyes and saw that she was there after all. He pulled her to him for security.
He wanted so badly to sleep and rest, but nasty contrary thoughts kept bedeviling him.
More rambling associations…
Mezzosopranos.
Mess of sopranos.
Mezzatinto.
Mesopotamia. Mosquito.
Mesquite. Tex Mex.
Mezzanotte.
Yeah. Mezzanotte. Midnight again.
He closed his eyes. Something else out of the past forcibly replayed itself.
It was a decade earlier and he was back in Nice, sitting on the Hotel Negresco’s terrace. It was the moment of his first international piano triumph. The sun provided a pleasurable warmth, as did the sound of a soft, new female voice.
“Bonjour,” she had said. “Ça va?”
He had been startled by her presence. He didn’t know anyone had moved that close to him, so far away had he been in his thoughts.
He turned to see a young woman in her early twenties. He was startled a second time when he had a few moments to appraise her. She was stunningly beautiful, with the smoldering good looks of a Botticelli painting.
“Hello,” he said.
“She smiled. “Vous parlez un peu de français, peut-être? Ou Italien?”
“I’m sorry. No. I don’t speak French,” he answered.
“You are the American pianist,” she said switching to English. “Rolf.”
“That’s me. Yes.” Still awkward.
“May I join you?” He corrected his posture and sat up.
“Of course,” he said. She seated herself and lay her purse on the table. The purse: luxurious black alligator with twenty-four-karat gold buckle that dazzled in the Côte d’Azur sunlight. Hermès. Her purse cost more than Frank Geiger earned in a month, on those odd occasions when he was employed.
She introduced herself. Everything s
he did, she did beautifully. Her English was smooth as silk.
Her name was Anila, she said. She was an Italian citizen and a fashion model from Rome. She worked on the most expensive runways in both Rome and Paris. But recently, she said, she had also landed a few movie roles in Europe.. When Geiger confessed that he had never heard of any of her films, she smiled indulgently.
“Well, you might not know cinema, but you certainly know your music,” Anila said. “You played magnificently last night.”
“Thank you,” he said.
There was a charming colonial lilt to her English. She was East Indian, she explained, and educated at British schools. She had come to Rome when she was fifteen.
It all sounded incredibly exotic. For lack of anything better to say, he admired her purse, though he’d never heard of Hermès back in West Virginia.
“It was a gift,” she said. “From a friend.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t see him anymore.” She laughed. “Long gone. Is that the phrase in English? ‘Long gone.’” She laughed again. “And good riddance, too. He was a cheater.”
He nodded and smiled dumbly in return.
“How did you learn to play the piano so well?” she asked picking up the silence.
“I taught myself.”
“You were tremendous,” she said. He had been and he knew it.
“Thank you,” he said again.
Anila looked at him. Rolf looked at her.
Then his naïveté getting the best of him, he finally confessed what was in his head.
“Look,” he stumbled. “You’re very pretty and you’ve been all over the world. I’ve never been out of the United States before. I have no idea what to even talk to you about.”
Anila smiled again.
“Who needs to talk?” she asked. “I want to go to bed with you.”
He was more nervous with her, however, than he had been on the stage the previous evening. That night they became lovers, commencing an intense seven-day fling. The next day, soaring emotionally, Geiger won the piano competition in Nice.
In his town house, his eyes opened again. Anila was gone and Diana was there. The memory of Anila had aroused him. So should he turn on Diana with lust that had been incited by another woman? He felt disgusted with himself. Distantly, he could have sworn he sensed the spirit of Rabinowitz reading his thoughts. He could have sworn he heard the old man laughing.
“Have sex with them both, Rolf. Pretend you’re making love to one while you’re penetrating the other. Infidelity is that easy!”
Rolf refused even to acknowledge that thought.
Several midnights had arrived and passed after the press conference. Geiger was deeply engaged now in selecting his music. He had organized scores, left them stacked by his Steinway downstairs, studied many of them, eliminated some, and even spent some time hacking around by working the primary theme from Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys into Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.
Oh, he wouldn’t dare! He laughed. Yes, he was going to play the Hollywood Bowl and yes, it would be a real howl to do that. But the classical music mafia would never forgive him for something like that, particularly having promised to stay away from such stunts.
But nonetheless, Geiger fantasized: Ludwig von B? Meet Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, plus Al Jardine and Mike Love here. And, boys, pay attention to Ludwig because he composed while deaf and with Paget’s disease.
Good Vibes with the Ode to Joy. The Beach goes to Bavaria. Brian Wilson at Das Bauhaus. Well, once again, why the hell not? At least in private.
He also had a little companion piece, fusing Van Halen with van Beethoven. The two Vans: Together Again for the First Time!
He played it for Diana. Then there was his standing joke in which, while giving a narration of his music he intentionally confused sentences with “Emanuel Ax” and “a man with an axe,” during which he played in a hatchet chopping motion and—as would be the result with an ax—hit no note more than once.
They had been beside themselves with amusement. Laughter was wonderful. He loved to sit her at the piano next to him and play for her, a special audience of one. In some ways, Moonlight Sonata and the theme from Swan Lake were now songs that belonged to her, because he either played them special ways for her or when he was in public, they were meant for her whenever he played.
They would goof around at the piano and laugh some more. There was too little laughter these days because the nights were increasingly dark.
Mezzanotte, after all. Mezzanotte meant more than the hour of midnight. It meant, the middle of the night. The real dark watches.
“The hour when spirits rise and walk, Rolf. It’s when the dead visit the living. We all know that.” He sprang up in bed again.
“Who said that?” Geiger demanded, frightened. This time, he could not dismiss the thought.
“I did.”
The voice was at the edge of his consciousness, a faint but insistent whisper.
“I said, the dead visit the living sometimes, Rolf. Is that so hard to understand?”
Diana rolled over in her sleep.
“What?” he demanded again. Now she found him. Her eyes half opened, joining him in the jagged unsettling darkness.
“Tiger?” Diana asked sleepily. “You’re talking in your sleep again.” He was as agitated as a dozen scared cats.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.” He eased down again into the warmth of his bed. He closed his eyes. Or tried to.
The first part of the night had come easily. It had been restful and calm. But as the dark hours of the morning progressed, other forces began to pilfer the peacefulness of Geiger’s sleeping hours.
Some force was again taking control of his head. Rolf settled back into bed, but involuntarily he began to dream. The sequences of the reverie made no sense, but the dreams were alive with disturbing images.
He envisioned his mother’s grave. It was set in the middle of a highway and a team of construction workers were digging it up. When they opened the coffin, his mother climbed up to the roadway and swore at her son for not burying her in a more restful setting.
“Absurdity of life and death”, a voice told him.
A second image: Rabinowitz wandered through the cemetery on Morningside Heights. He turned to look into the eyes of Geiger. “Don’t think for a moment I’ll stay buried here,” the maestro said. There were no eyes in his eye sockets. Just hollows.
“‘Rest in peace’! What a macabre joke that is! Ever done any research on how many subterranean creatures burrow through old cemeteries?”
Hollows where the eyes had been. No more windows to the soul. Just windows to the fleshless skull and an empty soul.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…
Everything went black. Geiger twisted again in bed, pursued now by childhood parochial-school doggerel.
They crawl up our nose and out your spout…
The unlinked visions continued.
A brightness came upon his subconscious, then a blackness—much more like a movie screen going from full light to no light in an instant. When light was present again, the grave of Isador Rabinowitz was peaceful one minute, then swirling with dirt a moment later, as if blasted up from underneath the ground.
“He’s coming back again,” Geiger thought. “Just like the dream the other night. The old bastard won’t stay dead!”
In bed, something tapped Rolf on the shoulder.
“Greetings, Rolf! I’m here! I’m in your home tonight.”
Geiger shook in his bed. In his dream there was a cold, firm hand on his shoulder.
He shook again. His eyes fluttered open into the darkness.
“Oh, Lord!” The hand was still on his shoulder.
He bolted up from sleep and flailed. The feeling suddenly lifted, as if the hand had released Rolf Geiger’s shoulder. Once again, his heart beat like a war drum.
He turned the light on and examined the room. He and Diana were alone. Or a
t least he couldn’t see anyone else. She was sleeping peacefully, the little piano pendant hanging between her breasts.
He looked back around the room. He was aware of the wetness on his brow. Then he settled back trying to sleep. He turned the light off. He held his eyes open in narrow slits in the darkness of his bedroom and waited to see if any images came to him.
None did. Not right away, at least.
His eyes closed, and he drifted again.
More thoughts came to him from a dark ominous somewhere. Now it was as if some other forces were guiding his consciousness, throttling his thoughts sharply into reverse, sending the kaleidoscopic patterns of his mind spiraling backward into his own youth.
Technicolor nightmares. The recurrent multihued terrors of his youth. When he had been a boy, he endured many of them. Some recurring. They hadn’t recurred for ages.
The first nightmare:
He was a boy again, sleeping in the decrepit small house in West Virginia. He heard a violent dispute. A man shouting, a woman screaming. He emerged from bed and ran to the top of the steps. It was winter. It was cold as death. He looked down the steps and saw the front door open, wind and snow pouring in, his father drunk and his mother on the floor as her husband flailed at her with his fists. Rolf’s feet were rooted in place. He couldn’t help her. In his nightmare, he turned away and played the piano to cover her screams…
Then the second vision. Pure terror this time:
He walked through the same childhood house. At the end of a long hallway, there was his grandfather’s piano. He sat down and started to play. A wonderful feeling enveloped him. A feeling of escape, beauty and freedom. Then there was a pounding sound.
Knocking.
Hammering.
“Hey! What’s that noise?”
He looked up. His father was smashing the piano as Rolf played. Then his father’s face dissolved and it was Isador Rabinowitz smashing the instrument. “You are not worthy of such great music,” the old man said.
But which old man?
“Noise.”
That’s what his father had called it when he played.
