by Noel Hynd
“Do you want me to leave completely,” she had asked over the Fourth of July weekend.
“Leave? Move out?” he had asked.
“Yes,” she had said.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“You don’t seem to need me,” Diana had said. “You don’t seem happy with me.”
“I sometimes don’t know what I want,” Rolf had answered after much thought.
“Me neither,” she answered.
For a period of two weeks, they barely spoke. For sleeping, she moved into the guest room. It just sort of happened one day, this mini-estrangement. Yet it was clear that it had been happening slowly all along, incrementally day by day since the tour had been scheduled and since Rabinowitz had returned.
Greatness at the keyboard, Geiger had reasoned in summation, was attainable only on old Isador’s terms. Was this why he had administered his own life the way he had, from one abusive failing personal relationship to another? Was that why he had been lowered into his grave by a core of onlookers, many of whom hated him?
But meanwhile, his piano had lifted its voice in ecstasy for six decades.
Geiger massacred a G chord. He winced.
“You’re thinking about her again,” Rabinowitz said. “You’re thinking about a woman. That is why you blasphemed your music.”
“I’m thinking about my life,” said Geiger, correcting the chord, retreating several bars and starting over.
“Your life is the keyboard. Same as mine was.”
More minutes went by. Geiger concentrated deeply. The piano was at the forefront of his mind, a multitude of thoughts and relationships at the fringes of his consciousness.
“I want to know about being dead,” Geiger said suddenly. A long hesitant pause, and then, “Is there peace? Is there joy? Is there a consciousness or a loneliness?”
His questions fit the passages he played. A weary soulfulness came forth in his voice and in the piano’s harp.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Rabinowitz said.
“That answer is unsatisfactory. You always asked me questions and posed challenges. But you don’t give me answers or solutions.”
“I do. But you are foolish and don’t assimilate.”
Geiger raised his eyes and flirted with throwing some Wilco into Franz Liszt. Rolf could use the piano as a weapon, too, he now knew. But he refrained.
As if to provoke, as if to suggest a perverse reversal of the natural order of time, Rabinowitz showed himself as a small boy. Three years old. Nineteen-eighteen. The year of the Bolsheviks, the year of the Armistice in Europe.
“I’m still waiting for an answer,” Geiger said.
“I am listening to your music. Your technique. It is almost good today.”
“It is better than that. Give me an answer or I will banish you.”
“And how would you banish me?”
“By removing you from my thoughts.”
“You will only remove me from your thoughts by surpassing me as an artist,” Rabinowitz countered. “And that you will never be capable of…”
“An answer about death, or I will abandon the piano and go watch baseball. Then you will be far from my mind.”
There was a blast of an unpleasant odor in the room. Something like the fetid flesh of a dead animal. Then there was an intense cold. Rolf steadfastly played through it.
At one point Rabinowitz’s hand, the right hand, the one with the emerald ring, appeared at the piano and tried to grasp Geiger’s. But Geiger played right through it, taking its power away, never focusing his gaze upon it.
Then on the other side of the room, two books flew from a table, landing on the floor with a loud thud. Still, Geiger played.
“Death?” said Rabinowitz. “That is what you wish me to speak of?”
“Is it lonely?” Geiger asked. “Have you met God? Have you encountered the greatest of all Jews, Jesus?”
“Such impertinent questions from so young a man.”
“Is it lonely?” Rolf repeated. “I want to know.”
“If your life was lonely, then your death is, too. You dig your own grave and die as you lived.”
“Appropriate,” said Geiger.
“The funny thing is, you no longer feel pain. Emotions, yes. But no pain. And no fear. What is there to fear after you die?” Geiger turned it over in his head. “You might fear an eternity of…of…of what?” he finally asked. “Damnation, in your case?”
“Invalid question,” answered the ghost. “There is no eternity because there is no time. If you died in 1938 or 2008 it makes no difference. You have no sense of how long you’ve been on this side.”
Geiger thought of what the ghost had said. He reached the end of the third movement of the Totentanz. He paused, then set his fingers to play the final part. His musicianship flowed.
“Now tell me what you want,” said Geiger, still busy at the keyboard. He mastered a prestissimo section.
“What I want?”
“Why are you here?” Geiger asked.
“You summoned me.”
“I did not.”
“You think you didn’t. But you did. The dead belong to those who keep them alive. So for that much, I am grateful.” Geiger considered the thought.
“You stand here and you seem to help me technically,” Geiger said. “But I think you are actually here for a different reason. To stop me from surpassing you.”
“I do not need to be here for that.”
“Yes, you do.”
Again the hand swiped at the keyboard. Geiger kept playing.
“My surpassing you did not happen in your lifetime,” Geiger said. “You helped see that it didn’t. Now? Now unless I empower you to stop me, no one will stop me.”
“Your logic is twisted. You do not have my talent.” Geiger smiled.
“In London will prove what I can do.” Rabinowitz vanished for several minutes, as if in anger. Then he was back.
“Where do you suppose your woman is?” Rabinowitz finally asked.
“Don’t start that again,” Geiger said.
“You let another man make love to your woman. That doesn’t bother you?”
“She is not…”
“It’s a disgrace,” the ghost said. “That’s what it is. You may be left with only one resort to save your honor.”
“What’s that?” Geiger asked.
“You will have to kill her,” he said. “The proper moment is near, and that is what I would suggest. There are ways of doing it that you won’t get caught. You will live well without her.”
The ghost nodded. “Yes, yes, yes. I do believe that is the only solution,” urged the ghost.
Geiger listened through a veil of exhaustion. No matter how many times he turned it over in his mind, no matter how many facets of it he counted, it all came back to the same thing. The thought horrified him.
“Do you believe I’m capable of murder?” he once asked the ghost.
The ghost roared with laughter.
“We are all capable of it under the right exigencies,” Rabinowitz answered. “You. Me. Could you kill in self-defense?”
“Probably.”
“Then why not in defense of your life’s genius?” Geiger was not convinced. Nor did he wish to be.
Meanwhile, his mind was starting to push in dark new uncharted directions, provoked incessantly by Rabinowitz’s accusations. The fantasy recurred to him of Diana being the figure model at the art gallery. He tried to picture her in the course of adultery with another man. He pictured her as another man pulled her into bed and make love to her.
He recoiled from the thought. The ghost read his thoughts and gleefully intruded.
Pure Rabinowitz:
“The horns of the cuckold rise so beautifully from your head, Rolf. He has his pleasures exactly right where you have yours.”
Geiger angrily pulled his hands from the keyboard. He rose abruptly and hurled a bookend at the specter. The bookend passed hard through the ghost
and hit a wall. There it broke and shattered an antique vase.
The ghost was gone and there were shards of plaster and crystal all over the floor.
Moments later, Geiger was surprised when Diana opened the door.
“Rolf?”
“What?” he snapped.
She looked around the room. Geiger stood at his piano, the broken crystal across the room. There was a dent on the wall and a cracked marble bookend lay on the floor. As they stood staring, the unchecked books slid sideways. Several tumbled off the shelf. Rabinowitz’s invisible hand? What had given the books the push? Geiger could hear the ghost chortling.
“What happened?” Diana asked.
“Some things got broken.”
“Want me to get a broom?”
Geiger glanced at the wreckage. He saw Rabinowitz standing near it, looking down, admiring the mess he had caused.
“Tell her that if she makes love to another man again you will kill her,” he said.
“No,” Geiger said, answering both of them as one.
“She’s already goes to bed with one of them. Maybe two,” Rabinowitz said. “Accuse her now! See how she reacts!”
“No!” he snapped again.
“I heard you the first time,” Diana said.
Rolf sighed. He felt a tension mounting with both Rabinowitz and Diana present at once. He thought of how to explain the mess on the floor. There were two ways. The lie and the truth. The first option seemed easiest.
“Lousy arrangement doesn’t make much sense. I lost my temper.”
“Try to keep calm, Tiger.”
“I am calm.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
She entered the room and moved toward him.
“May I come in?”
“If you want.”
“Whore!” said Rabinowitz.
“Do you hear anything?” Geiger asked. “A voice, maybe? An old man’s voice?”
“Something out on the street maybe?” she said. But she found nothing else audible.
Rabinowitz appeared right behind her.
“Claire is much more succulent,” Rabinowitz said. “You should stop delaying. Go down to the girl in Greenwich Village. Her hot lithe body awaits you.”
“When did you come in, anyway?” Rolf asked Diana.
“About a half hour ago.”
“Why didn’t you let me know you were back?”
“You don’t like to be bothered when you’re at the piano.”
“Well, I like to know who’s in the house.”
“Next time, I’ll…I’ll…Oh, screw it, Rolf! You’re impossible! I don’t know what to do!”
She stunned him. She turned and marched away. She slammed the door. Moments later, he felt the vibrations of the front door slamming shut. She had left again.
“Very good,” said Rabinowitz.
“So leave me alone and go burn in hell!” Geiger roared, to either, neither, or both. He picked up another piece of antique crystal and smashed it. She did not come back into the room.
And began to wonder. Why was Diana so irritable?
What was going on?
Why didn’t he go see Claire at her place?
Why wasn’t Diana here when he needed her?
Who, he wondered, had come into her life?
Whom was she seeing?
Rolf had to concede, the old man’s argument was making sense.
Thirty-three
Several days in August followed the same pattern. Rolf would practice and the ghost would visit. They would talk. As Geiger’s precision at the keyboard increased, the venom of the ghost’s tirades against Diana would intensify. He would sometimes elevate Rolf to a mean, homicidal frenzy.
When Diana was out, which was now almost always, Rolf would pour his rage into his music. When she came home, he would smolder, barely speaking to her.
“I think,” she said again one day. “I should move out.”
“No,” he said. “I want you here.”
“Will you treat me better?” she asked.
“I want you here!” Geiger said. “You know how you will be treated.”
“Oh, the abject disgrace of having your woman move directly from your bed to the bed of another man,” mused the ghost one day. “Such humiliation. Better she die somewhere than disgrace you in public like that.”
Sometimes, Geiger no longer felt the sense of horror over Diana’s death. Only a sense of sadness and inevitability.”
Added Rabinowitz boldly.
“As inevitable as Covent Garden.” Which raised the question: For the first concert of his tour, should she come with him? Several times the subject came up, alternating with whether or not she should move out. On some days, she was going, on others she was staying.
“But what do you want to do?” Rolf would ask her.
“I want you to have a tremendous appearance at Covent Garden,” she said.
“Does that mean you stay or come with me?”
“Whatever helps you more,” Diana said.
“If she stays behind she can spend the nights with her lovers,” Rabinowitz suggested.
Geiger was now hooked thoroughly into an existence defined by his piano on one side and a jealous rage on the other. One day when Diana was out, Rolf prowled through the guest room. He sifted through correspondence and found several from Phillip Langlois. He read them all. They were letters of increasing emotional intimacy and of a growing friendship. They indicated no sexual liaison, however.
Not yet.
He thought about the situation. Now he knew the identity of at least one of the men she was seeing. And knowing brought home the reality of it.
Rabinowitz stood over his shoulder as Rolf read every word of every letter. Geiger had never met Phillip Langlois. He knew nothing about the man.
“Go find out,” Rabinowitz said. “Go watch her with him.”
Two days later, when she left to have lunch with ‘a girlfriend’ Geiger followed. He saw her enter a small restaurant on the east side. He took up a position in a coffee bar across the street and waited till she emerged.
Two hours later, she emerged with a handsome man a few inches taller than she. He held Diana’s hand. He gave her a kiss and a long hug when they parted. Geiger reacted with anger and sadness. If she weren’t sleeping with this man, looked as if she soon would be.
Rolf went home and arrived an hour before she did. He never admitted that he had been out. All afternoon, all evening, he poured his attentions and his anger into his music.
“I tell you, she is sleeping with more than one,” the ghost taunted. “How long before this appears in the newspapers? There is no disgrace like being doubly cuckolded in public.”
“Vanish!” Geiger screamed.
Rabinowitz laughed. The ghost was thoroughly in his head by now, at last in full possession of his soul, his personality, his mind.
“You may play Beethoven until Heaven applauds,” Rabinowitz said, “but your woman will drag you low into the mud.”
That evening was a fertile one for suspicion, also.
Diana’s art lesson had ended at nine, and yet she had not come through the door by ten-thirty. Rolf had waited in the library, hunched at the piano, but was unable to practice properly until he had heard her come in. It was now a rainy summer evening and well after eleven-thirty.
A few minutes before midnight, she stood at the door to the library, her tall frame wrapped neatly in a trench coat, her dark hair at shoulder length, watching him, giving him a smile and waiting for a welcome in return.
“Hi, Tiger. How’s things?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said flatly. “How did it go with you?”
“It went well.”
“Stop somewhere on your way home?” he asked. No immediate answer.
“Maurice fed me,” she said.
“Fed you what?” he asked.
Instinctively, she didn’t like the tone of the question.
“Dinner,” she said. “Or a
late supper. Whatever you’d call it. There’s a little place on Spring Street around the corner.”
“What did you have?”
“A bowl of soup and a glass of red wine,” she said. His questions now took such an accusatorial edge that she quickly sickened of them. She paused.
“If you don’t believe me, the name of the place is Mistinguet’s. I’ve been there before and the waiter’s name is Kevin. If you’ll call and ask if he’s seen me, he’ll remember.”
“I’m not interrogating you,” Rolf said, easing slightly.
“You could have fooled me,” she retorted. Then she eased off, and answered in a gentler voice.
“Maurice has three students. He took us all out,” she said.
“Three women? Did he sell come canvases?” Rolf asked unmoved.
“Why?”
“He’s strangely solvent for an art teacher. Last time I saw him he was angling to find other new students. He looked rather threadbare.”
“I wouldn’t know about his finances,” she said. “He treats us well. He’s a good teacher.”
“Do you like him a lot?” he asked. “As a man?”
“Rolf,” she scolded. “Don’t be a pain! It’s not like that.”
“How is it, then?”
“He’s my art teacher. That’s all.”
She left the room. He looked at her leave and imagined how he would have felt if she were leaving him for good. “It’s not like that.” The statement ricocheted around in his mind and found infinite ways to reverberate.
“It’s not like that.”
No? Lately, he didn’t know how it was. Or how it wasn’t.
He felt like he needed her more. But he had the impression that she was intentionally spending more and more time away from him. Art. Magazine articles. Lunches. She even mentioned a book she wanted to write. What ideas were Maurice This or Phillip That putting into her head? And now she seemed always to be tardy coming home from an evening meeting.
“Just long enough to jump in and out of a hot bed,” Rabinowitz chided him.
He reminded himself that there needn’t have been anything to it. But her recent behavior, her strange hours of absence, were at variance with what had once been the norm. And that was what he noticed.
