Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

  I cried as I barged down Seventh Avenue, my messy path weaving to 53rd, past the elegant theatergoers and their $100 Miss Saigon tickets. Nobody noticed me. Nobody ever noticed any of us. The stage doorman reading his New York Post didn’t even bother to look up.

  At thirty-five, I felt even more washed-up than I had at twenty-six, when I’d burned my best freelance connections. Back then there were rays of hope. I thought I’d get married. Surely I’d win an orchestra audition if I just kept at it. I’d had an unconscious belief that other careers would be open to me if I wanted them. Now every one of those doors appeared to be firmly shut.

  Third Movement

  Symphonic Metamorphoses

  One of the Allendale’s stone lions, a remnant from the building’s days as a luxury residence.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Airlift from Saigon

  TWO DEEPLY TANNED men loaded nets into their dinghy as the sun sank between Inner and Outer Brass, steep rocky islands dropped into the azure sea off northern St. Thomas. I hung my wetsuit across the concrete balcony railing to dry.

  The Virgin Islands house-sitting invitation couldn’t have come at a better time. I would live here, and scuba dive for free, for two months just for taking care of Shivaya, the black Lab snoozing at my feet. I’d have time and solitude to consider my life and what I would do next.

  I’d first visited St. Thomas on a short trip with my parents a few months earlier, in the winter after Sydney and I had gone man-hunting in the Hamptons. That was when I’d seen Shivaya’s owner, Homer, loading scuba tanks near a resort’s private beach. His muscles rippled beneath his tank top. When he caught me staring, I hurried into the dive shop and claimed the last spot on the beginner’s dive.

  Homer fitted my weight belt with extra care, cinching it tightly around my waist before leading me into the surf. Terrified, I concentrated on breathing, hardly seeing the colorful fish or Caribbean lobster peeking out from the rocks. Suddenly I felt dizzy, as if I’d gotten out of bed too fast. Suspended underwater, I swirled round and round inside a kaleidoscope of soft corals, then fuzzy whiteness, then black. Gradually, blue light shimmered and Homer’s mask came into focus. He held me tight with one arm, signaling “Okay?”

  Up, up! I pointed. He shook his blond head no, folding a hand around mine to lead me across the sandy bottom, past conch trails, clownfish, a green moray gaping from its cave. Feeling safe at last, I began to enjoy the strange underwater sights. After we surfaced, I thanked Homer, and he invited me over for a barbecue that night.

  Homer had a routine for lady tourists like me, at his cement hurricane-roof bunker far from the island’s glitzy hotels. He put his big arms around me as we looked at the horizon through the glass louvers of his windows that faced the sea. His hard body glistened like nothing I’d seen back in New York. He reminded me of Walter, the Argentine tour guide I’d met in the jungle years before. Homer slid his huge hand around me and unbuttoned my cutoffs. I was thirty-five and turned on for the first time in my life.

  On this return trip, Homer and I had been sharing the house for two weeks until he left to visit family in Tennessee. He took one afternoon to show me the details of homeowning. Here’s the cistern’s water level. It has to last all summer. Be careful after dark; cops don’t come to the north side of St. Thomas. Frenchies take the law into their own hands, just like in their French Huguenot village back on St. Bart’s. Homer turned to a side table, reaching under a pile of cloth napkins. In one motion, he pulled out a Glock semiautomatic pistol and released its cartridge, snapping it back into place. There was a .38 special under the bed too.

  Now I was alone in the house with the guns. It was eight o’clock.

  New York, Miss Saigon’s curtain was rising now in its fourth year. My misery over such a good job seemed absurd, when everyone here on St. Thomas earned far less and worked harder, if they found work at all. Despondent, I stared at the Glock’s muzzle, poking out from the napkins.

  I hadn’t told anyone I was seriously contemplating suicide. After failing the business school test so thoroughly, I was convinced I would be unable to support myself once the show closed. My plan was to give myself at least six weeks to try to sort out where I might fit in to the mainstream world I’d never known. If I could not find my way, I planned to use this gun.

  After two weeks, though, I had calmed down enough to relax. For several years I had spent the evenings honking away in a dusty pit. Now I wanted to learn what other people did at night. Read? Cook a full dinner? I didn’t even know when to go to bed. Reggae pulsed from the Frenchies’ beach bar. Maybe I’d go there for a beer and tell everyone I was a rock star, a Romanian contessa, a real-estate mogul. The clouds turned pink as I headed down to Hull Bay. Shivaya bounded over to a blond man across the beach as if she knew him, and I never made it to the bar. Minutes later, the man and I walked back up the hill together to his tiny cottage right below mine.

  Pete owned one of the dive concessions on St. Thomas. His one-room house was perched on a cliff just above the lobster holes in Hull Bay. “You’re a nice little package,” he said, rubbing my shoulders. We made love to the pounding surf below.

  Soon, flowers showed up on my doorstep, then gifts from his dive shop—a swimsuit and funky flip-flops. Tall, handsome, and successful, Peter wouldn’t have stayed single for an instant in New York. Here on St. Thomas, the bars were full of virile men, desperate for female companions. Homer had pointed out that he knew most of these men from AA meetings, but I didn’t care. For two months I’d behave like they did, without thought of a permanent relationship.

  My daily routine started each morning when I met the boat from Homer’s diving company for their group trip underwater. As long as I tipped twenty dollars, the divemasters welcomed me aboard for free, especially if I tipped theatrically, which encouraged customers to tip generously too.

  Today’s group included a doctor from Boston, a London media exec, and a pair of fit construction workers from Texas, their wives and girlfriends left to lounge beside the Hyatt’s pool in pricey resort clothes. Usually, I was the only woman aboard.

  I stole a glance at Eric, who was helping customers suit up. He was a scuba instructor straight from central casting: yellow hair, hard muscles, and a macramé necklace of bleached seashells and leather. I chatted with the construction workers, who were fascinating to a late-night Broadway vampire like me. The conversation between the tourists and me on the dive boat was always the same.

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “How do you get two months off from work?”

  Eric gave me a sidelong smirk. He knew all about glamorous jobs. Strapping on my tank, I splashed backward into the water to wait. Down thirty feet to the bottom, I lay on the sand, looking up at clouds through the clear water’s surface. My hair drifted in a halo turned honey-colored by the sun.

  I wasn’t scared to dive anymore, after swimming against currents a hundred feet deep and stroking the sandpaper skin of a nurse shark. I earned a divemaster certification, addicted to the idea that I could move ahead at anything after the inertia of the classical music business. I listened to strange underwater sounds and could barely remember myself onstage, nervously fretting over a tiny piece of bamboo.

  I became more attracted to Eric each day as I watched him help divers down the anchor line, his calf flexing with each fin stroke. I could tell the interest was mutual, and on his day off we made a date to dive together. Eric brought the equipment, and we swam underwater near Coki Beach, past the snorkelers’ baby reef and out to the sand flats fifty feet deep. Conchs peeked from their shells, leaving long trails on the ocean floor as the sunlight dappled the sand. A diver’s playground lay beyond the sand flats, with square, round, and triangular hula hoops for certification tests tethered to cinder blocks, the ocean’s depth diffusing their neon colors. Eric and I played tag, twisting in and out of the narrow openings. I’d never felt so weightless
and free. We hung suspended halfway between the surface and bottom in an embrace, until our air was nearly gone. On the beach, we ditched our gear in Eric’s car and then headed for Homer’s.

  I flipped on the stereo to whatever I’d left in the CD changer. French horns and violas wailed as Mahler’s Sixth Symphony started, its lush chords and complex rhythm rising over the reggae coming from the beach. When Eric’s body froze, I rushed back to switch off the music, but stopped when Eric turned from the sunset, his expression earnest and intense.

  “I never heard anything like that before,” Eric said, setting down his Red Stripe beer.

  “You’re faking it,” I teased. His hurt look convinced me he wasn’t lying. I picked out the “Adagietto” from Mahler’s Fifth, Bernstein’s favorite. I slid back beside him in the hammock, and the string harmonies sailed through the house and out over the Caribbean.

  “This music. Why haven’t I heard it before?” he asked.

  The next morning, I phoned Sydney, asking her for more CDs from my apartment. I was eager to tell her why, but I first had to endure the latest pit report.

  “It’s sooo awful,” she wailed. “I give up! I quit!”

  She was exhausted from all her jobs. If only someone would let her have a moment to herself. “The show conductor is terrible! Why does he hate me so much anyway?” she cried. No one would let her play first flute anymore on freelance gigs. Even Jersey Symphony called someone else before calling her.

  “Why would you care?” I asked. She’d voluntarily quit her full-time position there more than fifteen years ago.

  Before she could answer, my news bubbled out of me. Sunshine and blue ocean, scuba divers, and Mahler. Dating three men at once with no strings! Life seemed a pleasure here, not the repetitive, pointless drudgery of practicing and playing for audiences who only came for the “star” soloist. I was learning to smell the roses, savor the simple things. I had made chutney from the mangoes in Homer’s yard ...

  From Sydney’s complaints, I realized how far I’d come in only six weeks from feeling so miserable. I was enjoying the smallest moments of each day. As I relaxed, I was even starting to love classical music again. My turnabout reminded me of Sam’s beatific expression as he listened to Schubert in his hospital room after a monthlong respite from the relentless work schedule that was required to earn a good living in freelance classical music.

  As Sydney and I hung up, I caught a glimpse of the gun under Homer’s cloth napkins. I had forgotten it was there.

  The stage doorman at Miss Saigon tried to stop me from entering; he hadn’t recognized me with my nut-brown skin and light blond hair. I looked very different; New York was the same. The conductor, Rieling, was just as nasty and the show was repetitive as ever.

  The Allendale hadn’t changed either. Jorge growled away on his contrabassoon downstairs. Slava Polozov vocalized next door, and I could faintly hear a flute playing Brahms’s Fourth, maybe Brian, who moved in last year. Or even Sydney. I couldn’t identify her sound anymore, now that she was trying different instruments to replace the stolen Powell flute.

  Sam practiced violently and was more robust than ever. Returning from his first-ever Caribbean vacation with Sue, he was filled with the energy of a man in love. The humiliation I remembered from Itzhak’s party was still upsetting, though. I had confronted Sam the day after, bursting into tears. He apologized weakly and urged me to understand that he was in the unexpected situation of a surprise party. Grudgingly I had accepted his words, but I believed he never valued the intense time I had devoted to looking after him during his illness.

  Back from the Caribbean, I decided to put my bad feelings behind me and accept our now-distant friendship. I was looking forward to turning pages for him later this afternoon, when he and Itzhak would perform r the David Letterman show. I followed Sam into the Ed Sullivan Theater where Letterman taped the show, across the street from Saigon’s stage door. An assistant led us upstairs to the dressing rooms, where the other guest, political commentator Cokie Roberts, talked with Itzhak.

  When it was time for their performance, I placed the Sarasate showpiece on the piano and sat quietly as Itzhak and Sam began playing. I hadn’t heard them in a while. Tonight their emotional energy was stronger and more poignant than ever.

  Letterman finished taping at six-thirty, and the Saigon stagehands had heard of my minor celebrity by showtime. I returned to obscurity soon enough, though, and Saigon continued on repetitiously eight times a week. Playing, reading, and ignoring Rieling, my mind wandered off to friends on St. Thomas, and especially to Eric. I realized I had fallen in love with him but had no way to tell him so. Hurricane Marilyn had battered the island of St. Thomas, destroying 90 percent of its buildings. No one came or went. The phones didn’t work. Three weeks passed before Eric finally called.

  “Come right away,” I urged, the words a surprise even to me as I invited him to ship his belongings and move in with me permanently. Soft snow fell the morning he arrived. Living in Hawaii, American Samoa, and the Caribbean, Eric hadn’t visited the mainland in seven years. He’d never seen the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, or Brooklyn Bridge. He didn’t have winter clothes.

  At the Allendale, he searched his suitcases but found only one pair of long pants. Rob Fisher lent us a sweater, and my large Saigon show jacket just fit around Eric’s solid torso. Socks and sneakers came from Sam, who regarded my island boy with curiosity.

  “Your friend Sam doesn’t look so good,” whispered Eric, as Sam closed his door.

  “You should’ve seen him before,” I replied.

  The snow accumulated, and at twenty inches the city declared a curfew. For the first time in years, Broadway went dark. With my unexpected night off, we bundled up and headed to Broadway and 105th. Eric caught flakes on his tongue and kicked up drifts with Sam’s shoes.

  Eric held open the door of Birdland, letting jazz music, smoke, and heat drift out. We ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir, and he leaned backward against the bar, wrapping his arms around my waist to watch the blizzard. “Hey, get a room,” a woman chided. Eric gave her a long look and buried his face in my hair.

  In the next few weeks, Eric adjusted to city life easily. He did the grocery shopping and filled my refrigerator with spinach lasagna, casseroles, and exotic chicken dishes. When I came home at eleven each night, Eric set an elegant table with my hodgepodge of dishes and played Vivaldi, Bach, or some new favorite of his on the stereo. He drizzled arugula and red globe grapes with walnut oil, arranged pink lamb chops atop wild rice with blanched almonds, or served up some other delicious combinations that never would have occurred to me.

  Eric found a minimum-wage job selling dive equipment at Paragon Sports on Union Square. He did our laundry, moved the car on alternate-side parking days, vacuumed, scrubbed the toilet, and fixed the leaky faucet Angelo couldn’t.

  While I played the show at night, he trained as a police auxiliary volunteer. This man, generous with his affection and household responsibilities, was also showing me a social awareness. The fact that his employment opportunities were limited by his lack of a college education didn’t matter, I told myself. It had all been so easy, as if I’d just been looking for love in the wrong places.

  * * *

  Eric looked happy as he crossed the street to Lincoln Center. I’d bought him a late Christmas present, tickets to hear a live orchestra for the first time. The Philharmonic was performing his favorite, Mahler’s Fifth. The price, $140 for two second-tier box seats, was shocking. I couldn’t afford to hear the Philharmonic very often as an audience member. Although Philharmonic and freelance musicians sometimes got two free seats to bring guests to a concert they were playing in themselves, there was no other way to obtain cheaper seats, even for an insider like me.

  Eric entered Avery Fisher Hall’s lobby and spread his arms beneath Richard Lippold’s dangling brass Orpheus and Apollo sculpture. He presented our tickets proudly and walked upstairs, where a surly usher pul
led open the box’s door and pointed to our seats. Inside, a fortyish couple studied their Stagebills. I recognized them from years back, when I played frequently at the Philharmonic. They always sat in this box. The wife pushed back her velvet headband, and an assortment of jeweled tennis bracelets on her right wrist made a tinkling sound.

  “Pardon us,” Eric said patiently, using his best manners. The woman pressed herself backward as we squeezed by, her eyes inspecting my scuffed boots, Levi’s, and faded black pullover and Eric’s cheap cotton shirt and chinos. Her upper lip curled.

  Had I stepped in something?

  I checked my boots as the musicians trickled onstage. Gary Levinson shifted his fiddle and bow to his right hand, slapping the back of a cellist’s tailcoat as he passed.

  “Isn’t that funny! Almost like they’re greeting each other at work,” said the husband, chuckling.

  “What are they playing again, Mahler? Do I know that one?” the wife asked. She waved enthusiastically to another couple in the balcony.

  Eric studied the stage. “Which guy plays principal French horn?” he asked. “Is that the grand harp, the one with the pedals you told me about?” The woman snorted, crossing her legs away from us.

  When trumpeter Philip Smith sounded the work’s first triplets, Eric closed his Stagebill and sat up straight, hands folded neatly in his lap. The violins began their simple tragic lament, their phrasing precise yet rife with emotion, as if they were speaking an elegiac poem for a loved one who had died. As Sarah Bullen wove her harp chords through the string harmonies of the “Adagietto,” the ethereal sound floating with a warmth recordings never quite captured, Eric closed his eyes and squeezed my hand contentedly.