Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

  “She hesitated, not looking at me, and reminded me that she was married.

  “‘Do you love him?’ I asked.

  “‘Love? Perhaps not, but I care for him,’ she said. ‘And we have a child.’

  “‘We could still be lovers,’ I urged her.

  “She turned her face away from mine. ‘I wrote you once that I was in love with you. I still am,’ she said, ‘but if I had to hide my love, I would feel I was perverting it, turning what’s natural into something shameful.’

  “‘Then why hide it?’ I asked, holding her tighter. ‘I don’t want to lose you again.’

  “She freed herself from my embrace and said, ‘My husband loves me. He has been very generous. Without his support I couldn’t have become who I am. I can’t leave him.’

  “As she turned to go, I blurted, ‘Please write to me again.’ Then she was gone, and the next day she and her husband left Crans-Montana.

  “I was left at first with the thrill of knowing that I had held in my arms the woman I loved, and only later did I become aware of my loss. As I waited for her to write, I fantasized about her more and more, always imagining her naked, making love to me in clandestine meetings—after her concerts, in big anonymous hotels on New York’s West Side; in out-of-the-way hotels in Paris, Rome, or Vienna; in motels in Los Angeles; in private rooms of the secret sex palaces in Rio de Janeiro.’ But she didn’t write, and I began to spend hours on end reading and rereading her old letters. During these periods I would despise myself—my music, my whole existence—because I’d failed to have her the only time I’d had the chance. The sight of a telephone filled me with pain, but I dared not call her. Like a desperate schoolboy in love with his music teacher, I made elaborate plans to follow her, to arrange things so that we would accidentally run into each other, but I always abandoned these adolescent designs out of embarrassment.

  “A few months ago I learned that her husband had died in an automobile accident.”

  “Really?” Andrea asked, casually reaching for a hairbrush. “Then why don’t you get in touch with her?”

  “What for?”

  “To be with her.” She brushed her hair slowly, letting it fall on her shoulders and neck. “You’re the best part of her past.”

  “But she isn’t the best part of mine,” said Domostroy in a voice deliberately calm. He got up and stretched. “Anyway, she wrote to me when I was a composer. All I compose now are letters—somebody else’s.” He chuckled, then reached for Andrea and laid her down on the bed. He covered her breasts with her hair and gently smoothed it out over her nipples.

  “How soon after that meeting with the pianist did you stop composing?” Andrea asked the next day in an emotionless voice.

  “A year or so,” said Domostroy. With a smile he added, “You might say creation petered out as abandonment set in.”

  “Aren’t you still in love with her?” Andrea asked.

  “Not with her. Only with her letters,” he said. “Which reminds me, your first letter to Goddard went out last night. I mailed it in an official White House envelope, one of a few I’ve saved as souvenirs over the years. They’re embossed inner envelopes, the kind you get wedding invitations in. They’ve never been postmarked or. addressed.

  “Where did you get them?” Andrea asked.

  Domostroy looked at her before he answered. “Each time I performed in Washington, I got congratulatory notes enclosed in them from a fan of mine, who was then an adviser to the President. If any fan letter ever reaches Goddard, that one surely will.”

  “He’ll probably think I work in the White House.”

  “Perhaps. Or that you’re the wife or daughter of one of the country’s big bosses—who, like Goddard, maintains invisibility. That will make him despair of your ever abandoning your own anonymity, but you can be sure it will also make him keep his eye peeled for the next White House envelope, and the one after that.”

  “What will be in those?”

  “More of your perceptions about him, his music, his life—maybe some photographs of you to show how beautiful you are.”

  “Should we let him know what I look like so soon?” she said, and then she promptly answered her own question. “Maybe they could be shot from a distance or taken with my face turned away.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said.

  “If I’m not signing the letters, I shouldn’t show my face either. Isn’t the face the body’s signature?”

  He smiled. “Do you have lots of good pictures of yourself?” he asked her.

  “Not many.” She paused and added, “Hey, maybe we could take some! Sexy ones. I could even undress for him.”

  “Another good, idea,” he said, then added, “but I wonder if he’ll resent your posing for another man.”

  “Of course he would,” she declared, “so we won’t let him know. Can’t we arrange the shots so that he would think I used a self-timing camera?”

  “I guess so. What purpose do you think the pictures should serve?” asked Domostroy.

  “Purely to excite him. To make him aroused by the very sight of me.”

  “You think of everything, don’t you?” he said, impressed.

  “Someone has to,” she said, “because, Patrick, if Goddard has kept his secret from the world all this time, he’s got to be smart. That means we have to be smarter, right? I think we must also make sure that there are no fingerprints on my letters to him—or on the photographs. If he does become interested in me, I wouldn’t put it past him to check for them, and we don’t want him to check me out before I’ve checked him in, do we?” She rolled her eyes and burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Domostroy asked her.

  “After all this,” she said, “what if Goddard turns out to like men?”

  “If he does,” said Domostroy with a wide smile, “you two will have something in common right from the start.”

  They lay naked, sunning themselves on the roof of her brownstone. Stretched out next to him, her head propped up on a folded towel, Andrea was asleep. He watched a single drop of sweat gather on her neck, roll onto her breast, stop at the nipple, run sideways, and with not a single wrinkle to stop it, roll down the smooth, dry surface of her belly.

  He then looked at himself. Streams of sweat poured out from small pools that had formed between the folds and wrinkles of his skin. Unable to stand the heat any longer, he put on his trunks and got up. The steaming streets of Manhattan stretched out below. A faint breeze brought the smell of tar, and on the Hudson a nuclear aircraft carrier, escorted by a flotilla of tugs and pleasure boats, was on its way toward Ambrose Light, the folded wings of the planes on its flight deck catching the sun like an open accordion.

  “I don’t believe you about the White House stationery.” Andrea’s voice caught him’from behind.

  “Why not?” he asked without looking around.

  “All that mail-inside-mail stuff sounded fishy,” she said calmly. “So I did some checking. They don’t use double envelopes in such cases at the White House. You lied, Domostroy. Now, why?”

  “I thought the envelopes might benefit our cause, not the truth about how I came upon them.”

  “Truth is not supposed to benefit,” she said. “Truth just is.”

  “Then I have merely withheld it,” he said, still watching the aircraft carrier.

  As he said it, for a moment he wondered: had he also withheld his life’s truth from himself? Would his life be better served if instead of enlisting in the service of the young woman behind him, he were an enlisted man, one of the crew of that aircraft carrier? To remain truthful to himself, shouldn’t he be adaptable, as changing as was the life of music, where it made little difference that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was, right up until the War of 1812, “To Anacreon in Heav’n,” a London supper-club drinking song? Or that Chopin’s majestic Polonaise in A-flat Major had reached masses of listeners for the first time in A Song to Remember, a vapid movie about the composer’s life,
and also as “Cheek to Cheek,” a swing version of its leading melody?

  “So how about trying the truth, Patrick? How did you get those envelopes?” Andrea persisted.

  “All right, I’ll tell you,” said Domostroy. “Over a decade ago, I taught musical syntax at the drama school of one of the Ivy League universities. Among my students was one whom I—quite frankly—liked a lot, and when she applied to become my assistant, I hired her on the spot.”

  “So much for impartial hiring practices in Academia,” interjected Andrea. “I bet the same goes on at Juilliard.”

  “She lived on the ground floor of a large country house near the university.” Domostroy went on. “The owner, who occupied its top floor, was a retired attorney, once a partner in a prominent Washington law firm and in his younger years one of the top White House counsels.”

  “And did he leave White House stationery lying around?” asked Andrea with a smirk.

  “Even if he had, at that time I had better things to think of than filching fancy stationery for letters I might one day write—as a woman at that!—to a rock star with a disappearing act.”

  “Better things? Such as?” asked Andrea.

  “Musical compositions. That was the year I wrote The Baobab Concerto.”

  Andrea smiled disparagingly. “Which, just a few years later, as I recall, you chose to rewrite because you said it wasn’t good enough. Obviously you had other things on your mind the first time through. That young assistant, to begin with.”

  “Correct,” said Domostroy. “Without her, my teaching would have been a drab routine.

  “The old man, by the way, lived alone, and despite his advanced age, he insisted on preparing his own meals—thus saving the cost of a cook.

  “One Saturday morning my assistant called me and asked if I could come over right away. She had a surprise for me, she said, which might just inspire a musical piece.

  “When I got to the house, I found her in the garden wearing an almost transparent chiffon gown from an earlier era and a pair of old-fashioned high-heeled shoes, and as she walked toward me a breeze made the gown cling to her shapely body. Like the Lady of Shalott from the Waterhouse painting in the Tate Gallery, she took me by the hand and led me to the house, where she blindfolded me with a scarf and led me up a flight of stairs.

  “We entered a room. From the smell of books and old leather, I guessed we were in the old man’s study.

  “The girl led me to a leather sofa and pushed me down onto it. Suddenly, as she placed a wet kiss on my lips, she pulled off the blindfold. I opened my eyes and saw him sitting at the desk not ten feet from us, his head resting on his hands as he stared at the two of us in blind fascination.”

  “Him?” asked Andrea.

  “The old man, who else?” said Domostroy. “But he didn’t move—he was dead.”

  “How long had he been dead?” asked Andrea matter-of-factly.

  “Just a few hours. That morning the girl noticed that he hadn’t come down to pick up his copy of the New York Times. When she went upstairs, she found him at his desk, already cold, and on an impulse she propped his head on his hands and telephoned me. She had a taste for the bizarre, you see.”

  “And silly me, I thought I could surprise you with my punk leather outfit!” Andrea moaned. “Tell me what happened next.”

  “Nothing much,” he said. “We went through his things—drawers, files, letter cabinets. His presence definitely excited her—the idea of Death watching Life. She said that the two of us making love then and there would have made a perfect subject for Hieronymus Bosch or Dali.”

  “With the old man, I hope, just watching,” interrupted Andrea. “Or was your assistant ready for a more bizarre experiment?”

  The aircraft carrier was gone now, and all the small boats had scattered.

  “And the stationery?” asked Andrea.

  “I took a packet of White House stationery from his desk. As a souvenir,” he said.

  “A souvenir,” murmured Andrea. “I wonder of what?”

  At odd and unexpected times, Andrea liked to throw Domostroy off balance.

  “When my grandfather retired,” she once remarked to him, “he did not want to eat anymore, and when the doctors saved him from starving himself to death, tired of his useless life, like Hemingway, he blew his brains out with a shotgun. Why haven’t you?”

  “Because I’m still useful,” said Domostroy. “To myself. To you. I’m happy to be alive.”

  “That’s not being useful,” she said, laughing at him. “That’s having an ego!”

  Occasionally Andrea would remind him that once she knew who Goddard was, Domostroy would have to go. She would say this perfectly calmly, as if to point out what was obvious: that finding Goddard was the only reason she and Domostroy were together. And she would sometimes say it right after their lovemaking, when she would let him excite her and then, switching roles, would tease and arouse him to cross all thresholds. When there was no more tension in him to release, after begging her to stop pushing him beyond his limits, he would fall asleep, exhausted by excitement, and wake up at her side satiated and serene. Then she would tell him.

  Her words inevitably brought back the terror he had often felt before he met her—the terror of driving back each night—alone—from Kreutzer’s to the Old Glory—the black hole of his shrinking universe.

  Domostroy knew that if the letters from Andrea and the photographs intrigued Goddard sufficiently, the star would eventually track her down to claim her. The trick would be to make it impossible for Goddard to positively identify Andrea before she could identify him. For if he found out who she was, there would be no reason for him to reveal himself, and all their efforts to discover him would have been in vain. Even if Goddard found Andrea and became her lover, Domostroy reasoned, he must never—not even with her naked body stretched out next to his—be able to make a positive identification on the basis of her looks. Rather, in order to identify her as the White House woman, Goddard must be forced to talk to her at length in hope of making her betray herself by alluding to a thought, a phrase, or an association in one of her letters to him. Domostroy hoped that, during their long verbal exchange, Goddard would trip and reveal himself first, by involuntarily referring to something Andrea would recognize as having its origin in the letters.

  To give Andrea the fullest advantages in the match, Domostroy decided to photograph her in an anonymous motel room rather than in her apartment, which Goddard would probably recognize instantly. He also decided to disguise her. By washing her hair with a color rinse and blowing it dry, he changed its shape and consistency. Then, using body makeup, he slightly altered the indentation of her navel, enlarged and darkened the aureoles of her breasts, and covered several conspicuous moles on her back and thigh. Because she regularly shaved off her pubic hair, he made her put on a pubic wig, a device popular with transvestites and hermaphrodites, which made her vagina look higher set, larger, and more elongated than it really was.

  In the many photographs Domostroy took of Andrea, he himself had to be completely invisible. There must be nothing in the picture or in Andrea’s expression or pose to indicate the presence of a man in the room. After preparing her for each pose, he would disengage himself from her, get up, and position the camera so that the photograph would show Andrea’s body—but not her face—and the camera itself, solitary, reflected in a mirror.

  As Andrea lay naked on the bed, with the pillows and sheets in disarray, Domostroy would pour oil on her shoulders, neck, breasts, belly, and thighs, and then on himself. Sitting next to her or straddling her, he would massage her with even strokes, starting with his palms at the top of her spine and descending along her back until his thumbs spread her buttocks. Turning her over on her back, he would guide his hands to the circles of her nipples, then press the tips of his thumbs on the nipples, stretching the coronas; he would slide his hands lower and with his thumbs trace oil on her loin, over the contours of her buttocks, on the lips
of her vulva. He would pause to pour more oil on her and then, hard, rigid, tense, and oily, raising her up without warning, her calves slippery against his arms, his chest against the backs of her thighs, he would slide into her with all his force and weight and push in and out of her. Just as her breasts started to rise and fall and she began to twist and moan and scream and toss and strain under him, he would pull away, dash to the camera, and direct it at her as she lay contorted, midway in her need. Then, after the undeveloped picture rolled evenly out of the camera, he would study its emerging contours and colors, checking critically the sharpness of every detail of her body and flesh as they gained contrast and density second by second.

  He would move the camera, massage her again, change her position—or the position of her hands on her breasts, her belly, or her mound—and take more pictures of her, glistening as if her body were bathed in sweat. Again he would return to her. Heaving, seeking his mouth, she would strain under him, shuddering, and her hands, slipping along his hips, would grab him and guide him into her flesh. He would thrust into her then, but only until she started to quiver and heave against him. Then he would pull out again and run to the camera.

  He took one picture after another, leaving her unfulfilled, screaming, calling him cruel and heartless. When she grew frantic, he would go over to her and with one hand slap her face back and forth while with the other he roughed up her flesh, until she would whimper and let him force her own passive hand between her thighs into her groin. As he rushed back to the camera and moved it closer to photograph her breasts, her thighs, her flesh and her fingers on it, she would start to abuse him again, and he would go over to her. Shouting that it was her idea to excite Goddard by showing him how aroused she could get, he would hit her on her breasts and belly and hips, like a jealous husband in a fight over his wife’s lover. Turning her face down, restraining her in a powerful grip, he would mount her from behind, then dive into her time after time, hurting her more with every thrust, while she thrashed under him, her face buried in the pillow, begging him to let her be.