“She likes you too,” responded his father. “She says the more she knows you, the more she likes to picture you as Lensky, the romantic poet in Eugene Onegin.”
“Tell her thanks,” said Osten, “even though Lensky gets killed by Onegin, his best friend, in a duel.”
“Come up and see us soon, Son!” his father said expansively, and then he had hung up.
Listening to his father on the phone that day, Osten had felt crushed by embarrassment. Weren’t wisdom and restraint supposed to be the rewards of healthy old age? What had happened, he wondered, to the man who was responsible for recording some of the world’s best music? The man who had been honored in countless testimonials by members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Record Industry Association as the unimpeachable aristocrat of the music business? The man whose closest friends were once such men as Goddard Lieberson and Boris Pregel? In his old age, his father seemed no different from some of the boys Osten had known in high school, who at one stage had thought about nothing but sex. Thinking of Mood Undies, Osten remembered how the group had talked endlessly about a special type of condom called Maiden’s Death, advertised as “an invasion of ecstasy, irresistibly urging the woman to let go.” Like all condoms, Maiden’s Deaths were supposed to make the man feel as if he wore nothing at all and the woman to experience urges and sensations she had never felt before. But their chief and novel source of excitement was visual. Maiden’s Deaths came in a variety of enticing colors: Skydive Blue, Ski White, Red Socks, Midas Gold, Golf Green, Silver Bike, and Nubian Black—each one guaranteed to make the woman frantic with desire. As vulvas painted in lush colors by courtesans of ancient civilizations once aroused male lovers, so brightly wrapped penises were meant to reverse the process in modern times.
Those gullible high school lovers who pinned their hopes on Maiden’s Deaths to assist them in their sexual conquests bought the condoms in such quantities that the local pharmacy wound up supplying them at a discount. Soon, however, detumescence set in. Although the idea of the colored condoms excited the boys to no end, one obstacle rendered Maiden’s Deaths almost totally useless: most of the girls who consented to go all the way insisted on total darkness—possibly because they were embarrassed to watch their boyfriends struggling to unwrap, unfold, and roll on their brilliant “pleasure invaders.”
Osten wondered whether his father’s behavior was the result of emotional rejuvenation or of some sort of moral and physical sclerosis. Was it possible, he asked himself, that men never really ripened with age, but only hardened in certain areas and went soft in others?
But, Osten reminded himself, his father was an incurable idealist and romantic. He recalled his father’s sporadic, childlike enthusiasms for the results of various parascientific experiments, particularly the ones that claimed that by affecting man’s higher cerebral centers, as well as the sympathetic nervous system, music could aid the digestive, circulatory, nutritional, and respiratory functions of the human body. Whenever his father learned that one of his friends or acquaintances was ill he would promptly dispatch to the patient a collection of Etude classical records, each one of which, he was convinced, would generate in the sick man a specific mood, helping him to combat the illness faster and better than all the doctors and their medicines combined could do.
As he drove, Osten recalled that his first impulse, after hearing his father announce that he was going to marry Vala, had been to call Blaystone and order him to withdraw Goddard’s secret backing from Etude Classics, even if that entailed a costly breach-of-contract suit. If Gerhard Osten were faced with losing his beloved business, Osten had reasoned, he might well reconsider the marriage. More to the point, since Osten had little doubt as to who in reality was pursuing whom, perhaps in those circumstances Vala would pull out of the engagement; what would she want with a man who was penniless and able to bestow on her nothing but his old age?
But, Osten had reflected, would he ever forgive himself if, confronted by bankruptcy, his father should have a stroke or a heart attack and die? Osten had instead decided to try to bring his father to his senses by invoking the image of his dead wife and reawakening his former devotion to her. He had also decided to speak to his father with shaming frankness about Vala’s youth and his advanced age.
“Just because he seems old to you, why should he seem old to himself?” Donna had demanded. “There’s nothing wrong with being old. Why shouldn’t he enjoy himself with Vala? Look at Liszt and Wagner—they both lived with women who were young enough to be their daughters!”
Easing into the stream of city-bound traffic, Osten started thinking about Donna. Some five or six months after their meeting, when the novelty of their relationship had worn off, a nagging doubt had begun to settle in his soul. He felt it from the moment he opened his eyes every morning until he went to sleep at night.
In order for his two existences to remain valid, he had to be assured of his inspiration. He had to be filled with a need to write and perform music, a need so overpowering that everything else would either lead to it or stem from it. He believed that if he began to feel musically sterile for even a moment, he would be lost. And Donna had failed to trigger in him the need to create.
He was less and less often prompted to fly on the spur of the moment from California to New York, for even though his physical infatuation with Donna was still strong, it hurt every time she expressed her disdain of rock music—and of Goddard’s music in particular.
He had told her, for instance, that if he were a musical performer, he would investigate electric pianos, the modern alternatives to the grand piano, which—with the help of oscillators, attenuators, and amplifiers—could create synthetic tones of a wide variety and a precise frequency and intensity. He reminded her of the ever-increasing use of electric pianos by popular recording stars and ensembles, adding that at least one distinguished piano manufacturer had even begun to develop an electronic grand piano.
But in his talks with Donna he had to be careful not to sound too well informed. Remembering that in her eyes he was a student of literature, at best a potential writer with only a minor interest in music which his father forced on him, he would attempt to talk her out of her rigid purism only in nonspecific terms. He defended the synthesizer as being not just another specialized musical instrument, but a creative multi-use musical erector set, and he quoted Stravinsky, who had once said that the most nearly perfect musical machine was a Stradivarius or an electronic synthesizer. Osten then speculated that the instrument would be a boon to composers and performers; at the merest touch of a button, they could hear full arrangements, as well as endless variations on a single theme; they could compress or extend a phrase, slow it down or speed it up. All this seemed to him an invaluable enrichment of the musical tradition—as well as a means of transcending it.
“For all of its presets, custom voice ensembles, special effects, and computerized rhythm and sequence programmers, a synthesizer is nothing but a hybrid of a jukebox and a pinball machine,” Donna had announced during one of their disagreements. “It turns the composer and the performer into a kind of creative automaton serving up crude mechanical selections.”
“But isn’t the piano, to a degree, mechanically crude as well?” ventured Osten. “So crude that simply by replacing its hammers with teaspoons, you can convert it into a harpsichord? And isn’t its imperfect state evident in the never-ending attempts to improve its sounding board, strings, hammers, and the action of its keys?”
“Certainly not,” replied Donna. “The piano is the descendant of a whole line of stringed instruments, starting with the ancient psaltery—a gourd with strings stretched across it that the player plucked—on up through Pythagoras’s monochord, the clavichord, the spinet, the harpsichord …” She caught her breath and glared. “Unlike all the synthesizer’s musical gadgetry, which changes from week to week, the keyboard of this”—she struck a resounding chord on her piano—“was already fully developed by the
fifteenth century, and no other instrument has ever matched the variety and richness of its tones.”
“I read somewhere,” said Osten cautiously, “that in a recent musical experiment, acoustics experts imitated—or should I say duplicated?—piano tones by tuning a series of audiofrequency oscillators to the precise frequency and intensity of struck piano strings. And when a panel of musicians and nonmusicians was brought in, they couldn’t distinguish between recordings of real piano tones and the synthetic tones made by the oscillators. In fact,” he went on, “the real and synthetic tones were so alike the musicians in the group couldn’t hear them any better than the nonmusicians could. Each group identified only about fifty percent of the tones correctly!”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Donna, her voice rising. “The point is, every real artist knows that synthetic tones lack harmonic richness and warmth.” Then she added, “In any case, Jimmy, you’re not a musician, so you’re talking about things you don’t really know about. Believe me, there are no bad pianos, only bad pianists. And there’s much more to making music than synthesizing a vibrating string!”
He felt irked and angry. After all, as a pianist Donna was just a performer, at best a talented imitator who knew nothing about the trials of composing—of writing original, vibrant music. He, on the other hand, was both a performer and a composer, and the value of his music, in sheer volume of sales, was greater than that of any previous recording artist, classical or rock. What would she say, he sputtered inwardly, if he were to tell her that? Unable to defend himself, he resorted to attacking her.
“There might be more to music than a vibrating tone,” he said, “but is there really any more to the piano?” He tried to stop, but he couldn’t. “After all, the instant you hit a piano key, the key throws out a hammer which is then no longer connected to the key but is flying freely, like a softball thrown through the air, beyond the reach of the pianist. Right? Therefore, for any given hammer speed, the tone is exactly the same whether the key was initially depressed by the finger of the great concert pianist Donna Downes or by the paw of a monkey from the Bronx Zoo!”
He could see that she was furious. She slammed the piano lid shut and spun around to face him. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” she said, “especially coming from you. You play the piano a bit yourself, Jimmy. Can’t you tell that there’s much more to it than hitting keys and activating little hammers? What about the whole art of pace and note-duration, of fingering and pedaling and attack and phrasing and coloration?” Without giving him a chance to reply, she groaned, “Oh, skip it. What’s the use of talking?”
The peace between them was once again broken. Feeling out of place, all he wanted was to be alone.
At times, as he lay next to Donna, Osten felt estranged from her and believed that she, sensing this in him, must also feel estranged. It seemed to him, at such times, that they were not so much lovers as merely people who were capable of pleasing each other.
After long hours of practicing scales and doing exercises aimed at strengthening her arms and wrists and increasing the span of her fingers, Donna was often restless and excitable. Her sexual needs came suddenly and in spurts, relentless, overabundant, rushing along like a stream, leaving him on the shore. Her eyes would shine then, her cheeks would burn, and, as if she were starved and sex were an act of nutrition, she would spell out the kind of lovemaking she wanted. In such moments, he could not fulfill her wants; what she took to be her impulse and improvisation was to him nothing but calculation and repetition. It made him uneasy and increasingly passive, and he would despair at being no more for her than a mere physical diversion, instrumental at best in drawing her away briefly from the piano—which was and always would be the main instrument of her life’s emotions.
Sometimes, after practicing the piano in front of him, she would suddenly fall on him and attempt to impale herself, to arouse him and make him erect, and if he did not respond at once she would push him down her body and force him to caress her with his mouth and tongue until an orgasm shook her body and the last of a string of urgent promptings died on her lips. It was as if, in return for being allowed to hear her perform, he had to become the servant of her resultant needs.
Yet there were other moments, just as frequent and persuasive, when Donna made love to him so ardently, so selflessly, that he felt himself the sole source and target of all her passion, moments when she would plead with him to drive her to respond to his impulses and his whims. But even then, after giving in to her forceful urging that he use her body as an instrument of his own pleasure, he often felt no closer to her, as if somewhere along the way she had failed to be the source of excitement for him.
One evening in her studio, waiting for her to come home from Juilliard, he pulled an album of photographs from a bookshelf and glanced through it. Among the many pictures of Donna with family and friends was one that disturbed him greatly. It showed her in a topless bathing suit being helped out of a small, obviously private pool by a young, handsome white man whose wet trunks bulged to reveal his unusually long and large member. The sight of the man, and of Donna’s full, bare breasts, caught by the camera as they thrust upward with the motion of her body; the photographer’s mood of sexual abandon—all this struck Osten as gross. It was a snapshot for a porno magazine, not for a personal album. Next to the slightly faded photograph Donna had glued a white square of paper with a poem by W. H. Auden typed on it.
Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.
Who was the man in the picture and what were his feelings for Donna? How had she felt about him? How long ago—and by whom—had the picture been taken? Osten felt chagrined by his ignorance. He was envious of the other man’s place in Donna’s life, and he felt physically inferior to him. He was also stung with shame to see Donna’s undisguised enjoyment at being part of this sexual show. Was it possible that she was as sexually uncurbed as Devon Wilson, the ill-fated girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix?
After hesitating for days, Osten finally brought himself to ask Donna about the man in the photograph, and Donna told him he was an actor she had once dated. Feigning nonchalance, Osten asked whether he might ever have seen the man in a play or movie. Visibly upset, Donna said she doubted it: the guy was a minor actor who played small parts in grade-B movies. Finally, when Osten asked her who took the picture, Donna snapped back that it had been taken by a friend of hers, a Juilliard student, at the friend’s family pool in Tuxedo Park. No wiser for his questions, Osten wondered what had upset Donna so much—his asking her about her past, or the memory of the man who had played a part in it.
Part of him also rebelled against Donna’s aesthetic taste. Even though Donna was a versatile pianist, accomplished and at ease with the work of many composers, she saw herself primarily as an interpreter of Chopin, a composer who was in her view as daring as Bach and unequaled in his harmonies.
Osten could not share her enthusiasm. First of all, there was, even to him, something incongruous about this ravishing black girl choosing to express herself in the field of classical music. Had she chosen to act in films or on stage instead of playing the piano, she could have been a star overnight on the strength of her exquisite face and figure alone. But in profile, bent over the keyboard, she was slightly grotesque, almost vulgar: her African head seemed too small, her neck too extended, her breasts oversized, her ass too round, her legs too long. He knew that it was the man in him—and the white man at that—who reacted to her in this way. He knew he might be happy to ogle such a beauty on a burlesque stage or a bed, but he was always surprised and a little disturbed to find one all dressed up behind a concert grand, and he found that he couldn’t control his reaction.
Then, too, it was the music she chose to play. Osten did not like Chopin, w
ho seemed to him a gifted amateur, a musical polyglot and a capricious, pampered wunderkind who had never developed into a classical composer. Chopin’s evanescent, donnish and fragile music simply was not universal, could never inspire the masses; it belonged in velvet chambers, in elitist concert halls, in music schools. There was also an ephemeral, almost ragtime quality in Chopin that Osten didn’t care for—the very quality that had made Chopin, an uprooted Pole transplanted to France, so popular a century later with the black ragtime pianists of New Orleans—who probably learned about him through the city’s Francophile coterie.
In order to understand Donna better, Osten had read a few books about Chopin, only to be troubled by most of what he learned about the composer’s tumultuous life. Although several biographers explained that Chopin’s feverish tubercular state was the cause of his constant sexual obsession, Osten nevertheless found it impossible to condone Chopin’s frantic and utterly perverse amorous escapades. To Osten, Chopin’s relationship with the French novelist George Sand was of a particularly disgusting nature, since from its outset the composer must have known that the novelist was not simply bisexual, but a lesbian by temperament as well as inclination. Yet he allowed her to use him over and over again as a pawn in sadomasochistic games with her male and female friends and lovers, among whom were some of the most perverse minds of the century. Listening to Donna’s passionate, sometimes frenetic, overtly sensuous renditions of Chopin’s ballades, nocturnes, and scherzos, Osten could not keep himself from making free associations between the music and the composer’s unhealthy life—or between Donna and Chopin.
Osten was glad to find that to H. L. Mencken, the toughest of American critics, Chopin was “another composer who is best heard after seeing a bootlegger. His music,” wrote Mencken, “is excellent on rainy afternoons in winter, with the fire burning, the shaker full, and the girl somewhat silly.”
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