Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

When he sang the first of the two Mexican songs, he could see her lips moving ever so slightly, forming the words he had written for her. Listening intently, Ahmed stared straight ahead. What if he knew the songs as well as Leila and noticed that Osten had changed the lyrics? What if—even though Ahmed’s Spanish was far from perfect—he understood at a single hearing the meaning of Osten’s lyrics?

  As before, there was a riot of applause, and to calm the audience down, Osten began to intone the opening phrases of the other Mexican song. As a surprise for Leila, he had woven into his arrangement a tender Arab motif from one of the Arab records he had studied. He played it first on what sounded like a single instrument, repeating it several times without variation according to the Arabic mode; then he sang it a number of times and picked it up once again with the solitary instrumental voice. Watching her carefully, he could see that the Arab melody had caught her off guard, rendering the familiar sad words even sadder for her, and as she listened to it, he saw tears welling up in the eyes that stared into his. He could also see that she was unaware of Ahmed’s eyes resting on her face. Shifting his gaze rapidly from Leila to Ahmed, Osten saw an expression on the other man’s face that filled him with dread.

  At the end of the performance, Osten went outside to speak to the Salems. He thanked them for coming, and Leila thanked him in return and lowered her eyes. The children shook his hand. Ahmed’s warm smile was back on his face as he thanked Osten for inviting them and said he hoped Osten would visit them soon in Mexico City. When Osten suggested that they might even get together again in Tijuana or Rosarito Beach, Ahmed, his smile still open and generous, said that unfortunately such a meeting would not be possible since he and his family were leaving for the capital the following day. When she heard what her husband had said, Leila lifted her eyes to his face; she could barely contain her feelings, but she said nothing. Osten’s heart raced; only a day before she had assured him that she and her family would remain in the Scheherazade for another week.

  A wave of childish anger, of adolescent jealousy, surged within Osten. In an instant Ahmed had reduced him to the position of spectator, powerless in the face of his own private drama; a bystander, unable to follow and be close to Leila, the woman he loved. If ever, Osten thought, he were to perform in public, even once, as Goddard—anywhere in the world—whether in tourist-jammed, poverty-ridden Tijuana, Mexico City, or even war-torn Lebanon, he would command crowds the likes of which Ahmed Salem had never imagined. Then it would be Goddard who would have the police escorts and the retinue of servants and the hosts of beautiful women—Leila among them!

  Osten’s mouth went dry, and he smiled. In a voice as firm as his handshake, he thanked Ahmed for the invitation, saying that, for a while at least, his studies would keep him in California. Sweetly he kissed the young girl’s cheek and patted the boy on the arm, and then, as if his entire life were contained in the fingers of his right hand, he extended it to Leila. With trembling lips she thanked him for his music and his company. The bodyguards opened the limousine doors, and the Salems got in, waving as the federales rushed to their cars and motorcycles and revved them up. Amid a squeal of sirens, under the admiring stare of the crowd, the limousines and motorcycles pulled away one by one. In another moment the onlookers had dispersed, and Osten stood alone at the entrance to the Apasionada. He felt empty, devoid of emotion. He believed he would never again see Leila Salem.

  In the two years and more since their parting he had made no effort to get in touch with Leila for fear of ruining her life. And even though she had his address—care of his father at Etude Classics, New York—he had had no word from her. Not long after his encounter with her, he had met Donna, who for a time had distracted him from the memory of Leila. Now, sitting alone in a sublet New York apartment, he wondered where Leila was and whether she had heard Goddard’s latest album—the one with the Mexican songs on it. Had she been curious to know how those songs had come to Goddard’s attention and why he had chosen to record them? As a foreigner living in Mexico, did she know enough about the American record business to be aware that the company that published Goddard’s records also distributed Etude Classics? If so, might she assume that, thanks to his father’s connections, he had been able to submit her two favorite songs directly to Goddard—also her favorite—who had then included them on his next album?

  An anguished thought that he might never meet anyone like her again prompted him to call Nokturn. He went out to a public telephone on the street and called Blaystone, telling him to instruct the secretaries who read Goddard’s fan mail to be on the lookout for another letter from the White House.

  Almost before Osten finished his sentence, Blaystone said that two such letters had already arrived, and he asked for delivery instructions. Wildly excited but attempting to sound calm, Osten told him to have all the mail sent immediately by company limousine to the Forty-second Street entrance of the Public Library, where a messenger would be waiting. He reminded Blaystone to take the usual precautions regarding the secrecy of the delivery. Then he phoned Donna to say he would be late picking her up, got into his rented car, and drove to the library.

  “You were wise to abandon the pianist in you,” the White House woman had written in her first letter. “Instead of merely transposing from the piano to other instruments as the old masters transposed from the violin and the human voice, you compose with the whole orchestra in mind. Just as Chopin revolutionized piano technique, you have revolutionized the use of the synthesizer. Did you do it so that you could compose, perform, and record with no one else’s help?”

  She was right. He had abandoned the piano, the instrument his mother taught him to play, when he found that it restricted him. She was also right about his use of the synthesizer. But the words “so that you could compose, perform, and record with no one else’s help” had disturbed him. Even though it was common knowledge that many big rock stars in the United States and England recorded their music on private equipment—several of them had complete sound studios in their homes—no music critic had ever suggested that Goddard composed, performed, and recorded alone. Most of the critics who reviewed Goddard’s music seemed to agree that he must have worked with a few carefully selected performers who valued their income too much to reveal the source of it. One of the writers claimed to have learned from an unnamed though reputable source that while recording his songs Goddard sat in the recording studio behind a oneway mirror so that he could see his band without ever being seen by them.

  Passing himself off as a messenger, Osten ran over to the Nokturn limousine and collected the letters. Then he got back in his car, drove a few blocks, and parked at the curb. He opened the new White House letter and started to read it through quickly.

  “I have listened to your last album again and again,” she wrote, “and the Spanish-language songs seem to have been inspired by actual events. Is it possible that you sang them first in public, for someone particular in the audience—someone you loved—or someone you may even still love? A married woman perhaps? You could have sung almost anywhere, I suspect, without being recognized, though I think of Tijuana as a likely spot—or was it San Diego, somewhere near the Hotel Del Coronado? Did either of these places play a role in your life? And is the arabesque woven into one of the refrains a dream out of the Arabian nights you and your love spent together?”

  In a sweat, he stopped. What if—his heart began to beat rapidly at the thought—what if Leila was the woman who had written these letters? Yet, if Leila thought Jimmy Osten was Goddard, wouldn’t she respect the camouflage of her friend and, fearing that any communication of hers might fall into the wrong hands, pretend that she did not know who he was? But what if Leila had talked to someone about Jimmy Osten’s music—someone she trusted—and that person now suspected who Goddard was and was determined to excite his imagination to the point where he would reveal himself?

  But if Leila ever suspected that he was Goddard—and nothing in her behavior had ever indicated
that she did—would she share her suspicion with another person before writing or talking to him first? On the other hand, how could anyone else—a stranger who knew only Goddard’s music—come so close to the truth? He resumed reading, terrified yet tempted to know more.

  “I have come to the conclusion that Goddard Lieberson and Boris Pregel were both important in your life—so important that you adopted the name of one and make occasional musical references to the compositions of both as some sort of homage. Since both men are dead, I suppose it is useless for me to speculate on whether they knew of your secret life and perhaps even assisted you in planning for your invisibility. I have familiarized myself extensively with the work and accomplishments of both these men, and I am in the process of learning more—much more—about their lives, trusting that somewhere along the line in my research, finding out about them may lead me to know more about you—in the event that you and I ever brush shoulders.”

  That couldn’t be Leila, he thought, and a sense of entrapment came over him. He hastily read the second letter. It analyzed his music in still greater detail, with two full pages devoted to the Mexican songs and his changed lyrics and a third page citing phrases in his music inspired by the music of Pregel and Lieberson. The analysis was nearly faultless. It had to have been written by someone with profound musical knowledge, extensive education in modern music, and—far more important—uncanny intuition.

  He was fascinated by and fearful of this White House woman. If he were ever to meet her, he wondered, how could he possibly protect himself from such sensibility and avoid being unmasked by her?

  If only he had an idea of who she was, he told himself, he would telephone her that minute and pretend to be Goddard’s manager or collaborator. He would call her bluff and feed her a thousand false clues. Not that she would believe him, necessarily, for he knew from reading the gossip columns how many people went around claiming to be Goddard, his music collaborator, or his lover, or his manager, or even his coke dealer.

  Three weeks later, when he had abandoned hope that she would write him again, Osten called Blaystone about another matter. “The President is after you again,” Blaystone jokingly announced. “There is another letter from the White House.”

  Osten gave instructions to have it delivered by the already tested Blaystone personal delivery service, and when he had the letter in hand lie raced to his apartment to read it. As he unfolded the neatly typed pages, several color Polaroids fell out. His hands trembling, he picked up the photographs one at a time, as if they were alive. The woman in the pictures was lying naked on a large bed, and the poses left no doubt as to what she was doing when the camera caught her. He could see, in a couple of the shots, a self-timing Polaroid reflected in a mirror. Looking for a clear shot of her face, he went avidly through the pictures a second time only to realize that not a single photograph revealed the woman’s face.

  Before reading the letter, he examined the photographs for a third time. She seemed to be in her mid-twenties—much younger than he had guessed from her letters—and her body was so perfect that it seemed to have acquired, on its own, a right to be nude. It seemed to palpitate and blush; it was firm but not hard, shiny with sweat yet cool by virtue of its faultless shape, as tempting in its purity as in its self-defilement.

  He felt aroused by her, and his desire seemed to emanate not from him, not from his brain, but—like a sound from an instrument the timbre of which he did not recognize—from the pictures. He promised himself that he would go after her and find her and make her give herself to him as readily, as openly, as sweatily as she had given her body to her own hands before a camera.

  Anxious to know her name and her whereabouts, he turned to the last page of the letter and saw to his dismay that it was, like the previous ones, unsigned. Then, disenchanted and angry, he started to read it from the beginning.

  Still not knowing anything about the White House woman, he felt deserted by her, much as he had once felt deserted by Leila Salem. Ironically, the two of them were the only women in his life who had understood and accepted him as he was—though Leila knew only Jimmy Osten, and the White House woman knew only Goddard—yet he could not be close to either of them.

  He had tried often to bring Donna closer and involve her in his life and thinking—almost as if he were preparing her spiritually to meet Goddard in him. But to Donna, most of the rock recording artists, with the exception of a few talented nightclub singers, sounded phony, the products of studio equipment and commercial hype. Possibly because she and Osten had met at the Goddard Beat, the most “in” place for such music, she invariably singled out Goddard—the man and his music—as the prime example of exploitive rock and ersatz music. Everything about Goddard, she maintained, was kept deliberately vague, from his voice to his gut-level sincerity, from his makeshift lyrics to his simplistic rhythmic intensity.

  Above all, to Donna, Goddard was an aleator, a musical dice thrower, who sought musical meaning in nihilistic spontaneity and depended for his effect on free-wheeling macaronic improvisation—not for his music’s sake, but for the sake of his audience, whose mood was as inconstant as the random throw of dice. He was also a cheap crowd pleaser, she claimed, who capitalized on being both a musical show-off and a personal no-show; and as for his crass invisibility act, it was no more interesting or original to her than the exaggerated visibility of other rock stars. Both extremes, she concluded, were nothing but manipulative devices used by the big record companies to mine the music market, to con and coax the masses of ignorant whites and underprivileged blacks into accepting disco and rock and punk music as their sole emotional expression and the antidote to their spiritual impoverishment.

  How different Donna’s perceptions were, he thought, from those of the White House woman, who had written in the latest letter: “By steadily improvising and developing new rhythmic and melodic values, you have become a descendant of the greatest of the performing virtuosos—Bach, Liszt, Beethoven—who knew that, in music, improvisation is synonymous with the’ search for meaning. For centuries music has been essentially a physical—as well as a symbolic—separation between composer and performer, and between performer and audience. You will be remembered as the first artist to generate true thrall and spontaneity in an audience by fusing composer and performer and then withdrawing from them both, leaving listeners hypnotized by a pure musical experience.”

  According to Donna, rock and disco had failed to produce any music of lasting quality. They had merely reduced popular music to its crudest and lowest common denominator—tortuous rhythm, sexual pantomime, and idiotic “kiss, kiss, don’t miss”-type lyrics. She emphatically agreed with Ralph Ellison, to whom commercial rock ‘n’ roll music was “a brutalization of one stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.” She felt that the bigger the rock music business became, the more it led to the suppression of better music—the best in jazz, for instance—as greedy record companies weeded classical music and much of the superior pop music out of their catalogs so they could budget more promotional funds to keep the rock and disco industry booming.

  “As a result, what prospect does a black instrumentalist have of ever being recorded?” she had asked him angrily. “Just look at what happened to that CBS record series featuring black composers from the eighteenth century to the present. After ten or twelve records were published, the series was ended, that’s what! Has Etude Classics, for instance, ever recorded a black composer? Or even a black instrumentalist? Has it, Jimmy?”

  Alluding to the fact that Etude Classics were now distributed by Nokturn Records, which was to her a mass producer of musical trash, Donna also pointed out that Osten and his family belonged to the capitalist class, the top one percent of the U.S. population, who owned half of the corporate stock, a third of the bonds, all the municipals, and over ninety percent of the total trust of American assets. These were the people who, in her eyes, controlled all the corporate assets and resource
s of the country—while she and her family came from the exploited masses, from the very bottom of the lower half of the population, all of whom held barely five percent of all the personal assets of the country.

  Aware of Osten’s extravagant spending habits and the way he threw money away on frequent trips between New York and California that struck her as completely unnecessary, Donna assumed he was a spoiled child supported totally by his rich father and she openly disapproved of both his dependence and the source of his father’s fortune. As much as she and Osten had in common, she implied, they were divided by an economic gulf so great that nothing—not even music—could bridge it.

  She often mentioned My Life in Bondage, the memoirs of the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who said that slaves loved spirituals, the precursors of the blues, only because they reflected the fear, despair, and pain consistently felt by these uprooted people. What spirituals once had been to the slaves, Donna said, rock had become for black performers and black audiences; while it helped to loosen their Protestant restraints, it also underscored their anxiety by seeming to reconcile what they, the descendants of slaves, knew could never be reconciled: the white man’s order with the black man’s chaos, the white man’s wealth with the black man’s poverty. Though rock lyrics often recalled spirituals and seemed loving on the surface, they were sexually antiseptic, exploitive, and as spiritually needy and loveless as the black man’s existence in the white man’s culture.

  Listening to Donna, Osten felt his innermost convictions, one after another, being distorted. Her words forced him to repress—even during their lovemaking—his dream, however faint, of one day sharing himself entirely with her. Through all of their most abandoned moments a single thought worked on Osten like an isolated musical phrase: if Donna ever learned the truth about Goddard, she would have to reject him utterly, and no amount of lovemaking, tender or violent, spontaneous or calculated, could return her to the fervor she felt for him now.