Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

  Donna paused and looked at Domostroy, expecting some reaction, but he sat motionless, crushed and disarmed. He was wondering whether Andrea had told him the truth when she said that Donna went right on living with Marcello long after she discovered that he was Dick Longo. If it was true, what hellish need in her, Domostroy wondered, could have made her punish herself so? What was Donna’s private organ playing?

  As if sensing his thoughts, Donna continued her story. She said that she went home after the screening and waited for Marcello to show up. She knew just what she would do when he entered, clean and freshly shaven and amorous as usual. She would grab a kitchen knife, the longest one she had, and like an addict in a rage of hurt pride, embarrassment before her friends, shame and anger of being, for him, just another wide-open cunt, she would stab and slash and cut him as long as his body kept on jerking and twitching and turning, until his blood filled his lungs and throat and drowned out the last gurgle of his life.

  But, she said, when at last he did come home, freshly bathed, smelling of cologne, sporting a new haircut, and wanting to kiss her exactly as she had imagined, all she could manage to do was ask him, just like that, why in all their time together he had never told her that every day, when he left her, he went off to fuck all those white and black and yellow cunts, front and back, one after another, one next to the other, one on top of the other, on cue in front of a camera, to be paid in cash for every hard-on, for every orgasm—all during the time he was supposed to be in love with her?

  All he answered was that, as he had told her from the start, he loved only her. He said that fucking all those countless, cunts was his job; that when he was with them, his prick was no different from a masseur’s hand; and that only with Donna he was utterly himself, able to bridge that sexual distance which, until he had met her, had remained open like a chasm between himself and the dead heat of his life.

  She neither screamed nor kicked him out, nor did she end the relationship until several more months had passed.

  With sudden clarity she saw that during their months together it was she who, with palpable abandon, enjoyed the temporary lifting of the burden of sexual consciousness, the obliteration of responsibility. It was she who had been using him in order to experience herself through him. Now, because of what she had learned from being with him she was whole. Marcello had been, she said, nothing but a bystander in the process, one more lecherous paw reaching out to touch her from the dark recesses of Dead Heat.

  Domostroy had always been convinced that in order to compose well, a good composer had to write to satisfy himself, not others. Because he had refused, at the peak of his career, to yield to the critics and go on writing as they wanted him to write, they had bombarded him savagely each time he produced an original work. That had caused the listening audience—fickle always, but especially so in the age of disco and television—to abandon him. After a malicious nation-wide defamation campaign launched against him and his work by one particularly hostile musical coterie, without creative prompting from his peers, the critics, or the public, he had finally stopped writing altogether, annoyed that his creative record could no longer be set straight.

  He knew that he wanted Donna, for in the hour she spent talking about her life, she revealed to Domostroy truths about himself he never had suspected. As he listened to her, he came to see that the state of his mind and the pattern of his life would be arbitrary from this point on unless he could go on being replenished by her. He sensed that he might be able to ensnare her by subtle, roundabout tactics, but that seemed cowardly, a bit like writing music to please the critics or to prove to himself that he could still displease them. The other way was to go after her directly, without psychological dodges or intellectual filters, straight from the gut of his being, from the vortex of his psyche, the way he once wrote music. If he displeased her then and lost her, as he had once displeased and lost his critics and his public, at least he would not have lied to her or to himself. As his father used to say, “When rain falls, logs rot, but roots grow deeper.” Domostroy wanted to send out sound roots in his dealings with Donna.

  Finally, he left it up to her. He thanked her for giving him so much of herself and told her matter-of-factly that he would be glad to discuss the Warsaw Chopin competition with her; that there might be something out of his long experience which she could use in preparing for it. She asked him if there was a piano where he lived, and he told her there was—a concert grand—and that she was free to use it at any time, alone or with him as her audience. They arranged for her to visit the Old Glory a week later, on one of Domostroy’s days off.

  When the appointed day came, he found himself restless. He went over the Old Glory a half-dozen times, dusting the piano, checking the liquor and ice in the kitchen, rearranging chairs and tables. In the event that she might spend the night, he changed the sheets and pillowcases on his bed and put fresh towels in the bathroom.

  A few hours before she was due to arrive, Domostroy had taken an added precaution to ensure her safety in the area. He drove to the nearby baseball lot and hunted up the leader of the local gang, known as Born Free. Living alone as he did at the Old Glory, Domostroy regularly bought their protection, for even though he knew that the owner of the Old Glory sent monthly payments from Miami to his old friends on the South Bronx police force to keep an eye on the unsold ballroom, he also knew from firsthand experience that the Born Free gang—referred to by the local citizenry as the Born to Burn—were the actual rulers of the neighborhood after dark. This time because he wanted to take no chances, Domostroy was several days early with his monthly payment.

  Not that such an arrangement was foolproof. On several occasions, arriving home late at night, Domostroy had been aware of huddled figures watching him from recesses in the walls or from behind the scrubby bushes. He knew full well he was an easy target, and he was never sure whether the figures were Born Free members or intruders taking advantage of the gang’s absence.

  He heard a car drive through the gate, but today he had little doubt as to who might be storming the drawbridge of his fortress. Donna was right on the dot, and as he stood there looking out of the window and watching her little white sports car raise a tunnel of dust as it sped across the empty parking lot he remembered that the South Bronx was Donna’s native land and that she probably knew her way through its maze of parkways, avenues, and streets even better than he did.

  She was at ease when he greeted her. As he shook her cool, firm hand, she bent forward and, ever so briefly, kissed him lightly on the cheek. When he felt her lips on his face and the slight pressure of her breasts against his chest, he was seized with a shiver of rapture that lasted no longer than the kiss, but long enough to rob him of his carefully collected composure. To hide his excitement and apprehension, he motioned for her to follow him to the bar, telling her that it once held two hundred patrons each evening, and as he showed her around the huge ballroom, he carefully avoided the narrow corridor, flanked by storage vaults, that led to his modest living quarters.

  But she had come, carrying her music, to play the piano for him, and it was the grand piano on the stage in the ballroom that quickly absorbed the two of them. Domostroy raised the lid and asked her whether, considering the sorry state of most pianos, she knew how to tune and test for voice and brilliancy all the registers of a piano. Donna admitted that she had always had to rely on the help of a professional tuner.

  Domostroy warned her that a concert piano was not like an unmade bed, which any maid could make, and that if she decided to go to Warsaw, she would do well to be able to adjust any piano she played, particularly the one assigned to her for the competition, for evenness of tone and volume throughout the keyboard. This could be done, he said, by means of the soft pedal and a tuning instrument, and she ought to know how to do it by herself if she had to, or with the help of a tuner.

  Like music critics, tuners were also known to be stubborn men, Domostroy told her. They might insist that, since th
ey didn’t tell her how to play the piano, she shouldn’t tell them how to tune it, but she must be firm with them. He also told her that once the pitch, the volume, and the timbre of the piano had been tuned to her liking, she should stand far back from the instrument and listen again. Many pianists considered the piano stool to be the only good listening post, but Domostroy was convinced they were wrong. Regardless of where she would play in the future—whether in the best concert halls of the world or in acoustically less perfect auditoriums—she must always ask her tuner to play for her while she stationed herself as far as sixty feet away or in the fourteenth row of the concert hall, for only then could she know how her piano would sound to the audience; and if it didn’t sound good, Domostroy insisted she should have the tuner adjust it until it did.

  Such a test was absolutely essential, said Domostroy, because the physical characteristics of a concert hall—the size and shape of the stage, the slant of the walls and the roof, as well as the type of absorptive or reflective surface they had—seriously affected the reverberation and diffusion of sound.

  In preparing for her visit, Domostroy had deliberately left a few small adjustments to be made in the tuning, and now he was pleased at how deftly Donna recognized what was needed and then followed his instructions to make the slight changes that were necessary. She was close to him, bending over to see inside the piano and observing how he held the tuning instrument to check the position of each hammer and the condition of the felt that covered it. The sight and nearness of her body aroused him. His mouth felt dry, as if desire had drained him of saliva, and to distract himself he began a meticulous demonstration of tuning.

  One comment he wanted to make before she started playing, he said, was that when he first heard her play at Gerhard Osten’s, he had noticed her use of the pedals, although original, seemed to be at times uncertain. His own view of the role of the pedals in Chopin’s music, he remarked, might be helpful to her.

  She kept silent and he pursued his point. He reminded her that even though Chopin never marked the use of the soft pedal, he realized better than most composers how important all the pedals were in coloring the sound of keyboard compositions. If used subtly and creatively, the pedals allowed the pianist to achieve rich and varied orchestral effects. But, Domostroy warned, pianists who misused or overused the pedals in an effort to cover up weaknesses in their fingering and touch only succeeded in calling attention to their deficiencies, for the slightest imbalance in technique was prolonged and exaggerated, not concealed, by improper use of the pedals.

  He then asked her to play several pieces that demonstrated Chopin’s fullest creative use of the pedals, starting with the Ballade in F Minor.

  After closing his eyes and listening for some moments, he stopped her and asked her to repeat again and again bars 169 through 174, which called for a particularly subtle use of pedaling. Chopin started each of the initial three bars with a little splash of pedal, followed by a fast bass run without any pedal, followed by a succession of legato notes in the right hand. Domostroy told Donna not to use any pedal on the smooth right-hand notes, and when she admitted that she had always been baffled in trying to play them legato without a pedal, he told her that it was because she didn’t have sufficient control in her fingering. Rather than wash the passage, he suggested, she should release the pedal as indicated in bar 169 and then, at the third sixteenth note of beat three, pedal almost imperceptibly for a split syncopated second; that would allow her to make the right-hand notes smooth while retaining an overall effect of dry sound.

  He then had her play a series of selections: the beginning of the Nocturne in F, to see whether her pedaling muffled the melody in the right hand; the Nocturne in E, which demonstrated Chopin s unique contrasts between pedaled and unpedaled sound; the Prelude in A Minor, which, except for one short passage near the end, was all without pedal; and the Prelude in B Minor, in which Chopin had initially indicated normal pedaling every second beat in bars 2 and 3—played with the left hand—but then had crossed out the markings, leaving all three opening bars in his autograph edition under one shockingly long pedaling blur.

  She finished and sat looking at him like a student nervously waiting for comments from her teacher.

  Being careful not to put her off, he said that he sensed in her playing two opposing forces: a desire to be free of Chopin’s written notes and dynamics so that she could improvise—an impulse she probably inherited from her jazz-playing father—and a need to be letter-perfect and to adhere rigidly to every mark on the dense Chopin scores, which certainly came from her classical schooling at Juilliard. With sufficient practice, and with her obvious talent, Domostroy went on, there was no reason why she couldn’t learn to fuse these drives and negotiate Chopin’s most difficult passages, not only with precision, but with all the ingenuity and energy of the born jazzman. To achieve this, he felt she needed to concentrate on developing greater suppleness and strength in her back, shoulders and arms, as well as in her wrists and fingers. He also offered to show her special exercises to improve her knuckle mobility, and told her frankly that she needed to practice more, not only rehearsing and polishing the Chopin pieces, but doing more exercises and scales to refine her overall technique. He-recommended to her certain exercises of Cramer and Clementi, two men who influenced Chopin’s technique and his understanding of the piano, as well as works of Czerny and Hummel and Leopold Godowski’s versions of Chopin’s Etudes, particularly his twenty-two studies for the left hand, which contained a C-sharp minor version of the so-called “Revolutionary” Etude.

  Donna listened to him carefully, and if she was surprised or hurt by any of the criticism implicit in his advice, she managed not to show it. Instead, she asked what he thought of her chance of winning at the Chopin piano competition in Warsaw. He answered with equal directness that, unless she improved her technique and increased her strength, her chances in his opinion were slight, but he added that he felt she could achieve much in a few weeks if she really worked at it.

  Now she stood up, and he led her outside. It was warm and sunny, and they strolled slowly around the Old Glory, crossing the parking lot and walking until they reached the tall wire fence. Beyond, as far as the eye could see, lay a dead ghetto of burned-out tenements, black ruins scarred by broken windows and boarded-up doors, the drooping old stoops and the backyards piled high with stones and charred rubbish. They walked along a path inside the fence, and at their approach a rat scurried out of the tall grass and ran towards the ruins.

  Domostroy glanced at her from time to time. In the past he had always seen her in artificial light, but here, in bright sunlight, her skin gleamed. Under the delicate lines of her brows, the long oval arches of her eyelids shone as if lighted from within, and her eyes, shaded by thick lashes, were leaf green. He kept glancing at the faultlessly etched hollows under her cheekbones, and at the subtle play of light on her lips, so full and smooth they threatened to burst open. Her beauty overwhelmed, almost stifled him; it was regal, yet unaffected, as pure as the soul within.

  Someone whistled shrilly from the roof of an empty building, and when Domostroy looked in the direction of the sound he saw three members of the Born Free gang waving at him. He waved back.

  “I went to school not too far from here,” said Donna as they turned to walk back. She waved at the ruins. “Those black holes were always there. I walked through them often, alone or with other kids, playing hide-and-seek, fighting, chasing cats and rats, and often being chased by the riffraff who would come looking for skirts. I used to crawl into smelly trenches like those, waiting and waiting for my boy lover.”

  They walked in silence except for the sound of chirping sparrows that foraged on the ground and in the bushes.

  “One day I heard my father singing an old blues song,” she said and intoned:

  “Come along—

  Done found dat new hidin’ place!

  I’se so glad I’m

  Done found dot new hidin place!”
>
  And I said to myself that I never wanted to go back to those pits, so I made up my mind to look for ‘dat new hidin’ place’ myself, and I knew it was going to be music. From then on my life in bondage was over.”

  She reflected for a minute, then smiled. “You know, whenever I try to think of myself as a serious musician, I always remember a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that was printed on a sampler my mother had in our kitchen:

  G’way an quit dat noise, Miss Lucy—

  Put dat music book away;

  What’s de use to keep on tryin’?

  Ef you practis twell you’re gray,

  You cain’t sta’t no notes a-flyin’

  Lak de ones dat rants and rings

  F’om de kitchen to de big woods

  When Malindy sing. …”

  As she finished the poem he sensed a conflict in her. He could tell that she was grateful to him for today and that she probably felt she should show it by staying with him a bit longer, possibly even letting him make a pass at her. But he didn’t make a pass. Even though he wanted her, and even though, knowing that she was about to leave, he felt forlorn, he didn’t attempt to detain her. He did not want to become her lover because of any gratitude she might have felt, and—even more than that—he didn’t want to share her with Jimmy Osten, the man in her life. Firmly—to her surprise, he imagined—he led her to her car and opened the door for her.

  As she slid into the seat she put her hand on his arm. “When will I see you again, Patrick?” she asked, a bit uncertain of herself.