Heart and Soul

by Sally Mandel

  “Sure,” I said. Sure I can not show up for my shift waiting tables at O’Neals. A lifetime of food stamps was a small price to pay for half an hour with those eyeballs.

  We went to a café on West 68th. I was annoyed that it was off the main drag where we couldn’t be seen by the entire Lincoln Center community. David ordered us herbal tea, which I hate.

  “I approve of what you’re doing with the phrasing in the Ruggiero,” he said. “You know, Bess, your playing makes me think of diamonds.”

  I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I was flattered that he’d been eavesdropping, but I was also wary. How long had he been listening to me, anyway? The tea came. I started to reach for the sugar bowl, but David covered my hand. “It’s so bad for you. If you must use sweetener, I’ll ask for honey.”

  “Healthy food gives me hives,” I explained. But I put my spoon down and sipped at my tea. It wasn’t so bad. I was thinking back to that diamond remark. I felt as if, from under my mother’s hand-me-down turtleneck sweater, I was glittering like jewels in a Tiffany’s window. “About the Ruggiero…” I said, not wanting to lose my chance at words of wisdom from the Man Himself. Besides, the composer was so contemporary and weird that there was hardly anybody around who knew how to play her stuff.

  He leaned forward across the table, took my hands in his, and started examining my fingers. “Yes, excellent,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  I wanted to close my eyes so I could concentrate on the sensations he was producing in my body. Maybe as a pianist I had extrasensitive hands, but I suspect that even somebody with heavy-duty calluses would get a buzz from that kind of exploration. I recommend it in the foreplay department. In fact, the impact of David’s total physical presence was something you couldn’t begin to imagine from the photographs in a magazine. His thick dark hair had just the right amount of wave at the ends, with maybe six threads of gray, a harbinger (vocab word from two weeks ago, thank you very much) of the distinguished way he would age. When he looked up from the table, those brown eyes fastened on you and didn’t let you go.

  “In the second movement,” David said, “the left hand should dominate. It must be ferocious, not wempy.”

  I smiled. “Wimpy?”

  “Yes. And don’t allow the tempo to accelerate so precipitously. It must be like a clever thief escaping from the house he has just robbed. First creeping away, stealthily, then picking up the pace until he is running headlong into the darkness. It must have drama.”

  Suddenly the section made sense. I felt my fingers twitch with eagerness to try it out.

  “You need more time with Chopin,” he went on. “Especially the Etudes.”

  “I did those when I was a kid,” I protested, and felt myself getting red in the face. Any idiot knows you can always learn something from good music.

  “Not properly, I would guess,” he said. “The Professor fully agrees with me. You play magnificently, Bess, but there is an emotional restlessness in your work. Chopin will help you with that.”

  “You’ve talked about me with Professor Stein?” I was beginning to get pissed.

  He gave me a smile and a charming shrug, which I tried to ignore. “Lookit, Mr. Montagnier, you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Please, it’s David. I wonder if you’d ever consider experimenting with the two-piano repertoire?”

  “I guess it never occurred to me.” Hard enough to find one piano in my old neighborhood, let alone two. I had just noticed that practically everyone who came into the café stopped to stare at us. It made me feel like I was in a play. It couldn’t possibly be real life.

  “I’ve never even done duets,” I admitted.

  “I think you might enjoy it. Could I convince you to take a look at the Scaramouche by Milhaud? It’s lively and fun and I think you could play the daylight out of it.”

  So what was I supposed to say? Correct him on “daylights” and tell him I had better things to do right now, like giving up my career? I’d actually been scanning the want ads over breakfast. “Sure. I’ll get a copy from Patelson’s,” I said.

  “I took the liberty of giving one to the Professor.”

  There were a couple of things I liked. One was that he offered me a sheepish grin when he said this, which acknowledged how pushy he was, and second, he called my teacher “the Professor” instead of “Harold,” which I thought was respectful. I recently overheard another female student complain that Professor Stein was getting too old to teach and she was lucky to escape with her life.

  Montagnier waved at the waiter. “I wish I didn’t have to rush off, but I have a rehearsal in a few minutes.”

  I happened to know that he was due to perform at Lincoln Center that night with the Oxford Harmonia Chamber Orchestra. I had cheap seats up in the nosebleed section so I could catch an hour of bliss in between jobs.

  “So what happens next?” I asked as he paid the bill.

  “Here’s my number.” He scribbled it on a napkin. “Call me after you’ve had a chance to work on the Milhaud.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “A pleasure to meet you, Bess Stallone-no-relation.” Then he hurried out and left me sitting there panting. A couple of groupies were standing by the cash register and when they turned to gape at me enviously, I made an attempt to look casual, like David Montagnier and I were in the habit of hanging out.

  At the concert that night, I tried to concentrate on the music, but don’t ask me what they played because I kept drifting into the most ludicrous fantasies about David and me. I was going to knock him on his ass with my fabulous rendition of Part Primo of the Milhaud and then he’d take me on as the replacement for Terese Dumont, and I’d be so much better than she ever thought of being. The two-piano scene would be in demand in the U.S. like it had always been in Europe, and of course, David would fall madly in love with me and we’d get married and have half a dozen kids. We’d go on the circuit like the von Trapp family, with each kid playing a different instrument, and every day right after lunch David and I would go straight to bed. Oh, I was on some trip.

  Naturally, instead of waiting for my lesson with Professor Stein, I boogied down to Patelson’s and blew $25.50 on a copy of the Scaramouche. I started practicing the Milhaud to the exclusion of everything else, all hours of the night and day. It wasn’t that it was a difficult piece, which it’s not. But I’d bought a recording—by the Twin Peaks, as it happened—and copying Terese down to the quarter rests was the real challenge.

  The Professor canceled my lesson that week due to bronchitis. It always scared me when he got sick because he seemed so ancient. I took him hot soup every day after work and made sure he was swallowing his antibiotics and not sticking them in the flowerpot under the cactus plant. I didn’t mention Montagnier. By the time I got to my next lesson, I’d learned the Scaramouche by heart.

  “You don’t look so perky,” I said to the Professor when I showed up for my lesson. His big nose was a deeper shade of blue than usual and everything was drooping. Even his tangled eyebrows looked like weeds that hadn’t seen rain for much too long.

  He gestured from his perch beside the piano. “Come in, Bess, come in,” he said with that staccato way he had of speaking when he was impatient. “I have no time to be sick.”

  “I brought you some medicine,” I said, displaying a tiny shopping bag. I’d hesitated outside the Belgian chocolate shop, realizing it was going to cost me the price of five loads of laundry. But it was worth it to see his face light up.

  Making it across the Professor’s living room was like threading your way through the narrow aisles of a Manhattan supermarket. There were waist-high stacks of music, and nestled in the curve of the Steinway stood a cello case. Its womanly shape was a comforting memory of his wife, dead eleven years. Besides for music and his wife, the Professor’s other passion was poker. He had a regular weekly game with a bunch of nonmusician cronies from Brooklyn. On the wall along with the photographs of him with Be
rnstein, Copland, and Horowitz was a framed poker hand he drew at his game on March 11, 1957: the ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of hearts, each one autographed by the other players who were there. Sometimes, when my lesson wasn’t going so hot, I would catch him staring dreamily at that spot on the wall and I knew he was reliving the great moment.

  “Did you take your Zithromax this morning?” I asked him, handing him the chocolates.

  “YesyesYES,” he said, waving an arm impatiently and giving me a damp cough just to let me know what he thought of pills. “Don’t hover, Bess. You know I hate that.”

  I sat down on the piano bench and started running through some scales. I could see David Montagnier’s music beside the Professor and waited to see if he’d raise the issue. I knew we were kind of teasing one another. After he’d made serious inroads on the chocolates and I’d played a couple of measures of the Prokofiev B-flat Major Sonata, I caved.

  “I’ve been working on something else the past few days,” I said. “Tell me what you think.” And I proceeded to whip through the Primo part of the Milhaud for him, by memory. It freaked me out a little to play for the Professor because it felt like a performance, but I finished without too many screwups. He gave me a sly little smile. Sometimes he could look awfully young and sassy for an old geezer.

  “I believe you’ve been conferring with a Monsieur Montagnier,” the Professor said.

  “You want to tell me what you boys have in mind?”

  “He approves of the way you play.”

  “He’s been spying on me, right?

  “Eavesdropping.”

  “Why?”

  “Terese is retired. David needs a new partner.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” My heart started thumping like a crazy bastard.

  “I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up, Bess. He’s been listening to a number of people, some of whom have a great deal of concert experience.” He lit a cigar and coughed.

  “Does he know I can’t appear on a stage unless I’m in a coma?”

  “You know you only reinforce your fears with that kind of talk. And yes, he’s aware of your problem. He’s struggled with it himself.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The Professor popped a truffle into his mouth. He closed his eyes in ecstasy for a second. Then he shot me a guilty look from under the bushy brows and held out the almost empty box. “You can’t afford these,” he said, “so you’d better at least have one.”

  “Nah, ruin the figure,” I said. “But you lay off that cigar. It’s not healthy.”

  He glared at me. “On the contrary, it’ll cure my bronchitis. And don’t you tell me bullshit. David Montagnier has a right to his fears just like any mortal. But I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. David and I merely discussed your playing through the Milhaud together. What did you think of him?”

  “He’s not bad-looking at all.”

  The Professor gave me a little tap on the top of the head. “Phone him. You’re ready.” He saw me turn the greenish shade of the couch. “It’s not a performance, Bess.”

  “Yuh.” I started fiddling with a corkscrew of hair. Each strand is like that ribbon you curl with the flat edge of a pair of scissors. When I start yanking on it, you can be sure I’m on my way to panic meltdown.

  I went home and phoned David Montagnier. His voice sounded so neutral that I thought he was the machine and I began leaving a complicated message. I got as far as my phone number when I heard him chuckle.

  “How’s tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Absolutely dandy,” I said. I wondered if he had a bucket in his broom closet, just in case.

  He lived in a landmark building across the street from Carnegie Hall, with a fancy gold lobby that made you feel like genuflecting. I rode up in the elevator reciting my mantra: Be still my heart—left over from another failed experiment to tame my phobia.

  He stood in the doorway with his hair all rumpled, wearing a pair of white jeans and a T-shirt. He had a mug of coffee in one hand, and his feet were bare. Damn, how rare are nice-looking male toes, I’d like to know? He ran a hand through his hair and yawned. “I’m so sorry, Bess. I didn’t get to bed until four.”

  “I can come back another time,” I said, and felt the color rising into my cheeks just from hearing him say my name with that accent of his. Uh oh, I thought. The last time I felt this way, I wound up in a bed I had no business jumping into.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” he said. “Let me get you some coffee.”

  I shook my head. Any more stimulation of my nervous system and my EKG would sound like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee. He drew me over to his pianos, two concert Steinways side by side in front of a million-dollar view of Central Park. “Jesus F. Christ,” I breathed.

  “The sad thing is, I hardly ever look out of the window.”

  “How come the pianos aren’t facing each other?” I’d only seen two-piano pairs perform that way.

  “There’s a choreography to it, Bess, like ballet. You want to rehearse so you can see one another’s arms and hands, so that your gestures will be similar in performance when the pianos are separated.” He sat me down, went to the other piano, and began running through some warm-ups. “C-sharp,” he said. “Come on, I’ll race you.”

  I was still holding my music, which had a damp dent in it from my grip. I set it down, stretched my fingers, and dove in. It was a responsive keyboard with the athletic action I like. We played around like that for ten minutes with David switching from one exercise to the next and me scrambling to keep up. It was fun and loosened me up a little.

  “All right,” David said. “Ready for the Scaramouche?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I lied.

  He came over and put a large sheet of music on the piano. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Your copy of the Milhaud. I always reduce the pages and glue them together.”

  Duo-pianists don’t ordinarily memorize their music, but this was new to me. “You don’t use page-turners?”

  “Never. They belong in hell with the music critics. They turn too early or too late, they have terrible breath, they moan in your ear. Either we learn by memory or we fix the pages so we can manage ourselves. You set the tempo.”

  Instead of trusting my memory, I struggled with the unfamiliar score.

  “That’s fine,” David said. “Don’t worry about mistakes. I don’t care about that.”

  And then we played. I was hesitant at first, afraid that I was dragging him down.

  “Again, Bess,” he said. “You’re doing well. Stop worrying about your fingers and listen to the music.”

  The second time through, I started paying attention to our exchange. Then, finally, on the third try, it all came together. The music soared between us, our fingers asking and answering questions in a nearly flawless, intimate conversation.

  We stared at each other for a moment, acknowledging that something amazing had just happened. “Again?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  We played the Scaramouche twice more, each time becoming more like one voice. Then David asked if I would like to read through some other more substantial things. We must have worked for more than two hours, mainly on Beethoven, which isn’t so difficult to sight-read.

  “You must be tired,” David said finally. “We’d better stop.”

  “I’m fine,” I assured him, although I could feel my spine fusing into a painful column under my sweater. The thing was, I couldn’t stand for it to end.

  “Haven’t you had enough?” David asked.

  I shook my head, and to my amazement, felt tears starting. I looked out the window to hide my face. The next thing I knew, David was standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders.

  “You’re crying,” he said. “Why?”

  I shook my head. The word “rapture” was on my self-improvement vocabulary list. I had learned what it was supposed to mean, lying ther
e flat on the same page as “rapacious” and “rapid transit.” But I had never imagined that I’d experience it. As if I was about to die, the history of my life spooled out against the tear-blurred landscape of Central Park. All those childhood nights with my ear stuck to the radio by my pillow, clinging desperately to some dream I couldn’t even begin to describe. Furtive hours with Amadoofus, alternating Bach with Billy Joel so I wouldn’t irritate my father and risk losing my piano lessons. The lonely, exhausting, thrilling years at Juilliard. It all seemed to lead to this sun-drenched room and this man whose music was like an embrace. I was crying with joy and with the fear that this was the first and last time I would ever feel this way.

  I wiped my eyes and stood up, hoping to get out of there before I made even more of an ass of myself.

  “Will you come again?” David asked.

  I liked that he didn’t press me to explain my overwrought state. “Of course,” I answered. “I’ll come.”

  He walked me to the elevator. My legs were wobbly stems that barely held me up.

  “I think I’d better put you in a taxi,” David said.

  “No. No. I’m fine.” I needed to walk, to breathe cool air, to remember everything, every note, every chord.

  “I have to be in Paris for a few days,” he said. “I’ll phone you when I get back.”

  He leaned down to give me a kiss on the cheek. He had a clean smell, like laundry drying in the sun. Then I took the elevator and headed for the park. As I walked north, I had the sensation that I was shedding, that there was trash trailing in my wake: dry husks of fear, anger, loneliness—there they go, litter in the breeze, twisting higher and higher above the city trees to blow out to sea and vanish.

  The sensation of nakedness made me tremble even more, so I sat down on a bench by the pond and watched a little boy feed the ducks. He kept shouting to his nanny in French. David might have looked like that once upon a time, the dark swatch of hair and tanned skin. The trembling didn’t stop. As I gazed around me, it seemed that it wasn’t just me. The entire world was vibrating, the leaves, the clouds in the sky, everything was humming. The words of the song were simple enough. They merely confirmed what I’d known for a while.