by Sally Mandel
“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said.
“Fine.”
“Thank you, Bess.”
“It’s for me to do the thanking,” I said.
He kissed me on both cheeks. A chorus of hoots echoed up and down the street.
After he’d driven away, Angie and Mumma met me at the door.
“Well, my goodness,” Mumma said, and gave me a hug.
“I was looking for the horses,” Angie murmured, watching the taillights of the limo disappear:
“Oh, they’re there,” I said. “Under the hood with the pumpkins and the glass slipper.”
Chapter Seven
I was back in the light. Sunshine all over the place. Even the crummy courtyard behind my apartment building with all the garbage cans where the rats disco all night looked gorgeous to me. Why shouldn’t they party? After all, life was beautiful.
The first thing I did when I got back to Manhattan was check out the latest research on David Montagnier. Information was power; I figured, so I dropped by the World Web Coffee House and logged on to my favorite sources for the latest news items. There were the usual gushy letters—Oh, David, you and me were meant to make beautiful music together! Marylou from Des Moines. (Granted, it was sickening, but I had some nerve dissing Marylou since I was in an identical pathetic state). There was an interview excerpted from a London magazine that made reference to how temperamental David was. Of course, I’d read that he was “moody” and “uncompromising,” but none of that kind of crap impressed me. As far as I was concerned, those remarks translated into somebody who cared about his art, which is a difficult concept for some people to grasp. Anyway, the last item was a review of a recent performance from Germany’s top music critic:
… As always, Montagnier’s playing soars. Technically, he’s never been better; that sometimes erratic left hand is now as dependable as the right. But at least for this listener something crucial is missing, which has been the case since Terese Dumont’s retirement. Could it be heart?
Anything that mentioned Terese Dumont felt like a needle in my brain. I’d already scoured the Web for any signs of the woman. As far as anybody knew, she’d vanished from existence the minute she split from David, as if her partnership with him was what made her real. It was a scary thought.
My favorite Web site—www.lovedavidmont.com—had to have been set up by a bunch of Montagnier groupies who, bless their horny little hearts, also included a bare-chested photo of David playing volleyball on a Caribbean beach. This was more like it. You can be sure I printed that sucker out. I could’ve drawn you a topographical map of David’s pecs by the time I’d pretty much destroyed the photo from handling it, not to mention the drool.
Sometimes doing research on the Internet is like taking a multiple choice exam. I found out that David Montagnier was raised in France, that his mother, Aimee, was very beautiful and a gifted (a) singer: soprano; (b) singer: alto; or (c) violinist. You choose. That his father was (a) a brilliant Italian physicist; (b) an impoverished member of the Greek royal family; (c) a scumbag con artist with a pretty face. Everybody seemed to agree that the father, whoever he was, disappeared before David was born. David and his mother were taken in by the famous Beauchapel salon in Paris. Maurice Beauchapel was somebody I studied at Juilliard, not only because he was a brilliant pianist but because he mentored so many successful musicians. In my unbiased opinion, David outshone them all. Beauchapel had died about ten years ago at the ripe old age of ninety, but nobody agreed on what happened to Aimee. It seemed clear that she’d wound up in some kind of institution, but depending on the source she either died in a TB sanitarium in Switzerland or wasted away in some fancy nuthouse after a nervous breakdown. The whole thing was a spooky replay of the Terese mystery.
Anyway, David didn’t give me much time to hang around snooping. The day after I got back to New York, he called to set up a practice session, this time at a studio in Carnegie Hall. Those words were enough to set fireworks off in front of my eyeballs. I had to grab the coatrack on my apartment wall to keep from toppling over. Oh, yeah, this is gonna fly, I told myself. I’ll be passing out before I get out the front door. Fortunately, he wanted to meet that actual day, so I didn’t have a lot of time to work myself into hysterics. What I did instead was wash my hair three times, just to make sure I got the last sick smell of Walnut Avenue out, shave my legs with extra attention—what did I think, that David Montagnier planned to crawl under the piano and grab my thighs?—and soak my fingers in warm water so they’d limber up. It only takes a couple of days without playing for me to get stiff, and it’d been three weeks since Amadoofus died. It was early November, and why the humidity was close to a hundred percent escaped me unless it was global warming, which is bad news for those of us with a lot of hair. I sat on the bus and imagined I could feel each strand swell as it drank up moisture. This took my mind off where I was going, since every time I imagined the pile of bricks at Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, I’d start to get woozy.
I’d been to concerts at Carnegie Hall probably a hundred times, mostly stubbing in after intermission—which gets to be an art in itself. You learn to position yourself outside the doors so you get first stab at sympathetic-looking people who leave after the first half. After a year at this, one elderly couple with Piano Series Number Two would look for me. They just got too tired to make it through a whole performance. On account of them, I heard Kissin play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto in B-flat minor. First of all, there’s this attitude that Van Cliburn owns that particular extravaganza and anybody else who takes it on is trespassing, and besides, whoever thought it was possible to make that worn-out old thing sound like it was broadcast live from heaven? Well, Kissin nailed it. I was there to hear it and bravo my brains out like the rest of us who will never forget that night.
I’ve got to admit, it was thrilling to walk in the back entrance on Fifty-sixth Street, give my name to the security guard, and take the elevator to the ninth floor like David had told me. I walked down the hall, checking out the numbers on the studio doors. An old woman in a tutu was doing stretches by the water fountain, and music floated past my ears—Chopin’s Scherzo Number Three—nice but a little too heavy-handed, the Ravel Concerto in G, and from down the corridor a more contemporary violin piece, maybe by Webern. No soundproofing, obviously, but that didn’t bother me. I stood there grinning like the village idiot. What a miserable time these past weeks had been—not just the exhaustion, the boredom, the depressing smells of illness and the hopelessness in that house. It was the lack of music. I stood there letting the sounds wash over me and thought, Just let me park here with a bedroll and a change of underwear. I’m never going back to the silence.
I stood outside Room 954 listening to David running through his finger exercises. I let myself in and David stopped playing immediately, came over, and did the usual double-kiss routine. I saw him glance at my hair.
“I’m going to shave it off,” I said.
“You will not.” He reached out for a touch, but decided against it.
“It’s okay,” I said. “People always want to. Strangers, even.”
But having come that close to something like an intimate gesture, he was suddenly all business. He was even dressed more formally, in slacks and a sports jacket. Just looking at him, I could have laid down on the floor and cried for love, but instead I went and sat at the other piano. There wasn’t much else in the room, just one battered sofa and a circular iron stairway leading to a loft. I still don’t know what was up there.
The First Rachmaninoff Suite was unfamiliar to me at that point. David explained that it’s based on Russian poetry, with each movement another poem. He set my part on the piano and we went right to work. The thing about David was, he could actually show me what he wanted. Professor Stein was the best teacher I’d ever had, but he couldn’t demonstrate the really difficult stuff. He just didn’t have the technique. With David, a lot of time was
saved by those keyboard demos. And after a while, I could do the same for him.
We worked for a couple of hours, and then David dropped it on me: “Let’s take a break,” he said. “I want to show you where we’re giving our first concert.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “Ex-CUSE me?”
He came over and held out his hand. I took it but my knees were already quivering.
“Don’t you want to know when?” he asked.
“No!” I shouted. “Tell me tomorrow, next week. Don’t tell me now!”
David put a sympathetic arm around my shoulder. I wanted to curl up into his chest and whimper like a dying dog.
“We’re going to work there this afternoon and as often as possible,” he said. “I want you to get comfortable.”
That’s like inviting a guy on death row to practice sitting in the electric chair. You’ll get used to it, son. Nothing to it, and then they pull the switch. But I did the old nod-and-smile as Roman candles started popping off behind my eyes. In the elevator, I had hold of David’s arm like it was the only thing between me and certain death.
I’d been to a number of performances at Weill Recital Hall. It’s a cozy space, and ornate like a pretty piece of jewelry. The acoustics are really good. I’d listened to a lot of famous people there, so it was a big deal to walk out on that stage.
We stood looking out at the seats while my breakfast said hello from the back of my throat. This was the first time that we would play facing each other instead of side by side. I remember thinking as I looked at David headon, Well, this is new, this is actually nice.
“This place is too small for two-piano concerts,” David said, “but I thought you’d feel more at home, like in a living room.”
Not like any living room I ever met, I was thinking as I sat down at my piano. I stared at him through the fireworks, trying to stay focused, but then I felt myself start to slide and down I went under the keyboard. Didn’t play a note. When I woke up, David had me more or less standing.
“Are you all right, Bess? Did you hurt yourself?”
One thing was lucky. When I fainted, I was usually so limp that I didn’t do any real damage. Except for that first childhood episode of the broken nose and the big lump in Boston. “I’m okay,” I said, but of course I felt like a horse’s ass. Plus I was angry at David for dragging me into this, and at myself for being such a defective jerk and at everybody else including and maybe especially God.
“You see the problem? You get it now?” I asked him, keeping my eyes on the floor so the sunspots would go away.
“I get it.” He held me against him until I could gradually raise my head.
“It’s hopeless,” I said when I could finally look up at him. “I’m hopeless.”
He didn’t answer, but I could feel his strength radiating into me, down my legs, up across my shoulders. “Come on, Bess,” he said in that gentle but no-bullshit tone. “You’ve got your color back. Let’s go.” He started leading me back to the piano.
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“We’re not here to play for our own entertainment,” he reminded me. “I’m only asking that you try. So no, I’m not shitting you.”
I almost laughed, but it’s hard to do that when your heartbeat is drowning out your own voice and you can’t see anything but big red comets exploding in front of your eyes. David sat me down, pressed his hands against my shoulders, and left me to go to his seat. We played the first couple of measures of the Rachmaninoff before I crash-landed again.
This time he was on the floor with me, cashmere slacks and all, holding me half in his lap. I peered through the sparkles at my legs stretched out like salamis and my toes pointed in opposite directions. I have a confession here, which since I’m trying to be totally honest I might as well spit out. I felt like hell, no question, but it was so amazing to be in David Montagnier’s arms even if we were halfway under a Steinway Model B. So I just lay there for a minute or two, playing possum and wondering what his cock looked like. I thought I could feel a vague outline under my fourth lumbar vertebrae, and the way things looked, this was about as close as I was ever gonna get to the aforementioned member. I moaned a little just for effect, but at that, David eased us both up off the floor and onto our feet.
“That was better,” he said. “You got through six measures. Let’s try for ten this time.” He left me again to go sit at his piano.
“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked him. “I could get a concussion.”
“I’m worried about that,” David said. “I was wondering if we should bring a mattress in here in case you fall again.”
“In case!” I yelled at him. “In CASE! Of course I’m going to fall again!” I took a deep breath and went on in my best commonsensical tone. “I’m sorry, but if this is your idea of fixing my problem, we might as well bag it right now.”
He gazed at me with disappointment and said, “All right, Bess, we’ll stop. I don’t want to torture you.”
I sat there listening to the ball bounce around in my court. If I caved, what would happen to Angie and her education? What about that fabulous red-faced bull moose of a nurse we’d hired to keep Dutch in line?
“Oh, merde,” I said. “Come on, Dave, let’s try it again.”
I realized that I’d actually been sitting there, on the stage, conscious, for several minutes while David and I duked it out with our eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. That seemed like a step in the right direction. Plus, David proceeded to give me one of those true dazzlers, a smile confirming that I was without a doubt the most courageous woman in the universe.
This time, we made it through about twenty seconds’ worth of Rachmaninoff, which was not too tacky considering. Then I crashed again, this time face forward, somehow landing on my hand, which cushioned the blow.
I don’t know how often I passed out that first day, but enough to feel like I was on a bungee cord. I also wondered how many brain cells I was trashing with this routine. But David picked me up every time, set me back at my piano, and we’d start over or work ahead in the music. I don’t think we read through a whole page, but David didn’t seem the least bit discouraged. When I was finally so exhausted from fainting that I couldn’t see the page anymore, he said in this upbeat voice, “All right, Bess, that was fine. We can start again tomorrow.”
“Huh?” I was so spaced out at that point I could barely get my tongue around an actual word.
“We’ve got the hall at seven o’clock A.M.” David said. “Come, I’ll get my car to take you home.”
I leaned against him all the way down the hall, not caring if everyone thought I was some drunk he’d found sleeping it off in a corner. He stuck his head into the limo once he’d got me installed.
“Thank you, Bess,” he said, picking up both hands and kissing them. “You were awesome.”
I rolled my eyes at him and was asleep by the time we got to Columbus Circle. The driver had to pry me out of there when we got uptown.
It didn’t take long for word to get out that David Montagnier had something brewing in his professional life. There was a bulletin in New York magazine:
Rumor has it that David Montagnier, after a critically successful stint as a soloist, has zeroed in on a replacement for Terese Dumont. He’s not talking, but sources say she’s a well-known, brilliant musician. Speculation favors Martha Argerich, given her preference for company onstage.
Scene magazine said that David and his new partner would be giving their first concert in early February. They got that part right anyway. I’d finally let David tell me the date—February fourteenth, which I thought was appropriate. I told him if I made it through in one piece, he’d have to be my valentine for life. He’d chuckled and that had made me ridiculously happy.
David and I both knew that it was only a matter of time before my identity was exposed, and meanwhile, I was still passing out. David had taken extraordinary steps to protect our privacy.
The hall was locked tight during each practice session so that the only person to see my tumbling act was the janitor, who’d been sworn to secrecy with bribes of expensive scotch. David experimented with laying a quilted pad under my seat, but decided later that I should be practicing under actual performance conditions. Since I never seemed to get hurt, he took it away again.
During the third week, I made it through four pages of music. It was a major triumph, and David laughed out loud. I’d never got a real booming laugh out of him before and the prospect of hearing it again gave me even more incentive to stay upright. The night we finished the first section of the Rachmaninoff, he broke open a bottle of champagne he’d been toting around just in case and we drank it warm, sitting on the floor with our legs dangling over the edge of the stage.
Because Weill was in use most of the time, we’d been practicing at all kinds of weird hours. The night of the champagne, we were out there onstage from two to four A.M., which I think was totally against union regulations but I didn’t ask any questions. In fact, I figured I was doing better because I was just too damn tired to live through the brutal routine of passing out every five minutes. Anyhow, we picked ourselves up to leave—both pretty wobbly after consuming an entire bottle of champagne with empty stomachs and no sleep—and discovered that all the doors were locked. The janitor was supposed to leave the key for one of the exits, but I guess he’d had too much fun guzzling his Glenlochness or whatever the hell it was. David finished messing with the door and turned to me with this gorgeous French shrug that said No can do.
“Fuck me,” I replied with my customary gift for choosing the perfect phrase for any given situation. “We’re stuck in here, aren’t we?”
“Fuck you,” David said in a friendly kind of way. It sounded so bizarre with his French accent that I started laughing. The champagne helped, of course, and pretty soon we were both hysterical. It had been a long couple of weeks.
