Heart and Soul

by Sally Mandel

  I figured, Oh, what the hell, we might as well have some fun. So I went out on the stage and started clowning around. “Ladies and germs,” I shouted at the imaginary audience. “I present to you all the way from the continent Mess-your David Montagnier and his fabuloso partner in crime…” I made a deep bow. “Who will perform for you from the classical repertory the famous Vaudevillia Sonata Opus Oh-Oh by Fred van Ludwig Jones of Kearny, New Jersey. To your instrument, Mister Montagnier, or we’ll have to refund all these tickets and I don’t know about you, but I’m broke.”

  I sat down at my piano and started pounding out that old crowd-pleaser, “Heart and Soul.” David got right into the spirit of the thing, improvising all kinds of riffs to accompany me, ranging in style from Baroque to Motown. We were both pretty drunk, so we were laughing our asses off like we were about the funniest pair since Abbott and Costello. We moved on to more elevated stuff like “Sergeant Pepper,” “Happy Birthday to You,” and finally a colossal keyboard battle between “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Marseillaise. I finally got up from my bench and stalked over to beat him up.

  “Shall I defend the honor of our country?” I yelled out at the darkened seats. “Applause! Louder! I can’t hear you!” When I put up my fists like I was going to belt David, he swung around so he could pull me onto his lap. Then he kissed me, and kissed me again. Then I kissed him, and there was no more laughing.

  “I’m sorry, Bess,” he said.

  We were barely steamed up but I moved off his lap to sit next to him on the bench. “Well, I’m not,” I said.

  “It’s a very bad idea,” he said.

  “What else are we supposed to do until that alcoholic janitor shows up?”

  He stood, took my hand, and led me across the stage and down the steps to the front-row seats. If I’d thought I was wobbly before, those kisses had turned my legs into overcooked macaroni. He plunked down and pulled me into the seat beside him. “Too much champagne,” he said. “I was determined this wasn’t going to happen.”

  “Aha,” I said. “So you’ve been thinking about it, too?”

  He wasn’t that drunk, because he managed to look embarrassed. “Your hair is so erotic,” he said. But his eyes were on my tits.

  “Well, then, maybe I should get that brush cut I mentioned. And perhaps a breast reduction?”

  He laughed, the deep rumble that seemed to take him by surprise. “Don’t you dare,” he said.

  “Look, anything for the greater glory of this musical partnership, but I for one really enjoy making out. You are one hot kisser, Dave. For a foreigner.”

  “Oh, you’re a specialist in non-American kisses?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” I said modestly. Of course, the crowd raised their hands in the back of my head. Just from high school, three came to mind: the Vietnamese exchange student, an Australian golf pro at the country club where I had a summer job, and the Canadian chef in the cafeteria, except maybe Canada doesn’t really count as foreign.

  “Seriously, Bess…”

  I groaned. I hate any sentence that begins like that.

  “We can’t afford to get distracted,” David said. “It’s too easy to damage the professional relationship.”

  “Are you speaking from personal experience?” I figured I’d give it a shot.

  “Let’s just talk,” David said. “We’ve got plenty of time until he gets here at seven, and I want to know about your life.”

  “You got a firsthand look at it,” I said. “If you’re not going to kiss me, the least you can do is spill your guts.” I got up and dragged him to a row back under the balcony where it was darker, a better place for confidences.

  “If you must know, I was raised by a wood nymph,” he said. “She had perfect pitch, of course. Pitch, you know, in the wood.”

  I gave him a whack. “All right, I’ll make it easy for you. Tell me the highlight of the year you turned ten.”

  He closed his eyes. I could see movement under the lids. “All right. That July I learned to play the parallel passages in the Beethoven Pathetique. You know, the second subject in the first movement where it switches back and forth from E-flat minor to D-flat major. That was difficult for me, even though I already had long arms and fingers. I remember being so excited that I waited outside Beauchapel’s door all night for him to wake up so I could tell him.”

  I was thinking that when I was ten, I was scoping out the perfect system for playing hooky. It was foolproof, until I got caught. “How about more along the lines of nonmusical memories?” I asked.

  “I don’t have any others,” David said.

  “Come on,” I said. “You must have had buddies you did stuff with. Trips with your mother.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” David said, “but I don’t remember them. I can tell you when I first performed the Brahms F-minor Sonata. And the time I finally played the first Bach Partita through by memory. I was thirteen. Christmastime.”

  “Jesus, David.”

  “You’re so normal, Bess. It’s one of the things I like most about you.”

  That was clever, a double whammy on his part. First to pronounce me normal—everybody laugh—and second, to toss me bait like that: one of the things he liked, knowing I was going to want the whole list. Well, I could corner him later; and meanwhile, I wasn’t about to give up. I thought a minute.

  “Okay, then,” I said, “tell me all about Maurice Beauchapel, and spare no details.” If I started out in neutral territory, maybe I could sneak up on Terese Dumont.

  “He scared the shit out of me,” David said. So much for neutral. David was staring at me like he’d just spit out a frog. “Dieu!” he whispered under his breath. He was beginning to fade, so maybe his defenses were down. I zeroed in.

  “Scary how?”

  David leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. He looked like a little boy who was fighting sleep, eyes half-mast with the thick eyelashes weighing down the lids. “He was so tall and straight. A handsome man but cold. Correct. I was just six when he took us into his salon, my mother and me. Though she was only with us for a year. I don’t like talking about it. I should have been with boys my own age. Tell me about hanging out. I don’t know what it is to hang out.” His voice made another decrescendo, and pretty much died out.

  “Nothing to it, just like what we’re doing right now. You still haven’t told me why you were afraid of him.”

  “He didn’t mean to be severe. I suppose he just didn’t know how to act around children. He told me if I didn’t practice my scales we’d have to leave, and my mother would become a beggar under the bridges of Paris. I remember that phrase. Une clocharde sous les ponts de Paris. I had nightmares about that. But I owe him everything.”

  “So that was it, just you and your mother and Beauchapel? No brothers or sisters?”

  “Music was my family.” A sound bite, I thought, produced to ward off probing questions.

  “David, it’s hard to cuddle up to a book of études.”

  “To Maurice Beauchapel’s credit, he ultimately realized that I needed companionship. He sent me to boarding school when I was twelve, which I know was difficult for him. He was used to supervising all my practice sessions and it meant my studying with another teacher.”

  “Did you make a lot of friends?”

  “I was busy with the piano, night and day.”

  “I can identify with that,” I said, remembering Juilliard. I’d never had much use for anything else myself, a typical piano nerd who was pretty much hopeless at English and science or anything that took me away from the keyboard. David shifted toward me to press his shoulder into the seat. I learned soon enough that David could only fall asleep on his side.

  I was imagining a slim solemn boy, straight-backed on the bench, his feet barely touching the pedals, a screen of shiny black hair falling forward over his face as he kept time with the metronome. A boy who was saving up safe memories, p
erfect moments he shared with his best and only friends—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and all the others who spoke the language he understood best.

  “Did you need the music that much?” I couldn’t help reaching out to touch him, resting my fingers lightly on his hand.

  He murmured something I couldn’t believe I’d heard. I asked him to repeat the last part.

  “Music flowed in my blood, Bess,” he whispered. “Like corpuscles, cells, red, white, and the notes, the sounds. I could hear it at night, traveling through my veins. Even as a child, to take it away they would have had to kill me.”

  I sat and watched him drift into sleep. If nobody’d ever come to unlock that door, it would have been just fine with me.

  Chapter Eight

  “Bess, do you have a long dress?” David asked over the phone. In my half-asleep state, the sound of his voice felt like hands moving across my body.

  “Yuh,” I said. It was eleven A.M. but we’d only finished practicing at four.

  “Excellent. I’m picking you up this evening at seven-thirty. We’re doing a little concert.”

  I rubbed my eyes hard, thinking maybe I could poke myself awake from this dream that was turning into a nightmare.

  “Bess?”

  “You want to fill me in or what?”

  “A friend of mine is pastor of a church in Harlem,” David said. “His congregation gathers for musical performances Wednesday nights. I volunteered our services.”

  “I’m not ready yet,” I said.

  “You are.”

  I could imagine this conversation deteriorating into an Am not!/Are so! battle like I used to have with my sister. “I thought we were a democracy,” I protested, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Cold air blasted my bare feet.

  “You were mistaken,” David said cheerfully. “I don’t want you to overpractice. Go to the pool and do laps.”

  “Can I use one in Cleveland?”

  He laughed. “That’s another thing I like about you, Bess. You make me laugh.”

  So that was two things in my favor. I was normal and I made him laugh. Well, five, really, because he liked my hair and my tits. I felt like I was collecting charms for a bracelet. In the limo, David told me I looked pretty steady. Was I all right?

  “Yeah,” I said. Considering I’d spent most of the day rocking back and forth on my seat in the bus, which I took all the way downtown and back up again. It was cheaper than a movie and more distracting. David was looking me over. He stuck a ringlet of hair behind my right ear, producing a little electric buzz here and there, mostly there. I figured I couldn’t be totally stressed out if I could still get that kind of a jolt.

  “I’ve been wondering,” he said. “How did you get through your jury for entering Juilliard?”

  “You mean you didn’t check that out with Professor Stein? He was there.”

  He smiled. “Actually, I did.”

  “Then you know I didn’t pass out during my performance,” I said. “I did it later on Broadway and Sixty-fifth in front of the deli.”

  “Ah.”

  “It wasn’t as bad then,” I continued. “If I was going to faint, I usually did it afterward.”

  “That’s because you weren’t thinking so much about yourself when you were younger. More about the music.”

  “Yeah, I know. Focus on the music, baby.”

  Another mantra. I’d heard it at least four thousand times, and finally, finally, it was beginning to happen. David was shoving me into the music as if he had both hands on the small of my back, my own personal guide into the hearts and brains of the composers. It was like I was falling in love with them, too.

  “Listen, Bess!” he’d shout at me across the piano, probably when he saw me begin to get scared and woozy. “Listen to the sadness, the loss. Be inside it! Listen!” And he’d pick out a phrase, just two or three chords, even, and make me play them over and over until I truly connected with the emotion in them. Compared to the genius in those passages, my dopey problems became insignificant. In a way, I guess I started realizing I just wasn’t important enough to be passing out all the time.

  The church was a small frame building north of 125th Street. There were already a couple dozen people, all of them African Americans and everybody dressed to the nines. The women were even wearing hats, which was touching but a little intimidating. We’d have to play well to live up to those hats.

  David introduced me to the Reverend Busky Wilcox, a big bear of a guy with a soft voice and a smile to die for. Reverend Wilcox held my frozen fingers in his warm ones and nodded at the two pianos near the pulpit, a small baby grand and an upright. “I’m sorry about that old model-T piano, Miss Stallone. David gave us the nice one, and now we’re after him for another.”

  My eyes were beginning to pepper the insides of the church with those miserable dizzy sparkles. I focused hard on the fact that I was curious how these two became friends. I knew if I asked David, he’d just hand me some bullshit about it being back about the time he learned to play the Beethoven “Spring” Sonata for piano and violin.

  “How did you meet?” I asked the reverend. My voice came out sounding like slo-mo, but they didn’t seem to notice. I knew I was blinking a lot to clear the spots.

  “We used to party together,” the reverend said. He and David traded sly little smiles.

  “Church suppers?” I asked.

  “Let me introduce you to our congregation,” Reverend Wilcox said, and I knew that that subject was closed for the duration. He presented us to the audience as “pretty decent ivory ticklers,” which got a laugh and made me feel a little more relaxed.

  At this point, I thought I was going to be okay, but as soon as we settled at our pianos, me at the baby grand, I felt myself starting to go. I shot David a last HELP! look and down I went. I woke up with David and Reverend Wilcox propping me up on my seat. Out in the pews, there were a lot of bugged-out eyes under those hats.

  “What’s it going to be, Bess?” David asked me.

  I sat for a minute, getting my bearings. The hats were bobbing and murmuring. I gripped David’s arm, hauled myself up and took a few deep breaths.

  “I apologize,” I said to the crowd, which is weird, I realize, but I could talk to a crowd of ten million without breaking a sweat. You just couldn’t ask me to play “Twinkle, Twinkle.” “It happens to me sometimes, but don’t worry, it’s cool.” I turned to David. “Want to give it another shot?”

  There was a smattering of applause and one hearty “You go, girl!” as David headed back to his piano. Even though I went blank about thirty seconds into the Rachmaninoff and had to start over, we gave them a damn good concert. I was beyond ecstatic. While we were taking our bows, I felt weightless, like I was being lifted up into the church rafters on silver strings. It was way better than any drug high I’d ever experienced. I mouthed to David while I floated up there by the ceiling, “Thank you. Thank you.” Because it was all on account of him and I knew it. I love you, was what I was feeling, but of course I couldn’t tell him that.

  Members of the congregation gathered around us to offer thanks. The next thing I knew, Professor Stein was standing there with his blue nose and clothes sprinkled with bagel crumbs and cigar ashes. He took my hand and held it between both of his old crooked ones. He just stared into my face with watery eyes, not finding the words. I, of course, started to cry, and just put my arms around him. His shoulders were bony and I could feel him trembling. I love you, too, old matt, I wanted to say. You good old man.

  That was the beginning. David never let more than a week go by without dragging me to some funky joint to perform. We played in a church way out in Brooklyn for three nuns and a drunk who was asleep in the aisle. I wasn’t picky, though—I passed out everywhere. We played for Professor Stein’s nephew’s daughter’s weekly assembly in some private school in Riverdale. That was some tough peanut gallery, let me tell you. A bunch of ten-year-old kids who al
l they wanted to do was throw stuff at each other. Their favorite part was when I fainted, but they also liked the Scaramouche. One of them asked what movie it came from.

  David even got me on a plane the size of your average housefly to Rochester, New York, where we played in some dead rich guy’s mansion, Eastman, I think his name was. I’d only flown once before when Angie and I went to Florida to visit our grandparents in a trailer park near Orlando, but that was a real airplane with real flight attendants, not a toy that you start up by yanking the rubber band around the propeller. The thing was, I wasn’t scared even though we were bouncing all over the sky in a blizzard because, apparently, it’s always snowing in Rochester.

  I noticed that David’s face was kind of green. “You’re not afraid, are you, Bess?” he said.

  “No. This is fun,” I said with my face plastered to the window, watching the clouds and snow swirl around us. I felt like I’d flown into the world’s most spectacular pillow fight.

  “But put you on a stage with a piano …”

  “I know, I know,” I said. We could easily die and I was Miss Cool, but just don’t ask me to play a tune in a nursing home for half a dozen old ladies who’re too deaf to hear me anyway.

  The first time I didn’t pass out was at a museum in Utica, New York. It should have made the newspapers, which it didn’t, but I’ll never forget it. By now, it was January, and let me tell you, I never saw snow like this. Up to your ass and climbing. I was excited because we were going to stay overnight and I figured maybe we could get back into the kissing thing. David had never mentioned the incident at Weill Recital Hall and he’d kept his distance. There was also no more champagne. I don’t mean to give the impression that he wasn’t affectionate. After our practice sessions, he still massaged my fingers. Then he’d give me the usual peck on both cheeks, and send me home in the limo. I tried wearing sweaters with no bra during rehearsals, but despite his earlier interest in my best features, David didn’t so much as give them a glance. If it hadn’t been for the night we got locked in the hall, I might even have suspected that he was gay. But I also happened to know he was seeing a very gorgeous model, or at least their picture was in the Post every other day. She wasn’t just some dumb bimbette either. I’d seen her on interviews and she had a head on her shoulders. I hated her guts, especially when the media asked her about David and she’d give them a little smirk and say, “No comment on that.”