Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  Mr. Powers smoked his cigar and said nothing for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Finally he extinguished his butt, jabbing it energetically in the ashtray. "So you want to be an artist, is that it?"

  "Yes, sir. Exactly."

  "That's for women."

  The remark was so blunt and so ridiculous Claude couldn't believe what he'd heard. "What?"

  "You heard me." Mr. Powers got up from his chair. "It's for women. Women and pansies." Without another word he'd left the room.

  Now Claude sat at the window of the Long Island Railroad carriage and watched the flat land drift by. At his feet was a small suitcase, a rather expensive item given to him by Otto Levits for his overnight engagements. "It's important to look good when you go someplace to play," Levits had said. "You're a performer, a serious artist. Shoes shined, suits pressed, quality accessories. It's a gesture of respect." Inside the suitcase were a change of clothes, some Bartók scores, a paperback edition of The Great Gatsby, and a round tin of marrons glacés.

  As the train pulled into the station at Ashton he realized he was simultaneously jiggling his knee and gnawing on a fingernail. He stopped instantly, as if rebuked. A strange mood was upon him—a mixture of romantic and erotic excitement, apprehension about Ted and Linda Powers (particularly since he knew Lady had forced the invitation), simple curiosity, and a certain amount of repressed and unacknowledged anger. He was both thrilled and slightly sickened.

  He stepped off the train and saw Lady standing in the sunlight on the platform. She wore tennis whites, a green ribbon in her brown hair, and sunglasses. Her long, perfect, tanned legs seemed even longer as she skipped to his side. "Hi, cutie!" She gave him a quick kiss. "Got your shining armor in there?"

  "No, but I did bring a bathing suit."

  "Super. Let's go."

  It was a British sports car, dark green, with a leather strap over the hood and the top folded down into a recess behind the jump seat. "Ouch! It's hot," she said as she got into the leather seat and grabbed the wheel. She pulled out of the lot with a splash of gravel. "This is the village," she shouted as they accelerated down a street lined with small Tudor buildings housing shops with tasteful signs. Tall elm trees threw dappled shade. They passed a movie theater, and then a white church with a slender steeple. Soon they were on a winding country road between fieldstone walls, speeding under a canopy of green.

  "Mother's off having tea," Lady cried. "Father's playing golf, thank God."

  "I brought a house present," Claude shouted.

  She geared down, double clutching with finesse, and turned the long nose of the car into a break in the wall. An ascending driveway, rising to a gravel turnaround and the house, sitting alone on the top of the hill. Claude had a moment of déjà vu. A large, white, two-story clapboard house with green shutters and trim and a portaled entranceway. The lawns, flowers, and shrubbery were tended to a point past perfection, lending the scene a tinge of unreality. It was the movies that made him think he'd seen this house, this impeccable setting, for indeed he'd seen its like from the balcony of the RKO many times. It was the sort of house within which might be found Walter Pidgeon, Greer Garson, or Ethel Barrymore. It made Claude feel better just to look at it.

  "You're in the guest quarters," Lady said as they got out of the car.

  They went through the front door into a wide hall. The living room was on the right—furnished with antiques and oriental rugs, much like the house on Seventy-third Street—dining room and kitchen off to the left. They walked straight across to a rear door and emerged onto a flagstone patio. There was a trellis, a small white building, and a swimming pool in the middle of the lawn, screened on two sides by rows of hedges. The clear blue-green water sparkled in the sun.

  "The servants are in back," Lady said, opening a screen door, "and you're in here."

  A bright room with hunting prints, a bureau, two small armchairs, and a four-poster bed. He put down his suitcase.

  "This is very nice," Claude said.

  Lady went to the bed and sat on the edge. "Comfortable bed." She fell back and threw her arms out to the side.

  "Is it safe here?" he asked.

  "Oh, absolutely," she said, her soft, breathy rasp more pronounced than usual. "Nobody comes in here."

  He kissed the inside of her elbow and worked his way up to her mouth. She closed her eyes and accepted the weight of his body, her hands light on the back of his neck.

  Later in the afternoon they swam in the pool. Claude lolled in the warm water while Lady did laps, her body moving smoothly and efficiently. Eight strokes, turn, eight strokes, turn, again and again until, breathing hard, she climbed out and lay on a towel. Claude spread one on the grass beside her and lay on his back, closing his eyes against the brightness of the sky. After a while he thought she might have gone to sleep, and he was just about to turn and look when she spoke.

  "What's the difference between somebody who knows how to play the piano—I mean lots of people can play anything you put in front of them—somebody like that as against what you do, or Fredericks, or the famous ones."

  Surprised, he opened his eyes and stared up at the blue dome. Lady had often asked him about how a concert had gone, or what sort of people he'd played with, or played for, or how much money he'd made, or what Minneapolis was like, but seldom more than that. It was as if his music were a given. "That's not such an easy question," he said.

  "No?"

  "Well, there are various levels. The higher you get, the harder it is to put into words, actually. Eventually it gets pretty mysterious."

  He turned to find her watching him. He got up on his elbows. The side of her head was flat against the towel, her brown eyes steady. The afternoon air had become still and he heard bird cries in the distance, ascending loops like a child's doodles. Water lapped in the gutters of the pool. "I guess the first thing is control," he said. "No, that's wrong. The first thing is probably the hand-eye thing. The way most kids are taught, there's so much emphasis on the eye, on the ability to sight-read, they become sort of input-output machines. You know, they just listen for mistakes, they don't listen for anything else. I was lucky. Right from the beginning the sound seemed so powerful and interesting I paid a lot of attention. Different key signatures meant my hands would assume different postures, and then those postures felt like emotions. C is a bright key, for instance. Cheerful. E-flat is darker, with more longing. It's like colors, almost. Anyway, there's something in there about the hands, a kind of feedback to deep inside you while your hands are moving and sort of tracing out the emotions there in the different key signatures, right there in the keyboard. I think you've got to have that right at the start." He turned on his side, facing her. "You sure you want to hear all this?"

  "Yes. And I already know something about your hands."

  "Then there's control," he went on, not picking up on her remark as he warmed to his subject. "That you have to work for, and it can take a long time. Dynamics, for instance. That's loud and soft. Take a single note and play it, then play it ever so slightly softer, then take it down by precisely the same increments all the way to silence."

  "Can you do that?"

  "Oh, yes. That stuff is basic. You play legato, staccato, and all of that and a lot more has to do with touch, with your ability to control the interaction of your body with the instrument. Your hands and the keys. You develop touch to the physical limit. You can be a pretty good player at that point. Most people don't go any further."

  "Why not?"

  He sat up and hugged his knees. "I don't know. Any number of reasons, I guess."

  She shifted onto her back. "The sun feels good."

  "Some people just never get past the written music. In a certain sense it's only black marks on paper, and of course you pay attention to it, but you have to remember there's actual music behind the black marks. Somebody played some music, or heard it anyway, and then wrote it down. Notation, well..." His voice trailed off for a moment. "I mean some of Bach, f
or instance, you just have the bare notes. No instructions, nothing. You have to be able to imagine the way he wanted it, and then play it that way. And he wrote before the piano was invented."

  She gave him an encouraging sound, to indicate she was listening even though her eyes were closed.

  "The thing is—and Fredericks showed me this—once you get to a certain point you can sort of forget your hands. It becomes mental, in a way. You go into a kind of trance of concentration, imagining what it's going to sound like, feeling it in your head, and somehow that's exactly what happens. It feels almost like magic. It feels so good sometimes you can hardly stand it. I mean, you know, you're playing and there's a resistance, you're pushing against it harder and harder, and then you break out into the clear. Just like that you're through and there's no resistance and you just sail along and it's like pure thought turning into pure music." He plucked some grass and let it fall. "You have to train yourself to keep your concentration, otherwise you can get so happy you just go over the top. It's wild."

  He turned his head to look at her and felt a twinge of disappointment. She was asleep, her breath deep and even, her mouth slightly parted. He glanced up at the silent house, and then down at her body. He felt a sudden sexual urge, so swift and sharp he found himself recoiling from her. After a moment he got up and slipped back into the pool.

  As he carefully removed a white shirt from his suitcase he was surprised to see his good-luck piece lying in a corner of the bag. He stood perfectly still, trying to figure out how it had gotten there. It was supposed to be with his cuff links, studs, and bow tie in a drawer at Obromowitz's—all the fancy stuff for formal dress performances in one place. Sometimes, for a really big job, he would carry the little wooden cross in his breast pocket. And yet here it was, all by itself. A mystery. He picked it up, rubbing it with his thumb, then put it back in the suitcase.

  When he'd finished dressing he went into the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. The blue blazer he'd gotten for three dollars at the Cadbury thrift shop looked fine. His teeth, as he leaned forward with a grimace, were as white as any movie star's. His black curly hair was perhaps a bit too thick and a bit too long, but not outrageously so. He buffed his brown loafers with a towel and decided he was presentable. Cocktails, Lady had said, at five-thirty in the living room.

  Outside, as he walked across the grass, his eye was caught by the swimming pool. The light from the lowering sun fell at a steep angle, and the water was almost too bright to look at. As he approached the edge of the pool the brightness waned. In the still air the water barely moved and he stood watching the minuscule ripples on the surface. The surface held his eye.

  Then, with a sensation almost like falling, his gaze was drawn through the water to the bottom of the pool. A smooth green expanse, two thirds in shadow, but with the last third covered with a fine net of shadow lines, a kind of gently wavering grid. It took him a moment to realize he was watching an intricate pattern thrown by the surface ripples, a pattern so regular it seemed unnatural. A strange, silent tableau, inexplicably beautiful. He stood staring down.

  "Claude!" Lady called from the French doors. "What are you doing?"

  "Nothing," he said, starting toward her. "It was the light." He waved to indicate the pool. "The shadows." He quickened his pace.

  "I think swimming pools are vulgar, don't you? I don't know why he built it," she said as Claude joined her.

  "Your father?"

  "No. My great-grandfather. He gave them this place."

  Inside, Linda Powers put down her pen and rose with a distracted air. "Ah, there you are. I can't seem to find my..." She looked back at the desk. "Well, never mind. I had tea with Bunny, dear. She says she looks for you at the club, but you're never there."

  "I was there this morning," Lady said.

  "Well, do be nice if you bump into her. She's been awfully good about the drive this year. Now, what was I—" Her voice broke off as the maid arrived. "Drinks! What would you children like?"

  "Gin and tonic," said Lady.

  "That sounds good," Claude said.

  "Three gin and tonics, Maria. And the usual for Mr. Powers. Thank you, dear." There was a brittle, avian quality to her attractiveness—the quick, glittering eyes, the short bursts of speech. "Sit down," she said to Claude. "And thank you for the matrons. Sinfully rich."

  "You were kind to invite me," Claude said, swiveling his head to include her husband. Ted Powers sat at the other end of the room over what appeared to be a very large jigsaw puzzle. He gazed down at the board with his chin in his hand.

  Lady sat on the couch, rolled her eyes at Claude, picked up a magazine, and began flipping pages.

  "Lady tells me you studied with Fredericks," Linda Powers said. "So you must have met Anson Roeg. In fact, it was Bunny who lent me a copy of Secret Meetings. We're all deliciously scandalized, of course." A quick smile. "But is she really so, ah, is she, er ..."

  "Eccentric, Mummy," Lady said. "That's the word."

  "Yes, exactly. Eccentric?"

  The maid arrived with a tray of tinkling drinks. Claude was served first, and was grateful for the interruption. His loyalty to Fredericks was almost as fierce as that toward Weisfeld, and he felt unaccountably nervous when talking about them to people who didn't know them, as if he couldn't do them justice, or worse, as if his reluctance might be construed as disinterest. The truth was, he loved Fredericks, but no one wanted to hear that. They wanted gossip.

  "She does smoke cigars," Claude said, "but they're quite small. Not much bigger than cigarettes."

  "One hears about her clothes," Linda Powers said.

  "She wears pants all the time, as far as I know."

  "Is she ... er ... mannish? That is, the way she behaves?"

  Claude stared into his gin and tonic, which was the color of the water in the swimming pool. "She's practical. She takes care of a lot of stuff for him, arranging things, remembering things. But I wouldn't say mannish. In a funny way the clothes call attention to the fact she's a woman."

  Lady put down the magazine. "That's interesting. Why do you say that?"

  "She's always struck me as feminine." Claude shrugged.

  "People say they're inseparable," Linda Powers said.

  "I guess they are."

  There was a silence, and Claude knew Linda wanted him to elaborate, but he chose not to. He felt awkward, and he was aware of the silent presence of Ted Powers.

  The tray of gin, tonic, ice, and lime had been left by the maid at a side table. Lady and Linda went periodically to freshen their drinks. Ted stayed where he was, served every now and then by another maid, who also passed hors d'oeuvres. Claude could hear the ticking of the ornate clock over the mantel. It seemed a very long time before they were called in to dinner.

  Mr. Powers and Claude sat at the ends of the long table, while Lady and her mother faced each other across the middle. Mrs. Powers kept up a line of light chatter, addressed mostly to Lady. Over soup Claude learned that Ernesto, the new gardener, seemed to be working out. Julio, the previous gardener, had been better, but he had died the previous summer of a heart attack. Linda had undergone the shocking experience of finding him face down in the flower bed. Over veal cutlets and asparagus it came out that Bunny had given five hundred shares of Pepsi-Cola to the Heuval Foundation, of which Mrs. Powers was the president. The foundation was dedicated to educational and proactive projects for unwed mothers. It ran four shelters in New York and Boston. Ted Powers, it turned out, had shot eighteen holes with a score of ninety, and had observed Judge Aldrich cheating on the approach to the fourteenth, kicking his ball from the edge of the rough onto the fairway. Over dessert, Linda Powers announced that someone referred to as Noodle was having her gall bladder removed.

  "Do you have plans for tonight?" Linda asked Lady.

  "We're going to the movies." Lady put down her napkin and rose. "Actually, we should get going."

  "In the village?"

  "Yup."

&nbs
p; This was news to Claude, but he followed Lady's lead and they slipped out.

  "I'm sorry," Lady said as they got in the car. "I just had to get out of there."

  "Did you mean it about the movies?"

  "Why don't we?" she said, pulling out onto the road. "It's supposed to be good. It's called Some Like It Hot."

  The theater was surprisingly small—perhaps twice the size of the children's section at the RKO—and completely filled. They were lucky to get two seats in the second row, which opened up at the end of the coming attractions. The crowd buzzed with anticipation, and then fell still as the movie began. Claude and Lady held hands, leaned back, and gazed up at the screen.

  In a very short time Claude was laughing. Soon after he was laughing helplessly. The farcical situations seemed to build one upon the other until he had to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. Lady would chortle every now and then, patting Claude's leg, without taking her eyes from the screen, when he seemed on the verge of losing control of himself. In the midst of his paroxysms Claude felt a sliver of fear as he perceived the remote edge of outright hysteria. He would quiet down for a few minutes, but then surrender to laughter because it seemed to cleanse him, to pull out the knots in his soul and leave him breathless and blessedly empty. When the lights came on, Lady looked at him with a smile. "Are you okay?"

  "I couldn't help it," he said. "It must be the funniest movie ever made."

  "It was good." She looked at him with curiosity, a muted version of the look she sometimes gave him during sex, and then turned away to collect her things.

  Outside, in the warm night air, they moved through the fanning crowd to the car.