by Frank Conroy
Claude signed programs, thanked people for their compliments, and made an effort to keep smiling.
"You're very kind," he said, and, "I'm glad you enjoyed it. I sure did," and, "Thank you so much."
"Is this your Philadelphia debut?" a reporter asked.
"Well, no, actually. But this is the first big ... I mean, I've played in various places but not in this hall, not for such a large audience, in Philadelphia."
"How did you meet Frescobaldi?" Another reporter.
"Through my teacher."
"Was this a big break for you?"
"Yes, it was."
As the questions got more personal he excused himself and turned around, bumping into a tall, gangly young man who looked familiar.
"Hi! Remember me?" he asked, extending his hand.
"Of course," Claude lied, and shook hands. "I can't remember where, though. At the store?"
"Longmeadow. The Beethoven quintet. I'm Jerry Marx. The bassoon?"
"Oh, yes! Absolutely. How are you? What are you doing here?" Claude gushed, happy to have placed the man.
"I got my ticket weeks ago," Jerry said. "I never expected to see you up there. It took me a while to recognize you."
"Filling in," Claude said.
Jerry frowned. "No, I wouldn't call it that. It was extraordinary. I can't remember when I've heard—" He broke off and covered his mouth, looking down at the floor. Then he raised his head, speaking fast. "I have to go. I just wanted to tell you, I'm proud to have played with you. Years ago, maybe, and now you're ... you're ... Well, anyway, just keep on doing what you're doing."
Claude felt the man's emotion and didn't quite know what to do. "Good to see you," he said limply.
"Yes. Yes." Jerry left quickly.
Frescobaldi had made his escape and the room was emptying. Claude got his case and slipped out.
The dining room at the small, elegant hotel at which they were staying was closed—had just closed, the concierge was desolated to report—but food from the short menu could be ordered from the room, and was available at the bar, should monsieur prefer. Monsieur did.
It was dark. An elderly couple sat at the bar, but otherwise the place was empty. Claude sat down in a booth and ordered a roast beef sandwich and a glass of milk. After quite a while it arrived, a splendid presentation of sandwich, potato salad, cornichons, cherry tomatoes, parsley, and horseradish sauce. He ate slowly, savoring the flavors.
He pondered Frescobaldi's confession of stage fright. It seemed so entirely out of character, so unconnected to the rest of him. And yet the intensity with which he had said "Black hell"! Claude almost shivered at the recollection, and felt a wave of sympathy. At the same time he was proud Frescobaldi had told him. It was a mark of trust, one professional to another, and Claude would bet very few people knew about it. He resolved to tell no one. How strange people were, he thought, subject to all kinds of invisible forces, dealing with hidden devils and all the while keeping up appearances. He wondered if he was capable of that kind of bravery.
And there had been something spooky about the cadaverous image of Jerry, his head bobbing as he'd made his emotional speech. The bassoonist had treated him as a superior, as someone on a higher level altogether, and there was no doubting his sincerity. It was as if Jerry had been talking to a third person. All at once—between a cornichon and a tomato—a complex insight came to him, surprising him so much he stopped eating.
Claude had been working at music all his life, driven by the need to penetrate deeper and deeper into its mysteries and sustained by his ability to do so. His progress had been constant, reasonably steady, and tangible with regard to his instrument. The growth of his musical imagination was simply a fact, like the growth of his physical body, except that it promised to continue longer. In a certain sense he had taken all this for granted, assuming the same thing was happening to everybody who worked hard. But suppose it wasn't! Suppose people got stuck—developing to a certain point and then staying there. How long might he have stayed at his own personal wall without Fredericks telling him how to get to the other side? How many young musicians, having been told, were able to do it? Desire for growth did not ensure the fact of growth, he now admitted. It was more complicated. There were imponderables. So Jerry might be one of the unlucky ones, a good player—probably working in an orchestra, a passionate lover of music, but stuck—aware of the other side, yearning for it but unable to get there. Hence his emotion. Claude allowed himself to see himself through Jerry's eyes, and for a moment it scared him.
"There you are!" Frescobaldi entered with two young women in evening clothes. They swept into Claude's booth in a cloud of excited chatter. Introductions. They were both singers. Renata, who sat on Frescobaldi's side, from Turin, and Nancy, a delicate Eurasian beauty, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who slipped in next to Claude and immediately grasped his upper arm.
"It was beautiful," she said, her black eyes steady. "The allegro of the Debussy. Perfection!" She wore a peppery perfume.
"Coffee! Coffee!" Frescobaldi shouted to the bartender. "Black. Strong. A pot. Four cups."
"None for me," Claude said. "It's too late. Doesn't it keep you up?"
"Ha! That is exactly what it does. That is the whole point!"
Renata, pleasantly plump, blond, and glowing, gave a quick guffaw and kissed him on the cheek. "Aldo, Aldo, cafone mio," she said tenderly.
"When was the last time we had coffee?" The big man pretended to search his memory. "Copenhagen?"
"Reykjavik," she said.
"Of course! There is nothing else to do in Reykjavik." He shook the booth as he leaned back in laughter.
"You look so young," Nancy said into Claude's ear. "Even younger than from the audience. Does it bother you when I say that?"
"I don't know yet," Claude said. "I'll have to think about it." Her small hand on the table seemed carved from ivory.
"Young is good," she said. "Young is very good."
The talk and laughter continued for an hour. Claude's spirits were high, and he contributed when he could, aware of Nancy's warmth beside him, feeling her hand on his knee as she emphasized a point, once squeezing his thigh while rolling her eyes. Her nearness dizzied him. The unearthly perfection of her skin seemed a challenge.
"Perchè dio!" Frescobaldi said. "He is closing the bar. Time to go upstairs."
Claude felt a frisson over his entire body at this news, because it was understood the women were coming too. Nancy even took his arm as they went to the elevator.
Jokes about how much space the big man took up in the small compartment. Nancy's thigh against Claude's. Giggles as the car rose slowly. Claude stared at Nancy's perfect ear—only inches from his mouth—and saw her pulse in the velvet softness below it. He imagined his hands in her blue-black hair, his fingers tracing her exquisite head. The gate pulled back with a crash and they stepped out into the corridor.
Frescobaldi had room 604 and Claude 605, directly opposite. They opened their doors simultaneously and Claude turned to receive a kiss on the cheek from Nancy, who then skipped into 604, following Renata, who was already throwing off her evening jacket. Frescobaldi, starting to close his door, looked up and saw the shock and disappointment on Claude's face.
"Ah!" Frescobaldi said, and bit his lower lip in chagrin. "Of course, you didn't know. My profoundest apologies. These are my habits, you see. When traveling. What a stupid I am. Scusi." He closed the door.
The next morning, in the train, Claude and Frescobaldi sat beside each other in their first-class compartment, handing the Philadelphia newspapers back and forth. Frescobaldi read rapidly, snorting, muttering, sucking his teeth, treating the pages like so much wrapping paper, flinging them to Claude with impatience. "Blah blah blah blah."
The reviews were more than positive—they were laudatory. Claude was thrilled to see his name, thrilled to read the praise. "But these are great!" he said. "See here, 'A triumph for the Italian master ... his angelic touch ... a new stan
dard for the Beethoven sonatas...' They go on and on about you."
"And you, too. 'Limpid lines ... extraordinary supple tones...' Not that you don't deserve it."
"So what's wrong?" Claude asked.
"Nothing." Frescobaldi threw the paper aside. "These are very good reviews. These are what you call money reviews. But they don't say anything. I get tired of the gushing, always the same words that don't really say anything." He pointed his finger at Claude's nose. "Remember that when you get a bad review. Most of them don't know very much, and they are full of fakery."
Claude thought about it for a while.
"Understand it now, when they praise you," Frescobaldi said, popping a button on his shirt while shifting to a more comfortable position, "so you can keep a sense of proportion when they damn you. It is just words, just words, caro."
Claude looked at one of the reviews again, trying to read coldly. A number of adjectives seemed arbitrary, and there were more than a few strained metaphors, now that he searched for them.
"I see what you mean," he said. "But don't you think it's practically impossible to write about music directly? It doesn't lend itself to words. I mean, all you can do is skirt around it, sort of." He folded the paper. "I could write about the structure of the Kreutzer, technical stuff, but what could I say about what it means? I don't really think it means anything. I think it just is."
"Eccolà."
"When I think of the mood of it, the feel of it, what it reminds me of is a smell. The smell of the steam radiators at home in the fall when they'd first come on. When I was a kid. For a couple of hours there was this special smell. That's the Kreutzer. If I said that, first of all they wouldn't understand because you can't describe smells, and second they'd think I was crazy."
"Yes." Frescobaldi patted his hand. "Only another musician could understand. And not even all of them. Everybody takes everything so seriously these days."
"I'm serious," Claude said. "I mean it about smells."
"Of course. But to them it wouldn't sound serious. You know the story of Kreisler and Rachmaninoff playing the Kreutzer? At a big benefit?"
"No."
"They were very, very close friends. Kreisler lost his place in there where the violin goes pum, pum-pah pa-dum deedle deedle deedle. He forgot and began making it up. They'd played together so much Rachmaninoff knew how he would improvise, and instead of helping out he improvised a piano part to go along. You see! You are scandalized!"
"What happened?"
"Kreisler came over and whispered, 'Where am I? Where am I?' Rachmaninoff said, 'You're in Carnegie Hall' "
They both laughed.
"He finally gave Kreisler a cue, of course, and they played right through."
"I can't believe it," Claude said.
"Nobody said a word." Frescobaldi folded his great hands on his chest. "I love those funny things that happen. How near chaos is! I have seen a conductor fall off the podium at the climax of Tristan unci Isolde. Boom! Arms and legs flying in the air. I've seen a trombone slide sail into the viola section. In Austria once—Wagner again—a percussionist disappeared into his own kettle drum. It's wonderful! And nobody in the audience laughs but me!"
They accepted coffee from a white-jacketed porter.
"Kreisler was fun," Frescabaldi said in an expansive mood. "Not like that sourpuss Heifetz. For years Kreisler would play these little pieces—a Pugnani found in an old church, a Francoeur somebody discovered, a Padre Martini from an attic—and it turned out he wrote them all himself. Everybody was fooled, including the critics."
"But why would he do that? If they were good, wouldn't he want the credit?"
Frescobaldi shrugged. "Who knows? He was méchant, that one. I think he enjoyed fooling Heifetz and Zimbalist."
"It's amazing nobody caught on," Claude said.
"Not so amazing," Frescobaldi said. "Not really."
Waiting to go on, in the wings of Carnegie Hall, Claude leaned against the wall some distance behind Frescobaldi, alternately staring down at the tips of his own shoes and checking the violinist to see when he would go forward. Thus far Frescobaldi had stood motionless, like a great boulder, staring straight ahead. Claude sensed movement, behind and to his right. A stagehand creeping in the gloom to attend to some task. Claude waved him back. Finally Frescobaldi leaned forward on his toes, like a man going off a diving board, and propelled himself onstage. Claude followed into the growing applause.
Stage fright or no, it was always an especially charged moment. The dazzle of light over his shoulder, a whip of instantaneous brightness. The sense of exposure, as if walking into a giant x-ray machine. The sudden change of acoustics and the opening up of space, like being in the center of a rapidly expanding sphere. The blur of oval faces, pale in reflected light, two-dimensional paper masks rising in a low wave to the indistinctness of the back of the house. Dust motes glowing in the air over the stage. Utter darkness above.
The piano—its black strength so vast as to transcend its image—the piano waiting to enfold him. As he sits the x-rays disappear, canceled by a higher penumbra of power within which his body feels solid, warm, and lively to the business at hand. His mind is clear and already working. The music begins.
That afternoon he had met with Otto Levits when he tried the piano. (The stage at that time had not seemed a particularly remarkable place. Rather shabby, Claude had thought.) The piano was fine.
"Are you sure?" Levits asked. "I hear the one in Philly was not so good."
Surprised, because he couldn't remember telling anyone, Claude asked, "Where'd you hear that?"
"I know people. Relax, it wasn't in the papers. Aldo said you asked for a tuning and didn't get it."
"It wasn't a big deal," Claude said. "Anyway, this one is good. Better than good."
"Because all we have to do is go up the street and take you down to the basement. You can pick whatever you want."
"What basement?"
"Steinway. Up the street. Whatever you want, they'll bring it here, tune it, plenty of time for the concert. Free of charge."
"They do that?"
"Not for everybody. They already heard about you. They had someone in Philly. That's how I knew about the sharp treble. Aldo wasn't specific."
"Wow!"
"I told you word would get around."
"Yes, you did. You certainly did."
"Okay, we'll go with this one. The bench okay? Any adjustments?"
"I'm happy."
"Good. When my artists are happy, I'm happy." They climbed down from the stage. "Also, I'm glad to report something you already know. Aldo is happy. This is very important because it isn't always the case, sometimes, if you get my drift."
"He's been great to me," Claude said. "I like him."
In the office behind the box office they dealt with the matter of complimentary tickets. Most on Claude's short list had already been sent, but his mother, who hadn't wanted to come in the first place, relented if she could be assured a seat in the back row of the orchestra, next to an exit.
"This was easy," Levits said, handing him a pair. "The house is sold out. These people are delighted to sit in the tenth row instead of in back, so it's a trade. What is it with your mother? Is she claustrophobic?"
"No," Claude said. "I don't know. More like self-conscious. Shy."
"I see. Well, the seats are exactly what she asked for."
"Thanks."
Lady had not asked to visit his dressing room before the performance, which was just as well—there was barely enough room for Mr. Weisfeld, the only person he wanted around at this moment. Claude took off his street clothes while Weisfeld glanced at the newspaper.
"It looks like they really mean it about the el," he said. "Mrs. Keller already had an offer for her building."
"Is she going to sell? We've got all that stuff in there."
"Don't worry. Never is when she's going to sell."
Claude slipped the little wooden cross around his neck.
/> "What's that?" Weisfeld asked. "You're getting religious all of a sudden?"
"Just a good-luck piece. A maid gave it to me when I was a kid. I never figured out why." He touched it. "I wear it sometimes."
"You look good. Your muscles look good."
"I still do those exercises Franz showed me. The ones the maestro suggested. Plus I've added some. Every morning."
Weisfeld picked up Claude's dress shirt, gave it a couple of shakes, and held it up. Claude eased his arms into the sleeves. "How much time?"
"Plenty of time," Weisfeld said. "Bergman would sell, maybe. He talks about Florida. I've never understood the great appeal of Florida. So there's the beach, but what else?"
"I still can't quite believe this is happening."
"It's happening." Weisfeld now held his black jacket. He gave Claude a quick pat on the back as he put it on.
"I learned how to do this," Claude said, tying his bow tie. "No more clip-ons."
A sharp knock on the door, startling both of them. "Five minutes, Mr. Rawlings. Five minutes."
"I'll just sit here," Claude said, taking a folding chair. "1 go sort of numb."
"Should I leave?"
"No, no." He reached out and touched Weisfeld's elbow. "It's like a nap or something, but I'm not sleeping. Wait with me."
Once again they seemed to levitate, picking up where they had left off in Philadelphia. For Claude, playing a particularly responsive and perfectly tuned piano, able, because of superior acoustics onstage, to hear Frescobaldi more clearly, picking up on the subtlest variations of timbre and texture, it seemed they had moved even closer, something he had not thought possible. It was not an effortless accord, however much it might have sounded so. Claude's concentration was so intense his shirt was soaked halfway through the Spring Sonata, while Frescobaldi's eyes seemed about to bug out of his head. But the power of the music in the abstract was especially strong, as if emanating from the very walls of the building. They were playing the music, minds, bodies, and souls stretched near to the limit, but it was also true that the music was playing them. A balancing act of excruciating fragility, but to Claude sweet beyond words, sweet beyond imagining.
