Stolen Pleasures. Gina Berriault

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СКАЧАТЬ to be able to come up with a miserable nickel once in a while.” He held out his hand for the coins that David was searching for and found.

      “What the hell.” David gripped his guitar between his knees again, settling back uncomfortably. “You sore because they wanted me to play?”

      He shifted into low to start the car again. “You don’t know what anybody wants, you’re too busy playing all night.”

      The boy waited a minute, then sprang the big psychological question with a rare timidity in his voice: “You sore because it’s me that’s going to play for Torres tomorrow?”

      “Jaysus Christ, I’m sittin’ next to Freud here!” he cried, disgusted.

      They went on in silence over the long bridge. The deputy at the toll gate reached out his hand to take the coins that Berger pressed into it with his gray-gloved fingers, suede driving gloves to keep his hands warm so that he could commence to play soon after entering a room, but David wore no gloves, came with cold, thin hands into a room and played slickly, charmingly, his first number and afterward blew on his fingers to impress upon the audience how cold they were still and how much they had accomplished even so.

      Along under the neons of the motels, assured by the rainbow lights and the traffic signals that the time had passed for his abandonment on the bridge, the boy spoke again, “Listen yourself, I’m not the one who’s destroying himself, you worry about yourself. Some day you’re going to explode, a hundred different colors and a sonic boom. Big little David, folks will say for miles around, got too big for himself. God, you slaughtered that Purcell. If you play that for old Torres he’ll ask for a change of rooms after you’re gone.” He unloaded now all the complaints accumulated against the boy—criticism of his teacher-companion that David made to friends: “Berger could be the best, good as Tomas Torres, but he doesn’t look the part, hasn’t got the urbanity, short you know, big shoulders, like a wrestler’s that don’t fit him, big face, and the way he telegraphs his mistakes to you before he makes them, like ‘this hurts me worse than you, dear audience.’ But the best, really the best, could have been the best, but came to it too late, a jazz musician until he was thirty, still got the mannerisms of a jazzman in a nightclub, smiling at the audience, smiling at himself. You can’t do that with a classic guitar. He’s good all right but he should have come to it at eighteen, twenty, then he would have been great.”

      “Things come back to me!” Berger was shouting. “For a man of few friends, like you say I am, they come back to me!”

      He drew the car to the curb, leaned across the boy to open the door. “Get out here, man. From here it’s just a mile to your mother’s place. I’d take you there but it’s a mile out of my way.”

      “Under the green-blue motel neon, David stepped out to the sidewalk, knocking his guitar case against door and curb and hydrant.

      “You’re doing it to yourself,” said David again, warningly.

      “You keep knocking that guitar around like a dumb bastard with a normal IQ!” he bellowed, slamming the door.

      He went through the amber lights of intersections as if they were red and he was drunk. Somebody else on the verge of fame, somebody else awaiting the encircling arm of the already great, sent him, Berger, over the edge, down into the abyss of his own life. It was not fame he wanted for himself, he would never have it now, anyway, at thirty-seven, with all the faults that David had so meticulously listed for everybody. Not that, but what? The mastery, the mastery, play without telegraphing the errors, play without the errors, play with the mastery of the great yet indifferent to fame if it came. Palermo was nothing, that mecca of all the world’s guitar students where Torres, old Torres of the worldly jowls, laid his arms across the jaggedy, humped young shoulders of the most promising. The photos of the students in the guitar magazines made him laugh. They came from everywhere to study under Torres at the accademia, they stood around the silk-jacketed Tommy like fool disciples: a middle-aged woman with a Russian name; a young curly-locks guy from Brazil, making hot amorous eyes at the camera; a stiff-elbowed kid from England who looked as if he stuttered; and the girls with their big naïve eyes and their skirts full to make it easier to part their legs for the correct position of the guitar. He saw them gathering in the hallways of some musty building in Palermo after school, saw them descend the street into the town with the stiff-swinging walk of youth attempting youth, and he had no desire to be among them, to be twenty again and among them. The older he got the less he wished for a new beginning and the more he wished for a happy ending. But sometimes, as in these last few weeks, the wish for that beginning laid him low again like a childhood disease.

      Before his apartment house he let the car door swing heavily open and lifted his guitar case from the back seat. The slam of the door reminded him that there was something else in the car that ought to be brought in, but unable to recall what it was he concluded that it was nothing stealable and went up the stairs in his neat, black, Italian-style moccasins, wishing that he were lurching and banging against walls. Not since he fell down somebody’s stairs six years ago, cracking a vertebra and breaking his guitar in its case, had he taken a drink, not even wine, and he had taken none tonight though everybody was awash around him, but he felt now that drunkenness again, that old exaltation of misery. Sick of black coffee after a dozen cups through the night, he found a cupful in a saucepan, heated it to boiling, poured it into a mug, and willfully drank, scalding the roof of his mouth. He opened his mouth over the sink and let the black coffee trickle from the corners, too shocked to expel it with force, bleating inside: To hell with all the Great, the Near Great, the Would-be Great, to hell with all the Failures.

      From the windowsill he took his bottle of sleeping pills, put two on his tongue, drank down half a glass of water. He dropped his tie on the kitchen table, his jacket on the sofa, stepped out of his moccasins in the middle of the living room. He put on his tan silk pajamas (Who you fooling with this show of opulence?) and crawled into his unmade bed. At noon he was wakened by a street noise and drew the covers over his ear to sleep until evening, until the boy’s interview with the Great Tommy was over.

      At four, moving through the apartment in his bare feet, in his wrinkled pajamas, he tore up the memory of himself that early morning as he had once, alone again, torn up a snapshot of himself that someone had thrust upon him—a man with a heavy face in the sun, hair too long and slick, a short body and feet small as a dandy’s. For with no reminders he was the person he fancied himself. But, dumping coffee grounds into the sink, he realized suddenly that the jawing he had given the boy had been given as a memento of himself, something for the boy to carry around with him in Palermo, something to make him feel closer to Berger than to anybody else, because Berger was the man who had told him off, a jawing to make him love and hate Berger and never forget him, because it is impossible to forget a person who is wise to you. If the boy never got to first base as a guitarist, then the jawing lost its significance, the triumph was denied to Berger. It was on David’s fame that he, Berger, wanted to weigh himself. Jaysus, he wailed, what kind of celebrity chasing is that? He smelled of cheese and bed and failure, sitting at the table with his head in his hands. The interview was over an hour ago and now he would hear from friends the words of praise, the quotations from Torres, as if these friends of David had been there themselves to hear the words drop like jewels from his lips, all of them closer to God because they were friends of him who sat up there in God’s hotel room, playing music to enchant God’s ears.

      So he stayed away from his friends, who were also David’s friends. For almost two weeks he eluded any knowledge of that interview. He gave lessons to his students in his own apartment or in their homes, and in this time it was as if he were seventeen again, living again that period of himself. He felt as if he were instructing them without having learned anything himself first, and he hated his students for exacting more of him than he was capable of giving. Again he was in that age of self-derision and yet of great expectations. A celebrated musician would recognize СКАЧАТЬ