Stolen Pleasures. Gina Berriault

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ saying good-bye.

      On the evening of the twelfth day he drove across the bridge to visit the Van Grundys. They were still at supper, Van and his wife and the two kids, eating a kind of crusty lemon dessert, and they made a place for him to pull up a chair. He had coffee and dessert with them, and joked with the boy and the girl, finding a lift in the children’s slapstick humor, the upside-down, inside-out humor, and in the midst of it he turned his face to Van Grundy at his left, the smile of his repartee with the children still on his lips, the hot coffee wet on his lips, his spoon, full of lemon dessert, waiting on the rim of his bowl—all these small things granting him the semblance of a man at ease with himself—and asked, “Well, did Torres flip out over Davy?”

      “You don’t know?” Van Grundy replied. “He told everybody as fast as if it were good news,” raising his voice above his children’s voices demanding the guest’s attention again. “Torres kept interrupting. Every damn piece Davy played, Torres didn’t like the way he played it. What’s the matter you haven’t heard? Something like that happens to a person he’s got to spread it around, along with his excuses, as fast as he can.”

      The coffee he sipped had no taste, the dessert no taste. “Is he going to Palermo anyway?”

      “Oh,” said Van Grundy, stretching back, finding his cigarettes in his shirt pocket, offering one to his wife by reaching around behind the guest’s chair, “he won’t go to Palermo now. He can if he wants to, he’s okayed as a pupil, but since Torres isn’t throwing down the red carpet for him he won’t go as less than a spectacular. You know David.”

      “Even if he doesn’t like old Tommy anymore he can learn a thing or two from him, if he went,” Berger said, sounding reasonable, sounding as if all his problems were solved by bringing reason to bear.

      “He’s already taken off for Mexico City. A week ago. He’s going to study under Salinas down there if he can get that cat to stay sober long enough. Say he’s always said that Salinas was better than Torres. He’s stopping off in Los Angeles to ask a rich uncle to subsidize him. He was going to do it anyway to get to Palermo on, so now he’ll need less and maybe get it easier. Hasn’t seen his uncle since he was twelve. Got a lot of nerve, our Davy.”

      “What did you think of that Rivas woman?” Van Grundy’s wife was asking, and he turned his face to hear, regretting, for a moment, that he heard her, usually, only with his ears and not his consciousness. He had known her for ten years now, she had been the vocalist with a combo he’d played string bass in and it was he who had introduced her to Van Grundy. A pretty woman with short, singed-blond hair and an affectation of toughness. “Rivas?” he asked.

      “Rivas, Maruja Rivas. The album we lent you. Last time you were here.” The smoke hissed out from between her lips, aimed into her empty coffee cup. “Don’t tell me she didn’t mean anything to you.”

      “Did you play the record?” Van Grundy asked.

      “I can’t remember borrowing it,” he said.

      THE LAST STUDENT was gone. He had come home from the Van Grundys’ to find the first student waiting on the apartment steps, and he had put aside the record on a pile of sheet music and there she had waited in the silence of the confident artist. He had noticed that proud patience of hers when, in the streetlight that shone into his car parked before the Van Grundys’ gate, he had looked for the album and found it on the floor, under the seat, where David had slipped it so he could sit down. After she had waited for so many days, she had waited again until the last student was gone, and when he picked up the album cover, the racy cover with orange letters on purple background and the woman in the simple black dress, there was that unsmiling serenity again.

      He turned his back to the record going around, half-sitting on the cabinet, chin dipping into his fingers, elbow propped in his stomach. He cautioned himself to listen with his own ear, not Van Grundy’s, but with the first emerging of the guitar from the orchestra, the first attack on the strings, he found himself deprived of caution. His head remained bowed through all the first movement, and at the start of the second he began to weep. The music was a gathering of all the desires of his life for all the beautiful things of the earth, the music was his own desire to possess that same fire, to play so well that all the doors of the world would spring open for him. Wiping his nose with his shirtsleeve, he sat down on the sofa.

      With the cover in his hands he watched her as she played, though he knew that the photo was taken while her hands were still, the left-hand fingers spread in a chord, he watched her, the pale face and arms against a Spanish wall of huge blocks of stone and a gate of wrought-iron whorls. Her hair was olive-black, smoothed back from the brow, the face delicately angular, the black eyebrows painted on, the nose short, straight, high-bridged, and the lips thin and soft and attuned to the fingers that plucked the strings. He knew the sensation in the lips, the mouth wanting to move over the music as if it were palpable. Concierto de Aranjuez, and the fine print on the back of the cover told him that Aranjuez had been the ancient residence of the Spanish kings. “I believed myself in some enchanted palace. The morning was fresh, birds singing on all sides, the water murmuring sweetly, the espaliers loaded with delectable fruit.” Why did they quote some Frenchwoman back in 1679? He knew the place without any help. The memory of another Aranjuez came to him, the party he’d played for last summer down the Peninsula, the sun hot on the pears and the plums even at six in the evening, and the shade waiting along with everything else for the cooling night. He had played all night under the paper lanterns of the brick patio, and tiny bells were tied to the trees and tinkled in the night’s warm winds, and, early in the morning when all the guests were gone, that party-thrower, that divorcée with a dress the color of her tan, had told him her checkbook was in her purse and her purse in her bedroom, and he had awakened at noon in a sweat from the heat of the day and the fiery closeness of her body. He had phoned her in the evening from the city, but she had spoken to him as to an entertainer who has already been paid and who says he hasn’t. Years ago it would have been a pleasure and a joke. He had known a lot of women briefly like that, but for some reason—what reason?—that time had hurt him. Was it because it had shown him the truth, that he was no more than an entertainer, not artist but entertainer, one for whom the door was closed after the woman had bathed away his odor and his touch. The music from the fingers of that woman on the album cover caused the ache of his mediocrity to flare up and then die down. For that Madrid woman went in everywhere and took him along. The great went in doorways hung across with blankets and they went in the gates of palaces, and everywhere they were welcomed like one of the family, and everywhere they took you along.

      The record went around all night, except for the hours he himself played, and he had more cups of coffee and, along about five o’clock, stale toast with stringy dark apricot jam which he did not taste as he ate and yet which tasted in his memory like a rare delight that he could, paradoxically, put together again easily. His shoes were off, he was more at home than he had ever been in his rented rooms anywhere, and the woman with him was like a woman he had met early in the evening and between himself and her everything had been understood at once. The disc went around until the room was lighted from outside and the globes drew back their light into themselves, and water began to run through the pipes of the house.

      He heated the last of the coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and pushed up the window, and through the clogged screen the foggy breath of morning swept in. What was morning like in Madrid? What was her room like, what was she like with her hair unbound, in what kind of bed did she sleep and in what gown?—this woman he had spent the night with.

      He tipped his chair back against the wall and the thought of David Hagemeister struck him like somebody’s atonal music. Now in the morning, whose silence was like the inner circle of the record, there returned to him the presence of David, but the discord was not a response anymore from his own being, the discord was in David himself.

      Davy’s СКАЧАТЬ