When I turned eleven, my major goal was to grow bigger breasts than Pauline Sabatino. At that point, I could still ignore my need for music, and what was definitely not on my list was the notion of performing in Carnegie Hall with the great David Montagnier in front of 2,802 people, not counting standing room. If you had told me it was going to happen, I would have said you had your head stuck someplace where the sun didn’t shine and we all would have had a good laugh, except for Pauline, who didn’t know what Carnegie Hall was. Anyhow, the media is always wanting to know how I got from a crummy neighborhood in Nassau County, Long Island, to a world-famous two-piano partnership. Being Bess “the Mouth” Stallone (no relation), I used to hand out the old flip response: “Practice.” But given the way my life has turned out, I decided it’s time to try to make some sense out of it all.
First thing, I never thought of myself as some kind of girl wonder, unless you count a genius for dreaming up creative excuses for why my report card didn’t show up in my parents’ mail, or how come the family laundry—my responsibility along with the rest of the housework—had blue stains all over it. But there was always this thing inside me that made me different. When I was little, I thought everybody had it, but once I figured out it had to do with the piano, I knew I was really on my own. I mean, there was nobody else in Rocky Beach who flipped out over Mozart, or if they did, they sure as hell kept it a deep dark secret. I know it’s supposed to be impossible to run at something just as fast as you’re running away from it, but that’s the way it was for me with music.
My earliest memories are of sound: my mother’s voice singing “Bela Bambina” in the darkness as I fell asleep; the opera of dogs yapping to each other on the street outside my window; sirens, car alarms, and always, always music. I can give you the theme song of every TV show all the way back to 1968, when I was two years old. My visual impressions of childhood are pretty hazy, but the sounds stuck with me.
Then in sixth grade there was a recital at school. Mostly, it was selections by the band, which sounded pretty much like a bunch of elephants with intestinal distress. Ray Zilenski kept pulling my hair from the seat behind me and Pauline was crying because she got gum stuck on her new blouse. I was cranky from the pain in my ears. But then the band clattered off and Amanda Jones sat down at the piano and began to play “The Happy Farmer,” by Robert Schumann. Talk about being bonked over the head. Nobody was paying attention except for Amanda’s parents and me but I’ll never forget that first clumsy little classical ditty. I hung around after everybody left the auditorium and went to the piano. It was a beat-up old baby grand with dirty yellow keys but to me it seemed like a holy relic. I started fooling around until I’d figured out more or less how the keyboard was organized and then I worked out the tune I’d heard Amanda play. Bess Stallone Meets the Piano—it was like being born.
My parents didn’t quite see it that way. When I pleaded for lessons, my father said, “Sure, Liberace. I’ll just hand you the mortgage money and you can serenade us when we’re living out on the street.” Nobody in my family knows from a simple yes or no answer. There always has to be drama.
I kept my mouth shut, but all the time I was scheming. I’d saved over fifty dollars from doing chores in the neighborhood, which I figured was good for a couple of lessons, and a few times a week I snuck into the music room at school and tried to reproduce stuff I heard on the classical radio station. I was eleven years old when Mrs. Fasio caught me trying to work out Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, which I liked even more than Wild Cherry’s number one tune, “Play That Funky Music.” Mrs. Fasio was the chorus teacher who also gave piano lessons. The kids called her Olive Oyl behind her back on account of her having popped-out eyes and being so skinny.
“Who are you?” she asked me as I was trying to make a run for the door. She was quick, and grabbed hold of my elbow before I could squirm away. I remember noticing that her panty hose hung off her ankles, she was that thin.
I slumped back down on the bench, knowing I was in deep shit—(a) because I had given the gym teacher a phony excuse about being sick so I could practice the piano, and (b) I’d figured out how to pick the lock Mrs. Fasio attached to a clamp on the piano lid.
“Your name,” she said.
“Bess Stallone.”
“How old are you?”
It’s funny how I remember every detail of that first meeting. It’s like when I first met David. Even at the time, I must have sensed how important it was. Anyway, I told her I was eleven.
“Good.” Mrs. Fasio sat down beside me. “Then maybe it’s not too late.”
I had my first lesson right there in the music room that had the sharp metallic smell of spit from the brass instruments. We didn’t hear the bell that signaled the end of gym class and the next thing I knew the assistant principal was banging on the door. The way he looked at Mrs. Fasio, I was scared she’d get fired.
“I’m not going to gym anymore,” I told him. “I’m doing this instead.” Not the most sensible remark I could have made to a guy who thought sports was what God did on his day off, and it didn’t sit well, especially when Mrs. Fasio backed me up. The guy was on my butt for months after that, sending demerit slips home to my parents and docking my privileges. Funny thing, he showed up backstage at Lincoln Center years later and asked me and David to sign his program. I was thinking, okay, Bess, here’s your chance: Dear Asshole, If I’d listened to you, I’d still be bagging groceries in Rocky Beach. But I took the high road and even though I spelled his name wrong on purpose, I scribbled Best regards.
I finally got my parents to pay for lessons by agreeing to baby-sit my sister every Saturday night. Mrs. Fasio found me an old junker upright piano. It lost a few of its keys right away when my cousins fell through the top screwing around but I was crazy about it and called it Amadoofus. Nobody wanted to listen to scales and when I played Chopin, my father would start yelling, “What the fuck is this, a fucking funeral? Can’t you play something with a fucking beat?” I loved the guys at the firehouse where he worked, but the vocabulary was kind of limited. Anyhow, Dad finally took an axe to Amadoofus, but I don’t want to talk about that.
So Mrs. Fasio taught me some pieces that I was supposed to play at her semiannual recital. That’s when I learned about fear. One time when I was little, my cousin dangled me by the ankles over the side of a bridge. I thought that was pretty scary at the time, but it couldn’t compare to the way I felt about Mrs. Fasio’s recital. I phoned her the night before, pretending I was my mother with some bullshit story about how Bess couldn’t attend the recital because she’d come down with pernicious anemia, a disease Pauline found in the encyclopedia. Naturally Mrs. Fasio double-checked, so not only did I have to show up for the recital but I caught hell from my mother for lying. Since I was slated for last, I had to sit there sweating through my party dress and tasting Fruit Loops from breakfast in the back of my throat while everybody else waltzed up and did their thing without so much as a twitch. Anyhow, time marched on and it was my turn. When I sat down on the bench, my right knee started bouncing and my fingers were slimy and cold. All I can remember thinking was Oh, God, somebody kill me kill me kill me. I must have stumbled through my Mozart Sonata because I somehow arrived at the last chord, but when I stood up, everything went black. Well, no, not black, everything but black. Every color exploding at once in front of my eyes. I passed out and broke my nose on the keyboard.
After that experience, it didn’t matter if there were ten or ten thousand in the audience, I was scared shitless, and that is a reasonably accurate term, I can tell you. I didn’t realize it then, of course, but right there in Mrs. Fasio’s living room I had taken the first step on my journey to David Montagnier.
So after that I became a teenager with this totally weird need to be listening to the local classical music station twenty-four hours a day. There was only one person in the world who didn’t seem to think I was nuts and that was Mrs. Fasio, which was pretty scary in itself. If I followed her lead, I figured I’d wind up a lonely old maid who was half-fermented from the buckets of bourbon she started guzzling about four o’clock every afternoon.
I suppose most adolescents feel alone, like nobody understands their own special problems. On the one hand, I was ashamed of my obsession and felt like there was something seriously wrong with me and I should just study computer technology like my father said. On the other, there was a tiny kernel of conviction way down deep that God had slipped a special gift into my packaging and I’d damn well better honor it. Talk about confused. I tried distracting myself with things like sex and drinking, but the bottom line was I still couldn’t stay away from the keyboard. It’s like the piano was a person to me. The way Pauline was hung up on Billy Joel, our Long Island piano man, I was mooning over a photo of Vladimir Horowitz that I kept hidden under the junk beside my bed. I’d get it out just before I turned out my light and stare at it despite the fact that even in the picture he was probably at least a hundred years old, listening in my head to the passionate pyrotechnics of his recordings. For me, Horowitz’s rendition of a Scriabin Étude inspired the same intense “if only” mix of longing and joy that “Just the Way You Are” produced in Pauline. I don’t know if anybody’s ever done the research, but it seems to me that music and love occupy the same hunk of real estate in the brain. It’s all hooked up, at least for women. So imagine what happened to my head when music and love collided: David Montagnier, Mr. Cosmic Fusion.
I know that’s what everybody is really interested in, me and David. We’re getting there, but it won’t make any sense if I start with that summer day in 1994 when we finally met. I must explain that Mrs. Fasio got me to the Juilliard School through her connections. (Her father was the famous violinist Max Pantani, and how Mrs. Fasio wound up in a dumpy little town like Rocky Beach is another story and has to do with a man. Don’t they all?)
So at Juilliard, I was completely out of my league socially and intellectually. I wore tight clothes and my hair was so big that other students would compete to sit behind me so they could sleep through class. Except for the secret vice of classical music, my idea of culture was Rambo: First Blood. What did I have in common with these smart-ass Manhattan kids and foreign students who were mostly Korean? The only other Italian student came from Milan, for Christ’s sake. Anyhow, the fact that I made it there was a major miracle, which is why I’m still always chasing off to the boonies to listen to some third-grader with talent.
I commuted into the city for classes and music lessons with the legendary Harold Stein. He scared the crap out of me, with a voice that thundered when he didn’t think I was trying hard enough and beady eyes that glared out from under a thicket of eyebrows. I knew I was way behind the others, who’d been studying nonstop since they were seven years old. But Professor Stein kept telling me that if I worked my butt off, I could catch up. He also gave me pep talks about living up to my heritage. At that point, I was still under the impression that Italians didn’t have much of a musical culture unless you counted my uncle’s old Perry Como recordings. Professor Stein understood that introducing me to compositions by Scarlatti would be inspiring for me. It would never have happened except for the professor, but two years after graduating from the conservatory, I was on a par with some of the top students. The only problem was, if I was going to be such a hotshot pianist, I was expected to perform. And I wanted to, desperately.
I don’t know what it is, exactly, that need to share your music. I mean, what the hell, if you love it so much, why shouldn’t it be enough to just sit alone in your apartment and make pretty sounds for the dust balls under the sofa? But it isn’t. Keeping your music private is like having your mouth taped shut, which I must say is a frustrating prospect for somebody like me. On the other hand, all those years later I could still resurrect the sour taste of fear just by thinking about Mrs. Fasio’s ivory keyboard, the one that broke my nose.
Jake Minello, who for most of my life shared billing with Pauline as my best friend, could never understand why I’d get so scared. “You’re not going to die out there, Bess,” he used to tell me. “The worst that can happen is you make an ass out of yourself in front of a couple thousand people. It’s not fun but it’s also not a plane crash.” I know it’s hard to believe, but facing a performance made me long for death. I would hope for any kind of disaster that would prevent my going out onstage. I’m ashamed to say that one time my mother was hospitalized just before I was supposed to perform a concert at the Church of the Heavenly Rest and they had to find a replacement for me. I was ecstatic. Now how sick is that? But ask anybody who’s got a bad case of stage fright and they’ll tell you the same thing.
Suffice it to say, I built up quite a rep at Juilliard. If I was listed in the program, they had to keep a bucket in the wings because I was definitely going to need it. Twice, I just sat there with my hands stuck over the keyboard like they had rigor mortis. I never played a note. Professor Stein tried everything. First, he sent me to a shrink who told me I’d been so freaked out by my father that it was a bloody miracle I could play at all. I went on beta blockers but first of all my betas refused to be blocked, and second, I had some unusual reaction that made me itch so much I couldn’t stop scratching long enough to perform. Drinking relaxed me a little but then I couldn’t remember the notes. Professor Stein kept telling me not to give up, that every pianist suffered from this problem and it was the ones who conquered their fear who succeeded. He said he was sure I would be one of those, but once I graduated, I could see that even he was beginning to feel defeated. It was looking like it was time to give up my dump of an apartment and my three jobs, and get myself a gig at the supermarket back in Rocky Beach.
I knew about David Montagnier, of course. Everybody did. He was part of that small group of respected artists who somehow managed to cross over into popular culture, like Pavarotti or Isaac Stern or Baryshnikov. It didn’t hurt that he was beautiful, with his shiny black hair, brown eyes, and a smile that was half sexual promise, half little boy. People magazine loved him. By the time I graduated from Juilliard, everybody knew that David and his longtime two-piano partner, Terese Dumont, had split up due to some unspecified illness of hers. The last I’d heard, he was pursuing a solo career.
I started running into him around Juilliard, where I was continuing my lessons with faithful frustrated Harold Stein. Once, I was waiting for the bus on Broadway and he got into a cab right in front of me. I recognized him instantly, of course—who wouldn’t? Twice, I came out of a practice room and he was walking past. Finally, I was hurrying to my waitress job and I literally slid around a corner and into his arms. Now, I’d spent years listening to recordings by Montagnier and Dumont (music students called them the Twin Peaks) and I had a lot of respect for them. Furthermore, I will never ever forget the wattage of that first smile David flashed at me. So that’s my defense.
“Shit! Oh my God, I almost killed you!” Pathetic, I realize, but at least I didn’t say Fuck me! which tended to slip out when I was flustered. (I was no stranger to my father’s firehouse.) “Bess Stallone, no relation,” I said, and held out my hand.
“Yes, I know,” he said, wrapping long, muscular fingers around mine.
“Shut up!” I said. David Montagnier knew my name! Jesus! He had a fabulous accent, sort of nonspecific European. He could make the menu from Schmuel’s Kosher Deli sound romantic. I know, because one time I made him read it to me just to test it out. Salami, pastrami, gefilte fish, and flanken. It was like a Puccini libretto.
“Are you hurt?” David asked.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just abashed.” I felt quite pleased with myself over that one. “Abashed” happened to be my vocabulary word of the day—my effort at self-improvement—and it wasn’t often I got to use the selection du jour to such terrific effect.
Meanwhile, David still had me by the elbow, and even though I was blushing to my roots, I was self-possessed enough to be pleased that a student from my old Music Theory class had spotted us and almost went into cardiac arrest from envy.
“The Ruggiero’s coming along well,” he said. David smiled again—whoa, fetch me my shades. “I heard you practicing,” he explained. “Would you possibly have time for a cup of tea and some pointers?”
What if I’d said no? Not that it ever would have happened. But here it was, the major crossroads of my life.
“Sure,” I said. Sure I can not show up for my shift waiting tables at O’Neals. A lifetime of food stamps was a small price to pay for half an hour with those eyeballs.
We went to a café on West 68th. I was annoyed that it was off the main drag where we couldn’t be seen by the entire Lincoln Center community. David ordered us herbal tea, which I hate.
“I approve of what you’re doing with the phrasing in the Ruggiero,” he said. “You know, Bess, your playing makes me think of diamonds.”
I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I was flattered that he’d been eavesdropping, but I was also wary. How long had he been listening to me, anyway? The tea came. I started to reach for the sugar bowl, but David covered my hand. “It’s so bad for you. If you must use sweetener, I’ll ask for honey.”
“Healthy food gives me hives,” I explained. But I put my spoon down and sipped at my tea. It wasn’t so bad. I was thinking back to that diamond remark. I felt as if, from under my mother’s hand-me-down turtleneck sweater, I was glittering like jewels in a Tiffany’s window. “About the Ruggiero…” I said, not wanting to lose my chance at words of wisdom from the Man Himself. Besides, the composer was so contemporary and weird that there was hardly anybody around who knew how to play her stuff.
He leaned forward across the table, took my hands in his, and started examining my fingers. “Yes, excellent,” he said. “Beautiful.”
I wanted to close my eyes so I could concentrate on the sensations he was producing in my body. Maybe as a pianist I had extrasensitive hands, but I suspect that even somebody with heavy-duty calluses would get a buzz from that kind of exploration. I recommend it in the foreplay department. In fact, the impact of David’s total physical presence was something you couldn’t begin to imagine from the photographs in a magazine. His thick dark hair had just the right amount of wave at the ends, with maybe six threads of gray, a harbinger (vocab word from two weeks ago, thank you very much) of the distinguished way he would age. When he looked up from the table, those brown eyes fastened on you and didn’t let you go.
“In the second movement,” David said, “the left hand should dominate. It must be ferocious, not wempy.”
I smiled. “Wimpy?”
“Yes. And don’t allow the tempo to accelerate so precipitously. It must be like a clever thief escaping from the house he has just robbed. First creeping away, stealthily, then picking up the pace until he is running headlong into the darkness. It must have drama.”
Suddenly the section made sense. I felt my fingers twitch with eagerness to try it out.
“You need more time with Chopin,” he went on. “Especially the Etudes.”
“I did those when I was a kid,” I protested, and felt myself getting red in the face. Any idiot knows you can always learn something from good music.
“Not properly, I would guess,” he said. “The Professor fully agrees with me. You play magnificently, Bess, but there is an emotional restlessness in your work. Chopin will help you with that.”
“You’ve talked about me with Professor Stein?” I was beginning to get pissed.
He gave me a smile and a charming shrug, which I tried to ignore. “Lookit, Mr. Montagnier, you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Please, it’s David. I wonder if you’d ever consider experimenting with the two-piano repertoire?”
“I guess it never occurred to me.” Hard enough to find one piano in my old neighborhood, let alone two. I had just noticed that practically everyone who came into the café stopped to stare at us. It made me feel like I was in a play. It couldn’t possibly be real life.
“I’ve never even done duets,” I admitted.
“I think you might enjoy it. Could I convince you to take a look at the Scaramouche by Milhaud? It’s lively and fun and I think you could play the daylight out of it.”
So what was I supposed to say? Correct him on “daylights” and tell him I had better things to do right now, like giving up my career? I’d actually been scanning the want ads over breakfast. “Sure. I’ll get a copy from Patelson’s,” I said.
“I took the liberty of giving one to the Professor.”
There were a couple of things I liked. One was that he offered me a sheepish grin when he said this, which acknowledged how pushy he was, and second, he called my teacher “the Professor” instead of “Harold,” which I thought was respectful. I recently overheard another female student complain that Professor Stein was getting too old to teach and she was lucky to escape with her life.
Montagnier waved at the waiter. “I wish I didn’t have to rush off, but I have a rehearsal in a few minutes.”
I happened to know that he was due to perform at Lincoln Center that night with the Oxford Harmonia Chamber Orchestra. I had cheap seats up in the nosebleed section so I could catch an hour of bliss in between jobs.
“So what happens next?” I asked as he paid the bill.
“Here’s my number.” He scribbled it on a napkin. “Call me after you’ve had a chance to work on the Milhaud.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “A pleasure to meet you, Bess Stallone-no-relation.” Then he hurried out and left me sitting there panting. A couple of groupies were standing by the cash register and when they turned to gape at me enviously, I made an attempt to look casual, like David Montagnier and I were in the habit of hanging out.
At the concert that night, I tried to concentrate on the music, but don’t ask me what they played because I kept drifting into the most ludicrous fantasies about David and me. I was going to knock him on his ass with my fabulous rendition of Part Primo of the Milhaud and then he’d take me on as the replacement for Terese Dumont, and I’d be so much better than she ever thought of being. The two-piano scene would be in demand in the U.S. like it had always been in Europe, and of course, David would fall madly in love with me and we’d get married and have half a dozen kids. We’d go on the circuit like the von Trapp family, with each kid playing a different instrument, and every day right after lunch David and I would go straight to bed. Oh, I was on some trip.
Naturally, instead of waiting for my lesson with Professor Stein, I boogied down to Patelson’s and blew $25.50 on a copy of the Scaramouche. I started practicing the Milhaud to the exclusion of everything else, all hours of the night and day. It wasn’t that it was a difficult piece, which it’s not. But I’d bought a recording—by the Twin Peaks, as it happened—and copying Terese down to the quarter rests was the real challenge.
The Professor canceled my lesson that week due to bronchitis. It always scared me when he got sick because he seemed so ancient. I took him hot soup every day after work and made sure he was swallowing his antibiotics and not sticking them in the flowerpot under the cactus plant. I didn’t mention Montagnier. By the time I got to my next lesson, I’d learned the Scaramouche by heart.
“You don’t look so perky,” I said to the Professor when I showed up for my lesson. His big nose was a deeper shade of blue than usual and everything was drooping. Even his tangled eyebrows looked like weeds that hadn’t seen rain for much too long.
He gestured from his perch beside the piano. “Come in, Bess, come in,” he said with that staccato way he had of speaking when he was impatient. “I have no time to be sick.”
“I brought you some medicine,” I said, displaying a tiny shopping bag. I’d hesitated outside the Belgian chocolate shop, realizing it was going to cost me the price of five loads of laundry. But it was worth it to see his face light up.
Making it across the Professor’s living room was like threading your way through the narrow aisles of a Manhattan supermarket. There were waist-high stacks of music, and nestled in the curve of the Steinway stood a cello case. Its womanly shape was a comforting memory of his wife, dead eleven years. Besides for music and his wife, the Professor’s other passion was poker. He had a regular weekly game with a bunch of nonmusician cronies from Brooklyn. On the wall along with the photographs of him with Bernstein, Copland, and Horowitz was a framed poker hand he drew at his game on March 11, 1957: the ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of hearts, each one autographed by the other players who were there. Sometimes, when my lesson wasn’t going so hot, I would catch him staring dreamily at that spot on the wall and I knew he was reliving the great moment.
“Did you take your Zithromax this morning?” I asked him, handing him the chocolates.
“YesyesYES,” he said, waving an arm impatiently and giving me a damp cough just to let me know what he thought of pills. “Don’t hover, Bess. You know I hate that.”
I sat down on the piano bench and started running through some scales. I could see David Montagnier’s music beside the Professor and waited to see if he’d raise the issue. I knew we were kind of teasing one another. After he’d made serious inroads on the chocolates and I’d played a couple of measures of the Prokofiev B-flat Major Sonata, I caved.
“I’ve been working on something else the past few days,” I said. “Tell me what you think.” And I proceeded to whip through the Primo part of the Milhaud for him, by memory. It freaked me out a little to play for the Professor because it felt like a performance, but I finished without too many screwups. He gave me a sly little smile. Sometimes he could look awfully young and sassy for an old geezer.
“I believe you’ve been conferring with a Monsieur Montagnier,” the Professor said.
“You want to tell me what you boys have in mind?”
“He approves of the way you play.”
“He’s been spying on me, right?
“Eavesdropping.”
“Why?”
“Terese is retired. David needs a new partner.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” My heart started thumping like a crazy bastard.
“I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up, Bess. He’s been listening to a number of people, some of whom have a great deal of concert experience.” He lit a cigar and coughed.
“Does he know I can’t appear on a stage unless I’m in a coma?”
“You know you only reinforce your fears with that kind of talk. And yes, he’s aware of your problem. He’s struggled with it himself.”
“Bullshit.”
The Professor popped a truffle into his mouth. He closed his eyes in ecstasy for a second. Then he shot me a guilty look from under the bushy brows and held out the almost empty box. “You can’t afford these,” he said, “so you’d better at least have one.”
“Nah, ruin the figure,” I said. “But you lay off that cigar. It’s not healthy.”
He glared at me. “On the contrary, it’ll cure my bronchitis. And don’t you tell me bullshit. David Montagnier has a right to his fears just like any mortal. But I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. David and I merely discussed your playing through the Milhaud together. What did you think of him?”
“He’s not bad-looking at all.”
The Professor gave me a little tap on the top of the head. “Phone him. You’re ready.” He saw me turn the greenish shade of the couch. “It’s not a performance, Bess.”
“Yuh.” I started fiddling with a corkscrew of hair. Each strand is like that ribbon you curl with the flat edge of a pair of scissors. When I start yanking on it, you can be sure I’m on my way to panic meltdown.
I went home and phoned David Montagnier. His voice sounded so neutral that I thought he was the machine and I began leaving a complicated message. I got as far as my phone number when I heard him chuckle.
“How’s tomorrow?” he asked.
“Absolutely dandy,” I said. I wondered if he had a bucket in his broom closet, just in case.
He lived in a landmark building across the street from Carnegie Hall, with a fancy gold lobby that made you feel like genuflecting. I rode up in the elevator reciting my mantra: Be still my heart—left over from another failed experiment to tame my phobia.
He stood in the doorway with his hair all rumpled, wearing a pair of white jeans and a T-shirt. He had a mug of coffee in one hand, and his feet were bare. Damn, how rare are nice-looking male toes, I’d like to know? He ran a hand through his hair and yawned. “I’m so sorry, Bess. I didn’t get to bed until four.”
“I can come back another time,” I said, and felt the color rising into my cheeks just from hearing him say my name with that accent of his. Uh oh, I thought. The last time I felt this way, I wound up in a bed I had no business jumping into.
“No, no, it’s fine,” he said. “Let me get you some coffee.”
I shook my head. Any more stimulation of my nervous system and my EKG would sound like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee. He drew me over to his pianos, two concert Steinways side by side in front of a million-dollar view of Central Park. “Jesus F. Christ,” I breathed.
“The sad thing is, I hardly ever look out of the window.”
“How come the pianos aren’t facing each other?” I’d only seen two-piano pairs perform that way.
“There’s a choreography to it, Bess, like ballet. You want to rehearse so you can see one another’s arms and hands, so that your gestures will be similar in performance when the pianos are separated.” He sat me down, went to the other piano, and began running through some warm-ups. “C-sharp,” he said. “Come on, I’ll race you.”
I was still holding my music, which had a damp dent in it from my grip. I set it down, stretched my fingers, and dove in. It was a responsive keyboard with the athletic action I like. We played around like that for ten minutes with David switching from one exercise to the next and me scrambling to keep up. It was fun and loosened me up a little.
“All right,” David said. “Ready for the Scaramouche?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” I lied.
He came over and put a large sheet of music on the piano. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Your copy of the Milhaud. I always reduce the pages and glue them together.”
Duo-pianists don’t ordinarily memorize their music, but this was new to me. “You don’t use page-turners?”
“Never. They belong in hell with the music critics. They turn too early or too late, they have terrible breath, they moan in your ear. Either we learn by memory or we fix the pages so we can manage ourselves. You set the tempo.”
Instead of trusting my memory, I struggled with the unfamiliar score.
“That’s fine,” David said. “Don’t worry about mistakes. I don’t care about that.”
And then we played. I was hesitant at first, afraid that I was dragging him down.
“Again, Bess,” he said. “You’re doing well. Stop worrying about your fingers and listen to the music.”
The second time through, I started paying attention to our exchange. Then, finally, on the third try, it all came together. The music soared between us, our fingers asking and answering questions in a nearly flawless, intimate conversation.
We stared at each other for a moment, acknowledging that something amazing had just happened. “Again?” he asked.
I nodded.
We played the Scaramouche twice more, each time becoming more like one voice. Then David asked if I would like to read through some other more substantial things. We must have worked for more than two hours, mainly on Beethoven, which isn’t so difficult to sight-read.
“You must be tired,” David said finally. “We’d better stop.”
“I’m fine,” I assured him, although I could feel my spine fusing into a painful column under my sweater. The thing was, I couldn’t stand for it to end.
“Haven’t you had enough?” David asked.
I shook my head, and to my amazement, felt tears starting. I looked out the window to hide my face. The next thing I knew, David was standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders.
“You’re crying,” he said. “Why?”
I shook my head. The word “rapture” was on my self-improvement vocabulary list. I had learned what it was supposed to mean, lying there flat on the same page as “rapacious” and “rapid transit.” But I had never imagined that I’d experience it. As if I was about to die, the history of my life spooled out against the tear-blurred landscape of Central Park. All those childhood nights with my ear stuck to the radio by my pillow, clinging desperately to some dream I couldn’t even begin to describe. Furtive hours with Amadoofus, alternating Bach with Billy Joel so I wouldn’t irritate my father and risk losing my piano lessons. The lonely, exhausting, thrilling years at Juilliard. It all seemed to lead to this sun-drenched room and this man whose music was like an embrace. I was crying with joy and with the fear that this was the first and last time I would ever feel this way.
I wiped my eyes and stood up, hoping to get out of there before I made even more of an ass of myself.
“Will you come again?” David asked.
I liked that he didn’t press me to explain my overwrought state. “Of course,” I answered. “I’ll come.”
He walked me to the elevator. My legs were wobbly stems that barely held me up.
“I think I’d better put you in a taxi,” David said.
“No. No. I’m fine.” I needed to walk, to breathe cool air, to remember everything, every note, every chord.
“I have to be in Paris for a few days,” he said. “I’ll phone you when I get back.”
He leaned down to give me a kiss on the cheek. He had a clean smell, like laundry drying in the sun. Then I took the elevator and headed for the park. As I walked north, I had the sensation that I was shedding, that there was trash trailing in my wake: dry husks of fear, anger, loneliness—there they go, litter in the breeze, twisting higher and higher above the city trees to blow out to sea and vanish.
The sensation of nakedness made me tremble even more, so I sat down on a bench by the pond and watched a little boy feed the ducks. He kept shouting to his nanny in French. David might have looked like that once upon a time, the dark swatch of hair and tanned skin. The trembling didn’t stop. As I gazed around me, it seemed that it wasn’t just me. The entire world was vibrating, the leaves, the clouds in the sky, everything was humming. The words of the song were simple enough. They merely confirmed what I’d known for a while.
“Bess is in love,” they said. “Bess is in love.”
And that’s how it all began.