Stolen Pleasures. Gina Berriault
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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 him and prove to everybody, once and for all, Berger’s genius. After every lesson his armpits were sticky and he would have trouble in civilly 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.
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