Body & Soul (30 page)

"Well, I'm going," the other girl said. "I'll watch the rest downstairs. It's just what I said, we should never have come up here in the first place."

"Okay." Mary was calm. "See you later."

They watched her step stiffly down the aisle, turn, and disappear.

"Miss goody-goody," Mary said. "Are you from Saint Ignatius?" She turned to look at him again.

"Yes," he lied.

"I thought so."

Moving his head forward slowly, he kissed her. Her mouth was warm, and soon he felt the quickness of her tongue, the touch of her hand on the back of his neck.

He had necked with girls in the movies before, long sessions of negotiated tenderness, gentle pressing, gentle demurral, but Mary was different. She was fierce, and he found himself ascending into fierceness himself, discovering at each level greater strength in her to accommodate the quickness of his passion. They bruised their mouths, they bit, they wrestled and pulled against each other in a frenzy of lust. Eventually his hand was in her slick vagina. They feasted for hours, until, both of them dizzy, she broke away, exhausted.

"Come with me," he said. "Come with me somewhere where we can—"

"No, no. I won't do that."

"We could go in one of the boxes."

"I won't do that," she said again. "I've got to go."

"My God, don't go. Okay, we'll stay here. Don't go."

She straightened her clothes and stood up.

"Wait," he cried. "When will I see you again? Where can we ..."

But she was off, moving fast over to the aisle, down the steps, and away.

A
S CLAUDE
came around the corner one spring afternoon his jacket slung over his shoulder, he was surprised to see Mr. Fredericks's Rolls-Royce parked in front of the music store. He quickened his step and ran across the avenue at an angle, giving a wave to the Negro chauffeur who sat behind the wheel. The little bell tinkled as Claude entered the shop, but neither Weisfeld nor Fredericks, deep in conversation by the cash register, looked up until he was almost upon them.

"Ah, here he is," said Fredericks, reaching out to touch Claude's cheek, making him blush.

"It's good to see you, sir."

"You see?" Weisfeld said from behind the counter. "Getting taller. Putting on some weight. Pretty soon shaving, Vitalis, the whole
mishegaas
"

" 'For never-resting time leads summer on to winter and confounds him there,' " Fredericks quoted.

"Gentlemen, you're embarrassing me," Claude said.

"All right, all right," Weisfeld said quickly. "Go on downstairs. Mr. Fredericks wants to talk to you."

"I'll be down in a moment," Fredericks said.

Claude descended, wondering what was up, what they could possibly be talking about that they didn't want him to hear. From the cigarette butts he had noticed in the ashtray—Fredericks's special
Turkish brand—he guessed they'd been at it for some time. He went to his workable and neatened up the surface, moving things back and forth until Fredericks came down.

"The famous Bechstein," he said, glancing around and then approaching the piano. "I played it many times in his living room." He sat sideways on the piano bench, facing Claude. "What are you working on at the moment?"

"I started
The Sunken Cathedral
last week, and I've been reading through Debussy. Also the Chopin B-flat Minor Sonata for a long time now."

"Good. Anything else?"

"Well," Claude said, shifting his position, "I've been trying to play some jazz. Improvising on chord patterns. There's a player named Art Tatum I like a lot."

"Yes, I know his playing," Fredericks said. "Rachmaninoff once said he wished he could play as well as Tatum."

"I've transcribed some of his runs for exercises."

Fredericks nodded, leaned forward, and clasped his hands between his knees. "I've been talking to Mr. Weisfeld about an idea I have." He paused for a moment. "You know, of all the music we worked on, you and I, the Mozart Double Piano Concerto seems to stand out most vividly in my memory."

"K. 365, in E-flat Major."

"Yes, I thought we went rather far with it in a fairly short time. Something very nice happened. What is your recollection?"

"Oh yes," Claude said, feeling a prickly kind of excitement, "it was wonderful. The way it would be so strong, and then suddenly it would be fun, and then into the minor. I loved it. I still play it. By myself, of course."

"Good. Now I should give you some background. A few friends of mine have a summer music festival up in Massachusetts. The idea is a student orchestra working with professional conductors, various instrumental workshops and classes, seminars on composition, orchestration, that sort of thing. All very informal. More or less continual performances of one sort or another going on right through the summer. You get the idea?"

"Yes, sir."

Fredericks raised his head a fraction and looked directly at Claude. "I've agreed to do a benefit for them in June. I thought we might do
the Mozart Double Concerto with the student orchestra." He held Claude's eye. "You and me, that is."

Claude became aware that his mouth was open. He closed it and swallowed. Fredericks was silent, waiting, but Claude could not speak. Fredericks's words were repeating and repeating inside the boy's head, so loud they drowned out thought. He swallowed again.

"What do you think?" Fredericks asked.

"I can do it," Claude blurted out. "Yes. Oh, sure, yes."

"I'm delighted." A faint smile. "It's settled, then. Now, as I said, it's all very informal, but we want to do the music justice."

Claude nodded.

"It would be nice to have more time," Fredericks continued, brushing a mote from his sleeve, "but we'll have to make do. We'll be using the Breitkopf and Härtel edition, and I suggest you take a very close look at the orchestral music with Mr. Weisfeld. We didn't do much of that before, and it's important. Study it."

"Yes, sir."

"I can manage four piano sessions with you. I'll let you know the dates. The first will be devoted to the twenty-two bars after the entrance. Now, I know you'll probably be playing the whole thing night and day, but remember, first we'll be digging into those twenty-two bars. We'll get them right, and the rest will follow."

"I understand."

"Excellent." Fredericks stood up. Claude jumped from his chair and they shook hands. "I'm looking forward to this," Fredericks said. "It's such an elegant piece."

They went upstairs to find Weisfeld in the front, staring out the window. "It's a lovely day out there today," he said, as if, for some reason, surprised.

"All is arranged." Fredericks opened the door and the bell tinkled. He looked up at it. "E-flat! How appropriate!"

From inside they watched him enter the Rolls, which pulled away from the curb like a great black ship gleaming in the sun.

"Well," Weisfeld said as they stood shoulder to shoulder, "this is quite a development."

"I can do it. I can do it."

"Of course you can. He knows you can, or he wouldn't have suggested it."

"With an
orchestra,
" Claude whispered.

"With Fredericks!" Weisfeld reminded him. "Maybe the best Mozart player alive."

"I can't believe it," Claude said. "I mean, just like that? Just..." His voice trailed off.

"It's the way things happen sometimes."

For several minutes they stood in silence, watching the street. Claude felt a brief electric shiver over his whole body, the hair on his arms standing erect. "Oh, my God," Claude said suddenly, panicked.

"What?"

"I forgot to ask him what part I'm going to play, one or two."

"We discussed it," Weisfeld said. "The second part. The lower one."

Claude blew up his cheeks and released the air. "Okay. Okay, good."

"It's the part Mozart played," Weisfeld said.

It took a day for everything to sink in, and the next night Claude and Weisfeld talked it over after the shop closed. There was the Mozart, and the need to drop everything else to work on it—the orchestral score, the structure of the concerto itself, analysis of both piano parts, and the time-consuming work of getting the music into his hands, getting it physically memorized so as to be ready for the subtle business of interpretation during his sessions with Fredericks. But there was also school, and the end of the school year approaching with a full load of exams, papers, and the like. Claude was an A student with the odd B now and then, and Weisfeld was insistent that the boy do nothing to erode his progress He pointed out that college was almost upon them and that the boy would need both high grades
and
the piano to get the full-tuition scholarship to a first-rate institution "I know it probably doesn't feel like it," Weisfeld had said, " but this is really more important than the concert There will be other concerts " Secretly Claude was relieved to hear him say this not because he agreed about college necessarily but because it took some pressure off in terms of the Mozart. Weisfeld would be satisfied if Claude got through it decently as long as he also did well in school.

With pencil, paper, and ruler they drew up Claude's present daily and weekly schedule—a fairly elaborate document as it stood—and moved around various blocks of time, amending the kind of work to be done within them. As the plan emerged Claude wanted to add an extra hour, early in the morning, at the Bechstein. Weisfeld was skeptical, worried about the possible effects of less sleep, but reluctantly
agreed to a trial period, reserving the right to put an end to it if he thought it was affecting the boy's strength. They drew up two copies of the schedule and Claude went home.

For some time now, after having changed the alarm clock on the floor by his cot from five-thirty to four-thirty
A.M.,
Claude found himself waking spontaneously at exactly one minute before the alarm would have gone off. He rolled over, reached down, and pressed the button by feel. Then he switched on the light by reaching high for the wall switch.

Moving silently, he got dressed, turned out the light, opened the door carefully, and went to the kitchenette. He fixed himself some cornflakes and sat down to eat in the dark. He watched the fan-shaped window beyond which, as he finished, dawn began to break. He put down his spoon and sat motionless, his mind empty as the gray light filtered into the room.

Then he heard a faint click, instantly recognizable as the knob mechanism on the door to his mother's room, out of sight around the corner. After a moment a figure appeared, fully dressed, tiptoeing to the front door, cap in hand. It was Al.

Claude stopped breathing. If he could have willed his heart to stop beating he would have done so, so eager was he for Al to get out the door without noticing him. But as if by sixth sense Al turned his head, saw Claude, and froze.

Neither one of them moved. It was an eerie moment, as if a movie had gotten stuck on a single frame, arresting the illusion of life. Then Al looked down at the floor, gave a little sigh, and came over to the counter. He put his cap down and sat on a stool. He raised a finger to his lips, with a tilt of his head to indicate Emma's room.

"Morning," he said very softly.

"Morning," Claude said, no louder.

"Well, I told her, I said, 'If he don't know already, we ought to tell him.' But she can't make up her mind." He drummed his fingers on the counter. "It don't matter now." He watched Claude's eyes.

The boy knew that something was expected of him, but he felt unsure of himself, plunged headlong into these adult matters. He found himself actually thinking about what he should say. What was being asked of him?

"I have to get up at four-thirty now," he said. "It gives me another hour for the Mozart."

"All right," Al said.

"I mean that's how come—"

"Claude," Al said, "you know I care about her a lot. A whole lot. Do you know that?"

Claude nodded.

"She's a good woman." He continued to speak in a murmur. "She been lonely."

"She had to stop those discussion groups," Claude said. "That man Eisler warned her, and I guess he was right, because then there was all that trouble. Then she started getting crazy."

"She told me."

"She didn't do anything except drive him around. She wasn't in any Communist conspiracy. The whole thing was ridiculous."

"I know that." He leaned forward. "She was just lonely. Uptown, a person would probably go to church, get some strength from the brothers and sisters, but this ain't uptown, and she ain't no sister."

"I think she's been a lot better since she met you," Claude said.

"I hope so. I believe she is." Al paused. "We've been talking. You understand, we've been talking to each other from our hearts."

Suddenly, for no reason that he could understand, Claude felt a wave of sadness, an utterly abstract, pure, and elemental sadness, washing over him. At the same time he felt a distinct but mysterious sense of relief, as if some hitherto unsuspected weight had been lifted from him, announcing its presence only by its disappearance. For an instant he was totally confused, but then he regained control of himself. "Good. That's good," he said.

Al watched him for a long moment and then nodded his head. "The thing is, we have to be careful. People don't like mixing."

"I understand."

"It could look like we're sneaky, but we ain't. It's just we have to be careful."

"I won't say anything."

"No, no." His voice rose slightly. "I don't mean you. You tell anybody you want. It might even be good you tell somebody—long as you trust them. I mean the neighbors, the landlord, the Hack Bureau, like that. That's all I mean."

"Okay."

They sat in the gray light as if waiting for something, in tacit agreement that more words were necessary and yet the words weren't coming. After a long time Claude got up.

"I have to go," he whispered.

A frown appeared on Al's narrow brow, but then it went away. "Yeah. Time to work. See you later."

Claude walked the quiet streets to the music store. The stillness reassured him, and the rhythm of his stride, by its very familiarity, seemed to suggest that it was okay for the time being to put Al and his mother out of his mind. He fingered the key in his pocket, eager to get into the store, down to the neatness and clarity of the studio where the Bechstein waited with timeless, infinite patience.