Authors: Frank Conroy
"Yes. And I already know something about your hands."
"Then there's control," he went on, not picking up on her remark as he warmed to his subject. "
That
you have to work for, and it can take a long time. Dynamics, for instance. That's loud and soft. Take a single note and play it, then play it ever so slightly softer, then take it down by precisely the same increments all the way to silence."
"Can you do that?"
"Oh, yes. That stuff is basic. You play legato, staccato, and all of that and a lot more has to do with touch, with your ability to control the interaction of your body with the instrument. Your hands and the keys. You develop touch to the physical limit. You can be a pretty good player at that point. Most people don't go any further."
"Why not?"
He sat up and hugged his knees. "I don't know. Any number of reasons, I guess."
She shifted onto her back. "The sun feels good."
"Some people just never get past the written music. In a certain sense it's only black marks on paper, and of course you pay attention to it, but you have to remember there's actual music behind the black marks. Somebody played some music, or heard it anyway, and
then
wrote it down. Notation, well..." His voice trailed off for a moment. "I mean some of Bach, for instance, you just have the bare notes. No instructions, nothing. You have to be able to imagine the way he wanted it, and then play it that way. And he wrote before the piano was invented."
She gave him an encouraging sound, to indicate she was listening even though her eyes were closed.
"The thing isâand Fredericks showed me thisâonce you get to a certain point you can sort of forget your hands. It becomes mental, in a way. You go into a kind of trance of concentration, imagining what it's going to sound like, feeling it in your head, and somehow that's exactly what happens. It feels almost like magic. It feels so good sometimes you can hardly stand it. I mean, you know, you're playing and there's a resistance, you're pushing against it harder and harder, and then you break out into the clear. Just like that you're through and there's no resistance and you just sail along and it's like pure thought turning into pure music." He plucked some grass and let it fall. "You have to train yourself to keep your concentration, otherwise you can get so happy you just go over the top. It's wild."
He turned his head to look at her and felt a twinge of disappointment. She was asleep, her breath deep and even, her mouth slightly parted. He glanced up at the silent house, and then down at her body. He felt a sudden sexual urge, so swift and sharp he found himself recoiling from her. After a moment he got up and slipped back into the pool.
As he carefully removed a white shirt from his suitcase he was surprised to see his good-luck piece lying in a corner of the bag. He stood perfectly still, trying to figure out how it had gotten there. It was supposed to be with his cuff links, studs, and bow tie in a drawer at Obromowitz'sâall the fancy stuff for formal dress performances in one place. Sometimes, for a really big job, he would carry the little wooden cross in his breast pocket. And yet here it was, all by itself. A mystery. He picked it up, rubbing it with his thumb, then put it back in the suitcase.
When he'd finished dressing he went into the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. The blue blazer he'd gotten for three dollars at the Cadbury thrift shop looked fine. His teeth, as he leaned forward with a grimace, were as white as any movie star's. His black curly hair was perhaps a bit too thick and a bit too long, but not outrageously so. He buffed his brown loafers with a towel and decided he was presentable. Cocktails, Lady had said, at five-thirty in the living room.
Outside, as he walked across the grass, his eye was caught by the swimming pool. The light from the lowering sun fell at a steep angle,
and the water was almost too bright to look at. As he approached the edge of the pool the brightness waned. In the still air the water barely moved and he stood watching the minuscule ripples on the surface. The surface held his eye.
Then, with a sensation almost like falling, his gaze was drawn through the water to the bottom of the pool. A smooth green expanse, two thirds in shadow, but with the last third covered with a fine net of shadow lines, a kind of gently wavering grid. It took him a moment to realize he was watching an intricate pattern thrown by the surface ripples, a pattern so regular it seemed unnatural. A strange, silent tableau, inexplicably beautiful. He stood staring down.
"Claude!" Lady called from the French doors. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," he said, starting toward her. "It was the light." He waved to indicate the pool. "The shadows." He quickened his pace.
"I think swimming pools are vulgar, don't you? I don't know why he built it," she said as Claude joined her.
"Your father?"
"No. My great-grandfather. He gave them this place."
Inside, Linda Powers put down her pen and rose with a distracted air. "Ah, there you are. I can't seem to find my..." She looked back at the desk. "Well, never mind. I had tea with Bunny, dear. She says she looks for you at the club, but you're never there."
"I was there this morning," Lady said.
"Well, do be nice if you bump into her. She's been awfully good about the drive this year. Now, what was Iâ" Her voice broke off as the maid arrived. "Drinks! What would you children like?"
"Gin and tonic," said Lady.
"That sounds good," Claude said.
"Three gin and tonics, Maria. And the usual for Mr. Powers. Thank you, dear." There was a brittle, avian quality to her attractivenessâthe quick, glittering eyes, the short bursts of speech. "Sit down," she said to Claude. "And thank you for the matrons. Sinfully rich."
"You were kind to invite me," Claude said, swiveling his head to include her husband. Ted Powers sat at the other end of the room over what appeared to be a very large jigsaw puzzle. He gazed down at the board with his chin in his hand.
Lady sat on the couch, rolled her eyes at Claude, picked up a magazine, and began flipping pages.
"Lady tells me you studied with Fredericks," Linda Powers said. "So you must have met Anson Roeg. In fact, it was Bunny who lent me a copy of
Secret Meetings.
We're all deliciously scandalized, of course." A quick smile. "But is she really so, ah, is she, er ..."
"Eccentric, Mummy," Lady said. "That's the word."
"Yes, exactly. Eccentric?"
The maid arrived with a tray of tinkling drinks. Claude was served first, and was grateful for the interruption. His loyalty to Fredericks was almost as fierce as that toward Weisfeld, and he felt unaccountably nervous when talking about them to people who didn't know them, as if he couldn't do them justice, or worse, as if his reluctance might be construed as disinterest. The truth was, he loved Fredericks, but no one wanted to hear that. They wanted gossip.
"She does smoke cigars," Claude said, "but they're quite small. Not much bigger than cigarettes."
"One hears about her clothes," Linda Powers said.
"She wears pants all the time, as far as I know."
"Is she ... er ... mannish? That is, the way she behaves?"
Claude stared into his gin and tonic, which was the color of the water in the swimming pool. "She's practical. She takes care of a lot of stuff for him, arranging things, remembering things. But I wouldn't say mannish. In a funny way the clothes call attention to the fact she's a woman."
Lady put down the magazine. "That's interesting. Why do you say that?"
"She's always struck me as feminine." Claude shrugged.
"People say they're inseparable," Linda Powers said.
"I guess they are."
There was a silence, and Claude knew Linda wanted him to elaborate, but he chose not to. He felt awkward, and he was aware of the silent presence of Ted Powers.
The tray of gin, tonic, ice, and lime had been left by the maid at a side table. Lady and Linda went periodically to freshen their drinks. Ted stayed where he was, served every now and then by another maid, who also passed hors d'oeuvres. Claude could hear the ticking of the ornate clock over the mantel. It seemed a very long time before they were called in to dinner.
Mr. Powers and Claude sat at the ends of the long table, while Lady and her mother faced each other across the middle. Mrs. Powers kept
up a line of light chatter, addressed mostly to Lady. Over soup Claude learned that Ernesto, the new gardener, seemed to be working out. Julio, the previous gardener, had been better, but he had died the previous summer of a heart attack. Linda had undergone the shocking experience of finding him face down in the flower bed. Over veal cutlets and asparagus it came out that Bunny had given five hundred shares of Pepsi-Cola to the Heuval Foundation, of which Mrs. Powers was the president. The foundation was dedicated to educational and proactive projects for unwed mothers. It ran four shelters in New York and Boston. Ted Powers, it turned out, had shot eighteen holes with a score of ninety, and had observed Judge Aldrich cheating on the approach to the fourteenth, kicking his ball from the edge of the rough onto the fairway. Over dessert, Linda Powers announced that someone referred to as Noodle was having her gall bladder removed.
"Do you have plans for tonight?" Linda asked Lady.
"We're going to the movies." Lady put down her napkin and rose. "Actually, we should get going."
"In the village?"
"Yup."
This was news to Claude, but he followed Lady's lead and they slipped out.
"I'm sorry," Lady said as they got in the car. "I just had to get out of there."
"Did you mean it about the movies?"
"Why don't we?" she said, pulling out onto the road. "It's supposed to be good. It's called
Some Like It Hot.
"
The theater was surprisingly smallâperhaps twice the size of the children's section at the RKOâand completely filled. They were lucky to get two seats in the second row, which opened up at the end of the coming attractions. The crowd buzzed with anticipation, and then fell still as the movie began. Claude and Lady held hands, leaned back, and gazed up at the screen.
In a very short time Claude was laughing. Soon after he was laughing helplessly. The farcical situations seemed to build one upon the other until he had to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. Lady would chortle every now and then, patting Claude's leg, without taking her eyes from the screen, when he seemed on the verge of losing control of himself. In the midst of his paroxysms Claude felt a sliver of fear as he perceived the remote edge of outright hysteria. He would
quiet down for a few minutes, but then surrender to laughter because it seemed to cleanse him, to pull out the knots in his soul and leave him breathless and blessedly empty. When the lights came on, Lady looked at him with a smile. "Are you okay?"
"I couldn't help it," he said. "It must be the funniest movie ever made."
"It was good." She looked at him with curiosity, a muted version of the look she sometimes gave him during sex, and then turned away to collect her things.
Outside, in the warm night air, they moved through the fanning crowd to the car.
"Tony Curtis surprised me," Lady said. "I usually can't stand him."
"The pace of it was terrific. The whole thing had a jazzy kind of rhythm, and of course they were supposed to be musicians, which makes it even better."
When they reached the car a group of young people passed by on the sidewalk. "Lady," a girl called, "are you going to Caroline's?"
"What?"
"Caroline's having a party. Are you going?"
"Maybe." She gave a little wave and got in the car. As Claude followed he noticed her glance at her watch. She started the engine with a roar and tapped her index finger on the steering wheel.
"Who's Caroline?" Claude asked.
"I play tennis with her sometimes at the club. Bryn Mawr. Slightly strange. Her mother's dead and the rumor is she hasn't seen her father for years. She lives with her old nanny in this huge mansion. We should go for a drink just so you can see it." She threw the car into gear and pulled away. "Are you game?"
"Sure."
The road was dark. Trees, hedges, and fieldstone walls slipped in and out of the car's tightly focused headlight beams as Lady swept through the curves. After perhaps a mile she slowed and turned through two enormous stone pillars and an open iron gate. The white gravel driveway led between an avenue of trees, curved to the right through what Claude sensed to be a series of landscaped parks, topped a gentle hill, and curved to the left, where Lady stopped the car and turned off the lights.
Above them, the open dome of stars. Ahead, as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw the faint luminosity of the gravel
road gently winding down a rolling lawn to a small cluster of lights surrounded by a vast blackness. Behind the blackness was Long Island Sound, beginning to glint now, just enough for him to see the outlines of a great house. They sat in silence for a minute, and then she turned on the lights and drove down the hill.
There were six or seven cars parked haphazardly in the circular driveway. Lady pulled in beside a gleaming chopped and channeled hot rod. They followed a flagstone path and climbed the wide steps to the front door. It was partially open and they pushed through.
Claude heard the thin sound of a scratchy record of a tune called "Harbor Lights" and moved forward in the marbled hall until he found the source. Lady stepped in front of him as they entered an enormous ballroom with chandeliers hanging from the curved ceiling. Three or four couples danced a slow fox trot, and a few people were outside leaning on a stone balcony, looking into the night. A long bar had been set up next to the French doors, and a girl in a blue dress accepted a glass of champagne from the ancient bartender.
"Caroline!" Lady said. "We heard and we came. I hope that's all right."
Caroline's skin was chalk white. Her round face and the softness of her arms suggested a trace of baby fat. Her eyebrows were thin and very dark, and her small mouth was painted a vivid deep red. "Of course," she said, suddenly smiling. "I left a note for you at the club."