Collected Stories, page 39
The rather dour accompanist moves to make place for him. Sue will not sit down; she stands there animated, all smiles. And Kaminski has changed his front. His politeness is as noticeable as perfume. He talks. He shows his teeth in smiles. The little music teacher leans forward, intent to hear.
With a tremendous flourish the waiter serves Ruth a bowl of fruit. “You do that like Alfredo serving noodles,” I say, but Ruth, who knows what I mean, does not say anything, and the waiter, who may or may not, smiles politely, and Bill, who hasn’t the slightest idea, comes back beaming into the conversation as if glad of any innocent conversational remark. With a bite of éclair in my mouth I wag my head at him, how delicious. I force down a few spoonfuls of ambrosial fruit. I succeed in forestalling ice-cream. The carts go away. Jerry comes around with a coffee flask. I dig out a couple of cigars.
I am facing the musical table, but I have lost my interest in how they all act. Full of highballs, food, smoke, coffee, my insides coil around heavily like an overfed boa constrictor. The only reason I don’t slide down in my chair and get really comfortable is that Kaminski is sitting where he can see me, and I will not give him the satisfaction of seeing me contented and well nourished. For his performance I shall make it a point to be as wide-awake as a lie detector, and though I shall listen with an open mind, I shall not be his most forgiving critic.
But there is a clash between comfort and will, and a little balloony pressure in my midsection. Damn Kaminski. Damn his Asiatic spirituality and his coddled Art and his ghetto defensiveness and his refugee arrogance. My esophagus comes again with a richly flavored brwwp! Just an echo, hoo hoo.
“Say,” says Bill, “how would a brandy go? Or calvados? I got some damn good calvados. You never had any till you taste this.”
The impetuous arm goes up, but Sue, who must have had her eye sharp on him, is there before the waiter. “Bill, do me a favor?”
“Surest thing you know. What?”
“Have Jerry close the bar. Don’t serve any more now till afterward.”
“I was just going to get Joe a snifter of calvados to go with his cigar.”
“Please,” she said. “Joe won’t mind postponing it.”
I have not been asked, but I do not mind.
“O.K.,” Bill says. “You know what you’re doing, I guess. Did you get anything to eat? I kept looking around for you.”
“I’ll get something later. As soon as people seem to be through, Jerry can start arranging the chairs. I went over it with him this afternoon.”
“Check,” says Bill. A smile, puzzled, protective, and fond, follows her back to the musician’s table. “Bothers her,” Bill says. “She’s got her heart set on something great. Old Arnold had better be good.”
We are silent, stuffed. I commune with my cigar, looking sleepily around this movie set where the standard of everything is excess. Somewhere down deep in my surfeited interior I conduct a little private argument with my client and conscience, Murthi. He is bitter. He thinks it is immoral to fill your stomach. In India, he tells me, the only well-fed people are money-changers and landlords, grinders of the faces of the poor. But these people, I try to tell him, grind no poor. They are not money-changers or landlords. They are the rich, or semi-rich, of a rich country, not the rich of a poor one. Their duty to society is not by any means ignored; they do not salve their own consciences with a temple stuck with pieces of colored glass. They give to causes they respect, and many of them give a great deal. And they don’t put on a feast like this because they want to show off, or even because they are themselves gluttonous. They do it because they think their guests will enjoy it; they do it to introduce a struggling young artist. And anyway, why should good eating be immoral?
You pay nothing for it, Murthi says. It is too easy. It does not come after hard times and starvation, but after plenty. It is nothing but self-indulgence. It smothers the spiritual life. In the midst of plenty, that is the time to fast.
I am too full to argue with him. I feel as if I might lift into the air and float away, and the whole unreal patio with me, bearing its umbrella of artificial moonlight and its tables and people and glass-fronted cabaña, its piano and its Artist, high above the crass valley. It is like a New Yorker cartoon, and me with my turned-up Muslim slippers and baggy pants, one of the Peninsula pashas on a magic carpet of the latest model, complete with indirect lighting, swimming pool, Muzak, and all modern conveniences.
All? Nothing forgotten? My feet insist on my notice. I stoop on the sly and feel the cement. Sure enough, the magic carpet has radiant heating too.
V
Kaminski is booted and spurred and ready to ride. The audience is braced between the cabaña and the pool. The moonlight is turned off. The air is cool and damp, but the pavement underfoot radiates its faint expensive warmth. Inside, one light above the piano shines on Kaminski’s white jacket as he sits fiddling with the knobs, adjusting the bench. The shadow of the piano’s open wing falls across his head. The Degas has become a Rembrandt.
On a lounge sofa between Sue and Ruth, old Joe Allston, very much overfed, is borne up like a fly on meringue. Bill has creaked away somewhere. A partition has slid across the barbecue, and from behind it, during pauses in the hum of talk, comes the sound of a busy electric dishwasher.
“Are people too comfortable, do you think?” Sue asks. “Would it have been better to put out undertaker’s chairs?”
I assure her that she has the gratitude of every over-burdened pelvis in the house. “There is no such thing as too comfortable,” I say, “any more than there is such a thing as a large drink of whiskey.”
Her hands pick at things on her dress and are held still. Her laugh fades away in a giggle.
I say, “What’s he going to play?” and quite loudly she bursts out, “I don’t know! He wouldn’t tell me!” One or two shadowy heads turn. Kaminski stares out into the dusk from his bench, and the shadow wipes all the features off his face.
We are sitting well back, close to the edge of the pool. “How did you manage to get him to play after all?” Ruth murmurs.
It is as improbable to see the sneering curl of Sue’s lip as it would be to see an ugly scowl on her face. “I crawled!” she says.
The cushions sigh as Ruth eases back into them. But I am sitting where I can watch Sue’s face, and I am not so easily satisfied. “Why?” I ask.
“Because he’s a great artist.”
“Oh.” After a moment I let myself back among the cushions with Ruth. “I hope he is,” I say, and at least for the moment I mean it.
The eyeless mask of Kaminski’s face turns again. Even when he speaks he does not seem to have lips. “For my first number I play three Chopin Nocturnes. I play these as suitable to the occasion, and especially for Mrs. Casement.”
Beside me I can feel Sue shrink. I have a feeling, though it is too dark to see, that she has flushed red. While the murmur rising from the audience says How nice, handsome gesture, what a nice compliment, she looks at her hands.
At the piano, Kaminski kneads his knuckles, staring at the empty music rack. When he has held his pose of communing with his Geist long enough for the silence to spread to the far edges of the audience, but not long enough so that any barbarian starts talking again, he drops into the music with a little skip and a trill. It is well timed and well executed. Without knowing it, probably, Sue takes hold of my hand. She is like a high school girl who shuts her eyes while the hero plunges from the two-yard line. Did he make it? Oh, did he go over?
The cabaña acts like a shell; the slightest pianissimo comes out feathery but clear, and Kaminski’s meaty hands are very deft. Behind us the faint gurgle and suck of the pool’s filter system is a watery night sound under the Chopin.
God spare me from ever being called a critic or even a judge of music—even a listener. Like most people, I think I can tell a dub from a competent hand, and it is plain at once that Kaminski is competent. The shades of competence are another thing. They are where the Soul comes in, and I look with suspicion on those who wear their souls outside. I am not capable in any case of judging Kaminski’s soul. Maybe it is such a soul as swoons into the world only once in a hundred years. Maybe, again, it is such a G.G. soul as I have seen on Madison Avenue and elsewhere in my time.
But I think I can smell a rat, even in music, if it is dead enough, and as Kaminski finishes one nocturne and chills into abashed silence those who have mistakenly started to applaud too soon, and pounds into the second with big chords, I think I begin to smell a rat here. Do I imagine it, or is he burlesquing these nocturnes? Is he contemptuous of them because they are sentimental, because they are nineteenth century, because they don’t strain his keyboard technique enough, or because he knows Sue adores them? And is he clever enough and dirty enough to dedicate them to her as an insult?
It is hard to say. By the third one it is even harder, because he has played them all with great precision even while he gives them a lot of bravura. I wish I could ask Ruth what she thinks, because her ear for music and her nose for rats are both better than mine. But there is no chance, and so I am still nursing the private impression that Kaminski is hoaxing the philistines when I am called on to join in the applause, which is loud, long, and sincere. If the philistines have been hoaxed, they are not aware of the fact. Beside me, Sue wears her hands out; she is radiant. “Oh, didn’t he play them beautifully? They loved it, didn’t they? I told you, nobody can play Chopin the way Arnold can.”
In the second row of lounge chairs the musical crowd, satisfactorily applauding, bend heads each to other. Mr. Ackerman’s big droopy face lifts solemnly against the light. Kaminski, after his bow, has seated himself again and waits while the clapping splatters away and the talk dies down again and a plane, winking its red and white wing lights, drones on down and blinks out among the stars over Black Mountain. Finally he says, “I play next the Bach Chaconne, transcribed for piano by Busoni.”
“What is it?” Sue says. “Should I know it?”
Over Sue’s head Ruth gives me one of her raccoon looks. I am delighted; I rouse myself. This time my lie detector is going to be a little more searching, because I have heard a dozen great pianists play the Chaconne, and I own every recording ever made, probably. Every time I catch a competent amateur at a piano I beg it out of him. In my opinion, which I have already disparaged, it is only the greatest piece of music ever written, a great big massive controlled piece of mind. If Kaminski can play the Chaconne and play it well, I will forgive him and his bad manners and his tantrums and the Polish soul he put into Chopin. It takes more than Polish soul to play the Chaconne. It takes everything a good man has, and a lot of good men don’t have enough.
Maybe Kaminski does have enough. He states those big sober themes, as they say in music-appreciation circles, with, as they also say, authority. The great chords begin to pile up. Imagine anyone writing that thing in the first place for the violin. As usual, it begins to destroy me. Kaminski is great, he’s tremendous, he is tearing into this and bringing it out by the double handful. A success, a triumph. Listen to it roll and pour, and not one trace, not a whisker, of Polish soul. This is the language you might use in justifying your life to God.
As when, in the San Francisco Cow Palace, loudspeakers announce the draft horse competition, and sixteen great Percherons trot with high action and ponderous foot into the arena, brass-harnessed, plume-bridled, swelling with power, drawing the rumbling brewery wagon lightly, Regal Pale; ton-heavy but light-footed they come, the thud of their hoofs in the tanbark like the marching of platoons, and above them the driver spider-braced, intent, transmits through the fan of lines his slightest command; lightly he guides them, powerfully and surely they bring their proud necks, their plumed heads, their round and dappled haunches, the blue and gold wagon Regal Pale—sixteen prides guided by one will, sixteen great strengths respondent and united: so the great chords of Bach roll forth from under the hands of Arnold Kaminski.
And as, half-trained or self-willed, the near leader may break, turn counter to his driver’s command, and in an instant all that proud unanimity is a snarl of tangled traces and fouled lines and broken step and cross purposes and desperate remedies, so at a crucial instant fails the cunning of Kaminski. A butch, a fat, naked, staring discord.
To do him credit, he retrieves it instantly, it is past and perhaps not even noticed by many. But he has lost me, and when I have recovered from the momentary disappointment I am cynically amused. The boy took on something too big for him. A little later he almost gets me back, in that brief lyrical passage that is like a spring in a country of cliffs, but he never does quite recover the command he started with, and I know now how to take him.
When he finishes there is impressed silence, followed by loud admiration. This has been, after all—Allston dicens—the most magnificent piece of music ever written, and it ought to be applauded. But it has licked Kaminski in a spot or two, and he can’t help knowing it and knowing that the musicians present know it. As he stands up to take a bow, his face, thrust up into the light, acquires features, a mask of slashes and slots and knobs, greenish and shadowed. He looks like a rather bruised corpse, and he bows as if greeting his worst enemy. In the quiet as the applause finally dies out I hear the gurgle of the pool’s drain and catch a thin aseptic whiff of chlorine, a counterwhiff of cigar smoke and perfume.
Says Sue in my ear, tensely. “What did I tell you?”
“For my last number,” Kaminski’s thick voice is saying, “I play the Piano Pieces of Arnold Schoenberg, Opus Nineteen.”
I have had Schoenberg and his followers explained to me, even urged upon me, several times, generally by arty people who catch me with my flank exposed at a cocktail party. They tell me that these noises are supposed, among other things, to produce tension. Tension is a great word among the tone-row musicians. God bless them, they are good at it. It astonishes me anew, as Kaminski begins, that sounds like these can come out of a piano. They can only be recovered from through bed rest and steam baths, maybe shock therapy.
For no amount of argument can convince me that this music does not hurt the ears. And though I am prepared to admit that by long listening a man might accustom himself to it, I do not think this proves much. Human beings can adjust to anything, practically; it is a resilient race. We can put up with the rule of kings, presidents, priests, dictators, generals, communes, and committees; we learn to tolerate diets of raw fish, octopus, snails, unborn ducklings, clay, the bleeding hearts of enemies, our own dung; we learn to listen without screaming to the sounds of samisens, Korean harps, veenas, steam whistles, gongs, and Calypso singers; we adjust bravely to whole-tone, half-tone, or quarter-tone scales, to long skirts and short skirts, crew cuts and perukes, muttonchops and dundrearies and Van Dykes and naked chins, castles and paper houses and barastis and bomb shelters. The survival of the race depends upon its infinite adaptability. We can get used to anything in time, and even perhaps develop a perverted taste for it. But why? The day has not come when I choose to try adapting to Schoenberg. Schoenberg hurts my ears.
He hurts some other ears, too. The audience that has swooned at the Chopin and been respectful before the Bach is systematically cut to ribbons by the saw edges of the Piano Pieces. I begin to wonder all over again if Kaminski may have planned this program with perverse cunning: throw the philistines the Chopin, giving it all the Schmalz it will stand; then stun them with the Bach (only the Bach was too much for him); then trample them contemptuously underfoot with the Schoenberg, trusting that their ignorance will be impressed by this wrenched and tortured din even while they writhe under it. A good joke. But then what is he after? It is his own career that is at stake, he is the one who stands to benefit if the musicians’ corner is impressed. Does he mean to say the hell with it on these terms, or am I reading into a not-quite-good-enough pianist a lot of ambiguities that don’t exist in him?
It slowly dawns on me, while I grit my teeth to keep from howling like a dog, that Kaminski means this Schoenberg. He gives it the full treatment; he visibly wrestles with the Ineffable. Impossible to tell whether he hits the right notes or the wrong ones—probably Schoenberg himself couldn’t tell. Wrong ones better, maybe—more tension. But Kaminski is concentrating as if the music ties him into bundles of raw nerves. For perhaps a second there is a blessed relief, a little thread of something almost a melody, and then the catfight again. Language of expressionism, tension and space, yes. Put yourself in the thumbscrew and any sort of release is blessed. Suite for nutmeg grater, cactus, and strings. A garland of loose ends.
He is putting himself into it devotionally; he is Schoenberg. I recall a picture of the composer on some record envelope—intense staring eyes, bald crown, temples with a cameo of raised veins, cheeks bitten in, mouth grim and bitter, unbearable pain. Arnold Schoenberg, Destroyer and Preserver. Mouthful of fire and can neither swallow nor spit.
In the cone of light under which Kaminski tortures himself and us, I see a bright quick drop fall from the end of his nose. Sweat or hay fever? Soul or allergy? Whatever it is, no one can say he isn’t trying.
The piano stops with a noise like a hiccup or a death rattle. Three or four people laugh. Kaminski sits still. The audience waits, not to be caught offside. This might be merely space, there might be some more tension coming. But Kaminski is definitely through. Applause begins, with the over-enthusiastic sound of duty in it, and it dies quickly except in the musical row, where the accompanist is clapping persistently.
