Heart and Soul (2 page)

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.”