The Soloist (23 page)

“Also, he’s a fairly bright guy, and thinks pretty clearly. He stumbled on a gold mine when he discovered that Zen church because their philosophy, from what I’ve heard, seems to encourage ‘doing your own thing.’ He’s not the only one to hop on that bandwagon, by the way; anybody remember the Beat poets? They were burping and scratching themselves at poetry readings and saying it was Zen for a while, but it went out of fashion pretty fast.”

Several people in the courtroom chuckled at the poetry-reading image, particularly Gary, who snorted like a horse. Maria-Teresa nudged me with her elbow, motioning toward Gary with her eyes and rolling them scornfully.

“Weber’s ideas, as unappealing as they are, are just too consistent and well organized to be coming out of a psychotic mind, I would say. Real psychotics may think they’re geniuses, but they almost always make poor sense. The transcripts of Mr. Weber’s interviews with the police, the other psychiatrist and me, on the other hand … Hell, if you published ’em, I’ll bet you’d get a lot of people wanting to be this guy’s disciple. He’s got a dangerously clever mind.”

It was disturbing testimony. I didn’t have much time to consider how it affected my opinion of the case, however, because just before Judge Davis announced the lunch break, Maria-Teresa leaned over and asked, “I found a better place to eat—are you free today?”

Of course I was delighted that she wanted to have lunch with me for the third time, but I also worried that some of the others, particularly Mrs. Friedman, were starting to show interest in the fact that we were spending so much time together. As we filed out of the courtroom and dropped behind the others I asked if she’d noticed the whispers and sidelong glances.

“Oh, yeah. I don’t care what they think—do you?”

It was the answer I wanted to hear, but shouldn’t have wanted to hear. I knew by then that she was interested in me; better judgment was telling me that I should not be giving her such encouraging signals. Poorer judgment, however, insisted loudly that nothing bad could come of it, that it was exciting but safe. As soon as the trial ended I wouldn’t ever see her again, and nothing serious could happen in such a short amount of time.

The restaurant was a little Indian place in an old hotel building. A tiny speaker nailed to the wall provided us with taped Indian music, which I found distracting. Hypnotic music makes my attention drift in and out, so that I feel as if I were hearing a mosquito making passes by my ear. I had the waiter move us to a table farther away from the speaker, but that only made it more annoying because then it really did sound like the buzz of insects.

Since I don’t know Indian food, I let Maria-Teresa order. I’d tried it once in England when I was about fourteen and hated it, but I didn’t like anything new then. I wanted my American hamburger for lunch every day, no matter what country I was in. Maria-Teresa ordered me a drink made of yogurt and mango juice; I tried to be open-minded about it, but yogurt makes me think of health food and all the desperately unhealthy-looking people who shop for it, so I let her have the drink and asked the waiter to bring me a martini.

Maria-Teresa laughed at the martini glass; apparently she found it amusing that someone my age would drink out of such a glass with a straight face. “Can I have your olive, though?”

“Not if you’re going to make fun of my drink.”

“I’m not making fun of your drink. I’m making fun of you.”

I let her have it. She wiped the gin off it with her napkin and popped it into her mouth. “Yum. Ask me something now.”

“What about?”

She unleashed that gorgeous smile—she had a slightly chipped tooth, and I was attracted even to that—and said, “Anything. Just ask me something—I want to talk.”

I thought for a moment, then asked her what hobbies she had besides listening to proletarian music.

“Oh, all right. Are you gonna be disappointed if I say I don’t have any good ones?” she asked.

“Why would I be disappointed?”

“Well, you lead this artistic life, and you’re probably always around people who are interesting and creative. My life is just get up, go to work, stress out, come home, fix dinner, listen to the stereo, watch TV, then go to bed. On weekends I try to go out with my friends, but since they’re all busy with their kids, it’s hard to get together. My life is boring, in other words.”

“What
would
you like to do, then?”

“If I could do anything? Oh, God … Let’s see. I bet it’s a pretty good life being rich and having a second house in South America, somewhere along the coast. Colombia has incredible beaches—my mother always talks about that—and I speak the language, so I could have a great time down there. Could you tell Spanish was my first language?”

I hadn’t noticed any accent at all, but as soon as she mentioned it I started to hear one, and it made her even more attractive. I tried to visualize her in a hammock on the balcony of a South American villa, and, best of all, speaking Spanish on a cordless telephone. It was a delicious image.

“Or maybe a singer. I think it must be wild to be on a stage and have people watching, and getting into the song. I don’t know—I’m sure there are downsides, but I think that must be a hell of a lot of fun. Plus, if you’re in classical music you get all that respect, and you don’t have to worry about getting too old for it like rock musicians do—you can be eighty and still play classical, right?”

Yes, I thought, but only if you can still play well. She asked
me what it was like to play on a stage, and I told her that the whole day before a concert I couldn’t eat or sit still. It wasn’t from being nervous; it was impatience. I wanted to play, I didn’t want to wait. I knew I was going to play well, so why wait? All day I’d be running through the music in my head. I’d wake up early that morning and jump out of bed—nothing could keep me lying there. I’d take long showers, I’d walk around inside the hotel, and then wander around the neighborhood with my mother. She and I would have lunch someplace nice, but I would have no appetite.

“So your mother went to all your concerts?” Maria-Teresa asked blandly. I could tell she was trying to hide something in her voice. I had to explain to her that the concerts I was describing all happened before my eighteenth birthday. Her face registered surprise, then relief.

She wanted to know if I was able to enjoy the concerts as I was playing, or if I had too much to think about to take it all in. I said that I wasn’t able to think verbal thoughts like This sure is fun or Look at all those people in tuxedos listening to me, but I was able to enjoy a glorious sensation of power. I told her about seeing a documentary where a scuba diver was underwater filming whales when one swam right past him, and all of a sudden he reached out and grabbed one of its fins and hitched a ride. It was a spontaneous decision, the diver explained as he narrated over the footage, and it was the most incredible experience of his life. He said the feeling of being pulled along by such an immensely powerful creature was simply indescribable. I told Maria-Teresa that it couldn’t have been that different from playing onstage.

Just talking about it to her gave me goose bumps; I rolled
up one of my sleeves to show her, and she was impressed. I can see now that the main reason I believed so strongly for so long that I would play onstage again was that I
had
to believe it. I was so unhappy as a nearly middle-aged virgin, a has-been concert musician giving cello lessons, that I simply had to believe great things would happen to me again someday. Otherwise how could I face myself? What else could I think?

Showing her my goose bumps seemed to embolden her. She leaned forward on her elbows, her chin resting on one hand, and asked, “You said you were never even close to being married. Is that true? You never had a serious girlfriend?”

Before that instant I would have thought that the closer one approached a morally corrupt situation, the more inner conflict one would feel. But it wasn’t like that at all; the further things went with Maria-Teresa, the easier it felt to go the next step. When she asked me that question I felt intense pleasure, as if I’d been hoping that she would ask about my barren romantic life. Although I still couldn’t imagine a relationship with her, other possibilities—fantasies I could briefly imagine—were starting to appear in my thoughts. I told her the truth, which was that until I was performing again, I couldn’t see how anyone would want to date me, and I didn’t want to put anyone through the embarrassment of turning me down. I wasn’t trying to manipulate her feelings, but whether I intended it or not, she seemed to decide that I had just crossed an invisible boundary and had invited her to do the same.

“Life is short,” she said, looking right at me with those sad, beautiful eyes. “Why waste it thinking about crap like
whether you’re famous enough or not when there’s so much right in front of you? You’re an extremely datable guy, if you ask me.”

At that moment we were suspended. The situation could have gone either way. It hung there and swayed; it might have fallen over, but it tipped back toward the safe side. I don’t even remember who talked first, but we fell into nervous chatter about how no one ever feels he or she deserves to be happy, how unfair life is and so on.

It didn’t last long, however. The situation was still ripe; we were so close that the slightest push would have done it. On the way out of the hotel we saw a young couple sitting close together drive by in a convertible, and that was it. Suddenly Maria-Teresa stopped walking. I stopped also and looked at her achingly beautiful face, and my resistance utterly disappeared, like a puff of smoke. It was overwhelming; there was no room at all in me to think why I should not touch her.

I remember once seeing one of my colleagues in the faculty center having a Bloody Mary when suddenly, noiselessly, the bottom of his glass simply dropped out. One moment he was dry and happy; the next he looked as if he’d been gored by a bull. You couldn’t have said precisely when it happened, and it took all of us, including him, several long seconds to figure out where all the red liquid had come from.

As on that occasion, it took me a few seconds to realize what exactly was going on. When I did, I found myself far along in the first passionate kiss of my life. It lasted for a long time. When it ended, I asked her if she would have dinner with me, and she agreed.

I wondered if the whole courtroom knew that something had happened. What with the excitement, the two drinks and
that kiss, I’m sure I was blushing. Maria-Teresa looked sublimely content. Her face had the same color as usual, that of coffee and milk the way they serve it in Europe, but there was a patch at the base of her throat that was flushed deep red. We must have been quite a sight, floating there light as feathers among all those bored, morose jurors.

I don’t remember much about Ms. Doppelt’s cross-examination of the psychiatrist because I wasn’t really paying attention. I know that she attacked the doctor’s view that only a sane person could accomplish the complex psychological feat of using Zen to justify crazy behavior. “This is a religion that vigorously encourages people to act impulsively!” she said, exasperation showing in her voice. “Someone like my client, who you readily agree suffers from a grave mental disorder, who you said yourself stands poised on that fine line between sickness and craziness, could easily be pushed across that line under extreme conditions. And what do you call what they were doing at that religious retreat, where they were barely eating or sleeping and were obsessing on those puzzles?”

The doctor didn’t seem shaken by this attack on his testimony. He continued to stroke his beard and insisted that regardless of what one thought about Buddhism, Philip Weber seemed to know what he was doing when he killed the Zen master. “The proof, for me,” he said, “is Weber’s claim that according to his enlightened view everything is an illusion. He says he felt no hesitation doing what he did, and now feels no remorse over killing the man because in his expanded view he wasn’t killing a real man; it was all just part of this great illusion we call life. That’s the giveaway for me. Psychotics don’t play-act—it’s all for real to them. Weber says he knew all along that none of what he was doing was
real, that he did it as an inspired, religious gesture. I don’t believe it.”

During the afternoon break Maria-Teresa and I didn’t say anything to each other; we had our date for dinner, and the rest was just waiting. She went out for her cigarette and I, for form’s sake, sat with the other men and pretended to listen to Roy, the retired factory manager. He was complaining to the others about all the dirty tricks the Japanese were playing to upset the trade balance. Whenever his eyes met mine he gave me a slightly combative look, as if expecting me to challenge him. He’d been wary of me since the trial began—my age, my last name and the fact that I taught at a university no doubt put him on guard—and once, out in the shuttle lot, he’d pointed at my car and asked me if I planned to buy American next time. Yet I wasn’t really following Roy’s speech during the break; my mind was all over the place. I was trying to commit myself beforehand to a decision about that night so I wouldn’t spend the whole evening wavering back and forth, only to freeze with indecision at the critical moment. I didn’t have a specific moral problem with having an affair; if Maria-Teresa was unhappy in her marriage and was willing to stray from it, I wasn’t going to try to convince her otherwise. I’d never been religious and I’d never been married, so neither of those institutions held much sway over me. The risks, if there were any, were hers to take.