Realization came slowly. I’m not in the habit of thinking in opus numbers, but it came through then to my dazed intelligence that 53 is the “Waldstein.” I think that was what made me reach one of those impulsive, wholly emotional decisions which I don’t expect to regret. I scratched on the rumpled program: Not dead, had to change face and name to help me hunt for A. No, dear, I haven’t found him. May I see you? Alone, please, and don’t tell anyone about me yet. You’re a musician. I love you beyond comprehemption.
I found an usher, a girl who promised to get my note to Miss Brand. I wandered outside. I watched that ship going downstream in the open night. After a while, as I’ve told you, I was quite happy. When I went back the popeyed usher located me, pushed a slip of paper in my hand, and whispered: “Hey, know what she did when she read your note? Kissed me! Well, I mean…”
I bumbled like Santy Claus. The lights had already dimmed, but I could read the huge scrawclass="underline" Blue River Café 2 blox down Esplan riverside wait for me lounge escape earliest poss O Ben Ben BEN!!!
She may have tried to see me in the audience, though I had mentioned a changed face. There was a blind look about her. I knew terror, fearing I might have upset her and hurt the second half of the concert. But then she was resting her fingers silently on the keys, as if the towering Steinway had its own will and could communicate, soothe, clear away confusion and leave her free. I needn’t have worried.
The Andrew Carr suite is excellent. Complex, serious, young; perhaps too heavy, too immense, but with a cumulative passion that justifies it. Likely a greater maturity will teach Carr the value of the light touch. In the program notes, I remember, he acknowledges a major debt to Brahms. All to the good, especially if it means that composers of the ’970s have finally buried the I-don’t-really-mean-it school of the ’930s and ’940s. Carr has learned more from the young Stravinsky than from the old; Beethoven glances over his shoulder; he needs more Mozart in his system….
I won’t play the “Waldstein” again. Anything else, yes — I don’t despise my own talent. Not the “Waldstein.” For anyone else it would have been bad programming to let the sonata follow the shattering climaxes and nearly impossible athletic demands of the Carr suite. Not for Sharon. She wasn’t tired. She made it a summing up, a final statement to throw the colors of a thousand flames on all the rest.
Maybe I’ve heard the opening Allegro done with more technical finish; never with more sincerity. In the melancholy of the brief Adagio I was lost. I don’t know all that Sharon meant; Beethoven’s meditations are not altogether ours at any time. She took the gentle opening of the Rondo more slowly than I would have done, but she was right, and the acceleration of the A Minor passage became all the more a terrifying flash, a blaze of longing abruptly revealed…. The sonata’s conclusion was blinding. No one looks at that much light.
I don’t recall much about the ovation they gave her: we were all hysterical. I don’t even remember what all her encores were. There were seven. We let her go at last only because she put on a small comic pantomime of exhaustion.
You could not imagine, Drozma, the first thing she said when she slipped into the Blue River Café, astonishingly small, shy, a mousy gray wrap over her gown — slipped in and knew me somehow through all my changes, caught up the clumsy skirt to run like a child and throw herself at me and bury her snub nose in my shirt. She said: “Ben, I fluffed the Prestissimo, I fluffed it, I went too fast, I scrabbled it — where, where have you been?”
“You never fluffed anything.” I must have muttered more such stuff while we struggled for calm.
We found a booth, with a window overlooking the river and the night. Tranquil and civilized, that restaurant, mild lighting, no fuss, hurry, or noise. It was past eleven o’clock, but they produced a hero-size dinner for Sharon, who admitted to fasting before the concert and now looked with pathetic astonishment at the lobster, saying: “Could I bodaciously have ordered that in my madness?” She ate it though, with all the fixings, and we grinned and mumbled and made groping reaches for the unsayable. Then the lobster was gone, coffee and cognac were with us; Sharon squared her little shoulders and sighed and said: “Now…!”
If there was anything in the nine years I failed to tell her it was either an unavoidable part of our Martian deception or too small to remember. I am “Will Meisel” at present. She found it difficult not to call me Ben. My departure from Latimer had been, in a way, cruel — I knew it at the time. She did not reproach me for it, or for the false message of my death — not directly. But once she took my fingers and pressed them against her cheek and said: “When Mrs. Wilks told me — you see, until Angelo went away I’d never lost anybody — and then you—” But rather than let me flounder and beg forgiveness she went on quickly: “Your hands are the same, just the same. How was it possible to change your face so much? I saw you recognize me, or maybe I’d’ve known you anyway, but—”
With careful vagueness and wholly genuine embarrassment, I lied about having suffered a serious face injury, years before my time in Latimer. I hinted that part of my facial structure was prosthetic, under a successful skin graft, and that I could play tricks with it. I conveyed too that I was sensitive and didn’t like talking of it. “Nine years’ aging too, Sharon, and the white hair is natural.”
“Ben — Will — why was it necessary? But, darling, don’t tell me unless you want to. You’re here. I’ll get used to it sometime….” I told her that my going away had made the police suspect me in connection with the disappearances of Angelo and Feuermann. She confirmed that Feuermann had never been found. My search had to be unhampered, I said, so I juggled personalities and faces, burying an old identity. It was all too far from the human norm and I don’t think it satisfied her, but it was the best I could do. She too remembered Amagoya. She hasn’t a suspicious heart. Sharon at ten had been somewhat sheltered from grown-up speculations and rumors, missing the real and unreal implications of that disaster in Latimer. Music and Mrs. Wilks had held her steady when the loss of Angelo and myself had shaken her world. Soon there had been time, and adolescence. I had foolishly not quite grasped the vast difference between nine of my years and Sharon’s nine between ten and nineteen…. I told her too how I thought Angelo might have been swallowed by the underworld — joined the hobos, something like that — or even suffered amnesia because he felt lost and condemned himself for his mother’s death.
“Why did he mean so much to you?”
“I felt responsible, perhaps. I ought to have kept him out of trouble because I knew he was supernormal and vulnerable, and I didn’t do it.” She wasn’t satisfied. “And I came to think of him as like a son.” There was too much truth in that. “I should have been a better guardian, because I don’t think anyone else saw the dangers.” Not for the first time, she started to ask another question, but held it back, frowning into her cigarette smoke, cherishing my hand. “How well do you remember him, Sharon?”