"What a privilege to be allowed ... what luck to live ... how amazing..."I babbled on. It was my third strike with her.
"I suppose it is a privilege," she said coldly, "but they do pay him."
"Who pay him?" I asked. Strike four.
"Who pay him?"
"Pays, pays."
"Steinway."
"Why?"
"Over the years, the artists have come to rely upon his critique. They're superstitious about it, and won't buy a piano unless Paolo helps them choose. He has a fine ear. It all started with Toscanini, who, when he saw my husband sitting as if on a raised platform, assumed that he was some sort of judge."
"Toscanini?" I asked.
"Arturo Toscanini," she repeated, adding for my sake, "he's a music guy."
"Yes, of course, Toscanini, how extraordinary!"
"He thinks Paolo is an Italian who forgot how to talk. 'Every power of your mind,' he said, 'has fled to your ear, and it is the most beautiful ear. Bellissimo!' "
I heard strains of music coming from within the house. I pointed in their direction, and asked, "Mozart?"
Unfortunately, I was also pointing to a marble bust of Beethoven that stood in the hallway. Angelica was beginning to lose patience. "No," she said, "Beethoven," and led me toward the back.
"Don't talk until Mr. Horowitz is finished and has left," she commanded. "Unless, of course, you are asked a question."
I agreed. I was taken to a darkened terrace entirely overwhelmed by the enormous mass of the Steinway factory. The factory walls were of richly colored ancient brick, strewn with ivy and the old brown iron of fire escapes and shutter latches, old iron that, like old wood, was comforting not for what it looked like but for what it had seen. It had held its place serenely as all the things that now vexed me had long ago passed it by, not once, but a hundred times. It had been the patient platform for the thick ice of blizzards, the heat sump of the August sun, the gymnasium of ten thousand contemplative squirrels in gray flannel suits, the trellis of ivy and wisteria and blooms that had bloomed when my father was courting my mother.
The massive brick and solid iron was the frame of many score floating windows through which came sound and light. The factory was at work that night, for the war had destroyed many pianos, the piano factories of Europe were in ruins, and the children born to returning soldiers were now old enough to begin their lessons at the keyboard.
Never in my life had I heard so many tappings, so many tuning forks, and so many basso profundo woods knocked into place with mallets that even in themselves were works of art. And as for the pianos, well, it was not so much craftsmanship and its vagaries that made one different from another, but accidents of wood that may have occurred with great slowness as summers varied in distant forests, or differences in ores that were first apparent as rivers of molten metal cooled long before the appearance of the clouds or the birth of the seas.
And at the base of all this was a middle-aged Vladimir Horowitz playing like sixty and lost in music to the detriment of time, of which all of us became mercifully forgetful. What beautiful cadenzas. They exploded into the night like huge white waves jumping shoreward in a storm; they took all the darkness from the air on that late September evening, and filled very beautifully all the empty spaces that exist to test the soul with doubt.
Smedjebakken looked dead. Not only was he immobile, his mouth open, his eyes wide, and his body stiff, but it was clear that his soul had risen from him (tethered, of course) to occupy some ethereal space nearby, like a weather balloon. It seemed as if all his mental power had been put by the magic of the music into a purifying centrifuge. Despite its connection to dance, music is nonetheless the emblem of immobility, for when it is really great it seizes time and holds it still in an invisible grip. I had experienced this many times myself, and now I was watching a portly engineer behind the Steinway factory in Astoria get exactly the same religion.
I was shocked, however, to see that he was a drug addict. The paraphernalia were arrayed damningly on a table beside him—a plate of rusks (as a chaser); a cup with leaves settled disgustingly at the bottom; and, out in the open, unconcealed, absolutely brazen, a pot of tea.
In my younger days, when I didn't know any better and when the recklessness of youth made me sometimes dissolute, I myself had experimented with tea. One January night, in a Harvey's Restaurant on the Niagara Frontier, I was so chilled and exhausted that I dipped a tea bag in a cup of hot water at least six times, and drank.
What visions I had, what ecstasy, what equanimity! I was able to see the continual action of colors, which move like a fire, but more evenly. The bee sees this, it is said, and what the bee saw, so did I. I watched falling snow blind the lights of Buffalo, and all my memories came as if upon the flood of a deep unagitated river cutting through the countryside of the present to find the place whence it had come.
Powerful stuff, tea, but, like all drugs, false and dangerous. For two weeks I lay moaning in the cheapest hotel in Buffalo, wanting with all my soul to kill myself, but having neither the courage to do so nor even the ability to leave the room. This was payment for mechanical ecstasy, or, if not that, the price one pays for two weeks in Buffalo.
When the lights came up I realized that the music had stopped. Horowitz leaned his head against his left hand, and, with the gravest of expressions, he said, "For the life of me, Paolo, I cannot decide which has the better sound. The actions are equal."
Smedjebakken didn't move.
"Which one, Paolo? Help me."
"Uh," Smedjebakken said. "Uh, Vladimir ... I think ... I think ... I think the one on the right. The one on the right has the contained magnificence of tone that you want."
"This one?"
"No, that's the one on the left. The one on my left is the one on your right. Artists," Smedjebakken said to me, acknowledging my presence for the first time, though he still did not know who I was. "The sonority of the one on the right," he continued, addressing himself entirely to Horowitz, "I would liken to claret as opposed to Beaujolais. Especially for Mozart, you want a bell-like sound muted by almost imperceptible mists of interference beginning at the strike of each note and following like a subtle echo thereafter."
"But what about for Beethoven?"
"Beethoven. Beethoven is ... less pure, more rounded, not as metallic. This piano is perfect for the area where Mozart and Beethoven meet, and when you play either, that is the magic circle where you want to be. You must tug each slightly in the direction of the other. For they are like a bipolar star, and eliciting absolute perfection from either depends upon leaning away from their proclivities and toward the center."
"Bravo," said Horowitz, throwing a kiss, making a bow, and signaling to the Steinway people that he had chosen the one on his left.
Before he went into the glowing interior of the factory and then, presumably, to his limousine, he said, "Thank you, Paolo. See you next time."
A Steinway worker pulled the doors to him like a fat woman doing the breast stroke, and they clicked shut. He brought up a trolley and attached it to the triangular base upon which rested the piano that Horowitz had chosen, and pulled it out of the studio, switching off the lights as he left.
"That's the way it is with Horowitz every time," Smedjebakken said to me. "Cash and carry."
"How often do you do this?" I asked.
"A couple of times a week, on average. They pay me."
"I know. Your wife told me. Do they pay you well?"
"It matches my TA salary, and I'd do it for free."
"That's extraordinary."
"It's the only gift I can give to my child," he said.
"How do you mean?"
"Music."
"Yes, music," I repeated, having nothing but a vague and unsatisfactory idea of what he meant.
"Someday," he went on, "they'll have high fidelity that will be indistinguishable from the real thing—a technology we can hardly dream of now—and she'll be able to listen to anything she
wants, at any time. I'm saving for that."
I dared not ask him to be specific, for, inexplicably, he was moved by his declaration to the point where his eyes had begun to sparkle in the light coming from the upper floors of the piano factory, and I thought it should rest, so I changed the subject.
"I play, you know," I said. "Not well, but well enough to appreciate someone who really knows what he is doing, and enough to understand that Mozart was a divine emissary. And I think he knew it from the time he was a baby. You know, you always hear about Freud, Marx, and Einstein. Of these I think only Einstein was truly great, but even he was far eclipsed by Mozart, who, in my opinion, was the greatest man ever to have lived."
"Yes," said Smedjebakken. "He wasn't like a baseball player or anything like that, was he, he was great beyond description."
After a few awkward moments when neither of us could say anything, because so much had to be said, Smedjebakken looked at me. "You're from the restaurant."
"And the roof," I added.
"Yes, the roof! And coffee."
"I hate it," I said, looking at the tea.
"Come inside," he told me. "It's getting cold out here. Let's go to the kitchen table."
"You drink tea?"
"If you come inside," he said, "I'll explain."
"I don't understand how a man sensible enough to figure out coffee could let himself get on the other side of tea," I said.
Smedjebakken was leaning over the kitchen table, his right hand on the throat of a lamp. After he pushed the switch, the room came up warm and his face glowed like a pumpkin. He looked at me, craftily. "I'm not perfect," he answered.
"But, to be a drug addict, in your own home, in front of your own family...."
"They have forgiven me."
"Why do you continue?"
"As I grow older," he said, "I find that I can't spring back as easily as I could when I was young. Then, I could go for days without sleep, I could work until I dropped, and, after a hap, start right in again. There seemed no end to my power or energy. But I no longer have the stamina to contemplate sixteen orgasms a day, much less to achieve them. My present self, though wiser, is bodily of almost a different species. At one time, my excessive vitality distorted all my opinions.
"How could it not have? I thought everything was possible, and that time moved with compassionate slowness. Hard to believe, but I wanted it to pass more quickly. I used to listen to music all night and lay ties all the next day.
"Then, youth left, fleeing like a coward from the onslaught of responsibility. And now that I'm well along into middle age, I need more strength than I have.
"I was at a loss. I had no way, no clue. But I needed the energy of two lives."
"So you turned to artifice."
"Yes!" He leapt up and ran out of the room. I thought he was propelled by shame, but he was back in a minute, carrying a book that he slammed down so hard I started.
" 'Narcotic Plants, by William Emboden!'" he read, quite excitedly. Then he flipped rapidly through the pages until he found the passage he was seeking.
"'In Tibet,'" he began, "'weary horses and mules are given large vessels of tea to increase their capacity to work. Mules are said to be gamboling like colts as a result of their tea rations.... The distance between villages is accounted for in terms of the number of cups of tea necessary to sustain the person traveling that route. It has been ascertained that three cups of tea is equal to eight kilometers.'" He banged the book shut. All that slamming and banging was undoubtedly the work of the tea.
"If this devilish substance," he said, "will work so charmingly upon completely innocent animals at terribly high altitudes, why should I abjure it? Tea, being translucent and light, does not, like coffee, offend due to lack of purity. The base issue of coffee is filth, is it not?"
"That and other horrors," I offered. "Conformity, sameness, compulsion, addiction, mental illness, et cetera."
"I agree, but there's something pure, angelic, and light about tea, isn't there? Admit it."
"I don't know. I had a cup of tea once in Buffalo, and it would have been the cause of my suicide had I been able to get hold of a barrel."
"I belong to the Church of Rome," Smedjebakken declared. "I don't commit suicide. What other drawbacks are there?"
"Weakness of character?"
"My character is weak," he said. "I've known this since I failed to become president of the United States. I'm sunk in my own depravity."
I looked at him and said, "I'm not sure if you're right for my project."
By the glint in his eye I could tell that he didn't want to be left out, so, to barb the hook, I rose from my chair.
"Still," he said, "I've never had a cup of coffee, and I've attacked a hundred urns, overthrowing them for the sake of everything that is just and good."
"That's admirable," I said, sitting down.
"How many people have you met who attack coffee urns?"
"Only me."
"Perhaps then, even if we differ, even if you are an upper-class asshole investment banker, we should work together."
"You misunderstand me," I said. "I started as a courier, a long time ago, and now I do manual labor in the vaults."
"Really."
"Yes. In some ways, I like it. It's simple. It keeps me strong, and I don't have to devote my attention to meaningless and ephemeral details. I can think all day, like a prisoner in solitary confinement."
"That's why I like maintenance of way," Smedjebakken said. "I get to make solitary patrols, like Lewis and Clark, in a world half underground and half flying above it."
"Lewis and Clark weren't solitary," I said. "There were at least two of them."
"Ah, but they were so lonely. Tell me what you have in mind."
At that very moment, Angelica Massina, the actual Mrs. Smedjebakken, came downstairs with a dinner tray.
"How's everything?" Smedjebakken asked.
"Fine," she said. "Sleeping."
After she washed the dishes, she left the room without looking our way.
"Is she a lawyer?" I asked.
"No. She was a typist for the Navy, but she quit when our daughter was born."
"Oh," I said. "I thought she had just come home from Manhattan: the suit and everything. She has the air of a career woman."
"She was in Manhattan," Smedjebakken said. "She was at the hospital. Look, I don't mean to pry, but what is it that you want to talk about?"
"Money."
"You go first." He insolently crunched a rusk, as if to suggest that he was not impressed by the fact that I was an investment banker.
"Do you need it?"
"Of course I need it. Everyone needs it."
"Yes," I replied, "but some people think they don't, or pretend they don't."
"Monks and stuff."
"Some monks and stuff," I agreed, "but even monks and stuff need money. They have to eat. They need a roof, clothes. They have to advertise their wine."
"Fine. Monks need money. Is that what you came to tell me?"
"No. How much money?"
"How much money do monks need?"
"No, you," I said.
"How much money do I need?"
"Yes."
"I never looked at it that way. That's like saying, how tall would you like to be? You're as tall as you are. You can't get taller."
"But?" I asked.
"But what?"
"But? Come on. Tell me, the difference."
He crunched another rusk. "All right. You can get more money."
"That's right," I confirmed. "That's what all those upper-class assholes do, or what their forebears did. They say, I think I'll get some more money."
"What do you want me to do, rob a bank?"
When I made no answer, and merely stared at him intently, he said, "You do. You want me to rob a bank."
I turned from him and walked to the window, where, to heighten the dramatic effect, I stood for the time it took to count to twenty-five.
/> "What are you counting, birds?" Smedjebakken yelled across the room, having heard me.
Then I came back to where I had been, and calmly said: "The biggest bank in the world. The greatest single concentration of wealth in the universe. We can do it slowly and methodically, and they may never know. If they do find out it could be many years from now, and no matter when they find out it's very likely that someone else will take the rap. We won't have to use weapons or resort to violence. We can split the proceeds equally. The only drawback is that you'll have to assume a new identity and live in a different place. You could be, for example, a Swedish count who has retired to a house in Geneva overlooking the lake. When you walk down the street in Switzerland you hear Mozart and Beethoven from within the houses, not boogie-woogie."
"I like boogie-woogie."
"So do I. But after five minutes...."
"Look," said Smedjebakken, leaning slightly forward. "Honesty is more important than money."
"Of course it is."
"So, I can't rob a bank."
"What's dishonest about robbing a bank?" I asked, offended that he had questioned my integrity. "We'd be taking out gold bullion. Did you ever really think about gold? It's mined by slave labor. In Rome and medieval Europe the gold was mined by slaves and serfs. Today in South Africa and the Soviet Union the miners are slaves except in name. That means that whoever possesses the gold after it comes from the earth is tainted."
"What about gold mined in the United States or Canada?"
"Gold is fungible, and the greater part of it was extracted by slave labor. Every bar is corrupt. But eventually," I continued, "it passes into legitimacy. You can't expect a moral trail to last through many owners, because you can't expect people to know things they can't know. Still, much of the gold goes into the treasuries of criminals, dictators, drug traders ... and to own it they have to put their mark on it, so to speak, so that you can know it's theirs and you can know you're taking it from someone who, on almost any scale of morality, has no right to it."
"Who do you want to take it from?"
"The gold I have in mind is kept in cages, and the most promising cage belongs to a sheik on the Arabian peninsula who has two hundred wives, several thousand slaves, and fifty Cadillacs. If he is criticized by his subjects and he can get to them, he will torture them until they die. I would say that, morally, he's compromised. Nothing you can do to a man like that is dishonest."