Pete Hamill - Forever

On slow days, or Sunday mornings, he sat beside her on the piano bench and ran his fingers over the keys, savoring each chord, astonished at the way music brought something from deep inside him. A choppy Celtic anger. A longing for a world already lost.

“You have very good hands,” she said one morning. “But then I already knew that.”

“They’re not good enough for music,” he said.

“They will be.”

She showed him what to do with her own long-fingered hands, telling him to watch the way those fingers moved. Sometimes she lost herself in the music, doing a concert for an audience of one, her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly backward, listening as if the rest of the world were a vast silence. Her music was lyrical and romantic, and he saw her as a girl in some stately white mansion in Port-au-Prince, alone in a vast room, or with some French exile serving as her musical overseer. In his imagination, her instructor looked like the dancing master from John Hughson’s tavern, small, a dandy, and then he wondered: Where did the dancing master go? Where did all of those people go who were in my life for a month or a year and then moved off the stage?

And so music merged with water as he meshed more closely with the Countess de Chardon. A set of rules was being formed between them, unwritten, unposted, but part of their shared time. He understood, as he painted the women of the house in his studio down the hall, that he might finish the night with a token of mutual gratitude. With shrugs, or phrases, the countess encouraged it, for she insisted that jealousy of the flesh was an absurd form of human weakness.

“Jealousy kills,” she said. “It kills love. It kills people. You know that. You see the results at least once a week in your job. The cemeteries are filled with people who thought jealousy was love.”

“But it’s there; it’s part of human nature.”

“No, it’s part of the idea of property. Read Mary Shelley, Cormac. I mean, truly read her. Men think women are their personal property. When women decide that they own their own bodies and will use them as they please, men kill them.”

“Women kill men too,” he said. “Jealous women.”

“To protect themselves. To kill before they are killed. They don’t really care if men go off with other women, as long as they come home, as long as they don’t pick up a disease and carry it into their beds and their bodies. I know. I see certain men here all the time, and then see them with their wives going down to Trinity or St. Paul’s on Sunday mornings. Then I see a notice in a newspaper that poor Missus So-and-so has died after a long illness, and I know she’s died from what he brought home. Not from this place, because I have the doctor to check each woman every week. But from a hundred dives on South Street. My point is simple: More women are murdered by men’s pricks than by gunshots, Cormac.”

“Can I quote you in the Post ?” he said, and laughed.

“You can translate me into Latin and chisel it over the courthouse door.”

She implied that when he was alone while she traveled to Philadelphia or Boston on business, she would not care if he sampled the other women of the house. They were there for many men, even Cormac. He was entitled to small pleasures, and so was she.

“I just don’t want your personal report,” she said. “I don’t want you to tell me that Fiammetta is wonderful. If she is, I want to be there myself, with the two of you.” She smiled. “The only way to prevent jealousy is to share one’s flesh. To be generous. To break down the notion of permanent ownership.”

“I don’t want to know what you might do in Philadelphia or Boston, either.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “But I won’t do anything. That’s not a promise to you. That’s a promise to me.”

Together, they often engaged in what the countess called “research.” The suite and the bed and the bath were all part of the laboratory. She wanted to do with her body (and Cormac’s) everything she could imagine as a woman. She guided him on some nights the way she guided him at the piano. There were chords in bed too, and solos, and glissandos. She tried to do things so impossible they both fell laughing into uselessness. But some worked. And then, as a businesswoman, she would offer such services, after the proper training of her young ladies, to all of the customers. Every house in New York had its specialties, and she wanted to keep changing the menu in hers.

“Think of this place as a restaurant,” she said one midnight, after dining with Cormac in the suite. “We have to satisfy certain… basic appetites. Every house must have a fat woman, of course. Every house must have a negress. Every house must have its ugly woman. And its girl dressed as a nun. The menu must contain the basics.” She laughed. “Livened up, of course, with a few… specialties.”

Some of her competitors had their own restricted menus. In one house, the customers would not be admitted if they were older than eighteen, a shameless play for the Columbia College trade. The older women, said the countess, loved working there, in spite of the low wages. Another house provided a silk-lined coffin for necrophiliac men. A dozen catered to those who wanted lashings. We can’t offer everything here, said the Countess de Chardon. But we can give them the odd surprise . Variety was good for business, and all these bored men, bored with wives, bored with life, needed those surprises. But there was a personal motive too for her own experiments. “I don’t want to die without trying everything, at least once ,” she whispered to Cormac one night. “I don’t know anything about the soul, but I want to know everything about flesh. Everything that I can possibly know. To see it. To feel it. To do it. For I could die tomorrow.”

So Cormac realized that he was also living with a woman who knew something about mortality. In a room on the top floor of a building on Duane Street. The palace of water and flesh and music.

One Tuesday morning, she moved a new piano into the suite, and across the long evenings, while the countess mingled with the customers, flirting, teasing, confiding, Cormac played. He learned to read music without much of a struggle; it was, as he’d thought, another language, and if he could think in Yoruba and Irish, if he could teach himself French, if he could decode Latin, then these notations, which were a kind of drawing too, did not intimidate him. Execution was another matter. Sometimes his hands felt encased in wool. He hit the wrong keys, smashed chords, lost the tempo. And started over.

On some solitary nights, he ignored the music sheets and allowed his hands to drift, to caress each key, to discover music he had never heard and could not imagine. It was as if he were bringing forth some hidden spirit from the secret caves within the piano, revealing its desperate yearning for pleasure. He could feel Ireland in the music. And Africa. And the ocean sea.

On other nights, he felt music as a form of landscape, with rolling hills and a placid river and trees with rustling leaves. He could feel it in his painter’s hands, which were not yet the hands of a musician. The terrain was not made of earth, or paint, but sound. He would try to find paths through the hills of sound, he would try to find a way to the river. He always failed. His hands were too crude. The paths were not marked. Then he would try again. He did not feel frustrated. Frustration, after all, was an impatience with the ticking of clocks. He had all the time in the world.

On some nights in early spring, after their bath, the countess would sit naked at the piano, commanding him to lie on the bed. Teaching him had brought back the passion she felt, long ago, for music. Or so she said. A passion she’d erased through an act of will. Now it rose from her again, like a ghost. Here is Vivaldi, she said. Here is Scarlatti. Here is something without a composer. Here is France. Here is Haiti. She would play then as if the notes were licking his flesh and entering his body. The music of such nights always made him hard.