Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

Technically no longer a virgin, Joanna nonetheless had to wait till the summer after her graduation for her first true sexual experience. She had accompanied her father to Rome for his conferences on the Cleopatra score (a job he’d never got), and then had prevailed upon him to let her stay behind for a few weeks after he went back home. She was, after all, eighteen years old now, and her father had many friends there who would take good care of her. One friend who took extremely good care of her was a man named Emmanuel Epstein who, after a champagne dinner in his room at the Hassler, humped her royally and later spanked her “little bottom,” as he’d called it, for betraying the trust of her father — “my very best friend in the whole world.” Epstein was five inches shorter than she was, a man of fifty-eight, going slightly bald, with a wife and two children in Scarsdale; he was doing publicity work for Fox in Rome. He was, as Joanna recalled, somewhat better hung than young Boyle had been, but she was nonetheless turned off the moment he achieved a second, almost immediate orgasm while spanking her.

It was Epstein who introduced her to the other two men with whom she spent a profligate month — she had promised her father only two weeks — in various bedrooms around the city. One of the men was married; the other was a young Italian auto worker from Turin, who was employed as a spear-carrying extra on the film. His thirty-second scene was later cut from the final print, much to Joanna’s dismay; she had gone to the movie when it was released, hoping to see what Antonio would look like on the screen. It was Antonio who’d given her the gold-link top she’d been wearing when Jamie met her on the Vineyard. Her other gentleman friend, the married one, gave her a variety of other things: an elephant-hair bracelet he had purchased on the Via Condotti, a hand-tooled, leatherbound edition of Dante’s Inferno — and gonorrhea.

She did not realize she was carrying this (“Ahem, social disease,” Professor Berkowitz said in a sudden excursion from Joanna’s genuine voice) until she had already enrolled at Juilliard that fall. Her ailment, once discovered and properly diagnosed, was treated promptly and effectively but not before, she was certain, she had unwittingly infected a piano student named Vladimir Potemkin (Vlad the Impaler, as she familiarly called him) who was devoted to practicing twelve hours a day and who, she was equally certain had strayed from his piano bench only once that fall, and then only to pick up a dose. She sent him one of her doctor’s cards, unsigned, but with the inscription, “Dear Vlad, please have a checkup!” He was now doing quite well on the concert circuit, making guest appearances with both the Boston and the Cleveland symphonies. He did not look particularly disease-ridden in his press photos, so Joanna guessed he’d taken her advice.

It was her genuine self who began talking about love that Saturday afternoon.

The only man she’d ever loved, she said, had been Harrison Masters, the aging poet from Indiana. She had met him at an April party given for the composer of a piece for string quartet which had been premiered at the Y on Ninety-second Street. She’d been invited to the event and the party following it by one of the fiddlers, who also played with her at the State Theater. Harrison had met the composer the summer before at Spoleto, where Menotti had arranged to have one of his poems set to harpsichord and lute, an experiment that failed because Harrison had insisted on reading the poem himself, and his rather frail voice had been drowned out by even such delicate instruments. There was a young girl on his arm when he arrived at the private party shortly after midnight. Joanna noticed them both the moment they came in.

He was a man with the gangling height of a giraffe, an eagle-like beak that was due to his part-Siouan heritage, and a leonine head of flowing white hair. “A walking menagerie,” Joanna said, “but I couldn’t take my eyes off him.” Hoping against hope that the girl on his arm was his daughter, dismayed to learn that she was instead one of his students, Joanna nonetheless sashayed across the room in the black wool knit dress she was wearing (“Basic black, dollink, mit pearls,” Joanna Jewish interjected), boldly intruded upon the conversation Harrison was having with the young composer of the work, and promptly and to the bewilderment of the hayseed student from Elephant Breath, Indiana, gained Harrison’s complete and rapt attention as she told him about her own side excursion to Spoleto during the summer of her Roman adventure. The student later went home with the cello player who’d performed brilliantly that night, playing Landscapes or Interiors or whatever the hell it was called as though it were the Haydn String Quartet in G. Joanna took Harrison home with her — to this house, to this bedroom, and on this bed they made love together for the first time.

Hearing this, Jamie felt only anger at first, and was tempted to ask whether she’d changed the sheets since. And then he suddenly realized she wasn’t going to give a detailed report on what had transpired in this bed with the poet from Indiana, but was instead only trying to understand why , for the first time in her life, she had felt unsparingly and selflessly devoted to a man who, by all reasonable standards, had been so completely wrong for her. Her voice was soft, scarcely more than a whisper. She lay beside him naked, one arm behind her head, staring up at the ceiling, wondering aloud, searching for clues to her own behavior; he suddenly felt as useless as Mandelbaum. But oddly, the feeling that he was neither necessary nor particularly vital to Joanna’s rambling monologue dissipated as swiftly as had his anger. Holding her in his arms, he listened without rancor or discomfort.

“He was,” she said, “the gentlest man I’d ever known. I’m not talking about when we made love, we did that rarely, in fact. Anyway, no man is really gentle in bed, is he? I mean, the very act demands that he perform aggressively — I hate the word ‘performance,’ don’t you? But it’s what we do actually, isn’t it? In bed, I mean. In a sense, I mean. Perform? Utilize our skills to give pleasure it’s a performance, really, similar to a concert, but not as carefully orchestrated or rehearsed.”

She took a deep breath, and turned into his arms.

“So gentle... in so many different ways,” she said. “I think his age had something to do with it, the very fact that we were eons apart, light-years apart, seventy-three and twenty-four, well, almost twenty-five, and earning a living as a musician — first chair with the City Opera, not bad, huh? — and having the time of my life before I met Harrison. So why him? The gentleness, yes, as though he were dealing with a child. So delicate with me. So careful of my feelings. So tolerant of my moods.”

Abruptly, she stopped. She was silent for what seemed like a long time. Then she said, “I think what I’m trying to say is I never thought I’d ever fall in love with anybody else ever again, not after Harrison. But now, you see, I have.” She smiled wanly, and touched his mouth with her fingertips. “I love you, Jamie,” she said.

He had heard these words before, had spoken them himself to countless teenage girls when he was growing up, had even whispered them into the ear of a Yokohama whore after the war, knowing she couldn’t possibly understand them, and actually believing he did love her, or the comfort of her body, or the safety she represented after months of slogging through the jungle dodging snipers’ bullets. He had heard these words before, he had used these words as easy currency in a free market — except with Connie. With Connie he had meant them, he guessed. With Connie he had always been impeccably honest when saying the three cheapest words in the English language.