Who’s Vladimir Horowitz?
Jim Cory
1.
The rented…Taurus?... whips along a mountain highway somewhere west of Charlotte. Sun up and not another car in sight. It’s fall, late fall, actually. Leaves mostly gone.
I lower the window an inch and snap the radio on. Out here in Billy Graham Land it’s a roll of the dice. Conway Twitty? Loretta Lynn? Still I want sound and I’ll settle for just about anything.
But on this particular morning how many years ago the dice produce a result that conditional probability and all its various outcomes could hardly have predicted: a classical music station, attached to a local liberal arts college I didn’t know existed. And just as I’m inwardly celebrating, prepared to revel in whatever comes next—bang!—the opening chord of Chopin’s “Ballade in G Minor” sounds.
Of perfect moments life offers few, a handful at most, which might be why we call them that. X conjoins with Y, Y with Z, each seemingly unrelated yet all coming for some nerve-curling instant into alignment, what Jung called “acausal parallelism.” This, I suppose, explains how I met Brian.
The word Allegro means “brisk pace,” but in this case it’s a bar, long gone, where many went to get drunk and dance in that order. The exact circumstances I would give if I could but to extract specifics from the murk of too many beers and bourbon shots makes this not possible. Suffice it to say that after chatting Brian and I ended up in that room with the blue paneling and cardboard chandelier that I, in those wanton days, had the effrontery to call my apartment.
There we fall into the eager gab of two who know there’s going to be sex but are hoping for something more, something better. Coincidence piles on. We both come from families of eight. Check. These eight consist of five males and three females. Check. We are both… middle children. Check. And before he leaves, this Brian, we tumble onto that gray felt sofa on which I made love to all the strangers who followed me home and, as was my wont, somewhere in the middle of all that, I pass out, and he leaves.
In the weeks immediately after there are other nights that end similarly and somewhere at some point this Brian decides he’s going to “save” me. I know this because he told me so years later. Actually, at the time I didn’t see myself as much in need of saving. But he suggests we move in together. I immediately agree. I don’t love him but it seems an easy thing to learn how to do. Meanwhile he’ll cook, clean, sew, run for beer, call in sick on top of my hangovers, and haul my clothes home from the cleaner.
2.
We find a two-bedroom walkthrough at 10th and Pine, which Brian decorates with ficus trees, a species he admired from having seen some at parties where he’s bartending for a catering firm.
Once installed, of course, we fight night and day.
“Jesus Christ, it’s Tuesday!”
“So.”
“So? So? So you’re drinking!?”
“I’m just having a few beers.”
Glance at the trash basket piled with empty cans.
“A few beers?”
Brian was a nice blond working class boy with a wide face and a big heart. The high point of our romance was the time we both were asleep and each of us dreamed he was having sex with the other. When we woke up, we were.
“Jim, wasn’t that strange?”
I agreed it was and fell back to sleep.
I had a job I didn’t like and when I wasn’t there, I drank. Or tried to. Sneaking drinks if you live with someone who doesn’t is a mess. Unless they’ll look the other way. Brian wouldn’t.
“I can tell,” he once said, “by the tone of your voice if you’ve had even one beer.”
Oh Christ.
Of course all I really wanted was to get drunk and pass out in peace. And every time it looked like that might be possible, some wretched eruption would shatter the household tranquility.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!?” I heard him scream one morning from the bathroom.
I guessed, correctly, that he’d found the label-less fifth of Old Granddad stashed in the toilet tank.
Whether it was forgetting four loads of our clothes at U Do It, staggering home tipsy or disappearing for an evening only to appear at three reeking of beer and bad sex, I kept it up and Brian kept losing his shit. Sometimes he’d yell. (“I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!”) Sometimes he’d weep. Sometimes he’d hurl an ashtray at the wall. Once even a bottle of his precious designer cologne. Sometimes he’d dump a drawer of my sweaters on the floor and drop kick a pile or two across the room for good measure.
Once I came home to find the locks changed. The neighbors had a blast with that.
I looked for ways to save this relationship. How could I be his hero?
One day I happened to read in the newspaper that Vladimir Horowitz was appearing at the Academy of Music. It looked like my chance. I’d introduce him to culture. He’d grow, acquire taste, sophistication, and I, of course, would get the credit.
“Brian,” I said, “look at this. Vladimir Horowitz is coming to Philadelphia!”’
I knew he didn’t know Horowitz from Ho Chi Minh, but I was determined to get him juiced, or at least curious.
Of course he’d learned that the slightest expression of enthusiasm for one of my projects amounted to giving me permission to drink.
“Who’s Vladimir Horowitz?” he said.
“WHO’S VLADIMIR HOROWITZ?”
Upstairs a window slammed.
3.
I told him that Horowitz had retired three times—most recently from 1969 to 1974—and three times come back to the stage. I said that he was famously fearful of audiences. I retailed at some length that old chestnut about how Horowitz had arrived once dressed to play but in an onset of stage fright told his manager he was too sick to go on at which point the manager suggested that that was fine with him but that he, Horowitz, would need to go out and explain to the people that their tickets would be refunded.
Guess how that turned out.
The next morning the line wound from the front doors and all the way to the rear of the Academy of Music. I stood or sat for four hours. But what seats. Sixth row back from the stage.
Then I blew it. The night before the recital—a Saturday—I happened to run into one of my old bar tricks named Timmy on Spruce Street. This Timmy had an amazing ass and knew it and, pining for old times, we ducked into the Westbury or Roscoe’s, maybe even the Allegro, soon proceeding to his apartment, where I woke at 4:43 in the morning to notice a fifth of Old Granddad on the nightstand. I chugged whatever remained, dressed and—Ta ta, Timmy!— headed home.
“Brian?” I said, pushing the bedroom door open.
He was awake but pretended not to be.
It’s hard working your way back from a fuck-up that big. I tried.
I scrubbed the tub.
Silence.
I washed the day’s dishes.
Silence.
Three o’clock rolled around. I pulled a suit out of the closet and laid it on the bed.
“Brian,” I said, pawing through drawers for a matching tie, “what are you wearing?”
“I’m not wearing anything.”
Uh-oh.
“Whadda you mean, you’re not wearing anything?”
“I mean I’m not going, asshole.”
He said this quietly. Quietly was worse than shrieking. It meant there was a lifespan attached.
“Not going? Are you insane? It’s Horowitz!”
I’ve always had this knack for saying the obvious and self-defeating thing exactly at the point where I shouldn’t. I suppose that’s a talent of some kind.
The steps in front of the Academy look like a church letting out, filmed in reverse. Spiffy haberdashers, Rittenhouse ladies in pearls, piano students from hundred of miles around, the whole desperate mass battling its way up and in. In the center of the stage sat a massive piano.
The concert was scheduled to start at four. At 3:45 the hall was packed. I folded my cashmere topcoat and set it in the only empty seat in the house.
Four o’clock.
Five after four.
Ten after four.
4.
Spssss, spssss, spssss, spssss.
I could feel people preparing themselves for disappointment. It was as if they’d gotten out a brush and dustpan and were already mentally sweeping up their busted hopes. Me, I was wondering how the whole fraud would play out in the papers the next day.
At sixteen minutes after four, Horowitz appeared, stage left. Barely visible at first, he blinked from the wings, hesitated a moment, then loped forward into the lights.
A hush.
Watching the maestro in bow tie and jacket it occurred to me for the first but not the last time that loneliness comes in as many forms as there are people but that there is no loneliness that compares to that of the stage performer.
Horowitz cocked his head at the 5,000 lb. chandelier. He peered at the boxes flanking the wings. Was he, a Jew born under Russia’s last (notoriously anti-Semitic) Tsar, thinking that those boxes were the sort of place a Tsar might sit? Now his eye alights on the piano. It was his own instrument, trucked down from New York, by terms of his contract. He stares as if he’d never seen one before.
The audience looked on indulgently. Suddenly from the top pocket of his jacket Horowitz extracted a folded handkerchief and flicked it open. He started with the music shelf, moved to the fallboard, the sidearm, the cumbrous but majestic lid.
Somehow he was able to polish keys without making a sound—the first of the afternoon’s miracles—after which he wiped down the bench.
Titters changed to laughter, the laughter that issues when hapless people are observed doing something ridiculous.
When the tension had reached a point where at any moment someone was sure to scream, he struck his first notes.
The program, including Schumann, Chopin and Rachmaninov, opened with Muzio Clementi’s “Sonata in C Major,” Opus 33, Number 3. Horowitz, who resurrected Clementi from a century of neglect, described him once as the “father of modern pianism.” The appeal is evident. Clementi has the competence and some of the ingenuity of Mozart, lacking only the sparkling wit. Of course no pianist starts with a blockbuster. That would be like handing out the best present first on Christmas.
Clementi gave me my first sense of the Horowitz sound. Its difference was instantly apparent. How to describe? Tender but restrained, mellifluous without a hint of corn. In performance as in creation, taste is everything. Each note belonged to him and only him.
My hunch is that most pianists are carried onstage in a cage of nerves. The exceptions are those unflappable artists—Yefim Bronfman, for instance, also a Russian Jew—who love to perform and would play through a nuclear strike and return for an encore. (A cell phone went off once while he was playing and Bronfman casually concluded the second movement of a Brahms’ sonata, glanced into the crowd and said, smiling: “Eez that for me?”)
Also obvious was the absence of coughing, sniffling, purse opening, program rattling, butt-shuffling, throat-clearing, etc. the racket that signals a performer’s failure to connect. Silence enveloped the hall, the silence of 2,508 people concentrating on the same thing at the same time.
5.
Soon enough it no longer mattered that I was alone, since, essentially, I was not.
Note by note, Horowitz cast his spell. Some pianists make a point of appearing enraptured with the sounds they produce. They sing, sway, grin, stare upward, shake their heads. It’s a way to guide the audience toward what it should be feeling. This musician, on the other hand, was out to enthrall. Watching that face, mostly immobile but for the eyes, those fingers longer than piano keys pressing and plunging, it was clear that every note had been weighed and tested to correspond with a fully formed sense of the score. Every effect was intention rather than accident.
This truth became evident with the “Ballade in G Minor.”
Chopin called this his “dearest” work. It begins, literally, with a bang before alternating between passages of somber reflection and explosive keyboard runs, like something remembered again and again, each time with greater mental violence.
With a face that looked as if he were performing an operation rather than making music, Horowitz stepped up the tempo just slightly, plucking notes in the slower passages so that they seemed to expand, echo and take on shade.
It was at some midpoint in the work’s roughly nine and a half minute length that I heard something that I’d never heard in the Academy of Music before nor in any concert hall since. Somewhere off to my right, a woman began sobbing. More weeping erupted a moment later to my left and then, from behind, out-and-out bawling.
I started to wonder if I was at a piano recital or a funeral. I wondered, too, if these responses were a regular feature of Horowitz performances and whether it was possible that the pianist was hamming in some sly way? The bashful lateness, the handkerchief, the piano-polishing, could it be a shtick? How much of this was showmanship, how much the expression of an essentially timid man called to greatness by the scope of his talent?
Soon enough the smiling bow, an exit, further bows, another exit, etc. The audience remained on its feet a good quarter hour. And when they knew that that was all they were going to get, they grabbed their coats and jackets, filing out in the same deathly quiet that had surrounded the music.
I was still up when Brian got back from wherever he’d been.
“Brian,” I said, “it was amazing.”
Silence.
It took a week for me to dry out and about that long for him to speak to me. Back and forth, for a year, it went like that. When I finally quit drinking the relationship died like an unwatered ficus. But Brian found another lover, a MathewMathew. This MathewMathew, a bartender at the Venture Inn, would taxi out to the apartment we shared in West Philly, arriving a half hour after the bars closed.
DING DONG!
The landlady, Eleanor, and her boyfriend, another MathewMathew—so many!—lived on the first and second floors. If the doorbell didn’t wake them, the sozzled stomp of Brian’s MathewMathew up the stairs to the third floor was guaranteed to.
Door closes. Battle begins.
“I don’t believe this, you’re drunk?”
“No I’m not!”
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
Etc.
6.
Eleanor might’ve put a stop to all this, except that her moral authority was considerably undermined given that she was known for moaning and howling during sex, keeping everyone in the neighborhood up. “FUCK ME YOU ANIMAL!” she’d scream, while her Mathew presumably did all he could to accommodate this request.
One floor up, my ear’s to the wall listening to Brian and his Mathew have the festivities underway.
“WHY CAN’T YOU STOP DRINKING?”
A book hits the wall, followed by a shoe.
“I just worked a full shift. Leave me the fuck alone!”
On a good night their histrionics ended in sex. On a bad one, Brian ordered Mathew out or harassed him to the point where he’d leave in a huff.
“CALL ME A CAB!”
“CALL YOUR OWN FUCKING CAB!”
Slam! went the windows.
Brian drove off for good in a U-Haul one sultry Fourth of July. It was his birthday and rather humid. I went back upstairs and turned the air conditioner on.
I saw him intermittently in the next dozen years. He got a degree in nursing. He was working as a nurse. There was money in his pockets. I was glad. A grudge is just a wound with a long lease. Meanwhile suddenly he has yet another boyfriend, also named Jim.
Jims, Brians, Mathews, that was the world then.
Brian and I would run into each other on the street from time to time.
“I see where Horowitz died,” he says to me, on one such occasion.
The obit had appeared the week before in the Inquirer. Why, I wondered, would it mean anything to him?
“I should’ve gone with you that time,” he said suddenly.
“Yes,” I said, “you should’ve.”
It takes only a pinch of salt to make dead things edible.
“It’s amazing how many people die,” a friend said the other day, genuinely shocked by this fact, which reminded me of something that happened a few years after Horowitz departed this world. I was on the phone one night when suddenly a third party, with the operator’s permission, burst into the conversation to tell me I had to get off right away. I was, said this third party, about to get an important phone call.
“From who?” I said. “About what?”
“Just hang up.”
Seconds later the phone rang. It was Brian’s boyfriend, Jim #2. He was combing through Brian’s address book, calling us all to say Brian had died of pancreatitis the month before. Diagnosed one day, dead three weeks later.
“He had HIV,” he said.
“Thanks for calling,” I said.
I dreamed about him for a few years. There were three dreams, really. The most frequent involved blond sex, sometimes on red velvet. I’d wake with a throbbing erection, usually alone. In another we’re exchanging Christmas gifts. I tear through wrapping paper, magenta bound in gold ribbon, to find the brand of cologne that he wore and wanted me to wear and which, of couse, I regused to do, telling him it was strictly for pissy queens. The third dream has me stranded on a chandelier, in panic, calling for Brian to get help. “I wanted to save you,” he said, once and only once, and I remembered it because of the way he said it, which was as if he were saying it to himself, a private thought that somehow escaped.
7.
“You saw Horowitz?” someone will say, frowning, when talk turns to the subject of the piano. “What year was that?”
___________
Jim Cory has published 10 chapbooks of poems. His most recent publications are Wipers Float In The New Of The Reservoir (1918, The Moron Channel, New Orleans) and 25 Short Poems (2016, Moonstone Press, Philadelphia). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press) and Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press). Poems have appeared recently in Apiary, unarmed journal, Bedfellows, Capsule, Fell Swoop, Painted Bride Quarterly, Skidrow Penthouse, Cape Cod Poetry Journal and Whirlwind. Recent essays include “What makes a queen a queen?” in the Gay & Lesbian Review, and “What do you think about concrete?” and “Are birds spies?” in the New Haven Review. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.