Heart and Soul Read Free Page B

at me enviously, I made an attempt to look casual, like David Montagnier and I were in the habit of hanging out.
    At the concert that night, I tried to concentrate on the music, but don’t ask me what they played because I kept drifting into the most ludicrous fantasies about David and me. I was going to knock him on his ass with my fabulous rendition of Part Primo of the Milhaud and then he’d take me on as the replacement for Terese Dumont, and I’d be so much better than she ever thought of being. The two-piano scene would be in demand in the U.S. like it had always been in Europe, and of course, David would fall madly in love with me and we’d get married and have half a dozen kids. We’d go on the circuit like the von Trapp family, with each kid playing a different instrument, and every day right after lunch David and I would go straight to bed. Oh, I was on some trip.
    Naturally, instead of waiting for my lesson with Professor Stein, I boogied down to Patelson’s and blew $25.50 on a copy of the Scaramouche. I started practicing the Milhaud to the exclusion of everything else, all hours of the night and day. It wasn’t that it was a difficult piece, which it’s not. But I’d bought a recording—by the Twin Peaks, as it happened—and copying Terese down to the quarter rests was the real challenge.
    The Professor canceled my lesson that week due to bronchitis. It always scared me when he got sick because he seemed so ancient. I took him hot soup every day after work and made sure he was swallowing his antibiotics and not sticking them in the flowerpot under the cactus plant. I didn’t mention Montagnier. By the time I got to my next lesson, I’d learned the Scaramouche by heart.
    â€œYou don’t look so perky,” I said to the Professor when I showed up for my lesson. His big nose was a deeper shade of blue than usual and everything was drooping. Even his tangled eyebrows looked like weeds that hadn’t seen rain for much too long.
    He gestured from his perch beside the piano. “Come in, Bess, come in,” he said with that staccato way he had of speaking when he was impatient. “I have no time to be sick.”
    â€œI brought you some medicine,” I said, displaying a tiny shopping bag. I’d hesitated outside the Belgian chocolate shop, realizing it was going to cost me the price of five loads of laundry. But it was worth it to see his face light up.
    Making it across the Professor’s living room was like threading your way through the narrow aisles of a Manhattan supermarket. There were waist-high stacks of music, and nestled in the curve of the Steinway stood a cello case. Its womanly shape was a comforting memory of his wife, dead eleven years. Besides for music and his wife, the Professor’s other passion was poker. He had a regular weekly game with a bunch of nonmusician cronies from Brooklyn. On the wall along with the photographs of him with Bernstein, Copland, and Horowitz was a framed poker hand he drew at his game on March 11, 1957: the ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of hearts, each one autographed by the other players who were there. Sometimes, when my lesson wasn’t going so hot, I would catch him staring dreamily at that spot on the wall and I knew he was reliving the great moment.
    â€œDid you take your Zithromax this morning?” I asked him, handing him the chocolates.
    â€œYesyesYES,” he said, waving an arm impatiently and giving me a damp cough just to let me know what he thought of pills. “Don’t hover, Bess. You know I hate that.”
    I sat down on the piano bench and started running through some scales. I could see David Montagnier’s music beside the Professor and waited to see if he’d raise the issue. I knew we were kind of teasing one another. After he’d made serious inroads on the chocolates and I’d played a couple of measures of the Prokofiev B-flat Major Sonata,