Page Turner Pa Read Free

room, where he sat before a scratched and battered table, the lights off, his fingers on his temples. Unlike Izzy Gerstler, he was not an experienced libertine; nor was it his habit to be driven to dementia by page turners. And yet something about Paul's nervous meticulousness, his good manners, the razor-sharp part in his hair, alarmed Kennington. He could not say why, exactly. Perhaps it was the degree to which Paul seemed an echo of himself, years earlier. (As a boy, making his first
tournée
of Europe, he too must have given off that musk of animal discomfort.) Also the tingle of unexpressed need that now clung to Kennington's suit, picked up like static electricity from a wall socket.
    A knock sounded. "Five minutes!" the stage manager called, and Kennington stumbled onto his feet. To his embarrassment he had an erection. He closed his eyes, tried to will it away, for he couldn't very well walk out on stage like that. And yet despite his efforts to fill his mind only with the
Archduke,
an image of Paul on all fours, with his shorts around his knees, materialized insistently on the insides of his eyelids. On the insides of his eyelids he was stroking the arched behind, the line of pale hairs that ran from the small of the back into the cleft between the buttocks. And Paul was begging him, he was saying, "Please, sir. Please." This wasn't in itself unusual. In fantasy at least, Kennington liked being begged. He liked withholding before satisfying. It was all rather like a curtain call.
    No, the thing that unnerved him was that the fantasy seemed to be having him rather than the other way around.
    Another knock. "Mr. Kennington?"
    "Okay," he said, and pulling himself together, headed downstairs. In the wings Paul stood where he had left him, apparently not having moved for the entire length of the interval. "Feeling all right, sir?" he asked, his cheeks pink, gazing at Kennington with horrible sincerity.
    "Better now."
    They returned to the stage. In the orchestra the last stragglers hurried to their seats, applauding even as they ran. Opening the score, Paul tried not to look at the backs of the bowing players, the lights, the blur of human pandemonium in the midst of which, somewhere, his mother sat, probably waving at him. (It was embarrassing even to contemplate.)
    At last Tushi, arranged in her chair, nodded to Kennington. The audience quieted, and the
Archduke
began.
    It is the rare privilege of a page turner to hear a pianist almost as he hears himself: to hear his humming, the occasional grunts that escape through his teeth, the dull clack of his nails against the keys. And not only hear, but see; study. As Paul was learning, Kennington didn't move a lot when he performed, didn't lunge or writhe on the bench, or drape himself over the keyboard in an attitude of sublime transfiguration. Instead his face remained impassive, even expressionless. He kept his lips together, his back straight, supple. And those hands! Earlier, they had seemed unremarkable to Paul, but now, in the throes of
doing,
they revealed their rarity. Precision and unity, that was the formula, each note offered with an eloquence that somehow never distracted from the larger narrative in which it was bound. His hands were themselves a kind of music.
    Forty minutes later, when the trio ended and the applause began, Paul obediently picked up the score and followed the musicians off the stage. Izzy Gerstler was wiping his mouth with a wrinkled handkerchief.
    "So what say we let the blue hairs have a chance to clear out, then give them the Schubert?" he asked.
    "Fine," Tushi said. "Richard, you up for it?"
    "What? Oh, sure."
    They did not move. From the upper tiers the music students stomped rhythmically, insistent that the musicians should now play their appointed roles in that approach-avoidance ritual known as the encore—an insistence they knew better than to oblige too quickly. After all, a certain coquettishness is expected from great artists.