Pinball Read Free

music, as if the waves of compression and dilation in the air around him influenced the pitch of his emotions. He perceived himself in terms of how he felt, not just in terms of who he was. In this age of video he often felt that he was an anachronism, trained to respond with his cochlea, not his retina; a creature of sound, not of sight. He speculated that, as mankind’s insecurity about its overcrowded physical world increased, so did its dependence on concrete space that could be seen and measured, and hence on visual art that portrayed it, from television to photography.
    But Domostroy was guided by the auditory, and his art was music, which enlarged his spiritual world by demolishing boundaries of time and space and by replacing the myriad separate encounters and collisions of men and objects with a mystical fusion of sound, place, and distance, of mood and emotion. His spiritual ancestors included poets, writers, and musicians, especially those who, like Shakespeare’s pair of lovers, could “hear with their eyes.”
    The two-hour tape he was now listening to contained about a dozen musical pieces, or fragments of pieces, some of them only a few minutes long. These pieces, selected over the years, were ones he trusted to ease him into a desired emotional state.
    By learning to give himself up to the proper music, he had become expert in the process of self-induced reflex.He could trigger in himself a variety of mental states: anticipation, tranquility, enthusiasm, sexual hunger, and in his composing days even the need to compose music. In “Life’s Scores,” his last published interview, he had said: “Composing is the essence of my life. Whatever else I do provokes in me a single question: Can I—would I—should I—use it in my next score? Whenever I hear my music played, I feel as though my whole life were at stake and that a single wrong note could mess it all up. I have no children, no family, no relatives, no business or estate to speak of; my music is my sole accomplishment, my only spiritual cast of mind.”
    Only once in a while, recalling his creative past, did Domostroy wonder what had happened to the essence of his life. Had the music critic of the influential
Musical Commentary
who had once accused him of composing himself into “radical isolation” been right? Was his music really so bleak and naked that it would one day tempt its creator, as another critic had once suggested, to cut his own throat?
    Domostroy remembered when, also some ten years earlier, he had appeared on
Tuning to Time,
a TV talk show. The other guest on the show was a foreign military leader who was living in exile in Florida. Although until his exile the leader had been backed by the United States in a war that had lasted for years, his country—and his cause—had eventually been defeated. “We still have a minute, gentlemen,” said the TV host cheerfully at the end of the program, and he turned to the military leader. “Tell us, General, after such a brilliant career—what went wrong?” Had the question been addressed to him, Domostroy would have panicked and not known how to answer. The military leader, betraying no emotion, casually glanced at his diamond-studded watch, then at the smiling host, then at the appreciative audience. “What went wrong?” he asked. “First, I was betrayed by my allies. Then I lost the war. That’s what went wrong.” To a military man, a lost war was the sufficient, obvious explanation for his life’s failure. But what wrong notewas sufficient to mess up the life, of a composer and make him lose, in the prime of his life, the will to compose?
    Domostroy parked the car in front of a renovated brownstone. Once inside, he ran upstairs and was out of breath by the time he reached the apartment on the fifth floor. He waited a minute for his heart and lungs to calm down, then he knocked. Andrea opened the door and let him in. She hung his jacket in a closet that was full of her dresses