Stolen Pleasures Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself, he would never have it now, anyway, at thirty-seven, with all the faults that David had so meticulously listed for everybody. Not that, but what? The mastery, the mastery, play without telegraphing the errors, play without the errors, play with the mastery of the great yet indifferent to fame if it came. Palermo was nothing, that mecca of all the world’s guitar students where Torres, old Torres of the worldly jowls, laid his arms across the jaggedy, humped young shoulders of the most promising. The photos of the students in the guitar magazines made him laugh. They came from everywhere to study under Torres at the accademia, they stood around the silk-jacketed Tommy like fool disciples: a middle-aged woman with a Russian name; a young curly-locks guy from Brazil, making hot amorous eyes at the camera; a stiff-elbowed kid from England who looked as if he stuttered; and the girls with their big naïve eyes and their skirts full to make it easier to part their legs for the correct position of the guitar. He saw them gathering in the hallways of some musty building in Palermo after school, saw them descend the street into the town with the stiff-swinging walk of youth attempting youth, and he had no desire to be among them, to be twenty again and among them. The older he got the less he wished for a new beginning and the more he wished for a happy ending. But sometimes, as in these last few weeks, the wish for that beginning laid him low again like a childhood disease.

    Before his apartment house he let the car door swing heavily open and lifted his guitar case from the back seat. The slam of the door reminded him that there was something else in the car that ought to be brought in, but unable to recall what it was he concluded that it was nothing stealable and went up the stairs in his neat, black, Italian-style moccasins, wishing that he were lurching and banging against walls. Not since he fell down somebody’s stairs six years ago, cracking a vertebra and breaking his guitar in its case, had he taken a drink, not even wine, and he had taken none tonight though everybody was awash around him, but he felt now that drunkenness again, that old exaltation of misery. Sick of black coffee after a dozen cups through the night, he found a cupful in a saucepan, heated it to boiling, poured it into a mug, and willfully drank, scalding the roof of his mouth. He opened his mouth over the sink and let the black coffee trickle from the corners, too shocked to expel it with force, bleating inside: To hell with all the Great, the Near Great, the Would-be Great, to hell with all the Failures.
    From the windowsill he took his bottle of sleeping pills, put two on his tongue, drank down half a glass of water. He dropped his tie on the kitchen table, his jacket on the sofa, stepped out of his moccasins in the middle of the living room. He put on his tan silk pajamas (Who you fooling with this show of opulence?) and crawled into his unmade bed. At noon he was wakened by a street noise and drew the covers over his ear to sleep until evening, until the boy’s interview with the Great Tommy was over.
    At four, moving through the apartment in his bare feet, in his wrinkled pajamas, he tore up the memory of himself that early
morning as he had once, alone again, torn up a snapshot of himself that someone had thrust upon him—a man with a heavy face in the sun, hair too long and slick, a short body and feet small as a dandy’s. For with no reminders he was the person he fancied himself. But, dumping coffee grounds into the sink, he realized suddenly that the jawing he had given the boy had been given as a memento of himself, something for the boy to carry around with him in Palermo, something to make him feel closer to Berger than to anybody else, because Berger was the man who had told him off, a jawing to make him love and hate Berger and never forget him, because it is impossible to forget a person who is wise to you.