The Price of Love and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

over it, and left him there.
    Now that there was no one to stop me, no one to claim plagiarism, I had to get back to the hotel and write down the music before I lost it. As luck would have it, at the other side of the junkyard, past another set of crossroads, was a wide boulevard lined with a few rundown shops and low-life bars. There wasn’t much traffic, and I was beginning to get nervous about the neighbourhood, but after ten minutes I saw a cab with its light on coming up the road, and I waved it down. The cabbie stopped, and twenty minutes later I was back in my hotel room, the red neon of the strip club across the street flashing through the flimsy, moth-eaten curtains as I furiously scribbled the notes and chords etched in my memory onto the lined music paper.
    I was right about the music, and what’s more, nobody ever questioned that I had written it, despite the fact that I had never composeda piece of any significance in my entire life. After all, what else did Charlie Chaplin write other than “Smile,” or Paul Anka besides “My Way”? Plenty, of course, but do you remember anything else? I thought not. Besides, I suppose I was well enough known as a competent jazz pianist in certain circles, so people just assumed I had suddenly been smitten by the muse one day.
    I called the tune “The Magic of Your Touch,” and it became a staple of the jazz repertoire, from big bands to small combos. Arrange ments proliferated, and one of the band members, who fancied himself a poet, added lyrics to the melody. That was when we really struck the big time. Billie Holiday recorded it, then Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald. Suddenly, it seemed that no one could get enough of “The Magic of Your Touch,” and the big bucks rolled in.
    I hardly need say that the sudden wealth and success brought about an immense change in my lifestyle. Instead of fleabag hotels and two-bit whores, it was penthouse suites and high-class call girls all the way. I continued to play with the sextet, of course, but we hired a vocalist, and instead of sleazy bars we played halls and bigname clubs: the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, Birdland and the rest. We even got a recording contract, and people bought our records by the thousands.
    “The Magic of Your Touch” brought us all this and more. Hollywood beckoned, a jazz film set in Paris, and off we went. Ah, those foxy little mademoiselles! Then came the world tour: Europe, Asia, Australia, South Africa, Brazil. They all wanted to hear the band named after the man who wrote “The Magic of Your Touch.”
    I can’t say that I
never
gave another thought to the wizened old black man playing his honky-tonk piano beside the brazier. Many times, I even dreamed about that night and what I did there, on instinct, without thinking, and woke up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. Many’s the time I thought I saw the old man’s flame-reflecting eyes in a crowd or down an alley. But nobody ever foundhis body, or if they did, it never made the news. The years passed, and I believed that I was home and dry. Until, that is, little by little, things started to go wrong.
    I have always been of a fairly nervous disposition – highly strung, my parents used to say, blaming it on my musical talent, or vice versa. Whisky helped, and sometimes I also turned to pills, mostly tranquilizers and barbiturates or ’ludes, to take the edge off things. So imagine my horror when we were halfway through a concert at Massey Hall, in my hometown of Toronto, playing “Solitude,” and I found my left hand falling into the familiar chord patterns of “The Magic of Your Touch,” my right hand picking out the melody.
    Of course, the audience cheered wildly at first, thinking it some form of playful acknowledgement, a cheeky little musical quotation or segue. But I couldn’t stop. It was as if I was a mere puppet, and some other force was directing my movements. No matter what tune we