is being “kissed by butterflies”’—did you ever hear of anything so stupid? So I write them some simple melody, a nonsense for six strings, and they think I am a genius. They don’t know what genius is, these people. They have no intellect. They have no soul . . .” He was getting quite heated, then remembered himself.
“But I expect you love the movies. Everybody loves the movies. Women love to be taken to the pictures, yes?”
I smiled and shrugged.
“I don’t go so often anymore.”
“Who knows,” he joked, “what this mysterious woman does, or does not, like.”
This interlude was nothing if not distracting. My steak was delicious and very welcome, and as long as I was able to sit here being enigmatic, flirting vaguely with this foreign stranger, I was free of worry, and time was passing quickly and pleasantly.
“Every few months I must travel to New York to teach, because I like to do something normal, something worthwhile. In New York I am taken seriously as a great composer—and yet I keep coming back to Hollywood,” he said, raising his hands dramatically. “There is too much money in movies,” he said. “We artists are like prostitutes: the Hollywood moguls open their purses and we poor immigrant musicians come running!” And he laughed.
I liked this man. He was entertaining, easy company—and his story was interesting enough to take me completely out of myself.
“What about your family?” I asked. “Are they still in Poland?”
“My parents died in the last war,” he said. “I was an only child. My professors at the Kraków Conservatory were my family.”
“Wife?” I asked.
He had a nice smile and was handsome—for his age, which was perhaps sixty.
“So, maybe this mysterious Irishwoman is not so cold after all?”
I found myself blushing, which was annoying.
“I only meant . . .”
“No, no, I am joking,” he said. “I have never had the honor of being married—although I have been in love many times. To tell you the truth, the women in Los Angeles who work in the movies are full of artifice. They dye their hair and wear too much rouge—or wigs—and they have straight white teeth that they take out at night and put in a glass!”
I let out a loud laugh. Really, this was wrong. I was supposed to be full of anxiety and misery, but here I was, with this strange man making me laugh out loud!
“I am too old to get married now. My work is the great love of my life. Passion, romance—it interferes with my creativity, I don’t expect you to understand but . . .”
“I’m an artist,” I said suddenly, “I do understand.”
Although I was not sure that I did, I wanted to let him know that I was not just an ordinary person.
“Ah,” he said and he nodded, as if he had seen something in me all along.
We ordered a second bottle of wine and talked about art. He knew something about Impressionism, but very little about Non-Objective Painting, and although he had seen some of the Guggenheim Collection, he was fascinated to hear more about the movement itself and the new gallery that Hilla was working on with Frank Lloyd Wright, designed specifically to best display the collection that she had worked on for Guggenheim himself. He was very impressed that I knew Hilla Rebay.
“Is she a Jew?” he asked.
“No,” I said. It was a common misconception that all Germans in America were here to escape the Nazis. “She came here well before the war.”
“Like me,” he said.
Then he became suddenly melancholy, his expression hardening.
“The Germans have Poland now—they have won. They call it Intelligenzaktion ,” and he cracked his hands together as if he were snapping a stick. “This is what they called the murder of our intellectual elite; this is the way they break us: by destroying our music, our art—everything. There is nothing left for me—nothing.”
It was a shocking outburst, and Stan seemed grateful when I picked up the dessert menu and
Jade Archer
Tia Lewis
Kevin L Murdock
Jessica Brooke
Meg Harding
Kelley Armstrong
Sean DeLauder
Robert Priest
S. M. Donaldson
Eric Pierpoint