Her eyes—leaning closer to the magnifying mirror, Elaine could read the future in her eyes. Not so long ago one of her best features, they now seemed less brown, less deep, less alive with the hope and promise they once held. Despite ministrations with moisturizers and creams, the skin at the corners had begun to show crinkles. Her once lush lashes seemed thinner, even slightly scraggly, and needed lots of help. Pouches had not yet formed—be patient, she told herself, these, too, will arrive soon enough. The rims tended to redden, especially at night, a condition worsened by many years of wearing contact lenses. She had finally given up the lenses, to which she never quite adjusted, four years ago, just after the divorce from Jacob.
Had she been more beautiful as Mrs. Jacob Kessler, the third wife of the famous pianist, than as Elaine Goldman Kessler, the forty-four-year-old divorced mother of an eight-year-old son, or did she imagine it? Certainly, the world had been much more impressed with her as Mrs. Jacob Kessler. Hotel managers, maîtres d‘, store clerks knocked themselves out to arrange the best tables, the most capacious suites, the quietest and most comfortable surroundings. Limousines awaited her exit from grand hotels; first-class was the only air travel she knew. Except for the month they spent every summer at Jacob’s place in Maine, near Castine, the details of cooking, cleaning, and other domestic chores were assumed to be beneath her notice—these days, working at a full-time job, she sometimes seemed to have time for little else—and even at Castine they had a cook four nights a week. The better part of her ten years as Mrs. Jacob Kessler had been quite magical—the most interesting part of her life, Elaine thought.
She had known about Jacob, of course, even owned some of his recordings, but had not met him until the first night she heard him play in concert. It was in Chicago, at Ravinia, in July, not under the pavilion but in the snug Murray Theater she so much preferred. She had been invited to meet him at a party after the concert at the Wasserburgs. Leonard Wasserburg was a former patient of Elaine’s father, a very rich man and a major benefactor of the Ravinia festival. She wasn’t at all sure she cared to go, but that night Jacob played the Schubert Impromptus, Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 25 in F, and the Beethoven Pathétique, whose second movement, the adagio, she particularly loved.
Elaine’s seat was only five rows from the stage of the small theater. She noted Jacob’s face, with its flared nostrils, fleshy ears, thick eyebrows, longish hair beginning to go silver at the temples, dark skin—the overall effect very Jewish yet aristocratic. Jacob Kessler was an aristocrat of art, Elaine formulated it to herself that night, someone who had been permitted knowledge of its inner secrets, one of the elect. For his encore, he played Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Infanta. He played it, as he seemed to play everything, without effort, his head and shoulders perfectly still, but with a beautifully controlled passion. She watched the slender strong hands returning to Ravel’s plaintive theme and thought, in a flash of pure eroticism, of how they would feel playing over her body.
At the Wasserburgs’ house on the lake in Glencoe, amid the Matisse, the Motherwells, the Fairfield Porter, and the large Frankenthaler, he approached her. She was then twenty-nine, he forty-three. She had never married. He was recently divorced from his second wife. He was delighted, he claimed, to learn that she wasn’t a musician, hadn’t even had any musical training.
“Forgive me,” he said, “I took you for a cellist.”
“Really? Why?”
“A little psychological vice. My world is almost entirely bounded by music. I assume that anyone I meet at such evenings has musical interests, and I try to guess their instrument.”
“But why the cello?”
“Deep strings, capable of passion and also darkness; I guess I saw such things in you. I think you would be correct to take it as a compliment.”
“I will,” she said.
“In any case, I’m thrilled to be wrong.”
“Why is that?”
“At least now I won’t have to shlep a cello case on planes and trains.”
Elaine didn’t press him further. She had her car with her, the seven-year-old red Toyota her father had bought for her when she graduated from Wellesley, and two hours later he asked if she minded driving him the few miles to his hotel in Lake Forest. At the hotel, he wondered if she could be persuaded to stay for a nightcap. After a drink, he asked her to stay the night. Although it wasn’t at all her way, she agreed without hesitation. They made love, fortissimo and pianissimo, and she fell asleep afterward, in his arms, Ravel’s beautiful little pavane echoing in her head.
_____________
Her fear that she had been no more than a night’s entertainment was put to rest when, two days later, he sent her a first-class plane ticket to Washington, where he was playing the same program at Wolf Trap the following weekend. He called the evening the ticket arrived, and she told him she would be there. In a calm, warmly reassuring voice, he said he was glad.
Elaine stayed in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton, near Dupont Circle. At breakfast Sunday morning in the Jockey Club, John Houseman came up to their table. Jacob had known the actor a long time, and they spoke as intimates.
“I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Elaine Goldman,” Jacob said.
“How pleasing!” Houseman replied, not immediately releasing Elaine’s hand. “My very best wishes, Miss Goldman.”
When he left, Elaine, her fork playing with the strawberries on her plate, her knee touching Jacob’s knee, was unable to look up.
“That’s a funny way to go about it,” she said. “I mean, learning you’re engaged through conversation with a third party.”
“I’m afraid I was using old John as a conduit, as they say in the CIA. But I really do hope you’ll marry me.”
“Do you usually move so quickly?”
“In these matters I do. It’s only the small things in life—what tie to wear, what to order for dessert—that I agonize over. Important things never seem to detain me for long, or at least they never have.”
“I hope you won’t mind if I take some time to think all this through.”
“Take all the time you need. I know you’ll make the correct decision and conclude, as I already have, that we belong together.”
Jacob went on to Boston for a performance at Tanglewood, and Elaine returned to Chicago. She had her job at Leo Burnett, the ad agency, where she was a media buyer; her apartment in Sandburg Village, for which her father had given her the downpayment; her friends, most of them by now married and with children and living in Highland Park or Northbrook. But life in Chicago, after a long weekend with Jacob Kessler, suddenly felt very unreal. Or was it the time, the quite magical time, spent with Jacob that seemed unreal?
When she told her father about it—Elaine’s mother had died of a stroke two years before—at lunch at the Standard Club, he showed his usual unexcited reaction. Dr. David Goldman, the noted oncologist, senior physician on the staff of Michael Reese Hospital, was a careful man. He was too careful, in fact too subtle, to tell his daughter not to act rashly. He took a different tack, assuming, as he always had with her, that she had her own good judgment and subtlety. Elaine loved her father without complication.
“I know you’ve taken into consideration that you will be this man’s third wife. You must have thought about your prospects of pleasing him when two women before you were unable to.”
“I have thought about it, Daddy,” she said. “And I’m afraid I don’t have a very intelligent reason for thinking that I can do better. I’m not under illusions that I possess some secret charm that’ll change his character. What’s worse, I’m not sure I want to change it. He’s very dashing.”
“There are children from the other marriages?”
“Two daughters, ten and eight, both from the first marriage. They live with their mother.”
“Does he see much of them?”
“As much as possible, but, you know, he travels a good deal, both here and abroad, concertizing.”
“I see,” said Dr. Goldman, but, from the way he said it, Elaine was pretty sure that he didn’t see, not really.
_____________
The main dining room at the Standard Club was filled with men who reminded her of her father. They were solid, substantial men, earnest, responsible, serious—men with gravity. Elaine always felt she would marry a younger version of such a man herself: a physician, perhaps, like her father, or a lawyer; in any case a professional man with all that “professional” implied in the way of competence, command, control. And security.
Looking around at all these men in their various dark grey and blue suits and subdued neckties, she thought of Jacob’s get-up when he left her at the airport in Washington: soft Italian loafers, tan twill trousers, a buttery soft, blue cashmere blazer, a thick red-striped shirt with white collar and white cuffs from Asser & Turnbull—Asshole & Turncoat, he called them, when she asked—and a rich multicolored ascot from Charvet. Imagining him in this room, she had to suppress a smile.
“Well,” her father said, “is there any great hurry about all this?”
“I think Jacob would like an answer before too long.”
“What is it likely to be?”
“You know, Daddy, being married to a man like Jacob provides every opportunity for an interesting life.”
“An interesting life?” Her father’s quizzical look suggested that the concept was a fresh and quite strange one to him.
“By which I mean,” she continued, “living for long stretches in Europe, meeting artists, a life surrounded by music and beauty.”
“I can see where it all must seem very seductive,” her father said. “But you won’t truly be at the center of it, you know. Your claim will always be through your husband’s talent.”
“Life is very pleasing with this man, Daddy. It’s more intense, exciting, richer than it’s likely to be with anyone I’ve ever met or I’m likely to meet.”
“What do you know about his family? Are his parents still living?”
“Neither is. He was brought up in Cincinnati. He was a piano prodigy. They weren’t wealthy people. His father worked in the wholesale grocery business. Jacob’s mother was the key figure in his life.”
Elaine didn’t stop to tell her father that, from the age of seven until he was seventeen, Jacob had had a patroness. A wealthy German-Jewish woman in Cincinnati, a Mrs. Loretta Binstock, put him on an allowance of $250 a month, to be used for lessons, private tutoring, clothes for recitals, and other expenses. She also paid his way to the Interlochen music camp in the summers. He was, as Jacob told Elaine, something like her house pet, invited to play for her guests, taught table manners, not infrequently humiliated for his youthful Ostjuden crudities. “Mrs. Binstock got her full money’s worth,” was his final word on the subject.
“So, like you, he’s an only child?”
“Yes.”
“Only children need lots of attention. I don’t worry about where he’s going to get his. But where will you get yours?”
“In good part from him, I hope. But do you think I need so much?”
“Truth is, you never did. You were always a good girl. Everything I wanted in a daughter.”
“That means a lot to me.”
“Sweetheart, you know I only wish you well. All I ask is that you retain your good judgment and remain as thoughtful as you’ve been all your life. What can the father of an intelligent woman hope but that she not make more than the allotted number of mistakes in a lifetime? You have my blessing.”
“I knew I would, Daddy. In time I hope to have your complete approval, too. I hope you’ll come to see the quality in Jacob that I do. I don’t hope, really—I know you will.” She covered his hand—his mottled, dry, veiny hand—with her own.
Dr. Goldman met his son-in-law only four times, for he died two years later of a heart attack, three years before the birth of the grandson who was named after him.
_____________
Elaine and Jacob were married, in London, a month after her lunch with her father. They had their honeymoon while Jacob played concerts across Europe. She sold her Chicago apartment with everything in it, and moved into Jacob’s large place on West End Avenue in New York. The apartment was dark, stuffed with books and records, and had two grand pianos. Nothing in the life she lived in Chicago had prepared her for life with Jacob.
Elaine soon came to understood that her husband wished to reside on the same august heights as Vladimir Horowitz. He thought of himself as Horowitz’s spiritual heir: the pianist as performer, interpreter, creator, quasi-composer. Jacob imagined—he told her as much—that the line from Franz Liszt, to Anton Rubinstein, to Vladimir Horowitz ended with Jacob Kessler. True, a large number of his contemporaries were impressive in their way—Brendel, Ax, Perahia, the younger (though no longer very) Serkin among them. Then there were the lesser figures: Dichter, de Larrocha, Watts, and scores of others whom he need not worry about. But none had emerged as the pianist of the age as, even in semi-retirement, Horowitz indisputably still was.
In the early years of their marriage, Elaine went on tour with Jacob to Brussels, Barcelona, Athens, Jerusalem. His easy cosmopolitanism thrilled her. This boy from Cincinnati, once roughly instructed in table manners by a German Jewess whose husband owned a downtown department store, was now utterly at ease in Paris, Rome, and London.
Wherever Jacob played, adulation followed. Audiences adored him; critics tended to agree. Vast applause, large quantities of lovely wine and excellent food, no money worries whatsoever—it was a fine life. “Ah, Mrs. Kessler,” the Vicomtesse de Rothschild told Elaine one evening at a small dinner party, “Your husband is a great artist, among the very greatest, and we are honored to have him here in Paris—and you with him, of course.”
Not that life was perpetually so exhilarating. At home, back in New York, there was Jacob’s unrelenting schedule of work. He had once told Elaine of a psychologist interested in artistic achievement who estimated that to become an accomplished piano soloist one needed to begin by the age of four and to have practiced 10,000 hours; to begin as late as eight and to have practiced a mere 8,000 hours condemned one to achieving nothing higher than the third rank. He estimated that he must have practiced for something like 12,000 hours. He had begun, under his mother’s supervision, at the age of three. At six, he told Elaine, he had heard Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a radio address, formally declare war on Japan and Germany and announce that every American must now do his all. After turning off the radio, his mother had placed her hands on his little shoulders, looked him in the eye, and said, “Jacob, you have just heard your President say that everyone must help the war effort. What you must do, my son, is practice the piano more than ever.”
Jacob practiced mornings, generally from nine to one. He always went reluctantly into the room he called his studio, dawdling over a third cup of coffee, asking for another piece of toast. He practiced in pajamas and robe. Elaine would listen as she moved around the apartment. Sometimes he would play compositions straight through, sometimes he would play a movement or a passage over and over and over again. On occasion, she would hear him curse himself. “Stupid!” he would yell. “Idiot! Get the damn thing right!” One morning when his fingers lost their memory of the opening movement of the Mendelssohn Sonata in G Major, she smiled as she heard him cry out, “Goddamn Clara Schumann!” At lunch, when she asked, he told her that it was Clara Schumann who had begun the tradition of playing in concert without musical notation, thus forcing all future virtuosi to do likewise. “It damn near drove poor Myra Hess to suicide, you know.” Elaine did not, but it didn’t seem to matter.
_____________
She would sometimes look in on him during these practice sessions. Unlike in performance, during difficult passages he sometimes ground his jaw, waggled his chin, moved his lips. (When asked, he said he was talking to the long-dead composer, checking to see if he got it right.) During more relaxed passages he did a fine thing with his head, holding it high and off to the side. The utter seriousness of it all impressed Elaine immensely. She felt as if she had married a great athlete, but an athlete engaged in the world’s most elevated sport. Watching him, she still couldn’t quite believe she was married to this man, let alone now pregnant by him.
They never really discussed having a baby. After a few years of being careful, they simply did nothing to prevent it. Elaine’s pregnancy wasn’t easy. Horrendous morning sickness attacked her well past her first trimester. She did not speak much about her illness to Jacob. He was nearly fifty years old, a man with adolescent daughters living on the West Coast and an important career in constant cultivation at home. Going to Lamaze classes with her was quite out of the question—not even a broachable subject.
How different this pregnancy would have been in Chicago, Elaine thought. There would have been old friends who had gone through it before or were perhaps going through it now with a third or fourth child. There would have been lunches with much talk about baby clothes and plans for fixing up a nursery. There would no doubt have been a baby shower or two. Elaine missed having her mother to help her through this. Jacob was not unsympathetic, but she understood that—how exactly to put it?—his interest was not fully engaged.
With a career of the kind he had chosen, how could it be? In fact, it turned out that Jacob’s agent at CAMI had arranged a European tour for him during the time that Elaine was to deliver their child. He asked if she wished to travel with him and have the baby in Oslo or Stockholm or Copenhagen. She thought about it and decided, no, it would be better to stay in New York, where she had confidence in her obstetrician, a burly, jokey man who reminded her of one of her father’s friends. Jacob offered to cancel the tour. Elaine said absolutely not, though she would have loved it if he had not merely offered but actually done it. When her son was born, Jacob, in Stockholm, sent two dozen long-stemmed roses and a magnum of champagne to the hospital. Elaine, from her hospital bed, wondered with whom he thought she might drink it. She remembered, too, that he had had an unbreakable concert date in Los Angeles the day of her father’s funeral.
Having understood the scope of Jacob’s ambition—or at least believing she understood it—Elaine wished she could find a way to help him achieve what he wanted. But she hadn’t the foggiest notion how. When she asked, he replied that merely being herself, being there for him, meant a great deal, really it meant everything. After David was born, she was able to persuade him to move from the West Side. She found a much lighter if slightly less roomy place on East 64th, off Park. He agreed to give up his second piano so that a room could be turned into a nursery for their infant son. Elaine handled all the details of the move.
Jacob insisted they hire a nanny. Elaine didn’t see the need for it. But he wanted his wife to have the freedom to travel with him when he required her to do so. She wanted to continue breast-feeding, but at the end of three months Jacob asked her to stop; it interfered with their travel plans and cut into their social life. Jacob was attentive to the child, but, after all, he was a man who had been through this not once but twice before with his own daughters. Children and artists did not entirely go smoothly together; in any case, in an artistic household, the needs of the artist, it was understood, came first.
On a day that Jacob was performing, for example, there was his special diet to be seen to: usually yogurt and perhaps a few strips of smoked salmon on very thin, lightly toasted bread. Coming out of his daily practice sessions, he was generally grumpy. Rather than giving him pleasure in his craft, practice reminded Jacob of all the things he wished to achieve at the piano but could not—not quite, or at least not quite well enough. He used to joke—it was barely a joke—that he practiced 364 days a year, and on Yom Kippur he read scores under the bed.
_____________
It was not until they were married more than five years that Elaine met Jacob’s two daughters. Phoebe and Patricia were fifteen and thirteen, and had been brought up in San Diego, where Jacob’s first wife lived. He had paid for their schooling and for most of the other expense of raising them. Their mother, who played viola in chamber-music groups on the West Coast, had never remarried. The girls were in New York to visit an aunt. They were tallish and fair, thin and awkward. Patsy, as Jacob called the younger, wore complicated braces on both her upper and lower teeth. Phoebe, who had her father’s good looks, also inherited some of her parents’ musical ability; she played oboe well enough, apparently, to consider doing so professionally.
Both girls were shy, and neither was able easily to negotiate the menu at the Russian Tea Room, where the head waiter made a great fuss over their father. He ordered blini and caviar for everyone, instructing the girls how to eat it and urging them to get used to the good things in life. Conversation did not flow easily. Elaine, feeling very much the outsider, attempted to question the girls about their schooling, about shopping in New York, and about anything else that came to mind—and not enough did. Their father braved his way through the meal with puns and less than successful jokes. My poor jokey Jakey, Elaine thought, trying so hard to convince them all that they were a normal, happy family. When the lunch was over, Elaine stood near the door of the restaurant as Jacob put the girls in a cab, not hugging but kissing each lightly on both cheeks. Their aunt was taking them to her summer place in New Hampshire and he wouldn’t see them again this trip.
After this lunch, Elaine often wondered how Jacob could have walked away from these girls, so fragile, so vulnerable, left in the world to grow up alone without a father. Her own father, who had been no less preoccupied than Jacob, working with cancer patients whom in most cases he knew he had no hope of saving, had nonetheless somehow managed to convey to Elaine that she made him proud, that at the end of another difficult day the sight of her refreshed him—that, despite everything else on his mind, life without her would have been less good.
The two men, Jacob and her father, were of different generations. Men of her father’s generation divorced only when they were driven to it. Without Jacob’s divorces, of course, Elaine would never have come into his life, nor would their beautiful son exist. Still, there were those two girls, with their thin legs, shyness, and braces who were being asked to pay the price for her happiness.
She was happy. She had her son and she had her much admired husband. Mrs. Jacob Kessler was not at all a bad thing to be. On the stage, at his piano, Jacob Kessler had magic in his hands, and so abundant was it that some of this magic seemed almost to have rubbed off on her. The young woman at Vidal Sassoon who gave Elaine her manicures, and whose brother was taking piano lessons in Rego Park, one day asked that she autograph the inside packet of Jacob’s most recent CD: “‘To Jimmy,’ if you don’t mind.” Embarrassed, Elaine nevertheless signed.
“JA,” a sleepy voice on the other end answered.”
“Jacob?” Elaine asked.
“One moment.”
“Jacob?”
“Elaine?”
“Who was that who answered the phone?”
“That was the maid, dear, come to turn down the bed. It’s nearly midnight in Amsterdam. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Jacob. Everything here’s fine. How goes the week?”
“With Yervi all goes smoothly. The Concertgebouw remains a pleasure to work with. How’s David?”
“He’s fine. I hadn’t realized it was so late. You’d think I’d have European times down by now.”
“Not to worry, darling. Why don’t I call you tomorrow?”
“Yes, do call. I love you.”
“I you.”
Elaine couldn’t get that voice out of her mind. It had spoken only three words—“Ja” and “One moment”—yet neither in intonation nor logic did they seem the words of a chambermaid. She played them over and over in her mind. Why did the voice sound so sleepy? Would a maid really say “One moment” and promptly hand the phone to her husband? Would a maid even answer the telephone when a guest was in the room? The more Elaine thought, the more dubious the whole thing became.
She decided not to confront Jacob with her suspicions—more than suspicions. She felt she had arrived at this decision in the name of peacekeeping, in the spirit of forgive and forget. Confronting Jacob would do no good—he would only deny it, he would act hurt—and it might even end their marriage. Disappointed though she was, Elaine was not ready to write finis to this union. Besides, there was David to consider. Should she deprive her little boy of his father just because she couldn’t bear the thought—the fact—of his unfaithfulness? Of course not.
Elaine also had to recognize the possibility that she didn’t want the marriage to end for her own sake. Divorce, dress it up any way you like, always meant failure, and she wasn’t ready to admit defeat. She wasn’t ready to become the third Mrs. Jacob Kessler, a sad sordid statistic. She preferred being the current—make that the final—Mrs. Jacob Kessler. She never mentioned the Amsterdam call to her husband. But a few months later, when Jacob sat down at the piano with their young son to test his pitch, and afterward reported that David had no special gift for music, Elaine, for reasons not altogether clear to her, was secretly pleased.
Her marriage became a lie of convenience; a lie, at any rate, was at the center of it. Other marriages survived with other lies at their centers. Men and women grew disappointed with each other; passion grew stale; small, once mildly irritating habits over the years drove husbands and wives nearly crazy with distaste. Still, all these people stayed with what they had; they played on through. As, Elaine was determined, would she. If her husband felt the need occasionally to sleep with another woman, so long as he did so discreetly, well, let him. Jacob Kessler was not after all an ordinary man; his moods, his needs, his life—all were somehow different.
Elaine, then, was prepared to live with things. A certain forbearance was called for; so were certain actressy qualities. She surprised herself at how many she had. At the breakfast table, at social engagements, even in bed she easily enough pretended that nothing was wrong, nothing had changed. She discovered that she was more than a bit of an artist herself.
The evening Jacob played at the White House Elaine knew she had made the correct decision. It was still a good, an interesting, life. The First Lady, whom she sat next to at the concert, confided that Jacob Kessler was far and away her favorite among the pianists of his generation. She asked Elaine about her own musical background. “Me,” Elaine found herself answering, “Oh, I used to play the cello, but no longer.”
Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the center of gravity in Elaine’s marriage began to shift from her husband to her son. There was, after all, so little that she could do for Jacob and so much for David. She continued to take an interest in Jacob’s career, sharing concern about his newest recordings, his concert dates, the scuttlebutt about other pianists—“the competition,” as Jacob only half-jokingly called them. But less and less did she travel with her husband, who himself seemed less and less to require her companionship. She assumed that on the road he found ways to look after his own needs, all of them. She didn’t like to think about it. In the end, he returned to her and their son, that was the main thing. Things were under control. And so they remained for more than a year.
_____________
The morning after the night Jacob learned he had won a Grammy for his six-CD recording of the Beethoven sonatas, which critics were comparing to Schnabel’s, a morning on which Jacob planned to celebrate by abstaining from practice and instead taking his son out to the park, began badly. It was nine-thirty. David was off in his room, his Filipino nanny, Mrs. Ramirez, helping him dress.
“Elaine,” Jacob began, “I fear I have some dreary news.”
“Which is?” she asked, looking up from the paper, a cup of coffee in her hand.
“Our marriage is over.”
Her half-full cup slipped from her hand, the coffee sluicing off the table onto the Oriental rug she had picked out with such care. “I’m sorry,” she said, “what did you say?”
“Over,” Jacob said. “I’ve committed myself to someone else.”
“What about your commitment to me and to your son?”
“There’ll be money to take care of you both.”
“I don’t think money’s quite the issue here, Jacob.”
“No, the issue is my career, in which, it seems to me, you long ago lost interest.”
“That’s not true,” Elaine said, not very authoritatively.
“I think it is. Besides, you must have known coming into this marriage what the arrangements were.”
“I thought I did. Maybe I was mistaken. Repeat them for me, please.”
“I’ll give you the short form. My career comes first. You had to know that.”
“Your sleeping with other women, in Amsterdam and God knows where else, is that also part of the arrangement?”
“An artist has certain needs, whether you want to believe it or not. Whatever is good for his art is good for him. That’s just the way it is.”
“What about an artist’s wife? What about her needs? What about children?”
“As far as I’m concerned the world is organized for the creation of art, and nothing else matters. Not personal relations, not family, nothing. I know this is probably repugnant to you, but it’s my view—and I’m stuck with it.”
Elaine knew that the next utterance, should she dare make it, would mark the end of her marriage. She couldn’t hold it back.
“But you just play the music,” she said, hearing her own heart pounding, “you don’t compose it. Faustian bargains aren’t available to piano players, you idiot.”
Jacob didn’t answer. He turned away. At just that moment David and Mrs. Ramirez entered the room. David was wearing a sailor suit. Jacob swept the boy, who looked so much like him, into his arms and headed for the door.
“We’ll return in an hour or so,” he called, without looking back.
_____________
It turned out that the woman for whom Jacob left Elaine and David was Irish, twenty-three, and a flautist with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Her name was Meagan O’Donnell. As with Jacob’s two earlier wives, Elaine never met her. She would from time to time see pictures of the two of them in the fashion press, at a charity ball or benefit.
Jacob gave her no difficulty about the divorce. She came away with the equity in the apartment and $5,000 a month in combined alimony and child support, as well as an agreement that Jacob would pay the expenses for his son’s education. This, added to the money she had inherited from her father, left her free from financial worry. Because of his traveling schedule, Jacob asked for no regular visitation rights and accepted Elaine’s assurance that he would be able to see the boy whenever it was convenient for him.
It turned out not to be very convenient, at any rate not very often. After Elaine sold the apartment, she and David moved back to Chicago. They lived on State Parkway, near North Avenue, and David, when five years old, was sent to Francis Parker School. He was a cheerful child. Whenever his father played in Chicago, David and he went off for an afternoon, and the boy returned a bit agitated but nothing worse. The effect on him of growing up without a father seemed to Elaine, in cooler moments, perhaps not so awful as she had expected—at least not yet.
When she first returned to Chicago, she thought she might somehow or other involve herself in the musical life of the city: do volunteer work for the Chicago Symphony or the Lyric Opera, or get herself on the board of Music of the Baroque or one of the other institutions in the city. But thinking further, she decided against it. When David was old enough to go to school full time, she returned to her job at Leo Burnett. She never again went to hear Jacob play.
From time to time she went out with men, most of them in their fifties or early sixties, the majority divorced or widowed. At work and elsewhere she was known as Elaine Goldman Kessler. Once, when a man named Sheldon Hefferman, who owned a number of car washes around the city, took her to dinner and asked her what her former husband did, she replied, “Oh, he was in the music business,” and let it go at that. Although she never directly announced it to herself or to anyone else, Elaine sensed that she would probably never remarry. She had had her interesting life—more interesting than most—and now it was over.
