Free Pinball by Jerzy Kosinski Page B

for the two of them, and as she sipped hers, and blushed with shame, he playfully said that he was the one who should feel insecure, faced with someone as young and attractive as she was. Slowly then, she began to open up. She talked about herself and her studies, told Domostroy how a fellow student who was a fan of his had first recommended his music to her, and confessed that through his music she had discovered emotions in herself she had not been aware of before.
    As the evening wore on, he tried to sort out his feelings about the young woman. Should he prolong their time together and eventually take her to bed, or should he leave her and join a group of his friends who were having a birthday party for a young, apparently very sexy French cellist they thought he would like. The party was being held at the Rainbow Room, a nightclub high atop the RCA Building.
    Domostroy was prone to these moments of conflict over unimportant matters—where to dine, what to wear, whom to call for a date, how long to stay at a party. Hisliterary friends chose to read into his chronic indecision a Jekyll-Hyde syndrome; his friends who believed in astrology saw him simply as a typical Gemini, forever torn between pairs of conflicting impulses.
    He could, of course, take his Michigan fan to the Rainbow Room, introduce her to his friends, and then take her back to her hotel; or he could go alone to the Rainbow Room, meet the French cellist, make arrangements to take her out in a day or two, and then go back and spend the night with his out-of-town visitor.
    He tried to assess the situation in terms of responsibility. Was it fair for him to take her to bed, treat her as if she were a thing, an image of youth and purity that he could use to shore up his self-esteem?
    On the other hand, he reasoned, she saw him as the artist who personified maturity, creation and many lively though now forgotten public controversies. And since she had created her concept of him in order to satisfy herself, she had made him a part of herself; but that image controlled her as the drug controlled the addict who sought it out. Yet by seeking him out, wasn’t she declaring herself able to decide on her own that she wanted to keep him as the source of her obsession—to become his lover and take him to bed as if he were an object, a thing created purely to satisfy her own needs?
    The girl must have sensed his restiveness, he thought, for she glanced at her watch and said she had taken up too much of his time. She thanked him once again, then went on to say that she had a confession to make: perhaps she was wrong to tell him this, she said, but the reason she had wanted this meeting so much was that she was suffering from acute myelomonoblastic leukemia, a degenerative disease that attacks the bone marrow as well as the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes, and according to her doctors—and all the books she had read on the subject—she would be dead within the year. Inasmuch as she was sure to be confined to a hospital for the final stage of her illness, she had decided to forgo her normal timidity and do everything she could, while she was still able, to meetPatrick Domostroy, the person who had most enriched her life.
    He looked at her carefully. Nothing in her looks or manner indicated the ravages of disease; on the contrary, she seemed almost glowing with health. He told her that in this day and age she might very well be cured of her illness and live for many years, even outlive her family and friends. Or, her life might be stopped in its course not by leukemia but, say, by a car accident. Only chance stands up to the predictable in our lives, he said; chance, in the end, provides man’s only excuse, and therefore his comfort in the face of the irrational.
    He watched her as he spoke, noticing how soft and unblemished her skin was, how thick and shiny her hair. Her breathing seemed perfectly even, and when, under the pretext of picking a bit of lint off her collar, he