Read Online Pinball by Jerzy Kosinski - Free Book Online Page B

all.” Domostroy got up. “Do you have any advice for me?” he asked as Scales escorted him to the door.
    “Write music and don’t make new headlines. They don’t do you any good,” said Scales, shaking his hand. “I mean that. Besides, isn’t Etude still your publisher?”
    “Yes,” said Domostroy. “They keep my records in print.”
    “Well, Etude records are distributed by Nokturn. So if you write some more music, you’ll be in the same boat as Goddard! What better way to find him?”
    “But how will I know the other guy in the boat is Goddard?” asked Domostroy.
    “You won’t. And that’s the catch,” said Scales, laughing as he closed the door.
    Listening to Goddard’s music and speculating about his own fate, Domostroy recalled his own better days, when he traveled to give a concert or plug his latest release on a publicity tour. All during the time when his records were selling and his music was at its peak of popularity, he often appeared on TV and radio talk shows and music programs across the country. His fan mail then was so voluminous that Etude would ship to him only the cream of the fan letters, for he could never have read them all. One of the secretaries at Etude Classics did the sorting out, sending him by express mail only letters fromcritics, serious listeners, and music students. The straight-into-the-wastebasket stuff, comprised largely of naive assurances of adoration, was answered by the secretary herself with the usual form letter.
    Domostroy’s thoughts wandered to a conversation he had once had with a handsome Hollywood star. The actor had said that most of the letters he received from his countless female fans—even when they contained photographs showing the writers as beautiful and voluptuous women—were so predictable and banal that he had never had any interest in meeting the women.
    “A typical fan letter from a woman,” he had said, “is all about how much she loves me, how much she wants to meet me, how much she would cherish a moment with me, how much she hopes I might go to bed with her! It’s all about
her
and what
she
wants. But how about me? Am I here to fuck America’s darlings just because I’m the star they want?
    “If any one of these spoiled cunts ever for a moment thought about me,” he had continued, “she would know that the way to meet me is not to offer to let me lay her—I can get laid by anyone I want—but to show that she understands me in some other way. Has she seen all my films, including the early ones, where I played bit parts? Has she read all that’s been written about me? Has she figured out from my interviews why I’ve said what I’ve said—and whether I’ve told the truth? Why I like some of my films and hate others? Why I’m proud of some of my roles, but not of others? After she’s done all that, let her convince me that she knows what I need and that she can deliver it better than any other woman I could pick up on my own. It would be fun to meet such a fan! But if there is one like that, she certainly hasn’t written to me yet—and so I’ve yet to go on a date with her. How about you, Domostroy? Did you ever have a fan who understood you?”
    “Maybe one,” Domostroy had answered evasively, “and I didn’t understand her.”

    “All the ways I’ve thought of up to now,” said Domostroy to Andrea, “are wrong. They’re wrong because they all go one way—from us to Goddard.”
    “Is there any other way?”
    “Yes. From him to us. We have to make him come out of his hideaway and then unmask him, rather than the other way around.”
    “He probably doesn’t have one hideaway,” she said. “The whole world could be Goddard’s hideaway.”
    “It probably is. So then, what we have to do is compose the right invitation from you to Goddard, send it to him, and hope it intrigues him so much that he shows up here to find you.”
    “And what would attract Goddard to me?”
    “What you say in your letter. You