Page Turner Pa by David Leavitt Page B

knew that these lapses derived not from inherent selfishness, or greed for attention, but rather from that extreme lassitude of self-knowledge for which he suspected his mother to be in no small part responsible. Though he was not an only child, his brother and sister were so much older than he was that he had ended up being raised in what amounted to a bubble of worship. It was into Paul alone that Pamela had sunk her store of hopes and ambitions: slipshod, hasty constructions, inclined to leakage or collapse, yet for all their shoddiness, as richly invested with pathos and intensity as, well, as the finest things Schubert ever built. For sadly, it is not only to the beautiful and the sound, Kennington knew, that people devote their souls.
    Another word, now, about Kennington's own amorous career: because his work required him to travel in such a comparatively limited orbit, almost all the men with whom he'd had affairs over the years had been musicians. Not only did they know exactly who he was before they met him, they often admired, or loathed, him intensely. And the result was that he found himself, time and again, in bed with people who knew enormous amounts about him, yet about whom he knew absolutely nothing, a disturbing imbalance that often led him to question the veracity of their attraction. Were his invitations accepted because of what he looked like (itself, he admitted, a rather degraded criterion), or because of who he was? Even in Paul's case, he never felt quite certain. He had been tricked with sex before. The last time had been in New York, the previous spring. Joseph was at the ASOL convention, which he liked to call the asshole convention, and Kennington was taking care of Sophie. One afternoon he was walking her in the park when a young man met his glance; followed him back to Central Park West; finally, after twenty minutes in a holding pattern, introduced himself, explaining that he rarely did this sort of thing, then plying Kennington with exactly the sort of erotic dialogue he could not resist; only later, when they had gone back to Joseph's apartment, and were kissing on the sofa, did the young man suddenly pull away. "I'm sorry," he said, sitting up. "I'm afraid there's something I haven't told you. I know who you are."
    "Who I am?" Kennington repeated.
    "Yes. You're Richard Kennington. I recognized you from the minute you started looking at me in the park. You see, I'm a piano student myself, at Mannes. And when I realized that
the
Richard Kennington was cruising me, I thought, how can I say no? The only problem is, I'm not physically attracted to you. I hope you don't mind. I like guys in their twenties." He grinned. "Maybe we could just talk instead?"
    "Sure," Kennington answered, tucking in his shirt. After which they had gone together to a café, where he had been forced to endure exactly the sort of prolonged interview he most loathed, and at the end asked a favor. Needless to say, as he headed back to Joseph's that afternoon with Sophie, mute witness to his ordeal, he had cursed his own fame; vowed, "Never again"; even stuck to that resolve, until he met Paul, who unlike the young man in the park was guileless, adoring, sexually enthusiastic, and fueled by a reverence so undiluted it was bracing.
    Would that last, however? Kennington wasn't sure. He wasn't even sure whether Paul, whose proclamations of love tended to be so bold and non-sequiturial, knew his own mind, or had merely confused eros with worship, a common sleight of hand in one so young and ambitious. And the degree of his ambition was frightening.
    This was becoming clearer to Kennington every day. Lying in bed together that morning, for example, their talk had drifted to record covers, and then to the recording industry in general. Then with a surprising modesty, Paul had announced that his goal was to release his own first CD before he turned twenty-one. Already he'd decided for which company he wanted to record (Deutsche