I WAS IN my early twenties, and on the rebound from a jazz bass player, a cad I adored all out of proportion and with whom I’d had heady, cathartic, atom-changing sex that invariably culminated in sweeping post-coital promises and lots of mutual weeping. Reeling from that relationship’s end, I decided in a moment of Xanax-addled logic that the best way to assuage my anguish would be to immediately replace The Bass Player with another jazz musician. It was simply too painful to consider that it was The Bass Player himself that I ached for, so I convinced myself that, really, it was jazz that I loved and jazz that I would love again.
There was a piano player I sort of knew who was boyish and brilliant and played ballads like Bill Evans. I’d heard through the grapevine that he had the hots for me, so I went, one balmy mid-summer night, to a concert he was doing at the 92nd Street Y and nervously approached him afterward.
“I’d love to be on your mailing list,” I told him, then, adding so it didn’t sound quite so line-y: “So I can know when you’re…gigging…”
He looked at me with wet eyes, a little sweaty and flushed, but whether this was due to post-concert catharsis or me, I didn’t know. I gave him my number and walked away quickly, not looking back.
The Piano Player called; he invited me to see him play the brunch at The Blue Note and then for some Carbonara at Porto-Bello on Thompson Street, where they played nothing but Monk’s Dream. As we ate, he told me dreamy stories of his parents—his mother, who’d been a girl singer on the Perry Como Show, and his father, a Runyonesque Broadway composer who died when The Piano Player was five—and the enviable childhood he’d had, growing up in a home frequented by musical theater luminaries like Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, Frank Loesser and Charles Strouse.
We finished our meal, then, took a cab to Inwood, where he had an enormous apartment with no furniture on a street called Seaman Avenue. In his bedroom, there was a Steinway grand, a mattress on the floor and soundproofing stuff on the walls that looked like egg containers.We kissed and it was nice. There was something about The Piano Player’s mien, a vibe he gave off, that made him seem out of place, almost unreal, as if from another era.
This is what it would feel like to make out with someone in the ‘50s…
It was that peculiar anachronistic quality that prevented me from stopping him as he unzipped my pants, slipped off my panties and stuck his face between my legs. I had never had anyone go down on me before; it was the first time I hadn’t forcibly stopped someone from attempting.Who knows why? I may have fancied myself just like “The Boys,” free to express my lust whenever and with whomever, unfettered by societal hang-ups about women and fucking around and what makes someone a slut, but, for whatever reason, the idea of receiving head made me feel weirdly shy. But that night, what with all the talk of show tunes and Yip Harburg, I felt safe and was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to surrender.
And he was amazing, adept and focused, and I came really, really fast, which made him come, too. I thought it was sweet that it turned him on so much that he came without any help from me, and I was only given pause when a while later, as we were fooling around, he came again before even entering me.
“I’m sorry,” he sighed as he let his weight go on top of me. “I think I’m just tired.”
“It’s fine,” I soothed.
In the morning, while I lay nude on his mattress, he sat at the piano in his boxers and played “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” then segued into tunes written by his dead dad.The Piano Player enacted each number, as if possessed; flawlessly impersonating his dad’s raspy singing voice and ham-fisted Tin Pan Alley–style piano playing. Soon I found myself mesmerized and more than a little turned on.
“His nickname was Rhino,” The Piano Player told me. Seeing how utterly enthralled I was, he ran to the closet and pulled out some tapes of Rhino performing his own songs. Listening to tune after tune from Rhino’s various musical hits and flops, I was knocked out by the ballsy humor and vitality of the impossibly energetic soul whose body, ravaged by childhood diabetes, would never live to see 40.
I wondered what kind of head Rhino gave.
“Chicks loved Rhino,” announced The Piano Player, as if reading my mind. “He fucked every chorus girl on Broadway….”
I lay down next to The Piano Player as he regaled me with more stories of his cocksmith father and then went home depressed, missing both my departed Bass Player and Rhino, and I realized how truly fucked up it was to yearn for those who are so profoundly unavailable.
It would be years before I would see the level to which I too was unavailable; how much I used sex to distance; that what I thought was running toward love was, in fact, fleeing in the other direction.
The Piano Player’s premature ejaculation issues would never be resolved and despite our most wholehearted attempts, including sessions with a Park Avenue sex therapist, our relationship would never be consummated. What ensued in the months that followed that first night on Seaman Avenue were fruitless attempts to stave off the inevitable, after which, I’d lie on the mattress, mooning over Rhino’s tapes.
Occasionally, The Piano Player would go down on me, but even then, I could think only of Rhino. And it was because of Rhino that I couldn’t break up: Impossible as it may be, I had fallen in love with my boyfriend’s dead dad.
Then, one day, The Bass Player called; I went to his pad on MacDougal Street, and we made love for several hours on his couch while The Gulf War played on mute in the background.And that was it. I bade a tearful goodbye to The Piano Player and tucked Rhino into the far reaches of my mind until one day, years later, in a Tower Records, I came across a CD of The Piano Player’s on which he played one of Rhino’s tunes. I paid for it but never even took it out of its cellophane. Perhaps one day, I will.
Nancy Balbirer’s first book, Take Your Shirt Off And Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences, was published by Bloomsbury in April. She is the co-owner of the West Village wine bar Pasita, and still listens to jazz.
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