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The Pool

Robert invited Victor Tandori to his swimming pool in upstate New York. He was about eighteen with a thick Hungarian accent and Robert was the ideal twenty-one.

Robert wanted to have Victor play the viola for his mother Bella, a concert violinist who had studied with Joseph Szigetti and Erica Morini.

It was July, and as the boys dived into the sunken swimming pool, Bell and her read-headed husband Ed were fighting in the pool, and Victor saw blood on her fingers.

Victor became frightened at the whole horrible scene and Robert told him it was a decades-old marriage story.

The year is 1960; the time is 4:30 pm; the weather is steaming.

After a quick shower, a Russian style salad and a somewhat burnt barbecued steak, Bella came over to Victor who was spreading rosin on his bow. She introduced herself in a cultured manner and asked Victor if he could take her place for a chamber music concert at the house that evening.

“I know it’s short notice, Victor.”

“I’m not that great at sight reading.”

“I realize Bartok is difficult, but Robert tells me you are a prodigy.”

“My own father, a conductor, knew Bartok before the war. Unfortunately he did not outlive the war…”

“I’m sorry. Robert never really got to know his father, either.”

“Mother, you don’t have to tell Victor the story of our lives.”

Robert led Victor to a soundproof pine music room in the ramshackle house. He saw a Bohemian metronome and grandfather clock. Robert had told him Bella’s parents had given them their old house, and they had moved to the Poconos.

“You like my mother?”

“Sure.” ”Don’t think that because she’s dressed all in white she’s completely pure in all this.”

“I feel an East European connection. Also there was violence in my family back home, and of course I felt the Oedipal pull and Narcissus in the pool.”

“You mean mom and big daddy?”

“You and I as well.”

Victor eyed Robert’s handsome face turning away, his muscled look of working out. He knew Robert didn’t want to deal with him beyond friendship.

“Do you think you can play the Bartok?”

Victor wanted to tell Robert that only for his sake he would, but was too shy. Robert seemed to him to be the coolest guy he knew even after he told him Nina, his girlfriend, had left him exam week and he had failed both of them. Victor wanted Rob to take him seriously, but perhaps their differences in how they sized up each other made it difficult.

“Why did you first speak to me at the record store?”

“Just because… Can’t you leave it at that?”

When he was irritated, Robert would get lines of anger under his mouth.

“There was something about you, Vic. You seemed old world.”

“Just because I come from Budapest you thought I was some sort of mysterious Transylvanian character, or what?”

“I wanted to befriend you.” ”Did I look like I needed a friend?”

“Well, Vic, you did.”

“And then you offered to buy me a record, proceeded to teach me to drive, to dance American style, to read me the Beats.”

“I never had a brother. It’s tough being an only child with a concert violinist mother and an ex-Commie screenwriter for a father, who tried to commit suicide five times before I was ten. My mother said he wasn’t violent then – only to himself. I guess it was those stupid McCarthy days.”

“Do you have to analyze everything politically, Robert? You are talking to someone who came here to escape from it all.”

“Want another swim?”

Victor knew he had to practice for the concert, but he watched Robert dive perfectly into the pool.

Bartok was frightful, but Victor expected it to go all right.

Victor heard Robert taking a shower, then invite Nina to the recital, then bang the phone down.

Bella knocked at Victor’s door. She listened to the first movement of a baroque sonata he was practicing, put her hands on her head and whispered, “Beautiful.”

Bella started to cry and told Victor how frightened she was of her situation.

“It’s impossible. My husband is mad, mad at me, mad at the government, mad at the world. You are good for Robert, you know.”

“I know it,” Victor whispered, “but does he?”

The concert went remarkably well. The suburban matrons and gentleman were impressed. Victor wore Robert’s tuxedo. Nina came by at the end of the recital and brought back the books Robert had lent her. They did not speak to one another.

Robert led the applause, giving Victor a bear hug and a back rub. Bella was thrilled with Victor’s Bartok in spite of the embarrassment of the revealing white gauze on her index finger, and had to think of difficult explanations to suit different friends. Perhaps she was used to it.

Ed was always volatile, and she expected explosions. But to hurt her on the night of her rehearsal recital was something Robert would not forgive. He remembered his father’s breakdowns when he was growing up in mid-century Manhattan; the days when the FBI would knock on their door, confiscate their mail (those leftist magazines) and interrogate their neighbors.

Robert went to live for a while with his grandparents on his father’s side who shared Ed’s rabid hatred of the system; and then with Bella’s wealthy parents who viewed their in-laws as fellow traveling idiots and tried to convince Robert that politics was a dead end.

It worked, and Robert began to despise his father, and to see him a weak man giving into emotional pressure by beating up his mother, making Robert turn to building up his body, learned karate, played soccer and swam, and other replacements for intellectual pursuits, and would spend hours thinking he would murder his father.

Victor heard Ed yelling at Bella, something like, “Why do you bring all these snobs here to show yourself off?”

Robert came to the soundproof room after the reception and started to drink vodka.

“Victor, I’m just waiting to kill.”

“What? What are you saying? Who do you wish to kill?”

“You just kill me Victor tonight, trying to become famous. I saw that agent from the city ballet get your address and phone.”

“I hardly said one word.”

“In America, that’s all it takes is one word or one sexy move. Just kidding… I was just deciding who I could kill. Would it be Nina, my father, my mother or you?”

“You are just drunk.”

“So what. Nina left me, my father humiliates us and rails against my mom, and I have no respect for her staying with him all these years, and I’m mad at you because you love me. I know you do. Don’t deny it.”

Victor didn’t know what to say. Robert started to laugh gingerly. They walked toward the pool and Robert jumped in. Victor couldn’t see anything in the darkness and wondered if Robert was just playing with him or punishing him. In his tuxedo, Victor swam towards him, but could not rescue him.

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