The irony was that Lexi was coping just fine. It was Peter who was lost.
Robbie’s fixed mental image of his father was of a strong, handsome, youthful man, a sportsman and a scholar. But the truth was that that man had died years ago. The face Robbie saw across the table from him now was broken and defeated, crisscrossed with lines and dark shadows under the eyes. It was a road map of suffering, a lifetime of loss. And it had all started because he married a Blackwell.
Kruger-Brent did that to him. The curse of the Blackwell family. Don’t you see, Dad? I can’t stay. I can’t let myself be broken, like you were.
“Honestly, Dad, I appreciate the offer. But I don’t want the money. I’ve only been clean for eleven months, remember? A big fat French bank account might be more temptation than I could handle.”
It was this last argument that had finally won Peter over. He knew that if Robert ever went back to drugs or drinking, he would die. It was that simple.
“Fine. Have it your way. But promise me, when the romance of the whole starving-musician-in-a-garret thing wears off, you won’t be too proud to come home. I…I love you, Robert. I hope you know that.”
Robbie’s eyes filled with tears.
I know, Dad. I love you, too. But I have to go.
The first few months were a living hell.
Dad was right. What in God’s name have I gotten myself into?
Unable to afford even a shoe box in the city center, Robbie had finally rented a room in Ogrement, a run-down part of the suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine. It was the most depressing place he had ever seen. Ugly sixties tenement buildings with broken windows, the stairwells covered in graffiti and stinking of piss, were home to a plethora of gangs and petty criminals. The gangs seemed to split along racial and religious lines. Ogrement was not a great place to be a Jew, that was for sure. But neither was it overly welcoming of preppy, blond Americans whose six words of French included foie gras and clavier (piano keyboard), but not percer (to stab) or filou (pickpocket).
The one language Robbie did understand was drugs. Ogrement was fueled by heroin the same way that China was fueled by rice. It was everywhere, calling to him, tempting him like the siren call of the sea.
It’s like renting a room over a kindergarten class to a newly released pedophile. God help me.
Robbie was determined to stay clean. He knew his life depended on it. But it was tough. The loneliness was grinding, soul destroying, and ever present. Not being able to communicate was the worst part.
Why did I have to “find myself” in France? Why couldn’t I have gone to London, or Sydney, or some other place where they speak English?
Of course, Robbie knew the answer to that. Paris was the musicians’ mecca. The Paris Conservatoire, where Bizet and Debussy had once studied, was a place of mythical significance to Robbie. The newly opened Cité de la Musique, architect Christian de Portzamparc’s celebrated ampitheater, concert hall, museum of music, and workshops in La Vil-lette, the old slaughterhouse district, had a new generation of musicians and composers flocking to the city.
The best musical talent in the world came to Paris. It was the center, the hub, the beginning and the end of everything for a would-be concert pianist like Robbie.
Unfortunately, would be turned out to be the operative words. Since he had no formal training or qualifications, the conservatoire refused even to see him, never mind hear him play. Simply finding bar work proved far harder than Robbie had imagined. The problem with moving to the most exciting city in the world for classical music was that everyone else had done the same thing. Paris was crawling with hot-shit piano players, and most of them had years of experience. Robbie was an unknown Yank whom no one could understand, who’d once had a job playing blues piano in a gay bar in New Orleans for all of three weeks.
Robbie did, however, have three things going for him. Talent, determination and looks. And the greatest of these was looks.
“Pay is fifty francs an hour, plus tips. Take it or leave it.”
Madame Aubrieau (“Please, call me Martine”) was a fifty-two-year-old ex-hooker who wore a blond wig to cover her bald patches, weighed approximately the same as a young hippo and whose breath smelled of a combination of garlic, menthol cigarettes and Benedictine that made Robbie want to gag. She wore a low-cut, cheap red top that exposed a quivering expanse of larva-white cleavage, and when she spoke to Robbie, she stared unashamedly at his crotch.
In addition to these attributes, Madame Aubrieau owned Le Club Canard, a dive bar in the twelfth arondissement whose piano player had quit the previous week in a dispute over unpaid wages. Madame Aubrieau liked the look of the shy young American. If he took the job, she would eat him for breakfast. Afterward, she would have him eat her. It was good to be the boss.
Robbie looked at Madame Aubrieau’s Jabba the Hut body and felt sick. Fifty francs an hour was not a living wage. On the other hand, his current earnings of zero francs an hour were beginning to irritate Marcel, his Ogrement landlord. Marcel was not a man Robbie wished to irritate.
“I’ll take it. When do I start?”
Madame Aubrieau clamped a fat, dirty-fingernailed hand on Robbie’s thigh and flashed him a toothless smile.
“Immédiatement, mon chou. Suivez moi.”
Robbie first laid eyes on Paolo Cozmici at the Salle Pleyel concert hall on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Cozmici was conducting the resident Orchestre de Paris. And he was magnificent.
Like every other musician in Paris, Robbie knew of Paolo Cozmici by reputation. The youngest son of a dirt-poor family from Naples, Cozmici was completely self-taught as a composer, a pianist and, most recently, a conductor. Nicknamed Le Bouledogue-“the bulldog”-by the French musical establishment, Paolo Cozmici had famously won his place as conductor of the Paris Philharmonic by storming unannounced into rehearsals for Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, seizing the baton from a bewildered Claude Dechamel and displaying the sort of instinctive virtuosity that had since made him one of the most sought-after conductors in the world.