Piano Study

Preface:

The joys of sexualized keyboard instruction having taken Michael Psmith from a piddling start to national recognition as a pianist, they now are shown to bring out and forward the potentials of Michael’s student, Ramses Córdova. That it might not prove too heady for readers, the chapter is short. Pithy, though – guaranteed.

***

Every piano aficionado in the area and advanced piano student who could be there packed Capitol City’s Civic Auditorium. Curiosity, sparked by rumors, accounted for about half. E-mails circulated advance word that could hardly be ignored. Granted, a few with low expectations were there as skeptics. Sixteen-year-old Ramses Córdova, sole pupil of the Federated Guild’s top prize winner Michael Psmith – only fifteen, some claimed – would play his debut recital.

So what? That one year gave him an advantage as I look back on what happened.

Connoisseurs responded to the list of works on the program, breathtaking for someone who had studied for so brief a spell: Bach’s B minor Sinfonia, Mozart’s Ah-Vous Dirai-je, Maman Variations, Beethoven’s Andante Favori, Chopin’s Raindrop Preludeand Ocean Etude, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, ending with Antheil’s Second Toccata.

Sitting together in the front row, the Psmiths and the Córdovas, now fast friends. They chatted along with the rest of the audience until Ramses, handsome in a tan suit and green silk tie matched to his emerald eyes, walked to the Bechstein grand. My Michael’s, transported for the occasion from our place.

Ramses, a good-looker, surveyed the assembly, smiling as he did – and sent girls’ hearts to high activity. A nod. A bow. He straightened, moved into position, sat on the padded artist’s stool, and wriggled characteristically as was his habit after being freshly seeded and plugged by his teacher backstage.

The program and performance consisted of limpid Bach (its two-note slurs sweetly coaxed), crisply pert Mozart (of crystalline perfection), lyrically charged Beethoven (a lyrical drama), Chopin’s Prelude (its droplets personalized) and Etude (a deep-voice chorale turned into churning waves), Debussy’s most famous piece (exactly as the composer told Robert Schmitz to play it – free of sentimentality), and Antheil’s shallow, noisy Toccata (a rendition which raised its Ivesian banality to the status of an early-Modernist frolic).

The impression made by the polished young musician was, well, awesome. Listeners were literally blown away on wings of song. Some thought they would like to blow Ramses. The least of the girls wanted him to suck their faces. Sexual tension amassed. Applause only grew.

No one expected an encore, yet Ramses came before us and announced, “To thank my teacher, the incomparable Michael Psmith, for his devotion to such talent as is mine, I wish to share with you the serene evocation of an ancient Greek dance by composer Erik Satie, Gymnopédie.”

Stage lights caught the gleam in Ramses’ eyes as he said, “This was the first piece he saw in me that I could learn.”

Cryptic to others, apt to my ears, it made sense - and there, under his now-sensitive fingertips, materialized the pastel-shaded image-in-tone of an archaically proportioned nude youth performing gravely ritualistic moves to Dionysian flute and kithara accompaniment. Ramses’ finest few moments – nonpareil.

This boy had put a foot into another world.

***

Joe Psmith, Michael’s older brother and my former student, furloughed from the secret-ridden Santorini Hyacinthus Retreat, arrived for a visit bristling with classical energy, brimming with love. No one being in, he thought of the garden – when he found me looking at the flowers and idle in thoughts. “Teacher mine!” he called in irrepressible fashion, one of his trademarks in high school days. He bolted toward me, arms wide, “Professor Apollyon sends me with his profound thanks.”

He pinned me to the wall for a lavish kiss which reacquainted every part of my mouth with his tongue. “There! Wait till you see my body, which also is here for you.”

With that, and despite our being outdoors in the Psmith’s sunlit back garden, Joe stripped and stood, in classical contrapposto. If eyes could drink, then drown, mine did.

Speechless at first, I began, “You look transmuted….”

“I know, like a cross between the work of Myron of Eleutherae and Praxiteles of Athens.”

“You look mighty and marvelous – and are, I suspect – mysteriously magical,” I managed.

“More than you know. The Apollyon brothers exercised me phenomenally throughout my beginning studies with them. Not to brag, but I’m the only one of my peers over there to have been initiated as cup-bearer to the Order of Eleusis.” His face turned toward the sun, “In visions, I have seen the gods on Olympus. Also, I’ve really been able to explore my formerly and largely latent, divinely feminine side.”

Too much to fathom even for a man of my acuity, his words made me want to ask, “What about your music studies?”

“When you’ve accepted the thanksgiving of my body – here, now – we can move to music at your piano. Certainly not on my parents’ awful thing.”

“On the grass?”

“I’ll face down and serve as your cushion. You might otherwise be overcome.”

Joe sang softly Seikilos’ hymn – with its delicate message the equivalent of Shakespeare’s centuries-later line about gathering rosebuds while one might – during the transcendent pleasure of my being inside him. Had not those minutes been so thoughtfully under his control, my heart might have burst.

Sun on my back, my body on his, and nerves more alive than I could remember, I had felt Joe using his interior muscles as though fingering my stave, taking its measure (as I had taken his when he was my student), determining how to treat it.

Satisfied by re-acquaintance, he drew down my length, lifted up and onto it, and said, “The way you used to, fuck me now. When you approach your boiling point, apply your libido’s brakes, and I’ll take over. You just hang on. You’ll see Olympus as I have seen it.”

How long we engaged, I have no idea. I remember penetrating and being accommodated. His voice told me when to embark. Then – as tinkles of wind chimes faded – grass, trees, bushes began to rotate, to spin with primal force. My eyes misted over, grew blind. My mind began to disconnect from my body. I lost track.

In unreckonable time, the threads of release swarmed and came together to weave the fabric of orgasm. The part of me that was conscious fought the impulse to climax. Between two worlds – at-hand reality’s and distant mythology’s – glimpses of Olympian figures registered, and disappeared as I poured into him. My new Joe took me further than I had ever taken him or his brother, my beloved Michael. Revelations of the origins of genius were mine, wrapped though they were in sensation.

The spinning slowed. I soaked in the luxury of his inner sanctum. Ideas formed.

The eternity of life, I thought, lies in moments of orgasm – eternity for a few instants. Worthy of the mighty effort it took to abandon all propriety and to surrender my selfness without restraint. I perceived that eternity is the mystery beyond thoughts and between the approach and the descent which can be recovered from memory. They – the build-ups and the fallings-away – stay with us to support the glory of experience between as a kind of spent ash there, then consumed in itself, glory beyond our remembered words for feelings – inchoate, impenetrable, past reason and alien to analysis, transformers of perception and decisive action. Sources of genius.

Voices inside the house – Ramses’ and Michael’s – prompted our search for clothing. “That’s my brother’s suitcase!” preceded the two teens’ sudden rush from the kitchen door.

Michael stopped so abruptly that Ramses almost knocked him over trying to see. “Joe!” he yelled in delight, “It’s you!” To witness the two embrace impressed me by their obvious affection.

Ramses, who had no brother, went with a single, “Wow!” I stepped to him and gave him my arm. Together, we watched Michael brush a few blades of grass from Joe’s cheek.

“When did you get here?”

“While you and your pupil were out.”

“Mom and Dad are at work.”

“Of course. We were just on our way to you-know-who’s Bösendorfer. Care to join us?” He ruffled Michael’s hair. Joe and Michael embraced again.

Michael rubbed his nose along Joe’s neck. “What is that smell – a special cologne?”

“Ambrosia, with a touch of ichor – the blue, not the gold. I’ll explain it later.”

Seeing Joe from the back, Ramses whispered, “Was he shaped like a statue when he studied with you?”

“No, I’ll explain it – later.”

***

In my room stood the Bösendorfer Imperial along one book-lined wall. A pair of straight-back chairs with cushions, my bed with its side tables, a wall-mounted television above two chests (one with a drop-down desktop), a tall cabinet, a whipping stool, an adjustable inversion table and multi-use sling stand, and to one side the entrance to my bathroom with its own equipment.

Imagine if you can, the first movement of Beethoven’s last Sonata as if its motives were thunderbolts hurled by Zeus’ Norse descendant, Thor, from some rocky crag in a storm-blackened sky followed by torrents of rain to the cackle of mocking laughter by Loki. The storm clears in preparation for the Sonata’s other movement: Divine equilibrium in variation form with syncopated efforts to upset its balance by metric dislocations and the confusion being swept for cleansing to the stars – and their release of its remainder to descend buoyantly but certainly back to earth. Rough-as-rape sex leading to sublime, euphoric sleep.

None of us did more than breathe as quietly as possible. His lap received Joe’s hands from the keyboard. He waited until we began our recovery, shifting slightly in our respective chairs. Ramses’ pants showed a damp place. Embarrassment suggested he might try to leave, but my palm calmed him.

Joe announced, “Liszt’s Un sospiro – A Sigh.” Pellucid melody sang, over arpeggios murmuring hammerlessly, rose to operatic height and arrayed kaleidoscopic cadenzas with the effect of miniscule jewels being strung. It subsided.

We sighed.

“Godowsky’s Passacaglia.”

My heart halted. The first person ever to perform that melo-maniacal masterpiece and to have his performance issued, unedited, as a commercial recording, Stephen, was my pupil years back.

“What?” I looked at Joe.

My question startled Michael and Ramses from their spell.

Joe beamed, verging on Gelosian laughter. “You played Steve’s recording for me, don’t you remember? And showed me the score when we were increasing my range of interests? It stuck. You said I’d probably never reach the Passacaglia’s level.”

Fact. He wasn’t reproving.

“Professor Apollyon and his brother positioned me mentally and physically to make it a part of me.”

I gathered myself together. “Boys, this is a work that intimidated Horowitz. Virtually no pianist has managed it as the musical entity that it is – except my Stephen. If the Apollyons deem it proper to our Joe, then fasten your seat belts. Let your minds dwell on Godowsky’s choice of the opening phrase from Schubert’s Unfinished as his recurring bass line.”

What could I do but shut out everything else? My view of Joe, my current boys, and the room vanished behind closed lids to let Godowsky present my inner eye with the richness of porphyry in gilt-bronze mounts, cabochons in lapidarian settings with surrounds of pearls of every hue, the emergence of a massive stained-glass rose window which expanded with the music’s amplitude and showed a way for recognized intellectual technicalities to engage with rarely surrendered innermost emotions.

Neither Ramses nor Michael looked anywhere but at Joe who turned, stood, and held out his hands to them. And…started opening…his shirt and…pants which…fell to his ankles. “Come,” he said in a voice that had the effect of an echo, “let me show you the other side of the love-forces behind what you heard.”

Michael rose to his feet before Ramses. Within seconds, he and pupil were naked together in my room where Ramses had been only once. Their articles I took from them as each was shed, neither able to direct himself to anything except the most beautiful, living, human form that could exist, and its beckoning, “Come unto me.”

I, under the double enchantment of my merger with Joe and his revelatory performances, withdrew from the bed and went to the piano so the youthful trio might undertake to seethe in eurhythmic interplays for all their good. To provide background stimuli, I closed my eyes and played, close to the level of inaudibility, a transcription I had made more than a decade earlier of Vaughan-Williams’ Thomas Tallis Fantasy.

Its shifting modes, an old, old melody connected to memories of centuries forgotten and ethereal mysteries never grasped. My absorption by the composer’s incantatory virtual image dissipated with the return to G Major and that chord’s long fadeout. Dreamlike, definitely sensuous risings and fallings among torsos and limbs died away, too. Spots of spume caught the light, evidence of effervescences which had escaped orifices. Beautiful waste in in an excusably purposeful cause.

My room held only the sounds of four musicians breathing. Spirits and bodies rested at peace.

***

The Psmiths’ need for emotional closeness as a family – parents and sons – cued me to excuse Ramses and myself for the evening. I white-lied that we two were expected at his house for supper. We weren’t, but were welcomed anyway. The chilled champagne (Veuve Cliquot yellow label) I had brought proved the perfect calling card with the Córdonas.

Ramses drank his two glasses the way he would have soda. By meal’s end quite tipsy, he belched and forgot to say “pardon me.” I rescued parental embarrassment by suggesting that his brisk accompaniment of me to my place and walk back home would sober him up and give him the chance to show me how polite he could be.

“You come straight back, you hear,” his father admonished.

***

Tickling so silly a boy in Ramses’ state produced squeals and shrieks throughout my removal of his clothes in my bedroom. Vacuum cups on his nipples, a genuine ball-stretcher on his scrotum, and a vibrating plug in his butt were the funniest things to him. His noises called for and received a small, penis-shaped tongue suppressor strapped to his face. Calmer, he listened while I placed him at my Bösendorfer and plunked onto the music desk the score to Shostakovich’s Age of Gold Polka.

“When you’ve learned this, I’ll hear it and send you off. It’s musical hilarity, silly as you are but learning it’s no joke, so apply yourself. Now, Ramses.”

A swift stroke of my tawse brought a halt to the funny sounds.

“Great chance to test his learning ability,” I telephoned his mom. “It’ll sober him for the stroll home. No charge. My pleasure.”

Fifty-eight minutes later, Ramses had learned it.

“Give me back my equipment. You take off the head gear – buckle’s in back. Squeeze the nipple cups to break the vacuum. Put those in your pocket. The ball-stretcher has a Velcro strap – just unwind using the tab. And retrieve my plug. I’ll wash them all and retain them in readiness….”

…“For?”

“Your next visit, silly.”

You will find the first chapters of "Piano Study" and my other stories here at GayDemon.

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