He was still fully dressed when they kissed. Their kiss was long and passionate. When at last she took her mouth from his, she helped him to disrobe, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt, unfastening the belt around his waist, and at last lowering his zipper and pulling him free of his shorts. She held him only for a moment, tightly, her fist clenched around him, and then she released him, and turned from him abruptly, and went to the bed. She lay on her back watching as he undressed, one leg bent, the other extended, propped against the pillows, her hands behind her head, a faint smile on her lips. He put most of his clothing on the seat of a chair, and hung his jacket over the back of it. Then he went to where she was waiting for him.
He discovered during that first afternoon in bed with her that there were several separate and distinct personalities which, like those of schizophrenic Eve in the Joanne Woodward movie, formed in the conglomerate the single person who was Joanna Berkowitz. The first and foremost of these was someone he labeled Joanna La Flute, who could talk tirelessly and with unbridled passion about the instrument she played and its role in the orchestra. She had grown up in a musical family; her father had been only a so-so pianist but a marvelous arranger who had worked for many of the big bands in the thirties and forties before moving on to score several motion pictures; her uncle played the cello, and it was he, she guessed, certainly not her father, who stimulated her first real response to music.
“I fell in love with the cello the first time I heard it,” she told Jamie. “I must have been seven or eight years old. My father took me to hear my Uncle Izzy playing — his name is Israel Berkowitz, he used to play first desk with the Philharmonic, but to me he was Uncle Izzy — and I heard the music he was making, and I simply fell in love with the instrument. It had such a masculine sound, do you know? I mean, I was only eight years old, but Jesus, I felt it right down here, I mean it, so robust, and gutsy, like a man, do you know? If I had to assign a color to the sound a cello makes, I guess it would be Army green.”
But despite her immediate infatuation with the instrument her Uncle Izzy played, her mother decided that Joanna should begin taking piano lessons, which she did indifferently all through her prepubescent years. In 1955, when the motion picture Blackboard Jungle exploded onto the screen with an under-the-titles background rendition of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets, Joanna (like millions of other eleven-year-old girls) discovered rock-and-roll and immediately began fooling around with the guitar.
“No lessons, you understand, just picking it up and strumming it, you know, like if a friend brought one over. Mostly folksongs, like that. But the important thing was that it got me away from the piano and into strings. So when I went to a music camp the summer I turned twelve — my birthday is June 6, 1944, does that date mean anything to you? Of course it does, it’s D-Day, I was born on D-Day. Anyway, that summer I went to camp, this was 1956, it was to study cello, not piano. Cello, mind you.
“But whereas I still loved the sound of it, I still do as a matter of fact, I really wasn’t devoting too much time to practicing or anything, I was more interested in boys, I guess. I’d just turned twelve, but I was pretty well developed for my age, and extremely horny. So that deep rumbling sound coming up from between my legs — the sound the cello was making, not me — was very sexual to me, and it just aggravated my horniness, and instead of practicing I went chasing around after all the boys. That’s neither here nor there, right? I mean, nothing happened to me that summer, musically or sexually. Sexually, I’d have to wait till I was seventeen. Musically, it happened two years later.”
She was a student at Fieldston-Riverdale and still taking cello lessons — this was now the fall of 1958; she was fourteen years old — when her grandmother took her to the Metropolitan Opera one night to hear Lucia di Lammermoor, which turned out to be the musical experience that changed Joanna’s entire life. When she mentioned the opera, she familiarly called it Lucia, and then saw the blank look on Jamie’s face (he truly was a musical ignoramus) and expanded it to its full, honorable and only world-famous title, drawing another blank, shrugging, and saying, “Anyway, I’d never really dug opera, and I didn’t that night, either. I mean, I frankly found it very boring until they got to the Mad Scene, do you know the opera at all? Not at all? Well, it’s really too complicated to explain, I mean the plot is really very complicated, even for an opera.
“But there’s the scene following the murder of Sir Arthur, she kills him, you see, she kills Sir Arthur whom she’s just married, and then she goes mad, and there’s this marvelous aria for coloratura soprano accompanied by flute, and when I heard that flute — oh, my God! I can’t tell you what it felt like, just hearing that sound. I took my grandmother’s glasses — I had to find out where that sound was coming from, who in the orchestra was making that sound — and I zeroed in on the flute. A lovely woman was playing it, I loved the look of her, and I loved the look of the instrument in her hands, and the way she was holding it, the way you have to hold the flute, but most of all, I loved the sound, so very different from the cello.
“It was sexy the way a dream is sexy, smooth and turning, like a dream, everything white, like daytime, like a mirror, smooth, like glass, turning, like a dream, like beach glass, do you know? Smooth and swift, like a cat, rainbow soft, like glass, like beach glass, pastels, smooth, God, I loved that sound! And I just knew, I knew right that minute, as I focused those glasses on that beautiful woman making that rapturous sound, I knew right then that what I wanted to play was the flute. I mean, I’d always known I wanted to play something, play it well, you know, not just fool around with it, but now I knew my instrument would be the flute. That was it. No further debate. The flute. Period.
“I borrowed a C-footed flute from the band room at school, and took it home to assemble the three pieces. There are three pieces, you know, it comes apart. The head-joint with the blow-hole on it — it sounds obscene, I know, but remember I was only fourteen and I didn’t know from things like giving head, dollink, or blowjobs, or other such disgusting tings, nu? The head-joint, and the middle-joint and then the tail, or the foot-joint, voilà, you got a whole fecockteh flute, am I right? Anyway, I put it all together, and I put my mouth over the blow-hole, covering about a quarter of it, and holding the flute horizontally, the way I’d seen that lady doing at the Met, and I blew down into the hole, and Jesus Christ, I made a sound!
“I was so surprised I almost wet my pants! My father was sitting in the living room, and he looked up at me, and saw the startled look on my face, and misinterpreted it for something else, because it certainly wasn’t what I was feeling — all I was feeling was shock at having produced any sound at all. My father said, ‘Such joy!’ and I looked at him, and realized he was looking at my face, studying it with a fondness and an appreciation I’d never seen before, not when I was playing piano, not when I was playing cello, but now, making a dumb ooonk sound on the flute, he gives me a look of approval like I’ve never seen before from him in my life, and he says, ‘Such joy’ again, softer this time, and that does it. Now I know that not only am I going to play the flute, I am going to be the best fucking flute player who ever lived.”