The Stars Shine Down

chapter Twenty
The day started with good news. Terry Hill called.

"Lara?"

"Yes?"

"We just heard from the Gaming Commission. You've got your license."

"That's wonderful, Terry!"

"I'll go over the details when I see you, but it's a green light. Apparently you impressed the hell out of them."

"I'll get everything started right away," Lara said. "Thanks."

Lara told Keller what had happened.

"That's great. We can sure use the cash flow. That will take care of a lot of our problems.."

Lara looked at her calender. "We can fly there on Tuesday and get things moving."

Kathy buzzed her. "There's a Mr. Adler on line two. Shall I tell him...?"

Lara was suddenly nervous. "I'll take it." She picked up the telephone. "Philip?"

"Hello. I'm back."

"I'm glad." / missed you.

"I know it's short notice, but I wondered whether you might be free for dinner this evening."

She had a dinner engagement with Paul Martin. "Yes. I'm free."

"Wonderful. Where would you like to dine?"

"It doesn't matter."

"La Cote Basque?"

"Fine."

"Why don't we meet there? Eight o'clock?"

"Yes."

"See you tonight."

When Lara hung up, she was smiling.

"Was that Philip Adler?" Keller asked.

"Uh-huh. I'm going to marry him."

Keller was looking at her, stunned. "Are you serious?"

"Yes."

It was a jolt. I'm going to lose her, Keller thought. And then?: Who am I kidding? I could never have her.

"Lara...you hardly know him!"

I've known him all my life.

"I don't want you to make a mistake."

"I'm not. I..." Her private telephone rang. The one she had had installed for Paul Martin. Lara picked it up. "Hello, Paul."

"Hi, Lara. What time would you like to make dinner tonight? Eight?"

She felt a sudden sense of guilt. "Paul...I'm afraid I can't make it tonight. Something came up. I was just going to call you."

"Oh? Is everything all right?"

"Yes. Some people just flew in from Rome" - that part at least was true- - "and I have to meet with them."

"My bad luck. Another night, then."

"Of course."

"I hear the license came through for the Reno hotel."

"Yes."

"We're going to have fun with that place."

"I'm looking forward to it. I'm sorry about tonight. I'll talk to you tomorrow."

The line went dead.

Lara replaced the receiver slowly.

Keller was watching her. She could see the disapproval on his face.

"Is something bothering you?"

"Yeah. It's all this modern equipment."

"What are you talking about?"

"I think you have too many phones in your office. He's bad news, Lara."

Lara stiffened. "Mr. Bad News has saved our hides a few times, Howard. Anything else?"

Keller shook his head. "No."

"Right. Let's get back to work."

Philip was waiting for her when she arrived at La Cote Basque. People turned to stare at Lara as she walked into the restaurant. Philip stood up to greet her, and Lara's heart skipped a beat.

"I hope I'm not late," she said.

"Not at all." He was looking at her admiringly. His eyes were warm. "You look lovely."

She had changed clothes half a dozen times. Should I wear something simple or elegant or sexy? Finally, she had decided on a simple Dior. "Thank you."

When they were seated, Philip said, "I feel like an idiot."

"Oh? Why?"

"I never connected the name. You're that Cameron."

She laughed. "Guilty."

"My God! You're a hotel chain, you're apartment buildings, office buildings. When I travel, I see your name all over the country."

"Good." Lara smiled. "It will remind you of me."

He was studying her. "I don't think I need any reminding. Do you get tired of people telling you that you're very beautiful?"

She started to say, "I'm glad you think I'm beautiful." What came out was: "Are you married?" She wanted to bite her tongue.

He smiled. "No. It would be impossible for me to get married."

"Why?" For an instant she held her breath. Surely he's not...

"Because I'm on tour most of the year. One night I'm in Budapest, the next night in London or Paris or Tokyo."

There was a sweeping sense of relief. "Ah. Philip, tell me about yourself."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

Philip laughed. "That would take at least five minutes."

"No, I'm serious. I really want to know about you."

He took a deep breath. "Well, my parents were Viennese. My father was a musical conductor, and my mother was a piano teacher. They left Vienna to escape Hitler and settled in Boston. I was born there."

"Did you always know you wanted to be a pianist?"

"Yes."

He was six years old. He was practicing the piano, and his father came storming into the room. "No, no, no! Don't you know a major chord from a minor?" His hairy finger slashed at the sheet music. "That's a minor chord. Minor. Do you understand?"

"Father, please, can I go? My friends are waiting for me outside."

"No. You will sit here until you get it right."

He was eight years old. He had practiced for four hours that morning and had had a terrible fight with his parents. "I hate the piano," he cried. "I never want to touch it again."

His mother said, "Fine. Now, let me hear the andante once more."

He was ten years old. The apartment was filled with guests, most of them old friends of his parents from Vienna. All of them were musicians.

"Philip is going to play something for us now," his mother announced.

"We'd love to hear little Philip play," they said in patronizing voices.

"Play the Mozart, Philip."

Philip looked into their bored faces and sat down at the piano, angry. They went on chatting among themselves.

He began to play, his fingers flashing across the keyboard. The talking suddenly stopped. He played a Mozart sonata, and the music was alive. And at that moment he was Mozart, filling the room with the magic of the master.

As Philip's fingers struck the last chord, there was an awed silence. His parent's friends rushed over to the piano, talking excitedly, effusive with their praise. He listened to their applause and adulation, and that was the moment of his epiphany, when he knew who he was and what he wanted to do with his life.

"Yes, I always knew I wanted to be a pianist," Philip told Lara.

"Where did you study piano?"

"My mother taught me until I was fourteen, and then they sent me to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia."

"Did you enjoy that?"

"Very much."

He was fourteen years old, alone in the city with no friends. The Curtis Institute of Music was located in four turn-of-the-century mansions near Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. It was the closest American equivalent to the Moscow Conservatory of Viardo, Egorov, and Tor adze. Its graduates included Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Peter Serkin, and dozens of other brilliant musicians.

"Weren't you lonely there?"

"No."

He was miserable. He had never been away from home before. He had auditioned for the Curtis Institute, and when they accepted him, the realization struck him that he was about to begin a new life, that he would never go home again. The teachers recognized the young boy's talent immediately. His piano teachers were Isabelle Vengerova and Rudolf Serkin, and Philip studied piano, theory, harmony, orchestration, and flute. When he was not in class, he played chamber music with the other students. The piano, which he had been forced to practice from the time he was three years old, was now the focus of his life. To him, it had become a magical instrument out of which his fingers could draw romance and passion and thunder. It spoke a universal language.

"I gave my first concert when I was eighteen with the Detroit Symphony."

"Were you frightened?"

He was terrified. He found that it was one thing to play before a group of friends. It was another to face a huge auditorium filled with people who had paid money to hear him. He was nervously pacing backstage when the stage manager grabbed his arm and said, "Go. You're on." He had never forgotten the feeling he had when he walked out onto the stage and the audience began to applaud him. He sat down at the piano, and his nervousness vanished in an instant. After that his life became a marathon of concerts. He toured all over Europe and Asia, and after each tour his reputation grew. William Ellerbee, an important artists' manager, agreed to represent him. Within two years Philip Adler was in demand everywhere.

Philip looked at Lara and smiled. "Yes. I still get frightened before a concert."

"What's it like to go on tour?"

"It's never dull. Once I was on a tour with the Philadelphia Symphony. We were in Brussels, on our way to give a concert in London. The airport was closed because of fog, so they took us by bus to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. The man in charge explained that the plane they had chartered for us was small and that the musicians could take either their instruments or their luggage. Naturally they chose their instruments. We arrived in London just in time to begin the concert. We played it in jeans, sneakers, and unshaven."

Lara laughed. "And I'll bet the audience loved it."

"They did. Another time I was giving a concert in Indiana, and the piano was locked away in a closet and no one had a key. We had to break the door down."

Lara giggled.

"Last year I was scheduled to do a Beethoven concerto in Rome, and one of the music critics wrote: 'Adler gave a ponderous performance, with his phrasing in the finale completely missing the point. The tempo was too broad, rupturing the pulse of the piece.'"

"That's awful!" Lara said sympathetically.

"The awful part was that I never even gave that concert. I had missed the plane!"

Lara leaned forward, eagerly. "Tell me more."

"Well, one time in Sao Paulo the pedals fell off the piano in the middle of a Chopin concert."

"What did you do?"

"I finished the sonata without pedals. Another time the piano slid clear across the stage."

When Philip talked about his work, his voice was filled with enthusiasm.

"I'm very lucky. It's wonderful to be able to touch people and transport them into another world. The music gives each of them a dream. Sometimes I think music is the only sanity left in an insane world." He laughed self-consciously. "I didn't mean to sound pompous."

"No. You make millions of people so happy. I love to hear you play." She took a deep breath. "When I hear you play Debussy's Voiles, I'm on a lonely beach, and I see the mast of a ship sailing in the distance..."

He smiled. "Yes, so do I."

"And when I listen to your Scarlatti, I'm in Naples, and I can hear the horses and the carriages, and see the people walking through the streets..." She could see the pleasure in his face as he listened to her.

She was dredging up every memory of her sessions with Professor Meyers.

"With Bartok, you take me to the villages of Central Europe, to the peasants of Hungary. You're painting pictures, and I lose myself in them."

"You're very flattering," Philip said.

"No. I mean every word of it."

Dinner arrived. It consisted of a Chateaubriand with pommes frites, a Waldorf salad, fresh asparagus, and a fruit tart for dessert. There was a wine for each course. Over dinner Philip said, "Lara, we keep talking about me. Tell me about you. What is it like to put up enormous buildings all over the country?"

Lara was silent for a moment. "It's difficult to describe. You create with your hands. / create with my mind. I don't physically put up a building, but I make it possible. I dream a dream of bricks and concrete and steel, and make it come true. I create jobs for hundreds of people: architects and bricklayers and designers and carpenters and plumbers. Because of me, they're able to support their families. I give people beautiful surroundings to live in and make them comfortable. I build attractive stores where people can shop and buy things they need. I build monuments to the future." She smiled, sheepishly. "I didn't mean to make a speech."

"You're quite remarkable, do you know that?"

"I want you to think so."

It was an enchanted evening, and by the time it was over, Lara knew that for the first time in her life she was in love. She had been so afraid that she might be disappointed, that no man could live up to the image in her imagination. But here was Lochinvar in the flesh, and she was stirred.

When Lara got home, she was so excited she was unable to go to sleep. She went over the evening in her mind, replaying the conversation again and again and again. Philip Adler was the most fascinating man she had ever met. The telephone rang. Lara smiled and picked it up. She started to say, "Philip...," when Paul Martin said, "Just checking to make sure you got home safely."

"Yes," Lara said.

"How did your meeting go?"

"Fine."

"Good. Let's have dinner tomorrow night."

Lara hesitated. "All right." I wonder if there's going to be a problem.