On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  He’d reached that point again. If he had to wait for Boa, then he’d wait. Waiting was something he was good at.

  He phoned down to the desk to say he’d be keeping the suite for another day and to order breakfast. Then he turned on the tv, which was showing what must have been the oldest cowboy movie ever made. Gratefully he let his mind sink into the story. The heroine explained to the hero that her parents had been killed in the massacre on Superstition Mountain, which seemed a truth as inexplicable as it was universal. His breakfast came, a gargantuan breakfast fit for the last hours of a man condemned to the gallows. Only after he’d finished his fourth fried egg did he realize that it was meant to be breakfast for two. Feeling replete, he went up to the roof and swam, all by himself, in the heated pool. He did slow weightless somersaults in the water, parodies of flight. When he returned to the room, Boa’s light was still glowing. She was spread out on the reclining seat exactly as he’d left her the night before. With half a thought that she might, if she were in the room and watching him, decide to be a dutiful wife and return to her body (and her husband), he bent down to kiss her forehead. In doing so, he knocked her arm from the armrest. It dangled from her shoulder like a puppet’s limb. He left it so, and returned to the outer room, where someone had used his few minutes away to make the bed and take away the tray of dishes.

  Still feeling oddly lucid and dégagé, he looked through a catalogue of cassettes available (at ridiculous prices, but what the hell) from the shop in the lobby. He phoned down an order, more or less at random, for Haydn’s The Seasons.

  At first he followed the text, hastening back and forth between the German and the English, but that required a more focused attention than he could muster. He didn’t want to assimilate but just, lazily, to enjoy. He went on listening with half an ear. The drapes were drawn and the lights turned off. Every so often the music would take hold, and he’d start being able to see little explosions of color in the darkness of the room, quick arabesques of light that echoed the emphatic patterns of the music. It was something he remembered doing ages ago, before his mother had run away, when they had all lived here in New York. He would lie in his bed and listen to the radio playing in the next room and see, on the ceiling, as on a black movie screen, movies of his mind’s own making, lovely semi-abstract flickerings and long zooming swoops through space, compared to which these little bips and flashes were weak tea indeed.

  From the first, it would seem, music had been a visual art for him. Or rather, a spacial art. Just as it must be for dancers (and confess it: didn’t he enjoy himself more when he danced than when he sang? and didn’t he do it better?). Or for a conductor even, when he stands at the core of the music’s possibility and calls it into being by the motions of his baton. Perhaps that explained why Daniel couldn’t fly — because in some essential way that he would never understand music was forever alien to him, a foreign language that he must always be translating, word by word, into the language he knew. But how could that be, when music could mean so much to him? Even now, at a moment like this!

  For Spring and Summer were fled, and the bass was singing of Autumn and the hunt, and Daniel was lifted outside himself by the music’s gathering momentum. Then, with a ferocity unmatched by anything else in Haydn, the hunt itself began. Horns sounded. A double chorus replied. The fanfare swelled, and formed… a landscape. Indeed, the tones that rolled and rollicked from the bells of the horns were that landscape, a broad expanse of wooded hills through which the hunters careened, resistless as the wind. Each “Tally-ho!” they cried was a declaration of possessing pride, a human signature slashed across the rolling fields, the very ecstasy of ownership. He’d never understood before the fascination of hunting, not on the scale on which it was conducted at Worry. He’d supposed it was something rich people felt obliged to do, as they were obliged to use silver and china and crystal. For what intrinsic interest could there be in killing one small fox? But the fox, he saw now, was only a pretext, an excuse for the hunters to go galloping off across their demesne, leaping walls and hedges, indifferent to boundaries of every kind, because the land belonged to them so far as they could ride and sing out “Tally-ho!”

  It was splendid, undeniably — splendid as music and as idea. Grandison Whiting would have been gratified to hear it set forth so plainly. But the fox takes a different view of the hunt, necessarily. And Daniel knew, from the look he had seen so often in his father-in-law’s eyes, that he was the fox. He, Daniel Weinreb. He knew, what’s more, that the whole of wisdom, for any fox, may be written in a single word. Fear.

  Once they put you in prison, you’re never entirely out of it again. It enters you and builds its walls within your heart. And once the hunt begins it doesn’t stop till the fox has been run to earth, till the hounds have torn it and the huntsman has held it up, a bleeding proof that the rulers and owners of the world will have no pity on the likes of fox.

  Even then, even in the grip of this fear, things might have happened otherwise, for it was a pellucid, not a panicky, fear. But then, in the afternoon (Boa had yet to return), it was announced, as the third item on the tv news, that a plane on its way to Rome had exploded over the Atlantic, and that among the passengers (all of whom had perished) was the daughter of Grandison Whiting and her newlywed husband. There was a picture, from the wedding, of the official kiss. Daniel, in his tux, had his back turned to the camera.

  The explosion was said to be the work of unidentified terrorists. No mention was made of the A.C.L.U. but the implication was there.

  Daniel was sure that he knew better.

  PART THREE

  11

  Thirty is a bad birthday when you’ve got nothing to show for it. By then the old excuses are wearing pretty thin. A failure at thirty is likely to be a failure the rest of his life, and he knows it. But the worst of it isn’t the embarrassment, which may even do you some good in small dosages; the worst of it is the way it works its way into the cells of your body, like asbestos. You live in the constant stink of your own fear, waiting for the next major catastrophe: pyorrhea, an eviction notice, whatever. It’s as though you’d been bound, face to face, to some maggotty corpse as an object lesson in mortality. Which had happened once to someone in a movie he’d seen, or maybe it was only a book. In any case, the life of Daniel saw laid out before him that morning, the morning of his thirtieth birthday, seemed bad news at almost the same scuzzy level, the only difference being the body he was tied to was his own.

  The things he’d hoped to do he hadn’t done. He’d tried to fly, and failed. He was a nothing musician. His education had been a farce. He was broke. And none of these conditions seemed amenable to change. By any system of bookkeeping this had to be accounted failure. He would admit as much, cheerfully or morosely according to his mood and state of sobriety. Indeed, to have admitted to anything else among the people he called his friends would have been a breach of etiquette, for they were failures too. Few, admittedly, had touched rock bottom yet, and one or two were only honorary failures who, though they’d fallen short of their dreams, would never be entirely destitute. Daniel, though, had already been there, though only in the summer, and never for more than a week at a time, so perhaps it hadn’t amounted to more than playacting — dress rehearsals for the worst that was yet to come. For the time being, though, he was too good-looking to have to sleep on the street, except by choice.

  Indeed, if blessings were to be counted, then looks would have to top the list, despite this morning’s taste of ashes. There it was in the speckled bathroom mirror, as (with borrowed razor and lather from a sliver of yellow laundry soap) he crisped the borders of his beard: the face that had saved him at so many eleventh hours, the feckless friendly face that seemed his only by the luckiest accident, so little did it ever reveal his own chagrined sense of who he was. Not Daniel Weinreb any more, Dan of the glittering promise, but Ben Bosola, Ben of the dead end.

  The name he’d taken to register at First National Flightpaths ha
d been his ever since. Bosola, after the family who’d rented the basement room on Chickasaw Avenue that became his bedroom. Ben, for no particular reason except that it was an Old Testament name. Ben Bosola: schmuck, hustler, lump of shit. Oh, he had a whole litany of maledictions, but somehow, much as he knew he deserved every epithet, he could never quite believe he was really as bad as all that. He liked the face in the mirror, and was always a little surprised, pleasantly, to find it there, smiling away, the same as ever.

  Someone tapped on the bathroom door, and he started. He’d been alone in the apartment five minutes ago.

  “Jack, is that you?” said a woman’s voice.

  “No. It’s Ben.”

  “Who?”

  “Ben Bosola. I don’t think you know me. Who are you?”

  “His wife.”

  “Oh. Do you need to use the toilet?”

  “Not really. I just heard someone in there, and wondered who. Would you like a cup of coffee? I’m making one for myself.”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  He rinsed his face in the toilet bowl, and dabbled the shaven underside of his chin with Jack’s (or would it be his wife’s?) cologne.

  “Hi,” he said, emerging from the bathroom with his brightest smile. You’d never have known from those bright incisors the rot that was happening further back in his mouth, where three molars were already gone. How dismayed his father would have been to see his teeth like this.

  Jack’s wife nodded, and placed a demitasse of coffee on the white Formica dining ledge. She was a short, tubby woman with red, rheumatic hands and red, rheumy eyes. She wore a muumuu patched together from old toweling, with long harlequin sleeves that seemed anxious to conceal her hands’ misfortunes. A single thick blonde braid issued from a mound of upswept hair and swung, tail-wise, behind her.

  “I didn’t know Jack was married,” Daniel said, with amiable incredulity.

  “Oh, he isn’t, really. I mean, legally we’re man and wife, of course.” She made a self-deprecating snort, more like a sneeze than a laugh. “But we don’t live together. It’s just an arrangement.”

  “Mm.” Daniel sipped the tepid coffee, which was last night’s, heated over.

  “He lets me use the place mornings that he goes to work. In return I do his laundry. Et cetera.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m from Miami, you see. So this is really the only way I can qualify as a resident. And I don’t think I could bear to live anywhere else now. New York is so…” She flapped her terrycloth sleeves, at a loss for words.

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I like to explain,” she protested. “Anyhow, you must have wondered who I was, just barging in this way.”

  “What I meant was, I’m a temp myself.”

  “You are? I would never have thought so. You seem like a native somehow.”

  “In face I am. But I’m also a temp. It would take too long to explain.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Ben.”

  “Ben — that’s a lovely name. Mine’s Marcella. Horrible name. You know what you should do, Ben: you should get married. It doesn’t necessarily have to cost a fortune. Certainly not for someone like you.”

  “Mm.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. But it is worth it, in the long run. Marriage, I mean. Of course, for me, at this point, it doesn’t make that much practical difference. I’m still living in a dorm, though they call it a residence hotel. That’s why I like to come here when I can, for the privacy. But I do have a registered job now, waitressing, so in another couple years, when I’ve qualified as a resident in my own right, we’ll get a divorce and I can find my own apartment. There’s still a lot of them, if you’re qualified. Though, realistically, I suppose I’ll have to share. But it will be a damn sight better than a dorm. I hate dorms. Don’t you?”

  “I’ve usually managed to avoid them.”

  “Really? That’s amazing. I wish I knew your secret.”

  He smiled an uncomfortable smile, put down the cup of silty coffee, and stood. “Well, Marcella, you’ll have to guess my secret. ’Cause it’s time I was off.”

  “Like that?”

  Daniel was wearing rubber sandals and a pair of gym shorts.

  “This is how I arrived.”

  “You wouldn’t like to fuck, would you?” Marcella asked. “To be blunt.”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “That’s all right. I didn’t suppose you would.” She smiled wanly. “But that’s the secret, isn’t it — the secret of your success?”

  “Sure enough, Marcella. You guessed.”

  There was no point in escalating the conflict. In any case, the harm was done, from Marcella’s point of view. Nothing so rankles as a refused invitation. So, meek as a mouse, he said bye-bye and left.

  Down on the sidewalk it was a blowy, overcast day, much too cold for this late in April and much too cold to be going around shirtless. People, naturally, noticed, but in either a humorous or an approving way. As usual he felt cheered up by the attention. At 12th Street he stopped in at what the painted sign over the window sill faintly declared to be a book store and had his morning shit. For a long while after he sat in the stall reading the graffiti on the metal partition, and trying to come up with his own original contribution. The first four lines of the limerick came to him ratatattat, but he was baffled for an ending until, having decided to leave it blank, as a kind of competition, lo and behold, it was there:

  There once was a temp whose despair

  Was a cock by the name of Pierre,

  For it lived in his crotch

  And made daily debauch

  By (Fill in the blank if you dare)!

  Mentally he tipped his hat to his Muse, wiped Arab-style with his left hand, and sniffed his fingers.

  Five years before, when there were still a few smoldering embers of the old chutzpah left in him, Daniel had developed a passion for poetry. “Passion” is probably too warm a term for an enthusiasm so systematic and willed as that had been. His vocal coach-cum-Reichian therapist at the time, Renata Semple, had had the not uncommon theory that the best way to fly, if you seem to be permanently grounded, was to take the bull by the horns and write your own songs. What song, after all, is more likely to be heartfelt than one original to the heart that feels it? Daniel, who tended to take for granted the lyrics of the songs he so lucklessly sang (who in fact preferred them to be in a foreign language, so as not to be distracted from the music), had had a whole new continent to explore, and one which proved more welcoming and accessible than music per se had ever been. At first, maybe, his lyrics were too jingly or too sugary, but he very soon got the hang of it and was turning out entire little musicals of his own. There must have been something wrong with the theory, however, for the songs Daniel wrote — at least the best of them — though they never got him off the ground, had worked quite well for several other singers, including Dr. Semple, who usually didn’t have an easy time of it. If his songs weren’t at fault, it would seem the fault must lie in Daniel himself, some knot in the wood of his soul that no expense of energy could smooth away. So, with a sense almost of gratitude for the relief that followed, he had stopped trying. He wrote one last song, a valedictory to Erato, the Muse of lyric poetry, and didn’t even bother trying it out on an apparatus. He no longer sang at all, except when he was alone and felt spontaneously like singing (which was seldom), and all that remained of his poetic career was a habit of making up limericks, as evidenced today in the toilet.

  Actually, notwithstanding his grand renunciation of all beaux arts and belles lettres, Daniel was rather proud of his graffiti, some of which were good enough to have been remembered and copied out, by other hands, in public conveniences all about the city. Each time he found one thus perpetuated, it was like finding a bust of himself in Central Park, or his name in the Times — proof that he’d made his own small but characteristic dent on the bumpers of Western Civiliza
tion.

  On 11th Street, halfway to Seventh Avenue, Daniel’s antennas picked up signals that said to stop and reconnoiter. A few housefronts away, on the other side of the street, three black teenage girls were pretending to be inconspicuous in the recessed doorway of a small apartment building. A nuisance, but Daniel had lived long enough in New York to know better than ignore his own radar, so he turned round and took his usual route to the gym, which was shorter anyhow, along Christopher Street.

  At Sheridan Square he stopped in for his traditional free breakfast of a glop-filled doughnut and milk at the Dodge ’Em Doughnut Shop. In exchange Daniel let the counterman use the gym on nights that he was in charge. Larry (the counterman) complained about his boss, the customers, and the plumbing, and just as Daniel was leaving he remembered that there’d been a call for him the day before, which was a bit strange since Daniel hadn’t used the doughnut shop phone as an answering service for over a year. Larry gave him the number he was supposed to call back: Mr. Ormund, extension 12, 580-8960. Maybe there’d be money in it, you never can tell.

  Adonis, Inc., across Seventh Avenue from the doughnut shop and upstairs above a branch of Citibank, was the nearest thing Daniel had to a permanent address. In exchange for handling the desk at different times and locking up three nights a week, Daniel was allowed to sleep in the locker-room (or, on the coldest nights, inside the sauna) whenever he cared to. He kept a sleeping bag and one change of clothes rolled up in a wire basket, and had his own cup with his name on it — BENNY — on a shelf in the bathroom. Two other temps also had cups on the shelf and sleeping bags in their lockers, and when all three of them slept over it could get pretty claustrophobic. Fortunately, they seldom all three coincided on the same night, since there were usually other, less spartan possibilities. At irregular but cherished intervals Daniel would be asked to act as watchdog for someone’s vacant apartment. More often he’d spend the night with a known quantity from the gym, such as, last night, Jack Levine. Once or twice a week he’d take pot luck from the street. But there were nights when he didn’t care to pay the price for such extra comfort, and on those nights it was good to have the gym to fall back on.