There were basically two classes of people who worked out at Adonis, Inc. The first were show biz types — actors, dancers, singers; the second were policemen. It could be argued that there was a third class as well, larger than either of the others and the most faithful in attendance — the unemployed. But almost all of these were either unemployed show biz types or unemployed cops. It was a standing joke at the gym that these were the only two professions left in the city. Or, which was nearly the case, the only three.
Actually, New York was in much better shape than most of the other collapsing East Coast cities, since it had managed over the last fifty years to export a fair share of its problems by encouraging the more energetic of these problems to lay waste the slums they lived in and loathed. The Bronx and most of Brooklyn were rubble now. No new housing was built to replace the housing burned down. As the city shrank, its traditional light industries followed the Stock Exchange to the southwest, leaving behind the arts, the media, and the luxury trade (all three, paradoxically, in thriving condition). Unless you could get on the welfare rolls (or were an actor, singer, or policeman), life was difficult verging on desperate. Getting on welfare wasn’t easy, since the city had slowly but systematically tightened the requirements. Only legal residents qualified for welfare, and you only got to be a legal resident if you could prove you’d been profitably employed and paying taxes for five years or (alternately) that you were a graduate of a city high school. Even the latter proviso wasn’t without a tooth or two, for the high schools no longer acted simply as part-time penitentiaries, but actually required students to master a few rudimentary skills, such as programming and English grammar. By these means New York had reduced its (legal) population to two and a half million. All the rest (another two and a half million? If the authorities knew, they weren’t telling) were temps, and lived, like Daniel, as best they could — in church basement dormitories, in the shells of abandoned midtown offices and warehouses, or (those with some cash to spare) in federally subsidized “hotels” that provided such amenities as heat, water, and electricity. In his first years in New York, before money became the overriding consideration (for Boa, providentially, had brought along in her hand luggage what had seemed a lifetime’s supply of pawnable jewelry — until it had all been pawned), Daniel had lived at such a hotel, sharing a semi-private room with a temp who worked nights and slept days. The Sheldonian, on Broadway at West 78th. He’d hated the Sheldonian while he was there, but those days were far enough behind him now to look like the Golden Age.
It was still relatively early when he arrived at the gym, and the manager, Ned Collins, was setting up a routine for a new customer, a fellow Daniel’s own age but badly gone to seed. Ned bullied, exhorted, and flattered in exquisite proportion. He would have made — he did make — a first-rate psychotherapist. No one was better at flogging someone through a crisis of morale or at goosing them out of the doldrums. Ned, and the feeling he generated of basic psychological comfort, was the main reason Daniel had made Adonis, Inc., his home.
After he’d swept the hallway and the stairs, he started to work on his own routine, and after a hundred incline situps, he had shifted down to first gear — a mood, or mode, of slow, thoughtless strength, such as derricks must feel when they’re most happy. Ned hectored the new customers. The wind rattled the windows. The radio played its small repertory of tunes for the brain-damaged and then delivered a guileless, Pollyanna version of the news. Daniel was too self-involved to be bothered. The news floated by like noise from the street, like faces drifting by outside a restaurant: signs of the city’s teeming life, welcome as such, but all homogenized and indistinct.
After an hour and a half he laid off and took over the desk from Ned, who left for lunch. When he was sure no one on the floor of the gym was watching, Daniel took the key-ring from the drawer and went into the locker-room where he opened the coin box of the pay-phone. With a quarter from the box, he dialed the number Larry had given him.
A woman answered: “Teatro Metastasio. May I help you?”
The name set off all his alarm bells, but he answered, calmly enough: “Yes. I have a message to call Mr. Ormund, on extension 12.”
“This is extension 12, and this is Mr. Ormund speaking.”
“Oh.” He skated past his double-take without skipping a beat. “This is Ben Bosola. My answering service said I was to phone you.”
“Ah yes. There is a position open here at the Teatro that a mutual friend said you would be qualified to fill.”
It had to be a practical joke. The Metastasio was, more than La Fenice, more than the Parnasse in London, the source, mainstay, and central glory of the bel canto revival. Which made it, in many purists’ eyes, the most important opera house in the world. To be asked to sing at the Teatro Metastasio was like receiving a formal invitation to heaven.
“Me?” Daniel said.
“At the moment, of course, Ben, I can’t answer that question. But if you would like to come in, and let us have a look at you…”
“Certainly.”
“Our mutual friend has assured me that you’re a perfect diamond in the rough. His very words. What we must consider is, how rough, and what sort of polishing will be required.”
“When would you want me to come by?”
“Is now too soon?”
“Um, actually, a bit later would be better.”
“I’ll be here till five. You know where the Teatro is?”
“Of course.”
“Just tell the man in the box office you want to see Mr. Ormund. He’ll show you the way. Bye-bye.”
“Bye-bye,” said Daniel.
“And,” he added, when he could hear the dial-tone, “amen, amen, amen.”
The Metastasio!
Realistically, he just wasn’t that good. Unless it was a place in the chorus. That must be it. But even so.
The Metastasio!
Mr. Ormund had said something about his looks, or looking at him. That was probably what was behind it. What he must do then, surely, was to look his best — and not his grotty best but his posh best, since this was, after all (and praise God), a job interview! That meant getting hold, somehow, of Claude Durkin, in one of whose closets Daniel kept the last suit remaining to him from his prehoneymoon shopping spree in Des Moines. It had survived only because he’d been wearing it the night everything else was stolen from his room at the Sheldonian. The jacket was tight across the shoulders now, thanks to Adonis, Inc., but the basic cut was conservative and didn’t give away its antiquity. In any case, it was all he had so it would have to do.
Daniel took another quarter out of the coin box, and phoned Claude Durkin. He got an answering device, which could mean either that Claude was out or that he wasn’t feeling sociable. Claude periodically came down with crushing depressions that kept him incommunicado for weeks at a time. Daniel explained to the answering device the urgency of his situation, and then, when Ned got back from lunch, trotted off to Wall Street, where Claude lived, wearing the jeans and turtleneck from his locker. If worst came to worst, he’d have to see Ormund in those.
The whole Wall Street area was a high security zone, but Daniel was registered as a visitor at the William Street checkpoint and was able to breeze right through. Claude, however, still wasn’t home when Daniel arrived at his building, or he couldn’t be bothered, so Daniel plunked down on the concrete ledge of an ornamental pool and waited. Daniel was good at waiting. In fact, he made his living as a waiter, waiting in ticket lines. He would go to a box office early on the morning that seats became available (sometimes, a day or two in advance) in order to buy tickets for people who weren’t free to stand in the line themselves, or just didn’t want to. Working at the gym provided him with a roof over his head; waiting paid for his groceries, at least from September through May, when there was something worth waiting in line for. In summer, he had to find other means of survival.
Claude Durkin was one of Daniel’s best customers. Also, gingerly, a fr
iend. They’d met in Daniel’s palmier days, when he was taking a course at the Manhattan League of Amateurs. The M.L.A. was less a music school than an introduction service. You went there to meet other musicians at your own level of taste, zeal, and incompetence. Claude had been going there, off and on, for years and taken most of the courses in the catalogue. He was forty when they met, a bachelor, and a fairy, though of uneven capability. In his youth he’d flown fairly regularly, though always with great effort. Now he got aloft at most two or three times a year, with even greater effort. Daniel always wondered, though he was too polite to ask, why Claude didn’t just take off permanently, the way (it would seem) that Boa had, the way he meant to if he ever reached escape velocity, which (it would also seem) he was never going to. Alas.
He waited, and he waited, fantasizing all the while about the Metastasio, though he knew he shouldn’t since he might not get the job. Gradually, the weather seemed to warm up. The fountain choked and gurgled at the center of the pool. A lost poodle ran around in circles, yapping, and finally was found. A policeman asked to see his I.D. — and then recognized him. It was a policeman from the gym.
At last, the third time he asked the doorman to buzz, he got in. Claude had been home all along, it turned out — asleep. He was in one of his bluer moods, which he nevertheless tried to conceal out of deference to Daniel’s euphoria. Daniel told the brief tale of Ormund’s call, and Claude made an effort to seem impressed, though he was still half-asleep.
Daniel refused Claude’s first offer of a bath in his tub, and accepted the second. While Daniel soaked, and then while he scrubbed, Claude, in full-lotus position on the carpet, described the dream he’d just awakened from. It involved flying through, around, and over various churches in Rome, imaginary churches that Claude was able to describe in wearisome detail. Though he’d long since ceased to be a practising Catholic, or even a practising architect, churches were Claude’s thing. He knew everything there was to be known about the ecclesiastical architecture of Renaissance Italy. He’d even taught a course in it at N.Y.U. until his father had died and left him a large hunk of secular architecture, the rents from which had made it possible to lead his present liberated, disgruntled life. He was always at loose ends, taking up interests and setting them aside like bibelots in an antique shop. His most abiding preoccupation was the decoration of his apartment, which changed every few months in accordance with his most recent acquisitions. The walls of all his rooms were one endless sideboard displaying bits and pieces of poor old demolished Europe: Ionic capitals, little ivory madonnas, big walnut madonnas, details of stucco-work, samples of moldings, fragments of statues in every degree of dismemberment, pewter dishes, silver dishes, swords, gilded letters from the fronts of shops, all of it stacked up higgeldy-piggeldy on the custom-made shelves. Each piece of junk, each precious jewel had its own story concerning the shop where he’d bought it or the ruin he’d dug it out of. To do Claude credit, most of his acquisitions he’d scouted out himself. Whenever he flew, his destination was some bomb site in France or Italy where he would flit about the rubble like some disembodied magpie, giddy with plundering. Then, when he’d flown back to his nest on Wall Street, he’d send off instructions to various agents who specialized in scavenging for American collectors. All in all, it seemed to Daniel a great waste of flight-time, not to mention money. He’d even said as much to Claude one Christmas in the tactful (he hoped) form of a limerick written in the flyleaf of the book he’d given him as a present (the book was a 19th century guidebook to Italy that he’d found in a box of garbage). It stood now, the limerick, carved on a granite tombstone, below Claude’s name and the date of his birth, an accepted component of the mise-en-scene:
There once was a fairy named Claude
Who loved to go visiting God;
If God wasn’t home
He would seek Him in Rome
On Maria Minerva’s facade.
Having told his dream and worried a portent or two out of it, Claude approved of Daniel’s turnout, with the exception of his tie, which he insisted on his replacing with one of his own in last year’s latest design of giant waterdrops running down clear green glass. Then, with a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the rump, he saw Daniel to the elevator and wished him the best of luck.
Poor Claude, he looked so woebegone.
“Cheer up,” Daniel urged, just before the doors chomped shut between them. “That was a happy dream.” And Claude, complying, bent his lips into the shape of a smile.
The waiting room to Mr. Ormund’s office, where Daniel waited half an hour, was decorated with so many chromolithoes of the Metastasio’s stars that you almost couldn’t see the raw silk wall-covering behind them. All the stars were represented bewigged and bedizened in the costumes of their most celebrated roles. All were inscribed, with heaps of love and barrels of kisses, to (variously): “Carissimo Johnny,” “Notre très cher maître,” “Darling Sambo,” “Sweetest Fatty,” and (by stars of a lesser magnitude) “Dear Mr. Ormund.”
Dear Mr. Ormund, in person, was a frightfully fat, professionally jolly, foppishly dressed businessman, a Falstaff and a phoney of the deepest dye, that darkest brown that hints of darker purples. Phoneys (from the French, faux noirs) were almost exclusively an Eastern phenomenon. Indeed, in Iowa and throughout the Farm Belt whites who dyed their skin black or even used any of the more drastic tanning agents, such as Jamaica Lily, were liable to pay heavy fines, if discovered. It was not a law frequently enforced, and perhaps not frequently broken. Only in cities where blacks had begun to reap some of the political and social advantages of their majority status did phoneys at all abound. Most left some conspicuous part of their anatomy undyed (in Mr. Ormund’s case it was the little finger of his right hand), as a testimony that their negritude was a choice and not a fatality. Some went beyond dyes and frizzing, and opted for cosmetic surgery, but if Mr. Ormund’s slightly retroussé nose wasn’t naturally come by, then he had been discreet in selecting a model, for there were still centimeters to spare before it would be a full-fledged King Kong. If he were ever to let his skin slip back to its natural pallor, you’d never have known what he’d been. Which made him, of course, less than a hundred-percent, gung-ho, complete and irreversible phoney, but phoney enough, for all that, for Daniel, shaking hands with him and noticing the tell-tale pinky, to feel distinctly off balance psychologically. In some ways he was an Iowan still. He couldn’t help it: he disapproved of phoneys.
“So you’re Ben Bosola!”
“Mr. Ormund.”
Mr. Ormund, instead of releasing Daniel’s hand, kept it enclosed in both his own. “My informants did not exaggerate. You are a perfect Ganymede.” He spoke in a lavish, lilting contralto that might or might not have been real. Could he be a castrato as well as a phoney? Or did he only affect a falsetto, as did so many other partisans of bel canto, in emulation of the singers they idolized?
Let him be what he would, as odd or as odious, Daniel couldn’t afford to seem flummoxed. He rallied his wits, and replied, in a voice perhaps a little fuller and chestier than usual: “Not quite Ganymede, Mr. Ormund. If I remember the story, Ganymede was about half my age.”
“Are you twenty-five then? I’d never have thought so. But do sit down. Would you like a sweet?” He waved the hand with its one pink finger at a bowl of hard candies on his desk, then sank down into the sighing vinyl cushions of a low sofa. Reclining, propped on one elbow, he regarded Daniel with a fixity of interest that seemed at once shrewd and idle. “Tell me about yourself, my boy — your hopes, your dreams, your secret torments, your smoldering passions — everything! But no, those matters are always best left to the imagination. Let me read only the memoirs of those dark eyes.”
Daniel sat stiffly, his shoulders touching but not resting against the back of a spindly imitation antique chair, and offered his eyes up for inspection. He reflected that this was what other people must experience going to a dentist.
“You’ve known tragedy, I can s
ee. And heartbreak. But you’ve come through it smiling. In fact, you always bounce back. Am I right?”
“Right as rain, Mr. Ormund,” said Daniel, smiling.
“I’ve known heartbreak, too, caro mio, and some day I will tell you of it, but we have a saying in the Theater — first things first. I mustn’t go on tormenting you with my inane chatter when, naturally, it is the position you wish to hear of.”
Daniel nodded.
“I’ll begin with the worst: it pays a mere pittance. You probably knew that.”
“I just want a chance to prove myself, Mr. Ormund.”
“But there are gratuities. For some of the boys here, I believe, they have been not inconsiderable, not inconsiderable at all. It depends, finally, on you. It’s possible just to coast along with the zephyrs, but it’s equally possible, with bit of spunk, to make yourself a bundle. You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, Ben, but I began, thirty years ago, when this was still the Majestic, as you’re beginning now: an ordinary usher.”
“An usher?” Daniel repeated, in candid dismay.
“Why, what did you suppose?”
“You didn’t say what the position was. I guess I thought…”
“Oh, dear. Dear, dear, dear. I’m very sorry. Are you a singer, then?”
Daniel nodded.
“Our mutal friend has played a most unkind joke, I fear. On both of us. I have no connection with that side of the house — none at all. I’m so sorry.”
Mr. Ormund rose from the sofa, making the cushions sigh anew, and went to stand beside the door to the waiting room. Was his distress genuine or feigned? Had the misunderstanding been mutual, or had he been leading Daniel down the garden path for his own amusement? With the door being shown him so literally, Daniel didn’t have time to sort through such fine points. He had to make a decision. He’d made it.
On Wings of Song Page 20
