On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  The articles of this contract were sworn to at a special dinner at Evviva il Coltello in the presence of Mrs. Schiff and Mr. Ormund, both of whom seemed to regard the occasion as auspicious. Mr. Ormund, indeed, was a proper mother of the bride, alternating between outbursts of ebullience and tears. He undertook to deliver Daniel that very evening into the hands of his own cosmetician and to supervise his entire transformation. This was, he declared, the very thing he’d hoped for when first he’d laid eyes on Ben and recognized him as a soul-brother. Mrs. Schiff was less effusive in her congratulations. She obviously regarded his physical remodeling as so much folderol, but she approved the relationship as being calculated to promote Ernesto’s peace of mind and thereby to enhance his art.

  Daniel had never before known humiliation. He’d experienced fleeting embarrassments. He’d regretted ill-considered actions. But through all his tribulations, in Spirit Lake and during his long years as a temp in New York, he had never felt any deep or lasting shame. Now, though he tried as before to retreat to the sanctuary of an inner, uncoercible freedom, he knew humiliation. He did not believe, any longer, in his innocence or righteousness. He accepted the judgement of the world — the sneers, the smiles, the wisecracks, the averted eyes. All this was his due. He could wear the livery of the Metastasio without injury to his pride — even, at his better moments, with a kind of moral panache, like those pages in Renaissance paintings who seem, by virtue of youth and beauty, the rivals of the princes whom they serve. But he could not wear the livery of prostitution with so cavalier a grace: it pinched, it tickled, it itched, it burned, it abraded his soul.

  He tried to tell himself that his condition had not been essentially altered, that, though he might give his neck to the yoke, his spirit remained free. He remembered Barbara Steiner, and the prostitute (her name forgotten) who’d inaugurated his own sexual career in Elmore, and the countless professionals here in New York with whom, in their free moments, he’d sported, both hustlers and whores. But there was no comfort in such comparisons. If he had not judged them so harshly as he judged himself, it was because just by being prostitutes they had placed themselves outside the pale. Whatever other qualities of worth they might boast — wit, imagination, generosity, exuberance — they remained, in Daniel’s eyes, honorless. As now he was himself. For didn’t they — didn’t he? — say, in effect, that love was a lie, or rather, a skill? Not, as he’d believed, the soul’s testing ground; not, somehow, a sacrament.

  Sex, if it was not the soul’s avenue into this world, and the flesh’s out of it, was simply another means by which people gained advantage over each other. It was of the world, worldly. But what was left then that wasn’t worldly, that didn’t belong to Caesar? Flight, perhaps, though it seemed that dimension of grace would always be denied him. And (logic demanded) death. He doubted, from his earlier failure in this direction, back at Spirit Lake, whether he’d ever have the gumption to kill himself, but Mrs. Schiff knew nothing of that, and he found a definite relief in throwing out dark hints to her. Scarcely a night went by without Daniel indulging in a rumble of off-stage thunder, until at last Mrs. Schiff lost all patience and called him to task.

  “So you wish you were dead — is that what you’re muttering?” she demanded one night during the second week of his captivity, when he’d come home half-drunk and bathetic. “Such stuff and nonsense, Daniel, such tiresome drivel! Really, you surprise me, carrying on in this catastrophic way. It isn’t like you. I hope you’re not like this in front of Ernesto. It wouldn’t be fair to him, you know.”

  “All you ever fucking think of is Ernesto! What about me?”

  “Oh, I think of you constantly. How should I not, with our being thrown together every day? But I do worry about Ernesto, that’s true. And I don’t worry about you. You’re much too capable and sturdy.”

  “You can say that when I’m sitting here in this pelvic straightjacket so that I can’t even take a piss by myself?”

  “You want the key? Is that all!”

  “Oh fuck it, Mrs. Schiff, you’re trying to misunderstand.”

  “Has he made you do something so awful, then, that it can’t be spoken of?”

  “He hasn’t made me do fucking anything!”

  “Ah ha!”

  “Ah ha yourself.”

  “It’s not humiliation that’s bothering you at all. It’s anxiety. Or are you, perhaps, a bit disappointed?”

  “As far as I’m concerned he can keep me in wraps till I’m ninety-five: I won’t complain.”

  “I must say, Daniel — you seem to be complaining. It’s quite possible, you know, that Ernesto will go on being satisfied with the status quo. Our marriage stopped, in effect, with the slicing of the cake.”

  “So, why does he do it?”

  “Bella figura. It’s good form to have a glamorous young person in one’s private possession. Admittedly, I couldn’t have been called glamorous, even in my youth, but in those days my father was still a prominent racketeer, so there was a social cachet. In your case, I think he is determined to one-up Bladebridge. The man does worry him — quite needlessly, I think. But among the people whose good opinion he covets your conquest has been taken note of, at least as much as if you were a Rolls-Royce that he’d bought and then had customized.”

  “Oh, I know all that. But he talks about how much he loves me. He’s always going on about his passion. It’s like living inside an opera libretto.”

  “I could think of nowhere I’d rather live. And I do think it ungenerous of you not to lead him on somewhat.”

  “You mean to say I’m not a good whore.”

  “Let your conscience be your guide, Daniel.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Chiefly, take an interest. Ernesto is a singer, and singers want more than anything else to be listened to. Ask to be allowed to go to his rehearsals, to sit in on his master classes. Praise his singing. Effuse. Act as though you meant every word in the letter you wrote to him.”

  “Damn it, Mrs. Schiff — I didn’t write that letter!”

  “More’s the pity. If you had, then you might be ready to learn to sing yourself. As you are, you never shall.”

  “No need to rub my nose in it. I guess I’ve learned that fact of life.”

  “Ah, there’s that whine in your voice again. The bleat of the guiltless lamb. But it isn’t some implacable predestining Force that keeps you from being the singer you might be. It’s your choice.”

  “Oh fuck off. I’m going to bed. Do you have the key? I need to take a piss.”

  Mrs. Schiff examined the various pockets of the clothes she was wearing, and then of the clothes she’d discarded in the course of the day. Her rooms were gradually reacquiring their former clutter now that Incubus was gone. At last she found her key-ring on her worktable. She followed Daniel to the bathroom, and, after releasing him from the insanity belt, stood in the doorway while he went to the toilet. A precaution against his whacking off. She was a very conscientious jailer.

  “Your problem, Daniel,” she continued, after his first sigh of relief, “is that you have spiritual ambition but no faith.” She considered that a while and changed her mind. “No, that sounds more like my problem. Your problem is that you have a Faustian soul. It is a larger soul, perhaps, than belongs to many who, for all that, can fly with the greatest of ease. Who ever supposed size was a mark of quality, eh?”

  Daniel wished he’d never started this discussion. All he’d wanted was a shoulder to cry on, not new insights into his inadequacy. All he wanted was a chance to piss and turn the lights out and sleep.

  “Merely to be striving, ever and always, is no distinction. That’s what’s wrong with German music. It’s all development, all Sehnsucht and impatience. The highest art is happy to inhabit this moment, here and now. A great singer sings the way a bird warbles. One doesn’t need a large soul to warble, only a throat.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Now would you leave me alone?”

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nbsp; “I am right. And so is Ernesto, and it galls me, Daniel that you will not do him justice. Ernesto has a spirit no larger than a diamond, but no less perfect. He can do what you only dream of.”

  “He sings beautifully, I’ll grant you that. But he can’t fly any more than I can.”

  “He can. He chooses not to.”

  “Bullshit. Everyone knows castrati can’t fly. Their balls and their wings come off with the same slice of the knife.”

  “I’ve looked after Ernesto for days at a time while his spirit was winging about thither and yon. You may believe, if you need to, that he faked that for my benefit, but I know what I know. Now I wish you’d wipe yourself and let me go back to work.”

  Since Incubus’s death Mrs. Schiff had been in spate, writing a new opera, which was to be her own and no one else’s. She wouldn’t discuss her work in progress, but she became impatient with anything that didn’t directly relate to it. As a result, she was generally mysterious or irritable, and hell to live with either way.

  Daniel took the opportunity, before he was locked up again, to wash in the sink. He bathed incessantly these days, and would have bathed still more if Mrs. Schiff had allowed it.

  “As to what you were saying earlier,” Mrs. Schiff noted, while he dried himself, “I think you’ll soon come to enjoy your humiliations, the way people do in Russian novels.”

  Daniel could see himself blushing in the bathroom mirror.

  Blushes are like tulips. In the spring there is a profusion of them, and then as the year gets rolling they become fewer and fewer. For a while it was enough that he be noticed by a stranger for Daniel to be afflicted by a spasm of shame, but inevitably there were times when, his mind being fixed on other matters, he was oblivious to the attention he received. As a natural consequence, he received less attention. For those moments when the world insisted on goggling, pointing fingers, and calling names, Daniel developed a small arsenal of defense mechanisms, from the preemptive snipping of “You’re another!” (best delivered to bonafide blacks who limited their hostility to ironic glances) to maniac self-parody, as when he would pretend to strum a banjo and start to sing a brain-damaged medley of minstrel-show tunes (a ploy that could strike terror to the hearts even of potential muggers). Reluctantly, he came to understand the secret phoneys shared with freaks of all descriptions — that people feared him as they might fear to see their own idiot ids capering about before them and proclaiming their secret desires to every passer-by. If only they knew, he would wistfully reflect, that they’re not even my secret desires; that they’re probably not anyone’s. So long as he bore that in mind he could even enjoy grossing people out — some people more than others, naturally. In short, just as Mrs. Schiff had prophesied, he was learning to savor his abasement. And why not? If there is something you’d got to do and a way to enjoy it, you’d be a fool to do it any other way.

  Toward his benefactor, too, Daniel took a more accommodating line. Though he never so far relented as to disguise the fact of an enforced compliance, he did try to act the part he’d been engaged to play, albeit woodenly. He resisted the impulse to wince when Rey would pet and pinch and otherwise feign a lubricious interest, which he only did when they were in public, never when they were alone. Then, in a way because there was an equivocal kind of cruelty in it, he began to reciprocate these attentions — but only when they were alone, never in company. He would call him “Sugar Daddy,” “Dear Heart,” “Lotus Blossom,” and any of a hundred other endearments borrowed from Italian and French libretti. Under the pretext of “wanting to look his best” for Rey, he squandered quantities of hard cash on over-priced and tasteless clothes. He ran up huge bills with Mr. Ormund’s cosmetician. He coquetted, strutted, posed, and preened. He became a wife.

  None of these abominations seemed to register. Perhaps Rey, as a eunuch, accepted Daniel’s outrages as a fair representation of human sexuality. Daniel himself began to wonder how much of his posturing was parody and how much a compulsive letting-off of steam. The celibate life was beginning to get to him. He began having wet dreams for the first time since puberty, and dreams of every sort in much greater abundance. One afternoon he found himself sneaking off to a double bill of the sleaziest porn — not just ducking into a theater on impulse but actually forming and following a plan. Most of the porn he’d seen had struck him as silly or stupid, and even the best of it couldn’t live up to his own unassisted fantasies, much less to the real throbbing thing. So what was he doing there in the dark, staring up the blurred gigantic images of genitalia and feeling sweet indescribable confusions? Cracking up?

  His dream-life posed much the same question. During his stint with Renata Semple his dreams had been Grade B, or lower — short, simple, guileless dreams a computer could have put together from the data of his daily life. No longer. The most vivid of his new dreams, and the scariest for what it seemed to suggest about his mental health, concerned his old friend and betrayer, Eugene Mueller. At an early point in the dream Daniel was dining at La Didone with Rey and Mrs. Schiff. Then he was out on the street. A mugger had come up behind him and asked, in a conversational tone, whether he’d like to be raped. The voice sounded uncannily familiar, and yet not to belong to anyone he knew. A voice from his past, before New York, before Spirit Lake. “Eugene?” he guessed, and turned around to face him and to fall, instantly, in love. Eugene spread his arms, Gene-Kelly-style, and smiled. “None other! Back from the bathroom—” He did a buck-and-wing and went down on one knee, “—and ready for love!”

  Eugene wanted to fly to Europe immediately, for a honeymoon. He explained that it was he who’d been responsible for the plane crash in which Daniel and Boa had died. Daniel began crying, from (he explained) sheer surfeit of joy. They began to have sex. Eugene was very assertive, not to say rough. Daniel cut his hand, and there was some confusion as to the nature of the pain he was experiencing. He told Eugene to stop, he pleaded, but Eugene went right on. Nails were being driven into his hands and feet, to secure (Eugene explained) his wings.

  Then he was standing on a chair, and Eugene was on a chair on the far side of the room, encouraging him to fly. Daniel was afraid even to lift his arms. Blood dribbled down over the feathers. Instead of flying, which didn’t seem possible, he started to sing. It was a song he’d written himself, called “Flying.”

  The moment he started to sing he woke up. He couldn’t believe it had been, he didn’t want it to be, no more than a dream. Awful as it had been, he wanted it to be real. He wanted to make love to Eugene again, to sing, to fly. But here he was in his room, with the moonlight coming in at the half-parted curtain and making a ghost of Boa under her single sheet. His cock was erect and the glans was pressed painfully against the unyielding plastic of the insanity belt. He started crying and then, without stopping crying, stumbled across the room to get pencil and paper. On the hardwood floor, by moonlight, he wrote down everything he could remember of his dream.

  For hours he would read over that transcript and wonder what it had meant. Did it mean that he might, after all, be able some day to sing? To fly? Or simply that his insanity belt was living up to its name?

  Whatever it might mean, he felt a lot better all the next day, a day of high summer and bright speedy clouds. He walked through Central Park relishing everything, the flashings of light on the leaves of the trees, the corrugations of bark, the russet stains of iron bleeding across the mammoth facets of a rock, swoopings of kites, women with strollers, the nobility of the towering apartment buildings that formed a grand horseshoe round the southern end of the park. And throngs of sexy people, all of them, whether they knew it or not, cruising, sending out signals, asking to be laid. The park was a vast dance floor of shuffling loins and appraising glances, of swinging limbs and shifting possibilities. The odd thing was that Daniel, despite his supercharged alertness to this clandestine bacchanal, didn’t mind, this once, being relegated to the status of observer. He could, of course, if he’d wished to, have offered some lucky
wight the still available delights of lips, tongue, and teeth, but Daniel had never been an altruist to that degree. Without requiring a strict teeter-totter equivalence of orgasm for orgasm, he did believe in some kind of quid pro quo. So he walked, loveless and at liberty, wherever the paths would take him — around the reservoir and through a series of mini-wildernesses, past the impromptu cabarets of street performers, past rows of sad bronze businessmen, drinking it all in or just gazing up into the cloudlands and trying to recapture the fading dream, that feeling of being poised right on the edge of flight (albeit on the seat of a chair). What had it meant? What did it mean?

  Then, out of the blue, as he loped down a long flight of steps leading to an ornamental pond, a statue answered that question. An angel rather — the angel who stood, wings unfurled, atop a tall fountain in the center of the pool. The dream the angel chose to interpret was not last night’s but the dream he’d dreamt in the sauna of Adonis, Inc., on the night of his thirtieth birthday, the dream about the fountain in the courtyard of the mosque that had seemed so obscure then and was so clear now as he stood at the edge of the pool and was drenched in the wind-borne spray of the veritable fountain.

  The fountain was the fountain of art; of song; of singing; of a process that renews itself moment by moment; that is timeless and yet inhabits the rush and tumble of time, just as the fountain’s trumpeting waters are endlessly conquering the same slim splendid space. It was what Mrs. Schiff had said about music, that it must be a warbling, and willing to inhabit this instant, and then this instant, and always this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song. That was what bel canto was all about, and that was the way to fly.