On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Shortly after ten that night Daniel, in his latest Arabian gear, appeared on Rey’s East 55th Street doorstep with a bowl of his special bread pudding. The doorman, as ever, looked askance, not to say daggers, but Daniel, borne along by winds of inspiration, just whistled a few bars of “I Whistle a Happy Tune” and sailed into the elevator.

  Rey, naturally, was surprised to be visited so late and without warning. He’d already changed from his daytime drabs to the night’s relative spendor, a shot-silk kimono with a few choice panels of embroidery.

  Daniel held out the still-warm bowl. “Here, amorino, I made you a pudding.”

  “Why, thank you.” Rey received the pudding in both hands and lifted it up to sniff at it. “I didn’t realize you were such a homebody.”

  “I’m not, usually, but Mrs. Schiff swears by my bread pudding. It’s my own recipe, and very low in calories. I call it humble pie.”

  “Would you care to come in and enjoy it with me?”

  “Do you have any cream?”

  “I’ll look. But I doubt it. Where would one get cream nowadays?”

  Daniel took a stoppered jug of cream from within his burnoose. “On the black market.”

  “You think of everything, mon ange.”

  In the kitchen, Rey, ever careful of his figure, spooned out a small portion of the pudding for himself, and a larger one for Daniel.

  When they were settled before the fireplace, under a fauvish pastel portrait of Rey in the role of Semiramide, Daniel asked Rey if he would do him a favor.

  “It depends on the favor, surely. This is delicious pudding.”

  “I’m glad you like it. Would you sing a song for me?”

  “What song?”

  “Any at all.”

  “That’s the favor you ask?”

  Daniel nodded. “I just suddenly had to hear you sing. With the Teatro closed for the summer… Records are wonderful, but they’re not the same thing.”

  Rey riffled through the sheet music on the piano. He handed Daniel the score of Schubert’s “Vedi quanto t’adoro,” and asked if he could handle the accompaniment.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  They went through the opening bars several times, Rey humming the vocal line, until he was satisfied with the tempo. Then he sang, without ornament or embellishment, the words Metastasio had written, the notes Schubert, a hundred years later, had set:

  “Vedi quanto t’adoro ancora, ingrato!

  Con un tuo sguardo solo

  Mi togli ogni difesa e mi disarmi.

  Ed hai cor di tradirmi? E puoi lasciarmi?”

  It dawned on Daniel, even as his fingers fumbled along in the loveliness, that Rey was not so much singing as setting forth a literal truth. Though he’d never heard the aria before, the Italian seemed to translate itself with spontaneous, pentecostal clarity, vowel by golden, anguished vowel: See! ingrate, how I still adore you! A look from you is still enough to shatter my defenses and to strip me bare. Have you the heart to betray such love? And then to leave me?

  Rey broke off at this point, Daniel having altogether lost track of the accompaniment from the marvel of Rey’s singing. They started out from the beginning again, and this time Rey introduced to the bare skeleton of Schubert’s written score a tremolo that mounted by imperceptible degrees to utmost extravagance at “E puoi lasciarmi?” Then abruptly, at “Ah! non lasciarmi, no,” the heightened color was gone, as though a veil had fallen from the face of the music. He sang in a silvery, slightly hollow tone that suggested that he (or rather, Dido, whom he’d become) had been abandoned at the very instant she implored not to be. It was heartbreaking, heroic, and thoroughly exquisite, a sorrow and a sunset condensed into a single string of pearls.

  “How was that?” Rey asked, when they’d finished the last repetition of the opening stanza.

  “Stupendous! What can I say?”

  “I mean, in particular, the ‘E puoi lasciarmi?’ which Alicia has objected to.”

  “It was like being slapped in the face by Death.”

  “Ah, you should be a reviewer, bell’ idol mio.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Oh, I’m quite sincere.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “I might even be able to arrange it for you.”

  Daniel looked down at his brown hands resting on the closed keyboard and expelled a short, self-defeated snort of laughter.

  “You wouldn’t want that?” Rey asked with, it would seem, honest incomprehension.

  “Ernesto — I wouldn’t want to review it, if I couldn’t do it.”

  “Then you’ve never given up the wish to be a singer?”

  “Does anyone ever give up his wishes? Do you?”

  “That is an unanswerable question, I’m afraid.” Rey went to the divan and sat down, his arms spread wide across the cushions. “All my wishes have come true.”

  Ordinarily Daniel would have found such complacence infuriating, but the song had modified his perceptions, and what he felt, instead, was a rather generalized tristesse and a wonder at the immense gulf between Rey’s inner and his outer man, between the hidden angel and the wounded beast. He went and sat down at a confidential, but not amorous, distance from him and leaned back his head so that it rested on Rey’s forearm. He closed his eyes and tried to summon up the exact curve and sweep and nuance of that E puoi lasciarmi?

  “Let me ask you more directly then,” Rey said, in a tone of cautious speculation. “Do you want to be a singer?”

  “Yes, of course. Isn’t that what I said in my letter to you?”

  “You’ve always denied that was your letter.”

  Daniel shrugged. “I’ve stopped denying it.” His eyes were still closed, but he could tell by the shifting of the cushions that Rey had moved closer. A fingertip traced the circle of pallor on each of his cheeks.

  “Would you—” Rey faltered.

  “Probably,” said Daniel.

  “—kiss me?”

  Daniel arched his neck upward till his lips had touched Rey’s, a very little distance.

  “The way you would kiss a woman,” Rey insisted in a hushed voice.

  “Oh, I’ll do better than that,” Daniel assured him. “I’ll love you.”

  Rey sighed a sigh of gentle disbelief.

  “Or at least,” Daniel said, trying for a bit of tremolo of his own, “I’ll see what I can do. Fair enough?”

  Rey kissed one cheek. “And I—” Then the other, “—will teach you to sing. At least—”

  Daniel opened his eyes at the same moment that Rey, with a look of pain and the hint of a tear, closed his.

  “—I’ll see what I can do.”

  As he was leaving the lobby with the empty pudding bowl, the doorman could be heard to mutter something subliminally derogatory. Daniel, still aglow with a sense of his victory, and proofed thereby against all injury, turned round and said, “I beg your pardon? I didn’t catch that.”

  “I said,” the doorman repeated murderously, “phoney, fucking whore.”

  Daniel considered this, and considered himself in the lobby’s mirrored wall, while he ran a comb through his frizzy hair. “Yes, that may be,” he concluded judiciously (tucking away the comb and taking up the bowl again). “But a good whore. As was my mother before me. And you can take our word, it’s not easy.”

  He winked at the doorman and was out the door before the old fart could think of a comeback to that one.

  But the distinction Daniel was making had not sunk very deep into the doorman’s consciousness, for when Daniel was out of sight, he adjusted his visored and braided cap to a significant, steadfast angle and repeated his earlier, irrevocable judgement. “Phoney fucking whore.”

  17

  Though it had begun at four in the afternoon and no one of any consequence had arrived till well after six, this was officially a fellowship breakfast. Their host, Cardinal Rockefeller, the Archbishop of New York, moved democratically from group to group, amazing one and all b
y knowing who they were and why they’d been invited. Daniel was certain someone was prompting him via his hearing aid, in the manner of carnival psychics, but perhaps that was sour grapes, since the Cardinal, when he’d offered his ring for Daniel to kiss, had affected to believe that he was a missionary from Mozambique. Rather than contradict him Daniel said that everything was swell in Mozambique, except that the missions were in desperate need of money, to which the Cardinal equably replied that Daniel must speak to his secretary, Monsignor Dubery.

  Monsignor Dubery, a man of affairs, knew quite well that Daniel was of Rey’s party and would later be helping to provide entertainment for the Cardinal’s inner circle. He tried his best to partner Daniel with other social pariahs present, but all in vain. A black Carmelite nun from Cleveland snubbed Daniel soundly the moment the Monsignor’s back was turned. Then he was matched with Father Flynn, the actual missionary from Mozambique, who regarded his introduction to Daniel as a deliberate affront on the part of Monsignor Dubery, and said so, though not to Dubery’s face. When Daniel, for want of other common grounds, told of Cardinal Rockefeller’s earlier confusion, Father Flynn lost his bearings utterly and began, in a fury of indiscretion to denounce the entire archdiocese of Sodom, meaning New York. Daniel, fearing to be blamed for deliberately provoking the man to these ecstasies, soothed and placated, with no success. Finally he just came right out and warned Father Flynn that he couldn’t hope to advance the interests of his mission by behaving so, and that seemed to serve. They parted quietly.

  Hoping to avoid Monsignor Dubery’s further attentions, Daniel strayed among the public rooms of the archepiscopal residence. He watched a high-power game of snooker until he was given, politely, to understand that he was in the way. He studied the titles of books locked within their glass bookshelves. He had a second glass of orange juice but prevented the well-meaning bartender from slipping in any vodka, for he didn’t dare tamper with what was so far, knock on wood, a completely level head.

  Which he needed. For tonight he was making his debut. After fully a year of study with Rey, Daniel was going to sing in public. He would have preferred a debut uncomplicated by social maneuverings with those who were shortly to provide his audience, but Mrs. Schiff had explained what it had been too self-evident to Rey for him to attempt to discuss — the importance of starting at the top.

  In all New York there could not have been a more select audience than that which attended Cardinal Rockefeller’s musicales. The Cardinal himself was a devotee of bel canto and was regularly to be seen in his box at the Metastasio. In return for his very visible patronage and the sparing use of his name in fund-raising brochures, the Metastasio supplied St. Patrick’s with a roster of soloists that no church in Christendom could have hoped to rival. It also supplied talent for more secular occasions, such as the present fellowship breakfast. Rey, though scarcely subject himself to such impressments, was a devout Catholic and quite content to grace the Cardinal’s salon with his art so long as a certain reciprocity was maintained; so long, that is, as he was received as a guest and given access to the latest ecclesiastic scuttlebutt, which he followed with much the same fascination that the Cardinal gave to opera.

  Daniel found an empty room, the merest closet with two chairs and a television, and sat down to nurse his drink and his anxiety. He thought, in principle, that he should have been at least nervous and possibly upset, but before he could begin to generate even a tremor in this direction, his introspections were derailed by a stranger in the uniform of the Puritan Renewal League (Cardinal Rockefeller was notoriously ecumenical). “Howdy,” said the stranger, tipping his Stetson back to reveal a small freckled cross in the middle of his black forehead. “Mind if I just collapse in that other chair?”

  “Be my guest,” said Daniel.

  “The name’s Shelly,” he said, collapsing. “Shelly Gaines. Isn’t it awful the way, even when you’re a phoney yourself, it’s the first thing you notice in someone else? Other people, I could care less, but when I see one of my own, boom!” He tossed his Stetson on top of the tv. “Paranoia time. Do you suppose Hester Prynne ever came up against another lady with a scarlet letter embroidered on her blouse? And if so, was she friendly? Not likely, I think.”

  “Who was Hester Prynne?” Daniel asked.

  “Foiled again,” said Shelly Gaines. He found, on the floor beside his chair, a beer mug with a third of the beer left in it and emptied it in one chug-a-lug. “Cheers,” he said, wiping his lips on the cuff of his denim jacket.

  “Cheers,” Daniel agreed, and finished his orange juice. He smiled at Shelly, for whom he’d felt an instant, patronizing friendliness. He was one of those people who should leave fashion well enough alone. A nondescript, round-faced, soft-bodied sort who would have been typecast as Everyman. Not the right kind of material for a phoney, or (Daniel would have supposed) for the P.R.L… And yet he tried so hard. Whose heart wouldn’t have gone out to him?

  “You’re a Christian, aren’t you?” Shelly asked, following his own dark trains of thought.

  “Mm.”

  “I can always tell. Of course, people in our scrape don’t have much choice in the matter. Are you here with someone? If I may be so bold.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “R.C.?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve—” He rolled his eyes, pressed his hand to his stomach, and brought forth a miniscule burp, “—been drinking since four o’clock, and I’ve spent the last half-hour trying to talk with a missionary from somewhere in Africa who is quite insane. Understand, I have the greatest admiration for our brothers and sisters out there among the heathens, but good Lord, shouldn’t we have our own folkways? Another rhetorical question. R.C. means Roman Catholic. Did you really not know?”

  “No.”

  “And Hester Prynne is the heroine of The Scarlet Letter.”

  “I did know that.”

  “Guess who’s with us tonight?” said Shelly, veering in a new direction.

  “Who?”

  “The mysterious Mr. X. The guy who wrote Tales of Terror. Have you read it?”

  “Bits.”

  “He was pointed out to me by dear old Dubery, who can be relied on, usually, to know about people’s sins. But I must say the fellow seemed inoffensive to me. Now if he’d pointed you out as Mr. X, I’d have believed him implicitly.”

  “Because I do seem offensive?”

  “Oh no. Because you’re so good-looking.”

  “Even in blackface?” Poor Daniel. He could never keep from flirting. He dug for compliments as instinctively as a bird for worms.

  “Even? Especially!” Then, after a pause meant to be pregnant with eye-contact, “Do you know, I could swear I know you from somewhere. Do you ever go to Marble Collegiate?”

  “Van Dyke’s church on Fifth Avenue?”

  “And mine. I’m one of the great man’s curates.”

  “No, I’ve never been there. Though I’ve thought of going lots of times. His book made a big impression on me when I was a teenager.”

  “On all of us. Are you in holy orders?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “That was a stupid question. But I thought, because you’re wearing that thing…” He nodded at Daniel’s crotch. “I was celibate myself once. Three and one-half years. But finally it was just too much for my weak flesh. I do admire those who have the strength. Are you staying for the singspiel?”

  He nodded.

  “And do you know what it’s to be?”

  “Ernesto Rey is here, and he’s brought someone else. His protégé.”

  “Really! Then I suppose I’ll have to linger on. Do you want another of whatever you’re having?”

  “Just orange juice, and no thank you, I don’t.”

  “You don’t drink? Pelion on Ossa!” Shelly Gaines levered himself up from his chair and turned to leave, then turned again to whisper to Daniel: “There he is. Just coming into the next room. Now who wo
uld suppose that that was Mr. X?”

  “The guy with the tie with the raindrops on it?”

  “Raindrops? Good grief, what eyesight! It seems a plain blurry green to me, but yes, that’s the man.”

  “No,” said Daniel, “I certainly wouldn’t have believed it.”

  When Shelly Gaines had gone to the bar, Daniel approached his old friend Claude Durkin, who was having a conversation with one of the more imposing priests at the party, a falcon-eyed man with an iron-grey crewcut and a loud, likeable laugh.

  “Hi,” said Daniel.

  Claude nodded to him and went on talking, eyes averted from this unexpected embarrassment. Daniel stood his ground. The priest looked at him with amused interest, until Claude finally did a double-take.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Ben!”

  Daniel held out his hand, and Claude, with just the slightest hesitation, took it. In (as an afterthought) both of his.

  “Claude, if you’ll excuse me,” said the priest, according Daniel a neutral but somehow still friendly smile, which Daniel returned with one of his best.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” Claude said lamely, when they were left to themselves.

  “I’m not recognizable.”

  “No. You’re not. It is nice to… For God’s sake.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you here either.”

  “It’s my last night in town.”

  “Not on my account I hope.”

  Claude laughed. “No, of course not. But it is startling, your warpaint. How long has it been since I last saw you? Not since you retrieved your suit from my closet, I think.”

  “Thank you for the loan of your tie, by the way. I see you got it back all right.”

  Claude looked down at his tie, as though he’d spilled something on it. “I did try to phone. They said they didn’t know what had become of you either. Then when I called again, a while later, the number was disconnected.”