On Wings of Song

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 had 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:

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 Civilization.

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.

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 friend. 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:

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 see. 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.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry for, Mr. Ormund. Or for me either. That is, if you’ll still let me have the job.”

“But if it would interfere with your career… ?”

Daniel gave a theatrical laugh. “Don’t worry about that. My career can’t be interfered with, because it doesn’t exist. I haven’t studied, in a serious way, for years. I should have known better than suppose the Metastasio would be calling me up for a place in the chorus. I’m not good enough, it’s simple as that.”

“My dear,” said Mr. Ormund, placing his hand gently on Daniel’s knee, “you’re superb. You’re ravishing. And if this were a rational world, which it is not, there’s not an opera house in this hemisphere that wouldn’t be delighted to have you. You mustn’t give up!”

“Mr. Ormund, I’m a punk singer.”

Mr. Ormund sighed, and removed his hand.

“But I think I’d be a terrific usher. What do you say?”

“You wouldn’t be… ashamed?”

“If I stood to earn money from it, I’d be delighted. Not to mention the chance I’d have to see your productions.”

“Yes, it does help if you like the stuff. So many of the boys don’t have an educated ear, I’m afraid. It is a special taste. Are you familiar, then, with the Metastasio?”

“I’ve heard recordings. But I’ve never been to a performance. Thirty bucks a ticket is a bit out of my class.”

“Oh dear. Dear, dear, dear.”

“Another difficulty?”

“Well, Ben. You see…” He raised his hand to his lips and coughed delicately. “There is a grooming code our ushers must observe. A rather strict code.”

“Oh.”

They both stood silent for a time. Mr. Ormund, standing behind his desk, struck a business-like attitude, clasping his hands behind his back and thrusting his wine-barrel belly forward aggressively.

“Do you mean,” Daniel asked cautiously, “that I’d have to… uh… darken my complection?”

Mr. Ormund burst into silvery laughter, lifting his arms in minstrel merriment. “Dear me, no! Nothing so drastic. Though, to be sure, I’d be the last person to prevent any of the boys from exercising the option. No, we couldn’t require anyone to convert against his will (Though it would be false to deny that I find it an appealing idea). But there is a uniform that must be worn, and though its essentially a modest sort of uniform, it is rather, how shall I say, jaunty? Maybe blatant comes closer.”

Daniel, who had walked all over the city in nothing but gym shorts, said that he didn’t think that would faze him.

“Also, I’m sorry to say we can’t allow beards.”

“Oh.”

“That is a pity, isn’t it? Yours is so full and emphatic, if I may say so. But you see, the Metastasio is noted for its authenticity. We do the operas the way they first were done, so far as that’s possible. And liveried servants did not have beards in the age of Louis Quinze. One may find precedent for mustachioes, if that’s any consolation, even rather swaggering ones. But no beards. Ahimé, as our Spanish friends say.”

“Ahimé,” Daniel agreed sincerely. He bit his lip and looked down at his shoes. His beard had been with him twelve years now. It was as essential a part of his face as his nose. Further, he felt safe behind it. Only once had Daniel been recognized behind his mask of dense black hair, and that once, luckily had done no harm. The risk was small, admittedly, but it couldn’t be denied.

“Forgive my impertinence, Ben, but does your beard conceal some personal defect? A weak chin, perhaps, or scar tissue? I wouldn’t want to have you make the sacrifice only to discover that we couldn’t, after all, hire you.”

“No,” said Daniel, with his smile back in place. “I’m not the Phantom of the Opera.”

“I do so hope you’ll decide to take the job. I like a boy with wit.”

“I’ll have to think about it, Mr. Ormund.”

“Of course. Whatever you decide, do let me hear from you tomorrow morning. In the meantime, if you’d like to see the performance tonight, and get some idea of what exactly is expected, I can offer you a seat in the house’s own box that’s going begging tonight. We’re doing Demofoönte.”

“I’ve read the reviews. And yes, of course, I’d love to.”

“Good. Just ask Leo in the box office as you go out. He has an envelope in your name. Ah: one last thing before you go, Ben. Am I right in assuming that you’ve had some instruction in the use of small arms? Enough to load, and aim, and such.”

“In fact I have — but it seems a strange thing to assume.”

“It’s your accent. Not that it’s at all pronounced, but I have a rather good ear. There’s just the faintest echo of the Midwest in your r’s and your vowels. Like an off-stage oboe. May I assume, further, that you’ve had some training in self-defense?”

“Only what I got in the regular phys ed program. Anyhow, I thought you wanted an usher, not a bodyguard.”

“Oh, you’ll rarely, if ever, be called on to shoot anyone. It hasn’t come to that yet in this theater (knock on wood). On the other hand, I don’t suppose a week goes by without our having to give the heave-ho to some asshole. Opera still does have the power to excite passions. Then too, there are the claques. You shall surely have a chance to see them this evening, for they’re bound to be out in force. Geoffrey Bladebridge is making his premiere in the title role. Till now only Rey has sung the part. The house will undoubtedly be packed with the partisans of both men.”

“Fighting?”

“Let us hope not. Generally they just scream at each other. That can be nuisance enough, when most of the audience has come here to listen.” Mr. Ormund once again offered his hand. “But enough idle chatter. Duty calls, ta-ra, ta-ra! I hope you enjoy the performance this evening, and I’ll expect to hear from you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Daniel promised, as he was shown the door.

Daniel clapped dutifully when the curtain came down at the end of Act One of Demofoönte, the single wet blanket in an audience berserk with approval. Whatever had stirred them to these raptures he couldn’t work out. Muscially the production was professional but uninspired; mere archaeology pretending to be art. Bladebridge, whom most of this commotion was about, had sung neither wisely nor too well. His stage-manner was one of polite, disdainful boredom, which he varied, when he wished to call attention to a particularly strenuous embellishment, by a gesture (always the same) of the most schematic bravado. At these moments, as he extended his meaty, jeweled hands, tilted back his head (but carefully, so as not to dislodge his towering wig), and let loose a bloodcurdling trill or a long, loud, meandering roulade, he seemed the apotheosis of unnaturalness. The music itself, though a pastiche of four composers’ settings of the same Metastasio libretto, was uniformly monotonous, the slimmest of excuses for the endless flowerings the singers foisted on it. As to drama, or poetry, forget it. The whole unwieldy operation — scenery, costumes, staging — seemed quite defiantly pointless, unless the mere expenditure of so much money, energy, and applause was, in itself, a kind of point.

He felt almost the same befuddlement as when, so many years ago, in the alternate world of his childhood, he had sat in Mrs. Boismortier’s living room and listened to a Mozart string quartet. With this difference — that he had lost the humility that had allowed him, as a child, to go on believing, provisionally, in the worth of what befuddled him. He decided, therefore, when the house-lights finally went up, that he would not return for the second act. Never mind that he probably wouldn’t have the chance to see anything at the Metastasio again (He’d already made up his mind to that). He had too high a respect for his own opinion to go on watching what he’d decided was complete claptrap.

Even so, once he was out in the lobby he couldn’t resist the opportunity of circulating among the Metastasio’s regular patrons, who were (despite their dominos, which were, as in old Venice, de rigueur) not at all so glittering an assembly as might be found, between the acts, at either the Metropolitan or the State Theater. There were, to be sure, more phoneys. Most castrati of celebrity rank were blacks, just as, in the heyday of bel canto they had been, mainly, Calabrians or Neopolitans, the poorest of the poor. Wherever blacks were offered for public worship, whether in the ring or on the stage, there were certain to be phoneys on hand worshipping. But this lot were an uncommonly discreet sort of phoney; the men tended to dress, like Daniel, in conservative and slightly démodé business suits, the women in dresses of well-nigh conventual plainness. Some of the genuine blacks allowed themselves a higher level of luminescence, with feathers or a bit of lace livening their masks, but the general tone, even among them, was decidedly muted. Possibly, even probably, a different tone was set downstairs in the Metastasio’s casino, but only members with a key were admitted there.

Daniel propped himself against a pillar of fake marble and watched the parade, such as it was. Just as he’d made up his mind, for the second time, to leave, he was suddenly latched on to by the girl he’d met that morning, Jack Levine’s official wife, who saluted him loudly with — “Ben! Ben Bosola! What a pleasant surprise.” For the life of him he couldn’t remember her first name. She lifted her domino.

“Mrs. Levine,” he murmered. “Hello.”

“Marcella,” she reminded him, and then, to show that in the face of Demofoönte personal slights were of no account: “Isn’t it the most beautiful… the most wonderful… the dreamiest, creamiest…”

“Incredible,” he agreed, with just enough conviction to get by.

“Bladebridge is going to be our next great singer,” she declared in a passion of prophecy. “A true soprano assoluto. Not that Ernesto is in any way less important. I’d be the last person to speak against him. But he’s old, and his top notes are already gone — that can’t be denied.” She shook her head with vigorous melancholy, wagging her long blonde braid.

“How old is he?”

“Fifty? Fifty-five? Past his prime, anyhow. But such an artist, even now. No one has ever equalled his ‘Casta diva.’ Isn’t it amazing, our meeting again so soon? Jack didn’t mention your being a buff. Naturally, I made him tell me all about you as soon as he got home.”

“I’m not what you’d call a real buff. I’d say that I’m at least six or seven levels from the top on anyone’s scale of buffdom.”

Her hollow, hooting laugh was as inane as his remark. Even with the terrycloth muumuu removed and repackaged in brown velvetine, Marcella was intensely the sort of person you didn’t want to be seen with in public. Not that it mattered, since he wouldn’t be returning to the Metastasio. So, as penance for his condescension, he forced himself to be nicer than the circumstance strictly required.

“Do you get here often?” he asked.

“Once a week, on my night off. I’ve got a subscription seat way in the last row of the Family Circle.”

“Lucky you.”

“Don’t think I don’t know it. At the start of this last season they raised the prices again, and I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to renew. But Jack was an angel and lent me the money. Where are you sitting?”

“Uh, in a box.”

“A box,” she repeated reverently. “Are you with someone?”

“Don’t I just wish! In fact, I’m all alone in the box.”

A wrinkle of doubt creased her forehead. Since he couldn’t see any reason not to, and since it was something to talk about, he told her the story of Ormund’s phonecall and their cross-purposed interview that afternoon. She listened like a child hearing the story of the Nativity, or of Cinderella, for the very first time. Her large eyes, framed by the slits of her mask, grew moist with unshed tears. The first of the intermission bells rang just as the tale was completed.

“Would you like to share the box with me?” he offered, in a burst of generosity (which, admittedly, cost him nothing).

She wagged her braid. “It’s sweet of you to ask, but I couldn’t.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“The ushers?”

“As long as you’re not taking someone else’s seat, they won’t know.”

She looked anxiously at the people filing up the stairs, then at Daniel, then back at the stairs.

“There are four seats in the box,” he urged. “I can only fill one of them.”

“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for your losing your job before you’d even started.”

“If they’re going to be pissy about a thing like that, they’re not the kind of people I should be working for.” Since he wasn’t going to take the job, it was easy to be high-minded.

“Oh, Ben — don’t say that! To work here — at the Metastasio — there’s nothing anyone wouldn’t give for the opportunity. To see every performance, every night!” The tears finally reached saturation point and trickled into her mask. The sensation must have been uncomfortable, for she pushed the domino up into her hair and, with a wadded-up hankie from the sleeve of her dress, dabbed at her smudged cheeks.

The second bell rang. The lobby was almost empty.

“You’d better come along,” Daniel urged.

She nodded, and followed him to the door of the box. There she stopped to give one last swipe at her tears. Then she tucked away the hankie and gave him a big, brave smile.

“I’m sorry. I really don’t know what came over me. It’s just that the Teatro is the center of my whole existence. It’s the only reason I go on living in this stupid city and working at my lousy job. And to hear you being, I don’t know, so cavalier about it… I can’t explain. It upset me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Of course not. I’m being an old silly. Is this your box? We’d better go in before they spot us.”

Daniel opened the door and stepped back to allow Marcella to go before him. Halfway across the small antechamber she stood stock-still. At the same moment the house-lights dimmed, and the audience applauded the entrance of the conductor into the pit.

“Ben,” Marcella whispered, “there is someone else.”

“I see her. But there’s no need to panic. Just take the seat beside her, as though you belong there. She probably snuck in the same as you. Anyhow, she won’t bite.”

Marcella did as she was bidden, and the woman paid her no heed. Daniel took the chair behind Marcella.

As the strings commenced a jittering introduction to the duet between Adrasto and Timante the intruder lowered her opera glasses and turned round to regard Daniel over her shoulder. Even before he’d recognized her, Daniel felt a premonitory malaise just watching the slow torsion of her spine.

Before he could rise, she had caught him by the sleeve. Then, deftly, without putting down her opera glasses, she plucked off his mask.

“I knew it. Despite the beard — despite the mask — I knew it!”

Marcella, though only a bystander to this drama, began once more, and quite audibly, to weep.

Miss Marspan released Daniel to deal, in summary fashion, with Marcella. “Hush!” she insisted, and Marcella hushed.

“As for you,” (to Daniel), “we’ll speak later. But now, for goodness’ sake, be quiet and pay attention to the music.”

Daniel bowed his head by way of submission to Miss Marspan’s command, and she fixed her falcon gaze upon the mild Adrasto, the merciless Timante, nor did she ever, in the whole course of the second act, turn round again. She was that certain of her grip.

As they rode, with the curtains of the taxi drawn, zigzagging along the potholed streets, Daniel tried to formulate a plan. The only solution he could think of, which might restore his shattered status quo and keep his whereabouts unknown to Grandison Whiting, was for him to murder Miss Marspan. And that was no solution. Even if he’d had the gumption to try, which he didn’t, he’d be more likely to wind up her victim, since Miss Marspan had let it be known (by way of assuring the taxi driver that it was safe to take them through Queens) that she carried a licensed pistol and was trained in its use. He could foresee the tenuous fabric of his incognito unravelling inexorably, twelve years of shifts and dodges undone in a moment by this woman’s whim, and he could do nothing but come along for the ride. She wouldn’t even listen to explanations until she’d seen for herself that Boa was alive.

“Is it all right if I ask you a question?” he ventured.

“All in good time, Daniel. If you please.”

“Have you been looking for me? Because otherwise I don’t see…”

“Our crossing paths was chance. I was seated in the box opposite to yours, and a tier above. While I waited for a friend to join me, I studied the crowd through my glasses. There is usually someone one recognizes on such an evening. You seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place you at once. Naturally enough. You didn’t have a beard, or wear a domino, when I knew you. And I supposed you to be dead. At the intermission I watched you in the lobby, and even contrived, standing on the other side of the pillar, to hear some of your conversation with that girl. It was you. It is you. And you tell me that my niece is alive. I cannot, I confess, imagine your motive in having kept these matters secret, but I’m not really interested in your motives. I’m interested in my niece, in her well-being.”

“It’s not pretty where we’re headed,” he cautioned. “But it keeps her going.”

Miss Marspan made no reply.

Daniel parted the curtain to see how far they’d come. What he could see looked like any part of Queens he’d ever been to: there was the wide, untrafficked highway lined on either side by junked-out cars and overturned trucks, a few of which gave signs of being inhabited. Farther back from the road were the blackened shells of single-dwelling houses. It was hard to believe that away from the highway there were still large areas of Queens that had been left unblighted. He let the curtain fall closed. The taxi swerved, avoiding something in the road.

He could make a break for it now, he supposed. He could go and live among those ruins, there to be ruined himself. But that would have meant surrendering Boa to her father, an act he could not, would not be driven to. It had been his whole pride, the source of all his self-respect, that he had, by privations great and small, by the daily indignities of these twelve years, been responsible for Boa’s maintenance (well-being would be stretching it). Other men have families. Daniel had his wife’s corpse (for such she was now, legally) to sustain him. But it served the same purpose: it kept him from believing, despite every other evidence, that his defeat was final, whole, and entire.

Once, he’d known why he was doing this, and why he must persevere. Fear moved him. But that fear had come, in time, to seem unfounded. Grandison Whiting might be a selfish man, but he was not insane. He might have judged Boa in error in taking Daniel as her spouse, he might have wished Daniel dead, he might even have arranged that to happen, other persuasions failing — but he wouldn’t have murdered his daughter. However, as the specific fear had diminished there had come in its stead a distaste for Whiting, and all his works and wiles, that mounted finally to horror.

He had no rationale for his aversion. In part it was simple class feeling. Whiting was an arch-reactionary, a Machiavelli, a Metternich, and if his reasons for it were more intellectual than most such sons-of-bitches’ reasons, even (Daniel had to admit) more persuasive, that only made him a more dangerous son-of-a-bitch than most. There was a religious side to it too, though Daniel resisted the idea of his having any connection whatever with religion. He was a no-nonsense, cut-and-dried, self-justified atheist. Religion, in the words of his friend Claude Durkin, was something you had to learn about in order fully to appreciate the Old Masters. But the book he’d read way back when in Spirit Lake had got a hold on Daniel, and the Reverend Jack Van Dyke’s blithe paradoxes had wormed their way into his mind, or will, or whatever corner of the soul it is that has faith in things unseen. There, in the darkness where no rational contradiction could touch it, the idea grew, and ramified, that Grandison Whiting was one of those Caesars whom Van Dyke had written of, who rule the world and unto whom there must be renderings, despite that they are savage, corrupt, and conscienceless.

In short, distance had turned Grandison Whiting into an idea — an idea that Daniel was determined to resist in the one way given him to do so: by refusing him the possession of his daughter’s twelve-years-comatose body.

Ward 17, where the corpse (as it was, in the eyes of the Law) of Boadicea Weinreb was to be found, occupied only a small part of the third sub-basement of the annex of First National Flightpaths. After Daniel had signed in at the desk in the lobby, and after Miss Marspan had, under protest, checked her pistol with the guard outside the elevator, they were allowed to go down to the ward unescorted, for Daniel’s was a familiar face at the annex. They walked down a long reverberating tunnel lighted, now harshly, now dimly, by irregularly spaced tubes of neon mounted on the broad low arch of the ceiling. On either side of them, spaced with the tight, terrible regularity of markers in a cemetery, lay the inert and weakly respiring bodies of those who had never returned from their flights into the spaces beyond their flesh. Only a few of the hundreds in this one ward would ever resume a corporeal life, but the husks lingered on, aging, withering, until some vital organ finally failed, or until the accounting office sent down the order to disconnect the life-supporting machineries, whichever came sooner.

They stopped before Boa’s cot, a kind of rubber sling suspended from a tubular frame.

“The name…” Miss Marspan observed, stooping to read the chart fixed to the foot of the bed. The sights of the ward had robbed her of her usual decisiveness. “Bosola? There’s some mistake.”

“It was the name we registered under, when we came here.”

Miss Marspan closed her eyes and laid her gloved hand lightly over them. As little as he liked the woman, Daniel could not but feel some sympathy for her. It must have been hard to accept this shriveled chrysalis as the niece she’d known and loved, so far as love was in her nature. Boa’s skin was the color of grimed light-bulbs of frosted glass and seemed, stretched tight across each prominence of bone, as brittle. All fullness was wasted, even her lips were thin, and the warmth you could detect in her hollow cheeks seemed borrowed from the humid airs of the tunnel and not her own. Nothing spoke of life or process except the plasma oozing through translucent tubes into the slow-revolving treadmill of her arteries and veins.

Miss Marspan squared her shoulders and made herself approach more closely. Her heavy skirts of pigeon-gray silk snagged on the frame of the cot adjacent to Boa’s. She knelt to loosen it, and remained a long while on one knee looking into the void of Boa’s face. Then she rose, shaking her head. “I can’t kiss her.”

“She wouldn’t know if you did.”

She backed away from Boa’s cot, and stood in the central aisle, looking about her nervously, but anywhere she turned the same sight was endlessly multiplied, row on row, body on body. At last she looked up, squinting, into the neon light.

“How long have you kept her here?” she asked.

“In this ward, five years. The wards on the upper floors are a bit cheerier, supposedly, but a lot more expensive. This is all I can afford.”

“It is a hell.”

“Boa’s not here, Miss Marspan. Only her body. When she wants to come back, if she wants to come back, she will. But if that isn’t what she wants, do you think a vase of flowers by the bed is going to make any difference?”

But Miss Marspan wasn’t listening to him. “Look, up there! Do you see? A moth.”

“Oh, there’s no harm in insects,” Daniel said, unable to repress his resentment. “People eat termites, you know. All the time. I used to work in a factory that mashed them up.”

Miss Marspan regarded Daniel with a level gaze; then, with the deliberated strength of a seasoned athlete, struck his face with the back of her gloved hand. Though he’d seen it coming and had braced himself, it was a blow to bring tears to the eyes.

When the echo had died out, he spoke out, not in anger but in pride. “I’ve kept her alive, Miss Marspan, think of that. Not Grandison Whiting, with his millions. Me, with nothing — I kept her alive.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel. I… appreciate what you’ve done.” She touched her hair to see that it was in place, and Daniel, in sarcastic mimicry, did the same. “But I don’t see why you don’t keep her with you, at home. Surely that would be cheaper than this… mausoleum.”

“I’m a temp, I don’t have a home. Even when I had a room at a hotel, it wouldn’t have been safe to leave her there alone. Rooms get broken into, and what would happen to anyone in Boa’s condition then—”

“Yes, of course. That didn’t occur to me.”

She flexed her fingers within their sheath of kid, flexed them and bent them backward, as if to defy the helplessness she felt. She had come here ready to step in and take charge, but there was nothing to take charge of.

“Grandison, I take it, has never learned of this? He doesn’t know that either of you is alive.”

“No. And I don’t want him to, ever.”

“Why? If I may ask.”

“That’s my business.”

Miss Marspan considered this. “Fair enough,” she decided at last, to Daniel’s disconcertion.

“You mean you’ll agree to that? You won’t tell him?”

“I would have thought this was too soon to begin bargaining,” she answered coolly. “There’s still much I want to know. But, if it will ease your mind, I can tell you that there’s little love lost between Grandison and myself. My sister, Boa’s mother, finally succeeded in killing herself a year ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nonsense. You didn’t know her, and if you had I’m sure you’d have despised her. She was a foolish, vain hysteric with a modicum of redeeming virtues, but she was my sister and Grandison Whiting destroyed her.”

“And he’d destroy Boa too, if you let him.” He said it without melodrama, in the calm accents of faith.

Miss Marspan smiled. “Oh, I doubt that. She was the brightest of his children, the one of whom he had the highest hope. When she died, as he believed, his mourning was as real, I daresay, as yours or mine.”

“Maybe it was. But I don’t give a shit about his feelings.”

Miss Marspan’s glance let it be known that even in these circumstances she did not like such language.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Gladly. Let me say this first, though, while it’s clear to me. The paramount question, the question I’ve been considering since we set off in the taxi, is whether Boadicea would be more… inclined… to return here, to you, or to her father.”

“Here, to me.”

“I think I have to agree.”

“Then you won’t tell him!”

“On one condition. That you allow me to have Boa taken from this place. If she’s ever to come back. I can’t believe she’d find this prospect at all inviting. It might even act to change her mind.”

“There’ve been studies. After a certain time it doesn’t seem to make any difference where they are, physically. The return rate is the same down here as anywhere.”

“Possibly, but I’ve never trusted studies. You have no objection, I hope, to my helping you if I can?”

“I guess that depends on the form that it would take.”

“Oh, I’m not about to lavish money on you. I have little enough myself. But I do have connections, which are the better part of anyone’s wealth, and I’m fairly sure I can find a home in which Boa would be safe and you’d be comfortable. I’ll talk to Alicia about it tonight, for she was at the opera with me, and she’s certain to have stayed up to find out what I’ve been so mysteriously up to. Is there somewhere I can get in touch with you in the morning?”

He couldn’t answer all at once. It had been years since he’d trusted anyone, except in passing or in bed, and Miss Marspan wasn’t someone he wanted to trust. But he did! At last, amazed at the turn his life had taken, all in a single day, he gave her the number of Adonis, Inc. and even let her, when they drove back to the city, drop him off outside the door before she returned to her friend’s apartment.

Lying alone in the sauna and listening to Lorenzo’s indefatigable exertions in the locker room, Daniel had difficulty getting to sleep. He came very close to going out and joining in and getting his rocks off just as a sedative, but though ordinarily that’s what he would have done, tonight was different. Tonight he would have felt a hypocrite if he’d mixed in with the others. Now that he could see a way out, the faintest glimmer of escape, he was aware just how much he wanted to put Adonis, Inc., behind him. Not that he hadn’t been having a wonderful time once he’d left off struggling and striving and just laid back and floated with the current. Sex is the one luxury for which money isn’t a qualification. So long live sex. But tonight he’d decided, or remembered, that he could, with a bit of effort, do better.

For openers, he’d take the job at the Metastasio. His only reason for having decided, earlier, not to, was the fear of being recognized. But Miss Marspan had recognized him, even with his beard, and so the moral of the story seemed to be that maybe he ought to take more risks. Hadn’t that been Gus’s advice, when they’d said good-bye? Something like that.

Moments before he fell asleep he remembered it was his birthday. “Happy birthday, dear Daniel,” he whispered into the rolled-up towels that served him as a pillow. “Happy birthday to you.”

He dreamed.

But when he woke, shivering, in the middle of the night, most of the dreams had already slipped away. He knew, though, that it had been a dream of flight. His first. All the details of his flight eluded him — where it had been, to what height, how it had felt. He remembered only being in a foreign country, where there was an old tumbledown mosque. In the courtyard of this mosque there was a fountain, and all about the fountain were pairs of shoes with pointy toes, lined up in rows. They’d been left there by worshippers who’d gone into the mosque.

The wonder of this coutyard was the fountain at its center, a fountain comprised of three stone basins. The upper basins seemed to be supported, so abundantly the water flowed, by the jets of white water gushing from the basins below. From the topmost basin, rising to inconceivable heights, was the final, fiercest flowering of all. It rose, and rose, until the sun turned it to spray.

And that was all. He didn’t know what to make of it. A fountain in a courtyard with old shoes around it. What sort of omen was that?

12

Mrs. Alicia Schiff, with whom Daniel was now to live, was, in the considered and by no means unreproving opinion of her friend Harriet Marspan, “the nearest thing to a genius I’ve ever known.” She was also, very nearly, a hunchback, though it seemed so natural and necessary a part of her character that you could almost believe she’d come by it the way she’d come by her squint — by dint of years scrunched up over a desk copying music — the way that pines at high altitudes are shaped by titanic winds. All in all, the sorriest wreck of human flesh Daniel had ever had to become acquainted with, and custom could never quite reconcile him to the facts: the crepey, flaking skin of her hands; the face all mottled pink and lemon and olive like a spoiled Rubens; the knobby head with its strands of sparse white hair, which she sometimes was inspired to cover with a scruffy red parody of a wig. Except when she left the apartment, which was seldom now that she had Daniel to run interference with the outside world, she dressed like the vilest and most lunatic vagrant. The apartment was filled with heaps little and big of cast-off clothes — blue jeans, bathrobes, dresses, sweaters, stockings, blouses, scarves, and underwear — which she changed into and out of at any hour of the day or night, with no apparent method or motive; it was sheer nervous habit.

At first he feared he’d be expected to excavate and order the apartment’s debris. The clothes were the least of it. Interleaved with these were layers and layers of alluvial deposits, a Christmas morning desolation of wrappings, boxes, books and papers, of crockery and rattling tins, of puzzles, toys, and counters from a dozen never-to-be-reassembled games. There was also, though mostly on the upper shelves, a collection of dolls, each with its own name and personality. But Mrs. Schiff assured Daniel that he wouldn’t be expected to act as chambermaid, that on the contrary she’d be grateful if he left things where they were. “Where,” she had actually said, “they belong.”

He was expected to do her shopping, to deliver letters and scores, and to take her elderly, ginger-colored spaniel Incubus for his morning and his evening walk. Incubus, like his mistress, was an eccentric. He had a consuming interest in strangers (and none at all in other dogs), but it was an interest he did not wish to see reciprocated. He preferred people who would let him snuffle about on his own, investigating their shoes and other salient smells. However, if you ventured to talk to him, much less to pet him, he became edgy and took the first opportunity to escape from such attentions. He was neither mean nor friendly, neither frisky nor wholly torpid, and was very regular in his habits. Unless Daniel had some shopping to accomplish at the same time, the course of their walk never varied: due west to Lincoln Center, twice round the fountain, then (after Daniel had dutifully scooped up that morning’s or evening’s turd and disposed of it down a drain) home again to West 65th, just round the corner from the park, where Mrs. Schiff, no less predictable in her habits, would be hovering, anxious and undemonstrative, somewhere in the hallway of the apartment. She never condescended to Incubus, but spoke to him on the assumption that he was a precocious child, enchanted (by his own preference) into the shape of a dog. She treated Daniel no differently.

Daniel, in exchange for these services, and for providing a masculine, protective presence, received the largest of the apartment’s many rooms. The others were so many closets and cubbyholes, the legacy of the apartment’s previous existence as a residence hotel. When Mrs. Schiff had inherited the building, twenty years ago, she had never bothered to take down the plaster-board partitions, and indeed had added her own distinctive wrinkle to the maze in the form of folding screens and free-standing bookshelves (all of her own carpentering). Daniel felt awkward, at first, occupying the only humanly proportioned room in the apartment, and even when he was convinced, from her reluctance to enter his room, that Mrs. Schiff really preferred her own cozy warrens, he never stopped being grateful. It was a grand room, and with a coat of fresh paint on the walls and the floor sanded and waxed it became magnificent.

Mrs. Schiff did like to be visited, and it was soon their settled custom, when her day’s work was over and he had returned from the Metastasio and taken Incubus twice round the fountain and back home, to sit in her bedroom, with a pot of gunpowder tea between them and a packet of cookies (Daniel had never known Mrs. Schiff to eat anything but sweets), and to talk. Sometimes they might listen to a record (she had hundreds, all horribly scratched), but only by way of intermission. Daniel had known many good talkers in his time, but none of them could hold a candle to Mrs. Schiff. Wherever her fancy lighted, ideas formed, and grew, and became systems. Whatever she spoke seemed illumined, sometimes in only a whimsical way, but often seriously and even rather intensely. Or so it seemed, till, with a turn of a phrase, she’d veer off on some new tangent. Most of it, in the way of much supposed “great conversation” was mere mermaid enchantment and fool’s gold, but some of her notions did stick to the ribs of the mind, especially those ideas that derived from her ruling passion, which was opera.

She had a theory, for instance, that the Victorian Age had been a time of massive and systematic repression on a scale more awful than was ever to be achieved again on the stage of history, even at Auschwitz, that all of Europe, from Waterloo to World War Two, was one colossal police state, and that it was the function of Romantic Art, but especially of opera, to train and inspire the rising younger generation of robber barons and aristocrats to be heroes in the Byronic mold; that is, to be intelligent, bold, and murderous enough to be able to defend their wealth and privilege against all comers. How she’d come to this theory was by listening to Verdi’s I Masnadieri, based on a play of Schiller about an idealistic young man whom circumstance requires to become the head of a band of outlaws and who ends up killing his fiancee sheerly on principle. Daniel thought the whole thing ridiculous until Mrs. Schiff, peeved at his obstinacy, got down her copy of Schiller and read The Robbers aloud, and then, the next evening, made him listen to the opera. Daniel admitted there might be something to it.

“I’m right. Say it — say that I’m right.”

“Okay, you’re right.”

“Not only am I right, Daniel, but what’s true of Schiller’s apprentice mafiosi is true of all the heroic criminals from that day to this, all the cowboys and gangsters and rebels without causes. They’re all businessmen in disguise. Indeed, the gangsters even dispensed with the disguise. I should know — my father was one.”

“Your father was a gangster?”

“He was one of the city’s leading labor racketeers in his day. I was an heiress in my gilded youth, no less.”

“Then what happened?”

“A bigger fish gobbled him up. He had a number of so-called residence hotels like this one. The government decided to eliminate the middleman. Just when he thought he’d become respectable.”

She said it without rancor. Indeed, he’d never known her to be fazed at anything. She seemed content to understand the hell she lived in (for such she insisted it was) with her best clarity of apprehension, and then to pass on to the next apprensible horror, as though all existence were a museum of more or less malefic exhibits: instruments of torture and the bones of martyrs side by side with jeweled chalices and the portraits of merciless children in beautiful clothes.

Not that she was callous herself, but rather that she had no hope. The world dismayed her, and she turned from it to her own snug burrow, which the wolves and foxes had somehow not yet discovered. There she lived in the inviolate privacy of her work and her contemplations, seldom venturing out except to the opera or to one or another of her favorite restaurants, where she would hold forth to other musician friends and dine on a succession of desserts. She had surrendered long since to the traditional vices of a recluse: she didn’t bathe, or cook meals, or wash dishes; she kept strange hours, preferring night to day; she never let sunlight or fresh air into her own rooms, which came to smell, most intensely, of Incubus. She talked to herself constantly, or rather to Incubus and the dolls, inventing long wandering whimsical tales for them about the Honeybunny twins, Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny, tales from which all possibility of pain or conflict was debarred. Daniel suspected that she slept with Incubus as well, but what of that? Was anyone harmed by her dirtiness or dottiness? If there was such a thing as the life of the mind then Mrs. Schiff was one of its champions, and Daniel’s hat was off to her.

So, for that matter, was hers, for she was beset, like so many who live apart from the world, with a naive self-conceit that was at once ludicrous and deserved. Indeed, she was aware of this, and prone to discussing it with Daniel, who had rapidly been elevated to the status of confessor.

“My problem has always been,” she confided one evening, a month after he’d moved in, “that I have a hyperkinetic intelligence. But it’s also been my salvation. When I was a girl, they wouldn’t keep me in any of the schools my father bundled me off to, as part of his program of redeeming the family name. My problem was I took my education seriously, which would have been forgiveable in itself, except that I tended to be evangelical in my enthusiasms. I was labeled a disruptive influence, and treated as such, which I resented. Soon I made it my business to be a disruptive influence, and found ways to make my teachers look like fools. Lord, how I hated school! My daydream has always been to go back, as a celebrity, and give a speech at the graduation exercises, a speech denouncing them all. Which is perfectly unfair of me, I know. Did you like school?”

“Well enough, up to the point where I was sent off to prison. I did well enough, and kids seemed to like me. What are the alternatives at that age?”

“You weren’t just deathly bored?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I still am. It’s the human condition.”

“If I thought that were the case, I’d kill myself. Truly.”

“You mean to say you’re never bored?”

“Not since I’ve been able to help it. I don’t believe in boredom. It’s a euphemism for laziness. People do nothing, and then complain they’re bored. Harriet does, and it drives me up the wall. She actually supposes it would betray a lack of breeding to take an active interest in her own life. But, poor dear, it’s not her fault, is it?”

This question seemed to be addressed less to Daniel than to Incubus, where he lay in his mistress’s rumpled sheets. The spaniel, sensing this, lifted his head from its dozing position to one of alert consideration.

“No,” Mrs. Schiff went on, answering her own question, “it’s the way she was brought up. We none of us can help the way our twigs are bent.”

The question having been answered, Incubus lowered his head back to the pillow.

She knew the Metastasio’s operas by heart and would cross-examine him minutely about every performance he worked at: who had sung, how well or poorly, whether a tricky piece of stage business had come off. She knew them so well not from having seen them that often but because, in many cases, she’d written them herself. Officially she was no more than the Metastasio’s chief copyist, though sometimes, when a text was well-known to be so corrupt as scarcely to exist, the program would include a small credit: “Edited and arranged by A. Schiff.” Even then, she got no royalties. She worked, she declared, for love and the greater glory of Art, but that, Daniel decided, was only half the truth. She also worked, like other people, for money. If the fees she received were small, they were frequent, and enough, when you added them to the rents from the buildings, to keep her supplied with such essential luxuries as dogfood, books, rare records, and her monthly chits at Lieto Fino and La Didone, where, rather than at home, she chose to entertain.

That side of her life Daniel was not privy to in these first months, and it was only gradually, from hints dropped by Mr. Ormund and yellowed clippings discovered among the debris of the apartment, that he learned that Mrs. Schiff had once been a celebrity of no small degree in the beau monde of bel canto, having fallen in love, eloped with, and married the greatest of modern-day castrati, Ernesto Rey. The marriage had subsequently been annulled, but Rey had continued to be faithful in his fashion. He was the only one of her friends she allowed to visit her at home, and so Daniel developed a nodding acquaintance with the man who was generally considered the greatest singer of his day (albeit that day was waning).

Offstage the great Ernesto was the least likely candidate for prima donna that ever was — a thin, twitchy wisp of a man whose smooth pale face seemed frozen in an expression of wide-eyed alarm, the consequence (it was said) of too many face-lifts. He was untypical of other castrati in being white (he was born in Naples), diffident (he assumed, among strangers, a flat, nasal monotone an octave below his natural voice), and guilt-ridden (he attended Mass every Sunday), and untypical of anyone else in being a castrato. He had recorded Norma five times, and each recording was better than the last. Of the first recording, a critic old enough to have heard her in performance, said that Rey’s Norma was superior to Rosa Ponselle’s.

Mrs. Schiff was as much in love with him now as on the day they’d eloped, and Rey (by her account, and everyone else’s) still took that love as painfully for granted. She flattered him; he drank it in. She worked like a troup of acrobats to keep him amused; he tolerated her efforts but made none himself, though he was not otherwise a witless lump. In all matters concerning interpretation and general esthetic strategy she acted as his coach, and served as spokesman with those conductors and recording engineers who would not at once bend to his will. She devised, and continually revised, all his supposedly ad libitum passages of fioratura, keeping them safely within his ever-diminishing range without apparent loss of brillance. She even vetted his contracts and wrote press releases — or rather, rewrote the tasteless tosh produced by his own salaried agent, Irwin Tauber. For all these services she received no fee and small thanks. She wasn’t insensible to such slights and seemed, indeed, to take a bittersweet satisfaction in complaining of them to Daniel, who could be counted on to respond with sympathetic indignation.

“But why do you keep putting up with it?” he asked at last. “If you know he’s like that and he’s not going to change?”

“The answer is obvious: I must.”

“That’s not an answer. Why must you?”

“Because Ernesto is a great artist.”

“Great artist or not, no one’s got the right to shit on you.”

“Ah, but there’s where you’re wrong, Daniel. In saying that, you show you don’t understand the nature of great artistry.”

This was a direct assault on Daniel’s sore point, as Mrs. Schiff well knew. The matter was dropped.

She soon knew everything about him, the whole story of his messed-up life. With Boa installed in Daniel’s room there was no point in reticence, and not much possibility of it. In any case, after twelve years of living under an alias the opportunity to tell all was too tempting to resist. There were times, as when she’d delivered the low blow just mentioned, that he thought she took unfair advantage of his revelations, but even then her home truths had no sting of malice. Her skin was just very thick, and she expected yours to be too. All in all, as a mother confessor she beat Renata Semple hollow. Renata, for all her Reichian jargon and weekly plumbing of the depths, had handled Daniel’s ego with too tender a regard. Small wonder if his therapy had never done him any good.

In short, Daniel was once again a member of a family. Viewed from without they were a strange enough family: a rattling, hunchbacked old woman, a spoiled senile cocker spaniel, and a eunuch with a punctured career (for though Rey didn’t live with them, his off-stage presence was as abiding and palpable as that of any paterfamilias away every day at the office). And Daniel himself. But better to be strange together than strange apart. He was glad to have found such a haven at last, and he hoped that most familial and doomed of hopes, that nothing would change.

But already there was news on the radio: a freak cold spell had done extensive damage to crops in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and a calamitous blight was attacking the roots of wheat plants throughout the Farm Belt. It was rumored that this blight had been laboratory-produced and was being propagated by terrorists, though none of the known organizations had come forward to claim credit. The commodities market was already in turmoil, and the new Secretary of Agriculture had made a public announcement that strict rationing might become necessary in the fall. For the present though, food prices were holding steady, for the good reason that they were already higher than most people could afford. All through that spring and summer there were food riots in such usual trouble spots as Detroit and Philadelphia. Mrs. Schiff, whose imagination was always excited by headlines, began stockpiling bags of dry dogfood. In the last such crisis, four years before, pet food had been the first thing to disappear from the shelves, and she had had to feed Incubus from her own limited ration. Soon an entire closet was packed solid with ten-pound bags of Pet Bricquettes, Incubus’s brand of choice. For themselves they did not worry: the Government would provide, somehow.

13

In September, when the Metastasio opened for the new season, Daniel reported back to work with a gratitude that verged on servility. It had been a lean summer, though better by far than previous summers, thanks to his having a roof over his head. He hadn’t been at the job long enough when the Teatro had closed early in June to have put aside more than a few dollars, and he was determined not to have recourse to Miss Marspan, who had already assumed the financial costs involved in keeping Boa functionally alive. Nor did he feel quite right, any longer, panhandling, for if he were to be seen, and word of it got back to Mr. Ormund, he was pretty sure it would have cost him his job. For lack of other resources he did what he’d vowed never to do: he dipped into the capital whose scant interest had paid Boa’s bills during her long sojourn at First National Flightpaths. That money had come from the sale of her jewelry, and till now he’d been able to avoid applying it to his own needs. Now, however, Boa was provided for by other and better means, and so Daniel could square it with his conscience by considering it a loan: once he was back at work, he’d return the money to the account.

Back at work it didn’t work that way, for he rediscovered the joy of being flush. It was like having his paper route again. There was change in his pocket, bills in his wallet, and all New York to entice him. He got himself some decent clothes, which he’d have had to in any case, since Mr. Ormund had made it clear that he didn’t want his boys to come in looking like ragamuffins. He started going to a ten-dollar barber, which was likewise pretty comme il faut. And now that he wasn’t helping out at Adonis, Inc., he had to pay a regular membership fee, which took a $350 bite out of the bank account. But the dividends were out of all proportion to the investment, since once he was back at work Mr. Ormund had assigned him to the Dress Circle, where the tips were many times in excess of what he’d got, starting out, up in the balcony (though still not so considerable as the pickings in the Grand Tier).

Tips were only, as Mr. Ormund had explained, the tip of the iceberg. The real payoff came in the form of courtship, with all its immemorial perks — dinners, parties, weekends on Long Island, and attentions even costlier and kinder, depending on one’s luck, ambition, and ability to hold out for more. At first Daniel had resisted such temptations from a sense, which twelve years in the big city had not yet wiped out, of what the world at large would have called him if he did not resist. Nor was Mr. Ormund in any haste to thrust him into the limelight. But increasingly he wondered whether his actions made any difference to the world at large. When, as the new season got under way, he continued, reluctantly, to decline any and all invitations, even one so little compromising as to accept a drink and stop to chat with a boxholder during one of the duller ensembles, when drinks and chat were the order of the day, Mr. Ormund decided that there must be a fuller understanding between them, and called Daniel to his office.

“Now I don’t want you to think, mignon—” That, or migniard, was his pet name for his current favorites. “—that I am some vile procurer. No boy has ever been asked to leave the Teatro for failing to put out, and all our patrons understand that. But you shouldn’t be so entirely standoffish, so arctically cold.”

“Did old Carshalton complain?” Daniel asked, in a grieved tone.

“Mr. Carshalton is a very obliging, amiable gentleman, with no other wish, bless him, than to be talked to. He realizes that age and corpulence—” Mr. Ormund heaved a sympathizing sigh. “—make any larger expectation unlikely of fulfillment. And in point of fact he did not complain. It was one of your own colleagues — I shall not say who — called the matter to my notice.”

“God damn.”

Then, as an afterthought: “That was directed at the unnamed colleague, not at you, sir. And I say it again — God damn… him.”

“I see your point, of course. But you must expect, at this stage, to attract a certain amount of jealous attention. In addition to your natural advantages, you’ve got, as they say, carriage. Then too, some of the boys may feel — though it’s perfectly unfair, I know — that your reserve and shyness reflects on their too easy acquiescence.”

“Mr. Ormund, I need the job. I like the job. I don’t want to argue. What do I have to do?”

“Just be friendly. When someone asks you into their box, comply. There’s no danger of rape: you’re a capable lad. When someone in the casino offers you a flutter on the wheel, flutter. That’s simply sound business practice. And who knows, your number might come up! If you’re asked to dinner after the show, and if you’re free, at least consider the possibility, and if it seems you might enjoy yourself, then do the world a favor and say yes. And, though it’s not for me to suggest such a thing — and, in fact, I don’t at all approve of it, though the world will keep turning for all I say — it is not unheard of for an arrangement to be worked out.”

“An arrangement? I’m sorry, but you’ll have to spell that one out a little more.”

“My dear, dear country mouse! An arrangement with the restaurant, of course. Good as the fare is at L’Engouement Noir, for instance, you don’t suppose there isn’t a certain latitude in the prices on the menu?”

“You mean they give rebates?”

“More often they’ll let you take it out in custom. If you bring them someone for dinner, they’ll let you take someone to lunch.”

“That’s news to me.”

“I daresay the boys will all be friendlier when they see you’re not entirely above temptation. But don’t think, mignon, that I’m asking you to peddle your ass. Only your smile.”

Daniel smiled.

Mr. Ormund lifted his finger to pantomime that he had remembered something forgotten. He wrote down a name and address on a memo pad, tore the paper loose with a flourish, and handed it to Daniel.

“Who is ‘Dr. Rivera’?” he asked.

“A good and not overly expensive dentist. You simply must get those molars looked after. If you don’t have the money now, Dr. Rivera will work something out with you. He’s a great lover of all things connected with the arts. Take care now. It’s almost intermission.”

The dental work ended up costing almost a thousand dollars. He had to withdraw a larger sum from the bank than the total of all his previous borrowings, but it seemed so wonderful to have his teeth restored to their primal innocence that he didn’t care. He would have spent the whole sum that remained in the account for the pleasure of chewing his food once again.

And such food it was! For he had taken Mr. Ormund’s advice to heart and was soon a familiar figure at all the relevant restaurants: at Lieto Fino, at L’Engouement Noir, at Evviva il Coltello, at La Didone Abbandonata. Nor did he pay for these banquetings with his virtue, such as it was. He only had to flirt, which he did anyhow, without trying.

His expanded social life meant, necessarily, that he had fewer evenings to spend at home with Mrs. Schiff, but they saw nearly as much of each other now in company as they had in private, for Mrs. Schiff was an old habituée of La Didone and Lieto Fino. To be seen at her table (which was also, often, the table of Ernesto Rey) was no small distinction, and Daniel’s stock rose higher among those patrons who paid heed to such things (and who would go there, except to pay heed to such things?), while in the usher’s changing room Daniel — or rather, Ben Bosola — had become the star of the moment, without an intervening stage of having been just one of the boys.

No one was more instrumental in Daniel’s winning to such pre-eminence than the person who had so little time ago tattled on him to Mr. Ormund. Lee Rappacini had been working at the Metastasio almost as long as Mr. Ormund, though to look at them side by side you wouldn’t have believed it. Lee’s classic face and figure seemed as ageless as Greek marble, though not, certainly, as white, for he, like his superior in this one respect, was a phoney. Not, however, by preference but to gratify the whim of his latest sponsor, none other than that latest luminary, Geoffrey Bladebridge. Further to gratify his sponsor’s whims Lee wore (its molded plastic bulging from the white tights of his livery) what was known in the trade as an insanity belt, the purpose of which was to ensure that no one else should enjoy, gratis, what Bladebridge was paying for. As to what benefits the castrato did enjoy, and his rate of payment, mum was the word, though naturally speculation was rife.

Lee’s mobile captivity was a source of much drama. Even to go to the toilet he had to have resort to Mr. Ormund, who was entrusted with one of the keys. Every night there were remarks, pleasantries, and playful attempts to see if the device might be circumvented without actually being removed. It couldn’t. Daniel, as laureate of the changing room, wrote the following limerick celebrating this situation:

To which Lee’s ostensible and probably heartfelt response was simply gratitude, for the attention. His enforced retirement was having the effect it usually does: people had stopped being actively interested. To be made the butt of a joke was still to be, for the nonce, a kind of cynosure.

This was a frail enough basis for friendship, but it developed that he and Daniel had something in common. Lee loved music, and though that love had been, like Daniel’s, unrequited, it smoldered on. He continued to take voice lessons and sang, Sunday mornings, in a church choir. Every night, no matter what the opera or its cast, he listened to what the Metastasio was offering, and could claim, as a result, to have seen over two hundred performances, each, of Orfeo ed Eurydice and of Norma, the two most enduringly popular of the company’s repertory. Whatever he heard seemed to register with a vividness and singularity that confounded Daniel, for whom all music, however much it might move him at the moment, went in one ear and out the other, a great liability during the endless after-hours post-mortems. By comparison, Lee was a veritable tape recorder.

It soon developed that they shared not only a love of music for its own sake but a lust for flight as well. For Lee as for Daniel this had always been a balked desire and (therefore) a subject better to be avoided. Indeed, there was no one who worked at or frequented the Metastasio who had much to say about flying. The castrati who reigned supreme on its stage seemed as little capable of flight as of sex. Some claimed that though they were able to fly, they had no wish to, that song itself was glory enough, but this was generally thought to be a face-saving imposture. They didn’t fly because they couldn’t, and the happy result (for their audience) was that they did not, like most other great singers, simply vanish into the ether at the height of their careers. By comparison to the Metropolitan, which devoted its flagging energies to the Romantic repertory, the Metastasio offered incomparably better singing as such, and if their productions didn’t stir the imagination in quite the same way, if they couldn’t offer the vicarious thrills of a Carmen or a Rosenkavalier, there were (as even Daniel would finally come to see) compensations. As the audiences of Naples had so long ago proclaimed: Evviva il coltello! Long live the knife — the knife by whose actions such voices were made.

Daniel had thought himself cured of his old longings, thought he’d achieved a realistic, grown-up renunciation. Life had denied him any number of supreme pleasures and ultimate fulfillments, despite which it was still worth living. But now, talking with Lee and worrying the meatless bone of why and wherefore they were set apart, he felt the familiar anguish return, that immense and exquisite self-pity that seemed tantamount to a martyrdom.

By now, of course, Daniel knew all there was to be known about the theory, if not the practice, of flight, and he took a kind of donnish satisfaction in disabusing Lee of many fond misconceptions. Lee believed, for instance, that the basic trigger that released the singer’s spirit from his body was emotion, so that if you could just put enough con amore into what you sang, you’d lift off. But Daniel explained, citing the best authorities, that emotion was quite literally only the half of it, and the other half was transcendence. You had to move, with the music, to a condition above the ego, beyond your emotion, but without losing track of its shape or its size. Lee believed (this being the first article of the bel canto faith) that words were more or less irrelevant and music was paramount. Primo la musica. In evidence of this he could adduce some awesomely ridiculous lyrics that had nevertheless been the occasion for one or another proven flight. But on this point too Daniel could give chapter and verse. Flight, or the release to flight, took place at the moment when the two discrete hemispheres of the brain stood in perfect equipoise, stood and were sustained. For the brain was a natural gnostic, split into those very dichotomies of semantic sense and linguistically unmediated perception, of words and music, that were the dichotomies of song. This was why, though the attempt had been made so often, no other musicians, but only singers, could strike that delicate balance in their art that mirrored an answering, arcane balance in the tissues of the mind. One might come by one’s artistry along other paths, of course; all artists, whatever their art, must acquire the knack of transcendence, and once it had been acquired in one discipline, some of the skill was transferable. But the only way to fly was to sing a song that you understood, and meant, down to the soles of your shoes.

Daniel and Lee did not limit themselves to theory. Lee was the proud, if powerless, possesor of a Grundig 1300 Amphion Fluchtpunktapparat, the finest and most expensive flight apparatus available. No one else, until Daniel, had ever been allowed to try and use it. It stood in the center of a bare, white chapel of a room in Geoffrey Bladebridge’s penthouse apartment on West End Avenue, where, on the afternoons when Bladebridge was not about, they would hammer at the doors of heaven, begging to be let in. As well might they have tried flapping their arms in order to fly. They soldiered on, regardless, through aria after aria, song after weary song, never saying die and getting nowhere.

Sometimes Bladebridge returned home before they’d given up and would insist on joining them in the capacity of vocal coach, offering advice and even, damnably, his own shining example. He assured Daniel that he had a very pretty baritone voice, too light for most of the things he attempted, but perfect for bel canto. It was sheer meanness. He probably thought Daniel and Lee had a thing for each other, which the insanity belt was baffling, and though Daniel was of the mature opinion that theoretically all things were possible and all men polymorphously perverse, he knew that Bladebridge’s opinion was in this case unfounded. He had only to look at Lee and see the pink tip of his nose in the middle of his teak-brown face, like a mushroom on a log, to be turned off entirely.

In December, just before Christmas, Lee showed up at the Metastasio without the tell-tale bulge of the insanity belt spoiling the line of his trousers. His romance with Bladebridge was over, and so, pretty much (and not coincidentally) was his friendship with Daniel.

Life, to be fair, was not all striving and yearning and certain defeat. In fact, barring those frustrating sessions hooked up with the Fluchtpunktapparat, Daniel had never been happier, or if he had, it was so long ago he couldn’t remember what it had been like. Now that he had a registered job, he could take out books from the public library, though with Mrs. Schiff’s enormous stock of books at his disposal that dream-come-true was almost a superfluous luxury. He read, and listened to records, and sometimes just lazed about without a care. The whirl of his social life only accounted for two or three evenings a week, and he worked out at the gym with about the same regularity.

Living out of the way of nightly temptation, he found his appetite for sex much reduced, though his life-style was still a long way from strict celibacy. When he did feel like mixing in, he went downtown to his old haunts and so preserved his reputation at the Metastasio for friendly inaccessibility. As a result, there was a decided falling-off of active interest among those patrons of the opera who, quite understandably, hoped for a better quid pro quo than Daniel was prepared to offer. What with the rationing that had gone into effect in January, it was beginning to be a buyer’s market for good-looking boys. His life grew still quieter, which suited him just fine.

Strangely (for he’d feared it would be a source of upset, or at any rate of depression), Daniel found he liked living with Boa and looking after her. There was a set of exercises he went through each morning, moving her limbs so as to keep the muscles in a minimally functional condition. While he worked her balsa-light arms in the prescribed semaphores, he would talk to her, in somewhat the half-conscious, half-serious way that Mrs. Schiff would talk to Incubus.

Did Daniel think she was listening? It wasn’t out of the question. Unless she’d left the earth utterly, it stood to reason that she might sometimes come back to see how her abandoned vehicle was getting on — whether it might, conceivably, be driven again. And if she did, it didn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that she would also take an interest in Daniel, and stop for a while to hear what he had to say. He knew now that they’d never truly been husband and wife and that he had, therefore, no legitimate grievance at being left in the lurch. What he’d thought had been love for Boa was just being in love. Or so he would tell her while he manipulated her light, lifeless limbs. But was it really so? It was hard to remember the exact feelings of twelve, no, thirteen years ago. As well to recall the vanished weathers of those few months they’d been together, or the life he’d led in some previous incarnation.

So it did seem strange to find himself actually feeling a kind of fondness for this bag of bones that lay in the corner of his room, breathing so quietly that she never could be heard, even from close by. Strange to suppose that she might be with him, nevertheless, at any moment of the night or day, observing, and judging, like a bonafide guardian angel.

14

Marcella, being a season subscriber, continued to turn up at the Metastasio every Tuesday. Finding that Daniel had become an usher, she couldn’t resist seeking him out at intermission or (after he’d been transerred to the Dress Circle) lingering out on 44th Street to waylay him after the show. “Just to say hello.” What she wanted was gossip about the singers. Any little scrap she accepted with the reverence of one being initiated into solemn mysteries. Daniel thought her a fool, but he enjoyed the role of high priest and so continued to supply her with crumbs and tidbits about her demigods. After a while he took to sneaking her into a good seat that he knew to be standing empty. These attentions did not go unnoticed by his colleagues, who affected to believe him smitten with Marcella’s very deniable charms. Daniel went along with the joke, praising her in the gross hyperboles of libretto verse. He knew that despite their banter the friendship did him credit among his fellow-ushers, all of whom had a friend, or set of friends, whose adulation and envy was a principal source of their own self-importance. That Daniel had his Marcella showed that for all his airs he wasn’t above such quotidian transactions. Indeed, his involvement went beyond merely basking in the false glory of an unmerited esteem; Marcella insisted on expressing her gratitude to Daniel by bringing him five-pound cannisters of Hyprotine Nutritional Supplement, which she “shoplifted” from a deli where she had established an understanding with the clerk at the check-out counter. What a world of mutuality it was!

One evening, after Daniel, with the collusion of Lee Rappacini, had managed to get her into the orchestra to see the last two acts of what was billed as Sarro’s Achille in Sciro (though, in fact, the score was Mrs. Schiff’s creation from first to last, and one of her best), Marcella accosted him at the corner of 44th and 8th with more than her usual urgency. Daniel, who was wearing only his uniform and freezing his shapely ass off, explained that tonight was out of the question, since he was on his way to a dinner at La Didone (with, once again, the constant Mr. Carshalton, whom nothing, it seemed, could discourage).

Marcella, insisting she needed only a minute, reached into a duffle-sized handbag and took out a box of Fanny Farmer chocolates with a big red bow around it.

“Really, Marcella, that’s going too far.”

“Oh, it isn’t for you, Ben,” she said apologetically. “It’s a Thanksgiving present for Ernesto Rey.”

“Then why don’t you give it to him? He’ll be singing tomorrow night.”

“But I’ll be working then, you see. And anyhow I couldn’t. I really just couldn’t. And if I did get up the nerve, he probably wouldn’t take it, and if he did take it, he’d probably throw it away as soon as my back was turned. That’s what I’ve heard, anyhow.”

“That’s because there might be poison in it. Or something unseemly. It’s been known to happen.”

Marcella’s eyes began to glisten. “You don’t think because I’ve said a word or two in praise of Geoffrey Bladebridge, that I’m part of some clacque, do you?”

“I don’t think it, no, but Rey doesn’t know you from Adam. Or Eve, for that matter.”

Marcella wiped her tears away and smiled to show that her heartbreak was of no account. “That’s why—” she snuffled, “—if it came from someone he knows, it wouldn’t be so futile. You could tell him the chocolates are from someone you know. And trust. And that they’re just my way of thanking him for the pleasure of so many beautiful performances. Would you do that for me?”

Daniel shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

If he’d stopped to think he might have answered that himself and been spared what was to come. The wise thing to have done would have been, as Marcella suggested, to dispose of the box of chocolates as soon as she was out of sight, or to eat them himself, if he dared. Instead he did as he’d promised and gave the chocolates that same evening to Rey, who was also dining at La Didone, with his agent Irwin Tauber. Daniel explained the situation, and Rey accepted the gift with a nod, not even bothering to ask him to thank his benefactress. Daniel returned to his escargots and Mr. Carshalton’s descriptions of the Vermont wilderness, and he thought no more about it.

The next evening a stage-hand delivered to Daniel a hand-written note from Rey, who was singing Norma. The note read: “Do thank your friend on my behalf for her box of sweets and her so friendly letter. She seems entirely charming. I don’t understand why she is so shy as not to approach me directly. I’m sure we’d have got on!” Daniel was miffed at Marcella’s smuggling a letter into her box of chocolates, but as Rey’s reaction was so cordial, what did it matter?

He genuinely forgot the whole thing — and so never connected it with Rey’s altered manner towards him, which didn’t amount to much more, at first, than common courtesy. When he called on Mrs. Schiff and found Daniel at home, he remembered his name — for the first time since they’d been officially introduced seven months before. Once, at Lieto Fino, when Daniel, having come with another party, stayed on to have coffee at Mrs. Schiff’s table, Rey, who was maudlin drunk, insisted on hearing the story of Ben Bosola’s life, a sad and unlikely tale that Daniel felt embarrassed to be telling in front of Mrs. Schiff, who knew the sad, unlikely truth. At Christmas, Rey gave Daniel a sweater, saying it had been a gift from one of his fans and didn’t fit him. When Rey asked, during one of his coaching sessions, if Daniel could act as his accompanist (Mrs. Schiff having burnt her hand making tea), Daniel accepted this as a tribute to his musicianship, and even when Rey praised his playing, which had been one long fumble, he attributed this to good manners. He wasn’t being disingenuous or willfully blind; he believed, even now, that the world was his shepherd, with a natural instinct for providing green pastures and attending to his wants.

In February Rey asked Daniel to dinner at Evviva il Coltello, an invitation he delivered in such carressing tones that Daniel could no longer evade his meaning. He said no, he’d rather not. Rey, still purring, demanded a reason. He couldn’t think of any except the true one — that if Rey should demand that instant capitulation that all stars seemed to think was their due, his refusal might well prompt Rey to retaliate by putting Daniel on his black-list. His job would be in jeopardy, and his arrangement with Mrs. Schiff as well. At last to avoid explanations he consented to be taken out: “But only this once.”

All through dinner Rey talked about himself — his roles, his reviews, his triumphs over enemies. Daniel had never before been witness to the full sweep of the man’s vanity and hunger for praise and still more praise. It was at once an awesome spectacle and a deadly bore. At the conclusion of the dinner Rey declared, flatly and matter-of-factly, that he was in love with Daniel. It was such an absurd non sequitur to the past two hours of self-aggrandizing soliloquy that Daniel nearly got the giggles. It might have been better if he had, since Rey seemed determined to regard his polite demurs as shyness.

“Come, come,” Rey protested, still in good humor, “let’s have no more pretenses.”

“Who’s pretending?”

“Have it your way, idolo mio. But there was that letter — that can’t be denied — and I shall continue to keep it—” He laid his many-ringed hand on the handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket of his suit. “—here, next to my heart.”

“Mr. Rey, that letter wasn’t from me. And I have no idea what it said.”

With a coquettish glance Rey reached into the inner pocket of his suit, and removed a folded and much-frayed paper, which he placed beside Daniel’s coffee cup. “In that case, perhaps you’d like to read what it says.”

He hesitated.

“Or do you know it by heart?”

“I’ll read it, I’ll read it.”

Marcella’s letter was written on scented, floral-bordered notepaper in a schoolgirlish script embellished with a few cautious curlicues meant for calligraphy. Its message aspired to the grand manner in much the same way. “To my most dear Ernesto,” it began. “I love you! What more can I say? I realize that love is not possible between two beings so different as you and I. I am but a plain, homely girl, and even if I were as beautiful in reality as I am in my daydreams I don’t suppose that would make much difference. There would still be a Gulf between us. Why do I write, if it is useless to declare my love? To thank you for the priceless gift of your music! Listening to your godlike voice has given me the most important, the sublimest moments of my life. I live for music, and what music is there that can equal yours? I love you — it always comes back to those three little words, which mean so much. I… love… you!” It was signed, “A worshipper from afar.”

“You think I wrote this glop?” Daniel asked, having read it through.

“Can you look me in the eye and deny it?”

“Of course I deny it! I didn’t write it! It was written by Marcella Levine, who is just what she says, a plain homely girl with a thing for opera singers.”

“A plain homely girl,” Rey repeated with a knowing smile.

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh, I appreciate that. It’s my truth too, the truth of my Norma. But it’s rare for a young man of your nature to understand such riddles so clearly. I think you really may have the makings of an artist in you.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake. What would I be doing—” He stopped short, on the verge of an irretrievable slight. It wouldn’t do to declare that no one in his right mind would write mash notes to a eunuch, when Rey evidently took such attentions for granted.

“Yes?” Rey folded the note and replaced it, next to his heart.

“Listen, what if I introduced you to the girl who wrote the note? Would that satisfy you?”

“I am curious, certainly.”

“She has a Tuesday subscription, and you’re singing next Tuesday, aren’t you?”

“Sono Eurydice,” he said, in melting tones.

“Then if you like, I’ll take you to her between the acts.”

“But you mustn’t prepare her!”

“It’s a promise. If I did, she might get cold feet and not show up.”

“Tuesday, then. And shall we come here again after, for a bite?”

“Sure. The three of us.”

“That assumes, caro, that there are three of us.”

“Just wait. You’ll see.”

On Tuesday, at the intermission, Rey appeared in the lower lobby of the Metastasio, already decked out in the costume of Eurydice and seeming, even close up and without the lights assisting, a very sylph, all tulle and moonlight — albeit a sylph of the court rather more than of the country, with enough paste jewels to have equipped a small chandelier and enough powder on his face and wig to have sunk a thousand ships. Being so majestical, he moved with the freedom of a queen, parting the crowds before him as effectively as a cordon of police. He commandeered Daniel from his post at the orange juice stand, and together they mounted the grand staircase to the Grand Tier level, and then (to everyone’s wonder) went up the much less grand staircase to the balcony, where, as Daniel had been certain they would, they found Marcella at the edge of a group of the faithful. Seeing Daniel and Rey advancing upon her, she stiffened into a defensive posture, shoulders braced and neck retracted.

They stopped before her. The group at whose edge Marcella had been standing now re-formed with her and her visitors at its center.

“Marcella,” Daniel said, in a manner meant to assuage, “I’d like you to meet Ernesto Rey. Ernesto, may I present Marcella Levine.”

Marcella dipped her head slowly in acknowledgement.

Rey offered his slender hand, dazzling with false diamonds. Marcella, who was sensitive on the subject of hands, backed away, pressing knotted fists into the brown velvetine folds of her dress.

“Daniel tells me, my dear, that it is to you that I am beholden for a letter I lately received.” You could almost hear the clavier underlining his recitativo, so ripe was his delivery.

“Pardon me?” It was all she could manage.

“Daniel tells me, my dear, that it is to you that I am beholden for a letter I lately received.” His reading of the line did not vary in any particular, nor could you tell, from his regal inflections, whether this statement portended thanks or reproof.

“A letter? I don’t understand.”

“Did you, or did you not, give this charming young man a letter for me, enclosed in a box of chocolates?”

“No,” she shook her head emphatically, “I never.”

“Because,” Rey went on, addressing the entire crowd that had gathered about them, “if it was your letter…”

The long blonde braid wagged wildly in denial.

“… I only wanted to say what a very kind, and warm, and wonderful letter it was, and to thank you for it, personally. But you tell me that you didn’t send it!”

“No! No, the usher must have… confused me with someone else.”

“Yes, that’s what he must have done. Well, my dear, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Marcella bowed her head, as though to the block.

“I hope you enjoy the second act.”

There was an approving murmur from all the onlookers.

“And now you must all excuse me. I have my entrance to make! Ben, my little trickster, I shall see you at eleven.” With which he spun round in a billow of tulle and made his way, royally, down the stairs.

Daniel had changed out of his uniform into a ragtag sweater and a pair of jeans and would not have been allowed into Evviva il Coltello if he hadn’t been accompanying the great Ernesto. Then, to compound the offense, he told the waiter he wasn’t hungry and wanted nothing more than a glass of mineral water.

“You really should take better care of yourself, caro,” Rey insisted, while the waiter still hovered in the background.

“You know it was her,” Daniel said, in a furious whisper, resuming their conversation from the street.

“In fact, I know it wasn’t.”

“You terrified her. That’s why she denied it.”

“Ah, but you see I was looking at her eyes. A person’s eyes always tell the truth. It’s as good as a lie detector test.”

“Then look at mine and tell me if I’m lying.”

“I’ve been looking for weeks now — and they are, all the time.”

Daniel replied with a subdued Bronx cheer.

They sat in silence, Daniel glowering, Rey complacently amused, until the waiter came with wine and mineral water. Rey tasted, and approved, the wine.

When the waiter was out of earshot, Daniel asked: “Why? If you think I wrote that letter, why would I go on denying it?”

“As Zerlina says: ‘Vorrei e non vorrei.’ She’d like to, but she also wouldn’t like to. Or as someone else says, I forget who exactly: ‘T’amo e tremo.’ And I can understand that. Indeed, with the baleful example of your friend before you, Bladebridge’s innamorata, I can sympathize with your hesitations, even now.”

“Mr. Rey, I’m not hesitating. I’m refusing.”

“As you like. But you should consider that the longer you resist, the harder the terms of surrender. It’s true of all sieges.”

“Can I go now?”

“You will leave when I do. I don’t intend to be made a public mockery. You will dine with me whenever I ask you to, and you will display your usual high spirits when you do so.” As an object lesson Rey splashed wine into Daniel’s glass until it had brimmed over unto the tablecloth. “Because,” he went on, in his throatiest contralto, “if you do not, I shall see to it that you have no job and no apartment.”

Daniel lifted the glass in a toast, spilling still more of the wine. “Cheers, Ernesto!”

Rey clinked his glass with Daniel’s. “Cheers, Ben. Oh, and one last thing — I don’t care how else you choose to pass your time, but I don’t want to hear that you’ve been seen in public with Geoffrey Bladebridge, whether alone or in a group.”

“What’s he got to do with anything?”

“My sentiments exactly.”

The waiter appeared with a new tablecloth, which he spread deftly over the one stained by the spilled wine. Rey informed him that Daniel had regained his appetite, and Daniel was presented with the menu. Without needing to look he ordered the most expensive hors d’oeuvre and entree that the restaurant offered.

Rey seemed delighted. He lit a cigarette and began to discuss his performance.

15

March was a month of judgements. The annual disaster of winter seemed to have rent asunder all the rotted threads of the social fabric in a single weekend. Social organization collapsed beneath successive shocks of power failures, shortages, blizzards, floods, and ever more audacious acts of terrorism. Units of the National Guard sent out to arrest this avalanche defected en masse. Armies of crazed urban refugees spilled out of the ghettoes and swarmed over the fallow countryside, only to suffer the fate of Napoleon’s troops in their retreat from Moscow. That was in Illinois, but every state had a tale of similar terribilità. After a while you stopped bothering to keep track, and after a while longer you couldn’t anyhow, since the media stopped reporting the latest disasters, on the hopeful theory that the avalanche might stop misbehaving if it weren’t spoiled by so much attention.

Meanwhile life went on pretty much as usual in New York, where disaster was a way of life. The Metastasio advanced curtain time an hour so that people could be home before the 12:30 curfew, and one by one the restaurants catering to the bel canto trade closed for the duration, all but Evviva, which doubled its prices, halved its portions, and carried on. The general feeling in the city was one of jittery exhilaration, cameraderie, and black paranoia. You never knew whether the person ahead of you in a breadline might not be the next thread to snap and — Ping! — shoot you down in your tracks, or whether you might not, instead, fall head over heels in love. Mostly people stayed indoors, grateful for each hour that they could go on gliding gently down the stream. Home was a lifeboat, and life was but a dream.

Such was Daniel’s Weltanschauung, and such, pretty much, was Mrs. Schiff’s as well, though her stoic calm was modified by a melancholy concern for Incubus, who, despite the bags of Pet Bricquettes stockpiled in the closet, was having a bad time of it. Early that year he’d developed an ear infection, which got steadily worse until he couldn’t bear to be stroked anywhere about the head. His balance was affected. Then, either from resentment at being kept indoors or because he’d truly lost control, he stopped using his box in the bathroom and began pissing and shitting at random throughout the apartment. The smell of sick spaniel had always been a presence in these rooms, but now, as undiscovered turds fermented in the mounds of cast-off clothes, as dribbles and pools of urine soaked down through the layers of detritus, the stench became a reality even for Mrs. Schiff — and unbearable to anyone else. Finally Rey presented an ultimatum — either she had the apartment cleared out and scrubbed down to the floorboards, or he would stop calling on her. Mrs. Schiff submitted to necessity, and she and Daniel spent two days cleaning up. Four large bags of clothes were sent off to be cleaned, and four times that amount went into the garbage. Of the many discoveries made in the course of these excavations the most notable was that of the entire score of an opera she’d written eight years ago to the da Ponte libretto for Axur, re d’Ormus. After an airing, this was despatched to the Metastasio and accepted for production the following year. She gave a quarter of her fee to Daniel for finding the score, and the remainder just covered her dry cleaning bill. A silver lining, though clouds continued to gather.

The first major intrusion of the world’s disorders on their private lives occurred when the pharmacist at First National Flightpaths informed Daniel that the Annex could no longer supply him with the liquid nutrient by which Boa was kept alive. The legal fiction of her death meant that no rationing card could be issued in her name. Daniel’s panicky protests elicited the address of a dealer in black market medical supplies, an elderly, out-of-work pharmacist in Brooklyn Heights, who pretended, when Daniel went to him, to have given up such traffickings. Such were the protocols of the black market. Daniel waited two days for his need to be verified. Finally a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven called at the apartment while Daniel was at the Teatro, and Mrs. Schiff showed him to Daniel’s room, where Boa lay in her endless enchanted sleep. The need being verified, Daniel was allowed to buy a two weeks’ supply, no more, at a price formidably higher than the going rate at First National. He was advised that the price was likely to continue to rise so long as rationing was in force.

Transatlantic phone lines had been one of the first victims of the crisis. You couldn’t even send a cable now without government authorization. The mail was the only way he could get an S.O.S. through to Miss Marspan. A special delivery letter might take two days, or a month, or might not arrive at all. Daniel sent off four letters from four different post offices; all arrived at Miss Marspan’s flat in Chelsea the same morning. If she had any suspicions that Daniel was inventing difficulties to line his own pocket she kept them to herself. She increased her banker’s order to five hundred dollars a month, twice the sum he’d asked for, and sent him a rather valedictory letter full of news about the decline and fall. Food wasn’t London’s problem any longer. Years ago every park and flower box in the city had been converted to growing vegetables, while in the countryside much pastureland had been restored to tillage, reversing the process of centuries. London’s weak link was its water supply. The Thames was low, its waters too rank to be treated. Miss Marspan went on for two closely-written pages about the exigencies of life on two pints of water a day. “One doesn’t dare drink even that,” she wrote, “though it serves for cooking. We are drunk night and day, all of us who’ve had the wisdom and wherewithal to stock their cellars. I’d never considered becoming an alcoholic, but I find it surprisingly congenial. I begin at breakfast with a Beaujolais, graduate to claret sometime in the afternoon, and turn to brandy in the evening. Lucia and I seldom get so far afield as the South Bank these days, since there is no public transport, but the local churches keep us supplied with music. The performers are usually as drunk as their audience, but that is not without its interest, and even relevance, musically. A Monteverdi madrigal becomes so poignant, bleared with wine, and as for Mahler… Words fail. It is quite generally agreed, even by our leading M.P.’s, that this is, definitely, le fin du monde. I gather it is the same in New York. My love to Alicia. I shall bend every effort to be at the premier of the rediscovered Axur, assuming that the final collapse is postponed for at least another year, as it has been traditionally. Thank you for continuing to care for our dearest Boadicea. Yours, etc.”

Harry Molzer was one of the most serious bodybuilders at Adonis, Inc. No one nowadays had the heroic physiques of the gods of the Golden Age half a century before, but by contemporary standards Harry did well — a 48-inch chest, 16½-inch biceps. What he lacked in sheer bulk he made up in articulate detail. Having that body was Harry’s whole life. When he wasn’t at work patrolling the 12th precinct, he was in the gym perfecting his Michaelangelesque proportions. All his earnings went into the upkeep of his hungry muscles. As an economy he shared a small studio apartment near the gym with two other unmarried cops, whom he despised, though he was never anything less than cordial with them — or, really, with anyone. He was, in the opinion of the manager, Ned Collins, the next-best thing to a saint, and Daniel pretty much had to agree. If purity of heart was to will one thing, Harry Molzer was right up there with Ivory Snow.

Rationing hit Harry hard. The Rationing Board was supposed to allow for individual somatic differences, but Harry was carrying around as much muscle as three or four average men. Even with the supplemental coupons police were entitled to, there was no way that Harry could have kept going at 195 pounds without resorting to the black market. Naturally, he resorted, but even on the black market the powdered protein he needed was not obtainable. Such concentrates were the first things hoarders had gone for. He switched to dry beans as the next-best source of protein, becoming notorious for his farts in the process, but by March even beans cost more, at black market prices, than Harry could afford. His muscles diminished and at the same time, because of the starch in the beans, he began to put on a thin cushion of flab.

Harry would never resign himself to the inevitable. He was always at the gym — staring morosely into the mirrors that lined the inner walls, or grimacing in private combat with the weights; standing at a window between sets and watching the traffic down in the square, or twisting in fast, furious torsion on the inclined sit-up board. But will power alone was not enough. Despite his unremitting effort, Harry’s body was saying good-bye. Without a steady supply of protein the hard exercise only hastened the self-destruction of his tissues. Ned Collins tried to get him to cut back his schedule, but Harry was beyond being reasoned with. He kept to exactly the same routine he’d followed in the days of his glory.

Harry had never been notably gregarious. For some like Daniel the gym served as a social club. For Harry it was a religion, and he wasn’t the sort to talk in church. Yet he had been liked, and even reverenced, by those who shared his faith but lacked his zeal. Now, in proportion as he had been liked, he was pitied — and avoided. Whatever corner of the gym he worked in would gradually be deserted, as though there might be a kind of contagion in Harry’s agony. In any case there were fewer people showing up these days. No one had that much surplus energy. And no one liked to be around Harry.

There were, inevitably, those who lacked the compassion or the moral imagination to understand what was happening to Harry, and it was one of this small number who, early one April afternoon, pushed him over the edge. Harry was doing bench presses and using, as he always did now, much more weight than he could handle. On the last rep of his second set his left arm began to buckle but he managed to straighten his arm and lock his elbow. His face was flushed a violent red. The straining cords of his neck formed a delta with his grimacing teeth at its apex. The barbell swayed alarmingly, and Ned jumped up from the desk, where he’d been talking with Daniel, and raced across the floor of the gym to get to Harry in time. It was then that the moral imbecile in question called out, from his perch on the parallel bars, “Okay, Hercules, one more rep!”

The bar crashed down into the stanchions and Harry sprang up from the bench with a scream. Daniel thought the bar had crushed his hand, but it was rage, not pain, that spilled from his lungs. Months and years of swallowed angers exploded in an instant. He swept up an eighty-pound dumbbell lying by the bench and hurled it at his tormentor. It missed him shattering an expanse of mirror and passing through a wall of plaster and lathe into the changing room behind. “Harry!” Ned pleaded, but Harry was out of control, beyond appeal, berserk. One by one, in a systematic ecstasy of destruction, he smashed every mirror in the gym, using the heaviest barbells in the rack. He sailed a twenty-pound plate, discus-like, into the soft-drink dispenser. He overturned a rack of dumbbells onto the floor. It felt like a bomb had hit the building. Through it all no one dared try and stop him.

When the last mirror was gone, and much of the supporting wall, Harry turned to face the three windows that looked down at Sheridan Square. They were still intact. He walked over to one of them, dumbbell in hand, and regarded the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk and in the street.

“Harry, please,” Ned said softly.

“Fuck it,” said Harry in a mournful, tired voice. He turned away from the windows and went into the changing room, closing the door behind him. Daniel watched him, through a rent in the plaster wall, go to his locker. For a long while he fumbled patiently with the combination lock. When he had got it open at last, he took his police-issue revolver from its holster, walked over to the single surviving mirror that hung above the sink, and struck his last, unconscious, classic pose as he pointed the barrel of the pistol at his temple. Then he blew out his brains.

Adonis, Inc., never did reopen.

Food had become everyone’s problem. According to the media’s steady buzz of placatory bulletins, there was enough to go round for many months to come. The difficulty was distribution. Supermarkets and grocery stores throughout the city had been pressed into service by the Rationing Board, but black market prices were now so inflated that it was worth your life to be seen leaving a distribution center with an armload (or pocketful) of groceries. Even convoys of five or six men might be set upon. As for the police, they were mainly concentrated in the parks or outside the parking lots where the black markets operated. Despite this protective presence not a week went by without another, and more violent, mob-assault upon these last tawdry bastions of privilege. By the end of March there was no longer a black market in the physical sense — only a network of individuals united by an invisible hierarchy. The economic system was being simplified to its atomic components: every man was his own armed camp.

Thanks to the closet stocked with Pet Bricquettes, Daniel and Mrs. Schiff were never reduced to direst need. Daniel, a passable though seldom inspired cook, concocted a kind of bread pudding from crumbled Bricquettes, Hyprotine powder, and an artificial sweetener, which Mrs. Schiff claimed actually to prefer to her usual fare. He also organized groups of the building’s residents to make trips to their distribution center, a former Red Owl Supermarket on Broadway. And, in general, he coped.

As the weather warmed it began to look as though he would scrape through the crisis without having to ask for Ernesto Rey’s help. He would have, if worst had come to worst (if, for instance, Miss Marspan had balked at the rising cost of charity). Living with Boa’s body had confirmed Daniel in his sense of duty, had made it seem less abstract. He would do anything he had to to keep her alive — and in his own possession. What could Rey demand of him, after all, that he hadn’t done already, either by preference or out of curiosity? This was a question he tended to dwell on rather more than was quite healthy. He would lie there alone in his room going over the possibilities with a glazed, insomniac persistence. Some of those possibilities were pretty terrible, but fortunately none of his imaginings, even the mildest, would come to pass.

It had become clear that Incubus was dying, though neither the dog nor his mistress were prepared to face the fact. He kept pretending he wanted to be taken out for a walk, moping about the hallway and whining and scratching at the outside door. Even if he’d had the strength to make it as far as the corner lamppost, there was no question of giving in to him, since a dog on the street these days was just meat on the hoof and an incitement to riot.

Mrs. Schiff was devoted to the dying spaniel, and Incubus took every unfair advantage of her sympathy. He was everlastingly querulous, begging for food that he then refused to eat. He wouldn’t let Mrs. Schiff read or write or even talk to anyone but himself. If she tried to get round these prohibitions by disguising a conversation with Daniel as a tête-a-tête with Incubus, he would sense it and punish her by staggering off to the darkest part of the apartment and flopping down in inert despair. A few moments later Mrs. Schiff would be there beside him, petting him and apologizing, for she could never hold out very long against his sulks.

One night, not long after the closing of the gym, Incubus came into Mrs. Schiff’s room and insisted on being helped up onto her bed, though until now he’d accepted the new prohibition against this. His incontinence and the ensuing drastic overhaul of the apartment had inspired Incubus with an almost human sense of guilt, which each new spontaneous defecation served to keep alive.

Daniel, passing the room and seeing Incubus sprawled on the bed, set in to scolding him, but both dog and mistress gave him such pitiable looks that he didn’t have the heart to insist. He came in the room and sat in the armchair by the bed. Incubus lifted his tail a scant inch off the sheets and let it drop. Daniel patted him on the rump. He began to whine: he wanted a story.

“I think he wants you to tell him a story,” said Daniel.

Mrs. Schiff nodded wearily. She had developed a kind of subdued horror of her own whimsies from having had to recite them so many times when she was feeling the opposite of whimsical herself. Her Scheherazade complex, she called it. It was useless, at these times, to try and abridge the tale being told, for Incubus could always sense when she’d departed from the established format and formulae and would whine and worry her until the straying story-line had been brought back to the narrow paths of orthodoxy. At last she’d learned, like a good sheep, not to stray.

“This is the story,” Mrs. Schiff began, as she’d begun so many times before, “of Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny and of the beautiful Christmas they spent in Bethlehem, the very first Christmas of all. One night, just about at bedtime, when Bunny Honeybunny was about to turn in for a well-deserved rest, for he had had, as usual, a very busy day, his dear little sister Honey Honeybunny came hopping, hippity-hop, into their cozy little burrow deep in the roots of a gnarly old oak tree, and she said to her brother — ‘Bunny! Bunny! You must come out and look at the sky!’ Bunny had seldom seen his sister so excited, so, sleepy as he was (and he was very sleepy)—”

Incubus knew better than to succumb to such hints. He was wide-awake and intent upon the story.

“—he hopped, hippity-hop, out of their dear little burrow, and what do you think he saw, shining up there in the sky?”

Incubus looked at Daniel.

“What did he see?” Daniel asked.

“He saw a star! And he said to his sister Honey Honeybunny, ‘What a beautiful and truly amazing star! Let us follow it.’ So they followed the star. They followed it over the meadows where the cows had settled down to sleep, and across the broad highways, and over the lakes as well, for it was winter and the lakes were all covered with ice, until at last they arrived in Bethlehem, which is in Judea. By this time, naturally, they were both quite tired from their journey and wanted nothing so much as to go to bed. So they went to the biggest hotel in town, the Bethlehem Hotel, but the night-clerk was very rude and said there was no room at the hotel, because of the census the government was taking, and that even if there had been room he wouldn’t have let rabbits into his hotel. Poor Honey Honeybunny thought she would cry, but as she didn’t want to make her brother unhappy on her account she decided to be brave. So, with a merry twitch of her long furry ears, she turned to Bunny and said, ‘We don’t need to stay at any silly old hotel. Let’s go find a manger and stay there. Mangers are more fun anyhow!’ So they went to look for a manger, which was no problem at all, for lo and behold, there was a cheery little manger just behind the Bethlehem Hotel with oxen and asses and cows and sheep… and something else besides! Something so wonderful and soft and warm and precious they couldn’t believe their bunnyrabbit eyes.”

“What did they see in the manger?” asked Daniel.

“They saw Baby Jesus!”

“No kidding.”

“Yes, there he was, the little Lord God, and Mary and Joseph too, kneeling beside him, and any number of shepherds and angels and wise men, all kneeling down and offering Baby Jesus presents. Poor Bunny Honeybunny and Honey Honeybunny felt just terrible, of course, because they didn’t have any presents for Baby Jesus. So, to cut a long story short—”

Incubus looked up vigilantly.

“—the two darling rabbits hopped off into the night, hippity-hop, all the way to the North Pole, which represents a lot of hopping, but there was never a word of complaint from them. And when they got to the North Pole, what do you suppose they found?”

“What did they find there?”

“Santa’s workshop is what they found. It was still early in the evening, so Santa was still there, and Mrs. Santa Claus as well, and all the little elves, millions of them, who help Santa make his toys, and the reindeer who help Santa deliver them, but I’m not going to name all the reindeer.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m tired and I have a headache.”

Incubus began to whine.

“Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. And Dasher and Prancer and… and… Help me.”

“Rudolph?”

“With his nose so bright, of course. How could I forget Rudolph? Well, after everyone had sat down in front of the blazing fire and warmed their little paws and enjoyed a nice slice of Mrs. Santa’s carrot cake, the two Honeybunnies explained why they’d had to come to the North Pole. They told Santa about Baby Jesus and how they’d wanted to give him a present for Christmas but didn’t have any. ‘So what we were hoping,’ said Honey Honeybunny, ‘was that we could give him ours.’ Santa Claus, naturally, was deeply touched by this, and Mrs. Santa had to turn away to dry her tears. Tears of happiness, you understand.”

“Is there any other kind?” Daniel asked.

Incubus shifted his head uneasily.

“Well,” said Mrs. Schiff, folding her hands purposefully in her lap, “Santa told the Honeybunnies that of course they could give their presents to Baby Jesus, if they would help him load them into his great bag and put it into his sleigh.”

“And what were the presents they put in the bag?” Daniel asked.

“There were rooty-toot-toots and rummy-tum-tums and dolls and frisbees and doctor kits with candy pills and tiny little thermometers for pretending to take a temperature. Oh, and a hundred other lovely things: games and candy and myrrh and frankincense and opera records and the Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott.”

Incubus laid down his head, content.

“And he loaded the bag of presents into his sleigh, and helped the two Honeybunnies in behind him, and gave a crack of his whip and—”

“Since when does Santa have a whip?”

“Santa’s had a whip time out of mind. But he rarely if ever has to use it. Reindeer know instinctively where they should fly. So — away they all flew, instinctively, like the down of a thistle, straight to the manger in Bethlehem where Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and angels and wise men, and even the night-clerk at the hotel, who’d experienced a change of heart, were waiting for Santa and the Honeybunnies, and when they saw them up there in the sky, which was lit up, you’ll remember, by that beautiful star, they all let out a great hurrah. ‘Hurrah!’ they shouted. ‘Hurrah for the Honeybunnies! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!’”

“Is that the end of the story?”

“That’s the end of the story.”

“Do you know what, Mrs. Schiff?”

“What?”

“Incubus just went wee-wee in your bed. I can see it on the sheets.”

Mrs. Schiff sighed, and nudged Incubus, who was dead.

16

There seemed to be general agreement among the commentators, many of them not given to expressions of easy optimism, that a new day was dawning, that a corner had been turned, that life would go on. Those for whom the word was not a bugaboo said there had been a revolution, while those less millenially-minded called it a time of reconciliation. The weather was nicer, of course, as it invariably is in May and June. No one was quite sure what marked the commencement of this brighter era, much less whether the forces of darkness were in full retreat or had only stopped to catch their breath, but when the country woke up from the nightmare of its long collapse, a lot of problems had disappeared from the headlines along with a number of people.

The most amazing change, from Daniel’s point of view, was that flight had been decriminalized in four of the Farm Belt states (though not yet in Iowa). Further, the government had dropped its prosecution of the publishers of the anonymous under-the-counter shocker, Tales of Terror, which purported to be the confessions of the man who’d blown up the Alaska pipeline nineteen years ago, single-handed, and who now regretted this and subsequent crimes, all the while plainly glorifying in their depiction. The government, by ceasing to require the publishers to divulge the author’s identity, was saying, in effect, that by-gones were by-gones. The result was that people could now afford to buy the book at its lower (over-the-counter) price, and were, by the millions, Daniel among them.

Along another axis of reconciliation, the Reverend Jack Van Dyke was back in the news as the first big-shot liberal to support the Puritan Renewal League, the latest splinter-group of undergoders to try and make it in the big time. Time Magazine had a cover photo showing Van Dyke and Goodman Halifax rigged out in the black Stetsons, stiff white collars, red rayon bow-ties, and insignia-blazoned denim jackets that were the P.R.L.’s cheerfully anachronistic uniform. The two men were shown pledging allegiance to a flag in Arlington Cemetery. It wasn’t Daniel’s idea of the dawn of a new era, but Halifax had been behind the move to decriminalize flight, which was certainly to be counted to his favor, however involuted and Van Dykean the motives ascribed to him by Time.

Daniel would have taken a larger and more affirming interest in these developments, but sad to say the vector of his own life refused to follow this general upward trend. Worst, in fact, had come to worst, for Miss Marspan had discontinued her assistance in the most definitive way. She was dead, one of a multitude to perish in London’s ongoing, multiple epidemic. Daniel was informed of her death in a telex from her bank. The bank regretted any inconvenience that might issue from the sudden interruption of its monthly drafts, but as the deceased had made no provision in her will for such payments to be maintained, it could not act otherwise.

Daniel was similarly limited in his course of action. Until the spirit of the new era reached the Rationing Board and moved them to reconsider the plight of such as Boa, it would not be possible to return her to the dismal wards of the First National Flightpaths annex. In any case, he no longer had cash sufficient to secure her stay at the annex for more than a few months. Telling himself he had no choice, he went to Ernesto Rey.

The terms set for his capitulation were not generous. He was to have his skin dyed a deep teak-brown, all but a broad circle on each cheek that would be left its natural color, so as (Rey explained) to reveal his blushes. His hair, being jet-black, need not be dyed, but would be frizzed, fluffed, and shaped, topiary-wise, as fashion should dictate. He would accompany Rey whenever required to, wearing the livery of the Metastasio, or something equally gay and gaudy, and he would perform small services symbolic of his subjection, such as opening doors, page-turning, and shining shoes. Further, he would engage, actively and unstintingly, in whatever carnal pursuits Rey should direct him towards, provided only (this was the one concession Daniel was able to obtain) such pursuits were legal and within the natural range of his competence. He would not otherwise be permitted to have sex, to which end he was to be fitted with an insanity belt. He would affect, both in public and private, to be infatuated with his benefactor, and to all inquiries as to why he acted in these ways he was to reply that he followed the promptings of a loving heart. In return Rey undertook to provide for Boa’s well-being for such time as he should require these services of Daniel and for a year thereafter.

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?”

“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.

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:

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 by 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 would 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.”

“Yeah. The doughnut shop went out of business a long time ago. How have you been? And where are you going?”

“I’ve been fine. In fact, I’m a changed man. And I’m going to Anagni, south of Rome. Tomorrow.”

Daniel looked at Claude and tried to rethink him as the author of Tales of Terror and the destroyer of the Alaska pipeline. He couldn’t. “And what will you do in Anagni?”

“Build a cathedral?”

“You’re asking me?”

“It sounds ridiculous, even to me, even now, but it’s the God’s truth. There was a cathedral there, one of the best Romanesque cathedrals. Frederick Barbarossa was excommunicated there. It was bombed, and I’m going there to help rebuild it. As one of the stone masons. I’ve joined the Franciscans, you see. Though I haven’t taken my final vows. It’s a long story.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s what I’ve always wanted. We’ll be using almost the original technology, though we do cheat a little as to actually lifting the stones. But it will be a step up from just scrabbling about in the rubble for souvenirs. Don’t you think?”

“I do. That’s what I meant — congratulations.”

“And you, Ben — what are you doing?”

“The same, pretty much. I’m doing what I’ve always wanted. You’ll see, if you stay for the whole evening.”

“You know, I don’t think you’ve changed an iota.”

“Does anyone, ever?”

“I hope so. I sincerely do hope so.”

A bell rang, the signal for Daniel to change.

“Gotta go now. But can I ask you a question first? Strictly between ourselves.”

“So long as you won’t be offended if I don’t answer it.”

“On second thought, I’ll just go on wondering. Anyhow, you’d pretty well have to say no, even if the answer was yes.”

“Those are always good questions to avoid, I agree. What a pity there’s so little time left. It would be nice to get together for a more formal good-bye. Anyhow — good luck with your cathedral.”

“Thanks, Claude. The same to you.”

He offered his hand again, but Claude went him one better. He grasped him by the shoulders and solemnly and unpassionately, as though he were awarding the Legion of Honor, kissed each of his cheeks.

For the first time that evening Daniel blushed.

While Rey sang his own brief offering, a Carissimi cantata abridged and ornamented by the trusty hand of Mrs. Schiff, Daniel changed into his costume, an old tux from the back of Rey’s closet, which he had, with the help of Mrs. Galamian, the Metastasio’s wardrobe mistress, meticulously tattered and torn. He still wasn’t feeling more than agreeably nervous. Maybe he was one of those fortunate few who just weren’t fazed by performing. Maybe he’d actually enjoy it. He tried to concentrate on Rey’s roulades, but for all the brilliance of the singing the music was almost impossible to fix one’s attention on. Carissimi had had his off days, no doubt about it. He was, however, one of the Cardinal’s particular favorites, so the propriety of Rey’s choice could not be called into question. If Rey’s impeccable pyrotechnics nevertheless left the audience (pared down now to a bare fifty or so) somewhat restive and willing to be cajoled into simply enjoying themselves, who could complain, except possibly Carissimi?

Rey finished and was applauded. He joined Daniel briefly in the green room, went out to take a second bow, and returned. “I shall go sit beside the Cardinal now,” he advised Daniel. “Don’t enter for another couple of minutes.”

Daniel watched the two minutes disappear on his wristwatch, then put on his ever-so-dented top hat, and made his entrance, smiling. Aside from the mildest tingling in his legs and lower back he had no symptoms of stagefright. The Cardinal was sitting in the third row of chairs with Rey, benignly impassive, beside him. Claude was in the first row next to the nun from Cleveland. Many of the Cardinal’s other guests were familiar to Daniel from the Metastasio. One or two had taken him to dinner.

He lifted his hands, fingers spread wide, to frame his face. He let his eyes roll, slowly, to the back of his head. He began to sing. “Mammy!” he sang. “How I love ya, how I love ya! My dear old Mammy.” He kept very close, vocally, to the authorized Jolson version, while exaggerating the body language. It was a polite version of the fractured minstrel-show he would perform to freak out selected strangers. He finished suddenly and, before there could be applause, moved right in to the next number, “Nun wandre Maria” from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch. Daniel accompanied its tortured and rather schizzy pieties with the same overwrought gestures he’d used for “Mammy.” They seemed, in this context, more like kabuki than schmaltz.

“The next song I’d like to sing for you,” Daniel announced, removing his top hat and reaching into his pocket for a pair of rabbit ears, “needs a bit of introduction, but only a little bit. The lyrics are my own, though the idea behind them originates with the woman who wrote the music, Alicia Schiff. It’s Bunny Honeybunny’s opening number from a little musical we’re putting together called Honeybunny Time.” He fixed the rabbit ears in place. “There’s nothing much you need to know about honeybunnies that the song doesn’t pretty well explain, except that they’re very lovable.” He smiled. “So, without more ado—” He nodded to the pianist. The rabbit ears wobbled on their wire stems and went on wobbling to the end of the song.

He sang as if transfigured by delight, negotiating the various vocal hurdles with room to spare. The music was ravishing, a chocolate box of a song that managed to make his dopey lyrics seem not only sincere but even, in a disturbing way, devotional. Where it really came alive was at the refrain, a long, looping chain of alleluias and la-la-la’s that soared and swooped and skittered around the steady swirling compulsions of the piano. Wonderful music, and here he was, standing in front of Cardinal Rockefeller and all his guests and singing it. He was aware, all the while he sang, of faces beginning to break into smiles, and aware, as he took in their reactions, of the music, and there was no disjunction between these two awarenesses.

Off he went on another roller-coaster ride of la-la-la’s. This time, knowing that he’d brought it off once and could therefore bring it off again, he began, diffidently, to camp it up in proper honeybunny style. The people in the audience — that’s what the faces had become: an audience; his audience — were grinning now, were eating out of his hand, were loving him.

Suddenly a switch flipped inside him, and a light came on, one bright flash of everlasting glory, and there was no way to explain it but he knew that if he’d been wired into a flight apparatus at just that moment (and the moment was gone already) he would have taken off. He knew it, and it made no difference, because he was flying already — up to the ceiling, around the chandelier, over the housetops, and across the wide blue sea.

He sang the last verse at full tilt, with wierd, bemused exuberance.

For the third chorus he did, impromptu, what’d he’d never dreamed of doing during the weeks of rehearsal: he danced. It was unabashedly naive, the merest hop and shuffle, but just right (he guessed) for a honeybunny. Anyhow it felt right, if also risky. Once, concentrating on his footwork, he almost lost hold of the vocal line, but if he’d fallen on his face it wouldn’t have made any difference.

He had become a singer. Which nobody could deny.

“And will there be more honeybunny songs?” Cardinal Rockefeller inquired, after Daniel had returned from the green room in his own human character.

“I hope so, your Grace. We’re working on it.”

“When there are, I shall try to persuade you to exert your fascination over us again. Such charm and, if I may call it so, innocence are all too rare. You, and your distinguished teacher, are both to be commended.”

Daniel murmured thanks, and Rey, by way of advertising this accolade to the company at large, knelt to kiss the Cardinal’s ring. The Cardinal then led Rey off to an adjoining room, and Daniel was left to receive various metaphorical posies of praise and a single matter-of-fact posie, from Monsignor Dubery, of six rather washed-up lilies. The nun from Cleveland apologized for her snub and gave him the address of her convent so he might send her the sheet music of this and all future honeybunny songs. Old acquaintances from the Metastasio offered prophecies of greatness.

When the circle of well-wishers had dwindled to a few garrulous shoulder-rubbers, Shelly Gaines, asserting the privilege of prior acquaintance, came forward with a drink in each hand — beer for himself, a screwdriver for Daniel — and commandeered the new-born star for, as he said, “some man-talk.”

“Your own song is, of course, beyond all praise, and entirely anomalous, if that isn’t the same thing. It isn’t pop, though it is in a way, and it isn’t bel canto, though it requires a voice of bel canto elasticity, and it’s nothing at all like operetta, though I suppose that’s what it must be nearest to. Really quite amazing — and in that I speak only of the song, nothing of the singer, who was—” Shelly rolled his eyes in imitation of Daniel’s own neo-darktown-strutters style. “—the prophet of an entire new form of madness.”

“Thank you.”

“But beyond compliments, Ben… May I call you Ben?”

Daniel nodded.

“Beyond mere rapturous applause, Ben, I would like to make you an offer.” He raised a finger as though to forestall Daniel’s objections. “A professional offer. I gather, from the second song on the program, that your goals aren’t entirely limited to the, how shall I say, commercial side of show biz.”

“Really, I don’t have any goals.”

“Now, now, no false modesty.”

“I mean, I’m still a student. A student’s goal is just to learn.”

“Well then, my offer should interest you precisely as a student. How would you like to sing at Marble Collegiate? As one of our soloists.”

“No fooling?” Daniel said, lighting up. And then, “No, that wouldn’t be possible.”

“Ah, the Cardinal has already taken you to his bosom, has he? One just can’t be quick enough.”

“No, not at all. And I’m sure he has no intention of doing so. He’s got the whole Metastasio to take his pick from. I’m simply not up to that level.”

“You’d certainly be up to ours, Ben. And then some. We’re not especially notable for our music program. A Bach cantata is about our farthest stretch, and that only once or twice a year. On the other hand, we try for more than a sing-along. From your point of view it would represent experience, which is a commodity you won’t be lacking for long, but do you, at the moment, have any other plans? Rehearsals are on Wednesday evenings. And I think I could get a hundred a week out of the budget. What do you say?”

“What can I say? I’m flattered, but—”

“Mr. Rey would object — is that it?”

“He might. More likely, he’d haggle over the fee.”

“What else then?”

“Where would I be? In a loft at the back, or up front where people would be watching me?”

“Surely, Ben, after what I saw tonight, you’re not going to tell me that you’re the shy type! I’ve never seen such sang-froid. And in front of this audience!”

Daniel bit his lip. There was no way to explain. He’d known he’d come up against this problem as soon as he became, in any degree, successful, but despite the steady progress he’d made studying under Rey, success hadn’t seemed an immediate danger. Hope had sprung eternal, of course, in his all-too-human breast, but the rational half of him, which was in charge of major decisions, had considered such hopes to be pipe-dreams, and so he’d let himself drift with the current from week to week till he arrived at the inevitable moment of decision, here at last.

How long, once he became, even in the smallest way, a public figure, could he hope to preserve his incognito? And more to the point: was that what he wanted, forever and always?

“Shelly,” he temporized, “I’m grateful for your offer, believe me. And I’d like to say yes right now, but there’s someone I have to talk it over with first. Okay?”

“You know where you can find me. Meantime, yours sincerely, and all that.” Shelly, a little sad and rebuffed, departed, bumping into the music room’s disordered chairs. No one else came forward.

Daniel looked for Claude through all the other rooms, but he must have left at the end of the concert. A small desolation settled over Daniel’s spirit. He wanted to deposit his six lilies in a waste basket (he was certain they’d done duty at a week of funerals) and go home and crash.

But that would never do. It was important now to circulate, and so he circulated. But as far as he personally was concerned the party was over.

Claude had not forgotten him, however. The next morning a delivery truck appeared on West 65th with a peculiar and very precious cargo, consisting of (1) a Sony Flight apparatus, (2) a tombstone with a limerick on it, and (3) a tie representing raindrops. There was also a telegraphically short letter from Claude saying good-bye, explaining that Franciscans weren’t allowed to fly, and wishing him good luck as a honeybunny.

When the delivery men were gone and his room had been rearranged to accommodate the two new items of furniture, Daniel sat down before the flight apparatus and let temptation have its way with him. But he knew he wasn’t ready, and he knew that he’d know when he was, and he didn’t succumb.

That night, as though in recompense, he had his first real flying dream. He dreamed he was flying over an imaginary Iowa, an Iowa of marble mountains and blithe valleys, of golden, unreal cities and fabulous farms dazzling the eye with fields of Fabergé wheat. He woke unwilling to believe it had been only a dream. But grateful, nevertheless, to have been given so unmistakable a sign.

18

Earlier on the evening of that dream, in the taxi returning from Cardinal Rockefeller’s, Rey had hinted at the possibility, then announced the fact, of Daniel’s manumission. Daniel expressed an honest surprise and a not dishonest regret; prudently, he did not by so much as one hurrah express his jubilation.

It was not to be an absolute sundering. Daniel would continue to study with the great Ernesto, but on the more customary footing of offering him, in lieu of immediate payment, a third of his professional income over the next seven years. Daniel signed a contract to this effect, witnessed by Mrs. Schiff and Irwin Tauber, who, as Daniel’s agent, was to receive a further fifteen percent. If this were exploitation, Daniel was delighted to be considered prospectively exploitable. Could there be any sincerer testimony to their faith in his future than their wanting to secure a piece of it for themselves?

His delight was soon to be tempered by the reality of his first paycheck. His wage from Marble Collegiate was an even hundred dollars; after deductions for Federal, State, and City taxes and for Social Security, and after Rey’s and Tauber’s percentages, Daniel was left with $19.14. So, when fall arrived, it was back to the Metastasio. Mr. Ormund kindly allowed him to take off early on Wednesdays to attend his choir’s rehearsals. Further, he was promoted to the position (alternating with Lee Rappacini) of croupier on the casino’s roulette wheel, a post which, even after the Metastasio’s and Mr. Ormund’s rake-offs, was an undeniably juicy plum.

Not that Daniel was given to fretting about money. He was still predominantly of the grasshopper persuasion and unable to take alarm at remote contingencies. By the terms of his agreement with Rey, Boa would be looked after for another year. Congress, meanwhile, was drawing up a uniform code of laws concerning flight, a code that would certainly see to it that no one would be put in the impossible position Daniel had been in, of being able to keep Boa alive only by resorting to the black market. In a year’s time, when Daniel would have to reassume the burden of her support, it should not, therefore, be quite so crushing and unfair a burden. If he saved, he might even be able to put her back in First National Flightpaths. Such are a grasshopper’s sanguine, summertime thoughts.

Having had, on the whole, a rather easy time of it during his year of concubinage, Daniel did not find freedom going to his head. In any case, these terms are relative. In a practical sense his life wasn’t much changed, except that now he could, when the urge came over him, go out and get laid. Mostly, however, except for a three-day binge right after the belt came off, the urge didn’t come over him, not in the old overmastering and time-consuming way. This diminution of his erstwhile perpetual motion may have had something to do with sublimation, but he doubted it. Renata Semple had always maintained that sublimation was a load of Freudian bullshit, that the best lays also transmitted the largests zaps of creative energy. Maybe he was just getting old and wearing out. Maybe his present sex-life represented the optimum level for his metabolism and previously he’d been overdoing it. In any case he was happy, wasn’t he, so why worry?

For two months he’d been letting his skin fade back to its natural color when an incident at the Natural History Museum made him think again. He was wandering lonely as a cloud among cases of curious rocks and mineral specimens, letting his mind get lost in the twists and turns, the dazzle and glitter of Nature’s own chinoiseries, when out of the dim past stepped Larry, the counterman of the now defunct Dodge ’Em Dougnut Shop. Larry, with more directness than grace, dropped a metaphorical handkerchief at Daniel’s feet, waited to see if it would be picked up, and, when it wasn’t, moved on to some ore-bearing boulders with a wistful, hard-boiled, “All right, Sambo, whatever you say.” And never a glimmer of recognition. There was a time, and rather a long one, when Daniel had seen Larry on the average of twice a day to pick up his phone messages and generally to coze. Larry, admittedly, had a partiality for phoneys, but even so! Is love as blind as that?

Daniel knew that every time he sang at Marble Collegiate he was taking a calculated risk of being recognized by someone from the still dimmer past. Because of Van Dyke’s association with the P.R.L. there was a constant influx of church groups and convention delegates dropping in for the Sunday services, and among these visitors there was bound, sometime, to be someone from Amesville or environs who’d known the old, unreconstructed Daniel Weinreb. His fears hadn’t finally stood in the way of his taking the job, but it might be just as well to continue to wear a mask that had proven so effective. Everyone would suppose he remained a phoney by preference, but that couldn’t be helped. Besides, admit it, it had its moments.

He determined, at least, to change his markings. On his next visit to the cosmetician he had a small, mandorla-shaped spot bleached out high on his forehead, a process as painful as it was expensive. Then, to his great and immediate relief, the circles on his cheeks were filled in and his frizzed hair was straightened and cut to form a bang of oily ringlets obscuring the upright almond of whiteness on his brow. The new mask, being less flaunting, was even more effective as a disguise. His own mother, as the saying goes, wouldn’t have known him now.

A year passed: a year immense with events, prodigies of history and of his own changed heart (if the heart it is, indeed, that registers the sense of vocation, of being summoned to a destined task, and not the eyes, or hands, or spine); a year of blessed tumult; a happy year too quickly gone by. What he did in that year could be quickly told. With Mrs. Schiff he finished a draft of a full-scale two-act version of Honeybunny Time, which Tauber immediately began showing to producers (all of them thought it was a put-on), and he wrote, or re-wrote, some seven or eight songs of his own. But what he learned would require a fairly epic catalogue. Insights blossomed into fugitive visions, branched into viable propositions, interlocked into systems, and the systems themselves seemed to resonate mysteriously with all manner of things, great and small, with his hugest, haziest intuitions as with the curves and colors of a gladiolus in a plastic pot. It was as though he’d been offered an interlinear translation to the whole span of his life. Old chunks of unsorted awareness fell together in patterns as lucid as a Mozart melody. Once, home alone and scaling the heights of Don Giovanni, the shape of the day’s epiphany was just that, a mere seven notes that seemed, from the height at which he heard them, to say more of justice, judgement and tragic fate than all of Aeschylus and Shakespeare rolled into one. It didn’t have to be music that got him going, though it usually was, somehow, a work of art and not the raw materials of Nature. New York doesn’t have that much unmodified Nature to offer, except its skies and what could be made to glow in the park, but it was chock-full of artifice and booming day and night with music. Daniel didn’t want for stimuli.

How long could one go on summing things up like this? Mrs. Schiff said forever, so long as one remained on friendly terms with one’s Muse. But who was the Muse and what did she require? There Mrs. Schiff could offer no oracles.

The question was important to Daniel, for he’d come in a rather superstitious way to believe that possibly Boa was his Muse. Hadn’t his awakening coincided with the time that he’d brought her here to live with him? But how ridiculous, to speak at all of ‘living’ with her, when she was nothing but an empty shell. It was with Mrs. Schiff, it was with Rey, that he’d lived for these three years. Yet he didn’t for a moment suppose them to be Muses. They’d been his teachers; or, if that didn’t do them sufficient honor or express the size of the debt, his Masters. The Muse was something, or someone, else.

The Muse, first of all, was a woman, a woman to whom one remained faithful, and Daniel had, in his fashion, remained faithful to Boa. This might or might not be significant, might or might not connect to some fundamental bedrock of truth beneath the unexplored murk of the subconscious. When it wasn’t shining in the clear sunlight of joy, sex could be infinitely mysterious. But Daniel’s conception of Boa as his Muse was more literal than that. He thought of her as an active presence, a benign will-o’-wisp, touching his spirit and lighting his way with unseen, subliminal glimmerings. In much the same way he had, in his earliest youth, imagined his mother flying to him from far away, hovering over him, whispering to him, regarding him with a mournful, secret love that had been, nevertheless, the force that had sustained him through the desolations of the first loneliest years in Amesville. He had been wrong then; his mother had not been with him, had never known how to fly. But did that mean he was wrong now? Boa was a fairy; she might be with him; he believed she was, and, believing it, he spoke to her, prayed to her, beseeched her to let him off the hook.

For the free ride was over. Rey, though he’d regarded it as an unqualified waste of money, had fulfilled the terms of their agreement. Now, with that debt satisfied, it was up to Daniel. Boa’s minumum weekly requirement cost a whopping $163, and there was no let-up in sight, as this wasn’t the black market price. Rationing was over, and Daniel was able to buy her supplies directly from the First National Flightpaths’ pharmacy. $163 represented the basic cost of one week’s vacation outside your body as fixed by the new Federal guidelines. By this means the government hoped to discourage fairies from permanently abandoning their vehicles by the roadside. Logically Daniel had to approve the new uniform code Congress had come up with — even in this particular. Alackaday, who would have supposed that such a wonder’s coming to pass would have been nothing but a new source of grief for Daniel, who had marched in so many parades and sung at so many rallies in this very cause? But such was the case, and though there had been a few woeful outcries in the press from parents and spouses (and even a granddaughter) who were in the same costly fix as Daniel, there really wasn’t much hope of this law being changed, for it represented a genuine concensus.

$163 stood at the borderline of what was possible and left a very scant residue from which to supply his own necessities. It was painful, it was downright cruel, to be earning a good living for the first time in years and still to have no security, no comfort, no fun. He let Boa know it in no uncertain terms (assuming she was listening in). Enough was enough. He wanted to be rid of her. It wasn’t fair of her to expect him to go on like this. Fifteen years! He threatened to phone her father, and set deadlines for doing so, but since these threats weren’t carried out, he had to assume either that she wasn’t listening, or didn’t believe his threats, or didn’t care. Upping the ante, he menaced her with being disconnected from the umbilicus of tubes that sustained her vegetable life, but this was the merest huffing and puffing. Kill Boa? She was, God knows, an albatross around his neck; she was a constant memento mori (more so than ever, now that Claude Durkin’s tombstone nestled at the foot of her bed); but she was his wife, and she might be his Muse, and to fail in his obligation to her would just be asking for trouble.

Aside from these notions about his Muse, Daniel was not, in general, a superstitious sort, but he was fast becoming a Christian, at least in the latter-day sense of the word as set forth in the teachings of Reverend Jack Van Dyke. According to Van Dyke, all Christians got to be that way by suspending their disbelief in a preposterous but highly improving fairy tale. This presented no difficulties to Daniel, who took naturally to pretending. His whole life these days was a game of make-believe. He pretended to be black. He had pretended, for one whole year, to be passionately in love with a eunuch. Sometimes he and Mrs. Schiff would pretend for hours at a time to be honeybunnies. Why not pretend to be a Christian? (Especially if it brought in, theoretically, a hundred bucks a week and, more to the point, a chance to perform in physical and social dimensions that suited the size of his voice and his art, which Marble Collegiate did to a tee). Why not say he was saved, if it might make someone else happy and did him no harm? Wasn’t that all most priests and ministers do? He’d never been the type, when people asked how he was feeling and he was feeling rotten, to say he felt rotten. He said he felt swell, and smiled, and he expected others to do the same. That was simply civilization, and so far as he could see, Christianity was just the logical outcome of such principles, the most devious and effective way ever discovered of being polite.

Mrs. Schiff, an old-fashioned atheist, didn’t approve of his conversion, as he styled it, and they had some of their most enjoyable arguments on this topic. She said it wasn’t intellectually self-respecting to say you believed (for instance) that someone could die and then return to life, which was what Christianity boiled down to. It was all right for people who really did believe such nonsense to say so; it was even good that they did, since it gave one fair warning as to the limits of their rationality. But in Daniel it was charlatanry pure and simple. Daniel replied that nothing was pure and simple, least of all himself.

Once, when Mrs. Schiff had been dead-certain about a fact of music history (Had Schumann written a violin concerto?), he made a wager with her, the forfeit of which was that she must accompany him to Marble Collegiate on a Sunday of his choosing. She was wrong. He chose a Sunday when Van Dyke was to preach on the immortality of the soul, and Daniel would be singing in Bach’s Actus Tragicus. It was not, as it turned out, one of Van Dyke’s best efforts, and the choir as well (including, alas, Daniel) had bitten off rather more than it could chew. Mrs. Schiff was commiserating, but otherwise unmoved.

“Of course,” she conceded, “one must be grateful to churches for providing free concerts this way, but it does smack a little of the soup kitchen, doesn’t it? One has to sit there for the sermon and the rest of it for the sake of a very little music.”

“But that isn’t the point,” Daniel insisted, somewhat testily, for he was still smarting from the mess he’d made of “Bestellet dein Haus.” “People don’t go to church for the sake of the music. They go there to be with the other people who go there. Being physically present, that’s the crucial thing.”

“Do you mean that it’s a kind of proof that there is a community and they’re part of it? I should think a concert would do that just as well, or better, since one can talk in the intervals. And the music, if you’ll forgive my saying so, would probably be a touch more professional.”

“I stank, I know that, but my singing, good or bad, is irrelevant.”

“Oh, you weren’t the worst offender. Far from it. You’re learning to fake the notes you can’t reach very ably. But what is the point, Daniel? In a word.”

“In a word, hope.”

“Well then, in a few words.”

“What was the cantata about? Death. The fact that that is what’s in store for all of us, and that there’s no way round it, and we all know there’s no way round it.”

“Your Mr. Van Dyke maintains differently.”

“And so did you, just by being there. That’s the point. Everyone has doubts. Everyone despairs. But when you’re there in church, surrounded by all those other people, it’s hard not to believe that some of them don’t believe something. And by our being there we’re helping them believe it.”

“But what if all of them are thinking the same as us? What if none of them are bamboozled and are just offering their moral support to others, who similarly aren’t bamboozled?”

“It’s a matter of degree. Even I’m bamboozled, as you say, a little. Even you are, if not in church, then when you’re listening to music, and even more when you’re writing your own. What’s the difference, ultimately, between Bunny Honeybunny’s song and Bach’s saying, ‘Come, sweet hour of death, for my soul is fed with honey from the mouth of the lion’?”

“The chief difference is that Bach’s is immeasurably greater music. But I should say another difference is that my tongue is firmly in my cheek concerning the philosophic views of honeybunnies.”

“Your tongue isn’t entirely in your cheek, though, and perhaps Bach’s isn’t completely out of his. He has ambiguous moments.”

“But he knows, he says, that his Redeemer liveth. ‘Ich weiss,’ sagt Bach, ‘dass mein Erloser lebt.’ And I know that mine doesn’t.”

“So you say.”

“And what do you say, Daniel Weinreb?”

“More or less the same as you, I suppose. But I sing something else.”

It was the night before Christmas, and the night before the night before Daniel was to appear in the Off-Broadway première of Honeybunny Time. Dreams, it seems, really do come true. But he was not happy, and it was hard to explain to Boa, who was the underlying cause of this unhappiness, why this should be so. There she sat, propped up in her little cot, a Christmas angel complete with a halo and a pair of wings from Mrs. Galamian’s stock of costumes for the first-act dream-ballet that had been scrapped during the last week of rehearsals. Yet the problem was easily stated. He was broke, and while his prospects had never been brighter, his income had rarely been less. He’d had to leave the Metastasio two months ago, time enough to exhaust the little money he’d put away to tide him through an emergency. But this was the one emergency he hadn’t reckoned with — success. Rey and Tauber were both adament as to receiving their full cuts. Daniel had done the arithmetic, and even if Honeybunny Time didn’t just fizzle right out, Daniel’s net earnings from it would still fall short of what was required at the heady rate of some three hundred dollars a month. And if the show were a smash, he wouldn’t do any better, since he’d had to sign over his interest in the book for the chance to play Bunny. That, as Irwin Tauber had explained, was show business. But try and explain that to a corpse.

“Boa,” he said, touching one of the nylon wings. But he didn’t know where to go from there. To talk to her at all was an admission of faith, and he didn’t want to believe, anymore, that she might be alive, and listening, and biding her time. If she were, it was cruel of her not to return. If she weren’t, if she’d left this world forever, as she’d left this husk of herself, this disposable container, then there could be no harm in his ceasing to care for it as well. “Boa, I’m not giving up another fifteen years. And I’m not going to peddle my ass again. I suppose I could ask Freddie Carshalton to loan me something, but I’m not going to. Or Shelly Gaines, who probably doesn’t have it to spare. What I am going to do is I’m going to call your father. If that’s wrong, then I’ll just have to bear the guilt. Okay?”

The halo glinted.

“If you want to come back later, you’ll have to come back to him. Maybe that’s what you’ve been waiting for. Am I right?”

He leaned forward, careful not to touch the tube that snaked into her left nostril, and kissed the lips that were legally dead. Then he got up and went out into the hall and down the hall to Mrs. Schiff’s office, where the telephone was.

In all these years he’d never forgotten the phone number for Worry.

An operator answered at the third ring. He said he wanted to speak to Grandison Whiting. The operator asked his name. He said only that it was a personal call. The operator said she would give him Mr. Whiting’s secretary.

Then a new voice said, “Miss Weinreb speaking.”

Daniel was too taken aback to reply.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” he echoed, forgetting to use the deeper voice with which he’d addressed the operator. “Miss Weinreb?”

Which Miss Weinreb? he wondered. His secretary!

“I’m afraid Mr. Whiting isn’t available at the moment. I’m his secretary. Can I take a message?”

In the other room Daniel could hear the telephone ringing. But it couldn’t be the telephone. It must be the doorbell. In which case Mrs. Schiff would answer it.

“Which Miss Weinreb would that be?” he asked cautiously. “Cecelia Weinreb?”

“This is Aurelia.” She sounded miffed. “Who is this, please?”

“It’s a personal call. For Mr. Whiting. It concerns his daughter.”

There was a long silence. Then Aurelia said, “Which daughter?” Hearing her dawning surmise, he became uneasy.

At that moment Mrs. Schiff burst into the office. In one hand she held the halo from Boa’s head. He knew, just by looking, what she was going to tell him. He replaced the phone in its cradle.

It hadn’t been the doorbell.

“It’s Boa,” he said. “She’s come back.”

Mrs. Schiff nodded.

Boa was alive.

Mrs. Schiff put the halo down on top of the desk, where it rocked unsteadily. Her hands were shaking. “You’d better go see her, Daniel. And I’ll phone for a doctor.”

19

A week after it opened at the Cherry Lane, Honeybunny Time was transferred uptown to the St. James Theater, right across the street from the Metastasio, and Daniel was a star. His name, his own name, the name of Daniel Weinreb, was spelled out on the marquee in winking lights. His face, dark as molasses, could be seen on posters all over the city. His songs were on the radio day and night. He was rich and he was famous. Time featured him on its cover, rabbit ears and all, under a 36-point rainbow-shaped and hued headline asking, portentously: BEL CANTO — IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Inside, in an exclusive article, Mrs. Schiff told something like the story of his life.

It was not his doing. Or perhaps it was. The phonecall to Worry had been automatically recorded and traced by Whiting’s security system. At his sister’s suggestion, the voice-prints of the call were compared with those of tapes Daniel had made with Boa in days gone by.

The police appeared at the door of Mrs. Schiff’s apartment at the very moment the curtain was going up on Honeybunny Time. Mrs. Schiff, presciently indisposed, was on hand to receive them. Boa had already been taken off to a clinic to recuperate from the effects of her fifteen-year-long coma and so was spared the first onslaught. When the police had finally been persuaded that only Daniel could supply them with the name of the clinic and had been dispatched to the Cherry Lane, Mrs. Schiff, seeing that the cat was, in any case, out of the bag, decided to cash in her chips. With Irwin Tauber’s help she got through to the editor-in-chief of Time, and before Daniel had sung the closing reprise of “Honeybunnies Go to Heaven,” she had struck a deal, giving Time exclusive rights to her own 4,000-word version of the “Romance of Daniel Weinreb.” There was no way, after that, that Honeybunny Time wasn’t going to be a hit.

Daniel was furious, but also, secretly, delighted. Even so, he determined, for form’s sake, to be angry with Mrs. Schiff for having so profitably violated his confidences. Of course, it had only been a matter of time, once his phonecall to Worry had been traced, before Daniel was apotheosized; a matter of hours, probably, as Mrs. Schiff tried, through Irwin, to explain. And to do her credit, her version of the past three years was as skillful a whitewash as any press agent could have contrived. According to Mrs. Schiff Daniel’s relationship with Rey had been based on mutual esteem and a shared devotion to the glory of the human voice. Her story dwelt mainly on Daniel’s undying love for his wife, his struggles against manifold adversities (she included his recipe for bread pudding), the discovery of his buried talent and (this last being intended, surely, as a private poke in the ribs) his Christian faith. Nowhere did she state anything that wasn’t strictly true, but it was scarcely the whole truth; nor — such were her powers as a storyteller — did the whole truth ever make much headway, once it did begin to leak out, via Lee Rappacini and a few other old friends. The media doesn’t like to waste its heroes, and that’s what Daniel had become.

Boa was preserved from most of this within the heavily guarded portals of the Betti Bailey Memorial Clinic, an upper-crust, Westchester version of First National Flightpaths. At her own orders no one but Daniel and the Clinic’s staff were to be allowed into her room. He came there once a day in a rented limousine. While the limousine waited for the gates to be opened, the press would gather round with their cameras and their questions. Daniel would smile at them through the bullet-proof glass, which served the camera’s needs. As to the questions — Where had Boa been these many years? Why had she returned? What were her plans? — Daniel was as much in the dark as anyone, for they had yet to speak to each other. Usally she was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, and he would sit by her bed, arranging hecatombs of cut flowers and waiting for her to make the first move. He wondered how much of all he’d said over the last three years she’d been at hand to take in. He didn’t want to go through it all again, and in any case little of that was any longer to the point. The Boa who’d come back bore no resemblance to the living Boa he remembered. She was the same gaunt, hollow-eyed object that had Iain all those years, inert, on the other side of his room, whom to love was as impossible as if she had been a bundle of sticks. She seemed infinitely old and wasted. Her dark hair was streaked with gray. She did not smile. Her hands lay at her sides as though she had no interest in them, as though they were not hers but only a more cumbersome piece of bed linen. Once in these two weeks of visits she had opened her eyes to look at him, and then had closed them again, when she saw that he’d become aware of her attention.

Yet he knew she was capable of speech, for she’d given orders to the staff not to admit any visitors but Daniel. Even this small distinction was scarcely a balm to his heart when he knew, through Dr. Ricker, the director of the clinic, that no one, aside from the press had sought to be admitted. Once Boa’s miraculous return to life had become a matter of public interest, her father had made himself unavailable for comment. To the rest of the world Daniel and Boa may have been the love story of the century, but to Grandison Whiting they were gall and wormwood. He was not, Daniel supposed, a forgiving sort of person.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s bandwagon rolled onwards and upwards, a triumphal chariot, a juggernaut of success. Five of his songs were at the top of the charts. The two most popular, “Flying” and “The Song Does Not End,” were songs he’d written in the sauna of Adonis, Inc., back before any of this had begun. Except, logically, it must have begun then, or even before. Perhaps it all went back to that spring day on County Road B, when he’d been stopped in his tracks by that devastating inkling of some unknown glory. Sometimes he’d look up at the issue of Time that he’d nailed to the wall of his room at the Plaza with four stout nails and wonder if that had been the actual, foredestined shape of the vision that had loomed behind the clouds that day — that dark face with its animal ears and the dumb question rainbowed over it. He would have preferred a more inward and transfiguring glory to have been intended, as who would not, but if this was what the moving finger had writ, it would be churlish not to be grateful for benefits received — and received, and received.

The next rung of the ladder, the next plum to fall in his lap, was an hour-and-a-half special on ABC. A third of the program was to be numbers from Honeybunny Time; another third, a selection of bel canto arias and duets featuring the great Ernesto, with Daniel doing little more than waft, metaphorically, an ostrich-feather fan; then, after a medley of such personal favorites as “Old Black Joe” and “Santa Lucia,” learned in Mrs. Boismortier’s classroom, there was to be a recreation of “The March of the Businessmen” from Gold-Diggers of 1984 (with Jackson Florentine making a guest appearance), winding up with the inevitable “Flying,” in which an entire chorus was to be borne aloft on wires. Irwin Tauber, who had volunteered, with a shrewdness equal to his magnanimity, to reduce his commission to a standard ten percent, sold the package for three-and-a-half million dollars, of which Rey, in return for relinquishing his over-all slice of Daniel’s next seven years, was to receive a million and a half outright.

Midas-like, Daniel’s success affected everyone within touching distance. Rey, besides his million and a half, booked a tour through the Midwest. Rather, he expanded the tour he’d already been planning, for the whole country was, quite independently of Daniel, in the throes of a passion for all things musical, but especially for bel canto. Rey, a legend in his own right, had become by his association with Daniel exponentially more legendary, and his fees reflected it. Mrs. Schiff, too, had her share of these repletions. Besides the royalties rolling in from Honeybunny Time, the Metastasio had agreed, against all precedent, to present Axur, re d’Ormus as her original work, dispensing with the fiction that it was from the hand of Jomelli. She brought out her own long-playing record of Stories for Good Dogs. She opened a pet show at Madison Square Garden. She appeared on a list of the Ten Best-Dressed Women.

Perhaps the strangest consequence of Daniel’s celebrity was the cult that sprang up around not simply his myth but his image. His younger admirers, not content with mere passive adulation, determined to follow his darkling example and went out, in their thousands and soon their tens of thousands, and had themselves transformed into exact replicas of their idol — to the often considerable dismay of their thousands and tens of thousands of parents. Daniel became, by this means, a cause célèbre, a symbol of all that was most to be extolled or most to be abhorred in the new era, a real-life Honeybunny or the Anti-Christ, depending on whom you listened to. His face, on a million posters and record-sleeves, was the standard that the era lifted up in defiance of the age gone by. Daniel, at the center of all this commotion, felt as helpless as a statue borne aloft in a procession. His position gave him a wonderful view of the surrounding bedlam, but he had no idea at all where he was being carried. He loved every ridiculous minute, though, and hoped it would never stop. He started making notes for a new musical that he wanted to call Highlights of Eternity, or else Heads in the Clouds, but then one day he’d read through his notes and realized they didn’t make any sense. He had nothing to say. He only had to stand in the spotlight and smile. He had to pretend to be this fabulous creature, Daniel Weinreb. Nothing more was asked.

On an afternoon in February, on a day of bright and numbing cold, Boadicea opened her eyes and drew a deep breath that was partly a sigh and partly a yawn. Daniel didn’t dare so much as look toward her for fear of startling her back into the glades of her long silence. He went on staring at the facets of the stone in his ring, waiting for her mind to materialize before him in the form of words. At last the words arrived, faint and colorless. “Dear Daniel.” She seemed to be dictating a letter. He looked at her, not knowing how to reply. She didn’t look away. Her eyes were like porcelain, shining but depthless. “I must thank you for… the many flowers.” Her lips closed and tightened to signify a smile. The least movement, the blinking of her eyelids, seemed to require a conscious effort.

“You’re welcome,” he answered carefully. What does one say to a bird that decides to light on one’s finger? Hesitantly, he spoke of crumbs: “If there’s anything else I can bring you, Boa, just say the word. Anything that might help to pass the time.”

“Oh, it passes without help. But thank you. For so much. For keeping this body of mine alive. It still seems strange. Like—” She turned her head to one side, then the other. “—a pair of very stiff shoes. But they’re getting broken in. Day by day. I practise. I forge new habits. This morning, for the first time, I practised smiling. It suddenly seemed important. They didn’t want me to have a mirror, but I insisted.”

“I saw your smile,” he noted weakly.

“It’s not very authentic yet, is it? But I’ll get the hang of it soon enough. Speech is much more difficult, and I already speak very clearly, do I not?”

“Like a native. But don’t feel you have to. I mean, if it doesn’t feel comfortable yet. There’s plenty of time, and I’m a basically very patient person.”

“Indeed. The nurses say you have been a saint. They are, all three of them, in love with you.”

“Tough luck. I’m already taken.” Then, abashed: “That’s not to say… I mean, I don’t expect, after all this time…”

“Why not? Isn’t it the best thing to do with bodies when you have them? So I seem to recall.” She practised her smile, with no greater success than before. “But I agree, it would be premature. I have been amazed, though, how quickly it all does come back. The words, and the way they try to connect with more meanings than they ever possibly will. As a fairy, one learns to do without them, by and large. But that was the reason I came back.”

“I’m afraid I lost track of that. What was the reason you came back?”

“To talk to you. To tell you you must learn to fly. To carry you off, so to speak.”

He winced, visibly.

She went on in the same evangelical vein. “You can, Daniel. I know there was a long time when you couldn’t. But you can now.”

“Boa, I’ve tried. Believe me. Too many times.”

“Precisely: too many times. You’ve lost faith in yourself, and naturally that gets in the way. But before I returned to this body I watched you. For days, I don’t know how many, I watched you sing. And it was there, all that you need. It was there in the very words of one of the songs. Honey from the mouth of the lion. If you’d been using a machine, you would have taken off any number of times.”

“It’s good of you to say so. But I’m sorry that was your reason for having come back. It’s a bit of a lost cause, I’m afraid.”

Boa blinked. She lifted her right hand and, as she looked at it, the first flicker of distinct expression stirred the muscles of her face. It was an expression of distaste.

“I didn’t come back for any other reason, Daniel. Though I have no wish to have to deal with my father, that was a secondary consideration. Your threat made me return a little sooner possibly. But I never thought, and surely had no desire, to begin this… circus.”

“I’m sorry about the fuss. It hasn’t been my doing, though I guess I haven’t exactly resisted it either. I enjoy circuses.”

“Enjoy what you can, by all means. I’ve enjoyed myself largely enough, these fifteen years and more. And I shall again.”

“Ah! You mean, you already intend… When you’ve got back the strength… ?”

“To take off again? Yes, of course — as soon as I can. What other choice can there be, after all? It is, as my father might say, a business proposition. Here one finds, at most, only a little pleasure; there, there is only pleasure. Here, if my body perishes, I must perish with it; when I am there, the body’s death will cease to concern me. My care, then, is for my safety. Why should I be trapped in the collapse of a burning building, when all that is required to escape it is that I walk out the door?”

“Ma’am, you preach a powerful sermon.”

“You’re laughing at me. Why?”

He threw up his hands in a gesture of self-parody that had become as automatic as the inflections of his voice. “Am I? If I am, then it’s at myself that I laugh. All you say is true. So true it seems ridiculous that I’m still around, discussing the matter.”

“It does seem so strange to me. It isn’t just you — it’s all these people. Most of them don’t even try. But maybe that will change. You must try, at least.” Her voice seemed oddly out of tune, when she spoke with any emphasis. “Perhaps our circus may do some good, after all. You are so much in the public eye. You can set an example.”

He snorted in self-derision, then felt ashamed. She didn’t know his reasons; he hadn’t told her what he’d done just that afternoon.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with grudging penitence. “I was laughing at myself again. I did something today I shouldn’t have done, that I’m already regretting.”

“Was that a laugh, before? It didn’t seem so.” She didn’t ask what he’d done. Her eyes seemed incurious.

But he didn’t let that stand in the way of his confession. “You see,” he explained, “I said, in an interview this afternoon, that I could fly. That I love to fly. That I’m always just zipping off into the ether, which I described in abundant detail.”

“So? I see no harm in saying that. You can fly.”

“But I never have, Boa. I never, never, never have, and despite your glad tidings I’ve got a feeling that I never will. But after what I said today, I’m going to have to go on pretending for the whole fucking world.”

“Why did you say it then?”

“Because my agent has been pressuring me to for weeks. For my image. Because it’s what people expect of me, and you’ve got to give them their money’s worth. But I’ll tell you where I draw the line. I’m not going to pretend to take off in the middle of a concert. That is just too gross. People wouldn’t believe it.”

She looked at him as though from the depth of a cold, clear pond. She had not believed what he’d said.

“And because, finally, I want people to think that I can. Because, if I can’t, then I’m no better than Rey.”

“How strange. Your words make less and less sense. I think, perhaps, if you would leave now… ? I meant to answer all the questions you’ve been so kind as not to ask. I know I owe that to you, but it’s a long story, and I’m tired now. And confused. Could we put it off till tomorrow?”

He shrugged, and smiled, and felt resentful. “Sure. Why not?” He stood up, and took a step toward her bed, and then thought better of it.

She looked straight at him and asked, tonelessly, “What do you want, Daniel?”

“I was wondering if I should kiss you. As a matter of courtesy.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, really. It’s my body, you see. I don’t like it. I’m not, in a sense, quite alive yet. Once I’ve begun to enjoy food again — perhaps then.”

“Fair enough.” He lifted his coat from the hook on the back of the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she agreed.

When he was almost out the door she called him back, but in so weak a voice he wasn’t certain, till he’d looked around, that he’d heard her speak his name.

“On second thought, Daniel, would you kiss me? I don’t like my body. Perhaps I’ll like yours.”

He sat beside her on the bed. He picked up her limp hand from where it lay on the unruffled sheet and placed it on his neck. Her fingers held to his skin infirmly, with only enough strength to support the weight of her arm.

“Does it turn you off,” he asked, “my being a phoney?”

“Your skin? It seems an odd thing for you to have done, but it all seems odd, the way people act. Why did you do it?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know very little about you, Daniel.”

He put his hands about her head. It seemed insubstantial, the wispy, graying hair like ashes. There was no tension, no resistance in her neck — nor, it would seem, anywhere in her body. He inclined his head till their lips were touching. Her eyes were open but unfocused. He moved his lips by fractions of inches, as though he were whispering into her mouth. Then he parted her lips with his tongue, pushed past her teeth. His tongue nudged hers. There was no reply. He continued to move his tongue over and around hers. There began to be a resisting tension in her neck. She closed her eyes. With a parting nip of her lower lip, he disengaged.

“Well?” he asked. “What does it do for you?”

“It was… I was going to say frightening. But interesting. It made you seem like an animal. Like something made of meat.”

“That’s why they’re called carnal relations, I guess.” He lowered her head to the pillow and replaced her hand at her side. He forebore to say what she put him in mind of: a funeral urn.

“Really? It’s not the way I remember it. But that is what ‘carnal’ means, isn’t it? Is that what it’s usually like? For you, I mean?”

“There’s generally a little more response. There have to be two animals involved, if you want results.”

Boa laughed. It was rusty, and she couldn’t sustain it, but it was a real laugh.

“I laughed,” she said, in her next breath. “And I’m so…” She raised both her hands and pressed the fingers together. “… inexpressibly relieved!”

“Well, that’s anatomy for you.”

“Oh, not just physically relieved. Though perhaps that is the more important aspect, at last. But I’d worried so. About having no feelings. No earthly feelings. I didn’t think I’d be able to sing again, without feelings. But if I can laugh… You see?”

“Good. I’m glad you can laugh. Maybe it was my kiss that did the trick. Just like the fairy tale. Almost like it, anyhow.”

She let her hands rest, one atop the other, on her stomach. “I don’t feel tired now. I’ll tell you about my life in the beyond, if you like.”

“So you won’t have to wait till tomorrow to leave?”

She smiled, and it was, though faint, a real smile, not the simulation she’d been practicing. “Oh, you’ll have months of me. How can I sing in this condition? And months are a long time here, aren’t they? They’re not, in the beyond. Time is quite beside the point.”

“Fifteen years just go by in a flash?”

“Thirteen did. That’s what I’m trying to explain.”

“I’m sorry. Tell your story. I won’t interrupt.” He put his coat on the hook, pulled the chair a bit closer to her bed, and sat down.

“I was caught in a trap, you see. The first night, after I left my body, I was so… delighted.” She spoke with a peculiar fervor, with the sudden, illumined lucidity of martyrdom. The present, flesh-encumbered moment vanished in the blaze of a remembered noon. “I flew out of the hotel, and up, and the city, beneath me, became a kind of slow, ponderous, magnificent firework display. It was a cloudy night, without stars, so that, very soon, the city became the stars, some still, some moving. The longer I looked, the clearer it became, and vaster too, and more orderly, as though each node of light were laboring to explain itself, to tear itself up out of the darkness and… and kiss me. Though not like your kiss, Daniel. Really, I don’t think it can be explained. It was such an immensity of beauty.” She smiled, and held up her hands to mark off some twelve inches. “Bigger than this.”

“And you didn’t want to leave it in order to come back to the hotel and nurse my wounded ego. That’s natural enough.”

“I did though, reluctantly. You were still singing, and I could tell you wouldn’t make it. You weren’t even near the edge. You are now. But you weren’t then.”

“Thanks for the Band-Aid. But do go on. You returned to the starry night. And then.”

“The hotel was near the airport. The planes coming in and out seemed, in a comic way, irresistible. Like elephants dancing in a circus. And the sound they made was like Mahler, pulverized and homogenized. It seemed objectively fascinating, though I suppose there was a fascination, underlying that, of a different nature. For what I did that night was follow one of these planes back to Des Moines. It was the same plane we’d come in, as a matter of fact. From Des Moines it was easy to find Worry. I was there by morning. I knew you’d be furious that I wasn’t back yet. I knew I’d made us miss our flight to Rome.”

“Providentially.”

“None of that mattered. I was determined to see my father. To see him as he really was. That had always been my obsession, and that part of me hadn’t changed.”

“So did you get to see him naked?”

“It was moral nakedness I was after.”

“I know that, Boa.”

“No, I never did. I saw him get up on the day after our wedding, eat breakfast, talk to Alethea about the stables, and then he went into his office. I tried to follow. And never made it, of course. I was caught in the fairy-trap in the corridor.”

“You must have known it was there.”

“I didn’t believe it could harm me. There didn’t seem to be any limit to what I could do. I felt like some giant unstoppable wave. I believed I could have anything I wanted just by wanting it. Flying is like that. The only thing was, when I saw the trap, or heard it, rather, for one’s first sense of it is of a kind of siren song played on a tuning fork, far, far away and posing no possible danger… when I heard it, that was what I wanted, what my soul lusted for. Whoever designed the thing is someone who has flown, who knows the sweetest sensations of flight and how to magnify them and draw them out. The damned machine is irresistible.”

“A little rotary engine that spins round and round like a clothes dryer?”

“Oh, it is easy to resist the lure of ordinary machinery. As easy as refusing a piece of candy. But this bore no relation to anything except, possibly, the solar system itself. There were wheels within wheels, and sets of wheels within sets of wheels, in an infinite recession. One moved through them, flew through them, with a kind of mathematical exultation, a steady unfolding of ‘Eureka!’s, each one pitched, so to speak, an octave higher than the last.”

“It sounds better than television, I’ve got to admit.”

“It was like that too: a drama whose plot always became more interesting. Like a game of contract bridge that was, at the same time, a string quartet. Like a test you couldn’t fail, though it stretched you to your limit.”

“It must have been a great vacation.”

“They were the thirteen happiest years of my life.”

“And then?”

“The tv was turned off. I can still remember the dismay of that moment, as the thing ground down to a stop, and I became aware of where I was and what I’d done. I wasn’t alone, of course. There had been hundreds of us whirling in the same ring-dance, dosie-do, and then ker-plunk. The spell was broken, and there we were, reeling a little still, but beginning to remember. And wishing the dead machine would start up again and sweep us back up into its lovely gears.”

“Had your father turned it off then?”

“He? No, never. A mob had broken into Worry. A large mob by the look of the damage they’d been able to do. I never saw the fighting. By the time I’d mustered some purpose and worked my way out of the trap, the National Guard was in charge. So I know nothing about my rescuers, neither their reasons nor what became of them. Perhaps they’d all been killed.”

“It was never in the news.”

“My father doesn’t like publicity.”

“When was that?”

“The spring before last. Before the trees had budded.”

Daniel nodded. “Things were pretty desperate in general around then. That was when—” He stopped short.

“When my aunt died, were you going to say? I know about that. In fact, I was there. I was here too, of course. I didn’t really think you’d have wanted, or been able, to keep my body alive all that time, but I had to find out. I went to the hotel. There’s a kind of cemetery on the roof, with the names of all the missing, and where we must go to find our bodies. Once I’d seen what I’d become, my only wish was to get as far from it as I could. It seemed another kind of trap. I didn’t want to become… meat. I still felt, in a way, new-born, unfledged. For all its fascinations, one doesn’t grow inside a trap. My own sense of it was that only a few weeks had gone by, the weeks I’d spent in Amesville after I’d got out of the trap.”

“Pursuing your father still?”

“No. He’d changed. He was older, of course, and also, I thought, smaller. No, it wasn’t on his account I lingered there. It was the landscape. That was as fine as ever. The skies and fields, they seemed my real parents, my source. I watched the first shoots force their way into the light, and each one was like a parable. I was a bird. In the trap I had rushed from complexity to further complexity. Now I became simpler, slower. Though I would still be overtaken by sudden alarms. One of them brought me to New York, and when I’d found this body, a worse alarm drove me away. I went to London, and after my aunt’s death, fled again, this time to Vilars, where I’d been sent to school. I fell in love again with the mountains and lived an eagle’s life. There were many of us there, and I began to learn, from the others, that there were forces of beauty and of… attraction… greater than the earth’s. As you leave it, as you mount above the clouds, above the winds, you shrink into a pinpoint of… it isn’t thought, it isn’t sentience… of purpose, call it. But a purpose so pure, so… unearthly… And then, at a certain height, you cease to be finite at all. There is no distinction of you and them, of here and there, of mind and matter.”

“What is there then? Anything?”

“One joins a kind of conscious sphere with the earth at its center, and the sphere revolves. It’s what, in a way, the trap had imitated.”

“Is it real?”

“Who can say? It seems, at the time, the only reality. But there’s something beyond even that. What I describe is the view from the threshold, as it were. I knew that, but I didn’t take the next step. If I had, I wouldn’t have returned. That’s quite certain. Something always held me back. The present delight. But not just that. That other gravity: of the earth and its fields, of my body. This body.”

“Jesus.” Daniel shook his head in mournful admiration. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

“You needn’t be. I did what I had to, no more. I wasn’t ready to go farther than I did. I hadn’t made a proper farewell. Now I have.”

“You don’t want me to come back here again?”

“Did my words betray me again? Come back again if you feel you need to. But not on my account. I’ve told you as much as I know how to tell.”

Daniel accepted this with the politest of grimaces. Then, smiling at the absurdity of the question that had popped into his head but seeing that it was, by its very irrelevance and triviality, a small revenge for her own Olympian betrayals, he said: “Before I go then, there’s one dumb question I’d like to ask you. Can you guess what it is?”

“About your family?”

“No. Time Magazine filled me in about them. My father’s retired and a bit senile. My mother runs a restaurant, and considers me an ingrate. Aurelia works for your father, and like him, has nothing to say about me. My other sister is married and has taken over my father’s dental practice. My question was dumber than that. What did you sing the night you took off? Did you get off on the first song you sang? Was it as easy as that?”

“I remembered the dream you’d told me about, the dream you had at Spirit Lake. So I sang that song. It was the first thing that came into my head.”

“ ‘I am the captain of the Pinafore.’ You sang that?”

“And not even all the way through.”

Daniel laughed. It seemed splendidly unfair.

“I’m sorry I asked. Well… good-bye, then.” He took his coat from the hook on the door.

“Good-bye, Daniel. You will fly, won’t you?”

He nodded, and closed the door.

He did, of course, return many times to the Clinic, and Boa never failed to be cordial. Daniel felt obliged to give his own account of the intervening years, though he doubted whether his story held any real interest for her. Mostly when they talked it was about music. Day by day she grew stronger, until at last she was strong enough to attempt departure. She offered to let him be present on the day, just as she might have asked him to see her off at a dock. He declined to do so. She had been certain she’d succeed and she did. Two weeks after she had left her body, medical support was withdrawn, according to her written instructions. Her body continued its automatic processes for another few days, and then it stopped.

Early in July her ashes were spread, secretly, from a low-flying plane, over the fields of her father’s estate.