Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

The guard reached into Daniel’s pocket and took out the disc.

Daniel lowered his hands. The guard seemed to consider whether to take offense. Instead he went into the gatehouse with the disc, and for five minutes Daniel saw no more of him. Finally he set his bike on its kickstand and went to the door of the gatehouse. Through the glass he could see the guard talking on the phone. The guard gestured for him to go back to his bike.

“Is something wrong?” Daniel shouted through the glass.

The guard opened the door and handed the phone to Daniel with a peculiar kind of smile. “Here, he wants to talk to you.”

“Hello,” Daniel said into the grill of the mouthpiece.

“Hello,” replied a pleasant, purring baritone. “There seems to be a problem. I assume this is Daniel Weinreb that I’m speaking to.”

“This is Daniel Weinreb, yes.”

“The problem is this, Daniel. Our security system insists on identifying you as, probably, an escaped prisoner. The guard is understandably reluctant to admit you. In fact, under the circumstances, he hasn’t the authority to do so.”

“Well, I’m not an escaped prisoner, so that should solve your problem.”

“But it doesn’t explain why the security system, which is preternaturally sensitive, should continue to declare that you are carrying a Pole-Williams lozenge of the type used by the state’s prison system.”

“Not the lozenge. Just the housing for it.”

“Ah-ha. Our system isn’t up to making such nice distinctions, apparently. It’s none of my business, of course, but don’t you think it would be wiser — or at least more convenient — to have it taken out? Then this sort of confusion wouldn’t happen.”

“You’re right — it is none of your business. Now, would you please buzz me in, or do I have to have surgery first?”

“By all means. Let me speak to the guard again, would you.”

Daniel handed the phone to the guard and went back to his bicycle. As soon as he came nearer the gatehouse, the hooter started in again, but this time it was switched off.

The guard came out of the gatehouse and said, “Okay. Just go down the road. The Whitings’ entrance is the one with the wrought iron gates. There’s another guard there, but he’s expecting you.”

Daniel nodded, smug with small triumph.

Alethea, at the base of the wind pylon, signaled with her scarf to Boadicea on the summit. Since their quarrel Alethea had put on a riding habit and looked more than ever the belle dame sans merci .

Boadicea waved back. She didn’t want to come down, but Alethea must have had some reason for being so persistent, and anyway she did want to come down since her face and her fingers were numb with cold. The wind and the view had served the simultaneous purpose of calming her down and lifting her up. She could return to earth and talk to Alethea in a spirit of no more than sisterly combativeness.

“I thought,” said Alethea, disdaining to shout but waiting until Boadicea was quite close by, “that your story of having invited that boy here was a complete fabrication. But he’s come, on his bicycle, and there seems to be some question whether he’s to be allowed through the gate. I thought you should know.”

Boadicea was taken aback. Alethea’s action too much resembled ordinary courtesy for her to take exception to it. “Thank you,” she had to say, and Alethea smiled.

“I gave him a disc,” Boadicea fretted.

“They must have thought he looked suspicious. He does to me.”

Inside the stairwell, on the next landing down, was a phone. Boadicea dialled the gatehouse. The guard said that Daniel had already gone through, on her father’s say-so.

Alethea was waiting for her by the elevator. “Seriously, Bobo…”

“Didn’t you say, less than an hour ago, that my biggest problem was that I was always too serious?”

“Yes, of course, but seriously: what can you see in this Weinreb boy? Is it because he was in prison? Do you think that’s glamorous? ”

“That has precisely nothing to do with it.”

“I’ll allow he has tolerable good looks—”

Boadicea raised her eyebrows challengingly. Daniel’s looks deserved more than a five on anyone’s scale of ten.

“—but, after all, he does represent the lower depths, doesn’t he?”

“His father’s a dentist.”

“And from what I’ve heard not even a particularly good one.”

“From whom did you hear that?”

“I forget. In any case, good or bad: a dentist! Isn’t that enough? Didn’t you learn anything in Switzerland?”

“Indeed I did. I learned to value intelligence, taste, and breeding — the qualities I admire in Daniel.”

“Breeding!”

“Yes, breeding. Don’t provoke me to comparisons.”

The elevator arrived. They had captured one of the maids, who’d been trying to go down to the kitchen on 2. They rode down in silence until she got off. Boadicea pressed G.

Alethea sighed. “I think you’re being very foolish. And, come the day that you finally do drop him, very cruel.”

“Who is to say, Alethea, that that day will ever come?”

She’d said it only to be provoking, but hearing the words spoken, she wondered if they might conceivably be true. Was this the beginning of her real life? (As against the provisional life she’d been leading up to now.)

“Oh, Bobo. Really! ”

“Why not?” Boadicea demanded, a trifle too emphatically. “If we’re in love.”

Alethea giggled, with complete sincerity. And shook her head, by way of saying good-bye, and set off down the hall in the other direction, toward the stables.

It was, Boadicea had to admit, an enormous “if.” She loved talking with Daniel, she loved looking at him, for he had the sort of features that bear contemplation. But love? Love, in the sense commemorated by centuries of books and operas and films?

Once, when she’d followed him about on his paper route, they had sat snuggling together in a broken-down car in a dark garage. It had seemed, for those fifteen minutes, the supreme happiness of her life. To be warm. To relax in that utter anonymity. To savor the silences and smells of a stranger’s garage — rust, dry leaves, the ghosts of ancient motor oils. They’d talked in a dreamy way of going back to the golden age of V-8 engines and superhighways and being two totally average teenagers in a movie about growing up. A lovely pastoral moment, certainly, but scarcely proof of their being in love.

She wondered if Daniel ever wondered whether they were in love; or whether they would be, some day. She wondered if she could get up the nerve to ask him, and what he would say if she did, for he could hardly come right out and say no, the thought had never crossed his mind. While she was still in the midst of her wonderings, there he was, with his bicycle, on the raked gravel of the crescent. The first snowflakes of the year were alighting on his beautiful black hair. His nose and forehead, his cheekbones and his chin were straight out of the most arrogantly lovely Ghirlandaio in all the museums of the world.

“Daniel!” she called out, bounding down the steps, and from the way he smiled at her in reply she thought that maybe it was possible that they were already in love. But she understood, as well, that it would be wrong to ask, or even to wonder.

Grandison Whiting was a tall, spare-limbed, thin-faced, pilgrimish man who stood in violent contradiction to his own flamboyantly bushy beard, a beard of the brightest carrot-orange, a beard that any pirate could have gloried in. His suit was puritanically plain, but across the muted check of the waistcoat hung a swag of gold chain so heavy as to seem actually serviceable in conjunction, say, with manacles or fetters. And glinting within the cuffs of his coat were cufflinks blazoned with diamonds larger than any that Daniel had ever seen, even in the windows of the Des Moines branch of Tiffany’s, so that he seemed to wear, not his heart, but his checkbook on his sleeve.