Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

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.