Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

“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?

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.”