Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

“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.”

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.”