On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I’d be the last person in the world to tell you to pass up a chance to earn the kind of money you earned last summer. It’s twice what you’re worth.”

  “And then some,” he agreed.

  “Besides which, there’s the experience.”

  “For sure, it’s a good experience.”

  “I meant it could lead to more of the same, numbskull. If you want to do that kind of work for a living, and God knows, in this day and age it’s about the only kind of work that has a guaranteed future.”

  “Mm. But it isn’t what I want. Not for ever.”

  “I didn’t suppose it was. So what it boils down to — pardon me for putting it so bluntly — is whether you want to take a big gamble.”

  “Gamble?”

  “Don’t make me spell it out, Danny. I am not a fool. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean.”

  “For heaven’s sake, I know that you and Miss Whiting aren’t performing duets down here all the time. You can hear that piano all over the house — when someone’s playing it.”

  “Are you complaining?”

  “Would it do any good? No, in fact, I think it’s wonderful that you two young people should have strong interests in common.” She grinned accusingly. “And what you choose to do down here is none of my business.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So I’ll say only this: nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “You think I should stay in town this summer.”

  “Let’s say I won’t reproach you for enjoying yourself a bit, if that’s what you want to do. And I’ll see that Abe doesn’t either.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not what you think, Mom. I mean, I like Boa and all, but we neither of us believe in… um…”

  “Matrimony?”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “Well, candidly, neither did I at your age. But anyone who crosses the street can be hit by a truck.”

  Daniel laughed. “Really, Mom, you’ve got it all turned round backwards. The way I see it, the real choice is whether I can afford to turn down the money Bob is offering for the sake of having a bit of fun.”

  “Money is a consideration, that’s so. No matter how nice they are, or how considerate, rich people will involve you in spending more than you can possibly afford. I sometimes think it’s their way of weeding the rest of us out. I say that from bitter experience.”

  “Mom, that’s not the case. I mean, there’s no way to spend that kind of money in Amesville. Much less, at Worry.”

  “Well, well. I’d love to be proven wrong. But if you should need a few dollars sometime, to tide you over, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That’s very sweet of you. I think.”

  Milly looked pleased. “One more word of advice, and I’ll leave you to the horns of your dilemma. Which is — I trust that one of you is taking suitable precautions.”

  “Um, yes. Usually.”

  “Always. With the rich, you know, things don’t work the same. If a girl finds herself pregnant, she can go off for a holiday and get rid of her embarrassment.”

  “Jesus, Mom, I hope you don’t think I’ve been planning to get Boa knocked up. I’m not stupid.”

  “A word to the wise. But if my back should ever be turned, you’ll find what you need in the upper left drawer of the chest-of-drawers. Lately, though this is strictly between us, I haven’t had much use for them.”

  “Mom, you’re too much.”

  “I do what I can.” She held up the coffee pot. “You want any?”

  He shook his head, then reconsidered and nodded, and finally decided against it and said no.

  Though she had been three times married, Miss Harriet Marspan seemed, at the age of thirty-seven the incarnation of Spinsterhood, its deity or patron saint, but at the huntress rather than the virgin-martyr end of the scale. She was a tall, sturdy-looking woman with prematurely gray hair and sharp, appraising gray eyes. She knew all her own good points and the basic skills of enhancing them, but nothing she could do could counteract the basic chill emanating from her as from the entrance to a food locker. Miss Marspan was oblivious to this, and acted on the assumption that she was rather a lot of fun. She had a silvery, if not contagious, laugh, a shrewd wit, perfect pitch, and unremitting powers of concentration.

  Boa had become her favorite neice during the term of her exile to Vilars, to which Miss Marspan, though not a skier, had made several visits at the height of the season. Additionally, Boa had twice spent the holidays with Miss Marspan at her Chelsea flat, being taken about to operas, concerts, and private musicals every night of her visit. At the dinner table of Lord and Lady Bromley (Bromley was an important television producer) Boa had sat between the composer Lucia Johnstone and the great castrato Ernesto Rey. And through it all they had pursued with endless patience, with infinite caution, with delectable subtlety, the one subject in which Miss Marspan chose to interest herself — musical taste.

  As to music per se, Boa thought that for a woman of such definite opinions Miss Marspan was oddly lacking in preferences. She could (for instance) make the finest discriminations among the various interpretations of a Duparc song but seemed to have little interest in the song itself, except as an arrangement of vowels and consonants to be produced in accordance with the rules of French phonetics. “Music,” she liked to say, “doesn’t mean a thing.” Yet the music she enjoyed most was Wagner’s, and she was a mine of information about the associated stage business she’d witnessed during different performances of the Ring. Daniel found this more disconcerting than Boa, who was used to similar equivocations from her father. Boa insisted that it must be simply a matter of age: after a while one took the basic amazement of art for granted, much as one might take for granted the rising of the sun in the morning, its setting in the evening. As a theory Daniel couldn’t fault this, but he wasn’t convinced either. He disliked and distrusted Miss Marspan, all the while he strained to make a good impression on her. In her presence he behaved as he would have behaved in a church, moving slowly, speaking deliberately, saying nothing that might contradict her established doctrines. Never, for instance, did he declare his deep-felt conviction that Raynor Taylor’s music was dust from the tomb; he deferred as well in the matter of Moravian hymns of Colonial America. He even started enjoying the hymn after a while. The Marspan Iowa Consort never did undertake anything Daniel thought of as serious music, which was both a disappointment and a relief. For all his practice and preparations in the past two years (more than two years now!) he knew he wasn’t ready for much more than the catches, ditties, jingles, and rounds that Miss Marspan, with the help of the library’s data-links, was so ingenious in unearthing from assorted music libraries around the country.

  Though he didn’t say so to Boa, not even after Miss Marspan had left, Daniel felt ashamed of himself. He knew that somehow he had cooperated in the subversion of his own principles. The excuse he’d offered himself at the time — that the hours of chit-chat with Miss Marspan had been so vacuous as to amount to no more than the silence he’d maintained in Mrs. Norberg’s classroom — was a crock of shit. What he’d done, plain and simply, was to suck up to her. It was true, then, about money: if you so much as rubbed shoulders with it, it began to corrupt you.

  One night, in disgust with himself, and wanting nothing more than to go back to being the person he’d been a year ago, he phoned Bob Lundgren to see if he could get his old job back, but of course it had long since been taken. Bob was drunk, as usual these days, and insisted on hanging on talking even though Daniel told him he couldn’t afford it. Bob made some digs, first about Daniel’s supposed deficits, then about Boa directly. You were supposed to suppose that he was trying to be good-humored in a locker-room way, but his jokes got more and more overtly malicious. Daniel didn’t know what to say. He just sat there, on the edge of his parents’ bed (that was where the phone was), holding the sweaty receiver, feeling worse and worse. A resentful
silence grew between them, as Daniel finally refused to pretend to be amused.

  “Well, Dan old boy, we’ll be seeing you,” Bob said at last.

  “Right.”

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “Oh, for sure,” said, Daniel, in a tone intended to be wounding.

  “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It was supposed to mean that that would give me lots of latitude. It was a joke. I laughed at all your jokes. You should laugh at some of mine.”

  “I didn’t think it was a very funny joke.”

  “Then we’re even.”

  “Fuck off, Weinreb!”

  “Have you heard the one about the nympho who married an alcoholic?”

  Before Bob could answer that one he hung up. Which was the end, pretty definitely, of that friendship. Such as it had been.

  One day, during the most ruthless part of August, and just after the twins had been packed off with a dozen other Brownies for their first taste of summer camp, Milly announced that she was being taken to Minneapolis for a full week of movies, shopping, and sybaritic sloth. “I’m tired,” she declared, “of swatting mosquitoes in a rented cabin while Abe goes off to stare at the ripples in the pond. It’s not my idea of a vacation. It never has been.” Daniel’s father, who had in fact been planning another fishing trip, gave in without even trying to negotiate a compromise. Unless, as seemed likely, the negotiations had already been handled off-stage and the official supper-time capitulation had been put on entirely for Daniel’s benefit. The upshot of his parents’ departure was that Daniel, who had often been a guest for lunch and dinner, was asked to stay at Worry for the whole week they were to be gone.

  He’d thought that by now he couldn’t be fazed, that he’d confronted enough of the place’s pomps and splendors, had touched and tasted them often enough that a more steady view would have no power over him. But he was fazed, and it did have considerable power. He was given the room next to Boa’s, which was still provided, from the era of Miss Marspan’s visit, with a prodigious sound system, including a horseshoe organ he could play (using earphones) at any hour of the day or night. The height of the ceiling as he sprawled in his bed, the more formidable height of the windows that rose to within inches of the mouldings, the view from these windows across a small forest of unblighted elms (the largest concentration of elm trees left in Iowa), the waxed glow of rosewood and cherry furnishings, the hypnotic intricacies of the carpets (there were three), the silence, the coolness, the sense of wishes endlessly, effortlessly gratified: it was hard to keep any psychological distance from such things, hard not to covet them. You were always being stroked, carressed, seduced — by the scent and slither of the soap, by the sheets on the bed, by the colors of the paintings on the walls, the same enamel-like colors that appeared, fizzing in his head, when he squeezed his eyes closed during orgasm: pinks that deepened to a rose, deliquescent blues, mauves and lavenders, celadon greens and lemon yellows. Like courtesans pretending to be no more than matrons of a certain elegance, these paintings, in their carved and gilded frames, hung on demask walls quite as though they were, as they declared, mere innocent bowls of fruit and swirls of paint. In fact, they were all incitements to rape.

  Everywhere you looked: sex. He could think of nothing else. He’d sit at the dinner table, talking about whatever (or, more likely, listening), and the taste of the sauce on his tongue became one with the taste of Boa an hour before when they’d made love, a taste that might be overwhelmed, all at once, by a spasm of total pleasure right there at the dinner table that would stiffen his spine and immobilize his mind. He would look at Boa (or, just as often, at Alethea) and his imagination would begin to rev until it had gone out of control, until there was nothing in his head but the image, immense and undifferentiated, of their copulation. Not even theirs, really, but a cosmic abstraction, a disembodied, blissful rhythm that even the flames of the candles obeyed.

  It was the same when they would listen to music. He had read, in some book of advice lent him by Mrs. Boismortier, that it was a bad idea to listen to too many records. The way to discover what any piece of music was about was to perform it yourself, or lacking that, to hear it performed live. The habit of listening to records was a form of self-abuse. But, ah, there is something to be said for the habit. Lord God, such music as they listened to that week! Such pleasures as they shared! Such flurries of fingers, such cadences and cadenzas, such amazing transitions to such sighs and smiles and secret sympathies suddenly made plain as in the most brilliant and luminous of mirrors!

  It dawned on him that this is what being in love was all about. This was why people made such a fuss over it. Why they said it made the world go round. It did! He stood with Boa on the roof of Worry’s tower and watched the sun rise above the green body of the earth and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy. He could not have explained how this was so, nor could he hold on for more than a moment to his highest sense of that enveloping Love, the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions. It was only a single moment, and it went.

  But every time they made love it was as though they were moving toward that moment again, slowly at first, then suddenly it would be there again in its immense, arisen majesty within them, and still the delirium swelled as they moved from height to effortless height, exalted, exulting, exiles from earth, set free from gravity and the laws of motion. It was heaven, and they had the keys. How could they have kept themselves from returning, even supposing they had wanted to?

  9

  Late on the last night of his sojourn at Worry, returning from Boa’s room to his own, Daniel was met in the hallway by Roberts, Mr. Whiting’s valet. In a confidential whisper Roberts said that Mr. Whiting would like to have a word with Daniel in his office. Would he come this way? It seemed useless to plead that he wasn’t properly dressed to visit Mr. Whiting, so off he went, in his bathrobe and slippers, to the drawing room in which he’d first taken tea with the family, then through a kind of lock connecting that room to the inner keep, a sealed corridor of whirling motors, winking lights, and eccentric clockwork contraptions. He wondered, walking through this fairy-trap, if it had ever actually served the purpose for which it had been built. Were there, lost in the perpetual rotary motion of these various whirligigs, or caught in the repeating decimal of some data-bank underfoot, snared souls forever unable to return to their flesh? To which question there could be no answer for anyone who entered, as he did now, corporeally.

  Grandison Whiting’s office was not like other rooms at Worry. It did not astonish. It was furnished with only ordinary office furniture of the better sort: glass bookcases, two wooden desks, some leather chairs. Papers littered every surface. A swivel lamp, the only one burning, was aimed at the door by which he’d come in (Roberts had not followed him through the fairy-trap), but even with the light in his eyes he knew that the man who sat behind the desk could not be Grandison Whiting.

  “Good evening, Daniel,” the man said, in what was unmistakably Grandison Whiting’s voice.

  “You’ve shaved off your beard!”

  Grandison Whiting smiled. His teeth, agleam in the subdued light, seemed the exposed roots of his skeleton. His entire face, without his beard, had the stark character of a memento mori.

  “No, Daniel, you see me now as I am. My beard, like Santa’s, is assumed. When I’m here quite by myself, it is a great relief to be able to take it off.”

  “It isn’t real?”

  “It’s quite real. See for yourself. It’s there in the corner, by the globe.”

  “I mean…” He blushed. He felt he was making a complete fool of himself, but he couldn’t help it. “I mean — why?”

  “That’s what I so much admire in you, Daniel — your directness. Do sit down — o
ver here, out of the glare — and I’ll tell you the story of my beard. That is, if you’re interested.”

  “Of course,” Daniel said, taking the proffered chair cautiously, so that his bathrobe wouldn’t part.

  “When I was a young man, a little older than yourself, and about to leave Oxford and return to the States, I had the good fortune to come across a novel in which the hero changes his character by buying and wearing a false beard. I knew that I would have to change my character shortly, for I would never be a credit to my position, as they say, until I’d learned to assert myself much more strenuously than I was accustomed to doing. I had tended to be reclusive in my college days, and while I’d learned a good deal concerning economic history, mostly forgotten since, I’d failed utterly to master the essential lesson that my father had sent me to Oxford to learn (and which he had learned there); namely, how to be a gentleman.

  “You smile, and you do well to smile. Most people, here, suppose that one becomes a gentleman by adopting what is called ‘good manners.’ Good manners, as you must know (for you’ve picked them up very quickly), are mainly an encumbrance. In fact, a gentleman is something else entirely. To be a gentleman is to get what you want with only an implicit threat of violence. America, by and large, has no gentlemen — only managers and criminals. Managers never assert themselves sufficiently, and are content to surrender their autonomy and most of the money they help to generate to us. In return they’re allowed the illusion of a guiltless life. Criminals, on the other hand, assert themselves too much and are killed by other criminals, or by us. As always, the middle way is best.” Whiting folded his hands with a consciousness of completion.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Whiting, but I still don’t quite see how wearing a, uh…”

  “How a false beard helped me be a gentleman? Quite simply. I had to act as though I weren’t embarrassed by my appearance. That meant, at first, I had to overact. I had to become, somehow, the sort of person who would actually have such a big bushy red beard. When I did act in that manner I found that people behaved much differently toward me. They listened more closely, laughed louder at my jokes, and in general deferred to my authority.”