On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Come, come,” Rey protested, still in good humor, “let’s have no more pretenses.”

  “Who’s pretending?”

  “Have it your way, idolo mio. But there was that letter — that can’t be denied — and I shall continue to keep it—” He laid his many-ringed hand on the handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket of his suit. “—here, next to my heart.”

  “Mr. Rey, that letter wasn’t from me. And I have no idea what it said.”

  With a coquettish glance Rey reached into the inner pocket of his suit, and removed a folded and much-frayed paper, which he placed beside Daniel’s coffee cup. “In that case, perhaps you’d like to read what it says.”

  He hesitated.

  “Or do you know it by heart?”

  “I’ll read it, I’ll read it.”

  Marcella’s letter was written on scented, floral-bordered notepaper in a schoolgirlish script embellished with a few cautious curlicues meant for calligraphy. Its message aspired to the grand manner in much the same way. “To my most dear Ernesto,” it began. “I love you! What more can I say? I realize that love is not possible between two beings so different as you and I. I am but a plain, homely girl, and even if I were as beautiful in reality as I am in my daydreams I don’t suppose that would make much difference. There would still be a Gulf between us. Why do I write, if it is useless to declare my love? To thank you for the priceless gift of your music! Listening to your godlike voice has given me the most important, the sublimest moments of my life. I live for music, and what music is there that can equal yours? I love you — it always comes back to those three little words, which mean so much. I… love… you!” It was signed, “A worshipper from afar.”

  “You think I wrote this glop?” Daniel asked, having read it through.

  “Can you look me in the eye and deny it?”

  “Of course I deny it! I didn’t write it! It was written by Marcella Levine, who is just what she says, a plain homely girl with a thing for opera singers.”

  “A plain homely girl,” Rey repeated with a knowing smile.

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Oh, I appreciate that. It’s my truth too, the truth of my Norma. But it’s rare for a young man of your nature to understand such riddles so clearly. I think you really may have the makings of an artist in you.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. What would I be doing—” He stopped short, on the verge of an irretrievable slight. It wouldn’t do to declare that no one in his right mind would write mash notes to a eunuch, when Rey evidently took such attentions for granted.

  “Yes?” Rey folded the note and replaced it, next to his heart.

  “Listen, what if I introduced you to the girl who wrote the note? Would that satisfy you?”

  “I am curious, certainly.”

  “She has a Tuesday subscription, and you’re singing next Tuesday, aren’t you?”

  “Sono Eurydice,” he said, in melting tones.

  “Then if you like, I’ll take you to her between the acts.”

  “But you mustn’t prepare her!”

  “It’s a promise. If I did, she might get cold feet and not show up.”

  “Tuesday, then. And shall we come here again after, for a bite?”

  “Sure. The three of us.”

  “That assumes, caro, that there are three of us.”

  “Just wait. You’ll see.”

  On Tuesday, at the intermission, Rey appeared in the lower lobby of the Metastasio, already decked out in the costume of Eurydice and seeming, even close up and without the lights assisting, a very sylph, all tulle and moonlight — albeit a sylph of the court rather more than of the country, with enough paste jewels to have equipped a small chandelier and enough powder on his face and wig to have sunk a thousand ships. Being so majestical, he moved with the freedom of a queen, parting the crowds before him as effectively as a cordon of police. He commandeered Daniel from his post at the orange juice stand, and together they mounted the grand staircase to the Grand Tier level, and then (to everyone’s wonder) went up the much less grand staircase to the balcony, where, as Daniel had been certain they would, they found Marcella at the edge of a group of the faithful. Seeing Daniel and Rey advancing upon her, she stiffened into a defensive posture, shoulders braced and neck retracted.

  They stopped before her. The group at whose edge Marcella had been standing now re-formed with her and her visitors at its center.

  “Marcella,” Daniel said, in a manner meant to assuage, “I’d like you to meet Ernesto Rey. Ernesto, may I present Marcella Levine.”

  Marcella dipped her head slowly in acknowledgement.

  Rey offered his slender hand, dazzling with false diamonds. Marcella, who was sensitive on the subject of hands, backed away, pressing knotted fists into the brown velvetine folds of her dress.

  “Daniel tells me, my dear, that it is to you that I am beholden for a letter I lately received.” You could almost hear the clavier underlining his recitativo, so ripe was his delivery.

  “Pardon me?” It was all she could manage.

  “Daniel tells me, my dear, that it is to you that I am beholden for a letter I lately received.” His reading of the line did not vary in any particular, nor could you tell, from his regal inflections, whether this statement portended thanks or reproof.

  “A letter? I don’t understand.”

  “Did you, or did you not, give this charming young man a letter for me, enclosed in a box of chocolates?”

  “No,” she shook her head emphatically, “I never.”

  “Because,” Rey went on, addressing the entire crowd that had gathered about them, “if it was your letter…”

  The long blonde braid wagged wildly in denial.

  “… I only wanted to say what a very kind, and warm, and wonderful letter it was, and to thank you for it, personally. But you tell me that you didn’t send it!”

  “No! No, the usher must have… confused me with someone else.”

  “Yes, that’s what he must have done. Well, my dear, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  Marcella bowed her head, as though to the block.

  “I hope you enjoy the second act.”

  There was an approving murmur from all the onlookers.

  “And now you must all excuse me. I have my entrance to make! Ben, my little trickster, I shall see you at eleven.” With which he spun round in a billow of tulle and made his way, royally, down the stairs.

  Daniel had changed out of his uniform into a ragtag sweater and a pair of jeans and would not have been allowed into Evviva il Coltello if he hadn’t been accompanying the great Ernesto. Then, to compound the offense, he told the waiter he wasn’t hungry and wanted nothing more than a glass of mineral water.

  “You really should take better care of yourself, caro,” Rey insisted, while the waiter still hovered in the background.

  “You know it was her,” Daniel said, in a furious whisper, resuming their conversation from the street.

  “In fact, I know it wasn’t.”

  “You terrified her. That’s why she denied it.”

  “Ah, but you see I was looking at her eyes. A person’s eyes always tell the truth. It’s as good as a lie detector test.”

  “Then look at mine and tell me if I’m lying.”

  “I’ve been looking for weeks now — and they are, all the time.”

  Daniel replied with a subdued Bronx cheer.

  They sat in silence, Daniel glowering, Rey complacently amused, until the waiter came with wine and mineral water. Rey tasted, and approved, the wine.

  When the waiter was out of earshot, Daniel asked: “Why? If you think I wrote that letter, why would I go on denying it?”

  “As Zerlina says: ‘Vorrei e non vorrei.’ She’d like to, but she also wouldn’t like to. Or as someone else says, I forget who exactly: ‘T’amo e tremo.’ And I can understand that. Indeed, with the baleful example of your friend before you, Bladebridge’s innamorata, I can sympathize
with your hesitations, even now.”

  “Mr. Rey, I’m not hesitating. I’m refusing.”

  “As you like. But you should consider that the longer you resist, the harder the terms of surrender. It’s true of all sieges.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “You will leave when I do. I don’t intend to be made a public mockery. You will dine with me whenever I ask you to, and you will display your usual high spirits when you do so.” As an object lesson Rey splashed wine into Daniel’s glass until it had brimmed over unto the tablecloth. “Because,” he went on, in his throatiest contralto, “if you do not, I shall see to it that you have no job and no apartment.”

  Daniel lifted the glass in a toast, spilling still more of the wine. “Cheers, Ernesto!”

  Rey clinked his glass with Daniel’s. “Cheers, Ben. Oh, and one last thing — I don’t care how else you choose to pass your time, but I don’t want to hear that you’ve been seen in public with Geoffrey Bladebridge, whether alone or in a group.”

  “What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  The waiter appeared with a new tablecloth, which he spread deftly over the one stained by the spilled wine. Rey informed him that Daniel had regained his appetite, and Daniel was presented with the menu. Without needing to look he ordered the most expensive hors d’oeuvre and entree that the restaurant offered.

  Rey seemed delighted. He lit a cigarette and began to discuss his performance.

  15

  March was a month of judgements. The annual disaster of winter seemed to have rent asunder all the rotted threads of the social fabric in a single weekend. Social organization collapsed beneath successive shocks of power failures, shortages, blizzards, floods, and ever more audacious acts of terrorism. Units of the National Guard sent out to arrest this avalanche defected en masse. Armies of crazed urban refugees spilled out of the ghettoes and swarmed over the fallow countryside, only to suffer the fate of Napoleon’s troops in their retreat from Moscow. That was in Illinois, but every state had a tale of similar terribilità. After a while you stopped bothering to keep track, and after a while longer you couldn’t anyhow, since the media stopped reporting the latest disasters, on the hopeful theory that the avalanche might stop misbehaving if it weren’t spoiled by so much attention.

  Meanwhile life went on pretty much as usual in New York, where disaster was a way of life. The Metastasio advanced curtain time an hour so that people could be home before the 12:30 curfew, and one by one the restaurants catering to the bel canto trade closed for the duration, all but Evviva, which doubled its prices, halved its portions, and carried on. The general feeling in the city was one of jittery exhilaration, cameraderie, and black paranoia. You never knew whether the person ahead of you in a breadline might not be the next thread to snap and — Ping! — shoot you down in your tracks, or whether you might not, instead, fall head over heels in love. Mostly people stayed indoors, grateful for each hour that they could go on gliding gently down the stream. Home was a lifeboat, and life was but a dream.

  Such was Daniel’s Weltanschauung, and such, pretty much, was Mrs. Schiff’s as well, though her stoic calm was modified by a melancholy concern for Incubus, who, despite the bags of Pet Bricquettes stockpiled in the closet, was having a bad time of it. Early that year he’d developed an ear infection, which got steadily worse until he couldn’t bear to be stroked anywhere about the head. His balance was affected. Then, either from resentment at being kept indoors or because he’d truly lost control, he stopped using his box in the bathroom and began pissing and shitting at random throughout the apartment. The smell of sick spaniel had always been a presence in these rooms, but now, as undiscovered turds fermented in the mounds of cast-off clothes, as dribbles and pools of urine soaked down through the layers of detritus, the stench became a reality even for Mrs. Schiff — and unbearable to anyone else. Finally Rey presented an ultimatum — either she had the apartment cleared out and scrubbed down to the floorboards, or he would stop calling on her. Mrs. Schiff submitted to necessity, and she and Daniel spent two days cleaning up. Four large bags of clothes were sent off to be cleaned, and four times that amount went into the garbage. Of the many discoveries made in the course of these excavations the most notable was that of the entire score of an opera she’d written eight years ago to the da Ponte libretto for Axur, re d’Ormus. After an airing, this was despatched to the Metastasio and accepted for production the following year. She gave a quarter of her fee to Daniel for finding the score, and the remainder just covered her dry cleaning bill. A silver lining, though clouds continued to gather.

  The first major intrusion of the world’s disorders on their private lives occurred when the pharmacist at First National Flightpaths informed Daniel that the Annex could no longer supply him with the liquid nutrient by which Boa was kept alive. The legal fiction of her death meant that no rationing card could be issued in her name. Daniel’s panicky protests elicited the address of a dealer in black market medical supplies, an elderly, out-of-work pharmacist in Brooklyn Heights, who pretended, when Daniel went to him, to have given up such traffickings. Such were the protocols of the black market. Daniel waited two days for his need to be verified. Finally a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven called at the apartment while Daniel was at the Teatro, and Mrs. Schiff showed him to Daniel’s room, where Boa lay in her endless enchanted sleep. The need being verified, Daniel was allowed to buy a two weeks’ supply, no more, at a price formidably higher than the going rate at First National. He was advised that the price was likely to continue to rise so long as rationing was in force.

  Transatlantic phone lines had been one of the first victims of the crisis. You couldn’t even send a cable now without government authorization. The mail was the only way he could get an S.O.S. through to Miss Marspan. A special delivery letter might take two days, or a month, or might not arrive at all. Daniel sent off four letters from four different post offices; all arrived at Miss Marspan’s flat in Chelsea the same morning. If she had any suspicions that Daniel was inventing difficulties to line his own pocket she kept them to herself. She increased her banker’s order to five hundred dollars a month, twice the sum he’d asked for, and sent him a rather valedictory letter full of news about the decline and fall. Food wasn’t London’s problem any longer. Years ago every park and flower box in the city had been converted to growing vegetables, while in the countryside much pastureland had been restored to tillage, reversing the process of centuries. London’s weak link was its water supply. The Thames was low, its waters too rank to be treated. Miss Marspan went on for two closely-written pages about the exigencies of life on two pints of water a day. “One doesn’t dare drink even that,” she wrote, “though it serves for cooking. We are drunk night and day, all of us who’ve had the wisdom and wherewithal to stock their cellars. I’d never considered becoming an alcoholic, but I find it surprisingly congenial. I begin at breakfast with a Beaujolais, graduate to claret sometime in the afternoon, and turn to brandy in the evening. Lucia and I seldom get so far afield as the South Bank these days, since there is no public transport, but the local churches keep us supplied with music. The performers are usually as drunk as their audience, but that is not without its interest, and even relevance, musically. A Monteverdi madrigal becomes so poignant, bleared with wine, and as for Mahler… Words fail. It is quite generally agreed, even by our leading M.P.’s, that this is, definitely, le fin du monde. I gather it is the same in New York. My love to Alicia. I shall bend every effort to be at the premier of the rediscovered Axur, assuming that the final collapse is postponed for at least another year, as it has been traditionally. Thank you for continuing to care for our dearest Boadicea. Yours, etc.”

  Harry Molzer was one of the most serious bodybuilders at Adonis, Inc. No one nowadays had the heroic physiques of the gods of the Golden Age half a century before, but by contemporary standards Harry did well — a 48-inch chest, 16½-inch biceps. What he
lacked in sheer bulk he made up in articulate detail. Having that body was Harry’s whole life. When he wasn’t at work patrolling the 12th precinct, he was in the gym perfecting his Michaelangelesque proportions. All his earnings went into the upkeep of his hungry muscles. As an economy he shared a small studio apartment near the gym with two other unmarried cops, whom he despised, though he was never anything less than cordial with them — or, really, with anyone. He was, in the opinion of the manager, Ned Collins, the next-best thing to a saint, and Daniel pretty much had to agree. If purity of heart was to will one thing, Harry Molzer was right up there with Ivory Snow.

  Rationing hit Harry hard. The Rationing Board was supposed to allow for individual somatic differences, but Harry was carrying around as much muscle as three or four average men. Even with the supplemental coupons police were entitled to, there was no way that Harry could have kept going at 195 pounds without resorting to the black market. Naturally, he resorted, but even on the black market the powdered protein he needed was not obtainable. Such concentrates were the first things hoarders had gone for. He switched to dry beans as the next-best source of protein, becoming notorious for his farts in the process, but by March even beans cost more, at black market prices, than Harry could afford. His muscles diminished and at the same time, because of the starch in the beans, he began to put on a thin cushion of flab.

  Harry would never resign himself to the inevitable. He was always at the gym — staring morosely into the mirrors that lined the inner walls, or grimacing in private combat with the weights; standing at a window between sets and watching the traffic down in the square, or twisting in fast, furious torsion on the inclined sit-up board. But will power alone was not enough. Despite his unremitting effort, Harry’s body was saying good-bye. Without a steady supply of protein the hard exercise only hastened the self-destruction of his tissues. Ned Collins tried to get him to cut back his schedule, but Harry was beyond being reasoned with. He kept to exactly the same routine he’d followed in the days of his glory.