Tin Pan Alley Cat

The playboy knows wine and song are the appetizers of love. An expert on wine, he puts together a knowledgeable “cellar” in the museum’s cavernous basement. More modest about his musical intelligence, he makes his selections with some trepidation. The equipment the recordings are to be played on, however, give the playboy a finite field to master. He becomes something of an audiophile, owning several phonographs and insisting on the very best for his wife’s listening pleasure.

The heavy walnut wood cabinet contains a radio and a turntable with a spindle and stylus that shine like birds of chrome. The speaker cones are boxed in walnut with gold-threaded fabric on one side. Cheerful-giver Harry gives Sarah the machine along with a big stack of platters—baroque, classical, and romantic—to replace the Jujuban bells she currently calls him with.

While she sits on the love seat saying her “cheese” quietly to herself, elegant as a lady of leisure in a Gourmet court, he installs the machine inside the top cabinet of the spacious armoire next to her bed, making it into a huge music box that will resonate in the walls and up the back stairs to the workshop. “Cupcake, whenever you’re game, just spin a little of what you fancy. I’ll be waiting to get the message and I’ll come right down.”

Sarah’s father, the Reverend Blanche, would raise hell if he heard even a lick of anything but stale frontier fundamentalist ditties. He had forced her to join the choir, put on a pious face before the tabernacle, and sing songs that made her retch. To this day Sarah has not yet rooted his prickishness out of her psyche and struggles against the feeling of being browbeaten by the rod of male authority where her taste in music comes in. In fact, at the time she met Harry, Sarah preferred jazz as much as did he, only pretending to like classical music so the playboy would not think she was a cheap trick. Admiring her affectation, her poise, her air of class, he fell in love with her, and instantly found his taste in music broadened.

The phonograph and records are nothing new to Sarah. Laudette has one and Sarah often goes in and listens to jazz records with her when Harry and Gloria are not around. Split when it comes to family integrity, she would rather neither of them see the rag doll in her soul. In fact she is genuinely pleased to have the fancy machine and cannot wait to hear what Laudette’s swing band collection is going to sound like on such a set-up. Sarah likes the spinning disks, but wheels within wheels, her world goes around by resistance. Within her contradictory heart, conformity is non-conformity. She knows Harry expects her to display a certain amount of displeasure with his gift, so she puts on a disagreeable face and says, “I do think this appliance is aptly named: what comes out of it sounds quite phony. Rather than hearing music, it only makes me miss the real beauty of it.” Thus the artificial purist speaks a phony piece and sits pat, smoothing her plucked eyebrows with her finger. “And did it ever occur to you, Harry, that I might not want to go along with these masquerades. Most of the time when I want sex, I just want it. I don’t need violins, soft lights, and lace.”

Harry is delighted. He finds her scowl breathtaking. “Nonsense,” he says, trying to get her even more riled up. “Women love this sort of thing. You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re lucky you have a husband who’s sentimental. Anyway, what can a little pretense hurt? Haven’t I been a good boy indulging your fantasies, playing the roll of this devil you worship? You never minded satisfying me before we were married.”

Familiarity breeds contempt. Contempt is the glue that holds them together. “Just who do you think you are to jeer at me and my God, Harry? Why, you’re nothing but a smug little man with a need to scoff at what you don’t understand.”

“What is there to understand? This hero of yours is all in your mind. I am the real man who loves you. And you love me, although you’re too ashamed to admit it.’

The pea sits up stiff in her chair, purses her lips, and shakes her head no. But her protests, true to her heart, also belie it. Shame is the very thing that feeds her acting. It makes her pretend to be a lover of classical music when she would much rather be tapping her feet.

The playboy, who cannot feel desire without some amount of discord and resentment, knows her smirk of cool critical piety is the mask of her heat. He understands that her father wanted her to put a man’s face on a woman’s mystery, and therefore it excites her to do the naughtiest things she can think of. Why not? He is excited by the very things he was told he should be humiliated by. And rage has a way of tickling a body’s subtle pathways, sending signals of passion. Shame on them both! And hurrah for it!

He smiles and puts the needle to the beginning of the duet La Fontana d’Amore from Giacomo’s opera La Donna Cantabile. “Come, my love, keep an open mind,” he says jovially. “They’re playing our song. And we don’t have to go out to hear it.”

He takes a place on the floor in front of the love seat and gently reaches out and kisses her knees. Noting the flutter of her calves in her silk stockings, he presses his lips further, under her gown, past her garters, all the way up to her powder-scented Elysian lace crotch.

She parts her legs but remains from the waist up self-possessed, every button, bow, and hair in place. On the surface she is the white phantom mistress of the opera, at home with having the aural luxury of the classics in her home; on the inside she is a tin pan alley cat with a yowling soul.

Even as her insides melt, her countenance remains composed, a no-show of lust for the tom below, as he ventures up her legs to kiss her secret face. When the high note of the duet comes and he is just about to lubricate her love with his tongue, she gives him the monkey business: a short hiss of hot, tea-scented rain, a spray that leaves the mark of the wild tigress in her all over him, her, the love seat, and the carpet.