In September, when the Metastasio opened for the new season, Daniel reported back to work with a gratitude that verged on servility. It had been a lean summer, though better by far than previous summers, thanks to his having a roof over his head. He hadn’t been at the job long enough when the Teatro had closed early in June to have put aside more than a few dollars, and he was determined not to have recourse to Miss Marspan, who had already assumed the financial costs involved in keeping Boa functionally alive. Nor did he feel quite right, any longer, panhandling, for if he were to be seen, and word of it got back to Mr. Ormund, he was pretty sure it would have cost him his job. For lack of other resources he did what he’d vowed never to do: he dipped into the capital whose scant interest had paid Boa’s bills during her long sojourn at First National Flightpaths. That money had come from the sale of her jewelry, and till now he’d been able to avoid applying it to his own needs. Now, however, Boa was provided for by other and better means, and so Daniel could square it with his conscience by considering it a loan: once he was back at work, he’d return the money to the account.
Back at work it didn’t work that way, for he rediscovered the joy of being flush. It was like having his paper route again. There was change in his pocket, bills in his wallet, and all New York to entice him. He got himself some decent clothes, which he’d have had to in any case, since Mr. Ormund had made it clear that he didn’t want his boys to come in looking like ragamuffins. He started going to a ten-dollar barber, which was likewise pretty comme il faut. And now that he wasn’t helping out at Adonis, Inc., he had to pay a regular membership fee, which took a $350 bite out of the bank account. But the dividends were out of all proportion to the investment, since once he was back at work Mr. Ormund had assigned him to the Dress Circle, where the tips were many times in excess of what he’d got, starting out, up in the balcony (though still not so considerable as the pickings in the Grand Tier).
Tips were only, as Mr. Ormund had explained, the tip of the iceberg. The real payoff came in the form of courtship, with all its immemorial perks — dinners, parties, weekends on Long Island, and attentions even costlier and kinder, depending on one’s luck, ambition, and ability to hold out for more. At first Daniel had resisted such temptations from a sense, which twelve years in the big city had not yet wiped out, of what the world at large would have called him if he did not resist. Nor was Mr. Ormund in any haste to thrust him into the limelight. But increasingly he wondered whether his actions made any difference to the world at large. When, as the new season got under way, he continued, reluctantly, to decline any and all invitations, even one so little compromising as to accept a drink and stop to chat with a boxholder during one of the duller ensembles, when drinks and chat were the order of the day, Mr. Ormund decided that there must be a fuller understanding between them, and called Daniel to his office.
“Now I don’t want you to think, mignon—” That, or migniard, was his pet name for his current favorites. “—that I am some vile procurer. No boy has ever been asked to leave the Teatro for failing to put out, and all our patrons understand that. But you shouldn’t be so entirely standoffish, so arctically cold.”
“Did old Carshalton complain?” Daniel asked, in a grieved tone.
“Mr. Carshalton is a very obliging, amiable gentleman, with no other wish, bless him, than to be talked to. He realizes that age and corpulence—” Mr. Ormund heaved a sympathizing sigh. “—make any larger expectation unlikely of fulfillment. And in point of fact he did not complain. It was one of your own colleagues — I shall not say who — called the matter to my notice.”
“God damn.”
Then, as an afterthought: “That was directed at the unnamed colleague, not at you, sir. And I say it again — God damn… him.”
“I see your point, of course. But you must expect, at this stage, to attract a certain amount of jealous attention. In addition to your natural advantages, you’ve got, as they say, carriage. Then too, some of the boys may feel — though it’s perfectly unfair, I know — that your reserve and shyness reflects on their too easy acquiescence.”
“Mr. Ormund, I need the job. I like the job. I don’t want to argue. What do I have to do?”
“Just be friendly. When someone asks you into their box, comply. There’s no danger of rape: you’re a capable lad. When someone in the casino offers you a flutter on the wheel, flutter. That’s simply sound business practice. And who knows, your number might come up! If you’re asked to dinner after the show, and if you’re free, at least consider the possibility, and if it seems you might enjoy yourself, then do the world a favor and say yes. And, though it’s not for me to suggest such a thing — and, in fact, I don’t at all approve of it, though the world will keep turning for all I say — it is not unheard of for an arrangement to be worked out.”
“An arrangement? I’m sorry, but you’ll have to spell that one out a little more.”
“My dear, dear country mouse! An arrangement with the restaurant, of course. Good as the fare is at L’Engouement Noir, for instance, you don’t suppose there isn’t a certain latitude in the prices on the menu?”
“You mean they give rebates?”
“More often they’ll let you take it out in custom. If you bring them someone for dinner, they’ll let you take someone to lunch.”
“That’s news to me.”
“I daresay the boys will all be friendlier when they see you’re not entirely above temptation. But don’t think, mignon, that I’m asking you to peddle your ass. Only your smile.”
Daniel smiled.
Mr. Ormund lifted his finger to pantomime that he had remembered something forgotten. He wrote down a name and address on a memo pad, tore the paper loose with a flourish, and handed it to Daniel.
“Who is ‘Dr. Rivera’?” he asked.
“A good and not overly expensive dentist. You simply must get those molars looked after. If you don’t have the money now, Dr. Rivera will work something out with you. He’s a great lover of all things connected with the arts. Take care now. It’s almost intermission.”
The dental work ended up costing almost a thousand dollars. He had to withdraw a larger sum from the bank than the total of all his previous borrowings, but it seemed so wonderful to have his teeth restored to their primal innocence that he didn’t care. He would have spent the whole sum that remained in the account for the pleasure of chewing his food once again.
And such food it was! For he had taken Mr. Ormund’s advice to heart and was soon a familiar figure at all the relevant restaurants: at Lieto Fino, at L’Engouement Noir, at Evviva il Coltello, at La Didone Abbandonata. Nor did he pay for these banquetings with his virtue, such as it was. He only had to flirt, which he did anyhow, without trying.
His expanded social life meant, necessarily, that he had fewer evenings to spend at home with Mrs. Schiff, but they saw nearly as much of each other now in company as they had in private, for Mrs. Schiff was an old habituée of La Didone and Lieto Fino. To be seen at her table (which was also, often, the table of Ernesto Rey) was no small distinction, and Daniel’s stock rose higher among those patrons who paid heed to such things (and who would go there, except to pay heed to such things?), while in the usher’s changing room Daniel — or rather, Ben Bosola — had become the star of the moment, without an intervening stage of having been just one of the boys.
No one was more instrumental in Daniel’s winning to such pre-eminence than the person who had so little time ago tattled on him to Mr. Ormund. Lee Rappacini had been working at the Metastasio almost as long as Mr. Ormund, though to look at them side by side you wouldn’t have believed it. Lee’s classic face and figure seemed as ageless as Greek marble, though not, certainly, as white, for he, like his superior in this one respect, was a phoney. Not, however, by preference but to gratify the whim of his latest sponsor, none other than that latest luminary, Geoffrey Bladebridge. Further to gratify his sponsor’s whims Lee wore (its molded plastic bulging from the white tights of his livery) what was known in the trade as an insanity belt, the purpose of which was to ensure that no one else should enjoy, gratis, what Bladebridge was paying for. As to what benefits the castrato did enjoy, and his rate of payment, mum was the word, though naturally speculation was rife.
Lee’s mobile captivity was a source of much drama. Even to go to the toilet he had to have resort to Mr. Ormund, who was entrusted with one of the keys. Every night there were remarks, pleasantries, and playful attempts to see if the device might be circumvented without actually being removed. It couldn’t. Daniel, as laureate of the changing room, wrote the following limerick celebrating this situation:
A tawny young usher named Lee
Wore a garment with this guarantee:
His bowels would burst
Or would turn into wurst
If ever Lee lost the last key.
To which Lee’s ostensible and probably heartfelt response was simply gratitude, for the attention. His enforced retirement was having the effect it usually does: people had stopped being actively interested. To be made the butt of a joke was still to be, for the nonce, a kind of cynosure.
This was a frail enough basis for friendship, but it developed that he and Daniel had something in common. Lee loved music, and though that love had been, like Daniel’s, unrequited, it smoldered on. He continued to take voice lessons and sang, Sunday mornings, in a church choir. Every night, no matter what the opera or its cast, he listened to what the Metastasio was offering, and could claim, as a result, to have seen over two hundred performances, each, of Orfeo ed Eurydice and of Norma, the two most enduringly popular of the company’s repertory. Whatever he heard seemed to register with a vividness and singularity that confounded Daniel, for whom all music, however much it might move him at the moment, went in one ear and out the other, a great liability during the endless after-hours post-mortems. By comparison, Lee was a veritable tape recorder.
It soon developed that they shared not only a love of music for its own sake but a lust for flight as well. For Lee as for Daniel this had always been a balked desire and (therefore) a subject better to be avoided. Indeed, there was no one who worked at or frequented the Metastasio who had much to say about flying. The castrati who reigned supreme on its stage seemed as little capable of flight as of sex. Some claimed that though they were able to fly, they had no wish to, that song itself was glory enough, but this was generally thought to be a face-saving imposture. They didn’t fly because they couldn’t, and the happy result (for their audience) was that they did not, like most other great singers, simply vanish into the ether at the height of their careers. By comparison to the Metropolitan, which devoted its flagging energies to the Romantic repertory, the Metastasio offered incomparably better singing as such, and if their productions didn’t stir the imagination in quite the same way, if they couldn’t offer the vicarious thrills of a Carmen or a Rosenkavalier, there were (as even Daniel would finally come to see) compensations. As the audiences of Naples had so long ago proclaimed: Evviva il coltello! Long live the knife — the knife by whose actions such voices were made.
Daniel had thought himself cured of his old longings, thought he’d achieved a realistic, grown-up renunciation. Life had denied him any number of supreme pleasures and ultimate fulfillments, despite which it was still worth living. But now, talking with Lee and worrying the meatless bone of why and wherefore they were set apart, he felt the familiar anguish return, that immense and exquisite self-pity that seemed tantamount to a martyrdom.
By now, of course, Daniel knew all there was to be known about the theory, if not the practice, of flight, and he took a kind of donnish satisfaction in disabusing Lee of many fond misconceptions. Lee believed, for instance, that the basic trigger that released the singer’s spirit from his body was emotion, so that if you could just put enough con amore into what you sang, you’d lift off. But Daniel explained, citing the best authorities, that emotion was quite literally only the half of it, and the other half was transcendence. You had to move, with the music, to a condition above the ego, beyond your emotion, but without losing track of its shape or its size. Lee believed (this being the first article of the bel canto faith) that words were more or less irrelevant and music was paramount. Primo la musica. In evidence of this he could adduce some awesomely ridiculous lyrics that had nevertheless been the occasion for one or another proven flight. But on this point too Daniel could give chapter and verse. Flight, or the release to flight, took place at the moment when the two discrete hemispheres of the brain stood in perfect equipoise, stood and were sustained. For the brain was a natural gnostic, split into those very dichotomies of semantic sense and linguistically unmediated perception, of words and music, that were the dichotomies of song. This was why, though the attempt had been made so often, no other musicians, but only singers, could strike that delicate balance in their art that mirrored an answering, arcane balance in the tissues of the mind. One might come by one’s artistry along other paths, of course; all artists, whatever their art, must acquire the knack of transcendence, and once it had been acquired in one discipline, some of the skill was transferable. But the only way to fly was to sing a song that you understood, and meant, down to the soles of your shoes.
Daniel and Lee did not limit themselves to theory. Lee was the proud, if powerless, possesor of a Grundig 1300 Amphion Fluchtpunktapparat, the finest and most expensive flight apparatus available. No one else, until Daniel, had ever been allowed to try and use it. It stood in the center of a bare, white chapel of a room in Geoffrey Bladebridge’s penthouse apartment on West End Avenue, where, on the afternoons when Bladebridge was not about, they would hammer at the doors of heaven, begging to be let in. As well might they have tried flapping their arms in order to fly. They soldiered on, regardless, through aria after aria, song after weary song, never saying die and getting nowhere.
Sometimes Bladebridge returned home before they’d given up and would insist on joining them in the capacity of vocal coach, offering advice and even, damnably, his own shining example. He assured Daniel that he had a very pretty baritone voice, too light for most of the things he attempted, but perfect for bel canto. It was sheer meanness. He probably thought Daniel and Lee had a thing for each other, which the insanity belt was baffling, and though Daniel was of the mature opinion that theoretically all things were possible and all men polymorphously perverse, he knew that Bladebridge’s opinion was in this case unfounded. He had only to look at Lee and see the pink tip of his nose in the middle of his teak-brown face, like a mushroom on a log, to be turned off entirely.
In December, just before Christmas, Lee showed up at the Metastasio without the tell-tale bulge of the insanity belt spoiling the line of his trousers. His romance with Bladebridge was over, and so, pretty much (and not coincidentally) was his friendship with Daniel.
Life, to be fair, was not all striving and yearning and certain defeat. In fact, barring those frustrating sessions hooked up with the Fluchtpunktapparat, Daniel had never been happier, or if he had, it was so long ago he couldn’t remember what it had been like. Now that he had a registered job, he could take out books from the public library, though with Mrs. Schiff’s enormous stock of books at his disposal that dream-come-true was almost a superfluous luxury. He read, and listened to records, and sometimes just lazed about without a care. The whirl of his social life only accounted for two or three evenings a week, and he worked out at the gym with about the same regularity.
Living out of the way of nightly temptation, he found his appetite for sex much reduced, though his life-style was still a long way from strict celibacy. When he did feel like mixing in, he went downtown to his old haunts and so preserved his reputation at the Metastasio for friendly inaccessibility. As a result, there was a decided falling-off of active interest among those patrons of the opera who, quite understandably, hoped for a better quid pro quo than Daniel was prepared to offer. What with the rationing that had gone into effect in January, it was beginning to be a buyer’s market for good-looking boys. His life grew still quieter, which suited him just fine.
Strangely (for he’d feared it would be a source of upset, or at any rate of depression), Daniel found he liked living with Boa and looking after her. There was a set of exercises he went through each morning, moving her limbs so as to keep the muscles in a minimally functional condition. While he worked her balsa-light arms in the prescribed semaphores, he would talk to her, in somewhat the half-conscious, half-serious way that Mrs. Schiff would talk to Incubus.
Did Daniel think she was listening? It wasn’t out of the question. Unless she’d left the earth utterly, it stood to reason that she might sometimes come back to see how her abandoned vehicle was getting on — whether it might, conceivably, be driven again. And if she did, it didn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that she would also take an interest in Daniel, and stop for a while to hear what he had to say. He knew now that they’d never truly been husband and wife and that he had, therefore, no legitimate grievance at being left in the lurch. What he’d thought had been love for Boa was just being in love. Or so he would tell her while he manipulated her light, lifeless limbs. But was it really so? It was hard to remember the exact feelings of twelve, no, thirteen years ago. As well to recall the vanished weathers of those few months they’d been together, or the life he’d led in some previous incarnation.
So it did seem strange to find himself actually feeling a kind of fondness for this bag of bones that lay in the corner of his room, breathing so quietly that she never could be heard, even from close by. Strange to suppose that she might be with him, nevertheless, at any moment of the night or day, observing, and judging, like a bonafide guardian angel.