He’d reached that point again. If he had to wait for Boa, then he’d wait. Waiting was something he was good at.
He phoned down to the desk to say he’d be keeping the suite for another day and to order breakfast. Then he turned on the tv, which was showing what must have been the oldest cowboy movie ever made. Gratefully he let his mind sink into the story. The heroine explained to the hero that her parents had been killed in the massacre on Superstition Mountain, which seemed a truth as inexplicable as it was universal. His breakfast came, a gargantuan breakfast fit for the last hours of a man condemned to the gallows. Only after he’d finished his fourth fried egg did he realize that it was meant to be breakfast for two. Feeling replete, he went up to the roof and swam, all by himself, in the heated pool. He did slow weightless somersaults in the water, parodies of flight. When he returned to the room, Boa’s light was still glowing. She was spread out on the reclining seat exactly as he’d left her the night before. With half a thought that she might, if she were in the room and watching him, decide to be a dutiful wife and return to her body (and her husband), he bent down to kiss her forehead. In doing so, he knocked her arm from the armrest. It dangled from her shoulder like a puppet’s limb. He left it so, and returned to the outer room, where someone had used his few minutes away to make the bed and take away the tray of dishes.
Still feeling oddly lucid and dégagé, he looked through a catalogue of cassettes available (at ridiculous prices, but what the hell) from the shop in the lobby. He phoned down an order, more or less at random, for Haydn’s The Seasons.
At first he followed the text, hastening back and forth between the German and the English, but that required a more focused attention than he could muster. He didn’t want to assimilate but just, lazily, to enjoy. He went on listening with half an ear. The drapes were drawn and the lights turned off. Every so often the music would take hold, and he’d start being able to see little explosions of color in the darkness of the room, quick arabesques of light that echoed the emphatic patterns of the music. It was something he remembered doing ages ago, before his mother had run away, when they had all lived here in New York. He would lie in his bed and listen to the radio playing in the next room and see, on the ceiling, as on a black movie screen, movies of his mind’s own making, lovely semi-abstract flickerings and long zooming swoops through space, compared to which these little bips and flashes were weak tea indeed.
From the first, it would seem, music had been a visual art for him. Or rather, a spacial art. Just as it must be for dancers (and confess it: didn’t he enjoy himself more when he danced than when he sang? and didn’t he do it better?). Or for a conductor even, when he stands at the core of the music’s possibility and calls it into being by the motions of his baton. Perhaps that explained why Daniel couldn’t fly — because in some essential way that he would never understand music was forever alien to him, a foreign language that he must always be translating, word by word, into the language he knew. But how could that be, when music could mean so much to him? Even now, at a moment like this!
For Spring and Summer were fled, and the bass was singing of Autumn and the hunt, and Daniel was lifted outside himself by the music’s gathering momentum. Then, with a ferocity unmatched by anything else in Haydn, the hunt itself began. Horns sounded. A double chorus replied. The fanfare swelled, and formed… a landscape. Indeed, the tones that rolled and rollicked from the bells of the horns were that landscape, a broad expanse of wooded hills through which the hunters careened, resistless as the wind. Each “Tally-ho!” they cried was a declaration of possessing pride, a human signature slashed across the rolling fields, the very ecstasy of ownership. He’d never understood before the fascination of hunting, not on the scale on which it was conducted at Worry. He’d supposed it was something rich people felt obliged to do, as they were obliged to use silver and china and crystal. For what intrinsic interest could there be in killing one small fox? But the fox, he saw now, was only a pretext, an excuse for the hunters to go galloping off across their demesne, leaping walls and hedges, indifferent to boundaries of every kind, because the land belonged to them so far as they could ride and sing out “Tally-ho!”
It was splendid, undeniably — splendid as music and as idea. Grandison Whiting would have been gratified to hear it set forth so plainly. But the fox takes a different view of the hunt, necessarily. And Daniel knew, from the look he had seen so often in his father-in-law’s eyes, that he was the fox. He, Daniel Weinreb. He knew, what’s more, that the whole of wisdom, for any fox, may be written in a single word. Fear.
Once they put you in prison, you’re never entirely out of it again. It enters you and builds its walls within your heart. And once the hunt begins it doesn’t stop till the fox has been run to earth, till the hounds have torn it and the huntsman has held it up, a bleeding proof that the rulers and owners of the world will have no pity on the likes of fox.
Even then, even in the grip of this fear, things might have happened otherwise, for it was a pellucid, not a panicky, fear. But then, in the afternoon (Boa had yet to return), it was announced, as the third item on the tv news, that a plane on its way to Rome had exploded over the Atlantic, and that among the passengers (all of whom had perished) was the daughter of Grandison Whiting and her newlywed husband. There was a picture, from the wedding, of the official kiss. Daniel, in his tux, had his back turned to the camera.
The explosion was said to be the work of unidentified terrorists. No mention was made of the A.C.L.U. but the implication was there.
Daniel was sure that he knew better.
PART THREE
11
Thirty is a bad birthday when you’ve got nothing to show for it. By then the old excuses are wearing pretty thin. A failure at thirty is likely to be a failure the rest of his life, and he knows it. But the worst of it isn’t the embarrassment, which may even do you some good in small dosages; the worst of it is the way it works its way into the cells of your body, like asbestos. You live in the constant stink of your own fear, waiting for the next major catastrophe: pyorrhea, an eviction notice, whatever. It’s as though you’d been bound, face to face, to some maggotty corpse as an object lesson in mortality. Which had happened once to someone in a movie he’d seen, or maybe it was only a book. In any case, the life of Daniel saw laid out before him that morning, the morning of his thirtieth birthday, seemed bad news at almost the same scuzzy level, the only difference being the body he was tied to was his own.
The things he’d hoped to do he hadn’t done. He’d tried to fly, and failed. He was a nothing musician. His education had been a farce. He was broke. And none of these conditions seemed amenable to change. By any system of bookkeeping this had to be accounted failure. He would admit as much, cheerfully or morosely according to his mood and state of sobriety. Indeed, to have admitted to anything else among the people he called his friends would have been a breach of etiquette, for they were failures too. Few, admittedly, had touched rock bottom yet, and one or two were only honorary failures who, though they’d fallen short of their dreams, would never be entirely destitute. Daniel, though, had already been there, though only in the summer, and never for more than a week at a time, so perhaps it hadn’t amounted to more than playacting — dress rehearsals for the worst that was yet to come. For the time being, though, he was too good-looking to have to sleep on the street, except by choice.