“Ah ha!”
“Ah ha yourself.”
“It’s not humiliation that’s bothering you at all. It’s anxiety. Or are you, perhaps, a bit disappointed?”
“As far as I’m concerned he can keep me in wraps till I’m ninety-five: I won’t complain.”
“I must say, Daniel — you seem to be complaining. It’s quite possible, you know, that Ernesto will go on being satisfied with the status quo. Our marriage stopped, in effect, with the slicing of the cake.”
“So, why does he do it?”
“Bella figura. It’s good form to have a glamorous young person in one’s private possession. Admittedly, I couldn’t have been called glamorous, even in my youth, but in those days my father was still a prominent racketeer, so there was a social cachet. In your case, I think he is determined to one-up Bladebridge. The man does worry him — quite needlessly, I think. But among the people whose good opinion he covets your conquest has been taken note of, at least as much as if you were a Rolls-Royce that he’d bought and then had customized.”
“Oh, I know all that. But he talks about how much he loves me. He’s always going on about his passion. It’s like living inside an opera libretto.”
“I could think of nowhere I’d rather live. And I do think it ungenerous of you not to lead him on somewhat.”
“You mean to say I’m not a good whore.”
“Let your conscience be your guide, Daniel.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
“Chiefly, take an interest. Ernesto is a singer, and singers want more than anything else to be listened to. Ask to be allowed to go to his rehearsals, to sit in on his master classes. Praise his singing. Effuse. Act as though you meant every word in the letter you wrote to him.”
“Damn it, Mrs. Schiff — I didn’t write that letter!”
“More’s the pity. If you had, then you might be ready to learn to sing yourself. As you are, you never shall.”
“No need to rub my nose in it. I guess I’ve learned that fact of life.”
“Ah, there’s that whine in your voice again. The bleat of the guiltless lamb. But it isn’t some implacable predestining Force that keeps you from being the singer you might be. It’s your choice.”
“Oh fuck off. I’m going to bed. Do you have the key? I need to take a piss.”
Mrs. Schiff examined the various pockets of the clothes she was wearing, and then of the clothes she’d discarded in the course of the day. Her rooms were gradually reacquiring their former clutter now that Incubus was gone. At last she found her key-ring on her worktable. She followed Daniel to the bathroom, and, after releasing him from the insanity belt, stood in the doorway while he went to the toilet. A precaution against his whacking off. She was a very conscientious jailer.
“Your problem, Daniel,” she continued, after his first sigh of relief, “is that you have spiritual ambition but no faith.” She considered that a while and changed her mind. “No, that sounds more like my problem. Your problem is that you have a Faustian soul. It is a larger soul, perhaps, than belongs to many who, for all that, can fly with the greatest of ease. Who ever supposed size was a mark of quality, eh?”
Daniel wished he’d never started this discussion. All he’d wanted was a shoulder to cry on, not new insights into his inadequacy. All he wanted was a chance to piss and turn the lights out and sleep.
“Merely to be striving, ever and always, is no distinction. That’s what’s wrong with German music. It’s all development, all Sehnsucht and impatience. The highest art is happy to inhabit this moment, here and now. A great singer sings the way a bird warbles. One doesn’t need a large soul to warble, only a throat.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Now would you leave me alone?”
“I am right. And so is Ernesto, and it galls me, Daniel that you will not do him justice. Ernesto has a spirit no larger than a diamond, but no less perfect. He can do what you only dream of.”
“He sings beautifully, I’ll grant you that. But he can’t fly any more than I can.”
“He can. He chooses not to.”
“Bullshit. Everyone knows castrati can’t fly. Their balls and their wings come off with the same slice of the knife.”
“I’ve looked after Ernesto for days at a time while his spirit was winging about thither and yon. You may believe, if you need to, that he faked that for my benefit, but I know what I know. Now I wish you’d wipe yourself and let me go back to work.”
Since Incubus’s death Mrs. Schiff had been in spate, writing a new opera, which was to be her own and no one else’s. She wouldn’t discuss her work in progress, but she became impatient with anything that didn’t directly relate to it. As a result, she was generally mysterious or irritable, and hell to live with either way.
Daniel took the opportunity, before he was locked up again, to wash in the sink. He bathed incessantly these days, and would have bathed still more if Mrs. Schiff had allowed it.
“As to what you were saying earlier,” Mrs. Schiff noted, while he dried himself, “I think you’ll soon come to enjoy your humiliations, the way people do in Russian novels.”
Daniel could see himself blushing in the bathroom mirror.
Blushes are like tulips. In the spring there is a profusion of them, and then as the year gets rolling they become fewer and fewer. For a while it was enough that he be noticed by a stranger for Daniel to be afflicted by a spasm of shame, but inevitably there were times when, his mind being fixed on other matters, he was oblivious to the attention he received. As a natural consequence, he received less attention. For those moments when the world insisted on goggling, pointing fingers, and calling names, Daniel developed a small arsenal of defense mechanisms, from the preemptive snipping of “You’re another!” (best delivered to bonafide blacks who limited their hostility to ironic glances) to maniac self-parody, as when he would pretend to strum a banjo and start to sing a brain-damaged medley of minstrel-show tunes (a ploy that could strike terror to the hearts even of potential muggers). Reluctantly, he came to understand the secret phoneys shared with freaks of all descriptions — that people feared him as they might fear to see their own idiot ids capering about before them and proclaiming their secret desires to every passer-by. If only they knew, he would wistfully reflect, that they’re not even my secret desires; that they’re probably not anyone’s. So long as he bore that in mind he could even enjoy grossing people out — some people more than others, naturally. In short, just as Mrs. Schiff had prophesied, he was learning to savor his abasement. And why not? If there is something you’d got to do and a way to enjoy it, you’d be a fool to do it any other way.
Toward his benefactor, too, Daniel took a more accommodating line. Though he never so far relented as to disguise the fact of an enforced compliance, he did try to act the part he’d been engaged to play, albeit woodenly. He resisted the impulse to wince when Rey would pet and pinch and otherwise feign a lubricious interest, which he only did when they were in public, never when they were alone. Then, in a way because there was an equivocal kind of cruelty in it, he began to reciprocate these attentions — but only when they were alone, never in company. He would call him “Sugar Daddy,” “Dear Heart,” “Lotus Blossom,” and any of a hundred other endearments borrowed from Italian and French libretti. Under the pretext of “wanting to look his best” for Rey, he squandered quantities of hard cash on over-priced and tasteless clothes. He ran up huge bills with Mr. Ormund’s cosmetician. He coquetted, strutted, posed, and preened. He became a wife.