None of these abominations seemed to register. Perhaps Rey, as a eunuch, accepted Daniel’s outrages as a fair representation of human sexuality. Daniel himself began to wonder how much of his posturing was parody and how much a compulsive letting-off of steam. The celibate life was beginning to get to him. He began having wet dreams for the first time since puberty, and dreams of every sort in much greater abundance. One afternoon he found himself sneaking off to a double bill of the sleaziest porn — not just ducking into a theater on impulse but actually forming and following a plan. Most of the porn he’d seen had struck him as silly or stupid, and even the best of it couldn’t live up to his own unassisted fantasies, much less to the real throbbing thing. So what was he doing there in the dark, staring up the blurred gigantic images of genitalia and feeling sweet indescribable confusions? Cracking up?
His dream-life posed much the same question. During his stint with Renata Semple his dreams had been Grade B, or lower — short, simple, guileless dreams a computer could have put together from the data of his daily life. No longer. The most vivid of his new dreams, and the scariest for what it seemed to suggest about his mental health, concerned his old friend and betrayer, Eugene Mueller. At an early point in the dream Daniel was dining at La Didone with Rey and Mrs. Schiff. Then he was out on the street. A mugger had come up behind him and asked, in a conversational tone, whether he’d like to be raped. The voice sounded uncannily familiar, and yet not to belong to anyone he knew. A voice from his past, before New York, before Spirit Lake. “Eugene?” he guessed, and turned around to face him and to fall, instantly, in love. Eugene spread his arms, Gene-Kelly-style, and smiled. “None other! Back from the bathroom—” He did a buck-and-wing and went down on one knee, “—and ready for love!”
Eugene wanted to fly to Europe immediately, for a honeymoon. He explained that it was he who’d been responsible for the plane crash in which Daniel and Boa had died. Daniel began crying, from (he explained) sheer surfeit of joy. They began to have sex. Eugene was very assertive, not to say rough. Daniel cut his hand, and there was some confusion as to the nature of the pain he was experiencing. He told Eugene to stop, he pleaded, but Eugene went right on. Nails were being driven into his hands and feet, to secure (Eugene explained) his wings.
Then he was standing on a chair, and Eugene was on a chair on the far side of the room, encouraging him to fly. Daniel was afraid even to lift his arms. Blood dribbled down over the feathers. Instead of flying, which didn’t seem possible, he started to sing. It was a song he’d written himself, called “Flying.”
The moment he started to sing he woke up. He couldn’t believe it had been, he didn’t want it to be, no more than a dream. Awful as it had been, he wanted it to be real. He wanted to make love to Eugene again, to sing, to fly. But here he was in his room, with the moonlight coming in at the half-parted curtain and making a ghost of Boa under her single sheet. His cock was erect and the glans was pressed painfully against the unyielding plastic of the insanity belt. He started crying and then, without stopping crying, stumbled across the room to get pencil and paper. On the hardwood floor, by moonlight, he wrote down everything he could remember of his dream.
For hours he would read over that transcript and wonder what it had meant. Did it mean that he might, after all, be able some day to sing? To fly? Or simply that his insanity belt was living up to its name?
Whatever it might mean, he felt a lot better all the next day, a day of high summer and bright speedy clouds. He walked through Central Park relishing everything, the flashings of light on the leaves of the trees, the corrugations of bark, the russet stains of iron bleeding across the mammoth facets of a rock, swoopings of kites, women with strollers, the nobility of the towering apartment buildings that formed a grand horseshoe round the southern end of the park. And throngs of sexy people, all of them, whether they knew it or not, cruising, sending out signals, asking to be laid. The park was a vast dance floor of shuffling loins and appraising glances, of swinging limbs and shifting possibilities. The odd thing was that Daniel, despite his supercharged alertness to this clandestine bacchanal, didn’t mind, this once, being relegated to the status of observer. He could, of course, if he’d wished to, have offered some lucky wight the still available delights of lips, tongue, and teeth, but Daniel had never been an altruist to that degree. Without requiring a strict teeter-totter equivalence of orgasm for orgasm, he did believe in some kind of quid pro quo. So he walked, loveless and at liberty, wherever the paths would take him — around the reservoir and through a series of mini-wildernesses, past the impromptu cabarets of street performers, past rows of sad bronze businessmen, drinking it all in or just gazing up into the cloudlands and trying to recapture the fading dream, that feeling of being poised right on the edge of flight (albeit on the seat of a chair). What had it meant? What did it mean?
Then, out of the blue, as he loped down a long flight of steps leading to an ornamental pond, a statue answered that question. An angel rather — the angel who stood, wings unfurled, atop a tall fountain in the center of the pool. The dream the angel chose to interpret was not last night’s but the dream he’d dreamt in the sauna of Adonis, Inc., on the night of his thirtieth birthday, the dream about the fountain in the courtyard of the mosque that had seemed so obscure then and was so clear now as he stood at the edge of the pool and was drenched in the wind-borne spray of the veritable fountain.
The fountain was the fountain of art; of song; of singing; of a process that renews itself moment by moment; that is timeless and yet inhabits the rush and tumble of time, just as the fountain’s trumpeting waters are endlessly conquering the same slim splendid space. It was what Mrs. Schiff had said about music, that it must be a warbling, and willing to inhabit this instant, and then this instant, and always this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song. That was what bel canto was all about, and that was the way to fly.
Shortly after ten that night Daniel, in his latest Arabian gear, appeared on Rey’s East 55th Street doorstep with a bowl of his special bread pudding. The doorman, as ever, looked askance, not to say daggers, but Daniel, borne along by winds of inspiration, just whistled a few bars of “I Whistle a Happy Tune” and sailed into the elevator.
Rey, naturally, was surprised to be visited so late and without warning. He’d already changed from his daytime drabs to the night’s relative spendor, a shot-silk kimono with a few choice panels of embroidery.
Daniel held out the still-warm bowl. “Here, amorino, I made you a pudding.”
“Why, thank you.” Rey received the pudding in both hands and lifted it up to sniff at it. “I didn’t realize you were such a homebody.”
“I’m not, usually, but Mrs. Schiff swears by my bread pudding. It’s my own recipe, and very low in calories. I call it humble pie.”
“Would you care to come in and enjoy it with me?”
“Do you have any cream?”
“I’ll look. But I doubt it. Where would one get cream nowadays?”
Daniel took a stoppered jug of cream from within his burnoose. “On the black market.”
“You think of everything, mon ange.”
In the kitchen, Rey, ever careful of his figure, spooned out a small portion of the pudding for himself, and a larger one for Daniel.