How long could one go on summing things up like this? Mrs. Schiff said forever, so long as one remained on friendly terms with one’s Muse. But who was the Muse and what did she require? There Mrs. Schiff could offer no oracles.
The question was important to Daniel, for he’d come in a rather superstitious way to believe that possibly Boa was his Muse. Hadn’t his awakening coincided with the time that he’d brought her here to live with him? But how ridiculous, to speak at all of ‘living’ with her, when she was nothing but an empty shell. It was with Mrs. Schiff, it was with Rey, that he’d lived for these three years. Yet he didn’t for a moment suppose them to be Muses. They’d been his teachers; or, if that didn’t do them sufficient honor or express the size of the debt, his Masters. The Muse was something, or someone, else.
The Muse, first of all, was a woman, a woman to whom one remained faithful, and Daniel had, in his fashion, remained faithful to Boa. This might or might not be significant, might or might not connect to some fundamental bedrock of truth beneath the unexplored murk of the subconscious. When it wasn’t shining in the clear sunlight of joy, sex could be infinitely mysterious. But Daniel’s conception of Boa as his Muse was more literal than that. He thought of her as an active presence, a benign will-o’-wisp, touching his spirit and lighting his way with unseen, subliminal glimmerings. In much the same way he had, in his earliest youth, imagined his mother flying to him from far away, hovering over him, whispering to him, regarding him with a mournful, secret love that had been, nevertheless, the force that had sustained him through the desolations of the first loneliest years in Amesville. He had been wrong then; his mother had not been with him, had never known how to fly. But did that mean he was wrong now? Boa was a fairy; she might be with him; he believed she was, and, believing it, he spoke to her, prayed to her, beseeched her to let him off the hook.
For the free ride was over. Rey, though he’d regarded it as an unqualified waste of money, had fulfilled the terms of their agreement. Now, with that debt satisfied, it was up to Daniel. Boa’s minumum weekly requirement cost a whopping $163, and there was no let-up in sight, as this wasn’t the black market price. Rationing was over, and Daniel was able to buy her supplies directly from the First National Flightpaths’ pharmacy. $163 represented the basic cost of one week’s vacation outside your body as fixed by the new Federal guidelines. By this means the government hoped to discourage fairies from permanently abandoning their vehicles by the roadside. Logically Daniel had to approve the new uniform code Congress had come up with — even in this particular. Alackaday, who would have supposed that such a wonder’s coming to pass would have been nothing but a new source of grief for Daniel, who had marched in so many parades and sung at so many rallies in this very cause? But such was the case, and though there had been a few woeful outcries in the press from parents and spouses (and even a granddaughter) who were in the same costly fix as Daniel, there really wasn’t much hope of this law being changed, for it represented a genuine concensus.
$163 stood at the borderline of what was possible and left a very scant residue from which to supply his own necessities. It was painful, it was downright cruel, to be earning a good living for the first time in years and still to have no security, no comfort, no fun. He let Boa know it in no uncertain terms (assuming she was listening in). Enough was enough. He wanted to be rid of her. It wasn’t fair of her to expect him to go on like this. Fifteen years! He threatened to phone her father, and set deadlines for doing so, but since these threats weren’t carried out, he had to assume either that she wasn’t listening, or didn’t believe his threats, or didn’t care. Upping the ante, he menaced her with being disconnected from the umbilicus of tubes that sustained her vegetable life, but this was the merest huffing and puffing. Kill Boa? She was, God knows, an albatross around his neck; she was a constant memento mori (more so than ever, now that Claude Durkin’s tombstone nestled at the foot of her bed); but she was his wife, and she might be his Muse, and to fail in his obligation to her would just be asking for trouble.
Aside from these notions about his Muse, Daniel was not, in general, a superstitious sort, but he was fast becoming a Christian, at least in the latter-day sense of the word as set forth in the teachings of Reverend Jack Van Dyke. According to Van Dyke, all Christians got to be that way by suspending their disbelief in a preposterous but highly improving fairy tale. This presented no difficulties to Daniel, who took naturally to pretending. His whole life these days was a game of make-believe. He pretended to be black. He had pretended, for one whole year, to be passionately in love with a eunuch. Sometimes he and Mrs. Schiff would pretend for hours at a time to be honeybunnies. Why not pretend to be a Christian? (Especially if it brought in, theoretically, a hundred bucks a week and, more to the point, a chance to perform in physical and social dimensions that suited the size of his voice and his art, which Marble Collegiate did to a tee). Why not say he was saved, if it might make someone else happy and did him no harm? Wasn’t that all most priests and ministers do? He’d never been the type, when people asked how he was feeling and he was feeling rotten, to say he felt rotten. He said he felt swell, and smiled, and he expected others to do the same. That was simply civilization, and so far as he could see, Christianity was just the logical outcome of such principles, the most devious and effective way ever discovered of being polite.
Mrs. Schiff, an old-fashioned atheist, didn’t approve of his conversion, as he styled it, and they had some of their most enjoyable arguments on this topic. She said it wasn’t intellectually self-respecting to say you believed (for instance) that someone could die and then return to life, which was what Christianity boiled down to. It was all right for people who really did believe such nonsense to say so; it was even good that they did, since it gave one fair warning as to the limits of their rationality. But in Daniel it was charlatanry pure and simple. Daniel replied that nothing was pure and simple, least of all himself.
Once, when Mrs. Schiff had been dead-certain about a fact of music history (Had Schumann written a violin concerto?), he made a wager with her, the forfeit of which was that she must accompany him to Marble Collegiate on a Sunday of his choosing. She was wrong. He chose a Sunday when Van Dyke was to preach on the immortality of the soul, and Daniel would be singing in Bach’s Actus Tragicus. It was not, as it turned out, one of Van Dyke’s best efforts, and the choir as well (including, alas, Daniel) had bitten off rather more than it could chew. Mrs. Schiff was commiserating, but otherwise unmoved.
“Of course,” she conceded, “one must be grateful to churches for providing free concerts this way, but it does smack a little of the soup kitchen, doesn’t it? One has to sit there for the sermon and the rest of it for the sake of a very little music.”
“But that isn’t the point,” Daniel insisted, somewhat testily, for he was still smarting from the mess he’d made of “Bestellet dein Haus.” “People don’t go to church for the sake of the music. They go there to be with the other people who go there. Being physically present, that’s the crucial thing.”
“Do you mean that it’s a kind of proof that there is a community and they’re part of it? I should think a concert would do that just as well, or better, since one can talk in the intervals. And the music, if you’ll forgive my saying so, would probably be a touch more professional.”