“I want to know who the hell you had in here.”
“I’ve already explained I am auditioning.”
“Yeah. To fuck somebody. What’s the shade doing down in the bedroom.”
“How dare you impugn my professionalism and make such a crass and entirely unfounded accusation.”
“Boy, you sure can be a real hoot sometimes.”
Sylvia returning to the bedroom. Closet doors slamming. A suitcase flung on the broken bed. Holy cow. She’s just pulled the godamn shade down off its roller. What kind of a disagreeably goddamn future is this. After the warmth of a so freely giving, soft enveloping Aspasia. So wonderfully conspicuous in her red hat and silver-fox collar. And so stunningly naked in her shiny dark skin. Black enough to provoke white racial slurs against us in this bigoted land. As I hunger and yearn now to hear some Gregorian chant the Adorate Deum of the Introitus. The faster I get up to St. Bartholomew’s Church in a hurry, the better. Where I have often gone to quietly listen to their choir. Now knock on the rector’s door. Please, will Your Esteemed Graciousness allow me to conduct old Charlie Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass in your most beautiful Byzantine church. Of such richly salmon-colored brick and Indiana limestone that it stands as an oasis in the sea of glass and exaggerated modernity hereabouts on Park Avenue. Vouchsafe that I be able to approach through your elegant bronze doors depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments. My baton polished and ready. The New York Philharmonic and your church’s choir ready to enjoin in rapturous harmony, and Aspasia to make her guest appearance. Just as Sylvia makes hers clearly on her way somewhere.
“Where are you going with that suitcase.”
“None of your fucking business. I’m leaving. Lover boy. Out of this hellhole and removing myself perhaps even farther away.”
“Have you no regard for someone telling the gospel truth.”
“That word gospel should be bullshit. And big-time conductor and Romeo, if you want to go on with that phony story, it’s best you know that it just so happens that my nonbiological mother and father are members of St. Bartholomew’s congregation, with their name reasonably readable on a pew. And I’ve been there more than a couple of dozen times, to perhaps be reminded that maybe my real parents were Jewish, Italian, or who knows, God forbid, even Irish and that I was lucky to be allowed in the church.”
“I’ll overlook that inference to being Irish, but it’s eminently understandable that your mother and father should want to indoctrinate you to religion.”
“Don’t you ever, ever call them my mother and father. Do you hear me. Never. They’re not my mother and father. Whom I am forced to adopt as parents. They’re my goddamn adopted mother and father. My real mother and father are someone else.”
“Forgive me. For clearly, as one might aver in French, j’ais commis un impair.”
“And don’t give me any of your fucking fractured French, either.”
“I have merely said in entirely linguistically correct French that I’ve made a tactless blunder in conversation.”
“And maybe that right now reminds me that I’ve made a blunder in marriage. I’m tired of not having any money while you take solace in the so-called great music of the so-called great composers, which seems to provide you with a curtain of insulation to shut out the unseemliness in your life, like a landlord coming around here pestering for rent while he’s trying to make passes at me. And by the way, I bought and paid for that Gounod record, not you.”
“Are you finished.”
“No, I’m not. Away from here, I won’t have to listen to any more of your bullshit. That one day you shall be richly recompensed standing on the podium in front of your awaiting orchestra in Carnegie Hall. Ready to receive Rubenstein. Who comes onstage with a roar of clapping, and, as he sits at the piano, the audience suddenly silent, he holds out his arms and then, at the anointment of your baton, with a flourish of his fingers descends to the keyboard to begin O’Kelly’O’s Nocturne Number One.”
“How the fuck do you presume to know how Rubenstein’s fingers will descend to the keyboard.”
“I don’t. But to such an unlikely event you can bet I’ll wear my tiara. Just make sure on the occasion your big cock is not hanging out. If whoever was here is in the audience, they might want to rush onto the podium to give you a blow job.”
“I reject your vulgar aspersion as grossly insulting.”
“What’s vulgar about sucking an old-fashioned prick. You’re so goddamn prudish. Meanwhile, I’d really still like to know what, between your big-deal concerts you conduct with equanimity in your imagination, you’ll be doing for food, since my adopted father, who may never have been guilty of doing a generous thing but sure knows how to live on other people’s money, refuses to donate to the furtherance of your career.”
“I shall emulate the tradition already established by many of the great classical composers who precede me and who without patronage have had to diet.”
“Well, one thing is certain. My adopted father could be accused of doing the stingy thing but never be accused of doing a stupid thing, like giving handouts to jerk-offs.”
“Who do you think you are to talk to me like that.”
“Oh, you’re not going to give me a punch in the jaw.”
“I have never struck a woman in my life, but maybe I might start.”
“Well, Mr. Potential Wife Beater, you just try it. My adoptive father was right when he said you were given to pedantic speak.”
“Well, in any kind of speak you want and in any language you want, you can anytime you want to get the hell out of here.”
“Well, I am. But just remember, I did once in a while try to be accommodating to your career. You could have gone as I suggested to see that rich lady I know living up in the top of the Hampshire House on Central Park South. Who could have been a help. But composers, for God’s sake, half of them are queer cocksuckers or deaf neurotics or both. Not that there is anything wrong with healthy God-fearing cock sucking. I mean, who’s to know for certain if those notes you’re scribbling over there are ever even going to get heard, never mind change the world. So far, all your musical compositions have done is lose me my allowance. The only one who seems impressed by your being a composer is my eye-winking adopted mother, who by the way, before I got here, asked me to ask you to come for a drink at the apartment, which is why I’m here, and if you want to take the trouble to change your clothes, I’m supposed to bring you there. You might even get a free meal of it.”
Horns stopped honking in the street. Sylvia waiting in the strange silence for an answer. Look out the window. A policeman directing traffic around a stalled car. Sylvia cleaning up the mess of my potatoes. Arguments seem to end as suddenly as they begin. But leaving me still suspected and unforgiven. Every clash between us always revealing some new fact of her life. Bitter to be adopted. Are her real parents maybe immigrant. And maybe even worse than Irish, Italian or Jewish. Without estates or trust funds. Ghetto dwellers in their litter-strewn streets. But who, if only they could have a chance to listen, could have respect if not love, for great music. And for whom I can and must win. Against all the adversarial odds. Rise up to be recognized out of the thousands of composers in this city alone. In their studios, testing notes on oboes, pianos, and harps. Hold tight to my nerve. Tinkle my harpsichord. Struggle on. I will change my clothes. Look respectable. Head uptown on First Avenue in a taxi to see my adopted mother-in-law. Maybe humming a song I’ve just thought of.