PEOPLE WERE ALREADY BEGINNING to forget we were veterans after the Second World War and that the government no longer owed us a living. Face-lifting, hair replacement, and breast enhancement hadn’t yet come into vogue and people still believed there were other kinds of contentment. Especially when television was just beginning to pleasantly paralyze the nation. The forces of commercialism and survival were hard at work doing a lot of us down, and I was at the time at a loose emotional end, as you might say, when she came into my life in the cold blue winter before Christmas. There’d been a couple of big snowfalls and icicles were hanging down from people’s windowsills.
It was a Sunday afternoon and I was standing in a friend’s ramshackle West Thirty-fourth Street apartment in a gray and dingy Garment District around the corner from one of the city’s biggest hotels, the New Yorker, and not far from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel that went out westwards under the Hudson River, starting a highway all the way to California. I was always fond of knowing where I really was in New York, right down to the bedrock and subsoil. There wasn’t much heat in the building and the friend, whom I had got to know while we were on the same ship in the navy, had a log fire going in his fireplace and I was glad to be somewhere warm. Her name was Sylvia and her girlfriend called Ertha, and both arrived enclosed in a bunch of thick heavy sweaters. Sylvia’s top was in green and her friend in blue. Both were advocates of modern dance, and even with all the thick wool over them you could see they were athletically curvaceous.
My friend Maximilian, who had after a brief marriage and divorce come back east from Chicago to make his fortune in New York, was already gaga over Ertha, having met her at a modern dance recital, and was now giving her his further line inviting her into his bedroom. To show her, he said, the rare fragile beauty of his seashells he’d collected on the Sagaponack beach out on Long Island. I took the opportunity to chat a little with Sylvia, who, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail, told me she was as an abandoned baby adopted by parents who were rich. She had attended fancy private schools and then a liberal girl’s college where the affluent students could indulge being radical. Growing up, she took an interest in music and classical ballet but finally, when she’d grown too tall, switched to modern dancing. When she found out during her last year at college that she was adopted, it was like a fuse on a bomb that had been lit as she went off delving into a mysterious obscurity, to search for her natural mother and father.
Anyone who was rich in those days about five or six years after the Second World War, or had in any decent way a pot to piss in, was immediately embraced in friendship and given the most comfortable orange crate upon which to sit. When I pointed to the best crate, she suddenly swept around in a circle, singing and repeatedly said hi right at my face by way she said, of an Iroquois Indian greeting, and did I want to go with her and spend the sixteen hundred dollars she had right there in her purse. I felt she was being the way some people briefly get before the real big hammer blows of life fall. Having served in the navy, I calculated I was about five years older, and had been a petty officer second class gunner’s mate on a battleship letting off sixteen-inch guns inside a turret. And here she was already taking command of the situation.
“Hey Sylvia, whew, give me a moment to think.”
“Sure. Think. You got five seconds.”
I moved back to lean against my friend’s new griller his mother had sent from Chicago for him to be able to cook steak and lamb chops in his apartment and in two seconds said to Sylvia, “That’s a lot of money.” Having removed two sweaters, she said, “Sure it’s a lot, but let’s spend it.” At the time I could have lived on sixteen hundred dollars for the next six months, but to achieve some rapport I pathetically tried to say, “I guess that’s what money’s for,” but she said it first. As indeed she’s said or tried to say everything first ever since.
I had a couple of times in my life thought I was in love when I’d find I’d get a magnifying glass to examine every tiny scrawl of a girl’s handwriting in a letter to see if it would reveal some mystical character hidden deep in her soul. And on a couple of occasions in doing so, and just when I thought I had the girl under my thumb, in the next letter I found I was gently but nevertheless ignominiously being brushed off. And the denouement — hey, what the fuck did I do wrong — was always severely painful and depressing. Anyway, in growing up in a large family your need for emotional attachment to other nonkindred people isn’t too great. But now I was out of the blue trying to assess my prospects with this attractive girl who had the most wonderful tits I’d ever seen in a sweater. I then sat on the orange crate myself and promptly crashed my way through it ass-first onto the floor. She continued in circles around the room, only now she was bent over double holding her stomach, convulsed in laughter.
“Forgive me my mirth, but the dumb way you just sat down was really funny.”
I should have realized right there and then that I was getting involved with a deeply spoiled bitch. Albeit whose ever-ready attraction was her astonishingly attractive body further revealed in her ballet practice gear, and the animalistically sensuous way she chose to move or pose to stand. She had said she was only privileged by proxy. Because from the vague hints she heard of her real mother and father, she was probably from the wrong side of the biological tracks. And suddenly during these speculations, she would put her hands on her hips, flexing her left knee forward and with her right buttock expanded, ask,
“Hey you don’t say much. Now why don’t you tell me all about you.”
“Well, except that I am a composer, there’s not too much to tell.”
In fact there was a goddamn massive lot. But to fit in a little bit with her own imagined underprivileged social estimations of herself, I invented a few romanticized ideas about how my own background had been deprived. Like I was disadvantaged growing up in the middle Bronx, and right from the cradle was denied any real opportunity to step choo choo choo on the big gravy train as it pulled out of the station, No Wheres Ville. But in fact our house in the Bronx was in Riverdale and isolated in the middle of a suburban contour of similar houses and was spacious enough with thirteen rooms with one of them housing a concert grand piano. And my first-ever composition as a composer came from tinkling the ancient Steinway. Outside it had a knoll of trees and outcroppings of rock and even a garter snake or two. I also had at least been to a couple of decent prep schools and after a couple of expulsions, finally graduated from one of the lesser-known ones in New Jersey. Plus, the rumor was that my own large very Irish family of seven children had been fairly prosperous bootleggers who still owned a couple of Bowery saloons as well as one in Hell’s Kitchen and a bit of city slum property. We even had a cook and a couple of maids. And it was when Sylvia saw me wipe the snow off the windshield of her car with the elbow of my jacket that she said it was a sure sign of being privileged.
“And hey, not only that but you seem to go do exactly what you want.”
And I guess that that was more than a little bit true because then, early after the war on the GI bill, I headed to Lawrence College out in Appleton, Wisconsin. I learned about dairy cattle and the chemistry of paper and a coed blew me out in the middle of a cornfield. And in the sylvan collegiate pleasures there, I got to thinking the world should have more dance and music. So after only a year I took off to attend the next two years at a music conservatory in Italy. Living in Europe and traveling a bit, I developed a social consciousness about the upgrading of the underprivileged. That they should enjoy the better things in life. That everybody, despite color, creed, or race, should be entitled to getting a square deal. But returning to America and arriving back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I began to find that not all Americans were on my side in this conceptual concern. In fact I found that when I posted up a sign, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL, some of these bastard neighbors flying the Stars and Stripes on their front lawns shouted they were taxpayers and were shaking their goddamn fists at me and wanting to kill me. And then along with all this I was having more than a few of life’s blows fall. My favorite and so beautiful sister I dearly loved and with whom I often exchanged our concerns, one evening, anguished after discussing her unhappy marriage alone with me at the kitchen table, fled the house in her nightclothes and rushed out in front of a truck on the nearby highway.
Back then upon that cold blue winter day there was already enough said between Sylvia and me to reach a sort of understanding, especially that I was on the side of the underdog, and it had us both thinking that we were suddenly in love at first sight. We giggled holding hands down those dark ramshackle stairs of Max’s apartment, leaving him and Ertha examining the seashells in his bedroom. Jumping into her nifty but chilly convertible car which I helped push out of the snowdrift, we sped off up Eighth Avenue to get on the West Side Highway. Crossing the George Washington Bridge to the top of the majestic Palisades along by the Hudson, we had warm new questions about who we thought we were and where we came from. And I was telling her that you could so easily be that way in America. Invent yourself moment to moment. Because in Europe, if you were anybody, it was already carved on a building, printed in a book, or remembered by somebody somewhere all over the goddamn place.
Sylvia said there was a lot of secrecy about her being adopted. And she didn’t, despite four years of searching, yet know who her real parents were but had nightmares that her father might have been a pimp and her mother a prostitute. Even growing up on a big estate with a farm and even learning how to milk a cow, she felt her life with her real parents would have been in a shack by the railway tracks. She often reminded me of being able to milk a cow, which I pretended to her was not a totally useless skill. Especially a few times later in our relationship when I found her exercise of the practice pleasurable. But her obsession with who her real mother and father were became bleaker and deeper. And she took to chanting a little song she wrote.
Keep your muscles strong
Around your asshole
Keep your muscles strong around your brain
That way too much shit doesn’t get out
And stops you sounding insane
Her adoptive parents had a property way up in New York State in the mid-Adirondacks, and in that direction is where we headed, driving north breaking the speed limit on the scenic highway. Stopping once along by the Hudson on a promontory, we looked back at the distant silvery thin skyscrapers sticking up out of Manhattan Island. Then farther north past all the passing wildernesses, where I had the fantasy of cheaply and healthfully living in a tent where I could with a piccolo compose and in order to eat, hunt with bow and arrow. It had just grown dark when we were finally driving through the tree-lined streets of Albany, and one took pleasure from the somber comfort of all its Edwardian and Victorian framehouses and their little lawns where nobody yet was standing shaking a fist at me. Then there were these small kind of hick towns she knew well. With names like Sabbath Day Point, Ticonderoga, Pottersville, and Sodom. And where she said folk talked in a twang and you knew if you asked them if they smoked, they’d say, “I ain’t never got that hot.”
Her adopted parents also kept an apartment of sumptuous sprawling rooms full of Impressionist masterpieces back in the city at Sutton Place, overlooking the East River. But here up in the country she said we should stay well away from her adopters, whose too-close proximity put her under strain. Fast driver that she was, she sure had me under strain as we whizzed around and especially as we reconnoitered a few curving miles of the adoptive parents’ estate wall and fence. And finally, at my insistence, slowly driving past the big iron front gates that led into their thirty-two-room mansion with an indoor swimming pool, tennis and squash courts. And as Sylvia described, a dozen French doors opening onto that many different brick terraces screened in summer and glassed in in winter. From a high point on the road and through the trees, you could see in the distance the front gable and tops of four Doric columns holding up a porte cochere. We then had a whole week of hilarity racing around town to town visiting a few of her friends who rode horses and played lacrosse, and who also had estates, one with a polo field, and others with formal gardens and imported statuary, and all the ladies seemed able to heave a football farther than you could believe and make you feel you needed a Charles Atlas course.
I didn’t want to be too nosy, but sometimes you really want to know where such nice things as her adoptive parents’ obviously lots of money came from. And where there could be so much at once that it never stopped coming. But she would never say where exactly, indeed if she even knew, but vaguely mentioned a couple of ranches out Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana way and utilities in one of the bigger midwestern cities, plus the land that a couple of midtown cross streets of New York City were built on. And reference to Palm Beach, Paris, and Rome were never far from her lips. However, as I was fairly broke, why worry about geographical details when she was paying the expenses as we stayed in a couple of pretty nice roadside inns. And dined plentifully on steak and knocked back some really nice dinner wines from around the Finger Lakes. But having to obey a sense of frugality in my life, I was tempted to complain about the size of the tips she made me leave. Her out-of-control extravagance making her sixteen hundred dollars disappear fast. And once she even grabbed a bunch of bills right out of my wallet when she said she needed some change. But again, aside from snatching a few bucks from me, what the hell, why intrude my parsimonious attitude, it was her money.
The nights got freezing cold and all the places we stayed were practically empty of other guests. Nor were the managements killing themselves making an effort to send heat up into the radiators of the bedrooms. In one place, the coldest, as well as the architecturally grandest, we danced alone on a dance floor where, with no other customers, the guy playing the piano at midnight, after dinner, suddenly stopped and was closing his piano and taking a bow. Then coming out onto the tiny stage from a side door, a guy looking like a Mafia don threatened to fire him if he didn’t get back strumming the keys. It was embarrassing, as then we had to go on dancing, and the guy looked so downtrodden glum as he went on playing in the empty room. Sylvia, obviously recognized as local gentry, said it served him right, but since I caught a snatch of marvelous Berlioz he played out of the Symphonie Fantasique while we were eating dinner, I thought this was cruelty to one’s talented fellowman and that the guy, if he already didn’t belong, should go pronto to join the musicians’ union.
“Sylvia, let’s go upstairs, and let the poor guy go home, and if he’s got any, to his wife and kids.”
“Sure. Your behavior is what I’d expect from someone full of warmth, understanding, and sympathy for his fellowman.”
As it was a cold night, I let the remark pass and instead felt her ass as she climbed in front of me up the stairs. And even though we were freezing in the bedroom, she divested of her woolly warm covering. With her nipples as hard as little acorns, she gyrated, cavorted, spun, and whirled through a half a dozen dances. A boogaloo and bolero, a bunny hop, a frug, and a Charleston. Then ending with a minuet. My God, she knew how to send me into a delirium even in the ice-cold bed and even when she got in between the sheets in a nearly frostbitten condition. The full moon seen out through the frosty window spun like a fast Ferris wheel and the stars exploded. Wham, bam, boom. Even as an atheist, I was wondering why does God do things like that to us. Impose enslavement. Putting one fatally in the grip of carnality.
“Stephen, I have a few other things I’d like to do, too, you know.”
“Honey baby, you just go ahead and tell me. I’m ready.”
“I want you to whip me with your belt.”
Holy cow, what’s new next. And although she didn’t specify, I got the impression that she’d seen her adoptive parents at this antic. A few nights in bed later, in, thank God, a somewhat warmer bedroom, she said she was also a little bit of a sadist and would I mind being a masochist for a while. She said with my straight black hair combed back flat, I resembled Rudolph Valentino, only that I was a paler shade. And when she asked for it, I gave her my belt. As if to make it more supple, she pulled it back and forth in her hand. Then in nearly a frenzy, before I could stop her, she whipped the living hell out of me. The lashing was excruciating and her glee alarming. Like a scalded cat, I jumped up out of the bed. She was with the belt still raised over her shoulder, in midlash.
“Hey Jesus Christ honey, I’m only human flesh. Take it easy will you.”
“Hey, gee, I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away putting welts on that beautiful beatific pink ass you’ve got and I guess I just like drawing blood and inflicting pain.”
“Well, what do you say, honey, if we just skip this next round while my wounds mend.”
The blows hurt more higher up on the back, but the welts left all over my rear end made it nearly impossible and painful to sit down. I especially was concerned and didn’t like the grin that seemed to stay on her face. I thought any second her whitely beautiful canine teeth were going to enlarge into yellow fangs and sink into my neck. At least it was a lesson learned not to agree to everything she suggested. But what she suggested next happened back in the city and nearly before I knew it.
“That’s right, I want to get hitched up. And you make an honest girl out of me.”
We went to take blood tests to make sure we didn’t have syphilis, and who knows whatever goddamn other things we might not have, and a few days later we were married at City Hall. Max and her best friend in the big blue woolly sweater, to whom Max showed his seashells, both were there as witnesses. She carried a yellow rose. While I had a big lump in my throat wondering about supporting two when I was still not yet on the verge of supporting one. I thought to myself, Hey, what the hell am I doing. This could be incarceration for life with a vampire sadist wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails and with my future freedom paid for by alimony till merciful death do we otherwise part. And looking in the mirror before the wedding, I was getting less resembling Rudolph Valentino in a hurry.
“Gee Stephen honey, you look so pale.”
“Well honey, maybe it’s because I am.”
Lordy sakes alive, what the hell do you do if you’re a composer with artistic sensibilities and have a deep compassion for your fellowman and in a country where the underlying ethic is to make a dollar and let dog eat dog. And what is worse, where no one wants to know you when you have no job, no income, and with the responsibility of marriage thrust upon you so early in life.
“Come on Stephen honey, has the cat got your tongue. Don’t look so goddamn glum.”
She was right. The thoughts were getting even worse when we came out into City Hall Park, walking a gray day through the pigeons with snow slush splashing up from passing cars. Each of us chewing on a slice of pizza, which was temporarily serving as the wedding reception. Across the street from the park I could see the lighted windows of the Barber College, where, I cataloged for future reference, you could get a nearly free haircut from the trainees for practically nothing other than maybe a gap left in the hair here and there or a little slice taken off an ear. And while I was watching, I stepped deeply into canine merde with my commando corrugated shoes. Another omen I thought, of odoriferous things to come. My little heart didn’t know what to do, save to go on baffled and beating.
“O God Stephen, I am insatiable for your seed. We’re going to be so happy. So goddamn happy.”
She tugged me by the arm and flagging a taxi, we all went back to her girlfriend Ertha’s apartment on Waverly Place in the Village. My first financial embarrassment was not having enough money to pay for the cab. My second chagrin was having Max buy the couple of bottles of champagne we had with the canapés. Then I started to choke on some of kind of gristle or something and Max slammed me on the back so hard, I fell face-first into the champagne bucket. The force Max used was explained when he said he didn’t want me to die in his girlfriend’s apartment with a whole lot of fuss with ambulance and police squad cars arriving and people writing down notes on pads like they were agents of the Internal Revenue Service. And especially where his own wife, whom he had married last year and just divorced, could find out he was holed up with the present lady of his affections and trace him to collect her alimony.
“Hey old fella Steve, sorry I hit you so hard between the shoulder blades.”
It did almost seem as if everyone was taking a turn belting the hell out of me. But what worried me most were the debilitating blows my nonfat wallet was taking. I never saw money disappear so fast. Present circumstances being what they were, I did perforce harbor a thought or two about Sylvia’s rich adoptive parents coming to the rescue who were giving Sylvia an allowance that would at least help keep her four-fifths in the manner she’d been accustomed to. But with fortune hunters everywhere, the parents were furious to hear of the marriage to which they weren’t invited, and a month went by before there was any sign of relenting, when we were finally invited for afternoon tea at the mansion in the country, where I learned a little more about what Sylvia was accustomed to. The Doric columns were ten times bigger than I first imagined. Every inch of the house polished and gleaming.
“Welcome home, Lady Sylvia.”
It was the butler called Parker, with an English accent, receiving us at the door. And with the adoptive parents just arrived back from Paris and still on their way up from the city, Sylvia gave me a quick tour of a wing or two of the house. Then took me to see her bedroom and about fifty different bath salts in glass jars all over the bathroom. She clearly lived like a princess with her silk embroidered chaise longue piled with pillows, and a spacious desk with iron claw legs clutched deep in the floor of her carpeted sitting room. Not that I was going to bust a gut over it but Christ, how did people get and stay so goddamn rich.
Then, as the parents still didn’t arrive, Sylvia said we should stay overnight. Parker dancing attendance, we dined in the candlelit sumptuous dining room, knocking back with roast duck a couple of fabled vintages of claret, the like of which I thought could only be served in a sommelier’s heaven. After having an ancient aged brandy and chocolate in the Pavilion Room, we then in Sylvia’s bedroom knocked off an exotically acrobatic piece of ass. As I was about to sleep, I had to dissuade myself of foolishly thinking that the world could go on just like this. Then realized it could if someone dumped a few million bucks on you. That not being likely soon to happen, I fell asleep and dreamt I was running to catch a train and tripped over someone’s briefcase left on the platform and fell on my face. It was Sylvia belting me awake with a pillow.
“Wake up you sleepy Irish bastard and fuck me.”
Strangely pleasant in the dawn to look out the window on a forested countryside and to have breakfast in bed. Then to perform ablutions on the warm tiles of the bathroom and following another fiercely fought fuck, to go taking in great lungfuls of the fresh clean country air as we then on this blue-skied sunny day walked out on the grounds and over grassy vistas. Sylvia twirling and executing balletic moves through the formal gardens of boxwood hedges. Then we went along a narrow trail into the woods, Sylvia’s mood seeming more solemn as she headed us along a disused path through thick foliage and saying that the snakes were safely hibernating. Under towering trees in a clearing, we came upon the back of a small lodge with a pitched roof of cedar tiles. Going around to the front, a veranda with two shuttered windows. Steps up to a porch approached by a straight, long pebbled avenue flanked by a strip of lawn and bordered by the woods. Sylvia taking an ornate golden key from a gold chain around her neck.
“Well, if you’ve ever wondered what this key is for, it’s for here, the Doll’s House and this door I’m about to open.”
A music box sound of tinkling “The Bells of Saint Mary’s.” A gaily carpeted room across which the woven shapes of dolphins cavorted as if alive, swimming in a sea. Seated on shelves, teddy bears and dolls balefully looking out. A desk. A pink tutu and pairs of ballet slippers. Photographs of ballerinas. A little library of books. A large stone fireplace. A variety of straw and felt hats hung adorning a wall. Berets and boaters, sombreros and sunbonnets. Framed children’s drawings and pictures. In a corner an enormous Georgian doll’s house, full of a perfection of miniature furnishings. Right down to a dining room table set for dinner with the tiniest candles in silver candelabra. I felt something woefully sad as I listened to the litany of Sylvia’s descriptions.
“This was always my cherished safe and secret place of refuge.
“This is where, while my parental usurpers were away, which was mostly always, I nearly spent my life as a little girl. My favorite haven in the whole world. Cool in the summer. Heated in the winter. At this little table I had tea with my governess in front of a fire at four. She taught me to play chess and honeymoon bridge. And, if I were alone, to sing, and I’d never feel lonely. On the record player we’d have Beethoven’s Adagio from his Piano Concerto Number Two. And if you ever wondered sometimes why I’m able to tolerate you when you’re intolerable, my governess was Irish. Guess she was designed to stop me becoming too much of an American. I still come here to be alone with myself. In there, that was my little kitchen where I could cook and bake cakes. See my little real dishes. All these pots and pans. And in here. My very own little bathroom. Tub, basin, and shower. And in this bedroom my governess could sleep. I loved it here. And if you’ve also wondered how I ever got so musically sophisticated. Here’s my collection of records. Beethoven, Bach, Mussorgsky, Handel, Bizet. My big radio could reach all the way to Europe. My skis are there. My snowshoes. And in here my bedroom, where, when I didn’t have a governess anymore, I was allowed to stay with that little girlfriend you see me holding hands with in that photograph. The two of us, when we were older, would go up those stairs to a little attic loft lookout window from which we could watch what the deer, possums, squirrels, and chipmunks were doing out in the woods. An enormous owl lived not far away in a tree. And sometimes on the hot summer nights you’d hear the big black snakes slithering over the leaves.”
Tears in her eyes as the Doll’s House door closed and was locked behind us. As we stepped back down the steps and walked away on the front-approaching drive, Sylvia’s eyes cast down, looking at the ground. And her little friend with whom she played as she grew up had mysteriously disappeared hiking across the arctic wastes of Alaska. Only later did I learn that the longing she felt for the world of all her small treasures of childhood, among which she had lived in this cozily lavish little hideout, was while she didn’t yet know that she was adopted and someone else’s child.
“Thank you Sylvia, for showing me.”
“Well thank you for the way you really looked and responded to everything. I’m beginning to think you’re really a softhearted and kind person. But God, look at the time. It’s time to meet the folks. Parker will have a writhing fit if we’re late for tea. He’s always harping on about the vulgar lack of manners and punctuality he suffers in America. Later I’ll show you the pool and tennis courts.”
In the drawing room, called the Pavilion Room, Parker had laid out cucumber sandwiches, scones, clotted cream, and imported black cherry jam to be scoffed back with a choice of India or China tea. Leaving the innocent with a plethora of urgent decisions. And what gave me a further few moments of contemplation, if not panic, was Sylvia’s slenderly tall and otherwise elegantly good-looking adoptive mother, Drusilla, her hair marvelously coifed back from a stunning profile, and who had a tic in her left eye which I could not have known, unless told, made her unpredictably wink. And stupid dunce that I was, made me once wink back. And bleep bleep, instantly returned were her two winks. I could feel the blushing blood go all the way out to the edges of my ears. Then the father turned up. I stood up to shake hands. The son of a bitch seemed to try to break my fingers. Perhaps not surprising, as I was crouched over like a cripple in a hopeless effort to disguise, despite all its recent use, a god-awful erection.
To escape my dire embarrassment and my tumescence adjusted as best I could painfully down my thigh, I took up her father’s invitation to go have a look at the horses. About at least thirty Arabians in a palace of a stable. Even the sawdust was spread like a palatial carpet, and the boxes were like luxury hotel rooms. I said wow, gee and gosh, to get me through the viewing. And pretended to know the difference as to what is meant by a fetlock or a pastern. I must have succeeded, for before we left, he asked to go have a drink with him at his club. My God. An emolument perchance, as I’d already been dropping hints to Sylvia. Or at least the opportunity to explore if one could be in the offering. I was finding that the difference with me, and anybody else in America in the circles in which I presently moved, was that I thought the world should be and maybe could be, a better place than it was. But all these people, having a mountain of money, seemed to like things just as they were. And above all to keep them that way. Nevertheless, I would adhere to my principles. That if composing music achieved such a purpose of bringing a little happiness to mankind, the composer’s goal was achieved and he should be applauded and aided without being subjected to snide remarks, such as could come unpredictably out of Sylvia, that while helpful could also be amusing.
“Hey, Chopin, here, take this. It will get you back and forth to Carnegie Hall and buy you a couple of beers and pretzels.”
I had an important meeting with a prominent conductor at Carnegie Hall and to take an odd taxi these days and have leftover spending money, Sylvia slipped me a twenty-dollar bill always got crisply new from a nice bank that looked like a country mansion on Madison Avenue. I objected to being called Chopin but found if I made an issue of it, it would mean taking the subway. Anyway, the son of a bitch prominent conductor who wore too much jewelry and pointy-toed shoes didn’t show up and I ended up having plenty of beers and tons of pretzels in the nearest bar. Indiscreetly of course, one took up a conversation with a nearby girl, who repeated that usual observation.
“Hey you, don’t you look a bit like Rudolph Valentino. Buy me a drink why don’t yuh.”
There were no more twenty-dollar bills for taxis for a while, but taxis were less necessary as nobody seemed that anxious to commission music or make appointments with me anyway. We’d now been living since the marriage in a temporarily borrowed apartment belonging to one of Sylvia’s girlfriends on West Sixty-eighth Street, from where I strolled into the park each day, looking around the skyline of the city, which, if you didn’t stare at it too long, was an inspiration. It was also a ready reminder of, holy cow, look at all the competition there is lurking behind every window you could see. Where people living on trust funds and investments just like Sylvia’s parents were ensconced amid their priceless antiques, filing their fingernails, powdering their asses, or else giving themselves pleasant enemas. Although we were living modestly comfortably on Sylvia’s allowance, I was also looking hard for somewhere to rent cheaply, heading downtown beyond the Village to reconnoiter around Little Italy. Meanwhile, I was starting to express the idea I had already more than hinted at to Sylvia that when I met her father I might suggest a stipend in the way of substituting for some kind of fellowship or grant repayable in full, which could allow me to give full time to composing. She smiled as if she had my principles at her mercy and whispered, “Hey, handsome kiddo, let me put you in the mood for groveling. Drop your drawers and let me give you a couple more swats on the ass.”
Listening to these further snide, demeaning remarks, I now understood how wife beating could come about. And it was also significant enough to stir up the past terrors of beatings in one’s life and those done in my Catholic grade school by Sister Shirley Sadist, the most stern disciplinarian in America, who with yard-long rulers belted the shit out of us in ninth grade or whatever numerical it was that designated her attendance upon us. The stings and yowls to high heaven of these trembling figures lined up in front of a whole class, suppressing their screams of pain, still haunted me. Sylvia also could be a bit of a card when she wanted, and when I told her of the school beatings, she suggested she dress as a nun to give me my next swatting across the ass. The trouble was the other things she wanted to do and have. Her total, undivided independence, she said. And that women should be as promiscuous as men. I caught her up short once when I said sure, good-bye, see you in the reincarnation. She didn’t like that kind of adieu much and said she’d stick around and be temporarily satisfied with steady boring fucking. Meanwhile, I took up the appointment to go have a drink with her father. While she went to have a beer or two with an always groaningly salivating admirer who wanted to marry her after she divorced me and then give her a two-hundred-foot yacht, a grass-roofed palace in Mexico, and open accounts — which, as it happened, she already had — in the best, most famous fashion stores in New York.
“He’s an international banker. Has fingers in all sorts of pies. He loves me and would do anything for me. Don’t you understand. And you’re yet to be somebody.”
I was of a mind to tell Sylvia to tell her friend to take his finger out of one of his pies and shove it up his ass, or indeed her ass, as she frequently requested me to do. But I demurred as my appointment with her father loomed. His club was a massive gray stone outfit on Fifth Avenue, with its own driveway in and out on a crosstown side street. It even seemed to get more massive inside, with a room like a football field and a ceiling so high, it seemed outdoors. But even with the size, you could get the impression the echoes could make everybody be aware of the subject, if not actually hear your conversation. I was still fumingly angry at Sylvia for suggesting I was some kind of panhandler trying to blackmail somebody and that I’d be groveling. And as if to remind me of my status, she shouted after me as I left the apartment.
“It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, it’s the poor what gets the pain.”
This was a little European song I’d learned and had been foolish enough to sing for her. The remainder of the vocalization being, “It’s the same way the whole world over. Isn’t it a fucking shame.” Anyway, there was no shortage of further intimidation. The adoptive parents, I found, minus Sylvia, were listed amid a lot of other similar surnames in the Social Register. Well, I might not own much of it, but this was my country, too. I fought for it when other foreign ethnics were doing us down, my eardrums and brain getting concussed in a turret of sixteen-inch guns. But having spent an hour getting ready with the right clothes and avoiding anything too much resembling casual dress and in the only thing I owned remotely suitable for a funeral, I even thought for a second I might, in this somber club chamber, be going to be arrested for being Irish Catholic and once an altar boy who thought that Jesus Christ’s flesh and blood were being eaten in the white wafer they gave you at the altar rail for Communion. Although he wasn’t onto my secret religious thoughts, I could tell he knew more about me than he first let on. I was planning, so I could appear courteously knowledgeable and bullshit a little, to ask for an imported beer. Then I forgot every goddamn brand there was, and ordered tomato juice. He didn’t beat around the bush.
“Nice to see you again, Steve.”
“Good to see you too, sir.”
“I understand you want a handout.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I think you heard me, a handout.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, sir. I believe the expression is an honorarium or bestowment.”
“Well, who do you think you are, other than being married to Sylvia, to be so deserving.”
“I might not yet be a Wilhelm Richard Wagner perhaps, who was worthy of getting help from King Ludwig of Bavaria, to whom he accorded much heavenly rapture and ecstasy and whose Schloss residence — Neuschwanstein, to be specific — on the Rhine is the wonder of all of Europe. But I must admit I thought I’d be at least meriting some kind of sympathetic emolument in the form of a dowry in the manner of an appanage, as it were, to contribute to the continuation of my musical studies and be able to work variously on a symphony, a slow stately dance, waltz, a gavotte or minuet, and also of course to help keep Sylvia more in the manner to which she has been accustomed.”
“Hey, you’re not a pinko, are you.”
“What is that.”
“Hey, come on, you know what it is. We’ve got a prominent senator broadcasting every day about it. A Red, a Commie. An enemy of our free country.”
“I do not deny that I admire the principles of socialism, but I am not a Red or a Commie.”
“Well then, Steve, I guess you’ve got the gift of the gab, but I don’t have to remind you we’re not in Europe now, where these old customs, if not liberal niceties, may prevail, but you can take some consolation in the fact that your charm and sincerity rates one hundred percent.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And I’m also impressed by your compassion, especially for the continuation of Sylvia’s welfare and maintenance of her living standards.”
“My top priority, sir.”
“Well, that’s swell, because I just stopped her allowance.”
“You what.”
“You heard me, Steve.”
“Sir. I consider that very unfair.”
“How is it unfair, when you’re her husband and you just said supporting her is your top priority.”
“Well, priorities can have their way of being sequenrial, and stopping her allowance sir, does rather stultify the lifestyle we would wish to maintain.”
“What, are you kidding. West Sixty-eighth Street was bad enough where you were living, but now Chinatown, down nearly on the Bowery with a bunch of alcoholic hoboes and derelicts all over the place.”
“Well sir, yes, there may be these persons discarded by society but who were once, many of them, citizens trying to do their best. However that area has many historic buildings and people of noted distinction to boast of who previously lived there. As well as many examples of Chinese artifacts and culture. And where can be obtained ingredients beneficial to health, such as ginseng root, dried sea horse, deer’s horn, and preserved bear’s testicles.”
“Hey don’t try to be funny with me, Steve.”
“I’m not, sir. Merely demonstrating that the area of Pell Street is not an habituation of the down-and-outs. Plus, it carries the name of a most distinguished family, the Pells.”
“Hey, what the hell are you. Some kind of social climber.”
“I am a delver into all aspects of the historic matrix that has played a part in forming possibly the greatest metropolis the world has ever known.”
“Well, okay. I’ll buy that bit of spiel. You seem to know quite a bit about this little old city of ours.”
“Plus, sir, such knowledge as I have, if I may be so blunt as to mention, prompts me to think, sir, that you might want to avail of an opportunity for you to become a munificent patron of the arts.”
“That’s more pedantic speak.”
“But honestly spoken, sir.”
“Well, I think if you take the trouble to look into as much as you have about the Pells, you’ll find my family name already well represented all over this island of Manhattan as a contributor to the arts. While your family seems to own just a couple of beer joints, a hangover from speakeasy days, in what some people might regard as the wrong part of town. I hear, however, they do okay business. But having had you personally checked out, your own financial status and prospects rate zero. Sit down. Don’t get alarmed. I would, in giving you a handout, only be giving you more financial quicksand to sink in.”
“I’m not looking for a handout. And I’m not sinking.”
“Well, I’ll admit that maybe you’re not, because with your kind of sales pitch you might get a job down Wall Street in a brokerage house speculating in Confederate bonds.”
“Sir, I’m not giving anybody a sales pitch. And I regard your statement as an insult not only to me but to the southern gentlemen who gave their lives in the cause of the Confederacy.”
“See what I mean. Gift of the gab. Next you’ll be telling me you grew up in Opelousas, Louisiana.”
“As a matter of fact sir, I have ancestral kin there.”
“Well, glad to hear that. But my word, let me look at my watch, and excuse me, I’m afraid I’ve got to rush. Just got time to get over to a backgammon match in exactly ten minutes. But stay where you are. Finish your beer. Oh, sorry, it’s tomato juice, isn’t it. Well, I’ve enjoyed our little informative chat. And it’s true what Sylvia says. You do look a little like Rudolph Valentino who, I believe, was also a little impecunious and did a bit of dish washing before he became a star. Pity acting is as tough to make a living at as composing. But good to meet you again, Steve. And if there is any way else I can help, outside the financial, that is, don’t hesitate to keep in touch. Good-bye.”
As Jonathan Witherspoon Triumphington III departed out his club’s front door, Stephen O’Kelly’O was left standing, having as he came to his feet pushed over his chair in the solemn silent emptiness devolving upon this place, the sound seeming to echo out to Fifth Avenue. And then the overwhelming need to take a nervous pee. Relieving the bladder lessens the stress. Head to the gents. I should have hit him. A goddamn social upstart. The O’Kelly’O’s were kings in Ireland when that fucker’s ancestors, somewhere obscure in England, were wiping their asses with fig leaves. And this while the O’Kelly’O’s were from their own carved stone lavatory seats shitting from a height up in their tower houses, and pulling a bell rope to make musical warning to everyone below to get out of the way. Although being hit by an O’Kelly’O turd was considered good luck. Now move across this vast room, through all these empty tables. But holy cow, I was shot down in flames before I was even airborne. Had a good mind to tell him I got twice awarded a Purple Heart. The fucker, a lieutenant commander in the navy, having a good time in Washington, D.C., during the war, probably sailing up and down the Potomac drinking cocktails on a yacht that one of my sixteen-inch guns could have blown out of the water with one salvo. He has the nerve to shake my hand vigorously. Then smiling, leaves me to finish my tomato juice with a couple of pretzels while he goes to play backgammon at another snooty club. Clearly the sort of person starving the cultural life of the United States, and wouldn’t between his polo matches know George Frideric Handel from Albert Einstein.
Stephen O’Kelly’O pushing open the door to the gentlemen’s rest room. The sweet smell of embrocations and the polished ceramic surfaces. A bottle of toilet water. Just of the sort one would expect a smooth socially registered fucker like Jonathan Witherspoon Triumphington III, with maybe fifty trust funds drenching him daily in dollars, to use. The son of a bitch is handing out worse blows than the blistering swats already landed across my ass from his adopted Sylvia. I’m sure its against a club’s rules to leave someone, a nonmember, unattended like me, a stranger who could then go start stealing books or magazines from the library or the toilet paper and bay rum from the gents. Where, Christ, right now I’m shaking in such rage that, holding my prick, I’ve already pissed all over my goddamn shoes.
At the coat check, O’Kelly’O retrieving his soup-stained overcoat, a button missing. Struggling with it half on and half off. And the sound of ripping echoing all over the vast room as another big tear splits the lining down the inside of the sleeve. The hatcheck gentleman, instead of calling the enforcement arm of the Social Register to have me apprehended, handcuffed and gagged, bowing a pleasant good-bye. All such thoughts a sure sign that my paranoia was going out of control. Miracle I have enough self-esteem left to hobble to and out of the front door. Time to reinvent myself. Famed linebacker on his prep school football team. Wartime naval hero slightly concussed, of noble Irish lineage, now foxhunting across the countryside of New Jersey. And soon to conduct his Fifth Symphony at Carnegie Hall.
With the light turning green, Stephen O’Kelly’O, collar up, tweed cap pulled down tight on his head and hunched in his coat, crossing Fifth Avenue. Yellow stream of checkered taxicabs roaring by, splashing up slush. Don’t give a good goddamn what they do to pedestrians. A secondhand phonograph record and book seller freezing his balls off on the corner. At least there’s a sign of some cultural dedication and concern for those impecunious who can’t afford new books or classical records. But somehow one feels he’d do better with a begging bowl. My occasional momentary inferiorities are busting out all over the place. A big cold sore beginning to erupt on my lip before I even got down the three or four steps out of that club. Be a relief now to go mingle awhile amid the more sympathetic animals in the zoo. Whose pleasant roars and screams won’t be accusing me of social climbing or looking for a handout.
The sun a red cold ball in the sky, sinking down somewhere over Nebraska. The light fading over the zoo. The sudden strange beauty of this city alerts you to its majesticness. Until some kid is screaming he’s lost his balloon floating away up over the hippopotamus house to disappear into the pink chill of the New York heavens. Once saw an eagle soaring up there over the apartment rooftops of Fifth Avenue just north of maybe Eighty-first Street. Still free in nature. And down here on earth in the zoo, the squawking, squealing seals knocking their way around the ice floes in their pond. An aqueous furore as the keeper arrives with a bucket of fish to toss in. Walk over to where the big outcropping of rocks are and see how the polar bear is psychologically coping pacing back and forth, claws clattering on the cement. Or maybe is content that he can luxuriate in the chill weather. Make a day of it here uptown before I go home downtown and face any more ignominy. Go check on the monkeys, who in their own rent-free hot house can go ad-lib amusing themselves scratching their asses, and shoving pricks into holes that take their fancy and then grinning obscenely out their window at the miserable spectators.
Darkness falling. Heralds danger in this city. Walk over through the winding little paths of the park. Have fists clenched, ready to bust the first marauder in the chops who’s at large trying to mug you, get your money, stick a gun in your ribs or a knife in your guts. The skyscrapers looming out of the cold mist along Central Park South. Lights on yellow and warm in the windows. Snow beginning to fall. Sweeps and whorls down out of a leaden sky. To whitely annoint the shoulders of the lonely. Strauss waltz comes through the air from the skating rink. A voice on a loudspeaker announcing to clear the ice. Sylvia said she went there to skate when the rink at Rockefeller Center was closed.
“George the chauffeur, until he fell madly in love with me, would bring me. My figure skating always drew a watching crowd.”
Talk about the privileged rich. With nothing better for the soul to do than to go shopping, get facials, and have their hair done. On the Triumphington’s estate a dozen different designed bathrooms all over the monstrous house. And way out on their miles of lawns, they have a couple of handkerchief trees, specially shipped all the way from China. Blooms like a bunch of snow white handkerchiefs. All just so you could get excited at the full moon, seeing the white fluttering going on during a windy night. And maybe be reminded to blow your nose. Just the value of one of his Arab horses or couple of polo ponies would have been more than enough to see me through to the completion of my first concerto for flute and harpsichord and full orchestra.
O’Kelly’O emerging from the park. Crossing the street to walk under the marquee lights of the hotels. The little groups of strangers in town. From way out west. Texans in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots. Their wives in fur coats. Waiting for taxis to take them to Broadway musicals. Doorman holding open doors and spinning those revolving. Saluting from the peaks of their caps as they are handed folding-money tips. At least it all looks bonhomie. And Sylvia said why didn’t I go see a very rich lady and noted patron of the arts who lives at the top of the Hampshire House on this Central Park South and is dedicated in her love of music and was known rarely to ever refuse a worthy cause, and might contribute to mine since she knew her. And here I am venturing to the doorway to look into the guarded lobby and have already got cold feet at the intimidation. Because like one of the rats living in their millions in this city I’ve already gone back down into the subway and some son of a bitch is glaring at me until I glare right back and make a goddamn fist in his face. He gets off at the next stop. If he didn’t, I would have killed him. No wonder there is murder, with people not minding their own business. To allow the citizens of this city to have some dignity in public and to otherwise ply their lives in the decent pursuit of peace and contentment, which doesn’t look like the case in a picture in the evening newspaper the guy’s reading across the aisle. A man committing suicide jumping out the window on the twentieth floor of a hotel and landing on top of a passing car, kills the driver and the car, out of control, kills two pedestrians. And just as you might expect as I reach what I now call home in Pell Street, some guy just finished pissing in the doorway invites me to join him in genital stimulation. Shake a fist in another face. And the masturbating desecrator goes mumbling off. Then up in the apartment just as I remove my overcoat and take the rest of the whole goddamn lining out of the sleeve, Sylvia in her leotards, who had worked up a sweat while exercising with her weights, laughs and thinks it is a big goddamn joke that my clothes are coming to pieces. Then when I tell her a little of what happened at her father’s club, it doesn’t take her long to embellish the embarrassment further.
“Well, what did you expect in bringing up a subject like that. You’re lucky he didn’t have you to drink at his other club, where he was going, which is even snootier and would have made you really feel like something the cat dragged in. And where if they let you get that far, someone might jump up from a backgammon table and say your more than slight deshabille was a distraction to their game and want you pretty quick dragged out again.”
“Well, by the way in bringing up subjects, he stopped your allowance.”
As a reminder of all the thousands of lonely miles across America, you could hear louder than usual traffic chugging by on its way to and from the Manhattan Bridge. The next day, Sylvia beat it uptown over to Sutton Place. And as the snow kept falling, the chill days went by getting chillier. To play the piano while composing, I wore gloves with the fingers cut off. Sylvia said that among other confidential reasons I couldn’t come to see her and luxuriate on Sutton Place was that her parents had important guests staying. This news cheered me up a lot. But at least with Sylvia gone, I could do something serious in cutting down on groceries. Walking down the Bowery to buy cheap vegetables and over to South Street, able to get fish from the Fulton Fish Market, whose motto was exactly suited to folk like me.
TO SUPPLY THE COMMON PEOPLE
WITH THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE
AT A REASONABLE PRICE
And until the rent had to be paid, one was surviving, just. Then one suddenly unseasonably sunny, balmy afternoon dawned. I was on my way back to Pell Street, faintly smelling of fish from the market because the Italian grocer where I had just bought a loaf of his delicious bread said he could always tell by the piscatory perfume when someone had been down on Fulton Street. He’d customarily give me a few free olives to taste and sing a few bars of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Beatrice di Tenda. He had a beautiful voice, which astonished in the setting of vegetables, wine, and salami and always left a broad smile on my face. Which I was still smiling as I came around the corner of Pell Street and the Bowery. And there approaching me was a tall and sinewy lady in a red hat and green coat with a silver fox-fur collar, who came to a full stop directly in front of me. Both stopped in our tracks as we stared at each other. Her skin shone the silkiest shiniest black. I smiled an even bigger smile. And she uttered her first pleasantly unforgettable words.
“Hey, you know, I ain’t never seen such a beautiful smile on anyone’s face before. You, honey, I want to fuck.”
On such a cheerful note and not wanting to appear unfriendly, one naturally invited her for coffee back in the apartment so conveniently close by. Suddenly it was looking better than Sutton Place, and in the hall and up the stairs she had her clothes off the moment she stepped inside the apartment’s front door. As I followed her into the bedroom, I could now think of a thousand more confidential reasons why I wouldn’t be visiting Sutton Place. And glad the telephone wouldn’t ring because it wouldn’t be installed till tomorrow. Her name was Aspasia. She said it meant “welcome.” Out of the Deep South, she’d sung in a gospel choir. Her father was a preacher. She’d studied at the Art Students League up on Fifty-seventh Street, in the Fine Arts Building designed by Hardenbergh. She even knew her architecture. When she found I wrote music, it seemed like we had a lot to talk about, but instead, in a bout of savage fucking we broke the bed and it fell apart on the floor. Teeth marks all over me. And as I realized I had desecrated my marriage, I hear Aspasia’s words.
“Hey, composer man, that was a true honey fuck and you done justified my desire. Nothing good is ever going to come to you by itself. You have to go out and forget that’s what you’re looking for.”
Aspasia was both a jazz and opera singer. She could go through four octaves like Yma Sumac. Dressed, as she was about to leave, we started kissing again in the doorway, got undressed again and went back to the bedroom. She wouldn’t tell me where she lived but said I was going to be a burning ember in her life and that if I got a message to the Art Students League, she’d leave a message for me about when and where we could meet again.
“Hey, composer man, I better get the hell out of here before your wife comes back.”
After Aspasia had gone, my gonads glowing, I opened up the window to let some nice new fresh fumes come from the passing traffic. For some days I had been further intensifying my study of the fugue. And taking deep solace listening to my heroes in the world of music. Especially the great swelling melodic choruses of Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass. Which I had once traveled to Paris to hear when it was being performed in the church of Saint Sulpice. A sacredly remembered day in my life. The waves of sound and voices still sweeping through my brain and throbbing in my ears even as I would walk along a noisy avenue. And heard myself saying, “Praise be to you, Gounod.”
And then opening up the window even wider, I played the record and turned up the volume. The orchestral sounds and the voices of Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass thundering out again to the uninitiated passing in the street. Not a goddamn person ever notices. How dare they be uncomprehending and not stop and listen. How dare they not let their souls be uplifted with the sound. Push up the window even wider. Further turn up the volume. Shout Gounod, Gounod out over the street. Listen, you bastards. The choral voices are roaring “Sanctus dominus,sanctusdominus.”And you, you philistine fucker in the lumber jacket on the curb with your big stomach sticking out. Who the fuck do you think you’re shouting at.
“Hey, somebody call Bellevue, will yuh. A guy’s gone crazy up there in the window.”
“Fuck you, you infidel barbarian scoffer. Get out of here before I come down there and bust you one.”
A little group had formed and a gang of kids collected. As well as the passing garbagemen, who stopped. Even one who had his face busily buried in the Wall Street Journal studying his investments, looked up. Lean out, shake my fist. Could make me look like someone who can’t take this city anymore. And lead to maybe any second an ambulance or paddy wagon coming to take me away to a padded cell in that building euphemistically referred to as “Bellevue,” with barred windows on the East River. Or if I bust one of these bastards in the face. Or worse if they shoot me, take me to Bellevue morgue, where the hundreds of bodies lie unclaimed. Sylvia could identify me on two sides. Either with the scars she’s left on my arse. Or by the size of my Irish big prick.
“No need to roll him over. That’s him.”
The hopeless obtuseness of it all. Except for the advent of Aspasia, how can one’s creative desires be unleashed to soar. The indifference to be found in this city has no equal. Makes you want to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge into the murky East River waters. Instead, all you can do is weep. Boo-hoo. But then one might as a pedestrian venture somewhere in the city and pass, totally out of the blue, some roving minstrel which would restore hope and optimism. Only yesterday I was elated as I stopped to listen to a man playing the concluding bars of Giovanni Pergolesi’s Concerti Armonici for strings. The quality of the playing astounded. And one was inspired by the total fortuity and happenstance. I removed my cap and swept it in a bow at the last fading chord. And although I could not afford it, I dropped half a dollar in this outstanding instrumentalist’s hat.
And this day as I was about to slam the window shut and go down and beat the shit out of the infidel barbarian scoffer, suddenly the music stopped. Just at the words “Benedictus nomine domini” sang out and ended, “hosanna in excelsis.” I turned around and there was Sylvia. Standing there in the middle of her exercise space in her flowing mink coat. Hands on her hips, lower lip tightly drawn across her mouth, and surveying me.”
“Who’s been here.”
“What do you mean, ‘who’s been here.’”
“I mean, whose goddamn cheap nasty perfume am I smelling. The bed is broken. Blankets on the floor. Those are teeth marks on your neck.”
“I was having a nap and a nightmare. And the marks are legitimate indentations caused by my own fingernails dug into the skin.”
“Like hell you were having a nightmare. Hanging out the window and music blasting out all over the street and I had to sneak in the downstairs door.”
“I was dealing with uncouth infidels.”
“You were dealing in the bedroom with some bitch who has been here. Look at this, big sloppy gobs of lipstick on a cigarette.”
“Well, I don’t want you to assume that I am the composer of the hour but if you must know, it was an opera singer auditioning. Someone who is to sing soprano in Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass at St. Bartholomew’s Church, where there is a very good chance I may be invited to conduct. Its parish has a musically discriminating and sophisticated congregation.”
“You fucking liar, you couldn’t conduct your way backing assward out of a wet, broken paper bag. You couldn’t even meet a raving queer conductor to kiss his ass and get somewhere, as he didn’t turn up.”
“Hey, you just wait a minute. I’ve been dealing with enough graceless reprobates in the street and other hindrances in my musical work to want to hear any more crap. Why don’t you just go back to Sutton Place and stay there.”
Horns honking down in the street in a traffic jam, as Sylvia, her fur coat flying open, pulled off the wooden arm of the broken chair and sent it sailing across the room. The piece of walnut shined with elbows, bouncing off my upraised arm with the sound of something that could be broken. Or something so goddamn bruised, it was beyond being used for squeezing again. As she huffs off through the kitchen, sweeping pots and dishes from the shelves, dismounts a pan cooking on the stove, and disappears into the bedroom. More sounds of flying objects and breaking glass. Life, as it does with a moment of bliss and promiscuous carnality, conspires then to bring every goddamn worry upon you. Not only attempted murder and a possible fractured arm but also the clap. Or worse, the syph. Or some other goddamn fatal affliction. That I may, if I’ve now got it, now give. Cerebral anguish that would drive you into buying a television set. Or attempting to climb a tree or get into heaven. Or best of all, to go get a ticket on a ship back to Europe. But she’s back before I can even get out the door.
“That’s right, look at me with your amazed look, Chopin.”
“Why the hell did you do an unladylike thing as that. Potatoes that I was boiling, all over the floor.”
“Since I’ve paid for everything in here, why not. After all, it’s merely the sort of primitive peasant vegetable your ancestors used to dig out of the ground.”
“Hey, you cut out that ethnic slander.”
“It happens to be an anthropological fact. I may have engaged in consensual gang-banging in my time, but you’re not going to bring someone into where I live to
screw.”
Holy Christ, she stands there readmitting her carnal past. Knowing of the wounding it gives and the sour wrench of distrust it sends convoluting through one’s guts. When such should be interred to remain in her graveyard of memory. In which it probably won’t be long before the indiscretions of yours truly reside. But I was a total innocent victim of an unpremeditated carnal incident, whereas women always plot and plan and always like having a few reserve pricks they can fall back on, even when the present one they’re enjoying stimulates them. And they never forget a shape or size. Plus, the more pricks hanging out around them nearby, all the better. I want similar freedom. And not be a poor innocent who encounters a moment of healthy carnal gaiety and ends up suffering a dusting-over and the apartment gets visited upon it even worse. Such goings-on could predict that one might never again have peace on earth. Never again see Aspasia’s big innocent doe eyes, hear her pleasantly raucous laughter, or feel her silken soft lips or incredible elliptically enticing tits.
“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.
How deep is your affection
Tell me soon so I’ll know
Is it skin-deep, oceans-deep
Or shallow like a piece of glass
As darkness attempts to descend upon this city, the lights as they always do, light and glow back up high into the sky. And I did go try impromptu again to meet the lady in the top of the Hampshire House, but they wouldn’t let me in without an appointment. Even though their attitude suggested that by the look of me it was inconceivable that I might try and steal one of her valuable paintings. And now on the corner of Canal and Mulberry streets, a yellow-and-black-and-white Checker cab squealing to a stop. Sylvia, minus her suitcase, climbing in. As I follow. The destination eliciting a preferred polite attitude from the driver. His ears alive to the silence of our conversation. Up and over to First Avenue. Through the Gashouse District, once a neighborhood of shabbiness and grime where the Irish once lived later joined by the Germans and Jews. At Twenty-sixth Street, passing by block after block, the massive grim complex of Bellevue Hospital. Treating the sick and injured, who on stretchers pour in its doors. And where, along its massive corridors, the dead under their white sheets are wheeled away into the cold silence of the morgue in there beyond the windows. Without a relative or friend, unmourned, get given to a private embalming school for practice. No sorrow so deep nor anguish so torn. The living screams inside the barred psychiatric wards. Where each face must desperately look to find a kindly smile. The kidney of New York ridding the city of its waste. A derrick lowering unclaimed bodies and amputated arms and legs into a barge moored on the river. Taking them to Hart Island for burial in a pauper’s grave beneath the legend HE CALLETH HIS CHILDREN BY NAME.
The taxi turning into these emptier streets, where the rich live on Sutton Place. And other socialites calleth by telephone. The windows of the buildings polished, gleaming. The acolyte doormen who adorn their entrance lobbies. In this my city. My town. My streets. Where I was born and grew up. Defiled by these pretentious interlopers with their sacks of gold hidden somewhere, who use precious space as a dormitory to come and occasionally play in. I detoured one day up the wide steps of the New York Public Library to find out more. And, heels clicking along its great marble halls, went to inquire how this street we now headed for had achieved its mystique of becoming such a bastion for the elite. Where the residents came to sit in quiet composure to defecate and ladies to urinate in the carved marble toilet bowls. In the vast reading room of the library and sitting an hour at a desk, I read in the pages of The New York City Guide for 1939 that this so unobtrusively situated location on a rocky high overlooking the swift-flowing East River was named after Effingham Sutton, an owner of a line of clipper ships. Here the East River briefly widened and yachts were moored, and the slum children came to swim from a wooden pier at the end of this dead-end street.
The taxi drawing up at the front entrance of this somberly elegant building. Sylvia, who complains of no money, giving the driver one of her new crisp twenty-dollar bills from the bank built like a mansion over on Madison Avenue and, after handing back a big tip, stuffing all the change in a secret side pocket of her mink coat. Follow the rich. As I do in trepidatious anticipation as one approaches the mausoleumlike solemnity of this entrance. The chiseled stone. The perfume scent. The polished brass. The green-uniformed doorman holding open the door.
“Good evening, Miss Sylvia. How nice to see you. Good evening, sir.”
No recognition of our marriage in his greeting, you bastard. Or that Sylvia had ever recently been staying at Sutton Place. At least he didn’t say, Hey, bud, where do you think you’re going. And don’t try to steal the flowers off the marble table in the lobby. And why don’t you get your zoot-suit shoes shined.
The elevator operator smiling at Sylvia and at least a little more polite, nodding his head at me. Takes the shiny brass knob in his white-gloved hand and turns it downward. And upward we go. In the darkly paneled chamber smelling of lavender wax. Past doors on each floor. And so that New Yorkers can avoid bad luck, no thirteenth floor. And no need to worry, as we’re not going that high. Slowing gently to a stop. At the Witherspoon Triumphingtons’ private entrance on their private floor. Step out into the glowing light of this domed vestibule. With its pillars flanking marble busts in niches around the wall. Philosophers upon their plinths. Drusilla standing there. In the center of this white marble area.
“Why hello. Didn’t expect you quite this early. But come in.”
Sylvia flinging her fur onto a chair. A stooped white-haired butler in a crimson brass-buttoned waistcoat emerging from the shadows. Takes my torn overcoat and Sylvia’s mink. Drusilla, a long ivory cigarette holder waving as she leads along a long hall to a vast drawing room. She’d only very occasionally smoked but always liked to have something in her hand. Just walking on the gleaming parquet from the domed entrance hall, you could see in the different directions, all the doors, and that ten families could easily live here and squeeze in a few more families of their relatives, and still have room for family wars. And with every architectural nuance to make you uncomfortably feel you were something the cat dragged in.
“Sylvia, I know, hates daiquiris. Even though she has them. But you’ll have your usual grapefruit juice, won’t you, my dear. What would you like, Stephen.”
“I’ll have a beer.”
“Gilbert does make wonderful daiquiris. He will be along in a moment. Poor old fellow, he’s only just recovering from the flu. He is, you know, rather getting on, takes an afternoon nap. I’m having a daiquiri.”
As we sit surveying the array of canapés in the sitting room, the stooped-over Gilbert ferrying in his tray of drinks. Out of his black coat and now in his white, the light flashing on the brass buttons of his crimson satin waistcoat. These Witherspoon Triumphingtons have a butler in the country, a butler in town. The hoot of a tugboat on the river below. Out the windows, the lights of Brooklyn in the distance. Walls along the hall decorated with etchings and glass cabinets full of snuffboxes. And in this room one or two fabled paintings I have actually seen pictures of in books. A portrait of a woman in a great black hat and black gown holding a small bouquet of purple flowers and a hound on a lead in front of her.
“Ah, Stephen, I see you’re looking at that painting. Are you perhaps a connoisseur.”
“Hardly that, ma’am. But, as the saying goes, I know what I like and I like that painting. Might it by any manner of chance be a Boldini.”
“My, you are a connoisseur.”
“Well, I have now and again visited a few galleries and looked at a few auction catalogs.”
Drusilla stands and moves to serve canapés. A curvaceously stunning figure revealed in a long dress of raw silk. Décolletage exposing the gentle outline of her creamy soft breasts. The delicate fragrance of her perfume. One’s own mother, by dint of a large family, always seemed to smell of her kitchen and had no choice but to be in an apron all her life. Sewing and mending, she further enveloped herself with her children, keeping them around her like a great protective cloak. And was never to be found in restaurants for dinner or in nightclubs all night for champagne. The Irish always like to say they worked their fingers to the bone and endured every sacrifice for their progeny. Certainly my mother’s hands were calloused and certainly were less tapered and fingernails less long than this elegant Drusilla’s, upon whose wrists diamond bracelets glitter blue-white and bright.
“Now tell me, what have you two lovebirds been up to downtown, or rather, especially you, Stephen, whom we haven’t seen for such a good long while. You know, you musn’t ever think we don’t always want to see more of you. Do you play canasta. I’d love to invite you, you know.”
“Well ma’am, I don’t believe I’ve ever played canasta. I’ve been under pressure with work with a deadline.”
“Oh, now that is good to hear. How many people do we know who are under pressure with work with deadlines. Who I do really think should be, you know. And how refreshing to hear that someone is. Solitude must really be so meaningful to you. And what are you working on now, Stephen. I know that can be an infuriating remark, for its not always a genuine question, but is often asked by way of saying you’ve never done anything yet and if you do, it will equally be of no importance. But I mean the question in its best sense.”
“Well ma’am, yes, it is kind of you to give me the benefit of the doubt.”
“There you go again, so damn formal. Why haven’t you done something about that, Sylvia.”
“Well, he’s not always that formal.”
“Then Stephen, please call me Dru. As in the past tense of draw, as with pen and ink. And so if I may so inquire, what is it you’re actually working on now.”
“Well Dru, I’m presently composing a minuet. And also I’m rehearsing conducting in the Russian manner.”
“Oh. I didn’t know there was such a manner.”
“Well, yes, there is. As one might imagine can happen with some of the more temperamental Russian conductors such as Nicolas Slonimsky, who is, as it happens, a foremost champion of contemporary American composers. Some Muscovite conductors can be too bizarre and behave like they are big birds, arms flapping as if to fly them off the podium. As indeed did happen once to one of them in Saint Petersburg conducting the explosions at the end of the 1812 Overture. It blew him in an arc right off the podium.”
“Oh my dear, I don’t mean to laugh, but how funny.”
“He landed feetfirst, going through a kettledrum being kept in the well of the stage. And wore it like a hula-hula skirt. And then did a rumba.”
“Ha, ha. How utterly rich. Well, I sincerely hope you’re not going to end up doing that, Stephen.”
“Well, of course one does eschew the conducting of some of these prima donnas. Imperceptibility is called for in one’s movements and not too much of this jumping up and down unless the music absolutely demands it. Then it is best done by a certain flexing of the knees. Calls for one always remembering to do one’s deep knee-bending exercises.”
“Ha ha, I never would have thought conductors had to be so on their toes. How wonderfully interesting, and it must for you, too, Sylvia.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fantastic. To stand around and watch prodigies springing up from nowhere to become major virtuosi playing at bar mitzvahs and weddings and Italian picnics. And all they need in the beginning is to be in their underwear, up on a reinforced orange crate, practicing in front of the mirror, bowing to the wall, shaking imaginary hands all around them and then doing deep knee bends. And then falling off on their ass.”
“Oh, that sounds rather more than a little impatient of you, Sylvia. Someone not knowing you would even say spiteful. Stephen is going to look very nice on the podium, and indeed, although I’m not familiar with the Russian manner of conducting, I’m sure once mastered it’s extremely effective. Stephen, let me replenish you. Do, instead, have a daiquiri. You’ve hardly touched your beer, and you must be a thirsty boy.”
“I don’t mind if I do try a daiquiri, ma’am.”
Drusilla pressing her little ivory servant’s button. Gilbert swaying in with another tray. Pouring out the drinks. His shaking hand an unsteadiness giving the impression old Gilbert was, by way of testing their strength, sampling the absolutely powerful daiquiris. The ambience beguiling as one sat on the down-filled pillows. Sylvia at one end and I at the other of what had to be a Louis XV gilt-wood sofa. Resting back and breathing comfortably amid the splendor everywhere. The carpeting, the statuary, the tapestry, the wonderment of the paintings. One’s eye changing focus. From the silver bronze figures to the other myriad objets d’art. Silkily soft napkins around the bottom of drinking glasses and coasters featuring foxhunting scenes on the polished, gleaming tabletops. Preserve above all the patina from the potential devastation of where one might place the moistured bottom of one’s glass. Should, of course, the napkin not have absorbed such wetness. Water puddles on your finer things could be as lethal as acid. At least I’m thinking that’s what propriety and good manners are all about. Don’t fuck up, if you can avoid it by decent behavior, another’s property. And no fear, that wasn’t the way it was growing up in my house. Every surface fucked up beyond restoration or redemption. But not in this outfit on Sutton Place. To which, as the alcohol seeps into my brain and knocks my neurons for a loop, I must confess I am taking an inordinate liking. Anything here could be shoved into an auction house to be bid upon and the proceeds support me through the writing of at least five major symphonies. And who cares if they are played at bar mitzvahs and weddings. Although I’d prefer the Italian picnics, quaffing red wop wine and sausages. And then when I’ve put my last note upon paper, and the last tremulo comes out of the string section of the last orchestra ever to play my minuet, and I hear my last standing ovation, then there would still be enough money left to support me, retired in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in luxury for the rest of my life.
“And Sylvia, you must keep on nibbling on a little something, you know. And you, too, Stephen.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I think I might just try this little sliver of smoked salmon.”
Sylvia’s adopted mother did, as she then passed the canapés closer, brush her hand over mine. Nor could one take one’s eye off a strange fanciful sculpture nearby on a side table, depicting, of all people — for there he was, absolutely, his head atilt, dancing the tango with Natasha Rambova — none other than Rudolph Valentino. The legs of the figures on point in the attitude croisée and their sculpted faces ivory white. Which whiteness seemed in contrast to remarks always made of his reputed darker-shade resemblance to me. The two of us both sure looking white tonight. A nice thought to contribute to the conversation, which, stilted as it was, was distinctly not the most stilted of all time. For on every occasion of Dru waving her ivory cigarette holder as she drawlingly spoke, she also winked and further stiffened my most uncomfortably situated cock.
“Well, since one hardly gets anything of news these days out of Sylvia, perhaps Stephen, having already brought the subject up, do tell me now is the minuet you are working on presently what one would term a ‘serious work.’ I mean, of course it’s serious. But I mean in the sense of its being something like a score, as part of a much larger work like an opera or a symphony. Perhaps for a special performance.”
“Well, ma’am—”
“Stephen, if you call me ‘ma’am’ again, I think I shall raise my voice in not-so-mild protest.”
“Well as a matter of fact, Drusilla—”
“Dru, please.”
“Well, Dru, I do not eschew operas or symphonies but often prefer to work on something light, short, and perhaps even sweet. Preludes, mazurkas, impromptus, and scherzos. But for the moment, and not being too embroiled in a creative panic, the minuet has, as a musical form, overtaken my attention.”
“Oh, how nice.”
“One looks for a certain perfection of tonal combination and pitch, occasionally dissonant, to be performed by a major virtuoso on the concert platform. I’m also trying to instill in it a certain quality inspired particularly by the majesty of Russian choirs in singing their wonderful folk songs. Availing of the soulful sadness and clarity of their voices in chorus. It is so marvelous when one of their voices breaks exquisitely loose in solo performance to permeate the air. In effect, the musical nature of what I should attempt to emulate.”
“Oh isn’t that marvelous. To hear this. To know firsthand as to how the artistic spirit works. That when bestirred by inspiration, it immediately takes pen to paper, the notes flying onto the page. Don’t you think that’s spirit stirring, Sylvia.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Oh, dear Sylvia, considering that we are talking about Stephen’s work, that is a singularly unenthusiastic response.”
“Well, yeah, why not. I haven’t heard the minuet yet.”
Solemn, sulking Sylvia. As I once called her. And multiorgasmic, as well. Crossing her exquisitely tapered legs, which these days kept inciting a vision of the gang-bang guys of her college days for whom she had expressed so much enthusiasm. Beer-boozing, water polo-playing fraternity brothers with their Green fraternal letters emblazoned in lipstick across their chests. Seven of them. They stood in a row, because if they stood in line, they’d be poking their pricks up one another’s asses. And all of them foaming at the mouth, ready in turn to jump on her and shoot their wad, as she said, one after another. It was, she said, after she said it was true, a phony story she invented because if it happened, she didn’t want to ever know who might be the father of any child she might ever have. It sounded too damn true to me not to be enraged, and I shook my fist at her. Somebody else could be the father if ever she got pregnant. She said, “Waiting to be a mother isn’t driving me nuts yet, but when it is, it’s my body, my ass, my mind, and I’ll do what the fuck I want with them. And you can take your squeamish Catholic bullshit morality and shove it as far as constipation will allow up your own ass.”
“Well now, my dears, are your daiquiris all right. Oh, sorry, I altogether forgot you’re not having daiquiris. Oh, but you are. Both of you. Do have another, Stephen.”
“Thank you, Dru. It’s having an effect. They sure pack a wallop.”
“Ah, that sounds better. So good to see you two young things together. Jonathan is away now so much and one is more than one likes these days on one’s own. One does get sick of playing bridge and backgammon and uselessly gossiping away at cocktail parties and dinner parties and balls. Saying the same things over and over again. I ought to go visiting downtown, where you are, where all the action is.”
“Well, Dru, it’s pretty much besmirched down there near the Bowery, with a bunch of bums hanging around all over the place, you must be warned.”
“Well, I know I should be simply charmed. But what a lovely word, besmirched. I had thought of going to Paris for a few days. But hardly know enough people there anymore, and the ones I do know are getting old enough to die. Hey, what’s with you two saying nothing to each other Sylvia. What fucking well gives. If I may be so bold as to inquire in an old-fashioned vernacular.”
“Nothing much fucking well gives.”
“Well, Sylvia, you do don’t you, as I’m sure Stephen does, like your Verdi. And such weeping sound as is found in passages of Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma.’”
“Christ, I hear plenty enough already of the abstruse about music in my dancing classes without wanting to go into any more of it just now.”
“Well, I guess that signals our move toward dinner. At least I know you like Italian food. Stephen, you’ve nothing against Italian food.”
“No, ma’am. Sorry, I mean Dru. I love Italian food. And excuse me a moment. If I may inquire where the nearest men’s room is.”
“You may inquire. Just out and down the hall, third door on your right.”
A nice long wink and smile from Drusilla as one stands up. One, too, did get a shock both of recognition and surprise at the use of the word fucking coming from this most elegant woman’s lips. Who was ready with a sledgehammer to break the ice of our overly polite conversation. And then finding that she knew more about music than she let on. Especially as I was aiding and abetting her every wink coming now, which made my already-rigid prick stiffen even more and made it feel a few inches longer. And after half a beer and three daiquiris consumed, left one more than desperate to take a pee. And as I got up to stand, I knew, Christ Almighty, that Drusilla knew I knew she was staring at my crotch as I headed to open one side of the double mahogany doors. And go counting to the third door, foot stepping on this glowingly golden carpet, and enter this exquisite little powder room off the hall. A dozen face towels, embroidered with the initials WT, hanging on gleaming hot rails. Scents and toilet waters. Soaps and powders. The washbasin in the shape of a great pearly shell. Unzip my fly. Can’t get ahold of my prick. Which I know is in there, because it’s busting to get out. Holy cow. In my emotional backlash panic down on Pell Street, after busting the bed with Aspasia, and changing my clothes, put my shorts back on, back to front. Leaving even less space for my hard-on and no space at all to get it out to take a pee. Before I piss in my pants. Have to take them off. And to get them off, because of the slight peg in the cuff of the leg, I have to take my god damn shoes off as well. Everyone is going to wonder what am I doing to be gone so long. Casing the joint to steal valuables. Well, standing in my socks, I’m looking at the unfunny cartoons on the wall, for a start. And I’m waiting for my prick to detumesce so the urine can flow. And I’ve just pissed, missing the toilet bowl. Momma meeo. Soaked my smelly long-unwashed socks in the puddle on the marble floor. And into which puddle, now to wipe it up, must go the most pristine towel I have ever laid eyes on in my life. Turned a butterscotch color. Sorry, Dru, I just pissed all over your house and just tried to do a little wiping up. And even as I rinse out the towel, it’s going to remain soaking wet. Will leave Gilbert, the butler, or whoever cleans up in here, wondering what the fuck hit the place. As I squeeze the piss out of my socks. And spin them in the air to hopelessly dry. Christ, and put goddamn spots of drops on the mirror and the rest of the fucking towels. And no time left to obliterate, never mind clean the piss-tinted desecration or to lay my socks for an hour or two on the hot rail along with the warm towels, which now also need a washing. This is all just perfect to lead to long-term psychotic manic depression. To which I suspect I’m already prone, with my recurrent bimonthly relapses conducted at myself in the mirror, which results in frenzied foaming at the mouth driving me into making accusatory assaults not only on myself but on the surrounding air.
Stephen O’Kelly’O shuffling back along the hall. To the raised voices in the drawing room. And Sylvia shouting, “Don’t you fucking well tell me what to do. I know how to lead my own goddamn miserable life.” Now silence as I, Stephen O’Kelly’O, ever so gently with the hanging handle open one side of the mahogany doors. The ladies arise as I enter. Sporting my wet anciently unwashed socks. Sylvia’s and Drusilla’s faces flushed. And we all proceed to the domed front hall to get coats, with the pervading stink of my feet following. What a figure Dru has, and a fantastic ass watched from behind. And whoops, another wink from her as she holds my miserable piece of apparel up for me to put on as she asks, “Well, Stephen, what about the weeping sound in Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma.’”
“Well, I am very much taken with the emotive content found in the singing voice telling a story.”
“You know, Stephen, I should one day so very much like to hear you play. You must come and try our Steinway in the music room. What about I give you a tinkle.”
As we three of us went by taxi to an Italian restaurant in a quiet street in the mid-Fifties, I thought, well, since you’ve already given me a hard-on, Drusilla, why not a tinkle. And it would be a little less embarrassing. It was one of those casual crosstown streets you walk along in New York, hardly noticing anything and noticing everything. And finding a couple or more of lifelong inhabitants still lurking behind the jumble of doorways and windows. And with nearly my last few dollars, I paid the fare. Not to suffocate us with the stink of my feet, I kept the taxi window a little open. But now, my God, if the proprietor, Jesepo, who is flapping his hands and uttering hosannas at Drusilla’s appearance, gets a whiff of me, I’ll be thrown out the door. Thank God waiters are scurrying around wielding their napkins to clear the air in front of us, ushered as we are to, as Jesepo said, her usual discreet table. Be just as well if my squelching feet continue to smell to high heaven. As we at last sat down, there is poured and placed before each of us a tulip glass of vintage Charles Heidsieck champagne. Poured from its bottle, taken from an elaborate bucket on its stand by the table. Jesepo, before putting his towel to the bottle, twirling the bottom rim on the edge of the bucket to rid it of excess drops of moisture. Drusilla raising her glass, proposing a toast.
“To you two, or at least one of you. And Stephen, here’s to your minuet. I really know it’s going to be wonderful and have all the critics in town impressed.”
“Thank you, Dru. And this is such marvelous champagne.”
“I’m so glad you like it. You know, collecting napkin rings and ice buckets, I fear, are two of my real weaknesses. And Jesepo keeps this crested one for me. I’ve always felt the best champagnes deserve the best silversmith’s buckets to keep them chilled.”
One waiter pouring the last of the bottle into the ladies’ glasses as another waiter opens another bottle of champagne. One’s mind floats free on the alcohol, back north to the Bronx, where, as a member of a large family who did not observe the democratic and American God-given principle of weekly pocket money, it was only occasionally that I could afford to ask a girlfriend out to the movies and for an ice cream soda afterward, especially as sodas had gone up to fifteen cents from a dime. And one bottle of this champagne tonight could buy a hundred sodas at the old price of sodas. If ever I get anywhere in life, I will leave a legacy in a few printed words of advice. Despite quaffing marvelous champagne, wet socks in one’s shoes makes one feel at a distinct disadvantage in elegant company. Only a little bit less worse than if one had a conspicuously fatal disease. And following the toast, one excused oneself to repair to the men’s rest room. For in my last hysteria taking a piss, I repressed much of my pee.
“Ah, please do excuse me, if you will, ladies.”
As I walked rearward in the restaurant, one lady in six rows of pearls and wristfuls of diamonds sniffed the air as I passed her table. And my God, what a nice new nightmare it was in the men’s room. Some son of a bitch in black tie, tassels on his black loafers and looking me up and down, and mostly down, was, as I reached for the bay rum, already reaching for it, and had the nerve to say as he grabbed the bottle, “Do you mind. I’m rather in a hurry to get out of the disagreeable fumes in here.”
Amazing how deeply one takes personally ridicule, insult and humiliation and starts blending them all together, and what you’ve got when you sum them all up is a chip on the shoulder the size of an Egyptian pyramid. I merely told the guy, “Well fella, anchors away. You better hurry like hell. A fart like you can really stink.” Holy Jesus, you’d think I’d insulted God, the way this guy reared up in outrage. His head looked ready to explode off the top of his neck. I thought my remark was a reasonably clever riposte to his own implied insult, although I suppose he wasn’t to know it was me with my wet rancid socks who was stinking and providing the disagreeable fumes. But what I had objected to most were those words—“Do you mind”—when the fucker grabbed the bay rum. Of course I fucking minded, you stupid supercilious bastard. If you had any sense of good breeding, you would have let go of the bottle and said, “After you,” and I would have said, “No, after you.” And for a few minutes, out of that stilted rejoinder, we could at least have left the bottle there untouched.
Stephen O’Kelly’O exiting from the men’s room into the sound of voices, tinkling glass and laughter and aromatic enticingly appetizing smells, returns to the table. The menu produced in the glowering silence. And one could forget the men’s room for a minute. I was surprised at the prices, for there were none. Recalling Sylvia once saying that she did not grow up in the school of hard knocks. But then she went on to say it was much worse. That she got just one big knock, which smashed her psyche. To have found herself in adulthood misplaced among the sort of people who, all they have to be is who they are. And being who she was, she wasn’t one of them. Having gin and tonic before lunch and daiquiris before dinner. And over dinner, talk about horses, dogs and candlesticks and never, God forbid, should the human condition or a question that it wasn’t wonderful, ever intrude into the conversation.
But then when I’d first returned to the table, what was absolutely stunningly amazing was to come out of the men’s room and find that the fucker was not already assembling other tassel-shoed confederates to assault me or at least to have a couple of dozen lawyers ready to serve me with a summons. And there he was, with five others. At a table not that far away, clearly contemplating revenge. And as he gloweringly watched me rejoin my table with Drusilla and Sylvia, he spoke to his friends, who cast glances in my direction, and these friends seemed to speak back to him all at once. And imperceptibly, his manner utterly changed, and when he next looked in my direction, he actually nodded at me and smiled. And I, being a charitable sort, nodded and vaguely smiled back. But which made me wonder why his sudden change of attitude. Perhaps with their three ladies sent home, the tassel-shoed gang of them would be waiting outside to wreak vengeance in the usual New York manner.
Sylvia toyed with her food, leaving each course nearly untouched on her plate. Whereas I had an excellent appetite, scoffing down a really wonderful piece of fish in a magically delicious sauce and worthy of originating from the Fulton Fish Market. The vino was a superlative Sancerre. And we finished up with an exotic peach dessert with a Château d’Yquem which was beyond what one ever imagined wine could taste like. Or indeed could ever cost like, as whatever this was, I found later, maybe cost as much as twenty thousand ice cream sodas. Then outside, ready to enter a taxi Jesepo had called, we heard gunshots echoing in another street and then sirens of a dozen police squad cars converging on cross streets and screaming up and down the avenues. Sylvia taking it upon herself to refuse us both an invitation to return and have coffee and liqueurs back at Sutton Place.
“Oh, no thanks, Drusilla. But thanks. Stephen and I have to be up so early.”
Drusilla in her own ankle-length black tweed coat lined with chinchilla fur, climbing into the taxi and waving what I thought was a kiss as it pulled away. Someone I just caught sight of in a window across the street, with a pair of binoculars, watching us. Another taxi coming around the corner approached and was flagged down to stop. Sylvia announcing she was going on her own way alone, downtown to Pell Street to get her suitcase, and that she and I were parting ways on this chill sidewalk. And then she was going somewhere where I didn’t need to know. I watched the flexing of her calf climbing into the cab and she stopped halfway in and turned around, stared a silent second, and began shouting.
“Rehearsing in the Russian manner, are you. You’re looking for a certain perfection of tonal combination and perfect pitch to be performed by a big-time vituoso, are you. You’ve got a deadline, have you. Well, you’re a bullshitter. Who the fuck has ever heard of you. Nobody. Nobody. And nobody is ever going to hear of you.”
Drawing her mink tighter around her, I thought I could see tears in her eyes. And better than the daggers that I thought were there. And just as she nearly had the taxi door closed, she said something to the taxi driver and opened it again and said her final parting words.
“Well, whoever it was, in the Russian manner you were fucking, you were pumping your personal genes into her. Well go ahead, pump some more. All she’ll beget is a fucking nonentity like you, who’s so prurient he gets a hard-on over a horny old hag like my adoptive mother. And don’t you ever think you’re ever going to get a penny of my money that you married me for. You Irish bastards always think you’re the cat’s meow. Good-bye. And meow, meow.”
Left standing there, the harshness of her words ringing in my ears I watched her taxi disappear around the corner onto Fifth Avenue. And found myself saying to myself, Hey gee, kiddo, you poor goddamn fortune hunter, you need a fucking break. I walked the few blocks up and over to Fifty-seventh Street to the Art Students League. Looking up at its darkened windows, the building seemed closed. It sure didn’t start with Butterfield 8, but I scribbled my less revered, newly installed telephone number in a note to Aspasia to call me in the morning, and found a place to put it in the door. At the nearby late-night grocery store I bought a tub of walnut ice cream. Walking down Seventh Avenue my feet now feeling frozen cold, I stopped and looked into the windows of the crowded Stage Delicatessen, remembering and reminded of the sharp smell of sauerkraut on the air in the zoo, as two figures came out, talking.
“You know, Sidney, always remember I’m ready to show the way. You’re an upper-echelon-type person. But I wouldn’t want your perfect sense of culture to be like an obstacle and slow you down in commerce. Otherwise, I’m convinced you’re outstanding.”
“I’m glad you said that, Arnold, because you’re sincerely the kind of person in whose direction I’d like to travel.”
Listen and you can hear sensible words spoken by these people who could be composers, playwrights, or actors. Scoffing back over a beer their massive thick corned beef sandwiches swabbed with mustard and dipping their forks into mouthfuls of coleslaw. Ticket brokers to the big Broadway musicals. Stagehands who shift the sets backstage. On their momentous salaries replenishing their energy to be able to go sit with the newspaper and study their investments on Wall Street. Some pretentious fucker just the other side of the steamed-up window, shooting his cuffs with gold links the size of mountain boulders and a big round diamond ring on his pinky finger. Showbiz habitués. Cigars in their mouths. Shiny fabrics on their backs, fancy shoes on their feet, and shirts pleated down their chests. Who keep the serious composer down. Before I shake a fist through the window at the inmates and leave before they call the police, I stop to wonder. And remember that just tonight I overheard Sylvia shouting at her adoptive mother, as she now calls her, back at Sutton Place and she was shouting, “Don’t you tell me what the fuck to do.” It was in reply to Drusilla’s quieter words, spoken first.
“Is there any way you can think of to treat him well. He might then be your liege man.”
“Why. Are you going to treat him well.”
“If you don’t Sylvia maybe somebody else will.”
Now left friendless on the street this could be my life. Heaped upon one the burden of someone who thinks you are a failure. Sneering and running off to better things. Away from a nobody. Well who the fuck isn’t a nobody. When you finally end up at best a name on a stone in a cemetery. She asked me to marry her and then turns around to tell me I married her for her money. What was I supposed to do, throw a tantrum, say I can’t marry you because she was rich. But all that’s happened is I’ve got poorer. She didn’t like it when I said that in the glow of glory the igniting spark of disaster always lurks. Boy did that little aphorism stop her to think for a few seconds. Hard now to recall that we had in the earlier days of our association done impromptu things like to actually go for an ice cream soda. One day I even prevailed on her to take the subway. Because she didn’t take subways. Because the Witherspoon Triumphingtons didn’t take subways. And had never been on one in her life. So I blurted out. Holy Christ millions do it every day. Let’s go to Coney Island. Which sports its slogan as the sand bar that became the world’s largest playground. She was both suspicious and amazed. And stunned silent on the subway train one could see she was wondering which way to go and what to do to get out. Any second I thought she might jump up from her wicker seat and run for it. And finally we got out at Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island. We went munching hot dogs along the boardwalk and on the hard sand washed by the gray green ocean. I showed her the shell of a horseshoe crab thrown up on the shore and hoping to make an impression said it was one of nature’s most ancient creatures. From the top of the Ferris wheel we could see for miles to the horizon and the distant ships at sea. And turned upside down in the Cyclone, we could see the ground. Then on the roller coaster they called the Gravity Road she was as cool as ice in the front car and grinning as it plunged on its tracks like a stone and seemed headed into oblivion and it scared the living shit out of me. On firm land again, I yawked up my frankfurter and sauerkraut while she tried not to be seen to laugh. We visited the freak shows, the penny arcades and went on the carousel, the folksy music of the organ throbbing away. Screaming squirming children and every nationality passing by. It turned out to be both the happiest and most miserable day I ever spent with her. Sylvia saying, “Holy gee wizz, hey, has all this been here all this time way out here beyond Canarsie. It’s real humanity in all its forms, flavors and colors.”
Coming back on the train between the Eighteenth Avenue and Ditmas Avenue stations, we were assailed by some kids in an empty car. I was standing looking at the map, reading the subway stops and without making too much of a nightmare of it I was trying to work out how to take the free transfer on the Culver shuttle to the Fourth Avenue line in order to get off the subway at a stop near Pell Street without a nightmare of taking the wrong train and ending up in Canarsie. I felt a poke in my back, and as I turned around, a long-bladed hunting knife was pointed at my heart. His associates grinning behind him, a spokesman kid in a black leather jacket adorned with a skull and crossbones now pointed the weapon lower, at my crotch.
“Hey daddyo I’ll cut your balls off if you don’t give us all your money. And the lady’s money, too.”
“Hey kid, hold it a second, let’s talk.”
“You don’t talk, daddyo. I talk. I give the orders.”
“Kid, why you wasting your time. You could be running a big business with your gang there behind you.”
“I said shut up, daddyo and give us your money fast, or I’ll cut you.”
“If you so much as move a muscle, kid, I’ll knock your head off.”
The kid moved a muscle. Jabbed out the knife. Caught me in the shoulder padding of my jacket as I sidestepped and grabbed his wrist. The knife blade cut through my sleeve. But my fist landed on his jaw so hard, it sent him on a fly halfway down the train. His brave jeering associates retreating just as we were pulling into the Ditmas Avenue station. The knife wielder minus his knife, scrambling up off his back, his face spouting blood as he ran, following his confederates out the train door. Nearly knocked over a woman getting on the train, who screamed. As the train pulled out I could see the gang through the window, racing toward the exit on the platform. One of them had enough theatrical flair to stop, and his thumb stuck in his teeth, made a Mafia curse sign at me. Then the darkness again of the tunnel as the train continued on its long way toward its final destination in the northern Bronx. And I missed the free transfer on the Culver shuttle. Sylvia sat silent all the way back to Manhattan and Delancey Street, where we got a free transfer back downtown to Canal. I thought she’d been left in shock. But it slowly became evident she was on the side of the marauding gang. And showing that, despite wanting to avoid rubbing shoulders with New York’s subway millions somewhere buried in her psyche there was a strong streak of sympathy for the criminally minded downtrodden.
“You should go to jail for hitting that young kid.”
“Is that right. Because he was going to rob and kill me with a knife, I should go to jail.”
“Yes. That’s what’s wrong with this country. Big bullies like you beating on the oppressed.”
And on this night after midnight of the lavish dinner in the Italian restaurant, I now walked alone down Seventh Avenue to Broadway and Forty-second Street. A girl cousin who took care of me when I was small and taught me to watch out for shooting stars said Forty-second Street and Broadway was the center of the world. Where people would come from Nebraska and Arkansas and even from farther miles away, to just stand, marvel and stare. The latest global news broadcast up in lights, the words passing like a train in front of your eyes. And as I arrived there into its glow of neon illumination, steaks being barbecued in windows, flapjacks being tossed in pans, one needed only to look down to see the sidewalks covered in crushed cigarette butts and blobs of chewing gum. It maybe could be the nearest place to hell. A traffic of strangers. And others. Pickpockets waiting for pockets to pick. Lurking pimps and prostitutes in the doorways. Loitering little groups of shady characters, crooks and drug dealers. For the prurient, movies to see. And for sale, the array of lewd, salacious and vulgar periodicals, pictures and books. In big numerals, the time and temperature. Smoke rings blown out of a mouth on a billboard. And as I went down the steps into the Eighth Avenue subway I felt that the peaceful soft white flakes of snow starting to fall were an anointment of cleansing refinement. At least before the flakes reached the ground and turned to gray slush in the gutter.
Stephen O’Kelly’O plugging his nickel into the turnstile. As smart kids growing up in the Bronx, there were always these dreams of how to constantly make a lot of money if everyone who went past you had to plug a penny into your personal turnstile. Or if you could install a revolving door in a big department store on the understanding that you could sell the electricity you generated from the revolutions. Thoughts to think while on this platform where someone is kicking a vending machine to pieces that didn’t deliver their chewing gum. And while the train is noisily roaring under the Garment District back down to Pell Street keep an eye out for knife wielders. Emerging back up out of the subway again I had the prolific composers Vivaldi and Handel on my mind. Then along the roadway came a tottering drunk shouting out, “Fuck God and the Holy Ghost.” I stepped into a doorway and listened to this itinerant iconoclast. Words that one might hear free of lecture charges.
“Be the reality. I was on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. I am the flicking maverick at large. What are the fucking issues. The fucking issues are Wall Street. They have us by the balls. Moral values are fucked. The wrongdoers with something to hide are behind their closed doors on Park and Fifth avenues. Skeletons are clanking in their closets. All over this city it’s the idle rich getting the pleasure and the goddamn working poor getting the pain. Those are the goddamn issues. There’s no question about it.”
I nearly stepped out to follow the man to hear more. This war veteran bringing back memories of the war. But as he walked farther away, he stumbled upon and fell headfirst into an empty garbage can. The roaring and rumbling passing trucks drowned out his voice. Then, as he picked himself up and on his way once more, I could just hear him singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Then these leviathan vehicles coming out or going to the Holland Tunnel under the deep waters of the Hudson River, finally obliterated his voice. I wanted to go shake the hand of this lonely tottering figure and at least say the word friend to him. He could have been in one of those amphibian assault boats which wasn’t blown to bits, hitting the beach. And now instead he is falling drunk into a garbage can. Turn my key in the door and open it into the stale smell of the hallway. Climb the rickety stairs. Open another door to the emptiness of the apartment. Switch on the light. And the cockroaches, goddamn bastards, scatter everywhere to hide. On the record player was left the French national anthem, the “Marseillaise.” If Sylvia isn’t eating crackers and drinking soda pop driving her car all the way to California, then maybe she’s on a ship first-class crossing the Atlantic to go to Paris.
Stephen O’Kelly’O checking through the apartment. Drawers, shelves, and closets. Her ballet books gone. All her notes she kept on Isadora Duncan, whom she would emulate in a toga while floating about spouting out Greek and Roman ideals. Dust-free space left where her jewelry box once rested. Full of gold chains, bracelets, and pearls. Crossed my mind once to ferry them all to the pawnshop. But keeping my dignity meant more. In the bathroom, where there is only room enough to stand along with her toothbrush, the toothpaste gone. Another expense to reckon with in order to keep the teeth white and bright. Plus, disappeared from the rusting medicine shelves are all her expensive creams and cleansers. Nightly to caress her smooth summer-tanned skin with the oil of this and oil of that. In the bedroom closet, a crumpled hat and her old raincoat and a couple of dresses. Vamoosed. Shipped out. Perhaps to Cincinnati, Ohio. To Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or to Kansas City. As she’s done previously in search of her real mother. She didn’t even know where to start to find her real father. But one guy said no I’m not your father, but come in I’d like to kiss you as if I were. Wild-goose chases to no avail. To go knocking on a strange door waiting for a strange face to say no I am not your mother, get the hell out of here. And she would go away from such doors racked with sobs. Back to some anonymous hotel. To next day fly back on a plane to New York. Then to vanish somewhere into the luxury of her own life. Emptier than it was before. Now she’s speeding far away from the poverty of my life. “Who the fuck has ever heard of you.” she said. “You’re a nobody.” And so was Vivaldi at the end of his life. But while he lived, he was one of the finest violinists of his day and a composer of dazzling warmth and verve, who only in death lay in utter lonely obscurity in Vienna. Just as Stephen Foster died impoverished in this city. The ignored end of great men’s lives leaves a cold clutching hand on the heart.
Stephen O’Kelly’O easing himself beneath the blankets of the broken bed. Staring at the ceiling, trying to sleep. Cold spell descending on New York. Radio warnings of a blizzard. Snow falling through the night and still falling in the morning. Flu epidemic raging throughout the city. One out of five going down. Suicides going up. Short on food and I’ve never felt healthier. In the navy, the most hated food was candied parsnips. And best liked was peaches in syrup poured on muffins as a dessert, which would make one take a five-second positive view of staying the navy. Force myself now to remember the pleasant taste. And my sailor-tailored bell-bottomed trousers. That Maximilian Avery Gifford, just to give a few of his Christian names, and the only friend I had in the navy, said I should get made to give the ladies a thrill. Wonder how such tailoring would go with a pair of tasseled shoes. Worn as a true sign of being a member of the tasseled-shoe club. Maybe someone will think that I am someone who is someone. Meanwhile look out the window. No tasseled shoes for sure in this neighborhood. Heat is at last tingling up through the pipes. Next the landlord will send a shiver of pain up my ass when he starts fist-pounding again on the door for the rent.
At dawn, hungry pigeons landing on the windowsill. Stephen O’Kelly’O putting out scraps of bread. Have breakfast. And give the pigeons some. Avoid electrocution while cooking up coffee in the old percolator. A couple of stale rolls, heat them in the oven with butter and save my two cinnamon buns. Today for lunch have some tomatoes, spinach and celery. Pizza pie for dinner. As mesmerizing time passes, play and compose for as long as I can. Put on another sweater and lumber jacket. Lace up my old woodsman’s boots and zip up my lumber jacket. Go to the store. Buy some nourishing cheese. Man who takes care of the garbage cans of the building next door is out chopping up the ice where he has cleared the snow from the sidewalk. He’s in the same thick brown jacket and black hat and earmuffs he always wears. For the first time as I walk by, he speaks.
“Hey, I found out it’s you who plays piano. I like the music. I can hear it a little bit down here on the street, between the traffic.”
“Thank you very much. It’s always nice to have my work appreciated.”
“Hey, that’s your music you composed.”
“Yes.”
“I like it. My father was in a symphony orchestra. Played oboe in Prague. He came here, fought for this country, got killed in the First World War. You think we needed a Second World War. I’m now like the refugee he used to be. That’s what’s wrong. No appreciation for anything. They don’t respect genius. They don’t care. That’s what’s being celebrated in America today is mass stupidity. And kissing asses of celebrities.”
A single small word of praise lightens and quickens the step through the snow. He heard me playing part of my minuet. Brightens the infinitesimally tiny glow on the horizon of the future. For the darkness in one’s soul gets so dark and so bleak that one’s fingers and hands struggle to feel and claw the way out. Folk brushing the snow from their automobiles. Shoveling to dig out their tires. Guy with his car hood up, recharging a battery. Grocery boy with a heaped box of groceries, wheeling it by on his bike. It could be like a little village in France or Italy. At least for eight seconds, until you wake up and know you’re only a stone’s throw away from the Bowery, the last and hopeless refuge of the defeated and forgotten. Now pass this doorway which has always looked suspicious. Two fat, dark, short men, one holding the other by the lapels, shouting into each other’s face. Then they are silent as I walk by, but start shouting again at each other when I’ve gone past. Woman bundled up wrapped in rags and coats, has a place cleared of snow on the sidewalk to sit. She is picking up and squeezing lice between her begrimed fingers.
One seeks for pastoral and civil places away from the wild energy of New York to induce musical ideas and relaxation. And the snow comes a great blanket of temporary silence. Wasted as I merely have lain late in bed. Let the lonely days go by. Forced in the chill to wear the gloves with the fingers cut off in order to play. Even the warmest of melodies fails to loosen the stiffened keys of the piano. Then at noon trudge out through the new drifts to the grocery store. To stack up with beans, potatoes, and the cheapest vegetables money can buy with what is left of my sixteen dollars and eighty-six cents. The rent to pay. One hundred and sixty-four dollars owing for two months. The gas and electricity could soon be cut off. My last steady money was as a war veteran being unemployed and looking for a job and accepted as a member of the Fifty-Two Twenty club. Twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks was at least survival until Sylvia came along. I ate all the potatoes she threw on the floor. Then as a last desperate measure, went over to the family-owned saloon farther uptown on the Bowery. Feeling like a begging leper. Warned by my parents never to be seen there. Sat in a darkened booth in the back like a wino. Had a couple of free bottles of beer, a pickle and a roast beef sandwich swamped in gravy. Bartender could have been a little more friendly. A big shiny cockroach ran across the table. To kill it, I took an empty beer bottle, smashing it down on the table. Missed the cockroach, broke the bottle, and left busted glass all over the place. Message will go back to my family I was unruly and maybe even drunk.
My long walks now each day took me north on Broadway. Past store after store selling everything on earth. Rugs, peanuts, hip boots, dresses, trusses for rupture, luggage, Halloween masks. And if I were hungry I could buy a salami sandwich with extra relish at no extra cost. When I reached Fifty-seventh Street, I left another note for Aspasia. Then to eat as cheaply as I could, went to Horn and Hardart. Opening up the little glass doors, pushing nickels into the slots. Pulled out a cheese sandwich and a piece of blueberry pie. Shoved a glass under the tap and pushed the lever for an exact glass of milk to pour out. As I sat eating at a table up in the balcony, a guy my age, and draped in a long raincoat buttoned up to his neck, goes with intelligent poise from table to table, taking the dregs of coffee left in cups and pouring one into another to make himself a full cup into which he puts masses of sugar. And then pours red gobs of tomato ketchup on his collected crusts of bread. And finding a newspaper to read he sits down to his free lunch. So well manneredly eating. Watching him he suddenly nods at me. It must be in affirmation that we both do what we’ve got to do to survive.
Then Jesus Christ. Someone has just walked in to announce that that is who he is. If it isn’t someone proclaiming they’re the Redeemer then nearly everyone else, and everywhere else you look in the corner of or behind something in this city, there is something or someone profane. A man in a large overcoat is lurking over a balustrade of the balcony, watching a woman in her tight white uniform below collecting dirty dishes while he’s pulling his prick. Then when you go out to walk across the park where within the shadows of the thicker shrubbery, guys are loitering with erections, and while they pretend to be pissing, they are instead conducting their own public den of iniquity. But even with all this disgraceful behavior, maybe it’s safer uptown. Because last night, a Mafia don with a cigar half smoked in his mouth just got gunned down in the local Italian bistro. He was ordering his fettuccine and about to taste a glass of wine. Always a nice little reminder that anywhere, just sitting or stepping out for a pleasant stroll on the street, or just as it was on the train from Coney Island, suddenly everything can turn into a fearsome battle for your life. Or sometimes you don’t even get time to battle. When a bullet instead goes through your brain. And your neurons get sent into the centuries yet to be invented.
Back on Pell Street where I hoped every moment there would be some good news, the phone had yet to ring. All seemed a desert wasteland where I wandered lost. No one is ever going to give me a commission to write an operetta. Or announce, Gee, Mr. O’Kelly’O, your minuet is the ten-thousand-dollar winning composition. Good to have reached you on the telephone, we’ve been finding it hard to track you down in order to inform you that the New York Philharmonic is practicing playing your wonderful opus prior to its gala performance. Of course meanwhile we will emolument you at the rate of one thousand dollars a month until your next masterpiece is completed, with the usual use of a concert grand Steinway in the isolated cabin in the Connecticut woods, and so as not to annoy you, all the other composers and commissioning agents will be kept at their distance. Three meals a day delivered to your door. And what you do in private with the female fans lurking in the woods, and over whom we have no control, is your own secluded and personal business.
Then the daydreams of glory vanish as quickly as they come. Sink back into depression. Unused hours to go by. Relive the misery of all the parting words Sylvia said. Unable in my despair to compose at the piano. Each day wrenching myself out of the apartment, to merely set out and walk again north along Broadway, through these canyon streets. Until dressed now in a jacket, shirt, and tie in order to frequent the better hotel lobbies. Pass by Broadway Central Hotel once billed as America’s most palatial hotel and greatest of all of New York’s hotels. Still there and long faded from its glory. I went in to stand and survey its large and once most fashionable lobby. I even looked at a room when a most civil gentleman manager inquired if I’d like accommodation. And then, cheered up by this courteous attention I continued on, as I did this day, tramping all the mile after mile of city blocks. Through the bleak streets of the Garment District, cutting across to Hell’s Kitchen, where the most secret of the family’s saloons was located and where the Irish gangs used to scare the shit out of the Italians. Then back through Times Square and onward to Columbus Circle. Ranting speakers on their soapboxes. So many cowed dark figures. Almost seems as if everyone has given up and is too tired to insult each other. Remembered the feeling throughout the war of dreaming when it would be over. And the life of freedom one could look forward to. Lazing about on a beach drinking mint juleps. And here it was. The war was over. And the dreams shrunk to a struggle to stay clothed, housed, and fed. The main things of life survival that one took for granted in the navy. And complained about. Three meals a day. And no longer having to swing in a hammock but given a canvas bunk tiered one on top of the other but at least a dry, warm place to sleep and comfortable so long as someone wasn’t trying to stick a prick into you. Now it seems like the last act of desperation to hope that one might even run into an old prep school chum who could ask me if I needed any money and invite me for a week to his mansion up farther north on the Hudson and well out of the Bronx. Or even someone, a gunner’s mate I knew from my turret on my ship, who’s made it big on civvy street. Or best of all, Max, who married Sylvia’s closest friend and transplanted in total silence to big big money in Texas. But my thoughts got all different as I finally detoured on reaching Fifty-ninth Street, to walk east along the conspicuous elegance of Central Park South. Thinking of the rich, like the Witherspoon Triumphingtons. And all these other folk who passed me as I loitered on the steps of the Plaza Hotel. Then I went in, walking through the marble halls, past the Palm Court to the Fifth Avenue-side lobby to further loiter. Doing the same thing was a pleasantly eccentric tall, dark-haired woman in an ankle-length black Persian lamb coat, thick gray socks and sandals. She elaborately wiped off the seat before she sat down. And then suddenly getting up again and in retrieving a discarded newspaper, she came back, and as she sat, missed the chair and landed on her ass. I nearly gave a guffaw, until I saw the look of humiliation on the woman’s face, and I rushed to help her up, and there were tears of appreciation in her eyes.
But nobody I knew was to be seen on my walk. The exhilaration and hope I first felt in taking my ambling strides now faded and died as I took the subway back downtown. I went to drink three beers in Minetta’s in Greenwich Village and could overhear these artistic bullshitters in their cashmere sweaters talking about the nobility of art. And then I walked the remaining blocks to Pell Street. Past the buildings that had now become familiar. As I entered the apartment, the telephone was ringing. Such was my haste to answer that I tripped over a chair and nearly ripped the phone wires out of the wall and the earpiece fell off the hook. It could be a commission. Or at least Sylvia saying sorry she left and wanting to come home. But it was instead a deeply growling, hostile voice.
“You white cock-sucking motherfucker, I’m going to come there and cut your balls off and then your prick. You go fucking my woman, you hear, you honky cock-sucking motherfucker.”
The phone hung up. And later, Aspasia rang that she was hiding out up in Harlem on Sugar Hill and in the Florence Mills Apartments on Edgecombe Avenue. At least one had the consolation of the apartments being named after that wonderful musical-comedy star. Her boyfriend broke her door down and threatened to choke her to death to get my telephone number I wrote on the piece of paper I’d left at the Art Students League. And now her boyfriend was looking for me to cut off my balls but didn’t yet know my address. And if he didn’t kill her in the meantime, she would call me again. I growled my own few angry words that I’d break his ass and blow his fucking head off if I saw him. Meanwhile as deaf as Beethoven I spent the rest of the day sitting with my head in my hands and my balls spiritually in a sling. That night I propped a chair against the door and stacked milk bottles to get knocked over to alert me from sleep. I slept with the carving knife, part of a canteen of cutlery I planned to soon pawn, from Sylvia’s adoptive parents. My hand gripped to the handle under my pillow. Waking up bleary-eyed, it was a struggle to go out to buy something for breakfast. Heading downstairs, I had to look in every shadow to see if anyone lurked there. Standing then looking left and right to see if the way was clear in the street. But I already had in my hand a letter from the mailbox. My name written in flowing beautiful script on an elegant cream-colored envelope. A gold-edged card inside, and beneath the Butterfield 8 telephone number were a dozen brief words.
As promised instead of my tinkle
my card.
The Steinway awaits.
Dru
Boyo boy I mean it, did I in one goddamn hurry dial Butterfield 8. And those words I heard on the other end of the phone. “Come right over, why don’t you.” And I nearly broke my ass in the speed with which I took a shower. Ripping the shower curtain down as my feet slipped on the soapsuds in the bath I crashed on one buttock and one elbow and banged the back of my head. It was a wonderful feeling. Even with my broken ass trembling I was elated and as if I were on the stage of La Scala in Milan I sang an aria from La Bohème and looked at my naked form in the mirror. Not bad. And looking trim. Then putting on my clothes and trying to find clean underwear, socks and an ironed shirt. New York became a different city as I rode north on the BMT line and got off at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South and now I didn’t give a good goddamn how sad the look was on people’s faces. Or maybe I did but they were now too crushingly dismal to contemplate. Also any second I expected some black bastard to come charging at me with a knife, screaming, “I’m going to kill you, you white bastard.” But at least for a moment or two, I had somewhere to go in life and play music. I walked east on Fifty-ninth Street, stopping off in the shoe-repair store, where, from one of their efficient team of shiners using about a dozen different creams, I got a badly needed shine. And here I was, all the way from Pell Street. And on these quieter pavements of Sutton Place again, that you would believe was another and nicer world. In which my presence produced a slight suspicion and then surprise in the eyes of the doorman, who pretended not to recognize me and had stepped back behind his desk, his finger already pointed at names in a book.
“Are you expected, sir.”
“I’m expected.”
“And who may I say is calling.”
“Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O.”
“Oh, yes. Listed here as Stephen O’Kelly’O. One moment and I’ll announce you.”
The elevator operator kept glancing down at the slight peg in my pants and then at my shoes which were before getting a shine, a little worse for wear. I felt more and more inappropriate as we rose up through the elegant floors of this building. Even old Gilbert forgetting he ever saw me before and, at the door, giving me the once-over. But recovering his powers of recognition as I made no bones about my identity.
“Oh, of course, Mr. O’Kelly’O, nice to see you again. I’ll take your coat. Madam is awaiting you in the music room, then if you’ll follow me this way.”
Another hallway exiting in another direction from this domed-ceiling lobby. The feet silently tread in the serene peace across these carpets. And then make noise on the parquet. The faint smell of wood smoke. And something not noticed before, a curving staircase sweeping upward to an indoor balcony. Dare one ask how many rooms and how many floors this joint has. No. Don’t dare. Just carry on. Let all knowledge arrive freely. A left turn and then a right through two double mahogany doors paneled in green baize, the doors closing over one another and opening into an enormous, somber if sumptuous room with prints and gilt mirrors on the walls, picture windows, a small terrace, and far below, on the river, a tug boat hauling barges, its bow afoam pushing its way through the ripples and waves. And there, across the golden carpet, the ebony concert grand piano, its top ajar ready to be played. Flames licking a brace of logs in the fireplace. But not to be ignored in the soft hues of light and seated at a small table in another of her white clinging gowns, her hair gleaming and drawn back from her face, Drusilla. And by her elbow, a dish stacked with a variety of cookies, and from within an elaborate silver ice bucket peeked a golden-topped bottle of champagne, and on a side table a tray with pink tulip glasses and canapés.
“Ah, the moment I’ve been waiting for while I’ve been playing my game of patience, with cards of course, as you are a little later than expected.”
“Forgive me, ma’am.”
“Oh please, no.”
“Sorry. I mean Dru. I had to find clothes to wear.”
“Well, I had a perfectly awful thing happen. So your later arrival has given me further time to recover my composure. Join me in a drink to help wash away images. You will, I hope, have some of my favorite champagne.”
“Yes, thank you. What a wonderful room.”
“Yes, originally two enlarged into one. Entirely soundproof. Well, there it is, the Steinway waiting for you.”
“Nice to feel one has no worry concerning any protesting neighbors.”
“And it is so nice to see you, Stephen, it really is. And I’m so so sorry about the situation. It’s not, of course, for the first time that Sylvia has run off and disappeared.”
“What would you like me to play.”
“Well, I’d love to hear your composition.”
“I might perhaps warm up my fingers on some composer whose music already possesses proven greatness.”
“Oh, you are modest, aren’t you.”
“Well truth be known, yes I am. Possibly because when I first used to play piano, growing up in my house, among my unappreciative family, only my dog Chess, appreciated my playing. And he would sit up, trying to balance on his hind legs out on the driveway below the living room window, howling always in perfect pitch.”
“Well then, would you know something perhaps by Rachmaninoff.”
“Yes, I believe I would.”
“Then Rachmaninoff.”
“How about some passages from his Piano Concerto Number Three in D Minor.”
“Oh, yes, that has such marvelous bursts of romanticism. And the climaxes arise so splendidly.”
Stephen O’Kelly’O massaging his knuckles and fingers, advancing to the piano. Turning to gently bow back to his smiling hostess. When about to sit to play, always the moment to set the scene. With the utmost seriousness in one’s posture, stand perfectly still, count to thirteen. Then be seated, look upward, as if seeking spiritual inspiration from above. Hold outstretched the fingers above the keys. For a moment, hold them as if to cause levitation and the whole piano to rise to the ceiling. Contract the fingers ever so slightly. Then. Now. Bring them down. Strike. Fingertips concussing upon the ivory whiteness. Usher into the world this exquisiteness of sound. What a pity it can’t escape across the fast flowing, shimmering water of the west channel of the East River. And thence pass over the gloomy shadowy buildings on Welfare Island to Queens and thence across to the distant lights of Brooklyn. And, in traversing the ether, even reach a sympathetic ear in Brownsville and Canarsie. To quaver, quiver and tremble their euphonic sensibilities as one’s fingers touch the keys and reverberate the strings strung across this cast of iron. And most nobly best of all. To have as well, as I strike the last chord upon the keys, the appreciative warmth and joy of an admiring listener.
“Stephen, that was wonderful, wonderful. Oh, you do play so beautifully. So marvelously easeful. Without being extrovert. Yet youthful. And with such forward surge. I can’t imagine why you’re not on the concert stage giving performances.”
“Well, having undergone a rather long stale stretch in the navy, where there were few pianos to be found to play, I have I’m afraid missed the boat. Very little privacy to pursue musical interests within a gun turret aboard a battleship.”
“Oh, you poor you, you. Did you make big bangs. Here, let me replenish your glass. And then, although I’m aware it’s not entirely finished, you must play for me your minuet.”
Stephen O’Kelly’O rising from the piano. Crossing the room, tripping on the carpet. Gaining his composure, a hand held over his heart, a broad grin on his face. Taking up his glass and drinking deep into the delicious grapey substance. If there were any condition and moment mankind could undergo that could be termed that overabused word happiness, then this was it. Amazing how with just a little admiration one is tempted to strike a Napoleonic pose and behave like a prima donna. And of course meanwhile wondering when old Jonathan Witherspoon Triumphington is going to jump out of a closet or from behind a door or come swinging into view off a chandelier with a.38-caliber pistol aimed at my head. And make his own big bang for my being here playing his piano and drinking his champagne and desperately now wanting to fuck his wife, who hasn’t even winked once since I began to play. Which I again return to do. The world premiere performance of my minuet. Bow. Beseat oneself to play. Totally and absolutely inspired. Improvise and embellish chords and harmonics. Fingers going wild, produce integral multiples of fundamentals up and down the octaves. Then dulcet passages on this dulcimer instrument. Tears welling in Drusilla’s eyes. Her hands folded still in her lap. Which, as I struck the last faint key, she raised to clap. A diamond on a finger glinting along with diamond-encrusted bracelets on her wrists. She stands and crosses to me. A kiss on my brow.
“That is simply so wonderful. So sadly delicate at the end. I’m so glad I worked up all my nerve and invited you to play.”
“And I’m so glad that you did and that I played.”
“Well you are brilliant. Come and let’s finish our champagne. Oh, but you’re limping.”
“A fall in the bath taking a shower in my rush to get here.”
“Poor boy, you must show me where it hurts. I believe in the laying on of healing hands. But now I do have a question or two, of course. Is your first Christian name Alfonso. They called from the lobby as you were coming up in the elevator.”
“In fact, yes. But I only use it to achieve people’s attention.”
“Ah. And question two. And I must warn you, I am incurably and insatiably curious. And I must ask. When last here, whatever were you doing in the loo, if I may use the British slang. Gilbert thought there had been a burglary, or at least a pipe leaking.”
“I did wonder when you might venture to ask me that. I suppose it was a damn silly business. But I was conjuring up to compose a march of pipes and drums.”
“Dear me, in the loo. How interesting, although I do hate and despise the word interesting and all those who use it throughout these our United States. But I do so love your pedantic speak.”
“Well as a matter of true fact, it comes from a slight impediment I have in the use of English, not that I speak French and Italian that well. However in the loo I had rather an insufferable situation. An accident. Or rather, discovered I had mistakenly put my shorts on back to front.”
“Oh my God. Forgive me. I can’t help finding that just a little bit droll. No wonder my dear fellow, that you had to pee. And your march you were conjuring up, pipe and drums. Did you compose it.”
“As a matter of fact, in my panic, I didn’t. But being also enamored by the lute and harp I instead put together a little bridal hymn.”
“Oh, did you. How sweet.”
“Well I’m afraid it’s not exactly sweet. Despite my classical tendencies, I do synchronize on the downbeat.”
“Oh, do you.”
“Yes. For hepcats. But I guess on the occasion in your powder room, I would have been better occupied composing something a little more akin to a dirge with muffled drums.”
“Oh, you mustn’t say that.”
“Well except for tonight in your wonderful presence, I’ve only met thus far dissent, opposition, and rejection in my efforts to enter the public forum, and to be recognized for my work. I eschew the barren and trite minds consumed with their pose of cultural omnipotence and pretense at original creativity, who by their very existence make the dedicated composer’s life such a misery.”
“You know, I have a solution. You must come out to Montana. I have a little ranch out there. Mostly wilderness. A grizzly bear or two. Buffalo, moose. And I suppose it might have more than a few rattlesnakes. But I’ve never seen one. Otherwise completely possessed of solitude. No one but me, a ranch hand or two, and the caretaker need know you were even there. I could have a Steinway for you. And I know you could work quietly in peace. Why do you not answer.”
“Well, I’m trying to remember all the languages that I can say yes in. Oui, sí, da. Igen.”
“And a’iwa, I believe, is Arabic.”
“And ja, I believe, is Lettish.”
“You have such exquisite hands, Stephen. I’ll bet you were lionized by the girls when growing up.”
“Well again, as a matter of true fact, I wasn’t. As a relatively poor boy of a very large family I could never ask anyone out on a date, even to the movies. With hardly much change left out of a dollar and ice cream sodas gone up to fifteen cents in the sweet shop where once they were only ten cents. And where some of the kids hung out who could afford it.”
“Oh, how sad for you.”
“Well, there was a little kid we could bribe for a nickel who cleaned up the candy wrappers and Popsickle sticks inside the movie theatre. Who would open up a side emergency fire exit to let us in, but I thought it an inappropriate entrance for an invited young lady.”
“Oh dear, I would have thought that so sweet and exciting.”
“Well I’m afraid young girls in the neighborhood were a little too conscious of what kind of an impression they were making. Their dignity and esteem and their reputations to uphold I’m afraid took precedence over the carefree.”
“Oh dear. When I was that age, before the war living as we did in Paris, where on Avenue Foch there were no neighborhood cinemas, no ice cream parlors, I remember I was always dying for something carefree and American like a pineapple soda and a jukebox crooning out something like ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’”
“Pineapple’s my favorite too. Well I hope you weren’t, had there been sodas then in Paris, short of an extra franc or two.”
“Well as a matter of fact, I was. Very short indeed. I’m afraid my frugal parents did not believe in children’s allowances. The only entertainment to be found for me as a young girl was a nearby street named Rue Rude, which I always laughed at, thinking that if you walked there, someone would be discourteous to you. Although I suppose, for all my parents’ parsimony, one might say one lived in rather ornate if shabbily genteel circumstances amid treasures. And as the saying goes, the beauty of which give their owners so much joy. But to a juvenile girl just wanting desperately to find someone to love her, giltwood consoles, rock-crystal chandeliers taken from the imperial palaces of Saint Petersburg, even a few pieces of silver furniture belonging to Louis the Fourteenth which he hadn’t melted down to finance his wars, were of very little consequence. And frankly, I always thought we were always very poor. To the degree sometimes that I shudder having to give someone a dollar.”
“Well Dru, I’d be glad to lend or give you a dollar anytime you feel nervous like that. And if I may gently say so, it’s not half-bad the way you’re living here.”
“Well, perhaps I exaggerate a little. Owning divine things is how people cling to life, I suppose. And especially at the time the end of their own lives inexorably approaches. Ah, but how morose one is. Time to fill our glasses. Do have a cookie. We are still alive. But I did, before my own unpredictable demise may come, delayed as it may hopefully be, simply have an overwhelming urge to hear you play. And I would so like you to stay and play some more but I have to go meet Jonathan due soon at Penn Station off the train. He hates flying. He’s been duck shooting out west. He does rather have a fixation on his shooting, claret, and cigars. And he hates not having someone meet him. But I shall see you soon again, shan’t I.”
“Yes, for absolute sure.”
“You know I often watch along with the numerous seagulls, faithful pigeons fly together past and below the window here, their wings almost touching and it sends a wrench through me. And I do think I can talk about anything under the sun with you and circumstances permitting, think I might want to know you better. I am, after all, I do believe, still your mother-in-law.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, that keeps slipping out.”
“Well, I’ll keep forgiving you. And I know that it may rather seem I’ve propositioned you, but you will think of Montana, won’t you. You have, you know, helped to set my mind at rest. After a totally unsettling experience just before you came. Gilbert was otherwise occupied and I thought I heard a noise outside the service door at the larder end of the kitchen. Opened it, and there was the grocery boy with a delivery but with his trousers open, pulling upon himself and at the crucial moment insisting I watch, and I thought he might have a gun. It made one flush with rage. Then he, pale with fright, poor boy, burst into tears. And said he was so ashamed. An altar boy at his church. I felt sorry for him. Then had to let him get the groceries in, two enormously heavy boxes. And before sending him on his way, he was in such a state and so shaking, I gave him some whisky and strictly advised him not ever to come back. Do you think I did the right thing in not calling the police. I can of course, be such a sentimental old fusspot.”
“Dru, I know this may sound like pedantic speak but allow me to say that there should be inaugurated as soon as possible in this town a devout society dedicated against the total indifference to the erosion of the human spirit. Enormous amounts of which are clearly present in your own heart.”
“I must kiss you for saying that. I must. Just a peck.”
Stephen O’Kelly’O taking his leave, formally bowing to Dru at the elevator door, kissing her hand in the European manner as clock chimes on two different clocks rang ten. Nightlife in New York starts to wake up. Not that the day life ever dies. Departing empty-handed. Tempted as I was to have stuffed a few of the delicious canapés into my pocket. And to have put my arms enveloping around her. The sound of the elevator coming. And the warm inner nature of this woman. As she suddenly rises on her toes, leaning forward to again kiss me on the brow. So close. Smelling so sweet. So welcome to the nose. As there is no worse or more unforgettable smell on a battleship than cordite and the stink of half a dozen sweating men.
Stephen O’Kelly’O walking with a limp along Fifty-seventh Street. Go by, one after another, the massive apartment houses. Somber with their many windows. And spaciously spaced inside where souls dwell, self-existing on private incomes. Doorways with their doormen stationed within. Suspicious eyes peering out. And I go step by step across this tall city. Passing a pharmacy and a discount store selling rugs, paintings. A hardware store selling locks. Another selling brass bathroom fittings, that the citizens struggle to own. A dark dingy brick building there with no windows but has a sign.
INTERBOROUGH
RAPID TRANSIT CO.
SUB STATION NO. 42
The pedestrians thicken westward across First, Second, Third, Lexington, and Madison avenues. And in this city of fervent aspirations, finally to Fifth Avenue the geographical center of wealth. And farther on where it begins to fade, turning into the stone bow-fronted elevation of Horn and Hardart. This old faithful emporium for the cheap square meal. For a dollar bill getting change of twenty nickels strewn out on the worn piece of marble. Twenty times you can read “United States of America. Liberty.” A buffalo bent ready to charge on one side and the noble profile of an American Indian on the other. And the settlers beat the holy shit out of both. But when plugging enough nickels in the slot, a hamburger, glass of milk and piece of blueberry pie come out.
My old pal seen last time I was here is now over there, halfway across the room, collecting his usual dregs of coffee, cup by cup, and with what looks like a script of some kind tucked under his arm. Gives me an acknowledging smile as he ladles out the ketchup on a goodly sized scrap of bread and munches away. Amazing how one can so immediately recognize a kindred spirit. Even though everyone is pulling his prick in this city and shooting each other with guns and stabbing people with knives, it’s still, with its flowing heaving tides of raw humanity, a wonderful democracy. And with a vengeance capable of leading to murder, everyone free to despise, resent and hate everyone else.
Thought of Drusilla all the way back to Pell Street, subway noise roaring in the ears. The faint blue veins of her hands, long-fingered and strong. A glittering bracelet covered in diamonds on both her wrists. Turn now to catch a peek at the rogue’s gallery of somber faces across the aisle. Each one looking as if he’s committed a recent murder or is about to get murdered. Although I had to rake up leaves and cut grass, I had a thirty-five-cents-a-week allowance and poor old Dru had nothing. But in my present poverty there is a vast chasm between our lives. The poor who want advantages and the rich, who don’t want to be taken advantage of. And her wealth, married as she is, wearing her golden handcuffs. Linked and locked up to a rich, rich man. Sampling her luxury makes the confines of Pell Street feel ever more gloomy. And dangerous. As later that night, Aspasia called again. Asked if I got the recording of her singing she’d left against the wall downstairs under the mailbox. I said I’d go and see and that it would be a miracle if it hadn’t been stolen. Said she told her boyfriend I lived on the corner of Fifth and East Sixty-first Street. She knew it was a house she had walked past many a time when she worked wheeling out an old man down the street, and which always looked empty. And now the boyfriend was foaming at the mouth to get there, with a knife longer than she had ever seen before. God help anyone answering the door without a baseball bat to knock the fucker on the head.
As a good citizen, I skipped downstairs, found the record, and went out and made an anonymous call to the police. Mayhem expected at Fifth and Sixty-first. Crazed, berserk, mentally ill and frenzied man rabid and foaming at mouth, armed with a big knife and screaming he is going to commit murder. Please try to save the lives of all the decent people you can. Then I returned to the apartment slightly happier, indeed delighted that justice might be served on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street and put Aspasia’s record on the phonograph. And listened. My God. The exquisite beauty of the melodic golden sonority so purely rising from her throat. A voice reminiscent of the great Russian sopranos. What if they don’t get this son of a bitch and I were ever conducting and she were a soloist at St. Bartholomew’s. Dru and her husband there. And Sylvia on the steps outside, smoking cannabis and snorting cocaine up her nose. Then Aspasia’s boyfriend, if he hasn’t already been arrested by a couple of dozen policemen jumping out of half a dozen squad cars, rushes in with a war cry and foaming at the mouth, charges up the aisle with a knife. My back turned, he has his stiletto raised ready to plunge in between my shoulder blades. The congregation knows I’m a Roman Catholic, so none of these Episcopalian Protestants will deign come to my rescue. And because of the thunderous voices of the chorus, no one hears folk shouting, “Hey, conductor, watch out.”
Waking this next morning in Pell Street unstabbed, alive, and hungry. The sun briefly out from behind the taller buildings shone as it did for exactly eleven minutes on the bed before it disappeared for good for the rest of the day. Exhausted by my dreams of a Steinway somewhere out in the wilds of Montana, I lay between the yellowing sheets and went back to sleep without anything to eat. At lunchtime, resurrecting to go out to buy my matters of survival, a bagel, cream cheese, an orange, and splurged on a croissant and the Daily News. Brewed some coffee in the old percolator, a comforting sound as the dark liquid spurts up. And then as I sipped my first cup, I turned over the newspaper to the front page and nearly keeled over in a faint. There a picture of a marauder brandishing a nine-inch knife and surrounded by a dozen police, guns drawn. Son of a bitch black bastard looked like a giant. With an equally massive headline.
MENTALLY DISTURBED MAN
ATTACKS FIFTH AVENUE MANSION
It was as if the whole world now knew everything about my life and that on any line as I read down the page, my name Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O would be revealed. Aspasia’s boyfriend luckily described as incoherent and disarmed after a struggle, was apprehended by the police, arrested, and arraigned. And he could finally be brought to prison on Rikers Island just up the East River and through Hell’s Gate, only a short canoe ride from Dru’s. And I could have been playing my minuet to send him on his way. A sort of tickling sensation to be at last part of the conspicuous activity in this city, even as a remote root cause, and maybe not so remote and safe, from some mad son of a bitch trying to kill you.
Spread open on the kitchen table I read the caption and the brief story a dozen times. Some black bastard gets a knife and goes out to kill a white bastard and in less than five-minutes activity gets his picture all over the newspaper. While I struggle for months to get a tiny plug for my minuet for immediate release, maybe in a parish magazine. And the only recognition I have to show is my name published on my mailbox. To take immediate delivery of an electricity bill. It’s the pigeons who have the best time in this city. Flying where they want. Roosting and cooing and shitting from on high all over the goddamn place. And just as I was imagining hearing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in my mind, the phone rang. Sending a shiver through me. Because I owe the phone bill. Pick it up. Wait for a growl. Or now an interrogation by the police. And hearing the Chicago drawl of a familiar voice, sigh with relief.
“Hiya kid, old buddy. Remember me. It’s your old friend Maximilian. I was best man at your wedding. Gee, I almost hung up, thinking it was a wrong number. You sound suspicious.”
“Hello, good friend.”
“Gee, that’s better. Sorry to hear about Sylvia but she gave me the number. Ran into her in, of all places, the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. You know, where a guest can still arrive in his private railway car. Hey, and I guess you heard all about me and Ertha.”
I had heard. But not the whole story. Old Max divorced by his first wife because he was broke without prospects, she then didn’t waste time trying to take him for all he was worth, which Max pleaded was nothing at the time except for a vintage Bentley. And then he became instantly more considerably rich as he immediately had married Sylvia’s pal Ertha after a whirlwind romance. The newlyweds then moved southwest to enjoy a dalliance in a severely affluent suburban clime located in Houston, Texas, where Ertha’s father was an oil magnate who readily assisted his very affably charming new son-in-law in making his way around in the corporate jungle of petroleum. And buying them a wedding present of a spacious house with coffered cathedral ceilings in a fancy district with two acres, four-car garage, five and half bathrooms, swimming pool and a cook and maid in attendance.
“Gee pal and old buddy boy, all went fine and swell for a while out on the old cocktail terrace until a comedy of unpremeditated imbroglios ensued, the unbelievable happenstance of which you could not ever in your wildest fears conceive.”
It transpired that old Max who, it had to be admitted, couldn’t control his sexual appetite and would, as the opportunity presented, jump in the nicest possible way on anything that moved and even a few that didn’t, had screwed someone else’s wife after a football game in a kiosk adjoining someone’s tennis court. The event of this alleged intercourse hit the local headlines when a robber, trying to rob the house next door with the owners away, got ripped apart and killed by two Doberman pinschers. Old Max and the beauteous lady, a multimillionaire’s spouse, discovered present on the other side of the fence, were called as material witnesses. And Max’s quote—“Hey gee, we were playing backgammon when we heard all this barking and then screams. We thought it was someone kibitzing about and having fun.” Nobody believed, including the judge, that they were merely playing backgammon. But the judge at least said they weren’t on trial. However, Houston society decided they were, and the scandal suddenly found Max out of a job, minus his twenty-four suits and three cars and, after a divorce, out of a marriage and without a roof over his head which literally happened overnight, for, added to his woes, the cuckholded husband put out a contract on his life, effective if he wasn’t out of Houston by sundown.
“That’s right old pal, pronto I beat it back to New York. But I wasn’t the one who first cheated. All that happened old pal after another story. Anyway, I drove the whole way back east in my old Bentley, the top down, the wind blowing through my hair. Later I find out old Ertha is all the time fucking an old flame. A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker on a professional football team, who gave her a venereal infection she gave to me, is how I first suspected what was going on. But wait till we meet and I tell you the rest of the story.”
Old Max, who himself came from Evanston, Illinois, on Lake Michigan and a fairly affluent family and was fond of reminding me in the navy that Evanston had the highest percentage of college graduates of any big town in the United States. He had old-fashioned ideas of behavior and etiquette amounting nearly to prudishness, not surprising, as Evanston was also the national headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of which his mother was an important member. He said he was disgusted by the kind of betrayal involving Ertha’s past lover. Which embarrassed hell out of him having to go back home to visit his family doctor and milk down his prick just as they did at a short-arm inspection in the navy when some medic was examining suspected cases of a contagious inflammatory disease of the genitourinary tract. Max in his own act of unfaithfulness, maintaining that he was only just yielding to a brief temptation, led on by a woman in heat, whom it would have been grossly ungentlemanly to rebuff. Sure, he could get his own back on Ertha, but what the hell, life was too short. He wasn’t going to yield to any low-down retaliatory behavior, no matter how much he was provoked. And even as he was at the moment monstrously provoked by the monstrous amount of alimony he was sentenced to pay. Having now that he was back east, got himself a slot downtown in a brokerage house at better than a decent salary, a membership in a fancy athletic club, and had taken over the lease on Ertha’s old rented apartment on Waverly Place in the Village, from which Ertha was presently trying to evict him, and which he had now filled with his collection of seashells and plants.
“Well old buddy boy, I guess I’m truly back in this town with its ten thousand major attractions. Gee, come and see me, old pal. I could do with a real friend. After Ertha and I divorced, I thought, Gee, she’s already rich and doesn’t need any money and suddenly now I have lawyers breathing down my neck for accumulated maintenance, with threats that they will end me up in alimony jail. I admit I had it kind of good out there in Texas, and her family was the reason. But now I feel I’m being taken unfair advantage of. You soon find out what a woman’s really like when they get lawyers and get you into court. And it takes the poor bastard for everything he’s got. And if you can find any other better way to make him suffer, do that too. Sort of brings on a paranoia. You begin thinking that no one on this goddamn earth can be trusted. You even find you’re looking for an excuse to hate people. That’s why it’ll be so goddamn good to see you pal. I’m taking the afternoon off. Why don’t you on Friday come to afternoon tea. Scones at teatime and all that goes with them. You know these nice old customs they got in old England help to keep you sane in a city like this. And maybe it’s a good thing I don’t live far from the Women’s House of Detention to remind me of the foibles of the female. Gee pal, it will be great to see you.”
Meanwhile another naval pal I knew who knew Max said it seemed old Max had in addition to his vintage Bentley, taken to wearing tweeds and become very English in both his accent and attitude, including flying the Atlantic several times to check up on having a pair of shotguns made by a famed London gunsmith. Also he’d headed to Georgia for numerous quail shoots, that is when he wasn’t making himself familiar with certain factions of the British landed gentry with whom he took up while indulging brief bouts of foxhunting. And I recalled his fastidiousness and complaints in the navy about the constant vulgar language. And then to find him uncharacteristically wearing nearly skintight tailor-made bell-bottoms which he said sent the girls nuts when he went back home on leave. And was just like a West Virginian we both knew aboard ship, who also on leave, was so mobbed by waiting women when he got off the train that they tore off his uniform and left him on the platform in his skivvies, until the strongest girl rescued him and took him home to screw him insane as he said, but left him just sane enough to fuck again.
Friday dawned sunny. With winter over, a mild breeze blowing up grit and dust in the eyes. And taking a bus north and forgetting to get off at the stop for Waverly Place, I had to walk back downtown again. And as would happen, past the Women’s House of Detention, a grim edifice seeming to stand like an island of feminine horror at the crossroads of Greenwich and Sixth avenues. There, high up at the windows, were wild jeering faces screaming out between the bars, voices raucous and vulgar shouting down into the street.
“Hey Romeo, let me suck your cock, if you’ve got one, while my girlfriend in here sticks her tongue up my ass.”
One shakes a fist up at these unseemly women, but then in instant retaliation, suffers just some more shockingly vulgar discourtesy and ill behavior, which one has so reluctantly become accustomed to in this town. You hear such vile invective coming out of a woman’s mouth, you kind of wonder what normal women are harboring in their brains. But at least in the Villagey atmosphere here, there are a few trees. And unlike nearly all the rest of New York, convening streets slanting in different directions. Turn left. A vegetable store. Next to it, a Chinese laundry. Mother and father in there around the clock sweating over hot irons while the sons and daughters are at Ivy League colleges, their nose stuck in books. This is it. Right here. At these stone steps. The engraved name above a bell. Press. Wait. Hear a buzzer. Push open the door. Climb up stairs. At the top stands Maximilian Avery Gifford Strutherstone III, grinning in a yellow cashmere sweater. How do I know it’s a cashmere sweater. I don’t. But on Max it sure looks like one. And on his feet highly polished mahogany loafers and thick fluffy sweat socks. Growing up, we kids had a name for it—“studied casualness in dress.”
“Gee pal, old buddy, this is a great treat. How are you doing.”
“I’m fine, Max. How are you doing.”
“Well, today I’m doing fine. Fine. Come in. It’s so damn good to see you.”
With a sweep of his arm, Max ushering one in. Under the leaves of palm plants to sit drinking Lapsang souchong and biting into the warmth of scones fresh from the oven and deliciously slathered with clotted cream and black cherry jam. All everywhere neat and clean. His shell collection in a display cabinet. A blue parrot in a cage. The floors polished. College pennants on the walls. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Colgate, the latter located mid — New York State where, Max after the war, came back east to go to college.
“Well Max, looking around here you sure pass inspection. And I am both relieved and impressed that your return to bachelorhood could possibly have demonstrated such endearingly soothing aspects.”
“Yeah, old pal. Old bachelorhood ain’t half-bad. No nagging. No goddamn bossing around. No whining, no bitching, no sulking. No immense surprise sprung on you every time you turn around. Just deliciously soothing tea like now and wonderful conversation. But hey, Steve old boy, my good pal, I’m sorry to hear about you and Sylvia, I really am.”
“What have you heard.”
“That she took off. But at least you know in the crunch, you don’t have any worries.”
“What crunch.”
“You know, like a divorce.”
“Why don’t I have any worries.”
“Well, I mean like alimony. A vise clamping closed on your short hairs, you complain, you squeal, you shout, but which holds you in pain for the rest of your natural life. But you know that can’t happen to you. Just look at who your in-laws are. Imagine, if it ever comes to that, information like that getting out in a divorce court and blaring all over in newspaper headlines.”
“What information.”
“Don’t be naïve, Steve. The amount of old moola of course. That kind of publicity gets a real play and goes everywhere. In fact, who do you know thinks of anything else except how much money somebody else has got.”
“Well, I’d like to know what kind of publicity you’re talking about and where everywhere is, because I don’t know who has ever heard of the Witherspoon Triumphington’s for anyone to care. And if they did, what difference is that going to make that my adoptive father-in-law is a tightwad. He cut off Sylvia’s allowance as soon as we got married.”
“Steve, I don’t mean him, I mean her. I mean, look when that comes out, at who she is.”
“Well, I already know who she is. She’s a very fine and a very beautiful lady.”
“Hey come on Steve, you don’t have to hide anything from me.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“Well, for God’s sake, you must know from Sylvia.”
“What should I know from Sylvia.”
“That her adoptive mother is known, at least among New York’s best society, as being one of the richest women in America. And probably in the world. Compared to her, the tightwad husband, who maybe has some sort of past celebrated lineage plus a few horses and polo ponies, and plays court tennis at the Racquet and Tennis Club, and goes salmon fishing on the Spey and fly-fishing in Finland and quail shooting in Georgia, he hasn’t got a penny. Never had. In fact, it’s probably all her fishing tackle and they’re probably her horses and polo ponies.”
“How do you know all this.”
“From Ertha, for a start. I know. Practically everything about the family. I mean she practically lived with Sylvia for a while in their place upstate. I’m amazed you don’t know. Sylvia had a little doll’s house in the woods where they would stay together. Sure, the two of them were sleeping together. I mean, they’re only part-time lesbians. If it’s really true you don’t know who’s got the money.”
“Hey, what are you trying to say, that Sylvia is a lesbian.”
“Hey, Steve, old pal. I’m just relating facts. No need to get hot under the collar, ole pal.”
“Well, if I don’t happen to know any of these so-called facts, and even if I did, I don’t see why it should be anybody else’s business.”
“Hey, come on Steve, who wouldn’t know these things in a world where that’s what people live and breathe on such information. I mean, shit, boy, Sylvia was raised as if, and thinking she was their natural daughter. You can bet you were checked out sixteen different ways from Sunday. I mean, I don’t know exactly what Sylvia inherits, but it’s enough anyway that they thought they had a slick fortune hunter on their hands when they found there were traces of bootlegging in your family background.”
“I categorically deny and resent deeply that aspersion.”
“It’s only what I was told, Steve, for God’s sake. But I mean, if you make enough at bootlegging it nearly becomes respectable. But then when you tried shaking down old Triumphington in one of his clubs for a handout, the alarm bells started to ring.”
“Hey, what the hell are you trying to say.”
“Hey Steve, old pal, don’t go white as a sheet. Sorry, that’s the news I got. Not that you were blackmailing or anything. What the hell, bootlegging could have meant that your family were goddamn rich. I mean, look at the big recent rubouts in this city by the guys who were once bootleggers. There must have been enormous profits somewhere once for the guys to be behaving so seriously. Here, have more tea. Gee pal, last thing I want to do is hurt your feelings. That’s what I’m saying. There’s so much money involved. Just from the inner workings of Wall Street and from my own brokerage house you’d know how much. All very confidential, but a senior partner buys and sells on Sylvia’s mother’s behalf. And boy, if that ole gal doesn’t know how to trade. Some of this stuff involves trust funds so massive, you wouldn’t believe. Then there’s a banking guy who manages a petty-cash account for her in one of their banks. Where the petty cash is in seven figures. A little munificence in a creative cause would be nothing. You see what I mean. Take it from a former second class yeoman.”
“Well, I know for a fact she’s terrified of even spending a dollar, but I think it’s all an outrageous invasion of someone’s privacy, including my own.”
“You know, old buddy boy, how some people, especially an Episcopalian like myself, feel about the general Irish. Goddamn famine and all that. Eating the green grass by the side of the road when they were tossed out of their hovels. Dying like flies. And ever since, that terrible stuff has been engraved, so to speak, on their behavior. And going after the main financial chance is the Irish ethic. They’d do anything to get their hands on money.”
“I resent that aspersion also. My parents honestly sweated and slaved so that they could give their children a decent, honest upbringing.”
“Okay. Okay. Steve, I don’t mean you. You’re the lace-curtain variety. I’m just giving a whole bunch of hypotheticals. But I always assumed you were on easy street.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Hey, we’re still good old friends, ole pal, aren’t we. And are going to stay that way and not let somebody else’s unbelievable riches come between us. Gosh almighty, meeting someone like you in the navy, out of about three thousand men aboard ship with whom I had no mutual cultural interests or who even knew who Shakespeare was, nearly saved my life. I would have gone nuts, which, I don’t mind admitting I nearly did pretend I was for a while, hoping for a medical discharge. And remember, you did save my life. I could have been beaten to death after that big crap game when that son of a big bitch lost that fortune, thinking I was using loaded dice, when all it was was that I was just lucky, like I usually am. Here, old pal, let’s top up the old tea and have another scone.”
“I’ll have another scone. I may need money, and have a desire to have funds, but I’m not a fortune hunter nor am I ever going to sue anyone for their money.”
“Of course you’re not, friend. Who knows better about something like that than me. Who said anything like that, anyway. It’s not your fault that with your mother-in-law there’s big money, with millions and millions around. And I apologize if I sometimes sound cynical. But you just name where it’s warm and culturally pleasant and boy, you find out they got a place there.”
“Well from my it seems limited informed knowledge, I only know of two.”
“Pal, well then you don’t know. There’s an estate in Palm Beach. Apartments in Paris and Rome. I know for sure there’s a house on the Riviera. Ranches out west, Utah, Oklahoma. Even a big section of Montana. They got something going even in Alaska.”
Unless old Maximilian Avery Gifford is acting in a deranged manner, with dreams of another’s untold grandeur, a brand-new bombshell exploding. The suffoeating smell of cordite. Holy cow. Old Dru from being rich to now being unbelievably rich. How rich is unbelievable. Bigger than the largest mountain. The gold hidden deep in a secret cavern underneath. Fall helpless into the soft-cushioned abyss of another’s affluence. As lethal as it could be luxuriously sweet. In which one could suffocate in the sickly fumes of the most fragrant perfume. To get my moral, if not physical ass broken and my dignity mangled. But I suppose could also make fainter the echoing sound of Sylvia’s jeers. I should have realized the vast dimensions of her contempt when she would say things like “Hey, you’re going to be wiped out with an obscurity so great and complete, you simply didn’t exist.” Well, that may be so, except now I’m at least in good company, along with maybe the richest woman in America.
“Hey, old pal, I can see I’m subjecting you to discomfort. What do you say we change the subject.”
“I already thought I had indicated to change the subject.”
“Sure. So let me ask. You’re still at the old composing, Steve.”
“Yes. It so happens.”
“What are you working on now, maestro.”
“Do I assume you’re really interested to know.”
“Of course I am, old buddy boy, Steve.”
“Well, I am composing a minuet.”
“Hey that’s great. Really great. I don’t know what the hell a minuet is. But I mean, it must be tough on the old mental process.”
“Well, I suppose it contains passages which in experimenting with a jazz cadence and blues motif, might be thought daringly modernistic. I’m also considering working on an operetta. Putting together music with overtones of the Civil War, songs like ‘Loreno’ and tunes reminiscent of that awful conflict.”
“What about ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ pal.”
“Although I am against the concept of slavery, I’ve got to say I am on the cultural side of the gentlemen of the Confederacy and all their descendants and that particular piece of music.”
“Well, pal, that march was sure admired by the North.”
“As were many people who were scoundrels and despots during the Civil War.”
“You said it, pal. But in your chosen profession, don’t musical matters take precedence over things like geographic patriotic partiality.”
“Yes they should, but not cause anyone pain or aggrievement. Such as the spiritual wonderment which can be obtained from hearing a thousand voices thundering out, singing from the very bottom of their gladdening hearts.”
“Jesus, pal. You really do don’t you, feel strongly and take your work seriously.”
“Yes, I apologize for my showing sentiment like this.”
“Pal, only a true man has courage to show his tears. Here, a handkerchief clean-laundered. That’s what I always admire about you guys who create. And gee pal, let me say it sincerely. No one can say you ain’t got virtuosity. And I know one day when your name is up there with the greats, I’ll be bragging saying I knew you. But hey. Just coming down to earth for a second, I mean, are you going to make any goddamn money out of tinkling the old ivories. I mean real money.”
“There is an answer to that. Short and not so sweet. The answer is no.”
“Well, that’s honest. But hey, gee pal, that could be tough. I guess you could if there’s no crunch and there comes a sort of reconciliation, lean a little bit financially on Sylvia.”
“I’m not going to lean financially upon anybody.”
“Well from my recent point of view, old pal, that’s goddamn sensible. And you know old friend, in the matter of being honest, as much as I love this great country of ours, I’ll be damned if I approve of the kind of women it’s producing these days. Maybe it’s just as well two good-looking, personable guys like us didn’t get mixed up in marriage forever with two old lesbian witches skulking around us for the rest of our lives. God forbid we should have also ended up having children. What’s the matter, pal. Did I say something wrong.”
“No. But I have feelings. My marriage was important. Sylvia’s life is her own to do with what she will, and I’m not going to judge her. Even though she thumbed her nose at me and my music.”
“Well sure, okay friend, having got that off your chest. And I guess we’ve had a real heart-to-heart talk here, which in a small way indicates what we do in mapping out a little bit of the future of our lives. I mean, we can’t go repeat what stupid stuff we did in the past. I got a couple of good little old clubs up there on Central Park. In one of them you can play squash and chess and swim in the same building and while you sleep, get your suit pressed, shirt laundered, missing buttons sewn on, then drink and eat, play billiards and then go bowling. Wait, that’s not all. You repair to the sportsman’s bar. You order a beer, sign a chit. About just before six o’clock, two chefs appear in the bar and on a couple of big tables they’ve got a baron of beef and a massive ham and bowls of gravy and slices of various breads. At your request, they carve off slabs to your delectation. Gratis and entirely on the house. And you come back for more if you want. I mean goddamn well free of charge. So if you’re short of a couple of bucks, you don’t have to go out to a Horn and Hardart, and you’re fed for nothing. What about the sound of two big slabs of the best roast beef gracing a plate. Rare and swimming in great gravy and on rye bread. How about that I propose you for membership, old buddy.”
“It doesn’t sound like I could afford it.”
“Hey, you can afford to keep in good physical shape while everybody else is falling apart in this town. Hey friend, I can advance you the initiation fee. Then when you’re squared away why not the two of us look up some of these charity benefit affairs where they have cotillion dances. I mean, hell boy, get out there. Meet some new women. Anticipation is the spice of life, old fella. I joined one of those smaller clubs they got over there on the Fifth Avenue side of the park. We got to live for ourselves for a change and get something more than we’ve been getting out of life. Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve been ditched. At least I have, by the richer, the higher and mightier. Even so, and even if we go half nuts in this town, what’s stopping us still wearing the mast of sanity. I mean, God, did you see the whole front page of the goddamn paper, some guy waving a knife, looking to kill someone he said was inside a house on Fifth Avenue, right by the club I joined.”
“Yes, I saw that. It’s an outrageous disgrace.”
“Well old buddy boy, we’ve been really having a philosophical talk. Just like we used to do those off-duty times half-going Asiatic out there in the Pacific. And you know pal, just between you and me, I sometimes think what a damn fool I’ve been. I had a good ole heiress girlfriend from childhood in Chicago I could have tied the knot with. They had an estate right on the lake shore, her family had a big engineering business. Straight away I could have slotted in somewhere near the top. Isn’t that the problem being a damn fool. And the solution. It’s simple. Stop being a damn fool. Right.”
“Max, I think you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. I still got some good connections from out Chicago way and my club out there. But leave your options open and be ready is my motto. Here. I’m going to go right now and break out a bottle of the pretty decent champagne I got waiting right in there in the refrigerator. A little bit of the old Charlie Heidsieck. You’ll take a glass of the good old bubbly.”
“Yes, I should enjoy and very much like to.”
“Attaboy. Only thing wrong in this apartment is, with no room in the kitchen, the decent-size refrigerator I need, I’ve got to keep out here in the living room. Tomorrow’s Saturday. No goddamn office in the morning. Hell, why don’t we just go out and celebrate in this city where they keep bragging that they got the world’s tallest building. That Chicago is one day, I promise you, going to end up building. Let’s go uptown over there to the old Waldorf or even better the old Biltmore, where they keep the women out of the gentlemen-only bar, and knock back a few. All on me, pal. Find a couple of bimbos for ourselves. I feel better already. Boy, it’s sure nice to see you again, pal. Untwist the old wire on the champers. Pop the old cork. Take these two tulip glasses I got polished ready and waiting and fill them up. Put the bottle in an ice bucket. Here we go. Your good health.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much. And to your good health, friend.”
“Steve, get yourself a couple of good shotguns made, old buddy boy. Some tweeds. Plus twos. Plus threes. I’ll tell you the name of a good tailor over there in London on Savile Row. British quality is what you want these days old bean. Like my Bentley four-and-a-half-liter Tourer, vintage 1930, I got sitting over there on Eleventh Street in a garage. Drove it, the top down, the breeze blowing through my hair, all the way from River Oaks Houston to New York. Nicest two weeks ever had in my life. Have me a big steak and few beers every night. Talk with the townsfolk. Always be the volunteer fire department guys sitting around bullshitting outside their fire station. Went via New Orleans — what a town, boy, for some pretty pleasant evil, if that’s what you’re looking for. Then north through Vicksburg, Memphis, Nashville, then detoured a little south again to Chattanooga. Now there’s a decent little old town. Had a couple of names and addresses with me. And, without repercussions, holed up with a nice little ole gal from Knoxville. What a gal. From a damn good family. She wanted to tag along. But I was traveling light. Now that I think of it I should have let her. But sent her back home on a train before heading across those Appalachian Mountains to Lynchburg, then on to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. Now how do you like that, isn’t that champagne really something.”
“Hey Max, the champagne is really wonderful.”
“Well old bean, I also got me laid down some good old port with a London wine merchant over there.”
“Max, as much as I should like to adapt to this quality-first manner of living, I think I got to wait a brief while with these kind of plans. I can’t even afford to buy new underwear or socks.”
“Steve. Come on. I already told you. The way I used to wangle things for you in the navy. What’s mine is yours.”
“I don’t believe in fact, you did say that.”
“Well, close enough to it. Jesus, three years we were chess-and bridge-playing pals out there in the Pacific where death could always be in the next second. Lobbed at you from the other side of the horizon. But boy, when we lobbed back with our little ole sixteen-inchers, they went off, wham, wham, wham. Nothing was as beautiful as that bright orange cloud of pure fulmination coming out of the muzzles of those guns. We have all that in common. I want you to feel you’ve got a true friend.”
“Well Max, putting aside the gunnery, chess and bridge a moment, let me attest to your always having been a steadfast ally.”
“Okay. Before it knocks us, let’s between us knock this city for a loop. It’s the weekend, pal. Know what I mean. A loop. A goddamn loop. I don’t mean overexert ourselves pleasure seeking. Just flow with the more felicitous tide. Come on. Down the old champers. Here, have a couple more pretzels and let me refill your glass. Gee it’s good to see you and bring back a few ole memories. Let’s you and me drive up Madison Avenue in my old Bentley.”
Excusing myself to take a piss, I passed through Max’s bedroom. Hung along the wall on a clothesline were at least fifty silk ties. And on the floor at least twenty pairs of shoes in shoe trees.
Now dressed to leave, Max beneath his dark blue blazer, buttoned closed with large silver buttons, sported a crimson silk cravat adorned with black dots and stuck with a gold pin. Max surely was a picture to behold in his racing green Bentley. Yellow plaid cap on his head, goggles shielding his eyes as he smiled over the motorcar’s great long bonnet, as he called it. The chromework polished, gleaming. Headlights like two large bulging eyes. The massive engine throbbed into life. And open to the balmy breezes, we drove past Washington Square. This motor vehicle so perfectly fitting the setting of this terrace of redbrick and limestone-trim houses.
“Hey pal, isn’t this beautiful. All in wonderful harmony. Where people must have once lived in dignity and must have peacefully gone about their business out their doors with cane and spats to take constitutionals in the park, without some-goddamn bastard conducting a holdup, poking a goddamn gun or knife in their ribs.”