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It soon developed that they shared not only a love of music for its own sake but a lust for flight as well. For Lee as for Daniel this had always been a balked desire and (therefore) a subject better to be avoided. Indeed, there was no one who worked at or frequented the Metastasio who had much to say about flying. The castrati who reigned supreme on its stage seemed as little capable of flight as of sex. Some claimed that though they were able to fly, they had no wish to, that song itself was glory enough, but this was generally thought to be a face-saving imposture. They didn’t fly because they couldn’t, and the happy result (for their audience) was that they did not, like most other great singers, simply vanish into the ether at the height of their careers. By comparison to the Metropolitan, which devoted its flagging energies to the Romantic repertory, the Metastasio offered incomparably better singing as such, and if their productions didn’t stir the imagination in quite the same way, if they couldn’t offer the vicarious thrills of a Carmen or a Rosenkavalier, there were (as even Daniel would finally come to see) compensations. As the audiences of Naples had so long ago proclaimed: Evviva il coltello! Long live the knife — the knife by whose actions such voices were made.
Daniel had thought himself cured of his old longings, thought he’d achieved a realistic, grown-up renunciation. Life had denied him any number of supreme pleasures and ultimate fulfillments, despite which it was still worth living. But now, talking with Lee and worrying the meatless bone of why and wherefore they were set apart, he felt the familiar anguish return, that immense and exquisite self-pity that seemed tantamount to a martyrdom.
By now, of course, Daniel knew all there was to be known about the theory, if not the practice, of flight, and he took a kind of do
Daniel and Lee did not limit themselves to theory. Lee was the proud, if powerless, possesor of a Grundig 1300 Amphion Fluchtpunktapparat, the finest and most expensive flight apparatus available. No one else, until Daniel, had ever been allowed to try and use it. It stood in the center of a bare, white chapel of a room in Geoffrey Bladebridge’s penthouse apartment on West End Avenue, where, on the afternoons when Bladebridge was not about, they would hammer at the doors of heaven, begging to be let in. As well might they have tried flapping their arms in order to fly. They soldiered on, regardless, through aria after aria, song after weary song, never saying die and getting nowhere.
Sometimes Bladebridge returned home before they’d given up and would insist on joining them in the capacity of vocal coach, offering advice and even, damnably, his own shining example. He assured Daniel that he had a very pretty baritone voice, too light for most of the things he attempted, but perfect for bel canto. It was sheer mea
In December, just before Christmas, Lee showed up at the Metastasio without the tell-tale bulge of the insanity belt spoiling the line of his trousers. His romance with Bladebridge was over, and so, pretty much (and not coincidentally) was his friendship with Daniel.
Life, to be fair, was not all striving and yearning and certain defeat. In fact, barring those frustrating sessions hooked up with the Fluchtpunktapparat, Daniel had never been happier, or if he had, it was so long ago he couldn’t remember what it had been like. Now that he had a registered job, he could take out books from the public library, though with Mrs. Schiff’s enormous stock of books at his disposal that dream-come-true was almost a superfluous luxury. He read, and listened to records, and sometimes just lazed about without a care. The whirl of his social life only accounted for two or three evenings a week, and he worked out at the gym with about the same regularity.
Living out of the way of nightly temptation, he found his appetite for sex much reduced, though his life-style was still a long way from strict celibacy. When he did feel like mixing in, he went downtown to his old haunts and so preserved his reputation at the Metastasio for friendly inaccessibility. As a result, there was a decided falling-off of active interest among those patrons of the opera who, quite understandably, hoped for a better quid pro quo than Daniel was prepared to offer. What with the rationing that had gone into effect in January, it was begi
Strangely (for he’d feared it would be a source of upset, or at any rate of depression), Daniel found he liked living with Boa and looking after her. There was a set of exercises he went through each morning, moving her limbs so as to keep the muscles in a minimally functional condition. While he worked her balsa-light arms in the prescribed semaphores, he would talk to her, in somewhat the half-conscious, half-serious way that Mrs. Schiff would talk to Incubus.
Did Daniel think she was listening? It wasn’t out of the question. Unless she’d left the earth utterly, it stood to reason that she might sometimes come back to see how her abandoned vehicle was getting on — whether it might, conceivably, be driven again. And if she did, it didn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that she would also take an interest in Daniel, and stop for a while to hear what he had to say. He knew now that they’d never truly been husband and wife and that he had, therefore, no legitimate grievance at being left in the lurch. What he’d thought had been love for Boa was just being in love. Or so he would tell her while he manipulated her light, lifeless limbs. But was it really so? It was hard to remember the exact feelings of twelve, no, thirteen years ago. As well to recall the vanished weathers of those few months they’d been together, or the life he’d led in some previous incarnation.