Part 18 (2/2)

”How are the terrible two?”

”Very well indeed: they send their love.”

”Dearest, I want you to be the first to know. Paul will make the announcement. Instead of doing Iolanthe this spring, we've commissioned a new work.”

Eleanor's heart sank. She had little taste for contemporary music and Billy knew it. She wiped the corner of her mouth.

”It's a very fine piece by a young composer, a protege of Paul's. The commission is a great thing for him.”

She didn't want to ask where the money came from to pay this protege. Instead she said, ”What a fine thing for Paul to have done.”

”Yes,” Billy said, ”I think it is. He's quite young, this fellow, twenty-four, but he has an extraordinary gift, he can write lyrically and satirically at the same time. A bite, but an aftertaste of sweetness. This piece is called The Dream of Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol relives the highlights of his life in the moments before his death.”

”Andy Warhol?” she said, not even trying to conceal her shock. ”An opera about Andy Warhol? Hardly a suitable subject, I'd have thought.”

Billy's face reddened. He wiped his mouth, very much as she had just done, with the white cloth napkin.

”Try and keep an open mind, there's a good girl. We'll be pa.s.sing out the score today. Must dash.”

He left her to pay the check, which was, she thought, most unlike him.

She was never sure how many of the Knickerbockers knew that she and Billy had been married. She never wanted to bring it up herself, because she wasn't certain if she wanted it known or not. Billy was universally loved by all the singers for his kindness and admired for the suppleness and flexibility of his accompaniment, so l.u.s.ter would attach to her if it were known that she had been his wife. On the other hand, everyone knew that he and Paul were partners, so humiliation would attach to her, inevitably, as a woman who had been left. But to be left for a man was not the same- by a long chalk, she had always told herself- as being left for another woman. And she found it hard to determine which would attach to her more securely: l.u.s.ter or humiliation. So she had held herself back from the other people in the chorus; after twenty-five years of being a member, there was not one of them she could call a friend. Even those she had thought of as close acquaintances had left the chorus, because they had reached a certain age, the age at which their voices weren't up to certain musical demands. She was one of the older members now- but that was all right, she liked to think that she maintained a nice balance: she kept her reserve but she was friendly to everyone. If, occasionally, she picked up a whiff of resentment, she reminded herself that musical people were temperamental and self-centered, and that it had nothing to do with her.

She was asking Lily Streicher, who had been to Tuscany, how her summer was, when Paul walked in, dressed in navy pants, a yellow s.h.i.+rt (untucked, Eleanor noted, to hide his belly), and black loafers that made his feet look like thick fish, steaming in a too narrow pan, on the verge of spilling over the sides. The look of his feet in their ill-fitting shoes made her own feet feel hot; she wiggled them slightly in her Ferragamos.

He was carrying a stack of scores and he laid them dramatically on the top of the piano.

”Something exciting, boys and girls. Papa has quite a special treat.”

There was a stir among the singers; Eleanor felt complacent in her secret knowledge.

”I've commissioned an opera for us. By the next genius among us; we've stolen a march on the MacArthurs. I'll pa.s.s out the score and Billy will play some bits for you. It's called The Dream of Andy Warhol. I'll allow the composer to fill you in. It's my honor to introduce him. Ladies and gentlemen: Desmond Marx.”

Certainly, there wasn't a gasp when the young man walked through the door, but there was something like it in the feeling that spread through the air. It was as if a Bronzino had walked in, Eleanor thought, one of those arrogant courtiers in velvet and satin with the full lower lip and dissolute, commanding stare. Desmond Marx was beautiful: there was power in his beauty, and he knew it. His black jeans were creased perfectly, as if they'd just been pressed; his s.h.i.+rt, a bluish violet open at the neck, spread itself lightly, easily, over his muscular torso; he wore loafers- the same loafers Paul was wearing, but without socks, and his feet were thin and shapely in the loafers whereas Paul's looked overstuffed.

”Hi,” he said, looking challengingly at the chorus. ”Well, as Paul told you, my opera is called The Dream of Andy Warhol and I know perfectly well it's a lot different from the kind of thing you do. Maybe a little bit shocking for you. But I think Warhol was a great visionary, the person who had the clearest vision of his time and ours, its violence, its strangeness, and this is my vision of his vision. I like to think it brings out the pathos and the grandeur of this artist. And I look forward to your responses.”

”Billy, if you would,” said Paul.

Billy and Paul looked at each other, Eleanor thought, like a pair of cats that had swallowed the cream. She wondered where this Desmond Marx was living; Billy had said he was staying with them. It was, as she very well knew, a one-bedroom apartment. She wondered if they had recently got around to buying a foldout couch.

Eleanor didn't know if everyone feared, as she did, the harsh, atonal sound so typical of contemporary music. But Billy was right; Desmond Marx had a lyric touch, and the melodies were sweet and haunting.

”Turn to the first scene in the Factory, the second place where the chorus comes in,” Paul said.

There was the sound of turning pages. Someone giggled. Eleanor didn't know why at first, and then her eye fell on the second page of the section that the chorus was meant to sing. She took her gla.s.ses off and put them on again. Surely she couldn't be reading what she thought she saw.

”f.u.c.k me, suck me f.u.c.k me suck me.” The words were peppered all over the page like a noxious mildew.

Someone else giggled. One of the tenors coughed.

”Anyone have a problem?” Paul said, challengingly.

Did she imagine it or was everyone looking at her? She'd been in the chorus longer than any of the others, except Randy Brixton, the tenor who had coughed. And nothing would make Randy Brixton speak up; he was pathologically disinclined to conflict. He would give way if anyone so much as asked him anything, so much as indicated he might have to a.s.sert himself. Randy would be no help. She looked around at everybody in the chorus, trying, in her teacherly way, to make eye contact. But no one would look up from the score.

”I don't know whether I have a problem, which would suggest something stemming from a personal set of circ.u.mstances, but I believe there's a problem with the Knickerbocker chorus, taking into consideration our history and the nature of our audience, singing words like these.”

”Anyone else like to respond to this outburst?” Paul said. She had always known he disliked her, but he had made a point of being coldly correct with her. She tried to get Billy's eye. Surely Billy would back her up. But Billy had his eye on the score; he was turning pages, as though he were looking for something real.

”I'd hardly call it an outburst, Paul. You asked for response. I'd a.s.sumed it was a question asked in good faith.”

It was as if a knife had been thrown down on the ground between them. Mumblety-peg, she thought, remembering a game she'd played in her childhood. One of those words that didn't sound like what it was. Which was certainly not the case with the ones on the page she was holding.

Silence s.h.i.+mmered in the air like an iron ring. Paul was indicating by his particular silence- a silence that was separate from the others as if it had been traced with a chalk line- that what she had just said wasn't worthy of a reply. And that was, she felt, the most insulting thing that he could do. The pusillanimity of her fellow choristers appalled her. She felt it was time to take a dramatic stand; that, she believed, would put some spine into some of them at least.

”I cannot bring myself to use such language,” Eleanor said.

”You can't bring yourself. Then I suppose we'll have to do without you. But let me make this clear: you will sing in this opera, or you will not sing with us at all. This season or any other.”

”You can't do that.”

”Oh yes, my dear, I'm the director and I can. And many, I'm sure, would support me in saying that it's a bit overdue. You might have made a graceful exit as many of your cohort have, but you've outstayed your welcome. Your taste is as tired as your voice. It's time to leave now, Eleanor. Pick up your toys and go.”

She waited a few seconds, certain that someone would come to her defense. But no one raised eyes from the score or the ground at their feet. And Billy was looking into s.p.a.ce, as if she had already left the room and he was waiting for the next thing that would happen.

She understood that there were no words that would do anything but weaken her position. She made her way to the front of the chorus- she was, unfortunately, in the third row- and heard her heels making a sharp clack-clack on the gray linoleum floor.

She closed the door and flung her cape around her shoulders, pleased at the military suggestions of the gesture. She was afraid her face must be bright red: heat climbed up it as she thought of Paul's crude words, his vulgar insults. She was certain that Billy would be behind her in a moment; certainly, even if he didn't stand up to Paul, he wouldn't allow her to make her way home like this, entirely unsupported.

But as she climbed the last stair, opened the heavy door, and found herself shocked at the brightness of the day, she began to realize that Billy was not going to follow. Why had it been so difficult for her to admit, always, that he had always been a coward? And why had she tried for so long to deny what Paul was, what he had always been, an insignificant and stinking little t.u.r.d. She banished the word from her mind; she would not sink to his level. Or to the level of the little Bronzino, the Bronzinetto, she called him to herself. Desmond Marx. Composer of that preposterous atrocity. The Dream of Andy Warhol. She'd have liked to call it instead The Nightmare of the Modern Age.

She must have been walking very fast, propelled by her rage, her shock; before she knew it she was in front of her building. Had she really walked forty blocks in half an hour? She could smell her sweat underneath the wool of her cape, the silk of her blouse, and it shocked her with its robust meatiness. She had never before a.s.sociated such a smell with her own body.

She couldn't bear to wait for the elevator, propelled as she still was with rage. She burst into the apartment, hardly able to get her key into the lock. ”Anybody home?” she called. Her mother's bedroom door was closed. Well, she would open it; she felt, today, she had a right. It was something she never did, but now she couldn't help herself. She had to tell her mother.

She knocked three times, but didn't wait for a response. At first, she couldn't tell whether or not her mother was there; the heavy velvet drapes were closed and she could barely make out her mother's shape under the satin coverlet. But then her eyes got used to the light and she saw her mother, lying on her back, her mouth open. On the night table beside her bed were her hearing aids, and in a gla.s.s, one on top of the other, the two halves of her dentures. Her mother's open, toothless mouth made her head look like a skull.

Had she known, had she ever considered, that her mother was toothless, that her mother wore false teeth? When had that happened? How was it that in all the years that they had lived together it was something she never knew? The rage that had consumed her body now spilled over to her mother. Why had her mother kept this from her? And how could she allow herself to be like this? It was against everything her mother stood for, to be lying here, in the middle of the afternoon, the drapes closed against the brilliant autumn sun, impervious to every sound, impervious to her shocking appearance.

She knew that she must leave the room. But she allowed herself to look at her mother for a few more seconds. Her mother was very old. Her mother's life was almost over. She was, lying on her back, cut off from light and sound, her countenance a corpse's, trying out the position she would, quite soon now, Eleanor realized, be permanently taking up.

There was something she wanted to say, but she didn't know exactly what the words might be. ”It's over, it's finished.” Was that what she wanted to say? But whom would she say it to? Her mother was deaf; her mother was asleep- she supposed it was peacefully- and her father was nowhere around.

She had been stolen from, and the thief had been not only thief but a.s.sailant. She resisted the impulse to go to the mirror and see whether, as a result of the a.s.sault, her looks had changed. That would be ridiculous, that would be- her mother's word, always used mockingly- ”dramatic.” This was her life, it was not an opera, and she would live it as she always had, as her parents always had: with dignity, on her own terms. And yet there had been this theft- must she think of herself now as impoverished, as her parents had never had to do?

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