When they were settled before the fireplace, under a fauvish pastel portrait of Rey in the role of Semiramide, Daniel asked Rey if he would do him a favor.

“It depends on the favor, surely. This is delicious pudding.”

“I’m glad you like it. Would you sing a song for me?”

“What song?”

“Any at all.”

“That’s the favor you ask?”

Daniel nodded. “I just suddenly had to hear you sing. With the Teatro closed for the summer… Records are wonderful, but they’re not the same thing.”

Rey riffled through the sheet music on the piano. He handed Daniel the score of Schubert’s “Vedi quanto t’adoro,” and asked if he could handle the accompaniment.

“I’ll do my best.”

They went through the opening bars several times, Rey humming the vocal line, until he was satisfied with the tempo. Then he sang, without ornament or embellishment, the words Metastasio had written, the notes Schubert, a hundred years later, had set: 

It dawned on Daniel, even as his fingers fumbled along in the loveliness, that Rey was not so much singing as setting forth a literal truth. Though he’d never heard the aria before, the Italian seemed to translate itself with spontaneous, pentecostal clarity, vowel by golden, anguished vowel: See! ingrate, how I still adore you! A look from you is still enough to shatter my defenses and to strip me bare. Have you the heart to betray such love? And then to leave me?

Rey broke off at this point, Daniel having altogether lost track of the accompaniment from the marvel of Rey’s singing. They started out from the beginning again, and this time Rey introduced to the bare skeleton of Schubert’s written score a tremolo that mounted by imperceptible degrees to utmost extravagance at “E puoi lasciarmi?” Then abruptly, at “Ah! non lasciarmi, no,” the heightened color was gone, as though a veil had fallen from the face of the music. He sang in a silvery, slightly hollow tone that suggested that he (or rather, Dido, whom he’d become) had been abandoned at the very instant she implored not to be. It was heartbreaking, heroic, and thoroughly exquisite, a sorrow and a sunset condensed into a single string of pearls.

“How was that?” Rey asked, when they’d finished the last repetition of the opening stanza.

“Stupendous! What can I say?”

“I mean, in particular, the ‘E puoi lasciarmi?’ which Alicia has objected to.”

“It was like being slapped in the face by Death.”

“Ah, you should be a reviewer, bell’ idol mio.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Oh, I’m quite sincere.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“I might even be able to arrange it for you.”

Daniel looked down at his brown hands resting on the closed keyboard and expelled a short, self-defeated snort of laughter.

“You wouldn’t want that?” Rey asked with, it would seem, honest incomprehension.

“Ernesto — I wouldn’t want to review it, if I couldn’t do it.”

“Then you’ve never given up the wish to be a singer?”

“Does anyone ever give up his wishes? Do you?”

“That is an unanswerable question, I’m afraid.” Rey went to the divan and sat down, his arms spread wide across the cushions. “All my wishes have come true.”

Ordinarily Daniel would have found such complacence infuriating, but the song had modified his perceptions, and what he felt, instead, was a rather generalized tristesse and a wonder at the immense gulf between Rey’s inner and his outer man, between the hidden angel and the wounded beast. He went and sat down at a confidential, but not amorous, distance from him and leaned back his head so that it rested on Rey’s forearm. He closed his eyes and tried to summon up the exact curve and sweep and nuance of that E puoi lasciarmi?

“Let me ask you more directly then,” Rey said, in a tone of cautious speculation. “Do you want to be a singer?”

“Yes, of course. Isn’t that what I said in my letter to you?”

“You’ve always denied that was your letter.”

Daniel shrugged. “I’ve stopped denying it.” His eyes were still closed, but he could tell by the shifting of the cushions that Rey had moved closer. A fingertip traced the circle of pallor on each of his cheeks.

“Would you—” Rey faltered.

“Probably,” said Daniel.

“—kiss me?”

Daniel arched his neck upward till his lips had touched Rey’s, a very little distance.

“The way you would kiss a woman,” Rey insisted in a hushed voice.

“Oh, I’ll do better than that,” Daniel assured him. “I’ll love you.”

Rey sighed a sigh of gentle disbelief.

“Or at least,” Daniel said, trying for a bit of tremolo of his own, “I’ll see what I can do. Fair enough?”

Rey kissed one cheek. “And I—” Then the other, “—will teach you to sing. At least—”

Daniel opened his eyes at the same moment that Rey, with a look of pain and the hint of a tear, closed his.

“—I’ll see what I can do.”

As he was leaving the lobby with the empty pudding bowl, the doorman could be heard to mutter something subliminally derogatory. Daniel, still aglow with a sense of his victory, and proofed thereby against all injury, turned round and said, “I beg your pardon? I didn’t catch that.”

“I said,” the doorman repeated murderously, “phoney, fucking whore.”

Daniel considered this, and considered himself in the lobby’s mirrored wall, while he ran a comb through his frizzy hair. “Yes, that may be,” he concluded judiciously (tucking away the comb and taking up the bowl again). “But a good whore. As was my mother before me. And you can take our word, it’s not easy.”

He winked at the doorman and was out the door before the old fart could think of a comeback to that one.

But the distinction Daniel was making had not sunk very deep into the doorman’s consciousness, for when Daniel was out of sight, he adjusted his visored and braided cap to a significant, steadfast angle and repeated his earlier, irrevocable judgement. “Phoney fucking whore.”

17

Though it had begun at four in the afternoon and no one of any consequence had arrived till well after six, this was officially a fellowship breakfast. Their host, Cardinal Rockefeller, the Archbishop of New York, moved democratically from group to group, amazing one and all by knowing who they were and why they’d been invited. Daniel was certain someone was prompting him via his hearing aid, in the manner of carnival psychics, but perhaps that was sour grapes, since the Cardinal, when he’d offered his ring for Daniel to kiss, had affected to believe that he was a missionary from Mozambique. Rather than contradict him Daniel said that everything was swell in Mozambique, except that the missions were in desperate need of money, to which the Cardinal equably replied that Daniel must speak to his secretary, Monsignor Dubery.

Monsignor Dubery, a man of affairs, knew quite well that Daniel was of Rey’s party and would later be helping to provide entertainment for the Cardinal’s inner circle. He tried his best to partner Daniel with other social pariahs present, but all in vain. A black Carmelite nun from Cleveland snubbed Daniel soundly the moment the Monsignor’s back was turned. Then he was matched with Father Flynn, the actual missionary from Mozambique, who regarded his introduction to Daniel as a deliberate affront on the part of Monsignor Dubery, and said so, though not to Dubery’s face. When Daniel, for want of other common grounds, told of Cardinal Rockefeller’s earlier confusion, Father Flynn lost his bearings utterly and began, in a fury of indiscretion to denounce the entire archdiocese of Sodom, meaning New York. Daniel, fearing to be blamed for deliberately provoking the man to these ecstasies, soothed and placated, with no success. Finally he just came right out and warned Father Flynn that he couldn’t hope to advance the interests of his mission by behaving so, and that seemed to serve. They parted quietly.