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.