Wrong Information Is Being Given Out At Princeton E-Book

J.P. Donleavy

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Alfonso Stephen O'Kelly known as Stephen, son of rumoured former bootleggers, ex-naval gunner, unemployed compuser, student of dairy cattle in Wisconsin and of music in Italy, has little to recommend him as a marriage prospect but his tender heart, his chivalry, and his comprehensive knowledge of the great city of New York. So when the exquisitely pneumatic and extraordinarily wealthy Sylvia Triumphington, adored adoptive heiress to the Triumphington family forture, sets her sights on him, Stephen is caught quite off guard … Wrong Information is Being Given out at Princeton' is an excellent work, proving Donleavy is still the master of blending pathos and humour.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

WRONG INFORMATION IS BEING GIVEN OUT AT PRINCETON

Also by J. P. Donleavy

Copyright

WRONG INFORMATION IS BEING GIVEN OUT AT PRINCETON

PEOPLE WERE ALREADY BEGINNING to forget we were veterans after the Second World War and that the government no longer owed us a living. Face-lifting, hair replacement, and breast enhancement hadn’t yet come into vogue and people still believed there were other kinds of contentment. Especially when television was just beginning to pleasantly paralyze the nation. The forces of commercialism and survival were hard at work doing a lot of us down, and I was at the time at a loose emotional end, as you might say, when she came into my life in the cold blue winter before Christmas. There’d been a couple of big snowfalls and icicles were hanging down from people’s windowsills.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I was standing in a friend’s ramshackle West Thirty-fourth Street apartment in a gray and dingy Garment District around the corner from one of the city’s biggest hotels, the New Yorker, and not far from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel that went out westwards under the Hudson River, starting a highway all the way to California. I was always fond of knowing where I really was in New York, right down to the bedrock and subsoil. There wasn’t much heat in the building and the friend, whom I had got to know while we were on the same ship in the navy, had a log fire going in his fireplace and I was glad to be somewhere warm. Her name was Sylvia and her girlfriend called Ertha, and both arrived enclosed in a bunch of thick heavy sweaters. Sylvia’s top was in green and her friend in blue. Both were advocates of modern dance, and even with all the thick wool over them you could see they were athletically curvaceous.

My friend Maximilian, who had after a brief marriage and divorce come back east from Chicago to make his fortune in New York, was already gaga over Ertha, having met her at a modern dance recital, and was now giving her his further line inviting her into his bedroom. To show her, he said, the rare fragile beauty of his seashells he’d collected on the Sagaponack beach out on Long Island. I took the opportunity to chat a little with Sylvia, who, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail, told me she was as an abandoned baby adopted by parents who were rich. She had attended fancy private schools and then a liberal girl’s college where the affluent students could indulge being radical. Growing up, she took an interest in music and classical ballet but finally, when she’d grown too tall, switched to modern dancing. When she found out during her last year at college that she was adopted, it was like a fuse on a bomb that had been lit as she went off delving into a mysterious obscurity, to search for her natural mother and father.

Anyone who was rich in those days about five or six years after the Second World War, or had in any decent way a pot to piss in, was immediately embraced in friendship and given the most comfortable orange crate upon which to sit. When I pointed to the best crate, she suddenly swept around in a circle, singing and repeatedly said hi right at my face by way she said, of an Iroquois Indian greeting, and did I want to go with her and spend the sixteen hundred dollars she had right there in her purse. I felt she was being the way some people briefly get before the real big hammer blows of life fall. Having served in the navy, I calculated I was about five years older, and had been a petty officer second class gunner’s mate on a battleship letting off sixteen-inch guns inside a turret. And here she was already taking command of the situation.

“Hey Sylvia, whew, give me a moment to think.”

“Sure. Think. You got five seconds.”

I moved back to lean against my friend’s new griller his mother had sent from Chicago for him to be able to cook steak and lamb chops in his apartment and in two seconds said to Sylvia, “That’s a lot of money.” Having removed two sweaters, she said, “Sure it’s a lot, but let’s spend it.” At the time I could have lived on sixteen hundred dollars for the next six months, but to achieve some rapport I pathetically tried to say, “I guess that’s what money’s for,” but she said it first. As indeed she’s said or tried to say everything first ever since.

I had a couple of times in my life thought I was in love when I’d find I’d get a magnifying glass to examine every tiny scrawl of a girl’s handwriting in a letter to see if it would reveal some mystical character hidden deep in her soul. And on a couple of occasions in doing so, and just when I thought I had the girl under my thumb, in the next letter I found I was gently but nevertheless ignominiously being brushed off. And the denouement—hey, what the fuck did I do wrong—was always severely painful and depressing. Anyway, in growing up in a large family your need for emotional attachment to other nonkindred people isn’t too great. But now I was out of the blue trying to assess my prospects with this attractive girl who had the most wonderful tits I’d ever seen in a sweater. I then sat on the orange crate myself and promptly crashed my way through it ass-first onto the floor. She continued in circles around the room, only now she was bent over double holding her stomach, convulsed in laughter.

“Forgive me my mirth, but the dumb way you just sat down was really funny.”

I should have realized right there and then that I was getting involved with a deeply spoiled bitch. Albeit whose ever-ready attraction was her astonishingly attractive body further revealed in her ballet practice gear, and the animalistically sensuous way she chose to move or pose to stand. She had said she was only privileged by proxy. Because from the vague hints she heard of her real mother and father, she was probably from the wrong side of the biological tracks. And suddenly during these speculations, she would put her hands on her hips, flexing her left knee forward and with her right buttock expanded, ask,

“Hey you don’t say much. Now why don’t you tell me all about you.”

“Well, except that I am a composer, there’s not too much to tell.”

In fact there was a goddamn massive lot. But to fit in a little bit with her own imagined underprivileged social estimations of herself, I invented a few romanticized ideas about how my own background had been deprived. Like I was disadvantaged growing up in the middle Bronx, and right from the cradle was denied any real opportunity to step choo choo choo on the big gravy train as it pulled out of the station, No Wheres Ville. But in fact our house in the Bronx was in Riverdale and isolated in the middle of a suburban contour of similar houses and was spacious enough with thirteen rooms with one of them housing a concert grand piano. And my first-ever composition as a composer came from tinkling the ancient Steinway. Outside it had a knoll of trees and outcroppings of rock and even a garter snake or two. I also had at least been to a couple of decent prep schools and after a couple of expulsions, finally graduated from one of the lesser-known ones in New Jersey. Plus, the rumor was that my own large very Irish family of seven children had been fairly prosperous bootleggers who still owned a couple of Bowery saloons as well as one in Hell’s Kitchen and a bit of city slum property. We even had a cook and a couple of maids. And it was when Sylvia saw me wipe the snow off the windshield of her car with the elbow of my jacket that she said it was a sure sign of being privileged.

“And hey, not only that but you seem to go do exactly what you want.”

And I guess that that was more than a little bit true because then, early after the war on the GI bill, I headed to Lawrence College out in Appleton, Wisconsin. I learned about dairy cattle and the chemistry of paper and a coed blew me out in the middle of a cornfield. And in the sylvan collegiate pleasures there, I got to thinking the world should have more dance and music. So after only a year I took off to attend the next two years at a music conservatory in Italy. Living in Europe and traveling a bit, I developed a social consciousness about the upgrading of the underprivileged. That they should enjoy the better things in life. That everybody, despite color, creed, or race, should be entitled to getting a square deal. But returning to America and arriving back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I began to find that not all Americans were on my side in this conceptual concern. In fact I found that when I posted up a sign, EQUAL OPPORTUNITYFOR ALL, some of these bastard neighbors flying the Stars and Stripes on their front lawns shouted they were taxpayers and were shaking their goddamn fists at me and wanting to kill me. And then along with all this I was having more than a few of life’s blows fall. My favorite and so beautiful sister I dearly loved and with whom I often exchanged our concerns, one evening, anguished after discussing her unhappy marriage alone with me at the kitchen table, fled the house in her nightclothes and rushed out in front of a truck on the nearby highway.

Back then upon that cold blue winter day there was already enough said between Sylvia and me to reach a sort of understanding, especially that I was on the side of the underdog, and it had us both thinking that we were suddenly in love at first sight. We giggled holding hands down those dark ramshackle stairs of Max’s apartment, leaving him and Ertha examining the seashells in his bedroom. Jumping into her nifty but chilly convertible car which I helped push out of the snowdrift, we sped off up Eighth Avenue to get on the West Side Highway. Crossing the George Washington Bridge to the top of the majestic Palisades along by the Hudson, we had warm new questions about who we thought we were and where we came from. And I was telling her that you could so easily be that way in America. Invent yourself moment to moment. Because in Europe, if you were anybody, it was already carved on a building, printed in a book, or remembered by somebody somewhere all over the goddamn place.

Sylvia said there was a lot of secrecy about her being adopted. And she didn’t, despite four years of searching, yet know who her real parents were but had nightmares that her father might have been a pimp and her mother a prostitute. Even growing up on a big estate with a farm and even learning how to milk a cow, she felt her life with her real parents would have been in a shack by the railway tracks. She often reminded me of being able to milk a cow, which I pretended to her was not a totally useless skill. Especially a few times later in our relationship when I found her exercise of the practice pleasurable. But her obsession with who her real mother and father were became bleaker and deeper. And she took to chanting a little song she wrote.

Keepyourmusclesstrong

Aroundyourasshole

Keepyourmusclesstrongaroundyourbrain

Thatwaytoomuchshitdoesn’tgetout

Andstopsyousoundinginsane

Her adoptive parents had a property way up in New York State in the mid-Adirondacks, and in that direction is where we headed, driving north breaking the speed limit on the scenic highway. Stopping once along by the Hudson on a promontory, we looked back at the distant silvery thin skyscrapers sticking up out of Manhattan Island. Then farther north past all the passing wildernesses, where I had the fantasy of cheaply and healthfully living in a tent where I could with a piccolo compose and in order to eat, hunt with bow and arrow. It had just grown dark when we were finally driving through the tree-lined streets of Albany, and one took pleasure from the somber comfort of all its Edwardian and Victorian framehouses and their little lawns where nobody yet was standing shaking a fist at me. Then there were these small kind of hick towns she knew well. With names like Sabbath Day Point, Ticonderoga, Pottersville, and Sodom. And where she said folk talked in a twang and you knew if you asked them if they smoked, they’d say, “I ain’t never got that hot.”

Her adopted parents also kept an apartment of sumptuous sprawling rooms full of Impressionist masterpieces back in the city at Sutton Place, overlooking the East River. But here up in the country she said we should stay well away from her adopters, whose too-close proximity put her under strain. Fast driver that she was, she sure had me under strain as we whizzed around and especially as we reconnoitered a few curving miles of the adoptive parents’ estate wall and fence. And finally, at my insistence, slowly driving past the big iron front gates that led into their thirty-two-room mansion with an indoor swimming pool, tennis and squash courts. And as Sylvia described, a dozen French doors opening onto that many different brick terraces screened in summer and glassed in in winter. From a high point on the road and through the trees, you could see in the distance the front gable and tops of four Doric columns holding up a porte cochere. We then had a whole week of hilarity racing around town to town visiting a few of her friends who rode horses and played lacrosse, and who also had estates, one with a polo field, and others with formal gardens and imported statuary, and all the ladies seemed able to heave a football farther than you could believe and make you feel you needed a Charles Atlas course.

I didn’t want to be too nosy, but sometimes you really want to know where such nice things as her adoptive parents’ obviously lots of money came from. And where there could be so much at once that it never stopped coming. But she would never say where exactly, indeed if she even knew, but vaguely mentioned a couple of ranches out Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana way and utilities in one of the bigger midwestern cities, plus the land that a couple of midtown cross streets of New York City were built on. And reference to Palm Beach, Paris, and Rome were never far from her lips. However, as I was fairly broke, why worry about geographical details when she was paying the expenses as we stayed in a couple of pretty nice roadside inns. And dined plentifully on steak and knocked back some really nice dinner wines from around the Finger Lakes. But having to obey a sense of frugality in my life, I was tempted to complain about the size of the tips she made me leave. Her out-of-control extravagance making her sixteen hundred dollars disappear fast. And once she even grabbed a bunch of bills right out of my wallet when she said she needed some change. But again, aside from snatching a few bucks from me, what the hell, why intrude my parsimonious attitude, it was her money.

The nights got freezing cold and all the places we stayed were practically empty of other guests. Nor were the managements killing themselves making an effort to send heat up into the radiators of the bedrooms. In one place, the coldest, as well as the architecturally grandest, we danced alone on a dance floor where, with no other customers, the guy playing the piano at midnight, after dinner, suddenly stopped and was closing his piano and taking a bow. Then coming out onto the tiny stage from a side door, a guy looking like a Mafia don threatened to fire him if he didn’t get back strumming the keys. It was embarrassing, as then we had to go on dancing, and the guy looked so downtrodden glum as he went on playing in the empty room. Sylvia, obviously recognized as local gentry, said it served him right, but since I caught a snatch of marvelous Berlioz he played out of the SymphonieFantasique while we were eating dinner, I thought this was cruelty to one’s talented fellowman and that the guy, if he already didn’t belong, should go pronto to join the musicians’ union.

“Sylvia, let’s go upstairs, and let the poor guy go home, and if he’s got any, to his wife and kids.”

“Sure. Your behavior is what I’d expect from someone full of warmth, understanding, and sympathy for his fellowman.”

As it was a cold night, I let the remark pass and instead felt her ass as she climbed in front of me up the stairs. And even though we were freezing in the bedroom, she divested of her woolly warm covering. With her nipples as hard as little acorns, she gyrated, cavorted, spun, and whirled through a half a dozen dances. A boogaloo and bolero, a bunny hop, a frug, and a Charleston. Then ending with a minuet. My God, she knew how to send me into a delirium even in the ice-cold bed and even when she got in between the sheets in a nearly frostbitten condition. The full moon seen out through the frosty window spun like a fast Ferris wheel and the stars exploded. Wham, bam, boom. Even as an atheist, I was wondering why does God do things like that to us. Impose enslavement. Putting one fatally in the grip of carnality.

“Stephen, I have a few other things I’d like to do, too, you know.”

“Honey baby, you just go ahead and tell me. I’m ready.”

“I want you to whip me with your belt.”

Holy cow, what’s new next. And although she didn’t specify, I got the impression that she’d seen her adoptive parents at this antic. A few nights in bed later, in, thank God, a somewhat warmer bedroom, she said she was also a little bit of a sadist and would I mind being a masochist for a while. She said with my straight black hair combed back flat, I resembled Rudolph Valentino, only that I was a paler shade. And when she asked for it, I gave her my belt. As if to make it more supple, she pulled it back and forth in her hand. Then in nearly a frenzy, before I could stop her, she whipped the living hell out of me. The lashing was excruciating and her glee alarming. Like a scalded cat, I jumped up out of the bed. She was with the belt still raised over her shoulder, in midlash.

“Hey Jesus Christ honey, I’m only human flesh. Take it easy will you.”

“Hey, gee, I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away putting welts on that beautiful beatific pink ass you’ve got and I guess I just like drawing blood and inflicting pain.”

“Well, what do you say, honey, if we just skip this next round while my wounds mend.”

The blows hurt more higher up on the back, but the welts left all over my rear end made it nearly impossible and painful to sit down. I especially was concerned and didn’t like the grin that seemed to stay on her face. I thought any second her whitely beautiful canine teeth were going to enlarge into yellow fangs and sink into my neck. At least it was a lesson learned not to agree to everything she suggested. But what she suggested next happened back in the city and nearly before I knew it.

“That’s right, I want to get hitched up. And you make an honest girl out of me.”

We went to take blood tests to make sure we didn’t have syphilis, and who knows whatever goddamn other things we might not have, and a few days later we were married at City Hall. Max and her best friend in the big blue woolly sweater, to whom Max showed his seashells, both were there as witnesses. She carried a yellow rose. While I had a big lump in my throat wondering about supporting two when I was still not yet on the verge of supporting one. I thought to myself, Hey, what the hell am I doing. This could be incarceration for life with a vampire sadist wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails and with my future freedom paid for by alimony till merciful death do we otherwise part. And looking in the mirror before the wedding, I was getting less resembling Rudolph Valentino in a hurry.

“Gee Stephen honey, you look so pale.”

“Well honey, maybe it’s because I am.”

Lordy sakes alive, what the hell do you do if you’re a composer with artistic sensibilities and have a deep compassion for your fellowman and in a country where the underlying ethic is to make a dollar and let dog eat dog. And what is worse, where no one wants to know you when you have no job, no income, and with the responsibility of marriage thrust upon you so early in life.

“Come on Stephen honey, has the cat got your tongue. Don’t look so goddamn glum.”

She was right. The thoughts were getting even worse when we came out into City Hall Park, walking a gray day through the pigeons with snow slush splashing up from passing cars. Each of us chewing on a slice of pizza, which was temporarily serving as the wedding reception. Across the street from the park I could see the lighted windows of the Barber College, where, I cataloged for future reference, you could get a nearly free haircut from the trainees for practically nothing other than maybe a gap left in the hair here and there or a little slice taken off an ear. And while I was watching, I stepped deeply into canine merde with my commando corrugated shoes. Another omen I thought, of odoriferous things to come. My little heart didn’t know what to do, save to go on baffled and beating.

“O God Stephen, I am insatiable for your seed. We’re going to be so happy. So goddamn happy.”

She tugged me by the arm and flagging a taxi, we all went back to her girlfriend Ertha’s apartment on Waverly Place in the Village. My first financial embarrassment was not having enough money to pay for the cab. My second chagrin was having Max buy the couple of bottles of champagne we had with the canapés. Then I started to choke on some of kind of gristle or something and Max slammed me on the back so hard, I fell face-first into the champagne bucket. The force Max used was explained when he said he didn’t want me to die in his girlfriend’s apartment with a whole lot of fuss with ambulance and police squad cars arriving and people writing down notes on pads like they were agents of the Internal Revenue Service. And especially where his own wife, whom he had married last year and just divorced, could find out he was holed up with the present lady of his affections and trace him to collect her alimony.

“Hey old fella Steve, sorry I hit you so hard between the shoulder blades.”

It did almost seem as if everyone was taking a turn belting the hell out of me. But what worried me most were the debilitating blows my nonfat wallet was taking. I never saw money disappear so fast. Present circumstances being what they were, I did perforce harbor a thought or two about Sylvia’s rich adoptive parents coming to the rescue who were giving Sylvia an allowance that would at least help keep her four-fifths in the manner she’d been accustomed to. But with fortune hunters everywhere, the parents were furious to hear of the marriage to which they weren’t invited, and a month went by before there was any sign of relenting, when we were finally invited for afternoon tea at the mansion in the country, where I learned a little more about what Sylvia was accustomed to. The Doric columns were ten times bigger than I first imagined. Every inch of the house polished and gleaming.

“Welcome home, Lady Sylvia.”

It was the butler called Parker, with an English accent, receiving us at the door. And with the adoptive parents just arrived back from Paris and still on their way up from the city, Sylvia gave me a quick tour of a wing or two of the house. Then took me to see her bedroom and about fifty different bath salts in glass jars all over the bathroom. She clearly lived like a princess with her silk embroidered chaise longue piled with pillows, and a spacious desk with iron claw legs clutched deep in the floor of her carpeted sitting room. Not that I was going to bust a gut over it but Christ, how did people get and stay so goddamn rich.

Then, as the parents still didn’t arrive, Sylvia said we should stay overnight. Parker dancing attendance, we dined in the candlelit sumptuous dining room, knocking back with roast duck a couple of fabled vintages of claret, the like of which I thought could only be served in a sommelier’s heaven. After having an ancient aged brandy and chocolate in the Pavilion Room, we then in Sylvia’s bedroom knocked off an exotically acrobatic piece of ass. As I was about to sleep, I had to dissuade myself of foolishly thinking that the world could go on just like this. Then realized it could if someone dumped a few million bucks on you. That not being likely soon to happen, I fell asleep and dreamt I was running to catch a train and tripped over someone’s briefcase left on the platform and fell on my face. It was Sylvia belting me awake with a pillow.

“Wake up you sleepy Irish bastard and fuck me.”

Strangely pleasant in the dawn to look out the window on a forested countryside and to have breakfast in bed. Then to perform ablutions on the warm tiles of the bathroom and following another fiercely fought fuck, to go taking in great lungfuls of the fresh clean country air as we then on this blue-skied sunny day walked out on the grounds and over grassy vistas. Sylvia twirling and executing balletic moves through the formal gardens of boxwood hedges. Then we went along a narrow trail into the woods, Sylvia’s mood seeming more solemn as she headed us along a disused path through thick foliage and saying that the snakes were safely hibernating. Under towering trees in a clearing, we came upon the back of a small lodge with a pitched roof of cedar tiles. Going around to the front, a veranda with two shuttered windows. Steps up to a porch approached by a straight, long pebbled avenue flanked by a strip of lawn and bordered by the woods. Sylvia taking an ornate golden key from a gold chain around her neck.

“Well, if you’ve ever wondered what this key is for, it’s for here, the Doll’s House and this door I’m about to open.”

A music box sound of tinkling “The Bells of Saint Mary’s.” A gaily carpeted room across which the woven shapes of dolphins cavorted as if alive, swimming in a sea. Seated on shelves, teddy bears and dolls balefully looking out. A desk. A pink tutu and pairs of ballet slippers. Photographs of ballerinas. A little library of books. A large stone fireplace. A variety of straw and felt hats hung adorning a wall. Berets and boaters, sombreros and sunbonnets. Framed children’s drawings and pictures. In a corner an enormous Georgian doll’s house, full of a perfection of miniature furnishings. Right down to a dining room table set for dinner with the tiniest candles in silver candelabra. I felt something woefully sad as I listened to the litany of Sylvia’s descriptions.

“This was always my cherished safe and secret place of refuge.

“This is where, while my parental usurpers were away, which was mostly always, I nearly spent my life as a little girl. My favorite haven in the whole world. Cool in the summer. Heated in the winter. At this little table I had tea with my governess in front of a fire at four. She taught me to play chess and honeymoon bridge. And, if I were alone, to sing, and I’d never feel lonely. On the record player we’d have Beethoven’s Adagio from his Piano Concerto Number Two. And if you ever wondered sometimes why I’m able to tolerate you when you’re intolerable, my governess was Irish. Guess she was designed to stop me becoming too much of an American. I still come here to be alone with myself. In there, that was my little kitchen where I could cook and bake cakes. See my little real dishes. All these pots and pans. And in here. My very own little bathroom. Tub, basin, and shower. And in this bedroom my governess could sleep. I loved it here. And if you’ve also wondered how I ever got so musically sophisticated. Here’s my collection of records. Beethoven, Bach, Mussorgsky, Handel, Bizet. My big radio could reach all the way to Europe. My skis are there. My snowshoes. And in here my bedroom, where, when I didn’t have a governess anymore, I was allowed to stay with that little girlfriend you see me holding hands with in that photograph. The two of us, when we were older, would go up those stairs to a little attic loft lookout window from which we could watch what the deer, possums, squirrels, and chipmunks were doing out in the woods. An enormous owl lived not far away in a tree. And sometimes on the hot summer nights you’d hear the big black snakes slithering over the leaves.”

Tears in her eyes as the Doll’s House door closed and was locked behind us. As we stepped back down the steps and walked away on the front-approaching drive, Sylvia’s eyes cast down, looking at the ground. And her little friend with whom she played as she grew up had mysteriously disappeared hiking across the arctic wastes of Alaska. Only later did I learn that the longing she felt for the world of all her small treasures of childhood, among which she had lived in this cozily lavish little hideout, was while she didn’t yet know that she was adopted and someone else’s child.

“Thank you Sylvia, for showing me.”

“Well thank you for the way you really looked and respondedto everything. I’m beginning to think you’re really a softhearted and kind person. But God, look at the time. It’s time to meet the folks. Parker will have a writhing fit if we’re late for tea. He’s always harping on about the vulgar lack of manners and punctuality he suffers in America. Later I’ll show you the pool and tennis courts.”

In the drawing room, called the Pavilion Room, Parker had laid out cucumber sandwiches, scones, clotted cream, and imported black cherry jam to be scoffed back with a choice of India or China tea. Leaving the innocent with a plethora of urgent decisions. And what gave me a further few moments of contemplation, if not panic, was Sylvia’s slenderly tall and otherwise elegantly good-looking adoptive mother, Drusilla, her hair marvelously coifed back from a stunning profile, and who had a tic in her left eye which I could not have known, unless told, made her unpredictably wink. And stupid dunce that I was, made me once wink back. And bleep bleep, instantly returned were her two winks. I could feel the blushing blood go all the way out to the edges of my ears. Then the father turned up. I stood up to shake hands. The son of a bitch seemed to try to break my fingers. Perhaps not surprising, as I was crouched over like a cripple in a hopeless effort to disguise, despite all its recent use, a god-awful erection.

To escape my dire embarrassment and my tumescenceadjusted as best I could painfully down my thigh, I took up her father’s invitation to go have a look at the horses. About at least thirty Arabians in a palace of a stable. Even the sawdust was spread like a palatial carpet, and the boxes were like luxury hotel rooms. I said wow, gee and gosh, to get me through the viewing. And pretended to know the difference as to what is meant by a fetlock or a pastern. I must have succeeded, for before we left, he asked to go have a drink with him at his club. My God. An emolument perchance, as I’d already been dropping hints to Sylvia. Or at least the opportunity to explore if one could be in the offering. I was finding that the difference with me, and anybody else in America in the circles in which I presently moved, was that I thought the world should be and maybe could be, a better place than it was. But all these people, having a mountain of money, seemed to like things just as they were. And above all to keep them that way. Nevertheless, I would adhere to my principles. That if composing music achieved such a purpose of bringing a little happiness to mankind, the composer’s goal was achieved and he should be applauded and aided without being subjected to snide remarks, such as could come unpredictably out of Sylvia, that while helpful could also be amusing.

“Hey, Chopin, here, take this. It will get you back and forth to Carnegie Hall and buy you a couple of beers and pretzels.”

I had an important meeting with a prominent conductor at Carnegie Hall and to take an odd taxi these days and have leftover spending money, Sylvia slipped me a twenty-dollar bill always got crisply new from a nice bank that looked like a country mansion on Madison Avenue. I objected to being called Chopin but found if I made an issue of it, it would mean taking the subway. Anyway, the son of a bitch prominent conductor who wore too much jewelry and pointy-toed shoes didn’t show up and I ended up having plenty of beers and tons of pretzels in the nearest bar. Indiscreetly of course, one took up a conversation with a nearby girl, who repeated that usual observation.

“Hey you, don’t you look a bit like Rudolph Valentino. Buy me a drink why don’t yuh.”

There were no more twenty-dollar bills for taxis for a while, but taxis were less necessary as nobody seemed that anxious to commission music or make appointments with me anyway. We’d now been living since the marriage in a temporarily borrowed apartment belonging to one of Sylvia’s girlfriends on West Sixty-eighth Street, from where I strolled into the park each day, looking around the skyline of the city, which, if you didn’t stare at it too long, was an inspiration. It was also a ready reminder of, holy cow, look at all the competition there is lurking behind every window you could see. Where people living on trust funds and investments just like Sylvia’s parents were ensconced amid their priceless antiques, filing their fingernails, powdering their asses, or else giving themselves pleasant enemas. Although we were living modestly comfortably on Sylvia’s allowance, I was also looking hard for somewhere to rent cheaply, heading downtown beyond the Village to reconnoiter around Little Italy. Meanwhile, I was starting to express the idea I had already more than hinted at to Sylvia that when I met her father I might suggest a stipend in the way of substituting for some kind of fellowship or grant repayable in full, which could allow me to give full time to composing. She smiled as if she had my principles at her mercy and whispered, “Hey, handsome kiddo, let me put you in the mood for groveling. Drop your drawers and let me give you a couple more swats on the ass.”

Listening to these further snide, demeaning remarks, I now understood how wife beating could come about. And it was also significant enough to stir up the past terrors of beatings in one’s life and those done in my Catholic grade school by Sister Shirley Sadist, the most stern disciplinarian in America, who with yard-long rulers belted the shit out of us in ninth grade or whatever numerical it was that designated her attendance upon us. The stings and yowls to high heaven of these trembling figures lined up in front of a whole class, suppressing their screams of pain, still haunted me. Sylvia also could be a bit of a card when she wanted, and when I told her of the school beatings, she suggested she dress as a nun to give me my next swatting across the ass. The trouble was the other things she wanted to do and have. Her total, undivided independence, she said. And that women should be as promiscuous as men. I caught her up short once when I said sure, good-bye, see you in the reincarnation. She didn’t like that kind of adieu much and said she’d stick around and be temporarily satisfied with steady boring fucking. Meanwhile, I took up the appointment to go have a drink with her father. While she went to have a beer or two with an always groaningly salivating admirer who wanted to marry her after she divorced me and then give her a two-hundred-foot yacht, a grass-roofed palace in Mexico, and open accounts—which, as it happened, she already had—in the best, most famous fashion stores in New York.

“He’s an international banker. Has fingers in all sorts of pies. He loves me and would do anything for me. Don’t you understand. And you’re yet to be somebody.”