But if I was remiss with Brian I made up for it doubly with Charlie Fielding. For sheer masochism-good, healthy, “normal female masochism”-you simply cannot beat my relationship with Charlie (which closely followed the end of my marriage to Brian). Interesting how we always give the next guy all the overflow from the guy who went before. A psychological case of “sloppy seconds.”
13 The Conductor
Is it an earthquake or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail-this feeling of joy,
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?
Have I the right hunch or have I the wrong?
Will it be Bach I shall hear or just a Cole Porter song?
– Cole Porter, “At Long Last Love,” (1938)
Charlie Fielding (“Charles” when he signed his name) was tall and stoop-shouldered and looked like the Wandering Jew. His nose was enormously long and hooked and had flaring nostrils, and his small down-turned mouth always wore a sour expression, somewhere between contempt and melancholy. His skin was sallow and unhealthy-looking, and had been ravaged by acne which still troubled him from time to time. He wore expensive tweed sport coats which hung on his shoulders as if on wire hangers and the knees of his trousers bagged. The pockets of his old Chesterfield were distended with paperback books. From his worn pigskin briefcase, the point of a conductor’s baton protruded.
If you had seen him on the subway or eating a solitary dinner in Schrafft’s (where he charged the bills to his father’s account), you would have supposed, from his expression, that he was in mourning. He was not-unless he was mourning in advance for his father (whose money he was due to inherit).
Sometimes, while waiting for his dinner to arrive (creamed chicken, hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream), he would take an orchestral score from his briefcase and, holding his baton in his right hand, would begin to conduct imaginary musicians. He did this with perfect unselfconsciousness and apparently without any desire to be conspicuous. He was simply oblivious to the people around him.
Charlie (his mother had named him for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Charlie was, after all, a Jewish prince) lived alone in a one-room apartment in the East Village. The same neighborhood his poor ancestors had lived in two generations before. The Venetian blinds were laden with greasy black soot, and grit crunched under your feet as you walked across the bare floor. The surroundings were Spartan: a pullman kitchen whose cupboards were always bare except for boxes of dried apricots and bags of hard candy, a rented piano, a single bed, a tape recorder, a portable record player, two cartons of records (which had never been unpacked since he brought them from his parents’ house two years before). Outside the window was a fire escape overlooking a sooty courtyard and across it lived two middle-aged lesbians who sometimes neglected to draw the blinds. Charlie had that defensive contempt for homosexuals which people often have when their own sexuality is an embarrassment to them. He was horny all the time, but he was terribly afraid of being vulgar. His Harvard education had been designed to extinguish all the vulgarity glowing deep down in his genes, and though he wanted to get laid, he did not want to manage it in a way that would make him appear crude-either to himself or to the girls he tried to seduce.
I’ve noticed, anyway, that unless a man is a bona fide genius, a Harvard education is a permanent liability. Not so much what they learn there, but what they presume about themselves ever after-the albatross of being a Harvard man: the aura, the atmosphere, the pronunciation problems, the tender memories of the River Charles. It tends to infantilize them and cause them to go dashing about the corridors of advertising agencies with their ties flapping behind them. It causes them to endure the dreadful food and ratty upholstery of the Harvard Club for the sake of impressing some sweet young thing with the glorious source of their B.A.
Charlie had this Harvard impediment. He had graduated with a straight C- average and yet he always felt incredibly superior to me with my Phi Beta Kappa from grubby déclassé Barnard. He felt that at Harvard he had been touched with the brush of refinement, that despite all his failures in the world, he was still (a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus should sing out this phrase) a Harvard Man.
Most mornings, Charlie slept until noon, then got up and had breakfast at one of the dairy restaurants left over from the old immigrant-neighborhood days. But two mornings a week he dragged himself out of bed at nine and took the subway uptown to a music school where he taught piano and conducted a choral group. The money he earned from this work was negligible, but he lived mainly on the income from a trust fund his father had set up for him. He was terribly furtive about the amount of his income, as if it were a dirty secret. Still, I always assumed that if it hadn’t gone against the grain of his stinginess, he could have lived somewhat less grubbily than he did.
There was, however, a dirty family secret and maybe that was what made the money so embarrassing. Charlie’s family had met with money by way of Charlie’s Uncle Mel-the famous pseudo-WASP ballroom dancer who glided through the 1930s with patent-leather hair and a fixed nose and a dancing shikse wife. Mel Fielding had made a life-long career of keeping his Jewishness secret, and he agreed to share his wealth with the family only on the condition that they fix all their noses too and change their names from Feldstein to Fielding. Charlie refused to comply with the nose, but took the name. Charlie’s father, however, did amputate half his nose (with the result that he wound up looking like a Jew with an absurdly small nose). But the main thing was that the Feldsteins left Brooklyn and turned up in the Beresford (that gilded ghetto, that pseudocastle) on Central Park West.
The family business was a worldwide chain of dancing schools which sold life memberships to lonely old people. It wasn’t exactly a racket any more than psychoanalysis or religion or encounter groups or Rosicrucianism can be said to be rackets, but, like them, it also promised an end to loneliness, powerlessness, and pain, and of course it disappointed many people. Charlie had worked in the dance-studio business for a few summers during college, but this was only a token gesture. He hated any kind of everyday job-even if it consisted of gliding across the dance floor with an eighty-year-old lady who had just become a life member to the tune of several thousand dollars. When I knew him, Charlie was very sensitive on the subject of ballroom dancing. He did not want it generally known that this was what his father did for a living. Nevertheless, he dropped his famous uncle’s name frequently among his friends and mine. Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
But what did Charlie do? He prepared himself for greatness. He daydreamed about his conducting debut-which otherwise he did nothing much to hasten-and he began symphonies. They were-every one of them-unfinished symphonies. He also began sonatas and operas (based on works by Kafka or Beckett). These were unfinished bars (but which he always promised to dedicate to me). Perhaps to others he was a failure, but to himself he was a romantic figure. He spoke of “silence, exile, and cunning.” (Silence: the unfinished symphonies. Exile: he had left the Beresford for the East Village. Cunning: his affair with me.) He was going through the initial trials of all great artists. As a conductor, he had not yet had his break and was further handicapped, he thought, by the fact of not being a homosexual. As a composer, it was a question of learning to cope with the crisis of style which bedeviled the age. That too would come in time. One had to think in decades, not years.