He kept looking up at the light above the door, wondering if she’d taken off on her first try, and what song she’d used, and where she was now. She might have been anywhere in the city, since all the First National’s studios had direct access to the outside. Finally, unable to stand it any more, he went in and looked at her. Or rather, at the body she’d left behind.
Her arm had fallen from the armrest and hung limply in a filmy envelope of orange crepe de chine. He lifted it, so limp, and placed it on the padded rest.
Her eyes were open, but blank. A bead of saliva drooled down from her parted lips. He closed her eyes and wiped away the spittle. She seemed colder than a living body ought to be; she seemed dead.
He went back to his own room and tried again. Doggedly, he went through everything twice. He sang songs by Elgar and Ives; they weren’t as great as Mahler’s but they were in Daniel’s own language, and that was a consideration. He sang arias from Bach cantatas, choruses from Verdi operas. He sang songs he’d never heard before (the studio was well-equipped with both scores and accompaniment cassettes) and old love songs he remembered from the radio, years and years before. Three hours he sang, until there was nothing left of his voice but a rasp and an ache deep in his throat.
When he returned to the outer room, the light was still on over Boa’s door.
He went to bed and stared at that baleful red eye glowing in the darkness. For a while he cried, but he made himself stop. He couldn’t believe that she could just go off like this, knowing (as she surely must) that he’d been left behind. It was their wedding night, after all. Their honeymoon. Was she still angry with him for what he’d said about her father? Or didn’t anything else matter, once you could fly?
But the worst of it wasn’t that she had gone; the worst of it was that he was here. And might be, forever.
He started crying again, a slow steady drip of tears, and this time he let them come, for he remembered the brochure’s advice not to let your feelings get bottled up inside. Eventually, with a bottle of tears and of champagne both emptied, he managed to fall asleep.
He woke an hour after the plane had departed for Rome. The light was still burning above the studio door.
Once, when he was learning to drive, he’d backed Bob Lundgren’s pickup off the side of a dirt road and couldn’t get the back wheels up out of the ditch. The bed of the truck was full of bags of seed, so he couldn’t just go off to look for help, since Bob had few neighbors who would have been above helping themselves. He’d honked the horn and blinked the lights till the battery was dead — to no avail. Eventually he’d exhausted his impatience and started to see the situation as a joke. By the time Bob found him, at two a.m., he was completely unruffled and calm.
He’d reached that point again. If he had to wait for Boa, then he’d wait. Waiting was something he was good at.
He phoned down to the desk to say he’d be keeping the suite for another day and to order breakfast. Then he turned on the tv, which was showing what must have been the oldest cowboy movie ever made. Gratefully he let his mind sink into the story. The heroine explained to the hero that her parents had been killed in the massacre on Superstition Mountain, which seemed a truth as inexplicable as it was universal. His breakfast came, a gargantuan breakfast fit for the last hours of a man condemned to the gallows. Only after he’d finished his fourth fried egg did he realize that it was meant to be breakfast for two. Feeling replete, he went up to the roof and swam, all by himself, in the heated pool. He did slow weightless somersaults in the water, parodies of flight. When he returned to the room, Boa’s light was still glowing. She was spread out on the reclining seat exactly as he’d left her the night before. With half a thought that she might, if she were in the room and watching him, decide to be a dutiful wife and return to her body (and her husband), he bent down to kiss her forehead. In doing so, he knocked her arm from the armrest. It dangled from her shoulder like a puppet’s limb. He left it so, and returned to the outer room, where someone had used his few minutes away to make the bed and take away the tray of dishes.
Still feeling oddly lucid and dégagé, he looked through a catalogue of cassettes available (at ridiculous prices, but what the hell) from the shop in the lobby. He phoned down an order, more or less at random, for Haydn’s The Seasons.
At first he followed the text, hastening back and forth between the German and the English, but that required a more focused attention than he could muster. He didn’t want to assimilate but just, lazily, to enjoy. He went on listening with half an ear. The drapes were drawn and the lights turned off. Every so often the music would take hold, and he’d start being able to see little explosions of color in the darkness of the room, quick arabesques of light that echoed the emphatic patterns of the music. It was something he remembered doing ages ago, before his mother had run away, when they had all lived here in New York. He would lie in his bed and listen to the radio playing in the next room and see, on the ceiling, as on a black movie screen, movies of his mind’s own making, lovely semi-abstract flickerings and long zooming swoops through space, compared to which these little bips and flashes were weak tea indeed.
From the first, it would seem, music had been a visual art for him. Or rather, a spacial art. Just as it must be for dancers (and confess it: didn’t he enjoy himself more when he danced than when he sang? and didn’t he do it better?). Or for a conductor even, when he stands at the core of the music’s possibility and calls it into being by the motions of his baton. Perhaps that explained why Daniel couldn’t fly — because in some essential way that he would never understand music was forever alien to him, a foreign language that he must always be translating, word by word, into the language he knew. But how could that be, when music could mean so much to him? Even now, at a moment like this!
For Spring and Summer were fled, and the bass was singing of Autumn and the hunt, and Daniel was lifted outside himself by the music’s gathering momentum. Then, with a ferocity unmatched by anything else in Haydn, the hunt itself began. Horns sounded. A double chorus replied. The fanfare swelled, and formed… a landscape. Indeed, the tones that rolled and rollicked from the bells of the horns were that landscape, a broad expanse of wooded hills through which the hunters careened, resistless as the wind. Each “Tally-ho!” they cried was a declaration of possessing pride, a human signature slashed across the rolling fields, the very ecstasy of ownership. He’d never understood before the fascination of hunting, not on the scale on which it was conducted at Worry. He’d supposed it was something rich people felt obliged to do, as they were obliged to use silver and china and crystal. For what intrinsic interest could there be in killing one small fox? But the fox, he saw now, was only a pretext, an excuse for the hunters to go galloping off across their demesne, leaping walls and hedges, indifferent to boundaries of every kind, because the land belonged to them so far as they could ride and sing out “Tally-ho!”
It was splendid, undeniably — splendid as music and as idea. Grandison Whiting would have been gratified to hear it set forth so plainly. But the fox takes a different view of the hunt, necessarily. And Daniel knew, from the look he had seen so often in his father-in-law’s eyes, that he was the fox. He, Daniel Weinreb. He knew, what’s more, that the whole of wisdom, for any fox, may be written in a single word. Fear.
Once they put you in prison, you’re never entirely out of it again. It enters you and builds its walls within your heart. And once the hunt begins it doesn’t stop till the fox has been run to earth, till the hounds have torn it and the huntsman has held it up, a bleeding proof that the rulers and owners of the world will have no pity on the likes of fox.