Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton Read online

  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 i
n 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 responded to 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 tumescence adjusted 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.”

  I was of a mind to tell Sylvia to tell her friend to take his finger out of one of his pies and shove it up his ass, or indeed her ass, as she frequently requested me to do. But I demurred as my appointment with her father loomed. His club was a massive gray stone outfit on Fifth Avenue, with its own driveway in and out on a crosstown side street. It even seemed to get more massive inside, with a room like a
football field and a ceiling so high, it seemed outdoors. But even with the size, you could get the impression the echoes could make everybody be aware of the subject, if not actually hear your conversation. I was still fumingly angry at Sylvia for suggesting I was some kind of panhandler trying to blackmail somebody and that I’d be groveling. And as if to remind me of my status, she shouted after me as I left the apartment.

  “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, it’s the poor what gets the pain.”

  This was a little European song I’d learned and had been foolish enough to sing for her. The remainder of the vocalization being, “It’s the same way the whole world over. Isn’t it a fucking shame.” Anyway, there was no shortage of further intimidation. The adoptive parents, I found, minus Sylvia, were listed amid a lot of other similar surnames in the Social Register. Well, I might not own much of it, but this was my country, too. I fought for it when other foreign ethnics were doing us down, my eardrums and brain getting concussed in a turret of sixteen-inch guns. But having spent an hour getting ready with the right clothes and avoiding anything too much resembling casual dress and in the only thing I owned remotely suitable for a funeral, I even thought for a second I might, in this somber club chamber, be going to be arrested for being Irish Catholic and once an altar boy who thought that Jesus Christ’s flesh and blood were being eaten in the white wafer they gave you at the altar rail for Communion. Although he wasn’t onto my secret religious thoughts, I could tell he knew more about me than he first let on. I was planning, so I could appear courteously knowledgeable and bullshit a little, to ask for an imported beer. Then I forgot every goddamn brand there was, and ordered tomato juice. He didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Nice to see you again, Steve.”

  “Good to see you too, sir.”

  “I understand you want a handout.”