Free Women and Men by Joseph McElroy Page A

statutory tenets; an old endangered apartment house, old building, but well built originally with walls sound-proof, we’ll be repointing the bricks in a couple of years from now but in the apartments the walls of the rooms are sound, in fact soundproof from unit to unit, that is apartment to apartment, if not within a given unit: still this well-known singer, a basso rotondo, would get out of here and buy himself a townhouse had he not recently become afflicted with a secret he cannot bring himself to tell his doctor or his friends: like the recently divorced tennis pro who one day in the middle of a match he’s met starts thinking about his wrist which at that instant becomes suspect, he finds it tilting to hit the ball up over the fence or down into the net; or the long-time diver, his tanks like rockets on his back, who suddenly questions his lung capacity and can’t stop breathing faster and faster—well, our resident basso one day finds himself thinking about, ye gods, his larynx, his head register, his wind, his glottis (narrowing its void-like passage almost to non-existence to increase the frictional vibrations in the famous membranes either side); also, above the true, the false vocal cords that close, then cough-like quick-release to attack a note—ye gods, these are all parts he learned long ago to forget except as love of self but now can’t help remembering, part by part, lest it all fall apart, eh?, his acoustical equipment, to the point where now he’s gone on to thinking about his difficulty swallowing and now here he is, not in his own living room between a baby grand and a giant divan that belonged to his mother that, what with the declining state of the elevators in the elegant, turn-of-the-century building you could never get furniture movers to move out of here so we’d just have to get a rigger’s license at an astronomical hourly rate—no he is not at home between piano and divan but he’s onstage across town, you know, having all evening puffed his way around problem after problem, ye gods, doubt upon doubt, as if this Strauss opera Rosenkavalier equals an attempt upon his life by dramatizing this secret that’s wrecking his confidence, and now at curtain call he’s breathless, swelling his sternum like a victim of slow vacuum torture.
    Yet at that instant he sees in the gaps between his parts a dark-haired bald man out there in the windowed world beyond the stagy brink frowning but applauding and beside him a light-haired lady smiling but not clapping; and seeing them turn to each other, the basso rotondo, for whom tonight performing was never so like work, turns to the woman in kavalier costume beside him and because he’s inspired by the look of that couple in the orchestra why he is suddenly released, loose, afloat, pure angelic promise turning in space, empty as if hearing his own delicious requiem; so he’s put in mind of the story going round about this slender lady beside his own wide load, she’s looking out into the full house she whose father far away in South America is said to talk louder and louder the older he grows so that his daughter the diva thousands of miles north is alarmed for his safety, so to the basso rotondo she seems newly frail; so he, betrothed for a moment by her innocent thigh, takes her hand, forgetting himself oh forgetting himself as two more singers come from the wings, and he and this lady who is dressed as the Kavalier move left with the Princess on their left toward the center of the great stage, and the basso, busy bison (it comes to him from nowhere), angelic bull at large within the delicatest discipline of total ballet, knows in his heart that he had always known that there must be infinite room for People, here and over the brink of the stage, for the magical individual, the limitless person, in this—what?—loose-strung grand opus the ongoing gods he feels in all his oh suddenly relaxed registers are giving us to live gorgeously and