It can’t be the edge as well as the center, says Vina, refusing to rise to the bait.
Sure it can, my pretty, says Yul Singh. Take a look around. Sure it can.
War-weary, divided, their belief in the mighty eagle’s global ascendancy damaged by the humiliating withdrawal of U.S. personnel from Indochina, Americans find they want what Ormus Cama has to say. The helicopters circle over the Saigon embassy like angels of judgement; the living cling to them and beg for salvation. The dead have already been judged, and found guilty, by defeat. Limb-shorn veterans retreat psychotically into forests and mountain fastnesses, to dream of rice paddies and King Cong rising out of the water right in front of their screaming faces, here comes a chopper to chop off your head. You can get the boys out of the war but you can’t get the war out of the boys. In this bereft moment, rudderless America is unusually open to the paradoxes of Ormus’s songs; open, in fact, to paradox itself, and its non-identical twin ambiguity too. The U.S. Army (and its rock songs) went into one East and came out with a bloody nose. Now Ormus’s music has arrived like an affirmation from another East to enter the musical heart of Americanness, to flow into the river of dreams; but it’s driven by the democratic conviction, retained by Ormus from the days when Gayomart sang the future into his ears, that the music is his as well, born not just in the U.S.A. but in his own heart, long ago and far away. Just as England can no longer lay exclusive claim to the English language, so America is no longer the sole owner of rock ’n’ roll: that is Ormus’s unstated sub-text (Vina, always the loudmouth, the thrower-down of gauntlets, will come out with it soon enough, and put a few patriotic noses out of joint).
The story of the ten-year engagement and of Ormus’s consequent oath of celibacy spreads quickly; and this, too, makes Ormus and Vina irresistible. The new band takes off almost at once, and the force of its ascending shakes the land. Starting as oddities, they grow quickly into giants. At once conqueror and celebrant, Ormus storms the citadels of rock, and Vina’s voice, as Yul Singh foresaw, is his weapon. Her voice is the servant of his melodies; his singing the servant of her voice. And while Vina’s is the exceptional instrument, capable of affecting the hairs on the back of your neck as it swoops and dives, Ormus’s lower, gentler harmonies perfectly offset her pyrotechnics, and the two voices, when they blend, create a magical third, more Righteous than the Righteous Brothers, Everlier than the Everlys, Supremer than the Supremes. It’s a perfect marriage. Ormus and Vina, put asunder by vows, are joined together in song. V-T-Ohh! America, disoriented, seeking a new voice, succumbs to theirs. Young Americans, in search of new frontiers, board VTO’s Orient express.
That part of the American soul which is presently in retreat finds comfort in the new stars’ restatements of the great American musical truths, the foot-tapper tempi that start out walking and then find the dance hidden in the walk; the placing of the beats that tug at our bodies; the speak-to-me rhythm and blues. And that America which by losing certitude has newly opened itself to the external world responds to the un-American sounds Ormus adds to his tracks: the sexiness of the Cuban horns, the mind-bending patterns of the Brazilian drums, the Chilean woodwinds moaning like the winds of oppression, the African male voice choruses like trees swaying in freedom’s breeze, the grand old ladies of Algerian music with their yearning squawks and ululations, the holy passion of the Pakistani qawwals. Too much of the people’s music settles for too little, Ormus says on the occasion of the issue of the self-titled first album (the one with the burgundy-colored velvet eye patch on the sleeve). It offers the people crumbs when they should have banquets.
He wants to work with what he calls the full orchestra, meaning not stiffs in tuxes but the full range of musical emotional intellectual yes and moral possibility, he wants this music to be capable of saying anything to anyone, but above all meaning something to someone. He’s started to speak in this big new voice, and the someones out there are listening.
Angry America, too, is listening hard: the America of loss, the America that’s taken a beating and doesn’t fully understand how, or what it’s done to deserve this pain (this America is looking not at the Indochinese dead but only at its own). This raging America responds to Ormus’s wrath, because he’s a very angry man, angry with Vina, himself and the cruel destiny thanks to which the decade of his high triumph has been rendered meaningless by the emptiness of his bed.
It responds in two ways. Only one of these is appreciative. Beneath the America that opens itself to VTO, there’s another country that turns against him, that sets its jaw and closes its mind.
Ormus and Vina begin to acquire powerful enemies.
Someone should shut those uppity bigmouths once ’n’ f’r all.
Melancholy and chastity make sublimation possible, according to the fifteenth-century Florentine Marsilio Ficino, and it’s sublimation that sets free the juror divinus. First in the Peace Ballads of Ormus Cama, then in his legendary quake album, Quakershaker, fury is evident in every chord, every bar, every line, fury deep-drawn like black water from a poisoned well. Whether it be divine or earthly furor is a matter of some considerable dispute.
If Ficino believed that our music is composed by our lives, the contemporary Czech Milan Kundera thinks, contrariwise, that our lives are composed like music. “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty, even in times of the greatest distress.” To stand the old principle of good design on its elegant head: in our functioning we follow the dictates of our need for form.
Bravo, Ormus. I’ve got to hand it to the guy. Bearing a satchel full of hard-won images of the fall of Saigon I come trudging home with a lifetime supply of nightmares to the sweet-dream needlework merchants and powdered-happiness pashas clustered on the stoops of the brownstones of St. Mark’s, and lo! there on the corner newsstand is our Ormie, already notoriously publicity shy, hitting a three-run homer, adorning the covers in the same week of Rolling Stone (with Vina), Newsweek (Vina’s reduced to an inset) and Time (not a trace of Vina to be seen). Not only has he pushed the war news on to the inside pages but he’s also marginalized one of the great beauties of the age, who is rapidly becoming one of the most famous women in the world. Some recluse! Some publicity! He must’ve really touched a nerve. Two quick albums, VTO and Peace Ballads—in those days before the omnipotence of videos and marketing, musicians put out records a whole lot more often—one, two!, and he’s sitting on top of the world.
They made peace in the other world too. (Baby I’ve got one of my own.) Ain’t no better than it is for you. (Good to know we’re not alone.) Well the war is over and the battle’s through. (But I can’t reach you on the phone.)
I call your number but you ain’t home. I call your number but you ain’t home. Seems I made this long journey just to wait on my own. It’s been a long journey home. A long journey home.
VTO’s Peace Ballads defies the injunctions of the post-ironical cinéaste Otto Wing. “Picking up the Pieces,” “(You Brought Me) Peace Without Love,” “Long Journey Home,” “Might As Well Live”: its easy enough to hear the bitter, disabused ironies in many of Ormus’s songs. But the music he’s come up with is jauntily, almost perversely uptempo. The overall effect is oddly affirmative, even anthemic, and for many young people these jaundiced, dystopic tracks become unlikely, adult anthems of relief, a new beginning, release. On my own block I can hear the young dope peddlers—Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Harry the Horse, Sky Masterson, Big Julie, Nathan Detroit—whistling Ormus Cama’s material. Peace without love: they are marketing this very product, the guaranteed top-grade genuine article, by the ounce. It’s the only racket; always was. And when you run out of peace juice, bliss pills or sweet treats for your veins, you are always welcome to return to Happy Valley here and get yourself another tasty helping, as long as you are in possession of the requisite spondulicks. Which, the dealers at least would argue, is more than can be said for love.
Americans buy the Ballads by the wagonload,
but the album’s anti-war message causes a few subterranean rumbles. Agencies who see it as their rôle to protect the country from fifth columnists, from being destabilized, start taking a discreet interest. Yul Singh receives a polite phone call on his unlisted private line from a voice that calls itself Michael Baxter when it says hello and Baxter Michaels when it signs off. A warning shot across the bows. A word to the wise. We have some concern about certain lyrical content. There is naturally no question of infringing any individual’s First Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand it correctly is not a U.S. citizen. A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host’s best rug.
Yul Singh summons Ormus and Vina to his suite of offices near Columbus Circle and then suggests a walk in the park. Ordinarily New Yorkers pride themselves on ignoring the fame of the famous but the exceptional success of Peace Ballads necessitates exceptional measures. For Ormus, an old hippie Afghan jacket, large round-lensed purple shades, a fright wig. Vina is harder to disguise. Her height, her Afro shock, her attitude, defy concealment. After much haggling she agrees to wear a floppy wide-brimmed felt hat in bright scarlet, because it matches her long Italian leather coat. Yul Singh refuses as usual to use a white stick, leans, instead, on Will Singh’s iron forearm. Half a dozen more Singhs follow at a discreet distance, in case of crowd trouble. In the park, emboldened by foliage, Cool Yul passes on the content of the feds’ phone call. Vina snorts her disdain, declines to take the threat seriously—Everybody’s got a fed on their tail right now, from Dr. Nina to Winston O’Boogie, it’s like a fashion statement?—and goes off at one of her zany tangents. What do they know, nobody ever gets rock lyrics right, anyway. For years I thought Hendrix was a faggot. You know, scuse me while I kiss this guy. And what was that about my feet begin to crumble. I used to admire the surrealism of rock lyrics?, the wild non sequiturs. Then I realized it was just my fucking ears.
Ormus, Yul Singh says quietly, these are what can I tell you sensitive times, people are touchy, skinless, you may be giving them too much truth. I’m just saying which it’s a matter for you, okay, but you should keep under control your crazier sentiments and if I may say so also her many unscripted remarks.
That’ll be the day, Vina snaps, flinging down her hat and shades and striding off fast through the dappled sunlight, a giantess at war. She turns heads, but the thunderclouds around her look too dangerous; people leave her alone.
There’s no follow-up. Somebody’s decided to let this one go. The attack on Ormus comes fifteen months later, after the earthquake songs.
The culture needs a vacuum to rush into, it is an amorphousness in search of shapes. Ormus and Vina’s suspended love, that divine absence which we can fill with our fantasies, becomes the center of our lives. The city seems to organize itself around them, as if they are the principle, the pure Platonic essence, that makes sense of the rest.
I flatter myself that here I use the word “we” to describe a collectivity of which I am not a part.
They live separately. She’s in a third-floor loft downtown, all the way west on Canal, a large space rescued from post-industrial decay in a building with brutalist common parts that satisfy some instinct of hers for roughness, though the loft itself is eminently creature-comfortable. She fills it with fish tanks for dumb company and whole walls of hi-fi equipment to shut out the noise of the West Side Highway and the no doubt even louder roar of Ormus’s absence, which sounds constantly in her ear like the ocean in a shell. He’s in a vast empty apartment uptown in the old Rhodopé Building, a classic-period Art Deco landmark; cocooned in space, looking east across the reservoir. Whole rooms contain nothing except a piano, a guitar, a few cushions. A fortune invested in soundproofing and air-purification systems. Ormus still wears his eye patch when he’s out and about, and always when he’s performing, as an aid to concentration, but here in this luxury padded cell he gives free rein to his craziness, his double vision: he rides it hard, busts it like a bronc. He shuts out the world and hears the music of the spheres. Though he is sworn to celibacy, he lets Maria come.
Their audiences, their arenas expand. The music gets louder. He goes on stage wearing earplugs but there’s already damage to his hearing. Vina has her ocean-roar; in his case it’s a ringing noise like a faraway alarm. This is the last sound he hears at night, the first that penetrates his consciousness each morning. Sometimes he mistakes it for air knocking in underfloor pipes or the wind whistling through a cracked pane of glass. The ringing noise is my life, he writes in his journal. It’s just another thing I can’t escape.
After a tense initial period during which they sometimes see each other in the evenings, with painfully awkward results, they agree to meet only to rehearse with the other band members, to discuss their finances and to perform. They are never alone together any more, they never eat a meal or take in a movie in each other’s company, never phone each other, never go dancing, never feed animals in the zoo, never touch. Like divorced couples, they avoid each other’s gaze. Yet mysteriously they continue to say they are both deeply, irreversibly, for-ever-and-a-day in love.
What can this mean?
It means that they are with each other constantly even while they are apart. When she stands in the shower she imagines him on the other side of the glass door, watching the water run down her body, pressing his lips to the steamy glass. She puts her own lips to the inside of the door, closes her eyes, imagines him waiting for her. The water becomes his hands, and her own hands run down her body, searching for and often becoming his touch. And when he lies in his bed he convinces himself there’s a warm hollow in the mattress beside him, as if she has just left the room; he closes his eyes and she returns, she comes close. Their curled bodies are a pair of question marks at the end of the puzzling sentence of the day.
When he writes a line he always wonders what she’ll think of it, he hears her goddess’s voice take his music and hurl it into the sky, to hang there like a shining star. And when she eats, alone or with others, she never fails to think of his carnivorous habits, his high daily intake of red meat cooked medium rare, and a look of exasperated affection crosses her face, a look which (if she is not alone) she uncharacteristically declines to explain.
Her decision to live her private life in public embarrasses and even humiliates a man as private as Ormus has become; yet he wonders every day at the raw courage of her engagement with the world, of her willingness to walk naked in its streets in the service of what she thinks of as the truth. In response to her blabbering mouth, his own reserve grows around him like a wall. She beats her fists against it, as she does against his famous oath; but she also thinks of his choices, as she thinks of him, with a respect that she accords to no one else.
Entering the same room, they crackle with the electricity of their solitary loving. They quarrel, of course. What he thinks of as his commitment to monogamy, she calls his growing absolutism. She accuses him of tyranny, which he calls fidelity. It is her nature that separates them, he replies. Her determined infidelity, her refusal to value what is of value, namely the love of a good man, himself. What he calls infidelity, she calls freedom. What looks to him like promiscuity, she provocatively renames democracy. These arguments go nowhere; like, perhaps, all lovers’ quarrels, though they cannot be ended, defused, as other lovers’ quarrels are: by oblivion’s kiss.
Everything is remembered.
And they can kiss only while they sleep; only in their dreams.
Vina continues to reveal everything to everyone all the time. The more intimate the detail the surer it is to see the light of day. When they go on stage Ormus stands with his back to the audience, facing his fellow musicians like a conductor, Karajan with a Stratocaster, while she yells out a number to the audience, which everyone knows by now is the number of days that have passed since she and Ormus last had sex. She announces the names of her latest stopgap lovers, her Reichian belief in the healing powers of orgone energy and multiple orgasms, and the
precise nature of her sexual preferences.
(Domination, bondage, aggression alternating with submissiveness, punishment, surrender: long before her eighties imitators she was bringing out into the open the flimsy repetitive secrets of our forbidden hearts, flaunting beneath the intense weight of stage lighting what had previously skulked around in the dark; demolishing—by inhabiting—taboos. For this she was predictably called the pornographer of the phonograph, the stereotypist of the stereo, by those who did not care to notice what was staring everyone in the face, namely her colossal and growing need for him, that need which she shouted to the whole planet in order to belittle and thus survive it, which hit her with redoubled intensity every morning of her life—her heart’s seismic scale, like the Richter, proceeded by doublings—and forced her into ever greater extremes of compensatory behavior, loudmouthings, promiscuity, drugs. Namely that there was only one person in all the world whom she was trying to offend: no matter how large the audience, how outrageously suggestive her performance, her true purpose was profoundly intimate, and her true audience numbered one.
Or perhaps, if I may be permitted a flash of vanity, two.
I say this because she, the queen of over-exposure, never exposed me.)
The arch-enemy of the hidden, she keeps me secret until the end. About our long afternoons on my outsize brass bed, Ormus will never learn as long as she lives. Why? Because I’m not nothing to her is why. We have duration, a present and a future, is why. Because a cat may look at a queen and maybe, just maybe, sometimes the queen looks right back at that hungry young tom.
Her casual amours, which she makes public, are rendered insignificant by being named. None of them lasts long, anyway: a few weeks, a couple of months at best. My love affair with her—or call it half a love affair, because half of the two of us was in love—will last for almost eighteen years.