She huddles up to him as he sings, pressing on his sides, patting his flank, resting her cool palms against his neck. It’s a loving cruelty, torturing him with touch. But this is how they learn best now, locked in a constant clinch, passing information through the siphon of skin.
“Grow huge,” she tells him. “Not in mass; not even in volume.” He must learn to place not just his sound but his very soul into the dark back corners of the most cavernous halls. One day, she’ll have him storm the arenas of drama and demand a hearing. Until then, he must perfect the high, clear force of lieder, a different matter altogether.
She wants us to hear how opera is really done, in the trenches, under fire. She gives us two tickets for her coming performance—Fiordiligi in Cos, for Mr. Bing. “Mozart?” Jonah teases her. “What nationality was he again?”
She tucks him under the chin the way Maria Theresa once coddled the boy composer. “He sure as hell wasn’t German, darling. He loved those Italian libretti, you’ll notice. And he’d have lived in Paris forever, by choice.”
Her coolness betrays how much is at stake. A role in Cos, at the Met. She seems, at most, a little harried. “Lives don’t come down to one moment,” she claims. We know she’s lying.
She gives us the golden tickets and shoos us away. “Have a good time, boys. I’ll be the one in the big wig and white petticoats.”
We wear our concert clothes for the event. It’s overkill, but it preempts trouble at the door. We head down to Broadway and Thirty-ninth, hoping to slip in without a scene. The seats Lisette gives us are magnificent, a few rows back from the block she gives her family. Jonah waits for the curtain, biting his cuticles until they bleed. He’s in agony, worse than anything he’s ever felt before going onstage himself. Here at eye level, he can see what his teacher cannot, up there behind the blinding lights.
“You feel that?” he asks. I nod, thinking he means the electricity. “They want her blood. They want her to fall to pieces.”
It’s crazy. We’re talking a midsized role in Mozart’s “problem” opera, the one nobody quite gets. Disaster will, at worst, send her back to San Francisco for a few seasons. Triumph will, at best, win her another chance to prove herself to Bing.
“That’s paranoid, Jonah. Why would anyone want her to fail?”
“What do you mean? For the excitement. The drama missing in their own lives. Look around. These people would love a good wipeout. Now that would be real opera.”
As soon as the curtain rises, Jonah stops worrying about whether his teacher’s going to die and starts worrying about whether she’s going to stay faithful to her feckless lover. He’s lost from the overture’s first theme. Doesn’t she love her officer? Why doesn’t his departure destroy her? How can she fail to see through these turbaned Albanians, gotten up like fifty-cent Turks?
In the intermission, he’s ruined for talk. He has it in for Despina and Alphonso. Only sheer, faithful concentration can hold their devious plot at bay. But all around us, the audience is deep in appraisal. They weigh the orchestra, the conductor, the leads, Mozart—deciding who should live and who needs to die for humanity’s sins. I know enough not to cough, lest they train the fire hoses on me. The matron next to me ruffles through her program. “Who is that gorgeous thing playing the faithful one?”
Her cadaverous escort coughs. “You mean Soer? She’s been around. Up-and-comer. Second lead sort of thing. Could go all the way.”
“She’s good, don’t you think?” I look to Jonah, but he’s busy fending off the first act’s dangers, guarding his teacher’s chastity. “The note doesn’t say where she’s from. Is she French or something?”
The cadaver just snorts. “Lisa Sawyer. Hails from Milwaukee, where, I understand, her father makes what passes for beer. Emphasis on passes.” He flips through his own program, frowning. “Hmm. They don’t mention that?”
The woman raps his shoulder. “Nasty. Is that her real color?”
“‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ Apparently, only half of the city knows for sure.”
She slaps him on the wrist with her rolled-up program.
Jonah comes out of his trance. “What do you think of the tempi?” I ask. He corrects them all, from memory.
The curtain rises on the second act, plunging us back into life or death. Jonah grips the armrest throughout Lisette’s second big aria, anticipating the octave-and-a-half swoops, sure she’s going to give in and get laid by this pseudo-Albanian, her sister’s fiancé, her betrothed’s most trusted friend. Everybody does it. Does she love this other man? Why is her fall so much sweeter than her earlier sworn chastity? His whole body sighs with her thrilling debasement.
Lisette doesn’t always soar. Some of the highs lack support, and her rapid, dipping passages take cover. Still, she’s supernatural. She inhabits the stage, never having lived anywhere but in this story, never experiencing any time but this one renewing night. Fiordiligi has waited patiently for just such a supple body to reawaken in after long hibernation. Never has a singer taken such shameless physical pleasure in a role. Lisette is wayward, consumed, consummated by the unlikely luck of this part. By her “Per pietà,” Jonah is lost, and even I forgive her anything.
“She is fun to watch,” the cadaverous man concedes in the extended applause. “A real piece. Piece of work, that is.” His consort smacks him again, this time with her knuckles.
From the “toast” quartet through the fumbling denouement, Lisette glows, divinely human. She radiates the social, unable to exist except through the grace of those out front, in this hall, from the pit to the upper balcony. She needs society, feeds off others, and yet her art lives in the most sealed of vacuums. The struggle of 1963 is nothing to her, not even unreal. This might be the Burgtheater, Vienna, 1790: a dress rehearsal in paradise, the morning after the last revolution.
Tonight, she is the privileged world’s darling. Applause brings the cast out again and again. Sheaves of roses float up to her onstage, more than for Dorabella and Despina combined. During her bows, she finds us and locks our eyes: You see now? Living maximum need? An old trick, a staple for those who live by an audience’s love: She knows how to gaze so that everyone in the house feels singled out.
We don’t even consider the receiving line. Lisette Soer is the toast of New York tonight, until tomorrow replaces her. She wouldn’t even recognize us in the adoring fray. The couple alongside me declines, as well. But they’re still talking about her as they file out ahead of us, on their way to whatever postopener postmortem their people retire to.
In the lobby, Jonah’s voice veers. “She’ll have her pick tonight, won’t she, Mule?” He doesn’t want an answer. He only wants me to get him home, down to Bleecker. “Let’s take a cab.”
“Sure,” I say. But I steer him to the subway.
When Jonah goes to his Wednesday lesson, she rages at him. “I give you tickets to opening night, the biggest role of my career, and you don’t care enough to come backstage to tell me what you think? Go on. Get out of here. Just get out!” She slams her studio door on him and will not open it.
He comes back home in agony. He sits me down and dictates a review of her performance, note by note, muscle by electrifying muscle. His letter is a masterpiece of exacting musicology. Its observations surpass anything that newspaper reviewers can even hear. His judgments are so closely grounded in musical specifics, they take on the air of universal truth.
“I was afraid to come see you afterward,” he has me write. “I just wanted to feel your transcendence a little longer, before rushing it back to earth.”
She writes him back. “Your letter is going into my first-rank scrapbook, next to the note from Bernstein. You are right: We must sustain the aura as long as we can. I wish I could have done so, with you. Would my greatest student accept a special lesson as my apology?”
Dignity has never meant much to Jonah. Now it’s not even an impediment. “Tell me she’s evil, Mule.” We’re trying to practice. His concentration is sh
ot. He’ll wander off and mark pitches for several measures, before remembering what we’re doing. I’ve learned to play through his vacancies. But when he talks, I stop. “Tell me the woman’s no damn good.”
“She’s not evil. Just manipulative. She knows everything there is about … performing. But she doesn’t know much about people.”
“What do you mean by that?” He sounds hurt, ready to charge out of his corner swinging at the sound of the bell.
“She wants you to adore her. She’ll do everything in her power to keep you on your knees in front of her.”
He studies me over the music rack. His face is a mask. Another thing she’s taught him: Never telegraph emotions. “What the fuck do you know about anything?”
“Nothing, Jonah. I don’t know anything.”
I stare at the keyboard, he at me. We sit for a long time, a fair rendition of John Cage’s 4’ 33”. I only wish we had a tape recorder; our first take would have been a wrap. I won’t speak first. I think he’s staring me down. Then I realize he’s just elsewhere. At last, he murmurs, “Wouldn’t mind being on my knees in front of her, come to think.”
I hammer out a little Scriabin, an on-the-fly Poem of Ecstasy. He doesn’t need the program notes. His head bobs up and down, his grin private. “Know what the problem is, Mule?”
“What’s the problem, Jonah?”
“The problem, since you asked, is she’s manipulative.”
I start a slow, seductive “Dance of the Seven Veils,” ready to throw on an overcoat at the first wrinkle in his brow.
“I know, I know. I have to get a handle on my life. Otherwise …” He raps the music stand, our shattered rehearsal. “Otherwise, we might never be able to perform Schubert in good faith again!” He giggles like a lunatic. For an awful moment, I think I’m going to have to call Da, or Bellevue. My alarm only makes him worse. “Yeah, I’m a goner,” he says when he comes back. “I’ve got to get the woman out of my blood.”
“There is a way. Call her bluff.”
“Oh.” Pianissimo. “Turns out … it’s not a bluff.” He mitts my shoulder, contrite now, inspecting the damage. “I’m sorry, Mule. I wanted to tell you. I tried a while back. I didn’t know how.”
“Are you … How long?”
“I don’t know. Weeks? Look. I said I’m sorry. Don’t try, Mule. You can’t make me sorrier than I already am.”
But I’m not angry. Not even betrayed. I’m cut free, lost in the inconceivable. My brother has learned how to act. He wanted to tell me. Tried but couldn’t. He’s slept with a thing fresh out of a sinister fairy tale, nearer our mother’s age than ours. I’ve been denying everything: his finicky distraction, our growing tension over the last weeks. He gives me the details, the ones I should have guessed weeks ago. Most of them float by in my disbelief.
The first time, it’s just like part of his lessons. She’s showing him Holst’s “Floral Bandit,” as always, with her hands. Pushing here, rounding there. Let every muscle serve the needs of the words. Well, the words are musty and suspect at best. She knows he doesn’t buy them. “Mr. Strom.” She pinches his flank, an aggressive sneer on her lips. “If you don’t believe the song, what right do you have to ask a roomful of people to believe you? Yes, I know. It’s sentimental rubbish, already archaic when the man wrote the words five thousand years ago. But what if they weren’t? What if the sun rose and set around this poetry?”
“That’s what you call this?”
“You don’t get it.” She stands six inches in front of him, grabs his armpits, and shakes him like a terrified mother might shake a child who has just survived death. “And you won’t be more than a pretty-throated boy until you do. Your personal taste means nothing. What you think of this frilly twaddle doesn’t count. You must make yourself someone else’s instrument. Someone with different needs and fears. If you’re trapped in yourself, screw art. If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out onstage.”
She draws him closer, placing both palms on his breasts. She has done so before, but never so tenderly as now. “Music is something we aren’t. It comes from outside and must go back there. Your job is notness.” She shoves him, then yanks him back by the shirt as he reels. “It’s why we bother to sing at all. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine”—she brutalizes his chest with each digit—“percent of everything that has ever happened, happened to someone who isn’t you and who’s centuries dead. But everything lives again in you, if you can clear enough room to carry it.” She jabs him in the sternum, and he catches her hand. “Ah!” she says, delighted, twisting back against his grip. “Ah! Want to fight me?”
He drops her wrist, surprised.
“Aw! Not this time?” She takes up his hand again, lifts her eyes, looks about the room, distracted. “‘Have you seen her? What is her name?’”
He thinks she has gone mad, another weak-gened Ophelia wracked up on the fey waywardness of Western high culture. Then he places the words: the damn Floral Bandit. The pathetic, pale, wilted thief of spring.
She closes his hand into her soft cushion. The scent of jasmine is her sweat. She snares his gaze. Her eyes, incredible, are jade against the amber of her hair, green as the words of the song she now degrades him with. “‘Who is this lady? What is she? The Sylvia all our swains adore?’” She smiles up at him, on her toes, drawing one finger down the cliff of his throat. She pinches his chin jut, swings his hand in hers like a little girl, the innocent, anemic girl he once was bound to.
This is a slaver’s game. This art only works by denying the desperate. But he feels her breath on him and stays as silent as the condemned. She puts that denying finger on his lips: “‘For human tongue would strive in vain to speak the buds uncrumpling in it.’”
Laugh lines light up every corner of her. She draws up level to his face. He hears her add, .“Do you want me?” She’ll deny ever saying this, though there are no words in the poem he might have mistaken for them.
This is her lesson in making songs real. And what happens next is just another. When he folds into her, he thinks it’s his own daring. She’ll draw away, outraged. She doesn’t draw away. Her mouth is waiting, an old familiar. He holds his skin on hers, moist-to-moist. Any taste of her would seem forever, and he gets twice that. When they stop, he turns his head away. She draws his face around, forces him to look. It’s her. Still her. Still smiling. See?
He’s too small for his shock. He can look at her. All her laugh lines look back, cheering his victory, daring him, asking him, How much would you like to see? All yours, for the gazing and grazing. If his fear were any less, his joy would kill him. The lessons move to her daybed, an antique Viennese unfolding fern whose function in her studio he has always dreamed about. She shows him how to unwrap her. All the while, she babbles senseless things, half-sung phonemes, droplets of words from the damn poem. “‘For no one knows her range nor can guess half the phrases from her fiddle.’”
She is more perfect than he imagined her in his best renditions. As fair as that first anemic girl he never got to see. Her flanks surprise him, the cup of breasts, the dimpling high up on the back of her thighs. She needs to be examined in her studio’s full sun. He feels callow, his slender arms, his tawny, hairless chest, his boyish explosiveness in her hands. No sooner does she take him, body swaying, an impulse gurgle in her throat, than he flows all over her. Even this, she marvels at, and her delight dissolves his shame. “Next time,” she promises. “Next lesson!” She presses his lips, shushes and dresses him, for she has another student coming. This lady who ’fore ev’ry man, breaks off her music in the middle.
She invites him to her apartment, an evening appointment he must clear with no one but me. He wants to tell me but doesn’t. That’s music. That’s his job. To be someone else, someone not him. If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out onstage. Her lair is filled with musical conjuring. The walls are covered with documents—her Paris triumph, a Verdi
manuscript page, a photo of Gian Carlo Menotti with his arm around her young waist. The furnishings feel like some museum Da might long ago have dragged him to. She shows him the eighteenth-century virginal with painted underlid and plinks out a gentle, deceptive cadence.
He feels these chords’ coy come-on and reaches for her there as she stands plinking. She recoils, hands up. “You haven’t even sung for me!” Her head tilts back, chin challenging. “How do I know what you’re worth?”
He sings the Host again. But now he sings as if his life hangs on these words. She rewards him by seeming to reward herself. Something in him that she wants: It works on him, like her creed of maximum need.
She’s his first. It stuns me. For years, I’ve imagined him enjoying a string of casual throwaways. But he’s been saving himself, faithful to this woman in advance of meeting her. They get better, lesson by lesson. They work at it, from the first burst of open throat down to the smallest details of support. They get so good, they must study more. She shows him goodness he never expected: all of life in front of him. They find out places that never were. She turns into his maker, his keeper, his ladder. Teaching him how to touch her, she tenses and subvocalizes, tenders into his hand, sforzando, as if she’s waited all her life to be performed only like this.
His first: She can’t remember what that landmark means. She’s too far down the path of experience. She’s refined all her pleasures already. All her surprise discoveries, long ago lost in perfecting. Or rather, this boy helps her remember—that ambush in his face, sweating, glowing above hers. His body lowers onto hers and freezes, overwhelmed by this prize. His freed gratitude returns her, once more, to that moment when everything might still turn out other than you think. Other than what it has so solidly become.