Читать книгу Performance Anxiety - Betsy Burke - Страница 11

Off with the Doc Martens and back into the Adidas. I thought I was so smart, running everywhere and talking all my employers into working around my schedule. I was like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces were connected but the outlines still visible, and other pieces were still missing. I was not a complete picture.

I ate one of Grace’s shrimp, rocket and lemon-pepper mayonnaise croissants as I power walked back in the direction of Davey Street. It was so delicious, and I was so hungry that for a moment I considered marrying Grace and forgetting all about Kurt Hancock.

I hurried through the door of Little Ladies Unlimited—a cleaning company housed in a big bleak one-story concrete block. Inside, there was just the barnlike unadorned storeroom where all the equipment was kept, and the tiny office, from which Cora, the owner, took all the client calls and kept everything running smoothly. At the end of the ranks of industrial vacuum cleaners, the other two women on my cleaning team were standing at the coffee machine. They were having a hot debate about whether drip or plunge was better.

“No contest. Plunge,” I joined in. “Now, whose husband are we talking about?”

“Coffeemakers not husbands,” said Fern, smoothing down her brassy scouring-pad hair with a tiny hand. She was smiling. “And on that subject, Miranda, when are you going to get yourself a husband?”

“I’m only twenty-six,” I said, “I’m not ready to be buried alive yet.”

“Hell, I was married at nineteen,” said Fern, “and I’ve had twenty-one great years.”

“You are so full of crap sometimes, Fern McGrew,” said Betty.

Betty was big and muscular, and always wore lumberjack shirts. There was something in her attitude that reminded me slightly of my roommate Caroline. Caroline was smaller, a size sixteen, so she could buy her clothes off most racks. Betty only bought hers off the racks at Mr. Big ’n Tall, but when it came to tough-assdom, they could have been mother and daughter. Betty had been a sled-dog trainer in the Yukon before she got sick of the snow and moved down to Vancouver.

Betty barged on, “‘Great years,’ says Fern. Miranda, get her to tell ya about the great time she had when her great husband goes and gets himself that stupid little slut on the side, and the great fights they has about it and the time he puts her in the hospital because he’s broke her cheekbone with his great big fat fist.”

“Every couple has its little ups and downs,” said Fern, but she was looking at the floor.

Betty leaned in to confide. “I gets the word about Fern here bein’ in hospital, gotta have surgery ’cause them little pieces of cheekbone is gonna get into her bloodstream otherwise and finish her off good-style once and fer all. So what does I do? I goes over to their place, and there’s old Cliff sittin’ on the couch swillin’ a beer and watchin’ football like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I hauls him up onto his feet and drags him out into the street. He’s wearing just his socks, no shoes, huh, and lookin’ pathetic. Then I lets the whole street know what he’s done, as if they doesn’t know already, and then I whacks him one across his cheekbone an’ I sends him flyin’ into somebody’s recyclin’ bin. The neighbors wasn’t too happy about that but they wasn’t gonna take me on neither. He never done it again, I can tell ya. Am I right, Fern?”

Fern nodded and said, “He’s been a pussycat ever since.”

Wow. Betty and her two meaty fists. Kurt would have to stay in line.

Cora came out of her office. She was a petite woman with a mass of platinum, back-combed hair in a white hair band. That day she wore tight white pedal pushers and a white angora sweater. She was in her forties but so youthful you wouldn’t know it. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sandra Dee film. All she needed was a surfboard under her arm and she was complete.

She grinned and said in a singsong voice, “Better get going, girls. This one’s a Special.”

We all groaned.

Betty grabbed her loyal Hoover while Fern and I loaded up our multipocketed aprons with our sprays and cloths. Fern was on dusting, I was on bathrooms and kitchens, and Betty was vacuuming. We were like soldiers going into battle.

We hurried out to the company car, loaded the equipment into the back and climbed in. With Betty behind the wheel, we whizzed down to The Bachelor’s place on Burrard. He lived on the twenty-eighth floor of a twenty-nine-story steel-and-glass high-rise overlooking English Bay.

We cleaned his place every week but today was a Special. Specials were more than just the regular Little Ladies cleaning job. They were expensive and meant we had to do anything that needed to be done. Within reason. As soon as we stepped inside his apartment, we knew The Bachelor hadn’t been operating within the confines of “reason.” He’d been partying.

“So what would you say’s going on here?” I asked as we surveyed the scene.

“Lazy drunken slob,” announced Fern.

“Barnyard animal,” confirmed Betty.

To start with, The Bachelor had a round bed and not-too-clean moss-green sheets twisted this way and that. At the chest of drawers, I imagined him emptying the contents of his pockets every night, since it was covered with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, sticky half-sucked peppermints, condoms still in their foil wrap but well past their expiry date, and numerous crumpled bits of paper with girls’ names and telephone numbers. Similar goodies sprinkled the brown-stained wall-to-wall carpet as well. The mirror tiles above the bed had some interesting spots on them, as though they’d been spritzed by quite a few bottles of fizzy stuff.

Meanwhile, the fridge held about fifty bottles of beer and a block of mold. No doubt he ordered in whenever he didn’t eat out. Interesting encrustations covered most of the kitchen, detailing The Bachelor’s gastronomic history for the week.

Back in the living room, there were suspicious-looking marks on his black couch. And his one weeping fig was half-dead. His shoes and socks were all over the place: on top of radiators, on the dining-room table, under the couch. One sock was stuffed into the weeping fig’s pot.

In the bathroom, I figured he had a nightly struggle getting his willy to cooperate and aim into the toilet rather than all over the wall. It was probably the beer. I could be sympathetic and understanding though. Men and women have their own unique sets of problems. If I had the Curse of the Mammary Glands, why couldn’t The Bachelor have the Curse of the Maverick Member?

Fern, Betty and I put our backs into the cleaning for two and a half hours, wondering the whole time how The Bachelor’s ancestors had ever made it out of the cave and into civilization.

As we cleaned, the silence was broken every so often with Betty’s mutters of “Slob.”

Fern said, “The poor man just needs a woman in his life. Someone to clean him up and organize him. You should have seen the way Cliff was living before we got married. He makes The Bachelor look like Mr. Neat. Now, Miranda, how about if you just add your phone number to that little pile on his dresser?”

Betty barked, “Would ya quit with the lonely-hearts crap, Fern? Miranda’s doin’ fine. She’s gonna be an opera star and no man’s gonna get in her way.”

I hoped Betty was a prophet and that her words would come true. I said, “Thanks for caring, Fern. If things don’t shape up by the time I’m thirty-nine, I’ll get you to do a little matchmaking, okay?”

“Oh, you don’t want to wait that long, Miranda. Everybody needs a soul mate.”

Betty said, “A soul mate, Fern, not a middle-aged preschooler who leaves his crap all over the joint. This guy’s mother has a lot to answer for.”

Fern countered with, “Listen to you, Betty. You wouldn’t be talking like that if you’d just get a man by your side, yourself.”

“Don’t need a man. Got ma dogs. And they’re as good as any man ya could know.”

It was dangerous territory. We knew better than to touch on the subject of Betty’s dogs, or the rest of the canine kingdom, for that matter.

As I brought The Bachelor’s stainless-steel fixtures back up to their original gleaming state, my imagination wandered to the life I would lead once I got to London.

My father would probably put me up. I had an open invitation, after all. I pictured his house in South Kensington, solid and white, a small garden in the back, a nice garret room with a gas fire for me on the third floor. He’d coach me on my audition pieces, give me the kind of tips that only the big singers can give you. I’d be doing quite a bit of cleaning and redecorating at his house, too, because he’d been living like The Bachelor himself all these years. He’d told me so.

He’d need me. He’d need a woman’s touch around the place. When we’d spoken on the phone a few years back, he’d told me I was welcome anytime.

It had taken a lot of courage for me to make the call but he’d sounded so happy, really overjoyed to hear from me. And after speaking with him, I could have flown around the room, I felt so high. When I told my mother about his invitation, she said, “He was probably pissed. He’ll have forgotten all about it by tomorrow.”

And Lyle, my mother’s second husband, had chimed in, “If ya gotta go ’n see him, Miranda, ya gotta go. But hang on to your wallet. And just remember, we’re here for you, eh? If ya wanna talk about it afterward.”

I’d wanted to fly off to England as soon as the call had ended, but I was nineteen at the time and already at university. I had no extra money and no extra time. But I knew that the day would come when the reunion with my father would become a reality.

We finished the Special and hauled the equipment down to the company car. There, I took off my Adidas and put my Doc Martens on. I badly wished I could have had a shower first and rinsed off all The Bachelor’s dust. But I was on a tight schedule. Betty was nice enough to give me a lift down to the theater. She wasn’t supposed to take the company car anywhere except to cleaning jobs, but she didn’t care. Nobody, not even Cora, ever argued with Betty.

I ate the last of Grace’s sandwiches in the car. It was Brie, speck and pickled artichokes on seven-grain bread. I looked forward to the day when I became rich and famous and would either pay for Grace to come and cook for me, or I could adopt her.

Can you do that? Adopt special spinster angels? Grace’s sandwiches homed in on oral pleasure centers I never knew I had.

Betty dropped me off right at the stage door.

I checked off my name and descended into the beige bowels of the theater. Fatigue stopped me in the doorway to the women’s chorus dressing room.

And then I had one of those moments. One of those insightful moments that make you so happy your skin tingles. You’ve arrived in your world. The one they nearly didn’t let you into, the one where it’s a privilege to sweat under hot lights in a costume that already reeks of another soprano, have your toes stepped on by hefty mezzos and your eardrums split by tenors who refuse to stop singing directly into the side of your head.

At the mirror next to mine, Tina, who was a mezzo like me, was applying her geisha face. I sat down.

Tina said, “Miranda. Finally. I thought you were going to be late. That stage manager would make a good prison warden. She doesn’t bend an inch on check-ins.”

Three red circles around your name for being late and you risked being kicked out of the chorus.

“I had four minutes to go,” I said.

“That’s cutting it pretty fine,” said Tina.

“You going to stand in the wings tonight?” When a singer was fabulous, like our lead soprano, Ellie Watson, that’s what we did. Stood in the wings and studied her, hoping some of her magic would get into our bloodstreams.

Tina nodded. “Our Madame Butterball’s pretty amazing, eh? That Ellie’s got another one of your paint-peeling voices. Too bad she doesn’t have the look. How much do you think she weighs?”

“More than bathroom scales register,” I replied.

“Yeah, she doesn’t need a dresser, she needs an upholsterer. But I’m not just standing back there to listen to her. I’m going to gape at Kurt. I’m shoving myself under the maestro’s nose so he’ll notice me. I wouldn’t mind studying under him any day. Under him. Over him. Any position he wants. That man is quality grade-A prime cut. He can beat my time with his baton whenever he likes.”

Against all of Kurt’s warning, I whispered into Tina’s ear, “You’re too late. He’s mine.”

She whipped around to look straight at me. Her voice dropped about a thousand decibels. “Kurt Hancock? What do you mean, he’s yours?”

“I mean we’re good friends. More than friends.”

We were huddled over our makeup tables while having this whispered conversation. The dressing room was too quiet and letting the other gossip-starved dames in on the latest developments in my life would be like throwing fat juicy sailors into shark-infested waters—instant death.

“Get your face on, Miranda, and hurry up about it,” Tina ordered. “I gotta have a word with you.” She was as tall as me but she had an angular face and piercing, intimidating, black eyes. When she gave me orders, I obeyed.

I smeared on the white for my geisha face, then drew in the tiny pinched lips and the eyebrows. We always left our wigs until last. They were heavy and itchy. It had been a bit of a catfight when it came to the director giving out these geisha roles. There was a whale-size middle-aged singer who thought that she should get first pick of everything because of seniority. What did she think this was? An office job? This was showbiz. And showbiz, as everyone knows, is the biggest dictatorship in the world. In the end, the geisha parts went to the youngest, thinnest girls in the chorus. Tina and me and six others.

When I finally had my costume and makeup on, Tina dragged me down the hallway and upstairs into a quiet corner of the vast area backstage.

“Okay. So what’s this ‘friends’ stuff?”

“Like I said, Kurt and I are very good friends.”

“In the biblical sense, right? You mean you’re screwing him?”

“Sort of,” I mumbled.

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“We haven’t actually gotten down to exchanging bodily fluids.”

“You’re kidding. What does it take to get down to it?”

“The mood’s got to be right but maybe tonight. He’s coming over after. I’d really like it to happen before the party because if he comes to the party with other people, he probably won’t stay after. You know, appearances and all that.”

“Why?” asked Tina.

“He doesn’t want anybody to know about us because he’s not officially divorced yet.”

“First of all, I have to say, Miranda Lyme, are you out of your gourd? You’re fucking the conductor…and he’s married.”

“Separated.”

She said to the air, “Kurt Hancock, I don’t know what you’re up to with my friend Miranda, but you’ve disillusioned me. I am so disappointed. I thought you were better than that. Yet another married man screwing around.”

“Well, not really, not exactly, not yet anyway…”

“Okay, and another thing. You’re nearly fucking the conductor and you don’t tell me? Some friend you are, Miranda Lyme.”

“It’s complicated. It’s not what it sounds like. And I would have told you as soon as it became a fait accompli. But it hasn’t yet.”

“You better get moving. Only two more performances left and then closing night and he’s outa here. Back to…where is it he lives? Paris?”

“London. But he’s got engagements in the States first.”

“So tell me about this not-what-it-sounds-like stuff. But I’m warning you. I’ve almost definitely heard it all before and reserve the right not to believe any of it.”

“His wife’s away in Tuscany. She wants a divorce…”

“Heard it,” blurted Tina.

“Just wait. If you could only see how upset Kurt is, you’d know it was for real. I mean, he must really care. It’s her that wants to leave him. He’s been pretty open about his feelings. They’re legally separated, and now it’s just a matter of finalizing.”

“Uh-huh?” Tina’s tone was skeptical. “So why’s she divorcing him? He tell you?”

“Yeah. He said it was because he’s always away. She wants someone who’s there. He’s almost single. Really,” I protested.

Tina was silent for a long time.

“Listen, Tina. I’m going to England anyway. I bought my ticket today.”

“Miranda. No. Really? You’re not bullshitting me, are you?”

“I’ve got that audition with the ENO.”

“Fantastic. Sort of… I wish you weren’t going though. Where am I going to find somebody else who lets me boss them around the way you do?”

“Jeez. It’s not forever. The audition’s in January. So I figure, if Kurt happens to be part of the bargain, all the better. Lots of people have these tricky back-and-forth relationships. You’re going to have to deal with it, too, you know, Tina. One of these days. Once you decide to take yourself seriously. Once your career gets going, you’re going to be traveling a lot.”

Tina snorted, “My career? Ha.”

“Trust me. You have to have a couple of plans of action. I can’t predict how things are going to go with Kurt. I don’t want to get inside his head, I just want to enjoy the feeling while it lasts, and then we’ll see. It’s been ages since anyone paid so much attention to me. So right now, it’s London, and the ENO, and getting to know my father again, and then I have to be back here in Vancouver for March. Kurt wants me to sing a song cycle of his.”

Tina gave me a dark look and I can’t say it wasn’t envy. “Nice side benefit to screwing the conductor, eh?”

I shrugged. “I had to work for it.”

She glared at me. “Sure you did.”

“I did.” Tina had a nerve. My first big date with Kurt had been an audition.

The evening after the broom-closet incident, he’d sent an unsigned note to me in the women’s chorus dressing room asking me to wait for him in the lobby of his hotel, and then to follow him up to his room at a distance. I was a bit put out by the cloak-and-dagger stuff but I did what I was told. I watched him get his key at the front desk of the Pan Pacific, then went up a few paces behind him. He left the door of his hotel room ajar, so I went in without knocking. When I came into the room, he was already seated at the piano.

Kurt had an entire suite. His rooms had fruit baskets, fresh-cut flowers, iced champagne, little chocolates on the pillow, pristine perfumed bed linen, Chinese screens, a giant claw-foot tub, a recently tuned Steinway baby grand piano and a spectacular view of Vancouver harbor.

I had to stand for a minute and take in the hotel suite. The best hotel in my hometown of Cold Shanks has lasagna carpeting to hide the spills and a series of black-velvet masterpieces and sad clown faces decorating the flocked bordello wallpaper.

Before he touched or kissed me again, Kurt asked me to sing for him. I was ready for it. In fact, I’d prayed for it to happen. I took some music out of my bag and put it on the piano. First I sang some French songs by Ravel and then some Rossini.

Without a word, Kurt then thrust a part of his song cycle at me and made me sight-sing it cold. I had to concentrate so hard I practically sweated treble clefs. Later, he made me sing it again. I must have impressed him because he was happy enough with my interpretation to promise me that I would be the one to premiere it with the Vancouver Symphony the following March.

But first, I’d have to deal with Madame Klein. She disapproved of young singers doing anything that was slightly beyond them, and Kurt’s music was difficult, even more difficult than Oskar Klein’s music. Oskar had been a composer in the line of Richard Strauss. The avant-garde composers of his time accused Oskar of holding back the progress of music, because his music was harmonic and harked back to romanticism. But it was singable, accessible, moving and beautiful.

As for Kurt’s music, that was something else.

Kurt’s music was all the fault of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone row.

One day at the beginning of the twentieth century, old Arnie must have woken up, taken a sip of his good strong Viennese coffee, clutched his stomach and yelled, “Mein Gott im Himmel,” as an undiagnosed ulcer started acting up. Maybe if he’d been feeling good about himself and the world, he would have sat down and written some gorgeous postromantic tonal symphony.

Instead, old Arnie had a bone to pick with the world.

You have to picture a short, balding man, whose big bulging eyes were filled with a fanatical gleam as he thought, “Ja. I’ll make all of them suffer, too. I shall invent the twelve-tone row and then they’ll be really sorry.”

So he uses the twelve notes that you find in an octave of black and white piano keys, lines them up in some kind of arbitrary order and calls it a tone row. Then he takes that little sucker of a tone row and sticks it everywhere in his composition, and God help you if you don’t know it’s there because that’s the whole point of the exercise. The new big test for the musical-chic crowd—spot Arnie’s tone row.

It’s also been called serial music, and I can guarantee that at times it’s been serial murder to listen to.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, Arnie had to go and start teaching his new approach and acquiring his disciples, Webern and Berg.

Collectively, they make up the group that I like to call the Bing Bang Bong Boys.

Imagine a cat with a really sophisticated sense of rhythm walking around on the piano. Black keys. White keys. It doesn’t matter. Then imagine scoring that sound for a big orchestra. That’s more or less how atonal music sounds.

I’m not saying this music doesn’t have its uses. Hollywood has gotten great mileage out of it for scoring movies about stalkers, slash murderers, killer vegetables, sharks and a whole galaxy of alien predators.

Schoenberg’s tone row is to music what Finnegan’s Wake is to literature. Do you curl up with Finnegan’s Wake when you want to have a nice relaxing read? Tell the truth now.

Okay. I know. Tonality had to go out the window. For the sake of artistic progress. It was a dirty job and somebody had to do it. And Arnie, Arnie was a guy with a real sense of mission, just the man for the job.

However, when I want a piece of serious music to curl up with, I choose something sweet and harmonic. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Prokofiev’s First Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Mozart’s clarinet concerto. Curling up to Schoenberg and the Bing Bang Bong Boys is like trying to cling to a slippery piece of driftwood in the middle of a desolate stormy ocean.

As for Kurt Hancock’s music, it wasn’t that his pieces didn’t have lush tonal, even pretty, moments. They did. But as soon as you thought those moments were going to blossom into a big phantasmagoric sequence of absolutely gorgeous harmonies, the composition moved into barbed and nerve-jangling Bing Bang Bong.

After I’d sight-sung Kurt’s song cycle for the first time that day at the Pan Pacific, I’d wanted to shake him and yell, “Why can’t you write melodic singable songs, goddammit?” But Kurt was regarded as an important composer, very much in demand, and the Vancouver Symphony had actually commissioned this song cycle to its great expense.

And when I made sneaky references to my feelings on atonal composition, Kurt had said, “What makes you think that listening to music should be an enjoyable experience, Miranda? It can be a significant, historical experience without necessarily being enjoyable.”

Well…gosh…slap me silly.

Maybe, in the future, I could influence Kurt’s music in some way, put a flea in his ear about accessibility.

I’d hoped our relationship would take a little quality leap that day but it didn’t happen. By the time I’d finished singing, we were both late for other commitments. Though I was tentatively delirious to be premiering a Kurt Hancock composition, now that the March date was looming before me, I only had six months to make it perfect. And as I mentioned, I still had to tell Madame Klein and she wouldn’t necessarily be happy about it, at all.

“Miranda…hey, Miranda. Earth to Miranda.”

Tina then pinched my arm. She persisted, “I said I never thought of you as the type to audition flat on her back.” But she was smiling as she said it.

“Jeez, Tina. You could have as many gigs as you want if you only spent a little more time on yours.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She grinned.

I went on, “If Kurt’s still with his wife when I’m over there, fine. I’ll be staying with my father anyway and we’ll have a lot of catching up to do. If Kurt’s not with his wife, we’ll spend some time together. But he says they’re on the rocks and that they’re definitely breaking up. I told him I was hoping to get the audition and he said if I did, we should see each other in London, because he’d be home over Christmas. He has no engagements. They’re not even spending Christmas together. That says it all.”

“Ooookaay. Normally, if it were me, that is, I’d ask the guy to show me the documentation. This isn’t exactly a new one, but shit, it’s Kurt Hancock, so I guess I have to believe his story. I mean, would a guy with a million Deutsche Grammophon recordings to his name string you that kind of crap? I guess these things happen in life, but jeez, Miranda, why couldn’t you find a man who gets right to the point?”

“I know, I know. Listen, he’s going to be at the dinner party tomorrow night. He promised he’d come. But this all has to stay between you and me. If he finds out I’ve told you about us, he’ll be mad. Typical temperamental-artist type, right?”

Tina smirked. “I’ll be checking you two out at the party tomorrow. For an afterglow.”

“Or a really pissed-off expression.”

“I’m dying to hear what happens. I bet he’s hot. You can tell by the way he conducts. You lucky bitch. I’m so jealous.”

I’d been keeping the whole Kurt thing to myself for too long. Now that I’d let it leak to Tina, I felt a little less anxious. “I’ll tell you tomorrow at the party. But don’t get too excited. You never know what could happen.”