Читать книгу Performance Anxiety - Betsy Burke - Страница 15

I was alone in the apartment in a state of pre-party alert. Caroline and the Sasquatch were out. I’d invited Kurt to come early, but now the afternoon was too far along to still be called early.

I reshuffled the pile of CDs. Nelly Furtado, Joss Stone, Ben Harper, Oasis, Cyndi Lauper, Simple Minds, Missy Elliott, Anggun, Lenny Kravitz, Aerosmith, The Calling, Fiona Apple, Stones, Shaggy, The Cure, Barry White’s Greatest Hits, and a bunch of rock and roll that was so old, you could almost smell the mould growing on it. Because I like those parties where the music reminds people of another time and they start acting out their old superegos, the ones they abandoned years ago.

I happened to know that Kurt had been a flat-out fan of Spandau Ballet, Pet Shop Boys, The Cure…those kinds of groups. Back in his dubious reckless days of clubbing and eyeliner. He was a good nine years older than me, after all.

I put some Oscar Peterson on the player and checked the food again. I just hoped it all tasted as good as it looked. Nerves had made my tongue go numb, so now everything tasted like soggy Kleenex to me.

As I was pouring myself an iced orange vodka, my favorite bottled shock absorber, the buzzer went.

I ran to answer. The voice in the speakerphone was Tina’s.

“C’mon up,” I said.

Tina was with her new conquest, Collin.

Collin was dressed from head to toe in black leather and carried two motorcycle helmets. He was a lighting technician at the theater and a man of few words. “Life’s a bitch and then you die” pretty much summed it up for him. Tina wasn’t interested in a lot of words from a man. The man of her dreams was a cowboy, a drinker and a wanderer. Collin came as close as possible to a physical copy of Tina’s father, except that his horse was a motorbike. You could say that Tina had a little obsession.

One day, when we were still in our third year at university, Tina stopped me in the hallway. I was on my way to the obligatory History of Musical Instruments, which, despite its potential, had turned into History of the Big Yawn for me.

“What other classes do you have today?” she asked.

“Library Skills 101,” I replied.

“Skip it,” she said.

“I’ve put if off for three years. They won’t let me graduate if I don’t pass it.”

“Borrow the notes. You’ve got to come with me.”

“Where?”

“To Victoria.”

“Are you crazy? It’s at least a ferry ride. It’s money. And why Victoria?”

“I’ve hitched us a ride one way. I’ll pay your part. We’ll hitch another to get back. We gotta hurry though. Wayne, this guy in my Women’s Studies class has got a truck. He’s going back to Victoria for the weekend.”

“Guys usually avoid those courses. What’s he doing in Women’s Studies,” I asked.

“Studying the women.” Tina smirked. “He’s not as stupid as he looks.”

Tina didn’t waste a lot of time, so there had to be a good reason for her wanting to go to Victoria. She looked terrible that day so I figured it was serious. Her long dark hair was stringy and her face looked drawn and ash-colored.

So I agreed to go with her and we crammed into the front seat of the appointed truck at the appointed hour.

Wayne, Tina’s friend from Women’s Studies, appeared to be majoring in Babes and Foxes at university. He was definitely eye candy, with an Olympic athlete’s body, a profile that belonged on a Roman coin and a shock of sun-bleached curls you wanted to reach out and twirl with your fingers. I imagined a lot of women were also majoring in Wayne.

He asked, “So how’s life in the music department, by which I mean, any action? You girls getting G-spots attended to?”

I flashed Tina an irritated quizzical look and said, “Ouch. Forget about the prelims. Let’s get straight to business.” But she elbowed me to be quiet.

He went on, “I mean, are you getting it often in that department, see, ’cause I was thinking, if they were short on dudes there, of changing my major. I’m running out of inspiration in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literature.”

Tina said to the windshield in a loud amused voice, “He’s worked his way through the whole faculty. Students and lecturers.”

“Hey. Only the babes, eh? Dudes aren’t my territory,” added Wayne quickly.

Tina turned to him and said, “You wouldn’t know what to do with the women in music, Wayne.”

“No?” He had an expression of disbelief.

“Music’s bigger than any man, Wayne. And they wouldn’t let you in anyway. Kazoo does not exactly qualify as an instrument.”

“Harmonica?” he said hopefully.

“Don’t think so,” said Tina.

Wayne pried and prodded a little longer, trying to get the biological profile on all the flora and fauna of the music department.

“Flautists,” he spouted enthusiastically. “All that embrasure could come in very handy.”

But Tina and I acted like a couple of brick walls and he eventually gave up.

Once we’d boarded the ferry, Wayne went off to check out the babes and foxes on deck while Tina and I sat at a table inside and sipped cappuccinos. First we griped for a while about our singing teachers and then, for the longest time, we just sat in silence.

I tried to break into Tina’s mood. “Wayne’s really, really amazing looking,” I said, “but he’s…”

“He’s gorgeous and he’s a total hoser,” said Tina, bored.

I watched the wild April ocean fracture into sapphire shards with each new gust of wind, and said, “Maybe a pod of whales will swim by and flick their tails for us.”

“Hmm,” said Tina. She was descending into a funk. If gigantic sea mammals impressed her, she wasn’t going to let me know about it that day. In fact, she was barely there.

Tina had left the planet, something she did from time to time. She was out there drifting weightlessly in the galaxy of her personal baggage. Not that she was a space cadet. Tina had no trouble being present for singing gigs. Singing gigs were easy for her because, unlike real life, you always know what’s going to happen in the end of an opera or a cantata or a song cycle. But she had other moments that were less solid.

That day I said, “Tina, you’re drifting into outer space. Don’t do this to me. Come back to Earth. Stay here.”

“I was just thinking.”

“That was not a ‘just thinking’ expression. It was a ‘Lizzie Borden works it out’ expression. You’ve made this trip to Victoria before, haven’t you? Recently, I mean.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because you know exactly where everything is right down to what kind of coffee they make and where the stir sticks are. You know where the bathrooms are and the best seats. How come you didn’t want to tell me before now? Is this about a man?”

“Sort of.”

“A sort of man. Who?”

She crossed her arms and glowered at me.

“Okay, surprise me then.”

We were interrupted by the call for passengers to go belowdecks. Tina gave me another grim look. I followed her down to the car deck.

Wayne showed up at the last minute, looking smug. He’d obviously scored some babe-and-fox action for later. In silence, we rode past soft hills and forest, past a long strip of car dealerships, fast-food joints and cheap motels, into the mock-English center of town. Wayne dropped us off in front of a big castlelike hotel and screeched away in his truck, laying a pungent black strip of rubber.

“Show-off,” muttered Tina, then started to hurry toward her mysterious destination with such huge strides that I was nearly running to keep up.

“At least let me take in some scenery,” I panted. “It’s so pretty here, all the flowers, the hanging baskets.” But Tina didn’t answer or slow her pace. I hated her when she was like that. She made me feel so useless, closing me and everybody else out.

“Why did you bring me along if you’re going to act like I’m not here, Tina?”

“Witnesses,” she barked. “I need a witness.”

I knew it. She was planning on killing somebody.

We’d been walking for almost an hour, uphill all the way, into a neighborhood where the trees were ancient, enormous yews and gnarled oaks, and the houses like great wooden sailing vessels, galleons for crews of fifty. Peeking through high hedges into vast gardens, I asked, “Who lives in houses like these anyway? They’re enormous.”

“A lot of them are divided into apartments,” said Tina.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. This used to be the residential center of Victoria. About a hundred years ago. When people had servants and lawn-tennis courts. There was a token Russian princess living up here. Up on that hill there, see that castle? That’s Craigdarroch Castle. It used to be the family home of the Dunsmuirs. One of the family used to invite Tallulah Bankhead up here. Old Dunsmuir made a pile with the railroad but he died a year before the place was finished. Then it was a college and then a music school at one time.”

“No kidding. How come you know so much about this neighborhood?”

“You’ll see in a minute.”

We’d arrived at a high stone wall. We followed it until we came to stone gateposts topped with brass griffins now green and pockmarked with age. Where the gate should have been was a chain with a No Trespassing sign swinging from it. Tina stepped over the chain and started walking up the wide, weed-infested driveway. It must have once been an impressive entrance, but now it was like the cracked surface of an old riverbed. In the distance was a cluster of tall trees, a small wilderness masking the house. I followed Tina through the undergrowth and the chaos of litter. Although it had obviously been years since anyone had taken care of the property, and kids had been in there to pillage and vandalize, it was easy to see the kind of estate it had once been.

The house was massive, with foundations in the same stone as the wall. The upper part of the house was rotting wood, trimmed with the kind of Victorian gingerbread and curlicues that always made me think of haunted houses. On one side was a crumbling terrace and eight smashed French doors leading into what had once been a mirrored ballroom. The mirrors had been smashed, too, and the effect was like looking at a person who had been maimed and blinded.

“It’s incredible,” I said. “It’s like The Fall of the House of Usher.”

“The House of Browning,” said Tina. There was a furious expression on her face.

“What do you mean Browning?”

“This was my grandparents’ house.”

“Your what?”

“My grandparents’ house.”

“You said you didn’t have any grandparents.”

“Think about it, Miranda. Everybody has to have grandparents somewhere. It’s just whether they’re alive or dead and your father lets you know about it.”

“Your grandparents,” I said, trying out the idea.

“This place belonged to my paternal grandparents. My father’s parents. This is the estate my father pissed away without a word to Mom and me. If he wasn’t so crocked already I’d like to kill him. They were rich, Miranda. Do you understand? My grandparents were stinking filthy rich and I never even knew they existed and they never knew that I existed. And to top it all off, my father drank it all away. The place is going to be demolished in two weeks. They’re building luxury condos.”

“How did you find out?”

“You know those genealogy things people do on the Net?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that. It was all there. Every detail.”

“Shit.”

“You said it,” agreed Tina.

We wandered through the stripped carcass of the house, silently taking stock and trying to imagine how each room must have been in the house’s happier days.

Back in the ballroom, the black expression lifted from Tina’s face. I could see she’d been harboring the secret of this house for months, hugging it to herself and trying to understand it, as if it were an affliction, a tumor. She lifted her arms and twirled three times, like an unhappy Gypsy wife giving herself a homemade divorce. She said cheerfully, “I would have held a recital in this room if I’d known it existed. I’ll bet it has perfect acoustics.”

She started to sing. I joined in, harmonizing. We improvised, following each other, singing whatever came into our heads, and I have to say, it sounded pretty good. We threw our notes out to the walls, walking slowly through the main floor like figures in an eerie dream. We paced and twirled and let loose in the huge abandoned house to exorcise her father’s oversight.

Tina began to make changes that day. She stopped being so hard on herself, stopped calling herself trailer trash and started to become the singer she’d always imagined for herself.

On the ferry ride home, Tina was in a much better mood. “I got one more favor to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“Theory homework.” She unfolded a scrunched-up scrap of paper and shoved it into my line of vision. German words were scrawled on it. “I wrote the poem but it’s gotta be a song, Lied in the style of Schubert. It’ll be easy.”

“Easy for old Franz but not for me,” I sighed.

“Ah, go on. You know you enjoy it. I’ll never get it done on time. C’mon. You know you can’t turn down the challenge.”

I was one year ahead of Tina in theory, and because she said herself that she was too lazy to figure it out, and I had done all the exercises the year before, I did her theory and composition homework for her. Pieces “in the style of” Bach fugues, Beethoven concerti, Byrd motets, Ravel arabesques. And it was true that I enjoyed the challenge.

It was unbalanced. In exchange for doing her music theory homework, I got to be her friend, witness her bad moods and endure her cruel and unusual punishments. But then, what else are friends for?

I poured out some iced orange vodka for Tina and Collin. The three of us made a quick toast to our health and knocked it back. I was a little disappointed with Tina. I was expecting her to liven things up but she sank into my couch with Collin and the two of them stayed there, exchanging gooey looks, wordlessly communicating their weird dark passion.