Performance Anxiety

“So what’s he done?”

“Well. In the beginning it’s all wining, dining, flowers, jewelry…right?” She caught the gold chain that glittered across her collarbone and fingered it nervously.

“Yeah?”

“And you think, shit, maybe he’s the one, right?”

“Yeah?”

“And then he says, ‘Can you do me a little favor?’”

“Yeah?” I repeated.

“He asks me if I can give him a hand with his granny.” Belinda spat out “granny” as if it were an obscenity.

“Okay,” I said.

“His granny’s an invalid. Prick.”

“I’m not sure I see the problem, Belinda.”

“She lives in the big family home, the one Mike and his brothers and sisters grew up in, right?”

“Yeah?”

“With his mom and dad and one of his sisters who’s married. The sister lives there, too, with her husband and two kids, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“What he means by giving his granny a hand is that I have to spend the night there. On a roll-up cot in the same room. She can’t do most things for herself. He’s asking me to do night duty for an invalid. Help her to the bathroom, wash her, dress her, that kind of thing. I’ve done one week of it and I’m exhausted. As if I didn’t have enough to do. I thought I’d be sleeping with him, not his grandmother. That’s the whole night wasted.”

“Um, you might find this hard to believe, but it’s a test, Belinda. If you do that for his granny, he’s yours.”

Mike had scared off quite a few girlfriends this way.

“I’ll end up doing it for everyone else in his family, too. I just know it. You should hear them criticizing me, bossing me around. Isn’t it enough that I give a hand? But then they all tell me I’m doing it the wrong way. I can’t take it anymore. But that’s not even the worst part,” Belinda went on. A teardrop baubled up and rolled down her cheek. “The old bag doesn’t speak a word of English. She’s been here most of her adult life and she doesn’t speak English. The place is a total zoo.” She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeves.

“It just seems like it now, but you’ll get used to the way Mike’s family does things.”

“No…no. It’s not worth it. I love him but not enough for all that.”

“You’re too alone in all of this. You have no infrastructure. You need infrastructure.”

“Like how?”

“Well…like extra granny-sitters who have no emotional investment. Somebody who gets paid to do it. You need to wear Mike down, threaten him a little, make him realize that he hasn’t got much choice if he wants to keep you. He’s a typical Italian. His philosophy is to get the woman into the cave and then leave her there…to do all the dirty work. But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”

Belinda was paying attention. “Yeah?”

“You’re washing dishes in Mike’s place. Don’t think it’ll change if you don’t stand up to him. Do the words family business mean anything to you? It means make all the families and their in-laws work like lackies for the greater good of the family, none of whom are having any fun because they’re all working too hard. Make sure you’ve got loads of reserves to step in and help you. And make Mike pay. He’s got the money. He’s been hoarding it since he was two years old.”

Belinda smiled then made pathetic orphan eyes and stared at me imploringly.

I backed up a step and held up my hands. “Oh, hey, wait a minute, Belinda. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t help you. I’m already working overtime.”

“It’s nights. You’re asleep most of the time. Granny takes a sleeping pill.”

I shook my head.

“Ah, c’mon, Miranda. I’m sure you could use the extra money. You’re not doing anything special with your nights, are you? You don’t have a boyfriend…”

“Hold on a second.”

“What? Now you have one?”

I backtracked quickly. “No.”

“I’ll talk to Mike, Miranda. He knows you. He’d never accept a stranger, but he’d accept you.”

She was right.

“It’ll be easy,” she gushed now. “I work your mornings here so you can go to Cold Shanks for a few days, then you do this for me when you get back.”

It was extortion, sort of, but I liked Belinda. And I was already picturing my plane zooming toward Ontario.

I knew a little something about Italian grannies.

During the summer between my second and third years of university, I went on a two-month work-study abroad program to Tuscany. I managed it all on the cheap, had the whole thing planned right down to the last nickel. I’d wanted to visit my father, but the pound was too expensive. Just setting foot in an English airport would have used up all my resources. And I had gigs to hurry back for.

I was primed for the romance of Florence from the minute I arrived. What I’d seen from the taxi window looked promising; medieval stone buildings, huge elegantly carved wooden doorways, outdoor cafés and restaurants with bright Cinzano umbrellas, quaint marketplaces, impossibly chic and gorgeous men. The foreign girls, tourists like me, were easy to spot. They all drifted gauzily around in loose pale cottons, looking arty, as if they’d just stepped off the set of A Room With a View. I quickly learned that Italian women wore tighter, darker clothes not just to look fashionable, but because the streets were narrow, and it was easy to clean the sides of sooty buildings with loose flowing skirts.

That first day, my taxi stopped in front of a large rundown palazzo just off Via de’ Bardi. I was ushered in by a Philippine servant and introduced to the Melandroni family, including all the in-laws and outlaws. Each time I thought I had a handle on how many of them lived under the same roof, a new one would pop up. My job for the next three months was to “accompany” the eldest family member, Baby Melandroni.

Baby was eighty-nine years old and a Bette Davis look-alike, with crimson lipstick oozing into the creases around her mouth. “Accompanying” meant following her every demented move, repairing her wardrobe, peeling her grapes, cleaning up her accidents and making sure she didn’t fall down any stairs. She insisted that I call her Contessa.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I was participating in a real-life version of The Twilight of the Gods. The Melandronis hated, tormented and plotted against each other at every available opportunity, but were scandalized when I naively suggested they might be happier if they didn’t all live in the same house.

I barely got near those gorgeous chic men that summer. I spent most of my time in the palazzo, at one window or another, sneaking peeks at the outside world. Although two of the Melandroni men lost their way during electrical storms and ended up in my bedroom, it was no consolation. They both looked like beagles and were unctuous and overeager, a product of too much noble inbreeding. Both times I had to defend myself by beaning them with the six-pound Italian-English dictionary I was trying so hard to absorb.

I was certain that all over Europe, inexperienced North American girls like me were submitting themselves to similar tortures. I had proof. Tina, for example, had chosen to do her work-study in Germany. I received a long, hysterical letter from her. It was written on toilet paper. She’d been locked into a supply closet while labor inspectors toured the hotel where she was illegally employed as a chambermaid.

It was not so much a work-study program as a ball-chain program.

The summer ended on a high note. I’d struggled the whole time to interpret Baby’s ravings and finally understood that she wanted nothing more than to escape. She was being held prisoner, she told me, by her very own family, and they had taken all her jewels from her and put them in the safe in the bank, and were taking all the rest of her money, stripping her of her wealth, not to mention the last shreds of her dignity. She wanted to dress up like the contessa she was and get back into society again.

So one Sunday after lunch, when all the other Melandronis were napping after having stuffed themselves at the big meal, I got her all dolled up. I packed my bags quickly and we snuck out of the palazzo. We took a taxi to Piazza della Signoria. I deposited Baby at a central table in Caffe Rivoire, ordered her a big dish of ice cream drowned in kirsch, and left. Just before catching my train for Pisa airport (a day ahead of schedule), I called the palazzo and told the servant where to pick up Baby. I spent nearly the last of my funds that night on a pensione in Pisa. What a luxury. It had been a completely frustrating experience, but at least it had been frustrating in a new language.

Chapter 6

I stood at the bus stop, buzzing with the caffeine from Mike’s, mentally preparing for my lesson. Over and over I sang the audition pieces in my head. I’d chosen them carefully. Opera management around the world was growing less and less tolerant of singers who didn’t look the part. The days of the three-hundred-pound consumptive heroine were over, except in the case of the truly prodigious voices, like Ellie’s and Peter’s, for whom exceptions were made.

Young singers just starting out were another story. You had to fit the role, and if you were willing to do cartwheels and lose your clothes along the way, all the better.

I’d opted for something safe, with no potential for nudity. I was going to sing Cherubino’s aria “Non So Più” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and “Iris, Hence Away” from Handel’s Semele.

In Le Nozze di Figaro, Cherubino is a trouser role, a boy or man played by a mezzo-soprano. Cherubino is a youthful and buoyant, all over the place, lovesick puppy. I was pushing it, given my C-cup, but I’d bind myself up for the sake of art and a singing job.

My other aria was from Handel’s Semele. Semele is hardly ever staged. It’s a baroque opera based on the infighting of the gods Juno and Jupiter. The aria is Juno’s fuming in a moment of vengeful plotting against Jupiter. “Iris, Hence Away” shows off a different style, my sung English and vocal flexibility in the middle range, as well as a character portrayal opposite to Cherubino. I tried to make my Juno dominant and alarming, a sort of Katharine Hepburn of the operatic stage.

When I’d told Madame Klein a month before that I was trying to get an audition with the ENO, she’d said dismissively. “Dis vill be a gut exercise for you, ja? Strange city, strange theater, people you don’t know, ja, dat is part of de zinging experience. Und you can alvays zing in de chorus.” But she wouldn’t commit on whether I had a minimal chance of winning a solo role with the company.

I wouldn’t be alone, though. Once I got to England, I would have my father to coach me through my pieces, prepare me, give me the inside story, let me know what my panel of auditioners really liked, on the deep dirty inside track.

But then Madame Klein had gone on to divulge one of her secrets to me, a little performer’s trick, and it had been like receiving the most generous gift.

“Vhile you are zinging de phrase, in your mind’s eye und ear, you gotta be also zeeing und hearing de phrase dat follows. You gotta hear two musicks at vonce.”

I rode for an hour and a half, thinking about the pieces, changing buses twice, until finally I reached the homogenous streets of the city’s farthest East End where Madame Klein lived. Her house was a brown stucco box in a neat row of brown stucco boxes that extended as far as the eye could see. The gardens were drab, and stumpy trees pruned to within an inch of their lives adorned the boulevard. During the winter, those trees made me think of mutilated hands grasping at the sky.

Madame Klein brought all her intensity and ambition with her wherever she lived, so that the neighborhood always seemed more impressive than before, vital and full of promise because of her.

Madame did all her own accompanying. Her arthritic hands were still able to coax subtle beauty from the keyboard. She did not want to know what was going on in her students’ personal lives. She did not want to know about our biorhythms. She did not care whether our hearts were whole or broken, whether we’d just been mugged or our dog had been hit by a car the day of the lesson. There was no excuse for not singing well. Life outside the score on the music stand was a series of minor obstacles that a real singer was expected to leap over without a second thought. The voice ruled supreme.

She only wanted to know that we had studied our pieces properly and would execute them precisely as we’d been instructed. She was exacting, tyrannical, and at times, brilliant. Nothing was ever good enough for her. And she didn’t need the money.

Now, there are singing teachers who make a good living buttering up egos, giving hope to hopeless cases and there are teachers who concede a compliment every so often. That was not Madame Klein. She was happy to lose students and I was desperate to keep her. It had taken me a long time to find a singing teacher who understood my voice.

Singing can be taught using various techniques. There’s the Squeeze Your Buns School, in which your breathing has to be so deep that your diaphragm expands so far that it reaches beyond your buttocks—buttocks that become cramped and muscular with the effort of controlling the singing breath. Then there’s the Up Your Nose School, where the soft palette has to be lifted and the sound has to buzz in the sinuses and ring in the nasal and head cavities—the joke being that a lot of singers have more resonating cavities than brains. There’s the Forget Technique and Think about the Music School of singing.

A good teacher believes in a delicate combination of all these things. That was Madame Klein.

In the waiting area, I sat on a Victorian sofa whose horse-hair stuffing prickled through the upholstery fabric, and thought about the ENO audition, myself and Kurt, Madame and her defunct husband, Oskar, and prepared to break the news about Kurt’s song cycle.

From my place on the itchy sofa, I could hear Madame’s voice in the studio but couldn’t make out the words. There was a staccato blast from her and then Martin, the singer whose lesson was before mine, erupted through the door. Martin was a tall, robust bass-baritone who also sang in the opera chorus. He thought himself very important. Today, he was sweating and on the verge of tears. Madame Klein had just made him less important. He barged past me and out the front door.

I approached her living room. Along with the lavish and finnicky antiques and mustard-colored walls, there was a lot of diva decor. Her walls were lined with photos of her with her spouse, with other great artists, conductors and accompanists, in the renowned theaters and concert halls of the world. Her recordings, awards and mementos filled the bookshelves next to her scores.

Her coiffed silver head seemed to be drowning as it bobbed behind the shiny black Steinway grand. She narrowed her eyes at me. She was checking my appearance like a cattle buyer at an auction, concerned with how I was presenting myself to the world. If she’d had her way, we’d all be wearing dirndl skirts and little white blouses with Peter Pan collars. When her perusal of me was finished, she shook her head tragically at all my denim and leg, acknowledging fashion defeat.

“Fräulein Lyme. Zing,” she commanded, playing the exercise.

I sang.

“Nein, nein, nein. You bleat like a goat. I vill take your name off ze marquee. You vill never be a great zinger if you bleat like zis.”

“I’m a little tired today, Madame.”

“Tired schmired. You conzentrate. You breaze. You picture ze music. Und you zing.”

So I did the opposite. I thought of Kurt, roving all over my body. I thought of Matilde, porking all over Paris. And I sang. I sang all the exercises and then she let me move on to some Italian art songs. After that, as a special treat, I was allowed to sing a long Mozart concert aria.

Madame Klein stopped playing and said, “Gut, gut. Not great but vee vill make a zinger of you yet.”

“Madame Klein. I got that audition I was telling you about. The one with the ENO.”

“Ja? It vill be a good experience. You get used to auditioning by doing lots of auditions.”

“So I’m going to London at Christmas.”

“Okay. Vhen you’re dere, you go see lots of de really big zingers. You can learn someting.”

“Oh and before I forget, Madame Klein, I have some more good news.” I prepared to unleash the bomb, with terror in my heart.

“Vhat is zis news?”

“I’ll be premiering a new song cycle by Kurt Hancock. With the Vancouver symphony.”

“You vill do vhat?”

I babbled fast. “I consider it my real debut, my first important gig really. I mean, with the symphony. It’s a pretty big deal. I don’t count the stuff we did at university or the opera chorus or those church solos.”

“You vill do no zuch ting. Zere vill be no debut.”

My silence was eloquent.

“You are too young. Your voice is not ready yet.”

“My…uh…voice…uh…” I was about follow in the footsteps of the baritone and let myself be reduced to tears.

“Ze music of Herr Hancock is demanding. Modern, difficult music. You do not vant to fall SCHPLATT on your pretty face.” She illustrated my messy musical dive-bombing with one hand crashing onto the piano keys. “You are not ripe for ze music.”

It was not the first time we’d had this conversation. If Madame Klein had had her way, none of us would have sung anywhere until we were so ripe we were rotten.

It was a vicious circle. You get a job in an opera chorus in order to have some money to pay for the singing lessons. At the singing lessons, the teacher tells you that the opera chorus will ruin your voice, ruin you for a solo career. So you’re supposed to pretend you’re singing by mouthing the words. But can you imagine what it sounds like when a whole chorus of would-be soloists does that?

She expected things to be the way they’d been in Vienna a million years ago. But times had changed. She didn’t want to accept the fact that we were living in the world of the one-night wunderkind, that we were expected to be wunderkinder, too; that even in opera, we were part of a showbiz machine that was only too happy to suck our young juices then spit out the empty husk.

From wunderkinder to kinder tinder in one quick move.

Not that I was cynical. I believed I was ready for the opera-biz machine. It was a fact of life in the twenty-first century.

“Vhen you forget about your idea of zinging Kurt Hancock’s music, ve vill talk. But now I have nutting more to say to you today, Fräulein Lyme. Shut ze door vhen you leave,” she commanded, then waved her hand to dismiss me.

Still caught up in my problem, I changed buses on automatic pilot. I had to get off in the center near Granville. As I was crossing the street, a sound floated across to me. If I had been a cat, I would have arched my back. All the hairs on my spine would have stood on end. But not for fear. For beauty. For a new enemy in the camp.

At first, it was unearthly, like a moaning ghost, and then when I got closer, I heard it for what it was, a mournful, limpid, pure soprano voice. The singer sang the hymn, “Jerusalem,” William Blake’s words, very slowly, with perfect control. I’d sung it myself twenty times or more in my church gigs, Sunday mornings, bleary-eyed and hungover, hanging out with any religion that would pay me to sing their top ten. I froze there on the street and listened. The singer was invisible, around another corner, and I was afraid that if I made a move, she would disappear and I would never see who she was. So I listened.

Now, with the prospect of London looming before me, the words seemed particularly poignant, especially the last part about bows of burning gold, arrows of desire, and building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

Yes, those were my sentiments exactly…I will not cease from mental fight…till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

Well.

Okay.

Maybe ours wouldn’t be a Jerusalem exactly. Kurt and I would have something less sacred and a little more hedonistic and spicy, something a little to the left of Jerusalem. Our own private Babylon, complete with hanging gardens and palm-waving slaves. That’s where you’d find me when I wasn’t singing concerts with my father.

Now that Kurt was in my life, I was starting to consider luxury, the trappings that came with the opera world, with being the desired object of a famous conductor. Gilt and plush red-velvet theaters, limousines, orchids and roses and champagne raining down on me. It was a nice thought.

When the hymn ended, the soprano began another piece. It was “Lift Thine Eyes” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. I hurried in the direction of the voice, along Granville Street, past the bars, bingo palaces, strip joints, pool halls, cinemas and pawnshops. I turned a corner and under a sign that said GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, XXX, was a beautiful dark waif seated cross-legged on a blanket with a cardboard box in front of her for offerings. She could have been fourteen or twenty-four. It was impossible to guess her age. Her face was dark and elfish, an exotic child’s face.

A small group had gathered near her. Approaching that part of town, it was kind of like coming upon a single Easter lily in a field of thistles. I rummaged in my knapsack for some change. While I was unsuccessfully hunting, an oily-haired lowlife in a buckskin jacket approached her. She shook her head violently, picked up all her stuff and hurried away.

I was tempted to run after her, but I didn’t. It would only be a matter of days, maybe even hours, before some other creep would get his hooks into her and have her selling her body to pay for his vice of choice. That part of town was crawling with junkies and panhandlers, some inarticulate and wasted, others fit, pompous and smart-ass, shoving themselves into people’s faces with lines like, “Could you spare five dollars to assist an indigent person in purchasing an alcoholic beverage?” My knee-jerk instinct was always to cross to the other side of the street to avoid them or rush away as quickly as possible. They weren’t getting my hard-earned dimes. But the girl upset me. The girl was all wrong out there.

I caught the last bus home. I still had to prepare everything for the party. I was a nervous cook. It’s a fine art getting all your dishes to arrive at the finish line in the same moment, hot and crisped to perfection. So I counted on lots of cold things, hor d’oeuvres, and dishes I’d cooked the week before, stashed in the freezer and then shoved into the oven at the last minute.

I know what you’re saying. What a little housewife, eh? Well, what if it all worked out with Kurt? What if I ended up moving in? What if Kurt wanted to entertain all his world-famous friends at home? What was going to happen, for example, if he conducted a big New Year’s Eve bash at someplace like the Albert Hall, and then he invited the Three Tenors over to his house after?

Even if we’re just talking about a little snack, that’s a wicked quantity of pasta and paella there. I’ve never met a singer who didn’t care about food. When there isn’t something coming out of a singer’s mouth, there’s usually something going in.

I was hoping Kurt and I would do a lot of eating out, experiencing all of London’s best restaurants and bistros. And maybe I could get help in the house for some of the other big events like parties and receptions, because, on a large scale, I really was a nervous cook. He was bound to have a housekeeper, wasn’t he? Somebody as important and famous as him? And separated, too? There was sure to be extra help. Maybe an au pair or two?

Although, I’d have to be careful about au pairs, screen them, make sure they were always older, fatter and uglier than me. You hear so many stories about men dumping their wives for the eighteen-year-old foreign student. Not that Kurt was going to do that to me. Wasn’t his full sexual treatment, minus one point, proof of his overall fidelity in such matters?

Chapter 7

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.