Kyra Read online

  My thoughts kept drifting to Andreas. He wanted to take Tosca into the schools, to invite people from the neighborhood to the final rehearsal, people we had passed on the streets, seen in the shops. One night we had gone out for Chinese food, wrapping shreds of pork and cabbage in paper-thin pancakes, hoisin sauce dripping from the ends. The energy of the opera was in his body, and I was in it with him. I told him it was like working in a holy space. He smiled. “It is a holy space.” He reached across the table and brushed a wisp of hair from my face. I said I’d been talking with the lighting designer about how much could be done simply with lights. We could use a column to suggest the thickness of the walls, and then darkness to create the feeling of enclosure.

  It had been late when he drove me back to Cambridge. There was a parking space in front of my building. We sat in the car listening to the all-night jazz program. “I’ll walk you in,” he said. We stood in the entry between the outer and inner doors, ceiling light glancing off the glass in the doors, the brass rows of mailboxes and buzzers, landing on the dirty white tiles. I searched for my keys. “Can I hold something?” he asked, moving closer, and then his arms were around me and we were kissing. With the unfamiliar sensation of my body softening, releasing, I must have leaned back against the buzzers, because suddenly there was a cacophony of voices, irritated and abrasive, asking, Who is it? Who is it? Who’s there? We both started laughing. I caught my reflection in one of the mailboxes, my face looking guilty, flustered. Had whatever gods, Chinese or otherwise, who were presiding over the evening sent us a signal? Stop?

  But the kiss left an impression. In that moment I felt how easy it would be to give myself over to this, to him. A rush had gone through me, compelling, impelling. I felt light-headed. Upstairs, in my apartment, I sat in the living room, on the sofa, waiting for the room to settle. I had seen him give himself over to his work. I found it very beautiful, arresting. Would we do that now with each other as well?

  After the committee meeting, I went home to have a bath. The design crew was meeting for dinner, and since the lighting person was working on a play at a church in Central Square, we had decided to meet at a restaurant on Mass. Avenue, around the corner from the church. I put sea salts in the bathwater. It turned green, like photographs of the Caribbean, the white porcelain a stand-in for sand. I stretched out in the tub and closed my eyes. If I were on a beach, waves lapping. If we were on a beach. I opened my eyes abruptly. In the fantasy, I was with Andreas, not Simon. I got out of the tub.

  My hair was darkening now. It was winter. I brushed it, starting at the nape of my neck, my head down around my knees, dropping down, vertebra after vertebra, fifty strokes. I rolled up my spine. Fifty more, from the forehead now. I watched my face in the steamy mirror. I looked like a person emerging from a fog.

  The bedroom was cold. I put on jeans and a black sweater. Added red beads, they picked up the lamp, shone with a far-off wisdom. Randy had given them to me, a gift from Thailand, in anticipation of the trip we would make there in March. I was looking forward to that, to experiencing what I had read about, a world where everything was permeable. Randy had said the Akha had no concept of the self. I looked at the beads under the light. Someone had seen that red, chosen that red. The necklace was made by the Akha.

  Boots or sneakers? The lighting person always wore black. Mika led the warm-up in red high-top sneakers she bought in London. I opted for the boots, the ones that folded down around the ankle.

  Anna had gone directly to Nashawena after her last patient. Since I had committed myself to Tosca, we were spending less time together. She and Tony, one of the construction workers who lived on the Vineyard, had been talking about starting an oyster farm. Tony was a dreamer, his love was the sea. His thin, wiry body sprang something loose in Anna, the sternness leaving her face. She was less judgmental, less the older sister. When the two of us were together, it was easier to talk.

  We had spent an evening talking, finally, about Andreas. The way he had worked with the singers fascinated Anna, the intense contact he made with people, the way he zeroed in, and yet there was also something remote about him. She wondered about his relationship with Jesse. It was complicated, I said. Aside from the color of his eyes, Jesse looked like his mother. Have you seen her picture? Anna asked. I hadn’t, but Andreas had commented on the resemblance, same hair color, reddish-brown. “It’s been over three years now,” I said, “since she disappeared.” Jesse had been two. Presumably she was dead. Anna said it takes at least two years to get over a death, and with something that shocking it can take much longer. I waited, but the comment wasn’t pointed at me. Simon had been dead for over ten years.

  I liked the way Anna and Tony were together, their calm assurance with each other. It brought out a side of Anna I hadn’t seen in years, a buoyancy I remembered from when we played together as children, the way she would cast herself into a game. She was doing that now with the oyster farm. She and Tony were moving ahead, planning to seed oysters in the spring. With their hair the same dark brown, their bodies approximately the same size, I thought they could have been twins.

  Otto von Simson’s The Gothic Cathedral sat on the table next to our front door. If it were a homing pigeon, it would take off for the library by itself. The cover was black with a row of cloverleaf windows, two in red, two in blue, underneath, a sudden light—gray-white stone and the curve of arches. I opened the cover and read the subtitle: “Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order.” I put the book back on the table and went out the door.

  This sounds ordinary. I mean, in a way it was. I’m an architect, an urban designer. Through a piece of good luck I became involved in a project to design a new city, albeit on a small scale. But mostly I was teaching at university, working with students, writing papers, going to meetings, making a living, more money than most people on this earth, not much by some people’s standards. I was living with my sister—which is unusual these days, but my husband had been killed, murdered by our half brother, which would be unusual except that many people’s lives have been shattered in this century. I’m asking myself how it was that I didn’t see it coming. They say you can always go back and find the beginning, recognize the theme the first time it comes in. Like the Scarpia theme. Like Peter and the Wolf. Every life has its leitmotif, its distinctive whorl. And you could also say that in every life there is a potential for disintegration. The keystone dislodges and the arch collapses.

  The studio projects were juried the third week in January. The constant was the elevated tracks of the High Line, rusty now and clotted with weeds. Architects in New York had petitioned against the High Line’s destruction, the plan for its restoration remained an open question, giving the students’ imaginations free rein. They had been working on their projects all semester, now was the moment of evaluation. It was something they would face in the future; here was a test.

  We gathered in the windowless classroom, the students with their models and drawings, the jurors a mix of faculty and guest critics. Sandro and Hakim were there from architecture. Erik and Craig from my department. Sid Winter, my pal, came up from New York, an architect involved in the campaign to save the High Line. Sid was tough, but I knew the students would love him because he fit their image of the successful young architect, cool and sexy, which was mostly not the case.

  The afternoon got off to a good start. My edginess subsided, I too was being judged, but the students’ projects were inventive and for the most part well executed. They presented them well, despite the fact that the room was freezing; something was wrong with the heat. The concrete exuded dankness; outside it was beginning to snow. The jurors drank coffee and huddled in their coats.

  When Eva got up to present, it was toward the end of the review. She had studied in Geneva, and her manner was diffident, Europeans would say restrained. She wore a gray skirt and a light blue blouse, her hair prim around her face. And maybe it was that her appearance belied the ambition of her project,
or maybe it was the ambition itself, but something bothered the jurors. It may have been just the cold, but they were not receptive. I could see she was not making contact. She soldiered on, but as the critical queries mounted, she faltered and began to cry. I looked around the room. The faces of the other students were frozen; the jurors continued their conversation about the project as if nothing were happening, shifting slightly to soft-pedal their comments. Eva collected herself and finished her review, but without receiving the recognition I thought the project deserved. The next student got up.

  I had been spending my days with actors and singers, tears part of the daily rhythm of emotion, often the gateway into a breakthrough. Culture shock fused with concern for my student. Eva’s project was exceptional, delicate and bold at the same time, but now her wings had been clipped. Where were my colleagues? I should have invited David. I had forgotten the academic distrust of emotion, the association of tears with breaking down. I suspected something more was involved. Envy perhaps, or incredulity that someone who looked and acted like Eva could be brilliant. If she looked like Tali, the Israeli soprano, or had the earnestness of a Japanese student, or was a regular guy like Sid, they might have spotted the brilliance, even though the presentation was flawed.

  I knew that the jurors’ comments would not be held against her, but I worried about how she would integrate the experience.

  Sid used the meager honorarium the Design School paid him to take me to dinner. We had worked together often when he was in Cambridge, not seen each other much since he went to New York. He had wanted me to go with him, start a firm together. His wedding ring was still shiny. They were expecting a baby. He was not the domestic type. Still, he looked happy.

  I brought up the subject of Eva. He didn’t have much to say. He felt sorry for her, it was a difficult review, but she’s got to learn how to take criticism and use it to move ahead. We’ve all been raked over the coals. I swallowed my distaste at cliché. He picked up his glass of wine. “To friendship,” he said, closing the conversation.

  I said I was doing the design for a production of Tosca. “That’s a shift,” he said. I said I was finding it challenging, like learning a new language. He had worked with a director in Paris, he loved the theater and especially opera. He offered to come with me the next day and look at the space before he left for New York.

  When Sid and I arrived, the cast was in a meeting. “Have you seen the church?” Sid asked. Somehow I hadn’t. We went in. It was quietly beautiful, simple Gothic, nave and transept, stained-glass windows. The blue in the rose window reminded me of Chartres. A piece of the twelfth century in this desolate part of Boston. Who built it, Sid wondered, and when? We sat in a pew, my mind floating, and suddenly the idea came to me: wouldn’t this be the perfect place for Tosca? I could see it, the lines of the walls soaring, the structure majestic, the intrigue of the drama set off by contrast to the spare elegance of the space. Lighting poles could be brought in. My mind was racing. I turned to Sid. He thought it was a fabulous idea. For the second act in the Farnese Palace, he said, a Persian carpet could be spread over the floor. The director he had worked with in Paris had come upon that as a simple solution to the problem of staging.

  We went to find Andreas. His face lit up at the idea. He had never liked the proscenium stage, felt it defeated his efforts to create an intimate relation between the performers and the audience. He had gotten to know some of the priests, had gone out drinking with them. One in particular had come back from Ecuador, bringing the message of liberation theology. Here in the South End, they were ministering to the poor in a seemingly godforsaken neighborhood in the midst of a city increasingly affluent. The priests had welcomed Peter’s idea for theater to take place in their building. Why not bring it into the church proper? It was in the spirit of Vatican II. Andreas said he would broach the idea, see what they thought, his enthusiasm only slightly dimmed by the realization that they could say no.

  Belatedly, I introduced Sid to Andreas. “We were almost partners,” I explained. Andreas looked puzzled. “I mean, we had thought of starting a design firm together.” Rehearsal was beginning. “Can you stay?” Andreas asked. “I’d love to,” Sid said. We were standing in the lobby outside the theater. Andreas put his arm around my shoulder as we walked through the door.

  “We’re starting with the third act, Cavaradossi’s act,” Andreas said, sizing up Sid. Did Sid know that Cavaradossi was Tosca’s lover, Mario, the painter? “It has two of my favorite tenor arias,” Sid said, passing the ball back. Andreas caught it, nodded.

  We sat in the third row, and Sid turned to me: “It breaks my heart. Just when Cavaradossi finally has what he most wanted in life, his dream of love, he has to die. That’s the aria that kills me. It’s where you hear the poetry of Puccini. Did you know he wrote some of the lines himself?”

  I realized I had missed Sid’s energy, his impetuousness, his loose-limbed body. He could have been a basketball player. There had always been a tension between us, a question as to whether we would become lovers, but I had said I couldn’t. Still, the frisson was in the air. I remembered the fissure in his voice when he called up to say, “I’m getting married.” He had moved on, but we remained friends.

  Tali and Dan moved to the stage. I watched Sid’s eyes follow Tali. She was wearing white pants and a long green shirt, which set off her dark hair. Dan wore jeans and a black soccer shirt with a red stripe down the arms, his shoes picking up the motif—brown with a white stripe at the side. He looked like a dolphin with his expanded chest, thin hips, his body shimmering, his motions lithe. The other two sopranos and tenors would be called upon later in an exercise that was one of Andreas’s favorites: a Tosca and a Mario singing while two others did the acting, to free the body’s movement from operatic conventions, to separate the dramatic from the musical line, or delineate as he would say, his British English softened by Hungarian cadence.

  Joel, the music director, led a boy to the stage. He was around nine or ten, his face impassive. He would sing the Shepherd’s song, which opens the third act. Andreas bent down to speak with the boy, who looked at the floor. The pianist began the Lydian melody. Suddenly, out of that dark, quiet boy’s face, a voice clear as the dawn. “Bravo,” Andreas said after, and got a shy smile in response. “Thank you,” Joel said, leading the boy back to his teacher, the priest who had started the choir school.

  The jailer entered, Cavaradossi was brought in by guards. The sergeant handed a note to the jailer, who opened his book to register the prisoner. You have one hour, he tells Cavaradossi, a priest awaits your call. Cavaradossi refuses the priest, asks for a favor. He wants to write a letter to Tosca. He offers the jailer his ring, if he will promise to deliver the letter. The jailer hesitates, then accepts and motions Cavaradossi to the chair at the table.

  Andreas stopped them.

  “Dan, if you sing a closed vowel in the prefix of deliver, it sounds like de-liver, to take out the liver.” Everyone laughed. “Otherwise it’s beautiful, but follow the line of the music, where it’s going.” He repeated the words “Would you give me leave to write her a letter,” placing the stress on leave and then on letter. “Listen to the pulse under the line.” Dan, the Cavaradossi paired with Tali’s Tosca, took the pencil from behind his ear and made a note in his score.

  “Go on,” Andreas said quietly.

  Sid turned to me. “Now, here it comes: ‘E lucevan le stelle, by the light of the stars.’”

  Dan closed his eyes. The room became still. When he opened his eyes and began to sing, his voice was gorgeous, fluent, simple. There was nothing operatic about his delivery. He is a man, writing his farewell to his beloved, remembering her footstep in the garden, her fragrance, the feel of her in his arms, soft kisses, sweet abandon. It’s his dream of love, and he must give it up. At the very moment when he could live most intensely, he is going to die. He bursts into sobs.

  “I love it, I love it, Dan,” Andreas said. “That’s it, that’s all I�
��m asking you to do. Go on.”

  “That’s the aria that totally breaks me up,” Sid whispered.

  Tosca arrives, a flurry of activity. She shows Cavaradossi the note of safe conduct, tells him he is free. She describes the bargain Scarpia had made, either she yields to him or Cavaradossi dies, the terrible decision, how Scarpia had then given the order for a simulated execution, fake bullets, how she extracted the free conduct pass. She is a religious woman, but she had taken a knife from the table, and when Scarpia came to claim the horrible embrace, she plunged the knife into his heart. “My hands were reeking in blood,” she says.

  I waited for Andreas. “Do you see it, do you smell it, the blood on your hands?”

  Tali nods. Andreas turns back to Dan. “I’m thinking we might do this next aria a cappella, or accompanied by solo piano.” He looks for Joel, in charge of the music: “What do you think?” Joel likes the idea.

  Sid turns to me. “He’s fantastic, this director friend of yours. Are you an item? He’s just your type, serious, funny, a little lost in himself.”

  I do not want to answer. “And the soprano?” I say. “Isn’t she yours?”

  “You bet, but now that I’m married, I’ve given that up.”

  “Me too.”

  “There’s a difference, Kyra, between alive and dead.”

  Andreas turned to us. “Please,” he said. I felt like I was in high school, but Sid’s words echoed through the afternoon. Was this something I would later regret, giving this up?

  Andreas returned to the singers. He took Tali’s hands and looked at Dan. “She has just said that her hands are reeking in blood. You realize that with these hands, she has killed Scarpia. Take her hands, touch them. What do you feel? Listen to the music. What do you hear?”

  “It’s just incredibly tender,” Dan said. A shiver visibly ran through his body.