by Ann Patchett
Number one: The dog doesn’t get on the furniture.
We blinked. We smiled nervously. “But she likes the furniture,” we said. “We like her on the furniture.”
He explained to us the basic principles of dog training. She has to learn to listen. She must learn parameters and the concept of no. He tied a piece of cotton rope to her collar and demonstrated how we were to yank her off the sofa with a sharp tug. Our dog went flying through the air. She looked up at us from the floor, more bewildered than offended. “She doesn’t sleep with you, does she?” the trainer asked.
“Sure,” I said, reaching down to rub her neck reassuringly. She slept under the covers, her head on my pillow, her muzzle on my shoulder. “What’s the point of having a twelve-pound dog if it doesn’t sleep with you?”
He made a note in a folder. “You’ll have to stop that.”
I considered this for all of five seconds. “No,” I said. “I’ll do anything else, but the dog sleeps with me.”
After some back-and-forth on this subject, he relented, making it clear that it was against his better judgment. For the duration of the ten-week program, I either sat on the floor with Rose or Rose and I stayed in bed. We celebrated graduation by letting her back up on the sofa.
I went to see my friend Warren, who, conveniently, happens to be a psychologist, to ask him if he thought things had gotten out of hand. Maybe I had an obsessive-compulsive disorder concerning my dog.
“You have to be doing something to be obsessive-compulsive,” he said. “Are you washing her all the time? Or do you think about washing her all the time?”
I shook my head.
“It could be codependency, then. Animals are by nature very codependent.”
I wasn’t sure I liked this. Codependency felt too trendy. Warren’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Kate, came in, and I asked her if she wanted to see the studio portraits I’d had taken of Rose for my Christmas cards. She studied the pictures from my wallet for a minute and then handed them back to me. “Gee,” she said. “You really want to have a baby, don’t you?”
I went home to my dog. I rubbed her pink belly until we were both sleepy. I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren’t other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog. We’ve had Rose a year now and there has never been a cold and rainy night when I’ve resented having to take her outside. I have never wished I didn’t have a dog, this dog, while she sniffed at each individual blade of grass, even as my hands were freezing up around the leash. I have never minded picking the endless white hairs off my dark clothes. All I had ever wanted was a dog who would sleep in my lap while I read and lick my neck and bring me the ball to throw eighty-seven times in a row. I thought a dog would be the key to perfect happiness. And I was right. We are perfectly happy.
(Vogue, March 1997)
The Best Seat in the House
WHEN I WAS six and seven, my older sister and I often stayed with the family of a man who was the house doctor for the Grand Ole Opry, back when the Opry was still in downtown Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium. This was 1969, 1970. On Friday and Saturday nights Dr. Harris would take us along with his two youngest daughters to sit backstage while he tended to whatever star needed tending, though most nights no one needed tending and he was free to drink and tell stories in the greenroom, where the best music was actually played. All the while the clutch of small girls, of which I was a member, sat in the dark wings and watched the high-haired men and women go back and forth in their spangles and fringe. We all liked Roy Acuff best because he had a yo-yo.
This should have been the moment of my musical birth. I was a child with the best seat in the house, but even in those early days country music and I were a poor fit. I can remember the hats and the boots, the rose-colored lights and the snakelike electrical cables, but I don’t remember a single song. Opry is what I was born to; it would take me another twenty-five years to figure out that my heart belonged to that from which Opry was derived.
My friend Erica Schultz lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She has hauled her boys to the Metropolitan Opera the way we were taken to the Ryman, as little kids. She got them in the children’s chorus so that they could walk onto the stage and sing. I wonder how differently my life might have turned out had I been lucky enough to be Alex Schultz. I was past thirty before I started research for a novel in which the heroine, an opera singer, is held hostage in an embassy in South America. It wasn’t until I was doing the research to write Bel Canto that I heard my first opera. The love that I came to feel was not immediate, but it was slow and deep and permanent, a love that could never be undone. Everything in me leaned forward then. This was my music, my destiny: coloratura instead of twang, “Dove sono” instead of “Stand By Your Man.”
The problem was I lived in Nashville, and true love, it has been my experience, never asks to see the check. I started buying opera tickets in other cities, and plane tickets to get myself to those other cities, and when I added on hotel rooms and cab fares and a snack I quickly found myself with a habit that would make most drug addictions look manageable. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. But, figuratively speaking, I had arrived at the theater well after intermission. What chance did I have for proficiency when there was so much I hadn’t seen? Listening was satisfying—yes, I was grateful for those Saturday broadcasts from Texaco; and, yes, I bought CDs—but opera is a dramatic art, and in many ways a visual art. It is sidelong glances as well as the E natural. I wanted to watch Violetta grow pale.
And then Peter Gelb got the job of general manager at the Met. He understood that people like me couldn’t always come to the opera, and therefore created a system by which the opera could come to us. The Met began to broadcast live high-definition performances into movie theaters across the country. I didn’t catch on until the second show of the first season, so I missed Julie Taymor’s production of The Magic Flute; I still haven’t gotten over that. But on January 6, 2007, I wandered into the Regal Green Hills Stadium 16 cinema and put down $20 for a ticket to I Puritani. I had read about this movie-theater thing, but I still didn’t really understand how it worked. There, in a comfortable fold-down seat with a whiff of popcorn in the air, I watched Anna Netrebko lie on her back, dangle her head down into the orchestra pit, and sing Bellini like her heart was on fire.
Are there words for this? I was in Nashville watching the Metropolitan Opera. I was seeing it on a screen so large that the smallest gesture of a hand, the delicate embroidery on a skirt, was clearly visible. I could see Netrebko’s tongue inside her mouth and see how it shaped the air that made the note. I could see the conductor, yes, the crisp gesture of his wrist, but my God, I could see the French horn player as well. I could look into the eyes of the chorus one by one, every man and woman focused in their part. It was Opera Enormous, every note utterly human, simultaneously imperfect and flawless. It was opera the way Alex Schultz saw it, which is to say, right there onstage.
If the opera itself wasn’t enough, there were perks besides: at the Met, the patrons killed time between acts by waiting in insanely long lines to get a drink or use the facilities. They reread the program, or stared aimlessly at the heavy velvet curtain. Those of us in the Regal Green Hills Stadium 16, on the other hand, got to go behind the curtain where Renée Fleming, armed with a microphone, stopped the soprano and tenor as they came offstage, and asked them why they liked Bellini and how hard it was to sing bel canto. Imagine getting to see Paul Cézanne interviewing Camille Pissarro over a half-finished canvas, getting to see them talk casually, intelligently, about technique. Imagine Cézanne pointing to a small smear of bright paint on a Pissarro pear and saying, “I love how you did that! I always struggle with the light on a pear!”
After I Puritani, I bought my tickets in advance and came to the theater early. Everyone came to the theater early. The place was packed but we al
l felt compelled to pretend we were season-ticket holders. We tried to sit either in the same seat we had sat in for the last showing or the one as close as possible to it. I am the second to the last row on the left-hand side, five seats over from John Bridges, five rows back from Eugenia Moore. We all know each other now and chat about what’s coming next while we wait for the giant countdown clock on the screen to hit zero. We watch the patrons in New York, people who have paid ten times more for their tickets, and some more than that, as they make their way to their seats. Like us, the audience members on the screen stop to greet the familiar people around them, and like the audience in New York, we clap for both arias and curtain calls. We call out Brava! and Bravo! The rational mind understands the singers can’t hear us, and yet we are living so completely in our high-definition moment it is easy to forget.
The second season of Met simulcasts was for me a breakthrough in the language I so desperately wanted to speak. I was seeing enough opera to develop a sense of Ramón Vargas. I had seen him live several years earlier in a production of La Traviata, but there he was again in last year’s broadcast of Eugene Onegin and this year’s La Bohème. I thought that Maria Guleghina had been the highlight of last year’s Il Trittico, and when she came back as Lady Macbeth my pleasure felt almost proprietary, as if I had been the one to discover her in the first place. The same was true with Juan Diego Flórez, who had been so dazzling in Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Three days before the broadcast of La Fille du Régiment, the Times ran an article about Flórez hitting the nine high C’s of his aria and then repeating the feat in an encore, the first Met encore in almost fifteen years! Two years ago I would have read the article with a certain numb acceptance, knowing that this was the sort of miracle a country girl was never going to see, but instead I came even earlier to the following Saturday’s broadcast, where we as an audience speculated in the aisles as to whether or not he would do an encore again or if it would seem, well, too obvious on a broadcast day. (Alas, I guess it was. No encore of the encore.) But still, even to hear it once was brilliant. We got to see the powerhouse performance of Natalie Dessay, who is herself proof that it isn’t enough just to listen. We did a lot of grumbling over the fact that her Lucia di Lammermoor wasn’t broadcast. (How quickly we turn from grateful to greedy.)
A real opera fan, the kind who is born into it, revels in obscurity. They are choking on Carmen. At thirteen, Alex Schultz is more interested in a production of JanáČek’s Jenůfa. Remedial fans like myself who have long lived with the burden of limited access are always playing catch-up. In the past, when I was out of town and had the chance to see an opera, I would choose, say, Madama Butterfly over Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, because I was trying to lay down the bedrock of my education. (I still haven’t seen Rigoletto, for heaven’s sake!) But the broadcasts have run the gamut from warhorses to world premieres. I didn’t love The Last Emperor, composer Tan Dun’s 2006 world premiere, but it made me feel cutting-edge to have seen it. I had never felt even remotely cutting-edge where opera is concerned. If I lived in New York and had all the time and money in the world, I doubt I would have gone to see Hansel and Gretel, but I live in Nashville and so I went. I have to say those giant fish in tuxedos will stay with me until the end of my days. The music was as haunting as the sets, and I will be so glad the next time I see the marvelous Christine Schäfer on the screen and can say, “Gretel! It’s Gretel!”
As time goes on, the Met has dug down deep to keep the intermission features interesting. While fifty teamsters roll giant sets around him, Joe Clark, the indefatigable technical director, explains how snow is made. Renée Fleming interviews not only the soprano and the conductor but the people who handle the horse in Manon Lescaut. The horse was a consummate professional, but Karita Mattila dropped into the splits in the middle of her intermission interview, and then, to keep things even, came up and slid down on the other side.
That we are kept so well entertained between acts is a bonus, but not a necessity. The necessity is opera itself. The way I cried at the end of La Bohème was expected, and when my friend Beverly called later that night to tell me how she had cried in her theater in Texas, we both said, “Mimi! Mimi!” over the phone and started to cry again. The crying I did in Suor Angelica, the second act of Il Trittico, took me completely by surprise; that final image of the luminous child coming in through the doors at the top of the stage forced the audience into a great, collective sob. But nothing really touched Eugene Onegin—the staging, the music, the glory that Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming made together. As wonderful as Fleming is as a guest host, the sight of her anywhere on the Met stage makes one feel she should go zip up her costume and sing. (I saw that same production three days later in New York, where part of my view was obstructed by a tree onstage. Even though my seat was good, I couldn’t see the nuances of joy that had radiated so clearly from Miss Fleming’s face in the movie theater as she wrote Onegin her letter, or the crushing humiliation and grief that passed through her eyes when he rejected her. Had the opera been better on the screen? I won’t go as far as that, because there is, of course, the magic of proximity, but I will say it was at once a different and equal experience.)
On the last day of the season, in April, the Met put a list up on the big screen of the next season’s coming attractions. Ten operas plus the opening night gala! The crowd at the Regal 16 broke out in a cheer, I swear to you, a cheer, when we heard that news. There had been only eight operas this year, and only six last year. In Nashville we had become ravenous. All we wanted was more.
What if culture turned out to be like vegetables, and we were told it was better to consume only that which was locally grown? Could I have learned to embrace the Opry the way I have managed to make peace with okra? I doubt it, but these broadcasts have given me the best of big-city life without the strain of bearing up under the big city’s weight, a task for which I know myself to be fundamentally unsuited. Implicit in my love for Tennessee has always been the understanding that certain needs were going to have to be met elsewhere. But these days, it seems, not so much.
Like any other monkey on your back, no addiction ever feels complete until you can pass it on to your friends. I have tried mightily, and in a few cases I’ve been successful, but for the most part I find it surprisingly difficult to get people to spend their Saturday afternoons in a movie theater watching opera. I am, I would guess, about twenty years below the median age of an operagoer at our local cineplex. Peter Gelb knows his audience, and he knows he needs to cultivate a new crop. I feel certain this will happen over time. People like me, the opera converts, we never shut up, and sooner or later you’ll go and see one, if only for the sake of appeasement. Once you get in there you’ll get it, and it will get you, and then, my friend, there is no going back.
(Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2008)
My Road to Hell Was Paved
IF YOU’RE NOT from Billings, Montana, you don’t expect to run into people you know at the Billings airport, but over at the luggage carousel is a doctor-friend of Karl’s from Nashville and his teenaged daughter. They’re meeting up with the rest of their family for a two-week vacation. The doctor asks about our plans.
Karl clears his throat. “We’re going out to the Badlands,” he says. “And then over to Yellowstone.”
“Camping?”
Can we call it camping? No, let’s call it what it is. “We’re renting a Winnebago,” I say.
“A Winny-Baaa-Go?” the doctor asks.
“We hate them,” the doctor’s daughter volunteers, in case I missed the gist of her father’s pronunciation.
The doctor nods, his expression grim. “They clog up the parks. They go five miles an hour. They’re everywhere. I hate those damn things. Why would you go out in a Winnebago?”
I tell him it’s an assignment—which, frankly, is the only circumstance under which I’d get in a motor home. This is not a vacation. This is undercover jo
urnalism. My plan is to infiltrate RV culture and expose it for the gas-guzzling, fitness-eschewing underbelly my editor knows it to be. But this is not the sort of thing I can confide while waiting for my suitcase.
Karl shifts uncomfortably, not wishing to be implicated. I do not remind him that he was never invited on this trip in the first place. It was my intention to drive the motor coach alone when he stuck his foot in the door. Karl and I have broken up, which makes this trip a grudging opportunity to consider reconciliation. But of course we’re not going to tell that to the doctor from Nashville either, since he never knew we’d broken up in the first place. Karl tries to steer the conversation by asking a question about his friend’s mother, when suddenly the doctor’s face lights up. He turns to his daughter.
“Do you remember the one that burned?” he asks, touching on a treasured family memory.
Enormous smile. “There was smoke everywhere,” the girl says.
“This was a couple of years ago,” he tells us, and for the first time he is fully engaged in our conversation. “We passed a Winnebago in Yellowstone, creeping along, and then coming back later on we see it again, the same one, on fire. That siding burned fast.” He makes a gesture with his hands to indicate shooting flames. Then he sobers himself. “The people got out fine,” he says. “But it sure was great to watch that thing burn.”
The daughter nods. “We got out of the car. We were dancing.”
I wonder if the people in that burning Winnebago had broken up at some point. I wonder if they were heading into America to see what of their love could be salvaged, only to have the whole thing burst into flames.
