Friendzoned Soprano (Singers in Love Book 2)

by Irene Vartanoff

  Still, we clung and emoted. The final tragedy occurred, with the fake-not-fake firing squad arriving, doing its evil business, and leaving Tosca alone with the corpse of her lover. It was an awful moment. The audience knew, but Tosca didn’t. Then she discovered the truth, and before she had time to process it—as if processing were possible at an extreme moment—Scarpia’s men arrived, led by Joe as Spoletta. I fled to the parapet and sang my last line.

  My job now was to fling myself over the parapet without hesitation. That was a hard one, especially since I couldn’t practice it in the rehearsal room. If the prop guys hadn’t put a couple of mattresses or a trampoline below me, I’d be seriously injured. I’d been so wrapped up in nerves over Sean, I hadn’t checked to see what was on the other side of the set.

  I jumped. The mattresses were there to cushion my fall, but I’d angled my leap blindly and would nearly hit the edge. I had a split second to maneuver my body so I fell on my side. It knocked the wind out of me.

  As I lay there, catching my breath, who should appear but Sean, already out of costume and makeup. “Upsy daisy,” he said, and used both hands to haul me to a standing position.

  “Thanks,” I started to say, but he pulled me fully into his arms and placed a burning kiss on my lips.

  I wrenched away. “Stop that.” But I didn’t resist instantly.

  “Can’t help myself, babe. You were alight with your love.” His voice smiled as much as his eyes smoldered.

  I tried to shake myself and my costume back to some semblance of order and control. “Love for Mario, don’t forget.”

  “Right,” he said solemnly. “Like I believe that.”

  My whole body tingled with delight. He wanted me. I wanted him. It was so simple. We had all week to explore our feelings between performances. Wait. He was Scarpia, not Mario.

  “Try not to confuse me, will you?” I scanned the immediate area. “There’s a New York Times reporter somewhere backstage. He’s here to do a feature on me. A photographer is here, too.”

  “Fantastic. That’s what you wanted after the Merrill.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re happy about it, aren’t you? Why aren’t you smiling?”

  “Claudio said they probably okayed a feature because of all the drama Saturday night with Daylia Fedora. I didn’t tell you about that.” I quickly outlined what had happened and Daylia’s screaming attack on me.

  “I saw the video.” Sean was sympathetic. “You made up your mind to refuse because of what happened at Aida, right?”

  “I did.”

  “Good move. Seriously.”

  “Anyway,” I shrugged again, not willing to acknowledge his praise, “I don’t know if the Times is interested in me because they scent a scandal, or because I’m hot stuff. But I’ll take it.”

  Sean said, “In my book you’re definitely hot stuff.” He led me to the front of the stage, where others were waiting for the final notes from the maestro and the director.

  I made a shooing gesture with my hand. “You’re not in this act. You’re dead. Go away.”

  He did, but not before making an offer I’d be a fool to accept. “Want me to come by your dressing room and help you out of your costume?”

  I rolled my eyes. Right. I knew what that meant. “No way.”

  After dutifully listening to Richard’s last notes and a few words from Herr Kaufmann, I was free to return to my dressing room and get changed. Luckily, Richard did not ask me to repeat jumping off the parapet. Directors could be very picky about that jump. Sopranos often balked at it out of fear they’d be injured. I had run for it full tilt because I was well padded. Richard was satisfied, and I’d escaped bruises.

  When we were done with our notes and I walked backstage and saw the reporter talking to an assistant stage manager, it occurred to me that Sean might have been trying to bolster my confidence.

  Madeline had already removed both my first- and second-act costumes from my dressing room. I must hurry to get into my own clothes before she returned and snatched my last costume directly from my body. Ruth was there to help me strip off the last bits of jewelry. Even while planning to flee Rome, Tosca wore a lot of jewels. Ruth carefully packed them in the costume department’s specially made box. We got me out of the costume with its elaborate and period correct lacing, and back into street clothes. Today, I had worn a dress instead of sloppy rehearsal casual items.

  Only a few seconds later, we heard a tap on the door. Ruth moved to open it, and Tim Fox asked, “Is now a good moment to be interviewed?”

  I said it was and invited him to sit down in the one guest chair. He got his recorder ready and pulled out a tablet that must have had all his questions.

  The next tap on the door was the costume department assistant. Ruth handed her the gown and cape, plus the shoes. The costume lady put them on a rolling rack, and then opened the jewel box and counted everything against her printed list. It wasn’t because the jewels were valuable, although they were pretty enough. The costume department did not want its property walking out of the building. They treated us like we were all kleptomaniacs.

  Tim Fox watched silently. After she left, and Ruth went to get us coffee, he began to ask me questions, starting with, “How does it feel to know that the costume department doesn’t trust you with fake jewelry?”

  I laughed. “They suspect we have other things on our minds besides counting the bracelets.”

  The interview was totally rote and as fake as my denial about the jewelry. He asked the usual questions about my background and was diplomatic about my single state. He didn’t mention my weight, either. I didn’t know which he thought was the sorer subject.

  “Tell me what happened between you and Daylia Fedora Saturday night.”

  No way would I be so unprofessional as to criticize Daylia to a reporter. I shrugged and subtly implicated management, citing not being informed in advance about any duets or ensembles. “Luckily, James, Larry, and I were able to quickly run through the Faust trio. Unfortunately,” I finished, “Daylia did not arrive at the concert venue in time to rehearse with me.”

  Tim was no fool, and brought up the common practice in a full opera of having a stand-in for a principal who only showed up a few days before the run.

  I said, “That’s true in fully staged operas but it doesn’t work for a concert.”

  “Why couldn’t you sing a duet you already knew by heart? You’ve sung the barcarole previously in concerts.” He’d done his homework. He even cited the specific concerts.

  I shook my head. “Those times, I sang it after rehearsing with everybody involved. In a concert, the maestro isn’t in front of the singers where we all can see him and follow his lead.

  I’m facing the audience. That leaves me not knowing what the tempo should be.”

  Tim Fox was a good enough reporter to keep asking in different ways, hoping I would break down and reveal the truth. I stuck to my story.

  He tried another angle. “Why wouldn’t you take the chance that you could pull it off?”

  Sneaky. He deserved a platitude as an answer. “I only want to give my best. The audience deserves a smooth professional performance.” I said it with a straight face.

  Tim was silent for several moments. I expected him to keep trying, but he probably thought I’d bore him to death with technical details about tempo. I would have, too.

  Happily, he finally gave it up as a lost cause and asked me some questions about my career successes and my plans for future roles. I enthusiastically detailed what I’d be singing and where, and how excited I was to be singing those roles with those top singers in those top houses. Interviews were the process of faking sincerity. I’d been interviewed enough to know how to do them.

  Tim had his photographer come in and take some shots of me in the dressing room, and then we were done. I could breathe freely.

  Now that I had gotten what I’d wanted so desperately, attention from the New York Times, I realized how silly I had been to carry on about t
he Merrill Prize coverage. It didn’t matter to my career whether the Times mentioned me merely in passing as part of an investigative piece on Daylia Fedora’s spectacular efforts to end her own career, or did a big feature article focusing exclusively on me.

  Did I feel deflated? I should have. Instead, I felt energized. Before the reporter had arrived, I’d been having a very good day. Now I was free to finish it in my own way.

  All the time I’d been talking to the reporter, I’d been thinking about Sean. About how he kissed me as if he could not get enough of kissing me. Sean was fun to be around, too. He made the work go easier. But I must not let his charm overwhelm me and lull me back into relationship limbo. I deserved better. He’d said he was setting Julie straight last night. For all I knew, today he was doing the same with other women in the building—in between moments of making semi-joking moves on me. I hoped so. I believed he’d been sincere last night, if lame.

  A lightweight guy could make a long day of rehearsal go faster, but also be essentially a tease. I didn’t want to pay for the fun with longings that wouldn’t be fulfilled. I wasn’t convinced Sean’s actions today were light, but what were his intentions?

  The only way I’d accept him was if the terms he offered were different from what he had always implied. I wanted serious, permanent. Did he still want run-of-the-play, friends-with-benefits? Where would caving in to his desires leave me by Saturday night, when we had finished our last Tosca for the Baltimore Civic?

  Even in a perfect, committed relationship, opera singers had unique challenges. We traveled constantly. A few husbands and wives were star teams in opera, but most of the time, one person in the relationship had to make a career retrenchment so there could be a home and children.

  But who was thinking marriage? Let alone talking it? How could we even keep a hot love affair alive if we would be apart constantly? Although we did pinky swear to get married three years from now. What a joke. Three years from now, I’d be almost thirty-eight, nearing the top of the game as an opera singer. Not a moment to pull back on the number of engagements I took, or to start a family, either. Although Anna Netrebko had done so successfully. If all went well, I could sing into my late forties, maybe even longer.

  I decided to give the Tarot cards one last chance to tell me what my choice should be. I pulled the velvet bag from my satchel, opened it, and laid out the cards. This time, I didn’t deal a Knight. Instead, I kept finding True Love cards. The Two of Cups. The Ace of Cups. I got the message that happiness was just around the corner. Maybe it was the message I wanted, and that’s why the Tarot laid out as it did. Should I believe the Tarot one more time?

  I probably could have sat in my dressing room and brooded over my love life for many more minutes, but my attention was distracted by the text I received from my agent. The Salzburg Opera had finally decided they did not want me after all for La Forza del Destino. I suspected Claudio didn’t call me with the bad news because he didn’t want to hear the deep disappointment in my voice.

  I’d wanted that gig. Badly. It was an edgy production, and I was to play poor lost Leonora in a very revealing outfit. There would be minimalist sets and lighting, bizarre symbolism, and situations never dreamed of by the composer. In this Forza, instead of retreating from the world and becoming a hermitlike nun, my character was to be forced into prostitution. Somebody must have taken literally that old line from Hamlet, “Get thee to a nunnery”—which my high school English teacher had delighted in informing us was four-hundred-year-old slang for a brothel.

  I had plenty of time to lose another twenty pounds and look good in a tight little costume with the help of control undergarments like Spanx, but Salzburg didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t have to search for a mirror to wonder why they’d dumped me. My weight had been my albatross throughout my entire life.

  I’d really wanted Salzburg. Suddenly, I was ravenously hungry.

  Sean was waiting outside when I opened the dressing room door. “How’d it go?”

  My expression must have been frantic. The words poured out of me. “I’m having a food emergency. I need a cheeseburger. And fries. And a big piece of coconut cake. I need them right now.”

  He looked perplexed. “What’s up?”

  “Salzburg said they don’t want me,” I said, holding back an intense desire to burst into tears.

  “That’s a shame. Their loss.” He pushed me back into the dressing room, slammed the door, and wrapped his muscular arms around me. He pulled me tight against his body. My breasts were crushed against his chest. He leaned his face close and captured my lips. Suddenly, every corpuscle was alive with a happy feeling. I hugged him fervently and opened my mouth to his passionate kisses. The kissing went on for a long time.

  After a few minutes, I sighed and tried to pull away.

  Sean very reluctantly loosened his embrace. “Still hungry, babe?”

  Hungry for him, but the need for food had vanished. “You’re a miracle worker,” I said, with a sly, delighted curve to my lips, “but I will not have sex in an opera house dressing room.”

  “Okay. Then let’s go back to the condo.” He wasn’t joking. Lighthearted Sean had been replaced by passionate Sean.

  I so wanted to say yes. He’d worn me down with all the teasing during the dress rehearsal. Not the lighthearted banter kind of teasing. The touching, the looks. I had been physically close to him for nearly three hours. Being in his arms just now, sharing kisses and caresses, made my desire for him burn brightly.

  I had to get away. I started for the exit. I walked fast.

  “Please don’t run away from me.” He stayed next to me as I kept moving. “You’re an amazing woman. You somehow seem to have forgiven me for last night even though I was a complete ass.”

  He was still right beside me as I silently strode out of the opera house and crossed the street to a small triangular park. He said, in a low voice. “I was wrong last night. And I’m sorry.”

  My puzzlement must have shown on my face. What did he mean?

  “I should have set Julie straight before you came back from DC. Lame timing. I honestly didn’t expect you to give me a hearing when I met your train. I was sure you’d leave me out in the cold again, and I thought, stupid me, at least I should get the non-involvement with Julie settled. All the action in that relationship was on her side. I swear it, babe.”

  He leaned closer to me. “You surprised me by being willing to talk after all, and then by stripping yourself bare and showing me everything. I’m so honored you trusted me with that. I am. What I should have done was stand Julie up so I could stay with you. I know I made you furious and I can see that somehow, you’ve already forgiven me.”

  My footsteps had slowed. He was right. Even if I hadn’t worked through my anger already, Sean’s support today would have made me forgive him.

  He held up a hand. “Last night, I said I had nothing to offer you yet. And I didn’t want to take from you. Now I realize I was wrong about that, too. I can offer you something you’ve never had before.”

  His earnest tone made me stare at him, puzzled.

  His face lit up with the confident smile of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “I can give you me. I can help you with one-third of the issues you’re battling. I’m not like those other loser guys you’ve known. Being with you through rehearsals, I kept wanting more. I want it all, Abbie. I want you to belong to me. I already belong to you.”

  His knowing look made my face heat. Yes, he was mine. I wanted the same thing he wanted, to be his in every way. Could we make it work for a lifetime? Did I have to answer that question at this exact moment?

  Standing in the park, we were still in the public eye. No doubt, opera employees were around and could see us. I was glad that Sean didn’t try some grand physical gesture to convince me. Bad enough I was indecisive about risking my heart once again without the whole world also watching.

  I fretted. “It’s so difficult. In only twelve days, I’m off to Muni
ch.”

  “Hey, cool. My next stop is Prague. Not to boast, but they love me in Prague. They ask me back every year.”

  I would love Sean in any city of the world. But dare I risk it?

  He discreetly took my hand and led me to a park bench. “We’ll be on the same continent. We can figure it out.”

  I withdrew my hand from his reluctantly, ignoring the warm tingle of his touch. I stared at the concrete fountain in front of us. Simple spouts of water danced and dripped into a basin to recirculate. The picture his words conjured up was so tempting. I shook my head. “It would be too hard to pull off.”

  “We can do it. Let’s be brave and be together tonight and from now on.”

  Just then, Richard walked by. “Hey, you two. You’re not fooling anybody.” He waved and walked on.

  I looked at Sean, appalled. “How did he guess?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “It’s the eyes. They tell all.”

  He took both my hands in his. “Take a chance on me, Abbie. I love you.”

  He’d said the L word. I hadn’t begged for his love. He was offering it freely. Tears formed in my eyes. Finally, I breathed. Why not take a chance and accept? Even the Tarot had urged me toward love today.

  I gathered my courage. “I love you, too. We’ll try.”

  He let out a whoop and leaped up on the bench. “Finalmente mia!”

  I laughed and cried at the same moment. “I promise I won’t kill you this time.”

  Sean jumped down, his expression serious as he wrapped his arms around me in a tight embrace. “Oh, please do your best to kill me, babe. I love how you kill me. But this time around, I get to go first.” His hot eyes promised me as much passion and commitment as I had shown him only a few nights ago.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go find a bed and start working on killing each other.”

  He pulled me toward the corner of the park to catch a passing cab.