I wrapped up my killer aria with pianissimi, soft sounds that nevertheless traveled to all corners of the auditorium. I stood unmoving as custom demanded, not breaking character, as the audience applauded thunderously. Nailed it. From this point on, I didn’t have a huge amount to do—except fight with my father and talk Radames into fleeing Egypt with me. Oh, and die with him in a sealed tomb after he got caught telling me where the army would be next. Oops.
I did my big duet with my father, Amonasro. Ironically, the base-baritone singing the part was an old flame of mine, James Haverhill. He maybe derived a little too much pleasure when the scene called for him to fling me to the ground and declare I was no daughter of his.
Then Václav and I had our lovers’ tryst and I convinced him to leave Egypt. It was all downhill from there, as we were overheard and he was hauled before the officials and condemned to death. Soon we were singing together in the tomb as the air gave out, while Daylia as Amneris sang above the tomb. She was still up to her tricks. Václav and I did our best not to get thrown off by her.
When we took our bows, I fantasized sticking my foot out and tripping her as she passed by for her solo bow. No one was willing to hold her hand during the group bow, although the other cast members tried to make it look like an accidental lack of coordination rather than the deliberate rejection it was. We were done, so I didn’t have to care.
I went straight to my dressing room to get out of the ridiculous costume and heavy wig and the ton of stage makeup. After the costume had been collected by the costume department—they never trusted us with their valuable creations, which they needed for other performers—I unlocked the drawer where I’d put my purse. I could leave now, but Daylia’s last-ditch efforts to throw off the timing had me steaming. The need for food had built all over again.
I’d consult my Tarot. Try to calm myself. Try to let reason prevail.
I laid the cards out and moved them according to the rules. The first card I drew was the Temptation card. I’d been tempted to swat Daylia, and I’d been tempted to binge. But shouldn’t the cards tell me about my future, not my past? What would the temptation be? Sean, obviously, but he was back in Baltimore right now. This card was all about food.
The next was the Moon card. I liked the stylized image of a moon with a face in its circle, but the Moon card meant an error. My error? Someone else’s? Of course it meant food. Did I have the strength to resist making an error?
On my third draw, I got the Hunger card.
I could take a hint. The Tarot had nothing positive to tell me tonight. The cards weren’t helping. I put them back into their bag and collected my few possessions.
I detoured to the break room again and bought a couple more candy bars. I ate one immediately. I threw a few more into my satchel for later, to tide me over.
What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just hungry, hungry, hungry. At this moment, the audience was still filing out, rushing across town to catch their trains, or fighting their way out of the parking garages. Daylia would by now have been whisked away in her chauffeured car. She was always the total diva. No fear of running into her here and being overcome by the urge to stab her with a cheap plastic cafeteria knife.
I had no social plans in this town since I hadn’t expected to be here. Might as well go to my hotel.
James caught up with me as I headed toward the stage door. “Where are you going?”
I replied blandly, “For a walk. I hear that’s how a famous comedian lived to be a hundred. He walked after his shows.”
He said, “I know who you’re talking about and it’s a lie. He was screwing every woman he met. That’s why he lived so long. He used it. How about we get together tonight?”
I rolled my eyes and didn’t even pretend I misunderstood. James and I had a history. Being with him was briefly tempting. I wouldn’t be alone. No. Bad idea. “Go call your wife and have phone sex with her.”
James had the gall to laugh at me. “Your loss.”
I made a face at him and turned away.
As I continued toward the exit, I realized it had been a close call. For an instant I’d considered sleeping with James tonight. Seriously. I had a free hotel suite courtesy of the opera house, and I didn’t have to go back to Baltimore until morning. Sex with James would have been fun. But I was done with him, and I was long done with casual hookups. I didn’t knowingly mess with married men, either.
What a day. Turned down at lunch and turning down someone else as a nightcap. Not to mention the Merrill insult and Daylia’s hijinks. I had nothing to do but go to bed and no interest in going there alone. Maybe I could find a late-night restaurant and have a good meal after all the day’s drama. Or better yet, a grocery store or one of those chain pharmacies that carried lots of food. I could buy myself a room full. I always asked them to double bag what I bought, and I put some cosmetic item or bottles of water or shampoo on display at the top of the bag. Just in case I bumped into somebody I knew. Not that I could hide being fat from anyone, but I disguised my food runs as much as I could. Sometimes I bought a tote bag to put the food in, or a backpack. I’d pay fifteen dollars for ice cream and thirty dollars for a backpack to hide it in, to make sure no one saw me with that much ice cream.
Binge eating was my deepest, darkest secret.
Chapter 5
People who didn’t binge eat thought it meant overeating. True binge eating was far, far worse. It was a compulsion to devour a mountain of food in a hurry. Entire cakes. Entire bags of cookies. Chips by the bagful, too. I got very hungry before and after a performance, but that was different. I never allowed myself to eat before, because digestion could interfere with having the strength to send out loud sounds. Digestion could send out nasty loud sounds all its own. But when the opera was over, I was ready for calories.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew very well that eating late and eating a lot were the one-two punches of weight gain. People were supposed to eat like manual laborers—pretty it up and call them farmers—a big meal in the morning, then tapering off as the day went by. Opera singers couldn’t do that. First of all, opera singers seldom saw mornings. We rose late so we could be in top shape to do our work in the afternoon or usually the evening—and sometimes, deep into the night. Even short operas like La Traviata and La Bohème got padded with intermissions, so we’d still be singing at ten-thirty at night. And we daren’t eat heavily before singing.
After the show was over, and the applause and the hugging among the cast and crew ended, the theater emptied out. It felt as if a village was being taken apart. Or like a carnival leaving town, actually. Something that was lively and vibrant and mysterious and dramatic and fun, and now it had ended and was being packed up.
Even knowing that the next night there could be another opera and another audience, I typically became melancholy thinking about how the synergy of the shared musical experience dissipated. I wanted to hold onto all that energy, that community of music lovers. I especially wanted to hold on to the high I got from singing. Singing emotional songs, being involved in a heart-wrenching drama that often ended in tragedy, raised my emotions. I loved it.
Once the show had ended, I was alone and revved up. My nerves were excited from all the emotion and the applause and being with other people achieving very difficult artistic feats at the height of our talent. Or screwing up. With live performances, there was always the risk of tripping over scenery, falling into the pit, going up on my next line, or the ultimate, cracking on an exposed note. It was not enough to bask in the satisfaction of a job well done, or of an artistic challenge splendidly overcome. I had been in a fever from the fear I would make some terrible error. Afterward, whether I’d triumphed or failed, there was nowhere to put that energy. Go home and just go to bed? No way.
Yet bar-hopping or clubbing was a problem because there was so much music in my head already. Also, those places attracted some fairly skeevy individuals. The best after-event was a hangout or party at someon
e’s place, where we could drink or not, where there was no music at all so we could calm the ringing in our heads, and where we could talk over and dissect every bit of the performance. Sometimes we would leave as a group and find an all-night coffee shop nearby. We usually got kicked out of the theater quickly since the management did not want to pay the union staff for extra hours if we didn’t leave promptly.
The very best thing to do after an opera was to go home with someone you loved and have sex. That was nearly impossible most of the time. Famous opera stars of last century, such as Roberta Peters or Risë Stevens, could live in New York all their lives and sing only at the Met. None of my generation could do that anymore. We had to travel to wherever a little bit of opera was scheduled. If I lived in Germany, with its forty plus opera houses, it would be easy. Take a train a couple of hours and get off and sing at the local opera house. A couple hours to go home, and I’d be back with my family. Not that I had a family yet.
In town after town, I’d walked in groups all around the public squares and fountains, visited the sections of the city known for lively nightlife, and sometimes holed up in hotel lobbies or bars. Anything to keep the party going, to keep the sense of community alive. We were in this together. Hanging out together strengthened the bonds and helped us when we performed. We also shared a ton of industry gossip. We swapped names of good vocal coaches, names of good agents, and names of intendants in European houses and general managers here in the U.S. We talked about vocal techniques. We worried about getting colds or worse from all the airplane travel we did.
After a long, difficult sing, we sometimes barely talked at all. Walking was handy then. We saw the city when it was quiet and we didn’t have to interact with anybody while we calmed down from the high of performing.
Sometimes I didn’t want to spend another minute near singers who elbowed me out of the limelight, or more likely, tried to cover my voice when they shouldn’t. Like tonight. It was pretty obvious when someone tried to pull stunts. I refused to buddy up with that type of person when the show was over. Which left me all alone sometimes.
To have the guts to perform at all, we needed to be egotists, sure of ourselves. For some people, like Daylia Fedora, their ego strength got out of hand. She had shown her teeth yet again tonight. Someone somewhere should rein her in.
When I was alone in a strange city, every difficulty got magnified. Daylia. James. He and I had a thing going for a while. I thought more of myself now, or I tried to. I only wanted to have sex with someone who cared about me, instead of having sex and then fooling myself that he might care about me. James had never shown me affection. Yet if he saw me, he always came on to me. Getting married hadn’t slowed him down at all. Ironic, considering he hadn’t been all that eager to be with me when we were both free and having our fling.
I took an oath of celibacy when I decided to change my life. No more sex as recreation or sex with men who didn’t even pretend they loved me. No food binges. It left me with nothing to do but be a tourist in a strange town or try to get a good night’s sleep after getting totally revved up by a performance. If I didn’t resolve this constant tension to return to my old ways, I’d surely fall off the wagon and mess myself up all over again. I’d been going to all-night gyms of late, or making sure the hotel I stayed at had an all-night fitness center. Sometimes I had to make special arrangements to be allowed to use the center at two a.m. Expensive arrangements. But it was worth it, because when the opera was over, I knew I could return to my hotel without delay, change into my exercise clothes, and be in my own private, quiet world while I wore out my body and mind enough to sleep.
Tonight’s rush hadn’t allowed me to make arrangements, so I was at loose ends after a tough day. Food beckoned.
I had the stage door manager order me a taxi. I planned to tell the driver to go to an all-night pharmacy and wait while I stocked up. Ten years ago, when I was just out of conservatory, I’d have been looking for an all-night liquor store. Jello shots and all the fun of college drinking palled on me quickly once I was a starving artist trying to get my first singing gigs. Drinking was too expensive. It was a short-term love affair at best, along with the guy who wanted me to drink with him. Afterward, I was still trapped in the never-ending cycle of diets and overeating, as I had been since childhood. The new, improved me was trying harder than ever to kick that habit, too. But not tonight.
My cab arrived, and I went outside and walked toward it.
“Want some company?” Sean stepped out of the night.
Chapter 6
“How did you get here?” I asked, stunned, but irrationally pleased to see the man I’d been thinking about all day.
Sean grinned at me. “Amtrak.”
“Oh, that explains it perfectly.” I stood there idiotically smiling. He smiled back, obviously delighted to have surprised me.
“What are you doing here in Philly, really?” I asked.
“Chasing you,” he replied. “Thought you might need a friend all alone in a strange town.”
The cab driver interrupted our smiling contest. “You call a cab?”
I indicated the cab with my hand. “Come with me? I’m going to my hotel.”
“Sure.”
When we were in the cab, for one crazy moment I thought everything would be simple.
“You changed your mind about just being friends?” I gave him a significant look.
He shook his head. “I’ll bed down on your couch.”
I rolled my eyes. “How long have you been out of college?”
“A while.”
“Not long enough, obviously.”
Sean shrugged. “We don’t have to get involved that way. We can be buddies.”
I cocked my head at him. “Now you’re playing me.”
“No, I just didn’t want your day to end on a sour note. You being all alone in a strange town after we’d talked about how lonely it was.”
I thought about it for a moment. I’d been on a path to binge my brains out tonight and that would’ve wreaked havoc on my year-long diet. Sean coming up to surprise me was kind of baffling. He’d said he only wanted a friend. Even though I craved him as a lover, what I needed right now was a friend, someone to divert my attention and stop me from what could be a ruinous binge.
I said, “Okay, a compromise. I haven’t even had a chance to check into my hotel room. If it turns out to be a real suite, with a locking door and a separate bedroom and all—or better yet, if there’s another room available at the hotel and they’ll trade—then we’ll see.”
“We can find an all-night diner and get in a good long walk, too,” he said, looking pleased with himself.
Already, the urge to binge was clearing from my brain.
The hotel was willing to exchange my suite for two single rooms. That eased the pressure on Sean to have sex with his idol, which I was unhappily sure was a relief to him. It kept us from getting too cozy. We checked in and then started walking. It was a warm spring night and Philadelphia after hours could be quite magical. The art museum was lit up on the hill at the end of the Franklin Parkway and drew the eye as a destination. We strolled up the broad avenue, past the Barnes Foundation collection that had been moved in from the suburbs, then beyond to the little Rodin Museum, and farther along the parkway to the art museum. Neither of us ran up the famous steps. We came back on the other side of the boulevard, and detoured past the famous Franklin Institute. We continued on to admire the fabulously intricate Second Empire architecture of City Hall, which was also beautifully lit up. We didn’t talk or touch, although I itched to hold hands. A block away, we found an upscale late-night restaurant and I had a piece of coconut cake, with lots of frosting. Sean had one, too. We smiled at each other over our cake and started talking.
Sean explained how he was the cuckoo in the nest. “My parents are both science professors. Dad’s physics and Mom’s biology. They have tenure at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, where they met. They’ve never worked
anywhere else. They don’t travel. Their hobbies are all local. They don’t even have a summer cottage by a lake. Yet I, and now my sister, are both traveling the world.”
“Tell me about your sister.” I was an only child and sibling relationships fascinated me.
“She’s younger than me. She majored in Renaissance history, but once she had her M.A., she got restless with the Ph.D. program and wanted a change. I fixed her up with an interim job at the Nat Opera in New York.”
He smiled reminiscently. “That’s when I met you, remember? JC Vasquez brought you to my party celebrating my first Nat contract.”
I thought back to the reverent way he’d greeted me. I’d been interested, but he had a girlfriend at the party with him. “I do remember. I don’t think I had a chance to talk to your sister. JC cornered her and they had words. After that, she sat by herself looking miserable.”
Sean’s mouth curved. “You have a very good memory. Kathleen and JC had stuff to work out. But that’s over with and ended happily. What about you? Do you have sisters or brothers?”
I shook my head. “It’s just me and my mom. For a while, I had a stepdad, but that didn’t last. My real father died in a car accident when I was nine.” I described our life in small town, rural Maryland and how it improved dramatically when my mom moved us down to a Washington, DC, suburb and she got a good job.
“So you’re not a small town wonder,” he said.
“I don’t know about the ‘wonder’ part, but I’m both small town and suburban. I like more greenery and space than a life in the theater provides.”
“Which is another reason why you walk.”
I nodded. “Fresh air. Living things.” I told him my plan to buy a home somewhere, but not in a city, and how I hadn’t picked the where yet.
We walked back via a large detour past another of Philadelphia’s legendary tourist attractions, the Liberty Bell. As a federally run site, it was locked up behind special defenses in a building of its own but we could see it through the big glass wall. The famous meeting hall was attractively lit beside the uninteresting modern bell building. By now, my feet ached. My weight was far less than it was a year ago, but walking multiple miles on concrete was still too much for me.
Friendzoned Soprano Page 4
