My redheaded teacher taught us about the great composers. Here is what I remember: Bach was a scrolled mahogany computer wearing a little wig. Mozart just farted all the time. Beethoven was deaf and had thunder for hair. Wagner was a Nazi and he had hooves instead of feet. Stravinsky bore the mark of the beast on his forehead. Aaron Copland was cut up for steaks by the National Beef Council and Tchaikovsky was a marzipan baby. John Cage had sex with a piano for five minutes in the middle of the stage at Carnegie Hall and at the end all of New York applauded.
More intriguingly, she told us the story of a man who painted a musical staff on an aquarium and put a goldfish in the aquarium and then sat in front of it with a flute and played whatever note the goldfish swam. “Oh great,” I thought. “We’re all goldfish, and some dick with a flute is playing every move we make.”
She showed us grainy black-and-white footage of Marian Anderson performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and her voice had such a marrowy, everywhere-at-once sound to it that my face twisted up listening and the wind went out of me with a whoosh. It was an awful sound, like God.
When Marian Anderson first sang for Sibelius, in the same house where he would one day burn a symphony, he cried out, “My roof is too low for you!” and called for his wife to bring champagne instead of coffee. When I read that, I remembered Truenessia standing in our midst with that same call for champagne inside her, a voice that was more than a voice, a voice that was in a duet with its own happiness. Telling us to think ourselves higher.
Our chorus had the same problem as America: too many white people. Everyone tried out, but an overwhelming majority of white girls made it every year. So the question was whose place did you take, and what was her name, and how did she sound.
I mean, I sang “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” for my audition—in a man’s key. We weren’t chosen because we were good. We were chosen because we were interchangeable, because a status quo emerged from us instead of a real song.
Once you saw these things you couldn’t shut your eyes to them, and once you started thinking about them you couldn’t stop—even if your understanding was poor, even if your intelligence regarding them was limited. “He had come to the stage when one realizes how difficult playing is going to be, but one cannot go back and not be musical, that is how one hears things and there is no help for it.” Rebecca West said that.
After high school, I sometimes thought about Truenessia. In class, I listened to her as I might have looked at her paper: because she always had the right answer.
Though I’ve noticed teachers often don’t like the students who always have the right answers—don’t want them to raise their hands, don’t want them to call out. As we practiced, I watched the line that went singing between her and my redheaded teacher, that tense and tacit agreement that Truenessia would not use her full power.
My second teacher was different. She gave me and my sister lessons in the afternoon, and she was not fragile at all. She looked like an olive or middle C, and she had a velvety plush all over her which I saw as the fat on her notes. A low, burnished, brass-lamp light came out of her, and a steady flame of song existed right at the center. She hugged us when we stepped into her house, which was washed and sunshiny and smelled of vanilla, and it was such a relief to let our sixty-pound bookbags drop down on her immaculate carpet.
I could never decide whether she was lovely herself, or whether she was just attended by lovely images. I thought of a pomegranate, a rosy skin around chambers of notes. I thought of a brocade chair, of tooled leather, a hummingbird’s throat, a glowing baby grand, a gilt mirror, a gazing ball, a peacock feather, a row of encyclopedias, a red-and-gold opera house.
She looked like she knew where Prague was, which at that moment in time I did not.
When I first met her she was singing the role of Madame Flora in The Medium, an operatic psycho who drinks too much and thinks ghosts are trying to touch her and lets loose dramatic swollen floods of song whenever she opens her mouth. I saw her dressed for the stage, robed and tasseled and finger-cymbaled, wearing slashes of makeup across her cheeks. I pictured her in a silk turban with a jewel set in the middle of it, which was the way she looked at me.
Right away she told me I was Stuck in My Head Voice. “You’re singing down into yourself,” she told me. “That’s why no one can hear you.” The problem, of course, is that I was a writer.
Singing down into yourself was called vocal masturbation, and you weren’t supposed to do it, even though in literature there were postmodernists running around all over the place wanking themselves into recursive frenzies and getting awards for it. In singing, though, there was no place for people who were filling whole pages with the word HAHA or not letting themselves use the letter e or turning to the reader and saying oh hello, I see you there, reading my book naked in your bedroom.
Being a writer meant my voice was in a different place. There was no rhyme or reason as to why I could make this sound and not the other. Always I felt that I was writing to the tune of some music that I learned very early and did not quite remember.
It was instructive not to be able to learn something. I broke my head trying to crack the problem of it. I stood next to her week after week and felt like Helen Keller, with my teacher writing a word on the palm of my hand as water ran over it, and I could not connect the two though the water was cold and clear and sometimes I came close.
She hired a soundproof room for me once, with a piano in it, and I had my lesson there. It felt completely safe, as if she had hired an eggshell to hold me, and suddenly, I was no longer afraid of what came out of my mouth. But you can’t always sing in a soundproof room.
She diagnosed my sister as a lyric soprano—an angelic term, the shape and strummed color of a harp. In contrast, she suspected that I might be a “torch singer.” This was a polite way of saying that in its lower registers my voice had a horny, mooing quality. My rendition of “Stormy Weather” made it clear why, in fact, my man had gone away: because he was frightened of the sounds I was making.
I thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday that I realized a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. It could be an ingenuity—in the same way some writers wrote books that coursed between the boulders of what they couldn’t do, and went faster, tumbled over, fell in rills and rushed breathingly over the stones.
The great singers were also the great interpreters. She had just a single octave, and she made it her lifelong subject.
I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.
I was sixteen years old and I wanted to die. Life was so unbearable, I had to wake up so early every morning and sit at a vandalized desk and learn about the history of Europe and the genetics of pea plants and the female reproductive system, and none of it had anything to do with me. When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it. Trees in pain, lit windows in pain, Wednesday nights in pain. Pianos flaming with pain, and the scale sliding up into a cry.
My teacher worried about me, she thought perhaps it was something at home. “How are things . . . at home,” she would ask, in a voice that sang with something else when she was speaking, with care.
What could I tell her? That it wasn’t a home at all, but a rectory where a priest had died in bed; that his unfulfilled ghost walked the halls; that it was a hopeless house, a house that was living out a labor of hell, day after day the same struggle?
My older sister dreamed of the devil there. He swooped out of her closet on leather wings and told her he would never leave her alone. My younger sister used to sit in the bath motionless, with the water pulled up over her knees and a bar of soap in her mouth
. Even today she cannot explain why.
At times the house seemed made of screaming, and I roamed it looking for a cell of silence, a single hidden rest in that thunderous and warlike score.
It was hard to be in love there, to experiment with my hair, to put posters up on the walls, to dot my i’s with hearts, to listen to the music I really liked. I felt too afraid to buy lipstick, I was not allowed to show my shoulders, and the only perfume I had was a sample of something called Mom Is Going to the Symphony. I lacked the courage or the knowledge to invent a self, which could have withstood this, that, anything.
I am not sure what I needed. I was as hungry as I was before I learned how to read. At one point I shaved my head, which Britney Spears later taught us was a sign of madness.
Sex would probably have helped, but the only thing I was having sex with then was the intolerable sadness of the human condition, which sucked so much in bed. It was always playing the Requiem Mass when we were doing it, and its D was very minor indeed.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had the “Lacrimosa” stuck in my flesh instead of my head, fragmented and repeating and never quite finishing, moving my arms and legs to its rhythms. It made me walk so slowly that sometimes I forgot I was walking at all and just fell down from a standing position.
Some days I couldn’t sing one note. Some days I opened my mouth to begin my exercises and an involuntary injured yowl came out, like I was the tail of a cat and someone had stepped on me. When that yowl made its appearance, my teacher would tell me to lie down on the floor and remember my breathing.
Singers were different because alone among people, they had been taught the right way to breathe. Their breath was a participation, a light lunch to give them strength, a bite of the bigger breath. You might have wanted to drop dead, but you couldn’t, because music was asking you one more time to fill up your lungs the way it had taught you.
I always had trouble learning what music wanted to teach me, though. One morning I took a hundred Tylenol, having looked up “household poisons” on the internet and chosen the first one I could find. Everything grew brighter, I seemed to levitate off the bed, and then I went and told my parents, who bundled me in the car and set out for the hospital.
My father, tight about the mouth, turned back to me and said, “I just want to thank you for ruining our anniversary.” I apologized, shielding my skinned eyes from the light. I had forgotten, or else I was the kind of daughter who never would have known.
When they slid the tube down my throat and began to pump the charcoal into me, I turned on my side and barfed in a single swoop of black eloquence, as if this were a film and the cinematography had suddenly transcended itself. I flowed and froze into a perfect composition. The camera, somewhere above me, connected with every point of my face.
The next morning I woke up to see three visitors standing in the doorway of my room like carolers. They were members of some religious organization, and after a brief awkward speech about how much God valued my life, they gave me what appeared to be a secondhand pink teddy bear with a light-up heart, the perfect cure for a sixteen-year-old girl who had just tried to kill herself. Examining it after they left, squeezing it so that its stupid little heart lit up again and again, I was astonished to still find myself in possession of a sense of humor.
My father came too, and sat in an unyielding metal chair against the wall and talked, his voice quieter and more targeted at me than I had ever heard it. He said, “The last time I tried to do it . . .” and the rest floated away. The gentleness of the words was so lovely, the tone, the undulations, the caress. He sounded like a wave in a woodcut.
I stayed in the hospital for a while, attending therapy with a group of other kids, including a skeletal nine-year-old with very fine fur all over her body who told me sorrowfully that she had been shut up there because she was a genius, she could make a violin do whatever she wanted.
I don’t remember much about the therapy itself, except that there was a room where we were all supposed to make bad art for one hour every afternoon. The hospital was under the impression that making bad art would soothe us. The nine-year-old and I exchanged looks.
I was telling more jokes than usual, and I was wearing my glasses for once. “She’s like Daria!” a boy named Patrick cried, delighted. He was there because he was obsessed with his neighbor. “I just know that she and I will always be in each other’s lives,” he said serenely, as we sat in a circle of chairs, and then out of nowhere he began to cry. The day I left and would not be coming back he curled up on the sofa at the back of the art room and turned his face to the wall in seeming despair, and refused to say good-bye.
There was a song in him too, the short discordant chorus of one, looping and looping until he couldn’t contain it. There on the sofa, he shook.
When I came back to school a few weeks later, it was very close to Christmas and time for caroling. The nicest part of caroling was going around to all the fine rich houses of St. Louis, houses that still dreamed of a future where St. Louis was a major city, and drinking wassail and eating chestnuts and wearing black woolen coats under the snow and the stars, which fell together. That winter more than any other, I loved singing those minor-key songs: holly and ivy, three ships and three kings, all the birds I could name.
After the caroling was over, my redheaded teacher told me to think about not coming back to chorus next year, which shocked me so much that I couldn’t respond. My heart flew out of me like a red cardinal, and then my parents told me we would be moving to Cincinnati that summer anyway, maybe because of what I had done, I didn’t know, and that was the end of that—that was the end of singing.
Still, it was too late: voice had walked into every corner of my life; it drew my head up toward the ceiling on a string. In the clocks on my walls it kept time. “Sharp, sharp,” it said when I spoke.
You know it took me so long to write this piece because I kept trying to make it beautiful and finally I just had to shake myself by the scruff of the neck until a more natural sort of grunting came out. You can’t make something sound beautiful. It’s either beautiful or it’s not.
Of all the opera singers, I liked Maria Callas the most because her voice was capable of being downright appalling. If Ella Fitzgerald stole from the horns, Maria Callas stole from the barnyard—from the goose, from the hog, from the bullfrog. At times she sublimely approaches the sound of the chicken impersonator; at times a bok-bok almost emerges. On a continuum of all animal noises, she is the furthest point, which is perfection.
“Open up the barn door in the back of your head.”
The funny thing was, even though my voice was so ugly, it wasn’t suited to sing the ugly songs any more than the pretty ones. And after all, I did prefer the church songs that my sister and I sang at Mass on Sundays, in a small alcove full of the solemn red candles that you could light for a dollar, while my father performed the age-old ritual in a gold dress. At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve he sang “O Holy Night” with us. His voice was a pleasure to listen to after some priests, who sounded like all the juice had been sucked out of them by large carnal mosquitoes. Priests are the worst singers in the world, except my father.
There is something easy about singing harmony with your family—even I could do it. The sweetest part is when you come back to the home note after diverging all throughout the hymn, and you sing it in a unison that is closer than other people’s. When you come back to the home note, you are hoping to achieve complete overlap. If you sing in perfect tune your sounds will disappear into each other, and for a minute you will have no sense of your own borders. You could lose yourself forever if you did this every day, but once a year on Christmas it was all right.
My teachers taught me to abandon the final consonant, so that certain songs never ended, so that you walked out of the room and into the sunlight with the song still continuing behind you.
Some unresolved chords I have heard I swear I can still feel—somewhere inside me, I a
m waiting for them to finish.
I left singing behind, but it does stay with you. At night, my body tries to go to the opera. On Sundays, my body tries to go to Mass.
My sister stayed on the home note, and she never walked outside of the church. She will take fresh breaths of the cathedral as long as she lives, and empty her dead breaths out into it, and in the midst of all that lofted air, her voice will keep climbing, surrounded by its angels and the arches of their wings.
Why could I never do it? Because I sang down into myself, because I was a writer.
“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet.
More music than even music to me is what has been written about it.
Why could I never do it? Because I keep a cat. A cat is a kind of externalized thinking, another intelligence in the house, which prowls.
But some people keep a canary.
15
I AM A PRIEST FOREVER
Priestdaddy Page 19
