State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  “Look who’s up!” Barbara said.

  “You were leaving,” Marina said, but very little sound came out. She coughed, trying to reset her vocal cords which had been stripped from vomiting. “You were leaving.” She found the bathrobe sheet folded on the foot of the bed and pulled it around her.

  “I was going to, but you got sick so fast. It really went right to work on you. I thought I should stay just to make sure you didn’t fall and hit your head on the toilet, anything like that. But you’re better, right? I can tell just by looking at you.”

  “I am,” Marina said. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the person who had so recently poisoned her, nor could she deny that the poison had improved her circumstances.

  “I’ve never read this article,” Barbara said, holding up the journal. “It’s fascinating, even the science parts which I really don’t follow. I kept thinking about how lucky it was that things worked out so that I was sitting in your hotel room for a couple of hours. I have to tell you, I really didn’t understand Annick’s work at all before this. To think of being able to wait and have your children whenever you want them, forty, fifty—sixty even, that would be amazing.” Barbara stopped and looked at her hostess. “You know, I’ve never asked you, do you have children?”

  “I do not,” Marina said. The air conditioning had been turned up to high and she was starting to shiver in the cold. “I’d like to get dressed now.” For the first time in days she was hungry.

  “Oh sure, of course.” Barbara got up from her chair. “Do you mind if I borrow this? I know Jackie would want to read it.”

  “Fine,” Marina said.

  “Try the dresses on and let me know which one you like.” Barbara stopped at the door. “I really am so glad it all worked out and that you’re better. I’ll tell the shaman, he’ll be so pleased. We’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven, alright?”

  But she didn’t mean it as a question. Before Marina had a chance to answer, Barbara Bovender and the New England Journal of Medicine were gone.

  Five

  The point of an evening at Teatro Amazonas was not so much to see an opera as it was to see an opera house. They had tickets for Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but only because there had to be tickets for something. The building itself was the performance, the two long marble staircases curving up in front, the high blue walls piped with crisp white embellishments, the great tiled dome that must have been torn from a Russian palace by a monstrous storm and blown all the way to South America, or so a tourist had told Marina one morning when she stopped to take a picture of it with her phone. There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

  “The natives swear that nobody built it,” Barbara said, taking the tickets out from her tiny black lacquered evening bag. “They say it just happened.”

  Jackie nodded. It was the version of which he most approved. “They say it was brought down in a space ship for some prince because this was the only place he could have sex.”

  Barbara Bovender was wearing a short ivory-colored dress that showed the full length of her leg, a shameless expanse of tanned calf and thigh that was exaggerated by a very high pair of evening sandals. It was a dress she had first offered to Marina and Marina had declined. Every dress Barbara had brought over in her tapestry bag was missing some essential piece of fabric: the front or the back or the skirt, leaving Marina to decide which part of herself she could best afford to leave uncovered. The ivory dress had a modest neckline and long sleeves but was short enough to embarrass a third-grader. In the end she settled on a long straight dress of dark gray silk that left bare her arms and back because Barbara consented to lend her a wrap, even though she said it ruined the lines. Once Marina’s fever had broken and the vomiting had stopped, she was in fact grateful, not only for her shaman cure (though she wished she had taken a vaccine for hepatitis A before leaving on her trip) but for the loan of an inappropriate dress and the chance to go to the opera. She appreciated having a reason to scrub beneath her fingernails, to leave her room in the evening, to listen to music. What’s more, Mrs. Bovender came back to her hotel before the performance to pin up Marina’s hair and apply her eyeliner as if she were a bride. Marina had had many friends in her life who could recite the periodic table from memory but not since high school had she had a friend with a particular talent for hair. When Barbara was through with her considerable work she led Marina to the mirror so that she could be overwhelmed by the results, and Marina, who didn’t remember looking as beautiful on her wedding day, obliged. “You have to make a point of looking nice every now and then,” Barbara said, clamping a significant gold cuff around Marina’s wrist. “Believe me, if you don’t do it down here then everything is lost.”

  When the three of them moved through the lobby, the crowds of opera goers turned to watch them pass. Jackie, slightly stoned, with his lightly tinted glasses and glossy hair, looked like a man who was likely to arrive with two women. He wore a white linen shirt with white embroidery down the front, a surfer’s version of formal wear. Marina was only sorry to think that this beauty she was doubtlessly incapable of replicating was being spent on the Bovenders. After all, Mr. Fox enjoyed the opera. It wasn’t so unreasonable to think he could have visited her here. She imagined the weight of her hand resting inside his arm.

  The usher unlocked the door to their box with a heavy brass skeleton key that he wore around his neck on a velvet cord. He made a slight bow to each of them while distributing the programs. The three of them had eight red velvet chairs to choose from. Marina leaned over the brass railing on their balcony to watch the prosperous citizens of Manaus find their way to their seats. The inside of the house was a wedding cake, every intricately decorated layer balanced delicately on the shoulders of the one beneath it, rising up and up to a ceiling where frescoed angels parted the wandering clouds with their hands. When the chandeliers began to dim, Jackie put his hand on his wife’s thigh and she crossed her other leg over to pin him there. Marina turned her attention down to the orchestra. With a face of pure serenity, Barbara leaned towards Marina and whispered, “I love this part.” Marina didn’t know what part she meant, and didn’t ask, but when the house was dark and the overture rose up to their third-tier balcony she understood completely. Suddenly every insect in Manaus was forgotten. The chicken heads that cluttered the tables in the market place and the starving dogs that waited in the hopes that one might fall were forgotten. The children with fans that waved the flies away from the baskets of fish were forgotten even as she knew she was not supposed to forget the children. She longed to forget them. She managed to forget the smells, the traffic, the sticky pools of blood. The doors sealed them in with the music and sealed the world out and suddenly it was clear that building an opera house was a basic act of human survival. It kept them all from rotting in the unendurable heat. It saved their souls in ways those murdering Christian missionaries could never have envisioned. In these past few days of fever Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her. She knew the story of Orpheus, but it wasn’t until the singing began that she realized it was the story of her life. She was Orfeo, and there was no question that Anders was Euridice, dead from a snake bite. Marina had been sent to hell to bring him back. Had Karen been able to leave the boys, she would have been Orfeo. It was the role she had been born to play. But Karen was in Minnesota, and Marina’s mi
nd was filled with Anders now, their seven years of friendship, the fifty hours a week they spent charting lipids, listening to the rise and fall of each other’s breath.

  Barbara opened up her tiny purse and handed Marina a Kleenex. “Blot in a straight line beneath your eyes,” she whispered.

  A woman sang the role of Orfeo in a baggy toga, her hair slicked back and caught beneath a crown of gilded leaves. She stood there center stage, a lyre in her arms to cover her breasts, and sang her sorrow to the chorus.

  Jackie leaned across his wife. “Why is it a woman?” he whispered to Marina. Marina dabbed her nose and bent in to tell him that the alternative was to find a castrato for whom the part was originally written, but a hand reached between them and thumped Jackie on the shoulder with two hard taps.

  “Quiet,” the woman’s voice said.

  Marina and the two Bovenders straightened their spines as if the same small voltage had run up the carved chair legs and through the velvet seats. They began to turn, the three of them together, but the hand came back between Barbara and Marina and pointed to the stage. That was how they watched the rest of the opera, their eyes forward and their entire consciousness turned behind them to focus on Dr. Swenson.

  Dr. Swenson! Back from the jungle and here at the opera with no announcement at all. And now they were made to wait, not to get out of their seats like reasonable people, step into the stairwell or go down to the lobby to begin the conversation that should have been started weeks ago. At first Marina had thought about how she would feel once she saw Dr. Swenson, but the longer she had stayed in Brazil the more she came to consider her chances of finding her to be hopeless. The scenarios she had run in her mind involved going home to tell Karen and Mr. Fox that she had failed. Euridice was behind Orfeo as they trudged the long road up from the underworld, Euridice constantly harping, complaining, her lovely soprano voice turned into a droning saw—Why won’t you look at me? Why don’t you love me? Dear God, even in her enormous beauty she was unbearable. Marina fixed her eyes forward and willed herself with everything in her not to turn around. She noticed that Jackie’s hand was no longer sandwiched between his wife’s thighs and that they were both staring at the stage with great concentration, no doubt wondering if they had properly aired the apartment, made the bed, returned all the lacy scraps of underwear to their proper drawers. Marina, who had folded the shawl in her lap once the lights went down because it was less than perfectly cool in this third-tier box, considered the visage of her naked shoulders and back that were presently obstructing Dr. Swenson’s view of the stage, the complicated twist of her hair held in place with two black sticks ornamented with tiny gold fans as if she were a Chinese princess. She imagined herself in a hospital room, sitting at a patient’s bedside in her dark gray silk, and suddenly Dr. Swenson came into the room behind her. I was paged, Marina said to her, trying to explain the lack of fabric in her dress. I’ve been at the opera.

  Her own fear surprised her most, the dull thumping deep in her bowels that was associated with the instruction that she might now open her test booklet and begin. Or even later, being called on in Grand Rounds, Dr. Singh, if you would then explain to us why the numbness persists. Marina would have expected anger, confrontation. It wouldn’t matter that someone was singing, that everyone around them would hear her. I want you to tell me what happened to Anders! was what she had planned to say. What a thought. She had nothing to say to Dr. Swenson. She was waiting to hear what Dr. Swenson had to say to her. Dr. Singh, of course I remember, you blinded that child in Baltimore. The sweat under her arms came down her rib cage in an unimpeded line, and because of the way the dress was cut, fastened behind her neck and low across her back, it did not pool into a stain until it was nearly at her waist. Orfeo could not take it another minute, the badgering, the chilling doubt. Isn’t it proof enough that I’ve come to hell for you? he could have said. Couldn’t you trust my love and wait another twenty minutes while I navigate this narrow path? But no, it didn’t work that way. He had to see her. He had to reassure her of his love. He had to shut her up. He turned to his beloved and in doing so he killed her all over again, sending her down to that pit of endless sleep where the story had first begun.

  With everything in her, Marina willed the singers to stop singing, the musicians to put down their instruments in recognition of the unbearable anxiety emanating from the third tier. Such is the stuff of dreams. It wasn’t enough that in this opera the dead were alive and then dead again due to the botched efforts of the protagonist, there were still more reversals of fortune and a very long dance segment to endure, but the ending did at last arrive. Marina and the two Bovenders applauded violently, all the repressed energy of waiting finally able to release itself into their slapping hands. “Brava!” Jackie called when the mezzo came forward on the stage.

  “It was hardly as good as all that,” Dr. Swenson said behind them.

  As if that sentence were their permission, they stood and turned, the three of them, Dr. Swenson’s chorus. “Probably not,” Barbara said, as if this were a conversation. “But it’s just so lovely to go to the opera.”

  “Great seats,” Jackie said.

  Marina, who was considerably taller in Mrs. Bovender’s shoes, neglected to take Dr. Swenson’s height into account and so looked directly over Dr. Swenson’s head when she turned. She saw another person in the box, a man in a suit who stayed beneath the eaves. Milton mouthed to her a silent hello.

  Barbara put her arm around Marina’s shoulder and pulled her close. The gesture could have been seen as possessive or loving and yet Marina suspected it was really an attempt by the younger woman to remain standing. She could feel Barbara Bovender’s heartbeat as she pushed in hip to hip, rib to rib. A low current of trembling rumbled between them and she could not be sure which of them was the source. “Annick, you know my friend Dr. Singh,” Barbara said.

  “Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said, and offered her hand, neither confirming nor denying what she knew. The last thirteen years had not touched Dr. Swenson, except that her skin, which had seen very little sun in those Baltimore winters, was now quite tan, and her hair was more white than gray. It still floated around her broad, open face in the same disorganized cloud Marina remembered. She was blue-eyed, bright, her small hand round and soft in Marina’s own. Her clothing was wrinkled, sensible, making no concessions for a night at the opera. It seemed possible that she had come directly from the dock. This woman who had fixed the course of Marina’s life looked for all the world like somebody’s Swedish grandmother on a chartered tour of the Amazon.

  “I’m very glad—” Marina began.

  “Sit, sit,” Dr. Swenson said, and sat herself to set the example. “She’s going to sing the Villa-Lobos.”

  “The what?” Barbara said.

  Dr. Swenson answered her with a tremendous glare and took the fourth chair in the first row next to Marina while the soprano, the tedious and beautiful Euridice, put a modest hand to her breast and bent her head forward to receive the maelstrom of applause. The Villa-Lobos, Brazil’s singular contribution to the classical repertoire, was considerably more beautiful than the Gluck, or the soprano was inclined to sing the vocalise with more tenderness than she had been able to bring to her previous role, and for the briefest moment Marina was able to forget what was behind her (Anders’ death) and all that there was still to come (the now inevitable trip into the jungle with her professor) and she listened. It took eight cellos and a human voice to quiet her mind.

  “Now that was worth coming in for,” Dr. Swenson said, when finally, after fifteen minutes of thunderous applause, the soprano reluctantly tore herself from the proscenium. As they picked up their programs and opened the door to the box, Dr. Swenson addressed Marina directly. “What did you think of the Gluck, Dr. Singh?”

  Tell us about the patient, Dr. Singh. Marina stopped herself. “I’m afraid I’m not a good judge this evening. I was distracted
.”

  Dr. Swenson nodded as if this was the correct answer. “I feel certain it’s better that way. The Gluck in one’s memory is always more satisfying than the Gluck itself.” She turned and led the way down the hall to the staircase and the four others followed behind. Milton took Marina’s arm for the stairs and she was grateful for the kindness. She spent very little time in high heels and she could feel a sway in

  her ankles.

  “No one was expecting her?” Marina said. She made her voice quiet but the crowds were pouring into the hallways now and filling up the space around them, everyone chattering to one another, to their cell phones. The air clicked with the hard, bright syllables of Portuguese spoken by Brazilians well pleased with their evening out.

  “There is no expecting Dr. Swenson,” Milton said, tightening his grip on Marina’s arm as two young girls cut through the crowd at a gallop pace, their party dresses flipping up behind them to show white underskirts as they took the stairs three at a time. “But there is suspecting. She doesn’t like to miss the opening of the season. I didn’t take any bookings for tonight though there were plenty of people who wanted to come in a car. That is not because I expected her, but because I suspected.”

  Marina had lost sight of Dr. Swenson but not the Bovenders, who were a dozen steps ahead. Mrs. Bovender especially was a virtual lighthouse. “I would have appreciated you passing your suspicions along.”

  “I might have made you worry for nothing then. She doesn’t always come. She doesn’t always do anything.”