Her father had grown up near the Georgia-Florida border with fifteen or sixteen siblings, natural and adopted. He was part Seminole on one side of his family and part white on the other. His father, Ryan’s great-grandfather, Valerie said, was well along in years when he married and began producing children in a frenzy. Ryan’s great-grandfather had been born into slavery, though his skin was so pale that he’d been raised for a time within the master’s family.
“My father,” she said, “he was a handsome man. The profile of the Indian on the nickel? That was his silhouette. If he walked me to school in the morning, later that day the women would come up to me. ‘Ooo, is that your father?’ His nose was straight, and his hair was wavy, and he wore it combed back.”
The concerts in the project courtyard, the Christmas lights, the father who came home from work and, still in his foundry uniform, read her the newspaper funnies—these were her memories. But her recollections existed on a margin between the sweet and the harsh. When we walked up to the entrance of her building, thinking we would peek in at the lobby through the plexiglass of the front door, or maybe press a superintendent’s buzzer with the hope of being let in, we found, as we neared, that the plexiglass was completely missing and that the lock had been removed. The low-ceilinged, unlit lobby was like an open cave. We went in, and though the outside air mingled with the indoor atmosphere, the acrid smell of urine curled at the backs of our nostrils. “It smells the same,” she said.
We turned into the elevator to ride up to her old floor. The door closed, the odor thickened; she found a cloth in her coat pocket and covered her mouth and nose. The button for her floor was broken. From the floor above, we walked into the dim stairwell and down the steps, which were gouged, as if an addict had tried, in an act of lunatic need, to score by chiseling off and selling chunks of concrete. “People killed themselves on that elevator,” she remembered, lowering the cloth from her face. “They was on whatever drugs they was on in that era.”
We knocked repeatedly at the door that had once been her family’s. A woman opened it several inches, then quickly bolted it again. We continued down the ravaged steps and outside along a path, passing under a series of sycamore trees whose branches were covered in discarded plastic bags, black sacks from corner stores, hundreds of them whisked up in the wind, caught in the limbs, and quivering like monstrous leaves.
Valerie’s older brother was sent away for robbery as a teenager, she mentioned, and at some point, either before that first incarceration or later, he started using, shooting up. Eventually purple blotches and bloody lesions appeared and spread on his skin, the skin his family had called “clean” in the winters and “dirty” in the summers because his complexion stayed light through the cold months and turned darker when he was out in the sun. Eventually he died of AIDS.
* * *
Each contestant performed two arias in the semifinals. The singer picked the first. The judges listened, conferred among themselves for about ten seconds, and chose the second piece from a short list of repertoire that the semifinalist had submitted. “‘Madamina,’” one of the judges called up to Ryan. He drank from a bottle of water and remembered to unbutton his suit jacket, which he’d planned to do if this aria was selected. He revealed a bright and glossy scarlet vest.
In the aria, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Ryan’s character, who is Giovanni’s manservant, gleefully torments one of Giovanni’s lovers by telling her about all the women his boss has seduced. The music is full of mischief, the lyrics full of comic hyperbole. The singer has hardly any option except to be theatrical, to be playful, to ham, and Ryan didn’t resist. He swayed his shoulders as he pronounced the sensuous syllables of the word “Ispagna”—in Spain alone, he sang, his boss had claimed no fewer than “a thousand and three!”
When he gave his upper body a twist to one side and the other, his jacket flapped wide open. “Country girls, chambermaids, city girls”—he celebrated Giovanni’s conquests, his red vest looking like a sign declaring unlimited lust. “Baronesses, marquises, princesses.” His resonant voice filled the far reaches of the theater, and as he ran on with his list he exuded every bit of Mozart’s unhinged exuberance. “Women of every rank, of every shape, of every age.” He swept his hands profligately through the air. “He likes them plump when the winter sets in.” Ryan sang the Italian lyrics—“Vuol d’inverno la grassotta”—with relish. “But in the summer he likes them slim.”
He fluttered his fingers manically. He tilted his hefty torso to one side. “He is not choosy, be she ugly, be she beautiful.” He shimmied and grinned. “Even the old ones he conquers.” On the climactic notes, he did a single quick gyration with his hips, leaned back with his elbow on the piano, and beamed.
* * *
The competition’s director, Gayletha Nichols, told the singers to line up. An hour and a half had crept by since Ryan’s “Madamina”; four more contestants had taken their turns, and then the judges had hidden themselves away and debated. Everyone was crowded in an area between the red-carpeted stairs curving down to the lobby and the bank of windows overlooking the plaza: singers, family, Met patrons, voice teachers, in-house photographers, a hundred and fifty people through whom Nichols navigated, her large, pillowy body draped in patterned fabric. With her round face and little glasses and ready laugh, she was the maternal figure of the contest; her soft weight seemed to absorb and slightly reduce the desperation surrounding her. Decades ago, she herself had set out to sing opera. She had trained at a top conservatory. But she’d been rescued from her ambition by the chance to discover talent that wasn’t her own, first with a regional company, then with the Met. “Sometimes there will be a tug,” she had told me. She would hear a young singer perform something that had once been part of her own repertoire. “I’ll remember what it was like to make that music.” But the feeling didn’t go any further. “There isn’t the impulse to run home and find that score. Not anymore.” She smiled ruefully. “To train to be an opera singer takes as much time as to train to be a physician. And the odds of success are frightening.” Prevailing in the contest merely allowed a singer a toehold on a new ladder to be climbed.
Plenty of winners wound up scraping away at the edges of the profession, a cruelty that waited most often for those with low voices like Ryan’s and for women whose voices had a particular power. For them, the risk of futile effort, of vain devotion, was greatest, because for them, everything that was physical and ineffable, everything in the anatomy and the mind, was known to take longer to evolve and settle, to meld and emerge into the artist’s true timbre and intensity. “Big voices take longer to cook,” Sondra Radvanovsky, a Met superstar with a substantial sound who’d won the contest in 1995 and who’d been a regional judge this year, said to me. Unlike with coloratura sopranos, whose level of lithe talent was clearly perceptible in their twenties, the potential of a voice like Radvanovsky’s or Ryan’s could be unknown till early middle age or later. For such singers, it was easy to keep thinking back to the prediction of the judges, to keep telling themselves to be patient. For them, it was easy to keep trying for too many years.
Gayletha didn’t have to raise her voice to gather the semifinalists in a row. The singers and spectators were loud with nervous chatter, but every contestant’s ears awaited any signal that the selection had been made, that the winnowing was done. Ryan lurched away from his mother. Opposite Gayletha, twenty-two bodies, in their suits and gowns, were aligned in an instant, silent and still.
“We have eight finalists this year.”
Ryan’s eyes scanned her face. He forgot manners, forgot pride; guilelessly he searched her features for some hint of whether he would be named. He fixed his eyes on hers. His hands were fists in his pockets. He kept staring.
She read out the finalists, singer by singer, pausing for applause after each one, pronouncing the names with excitement but not with so much fanfare as to punish the others who, name by name, were hearing their chances diminish, dwindle.
A soprano came sixth. A bass was seventh. His fists stayed tight, but it was finished.
When she spoke his name—with just a bit of buildup: “And last but not least…”—his fists burst from his pockets. He squatted down and sprang upward, his three hundred–plus pounds exploding into the air.
THREE
THEY CALLED ME Kindergarten Dropout,” Valerie said, laughing, as we walked around her housing project. “Because I got skipped past kindergarten. Went right into first grade.”
Later, she showed me a letter from one of her elementary school teachers. She’d received it after she graduated from high school and wrote him to say that she’d enlisted in the military. She and the teacher had corresponded occasionally over the years since grade school. He had recognized something special in her back when she was a young girl, she believed. In his brief letter, he gave his approval: with the military, she would be seeing the world.
The letter, from this man who had known her for nine months when she was a child, was like a fragile relic from the far side of a divide, a scrap that she treasured. The divide was defined by the period of enlisting and training, of being sent to California and South Korea. Before then, in high school, she had played on the basketball and volleyball teams, competed in track and field. She had kept her grades up even after her father suffered a debilitating heart attack, and even while she worked the cash register at a grocery store. She had joined the junior ROTC and risen to squadron commander, and she had applied to the Air Force Academy.
As she told it, she was accepted; she could have gone. In return for eight years of service afterward, during a time when the country seemed likely to stay out of war, she was given the promise of a Bachelor of Science degree—for a girl whose mother, from a Virginia hamlet called Saint Stephens Church, hadn’t reached as far as seventh grade, and whose father hadn’t made it to ninth. Right out of the academy, she would be appointed to the rank of second lieutenant. She would be promoted from there. But at seventeen, she didn’t like the idea of committing herself for such a long time, and she had no one to guide her. Signing up, instead, for boot camp and the Air Force’s bottom rungs seemed to make more sense. She would be free to leave after half as long. She would be keeping her options open.
She was stationed in San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, at the border of the Mojave Desert, and there, on the base, she did what the Air Force trained her to do: handle paperwork for the personnel department. She was a low-level secretary. Hangars and sheds and squat houses sprawled across the base, where the stretches of pavement led nowhere, stopping at fenced boundaries or at the ends of runways.
She met Cecil at a club nearby. He was from San Bernardino. His destiny, he told her, was to become a chef, and in the meantime, he worked at a local battery plant. She was five feet ten and beautiful, with a sleek, high-on-top hairstyle that made her yet taller, and with elegant features and a strong, honed body. He was three inches shorter, stubby, muscly, a jokester. He clowned and attached himself to her.
The dance floor was his habitat. He knew every move—not only knew, but had mastered. He moonwalked, making the floor look frictionless and his feet look like they were tugged by an unseen puppeteer. He pop-locked, undulating and suddenly paralyzing his shoulders, causing them to bend and jerk and seize in high-speed patterns that seemed inhuman, alien. Standing straight, he was short, but dancing, his height didn’t matter. He took on all sorts of contorted forms, his limbs by turns rigid and rubberized, his torso angling in multiple directions simultaneously, his neck a spring.
“He could have been a professional. He could have been one of those Michael Jackson video–type dancers. He could spin on his head, he could do the worm, but it was more than that. He was so smooth.” She said, “Cecil was always the life of the party. And we became fast friends. But I was not in love with him, and he knew it from the get-go.”
He proposed, and she told him no. He waited and asked again, this time in front of his parents. Thinking back, she felt he had trapped her with this ploy of having his mother and father in the room; she adored his parents; he left her no choice but to say yes. Suppressed anger took hold of her voice as she recounted this. Her mouth tightened, her tone sharpened; rage sat low in her throat. She added, with bitterness and bewilderment, “I was nineteen. Twenty. I had nothing else to do.”
* * *
She gave birth to Adrian and then to Ryan. A few years later, after a reenlistment, the Air Force decided that she was needed for secretarial duties in Korea. Adrian, two and a half years older than his brother, was already in school; she left the boys with Cecil, living on the San Bernardino base, while the military took her for a stint on the other side of the planet.
The first sign of trouble was that her checks, written off their joint account, began to bounce. Cecil, ever the clown, gave goofy, dismissive explanations or cooed apologies when she asked about the missing money. It happened again and again; the salary she earned in Asia, and sent home “to take care of my two boys,” was getting spent in ways that she felt helpless to figure out at a distance of six thousand miles. Because her checks were bouncing where she was stationed, a sergeant got involved, reprimanding her but eventually helping her to set up a separate account and telling her to deposit just what she thought her husband needed in the account he could access. Shortly after that, the military mail delivered divorce papers. She read Cecil’s demands for custody and child support, and guessed some of what was going on.
“Needless to say, they had to sedate me, because I was ready to swim across the Pacific. I mean sedate as in put me under. But my heat was still on high when they let me leave. I got me back to California, and I got me a room on base, because I needed to collect myself. I took a nap, and I got dressed, back into my uniform. I had my key. That was my home. I put my key in my door, and the latch was on. So I had to knock.
“‘Who is it?’ That’s what he said. And when I heard that! I told him, and he tells me, ‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ And after a minute, he opened the door. He reached out for a hug, and I moved him out of the way. I went to the back room. That was my boys’ room. They were sleeping. I had bought them one of those trundle beds, and the mattress from the trundle was out on the floor, away from the bed, and some strange child, about Ryan’s age, around four, was laying on it, and my two boys, my two babies, was sleeping together.
“I woke them up. They was excited to see Mommy, but they was still sleepy. I put them back down. I shut the door, and my husband, he was there in the hallway area. Adrian and Ryan’s room was off to one side, and then there was the master. He was blocking my way to the master. ‘Tell her to come up out of there.’ ‘Ain’t nobody here.’ ‘What you talkin’ about?’ ‘Ain’t nobody here.’ ‘Whose kid is that?’ ‘That’s the babysitter’s son. She left him here ’cause he was asleep.’ ‘Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m stupid?’
“That’s when Cecil and me started tussling, and I kicked the master door off the hinges. We tussled, and I got into the bedroom. She was in the closet. Cowering. I told her she had thirty seconds.
“None of this was because I loved him. I didn’t. It was because he was playing house with some other woman with some other child in my home. Well, she grabbed her kid and took her leave, which is when the tussling really started.
“I roughed him up. We was in the living room�
�kitchen, and there was a door there, to my left. We shut that door behind us. I roughed him up, and I went to do open heart surgery on him. I snapped. How are you going to be in my home with my children with somebody else? It was like I blacked out. He liked to think he was a chef, and we had a lot of knives. I took one of those big knives, and I was standing right there with it, ready for open heart. That’s when Ryan opened that door, crying. He said, ‘Mommy, Mommy.’ I had that knife in my hand.”
* * *
The morning after the semifinals, the eight remaining singers wended through a maze of Met passageways and gathered in a rehearsal room. The final round was next Sunday, six days away. It would be a formal concert. The theater would be packed from the front row to the upper boxes; the singers’ photos would be in the Playbill. The days between now and then would be spent with the concert’s guest conductor and the Met’s own coaches. The finalists would absorb their wisdom. They would race to incorporate the alterations they were advised to make, to lace them into their arias, note by note, so that, when next Sunday came, the audience would cry out and the judges would feel their voices burned into their minds.
And for this week, the chosen eight could imagine themselves part of the Met’s world. They could enter the building through the stage door. With the special passes they’d been given, they could glide by the guard in his interior security booth and through a waist-high wooden gate, the same gate that Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas and Ferruccio Furlanetto and Anna Netrebko had pushed open and strode through on the way to their dressing rooms.
Sing for Your Life Page 2