Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  They had to. Somehow they needed to take the prosaic buzz of sound that rose from the vocal cords—those two oscillating flaps of tissue that stretch across the throat—and transform it into music, transfigure it by channeling it to flow and bounce in calibrated ways around all the internal chambers above the cords, and off the soft membranes and the hard surfaces, and through the lips and out into the world.

  “Why don’t you come over to the mirror?”

  Ryan squeezed alongside the piano and faced his reflection in the mirror on the studio wall.

  “On this note, let’s try showing a little teeth.” Oswald returned to the voluntary. “Just a little front teeth, so you can hardly see them in the mirror. It will give this note the brightness. But keep anchored and dark in the back. And let’s think about the diaphragm, about support. We have to engage the abdominals below the belly button; you want that angled support.”

  Oswald had noticed something about Ryan, something he hoped to relieve through all his directions about teeth and diaphragm and dome and anchor: a look of bewilderment and helplessness when Ryan heard a note go awry. “It can last for five seconds,” Oswald told me, “which is a long time. You can see how concerned he is. You can see him thinking, I can’t fix this—I’m standing in front of someone important, and I can’t fix this.”

  * * *

  “It’s melancholy,” Noda said about the mood of a Michelangelo poem set to music by Wolf, one of the pieces Ryan was learning.

  “Sorry, I don’t know what ‘melancholy’ means.” Ryan was faithful to his vow, obeyed his own edict: “The only thing that’s stupid is not to ask what I don’t know.”

  Noda and another coach who’d joined them in the practice room, a German specialist wearing knee-high black suede boots, attempted a definition. “Reflective and—”

  “Dejected.”

  “Downcast.”

  “Tell me more,” Ryan said. He never forgot a definition once he’d taken it in.

  “Heavy in feeling.”

  They read through the text, the German specialist, her silver hair cropped short and black jacket cut tight, correcting: “The ch in ‘flüchten’ is too thick. Bring it forward. And the ü must be more open.” Ryan’s mind was a vault for definitions, a sieve for enunciations. She repeated herself, and finally they decided it was time for him to sing the piece. Noda played the quietly churning introductory measures, and Ryan came in. Noda cut him off.

  “Remember what the mezzo said in the forum last week, that she never sings loudly when she’s first learning a piece, because she wants to fully take in the accompaniment. There’s so much to pick up subliminally in the music if you let yourself hear it.”

  Ryan agreed, then said he was curious about something in the text. One of the lines seemed to imply that Michelangelo had been a singer—was this right?

  “No, a sculptor, a painter,” Noda said. “An architect, a poet.”

  “Okay, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t really know who he was before I looked him up online. I read a lot about his art. The Tristine, Chistine—”

  “Sistine Chapel.”

  * * *

  Pristine Italian vowels, the note-by-note repositioning of invisible anatomy, the capacity for subliminal listening—the necessity of uncountable elusive skills was preying on Ryan one day when his cell phone rang.

  He was a year into the program. His progress so far had been reasonable, if unremarkable, to Oswald’s ears; it had been sluggish to Noda’s and Zeger’s. Yet there was one exultant moment. As part of the program, he’d had his Met debut. He was given a few lines of singing in a production of Puccini’s Turandot, a love story set in a Chinese royal court. Ryan didn’t have much to do vocally, but his costume was an amalgam of the Oriental and the surreal, with a stupendous cloak and gilded talons that doubled the length of his fingers. The costume stood out even among the other figures of the palace, and for this, it seemed, the audience awarded him with an uptick of applause when he took his bow. Or maybe they clapped heartily because he looked so happy to be on that stage, and so unsubtly pleased by their approval.

  Both Valerie and Cecil were there for opening night, proud but reticent, Cecil’s gregariousness quelled by the aura of the Met, though he did wear a flashy cutaway jacket and silver vest, as if to advertise his connection to his son, the star. There was a stiffness, a chilliness between Ryan and his mother. They didn’t talk much by phone these days, and he rarely initiated the stilted exchanges they did have. He had spoken to me, a year earlier, of the wall he felt that his mother had built between the two of them, after he’d threatened her life, a wall that remained standing and that he yearned to bring down, bit by bit, with his singing. But now he seemed willing to leave the wall between them or, tentatively, to be putting up a wall of his own.

  With his father, he’d been talking regularly by phone since their time together in Colorado. Cecil had described an idea he had, a dream for both of them. He’d made Ryan a proposition. He and Ryan should go into business together. They should combine his barbecue catering and Ryan’s singing. It was scarcely relevant to Ryan that this didn’t exactly match his own dreams for his future. What mattered was how his father always ended their calls. “I love you, son,” he said.

  When his cell phone rang—as he stood in an area of the opera house with glass-walled offices and a tiny lounge—it was toward the end of the Turandot run, which spread over four months. Ryan could see on the screen that the call was from his father. A jolt of guilt ran through him. It was his father’s birthday—he’d forgotten to call.

  The area where he stood was a kind of home to him; several Met staffers had desks there, and Gayletha Nichols, the motherly director of the contest, had her office there, and Lindemann faculty and trainees wandered through. Between coaching sessions, Ryan liked to spend time in this corner of the Met, chatting with anyone who might be available for conversation. He seemed compelled to do this, inexhaustibly eager to bond.

  “He’s a special guy,” Nichols said. She hadn’t been able to help but keep watch over him since the competition. “He puts himself out there, so people are drawn to him. You can tell he’s sought out a feeling of family here, even with all the pressure and judgment.”

  “He has to know everyone. He knows the stagehands, he knows all the security guards,” Noda said. “When he’s late for a coaching, it’s because he’s talking. He’s like this wide-open heart. He’s like a walking heart with a face and a voice.”

  Now Ryan said hello into his phone and waited for his father to rib him about his forgetfulness. But it wasn’t his father. It was the woman Cecil had been with for the past few years, who’d become his fiancée, a woman Ryan knew as Miss Lonna.

  Seconds later he was kneeling. “You’re joking, you’re lying, it’s his birthday.”

  He straightened, reeled into a hallway to be alone, sank down again. “You’re lying. No!” he howled. “That can’t be true.” He could hear only half of her words over his own insistence, but it was plain that there was no joking or lying in her voice. His father had gone back to bed in pain that morning and hadn’t woken up. He’d had a heart attack.

  One of the Met staffers tracked him into the hall. Sobbing, Ryan tried to answer his question, to communicate that his father was gone. He fled along the hall and lunged through a yellow-and-black-striped door. He was in a parking garage. He hurried past numbered pillars and stop signs, his vision a blur, and out onto the sidewalk. He slowed in front of a Met loading bay. It was a giant mouth, rimmed by concrete and corrugated metal, dark inside. He lost all strength and stopped, as if he wished to be swallowed by it.

  Nichols, alerted by the staffer about what had happened, trailed Ryan and saw him up the block, bent over next to the loading zone. The skeleton of an unfinished building rose above him, sheets of orange plastic flapping. He was fighting to slow his sobbing breath. She put a hand on his back, and he pulled himself up partially, hugging her, propping his weight against her girth, cry
ing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said.

  She asked what he needed, her arms enwrapping what little they could of his upper body. “Do you want me to take a cab home with you?” she asked.

  “No, I’m okay, but thank you. I’m sorry.”

  “Make sure I know whatever I can do.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  He traveled to Bakersfield for the funeral a few weeks later. The Met paid for his flight—another singer in the program offered to do this, too—and condolence emails came in from his fellow trainees and from Levine and Oswald and Noda and Zeger and the Met administration. “You’re in my thoughts.” “If there’s anything you need at all…” The emails consisted of the standard phrases, but for Ryan they signified family.

  At the funeral, Adrian wore a sleeveless T-shirt, muscles and elaborate tattoos on display. He was with a woman who was seven months pregnant with his second child. He didn’t really know his first child, his eight-year-old son, at all. Ryan hadn’t seen Adrian in a number of years, hadn’t heard anything from him in over two. Cecil’s stepson, Ryan’s stepbrother, was still serving time, and wasn’t there.

  Over the last week, Ryan had rehearsed and rejected twenty songs till he resolved on one that expressed the way he felt.

  Hear my cry, hear my call

  Hold my hand lest I fall

  He barely made it through without disintegrating. Adrian didn’t make it through “When Tomorrow Starts Without Me,” the poem that Cecil’s fiancée had chosen for him to read.

  I wish so much you wouldn’t cry the way you did today

  While thinking of the many things we didn’t get to say

  The ache that was Adrian’s life, the ache that was this moment, overtook him, rattling his naked shoulders, forcing him to stop again and again, to wait for his violent shaking to subside. His and Ryan’s half brother, Greg—the son Cecil had before Adrian, with a woman he’d known before Valerie—held Adrian as the shaking slowed to trembling.

  Ryan had never seen Adrian so defenseless. Maybe, he thought, he and his brother would be able to connect before the weekend was over. They hadn’t spent a minute alone, he realized, in nearly ten years. A few years before that, Adrian had punched through the wall of the trailer and basically disappeared from his life.

  The service was splendid. A photograph of his father as a child, clowning and smiling, glowed on the wall above the podium. It was the same smile Cecil still had at fifty, Ryan could see. Friends and relatives told stories: Cecil as a hapless fisherman with a sense of humor, Cecil as an agile dancer with exuberant moves, Cecil as goofy, Cecil as someone with a gravitational pull, someone people wanted to be near. For Ryan, the likeness he felt in Colorado was confirmed. He was his father’s son. “From the way everyone talked about him, you could see he had such a zest,” he told me. “I didn’t grow up with my dad, but a lot of people’s personalities—it’s genetic. So much of me is his soul in mine.”

  The weekend that followed was a series of high-piled plates and boozy concoctions. There was a restaurant with all-you-can-eat catfish; there was glass after glass of Baileys Irish Cream poured into dark beer. At a diner, at two in the morning, Ryan looked across the table and said, “I need you to get your life together. I need you to do that for the child you have on the way. Adrian, I need you to do it for me, for me as your little brother.” It wasn’t just the two of them in the booth. It wasn’t the private situation he had imagined. Two of their cousins and the mother of Adrian’s unborn baby were squeezed in with them. But the others remained quiet, and Ryan lurched on.

  “I looked up to you as a kid because you’re so strong. And when I think about it, I think one of the reasons I got into opera, it was because you were so different. You were the greatest artist in the world. You drew all those dinosaurs. Those superheroes. All that artwork. I thought you were so cool. You’re my big brother. When you left, when I never heard from you, I wondered why you hated me. But I never stopped worrying about you. I never stopped wanting to hear from you. We need to be better brothers to each other. We’re made of the same genetic material.”

  Ryan kept expecting someone to interrupt him as he recounted and pleaded. No one did, not his cousins and not the woman who stroked Adrian’s back. Adrian said nothing. He stayed silent even when Ryan wound down. Yet Ryan could tell he was letting the words flood through him. And he felt Adrian’s silent listening flooding back.

  But before he boarded his flight to New York, he had one more drunken conversation. Greg, his half brother, who hadn’t known Cecil for much of his childhood but who later became close to their father, told Ryan there was something he should know. Cecil hadn’t believed that Ryan was his son.

  FIFTEEN

  I ASKED HIM if he was serious,” Ryan told me, “and he said he was. And then he kind of went dead. I went dead, too. I didn’t push the subject. I didn’t delve any deeper. I didn’t ask him when our father said that or how it came up. I didn’t think about it till I was back here. Then it hit me. I was—”

  Ryan was about to say something about the feelings that came when he thought about his half brother’s revelation. He cut himself off. We were alone in the apartment he shared with a roommate. In the small common area off the kitchen, there was an electronic keyboard on a folding stand, where he plunked out notes to help himself practice, and a television for watching football. Sitting on a leatherette couch, he paused for quite a while before continuing: “I don’t know. My brother and my half brothers have my dad’s complexion. I’m my mom’s complexion. I know he was unfaithful. I don’t know about my mom. I—”

  Again he stopped himself. He yawned. It was a long, oversized yawn, but there was nothing theatrical, nothing exaggerated about it; the reflex seemed to overtake him, to shut down his mind and break off his thought. When he resumed speaking, it was on the same topic but with the focus turned upon his half brother. “I just feel bad for him. It sucks that he had to hear our father say that. It sucks for him.”

  Ryan didn’t doubt that his half brother was telling the truth about his father’s words. “He wouldn’t lie to me about that kind of thing.” Then his voice lifted: “I believe my dad died knowing that I’m his son. I know he loved me, and that he passed away knowing how much I loved him. I talked to him in the weeks after he died and before the funeral. I know he’s in a better place, watching down on me.”

  I asked whether he’d spoken with anyone, besides me, about what his half brother had said, about the emotions it had stirred. He hadn’t. I asked whether he thought he should, whether he thought a therapist might be helpful, whether the Met program might put him in touch with one or whether he’d like me to do that. I had a sense of foreboding. He’d lost his father three times: lost him as a child, for twenty years; lost him to death just as he’d reclaimed him in the contest and in Colorado; and lost him now to the doubt his half brother had planted. It seemed too much.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I’m ready for that. It could make me go backward. I want to think of my father the way I think of him. I don’t want to think of him as the person who didn’t call me for years, who forgot my birthdays. I, me as a child, desperately wanted to know him and for him to love me. Desperately. I wanted him. But that’s something I’ve tried to teach myself—forgive; don’t blame people for being human.” He laughed slightly, coughed, and groaned in quick succession. “There’s probably a lot of things I should see a therapist about, but I’ve built myself up mentally by always pushing forward. Seeing a psychologist might make me fall apart—and what would I do after that?”

  * * *

  The same sort of fear—of falling apart—stalked him during acting class in the program. The sessions were essential to the training; acting was becoming a crucial part of opera. There had long been some singers who found it a distraction, who felt it was beneath them. Lately the Met was making it clear that it mattered for casting.

  The program’s acting coach led th
e trainees through exercises. They recalled private scenes, memories that would connect them to their characters. Ryan admired how the others seemed to hold these memories in their minds as they sang. No one was permitted to share the recollections aloud, yet he felt he could see them at work in the trainees, permeating their bodies, their faces. He couldn’t do this himself. Once, working on an aria from The Marriage of Figaro that he was considering adding to his repertoire, an aria about the dangers posed by women—“These you call goddesses…are witches who enchant”—he pictured what led up to his being locked away: the frenzy of rage his mother had stoked in him; his threat on her life; her calling the cops; their carrying him down the stairs. But he couldn’t hold on to the images as he sang in class. Right away they fragmented, faded, cleared. This was lucky, he was sure. It would have been impossible for him to get through even the opening lines of the aria with that in his head.

  The scenes he was drawn to using all centered on his family, but they were too powerful. He had to ignore the exercises; if he didn’t, the vocal techniques he was learning with Oswald would be obliterated. Maybe in the future he would try what the coach was teaching—maybe in the future, when the musical techniques were rooted within him and the memories weren’t so consuming.

  For now, there was a divide between his dramatic and his comic arias. With the dramatic characters, he ventured further than he would have before starting the program, pushing himself to understand the men he was playing and to let his understanding spread through both voice and body—but with limits. He wasn’t going to risk the coach’s methods. With the comedic characters, though, no method was required. His immersion was immediate, complete, natural. His acting was manic in the right way, enthralling, charismatic. It had been full of flair in the contest; it was more so as his time in the program went by; everything that he kept in check emotionally seemed to spring out sideways in comedy. And the link he’d discovered with his father’s personality, a hereditary tie he didn’t question consciously for more than a few scattered seconds, impelled him.