Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  Irene’s biological father was a Russian soldier stationed in Kazakhstan, a man her mother had fallen for, and had an affair with, years before they immigrated. The soldier had offered a refuge from the addict’s abuse, and for a time Irene’s mother had accepted that refuge, that affection. Irene had never met him. She knew only what her mother had told her: his name, the year he was born, that he was from Moscow, that he had been kind. Irene dreamed of locating him somehow, contacting him, seeing him, talking with him.

  Irene had landed in America three years before she and Ryan met. She had slept on the couch of an acquaintance in a Hassidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, found a job as a clerk with a jewelry company, weighing and measuring stones, then gotten herself hired as a paralegal by a law firm that made use of her fluent German. To Ryan, her lack of knowledge about opera was irrelevant. There was her past, and there was her dream of finding her father, and there was her beauty—these were more than enough.

  She was there at the party, at the back of the room, when the pianist suggested “Ol’ Man River,” proposed it heartily, his voice ringing out.

  The hostess and host and their guests, a celebrated Met tenor among them, formed a white chorus:

  “Yes!”

  “‘Ol’ Man River’!”

  “Sing ‘Ol’ Man River’!”

  * * *

  He was surely alone at that moment. He wanted to be seen. He wanted to be heard. And here he was in a room packed with well-meaning people who did not see him, who perhaps were incapable of seeing him, who possibly refused to see him, and who were eager to have him inhabit an object of pity, to hear him be that pitiable object with every note that rose from behind his ribs and from within his throat, to gather around the big brawny black man and listen to him lament his oppressed and thwarted and minuscule life.

  “I am the epitome,” he’d said in the months before that party, “of ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Everything I did when I was younger, everything I was around, everything I was, gave you only a cover to look at. I was another number, another statistic. I was a stereotype, another kid going worse than nowhere. And I was only seeing the cover. A few people were trying to read the book, and then I started to read it and started to create new chapters in it. But earlier, the cover was what I was looking at.” And here, beneath the tapestries, he was surrounded by people who longed to have him shrink back behind a cover—not the same cover, but a similar one—and the threat he felt was not only in how they would see and hear him but in how he would see and hear himself, in what he would sacrifice, in what he would betray of his ambition and accomplishment as he sang each note.

  He would feel reduced, confined, simplified, compressed, concealed—while a crucial part of what he aimed for as an artist was an expansion, a wrestling against assumption, a defying of definitions, a tenacious embrace of complication when it came to being African American. Beyond that living room, in the city and in the country, those were keenly troubled times on the topic of race. The Trayvon Martin killing, and the trial of his killer, George Zimmerman, still hung in the air. Race—and stop-and-frisk policing—had dominated the campaign for New York’s mayor. And things were about to become far more painful. A spate of police killings of African Americans, from Missouri to New York to Ohio to South Carolina, was on the way. Ryan and I talked sometimes about the Zimmerman trial, about the acquittal of the neighborhood watchman who testified that Martin, a black seventeen-year-old, appeared to be casing houses for burglary. Zimmerman had confronted the kid, who was unarmed but who, Zimmerman insisted, made him fear for his life and fire his gun in self-defense. In the aftermath of the trial, President Obama had given a televised address that began by touching on the experience of young black men who were presumed to be criminals, who were trailed by security guards as they shopped in department stores, who, as they crossed the street, heard the locks click on car doors. The president said that he himself, as a teenager, might easily have been perceived as a criminal and wound up shot.

  “That took a lot of guts,” Ryan said. He kept his vote in Obama’s second election private, but added, “I think he probably pissed off a lot of people with that speech. It was amazing. He spoke to the African American community, because when he talked about being followed in malls, and about women holding their pocketbooks tighter when you’re near, that’s what happens. What happens to me. On the street, all the time, women will look back and walk slower and stop so I’ll walk past. I know the signs. Or when their boyfriend is there, he’ll grab her hand to let her know he’s protecting her, like I’m an evil homeless animal. I’m numb to it. I’ll say to myself, My music is me, just let me get home.”

  He recalled a drive he’d made from Colorado, when he’d moved his belongings to New York after being accepted into the Lindemann Program. He made the cross-country drive with a black friend, and in Nebraska a cop pulled them over. He couldn’t give Ryan a ticket; Ryan hadn’t been speeding. He peered into the car and asked to search it. “Don’t you need paperwork for that?” Ryan answered crisply, restraining himself, taking in the cop’s hostility.

  “Honestly, though”—he returned to the subject of Obama’s speech—“I wish he’d also said more about how we need to do better. How we can’t have this generation of African American men calling women bitches and men niggaz and throwing up gang symbols and going around shooting each other, being just what society builds up about us. What the videos on VH1 and Black Entertainment TV build up. That’s not what Langston Hughes or Martin Luther King or Thurgood Marshall wanted us to be.”

  Not long ago, he’d moved from an apartment in Washington Heights, near the northern tip of Manhattan, to an apartment in Harlem, and Harlem thrilled him, reminded him of the Black History Month essays his mother had assigned, made him think about the African American luminaries, from Hughes to Malcolm X, who were part of this place where he now lived. They were in the air he breathed. “This is a neighborhood of significance,” he said, and on 125th Street, where tables of merchandise lined the sidewalk, he bought a set of chunky wooden beads to wear around his wrist. He bought a wooden medallion of the African continent to wear around his neck.

  But he tried to avoid the subway stop three blocks from his building, because it let out on a corner he couldn’t stomach. There, toward the eastern end of 125th, a few blocks from the section of the street with the tables of beads and Africa medallions, around a series of steel sidewalk benches, addicts and drunks spent their days and nights. There were a lot of them, sitting or standing, inert or milling—a gauntlet. At varying hours they occupied the entire block. It was an unusual sight in the city where Ryan had come to live, a city that had undergone a two-decade transformation, and it was unusual in Harlem, which had its rough edges but was part of the transformation—and Ryan, though he was a recent arrival, was acutely aware of the anomaly. It pained him. “Why do they let them do it? There’s a police station right near. But no one does anything about it. There are so many crackheads. They smoke their rocks right behind the supermarket. There are so many prostitutes. Just hanging out in the open air. I feel like it’s the twilight zone. I feel like this might have been what New York was like twenty years ago. But for some reason they allow that to happen here. It’s a major intersection. It’s 125th Street!

  “When I watch the kids getting off at the bus stop there after school and seeing those guys drinking their forties and walking around wasted and going through the trash bins—what does an African American kid think, taking that in? It blows my mind. This is Harlem. It…When I have to go to the supermarket, I walk around the long way, so I don’t have to see that block. When I’m on the subway, I’ll get off at 116th, so I can walk home from the other direction. I resent those people for displaying their inability to fix their problems and do something with their lives. For openly displaying their giving up. They represent every stereotype you can come up with. Acchh, it’s not okay. It’s not okay.”

  * * *

  He had already b
een to one of the hostess’s parties, a year earlier. She had a position at the Met; she was entrusted with making sure that European stars felt at home during their stays in New York, that they had everything they needed. She’d met Ryan in the opera house and asked him to one of her gatherings, an honor she was known to extend to only a few in the program. Excited, he had gone, not knowing that a song would be mandatory, that all the singers obliged. After mustering up a show tune on the spot, he was besieged by cries for “Ol’ Man River.” He smiled and said no, smiled and demurred again, and angled his way swiftly from the piano to the food table. He remained at the back of the crowd, praying that he wouldn’t be asked again for the song. Then, for a year, he had declined the hostess’s invitations. But recently he’d run into her at the Met, and lightly she’d demanded to know what he was doing on a certain date. He found himself trapped into attending this party.

  He went with a strategy. He would volunteer to sing first, before anyone else. He would perform the Broadway song he’d done at the center, “This Nearly Was Mine,” and after that, because there would be many singers left to fill the evening, he would be allowed to drift away without any more attention. He was fairly confident this would work. Instead, though, everyone shouted for an encore; he said he had nothing prepared; the silver-haired African American pianist, in his reading glasses and jacket with a handkerchief in the pocket, made his loud proposal; the guests agreed avidly; and Ryan was stuck standing at the piano, perspiring and saying, “I don’t really want to sing that.”

  Even the clothes he’d chosen for the evening emanated his reluctance about being here and his dread of this request. The rips in his jeans and the slack, stretched neck of the undershirt he wore with a blazer were stylish—but not in this formal crowd.

  “Please!” the hostess called.

  “Everyone wants you to sing it!” someone bellowed.

  “Please, sing it for me. Sing ‘Ol’ Man River’ for me.”

  The food table, to which he’d fled the last time, seemed a long distance away, and the apartment door was just as far. The pianist was smiling up at him, glad that his idea was so well received. He motioned for Ryan to lean down and murmured into his ear, “Do the PG version.”

  “PG version?”

  “Yes, you know. Don’t say ‘white boss.’ Say ‘big boss.’”

  Ryan laughed softly, furious. So he was supposed to sing woefully about the oppression of black people while taking care not to make white people uncomfortable? His mind swirled, his body straightened. He saw a mob of desiring faces. He dropped his eyes to the piano. He stared at the surface of brown wood, as if at a sheet of music. No music lay there. He didn’t need any. He only needed to direct his gaze somewhere other than where he was. Two minutes ago, performing his first song, he’d stepped away from the piano, wandering this way and that in front of the guests, swaying, relishing the emotion of the romantic ballad from South Pacific and singing into their eyes. Now, his torso stiff, he stayed tight to the instrument and avoided any glimpse of the hunger in their expressions. He lowered his head slightly. He wished to float out of his body, out of this room. He felt a kind of death claiming him.

  There’s an old man called the Mississippi

  That’s the old man that I’d like to be

  What does he care if the world’s got troubles

  What does he care if the land ain’t free

  Enunciating, he got through the first verse, but as he neared the PG substitution in his half-dead state, he lost his way entirely. He sang a contorted word that didn’t belong to any language or dialect, and realized how disoriented he was, that he had no idea what verse he was in. He hunched down for help from the pianist, who cued him, and he continued, his pronunciation shifting.

  Don’t look up

  And don’t look down

  You don’t dast make

  De big boss frown

  Let me go ’way from de Mississippi

  Let me go ’way from the—

  His voice stumbled; he looked perplexed. Was this another spot for the substitution or was he someplace else in the song? Haltingly, he forced himself onward.

  —the big boss man

  His eyes flitted across his audience. He heard how incompetent he sounded, and he attempted, with a twist of his face, to turn his broken rhythm, his botched notes, his mangled verses, his breakdown into a joke. He didn’t succeed. There was a moan of disappointment or disapproval from the crowd. He bent toward the pianist, bent almost double, getting his ear close to the elderly black man’s mouth, seeking some word of guidance that would get him through the rest of the song. The man said nothing. He kept his fingers moving on the keys and chuckled.

  Ryan recoiled from the piano player, pulled himself up. He pivoted gradually to face the nearest wall, the wall on the opposite side of the instrument. He faced away from the audience, partially away from some, completely away from others, and sang the final verses. Flawlessly. With the hostess and the host and the guests at his back or at his shoulder, shut away from him, he sang the climactic phrases—sang with almost enough ferocity, and with almost enough beauty, to crack the wall in front of him and make it disintegrate.

  EIGHTEEN

  HE LEFT THE party quickly afterward, explaining to Irene why everyone’s plea for the song—and why the old African American’s proposal of it and instruction about the word he shouldn’t sing—had rattled him to the point of falling apart in public.

  He would perform the song again; he was sure of that. The song was, it was true, a stunning piece of music with a shattering story to tell and a past that included Paul Robeson, the greatest African American bass of the last century. And Ryan felt that his voice did own those final verses or that somehow they possessed him, that he couldn’t and shouldn’t escape them. But Joe and “Ol’ Man River” would have to be part of something much, much larger, part of a career consisting of Verdi and Rossini, of Wagner and Mahler, of everything that had somehow taken root within him since he’d seen Denyce Graves in Carmen and told Mr. Brown what he intended to do, of everything he now was.

  There had been signs lately that such a career might happen—and not merely on lesser stages, not merely in the cobbled-together way that awaited those who were selected for the program but never fulfilled their promise or never had luck flow in their direction. There had been small signs, uncertain signs, of something more. The Washington Post had written that one spectacular line about him. Then again, that single line had come within a list of compliments for other singers who’d been onstage alongside him that evening, and it had come within a review of a summer festival production whose purpose was to nurture young talent. After the euphoria of reading the critic’s words had worn off, he’d understood that her standards that night weren’t the highest.

  Within the program, Maestro Levine—whom Ryan called “a musical Gandhi” for the wisdom of his appraisals and the delicacy of his baton work—had listened to him one afternoon from his elaborate wheelchair. At the end of the aria, the maestro lowered his baton at the pace of a falling feather. He declared in front of the other trainees, “Well done, sir. Well done. Your voice is in great shape.” And these days, whenever Levine, in his gray sweatpants, motored into a room to preside over the group, he seemed, in Ryan’s mind, to bestow on Ryan an extra bit of attention. Levine and the program’s coaches also seemed to trust him in a new way, to believe that he could make meaningful interpretive decisions, that he could absorb the music of an aria and study the libretto and arrive at nuances on his own, a confidence that they’d never shown before. And one of the most important people at the Met had called him into his office and advised him about potential managers. Ryan had spoken with two. One of them managed Renée Fleming.

  Then again, the Met tended to cast singers far in advance, and the house had booked two of Ryan’s fellow trainees for prominent roles in coming seasons. For Ryan, this hadn’t happened. If he let himself think about this, he sensed that he was being left behin
d. The evidence piled up. Despite the enthusiasm that both managers conveyed about his voice and his prospects, and despite one of them saying that he’d heard talk around the Met that Ryan might be “something special,” neither of them had presented him with a contract and offered to make him a client.

  He’d won two prestigious grants from opera foundations. Then again, both were for emerging singers and had been given more often to artists who wound up failing than to those who went on to first-rate careers.

  The program had been putting him on the list for lots of auditions whenever casting directors or their assistants flew in from overseas or from American cities to scout singers for their companies. Numerous times, he’d waited outside the Juilliard rehearsal rooms where the auditions were held. He’d shuffled and paced with the others who were scheduled for a ten-minute slot near his own, traded audition horror stories, and stared at the lapdog one of the accompanists insisted on wheeling everywhere she went in a screened case.

  Only one of these auditions had worked out. He was booked to sing a somewhat significant role, a few years in the future, with a fairly insignificant company in northern France. “If I prove myself there…” he said. But it wasn’t at all clear what, if anything, proving himself there would mean.

  Then, through the program, he was scheduled for an audition with the Vienna State Opera, Austria’s main company. Along with the Met, it was one of the five most revered companies in the world. The program arranged auditions at this high level partly in the hope of bookings but mostly so that its singers could at least be heard by the most elite decision-makers in Europe. Serious consideration for roles might only come later on, and this was especially true for basses and bass-baritones. So when Ryan woke up early that morning, having felt congested all week and feeling sicker now, he decided not to cancel his ten minutes. He reminded himself that the audition was only an introduction. He told himself that he didn’t have to sing perfectly.