Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  He didn’t consider how badly things could go.

  The problem was a combination of a waning cold and surging allergies. Ryan contracted more than his share of colds no matter what the season, and was assaulted by pollen every spring and fall; he was a regular in the chair of Dr. Cho, the Met’s ENT. But the day before, when he could have scheduled an appointment to receive one of her assortment of temporary cures, and maybe had his infected mucus and blood vacuumed out, his sinuses hadn’t felt as clotted as they did this morning. His throat hadn’t felt so tight, his ears hadn’t been so clogged. Now it was too late. His audition was at 11:10 a.m.

  In his bedroom, he marched his voice through arpeggios, testing his limits. He could get close to his usual top and typical bottom, but both high and low were a strain, and he had little sense of how the notes sounded because the passageways leading to his ears were filled with fluid. He emailed the program’s administrative assistant, telling her to take one of his pieces, a vaulting Mozart aria, off the repertoire list that the auditioner would pick from.

  He coughed, hacking a yellow-green globule into a paper towel. He reread the directions on a box of decongestant pills, sneezed out tusks of snot, and reread the directions again. There was no question: he wasn’t supposed to take another dose so soon. Resisting, he put aside the box and blew his nose until he felt that he was about to propel frontal bits of his brain through his nostrils. He poured green powder into a glass of water, guzzled, attempted more arpeggios, heard the hoarseness clinging to his voice, sipped chamomile tea, and decided to quit warming up and stay silent.

  He got himself into a purple dress shirt and black vest without sneezing on the fabric of either, and got himself onto the subway. Riding downtown toward Juilliard, his hacking ceased and his nose cleared, but his throat felt as if someone had stuffed it with cotton balls, and every cavity and passage behind his nose was plugged. He took the elevator up to Juilliard’s third floor and was glad to see one of his favorite trainees, the Korean American tenor who’d shared his dressing room for Parsifal, outside the audition room door. “Tell me you have a cough drop,” Ryan said, needing to get rid of the cotton.

  The tenor didn’t. Ryan wandered down the hall, emitting notes with various vowel shapes, trying to shift the placement of resonance this way and that on one pitch and another, forward or back within his head, a tad higher or lower, searching for unclogged spots. He put his forefinger on the flesh above his upper lip to check for the proper vibration. He felt nothing. The door opened; it was his turn.

  The piano sat deep in the room, below a strip of windows set high in the wall. The windows didn’t admit much light, and the walls and floor were dark gray or black. To Ryan’s left as he stepped toward the instrument, Brian Zeger, who ran the program and who’d been so kind lately, sat next to the auditioner from Vienna at a fold-out table. The auditioner wore all black. He had a notepad in front of him, to be filled with commentary, with verdicts. Ryan kept his eyes on Zeger’s generous face, stilled himself, listened to the hush of the room and then to the piano filling the quiet. He sang.

  Within a few phrases, he could hear the raspiness stealing into his throat and adhering to his notes. But it wasn’t only that. He realized that his voice was spreading amorphously, that it was fuzzy and unfocused, that he was producing the kind of low pitches that would wallow inaudibly beneath a world-class orchestra like Vienna’s. His mind manufactured two runs of words simultaneously, the lyrics of the aria and a litany of reproach: This is the worst audition you’ve ever sung, they’re not even going to let you sing a second piece…

  Zeger’s face was unreadable. When Ryan finished the first aria, the auditioner did request a second, but added, as Ryan reached for his bottle of water, “Take as much time as you need. Don’t worry.” He spoke in a tone of consolation that summed up everything.

  Ryan proceeded through “La calunnia,” flitting his hands in a facsimile of his usual clownishness. Between congestion and despair, he could hear himself only distantly. He pushed himself arduously, traversing a sequence of alternating eighth notes, Cs and Bs, that led to a high, elongated E, one of the song’s comic peaks, a note that was well within his range and that he could hold with ease. After a particular C and B he always took a breath, filling his lungs for what followed. But this time, in his agitation, he forgot. He recognized his mistake two notes farther on, too late to inhale before the extended, mock-heroic climax. His voice climbed upward toward the E, hit the note, and immediately gave out. The comedic culmination was, instead, an absence, a void, a zero.

  As the aria wound down, he surrendered to what felt like an omnipotent force of self-destruction. He relinquished all will, attempted no artistry, no recovery. He let the notes drag him to the end.

  The audition was over.

  “Thank you,” the man from Vienna mumbled.

  Ryan smiled and hustled out of the room and past the tenor and into the elevator and out the revolving doors and onto the sidewalk. He fled past Lincoln Center, fled across the intersection where Broadway and Columbus converged, fled through the chaos of traffic, fled down the block toward Oswald’s studio. He had a lesson scheduled; he was late but wanted whatever minutes he had left—for Oswald’s sympathy, for any solace he could give, for his advice about how to avoid being written off as an embarrassment, as hopeless, by Zeger and the program, if avoiding that was even possible.

  He buzzed and was let in. He reeled through the building’s lobby and into the studio. He stood in front of Oswald’s piano. He dropped his neck, let it loll, and from his height he wilted in stages until his forehead rested on the crimson blanket that covered the piano top. After a long moment, he straightened partially, leaning. He reported what had happened, in words punctuated by guttural sounds of shame and self-recrimination. Oswald kept his reaction modulated but looked worried—more than worried. He helped Ryan to draft an email, an effort to limit the damage.

  Hello Mr. Zeger,

  I was sick earlier in the week with bad allergies and I ignored my gut instinct to cancel today’s audition because I wanted to give my all. I apologize for the result this morning.

  Two hours later, Ryan opened a message from the program’s administrative assistant. He was wanted for a callback the next morning.

  Was this a mistake? A message meant for another singer? Had they heard the same crippled E, the same complete anticlimax, the same eight-minute disaster he’d heard, dimly through all the fluid, with his own ears? Soon after the message from the administrative assistant, he received a second email. This one was from Zeger.

  “They liked you tho I knew your top was not all there.” He went on, “These auditions are about the future—it’s not too soon to be heard.” This wouldn’t be his last chance to audition for Vienna, Zeger reassured; he should just go to the callback tomorrow without fretting about his allergies.

  In three days, Zeger sent another message. This one was full of capital letters and exclamation points. Ryan was going to Vienna.

  NINETEEN

  SPARAFUCILE IN RIGOLETTO, the Egyptian king in Aida, the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, Basilio in The Barber of Seville—these were some of the midsize roles Ryan was given in Vienna during his first year after the program, the first year of his two-year contract with a company once led by Mahler, in a house where Norman and Callas and Ghiaurov and Pavarotti had performed, in a city where Mozart had composed. Outside, winged horses pranced atop the arched entryway, and fountains and statues and ornate stone columns surrounded the Viennese who sat on the square, watching the operas on a giant screen, while those who watched from inside passed between gilded walls adorned with tapestries and beneath golden cornices and into boxes whose balconies of red velvet seats hovered above the stage.

  This story is unfinished, just as all of our stories are. When I last saw him, Adrian was staying with a few friends on a rutted, half-paved street where the sand and scrub of the California desert met the outskirts of a town whose main economy, he s
aid, was the meth trade. The house was tiny and looked like it could be swept away by the winds that came off the Mojave. During sandstorms, dust blew through cracks and joints, coating the furniture.

  We went to a restaurant next to a freeway on-ramp. He said he was trying to keep on the right side of the law, trying to get back into cage fighting, and trying to find a job. He talked about Spawn, a superhero who’d been a favorite of Cecil’s. In the movie, made in the late nineties, about his demon-killing exploits, Spawn had been the first superhero to be played by an African American. And we talked about dinosaurs. He told me that scientists had found sites with fossils hinting that dinosaurs had been covered in feathers rather than scales. “They were birdlike,” he said.

  All the while, he fed his baby, who sat next to him in the booth. He spooned bits of mashed up Mexican food tenderly into the boy’s mouth. His relationship with the baby’s mother was over, but he divided the child care with her. When the baby puked up a good amount of his meal, Adrian wiped him down thoroughly, gently.

  Then I drove him back to the cramped and cluttered house at the edge of the desert. Much of the living room was occupied by a giant TV screen filled with the otherworldly fighters of a video game. His friends would take care of the baby while I drove Adrian into town to a potential new job. To get around, he either got rides or walked a fair distance to the nearest bus stop. That afternoon and evening was his trial shift at a restaurant. He may have been living an existence as far as it was possible to imagine from Ryan’s, but they shared a resilience: He was going to stand by the side of the road with a sign that read “All-You-Can-Eat Riblets.”

  * * *

  Valerie was married again, to a diminutive man from the Ivory Coast who worked at one job or another during almost every waking hour. She still had the dispatcher’s job she’d found a few years earlier, and together they had left the besieged little house with bullet holes below the eaves. They rented a compact apartment with a sliver of a balcony in a complex near a military air base in Virginia Beach. Fighter jets roared overhead on a regular basis, but otherwise the apartment was pleasant.

  As we sat at her dinette table, she wanted to show me various things. There was an invitation card, with fancy gold script, that she’d made in honor of Ryan’s senior-year recital at the conservatory in Connecticut. And onto the table she placed a birthday card he had given her several years ago. It said, “Love You Forever.”

  They hadn’t spoken much during the months before he left for Vienna, and they communicated only slightly more now. She wrote sometimes on his Facebook wall. He avoided the sound of her voice. For him, the past continued to be too close, her voice too charged. Yet he was formulating a new understanding about his childhood, one that had been slow to take shape.

  I’d heard the change sharply after we visited the center. We were walking toward the parking lot, walking along the red-and-yellow exterior wall of the facility, leaving behind the Middle Eastern girl and the rapper, leaving behind all the kids on the other side of that wall, leaving them to their cells and to futures scarcely in their control, and we fell silent.

  “What are you thinking about?” Ryan asked.

  I told him I was thinking about what it would be like for my son if he was locked inside.

  Ryan’s features seemed to flatten. He looked at me with enmity, as if my answer missed the point, as if I lacked all empathy. “Maybe you should think about what it would be like for your son if his mother was the one who put him there.”

  His anger faded quickly, but it was searing, and I asked him about it during a call to Vienna. I said that the words he’d spoken—“if his mother was the one who put him there”—seemed a long way from what he’d told me when we first met, about singing to wear down his mother’s wall and win her forgiveness. “Exactly,” he said over the phone. “One of the things I’ve thought about, especially after that visit to the center, is that it took a lot of emotional karate-chopping, a lot of damage, to get me to the point where I got put there. That doesn’t happen naturally to a kid. Knowing me, knowing me as an adult, that wasn’t me. So maybe she should be wanting me to forgive her.”

  He didn’t expect, he said, that she would ever apologize for anything that had happened; he would have to do the forgiving on his own. He didn’t know if their relationship would ever become easy. But lately he’d done something that was like a shout through the silence.

  He knew that his mother had a wish. “It will happen if it is His will,” she liked to say, “and I believe it is. It can be a fixer-upper. That’s what they call it, and I’m willing to fix up.” She wanted, someday, to own a home, and she envisioned children within it: Adrian coming to stay with his new son, so she could help to raise him, though Adrian talked with her even less than Ryan did; Ryan visiting with the babies he would eventually have.

  And as Ryan sang in Vienna, her wish seemed to be coming closer. He still had a heavy balance on his student loans, but when she asked, he contributed, and Valerie and her husband made a down payment on a condo near where they now lived. “I feel good as a son knowing that I gave her what she asked me. I love her—she’s my mother.” The condo didn’t exist yet. The developer hadn’t broken ground on the complex he promised to build. But he sold to early buyers, buyers who put their faith in him, at a discount. Valerie had studied the plans and fantasized over the photos of staged kitchens and bedrooms. There she would cook for her grandchildren, and there they would sleep.

  * * *

  Irene had moved to Vienna with Ryan, and she tried to shield him from his first reviews. Rigoletto—Verdi’s tragic opera about a hunchbacked and lonely court jester who hires an assassin to take revenge on a callous nobleman, but who, unwittingly, winds up having his own beautiful daughter killed instead—was not a resounding success for the Vienna company. It was not a success for Ryan. The company had given him some coaching for his role as the assassin, but mostly he was on his own now; the constant instruction he was used to receiving, from masters like Noda and Oswald, was over. Irene translated the Rigoletto reviews for him, since he couldn’t read German. She altered and adjusted the sentences. But he guessed what she was doing and resorted to translating online. Critics called the production “a disaster.” They called Ryan’s performance tepid, describing him as a “vocally harmless hit man.”

  Yet people at the company encouraged him; they seemed to withhold judgment. The man who’d heard his first-round New York audition and been involved in hiring him praised his singing in Rigoletto, as if the reviews didn’t exist. And it was as if, given all the condemnations he’d once endured, the assault of dismissive and damning reviews couldn’t penetrate him deeply. He fretted over the critiques but didn’t dwell on them. When I visited him a few days later, he was much more interested in giving me a tour of his favorite sausage stands and taking me to cafés specializing in chocolate tortes than in seeking whatever reassurance I could offer that his initial reviews wouldn’t harm his career.

  He had the comfort, too, of waking next to Irene every morning. Together they had created a kind of cocoon in a one-bedroom apartment that seemed to them a stroke of good luck—for its modernity, for its heated bathroom floor, but also for its balcony looking out on the cupola of a three-hundred-year-old church. Irene had chosen a light fixture that suffused the living room with a supposedly medicinal and becalming shade of blue, and on their flat-screen TV they often played a video of logs burning in a fireplace. They’d taken cooking classes together in New York, and in Vienna, with the fire crackling, they prepared elaborate meals for each other, and sat down to eat under the blue light, and talked about their pasts, their missing fathers, the violence and chaos of their childhood homes, their terror, shame, isolation. “It wasn’t something I spoke about,” she said, “before I met him. Never. It just was not something to talk about. He was the first person in my life to say, ‘Let it out, let it go.’ He and I come from such different worlds, but what we have in common makes us such strong people—c
ombined.”

  * * *

  At Ryan’s insistence, Mr. and Mrs. Hughes came to visit and hear him in Aida. They had seen his senior recital in Connecticut, and seen him in two of his summer festival performances and two of his minor Met roles during his Lindemann years, and they sent him birthday and Christmas cards. But in his mind the Hugheses were forever near, their paired heads, covered in brass-tinted curls, suspended over his life as if they were fairy godparents. While he was at Florida State’s conservatory, he and the Hugheses had connected only occasionally, yet when he graduated he sent them a plaque engraved with words he’d written. “Be it known that Mr. and Mrs. Hughes, ” the engraving began. It went on “to honor and recognize the confidence, guidance, and wisdom freely given in helping me to attain this important milestone in my life.”

  When Mr. and Mrs. Hughes arrived in Vienna, Ryan and Irene served them cocktails that they’d chosen with much deliberation—champagne laced with an Austrian elderflower liqueur. This was followed by a fireside meal that took more than a day to prepare. It started with a cream-based soup of fresh chickpeas and mushrooms; continued with short ribs that Ryan had marinated overnight—in bean leaves and basil, olive oil, and brown sugar and a host of spices he’d learned about from his father—and then slow-cooked for six hours and surrounded with Irene’s Parmesan Brussels sprouts; and ended with a multilayered chocolate cream pie constructed on a coconut-touched crust that they’d made from scratch.

  For their few days in Vienna, Mr. and Mrs. Hughes would be staying at a hotel nearby, but Ryan worried that his desire for their attention might be overwhelming. “I just have to tell you,” he said, “that I want to be with you as much as you can stand me.”