by Matt Dean
Chapter 14
What had she expected? Something jaggedly impossible to sing. Muted trumpets. Occasional caricatures of mariachi music. A lot of thorny contrapuntal quartets and choruses, incomprehensible to the ear. A staging that bent toward kitsch: faux-painted stucco, piñatas, sombreros, Sam Browne belts. She’d been wrong, happily wrong, on all counts
Sitting on the sofa in the study, Leland’s laptop balanced on her knees, a glass at her elbow, Anna Grace had watched the DVD twice. Some of the instrumental interludes reminded her of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen. In a duet between the two brothers, Hugh and Geoffrey, she thought she heard a near-direct quote from Tristan und Isolde. A chorus of bar patrons, late in the opera, sounded at certain moments like Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. But in truth she’d never heard a score quite like this one.
Scott had lent her the score and DVD in the hopes that she’d stage the opera in the spring term. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. There were no tenors in the music department who could sing Hugh, no sopranos who could sing Yvonne. Even if she could cast all the roles, the opera was already becoming a dear and private thing to her. She couldn’t bear to pull it apart into its constituent pieces. She couldn’t even bring herself to follow along in the score. If she had to stop her teenage students in the midst of flubbing the arias, if she had to hear the texture and subtlety of the strings reduced to the chunkety-chunk-chunk of a rehearsal-room piano, she’d never love the music in quite the same way again.
Once, not so long ago, Anna Grace could have sung Yvonne. No, on second thought, that wasn’t true. She’d had the voice for it, not so long ago, but not the life. She would have nailed the notes, even to the top of the range—high C? C-sharp?—but the singing would have been empty. The passion, the empathy, would not have been there. Nowadays, although she couldn’t trust her voice—she could never bring herself to trust it again—she could nevertheless imagine how it would feel to sing Yvonne.
Well, of course she could. She’d sing Yvonne as a gift to her husband, as a way of telling him she knew what it must be like for him, to live with an alcoholic.
Alcoholic, alcoholic, alcoholic: The word no longer stung. For nearly two months, she’d spent part of every day among the alcoholics of the Internet—lurking in chat rooms, scrolling through bulletin board posts, skimming through LISTSERV digests. At first she could bear only a few minutes at a time, until her heaving stomach and tightening throat drove her away.
Still, she kept coming back, hoping the stories she read online—the lost weekends, the DUIs, the wrecked fortunes, wrecked marriages, wrecked bodies—would pave the way vicariously downward to rock bottom, and then as if by magic, she would no longer want to drink. Instead, the narratives, which were somehow all the same and yet all unique, had become a kind of comfort. After an extra drink at lunch, her first lesson of the afternoon was a wasted hour, both useless and unkind to the student, but so what? At least she’d never slept with the married best man at her ex-husband’s wedding. Almost every night, she searched her husband’s browser history, hoping to find—and also hoping not to find—some new evidence of misconduct, but so what? At least she’d never driven her car into a neighbor’s house. Since the night of Leland’s birthday party, she’d never found anything untoward—not so much as a single bare-chested or bare-legged man—and that, somehow, more than direct evidence of guilt, made her want to drink and drink and drink. But so what? At least she’d never spent ninety days in jail for public intoxication and reckless endangerment.
She refilled her wineglass. Unaware that Scott was a teetotaler, Leland had opened a bottle of Barolo and a bottle of Pinot gris. Ever the good host. Anna Grace had finished the white not long after Corinne had left. The second bottle now contained, at most, half a glass. Sad.
A footfall on the stairs.
She moved the wine bottles from the end table to the floor. At the same time, she tried to pause the DVD. The laptop slid sideways. At the last second, just before it crashed to the floor, she caught it by the edge of the display, but she also knocked over the empty Pinot bottle. It struck the floorboards with a clank. Cringing, she pushed the bottle under the sofa with her foot.
John Carter leaned in through the door. “Ma?” he said, his voice clotted with sleep. He stumbled into the room. He yawned and stretched. “Can’t sleep? What doin’?”
“Watching this.” She’d smeared about a quarter of the screen with her fingers. She must have gasped or cried out, too: Flecks of her spittle clung to the display and the trackpad and some of the keys. She wiped the surfaces with the hem of her T-shirt.
“What’s it?” Still yawning—one long chain of yawns—he sat on the sofa beside her.
“Under the Volcano.” Did she seem rude or curt or cold? She hoped not, but after a bottle and three-quarters, she was fairly sure she’d be slurring her speech. She took pains to clip her syllables, keep her enunciation crisp. “An opera.”
“I thought I heard guitar.”
“You did. Probably.”
She pressed the space bar to resume playback. As it happened, the guitar had a moment of prominence, a flashy spray of notes. The bassoon overtook it. A group of women in black, a chorus of widows, marched downstage and sang a wordless fugue. Prayers for the dead.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” John Carter said. “What’re they doing?”
His face was all pinched together, his eyes narrowed. To Anna Grace he hadn’t looked or sounded so much like a little boy in a long time. She smoothed his hair, and he leaned sideways to lay his head on her shoulder.
The opera went on, and Anna Grace watched it through for a third time. John Carter’s breathing deepened, and he slept curled against her. Afraid to wake him, she let her wineglass sit on the end table. For two hours, not even a sip.
Late in the final act, Yvonne appeared at the center of the stage. Popocatépetl and Ixtaccihuatl loomed above her on the scrim. Patterned stars filled the night sky. She sang the names of stars and of constellations. “I’m so far from home, yet all are in their places.”
The home Yvonne had in mind—it became clear as she went on—had never existed. A cabin by a far northern sea. A house among the trees. The trees gleaming with frozen fog, with blades and needles of ice. The dark seawater still and quiet and cold beyond the shore.
John Carter stirred. He propped himself on one elbow and squinted at the screen. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s singing.”
“I know that, but what—?”
“She’s singing about a lost dream. She and her husband dreamed of moving away.” To her surprise, Anna Grace felt mostly sober. Her tongue obeyed her. No slurring. “They could’ve pared away everything extraneous. They could’ve lived simply, as if on love alone. But it was only ever a dream. Hopeless. Now she’s imagining that it’s on fire. Burning away.”
“Hm?”
She kissed the top of his head. “You should go to bed. You’re practically sleepwalking.”
“Hm,” he said, and he got up. He trod flat-footed to the door of the study, then turned back. “I’m sorry I got so mad.”
“I know, sweetie.”
“It’s not like I meant to get fired.”
“No one ever means to do anything,” she said.
“Mama.” Half word, half groan.
“Listen to me, now. You’ve lost two jobs in two months. I don’t want you to be one of those people who can’t hold a job. And Jean-Marc told me you’re currently between a C and D in theory? You have to work harder.”
The boy was swaying, half-asleep on his feet, but beginning to wake up. They’d had a nice moment there, a rapprochement of sorts, and she was doing her damnedest to ruin it.
His eyes welled. “You think I’m smart, Mama, but I’m just not.”
Anna Grace shoved aside the computer and got to her feet. She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him toward her and folded him into her arms. Smart or not, responsible or not, employable o
r not, he was for sure never going to be tall. She barely had to raise her chin to speak into his ear. “Oh, my beautiful, beautiful boy,” she said. “You’re smart and talented and perfect and thus have you always been.”
“No,” he said. It was the single most sodden-sounding word she thought anyone had ever uttered.
“I think,” she said, holding him at arm’s length. “I think it’s the middle of the night and you’re tired and cranky like a baby.”
He smiled, more or less.
“Go on to bed,” she told him. “Go to bed, and everything will be perfect again in the morning.”
After a brief bit of grumbling, he subsided: His shoulders sagged and and his eyes went slack. He kissed her and trundled out.
She waited and counted his footfalls until he’d climbed all the stairs. She drained her wineglass and poured again.
He was smart and talented and perfect. All the children were smart and talented and perfect. But John Carter was also her last hope. After Anna Grace had left Leland and come back, Corinne wouldn’t have sung a note or picked up an instrument on pain of death, not if it made her mother happy. Ben had shown some early promise with the violin, but then he’d discovered the Cub Scouts and—as he’d called it—“boy stuff.” John Carter was all she had left. Now that she’d stopped singing, there’d be no more music if not for her second son.
She’d overestimated what remained in the bottle. Barely a swallow. The hours without a drink had banked the fires, so to speak, and this tiny splash of Barolo wasn’t enough to rekindle them. Another bottle? Could she risk another bottle? She should brazen it out, throw the empty in the recycling bin and think no more of it. She still had her ace in the pocket. DaddiesLove.com. Hot dads and horny sons. Bi married dudes together.
If only there were some mescal in the house—or tequila, which would be close enough. Under the Volcano was fairly drenched in mescal. Geoffrey drank almost nothing else. Anna Grace had developed a craving.
There was vodka. Anyone in the house might count the bottles in the recycle bin, but she kept the vodka underneath bags and boxes of frozen vegetables. As far as she knew, no one else had ever noticed it was there.
Holding quite still, she listened for the creaking and complaining of the joists under her son’s weight, or her husband’s. All clear, it seemed.
Closing the laptop and tucking it under her arm, collecting her glass, she went to the kitchen. She laid the laptop on the island. In a crouch at the open freezer drawer, she added ice and vodka to her glass. The dregs of the Barolo imparted a pale pink tint. When she took a sip, she tasted only the Citron. Nothing like tequila—she’d never drink tequila cold, for a start—but the vodka had the bite she’d wanted.
She sat at the island. Opened the laptop. Touched the space bar.
Yvonne’s final aria continued. A mad song now, more and more fraught with terror and despair. Their home by the sea—the imaginary cabin, the hopeless dream—was gone. Burned. The eaves under which she and Geoffrey would have made their marital bed, the garden, the forest, the jack-in-the-pulpits: All had turned to ash. Her song was a farewell to everything she’d wished for. She described the rising sparks as if they were genuine things that she could see before her. The embers whirled into the air and met the clustered stars, and the bright stars chased each other through endless space.
Thanksgiving