Haunted Tenor

by Irene Vartanoff

  Well bundled in our winter gear, we moved through the rather ill-lit entrance, a narrow passageway that was proof of the restaurant’s age. A surprising number of buildings in the city were over a hundred years old, although much modified. Probably the uneven lintel stone, worn down over the decades by legions of diners, was what tripped me as we exited.

  I didn’t fall. I merely lost my balance. I would have regained it on my own, but JC had already grabbed me to prevent a nasty close-up view of the sidewalk. There on the well-lit sidewalk outside the entrance, as people passed by us quickly on their journeys to important places, JC enfolded me more possessively, and turned me to face him fully.

  “Once again, you fall into my arms.”

  For a long moment, we searched each other’s faces. I had been pretty sarcastic with him at the end. Lots of attitude. For that matter, he had openly doubted my sanity. He had an idée fixe about my behavior, not that I blamed him.

  None of that mattered right now. Something else was happening here, something growing that both of us felt.

  Finally, he released me and spoke softly. “Maybe this won’t solve anything. Maybe it will. Come home with me tonight.”

  I stared at him. He wasn’t even touching me now, yet the passion that had threatened to overwhelm us two hours ago was blazing in his eyes again. I knew my eyes were revealing my own eagerness and fear. I wanted him, too. I nodded.

  We took a cab to his upper west side condo in silence. We rode the elevator up to his floor without speaking. We entered his apartment and paced through a living room to his bedroom without turning on a light or a word being said.

  Then, standing next to a massive bed, he touched me. Just so I turned to face him. There was light from the city coming through windows. We could see each other. He did nothing for five seconds. Neither did I.

  Then he reached out and pushed my coat off my shoulders. When he stripped my dress from me, and his eyes lit up seeing that I wore no bra, I didn’t stop him. When he caressed my breasts with his hands, I sighed. When he suckled them, I cried out.

  My own hands sought him out under that casual pullover shirt, roving over hard flesh that was smooth and hot. My fingers dug down to find the globes of his buttocks. At my touch, he shuddered. He pulled my hands around to the front of his body, to feel his desire, and then I shuddered, too.

  After that, there was no turning back. We loosened the rest of our clothing quickly, while each grabbed frantic kisses and caresses. Then he lay me down on the bed and spread my willing legs. I expected him to drive into me forcefully. That was what I wanted. Oblivion instead of confusion. Instead, he gave me a burning glance, and then leaned down and began to caress me with his tongue.

  Time stopped.

  For other men, perhaps touching a woman there is merely foreplay. For JC Vasquez, a man whose lips, tongue, teeth, and lungs were the center of his life, it was obviously much, much more. He used his world-renowned talent on my most sensitive area and had me singing—when I wasn’t crying out or sighing in amazed pleasure. It took a very long time. Every tiny exploratory move was with his whole being. He had intense control of every flick of his tongue, every motion of his lips.

  I screamed and shuddered and wept from the pleasures that he wrung out of me with his skillful tongue, his clever teeth, the breaths he carefully used to heat and cool my tender tissues. And his lips, his curious, hungry lips. He devoured me, but delicately, like the artist he was.

  Oh, there was more. Eventually we embraced fully as I had expected. By then I was completely blind with the desperate need to devour him as he had sampled, pierced, and devoured me.

  An hour or a lifetime later, I woke to find him pacing the room. He was barefoot, but wearing trousers. Not a good sign. He did not look happy. When he spoke, his voice was tense with an emotion I could not identify. Or maybe it was with control of emotion. “Do you comprehend why this must go no further?”

  I shook my head. My hands instinctively drew up the sheet to cover my nakedness, which in that moment suddenly felt wrong. I tried not to show how my whole body began to tremble from the inside.

  “I care about you, Kathleen.” His hands rested on his slender hips. His pants were zipped, but not buttoned, and his action pushed them dangerously low. “But I don’t know you. I can only guess what you have wanted from me. What desperate urges created an elaborate hoax. Whatever you have done to forge an acquaintance with me, it was very clever.”

  He shook his head. “I admit it. You penetrated my defenses. I wanted you, too. This cannot continue. You must seek help for yourself. I must end this. I was wrong to bring you here. Wrong to give in to desire when I believe that you may be ill.”

  My impulse was to ignore the horrible pain of his rejection. To argue with him. Yet some of what he said was true. We didn’t know each other well enough to confide secrets about our lives. Or to have sex. We’d done it, but we had not kept it impersonal. It had been too intimate an act. Now he regretted it. Whatever excuse he gave, he regretted it.

  “I—” I started, and then I knew it was useless. “I can’t convince you at this moment. I promise you, I’m not crazy,” I said. Then I shut up. It hurt too much, this rejection mere minutes after the most passionate, devastating lovemaking of my entire life. How I kept the tears at bay, I don’t know. I wanted to cry, but I had too much pride. I refused to look as wretched as I felt.

  I put on my clothes in the bathroom, needing the privacy to shield my raw emotions from him. Not that he wanted to acknowledge them. He was too busy denying his own, whatever they were.

  JC escorted me to the elevator—which surprised me. As we waited for it to arrive, he said, “I’m sorry about this. I did not mean to hurt you.”

  Neither of us spoke again. When the elevator arrived, he kissed me. It was the first kiss he had given me on the lips since the dressing room. My nether lips shuddered.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  When I got to the ground floor, dazed with misery, the bellman had called a prepaid taxi to take me home. Obviously at JC’s request. The doorman handled it smoothly. He’d probably done this before. I could only hope not for JC Vasquez.

  I sat like a stone on the uncomfortable seat as the cabbie drove down the quiet avenues and crosstown streets. There were still cars moving around, but not many at this wee hour of the night. We would be at my brother’s apartment on the east side in a few minutes.

  It was to go down as a night of sex, a hookup, nothing more. We were to have no relationship. JC was leaving for Europe soon. He wasn’t willing to make empty promises. “I care about you” was a convenient lie to avoid a big emotional scene. He hadn’t offered any of the other usual falsehoods, like “I’ll call you.” And he never said the most important thing, “We’ll get together again when I’m back in New York in two months.”

  For my part, I’d wanted to make promises to him, but obviously he didn’t want to hear them. What kept me from speaking was the fear that my feelings were confused. Was I in thrall to the mythical Don Carlo whom he created on stage, and not attracted to JC as himself? I didn’t know him well enough to be sure. As much as I wanted to believe the sex between us had forged a true bond, I knew that was unlikely. The compulsions of the ghostly doings had created a barrier between us more potent than physical attraction alone could surmount. Despite the lovemaking that itself felt like a bond.

  Chapter 5

  JC did not contact me. I didn’t expect him to, but I still was disappointed. He was in two more Turandots, but I stayed away. No more Don Carlos. I felt no strange compulsions, and I stopped dreaming I was in the midst of that opera. Instead, I dreamed that JC and I were making love. In his bed. In his dressing room. In my tiny bed. In some lavish, sunlit palace—one completely unlike the typically gloomy opera sets of Don Carlo. These were very pleasant dreams.

  Did I plan to act on my feelings for JC? We hadn’t resolved the key problem between us. I knew JC did not trust me. I didn’t know why he had hooked up
with me, other than the obvious. We both had wanted each other, so why not?

  A lousy rationale, as my bruised feelings kept telling me. I should have been able to shrug off the sense of rejection because he didn’t contact me. I couldn’t. I thought about JC too often, wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he missed me at all. He’d said he cared about me, and I clung to that. I should have distracted myself and moved on by making contact with the local dating scene. Maybe teaming up with Sean’s friend Rachel, hitting the bars and whatever. I didn’t want to date other guys. I wanted to work out whatever was between JC and me. Even if it was only a ghost from five hundred years ago. Then I could move on.

  With Ralph’s help, I decided to experiment. I saw Puccini’s Tosca, to learn if any love scene in any Italian opera would affect me. No. I saw Der Fliegender Hollander, by Wagner, hoping to discover whether it was the repertory, or the man, or the specific opera that messed me up. Wagner simply confused me.

  “You’re a neophyte,” Ralph consoled. “Wagner takes some getting used to.”

  “I had an instant reaction to Don Carlo,” I argued.

  “It’s very romantic and tragic. Of course you did.”

  “There is something special about Don Carlo,” I agreed. Major understatement.

  Ralph beamed. “Now that’s the spirit.”

  He happily lent me DVDs of Don Carlos, the French version, and Don Carlo, the Italian version. One had four acts; the other had five. One dropped the first act, the Fontainebleau scene, the other preserved Carlo’s first meeting with Elisabetta and their discovery of mutual love. I watched these renditions at my apartment and only felt pity for Don Carlo and his lost love. No strange feelings in my gut. They each ended slightly differently. None of them ended with the outright killing of Don Carlo as in the Nat’s production, though. Maybe that meant something to the ghost.

  Must it be a live performance to move me? And one by JC? Ironically, I had no way of finding out. Don Carlo evidently was such a massive and taxing opera that only an expensive assemblage of major voices could do it justice. Only a big opera house like the Nat could afford to mount the production.

  Bottom line, although I asked Ralph about it and with his guidance checked the Opera News calendar, there were no American opera houses doing Don Carlo currently. Jetting over to Paris to see theirs was out of my budget. I was here in New York to work and save money and try to find a future direction for my life, not take hasty trips to Europe. Especially when deep down I was convinced that it was only my visceral reaction to JC Vasquez that had created the right situation for a paranormal force to intervene.

  A month went by. JC had left town without saying goodbye or contacting me in any way. That hurt. I knew it wasn’t supposed to. We’d had a casual hookup. He’d specifically told me it was nothing. But if the sex was good and you sort of liked the person, who really believed that would be the end of it? It bothered me that he could walk away from me so easily. Still, we had many bars against having a relationship. In addition to the big question about my weird astral projection or whatever it was.

  Soon I heard from Ralph that JC had been singing in London. I remembered he said he liked London. I suppose I could have followed him there, but that would have been a mistake. He’d accuse me of stalking him, and it would be true.

  I wished we had a reason to see each other again. To have a relationship. Because I felt there was a bond. Did his statement that he cared about me mean as another human being, or as someone he might love? I had no way of telling.

  I’d never done the hookup scene. Girlfriends had, and many had cried on my shoulder afterward. Now I called my best friend, Wendy Sturic, and poured out my tale of woe.

  She crowed, “I can’t believe it. You’ve finally fallen for a grown man instead of a boy.”

  She’d moved in with her boyfriend straight out of college, gotten a good job, and now their wedding was planned for next June. I found myself envying her. She knew what she wanted and she’d gone for it.

  “Hey, cut me a break. I was in school before. If I want my Ph.D., I’m only on hiatus.”

  “Maybe a taste of the real world will seduce you away from the library.”

  “Bad word choice.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She was laughing.

  “What do I do now?”

  “You wait for your guy to come back to New York and then you seduce him this time around.”

  “That’s not going to solve another basic problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Wendy, he’s almost a decade older than me. He’s famous. He spends the entire year traveling the globe. He rehearses and sings in one city for a few weeks, six if he’s lucky, and then he’s on to the next city.”

  “What’s wrong with any of that?” Before I could enumerate the potential issues, she continued, “Older men are great as long as they’re not too terribly much older. They have more money, and they have savoir faire. They also do sex better than boys do.”

  “He’s famous.”

  “Fame isn’t a relationship killer unless you’re jealous of his fame or of the other women he meets. Are you?”

  “No, of course not.” Although my denial rang false in my ears. I had indeed been jealous when JC showed up at Sean’s party with Abbie Fisher. I didn’t want to admit that to Wendy.

  “Then what’s your problem?” she coaxed.

  I described how getting my Ph.D. would mean spending all my time in one university library. Once I finished, I’d probably teach college somewhere if I could get a spot. The school year was when the opera season happened, so JC would be traveling while I was stuck in a classroom. Then in the summers, he’d be singing in opera festival venues or taking special classes from retired opera masters living in Berlin, or Rome, or Paris. Meanwhile, I’d be stuck researching in other university libraries and special collections so I could write scholarly articles as fast as I could churn them out, to keep my tenure and get promotions.

  “That sounds colossally boring,” Wendy said. “Where’s a life in there for you?”

  “That’s why I’m on hiatus. I’m not sure anymore.”

  Research itself was fun, but did I want to be a professor like my parents? I knew exactly what that life was like. It had been easy to go down that path for years, never really thinking about whether I wanted to be a college professor like my parents.

  “Don’t worry about the future right now,” Wendy advised. “Long-term, you and your tenor might not be right for each other anyway. Aren’t tenors notoriously self-absorbed? Is JC vain and egotistical?”

  “More like arrogant and high-handed.”

  “That can be useful when ordering in a restaurant I suppose, or hailing a taxi. What about in bed?”

  My silence told the story.

  “That good, huh?”

  “Oh, Wendy, you have no idea…”

  “Yes, I do.” She snickered. “Why do you think I’m marrying Patrick?”

  “Oh.” I felt like a fool. “I’m acting like I’m in middle school, aren’t I?”

  “Yes. Don’t behave like a teenager with a crush. See other men. If you’re both still interested when he comes back, go for it. If it doesn’t work out, that’s life. Meanwhile, think about what you want your future to be.”

  We talked a little more and she told me details about her wedding plans. Then we clicked off.

  In the new few weeks I did as Wendy suggested. I made myself go out to bars with Rachel, who worked in the Nat costume department, and met some guys. None of them interested me. I was much more fascinated by the additional library and internet research I did on ghosts and astral projection. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything useful about mind links. Telepathy as a concept did not cover how I could appear in costume on the Nat stage and yet only one person could see me. Anyway, nobody had ever proved that telepathy existed, let alone astral projection. Most of the articles on ghosts and such were based on lies, hysteria, and wishful thinking.

  Y
et I had been on that stage. JC had seen me. We had touched. Each of us had felt it. Then we’d complicated it by touching a different way.

  JC was now in Milan, at La Scala.

  “They didn’t boo him,” Ralph said, obviously happy as we watched the singers take their final bows. We were sitting in a Manhattan movie theater in the middle of the day, viewing the end of a live simulcast from La Scala’s opening night. Ralph had insisted I attend the simulcast of Carmen so I could see how Italian opera audiences behaved. He’d even come with me. I was impressed by the crowd of dignitaries, the wealthy, and celebrities who filled the ornate old theater. Italy’s president was in the grand box, along with the mayor of Milan, who wore amazing emerald earrings. They were joined by the presidents of two African countries and their wives. Every woman the camera focused on was wearing a designer gown and serious jewelry. Nothing over the top. No tiaras, as beloved in opera spoofs in the movies. But plenty of real diamonds and obvious designer earrings and necklaces. The audience did not applaud after every aria as they did at the Nat, but there were no boos for the singers, only for the conductor and the director.

  “Why did they boo?” I asked.

  With the program over, we were free to talk. We filed out of the theater with the rest of the crowd. Ralph restlessly looked at the expressions on the faces of the others from the audience. It was not a young crowd. Silver hair predominated. He sighed. Then he shook it off.

  “Booing is very common at La Scala. One time they booed so loudly during Aida that the tenor walked off the stage in the middle of the act. He left the soprano alone with no one to sing to.”

  “You’re kidding.” I laughed. “That must have been awful.”

  “You can see it online. Opera lovers can be brutal.”

  “Why did you think the audience at La Scala would boo JC Vasquez?” I asked, trying to keep my extreme interest out of my voice as we made our way to the curb to hail a taxi and return to the Nat offices.