by Reed Arvin
The concert was still some time off, so I wandered around campus for a while. About an hour before the concert I drifted back out to the backstage area. I scouted around the dressing rooms and found one with a large star on the door and a sign that read, “Ms. Sonnier.” I knocked.
Nothing happened for a second; then it suddenly opened. Michele was standing in front of the door in a half-open robe, her hair pulled back off her face by a barrette. I could see the line of her breast disappearing into the red folds of the fabric of her robe.
“Where’s Trammel?” she asked.
“No idea. How’s it going?”
“The director is inept, I just banished the costumier, the baritone is tone deaf and sings so loud he makes me sound wrong.”
“Glad I came.”
She smiled at me and the prima donna vanished. “You’re good for me, you know that?” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Help me with this?” She turned her back to me and let the robe slide down off her shoulders to her waist. She was wearing a black, sheer bra of lace. Her shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist, and I could see the top of a matching pair of thong panties.
I pulled my eyes upward. “Help you with what?”
“This.” She reached out and handed me a drab, brown costume. It was stained, and looked like it had been worn nearly through. She held her hands up, and I pulled it down over her arms. As it reached her waist, she let the robe slip down over her hips. The costume nestled down over her butt, reaching a mid-thigh length.
“I take it you’re supposed to be poor.”
“Po’.” She laughed. “In Paris, though, which helps.”
“Yeah, Paris would help.”
“You know much about bein’ po’, Jack?” The smooth, upper-class accent vanished, for the moment. Her voice was suddenly young and urban, the harsh tone of the inner city. I didn’t know if it was authentic or if she were putting it on, like a suit of clothes.
“I never went hungry. But I know what it feels like to be on the outside looking in.”
“I thought so.” She turned, gazing at herself in the mirror.
“I’ll go,” I said, nodding. “Trammel showed me the green room. I’ll go eat some cheese.”
She laughed, her silken voice returned. “You do that,” she said. Her voice was pure music, even when she was talking. She turned back to me and said, “I’m glad you’re here, Jack. Friends is good.”
She stood before me in her street urchin’s costume—a stunningly appealing combination of innocent waif and worldly seductress—and I wanted to pull her into my arms and save her from all the ravages of a bitter Paris winter. “Time to go,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” she said. Then, she bussed my cheek, soft and chaste. I felt her lips on my skin all the way backstage to my seat.
Eventually, the crowd started to filter in, a casual mix of students and older folks, more relaxed than at the Fox. Michele had got me a fifth-row seat, near the center, and I settled in to watch her sing.
From the beginning, something bothered me. It began as a vague feeling of discontent, but it grew as the performance continued. It took me about thirty minutes to figure out what was pissing me off. Then, it hit me: if Puccini knew much about being poor, he didn’t put it in La Boheme. The program said he started out broke, but he was famous and rich by the time he wrote the opera. That screwed up his perspective. It’s always the same: once somebody makes real money, he romanticizes the hell out of what it was like when he had nothing. He tells stories about how great it was when he didn’t have all the problems of wealth. I know, because I did it myself. I figure Puccini was about the worst offender of all time on that score. The picture of Paris in winter that I saw on stage—a poverty so subtly colorful and charming it could have come out of a Disney movie—was a long way from the Atlanta projects. And the bohemians—the painter, the writer, and all the rest of them—chirped around like Disney birds, too. They enjoyed the hell out of being poor, mostly. The only one I could get a handle on was Mimi, because she was dying. Not that I think you can’t find a moment of happiness in the ghetto. I’ve seen it, a hundred times. But ghetto humor is tinged with the kind of edgy nervousness that comes from knowing your existence isn’t a foregone conclusion. This is what Puccini forgot: When ghetto people laugh, they laugh hard, as a kind of armor against life. The humor isn’t charming, it’s defiant. The characters in La Boheme sang about love and poetry like they didn’t have a care in the world. In other words, they acted like rich people who just didn’t happen to have any money. The truth is not having any money stinks, and the people who don’t have any can tell you how many ways. Johnny Cash sure as hell wouldn’t have made that mistake.
Which isn’t to say it wasn’t beautiful. That, I suppose, is its own statement. It just showed that a thing can be a load of crap on one level, and still work its magic on another. The music was so beautiful it could break you down if you weren’t careful. And in the center, lit from within and without, was Michele Sonnier. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, she sang that night. She was good in Atlanta as Romeo, but this was another level. At times, she sang with the delicacy of a glass figurine, as if her voice would shatter into bright fragments if it were touched. At other times, she sang with a riveting, unashamed sexuality. Believe me, there wasn’t a guy in the place who took his eyes off her. She was a miracle.
I suppose it’s a gift, because the other people on the stage worked just as hard. Harder, actually. You could see it in their eyes, how they had spent a million hours in dumpy practice rooms, singing scales or whatever singers do. But you could also see fear and a little awe in their eyes whenever Michele sang. It might have even been hatred. Because no amount of effort was going to take any of them to the place that Michele went when she sang. No matter who else was on stage around her, you never looked at any of them. You kept your eyes on Michele, watching her luminous face. It was like she had said: no matter what she was singing, she was singing her life. She had mastered the ability to completely let go, which was why, watching her there in the dark, whatever protections I had erected between the two of us began to come down. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it, either. In view of what eventually happened, its meaning turned out to be so tortured that I’ll never completely understand it. But when I look back, I know what it was that bound me to her: we both wanted to disappear into something. It meant different things to each of us, but the essence was the same.
Fall in love. I didn’t say the words to myself that night, sitting in the dark, because their time had yet to come. But on some roads, the first step is all you need to decipher the destination. Maybe those words would have come to me that night—premature, but prophetic—but suddenly she was dying again on stage. I had seen her sing twice, and both times she had ended up dead. This time it was from tuberculosis—a gift of the cold Paris air—and I began to wonder if it was some opera thing, all the dying. But whatever it was, this death was completely different from her Romeo. It was a cold, hard struggle for life, and it was chilling to watch. Her voice got smaller and smaller, but it was still beautiful, hanging perilously in the air, the orchestra a whisper beneath her. And then she exhaled her last, tremulous note. You could feel the audience breathing out with her, brought into her world completely. A bit of each one of them was dying, and just like at the Fox, some people around me started to cry. It was exactly like what she had done to me backstage, but she was doing it to a thousand people at once, all of them complete strangers.
And then, as before, it was over. The spell was broken, shattered by applause. Backstage there was another crush of affirmation, dozens of sprays of flowers, scores of well-wishers wanting to touch the star. I lay back, staying at a distance. It wasn’t my world, but it was fascinating to watch. I couldn’t figure out how she could be lonely with all the people around her telling her how great she was, but she was lonely; I knew that absolutely. She was as lonely as I was, lonely enough to wake us up in the middl
e of the night with a dull ache in our souls. At one point in the chaos she looked over at me, and I smiled, nodding my head. She smiled back, but it was only a moment’s connection. She was quickly pulled back into the throng of admirers.
I walked back out the stage door, looking for relief from the noise, and a little fresh air. Trammel was out there, smoking a cigarette. “Good show,” I said. Trammel looked at me as though I had just wrecked his new BMW.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Hammond?” he asked.
“I was just wondering that myself,” I answered. “I’ve decided it comes down to being asked.”
His lips formed a kind of sneer. “So you’re this season’s toy.”
“Excuse me?”
“The expression is self-explanatory.”
I looked at him: narrow face, intelligent eyes, dark suit not quite put together. “Lemme ask you something,” I said, changing the subject. “What’s a tour manager do?”
Trammel shrugged. “Collect money, mostly. Say things to people that Michele doesn’t want to say herself.”
“What kinds of things?”
“‘My dressing room is cold. The bottled water is the wrong kind. The stage manager is incompetent.’ And, of course, ‘Goodbye.’”
“Goodbye?”
Trammel gave me a leer. “That’s right. ‘Goodbye.’”
We stood in silence, the smoke wafting up off Trammel’s cigarette in the light of an overhead streetlamp. “How often do you say it?” I asked quietly.
Trammel looked over at me. “Whenever necessary.”
“She doesn’t say it herself?”
Trammel shook his head. “Why should she? She has me.”
“But what about Ralston? Surely he doesn’t put up with this.”
Trammel shrugged. “That’s not for me to say. Mr. Ralston can manage his own affairs.”
There was some noise behind us; the first few cast members were escaping the auditorium, heading for their cars. Trammel dropped his cigarette onto the pavement and ground it out with his shoe. Before he moved off I said, “One more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Who was last season’s toy?”
Trammel’s lips formed the sneer once again. His answer was a single word: “Gone.”
On the plane, the postperformance exhaustion showed through again. There was a bar, and she asked me to pour her a drink. I set us both up with a scotch, and we settled back for the flight. The plane was a kind of cocoon, the narrow fuselage creating a warm, cozy space. We were sitting side by side, and once airborne she suddenly nestled against me, coming in under my arm. It was a kind of trust, the way she let go, her breathing deep and slow. Her eyes were half-closed, and she seemed perfectly content, her body framed against my own. She was brilliant, an angel, and she was leaning her beautiful, exquisite body against me. She was also married to another man, which is why I needed to blow it up. This was something about which I considered myself an expert. “Trammel said something interesting after the show,” I said. “Kind of a stopper.”
Michele looked up at me from under my arm. Her skin was so smooth and radiant it was all I could do to keep from touching it. “What was that?”
“He said I was this season’s toy.”
I admit I didn’t expect her to laugh, but she did. “He would say that.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because he’s such a boy.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He hit on me mercilessly for what, three months?”
“You mean he’s just pissed?”
“When he finally got the message, he got sullen. Typical.” She looked at me. “Which is why I like you.”
“I’m sullen already?”
She smiled. “You don’t try.”
“To do what?”
“Exactly.” She nestled deeper into my side, my arm falling down around her. My fingertips were resting on the upper half of her breast, directly on her lovely, brown skin. It had been two years since I had made love to a woman, and the instant my skin touched hers, I was aware of every day of it.
I sat there without speaking, watching my resolve fall apart. I won’t belittle the beauty of fidelity by excusing what happened. I grew up in the church and I know right from wrong. But need speaks its own language. You can turn yourself off inside for only so long, and what lingers inside you will find a way out in the end. For every moment of carefully constructed perfection, there is a loss of control. Or maybe it’s finding yourself again, your true self, the one closest to your soul. All I know is that we talked for a while, and I don’t remember much about what we said. I know that it felt safe, and that, caught in the womb of our mutual acceptance, it didn’t matter that I was a destroyed man locked in a nothing law practice who still owned a few good suits. And it didn’t matter that she was in a loveless marriage, and that she was carrying around a horrible guilt I would only later be forced to confront. Damage met damage, in the vain, utterly impossible hope that two wrongs could heal a soul. It’s the lie that drives every love story, whether written, sung, or lived.
I’ll tell you something, and you can trust this completely: Men act like the idea of being found out is so hateful that they would kill rather than be exposed. But the truth is they are longing to be discovered, and they are desperate to have their weakness accepted. When a woman does that, there’s nothing left to say, because she owns him.
What, I remember thinking, are you so afraid of? Why haven’t you started your career over again? Why have you been content to sit in Odom’s court, doing penny-ante cases? Why haven’t you loved anyone in more than two years? Why is your best friend a failed law student and a drunk? Why haven’t you found your level again? Why don’t you lean down and kiss this incredible woman, and worry about what it means later? I could feel myself unraveling, bit by bit. While all those questions were passing through my brain, it wasn’t a big deal on the surface, just a deeper breath, a flushing of my face. I got it under control in a few seconds, but it was too late.
She saw through me. She was watching me, her artist’s eyes looking into mine with a kind of warm precision, and I was exposed, game, set, and match. I don’t know at what point her fingers were touching my face. I don’t even remember her leaning up toward my mouth. I just know that at some point my eyes were closed, and her fingertips were tracing under my chin, across my cheek. When her fingers touched my lips, I opened my eyes. Her mouth looked so warm, with her lips slightly parted, that it seemed like the answer to every question was hiding just inside them. I leaned down and I kissed her, and my God, I hadn’t been with a woman in such a long time that in the back of my mind I was afraid I had forgotten how to do it.
Now, looking back on it, everything means something different. Not just that kiss—everything, I’ve come to believe, is like that. Distance changes things. But a part of me hangs on to that kiss, to that moment. I don’t know how to lie about it. She was married—loveless or not—and it was wrong. But I had no defense, no armor for it. Touching her lips took me into all my upbringing about white and black and fucked it up, rearranged it, spit it out and I was lost in some earthy bayou, devouring her black skin, going back into time to where there weren’t any races and there wasn’t McDaniel Glen and the War between the States never happened and Jesus, it was like being kissed by Gaia herself. Some moments we possess for ourselves alone, and they cannot be justified in the minds of others. I only know that no man or woman will ever take those sacred, holy minutes away from me, the minutes the great Michele Sonnier set me free.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AFTER THE LOVEMAKING, there is the shock wave. The plane landed and we reentered not just the humid atmosphere of the city, but the realities and concerns that had seemed so remote at forty thousand feet. There was a powerful force to help us reorient to our newly changed circumstances, however, and that was the city of Atlanta herself. She is a willing accomplice to love. Her heavily treed, upper-middle-class neighborhoods are so vast
that they invite the illusion that they exist in a state of grace, cocooned from all harm. In that calculated state of denial, the city is susceptible to the soft southern light of late summer afternoons, the same light that fell on antebellum plantations and warmed promenading debutantes. The natural beauty of the place somehow persists: its breezes are still sweet, its pines slender and tall, its honeysuckle fragrant. Cast in that gentle glow, the city willingly accepts its most treasured illusions. And what happens in a city can happen in a pair of human souls. For new lovers, the beauty of Atlanta can be a nightshade to reality. With Michele by my side, there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be.
We were changed now, a new, complex layer of considerations mingled with an already charged situation. There was married and single. There was black and white. There was rich and tenuously hanging on. There was high culture and low. There were more reasons to run than I could count. And none of them meant half as much as the fact that she had found the lock that opened a door I had successfully held shut since Violeta Ramirez died.
Even illicit love has its codes of conduct, and there was no question that we would meet. If it was too soon to know exactly what it was we were sharing, we both knew it was much more than a moment’s loss of control. So we did what every pair of lovers has done, from Romeo and Juliet to this day: we longed for reprieve from the world’s concerns, for an uncluttered space in which to simply feel.