“Le Millenium, s’il vous plaît,” I said, dropping my throbbing head back against the seat and shutting my eyes as he screeched off.
I just wanted the world to go away.
Back at the hotel, the doorman helped me out of the cab, tut-tutting solicitously at my condition. I squelched across the lobby, water dripping from my clothes, soggy parcels under my arm. I knew I looked like a drowned rat but really didn’t care.
Once in my room, I went straight to the bathroom, where I turned on the taps for the tub full blast. After pouring in an enormous quantity of bubble bath, I stripped off my drenched clothes, dropping everything on the tile floor. My body and mind felt as if I’d just performed all four operas of the Ring Cycle back to back. Sitting on the edge of the tub, I watched steam slowly filling the room as I paddled one hand in the water.
Once the bath was ready, I climbed in and leaned back, stretching out. Tentatively, I mentally poked at what had just occurred, not daring to really admit to myself that I was doing it. When I began to shake, I quickly shut my brain down again. “Keep yourself in one piece, woman,” I told myself. “You can’t afford to lose it!”
I stayed in the safety of the floating cloud of bubbles until my fingertips puckered and any hint of cold was gone from my body. One thing about first-class hotels is small things like heat lamps in the ceiling, so the room was comfortably warm when I finally stepped out.
Roughly drying my body until my skin tingled, I considered what to do next. Thank the Lord I didn’t have to sing tonight. I knew there’d be no way I could step on the stage and do any role, but especially Violetta. Not tonight.
But would it be any better tomorrow when I did have to sing?
I slipped into a hotel robe and slippers, exited the bathroom, then crossed over to the phone and picked it up.
“Oui?” came a tinny male voice at the other end.
“Could you send up a pot of tea?” I stopped and thought for a moment. “On second thought, I’d like some cognac. Make it a double.”
“Oui, madame. Toute de suite.”
I slumped down onto the bed, then curled up on my side. Make the world go away, I thought, but knew that would do no good. Things had to be faced. First and foremost, I feared for my sanity. I’d finally begun putting Marc behind me, and now hit this setback. Rubbing my aching temples, I decided to go in search of a pill for my pressurized skull.
Answering a soft knock on the door, I found a young waiter in a crisp white shirt and bow tie with my cognac on a silver tray. He came into the room, setting the snifter down on the coffee table.
“Compliments of the manager,” he said. “Madame was noticed on returning to the hotel.”
“Thank him very much for me,” I answered and fumbled in my purse for some coins, grabbing several and pressing them into his palm.
He bowed, giving every impression of wanting to also click his heels together, and quickly departed. A handsome lad with a friendly, competent manner — he’d go far.
Perched on the edge of the sofa, I picked up the snifter with a shaking hand and downed the spirit in one gulp, feeling its burn all the way to the pit of my stomach. The glass almost slipped from my grasp as I put it down.
Leaning back, I shuddered. Get a grip, Marta. Get a grip!
The more I assured myself that I was okay, that there was a logical explanation to the afternoon’s bizarre happenings, the more the knot in my gut and the throbbing in my head told me I was wrong. A half-hour later, I had the phone in my hand and was dialling Lili in Toronto. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be out or already asleep.
I struck out on my first two calls: one to her home phone and one to her cell, leaving messages on both. They sounded pretty hysterical, even to my own ears.
Another double shot of cognac from room service earned a discreetly raised eyebrow from the young waiter. “Would madame perhaps like to order a bottle?” he asked with the utmost tact.
That sort of snapped me out of it. Piling on the alcohol would not do me any good. If nothing else, my voice would sound like crap the next day. Even so, I finished the cognac far too quickly. It didn’t do a bit of good.
By the time the phone rang an hour and a half later, I was a complete wreck. Unable to sit still, I was wearing a groove in the carpet as I paced between the door and the window overlooking Boulevard Haussmann, four storeys below. I made a very unladylike dive over the bed to save time getting to it. “Hello! Lili?”
“It is me,” she confirmed, her Czech accent stronger than usual, so I knew she’d spent the evening with friends from the old country. “What has happened? Your message made little sense.”
For all my agitation since I’d gotten back to the hotel, I had completely neglected to figure out what I would say to her — or to anyone.
“Marta! Are you still there?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“What has you in such a state?”
“I ... um ... Something happened this afternoon.” The pounding in my head increased dramatically. “I ... I saw ...”
“You saw what?”
“I thought I saw Marc this afternoon.” There! I’d gotten it out.
The line was very silent for several heartbeats. “Sit down, Marta and —”
“Actually, I’m lying across the bed at the moment.” I felt a giggle rising up inside me. That was not a good sign, so I took a deep breath to centre myself as Lili had taught me and rolled over onto my back. “I’m quite comfortable, Lili.”
“Have you had anything to eat recently?”
“Not since lunch, but what has that —”
“Your blood sugar is very certainly low. Order some food and then you will call me back. All right?” Lili hung up, cutting off any argument.
She was probably right. In less than ten minutes, some bread, cheese, and fruit had been delivered, along with a cup of tea. No more alcohol for this girl. The waiter seemed clearly amused by my bizarre behaviour.
Lili answered her phone on the first ring. “You have done what I said?”
“Yes. The food just arrived. I’ll eat while we talk.”
“Tell me exactly the order in which things happened. I want to know all that has happened since we last spoke.
I gathered my scattered wits and plunged in. It took nearly a half hour to satisfy her.
“And what was your state of mind before this happened?”
“Lili! I’m going mad and all you can do is talk all clinical at me!”
“Marta, you’ve clearly had an episode of some kind and we must find the reason for it. You are not going mad. There is an explanation.”
“All I had to do was call out and he’d have turned to me.”
“You have probably seen someone who looked very much like Marc and just projected the rest onto this person.”
“But it seemed so real.”
“These things can. You said the man had a beard and moustache. Did you ever see Marc with facial hair?”
“No.”
“No old photographs? Young men often grow facial hair at one time or another.”
“Marc didn’t have any old photographs. He didn’t have much of anything. He told me all his possessions had been lost in a house fire a year before we met.”
“So it is possible that the man you saw this afternoon just looked like you think Marc might if he had grown a moustache and beard? Yes? You admit yourself that you could not see all that clearly through the rain.”
“And I wasn’t all that close,” I added, beginning to believe what Lili was saying. I had been thinking of Marc earlier in the day.
“This event is just your mind playing tricks on you.”
“Like moving on with my life is somehow being disloyal to Marc?”
“Exactly! In your subconscious you must be feeling still that you should always mourn your husband.”
“You must think I’ve been acting pretty silly.”
“Not at all. I expected that going back to work would be challenging
for you, especially doing Traviata. I would have preferred something like La Bohème. You’ve always done Mimi very well.”
“Not too over the top?”
“Marta, I will be the first to tell you when you are, as you say, ‘over the top.’ I would enjoy very much telling you that you have been over the top.”
Feeling more at ease, I laughed. Her calm words were very reassuring. “Perhaps if I continue to impress as Violetta, they’ll ask me back.”
“I have read all the reviews online and they are excellent. I was about to ring you up to offer my congratulations.” Lili’s voice became businesslike once more. “Marta, you must maintain your focus. Do those relaxation exercises that I have taught you. Also, think of Marc in a good sense, but also think of your time with him as being in the past. You are moving on to other and better things.”
“You really think that?”
“Yes. The past is over. Done. You have mourned your husband sufficiently. It is now time to move on with your life. Be open to change. Keep telling yourself this thing!”
I was flooded with gratitude to this person who’d stood by me so tirelessly. “I don’t know how to thank you, Lili,” I began.
As always, she deflected my comment. “Go out there and give an even better performance tomorrow evening. That will be thanks enough for all my very hard work.”
Hanging up the phone, I wasn’t sure if she’d had her tongue completely in her cheek.
Vocal coaches, especially the good ones, can be tyrants at times. They need to be. No matter how good a singer you are, you require that outside set of ears, someone who really knows your voice to tell you if you’re doing it right. Is the passaggio, that treacherous space between chest and head voices, smooth and even in tone? Singers can’t completely tell that themselves. We rely on vocal coaches.
Lili Doubek was one of the best, even though she could be a filthy little slave driver if she felt her clients were not putting forth everything they had. One time, I jokingly began singing “All or Nothing at All” when she was particularly in my face about not trying, but she failed to make the connection. The more I got to know her, the more I realized she didn’t possess much of a sense of humour.
Because of my breakdown, our relationship had undergone a profound and somewhat schizophrenic shift. She still remained my vocal coach, and I relied on her more than ever to help me keep all those singing muscles supple and in prime shape. As soon as she’d get up from the piano, though, she became my therapist, and if I’d thought she was hard on me vocally, it was nothing compared with Lili crawling around inside my head.
Now at the end of the two-year process, I was feeling more like my old self: the footloose musical vagabond I’d been when Marc had walked into my life. Lili made me realize that this had been the real me. When I’d been with Gerhard Fosch, I was very much the student, the one constantly being taught: how to sing, how to perform (two very different things), how to dress, how to behave in public, even how to make love. He very much formed me into the person whom I presented to the world.
This man had given me a great gift, showed me how to fashion myself a new skin that I felt completely comfortable in. After his sudden death, when I finally realized just what he’d taught me, I put it into use. The more I refined this skin, the more self-sufficient and confident I became.
Then Marc dropped into my life and I changed. I became one half of a whole — the lesser half, Lili had pointed out to me on numerous occasions. My life and how I viewed myself had diminished and I never even realized it.
Yes, I kept singing, and my career slowly blossomed, but it was far short of the meteoric rise that Gerhard had once predicted. The drive that had pushed me to succeed slowly began to dissipate. Puzzlingly, though, Marc stayed completely away from that part of my life. He only heard me sing once — other than around the house — at a party at one of the embassies in Ottawa. We never travelled together; he only came to my condo in Toronto a handful of times. He never really understood what made me tick and seemed not to care. It was the only thing he’d ever done that had hurt me.
Maybe I just loved him too wildly. I was blind to how I’d begun pulling back from everything that was so important to me, wanting to spend every moment of every day with him, not off in some hotel halfway around the planet.
Lili had seen all that clearly and worked hard to help me back to my previous state of equilibrium. I was struggling to stay afloat, and when Marc died, I had no anchor, nothing to hold on to. Somebody who was no longer there was still the centre of my universe. And his loss had been just too devastating.
Lili’s gift was helping me understand why.
Marc had arrived in my life driving an old pickup truck with one of those cover things over the back. Inside were all his tools, not neatly laid out and clean, but looking as if they’d just been chucked in as he hurried off to his next handyman gig. I found out later that this impression was indeed accurate, when I’d hired him to re-hang the doors on the old barn behind my 150-year-old log home.
I didn’t realize he was French Canadian until I saw the roughly lettered MARC TREMBLAY on the side of the truck. From a brief phone call, I had him pegged as Mark and firmly Anglo.
“Vous êtes québécois,” I said. “Je m’en étais pas rendu compte au téléphone. Your English is very, very good.”
“Merci, madame. Et votre français de même.”
“It’s not as good as your English,” I said, laughing. “Where are you from in Québec? Montreal?”
He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Sort of.”
As we strolled through the long grass from the log house to the unpainted barn two hundred feet away, he said to me, “I have passed this place before and wondered who lived here. Had I known it was such a lovely lady, I certainly would have stopped to offer my services.”
I held back a snort at his outrageous words. Just over six feet, brawny and ruggedly handsome, Marc reminded me of one of those stud muffins you see on the covers of romance novels: all muscles, dark hair, dark eyes and full lips.
Me? In those days I’d admittedly gotten a bit plump (like many opera singers), and my brown hair was cut short to more easily accommodate the wigs many roles demand. I had a good enough body and a nice enough face. My best feature was undoubtedly my whiskey-coloured eyes. I figured Marc only saw an easy chance to score with a lonely, slightly older woman.
It took two days to re-hang the old barn doors. Since their size (each twelve feet tall and six feet wide) made it impossible for one person to handle them, I had to work closely with Marc the entire time — and I can’t say that I minded. It had been a long time since someone stirred my blood the way he did.
“You are quite strong,” he remarked on the first day, wiping his arm across his sweaty brow. “When I arrived here, I didn’t think you’d be able to help me much even though you are tall.”
Resting my hands on my hips, I fixed him with a mock glare. “Why? Because I’m a woman or because I look delicate?”
He grinned, knowing that he’d at least partially gotten my goat. “You seemed too much of a lady.”
That time I did snort.
“Well, are we going to chatter all day, or are we going to get this job done?” I asked, tossing his hammer to him, maybe a bit closer to his head than he was expecting. “I’m still the boss on this job site. Get to work!”
Reflecting back on it now, it was amazing how well we fitted together right from the beginning. My yin complimented his yang in almost every way. I was seldom comfortable with people as quickly or easily as I was with Marc.
The second day was very hot with almost no breeze. By the time we finished in mid-afternoon, Marc and I were both drenched in sweat. When I came back from the house with another tall pitcher of ice water, the last having been finished during the afternoon’s work, Marc was nowhere to be seen.
“Marc! Marc, where are you?” I shouted.
“I am here,” his voice came from the farm’s thre
e-acre pond, just down the hill from the barn.
Walking through the waist-high grass and out onto the old, rickety dock my dad had built many years before, I could see Marc out in the centre of the pond. His clothes had been dumped in the long grass near the shore.
“You have trout in this pond!” he shouted.
“Yes, I know. There are also enormous leeches. Better be careful — especially in your state.”
“You should come in. The water is really quite wonderful on this hot day.”
“My bathing suit is back at the house.”
“You should swim as God intended.”
“I think not,” I replied, but Marc’s suggestion did cause a flutter in my stomach.
When he unselfconsciously hoisted himself onto the small dock, the flutters turned into a full-scale butterfly migration.
We eventually finished off the last adjustments to the doors, and as we stood around chatting after I paid him, I threw caution to the wind and invited him to dinner — then later in the evening, to breakfast. The following week he moved in.
Six weeks later, in front of a justice of the peace in Perth, we became husband and wife.
Chapter Three
Yet another Paris driver leaning on his horn in front of the hotel woke me up the next morning. The grey clouds and rain of the previous afternoon had blown away during the night, and I hoped they’d taken the disquieting events of the previous day with them. Standing at the window, looking out on a perfect autumn day, I took a deep breath and began to feel that my behaviour the previous afternoon had been pretty ridiculous.. Thankfully, too, my throat felt fantastic after I’d had some hot tea and done a bit of vocalizing. A second bullet dodged.
My manager, Alexander Bennison, had called from New York late the previous evening to congratulate me on my triumph and to let me know that he arranged for an interview with a reporter from an Austrian paper.
“I knew you had it in you to come back in a big way, Marta,” Alex had said. “Already other opera companies are nosing around. The Canadian Opera had been sitting on my queries about future bookings, and they’ve called twice today. I can’t say what it will be yet, but you’re going to get something good from them.”
Masques and Murder — Death at the Opera 2-Book Bundle Page 3