Prima Donna

by Megan Chance

  I hit the G; my voice wavered.

  C, A, D. My fingers pressed harder. The notes jarred. I hit a sharp. I stopped humming.

  Impatiently I slammed the lid back down and rested my elbows on it.

  I don’t know how long I sat that way. When I heard the soft step up the stairs, I thought I had imagined it. Voices were still murmuring downstairs. But then she settled her hand upon my shoulder, and I wasn’t the least bit startled.

  “Duncan wants to know if you’re going home or staying with Johnny.”

  I looked up to see her standing behind me. “I don’t know.”

  “He’s tired, Marguerite. He wants to go now.”

  “Then you should go ahead. I’ll stay here.”

  She hesitated. Her fingers tightened on my shoulder. “Why don’t you come home tonight? You said you’d tell me where you were today.”

  “I was … nowhere. I went for a walk.”

  She sat down on the bench beside me, forcing me to move over. “Maybe you can get Johnny to believe that shit, but I ain’t Johnny. You ain’t the kind to go promenading by yourself. Where were you?”

  “That is where I was,” I said irritably.

  “Walk down by the water, did you?”

  “Yes, as it happens.”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t see you. I happened to be promenading myself.” Her voice took on a mockingly aristocratic tone. “With the good Dr. Marsdon.”

  “Were you?”

  “I never thought to like a respectable man so well.” She sighed, a soft breath of air, scented with the watered-down whiskey we gave the girls. “You know, I been thinking. Maybe … if this place goes the way you and Johnny say … I don’t know … maybe I could … give up the whoring.”

  She was waiting; I felt it. She was telling me something important, and I knew I should listen. But all I could hear were Gideon’s words in my head. All I felt was my own longing. “I suppose.”

  She went quiet. She traced the keyboard cover with her finger, leaving a greasy streak behind. “You learn to play this from your musician?”

  I said without thinking, “The first time I saw him, he showed me how to play ‘Hot Cross Buns.’”

  “The first time you saw him?” she echoed.

  I nodded.

  “He had a piano there on the street under your window?”

  Too late I heard the flatness of her voice. Too late I remembered the lie I’d told her. “I meant … the first time … face-to-face. The lesson.”

  She rose. I felt the loss of her warmth, which made me shiver. “How much of it was true, Marguerite?”

  I could not answer her; I could not look at her.

  She went down the stairs, and I heard her call out to Duncan, “She’s staying with Johnny tonight,” and I heard his quiet assent and the cross of her footsteps to the door, the open and close, and then the silence she left behind.

  I WOKE SWEATING, haunted by a nightmare I could no longer remember. I was too distressed to care about waking Johnny as I slid from beneath his arm. I went to the window, pushing aside the curtain of fading, dusty calico to stare out onto the street. It was just past dawn; I’d been asleep for only a short time. Below, it was quiet, only a crow pecking at something lodged in the mud, cawing raucously as his fellows joined him.

  I knew I must make Gideon go. If nothing else, the despair I felt at the thought should convince me how necessary it was. I wanted what he offered too much, but I could not let myself forget what had led to my own hands covered with blood and the scar that marked me. I had meant to leave him. I had been desperate to do so. The girl I’d been had known what was best; I could not let four and a half years of distance tell me otherwise. I looked over my shoulder at Johnny. I had another life now. A life I meant to be happy in.

  I stood there gathering my courage and my resolution, and then I dressed and went to the New Brunswick Hotel and knocked upon his door.

  He did not seem surprised to see me. He was only partially dressed—it was early, after all, and I supposed I’d been lucky to not find him still abed. His shirt was open to reveal his long underwear beneath, his hair tousled from sleep. He’d obviously been shaving; he wiped at his face with a towel as he stepped back to let me in. He missed a bit of shaving lather. I reached up to wipe it away with my thumb—a reflex born of habit, a quick flick that I wished I had not done the moment I did so. His skin was warm, the hardness of his jaw familiar. I curled my thumb into my palm and stepped quickly away.

  He seemed hardly to notice. He flung the towel to the top of the dresser and asked, “Did you read the journal?”

  I’d forgotten all about it. “No.”

  “Have you changed your mind?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I came to convince you that I mean what I say.” I sat down at the desk. The music folio was there, stuffed full, the curled edges of the sheets peeking from between the covers, and the hunger to see that music again made my mouth water. I rested my fingers on the smooth, worn leather. “I’m not going back. I want you to leave. It’s a waste of your time to stay.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “You’ve wasted so much time already.” I drew my finger down the soft leather, down the side, over the edges of the pages. “Four years. I should think you would hate to waste more.”

  I meant to be cruel; I couldn’t help myself. I expected him to make some cutting reply and was surprised when he didn’t. He came up behind me.

  “Why don’t you look at it?”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder. “Look at what?”

  “The music.”

  I drew my fingers from the folio. I shook my head.

  He said, “Come, Bina. You know you want to.”

  “I’ve seen it all before.”

  “The mad scene from Lucia‘s there, and the Fountain Song,” he said softly. “Music from La Trav, and your Marguerite, the Barber, Il Trov—”

  “I don’t need to see.”

  “Aida, Don Giovanni, L’africaine—”

  “I’ve never really liked that one.”

  “Sonnambula.” He was almost whispering. “Ernani.” He was closer now, leaning over me, pulling the ribbon of the folio so it slipped loose, then opening the cover. On top was The Barber of Seville, Rosina’s aria. Despite myself, I looked at it. The notes jumped off the page and into my brain like an electric current, the little notations above written in familiar pencil, the notations he’d made for me. This was the music we had practiced with in the past, his commentary on where I should embellish and where I should not, his always brilliant assessment of the music and how it should best be sung.

  Each note leaped free and into my head, long remembered, never forgotten. My eyes raced hungrily over it, and the room disappeared before me, fading until what was real was the illusion cast over it, a glamour of white satin beneath my fingers and silk flowers in my hair, the smell of the gas footlights and the too-fresh paint of scenery strong in my nose. “Una voce poco fa,”—”a little voice I heard just now….”

  I reached to turn the page. One after another and then the next, not pausing until I came to the reconciliation duet from Ernani, and then I stopped, suddenly breathless.

  “‘Tu, Perfida.’ Remember?” he asked softly.

  I nodded. I felt him against me, though the back of the chair was between us. He bent to read the music over my shoulder, his hair brushing my cheek.

  “I think it’s when I first fell in love with you,” he said. “Onstage, watching you sing those words to me. I remember thinking you were either the best actress I’d ever seen, or that you were in love with me too.”

  I could barely get the words past my throat. “I wasn’t that good an actress.”

  “One night Barto was watching from the wings—did I ever tell you this?—and he pulled me aside and told me what a lucky man I was. He said that if he’d been twenty years younger and you had looked at him that wa
y, he would never have left your side.”

  “You never told me that,” I whispered.

  “I suppose I didn’t want you to know you’d snared another one.” He laughed lightly. His breath stirred the pages. “There was already enough competition.”

  The memories were there again, shifting back, shrouded and drifting….

  “When I saw you in Rinzetti’s arms … I wanted to kill him, you know. It was all I could do to let you be with him.”

  “You had Follett,” I said tightly. “And Willa.”

  “Yes. I told myself that mattered. But it didn’t, Bina. You know it didn’t. Because I had that duet too. I think I would give anything to hear you sing it again now.”

  And then he began to sing his part, lightly, teasingly, against my ear. His voice was gravelly and unused, rough with smoke, but still his, the voice I remembered, not good enough for real fame, but one that had disguised very well and for a long time his real talent, and I closed my eyes and remembered looking at him across the stage, his eyes kohled and his reddened lips, his dark hair gleaming red in the footlights. I remembered pretending he meant those words he sang, and how much I wished they were true. And with that memory came another one, hazy, as if through smoke and distance. The way I’d leaned into him as he played piano during practice. The way I’d deliberately put everything I felt into my eyes when we sang together, how I’d meant for him to know I meant to have him.

  The realization startled me. Hoarsely, I said, “I know what you’re doing. I’m no callow girl any longer. Your seduction won’t work this time.”

  “Won’t it?” His lips brushed my hair. “Remember, Bina? Remember the way it really was? It was good, wasn’t it?”

  “Some of it,” I admitted.

  “Most of it.” He drew back, and I felt him tug my hair, twirling a loosened strand of it about his finger. “I miss your yellow hair.”

  I tugged gently away. “That’s no longer who I am.”

  His pale eyes flared. “It’s who you’ll always be. You belong up on Vanderbilt’s stage, Sabine. And not just there, but at La Scala too, and Covent Garden, the Theatre Italien…. Take back your place. They’ll come in droves to see you. You barely realized your promise. There was so much more to be had.”

  The things he made me see, the things I wanted … I shook my head desperately. I jerked away from him, on my feet so quickly the chair rocked. “And you would be right there beside me.”

  He frowned warily. “Yes.”

  “Guiding me. Managing me.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Telling me what to do—”

  “Christ. What do you think you are, some biddable child?”

  I turned away from him with a cry of frustration. “Dear God, why did I even think to come here?”

  “Because you know what you want, even if you won’t admit it to yourself. You know what I can give you.”

  “Oh yes. The reputation for being a whore. The return of a scandal I’ve spent years running from.”

  “If you would embrace it, Sabine, no one could use it against you.”

  “I don’t want it! Don’t you understand? I loved you and you used that to manipulate me.”

  “You did some manipulating yourself, as I recall. You weren’t the only one who suffered. D’you think I enjoyed it? Watching Barret destroy himself? Seeing you go everywhere on Jerome’s arm instead of mine? Letting all those men fawn over you because I was supposed to be your manager and nothing more? Christ, if just telling you no would have ended the torment, I’d have done so in a moment.”

  “You never even tried,” I accused.

  “You weren’t listening.” He was breathing hard, as angry as I was. “You never did.”

  I spun on my heel, heading for the door. “There’s no point in this. I’m leaving.”

  “Go then,” he snapped. “Run away. Keep running.”

  I had my hand on the knob. But I paused; I could not make myself turn it. As angry as I was, I did not want to go. Instead I turned back to him, uncertain.

  He was there in a moment, as if he’d known better than I what we were moving toward, what we were waiting for. He pinned me to the door, shoving his hand into my hair so roughly it fell loose, and there was no subtlety in our kiss. It was open-mouthed and starving and still it was not enough. I had missed him. I could not satisfy my craving for him; there was no way to bring him close enough.

  He lifted me onto the edge of the desk, and then his hands were beneath my skirt, pulling it up, running over my bare skin. The desk was too small, the music was in the way, and I pushed it, too far; the folio slipped to the floor and the pages scattered everywhere, and I didn’t care. I cared about nothing but having him. And when he was deep inside me, one hand grasping my hip and the other entwining with mine as together we braced ourselves against a desk that rocked and jarred beneath our weight, I heard the music of him, vibrating into my body like a struck chord, a note held and blooming into fullness, harmonizing, and I burst and was gone, cast into a net of my own making, tangled irrevocably once more.

  HE TRAPPED ME as I made to leave. He kissed me, his lips against mine as he murmured, “Meet me here in the morning. We’ll begin practice.”

  “I’m not coming back,” I said.

  CHAPTER 20

  Everything had turned upside down, my entire life upended. I could no longer keep the past and the present separate—or, more accurately, the past would not stay the past. I was angry with myself for falling so spectacularly into the trap he’d laid for me, for failing to send him away, for not saving the life I’d worked so hard to make.

  But mostly, I was furious with myself for wanting.

  The past was there now, in my head, at every turn. I could not look at the Palace stage without yearning for it myself. I could not watch those girls singing without wanting to show them how it was done. I could not be Marguerite because Sabine was so much stronger, and the efforts I’d made to quiet her were unraveling, leaving me scrambling to catch the threads before they came completely apart.

  The only thing I knew for certain was that I could not trust myself around Gideon, and therefore I would stay away from him. He could not tempt me if I did not see him. I would not go back to the hotel. I would not meet him tomorrow. And I would not—no matter the temptation—let him practice me.

  I could go back to the way things were if I stopped now. It hadn’t gone too far, not yet. I could still hold this life together if I tried. I had to. Today had shown me just how weak I was. I wanted to be Sabine Conrad. But being her had nearly destroyed me.

  I glanced across the saloon to where Charlotte hovered at Lee Blotsky’s table. She was laughing with some burly lumberman, and I remembered last night, how she’d come to me in the orchestra loge, how I’d disappointed her. I thought of how she’d brought me to the choir—had it only been six months ago? It seemed a hundred years—and how much she’d sensed of me even through my dishonesty. “What makes you happier than singing?”

  I turned away, taking up the skirts the seamstress had mended and dropped off that afternoon, hurrying down the darkened hall behind the stairs toward the dressing room.

  “You in another world tonight, honey?”

  I jumped and dropped the skirts at the sound of Johnny’s voice. I felt the blood rush hot into my face at the thought of where I’d been that morning, of what I’d done.

  “Why, it seems you are,” he said with a laugh. He kicked the skirts aside and pushed me into a darkened corner, kissing my ear. “Now I wonder, could it have anything to do with this morning?”

  “This morning?”

  His lips were at my throat. “You were gone before I woke. Not even a good-bye. Why, honey, I was worried.”

  I put my hand to his chest. “I went to breakfast. I was hungry and you looked as if you meant to sleep the day away.”

  “Hmmm.” Johnny pressed close. “Where’d you go?”

  “Only a few blocks away.”

>   “By yourself?”

  “Why, yes, as it happens.”

  He drew back, studying me.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Why do you look at me that way?”

  “Where was your tall friend?”

  “Charlotte. In bed, I suppose. It was early.”

  “Now, ain’t that odd,” he said. “She said she was with you. That you went to Miller’s.”

  Charlotte had lied for me. I was uncertain whether to be angry that she’d put me in this position, so neatly caught, or to feel relieved that, after last night, she still felt enough affection for me to protect me. Desperately I tried to stall. “She told you?”

  Johnny’s gaze was dark. “Where were you this morning, Margie?”

  “I … I thought she meant for it to be a secret, that’s all.”

  “Why should it be secret?”

  I scrambled for a lie he would believe. “Why … because she’d arranged to meet with a man at Miller’s, but she was afraid to go alone. So I went with her.”

  “Why’s that a secret?”

  “She’d met him here. I thought she didn’t want you to know. I’m surprised she told you.”

  “She didn’t tell me. She said she went to Miller’s with you.”

  “She was afraid you would be angry that she was bedding him for free.”

  He was quiet for a moment, assessing. “Damn whores. I can hardly wait to be rid of them.”

  “Are we still to meet with Mr. Kerwin?” I struggled to keep my voice even.

  “Not tonight. I’m going to show him around town. Show him Seattle potential.” He laughed a little. “Such as it is.”

  “You don’t need me?”

  “Not yet.” He paused. “You lying to me about all this, honey?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you did earlier.”

  “I’m not lying now.” I put my arm around his neck, drawing him down, kissing him, appeasing him, reassuring myself.

  When he was gone I knelt to gather the skirts I’d dropped. I pressed them to my face, inhaling the odors of musty satin and sweat and sex, and in my head I heard that desk rocking against the wall. Rocking and rocking, my breath a staccato accompaniment, his offer to practice me a haunting song.