“Eyesore,” I said. John shook his head.
“Nah.”
His pants were rolled up, his shoes and socks in one hand so he could step into the water and feel the cool sand. He paused, digging in his toes, and I stopped beside him. A wave rolled in all the way to my calves, eliciting an oh as it moved like an animal, up and around my legs. John’s hand went to the small of my back, making a counterpoint against the water on my skin.
“It’s like . . .” His fingers moved against my spine, drumming out a pattern. “It’s not natural, I get it. Like a lightbulb. But those are islands in the middle of the ocean that help me see you in the dark. They make power.” He turned to me, smiling at himself. At his own romanticism. “That’s magic.”
We both dissolved into the water then; that’s how I remember it. Just so much sugar on the tongue.
But things change. Or at least they should—a person should. Moving with the tide of life, up and down. Letting yourself expand and shrink as the situation merits. You can become just as stuck in good stories as in bad habits, and then when things don’t go your way you fall hard. Tumbling through open air when the wave goes out from under you. I should know.
That night at dinner, before I got the call from Michelle, John had been complaining about his career. He wouldn’t call it complaining, just talking. He might even have thought he was being elegiac, telling me about some old tour from years ago. I’d heard it before, but I listened. Trying not to pay attention to the keen in his voice that asked, What happened between then and now, what changed? He wouldn’t have wanted me to tell him. He would have found it a strange interruption.
You can think about it like this. When singing a scale, the real difficulty is not in hitting the high notes or the low, regardless of range. The recognized test of a voice is its navigation of the passaggio: the space between the head, the middle, and the chest. The ability to move between different modes of being.
In a less-experienced singer, the passaggio transitions are all too noticeable; they jar like the gear shifts of a new driver. The timbre in the singer’s voice stutters and breaks, and the listener—probably incorrectly, but still—assumes they could do better themselves.
John has this trouble, and it costs him parts. Not as noticeably as in a beginner, but still. He takes the easy path into his head voice and ends up in a breathy falsetto that lacks support from his whole body. His whole range of possible sound. And he complains about it, making a case against the world. I know this about John: that he can be hard to listen to just as often as he is dramatic, heroic. A marvelous tenor. I am bound up in it too. My stories exist in his mouth, and I exist in them.
The man who requested the Tucson concert, the man whose birthday it was, had tried to book me before, once or twice. Though this was the first time he’d built me a stage.
“He heard you sing in Paris, I think,” Michelle told me over the phone. “He likes the best and brightest, you know the type. Richie Rich.” It didn’t matter to me, I said. It sounded too good to pass up. An experience, at least. “Just be careful with him,” she advised before hanging up.
“Careful? Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Michelle was quiet for a second; I could hear her choosing her words. “He just strikes me as a collector.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, you’re right. It’ll be something, I’m sure.”
Ending the call, I curled my phone into my palm.
“I’m going to Arizona tomorrow,” I said. “Some guy’s party.”
John speared a long purple bean pod on the left-hand tine of his fork, considering it with more seriousness and focus than it quite deserved.
“You’ll have a good time, I bet,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he was angry or just thinking about something else. A musician of his caliber, though, is trained to control his voice and use it to express whatever emotion he needs in a given moment. No matter what he feels. He bit off one end of the bean and observed the steam piping out of the flesh that remained. “It’s nice to be impulsive.”
He wasn’t done talking, but I didn’t know that yet.
After deplaning in Tucson I was shuttled quickly into a Mercedes, plush with black leather. The assistant who’d been dispatched to fetch me handed over a bottle of cold water and asked if I was familiar with horses. She didn’t really appear to be listening so much as checking things off a list in her head.
I sipped, then frowned. “Should I be?”
She frowned too.
“It was part of the agreement.” Her voice kept an even pitch, but she crossed her legs so hastily that the heel of her boot snagged the cuffed edge of her jeans. Unhooking it with a thumb, she began typing into her phone with the other hand. I waited for a moment, but she didn’t look up.
The ranch, it turned out, was inaccessible by car, nestled in a valley between mountain crags. We arrived at the end of a long dirt road—the literal end, where the dirt track wavered and diminished into weeds and shale—and I stepped out into the sharp desert light, not sorry to be rid of the assistant. Guests were milling around in the dust, while ranch hands cinched soft leather saddles onto the horses.
The birthday gentleman, who went by Finn, came up and kissed my hand. He took off his hat to introduce himself as the owner of the ranch and wrangler of all the fine country folk around us. Finn’s hair was dark and disarrayed by sweat, his body thick but muscled. A 1950s sort of physique to match, it seemed, his manners.
“I heard you weren’t comfortable on pack animals,” he said. So he had to have a phone, hidden somewhere in all that rustic apparel. Full of urgent texts about me and my city-slick ways. “Perhaps you’d prefer to travel by carriage?”
I squinted at him, then at the stone and spiny plants around me.
“Is that even possible?”
“We can make miracles,” Finn said. “For your delicate sensibilities. The rest of us are basest cowboys.” He turned my hand over and kissed the soft skin of my wrist.
I pulled away.
“I can ride.” This was not true, but I didn’t think it could be very difficult—all the animals seemed sleek and gentle. And I didn’t like the way Finn looked at my skin like it was milk to be lapped up from a saucer.
His eyes were blue and inscrutable.
“As you wish,” he said.
Luckily the horses themselves were mild, because the passage was not particularly straightforward. There were many dips and divots in the trail; dry logs to jump over; spontaneous wells in the sand; and always, Finn riding up from behind me to make some obscure observation. He was a wellspring of information, pointing out the differences between the bleached skull of a dairy cow and that of a deer. The deer’s head was smaller and more tapered, but made to look somehow more substantial by still being attached to a ribbon of vertebrae. Finn called the cow a beef, and let his horse clatter its hooves over the half-smashed remnants.
“That one we call Bob or Bobo.” Finn pointed to a saguaro cactus some thirty meters off the trail with bubble arms growing off it in every direction. “We like to keep track of the freaks. There’s one about fifteen miles that way”—he waved a cupped hand behind him and to the left—“bent over like a horse, with a yucca growing right up through a hole in the middle. Damnedest thing.” He nodded to me, just a hint of a smile on his mouth. “Pardon the language, of course.”
Finn rode up and down the line of horses, laughing with some guests and favoring others with wild stories, making all of us stop dead and peer into the sun at a coyote loping across the middle distance. He seemed to transform depending on whom he was regaling, and so everyone loved him—a man who could pick people up and make them shine with his own reflected glow. Most of the time he left me alone; I wasn’t the only one there, not hardly. But every so often he spotted me and smiled, as if discovering me. Against my better judgment, his attention drew me in. The ebb and flow of it. The rare flashes.
A collector, Mi
chelle had said. I could see it. The thing was, when Finn set his toys back down they disappeared—out of sight, out of mind. That was why I felt new each time he turned in the saddle and met my gaze. In a way, I was. And in a way—even though it meant he forgot me each time he turned his back—I liked it.
That night Finn started a large fire in the brick-lined pit in the ranch’s courtyard. The next day we would walk to the amphitheater in the midafternoon, and from there the real party would commence. Although I was not in fact obliged to do more than smile and retreat to my room, I lingered beneath the darkening sky, skirting away from the smoke of the fire.
“I hate white rabbits,” people chanted whenever they saw me ducking another cloud. “I hate white rabbits, I hate white rabbits.”
I thought they were making fun of me, but the wife of an architect I’d ridden with before assured me that it was a kid’s game meant to chase away the smoke. I put a hand up to my throat.
“I just have to be careful. If I inhale too much, I’ll sound awful tomorrow.” I rubbed my fingers down the crest of my neck, where an Adam’s apple would have been on a man. “I can already feel it building up.”
“Of course,” the wife said. She took a sip of whiskey-laced tea from a delicate teacup. All around us people sat on logs, balancing china plates on their knees while the fire illuminated their faces erratically.
Just as I decided that I ought to sneak away, someone brought out a few guitars, and to my surprise the group converged around them. I thought my presence was just a whim of Finn’s—an embellishment, like the china and the beef bourguignon. My concern over tomorrow’s performance was half a put-on: it was true that I didn’t want to inhale too much smoke, but the show I was worried about would take place in New York a week hence. This was the desert. These were desert people, at a party for their wealthy friend.
As the instruments were strummed and tuned, the crowd reshuffled themselves and began to sing. Country songs, old James Taylor, Johnny Cash. Then they veered towards folk songs, or so I assumed anyway, being unfamiliar with absolutely all of them. The songs seemed tied to the singers’ bodies, borrowing rhythm from hands slapping or feet landing against the dirt while couples danced. I settled myself on a stone bench some distance from the fire and watched them. Listened. While two women wove a harmony so sleek I could feel their voices rolling through one another like strips of silk being tied into a knot. While the guitars bantered, and skipped, and ran. While Finn played and sang, a smile opening his face so wide it became another face entirely.
Easy to read. Empty of expectations, save one.
I don’t know how long the music went on, but by the time it stopped the cold from the sky had settled down over our shoulders, dampening the fire. I shivered, sitting lonely on my stone bench, and the shudder in my body startled me properly awake. Standing up, I stretched my arms to the stars and shook out my hair, taking one last look towards the bonfire. Finn was sitting with a guitar flat across his lap, the fingers of one hand stroking the strings, the fingers of the other hand muting them. He stared at me and I stared at him until finally the night was so fully quiet that I walked back to my room just to hear the sound of my footsteps falling.
And, when Finn followed behind me, his.
In Chicago, after ending my call, I’d made a show of powering my phone all the way down and tucking it into my purse. John seemed pleased, growing more gregarious as we ate. When our waitress brought over the dessert menu, he asked her for a split of champagne to accompany our almond praline macarons.
“To what do I owe this sudden joie de vivre?” I accepted a glass from the waitress but didn’t take my eyes off John. He took his own glass, tasted it. Smiled.
“To impulsivity?” he suggested. “Impetuousness? Impishness?”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Infatuation?” I offered. “The attitude of an infantile, indulgent impresario?”
John toasted me. “Indeed. At your service.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.” We sat quietly for a time, listening to a Bach fugue playing over the stereo and sipping our champagne. I let my gaze travel out the window, around the room, but my eyes kept drifting back to John. His hair was thinning away from his temples, something I’d never noticed. It looked good on him. A slight tightening. But I felt a little hollow pocket in my chest, knowing this was something I should have seen before.
When you’re young and your love is new, you map the geography of a person’s body inch by inch. You want to know them so well you could make another version of them, one wrought out of gold and filled with light. And so when you touch your lover, you’re also molding and reshaping their avatar. This rib slightly lower down. The birthmark higher, above the hip. Later, you don’t look so hard. After so much careful scrutiny, you come to believe that you know all the secrets of your beloved’s skin and bones. You run your hands over the golden version in your head, thinking it is the real flesh. Thinking you can do everything by memory. We were only four years married, that night. And yet his hair seemed like a revelation.
“I’m going to tell you something,” John said.
I raised my eyebrows. “What?”
“Oh, I think the story of the man who’ll take you away.” He ran a nail down the stem of his glass. “What do you think this time? Zeus the swan, or Zeus the bull?”
A little sigh of relief escaped me, though I couldn’t have said why. I suppose I thought he was going to reveal something terrible, something that I could never unhear. After all, there had been times lately when I caught John assessing me carefully, slantwise. Like I was a creature invading his home, which he was afraid to startle.
My touring frequency had risen to an alarming pitch—I flew to a different performance every few weeks, sometimes jumping from one to the next and staying away for a month at a time. More. When I came home, John seemed surprised to find me there, doing what I always do. Lounging in bed, reading a score in a state of undress. Picking a plum out of the refrigerator and eating it.
But the stories of my kidnapping were old standards. John used to tell them often, to make me laugh. When he wanted to say that I was beautiful. A god sees a maiden on earth and can’t stand to live without her. Steals her while wearing the skin of a beast and takes her essence for himself.
“Well,” I said, “I’m going to Arizona, right? Some rich so-and-so with a ranch.”
“Okay.” John tilted his head, waiting.
“So the bull, I’d think? Southwestern?” I could see that something about my answer didn’t sit right with John. A little frown crossed his face, then disappeared. “Or maybe Greece doesn’t translate well to contemporary American landscapes?”
“Not an inspired choice,” he agreed. “Maybe it would be better to pick something new. Go down an uncharted road.”
He sat back in his chair, tilting it onto two legs in a way that always makes me nervous. One false move and crash, we can’t come back to this restaurant, ever again. On the stereo, Bach changed to Vivaldi.
“Someplace,” John continued, “remarkable.”
“All right,” I said. But I felt, again, that little shiver.
The wonderful thing about Bach is that his music always says what it means—his exploration, his sense of exercise, is plain in each line of notes as they ascend and then descend in turn. And in Bach’s case, clarity is not at odds with transcendence. They are one and the same: a pure thought, a wordless feeling. Vivaldi is more of a piece with the backways and canals of Venice. His tone is light and seems to follow—as his titles promise—the seasons. But under the sunlight of it, under the whiff of clean snow, I’ve always felt something lurking. People laugh at me when I tell them this, but I maintain that Vivaldi is untrustworthy.
“Well.” I spoke carefully. “Like what?”
“We have to decide on the rules of the world,” John said. “First of all, you’ll be gone there for a long time. Maybe it’s even somewhere you’ve been before?” His eye cau
ght mine in a flash, then flicked away. Sounding me out. If I hadn’t noticed what he looked like, what else might I have missed? Submerged signals. Signs of displeasure when I talked about a conductor in Berlin, the broad chest of a basso profundo in Carnegie Hall.
“I go where I’m asked.”
“Yes.” John let his chair descend with a thump and I looked around, embarrassed, but no one was paying attention. “But who’s asking? A, shall we say, rich so-and-so. Debonair type, who keeps a whole storeroom full of jewels to drape around the shoulders of the women he lures in.”
“John,” I said. But he put up a hand, one finger aloft. Let me continue.
“What you see when you look at him isn’t the whole truth. But at first that won’t be what’s important, because he’ll want to look at you. He’ll give you a necklace to wear when you sing, one that clasps at the top and bottom of your throat. And there will be jewels—rubies, probably.” John raised an eyebrow at me, daring me to critique him.
I shook my head. If we were going to really go for it: “Garnets.”
“Ah, ha,” he agreed. “Even better. Garnets then. To mark each gulp.” John traced a vertical line down his neck, running over the Adam’s apple. “A row of jewels up and down, a collar of jewels at top and bottom. That will be your welcome gift.”
“Not a very good gift, if he wants me to sing.”
“Why not?” He looked wounded, and by way of explanation, I made a choking motion, hands a V on my collarbone.
“Too restrictive.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.” I could feel my blood pressure rising—a dial twisting, turning by centimeters. I wanted John to stop, to look at me and say he was sorry for letting himself get carried away. But he didn’t.
“Well, that’s just the point,” he said instead. Then he smiled. Wide. And with that smile, I felt him pull something out of my hands. The rope that tied us to shore. The mooring. “He’ll have had it designed just for you. So it doesn’t obstruct your throat, it moves with it. You see? He’s a man who likes to watch.” He took a drink of water. “Watch you sing, that is.”
The Daughters Page 4