Chapter 43

The next morning, though, her nerves seemed to be bothering her from the moment she woke up. And in fact it was probably even before, since she was up before 9:00. She virtually gulped her coffee, picked fitfully at the small fruit plate and croissant that room service had brought and finally, still in her peignoir, went over to the piano for her warm-up.

For a lead singer the rule is that you do only a light warm-up the morning of a performance; you save the main exercise for about an hour before the curtain rises, more or less—it varies among singers—so it'll carry over on stage. But she started on her full routine, which sounded perfectly fine to me, only to bang the piano lid down with a muttered curse halfway through.

I'd been watching with increasing concern but no idea what I could do to help. Well, hell, I figured, almost anything would be better than just to stand by and do nothing. "Want to talk, sweetheart?" I asked tentatively.

"No," she snapped. "Or yes, maybe. Dammit, I don't know what I want." She was pacing up and down.

"Why is Tosca so different?" I asked. There'd been none of this pent-up edginess before the Traviata opening, just a sure confidence; I was the one who'd been wired then.

"I don't know, it just is," she told me sharply. Then she suddenly looked at me fully for the first time all morning and her face crumpled. "No, I tell a lie, Nicky. I do know, it's this way every time I sing it, but today particularly. It's just so damned childish!"

I sat down on the couch and patted the cushion beside me. "Sit down and tell me about it?" I invited.

She did, and cuddled up to me. I turned my head toward her. She reached up and took my chin to turn it back. "No, don't look at me right now. Look over there at Asmedogh or something."

My eyebrows went up, but I complied. She half buried her head in my chest.

"You remember I told you my mom used to have the Met broadcasts on every Saturday afternoon, and it's why I decided I wanted to sing opera?" she asked, her voice muffled.

"Yes."

"Well, I was, I don't know, eleven or twelve, something like that, and just finding out I had maybe the makings of a real voice, and one Saturday it all came together for me. I remember like it was yesterday. And all of a sudden I just sat up and looked over at Mom and said to her, 'I'm going to sing that, and I'll sing it better than she's doing.' I don't even know who the soprano was that day, and it's not important because I didn't stop there, I said, 'I'll sing it better than anybody ever has in the history of the world!'" I could feel her shaking her head against me.

"Don't tell me," I said, "the opera that day was—"

"Tosca, " she said, grabbing me with both arms and pressing her face even harder into me.

So that was what this was all about.

In a moment she sat back up and let me go, reaching out to take my hand. "I've never forgotten that moment," she said, and I turned to look in her eyes. "But I've learned a lot since. I've learned that it's not enough just for me to sing it, it has to be everybody, the whole cast. That's why I cut my fee here thirty percent, so they could afford Mario and old what's-his-name"—she meant the baritone originally slated for Scarpia—"and I begged Gerry to conduct. It's why I was so against that dork Marko. I was grasping at straws that night when I talked to you about it, but I'd put so much into making this the best Tosca ever. And then you turned out to be so much better than I could ever have dreamed, and I fell in love with you on top of it, and now I'm scared you'll think I've just been using you. For nothing more than fulfilling a child's empty boast to a mother who's been dead now for years."

"No, actually I thought you were just using me for sex," I told her straight-faced. And her mood was gone in an instant and Camilla was back.

"Well, that, too," she giggled.

"Hey, honey, nothing the matter with dreams," I said. "In fact, where I come from dreams like that are called ambitions. And maybe this is one ambition you can actually realize."

"Do you think so, Nicky?" she asked anxiously.

"You're that good. And Mario is, and Oliver, Gerry. And even the bits"—the singers doing the smaller roles, I meant—"are as good as you could ask. All that leaves is me, and I'm sure going to try like hell."

"Wouldn't it be something if we could really pull it off?" she said. "The best Tosca ever?"

"Well, 'best' is pretty subjective. I'll settle for 'great, ' won't you?"

She nodded eagerly. "Yes, 'great' will do it for me. I mean, this isn't the kind of thing they put in the Guinness Book of World Records, is it?" Then she just shrugged. "And even if it were, it'd be kind of meaningless. You know, like all those records for things that nobody actually does, tipping over dominoes or something."

"A bit more than that," I said. "Last I looked people actually sing opera."

"But for how long?"

That one caught me flat-footed. "Well, I don't know, but it's been around kind of a while, you know. I expect it'll keep on going."

"I doubt it," she said.

I looked at her in surprise.

"We're a dying breed, Nicky. Singers like you and me and Mario and all. Sort of like the castrati back a couple hundred years ago, except without the surgery." From the 17th to the early 19th centuries women were barred from public performances in many places, so they created sopranos by the rather cruel method of gelding young boys whose voices showed promise. The few who made it—most didn't and spent their lives as pointless eunuchs—were publicly acclaimed. The practice was banned in the mid-1800s. I thought it was a pretty poor analogy, and I said so.

"Oh, I guess," she acknowledged. "And it's not really we who are disappearing, it's the music that makes us necessary. I mean, real opera, the stuff that endures, all of it dates back nearly a hundred years or more now, most of it much more. The new ones are just pale imitations, and even the few that get done at all last only a handful of performances. People just don't seem to want our kind of singing any more, they'd rather have rock concerts. Have you ever been to one of those?"

"No," I said with a grimace of distaste.

"I have. It's mostly just screaming. Not even from the stage, from the audience, for God's sake. They pay good money to go to these things and then they sit there and screech their heads off like ... like animals. The musicians, if you can even call them that, they have to turn up the gain so high on their amplifiers to even be heard that you can barely tell it's a human voice producing those sounds. And even then it's nearly inaudible because the audience just yells louder, like they're competing with what they've paid to hear."

"Nasty," I agreed. I'd never actually been, but I'd seen snippets of them on TV and knew she wasn't exaggerating.

"Oh, it's worse than that," she went on; apparently this was a bug in her ear. "A lot of the so-called performers, they don't even sing, they just chant. Oomp-bah, oomp-bah, oomp-bah-bah, just saying things rhythmically. And the things they say! Most of it's really foul, smut, stuff my mom would've washed my mouth out with soap if I'd said. Nigger this, cunt that, suck my dick the other, kill him or her or them or whoever all over the place, on and on. That's the kind of atrocity that passes for music these days."