Chapter 50

Cam didn't get to stay long, of course, only four days. She got hold of Marilyn while we were in the air—government pilots don't worry about cell phones messing up their instruments, which has always been silly, the way commercial ones do—and found she was scheduled to do a Boheme in South America. After that she'd go over to Europe for Don Carlo and Faust, and then on to New York for an extended stay at the Met.

But it seemed that I had bookings too, or at least offers, when I phoned Sam at Marilyn's urging. When the company had been forced to cancel the rest of the Tosca run they'd offered ticket-holders a choice: they could take a full refund, or they could settle for only a partial and come see the DVD on big screen. Enough went for option A that there were tickets left, and they were snapped up—mostly by the local public, but some by other musicians and managers of other companies who flew in, and so on. Word of my Scarpia had got around, and I was sudden­ly in high demand.

It was too good to turn down. Cam and I compared notes, and there was no way I'd be able to join her abroad; we'd be apart for more than five weeks. But one of my offers was from New York City Opera. It wasn't great—Rance in Girl of the Golden West, one of Puccini's more forgettable ventures with one of his more forgettable baritone roles, and, interestingly, Enrico in Lucia, the role I'd started with so many years ago in college. Not plums, but I'd be doing bona fide leads in one of the biggest venues in the world; and, better yet, the dates largely overlapped with Camilla's Met commitment.

So we took our four days in my cabin and made the most of them. We had to fend off reporters in droves; with Sam and Marilyn driving, and with Camilla's famous photo as fuel, our incarceration had stayed well up in the news, and when the media learned we'd been released the phone calls started coming. A carload of enterprising reporters actually found their way to my cabin one afternoon. We were polite, we were pleasant, and we were boring. They'd thought we'd heard or seen something, it turned out we hadn't, they finally realized their mistake and let us go. What was it we'd supposedly heard or seen? Sorry, they'd asked us to say nothing more about it, it was a question of, yep, "national security."

In fact they hadn't said anything at all about what we could tell the media. They hadn't needed to. If we tried anything remotely resembling the truth we'd sound like complete fools without the photos as support, and they surely wouldn't offer confirmation. They also wouldn't confirm our tale of a "mistake," but that was so typically government cover-your-ass that nobody paid the least attention.

It wasn't, however, very interesting, and as much as we could we made it seem even less so. Interesting is what drives the news, boring kills it. Even before Camilla had to leave the whole thing was dying down.

So we set off on our separate ways for a while. Just for a while, though. Nothing was going to dampen the fire we'd kindled in our four weeks together. And nothing ever has.

We got married the next summer, a very low-key and mostly private ceremony in a small Swiss town we both loved. We were nearby because Cam usually sang at the famous Salzburg Festival in Austria, and when they'd found out I'd be traveling with her they snapped me up, too. Don Giovanni (I sang Leporello, she was Anna) and Traviata again.