Mes cheveux vous attendent tout le long de la tour,
Et tout le long du jour,
Et tout le long du jour.
I had just about reached Mélisande’s list of saints when Philippe tilted over and started whispering to Martin. I stared at them without breaking my pace, then glanced back at Rick, who shrugged. It’s not a long piece, and we were through it before I had time to really worry. Without looking up, Martin flicked a hand at us.
“Again.”
And so we started from the beginning. Mes longs cheveux descendent, and all the rest. The two men had their heads pressed together as if they were teenage boys planning a conquest. They flipped through something, and then Martin looked up briefly.
“Again,” he said.
So we did it again. And again. And again. Repetition, obviously, is par for the course in a rehearsal, especially an early one, but you usually get some sort of direction to stop you from tearing off into the same mistakes over and over. By the fifth go-round, I was tapping my foot against the stage as quietly as I could, swaying my hips just a little to see if a hint of the sultry would get some kind of response. Très innocent, they’d said. Très jeune.
On the sixth repetition, Martin and Philippe were still deep in congress, and my heart was beating hard. Well, I thought, give them something worth whispering about. I caught Rick’s eye just before he went into the opening and released a quick thrum of nails on the piano, then two more, double time. He winked at me.
At first I’m not sure either of the men in the audience noticed our slight edits to the score, but by the tenth bar I’d substituted out Mélisande’s quiet liquid rippling for a tremulous jazz, and by the time we turned the corner into our seventh repetition, Rick and I were racing each other to see who could control the tempo. I had unsettled him by taking the whole piece up an octave, and he retaliated by trilling shamelessly at the end of a phrase.
“Enough!”
The voice startled us so thoroughly that we cut off where we were, Rick letting two or three last notes trickle out before he took his hands away from the keyboard and folded them in his lap. It wasn’t Martin who had spoken, but Philippe, and now that he had our attention he turned back away from the stage.
“Do you see?” he said, addressing himself to Martin but talking loudly enough that we could all hear him. “This is what I was talking about.”
Martin frowned. “She’s too young?” There was a question in his voice. His hand strayed up to his throat, as if it could discern with subtle fingertips the nodes young singers develop on their vocal cords by pushing too hard, straining too soon. I wanted to scream at them. Not me. I’m different.
But Philippe spoke for me.
“She’s wasted on Debussy. This girl is a born Reine de la Nuit.”
A gong went off inside my head, and in its aftermath I couldn’t hear Martin’s reply, could only track the movement of his hands as if they were showing me the way somewhere. Mozart’s Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute, is his best witch, and I prefer to sing the songs of witches. The Queen is impossible for most voices, and quite wicked. She’s ready to eat her own young.
“Darling.” Philippe leaned forward in his chair, chin seated on his laced fingers like a soft-boiled egg. He was known to devastate debut singers. Make them cry. He purred at me. “Do you think it would be too much?”
Rick barked out a single laugh, then stared straight ahead as if it had been someone else. It was then that I truly began to adore him. I allowed my hand to stretch and flatten against the cold bulk of the piano’s hood, for balance. Raised my eyebrow.
“If anything, I may be too much for her.”
Martin sighed.
“You’re going to owe me,” he said to Philippe. And then, looking me up and down, “And spoil her rotten.”
Philippe just smiled.
“You know,” he said, “I quite intend to.”
That night I could barely hold my keys as I jammed them against the door, only tumbling into the apartment when Ada stood up from whatever she was doing and put me out of my misery by unlocking it from the inside. She was already an old woman then, my babenka, but you’d never have known it. Her hair was dark brown and piled on her head in an impressive bun, and she was wearing a wool pencil skirt that gave her the shape of a girl. Ada always said I kept her young, and it certainly seemed true that night. I bounced from one foot to the other and infected her with the aura boiling around me until she started to do a little shimmy of her own.
“What?” she asked. We were both laughing, though she didn’t yet know why, and I spun around, allowing her to pull my coat off my shoulders.
“Three guesses,” I said. And she considered, poking her tongue out thoughtfully to touch her upper lip and wrangling my coat onto a hanger. We had pathetic little wire hangers, from thrift stores and the odd dry cleaning mostly, bent into oblongs and suffering greatly under the weight of their burdens. First thing to go, I thought. Wooden hangers forevermore.
“You found a pile of gold,” she said. I clapped my hands as I bounced.
“Not exactly. Two more guesses.”
“It turns out that your shoes are magical dancing shoes, which will skirt you away to the land of the eternal ball, where you will dance faster and faster, until at last you light on fire.”
Ada made eyes at me, but I tucked my chin down, unwooed. Lowering myself calmly onto flat feet, I shook my head.
“Well, all right then,” said Ada. “It can only be one thing.”
“Oh yes?”
“Oh yes,” she said. She brushed an imaginary beard against her pale skin. “You figured out that Mélisande is not so bad after all and remembered that you’re about to sing on a real stage. I will admit, doing away with the silly goosey versions will be a difficulty, but I think, all in all, I can manage.”
Baba Ada looked happy with herself. Always upon making some sort of breakthrough in my singing, I’m consumed with a ball of energy. She assumed that the rehearsal onstage, with live accompaniment and professional critiques, had plucked me from my slump and reminded me to thank heaven for the favors I’d been granted.
“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no no no.”
“Well then, what?” she asked. “I do have to get dinner on, you know. You aren’t over the moon about a movie coming out or some other nonsense like that, are you? Because I told you last time, I can only care so much about—”
“I’m going to be the Queen of the Night,” I said. “I’m going to sing The Magic Flute.”
Ada stopped in the middle of hitching up one of her nylon stockings as she turned back to the kitchen. I watched the air leak slowly out of her, only to return, transfused, as if made into champagne. She bubbled upward back towards me and put both hands on my shoulders. They were surprisingly strong, and in other circumstances I might have winced.
“Are you being serious, Luscia?” Her voice was deadly focused, and her eyes shone like gunshots right into my own. I nodded.
Ada rested her forehead on mine, leaning down just slightly. She had three inches on me. “I knew it,” she said. So softly I almost couldn’t hear. “I knew it.”
Her fingers were still digging into my shoulders.
“Can you imagine,” she continued, as if to herself, “what your daughter will be like someday?”
I craned my neck back, away from her.