Falling in Love (2 page)

Halfway down the corridor, Flavia caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her scarlet gown and lurched forward, managing to save herself from falling only by lunging towards one of the costume assistants. The young woman proved surprisingly strong, as well as quick-thinking: she wrapped her arms around the singer and managed to support her weight and thrust without being knocked to the ground.

As soon as Flavia was steady on her feet, she pulled herself free of the younger woman, asking, ‘Are you all right?’

‘It’s nothing, Signora,’ the assistant said, reaching across her body to rub at her shoulder.

Flavia placed a hand on the woman’s forearm. ‘Thank you for catching me,’ she said.

‘I didn’t really think about it: I just grabbed you.’ Then, after a moment, ‘One fall is enough for tonight, don’t you think?’

Flavia nodded, thanked her again, and continued down the corridor to her dressing room. She started to open the door but paused, shaking in delayed reaction to her near-fall and with the adrenalin rush that always followed performances. Feeling slightly faint, she rested her other hand against the jamb and closed her eyes. Moments passed, and then the sound of voices at the other end of the corridor energized her, and she opened the door and went in.

Roses here, roses there, roses, roses everywhere. She caught her breath at the sight of the flowers, every surface covered with vases filled with dozens of them. She stepped into the room and closed the door. Motionless, she studied the sea of yellow, growing even more uneasy when she noticed that the vases were not the usual catch-alls that most theatres kept for such occasions: chipped, even paint-smeared, some of them obviously taken from the prop room to be put to less visible use.

‘
Oddio
,’ she muttered, going back through the open door. Her usual dresser stood to the left, a dark-haired woman old enough to be the mother of the costume assistant who had saved her from falling. As she had after every performance, she’d come to take Flavia’s costume and wig back to the storeroom.

‘Marina,’ Flavia ventured, ‘did you see who brought these flowers?’ She waved vaguely and stepped back to let her into the room.

‘
Oh, che belle
,’ Marina exclaimed when she saw them. ‘How much they must have cost. There’s dozens and dozens.’ Suddenly she, too, noticed the vases and asked, ‘Where’d those come from?’

‘Don’t they belong to the theatre?’

Marina shook her head. ‘No. We don’t have anything like that. They’re real.’ Seeing Flavia’s confusion, she pointed to a tall vase of alternating white and transparent stripes. ‘Glass, I mean. That one’s Venini,’ she said. ‘Lucio used to work there. I can tell.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Flavia said, wondering how the conversation had led to this. She turned her back on the woman and said, ‘Can you unzip me?’

She raised her arms, and Marina helped her step out of the shoes and then the costume. Flavia pulled her dressing gown from the back of a chair and sat in front of the mirror and, almost without thinking, began to wipe at the thick makeup. Marina hung the dress on the back of the door and stood behind Flavia to help her remove her wig. She slipped her fingers under the back and prised it from Flavia’s head, then peeled away the tight rubber cap that covered her hair. As soon as her head was free, Flavia dug her fingers into her hair and scratched her head for a full minute, sighing with relief and pleasure.

‘Everybody says that’s the worst part,’ Marina said. ‘The wig. I don’t know how all of you stand it.’

Flavia spread her fingers and ran them through her hair repeatedly, knowing it would dry quickly in the overheated room. It was as short as a boy’s, one of the reasons she was so seldom recognized on the street, her fans having in mind the long-haired beauty they saw on stage, not this woman with a short cap of curly hair in which there were already faint traces of grey. She rubbed harder, enjoying the continued relief as her hair dried.

The phone rang; with some reluctance, she answered with her name.

‘Signora, could you tell me how much longer you’ll be?’ a man’s voice asked.

‘Five minutes,’ she answered, the response she always gave, whether she would be that amount of time or half an hour longer. They’d wait.

‘Dario,’ she said before he could hang up. ‘Who brought those flowers?’

‘They came on a boat.’

Well, since they were in Venice, it was unlikely they’d come any other way, but she said only, ‘Do you know who sent them? Whose boat it was?’

‘I don’t know, Signora. There were two men, and they brought everything to the door here.’ Then, after a moment, he added, ‘I didn’t see the boat.’

‘Did they give a name?’

‘No, Signora. I thought that . . . well, I thought that, with so many flowers, you’d know who they came from.’

Ignoring this, Flavia repeated, ‘Five minutes,’ and replaced the phone. Marina had gone, taking the gown and the wig with her, leaving Flavia to the silence and solitude of the dressing room.

She stared at her reflection, grabbed a handful of tissues and wiped her face until most of the makeup was gone. Remembering that there would be people waiting for her at the exit, she lined her eyes with mascara and smoothed some makeup over the signs of tiredness under her eyes. She picked a lipstick from the table and applied it carefully. A wave of tiredness swept over her, and she closed her eyes to wait for the adrenalin to fight it away and buoy her up again. She opened her eyes and studied the objects on the table, then took the cotton shoulder bag from the drawer and swept everything – makeup, comb, brush, handkerchief – into it. She no longer carried anything of value into the theatre – into any theatre. Once, in Covent Garden, her coat had been stolen; at the Palais Garnier, it had been her address book, the only thing taken from the purse she had left in a drawer. Who in God’s name would want her address book, and given the fact that she had had it for ages, who would be able to decipher the hodgepodge of cancelled names and addresses, updated email addresses and phone numbers that kept her in touch with other members of this strange geographically liquid profession of hers? Luckily, most of the addresses and numbers were also in her computer, but it had taken her weeks to get some of the others back. Then, unable to find an address book she liked, she decided to trust to her computer and prayed that no virus or crash would sneak in and erase them all.

It was only the third performance in the run, so there were sure to be people waiting. She pulled on a pair of black tights and put on the skirt and sweater she had worn to the theatre. Slipping on her shoes, she took her coat from the closet and wrapped a woollen scarf – red as her dress had been – around her neck: Flavia often referred to her scarves as her hijab: she could never leave the house without wearing one.

At the door, she paused and looked back into the room: was this the reality that came to replace the dream of success? she wondered. A small, impersonal room, used for a time by one person, the next month by another; a single wardrobe; a mirror surrounded – just as in the movies – by light bulbs; no carpet on the floor; a small bathroom with shower and sink. And that was it: if you had this, you were a star, she supposed. She had it, so she must be a star. But she didn’t feel like one, only like a woman in her forties – she forced herself to say – who had just worked like a dog for more than two hours and now had to go and smile at nameless people who wanted a part of her, wanted to be her friend, her confidant; for all she knew, her lover.

And all she wanted to do was go to a restaurant and eat and drink something and then go home, call both of her children to see how they were and to say goodnight to them, and when the rush of performance began to dissipate and normal life started slipping back, go to bed and see if she could sleep. During productions where she knew or liked her colleagues, she looked forward to the conviviality of dinner after the show, of jokes and stories about agents and managers and theatre directors, of being in the company of those with whom she had just experienced the miracle of making music. But here, in Venice, a city where she had spent a great deal of time and where she should know a lot of people, she had no desire to mingle with her colleagues: a baritone who spoke only of his success, a conductor who disliked her and found the feeling hard to disguise, and a tenor who seemed to have fallen in love with her – and she looked herself in the eye when she maintained this silently – with certainly no encouragement from her. Not only was he little more than a decade older than her son; he was far too innocent to interest her as a person.

As she stood there, it occurred to her that she had effectively blocked out the flowers. And the vases. Should the man who had sent them be at the exit, she should at least be seen leaving the theatre with one of the bouquets. ‘To hell with him,’ she said to the woman in the mirror, who nodded back at her in sage agreement.

It had happened first in London, two months before, after the last performance of
Nozze
, when the single yellow roses had rained down on her at the first curtain call, and during each successive one. Then at a solo recital in St Petersburg, they had fallen amidst quite a number of more traditional bouquets. She had been charmed by the way some of the Russians, most of them women, had walked to the front of the theatre after the performance and handed the bouquets up to her on stage. Flavia liked seeing the eyes of the person who gave her flowers or said something nice to her: it was more human, somehow.

Then it happened here, the opening night, scores of them falling like yellow rain, but she had found none in the dressing room after that performance. Yet they had appeared again tonight. No name, no information, no note to explain such an excessive gesture.

She was stalling: she didn’t want to have to decide about the flowers, and she didn’t want to have to go and sign programmes and exchange small talk with strangers or, sometimes worse, with those fans who came to many performances and believed that frequency earned familiarity.

She slipped the cotton bag over her shoulder and ran her hand through her hair again; it was dry. Outside, she saw the dresser at the end of the corridor. ‘Marina,’ she called.

‘
Sì
, Signora,’ the woman answered, approaching her.

‘If you’d like, take the roses home with you: you and the other dressers. Anyone who wants them.’

She didn’t answer at once, which surprised Flavia. How often were women given dozens of roses? But then Marina’s face brightened in obvious delight. ‘That’s very kind of you, Signora, but don’t you want to take some of them?’ She waved her arm towards the room, where the flowers glowed like artificial daylight.

Flavia shook the idea away. ‘No, you can take them all.’

‘But your vases?’ Marina asked. ‘Will they be safe if we leave them here?’

‘They aren’t mine. You can have them, as well, if you like,’ Flavia said, patting her arm. In a softer voice, she added, ‘You take the Venini, all right?’ She turned away towards the elevator that would take her to her waiting fans.

3

Flavia was aware of how long it had taken her to change and hoped that the long delay would have discouraged some of the people waiting for her. She was tired and hungry: after five hours in a crowded theatre, surrounded by people behind, on, and in front of the stage, she wanted only to find a quiet place to eat in peace and solitude.

She stepped from the elevator and started down the long corridor that led to the porter’s office and the space in front of it where guests could wait. The applause started while she was still ten metres from them, and she flashed her most delighted smile, the one she kept for her fans. Seeing them, she was glad that she had made the attempt to disguise how very tired she was. She quickened her step, the singer eager to see and hear her fans, sign their programmes, thank them for having waited all this time for her.

At the beginning of her career, these meetings had been a source of triumphant joy to her: they cared enough to wait to see her, wanted her acknowledgement, her attention, some sign that their praise was important to her. It was then, and it was now: she was honest enough to admit that she still needed their praise. If only, if only they could be faster about it: say they enjoyed the opera, or her performance, and then shake her hand and leave.

She saw the first two, a married couple – elderly now, both of them shorter than when she had first seen them, years ago. They lived in Milano and came to many of her performances, then came backstage only to thank her and shake her hand. She had seen them all these years but still she didn’t know their names. Behind them stood another couple, younger and less willing to thank her and leave. Bernardo, the one with the beard – she remembered because both words began with ‘B’ – always started with praise for a single phrase or, occasionally, a single note, clearly meant as evidence that he knew as much about music as she did. The other, Gilberto, stood to one side and took their picture as she signed their programme, then shook her hand and gave her generic thanks, Bernardo having taken care of the details.

When they left, their place was taken by a tall man with a light overcoat draped over his shoulders. Flavia noticed that the collar was velvet and tried to recall the last time she had seen that: probably after an opening night or gala concert. His white hair contrasted with his deeply tanned face. He bent to kiss the hand she offered him, said he had seen the role sung by Callas at Covent Garden half a century ago, and thanked her without causing the embarrassment any comparison would make, a delicacy she appreciated.