Like People in History (64 page)

"You'll see," she insisted. "We'll run way past the showcase period, and then Blasé will have to worry about Equity making us pay real salaries and run ads and all that."

She hugged me so fast I didn't have a chance to push her away. As Cynthia passed through the curtain into the theater, I couldn't help but notice that the guy she'd kissed before was still lingering inside the lobby. He looked as if he would say something to me, spun as though leaving, then turned back.

"Don't tell me," I said. "You were watching the scene from the control room and you agree it stinks."

"I was mostly talking with Cynthia. But what I paid attention to in the show seemed fine." Then, "You're Roger Sansarc. The writer."

"Guilty as charged."

"Reason I axe is, I think we had a mutual friend? Back a few years in the Bay Area. My name is Bernard. Bernard G. Dixon. The friend's name is..."

His name had turned a key in a door into 1974. I was on a balcony overlooking Pozzuoli's main floor, looking down at people entering for a vernissage, talking about Donizetti's
Linda di Chamounix
with...

"Calvin Ritchie!" We both said the name at the same time.

"I don't remember any friend of Calvin's named Bernard. I met all Calvin's friends. Most of them were white. Only his boyfriends were... Oh, my God!" I suddenly got it. "You're Bernard!"

"I just said that."

"Of Bernard and Antria?"

"When I wasn't going with Calvin, I.,."

This vision of Kenyan pulchritude was Calvin's Bernard? No wonder Calvin had gone through such shit.

"I'm afraid I have bad news about our friend," Bernard said.

"There's no bad news left," I said, feeling the familiar bitterness sweep over me instantly again. "I was on the Coast last week when he died."

"You was?" Bernard said. "I was in a show. Couldn't get away. We talked up until a few weeks before... until he couldn't speak anymore on the phone. I should ask how it was."

"Don't! I don't want to remember the details." But of course I did remember them. "Whatever happened to you and Antria the night of that big party at the bookstore? You know, the night we all quit our jobs and the others got subpoenaed?" I asked.

Bernard didn't recall.

"So, you're what now? Living on the East Coast?"

"East Side. Alphabet City."

"And you know Cynthia?"

"From productions. I'm an actor. And dancer. I've worked pretty steadily since I got here. I live with someone. A guy from El Salvador. He's an orphan. Lost his family in right-wing shoot-ups. Came here not knowing anyone or even English. I help him along. You know, Calvin taught me a lot about myself. It took a while to sink in," Bernard admitted. "And it wasn't until recently that I found out who I really am..."

Imagine Calvin's Bernard being sensitive—sensitive, nurturing, with teak-colored thighs like tree trunks and that face...! No wonder Miss Ritchie had upped and died. Why bother going on? I couldn't help but recall those last few sessions at the hospice, Twin Peaks and its TV-transmitting antennae filling the view through the window, that perfect white California light, Calvin's face shrunken into that of a hundred-year-old—"Miss Jane Pittman as drawn by the artists of
Tales from the Crypt,"
as Calvin accurately, cruelly, described it to my horrified amusement. No lies between us, not ever. His bony, sore-cracked knuckles grasping my hand, his stertorous breathing—even with the tube.

"...compared to the one out there. Even so," Bernard was saying, "it turns out that Calvin had many friends and even family now in the tri-state area. So, it's tonight. At six."

"A memorial service?"

"Just across town." Bernard handed me the invitation.

The card was dove-gray, with brown ink: classy.

"It'd be really nice if you came. Bein' how close you were and all," Bernard said. Before I could answer, he was out the door.

I stared at the invitation, remembering how Calvin's eyes had grown to the size of fucking Crenshaw melons just before...

"You still here?" Blaise charged through the curtain, headed for the control booth. He climbed up and began doing things with lights, followed by Cynthia, who climbed in behind him.

A memorial service for Calvin—how many did that make this month?

Heads peered out of the booth. Together they said, "Roger! Go home!"

The address on the invitation must be wrong. Could that be die chapel behind the low, wavy fieldstone wall? That tiny building (given what must be prohibitively expensive midtown East Side real estate) shaped like something Le Corbu might have designed late in his senility and curiously sited within the looming shadow of the United Nations' Secretariat Building?

Must be... Inside, what I could make out of the chapel continued the motif of subliminal grotesquerie: more low, wavy walls in dark tulipwood and "comforting" warm tones. Only a hint of the externally overused fieldstone surrounded what I guessed to be the altar area (little else hinted at it) and around one capriciously rhomboid window that peered into the heart of a stand of ginkgo trees, devoid of leaves this early spring evening. Above was a matching rhomboid skylight. Slabs of yet more tulipwood and teak formed the sides and backs of pews, softly angled, more or less concentric, already filled.

I signed in and located a seat not too far from center. I squirmed on the cushion, then became aware of piped-in music: the adagio to Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, appropriately dirgelike, if by no means one of Calvin's favorites (Calvin's absolute fave, Bernstein's
Candide
Overture, was undoubtedly too bubbly for the occasion).

I concentrated on the program, although I was far more interested in who all the people around me might be. From the cursory glances I had made, they seemed of mixed skin color, age, and gender but on the whole white, professional, thirtyish, and female. Strange. However did they know Calvin Ritchie? From his work with the San Francisco and Santa Fe operas? From the two or three TV programs of those productions? From Calvin's few articles over the years since he'd quit the magazine? From his one small book,
Singing—and Acting—Donizetti's "Four Queens"
? Unlikely: that densely reasoned monograph (almost doubled in size by footnotes and quirky discography) had been published by a university press somewhere in the Australian outback, released in an edition of no more than a thousand copies, by now unquestionably out of print.

Perhaps the program might give a clue to the group by indicating how Calvin was to be acknowledged tonight? The copies carefully laid out upon the pews exactly mimed the expensive style of the invitation— who'd paid for it all? On the front cover, along with Calvin's dates, was a photo taken maybe two years ago, in which he looked wonderful— chubby, and balding and happy, his mouth open as though about to make some devastating quip about Gruberova's
"Caro Nome."

Instead of explanation, however, the program seemed to be a cryptic sketch of who would be taking part in the memorial. The only name I recognized was "Signor Dane Biyden-Howard," the pseudonym of a young male countertenor whose career Calvin had pushed at one time. Bryden-Howard was to be one of two "artistes": he was to sing the coloratura aria, "Let the Bright Seraphim" from Handel's
Samson
, an aria Joan Sutherland had debuted with in the Laserless Dark Ages. Cheeky lad. But Calvin would have loved it, Calvin the greatest Opera Queen on two coasts. Calvin who'd called me many tilings but most often "My vanilla Malibran," after the nineteenth-century diva and whom I had called back "Leontyne!" or on an especially good day simply "Miss Norman."

The other "artiste" on the program was listed as "Mademoiselle Francine—'Francie'—Faeces," who would be reading a poem: author, title, and subject unlisted. The rest on the program were Sarah-Anne Schenk, "Miss Upper Peninsula, 1975-1978," and three men: Leonard Barber, Andrew Reese, Jr., and Darius Miller. The host would be the Reverend Mr. Foot, from the Jersey City Ethiopian Church.

But if none of this program calmed my already serious misgivings, seeing how precisely the Bruckner movement's tempo had been described in the program—
"Freierlich langsam: doch nicht schleppend"—
relaxed me a bit. I might not know a soul here, but in that listing I sensed the unmistakable hand of a Very Efficient Queen.

I looked up in time to spot Bernard Dixon entering with a smaller, lighter-skinned man, when there was a general murmuring from those in the pews. Near the altar, a very tall, very bald, wildly mustachioed young African-American had stepped out of some heretofore hidden inner sanctum (the good Reverend Foot?), followed by a pretty, stunningly built young brunette (Ms. Schenk?), whose attempts to "dress down" in a black mourning suit had clashed with her physical prepossessiveness, resulting in an outfit monklike yet form-fitting, her breasts so prominent you expected her to constantly try to flatten them down with her hands. Behind her, an overcosmetized woman dressed as a child, in a too wide and too-short-for-her pale-blue frock, with frizzy Crayola-yellow hair pastelly beribboned into double up-in-the-air pigtails, carrying a dazed-looking teddy bear (Miss Faeces?). Behind her marched three slim and very grim-looking black gentlemen garbed in what looked like ninja assassination outfits, save for spots of red and green color here and there (Messrs. Barber, Reese, and Miller, I assumed), each carrying a differently shaped smallish object, like a fetish or juju I couldn't quite make out, they seemed to be so rapidly, surreptitiously, hidden within the capacious dark folds of their uniforms.

The five personages quickly sat down in one of the pews nearest the lectern, kept reserved until now, where they were joined by Bernard Dixon and pal. As they too sat down, Bernard's blocky companion turned around, checking me out. He had to be the boyfriend from Central America I had heard about: his facial features so perfectly Mayan he might have been any of a hundred sacrificial victims pictographed on ruined temples vine-encrusted for centuries within the miasmas of the Yucatan.

In die pew behind me, I heard someone pushing his way into the already crowded row with a lot of "excuse me"s. The voice seemed awfully familiar.

Before I could turn to look or indeed do anything more than note the words or the voice, the reverend faced the congregation. In a velvety deep voice, he murmured, "Our brother and friend, Calvin Copernicus Ritchie, 1946 to 1985. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."

"Copernicus?!" that same voice behind me asked, dreadfully familiar now and awfully close to my left ear. "I thought the name was Albert!"

Despite my instincts, which said,
Don't,
I now could no longer hide from myself the fact that I did recognize that all-too-familiar voice. Instinct also said that above all I ought to avoid turning around to be certain. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind, confirming that indeed it must be, of all people, my second cousin, the dreaded Alistair Dodge.

"What's this Copernicus business?" Alistair asked.

"What are
you
doing here?" I whispered furiously.

"Same as you, sweetheart," he whispered back. Leaning closer: "Albert! I'm sure of it."

"How would you know?" I asked. After all, Calvin and Alistair had only spoken in my company, around me as it were, and usually in very pointed phrases that revealed what they thought of each other.

Immediately from somewhere behind me came the sound of a plucked instrument, in obvious prelude, its sketchy theme filled out by a high, blaring trumpet, then by a disembodied, bright, genderless voice: the Handel aria.

People turned to look at the singer, but all they saw was the blank fieldstone wall. Somewhere nearby was an obscure chamber that opened slyly and acoustically, if not visually, into the chapel.

It was a
coup de théâtre
Calvin would have adored, I found myself thinking, still puzzling over that name Reverend Foot had said: whoever suspected Cal's middle name was Copernicus? Co
per
-nicus?!

Bryden-Howard moved into the area's echo section, trading stratospheric phrases back and forth with the trumpeter, until they united amid trills, the vocalist's decorated, the instrumentalist's barely negotiated. The keyboardist then began to noodle in the slow middle section and was joined by the singer, whose plummier tones were now evident. They were joined by the brass, and the duettists once more rose again in tandem, gaining speed as they circled each other, until first the trumpet then Bryden-Howard hit their final phrase and high note, the instrument a teeny bit flat, the singer dead on pitch.

It was glorious! Astonishing! I hadn't listened to his
Art of the Prima Donna
LP—nor for that matter the CD that had replaced old OS 25232—in months, but Bryden-Howard seemed perfectly to mime the Australian diva in her palmiest early days. Could singers channel the living? That pianist in Europe a few years back claimed she was playing Liszt's Second—until then totally unknown—Sonata (as well as a few allegedly undiscovered
"Nuages").
But Bryden-Howard's technique! His tessitura! It was uncanny! No wonder Calvin had been intrigued.

Even so... what was one supposed to do now?

"At the least, it calls for a bravo," Alistair said, leaning over onto my shoulder. "Or a bouquet of roses thrown onstage. Instead all we can do is sit here, unfairly excited."

Maybe if I ignored him....

What sounded Suspiciously like a scuffle in the front, reserved row of seats of the chapel suddenly arrested everyone's attention. The Reverend Foot stood up straighter, and behind him first Miss Upper Peninsula then Mile. Faeces appeared—could it be?-
¹
—pushing for position. The Beauty Queen won. The reverend noted the fact and said, "We're here to memorialize our brother and dear friend, Calvin Coper-nicus Ritchie. As you may know, he grew up in a suburb of the state of Michigan."

"Revisionist history!" Alistair loudly said from behind me. "He came from Grosse Pointe, not some slum!"