The Pacific and Other Stories (6 page)

“Wasn’t she always that way?” he asked, a fork speared into quail poised in his left hand, and a crystal tumbler of scotch in his right, airborne.

“You mean that, when she was nineteen, she had to sit in the center of the backseat of a car or it would go around in circles because it would lean so much that the metal would scrape the ground? No. She was always a big eater, but she was once as thin as either of you.”

“What happened?”

“What happened? She got what she wanted, and to get it she gave up what she needed.”

They looked at me as if they didn’t understand what I was saying, because they didn’t. At their age and in their position it would have been impossible for them to understand.

“You think she’s happy?” I asked. “Do you think that with her villa, her apartments in Rome, Paris, and London, her Bentley, her special African-mud-wasp facial stuff, or whatever it is, with deference and solicitude everywhere, she’s happy?”

“She isn’t, then?”

I shook my head. “No, she’s not happy. She’s just a commodity, hardly a human being anymore. Everyone feels obliged to tell her how wonderful she is. She believes none of it. She had a few great moments, but now she suffers from every decline in the gate, from every fall in CD sales, from every bad review, and although they still cannot justifiably fault her singing, they attack her anyway. They attack her for failing to do what they arbitrarily feel that she should do but what she never intended to do, for her politics or the lack of them, for her missing personal life, for her appearance.

“I’m the manager, so I take some of the blows, but even when we do make a good contract it’s like buying and selling a slave. What makes it worse is how the people who are buying profess to love her singing. All I can say, and you may never understand this, is that if you are in the business of buying and selling singers, you cannot credibly say that you love singing.”

“What about you?” he asked.

I briefly closed my eyes. “I never, ever, tell anyone that I love her singing, or his singing. Because I am an impresario, it would not, to a singer, be credible. Only God knows what I feel.”

“What about me, then?” she asked. “I sang for you. It’s not easy to put oneself out like that, for strangers on the street. …”

“Which is why he is rightly so protective,” I interrupted.

“Which is why he is, yes. You won’t tell me what you think?”

“I will tell you what I think you can do, where you can sing, what your life might be like.”

“Then tell me.”

They braced themselves. Here it was. We were finally getting down to it.

“I’m relatively certain that after a year or two, perhaps more (depending upon what you know of the repertoire and how fast you learn), you would be a rising star, and that, not long after, with luck, you could be one of the two or three leading sopranos of the world. Perhaps, if your beauty and severity of appearance took the right turns, and others fell back, as they tend to do, you could be, as they say,
facile princeps
, the leading soprano of the world.”

They were stunned. They believed me, but they could not believe me.

“You would be wealthy beyond what you can imagine. You would have villas and obscenely expensive automobiles. You would stay in presidential suites. Everyone you meet would treat you with deference—even royalty and prime ministers, even the Pope.”

I paused, and then I said, with great difficulty, “You, not he,” pointing at him almost accusingly. “Not he. He would be the afterthought. He would fade away. If he had been a pianist or another singer, he would have had his own chance, even if impossibly small. But not guitar. He’ll drop back, and then he’ll drop away. I saw it even this afternoon, on the street.”

“How did you see it?” she asked, determined to defend him.

“In his expression, his position, his eyes.”

“Why are you telling us this?” he said with justifiable indignation. “Why are we here?”

“I’ll sign both of you,” I said. “I would love to. She can rise … there is no limit to how high. But I refuse, I refuse, to do any further damage.”

“What damage?” she asked. She did not actually know.

“Immense damage.”

“We would be fine,” he insisted. “As long as I can play, I’ll be happy.”

“What are you suggesting?” she insisted. Now that the picture of triumph had been complicated, she was greatly disturbed.

“I’m suggesting, although I know you would never be able to believe this, that what you have now, as you struggle, is something you may regret to lose.”

“What’s the difference if we sing on the street or in an opera house?” she asked.

“What’s the difference if
you
sing on the street or in an opera house?” I repeated. “All the difference in the world. The difference between hope and success, youth and age, and, in some ways, life and death.”

I knew what was coming, and was ready for a minute or two of storm. As I expected, he leaned forward in his chair, made a fist with the index finger extended, and lectured me passionately on their deprivations, beginning with “You don’t know. …” They came, with great power, one after another. “You don’t know … this,” and “You don’t know … that,” and so on.

When he was finished, and somewhat exhausted, after relating to me what it was like to sleep under bridges and go without meals and washing, I nodded, and said quietly, “But I do know. I grew up in the war, so I know very well.”

“Who would choose not to have what you have said we could have,” she asked quite sensibly, “in favor of what we have now?”

“No one,” I answered.

“Then, you tell us,” she went on, “what should we do? What makes sense?”

“First of all,” I said, “I’m not the only impresario in the world. You can always appeal to someone else—and then,” I said, almost as an aside, “I’ll have even more regrets to live with.”

“We don’t know how to appeal to impresarios except by accident,” he said. “It’s not that easy.”

He was right. I nodded. “Could you teach in Rapla?”

“Far too small.”

“Tallinn?”

“Yes, but it would be nothing like what you have held before us.”

“And you never thought of it before?”

“Of course we did,” she said, “but now you’ve made it seem real.”

“Because it is real. And it will remain real. This is what I suggest. First, stay for dessert, and don’t be angry with me.” I looked up at them. They agreed, and, to my surprise, happily. “I want only the best for you.” This was true more than they could know.

“You should understand, first of all, that if you do sign with me I’ll ask only ten percent.”

They looked at one another as if perhaps ten percent was a lot and they
were about to be cheated. This made me laugh. “Anyone else, as you will see if you care to look, will take much much more than that. And anyone else would try to sign you immediately—my own first impulse. When I heard you, I ran down the stairs at the Accademia. And anyone else would never urge you to do what I am going to ask you to do now.”

They looked both expectant and disappointed.

“First, I’m going to give you ten million lire.”

“For what?” he asked.

“For nothing. You don’t have to pay it back. It will cover your expenses for the rest of the summer, and you can concentrate on what you do, without desperation. Then, go home. Think about what may happen, what life could be like. Think carefully, and keep working. It’s the work that in the end is worth something, and when you exchange it for something else, it leaves you in more ways than you know. Because of your perspective and your position, you won’t be able to believe me when I say this, but what you have now is more than you will ever have.

“Perhaps next year you’ll want to come to Milan. If you lose my card, just remember
Cassati
. You can find me. Even if you forget my name, you’ll never forget Rosanna’s, and you can reach me through her.”

“Next year,” she said, “our chances may not be as good.”

“No. Next year, your chances, once you have considered them in tranquillity, will be better. And if that is what you decide, next year, they will not seize you, you will seize them. Something that people are often afraid to know or say is that life is more splendid than career.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“From regret.”

The waiter was sweeping crumbs from the table before bringing dessert. He was my age, his hair was slicked back, and he must have wondered who we were.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, when I left Venice, I felt older than I am. The hotel provided a gondola that took me, via the Grand Canal, to the station. I had time to make the trip this way rather than on the vaporetto, because the fast train left at eleven. You cannot help but feel either very old or very young, like a
child, when you are helplessly borne along in a gondola, and see young people making their way on the streets and crossing the bridges, knapsacks on their backs, sandals on their feet, their strength and youth a blessedness that they only half know.

I suppose they may have envied me, riding easily in the gondola, my luggage stacked, my hat, my suit, its cream-colored linen suggesting someone of influence and consequence, which I know is not true. They may have envied me, but I envied them—sunburnt, straight of leg, firm of arm, awake as I can never be awake again. It is in the nature of things, however, that my envy be quick and benevolent, for I have had my turn, and now it is rightfully theirs. And for all my dignity and wealth, I am an impresario, and an impresario, you know, is nothing more than a glorified parasite.

I have had this discussion too many times not to know where it leads. I explain the truth of my condition, and the people I am with—usually in a restaurant—protest. How can I say that? I brought Rosanna to the world, enriching it immeasurably. That is when I shock them, because I say that I should have left her in the laundry. And when they get their breath they pronounce with annoying certainty, no, for if I had, the world would be immeasurably poorer.

“Listen,” I say, “let me tell you this. I’m an impresario. I know the job. I know what to do. I work in the service of art, the art that you love, and I love. But if in my lifetime in service to art, surrounded by it, moved by its beauty again and again, I have learned one thing, it is that in its every expression and in its every utterance it is adoring of the human soul and the human heart. If I had left Rosanna in the laundry, her life itself may have been a work of art greater than the sum of all the songs she has ever sung.”

They don’t understand. They never understand. Why would they? They have not intervened, as I have. They have not interrupted the course of things. They have not broken apart lines. Or, at least, if they have, they seem not to care. I am now old enough to choose where I stand at the last, and though my friends and acquaintances in the world of music may not understand or approve, I stand on this. I see clearly. I know what I have done. And I know, finally, what is right.

In the gondola, on the Grand Canal, I felt that I was borne back toward where I had started, not by the power of the gondoliere and not merely with
the gentle flow of the tide, but as if on a river that, though running into darkness and oblivion, was running swift and bright.

Soon after pushing off from the dock at the Celestia, we passed under the Accademia bridge. I strained toward the Rio Terrà Foscarini, but heard nothing, only the water and the noise of the crowd. It felt like sitting in a dark room, and I looked ahead as if I had lost every chance in the world.

But then, as if the lights of a room had come up, or the great and powerful lights of the stage were pushed to the full so that the rouge on the singers’ faces looked like roses in the summer sun, I heard her as she began to sing.

Her voice, not even a full day later, was more powerful, more masterful. She had ascended from her very high position at least a step or two, and her song was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, far more beautiful in its promise, despite a younger and less accomplished voice, than any song Rosanna has ever sung, for, you see, Rosanna was not allowed to bloom.

And as I passed over the waters and heard this song that she sang on a side street, it said to me that no matter where you lead or you are led, no matter how the waves may break upon you, and what sins you may unknowingly commit, it is true that by the grace of God you can sometimes make amends.

T
HE MOST DIFFICULT
of the dinner parties I ruin are usually around Christmas, and always those of the younger members of the firm, who, no matter how well they have done, have yet to find their place because they have yet to fall from grace and restore themselves. They know I have built and rebuilt, that, quite apart from my military history, I have, in corporate terms, come back from the dead. That very thing, though I did not ask for it, is what they fear the most to get and fear the most in me.

It is why, while I sit still and merely smile, they hold forth in a volume of words that would blow up a tire. You would think that because they talk as enthusiastically as talking dogs, they would win. While they say everything, I say nothing. I am shown the second-tier paintings, and harried children who can play Mendelssohn, and from the corner of my eye I see the ineluctable Range Rovers, the Viking stoves, and the flower boxes perfectly tended by silent Peruvians with broken hearts.

Still, I win, they lose, and I couldn’t throw the game if I tried. They just don’t know. They’re younger than my sons and daughter. I find their claims embarrassing: I don’t care where they went to college; I don’t even care where I went to college. I want only to spy the youthful graces they cannot see in themselves, and encourage them to do well and spend more time with their children than I spent with mine. They won’t. I didn’t. They can’t. I couldn’t.

“We’ve just come back from Venice,” said the lady of the house, the wife of one of our foremost earners. He is less than thirty years old, and she is stunningly beautiful and looks eighteen.

“He knows,” her husband said, “he sent me.”