The Vampire Tapestry (23 page)

He walked out into the brilliant summer sunlight.

* * *

The tourists ambled through the opera house. From the ridge on which the building lay they could look south toward Santa Fe, east and west toward mountains. Even on hot days breezes cooled the opera hill. The deep, concrete-enclosed spaces of the house were wells of shadow. The house manager, who was guiding the tour, led the visitors through the wings and down an open stair. They emerged onto a sunny concrete deck that backed the entire building—stage area in the middle and flanking work areas—in a north-south sweep.

Raising his voice above hammering sounds and a whine of power tools, the guide said, “Most of the technical work gets done here on the deck level.” He pointed out the paint and electrical shops and, just behind and below the stage, the big scenery lift between the two open staircases. The group drifted onto the shaded southern end of the deck, which became a roofed veranda adjoining the wig and costume shop. They stood like passengers at the rail of a cruise ship, looking westward. Someone asked about the chain-link fence that ran behind the opera house near the base of the hill. The house manager said, “The fence marks off the property of the opera itself from the land that the founder, John Crosby, had the foresight to buy as a buffer against growth from Santa Fe. Nobody will ever be able to build close enough to give us problems with noise or light, or wreck our acoustical backdrop—that hillside facing us across the arroyo at the bottom of our hill.”

The tourists chatted, lingering on the shady veranda; even with a breeze, it was hot out on the exposed deck. Cameras clicked.

Looking down, a man in a safari suit asked disapprovingly, “What’s all that trash down there?”

The others moved to look. On the deck they stood perhaps thirty feet above a paved road that ran below the back of the opera house along the west face of the hill. Beneath them the road gave access to a doorway and a garage entry, on either side of which huge piles of lumber and canvas were heaped high against the stucco wall.

“That’s discarded sets,” the guide said. “We have only so much storage space. Old productions get dumped there until we either cannibalize them for new sets or haul them away.”

A woman, looking back the way they had come, said, “This building is really a fantastic labyrinth. How does everyone keep track of where they’re supposed to be and what they should be doing during a performance?”

The guide said, “By the music. You remember the stage manager’s console in the right wings with the phones and the mic and the TV monitors? The whole show is run from right there by the numbers in a marked copy of the score. Our stage manager, Renée Spiegel, watches the conductor’s beat on the monitor, and according to that she gives everybody their cues. So the music structures everything that happens.

“Now, when we want to shut out the view of the mountains, for an indoor scene, say, we use movable back walls...”

* * *

“Dr. Weyland? I’m Jean Gray, from the Walking River Gallery. Albert McGrath, my partner, had to go to Santa Fe earlier today, so we’ll meet him at the opera. You just sit back and enjoy the scenery while I drive us up there.”

He folded his height into the front passenger seat without speaking or offering his hand.
What’s this
, Jean wondered,
doesn’t the great man believe in hobnobbing with the common folk?
Her friend the department head’s wife had impressed upon her in no uncertain terms that this was indeed a great man. He fitted the part: a dark, well-tailored jacket and fawn slacks, gray hair, strong face—large, intense eyes brooding down a majestic prow of a nose, a morose set to the mouth and the long, stubborn jaw. They also said he’d been ill back East;
give a guy a break
. Jean nosed the car out past striped sawhorses and piled rubble, exclaiming cheerfully, “Look at this mess!”

In precise and bitter tones Dr. Weyland replied, “Better to look at it than to listen to it being made. All afternoon I had to endure the bone-shattering thunder of heavy machinery.” He added in grudging apology, “Excuse me. I customarily sleep after eating. Today a nap was impossible. I am not entirely myself.”

“Would you like a Rolaid? I have some in my purse.”

“No, thank you.” He turned and put his coat on the back seat.

“I hope you have a scarf or sweater as well as your raincoat. Santa Fe’s only sixty miles north of Albuquerque, but it’s two thousand feet higher. The opera is open-air, so because of the lighting nothing starts till after sunset, about nine o’clock. Performances run late, and the nights can get chilly.”

“I’ll manage.”

“I keep a blanket in the trunk just in case. At least the sky’s nice and clear; we’re not likely to be rained out. It’s a good night for
Tosca
. You know that marvelous aria in the third act where Cavaradossi sings about how the stars shone above the cottage where he and Tosca used to meet—”

“The opera tonight is
Tosca
?”

“That’s right. Do you know it well?”

After a moment he said distantly, “I knew someone in the East who was named after Floria Tosca, the heroine of the story. But I’ve never seen this opera.”

* * *

After last night’s performance of
Gonzago
, a dissonant modern opera on a bloody Renaissance theme, the
Tosca
lighting sequence had to be set up for tonight. Having worked backward through Acts Three and Two, the crew broke for dinner, then began to complete the reversed sequence so that when they finished at eight o’clock the lights and the stage would be set for the start of Act One. Everyone was pleased to abandon the dreadful
Gonzago
, this season’s expression of the Santa Fe Opera’s commitment to modern works, in favor of a dependable old warhorse like Puccini’s
Tosca
. Headsets at the stage manager’s console, in the lighting booth, in the patch room and at the other stations around the house, hummed with brisk instructions, numbers, comments. Renée Spiegel, the stage manager, pored over her carefully marked score. She hoped people hadn’t forgotten too many cues since
Tosca
last week, what with doing three other operas since. She hoped everything would run nice and tight tonight, orderly and by the numbers.

* * *

Jeremy Tremain gargled, spat, and stared in the mirror at the inside of his throat. It looked a healthy pink. Nevertheless he sat down discontentedly to his ritual pre-performance bowl of chicken broth. Tonight he was to sing Angelotti, a part which ended in the first act. By the opera’s end the audience would remember the character, but who would recall having heard Tremain sing? He preferred a house that did calls after each act; you could do your part, take your bows, and go home. The part he coveted was that of the baritone villain, Scarpia. Tremain was beginning to be bored with the roles open to him as a young bass—ponderous priests and monarchs and the fathers of tenor heroes. He had recently acquired a new singing teacher who he hoped could help him enlarge the top of his range, transforming him into a bass baritone capable of parts like Scarpia. He was sure he possessed the dark, libidinous depths the role demanded.

He got up and went in his bathrobe to the mirror again, turning for a three-quarter view. You wanted a blocky look for Scarpia. If only he had more jaw.

* * *

Weyland stared balefully out the car window. His library meal weighed in his midsection like wet sand. Being deprived of rest after eating upset his system. Now in addition he’d been cooped up for an hour in this flashy new car with an abominably timid driver. At least she had stopped trying to make conversation.

They overtook the cattle truck behind which they had been dawdling, then settled back to the same maddeningly slow pace.

He said irritably, “Why do you slow down again?”

“The police watch this road on Friday nights.”

He could hardly demand to take over the driving; he must be patient, he must be courteous. He thought longingly of the swift gray Mercedes he had cherished in the East.

They took a stop-light-ridden bypass around Santa Fe itself and continued north. At length Jean Gray pointed out the opera house, tantalizingly visible beyond a crawling line of cars that snaked ahead of them past miles of construction barriers.

“Isn’t there another road to the opera?” Weyland said.

“Just this one; and somehow during opera season it does tend to get torn up.” She chattered on about how Santa Feans had a standing joke that their streets were regularly destroyed in summer solely to annoy the tourists.

Weyland stopped listening.

* * *

In the parking lot young people in jeans and windbreakers waved their flashlights, shouting, “This way, please,” to incoming drivers. People had formed a line at the standing-room window. The ushers stood, arms full of thick program books, talking in the sunken patio beyond the ticket gate.

* * *

Tremain checked in with the stage manager, who told him that the costume shop had finished mending the shirt for the dummy of Angelotti used in Act Three. That meant that tonight Tremain wouldn’t have to strip after his part was over in Act One, give up his costume to the dummy, and then change back again for curtain calls. He took this for a good sign and cheerfully went down to the musicians’ area to pick up his mail.

Members of the orchestra lounged down here, talking, playing cards in the practice rooms, getting their instruments from the cage in back and tuning up. Tremain flirted with one of the cellists, teasing her into coming to the party after the show tonight.

In the narrow conductor’s office off the musicians’ area, Rolf Anders paced. He wished now for just one more run-through with the backstage chorus in Act Two. The assistant conductor, working from a TV

monitor, had to keep his backstage players and singers a fraction ahead of Anders and a fraction sharp for their music to sound right out front.

Anders looked forward to shedding his nervousness in the heat of performance. Some people said that every opera conductor should do
Tosca
each season to discharge his aggressions.

* * *

Three ticket-takers stationed themselves beside the slotted stub boxes, and the long iron gate swung wide. The people who had pooled on the steps and round the box office began to stream down into the sunken patio in front of the opera house. First comers sat down on the raised central fountain or the low walls containing foundation plantings of white petunias. From these vantage points they observed the clear but fading light flooding the sky, or watched and discussed the passing pageant. Here an opera cape from another era, the crushed black velvet setting off an elegant neck; there blue jeans and a down-filled vest. Here a suit of Victorian cut complete with waistcoat, flowered buttonhole, and watch chain, the wearer sporting between slim, ringed fingers an even slimmer cane; there a rugby shirt. Here a sport jacket in big orange-and-green checks over green slacks—and there, unbelievably, its double just passing in the opposite direction on a larger man who clearly shopped at the same men’s store. Everywhere was the gleam of heavy silver, the sky hardness of turquoise, sparkle of diamond, shimmer of plaited iridescent feathers, glitter of baroquely twisted gold. A church group of white-haired women, come for the evening in a chartered bus, stood goggling, a bouquet of pastel polyester flowers.

The house manager, in sober evening dress, moved nimbly through the crowd, sizing up the house, keeping track of mood and movement and the good manners of his ushers.

* * *

Jean, standing on her toes, spotted McGrath—stumpy, freckled, thinning on top—at the fountain. He had with him young Elmo Archuleta, a painter he was wooing for the gallery.

“That’s Albert McGrath; would you mind going over and introducing yourself?” she said to Dr. Weyland.

“I have to make a dash for the ladies’ room.” Jean and McGrath were at odds over her plans to leave the gallery and return to the East. These days she spent as little time as she could around McGrath. Dr. Weyland grunted disagreeably, tucked his raincoat over his arm, and went to join them.
God save us
, thought Jean,
from the grouchy great.

* * *

“Pleased to meet you, Professor,” McGrath said. So this was the hotshot anthropologist the university people were crowing about; handsome, in a sour, arrogant way, and he still had his hair. Some guys got all the luck.

McGrath introduced Elmo, who was scarred with acne and very shy. He explained that Elmo was a hot young local artist. Jean was undoubtedly trying to steer the kid away from the gallery, to retaliate for McGrath’s refusal to let her walk out on their partnership. McGrath let slip no chance to praise Elmo, whose work he really liked. He flourished his enthusiasm.

The professor looked with undisguised boredom at Elmo, who was visibly shrinking into himself.

“Nice ride up?” McGrath said.

“An exceedingly slow ride.”

Here comes Jean, thank God
, McGrath thought. “Hiya, Jean-girl!” She was little and always fighting her weight, trying at thirty-two to keep looking like a kid. And sharp—you’d never guess how sharp from her round, candid face and breathless manner. Smart and devious, that was Easterners for you. The professor said, “I think the altitude has affected me. I’d like to go in and sit down. No, please, all of you stay and enjoy the parade here. I’ll see you later inside. May I have my ticket stub, please?”

He left them.

Jean smiled at Elmo. “Hi, Elmo. Is this your first time at the opera?”

“Sure is,” McGrath answered. “I got him a seat down front at the last minute. And speaking of last-minute luck, I’ve wangled an invitation to a party afterward. Lots of important people will be there.”

He paused. She was going to let him down, he could see it coming.

“Oh, I wish I’d known earlier,” she said. “I have to be back in Albuquerque early tomorrow morning to meet some clients at the gallery.”

McGrath smiled past Jean at a couple he knew from someplace. “I’ll take Elmo and the professor with me, then. He doesn’t seem exactly friendly, this Weyland. Anything wrong?”