The History of Great Things (12 page)

Y
our room at the Barbizon is tiny, but it has gloriously high ceilings with wood floors and crown moldings, and Grace Kelly once stayed there, maybe even in your room, and there's a heavenly skyline view, if you lean out the window a bit and look to the right. The hotel is filled with wide-eyed women just like you (though even by this age you are sure there is no one on earth just like you); over breakfast in the formal dining room, you make several new girlfriends, all as eager to forge their careers as you are, aspiring journalists and actresses and even a poet (about which you think—poet? You have no imagination for what that life would look like, post–Emily Dickinson). You observe that some of them have potential and drive, and others are entirely delusional about their prospects. One young woman you chat with, named Evelyn, wants to be a model, but she's not what you would call anything other than plain; compared with the beautiful, stylish women you've seen in the lobby or on the streets just since you arrived, this woman doesn't have a chance. Why don't people know this, that they don't have a chance, why not just accept it instead of holding out hope for some unattainable thing? It does not occur to you at this time that the city is also full of aspiring opera singers,
several of them right here in the hotel, and that talent or not, your chances may or may not be better than anyone else's. You are certain that your spot is assured. Almost certain.

The opera director from Binghamton has recommended a vocal coach. You choose a pale-pink dotted Swiss blouse and your favorite wool gabardine skirt for your first lesson. Her name is Carolina, she's Cuban, sixty-something, with a cottony blond updo and a flair for the dramatic—you walk in and she says
Muy bonito! Come in, bonito!
offers a cup of tea, asks if you drink tea; you say
Occasionally
, she says
You must drink tea now and forever, every day, it is a must!
Everyone who meets Carolina falls a little bit in love with her and you are no exception.

Carolina sits you down on a sofa in her parlor before you sing, asks a million questions about everything:
Do you have a fam-ee-lee, where do you live, how do you practice, how do you take care of yourself, where have you sung before, what have you sung
. To say you're overwhelmed is an understatement; you have been told that Carolina is not guaranteed to take you on, so this is something of an audition, but you had thought all you'd have to do was sing; you weren't expecting an interview. Still, Carolina has a way of asking questions that indicates genuine interest; she nods, says
I see, I see
; you don't see, but it seems all right.
You will sing now
, she says.
First scales, like this: Lololololololo, Lalalalalalala, Lelelelelelele!
; you think she's simply having you warm up, but what she discovers through this process is that you have perfect pitch and four solid octaves. She nods, says
Wonderful, wonderful, very good
, finally asks to hear the aria you've prepared. You sing “Caro Nome” again because it's gone well in the past.

Ordinarily, Carolina has a game face for first auditions, a semi-ambiguous nod until the singer is finished. Many, many times, Carolina has said
Singing is not for you
, or
No, I am sorry,
but you should think of something else to do
. (A warm and kind person, Carolina on these occasions will fix another cup of tea and sit down with the singer to hash out other interests and career directions to take.) Today, what Carolina says is
Lovely, lovely, lovely
. She's holding back because she knows a singer's ego, which she will neither stroke nor ignore, but she hears you reach the high C, a fifth octave, closes her eyes, keeps saying
Lovely, lovely, lovely
, and
I can help you
.
You have mistakes, but I can help you.
You are thrilled, in spite of the word “mistakes,” only because it is offset by Carolina's unhidden enthusiasm. Carolina says
You must move here, it is no question that you will do this
. Your breath, which you usually have in ample reserve, is almost sucked out of you. Fred hasn't been at his job all that long; you weren't planning another move, that was just a little fantasy. You're just a girl from Muscatine, how will this happen? You don't know. It just will. You're bigger than Muscatine, bigger than Binghamton, bigger than Baton Rouge. Aren't you? You are.

Carolina schedules regular lessons for the rest of your time in New York. You don't even have an appointment calendar; she tells you to go get one. S
ometimes they give them out at the bank for free. Carry it always. You will have many appointments.
You race back to the Barbizon, scuffing your best flats without a care (you can touch that up later); you're dying to make a long-distance call to Fred to tell him the news, to outline a detailed plan for your entire future, but you've agreed not to call unless there's an emergency, long-distance is simply too expensive. So you sit down to write him a letter on the hotel stationery; three drafts later, you've got a version that seems reasonable, though when it reaches Dad, it's still shocking. Fortunately, by the time you return home, he's had some time to sit with it, and you reach
a compromise: you will rebudget, you will go back and forth from New York every other month and see how that goes, and you will do this for a year.

But before you leave New York, something else unexpected comes up. Carolina, seeing your rapid improvement under her tutelage—you do everything she tells you to, practice as much as she dictates but no more (she knows you would be inclined to)—invites another student of hers, a tenor, to sing a duet with you. This goes as marvelously as she expected, though what she hadn't realized (or perhaps she had), was that there would be sparks between you and this handsome, also-married tenor. Carolina, married, divorced, married again, divorced again, married again, and now widowed at sixty with an
amante
, knows a thing or two about sparks, and she keeps you behind after the married tenor leaves and pats the sofa next to her, again.
I do not tell you to do this, my love. I do not tell you to do this, but I do not tell you not to do this. We cannot—must not—contain our passion. Our passion and our art are one thing, do you see? Discretion is everything, yes?
You try to interrupt Carolina several times during this;
Oh, I would never!
you insist (though you have imagined moments like this a time or two, harmless fantasies, weren't they?), but she shushes you, says
I don't say what will happen. I just say I know of this. Our hearts and bodies go where they will.

O
n a trip back east for a visit, you read me a letter to the editor you wrote that got printed in the
New York Times
. You are as elated as if you'd been proclaimed the next Virginia Woolf.
Someone published what I wrote
, you say.
I'm a published writer!
I nod; it was just a letter to the editor, though, granted, a funny one. Something about bagels.
Don't people publish letters to the editor all the time?
I ask.
How do you not get it?
you answer.
Someone read what I wrote and they saw something in it. Did you become a singer overnight? Hardly, Betsy. I busted my ass for years.
For a brief second you think I might key into your point, when Victor asks how much you got paid for it.
They don't pay for letters to the editor, Victor.
You're pretty sure he knew this before he asked.
If they don't pay then you're not really a writer. Everything isn't about money. Don't kid yourself. Well, it isn't for me. Yeah, I'm aware
, he says.
You have health insurance yet? You know I don't. Get back to me when your letters to the editor start offering major medical.
At this point, you look like you could haul off and punch him in the face, and if it had been my battle, I very well might have. Instead you tell him to fuck off.

—You know I never would have told you or Victor to fuck off.

—Well, there's your problem.

—You might be right about that.

—Anyway, you said you only wanted things that didn't happen.

—But this is not unlike something that did happen.

—So it could have happened, but didn't.

—Sure.

—Like all the other scenes so far.

—I guess what I'm saying is that the point of view gets blurry in these scenes. Because here, in this one, it's you, talking about me, sort of from my POV, even though you were actually there, as opposed to let's say a scene that we know didn't happen in any form.

—Now you're confusing me.

—It
is
confusing.

—How are you and I supposed to have any conflict if we're not in the same scene together? Someone has to write it. How do you have a mother-daughter story where the mother and the daughter are never together?

— . . .

Y
our father, on the other hand, is positively proud about your letter to the editor.
You're on your way!
he says. He buys you your first laptop computer to replace that clunky old desktop from the eighties.
You're going to need the best moving forward. You'll be on a book tour in no time! I have to actually finish writing a book first, Dad. Well that's why you need the laptop. Do you know that soon everything will be done on the computer? People are going to write letters onscreen, and send them instantly through their phones. It will be fantastic!
Your father has never had piles of money sitting around, and he and Jeannie do have other kids too, but they're always happy to help out when they can, and he could not be more excited to see your name in the paper. This is one of the top stories in his holiday letter this year, in the same paragraph as your sister's college graduation and your youngest brother's first son.

What didn't make the holiday letter at all: your father's heart attack.

—Interesting.

—Really? I guessed right?

—No, but he was in the hospital. A heart attack—that'll work. That sounds weird.

You drive out to Iowa City from Chicago several times a year now—it's just four hours door to door—so when Jeannie calls from the hospital with the news about Fred, you're able to get there later that same day without taking on any more credit card debt. The prognosis is good, assuming he changes his entire diet and currently non-existent exercise routine, but he'll stay in the hospital for a week for observation. Your father is a different kind of patient from me, he's a patient patient, he's a patient who doesn't hate the lukewarm beef broth or the pudding cups on his hospital tray (
Oh, these are delicious! Jeannie, can we get these at home?
), who's content to catch reruns of old Westerns on network TV and read the back copies of
Ramparts
magazine that have been piling up at home.

—
Ramparts
hasn't existed since the seventies, Mom, but whatever, I guess.

—But is it believable that he still has piles of them that he bookmarked in 1968 to read later?

—Yep. It sure is. Continue.

He would have never thought a thing of it if you hadn't made it there, but the fact that you did, and that you stayed the whole week, spent every day next to his bed watching those Westerns that actually put you both to sleep at times, sharing the extra pudding he got the nice nurse to bring, meant more to him than he could ever tell you.
You really didn't have to come, Betsy. Dad, I would never not come. Well, it was extra-special nice of you. You're a good daughter. I could improve. I don't think a poll of my parents would indicate that to be fact. You're a wonderful daughter, Betsy!
Jeannie says.
I fought with Mom when she was in the hospital. What? Oh, you're exaggerating. Not really.

S
o I die, and you're angry and sad and alone, and what comes home now is that you're single and childless and you have about five minutes to fix that.

—Why does it have to be fixed?

—Are you happy?

—That's not my point, Mom.

—I guess I have a couple of competing ideas for how it goes for you after this.

—You can say them both.

—That's not how stories work.

—Stories work any way you want them to work.

—All right, well you can figure it out later. Maybe you'll like one idea better than the other.

—Maybe I'll like them both. But I doubt “like” would be the word I'd choose here.

Okay, good. In that case, in scenario one, after I die, you decide there's no time to waste, so you sign up for a dating service and meet a nice man, Alan, who has some normal steady job with health insurance, which you need, and a nice house in the
suburbs of Chicago. You get married and try to have a family right away, but you can't get pregnant, so you have one of those medical procedures they do now where sometimes you end up having multiples, what's that called, when they mix shit up in a petri dish—

—In vitro fertilization.

—you have that, and you have twin girls, beautiful twin girls. Before they're born you knit them sweaters; I remember you had done that a few times over the years for gifts, the sleeves were a bit odd, made some baby quilts too. You fix up an old dresser like I showed you I'd done once. You get caught up in that for a while; you love the girls, of course, but as they get bigger and throw twin tantrums, or you fail to connect with them in that rhapsodic kind of way you hear so much about, greatest thing ever, you don't know what love really means until you're a mom, blah blah blah, it's not even post-partum, it's post–worst decision you ever made, or you try to join one of those mommy groups only to discover that whatever joy there is in having children is utterly desiccated by talking about having children, that you maybe have a three-minute window before you want to yell that you don't give two shits about the details of a virtual stranger's labor, or the tenor of some baby's first burp, and from there it's a short hop to realizing that you were not thinking clearly, getting involved with a man named Alan, that you could last long with an Alan, and so you tell Alan he's better off without you and divorce the best thing that ever happened to you and leave the girls with him and move back to the city, but then you fall into a terrible depression since this makes you a horrible, horrible person. Eventually, though, you get a good
therapist who prescribes meds, which is the other best thing that's ever happened to you, and you meet a new man, Eduardo, a chef, and you live happily ever after.

—Three hundred and ninety words. For the whole rest of my life after you die? I abandon my children in less than four hundred words?

—The kids are fine. I gave you a happy ending.

—A guy.

—Don't forget, there's another scenario too.

—I understand, but still. Married, divorced, married again, and that's it?

—What else do you want?

—Was getting married the end of
your
story?

—It was the best part of my story.

— . . .

—Okay,
one of
.

—I didn't have the sense that either of your marriages was so easy.

—Well,
I
wasn't easy.

—I won't argue with me-as-you saying that.

—It was better, though, yes. I needed to be married. But maybe you don't. Are you married?

—I'm just trying to say—married or not married, maybe more than three hundred and ninety words?

—I did say I had more than one idea.