like it is
That winter, as I lay on my new rug pressed on the floor, songs of love and despair leaked out of the pipes and sighed from the air shaft: Nessun dorma. Recondita armonia. The ancient building’s steam heaters hissed, its hidden pipes groaned, and its joints cracked late at night. I huddled under blankets to keep out the midwestern cold that layered the floor, turned on my stereo, played the guitar, and listened to shouts from the street and the booted feet of neighbors returning from late parties or afternoon shifts. The arias darted out like mice in the silences: Di’ tu se fidele! Un bacio, un bacio ancora, un altro bacio!
I met the singer one afternoon in the laundry room while trying to fold a fitted sheet. A student at the local university, Oliver was planning to attend law school when he graduated, as he’d promised his parents, though he admitted that he continued voice lessons and confessed to the dream of becoming an operatic tenor. The residents in the units on either side of his reported that they could scarcely hear, so he practiced in his room. He didn’t know about the secret hollows in the old building’s entrails that funneled his voice past their apartments straight to mine.
Oliver was a big man with a round, self-deprecating face and a soft speaking voice that bore no resemblance to the strong, sweet, buttery tenor that surged through the pipes. In the laundry room, we spoke across a friendly distance about the personalities of the washing machines and the strange prejudices of the bill changer. I kept the secret of my front-pipe seats to myself.
With practice, I could identify each aria in the thicket of car horns, rock anthems, and shouts that thrust through the doors, walls, and windows. At Oliver’s first note, I’d head to the window on the airshaft and crank it open. His voice pushed upwards, dislodging paint flakes and the soot of many winters. Una furtiva lagrima. La rivedra nell’estasi. La dona e mobile. I’d even been known to stand inside the shower. The pipe that led to the shower wasn’t to be relied on in delivering hot water, but it delivered that tenor voice with precision. Amici in vita e in morte.
I often pretended to sing along, with operatic gestures. I clowned because I was reminded of the pressures that accompanied parental promises and because we’d make popcorn in the miraculously-unchoked fireplace of the hundred-year-old building, with butter kept overnight on the window sill. It didn’t matter if the butter came powdered with an early morning layer of snow and soot. Everything was an in-joke during that first year. Vesti la giubba: Ridi Pagliaccio!
The next few years fan out like pictures that I discover in a drawer and can’t quite summon the energy to paste into a photo album: Gia and me lying on the sofas, watching Greta Garbo on the 2am movie; our floors carpeted with friends rolled in sleeping bags; Shea avoiding the camera’s eye across a room filled with men in suits and women in cocktail dresses; Bobby at the end of a long lecture hall, his head emerging from a podium and a pile of papers; Matt pushing his girlfriend on a swing.
Addio, senza rencor; addio, o dolce svegliare!
Then quite by accident, one day I glanced down at an opera review and Oliver’s name leaped up. He was singing tenor in a touring production of an American opera company; it was a good review. I searched for him and fished out a dozen other references. One interviewer reported that Oliver had gone to law school and worked as a lawyer for a few years, singing on nights and weekends; finally, he’d gathered his courage and his savings and joined a small troupe. Then he had a series of increasingly important parts in bigger theaters. Now, this role and a national tour.
The chilly room, the smell of burnt popcorn and snow, and the sound of a tenor voice climbing through the pipes broke into my mind, battering down the years between. E lucevan le stelle! I called Matt to tell him that Oliver had escaped being a lawyer and was making it in opera after all.
“It’s too bad we can’t call Gia,” he said. “She’s the one who would truly appreciate how ironic, how right, this news is.”
With a lurch of the heart — T’amo, si, t’amo, e in lagrime — I remembered that Gia was the one person we couldn’t call; she passed a few months earlier after a grueling five-year battle with malignant modular melanoma. A blister of tears swelled behind my eyes. One drop broke out, found a path out of my left eye, and tickled the side of my cheek.
I’ve had a lifelong love affair with opera, and at that moment I suddenly realized why: only opera tells life like it really is.
