Edinburgh Page 6

  Peter opens his mouth. The first note pierces, the next goes inside the choir’s airborne array, and then he is there, a part of us, all our tangling voices skein the air and Peter slips up, born aloft. My jealousy scrapes off as he keeps breathing, keeps sending more air through himself. Slow fire.

  Love melts all our murder. As much as it makes it. Love melted me. Peter, it could only have been you.

  Later, it is my turn in the program. I’d forgotten, in some bizarre way: the piece forced from my mind entirely. As we tuck the pages of our scores into place, Big Eric’s eyes find mine. I sweat. All the colors around me leave. I don’t remember more than the first three words. The people in the audience come into sharp focus, and I see small hats, wrinkles, tired eyes tired for years. Big Eric’s eyes have the look of the owl now, but this time it’s the owl descending. The owl who can see you from somewhere in the night sky, where the flying hides it.

  Right inside my chest, a space opens. He brings to his mouth a mouth harp, and he whistles a tone for me to begin on. The tone opens in my chest, rolls over in language, opens my mouth. All along, I thought I was the one singing. I am not. He sings through me. He opens his mouth and I sing. My mouth is his.

  Full Fathom Five my father lies . . .

  At the entrance of the choir, as they surround me, I feel myself return. For the moment I was alone, I was gone. I vanished. I keep singing, though, for here I am, a song again.

  Afterward, as we stand around, receiving our parents and friends, I want to walk away from here with Peter. I want the doors to St. Andrew’s to fly open at heaven’s bidding and on a plank of sunshine to walk right up to heaven with Peter, where, looking at God’s face, we explode into flame, as all mortals do, looking on His countenance.

  Instead, we return to the dressing room where we change in the smell of sweat socks and old dust, hang our robes, coil the ropes around the neck of the hanger. We climb into our clothes. We look at each other.

  He knows.

  All this singing seals something in. And so Peter says, You were really great.

  In the dark gothic closet, dust spins around us. You were great, I say. In the only way. You were the only great thing.

  No, you were, he says. You were.

  I hug him to me and suddenly, I kiss him. On the mouth. Briefly. When I pull back, he’s frozen in place. Looking off to the side.

  Like a tap I feel Zach watching us from the door.

  You both were great, he says. Now let’s go.

  Outside, my grandparents stand on the sidewalk, smiling hugely. Somehow, they seem stiller and stronger than the other people around them. As if gravity hugged them a little closer. Koreans very good singer, my grandmother says.

  Yes, grandfather says. Very good singer. You have good Korean voice. Very strong.

  My grandfather tells me again about how in Korea, everyone knows all the Korean songs, and sometimes, they start singing. On the bus, in the street. Everyone just singing, like in a musical. And for a second it seems like maybe I only wanted to sing because I am Korean, and not over there, with all the rest of them.

  My grandparents haven’t come to my concerts before now. They don’t, in fact, often leave the property. My grandmother likes her garden. My grandfather likes our kitchen. But here they are, and at the sight of them everything evil in me seems to blow away, like dust from the top of a book. They hug me between them. Around us on the cold sidewalk the people my grandfather calls the potato people walk the streets, headed home.

  19

  BACKSTAGE. BIDDEFORD OPERA House, opening night. We sit in our costumes, playing cards in our dressing room. Our faces are made up.

  The diva slips into our dressing room, a beautiful young soprano by the name of Mare Winslow. Her hair is dyed red for the part. Her low-cut dress reveals a very full chest. She smiles at us. You’re so beautiful, she says. All of you. Your voices, so beautiful.

  She doesn’t quite say it. That it’s a pity, the voice won’t stay. Some of us might end up with a contra-tenor, but that seems to me to be, at my childish vantage, wildly, unreasonably effeminate. A boy’s voice is a masculine voice not in pitch but because it does not waver. I remember a rehearsal warm-up she attended, where my voice and Peter’s remained, scaling up and up, and she said afterward, even I don’t have that note. Envious then, she was a little like a child looking at monkeys climbing and wanting a tail.

  Later, on stage, in the lights, her face slick with sweat, she radiates sound out to the audience in passionate bolts and rays. Tosca is demanding her lover repaint the eyes of the Mary Magdalene to match hers, that he blot out the eyes of the Marchese Attavanti, whose portrait he has incorporated into the picture there in the church.

  I see as I watch, her comparison of our voices is a false one: a woman’s voice is different, so very different, and hers, ridged by vibrato, cuts like a serrated blade, where we boys stab like swords—our voices tremble not at all. In this way, musically, innocence is represented. Knowledge, specifically knowledge of passion, makes you shake, apparently. As you answer for it before God, singing for your short, beautiful life to inch forward even by another minute. Even in the agony of loss is passion, is love, and measured against death this sort of pain is a feast, also, and requires a knife to carve it. Or so it seems, watching her run back and forth across the stage.

  We have one other scene, apart from singing in the first act. In the second one, while Tosca rehearses, offstage, for her royal command performance at the Farnese Palace, we sing with her. We sing softly, to represent distance, and the composer has arranged Scarpia’s interrogation in counterpoint to what we sing. And even later, at the beginning of the third act, as the prisoners wander the yard, Freddy Moran has a brief solo offstage, where he sings, I send you as many sighs as leaves rustle in the wind.

  And then later, in the prison, Tosca sings with Cavaradossi, Our love will glow like a blazing rainbow over the sea. She says good-bye to him, before his execution, I’ll close your eyes with a thousand kisses, I’ll call you by a thousand names.

  Peter, somehow, shining there in the dark, all the light manages to find an excuse to go his way, to leave him the gifts of their colors. In his choirboy robes, bored by the passage of the opera, waiting for the ride home, the tucking into bed.

  Peter sees me looking at him, finally. He smiles and waves, silent. I wave back. I tell myself, Not even the light should dare to love you.

  After, as I sit, waiting for my mother to come and pick me up, Mare walks the empty stage, sits down beside me, adjusts the skirts in her costume, and sighs. Her powdery breasts push tightly together, like grapes pinched by fingers. I wanted to laugh tonight, she says.

  I can feel the days ahead pulling her away, into other songs.

  Me too, I say. Why is that?

  Because love like this looks funny. People yelling for each other, shouting their jealousy, killing. Singing the whole time.

  I think it’s beautiful, I say.

  Of course it’s beautiful, she says. And there’s really nothing like it, when you are climbing the notes and you realize suddenly, there, right there, this, and the music opens to you. You see how you aren’t there, something else is there that belongs . . . to the music. It doesn’t belong to you at all.

  No rehearsal that Monday. My father returns from Sweden. He has begun a consulting business. As far as I can tell, that means he gets paid to tell people how to do things and how much it will cost them. Each time he returns from a business trip he has presents for all of us, my brother, sister, and I. Teddy gets skates. Sam gets a stuffed Laplander reindeer. I get a ski sweater, of some wool from an animal so vigorous, knitted by people so powerful, I feel like I am wearing a force field and not a gray sweater. The yarn seems to add muscle to me. In the mirror, I look powerfully built, like a boy-hero. When I remember the sweater is from Sweden I never wear it again.

  While Big Eric runs the newer altos through his spiel about head tone and falsetto, I write about How to Fill
a Heart with Hate, a poem, which I title that way. I write, The Heart to become Hate removes the R, which is Rue / a witches’ brew of regret, separates the A which is Art from the E which is Eros by the T, / which was together and is now Terror. Or Time. But never loses / the H, which is Heaven, which is the way back. To the Heart.

  Peter has cut all his hair off in what he calls a fade haircut. A blond frost covers his bare head. The altos finally learn, but now we are out of time. I close my music folder and cover my poem. Big Eric announces, at the rehearsal’s close, a tour for the winter. Schools and churches, throughout Maine.

  After the rehearsal, I watch Freddy walk in a slow circle as he waits for his mom. Peter waits beside me, pulls out a jar of black fingernail polish and begins to paint every fingernail. My sister, he says to me, dared me to do it. Fifty bucks if I did every finger.

  Really, I say. Can you do that at a Catholic school?

  Mmm, no. Clashes with the uniform, he says, and giggles. But the hair is fine. I’ll just walk around with my hands in my pockets, like the rest of them do anyway. He casts a green eye my way. You want, he says, offering the bottle.

  Just the pinkies, I say, thinking of a boy I saw downtown the other day, hair spiked red, black pinkies.

  Tomorrow night, Peter asks, do you want to go to a hardcore all-ages show? Seven bands. My sister and I are going, and she’s driving.

  Yes, I say.

  On the way home, I feel like I have Peter on my fingers. I curl my hands inside my pockets, and no one sees until swim practice the next day, where the other boys only wrinkle their noses, swimmers being mild-mannered. After practice, I ride my bike over to the barbershop around the corner from the bank near the school and sit down for a five-dollar fade. Fade. Something going away slowly. Pomade? the barber asks, and I ask what is it, and after he tells me, I leave, my hair shining, straight up, like the cut end of a paintbrush. I buy the pomade. I walk out stepping on my own hair, like feathers there on the floor where someone killed a bird.

  The next day, when I go over to Peter’s house, he says, It’s good, and traces my fade with his finger for a moment.

  What’s this group’s name, I ask Peter.

  We’re in his room, the door closed, his big old ugly stereo’s volume turned way up. New Order, he says. He’s smoking a Marlboro, blowing smoke into the sunbeam crossing his room. We are waiting to go into Portland with his older sister, Elizabeth. She’s in the bathroom spraying her hair straight up with Aquanet and drawing lines of eyeliner out to her hairline. Punk-rock pharaoh, she says when I ask her about her look. Liz Taylor Bad Hair Day.

  I like Elizabeth. She and Peter say they hate each other. She steals my butts, Peter says. He’s a twerp, she says. Elizabeth is pretty, her blue mohawk cheers me up, like a sail or a blade, the crest of a lizard. Today we are going shopping at Goodwill and then from there to the show.

  At the Goodwill, everything Peter finds he grabs one of for me, and there are patch-elbow sweaters, brand-new indigo jeans rolled high, T-shirts from rival high schools or faraway ones, their letters faded off, and then the precious black overcoats. Ten dollars. Good deals, Elizabeth says, who has found an old beaded black dress. I want to wear it now, Elizabeth says, and hops in the car. Play lookout, she orders, and starts to pull her clothes off. Peter and I sit on the sidewalk and paint our thumbs silver, because, we decide, we walk around with our thumbs in our pockets anyway. From far away, sitting down, it looks like we have a nickel out, ready to call, heads or tails.

  Later, Peter and I stand together at the back of the all-ages hardcore show. Elizabeth is drunk and hitting on skinheads. The band starts to lean into their guitars and the lights blink. Everywhere around us, kids are throwing themselves into each other, banging and falling. A few, like me, pretend that nothing is happening and light cigarettes. Peter takes a straight razor from his pants and runs the razor up his forearm. A bright bead of blood follows. He does it again. And again.

  Peter, I say. What the hell.

  Don’t worry, he says. You cut across, so you don’t slice a vein. He begins on his other arm. And then he hands the razor to me. His arms a red crisscross. He winds himself up with a kick and throws himself into the boys.

  Blood starts to come off on the other slam-dancers. I look at my arm, the skin there starts to look like it could be anything. I test the blade there but I can’t press down. Peter returns, winded. Splashed ’em, he says. God, that’s good. And he jumps back.

  I try to imagine myself at swim practice, my arms marked. I wouldn’t be able to swim with open cuts. I take out a cigarette and light it. The smoke takes the image away.

  Dick-face, Peter says, reappearing in front of me. Blood now dried dark on his arms, across his white T-shirt. Give me that. And he takes my Zippo. He runs fluid over his hands and closes the tank, and flicks it across one hand and then the other. His hands on fire now, blue-white, he raises them over his head and spins back into the bodies. Ha! he shouts, and goes down to the floor, and then up again, and with his hands still burning he leaps from the edge of the stage and lands across a tangle of boys. His fire-hands go out.

  I am watching Elizabeth. She has been drinking, talking all night to a cute skinhead boy about four inches shorter than she is. I find myself wondering if he will grow those four inches this year. He looks almost our age.

  My sister is such a slut, Peter says, as if he can see what I am watching. He sits down. She’s had every skin between here and Portsmouth between her legs, he says, and he lights a cigarette. He just moved here from Boston and he’s heard of her, I bet. He spits on the floor behind us.

  According to my mother, I’m over at Peter’s. According to Peter’s mom, Elizabeth has taken us to a late movie. Somehow after the show we go to an apartment building up off Congress Street, where loud music sprays the sidewalk and seventy-odd skinheads and punk kids drink beer and try to have sex. Peter and I are hiding outside the house, in a shadow now, trying to avoid the mean skins, our coats wrapped around us. They are threatening to shave our heads. Make you a proper skin, they say. Crewcuts are for hippies. We went outside when one of them asked me what I was.

  What do you mean, I said.

  Are you a gook or what? Eh, Charlie? Eh?

  She’s passed out for sure, Peter says, looking down the dark street. Street lamps post bleary light in rows away to either side. Lucky for us all those skins want a piece of her more than they want to shave our heads. I’m sure they’re upstairs on her. His breath clouds on the winter air, a personal weather.

  Peter takes my Zippo out of his pocket, twists and pours lighter fluid onto his thumb. He closes it and running it along his jeans, lights the lighter and then his thumb. A blue candle of his hand in the dark. He holds the thumb against the trash in the can next to us and the cartons and paper in there catch. If a cop comes, he says, we can pretend we’re vagrants. He walks over to the side of the house. Wait here, he says. I need to go get my sister.

  The fire gets larger. A peaceful warmth, some light for this dark corner, a bit of bitter smoke. I take a cigarette out and light it. For no reason I can account for, I am calm, searching myself for panic and not finding it. The cold is like a hand at my back, pushing me forward toward this burning can. I see Elizabeth’s car, and go over to sit on the hood, where I wait until Peter comes out, his sister and another girl with him. They are helping Elizabeth walk but it looks actually like she’s floating, carrying them with her as she flies. Wait, she says, and turns her head to the side, and dull amber vomit chokes out of her in a spurt. Steam rises where it hits the ground. Her head looks like its bleeding, but closer I see it’s actually an A for anarchy, painted there, shiny. Like it was done in lipstick. Fuck, she says. Oh, fuck me. She drops, cross-legged, onto the ground beside her vomit.

  Peter fishes through his coat and comes up with his pack. He holds a cigarette out to his sister. Here, he says.

  Thanks, she says. He lights it for her.

  She looks into the trash fire
and starts laughing.

  Oh, fucking A, she says. A camp-out.

  Peter taps on the shoulder of the other girl, a broad-shouldered swimmer I recognize now from meets. She swims for Falmouth, Butterfly. Her hair is cut short, almost like mine and Peter’s. She leans in and says, Yeah. I’ll drive. Peter hoists his sister up and loads her into the backseat, and I climb into the shot-gun seat.

  Hang on, he says, as the girl settles behind the wheel. He runs back to the trash fire and for a second, I think he’s going to put it out, but instead he kicks it against the side of the building, where it falls over the snowy ground. He picks up a stone and hucks it through the window. FIRE, he yells after the broken glass, and he hoofs it to the car, tossing himself into my lap. The door shuts with a bang, the flames splash the other trash cans, which start to roar, and the girl beside us is cursing, quietly, flooring the pedal as the wheels grind and then catch. Soon we are on the road out to Cape Elizabeth.

  Peter says, Fee. Look back. Is she passed out?

  I peek back to see her staring, wide-eyed, her hands crossed in front of her, laid across the seat. One hand cradles nothing, and then on the floor, I see the cigarette, which I pluck and hand to Peter. She dropped this, I say. He raises his eyebrow and then pushes down the car-lighter. As he relights her cigarette, the orange ring lights his face. He inhales hugely and smoke pours out of his nostrils.

  Why’d you do that, the girl driving us asks.