Guests on Earth (12 page)

CHAPTER 5

O
R TO HEAR FROM
a
nyone, actually, since by that time even I could no longer pretend that Joey loved me—or, that is, that he loved only me, for he had grown so large in his appetites that he was becoming legendary even among his peers. And New Orleans is a feast for the senses, of course. With the temptations of the street added to an ever-increasing intake of alcohol, Joey lost all vestige of scruples and caution. Even his beloved work suffered. Mr. Herbert issued a warning, then a strong rebuke.

Often alone, I found myself thinking back to that fateful night at Peabody when it all began, for Joey, whom I had yet to meet, was sitting in the dark audience when I accompanied Lillian Field in our senior recital. Lillian went on from there to sing with several of the leading orchestras in the United States before being struck and killed by a taxicab outside Severance Hall in Cleveland only two years later, when she was engaged to be married. The knowledge of this tragedy has always underscored my memory of our Strauss duet that evening, for it has a size to it, a sense of true performance, of grandeur even, from the dark wintry night outside to the gleaming chandeliers and mirrors within the hall. Wearing my new black dress and pearls, I scarcely recognized the girl I glimpsed in one of those gilded frames. Barbara had helped me fasten my hair up high on my head in that little knot that is traditional among accompanists. My neck looked somehow disturbing to me, so private, so long and so white as it rose from my low-cut neckline.

“You were like a little swan,” Joey told me later, “gliding across dark water.”

D
ARK WATER INDEED.
Y
et we did not meet until the evening when I filled in for Jules Brunhoff and accompanied Joey for that first amazing time. He was still surrounded by admirers when I slipped out unobtrusively, as was my wont, and headed across the cold dark campus with its antique lampposts bearing frosted globes, which shone at intervals along the sidewalk. Halfway to my dormitory I heard “Miss! Miss!” behind me and turned to see Joseph Nero himself rushing out of the darkness like a great black bird, long coat flapping out behind him, carrying a sheaf of music foolishly exposed to the elements. His gait was both impetuous and halting.

“Miss!”

I paused in a pool of light beneath one of the lamps, and waited for him.

It had just begun to snow; a few snowflakes were already glistening on his unruly cap of dark curls. He caught up to me then paused, hand on lamppost, like a figure from a melodrama—a big, hefty young man well over six feel tall, looming out of the elements, out of the very night, breathing hard. He reminded me of a bull, the bull in the Europa myth, perhaps. His breath made white plumes in the air.

“Why did you run away?” he asked—to my great surprise, for why would I have stayed? “I wished to thank you,” he continued, with a funny, almost archaic little bow. “So, thank you!”

This was so awkward as to be charming; I burst out laughing.

He laughed, too. “How can I find you again?” he asked. “For I will need you, I know. Please write it down for me how to find you, though I will lose it, and you will have to write it down many times more. As for me, it is easy, just ask them . . . ask that terrible woman, she will know.” Miss Turnbull was the administrative secretary in the opera division.

I smiled as I scribbled the information down on the little pad I always kept with me. “I am easy to find, too,” I said, “for I live at Peabody itself, in the dormitory, where I am a counselor for the girls.”

“Oh dear God!” He seemed to consider this situation intolerable, snorting out a cloud of frosty air. He jammed my scribbled note deep into his coat pocket, where I assumed it would stay forever. But “I shall need you,” he continued. “Peabody is a way-station for me, a distraction, yet a credential, do you see? In the meantime I must practice, do you understand? Can you do this? Are you available? I will need you.”

The words I could not refuse. “Oh yes,” I said, immediately reconsidering my crowded schedule.

Thus it began, in a circle of light in the chilly, dark Baltimore night, as the snowflakes began to drop silently, now in earnest, all around us. Joey stood completely still, looking at me. His was the perfect face for opera: the great dark liquid eyes, the bristling black brow, the strong cheekbones and sad, mobile mouth. He appeared to embody sadness, loss, and tragedy, an emptiness that could never be filled, a pain that could not be assuaged. Without another word, he turned and lurched off into the falling snow. Later I would learn that his left foot had been crushed by a streetcar in early childhood, an injury which kept him out of the War.

Waking in my narrow bed the next morning, I felt that I had dreamed the entire encounter, conjured him up “out of whole cloth,” as Mrs. Hodges used to say. I was distracted all day long, smiling a goofy smile that I was unable to wipe off my face.

Then, nothing. Ten days passed. Eventually, I plunged back into my work, chiding myself for my silliness.

Until that Sunday evening when the dreadful Miss Turnbull herself came pounding upon my door at 9 p.m., wearing red galoshes. “Can you come along then, Evalina?” she asked abruptly. “He is asking for you.”

“Yes,” I closed my book. “Of course.”

Soon I was indispensable to him, my duties rapidly expanding beyond the piano to errands, laundry, shopping, and even housekeeping. I could have walked with my eyes closed to his third-floor flat in an old brownstone rowhouse several blocks from Peabody. For such a rundown edifice, it boasted a surprisingly ornate stoop and entry—beautiful rose marble steps that appeared to change color depending upon the time of day, or the weather—they seemed entirely magical to me, an entry into another world.

I did not bat an eye the first time I encountered a disheveled woman coming down the narrow stairs as I climbed up to Joey’s apartment. She murmured an apology as I stood aside, with lowered gaze, to let her pass. Another time I slipped upon some tiny silk panties as I entered the apartment carrying groceries, and once I found “
PIG! PIG!
” scrawled in scarlet lipstick across the mirror in his bathroom.

All this seemed quite natural to me, for Joey drew women the way honey draws flies, through no will of his own it seemed, moving through the world like another order of being, one of the gods and goddesses of mythology who were not bound by earthly laws. I also realized that this was ridiculous, such power held by a big, undisciplined immigrant street kid from Philadelphia whose father was an Italian butcher.

Of course my own work suffered—I who had been appreciated and rewarded for my reliability now drew looks askance, raised eyebrows, as I arrived late for certain responsibilities and refused other requests. Such a good girl all my life, I felt my own identity crumbling, yet I did not care.

May arrived, the most beautiful springtime I had ever seen—or perhaps I was only noticing it, in the heightened sense of awareness that had come to me with Joey. One day I traveled down to Richmond for a noontime concert with my beloved choir, leaving in the predawn darkness and returning at dusk with our bus full of children . . . then waiting even longer for several tardy parents to pick up their exhausted little singers. I sat playing XO’s and Hangman with them until their parents finally came.

Though I had been absent from my post in the dormitory all day—and was exhausted, to boot—I felt that I must, must go by Joey’s apartment before returning to my room. I can’t even remember what my pretext was. Soon I was running up the rosy steps. I turned my key in the lock. “Hello?” I called. “Hello?” At first, stumbling through clothes and books strewn across the floor, I thought he wasn’t there.

Then, “Who is it? I am outside, just here—” His booming voice echoed through the little rooms, and there he was, out on the fire escape amid the flowering trees, shirtless, suspenders dangling over his striped trousers, waving a big bottle of red wine. “Evalina!” He sounded delighted, as always. He held up a wineglass full. “Join me!”

I scurried to do so, first rinsing out another wineglass in the kitchen. My tiredness vanished the moment I stepped through the bedroom window onto the narrow iron fire escape. I was taken aback by his closeness and by the mat of curly black hair on his wide chest. For a moment I thought to run. Yet I held out my glass.

He filled it, then raised it aloft. “To Evalina!” he cried out. “My little swan!”

No one had ever toasted me before.

I had to sit one step above him on the narrow iron fire escape, which was nothing more than a ladder, really. The setting sun shone through the flowering dogwoods all around us; streetcars clanged somewhere below; and the silly tune from an ice cream wagon came wafting up to us on the little breeze that lifted my wispy hair. “Have some more, my Evalina,” Joey entreated, and I did, and yet another glass.

As dusk came, everything took on a heightened, mysterious intensity. Now streetlights shone through the trees. And it was I—I, Evalina!—who leaned down in the darkening shadows to kiss his neck, thick and salty, to touch the hair that grew in clumps upon his shoulders, to receive his waiting kiss, which was everything I had somehow known it would be. He picked me up like a rag doll, and lifted me back inside.

I
WOKE BEFORE
J
oey, lying with him in silence while the first faint light of dawn crept through the open window into the bedroom, breathing with him, in and out, in and out, as he lay curled around me, sleeping like a child. Reluctantly I rose, then hurried through the still-dark streets hoping to make an inconspicuous return to the dormitory.

I arrived instead to find a scene of horror in the early morning light: all traffic blocked from entering our cul-de-sac by uniformed policemen; the blinking red lights of an ambulance and two police cars drawn up before the building; several staff members and many students milling about on the sidewalk, most of them still in their pajamas or gowns and robes. The ambulance pulled out just as I reached the group. One of the police cars followed, siren shrieking.

“Now, now girls, not to worry, she will be all right,” screeched old Miss Barnstable, the counselor from upstairs, still wearing her ugly black hairnet. Several of my girls were hugging each other and crying. They looked at me curiously. I could not even imagine how I must have appeared to them at that moment, considering the night I had spent. Surely, all could tell!

Dr. Humboldt, dean of students, turned to me as well, dark circles under his sad, bespectacled eyes. “Miss Toussaint,” he said, “at last.”

We shepherded the girls back inside, past my own locked door with its several missives still taped or tacked to it: some of them sealed, with my name written on the front of the envelopes, then one sheet of paper that read simply in bold print
MISS TOUSSAINT WHERE ARE YOU? MARY STILL WON’T MOVE WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO PLEASE COME, SUSAN ROYSTER

A
FTER LEAVING
B
ALTIMORE,
J
oey and I traveled constantly (San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal). Wherever we were, I found jobs in churches or schools, gave lessons, or worked in music libraries or stores. Though Joey’s career flourished, his habits and tastes grew ever more expensive—silk shirts, restaurant meals, fine wines, late hours, and taxicabs. Usually I had been asleep for hours when he came in. And yet I was always thrilled to wake and find him there beside me, like a miracle—and glad enough to slip out to the early morning bus or metro while he slumbered on, rosy mouth open, breathing in and out, in and out, lying hugely across the bed in whatever rented rooms in whatever city we inhabited at the time, sprawled out on his back like a great broken statue or a giant angel fallen to earth. Of course I had no ring!

How happy we were in Paris in those heady days following the end of the War—hugely happy—and here it was that Joey first sang Tristan, the role that would make him famous. O, the Rue Coquillière! Soupe à l’oignon at midnight in the Pied de Cochon just down the street from us, always open for the delivery men who arrived in their clanging trucks filled with all manner of fresh foodstuffs for the stalls, which did a bustling business all night long. Frequently we walked to our building through running blood from the butcher’s on the corner, crowded with its hanging slabs of beef, whole lambs, and pigs. Everybody spoke to us; everybody knew Joey. Sometimes, too keyed up after a performance to sleep, he’d drink at the bar of the Pied de Cochon until dawn, finishing up with dozens of oysters (huîtres de Bretagne) and champagne, paid for by somebody else. Joey and I had a private reference to the “great organ” of Saint-Eustache, and I remember how he stood behind me pushing his erection against my coat at mass in the vast, chilly cathedral with the glorious deafening music booming from every side, filling the nave with exaltation as I swooned with desire.

But here our troubles began as well, when Madame du Maynadier, our landlady, suddenly evicted us, claiming that she had not received our rent payment for four months, though Joey swore that he had paid her . . . but in cash, so it could not be proved. There was a horrible scene, and a rage, and a broken lamp, followed by our sudden surreptitious move to a smaller set of rooms in the rue Gay Lussac, near the Luxembourg Gardens.

T
HE PATTERN WAS
e
stablished long before our move to New Orleans. Incidents occurred, which I was not to know about, so I did not know about them, concentrating instead upon every moment I had to spend with Joey, for he was still mine then, though not all mine, I suppose . . . but I did not care. I would take what I could get.

Thus arrived the day that I left work early, feeling slightly ill, and opened the door to our rooms in the Hotel des Fleurs to find him in bed with twin chorines, the Fabulous Fouche Sisters, who beamed at me identically above their round, pink breasts. Joey did have the grace to pull up the covers, though he elected to brazen it out, speaking to his companions instead of me: “Allow me to introduce my little swan, my Evalina.”