This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (10 page)

The Best Seat in the House

W
HEN
I
WAS
six and seven, my older sister and I often stayed with the family of a man who was the house doctor for the Grand Ole Opry, back when the Opry was still in downtown Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium. This was 1969, 1970. On Friday and Saturday nights Dr. Harris would take us along with his two youngest daughters to sit backstage while he tended to whatever star needed tending, though most nights no one needed tending and he was free to drink and tell stories in the greenroom, where the best music was actually played. All the while the clutch of small girls, of which I was a member, sat in the dark wings and watched the high-haired men and women go back and forth in their spangles and fringe. We all liked Roy Acuff best because he had a yo-yo.

This should have been the moment of my musical birth. I was a child with the best seat in the house, but even in those early days country music and I were a poor fit. I can remember the hats and the boots, the rose-colored lights and the snakelike electrical cables, but I don't remember a single song. Opry is what I was born to; it would take me another twenty-five years to figure out that my heart belonged to that from which Opry was derived.

My friend Erica Schultz lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She has hauled her boys to the Metropolitan Opera the way we were taken to the Ryman, as little kids. She got them in the children's chorus so that they could walk onto the stage and sing. I wonder how differently my life might have turned out had I been lucky enough to be Alex Schultz. I was past thirty before I started research for a novel in which the heroine, an opera singer, is held hostage in an embassy in South America. It wasn't until I was doing the research to write
Bel Canto
that I heard my first opera. The love that I came to feel was not immediate, but it was slow and deep and permanent, a love that could never be undone. Everything in me leaned forward then. This was my music, my destiny: coloratura instead of twang, “
Dove sono
” instead of “Stand By Your Man.”

The problem was I lived in Nashville, and true love, it has been my experience, never asks to see the check. I started buying opera tickets in other cities, and plane tickets to get myself to those other cities, and when I added on hotel rooms and cab fares and a snack I quickly found myself with a habit that would make most drug addictions look manageable. I couldn't get enough of the stuff. But, figuratively speaking, I had arrived at the theater well after intermission. What chance did I have for proficiency when there was so much I hadn't seen? Listening was satisfying—yes, I was grateful for those Saturday broadcasts from Texaco; and, yes, I bought CDs—but opera is a dramatic art, and in many ways a visual art. It is sidelong glances as well as the E natural. I wanted to watch Violetta grow pale.

And then Peter Gelb got the job of general manager at the Met. He understood that people like me couldn't always come to the opera, and therefore created a system by which the opera could come to us. The Met began to broadcast live high-definition performances into movie theaters across the country. I didn't catch on until the second show of the first season, so I missed Julie Taymor's production of
The Magic Flute
; I still haven't gotten over that. But on January 6, 2007, I wandered into the Regal Green Hills Stadium 16 cinema and put down $20 for a ticket to
I Puritani
. I had read about this movie-theater thing, but I still didn't really understand how it worked. There, in a comfortable fold-down seat with a whiff of popcorn in the air, I watched Anna Netrebko lie on her back, dangle her head down into the orchestra pit, and sing Bellini like her heart was on fire.

Are there words for this? I was in Nashville watching the Metropolitan Opera. I was seeing it on a screen so large that the smallest gesture of a hand, the delicate embroidery on a skirt, was clearly visible. I could see Netrebko's tongue inside her mouth and see how it shaped the air that made the note. I could see the conductor, yes, the crisp gesture of his wrist, but my God, I could see the French horn player as well. I could look into the eyes of the chorus one by one, every man and woman focused in their part. It was Opera Enormous, every note utterly human, simultaneously imperfect and flawless. It was opera the way Alex Schultz saw it, which is to say, right there onstage.

If the opera itself wasn't enough, there were perks besides: at the Met, the patrons killed time between acts by waiting in insanely long lines to get a drink or use the facilities. They reread the program, or stared aimlessly at the heavy velvet curtain. Those of us in the Regal Green Hills Stadium 16, on the other hand, got to go
behind
the curtain where Renée Fleming, armed with a microphone, stopped the soprano and tenor as they came offstage, and asked them why they liked Bellini and how hard it was to sing bel canto. Imagine getting to see Paul Cézanne interviewing Camille Pissarro over a half-finished canvas, getting to see them talk casually, intelligently, about technique. Imagine Cézanne pointing to a small smear of bright paint on a Pissarro pear and saying, “I love how you did that! I always struggle with the light on a pear!”

A
fter
I Puritani
, I bought my tickets in advance and came to the theater early. Everyone came to the theater early. The place was packed but we all felt compelled to pretend we were season-ticket holders. We tried to sit either in the same seat we had sat in for the last showing or the one as close as possible to it. I am the second to the last row on the left-hand side, five seats over from John Bridges, five rows back from Eugenia Moore. We all know each other now and chat about what's coming next while we wait for the giant countdown clock on the screen to hit zero. We watch the patrons in New York, people who have paid ten times more for their tickets, and some more than that, as they make their way to their seats. Like us, the audience members on the screen stop to greet the familiar people around them, and like the audience in New York, we clap for both arias and curtain calls. We call out
Brava!
and
Bravo!
The rational mind understands the singers can't hear us, and yet we are living so completely in our high-definition moment it is easy to forget.

The second season of Met simulcasts was for me a breakthrough in the language I so desperately wanted to speak. I was seeing enough opera to develop a sense of Ramón Vargas. I had seen him live several years earlier in a production of
La Traviata
, but there he was again in last year's broadcast of
Eugene Onegin
and this year's
La Bohème
. I thought that Maria Guleghina had been the highlight of last year's
Il Trittico
, and when she came back as Lady Macbeth my pleasure felt almost proprietary, as if I had been the one to discover her in the first place. The same was true with Juan Diego Flórez, who had been so dazzling in
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
. Three days before the broadcast of
La Fille du Régiment
, the
Times
ran an article about Flórez hitting the nine high C's of his aria and then repeating the feat in an encore, the first Met encore in almost fifteen years! Two years ago I would have read the article with a certain numb acceptance, knowing that this was the sort of miracle a country girl was never going to see, but instead I came even earlier to the following Saturday's broadcast, where we as an audience speculated in the aisles as to whether or not he would do an encore again or if it would seem, well, too obvious on a broadcast day. (Alas, I guess it was. No encore of the encore.) But still, even to hear it once was brilliant. We got to see the powerhouse performance of Natalie Dessay, who is herself proof that it isn't enough just to listen. We did a lot of grumbling over the fact that her
Lucia di Lammermoor
wasn't broadcast. (How quickly we turn from grateful to greedy.)

A real opera fan, the kind who is born into it, revels in obscurity. They are choking on
Carmen
. At thirteen, Alex Schultz is more interested in a production of JanáČek's
Jenůfa
. Remedial fans like myself who have long lived with the burden of limited access are always playing catch-up. In the past, when I was out of town and had the chance to see an opera, I would choose, say,
Madama Butterfly
over Prokofiev's
Love for Three Oranges
, because I was trying to lay down the bedrock of my education. (I still haven't seen
Rigoletto
, for heaven's sake!) But the broadcasts have run the gamut from warhorses to world premieres. I didn't love
The Last Emperor
, composer Tan Dun's 2006 world premiere, but it made me feel cutting-edge to have seen it. I had never felt even remotely cutting-edge where opera is concerned. If I lived in New York and had all the time and money in the world, I doubt I would have gone to see
Hansel and Gretel
, but I live in Nashville and so I went. I have to say those giant fish in tuxedos will stay with me until the end of my days. The music was as haunting as the sets, and I will be so glad the next time I see the marvelous Christine Schäfer on the screen and can say, “Gretel! It's Gretel!”

A
s time goes on, the Met has dug down deep to keep the intermission features interesting. While fifty teamsters roll giant sets around him, Joe Clark, the indefatigable technical director, explains how snow is made. Renée Fleming interviews not only the soprano and the conductor but the people who handle the horse in
Manon Lescaut
. The horse was a consummate professional, but Karita Mattila dropped into the splits in the middle of her intermission interview, and then, to keep things even, came up and slid down on the other side.

That we are kept so well entertained between acts is a bonus, but not a necessity. The necessity is opera itself. The way I cried at the end of
La Bohème
was expected, and when my friend Beverly called later that night to tell me how she had cried in her theater in Texas, we both said, “Mimi! Mimi!” over the phone and started to cry again. The crying I did in
Suor Angelica
, the second act of
Il Trittico
, took me completely by surprise; that final image of the luminous child coming in through the doors at the top of the stage forced the audience into a great, collective sob. But nothing really touched
Eugene Onegin—
the staging, the music, the glory that Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming made together. As wonderful as Fleming is as a guest host, the sight of her anywhere on the Met stage makes one feel she should go zip up her costume and sing. (I saw that same production three days later in New York, where part of my view was obstructed by a tree onstage. Even though my seat was good, I couldn't see the nuances of joy that had radiated so clearly from Miss Fleming's face in the movie theater as she wrote Onegin her letter, or the crushing humiliation and grief that passed through her eyes when he rejected her. Had the opera been better on the screen? I won't go as far as that, because there is, of course, the magic of proximity, but I will say it was at once a different and equal experience.)

On the last day of the season, in April, the Met put a list up on the big screen of the next season's coming attractions. Ten operas
plus
the opening night gala! The crowd at the Regal 16 broke out in a cheer, I swear to you, a
cheer
, when we heard that news. There had been only eight operas this year, and only six last year. In Nashville we had become ravenous. All we wanted was more.

What if culture turned out to be like vegetables, and we were told it was better to consume only that which was locally grown? Could I have learned to embrace the Opry the way I have managed to make peace with okra? I doubt it, but these broadcasts have given me the best of big-city life without the strain of bearing up under the big city's weight, a task for which I know myself to be fundamentally unsuited. Implicit in my love for Tennessee has always been the understanding that certain needs were going to have to be met elsewhere. But these days, it seems, not so much.

Like any other monkey on your back, no addiction ever feels complete until you can pass it on to your friends. I have tried mightily, and in a few cases I've been successful, but for the most part I find it surprisingly difficult to get people to spend their Saturday afternoons in a movie theater watching opera. I am, I would guess, about twenty years below the median age of an operagoer at our local cineplex. Peter Gelb knows his audience, and he knows he needs to cultivate a new crop. I feel certain this will happen over time. People like me, the opera converts, we never shut up, and sooner or later you'll go and see one, if only for the sake of appeasement. Once you get in there you'll get it, and it will get you, and then, my friend, there is no going back.

(
Wall Street Journal
, June 21, 2008)

My Road to Hell Was Paved

I
F YOU'RE NOT
from Billings, Montana, you don't expect to run into people you know at the Billings airport, but over at the luggage carousel is a doctor-friend of Karl's from Nashville and his teenaged daughter. They're meeting up with the rest of their family for a two-week vacation. The doctor asks about our plans.

Karl clears his throat. “We're going out to the Badlands,” he says. “And then over to Yellowstone.”

“Camping?”

Can we call it camping? No, let's call it what it is. “We're renting a Winnebago,” I say.

“A Winny-Baaa-Go?” the doctor asks.

“We hate them,” the doctor's daughter volunteers, in case I missed the gist of her father's pronunciation.

The doctor nods, his expression grim. “They clog up the parks. They go five miles an hour. They're everywhere. I hate those damn things. Why would you go out in a Winnebago?”

I tell him it's an assignment—which, frankly, is the only circumstance under which I'd get in a motor home. This is not a vacation. This is undercover journalism. My plan is to infiltrate RV culture and expose it for the gas-guzzling, fitness-eschewing underbelly my editor knows it to be. But this is not the sort of thing I can confide while waiting for my suitcase.

Karl shifts uncomfortably, not wishing to be implicated. I do not remind him that he was never invited on this trip in the first place. It was my intention to drive the motor coach alone when he stuck his foot in the door. Karl and I have broken up, which makes this trip a grudging opportunity to consider reconciliation. But of course we're not going to tell that to the doctor from Nashville either, since he never knew we'd broken up in the first place. Karl tries to steer the conversation by asking a question about his friend's mother, when suddenly the doctor's face lights up. He turns to his daughter.

“Do you remember the one that burned?” he asks, touching on a treasured family memory.

Enormous smile. “There was smoke everywhere,” the girl says.

“This was a couple of years ago,” he tells us, and for the first time he is fully engaged in our conversation. “We passed a Winnebago in Yellowstone, creeping along, and then coming back later on we see it again, the same one, on fire. That siding burned fast.” He makes a gesture with his hands to indicate shooting flames. Then he sobers himself. “The people got out fine,” he says. “But it sure was great to watch that thing burn.”

The daughter nods. “We got out of the car. We were dancing.”

I wonder if the people in that burning Winnebago had broken up at some point. I wonder if they were heading into America to see what of their love could be salvaged, only to have the whole thing burst into flames.

T
he first night is simple: one hotel room, two beds. In the morning we head down to Pierce RV in Billings to pick up our twenty-nine-foot Winnebago rental. Over the phone, twenty-nine feet sounded like a whole lot of vehicle, but standing in the lot we see it's just a bantamweight. There are thirty-three-footers here, thirty-four, thirty-six. Everywhere I turn I see big tires and endless expanses of glass and steel and aluminum. Our coach is fresh off the factory line, and because it must be returned in perfect condition, the entire interior is covered in plastic—the floors, the booth table with bench seats, the driver's seat, the bed. It smells not unpleasantly of polyvinyl chloride. Paul, the pale and amiable young man charged with setting us up, asks if either of us has driven a coach before.

“No,” Karl says.

I shake my head.

“Not to worry.” He smiles, not worried at all. “I've taken a thousand people through this.”

Our Winnebago says “Minnie” on the side in sweeping, wavelike letters because motor homes have cute names (Holiday Rambler, Alpenlite, Southwind, Prowler) which fit in nicely with the spare-wheel covers that say things like “Gone Fishin' ” or “Hardly Working.” Paul demonstrates how to roll down the awning out front, a long and complicated process vaguely akin to setting up a gigantic ironing board. Paul gives detailed instructions for emptying and filling tanks (104 gallons for water, fifty-five gallons for gasoline, averaging just under ten miles to the gallon). He hands over the keys and I climb into the driver's seat because this is my assignment, my job, and I was fine to go alone. Karl is riding shotgun.

In Albert Brooks's 1985 film
Lost in America
, a couple cashes in everything they own to tour the country in a giant motor home. Brooks, behind the wheel while Julie Hagerty makes toasted cheese sandwiches in the microwave, is funny. The long shots of the lumbering whale creeping uphill in traffic—funny again. Two people driving a Winnebago was such a riot it merited an entire film, and still I am not laughing. While I'm sure I could take this thing forward, I have serious doubts about backing it up. After a moment of interior wrestling I slip the motor home back into park. “I can't do this.”

Karl doesn't make my admission into anything other than what it is. He just steps back from his seat, lets me cross over, and gets behind the wheel. Karl knows a thing or two about backing up, and he is a stone-cold genius at parking. This is not enough to make it work between us. Once he gets the thing turned around he doesn't ask me if I want him to drive the first leg, because I want him to drive the first leg, and he knows it.

We ease into the late-morning traffic of downtown Billings, the plastic-wrapped captain's chairs cradling us like La-Z-Boys. Two blocks out, a black-and-white dog runs into the street and heads straight for our front wheels. Karl slams on the brakes. We then discover the First Great RV Truth: Like ocean liners and oil tankers, RVs do not stop. While Karl grinds the pedal into the carpet, I scream at the dog, “Go! Go!” We might have clipped its tail but the dog itself is spared, and we, very nearly stopped now, are ecstatic. We did not kill a dog in the first five minutes of the trip! We say it out loud to one another. What a good omen! What a positive sign! Five minutes in a Winnebago and we haven't killed anything.

Here are the salient details of our personal life: Karl left when I didn't want him to go and came back right about the time I was no longer interested in having him back. He persisted. We argued. I told him to go and he would not go. Months and months and months went by and still he would not go. Now we are in a motor home heading east.

After stopping at the grocery store to stock up, we push the cart full of groceries across the parking lot and straight up to the side door of the Minnie. We have not used shopping bags. Karl takes the bananas out of the cart and hands them up the stairs to me. I take the bananas from Karl and set them on the kitchen counter. There is some bending in our upper bodies but our feet do not move. When everything has been unloaded, we roll the cart back to the cart corral and return to sit on the couch, feeling like time itself is not quite right. Some essential step between grocery and kitchen has been lost. We unpack our suitcases and eat peanut butter sandwiches and we are still parked in the parking lot of the grocery store. I find that I am overcome by a powerful listlessness. Why bother driving anywhere? Why not just stay where we are?

M
ontana has no highway speed limit, and we are doing sixty. Cars in the fast lane shoot past like pinballs. Perhaps we could go faster, but there doesn't seem to be any point. Our vague plan is to head south on the interstate into Wyoming, then east to South Dakota, then ultimately wind up in Yellowstone. The Minnie is ours for a week so we have nothing but time. If I must drive a Winnebago, I'm glad I'm doing it in the West. It is big. We are big. We cut a meaningful silhouette against the expansive sky. Everywhere we look it is empty and gently rolling like an ocean and I feel like we are a schooner, a prairie schooner, clipping over the waves. It is a world completely divorced from the one we actually live in, the one in which we are responsible people with jobs and expectations and a shared dog who is now my dog because we are not seeing each other anymore. We don't talk about what went wrong with us or if we'll manage to fix it. We listen to the radio and discuss the passing scenery, and while I don't mention it, I have a powerful understanding of how odd it would be to drive this Winnebago alone.

After a while, we pull up behind a truck going even slower than we are, and Karl, after a long consultation with his side mirrors and plenty of discussion with me—his navigator and person whose name is on the insurance forms—opts to pass, which is when we very nearly take out two motorcycles sailing up alongside us.

We lumber back into the right lane.

The bikers look up at us, not with anger, but with bewilderment, their lives still flashing before their eyes. A group of ten or twelve motorcycles follows behind them. My hands are shaking. Karl is shaking. He had been talking about buying a motorcycle himself. “I didn't see them at all,” he says, bringing us to the Second Great RV Truth: There's a lot out there you just can't see. This lesson is important even if you never plan to drive one yourself. Give all vehicles containing showers a wide berth.

W
e have our route planned out, but then decide to take another highway. What's the difference? We have no hotel reservations. Our hotel is with us. Our restaurant is with us. We are turtles, carrying our world on our backs. Once we leave the interstate we don't have to worry about driving too slow for the cars behind us. We don't see a car again for the next two hours.

Do not mistake eastern Wyoming for western Wyoming. There is no one here. There are cows standing mid-road, still far away. This time, we know to start slowing down long before it would seem necessary, and eventually we stop, waiting for the cows to amble off. We are nowhere, but we are nowhere with fifty gallons of gas and a hundred gallons of water.

When it is good and dark, we find ourselves not far from a ranch I used to visit years ago, and I tell Karl the owners wouldn't mind if we park by the barn and spend the night. (In the parlance of RVers this is known as “boondocking.”) When we arrive at the ranch, no one is home. Karl lowers the shades and I flick on the generator, and the lights inside the Minnie are bright, and everywhere there is a humming like an industrial refrigerator. We crawl into bed and try to read and try to sleep but can do neither. We turn off the generator and the silence and the impenetrable darkness pour in through the windows and cover us up.

“This is the weirdest thing I've ever done,” Karl whispers. “I feel like I'm sleeping in the trunk of a car.” We each stay on our own side of the bed, and when we shift in our spots the plastic-covered mattress crunches beneath us.

“Let's go outside,” I whisper back.

And so we go outside, climb the ladder to the top of the Winnebago, and stretch out flat on the metal roof to look at the stars. So many stars fall on this night it's impossible to think we won't eventually run out of stars. After the deaths of a million stars we are sleepy, and we climb back down to bed.

During the night a storm wakes me. Every time the lightning flares, the sky stays bright for several seconds. Thunder rocks us and the rain is deafening, and then hail starts clattering against the fiberglass siding. It sounds like peach pits thrown by Sandy Koufax. Inside our tin house we are snug, and I roll over and fall asleep again.

The next day we drive to Devils Tower to see that astonishingly weird monolith of rock. We hike farther than we mean to on a day that is hotter than it seemed. We make it back to the Minnie, and drive for half an hour before we realize that we're wrung out, exhausted. We limp into a rest stop, turn on the generator, crank up the AC, and then fall into a coma-like sleep. This illustrates the Third Great RV Truth: Wherever you are, you are no more than fifteen feet from bed. For all of my bone-deep distrust of motor homes, they do combine two of my favorite pastimes: driving and napping.

When I raise the blinds an hour later, another motor home is parked snugly next to ours, and a boy eating a sandwich at his diner-style table looks through his window into mine. He waves and I wave back, and a few minutes later I get behind the wheel and drive away. Now that I'm used to the RV, driving doesn't seem so bad. Trips to the gas station, however, are stressful. We're spending around $50 a day on fuel, and as I stand at the pump watching the numbers roll up I have to remind myself that I have an expense account. When the news talks about America's dependence on fossil fuel, it's talking specifically about me driving the Minnie. I am the person for whom the Gulf War was fought and won.

Late that night we have a hard time finding the Badlands Interior Campground, where we have a reservation, and it's long past dark when we finally arrive. Overhead, the South Dakota stars—the ones that did not fall last night over Wyoming—glitter in bright abundance. Up and down the aisles, RVs glow with cool blue television light. Children cluster around citronella candles on picnic tables. I think we could be on any suburban street in the world.

But in the dawn's early light, it's clear this motor park is nowhere near a suburb. We are definitively in the Badlands, and the razor-blade bluffs cresting over so many neatly parked RVs are indeed a sight. By six o'clock the sun glares as brightly as noon, and the RV world is up and about. Karl spots Tennessee plates on a big Allegro Bay RV coach. It is all the encouragement he needs to knock on the door. Karl is friendlier than I am, braver, and better at backing up large vehicles. I make a note of everything. The Allegro contains a couple in their seventies, along with their daughter and her husband, who are also from Nashville. The older man is in the process of emptying out his “black water” sewage tank into a discreet metal hole in the ground. I ask if perhaps it got cramped in the Allegro, traveling with four adults. The son-in-law tells me that he and his wife sailed from Nashville to South America and then to Europe and then back. They were gone six years.
That
was cramped.