Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [19]
One day I received a call at my desk. A quietly controlled female voice asked, “Is this Peter Jenkins?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said, as if she’d forgotten what she meant to tell me, “this is Karen Jensen. That’s almost like Jenkins, isn’t it?” I waited. “I’m a singer,” she said, after a moment. “A soprano. I’ve just lost my accompanist and I’m planning on giving a recital in three months. They said you were available. Are you? And what do you charge?”
I told her.
“Isn’t that kind of steep? That’s kind of steep. Well, I suppose … I can use somebody else until just before, and then I can use you. They say you’re good. And I’ve read your reviews. I really admire the way you write!”
I thanked her.
“You get so much information into your reviews! Sometimes, when I read you, I imagine what you look like. Sometimes a person can make a mental picture. I just wish the paper would publish a photo or something of you.”
“They want to,” I said, “but I asked them not to.”
“Even your voice sounds like your writing!” she said excitedly. “I can see you in front of me now. Can you play Fauré and Schubert? I mean, is there any composer or style you don’t like and won’t play?”
“No,” I said. “I play anything.”
“That’s wonderful!” she said, as if I had confessed to a remarkable tolerance. “Some accompanists are so picky. ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that.’ Well, one I know is like that. Anyhow, could we meet soon? Do you sight-read? Can we meet at the music school downtown? In a practice room? When are you free?”
I set up an appointment.
She was almost beautiful. Her deep eyes were accented by depressed bowls in quarter-moon shadows under them. Though she was only in her late twenties, she seemed slightly scorched by anxiety. She couldn’t keep still. Her hands fluttered as they fixed her hair; she scratched nervously at her cheeks, and her eyes jumped every few seconds. Soon, however, she calmed down and began to look me in the eye, evaluating me. Then I turned away.
She wanted to test me out and had brought along her recital numbers, mostly standard fare: a Handel aria, Mozart, Schubert, and Fauré. The last set of songs, Nine Epitaphs, by an American composer I had never heard of, Theodore Chanler, was the only novelty.
“Who is this Chanler?” I asked, looking through the sheet music.
“I … I found it in the music library,” she said. “I looked him up. He was born in Boston and he died in 1961. There’s a recording by Phyllis Curtin. Virgil Thomson says these are maybe the best American art songs ever written.”
“Oh.”
“They’re kind of, you know, lugubrious. I mean, they’re all epitaphs written supposedly on tombstones, set to music. They’re like portraits. I love them. Is it all right? Do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
We started through her program, beginning with Handel’s “Un sospiretto d’un labbro pallido” from Il Pastor fido. I could immediately see why she was still in central New York State and why she would always be a student. She had a fine voice, clear and distinct, somewhat styled after Victoria de los Angeles (I thought), and her articulation was superb. If these achievements had been the whole story, she might have been a professional. But her pitch wobbled on sustained notes in a maddening way; the effect was not comic and would probably have gone unnoticed by most nonmusicians, but to me the result was harrowing. She could sing perfectly for several measures and then she would miss a note by a semitone, which drove an invisible fingernail into my scalp. It was as though a Gypsy’s curse descended every five or six seconds, throwing her off pitch; then she was allowed to be a great singer until the curse descended again. Her loss of pitch was so regularized that I could see it coming and squirmed in