Performance Anxiety

If Kurt had proposed to Ellie what he’d proposed to me, i.e. neutered sex, she would have said something like, “No actual shaggin’? ME BOLLOCKS!” and booted him out of her bed.

In the studio, Lance was going back over the takes we’d already done. He was wearing earphones and mouthing the words along with the characters on the screen. I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and smiled. “It’s good, Miranda. Here, listen to yourself.” He placed the headset on my ears.

I listened for a few beats then said, “It’s not bad, is it?”

“C’mon, sweetheart, let’s bury Matilde. You warmed up?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, and began to pace, first humming then breaking into scales.

Lance leaned against the wall. He was studying me. I stopped and said, “What?”

“No…it’s nothing.” But he was still studying me.

Then I remembered Kurt’s advice from that morning. A nice little gay friend, somebody who could keep me company when he wasn’t there.

“Before I forget, Lance. I’m having some people over to my place tonight. Sort of a dinner party except I don’t have a big enough table, so it’s perch wherever you can. I know you’re probably too busy or I would have asked you earlier, but it would be really great if you could come. You have my address and my number. Come later if you like. For dessert.”

I’d always wanted to invite Lance to my parties but didn’t know whether they’d be his speed. I had no idea what his speed was. I’d never partied with him. I’d developed this weird intimacy with him in the darkness of the studio but I’d never seen him away from work. I wondered if he had a life away from work.

He nodded thoughtfully, then said, “C’mon, we’re running behind schedule.”

Matilde and her swineherd hurtled toward their demise, moaning, gasping, singing and generally porking their way around the rest of Paris until they were caught by the homely wife, hacked up and turned into quite a few kilos of nice link sausages and sold for a good price at the market.

When we’d finished, Lance reached out and rested his hand on my shoulder. His tone was serious. “I know, Miranda. It’s peculiar work. It’s not glorious and you want more limelight than this, and someday very soon you’re going to dump me cold so that you can become famous.”

Quicker than you know, I thought.

“But we’ve done a good job,” he said. “We’re close to finishing. I’ll let you know if we have to do some retakes.”

I tried never to telegraph my impatience, but Lance must have sensed it anyway, even in the darkness. In my early years in the city, the university years, I’d been so happy, so grateful to have those jobs that were somehow related to singing and got me a little closer to where I thought I should be going.

But that morning, I felt boxed in. I had the sensation of being in a cage, of suffering the same indignities as a captured parrot. Someone forced to learn words in another creature’s language, on the verge of forgetting the dreams and dialects that expressed life in the lush, raw, blazing freedom of the Amazonian jungle, now far away.

The Amazonian was the other Miranda in me. The wild, restless, unsatisfied one, age thirteen and obedient to no one, who heard Bach and Mozart and Brahms and Verdi and wondered how to unlock the secrets of that music, how to devour all the sounds in the universe, wrestle with them, make them hers, and then pour them back out to the world.

I took a quick run over to Mike’s for a double caffe latte refresher and to check my work schedule. I’d asked for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off. Mike had said he’d try to talk another girl into working my shifts but he wasn’t sure he could manage it. The other girl was Belinda, his latest girlfriend. They’d been seeing each other for two months and the bloom of the romance was starting to fade. Belinda was sulking.

Mike had gone to the bank. And other than a customer, she was alone. She slapped the customer’s cappuccino down so hard that the liquid gave a little bounce and slopped out onto the saucer. The guy started to protest but she froze him with a look and walked away.

I was overdue for a short visit to Cold Shanks. Even though it was just a long bus ride away, my life had been so busy that I hadn’t been back since last Christmas.

I needed Belinda badly. I approached her cautiously. “Hi, Belinda,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Prick, prick, prick!”

“Excuse me. Did I miss something?”

I followed Belinda into the kitchen. She began unloading the dishwasher, crashing everything down as hard as possible. She was a redhead, ethereal and nervous, with short, lank, baby-fine hair. Normally, her skin was pale and transparent, but that day, it was bright pink with anger. “I just can’t believe him.”

“What’s he done?” I asked.

“Mr. Smooth, eh? It’s so nuts. Sooo nuts, I can’t believe I’m in the middle of all this.”

“So what’s he done?”

“Well. In the beginning it’s all wining, dining, flowers, jewelry…right?” She caught the gold chain that glittered across her collarbone and fingered it nervously.

“Yeah?”

“And you think, shit, maybe he’s the one, right?”

“Yeah?”

“And then he says, ‘Can you do me a little favor?’”

“Yeah?” I repeated.

“He asks me if I can give him a hand with his granny.” Belinda spat out “granny” as if it were an obscenity.

“Okay,” I said.

“His granny’s an invalid. Prick.”

“I’m not sure I see the problem, Belinda.”

“She lives in the big family home, the one Mike and his brothers and sisters grew up in, right?”

“Yeah?”

“With his mom and dad and one of his sisters who’s married. The sister lives there, too, with her husband and two kids, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“What he means by giving his granny a hand is that I have to spend the night there. On a roll-up cot in the same room. She can’t do most things for herself. He’s asking me to do night duty for an invalid. Help her to the bathroom, wash her, dress her, that kind of thing. I’ve done one week of it and I’m exhausted. As if I didn’t have enough to do. I thought I’d be sleeping with him, not his grandmother. That’s the whole night wasted.”

“Um, you might find this hard to believe, but it’s a test, Belinda. If you do that for his granny, he’s yours.”

Mike had scared off quite a few girlfriends this way.

“I’ll end up doing it for everyone else in his family, too. I just know it. You should hear them criticizing me, bossing me around. Isn’t it enough that I give a hand? But then they all tell me I’m doing it the wrong way. I can’t take it anymore. But that’s not even the worst part,” Belinda went on. A teardrop baubled up and rolled down her cheek. “The old bag doesn’t speak a word of English. She’s been here most of her adult life and she doesn’t speak English. The place is a total zoo.” She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeves.

“It just seems like it now, but you’ll get used to the way Mike’s family does things.”

“No…no. It’s not worth it. I love him but not enough for all that.”

“You’re too alone in all of this. You have no infrastructure. You need infrastructure.”

“Like how?”