Performance Anxiety

We’d been walking for almost an hour, uphill all the way, into a neighborhood where the trees were ancient, enormous yews and gnarled oaks, and the houses like great wooden sailing vessels, galleons for crews of fifty. Peeking through high hedges into vast gardens, I asked, “Who lives in houses like these anyway? They’re enormous.”

“A lot of them are divided into apartments,” said Tina.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. This used to be the residential center of Victoria. About a hundred years ago. When people had servants and lawn-tennis courts. There was a token Russian princess living up here. Up on that hill there, see that castle? That’s Craigdarroch Castle. It used to be the family home of the Dunsmuirs. One of the family used to invite Tallulah Bankhead up here. Old Dunsmuir made a pile with the railroad but he died a year before the place was finished. Then it was a college and then a music school at one time.”

“No kidding. How come you know so much about this neighborhood?”

“You’ll see in a minute.”

We’d arrived at a high stone wall. We followed it until we came to stone gateposts topped with brass griffins now green and pockmarked with age. Where the gate should have been was a chain with a No Trespassing sign swinging from it. Tina stepped over the chain and started walking up the wide, weed-infested driveway. It must have once been an impressive entrance, but now it was like the cracked surface of an old riverbed. In the distance was a cluster of tall trees, a small wilderness masking the house. I followed Tina through the undergrowth and the chaos of litter. Although it had obviously been years since anyone had taken care of the property, and kids had been in there to pillage and vandalize, it was easy to see the kind of estate it had once been.

The house was massive, with foundations in the same stone as the wall. The upper part of the house was rotting wood, trimmed with the kind of Victorian gingerbread and curlicues that always made me think of haunted houses. On one side was a crumbling terrace and eight smashed French doors leading into what had once been a mirrored ballroom. The mirrors had been smashed, too, and the effect was like looking at a person who had been maimed and blinded.

“It’s incredible,” I said. “It’s like The Fall of the House of Usher.”

“The House of Browning,” said Tina. There was a furious expression on her face.

“What do you mean Browning?”

“This was my grandparents’ house.”

“Your what?”

“My grandparents’ house.”

“You said you didn’t have any grandparents.”

“Think about it, Miranda. Everybody has to have grandparents somewhere. It’s just whether they’re alive or dead and your father lets you know about it.”

“Your grandparents,” I said, trying out the idea.

“This place belonged to my paternal grandparents. My father’s parents. This is the estate my father pissed away without a word to Mom and me. If he wasn’t so crocked already I’d like to kill him. They were rich, Miranda. Do you understand? My grandparents were stinking filthy rich and I never even knew they existed and they never knew that I existed. And to top it all off, my father drank it all away. The place is going to be demolished in two weeks. They’re building luxury condos.”

“How did you find out?”

“You know those genealogy things people do on the Net?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that. It was all there. Every detail.”

“Shit.”

“You said it,” agreed Tina.

We wandered through the stripped carcass of the house, silently taking stock and trying to imagine how each room must have been in the house’s happier days.

Back in the ballroom, the black expression lifted from Tina’s face. I could see she’d been harboring the secret of this house for months, hugging it to herself and trying to understand it, as if it were an affliction, a tumor. She lifted her arms and twirled three times, like an unhappy Gypsy wife giving herself a homemade divorce. She said cheerfully, “I would have held a recital in this room if I’d known it existed. I’ll bet it has perfect acoustics.”

She started to sing. I joined in, harmonizing. We improvised, following each other, singing whatever came into our heads, and I have to say, it sounded pretty good. We threw our notes out to the walls, walking slowly through the main floor like figures in an eerie dream. We paced and twirled and let loose in the huge abandoned house to exorcise her father’s oversight.

Tina began to make changes that day. She stopped being so hard on herself, stopped calling herself trailer trash and started to become the singer she’d always imagined for herself.

On the ferry ride home, Tina was in a much better mood. “I got one more favor to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“Theory homework.” She unfolded a scrunched-up scrap of paper and shoved it into my line of vision. German words were scrawled on it. “I wrote the poem but it’s gotta be a song, Lied in the style of Schubert. It’ll be easy.”

“Easy for old Franz but not for me,” I sighed.

“Ah, go on. You know you enjoy it. I’ll never get it done on time. C’mon. You know you can’t turn down the challenge.”

I was one year ahead of Tina in theory, and because she said herself that she was too lazy to figure it out, and I had done all the exercises the year before, I did her theory and composition homework for her. Pieces “in the style of” Bach fugues, Beethoven concerti, Byrd motets, Ravel arabesques. And it was true that I enjoyed the challenge.

It was unbalanced. In exchange for doing her music theory homework, I got to be her friend, witness her bad moods and endure her cruel and unusual punishments. But then, what else are friends for?

I poured out some iced orange vodka for Tina and Collin. The three of us made a quick toast to our health and knocked it back. I was a little disappointed with Tina. I was expecting her to liven things up but she sank into my couch with Collin and the two of them stayed there, exchanging gooey looks, wordlessly communicating their weird dark passion.