Performance Anxiety

We both laughed and then he said softly, “So you’ve followed in his footsteps. Marvelous. May I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“May I kiss Sebastian Lyme’s daughter?”

I didn’t expect it but I let him because he’d really earned it. And it was a nice kiss—not too sloppy or dry, nor too deep or shallow. Maybe Kurt would never have taken notice of me if my father hadn’t exalted me like that. I was no longer a nameless chorus singer but Sebastian Lyme’s daughter. And I began to fall a little in love with Kurt that night because he’d said such nice things about my father. Something my mother rarely did.

We stayed in that broom closet for a very long time. He turned out to be an amazing kisser, and I started to imagine the possibilities, to think that maybe he could be my type after all. I guess he thought so too because every day for the next week there was such a huge delivery of flowers from “Admiring K to Beautiful M” that my roommate, Caroline, said our apartment was starting to remind her of a funeral parlor.

But I didn’t tell any of that to the travel agent. There wasn’t time. And Kurt didn’t want me to broadcast our relationship. If you could call it that. After two weeks, we still hadn’t made it past the intense talks and eager groping in the darker corners of the theater.

After the travel agent’s, I had to get to the supermarket to buy the fruit for the dinner party I was throwing on Tuesday night, and then to work. The unpaid ninety-nine percent of the plane ticket was now hanging over me.

I admit I was very hyper and distracted that Monday after buying my ticket. My mind had also been zooming around all the other executive decisions I still had to make. Such as: should I buy the out-of-season strawberries and out-of-country mangoes and risk having Caroline rant about the exploitation of Mexican field workers? Because there was no way I could avoid inviting Caroline to the party. She was my roommate. She was three years older than me, which made her twenty-nine and on the edge of Thirties Purgatory. Apart from her political zeal, she was an okay roommate, but she did tend to hold those three extra years over my head sometimes, to polemicize everything, especially when my opera friends were around.

Caroline has a degree in poli sci. She works as a Jacqueline of all trades at the Student Union Building, but sometimes, to hear the way she talks, you’d think she were an indispensable cog in the wheels of international relations.

And she loves parties. She can sniff them out the way a pig sniffs out truffles.

Was it better to leave the pretty and exorbitant fruits and have pale, sensible and boring local varieties? The party was going to be the next evening and it was really important, a celebration of sorts, if you took the Kurt factor into account. So the dessert had to be perfect. Well, it was a cake really, but a cake that didn’t look like a cake once you dressed it up with all that fruit.

The whole idea was that it had to drip with every possible tangy, sweet, sensuous decadence, the fruit literally tumbling over the whipped-creamy edges. The dessert had to look baroque and scream sex from its rum-and-cream-filled center. Because Kurt had told me he was definitely coming to the party. Definitely coming. And I’d decided it was worthwhile to impress him a little.

So I had to have those crazy-ass foreign fruits on that cake.

On the other hand, there’d been that dinner party six months back when Caroline had ruined everything because I’d bought a few freshly imported lychees and she didn’t approve; she’d gone on and on about the oppression of Chinese growers by the new wave of pseudocapitalists, which was nothing more than a devious form of superslavery to Western consumption. There in the supermarket I started to get so anxious just thinking of that evening. It was the same kind of feeling you get while watching circus acrobats performing without a net. It made my palms sweat to recall the way my guests had slunk away, whispering their lousy excuses while Caroline pontificated drunkenly in the center of the living room.

Caroline will probably become Canada’s next female prime minister. She has the hide of a rhinoceros and infinite staying power.

So as I hurried out of the travel agency and along Denman through the sidewalk mulch of falling leaves, that anxious feeling had started to grow. I passed the low green awnings of the West End Community Centre and the mute yellow deco squareness of Blenz Coffee, where the last hearty stragglers were sitting at outdoor tables trying to pretend it was still summer. They looked chilly.

Denman was getting trendier by the minute and it almost made me sorry to be leaving the city. All kinds of stores and restaurants offering empty but delicious calories were cropping up. I hurried past my favorites, Death by Chocolate, the faux-Brit Dover Arms Pub, and the rotund glass-and-brick facade of Miriam’s Ice Cream and Pies on the corner of Denman and Davey.

My West End neighborhood was a jumble of architectural styles. On tree-lined streets, vertigo-inducing glass-and-concrete high-rises stood next to stout, comfortable, early twentieth-century brick and stone three-story apartments and stores. Punctuating them like a calm breath were the remnants of the earlier residential neighborhoods of old wooden houses, some painted and fixed up for the here and now, others drab and surrendering to damp rot and termites. Bordering it all was Stanley Park, and beyond that, the ocean, which was steely gray and matched the sky.

As I hurried along Davey toward the Super Value, not only were the ticket, trip, seeing my father again, the dessert and Kurt’s coming to the party all whizzing through my mind, but so was my Davey Street Song. The storefront names always made me smile. I had an urge to set them to music.

Quiznos, Panago, T Bone Clothing,

Gigi’s Pizza and Steam (breathe)

Launderdog, Love’s Touch,

Falafel and Shawarma,

Towa Young Sushi,

Thai Away Home.

Thai Away Home. It was like a lullaby.

As I went through the Super Value doors, I was just as nervous and excited as if Kurt had asked me to marry him. He hadn’t. But he’d said only the day before—a mere two weeks into our relationship—that maybe, someday, later, when things had settled down in our lives a bit, we might get married. I hoped he didn’t mean when my breasts had settled down to my navel. Still, I thought this was very promising, considering the stature of the person it was coming from.

And such a combo wasn’t unheard of. My singing teacher, the renowned mezzo-soprano Elisa Klein, had, in the last century, enjoyed a brilliant artistic fusion with her husband, Oskar Klein. Madame Klein had been barely more than a teenager when she met Oskar in a DP village at the end of WWII. He’d been much older than her, and their time together as man and wife had been more of a student and teacher relationship. But eventually, she made her debut as a mezzo-soprano, was applauded all over Europe and took her place beside him as an equal. After he died, she never remarried. Oskar had been her ideal. She had known and sung with the greats. She’d had a significant career. The idea of a musical marriage was enticing. Or at least, my waking mind thought so.

The night before, I’d dreamed that Kurt and I were both standing in a big white hall, a cross between a church and a city hall registry, and we were getting married. I’d filled out my part of the forms properly and I was watching his long-fingered hands and the way they were holding the pen. I was getting all shivery and a little crazy thinking about the way those hands were going to slide along my skin later.

The spoken questions that you usually hear in the ceremony were actually written down. Do you take this woman, and all that jazz. I looked down again at his hand hovering above the thick black ink and saw that he’d written lines and lines of gibberish. He had this half smile that he has when he’s being clever. He’d written strings of nonsense words and was smirking as if he’d pulled one off.

Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?

Instead of “I do,” he’d scribbled, “Spruckahaw broogie figgle foo ickle pickle beeky boo” in the provided space.

I’d woken up fast that morning, in a cold sweat, my heart thumping like a happy Labrador’s tail. The dream worried me a little. There were a lot of things about Kurt’s character that I still had to get acquainted with.

I was remembering all this as I grabbed a shopping cart and hurried along the aisles of Super Value. As my cart was picking up speed I was passing people casting me worried looks. I paid no attention as I wheeled around the end of an aisle and slammed into the side of another shopping cart.

Hence the collision.

The driver staggered toward the fresh-meat section and managed to catch his balance and avoid tumbling into the open freezer and flattening the chicken breasts.

He yowled with pain as his arm was mashed against the side of the meat display then he straightened up, rubbed his wrist and said, “Oh Jeeeeez.” He was staring at me, first bleakly, then his face lit up. It was like the sun coming out.

I moved in quickly to touch his arm but stopped myself. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s all my fault.”

“Yeah, it is,” said the man, grinning, which I thought was odd under the circumstances.

“I’ve hurt you,” I said, although I meant it as a question.

“Just a few little fractures. Nothing major surgery can’t fix.”

I opened my mouth to say something witty but could only come up with, “I’m sorry,” again.

He was smiling crazily.

A long embarrassed silence hung between us.

Now I’d gone and done it. I’d probably slammed into my future downfall. The guy was smiling because he was going to try to sue me. But what about when he found out that I didn’t have any significant money? He’d get his revenge by creeping around in my shadow waiting for me outside my door.

Although, as potential stalkers go, he wasn’t bad looking.

He stopped grinning and said in a disappointed tone, “You don’t remember me, do you, Miranda?”

There was a little flutter in my stomach. I stared at him, his bulky height, the length of his crow-black hair tied in a ponytail, his scruffy jeans with the rips in the knees (boho fashion or pure poverty?), his perfect oval face, amused smile and slightly mocking eyes.

In the file cabinet of my mind, I started ransacking the faces drawer. Nothing appeared except the blank chaos of my lousy memory for faces.

There it was. The performer’s curse. All those people who remember you because you had a little solo role, and they were there in the back row, but you couldn’t possibly have a hope of remembering them because you were too busy concentrating on your performance. This guy had probably been in some production with me, carrying a spear, singing bass, wearing a periwig. Who could know?