For my forty-fourth birthday, my son gave me twelve voice lessons. Where he got the money, I couldn’t imagine at first, since Jake was a fifteen-year-old with minimal moneymaking possibilities, but then it turned out he had sold the stamp collection his father had given him before he ditched us. Jake had chosen a voice teacher from the back pages, appropriately enough, of the Voice. This teacher’s name was Leonid Koslov. He had studied at Juilliard, according to his ad, but who knew what that meant. Jake confessed he’d liked the idea of a Russian teaching me to sing. “Some weird lady answered the phone when I called,” he said. “It’s all set up. This is the address, you’re supposed to go on Saturdays at three. I checked your calendar, you’re free.”
I had talked about wanting voice lessons for years, but in typical single-mother fashion had never gotten around to actually doing anything about it. I had always cherished the idea that if someone would only teach me how, I’d be able to sing. To me, singers had always seemed the most vulnerable and passionate and thrilling of all artists.
“Thank you, Jakey,” I said, my throat tight with gratitude.
“Don’t fucking call me that,” he said. We laughed.
Leonid Koslov lived on East 89th Street, almost all the way east, near York Avenue. It was a long hike from the subway along tree-lined, calm, stolid blocks. His building was brick like all the others, four stories high, with a plain stoop, no plants. I was a few minutes early. I pressed the button marked “Koslov.” A split second later, the buzzer made its harsh sound. I pushed through the glass door and dashed up three flights of stairs.
An uncommonly short woman answered the door. “Come in,” she said. She had a strong accent; I assumed it was Russian. I followed her into the apartment. The door opened directly into the kitchen, a dark, clean, plain room. It was a warm day, but there was something simmering in a pot on the stove that smelled of scalded milk and almonds. She turned to look me over, so I returned the favor. She could not have been five feet tall. Her face was large, oval, with very pale, unlined skin, her eyes gleaming wide and wet in their sockets like wide-angle fisheye lenses. She had an oversized head, black curls shot through with gray. Her lumpy body was clad in a long black dress. On her feet were a child’s black sneakers. Those uncannily wide eyes held a glint of hostility, or maybe I imagined this; I have always been given to imagining that people don’t like me. But I wasn’t imagining the power she exuded, a charisma that struck me as sexless but potentially malevolent. She looked like a fairy-tale troll.
“Lyonya is in there,” she said after her appraisal of me. If I hadn’t passed muster, I wondered whether she would have lied and said he wasn’t at home.
“Thank you, Mrs. Koslov,” I said. “You’re his wife?”
“I am Lyudmila,” she said. “His mother.”
I looked at her again in frank surprise.
“In there,” she said again.
I went through a doorway. “Leonid?” I said.
“Hi, come on in.” A male voice, American English, unaccented except for a slight native New Yorkiness, something in the vowels. “You must be Jessica.”
He stood at the window of a small room. He was slight, about my height, with dark hair and narrow shoulders. He came toward me and shook my hand. His handshake was just firm enough not to be limp. He had a handsome face with a small, weak but pretty mouth and ears close to his head like a marsupial’s. His eyes were black, like his mother’s, but they were normal-sized. He seemed nervous, I thought at first, and I was anxious to reassure him that I meant no harm. I guessed that he was a few years younger than I was; it turned out I was right about this, at least.
“I’m so glad to be here,” I said. “I’ve wanted voice lessons all my life. My son gave them to me as a birthday present.”
“I’m your birthday present from your son?” he said. He looked amused.
Then I realized that I was the one who was nervous. “You studied at Juilliard.”
“No,” he said. “My mother placed the ad. She thought it would get more students. And it has. Once you learn my techniques you won’t mind the lie. I invented them myself. I am completely self-taught. Sit down.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and urged me into a chair I hadn’t known was right behind me. I sat, having no choice. Then he drew a deep breath through his nose and began to sing. Cringing suddenly with embarrassment for him, I averted my eyes from his open-mouthed, strangely innocent face, his eerily perfect, high, clear voice.
“Aleluja, Aleluja,” he sang over and over. “Aleluja, Aleluja.”
It was no melody I had heard before. It sounded Slavic, possibly a folk melody, full of quavers and grace notes. He sang as if he were unafraid of the beautiful, shocking power of his own voice. I dared finally to watch his face as he sang. He looked straight at me. He sang with a tenderness that was entirely impersonal, an unearthly resonance. When he’d finished we looked directly at each other without saying anything. Tears had sprung to my eyes, but whether they were caused by mortification or emotional intensity, I didn’t know.
“What was that?” I asked as the silence became intolerable.
“Oh, I made it up. You can learn, it’s not hard. Stand up. Let’s start with your breathing today. Only breathing.”
I stood up. He came to stand very close to me and put his hand just below my breasts on my rib cage. His touch was firm; it was the first time a man I wasn’t related to had touched me in longer than I cared to remember.
“In,” he said.
I inhaled.
“No, no,” he said, and pressed on the tender spot below my ribs, in the center of my torso. “Your diaphragm has to expand,” he said.
“My diaphragm,” I said, laughing self-consciously. I breathed in again, pushing against his hand with my solar plexus.
“Better,” he said into my ear. “Again,” he said, his hand pressing more firmly against me. “Don’t be afraid to fill yourself completely.”
By the end of the forty-five minute lesson, I was dizzy and enamored. I stumbled from that place and made my way to the subway station, staring at the quiet afternoon streets as if I were in a foreign city.
“How was your lesson?” asked Jake, removing one earphone, as I came in the door of our apartment. He sat at the kitchen table eating from a bag of Smart Food. His wild red hair looked as if the wind had been blowing it around all day, which it probably had; he went everywhere on his skateboard.
I had recovered my equanimity on the subway ride enough to say, “Great, actually,” and help myself to a big handful of his popcorn.
Jake’s laptop sat in front of him on the table; on the screen was a screensaver that had hastily covered something up — Instant Messaging, porn, or something worse — but I would never be able to prove it. Anyway, Jake seemed to be doing all right, in general, and his grades were good, so I wasn’t worried.
“So sing something,” he said. The earphone between his finger and thumb gave off a faint pulse.
“We only worked on breathing today,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to show yet.”
He rolled his eyes at me and plugged himself back into his iPod.
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Part Two
The following Saturday at three, when I arrived, Leonid let me in; the kitchen was empty, and nothing was on the stove. I didn’t ask where his mother was; my relief at finding her gone was something I tried to mask even to myself.
“You look nice,” Leonid said as he led me into his little studio.
“Thanks,” I said. I was wearing a tight black T-shirt and low-slung pants. My shoulder-length hair had been freshly colored, and I wore a little makeup.
“Did you practice?” he asked.
“So much I hyperventilated,” I joked.
“That’s not good,” he said. “If you get dizzy you’re not breathing right. This is all about control.”
“I was just kidding,” I said, perversely turned on by his disapproval; his hand was already on my solar plexus.
“Inhale,” he said softly right in my ear. I breathed. We did that a few times. A while later, he told me to vocalize. Breathe in, push out on a note. Think of sending it through my skull bones, not my throat. Control. In, out. Breathe. Everything I did seemed to disappoint him.
He stopped suddenly. “What are you holding on to?”
“Holding on to,” I repeated.
“What can’t you let go of? Something’s in the way.”
I pretended to search my memory. He waited.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes you do. You don’t have to tell me what it is. Just let it go.”
“My husband dumped me six years ago and ran off with my best friend,” I blurted. “He left me and our son. He pays child support and he takes Jake for vacations, but I don’t speak to either of them. I lost them both at once. Since then, I have felt so incredibly alone. But I’m not holding on to them.”
He pinched the top of his nose, right between his eyes, and blinked rapidly. “They don’t matter, Jessica, trust me. You’re better off without them. Breathe them out of you every time you exhale. I don’t care how hokey it sounds. Stop holding on to them. I mean it.”
“I’m not holding on to them,” I said. “I had a lot of therapy. I swear.”
“Ssshh,” he said. He put the flat of his palm on my breastbone and pressed warmly. “Breathe in, breathe out,” he said with my inhales and exhales. “Now let’s sing.” I stood in front of him singing plain vowel sounds in as high and clear and strong a voice as I could muster, feeling naked and exposed. When the lesson was over, my panties were drenched. Sheepishly, I tried to seem casual, unmoved. “Is your mother a musician, too?” I asked.
“She was, but she stopped playing the piano professionally after she had me and my younger brother, to raise us,” he said. “Then my father died. We’re all she has.”
“Your brother,” I echoed.
“He lives in Queens now with his wife and kids. She sacrificed everything for us. With her great beauty and rare musical genius, she could have been an international superstar. There are still great conductors in Russia who pray for her to make a comeback. They say they’re waiting for her.”
“Her great beauty,” I repeated with a sharp, unaccustomed pang of pity for him.
That night, I sat alone in a bistro on Avenue B after seeing a painfully romantic movie. A song played over the sound system, a man’s ethereal voice accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. I had had two glasses of pinot noir; I leaned my head in my hand, my food unfinished in front of me, and gazed into the air, imagining Leonid sitting across from me, looking steadily back. I hadn’t felt this way about a boy since I was fifteen.
The next Saturday afternoon, I was five minutes early. When I arrived at the top of the stairs, Lyudmila stood in her doorway watching me with a knowing, cool expression. Another one of Lyonya’s besotted middle-aged students, I could hear her thinking as she took in my heightened color, my eyelashes spangled with raindrops, my slutty shirt, damp and plastered to my chest.
The studio felt close; the air conditioner whirred and pumped out a chilly breeze that made me shiver in the humidity. Leonid’s clever, olive-skinned face looked so handsome I almost could not bear it. He was in a strange mood that day. His narrow shoulders seemed more stooped than usual. He wore a black shirt that brought out the blackness of his eyes and hair, the paleness of his skin. “What’s wrong?” I asked him, before I could stop myself. I was hoping, wistfully, that he was suffering because he was in love with me, too.
He looked surprised. “I’m just melancholy today,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
He’s melancholy, I thought with wild jealousy, because he’s in love with another one of his students. “Maybe you just need to take a vacation.”
“I don’t really travel much,” he said. “Actually, I don’t go out much. Everything I need is here.”
“What about movies?”
He smiled, surprised. “I prefer to read.”
“What do you like to read?”
He took down a book from a shelf and opened it to a spot held with an embroidered cloth bookmark. He read a short poem aloud in Russian. His voice sounded tougher, more authoritative. Then he translated it for me:
“Something of heavens ever burns in it,
I like to watch its wondrous facets’ growth.
It speaks with me in fate’s non-seldom fits,
When others fear to approach close.
“When the last of friends had looked away
From me in grave, it lay to me in silence,
And sang as sing a thunderstorm in May,
As if all flowers began to talk in gardens.”
“It’s called ‘Music,’” he said. He closed the book and looked over at me.
I had no idea what the poem meant. My pupils were dilated with lust. Thunder cracked hard outside. “Who wrote that?” I asked.
“Anna Akhmatova,” he said.
“Maybe you’re melancholy because you don’t go out.”
He stood very still, his spine straight, his eyes directly on my face as if he hadn’t heard me. I willed myself to meet his gaze without showing any feeling.
“Let’s do our breathing exercises,” he said.
As we went through the usual breathing warm-up, he did not touch me. I should have taken this as a sign of my progress, but it made me feel rejected. My throat closed up so I couldn’t make a sound when he asked me to go through my vowels.
“Sorry,” I said, clearing my constricted throat. I tried again. “Aaaaaa,” I sang.
There was another crack of thunder. Rain streamed down the windowsill. His hand went to my torso. I breathed and leaned against his hand, my eyes fluttering. “Eeeeeee,” I sang. My voice cracked. “Ugh,” I grunted.
“Let’s stop for a minute,” he said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Let’s sing together. Here.” He stood shoulder to shoulder with me so we both looked out the window at the storm. “Aaaaa,” he sang out, his voice high and clear and rich.
I joined in, “Aaaaa,” almost giggling at how alike our voices were in pitch and timbre although he was a grown man, but under the reflexive irony I felt a great need to match his tone exactly. I couldn’t. His voice was perfect, mine was flawed; hearing them together made me even more aware of this.
At home after the lesson, I lay on my bed in a swooning nineteenth-century brain fever, my arm flung over my eyes, my heart pounding from the heat.
“Ma,” Jake yelled as he came in and threw his backpack on the table and opened the refrigerator. “Where are you? Please please can I have some money to go see the new Spider-man movie at seven with some friends?”
“In my bag,” I said back without moving. Normally I would have grilled him: What friends? Where? But tonight, I couldn’t bring myself to muster the requisite maternal concern. He was fine; he was normal; he went out to see comic-book movies with the friends he’d been Instant-Messaging with all day. “Have fun,” I added guiltily.
“Awesome!” he said. “Thanks.”
I heard him gulping some liquid, slamming the fridge door shut, rummaging in my bag, and then the apartment door slammed and he was gone again, off on his skateboard, hair flying around his head.
Part Three
At work the following week, I got more done than I had in a while. After what seemed like years of being sluggish and bleak and dull, all of a sudden I felt light and manic and clear-headed. I was sleeping and eating very little; my pants were satisfyingly loose around my hips. Several of my female co-workers told me how great I was looking. I felt awakened, renewed, as if I were in love, but of course I wasn’t in love. Leonid was a passive, eccentric agoraphobic who lived with his weird dwarf of a mother. He didn’t know a thing about the world. His mind hadn’t been sullied or soiled by real life. But I wanted to drown myself in his purity and arrogance.
My lessons went by in a blur of heavy breathing and vocalizing with vowels in an airy, heady voice under Leonid’s black-eyed gaze; whenever I encountered Lyudmila, who always seemed to be standing in her kitchen over a pot with liquid simmering on the stove, I felt guilty, but why I felt guilty I had no idea. She looked at me with what I took to be suspicion, but why she should feel that for me I didn’t know, either. Being in their apartment tipped me off-balance. I hated Lyudmila with an increasing force that startled me when I became aware of it. I burned to rescue Leonid from her; I just knew, no matter what he said, that he was trapped and miserable. My voice became stronger, clearer. It would never be as powerful and rich as his, but when I got home after my tenth lesson and sang an old torch song in the shower, I thought I sounded pretty good. In fact, I thought I sounded great. During the week before my eleventh lesson, I practiced so much I was almost hoarse by Saturday afternoon. Leonid was alone when I arrived.
“Where is your mother?” I asked with joy.
“Teaching piano downtown,” he answered. “A professional musician hired her to give him some lessons.” He was wearing a dark blue shirt that made his eyes look obsidian. His face looked swollen, as if with some strong emotion he was trying to contain.
He turned to lead me into his studio.
“Do you ever go out?” I asked with brazen courage, following close behind him. He looked catlike and slinky from the back. I felt like a gigantic wolverine clumping along behind him, teeth bared to swallow him whole.
“I rarely go out,” he answered as if this were perfectly normal.
“I would love to take you out to eat,” I said. I had rehearsed this speech a few times in my bathroom in front of the mirror, so it came out sounding much more natural than I had expected. “There are some nice little bistros near here. We wouldn’t have to go far. An early dinner maybe, after my lesson today.”
“My mother is cooking tonight,” he said without emotion. “She’d be disappointed.”
We were standing very close together. His breath smelled very faintly of something from my childhood, the old, familiar smell of squished ants on hot pavement, the very slight, clean, bitter smell of formic acid. It was the breath of someone who rarely breathed fresh air, if you could call the air in this city fresh. During the past several lessons, he and I had talked about poetry, music, the intimacy and power of the human voice. I had told him honestly that because of him, I had finally rid myself of the ghosts of my former husband and best friend. He always seemed overjoyed to see me when I arrived and sorry to see me go when the lesson was over. He was childlike in his guilelessness and openness; he couldn’t hide anything.
“Another night, then,” I said.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said with cautious politeness. “Jessica, I have nothing to offer you.”
I gasped. “I’m not asking you for anything,” I said coldly. I sniffed. “Anyway. You’ll be glad to know that I practiced hard this week. Let’s start the lesson.”
I sang my vowel notes stridently, with glinting eyes.
“Jessica,” he said, “if you were angry with me, would you tell me?”
“I am angry with you,” I said. “I asked you to dinner. You acted like I was begging you for something. That’s insulting.”
He watched me intently as I said this, as if I were speaking a language he didn’t know but wanted to learn. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I wonder, what would I say to you if I were really honest with you?”
“I don’t know,” I said huffily.
“I would say,” he said shyly, feeling his way into it, “that it’s nice to fall in love like this.”
“I knew it,” I whispered. “I knew you felt it, too.”
“Well, I do feel it,” he said.
We gazed at each other with melting faces. I moved toward him and put my hands on his shoulders. I was slightly taller than he was; I kicked off my shoes, and we stood exactly eye to eye. He set his hands at my waist, but lightly, without possession. He didn’t kiss me.
“I want to sing you something,” he said. “I must’ve written it for you, but I didn’t know it until right now.”
He sang with his mouth inches from mine. His face contorted on the highest notes so unselfconsciously I cringed with that same reflexive mortification I had felt the first time he had sung for me, in my first lesson. Surely such purity of feeling couldn’t sustain itself, not in the real world. The song was painfully beautiful. I could hardly listen to the words, I was so overcome. “I want to drown in you, die in your eyes…”
He finished singing and I stared at him agape. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I know you don’t,” he said. “It’s so intimate, to sing to you like that.” His eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been so lonely until this minute, you have no idea.”
“Me too,” I said. When I pressed my open mouth to his, a tear spilled from his eye and ran down my cheek. We breathed into each other. Our stomachs were pressed together.
“We have to take our clothes off,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not yet…”
“Yes,” I said. I unbuttoned his shirt and took it off him and ran my hands over his pale, smooth, boyish torso. I unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the floor.
“Ahhh,” he said with a strange melancholy.
I stepped back to look at him. He was almost as narrow-waisted and slender-thighed as I was. He wore black jockey briefs, which surprised me; I had expected old-fashioned white boxers. “God, you’re perfect,” I said. I stripped off my shirt and pants and underwear. I held out my arms to him. He clung to me and nestled his head in the crook of my neck and kissed my neck over and over. I cradled him, stroked his head. Then we kissed each other’s mouths again as if we could not stop.
“You are such a beauty,” he said, his face flushed and feverish. Then he said something in Russian.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means something I can’t translate perfectly. ‘You are my deepest dream made flesh,’” he said.
“I’m no one special,” I said honestly.
“You are the most amazing woman I have ever known,” he said. “Every time you come in here, I can’t believe you exist. I dream about you every night.”
“I dream about you, too,” I said in wonder. Our faces close together, we stared raptly at each other, our eyes wide and shocked, looking straight into each other’s irises and pupils. Our mouths were open, quivering, an inch apart; I could taste his breath on my tongue.
I slid my hands down his hips and under the waistband of his underwear, then pushed them down his legs and helped him step out of them. He pulled me upwards so quickly I almost lost my balance. “Hey,” I laughed, leaning against him.
He caught me in his arms and said rapidly into my ear, “Please don’t be angry at her. Please don’t hate her. Please.”
Exultant, swollen, wild with happiness, I said laughing, “Hate who? Why?’
He couldn’t meet my eyes.
“Who?” I asked again. I couldn’t stop touching him. I held his buttocks in both my hands and rocked his groin against mine. I had expected to feel his erection against my thigh. Instead, his cock was soft. I reached a hand to hold it, rub it, make it hard.
“No,” he said, “it can’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
Something in his face got to me then, a true sadness.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It can’t work,” he said.
We looked straight into each other’s eyes for several terrible seconds.
“You mean it can’t work between us?” I asked cautiously.
“My penis,” he said.
I waited flummoxed, but he didn’t say any more, he just looked at me.
“I can fix it, my love,” I said, thinking I understood — he was shy; he was impotent because no one had ever loved him properly. I knelt in front of him and took his cock in my mouth. I sucked, salivating with excitement, then slid a hand up the shaft to cup his balls.
There was nothing there.
Part Four
Confused, I ran my fingers back and forth. Where balls should have been, there was nothing but a smooth firm absence. I felt the bare patch again with the backs of my knuckles, pressed on it. I looked dumbly up at him. He looked back down at me, blankly, offering no explanation or excuse.
“Where are your balls?” I asked, almost giggling from fright and shock.
“They took them off,” he said. “When I was a baby.” His eyes were pitch black.
I lifted his cock and stared boldly at the smooth, pink, shiny patch of skin beneath it. A neat white threadlike scar bisected the bareness.
I stood up, my knees cracking a little, and faced him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who took them off?”
“My father was a surgeon,” he said. “My mother was a pianist, but she wanted to be a singer. I was their firstborn child. In the olden days, the castrati sang with celestial perfection, and their voices never changed. She gave me what she didn’t have, herself. It was her gift to me. Theirs. Hers and my father’s.”
I tried to imagine doing something like that to Jake. My imagination shut down. Sexual frustration and horror exploded in a toxic cloud in my brain. “She is evil,” I said. “They both are. They mutilated you.”
“My father killed himself from guilt. She lost him. My brother hates her. She’s all alone except for me.”
“I don’t give a fuck about her,” I said. “Taking away your right to a normal, real life is evil. Keeping you here, locked up, never letting you out — it’s evil.”
“Stop, my love,” he said. “Please stop. We’re both upset.”
I jammed my clothes back on, shaking with rage.
“You’re not even angry at her,” I said. “What is wrong with you?”
“How can I be? It would poison my entire life. My father is gone and so is my brother. I am all she has; her whole life is suffering, except for me. I’m her only comfort.”
“So why aren’t you a famous singer? Why don’t you perform?”
“I can’t perform. I literally faint from nervousness. I sing for my mother after dinner at night. It isn’t in me to stand in front of an audience. And you want the truth? I can’t teach any one to sing like me. Only another man like me could sing like me. It’s a racket, Jessica. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “You’re a brilliant teacher, Leonid.”
“Now you see what I meant when I said I had nothing to offer you.”
“Stop it,” I said. “Your mother is insane. She totally fucked you up.”
“My poor mother,” he said.
Furious, I shoved my feet back into my shoes. He was still naked. He looked defenseless and beautiful. I went to the door and fumbled at the knob.
“You have one more lesson that was paid for,” he said. “Two, because today doesn’t count. I can refund your money.”
I said savagely, “No. Keep the money. Today certainly does count. I’ll be back next week.”
“Goodbye,” he said as if he never expected to see me again.
In the subway downtown, I stared at the faces of the men in my car; they must have thought I was demented. A couple of them darted uneasy glances at me. One of them moved away from me. I didn’t care. They were normal everyday men, men with balls. I needed to look at them. Even the homeless guy asleep in the corner at the front of the train — I needed to look at him.
When I got home, there was my healthy male child at the table, my vibrant, redheaded, stocky, pimply boy, eating caramel-flavored mini rice cakes, wearing Hurley jeans and a ZZ Top T-shirt his father had given him as part of some joke the two of them shared that I was excluded from.
“You’re home early!” he said in a super-friendly, horrified tone. “How was your lesson?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Kind of weird.”
He looked at me then, for real. “Are you okay, Ma?”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “What are you up to?”
“Doing homework,” he said. His eyes shot to the opposite wall.
I waited and didn’t say anything. He writhed under my mild but curious gaze. Then the bathroom door opened, and a girl emerged. The toilet hadn’t flushed; what had she been doing in there? She wore a mini-sundress with wedge sandals. Her dark hair was silky and straight, her tanned slender arms gilded with peach fuzz. Her dauntingly pretty face was flat with a superb self-containment. Her expression didn’t change at all when she saw me.
“Hi, Mrs. Sweeney,” she said to me. “I’m Jake’s friend from school, Alison Goldstein.”
“We’re doing homework,” said Jake. It reminded me of when he was six and I had caught him looking into the closet where I hid his Christmas presents. “I was looking for my boots,” he’d said in this same aggrieved voice. He hadn’t changed at all since then. Alison Goldstein would eat him alive.
“First of all, my name isn’t Mrs. Sweeney,” I said to her. Then I turned to my son. “And second, Jake, you’re not allowed to have friends over without permission.” I had instituted this rule after a couple of Jake’s friends, thuggishly nicknamed Vandal and Dollar, had hung out in my kitchen for seven hours eating all my food and bragging to each other about their prowess with chicks in obnoxious, one-upping voices.
Of course that had been another matter entirely; I was being unfair, I knew it, but I had to protect him.
Jake would not look at me.
“That’s the rule,” I added.
“I’m outta here,” Alison said in a voice she surely had not intended to sound so snotty. “See you, Jake.”
She slipped out the door to our apartment and was gone, leaving a blank silence behind her.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” I said.
“I can’t believe you said that.” Jake was speaking to the wall above my head with the kind of nastiness that prevents tears. “We were working on our history assignment. Now she’ll never speak to me again, so fuck you.”
I was silent, looking at him, trying to figure out how to handle this. He looked back at me with outraged confidence, waiting for me to make everything all right again. Of course I couldn’t; I had fucked up.
“If you had told me she was going to be here, I wouldn’t have reacted that way,” I said, feeling clumsy and oafish. “But you broke the rule. I reacted that way because you hadn’t told me.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “She called me right after you left. She lives like three blocks away. She asked if it would be okay for her to come over, if I would explain all this stuff to her.”
“Jake,” I said sadly.
“Whatever.” He waved me angrily away, not wanting pity. “She thinks I’m an idiot.”
We stood there on opposite sides of the kitchen, looking at each other. I imagined Alison running down the stairs of our building and pushing open the door and finding herself back on East Eleventh Street in the sunshine, reabsorbed again by the satisfying effect she had on other people.
“She doesn’t think you’re an idiot,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I just do,” I said. “She thinks I’m a bitch, but she’s forgotten the whole thing by now, and she’ll see you on Monday and it will all be the same.”
“You better be right,” said Jake.
“I am right. And by the way,” I added as he sidled toward his bedroom door, “thanks again for the voice lessons.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I thought you needed something fun to do. I was getting worried about you.”
“You were just trying to get me out of the house so you could sneak girls in,” I said.
He made a face at me. “So how’s your singing?”
“Better,” I said. “Want to hear?”
With an expression of mock horror, he disappeared into his bedroom.
Part Five
I went into my bedroom and sat down at my computer and googled “castrati.” Within five minutes, I’d learned from several seemingly reputable web sites that according to historical record, castrati were able to have erections and ejaculate. A lot of them carried on torrid affairs with men or women or both. No matter how hard I looked, I could find no medical or physiological reason why Leonid couldn’t get hard and fuck me. Exactly what I had thought.
Maybe there was hope for him, and, by extension, for us.
A good therapist could help him. My love could save him. He could come and live with Jake and me; he could sleep in my bed and give voice lessons in our apartment while I was at work. He could have a full, normal life.
At work all the following week, I felt distracted and tense and sick with elation. At night, I had strange dreams that weren’t about Leonid directly, but the unsettled, longing, passionate feelings these dreams evoked were certainly about him. On Friday night, I dreamed Lyudmila was shrieking through a howling hurricane like the Wicked Witch on her broomstick in “The Wizard of Oz.” I woke up on Saturday morning with a clear head and a calm mind. I thought to myself, What a tacky and obvious dream, and went to the gym, as usual, before my voice lesson.
At three o’clock, I climbed the stairs to their apartment, and there in the doorway was Lyudmila. She let me enter without a word to me, her huge boiled-egg eyes fixed on my face. She knew what had happened between Leonid and me the week before, and I knew she knew, and she knew I knew she knew, and so forth. She must have known, too, that I hated her with a murderous loathing. If she felt the same way about me, I didn’t care. I loved her son with all my heart. I was here to take him away from her.
I entered Leonid’s room, alight with righteous passion.
He couldn’t hide his joy at the sight of me. “You came back,” he said.
“Of course I came back.”
“I thought I would never see you again.”
“I missed you so much.”
“I thought I would die.”
I held out my arms to him. What had been tamped all week roared again.
“You aren’t broken,” I whispered against his mouth. “I looked it up. It’s all in your mind. There is nothing wrong with you.”
“God,” he said. “If only that were true.”
I pulled my mouth away from his and said into his ear, “No no, it is true. The Italian castrati had normal sex lives. They got erections and had orgasms and even ejaculated. You can, too. We can send you to a therapist. We can help you.”
“It won’t work,” he said.
We were speaking urgently but very softly. Even so, I felt her there in the kitchen, taking in every word.
“How do you know it won’t work?” I said. “You’re young. You deserve to live your life as a free man. You deserve to have love. I want to love you, I’ll be so good to you.”
“Jessica,” he said almost inaudibly. “Listen. I can’t leave her. It will never work.”
We embraced then for a long time. He was trembling and silently crying. I held him, feeling powerful and victorious, almost levitating from the force of my love for him.
“Leonid, please come and live with me and Jake.”
“No,” he said. “I have to stay here. I feel like I could die of sadness. I feel like life without you will be unbearable. I could go insane just thinking about it. But I mean it. I can’t leave.”
“But why?” I sobbed.
“I belong to her,” he said. “I always have and always will.”
“She has to let you go.”
“She can’t.” His voice was firm. His body was suddenly unyielding.
I pulled away from him, wiped my eyes. “Oh God,” I said. “Leonid. Thank you so much for teaching me to sing.”
“I taught you nothing.”
“You taught me to sing.”
“Come on, Jessica, you know I’m incapable of teaching anyone to sing.”
I opened my mouth, my heart knocking against my ribs with nervousness, and I sang as if I were speaking to my most trusted friend,
“I hate to see the evening sun go down. I hate to see that evening sun go down. Ever since my baby up and left this town… Feeling tomorrow just like I feel today, if I feel tomorrow just like I feel today, gonna pack my bags and make a getaway.”
I sang the entire song with my eyes on his, my breathing controlled, my voice bluesy, rich, and sad. Then, when I had finished singing “St. Louis Blues,” I smiled at my voice teacher and left the room. I walked straight through the kitchen without looking at or speaking to his mother. I walked down the stairs, out into the street, and to the subway station with my face expressionless and my eyes straight ahead.
