Betsy Burke - Performance Anxiety

Tina turned to him and said, “You wouldn’t know what to do with the women in music, Wayne.”

“No?” He had an expression of disbelief.

“Music’s bigger than any man, Wayne. And they wouldn’t let you in anyway. Kazoo does not exactly qualify as an instrument.”

“Harmonica?” he said hopefully.

“Don’t think so,” said Tina.

Wayne pried and prodded a little longer, trying to get the biological profile on all the flora and fauna of the music department.

“Flautists,” he spouted enthusiastically. “All that embrasure could come in very handy.”

But Tina and I acted like a couple of brick walls and he eventually gave up.

Once we’d boarded the ferry, Wayne went off to check out the babes and foxes on deck while Tina and I sat at a table inside and sipped cappuccinos. First we griped for a while about our singing teachers and then, for the longest time, we just sat in silence.

I tried to break into Tina’s mood. “Wayne’s really, really amazing looking,” I said, “but he’s…”

“He’s gorgeous and he’s a total hoser,” said Tina, bored.

I watched the wild April ocean fracture into sapphire shards with each new gust of wind, and said, “Maybe a pod of whales will swim by and flick their tails for us.”

“Hmm,” said Tina. She was descending into a funk. If gigantic sea mammals impressed her, she wasn’t going to let me know about it that day. In fact, she was barely there.

Tina had left the planet, something she did from time to time. She was out there drifting weightlessly in the galaxy of her personal baggage. Not that she was a space cadet. Tina had no trouble being present for singing gigs. Singing gigs were easy for her because, unlike real life, you always know what’s going to happen in the end of an opera or a cantata or a song cycle. But she had other moments that were less solid.

That day I said, “Tina, you’re drifting into outer space. Don’t do this to me. Come back to Earth. Stay here.”

“I was just thinking.”

“That was not a ‘just thinking’ expression. It was a ‘Lizzie Borden works it out’ expression. You’ve made this trip to Victoria before, haven’t you? Recently, I mean.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because you know exactly where everything is right down to what kind of coffee they make and where the stir sticks are. You know where the bathrooms are and the best seats. How come you didn’t want to tell me before now? Is this about a man?”

“Sort of.”

“A sort of man. Who?”

She crossed her arms and glowered at me.

“Okay, surprise me then.”

We were interrupted by the call for passengers to go belowdecks. Tina gave me another grim look. I followed her down to the car deck.

Wayne showed up at the last minute, looking smug. He’d obviously scored some babe-and-fox action for later. In silence, we rode past soft hills and forest, past a long strip of car dealerships, fast-food joints and cheap motels, into the mock-English center of town. Wayne dropped us off in front of a big castlelike hotel and screeched away in his truck, laying a pungent black strip of rubber.

“Show-off,” muttered Tina, then started to hurry toward her mysterious destination with such huge strides that I was nearly running to keep up.

“At least let me take in some scenery,” I panted. “It’s so pretty here, all the flowers, the hanging baskets.” But Tina didn’t answer or slow her pace. I hated her when she was like that. She made me feel so useless, closing me and everybody else out.

“Why did you bring me along if you’re going to act like I’m not here, Tina?”

“Witnesses,” she barked. “I need a witness.”

I knew it. She was planning on killing somebody.

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.”