was born in London, England, and grew up on the west coast of Canada. She has a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria. Among the many jobs on her résumé, she includes opera singer, dishwasher, guitar teacher, nurses’ assistant, charwoman, mural painter, salesclerk, puppeteer, English teacher and most recently, freelance translator. She currently lives in Italy. Her interests include art, music, books, rejection-slip origami, turning the planet into a garden rather than a toxic waste dump and trying to convince her four-year-old daughter that chocolate is not a breakfast food. She is also the author of a murder mystery set in Florence.

Performance Anxiety
Betsy Burke

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Sara and Salva and music-makers everywhere.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Yule Heibel, Jean Grundy Fanelli, Katie, David and Susan Burke, my extended Canadian family, Helen Holubov and a very special thanks to Elizabeth Jennings and Kathryn Lye.

Vancouver

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

London

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Vancouver again.

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Vancouver

Chapter 1

The collision was all my fault.

It had happened on the day I was making my big move. I’d walked into the travel agency that gray Monday in early October and booked my ticket. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Vancouver to London—Heathrow.

The woman at the agency is a big opera buff. She always asks me about my career progress and gives me special treatment. That day, she let me leave a deposit for one percent of the fare. There was no need to tell her that I still had to earn enough to pay for the rest of the ticket, because I knew I’d find the money somehow. How else could I justify all those menial jobs and forty-eight-hour workdays?

It felt so great when she printed out that little piece of paper, handed it to me and said, “Here’s your flight itinerary, Miranda. I sure do envy you. I love London at Christmas.”

I took a big breath and said to her, “This’ll be my first time there.”

Although it wouldn’t feel like it. I had Londontown.com on my browser. I could tell you what was going on in every concert hall and theater in the city. I could already imagine myself strolling through Covent Garden, or grabbing a bite to eat at Bad Bob’s or Café de Paris before the opera, maybe a Carmen, a Tosca, or a Nixon in China. I can even tell you what the weather is in London on any given day. That Monday, London had drizzle with the prospect of heavy rain.

“I’m going over for an important audition,” I said.

“Oh, wow. Really? Who’s it for?”

“The English National Opera. I got the letter a couple of days ago. I’ve got my time slot. It’s January the tenth at 3:30 p.m. In the theater itself. The brand-new beautiful renovated Coliseum.”

Peter Drake, the two-hundred-ton tenor who was singing Pinkerton in our current production of Madama Butterfly, was good buddies with everyone at the ENO, so I took advantage of his buddydom and asked him to get me an audition. And he did. Although Peter acts like a diva, he’s really a very nice man. His generosity is as vast as his costumes, which could probably double as pup tents in an emergency.

“How exciting,” said the travel agent, “and a little bit scary too, I’ll bet. What are you going to be singing?”

“Some Handel and some Mozart. And if they want to hear more, Rossini.”

“Oooo. Sounds good, Miranda.”

I pulled my pink cashmere scarf tighter around my throat. “Yeah. I’ll have my fingers crossed the whole way. Recycled airplane air can be hell on your high notes. And my pieces have a lot of high notes and runs. But I know it’s going to be fine. I have a great teacher and I’ve been doing a lot of performing lately to work up to it, and I even have a technique for handling the stage fright.”

“You do? What’s that?”

“Well, I learned it in my Centering Group. You see, you have to give the fear a shape. So mine’s a nag. An old, swayback, dirty black plug of a horse with a voice like Mr. Ed’s. And whenever it says, ‘Miranda Lyme, you untalented half-wit, what makes you think you can sing this piece? Who do you think you are anyway?’ I just try to push the old nag as far back in the theater as I can get it. Try to get it out through the exit doors. Although, sometimes, it’s right there on the stage with you, but as long as it still has its shape, and isn’t stepping on your toes or anything, the anxiety isn’t too bad.”

“That’s a new one on me.”

“It was on me, too. Four years ago.”

“Well, then…I really wish you luck, Miranda.”

I yelped, “No, you can’t say that. It’s bad luck to wish me luck.”

“Sorry.”

“In opera we say toi, toi. Or mille fois merde.”

“Toi, toi then. And mille fois merde.”

“Thanks. I’m so excited about being able to do the audition right there in that theater. There’s nothing like standing up on a real stage where the great stars have sung and letting it rip into that huge space. It’s the most incredible feeling. It’s electric. It’s better than sex.”

She opened her eyes wide. “Really? Maybe I should give it a try.”

We both laughed, then I said, “I’ll be back in a few weeks to get my ticket.”

I was tempted to stay and tell her about the other things that were taking me to London. Like my father, the baritone Sebastian Lyme. And Kurt Hancock, the conductor/composer who was suddenly cutting into my practice time.

Kurt hadn’t been part of my strategy, but when he’d strolled into the rehearsal hall two weeks earlier to conduct the Madama Butterfly, all the chorus women were immediately in heat.

To be honest, he wasn’t really my type. I prefer darker, heftier men. Kurt is slim, blond and blue-eyed. But there were women in that chorus ready to poison their families and run away with him, and I guess, in trying to figure out what it was about him that was making them all unhinge, I let myself be carried away by the Kurt Hancock psychosis, too.

After that Butterfly rehearsal, everybody went out to Mimi’s, a Gastown restaurant where opera singers often showcase their talent. The place is decorated in Chocolate Box Gothic with rich dark heavy drapes and tablecloths edged with a fatal amount of flounce. It’s a home away from home for the opera bunch. Sometimes the singing is really fantastic, the performances glow, and sometimes the singers leave you feeling that it might be more fun to be slapped in the face over and over with a fresh cod than to have to listen to their talent. But I guess it’s a question of how everybody’s feeling.

That night was a fresh-cod night at Mimi’s, my fellow chorus singers all trying too hard to impress Kurt.

My defective tights had been slipping down all evening and eventually were clinging to my knees. I wanted to yank them up again without doing a striptease in front of the entire opera company, so I went looking for a private place to sort out the matter. The tiny bathroom was occupied but I opened the door next to it, which was a big broom closet, and stumbled onto Kurt.

He froze like a startled deer caught in headlights. I’m not sure what he was doing in there all by himself before I came onto the scene, but I’d heard a series of rhythmic thuds just beforehand, and now I thought he might have been punching or hitting something or someone. So I said (I was a little drunk), “Don’t mind me, Mr. Hancock. This won’t take long. You can go back to whatever it was you were doing in a second. I just have to take care of something.” And then I hitched up my dress and tugged everything into place.

He stared at me the entire time and I stared back. Then I noticed that the wall near his foot was covered with little black crescent-shaped marks. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this sort of thing. Music training had taught me early on that pianists never use their hands when they have to punch something.

But then Kurt started to smile. And appreciatively, too. He looked quite sweet, even a little forlorn, and I began to get a glimpse of his charm.

I smiled back. He smiled even more broadly, then sat down on a bucket and started asking me all about myself. I told him the basics, that my name was Miranda, that I was a lyric mezzo-soprano from the illustrious cow town of Cold Shanks, B.C., and that I’d done my voice degree in Vancouver but was going to London in December to do an ENO audition. And then I added that my father also lived in London, and was a well-known baritone.

“Oh, really?” asked Kurt. “What’s his name?”

“Sebastian Lyme.”

Kurt stood up. “Sebastian Lyme? I have a Don Giovanni recording with your father singing the Don. A fine voice. A very fine voice indeed. I’ve seen him perform. He had great charisma on stage.”

“Really?” My heart began to race.

“Yes. He did a stunning Figaro in the Barber. Apart from his technical ability, the man had wonderful presence. Quite exceptional acting. He had the audience in stitches. Not an easy feat.”

I was nodding vehemently. More. I wanted him to tell me more. I wanted to kidnap Kurt Hancock and make him tell me everything he knew about Sebastian Lyme.

Kurt went on, “And he did an impressive Rigoletto for the Royal Opera, but that must have been a good ten years ago. It’s a pity we haven’t crossed paths… Oh, Good Lord! You’re not about to cry, are you?”

I laughed, shook my head and wiped my damp eyes. “It’s just that hearing about my father like that…out of the blue…”

“Heavens. It usually takes me at least a week to make a woman cry.”

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?

He said, almost shyly, “Winston Churchill Senior High. Cold Shanks.”

“You’re joking,” I said. He’d caught me completely off guard. I started to giggle. Cold Shanks to Cold Shanksians was one of those places that got instant tittering recognition from its citizens. Like Moose Jaw (euphemistically known as Moose Groin) or Biggar, Saskatchewan (with its sign that read, New York Is Big But This Is Biggar). We Cold Shanksians were a race apart.

“You really don’t remember me,” he said again. His disappointment was almost tangible.

“I’m sorry, I’m so bad with faces…”

“A few years have passed. I’m Patrick Tibeau.”

The sound of his name went through me like a childhood taboo, like a decade of old schoolyard chants. There was always that weird kid at school who everyone treated as a pariah because he didn’t have the same ideas as the rest of the herd, was content to eat lunch by himself in a far corner of the playing field, and stand up in class and expound endlessly on theories that only the teacher could appreciate. That was Patrick Tibeau. I really should have been more discreet but I blurted out, “Oh my God. I can’t believe it. You’re Patrick Tibeau? You’ve changed so much.”

“You used to sing at assemblies. I thought you had a really fine voice. You still singing, Miranda?”

“Just a minute. Just let me get a handle on this. The Patrick Tibeau? You’re a legend.”

He was laughing now.

“The same Patrick Tibeau that set Winnie Churchill High on fire?”

He nodded. He was still laughing.

“And got sent to reform school?” I said too enthusiastically.

He stopped laughing and sighed. “It wasn’t a reform school. Reform schools don’t exist anymore.” He seemed so instantly disillusioned with me. Sometimes, I just have the biggest, stupidest mouth in the world and can’t stop myself.

He no longer resembled the geeky, spidery, scruffy-haired, beetle-browed adolescent who I remembered. This was a full-grown, credible-looking man standing in front of me.

Then I had to ask. It was irresistible. I was going to be late for work but I did it anyway. “Can I buy you a coffee?” The chance to chin-wag about Cold Shanks with the Patrick Tibeau and get his side of the story was too good to be true. Tina, my best friend, also from Cold Shanks, would be emerald with envy.

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” explained Patrick.

I was frantic. He was like a prize trout about to slip off the hook. I couldn’t let it happen. “Listen, Patrick.” I dug my hand into my purse and pulled out a pen and an old phone-bill envelope. “I’m having a dinner party tomorrow night. It would be really great if you could come…and bring your wife…or girlfriend…or boyfriend…or whatever.” I handed him the scrap of paper with my address scribbled on it.

He took it and smiled again. I noticed he had very white teeth. “We’d like that. What time?”

He was a We.

I said, “Seven. There’s going to be lots of food, but bring something if you feel like it. Extra never hurts. And some wine.”

“Wine. Right. See you then, Miranda. Tomorrow, Tuesday. Seven.”

As I finished pushing my cart around the supermarket, I had a flash of memory. Me and Patrick Tibeau, circa age fifteen, meeting up by accident outside the tin-roof movie theater after a showing of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, walking home in the snow under a royal-blue sky full of stars and a bright disk of moon, and talking, talking, talking. Though, about what, I couldn’t even remember.

Still, I was elated to hook up with someone from Cold Shanks. I hated to admit that sometimes I got bouts of hometown nostalgia, but it was true, and Patrick had cheered me up. So I thought, to hell with Caroline, and bought every fruit I felt like buying.

12 Keying.

Performance Anxiety

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