IN HER PRACTICE room high above the street at the opera house, Luisa played the piano for Starr. She wanted music, but her throat was too parched for her to risk her voice, Luisa wasn’t skilled on the keyboard—she’d only ever learned enough to pick out accompaniments to vocal pieces she was studying, but today she felt the music in her fingers. After a time Starr began to sing.
The words, if they were words, were in a language Luisa didn’t know. The gutturals were harsh and Starr’s voice was strong without being melodic, but Luisa listened as intently as if Mozart himself were performing. The rough voice seemed to blend with Luisa’s playing, with half-forgotten chords to half-remembered arias. The diva forgot her sore throat, her grievances against Harry and Karen, against her agent and the director of the Met. All her being was concentrated in her ear.
As she played, as Starr sang, Luisa’s head was shot through with images, a slide show, where the pictures came slowly at first: a river; a gated city with brick towers; then a long and difficult journey by boat, carrying books of law, with an angry father in pursuit. Luisa’s fingers picked out passages from Schubert’s Elf King, and its urgent pounding of pursuit through the night.
The mood of Starr’s singing seemed to shift. Luisa found herself returning to her beloved Verdi while pictures cascaded more wildly through her brain.
The sky was the brilliant blue that arched over her villa in Campania. She sat under a tree whose long green branches curved and swayed like arms stretching to embrace her. A bird in the middle of the tree mocked her, fluttering just beyond her reach when she tried to drive it off. A man appeared, a ruddy man, who caught and removed the bird.
King David was described like that in the Bible: a ruddy man. Luisa had always thought that meant reddened, coarse, but she saw now it meant someone so vital that his skin glowed from the coursing of his blood.
She barely had time to realize that when she was lying with him on a giant wooden bed, riding him in an ecstasy she’d never known, urging him in language she couldn’t imagine uttering: plow me, plow my vulva, she was saying, but it wasn’t she riding, it was Starr, and there was no ruddy man, only herself, Luisa, so that her fingers left the keyboard, and sought Starr’s breasts, warm and firm as rising bread, and Starr’s lips were on her, glowing coals that burned her, froze her, then melted her again, and gold came pouring from her, cleansing her, creating her new.
She tried to twine her legs around Starr, but she was too small. Starr grew bigger and bigger, her black coiled hair became the horns of a wild cow, her nostrils expelled fire, and the earth itself was not as large as those breasts. Luisa clung to her, sobbing through her parched throat; her arms and legs too frail for the ride, clutching at the horns, fearing to let go, until the horns were suddenly clumps of sweaty hair, the fire breath only garlic, and the two women slept in a heap beneath the grand piano.