GIO talked while he plugged his MP3 player into the speakers. “I had a voice coach when I was living in Milan who thought the best way to inspire his singers was to scare the living hell out of them. So now I will do that to you.”
Twelve teenagers sat rapt on the studio floor, staring at Gio. He found “Der Hölle Rache” in the list of songs. “This is June Anderson singing from Die Zauberflöte.” He hit play. “It is famously referred to as the Queen of the Night’s aria, although she sings another earlier in the opera that is nearly as good. Here, she is singing, ‘Hell’s vengeance boils my heart.’ She is not having such a good time, eh? And Mozart is about to put her through hell vocally too. Listen.”
It was clear from their expressions that a few of the girls knew this aria. Emma McPhee certainly did. The girls who didn’t blanched when the singer got to the run pattern between the verses.
“This,” Gio said when the aria finished, “is coloratura. Literally, it means coloring, but in the context of an opera, it means to add these vocal flourishes. They are beautiful but extraordinarily difficult to sing.” He smiled, trying not to freak the kids out too much. “That is, coloratura was often added to songs in the bel canto tradition. Can any of you think of other examples?”
About half the class was with it. Emma cited Rossini, the obvious example. Marie pulled out an obscure Mozart piece, which allowed Gio to freak the class out more by pointing out that this particular part was written for a castrato. Most of the boys winced at that. Greg knew “Every Valley Shall Be Exalted” from Handel’s Messiah was a coloratura tenor aria.
“Good,” Gio said. “Now I will blow your minds some more. This one is from Nixon in China.”
After playing a few more arias, he had the class stand and he ran through some vocal exercises, mostly scales and weird syllables and matching pitch to the piano. It was a good crop of students, no doubt about that. Still, he said, “The expectation is not for you to sing like June Anderson when you finish my class, particularly since you are all teenagers and your voices are still developing. But I want you to think about what you might do in the future, what you’re capable of. Maybe one of you will play the Queen of the Night at La Scala someday.”
He gave them homework, asking them to find their favorite aria in their own voice range, something they could aspire to. Then he warned them, “This session was easy. After today, I will put you through your paces. I will challenge you to sing things you never thought you could sing, and I will teach you technique and style and grace. We will read music and we will learn languages. It will not be as easy as this. Fair warning.” He put his hands on his hips and aimed a stern look at them. “All right. Class dismissed.”
The kids gathered up their things. A few of the parents filtered into the studio, including Mike McPhee, who grinned when he saw his daughter. The fanatical stage parents often picked up their kids, but it seemed weird for someone like Mike—today in beat-up jeans and a paint-splattered T-shirt—to pick up his daughter when she could just as easily get home by herself on the subway, like most of the kids in this city. Gio found Mike’s overprotective instinct a little curious.
So he approached. “Mr. McPhee. Nice to see you again.”
Mike smiled. “Yes.” He turned to his daughter. “How was class?”
“Good,” said Emma. “I’ll tell you about it on the way home.”
“Not all of the parents pick up their kids,” Gio said, trying tactfully to ask why Mike was there.
“I was working in the neighborhood. Figured I’d drop by so she didn’t have to take the bus alone.”
Gio couldn’t decide if the bright smile and the ratty clothes made him more or less attractive. After a split second, when Mike smiled again, Gio decided they added to Mike’s appeal. “What do you do?” he asked, gesturing at the paint splatters.
“Independent contractor. I’m remodeling a kitchen a few blocks from here. Well, not just me, I’ve got a team of guys who work for me. But, yeah, that’s what I’m working on right now.”
“Oh, okay,” Gio said, not sure how to respond. “I know very little about that sort of thing. Is it going well?”
“It is. We should finish ahead of schedule.” He smiled again, and Dio, but this man had a beautiful smile. “I don’t know much about opera except what Emma tells me, so I guess you and I don’t have a lot in common.”
“Oh, I left my water bottle by the drinking fountain,” Emma said. Then she dashed off.
That left Gio alone in the studio with Mike.
It was strange. Mike was not Gio’s type at all. All of Gio’s exes were dancers or artists or people who worked in the theater in some capacity, and yet here was this blue-collar guy who drew Gio’s attention like no one he’d seen in a long time.
It was wiser to keep one’s distance, Gio reasoned. Mike was handsome, but he was also the father of one of Gio’s students, something that seemed ethically problematic. Furthermore, Gio had no idea if his advances would be welcome or if that would be the sure way to destroy Mike’s jovial demeanor. Trying to keep the conversation going, he said, “For someone who doesn’t know much about opera, you are raising quite the young singer.”
“Thank you. She loves it. And she has a mind like a sponge, so she learned all about it on her own. I never wanted to force her into something she wasn’t interested in, you know? My parents were always trying to make me fit in this little box, and I hated that.”
“Whereas my mother sang opera at La Scala and I followed right behind her.”
Mike laughed. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t say something offensive.”
“It’s quite all right.” Gio smiled. The truth was that he liked listening to Mike’s voice. Mike probably could be trained to sing baritone, and his voice had a rich quality to it, although that Brooklyn accent kept him from sounding like he belonged in Gio’s world.
Emma appeared in the door of the studio. “I’m ready to go, Daddy,” she said.
“Okay, kiddo. We’ll see you next time, Mr. Boca.”
There weren’t any other students around, so Gio leaned forward and said softly, “Please, call me Gio.”
“Gio?” Mike raised an eyebrow.
“Perhaps not in front of the other students.”
Mike glanced toward his daughter again. “I should go. Till next time!”
Gio watched him go, ruminating on how silly it was to develop a crush on the parent of one of his students. Except it wasn’t just silly, it was dangerous.
THE thing of it was, Mike was really attracted to Gio.
It was a little strange to feel so strongly attracted to someone after a long time without dating much. Not that Mike didn’t appreciate a hot guy, just that he hadn’t really been looking, not after his last few relationships had fallen apart. In some ways, dating was easier now than it had been in the first years after Evan’s passing, but in some ways it was harder. He didn’t feel the same shame or guilt he used to, but it was hard to negotiate being a dad with dating. It wasn’t just time spent away from Emma; it was that every man he’d met was perplexed—or horrified, sometimes—by the fact that he had a daughter, and that tended to scare them off.
He sat beside Emma on the crosstown bus. She sounded even more taken with the great Giovanni Boca than Mike was. “So he played us this famous aria,” she said, “and it’s really tough. Like, only a handful of sopranos in the whole world can sing it. And I thought, ‘That will be me someday.’ I want to sing that aria when I play the Queen of the Night on one of the world’s great stages. I think Mr. Boca can help me get there.”
“So it’s going well?” Mike asked with a smile.
She grinned back. “Yeah, so far. Although, he implied that the real work will start in our next class.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “What’s for dinner tonight?”
“Not sure. Sandy wants to come over to watch the game. I told him he could only come if he brings dinner.”
“So, pizza, probably.”
“Is that all right?”
She yawned. “That’s fine, Daddy.”
She had grown up so fast. It felt like just yesterday she’d been his little girl and he’d been crying over her starting kindergarten. She was a young woman now, starting high school in the fall. She squeezed his heart every time she called him “Daddy,” because he knew the days of her doing that were numbered. He was enormously proud of her too, amazed by the person she had become.
When they got home, he put her to work on her chores, which got him a bit of whining in return, but she did them. He changed out of his work clothes, showered, and settled on the couch to watch that night’s Yankees game. He picked up the remote and thought of Gio and how weird it would be to have the man sitting here with him, watching the game. Then again, Mike did occasionally put on a suit and go with Emma to the opera, so he supposed anything was possible.
Sandy showed up a short time later with a grin on his face and a pizza box in his hands. Mike let him in, and Emma, probably having been alerted to Sandy’s arrival by the squeak of the door, zoomed into the room and threw her arms around him.
Sandy’s real name was Alexander, but he’d been given the nickname years before because of his sunny good looks, and it had never occurred to Mike to call him anything else. They’d been best friends, brothers, since high school in south Brooklyn, seeing each other through the army, through Evan’s death, and through Sandy’s romantic ups and downs.
Sandy danced free of Emma and slid the pizza box onto the coffee table. “So,” he said. “Yankees.”
Emma sat on the couch while Mike grabbed plates and cups from the kitchen. She rattled off some trivia about the game, and Mike couldn’t help but smile. That sponge brain of hers had absorbed every bit of sports knowledge he had ever imparted, and even though opera was her greatest obsession at the moment, she could talk to Sandy about baseball just as easily as she could talk to Mr. Boca about Puccini.
During the third inning, Sandy said, “So. I’m dating a doctor.”
Emma perked up at the potential for gossip. “Is he cute?”
“Yes, very. Here’s the issue. He’s an ER doc at Roosevelt Hospital and apparently he’s on call all the time. So although I like him, I’m not sure if we should really date. He doesn’t have time for me.”
Mike nodded. “You do need a lot of attention.”
Sandy tossed a throw pillow at Mike’s head. Mike caught it deftly.
Sandy sat back on the couch and sighed. “I don’t know if I can be a doctor’s wife. All those crazy hours. And isn’t working in the ER kind of dangerous?”
“Probably not in that neighborhood,” Mike said.
“Hmm.” Sandy seemed to consider that. “Yeah, I guess it’s not like being a cop.”
A wave of panic went through Mike, cold sweat breaking out everywhere.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” Sandy said. “I wasn’t even thinking.”
“It’s all right,” Mike sighed. “It’s been more than ten years. You’d think those memories wouldn’t hit me that way anymore.”
“But sometimes they do,” Sandy said softly.
“Yeah.” He was aware of Emma staring at him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look back. He had to fight not to retreat into himself, to dwell in some of the darker spaces within. He took a deep breath.
“Anyway,” Sandy said. “Being a doctor also requires all that school. You know I ain’t never been much for book learnin’. One of these days, he’s going to figure out I’m not that smart.”
“Don’t need school to be smart,” Mike said. It was a refrain, something he and Sandy had told each other plenty of times. Mike hadn’t been college material, and he was all right with that because he’d made a good life for himself and Emma. He turned to Emma. “You’re going to college, though.”
She laughed. “Juilliard.”
“Right. Just so we’re clear.”
That she didn’t remember Evan was sometimes troublesome to Mike. She’d still been in diapers when Evan had died, leaving Mike a single parent to a precocious little girl. He still thought of her as their daughter, his and Evan’s, even though Evan had missed nearly all of her life.
He still got angry sometimes. Those moments were becoming few and far between, but as they watched the game and Sandy prattled on about his doctor, Mike felt that wave of anger at Evan for abandoning them, for putting himself in a position that would cause harm. He knew that was irrational, that nothing Evan could have done would have made that night any less horrible, that Evan was a hero, in fact, because he’d stepped between a bullet and a kid, but, God, sometimes… sometimes he resented the hell out of Evan for leaving him alone.
“How’re your singing lessons going?” Sandy asked during the sixth inning.
“First of all, it’s Giovanni Boca’s opera workshop, not just singing lessons,” Emma said.
Sandy held up his hands. “Oh. Well, excuse me.”
“It’s going well. We’ve only had the one class so far, but I like Mr. Boca. He says our future classes are going to be much tougher, but I like the challenge.” She grinned.
“Who is this Boca guy?”
“He’s a famous opera singer,” Emma said. “A tenor. He’s sung all over the world. Now he teaches at the Olcott School.”
Sandy nodded. “All right. So. On a scale of homely to dreamy, where does he fall?”
Mike put a hand over his mouth to hide his reaction, which was somewhere between horror and amusement. He didn’t want to explain his attraction to the man to Sandy.
Emma raised her eyebrows. “That hardly seems like a fair question.”
“Turnabout is fair play,” Sandy said.
“He’s pretty cute. Daddy, you agree, right? You talked to him for a while after class today.”
Sandy smirked. “Oh, really?”
Mike felt the heat come to his face. “About Emma. We talked about Emma. And then I embarrassed myself because he asked me to call him ‘Gio’ and I didn’t know how to respond, so I just… left.”
Emma turned to him abruptly. “He asked you to call him Gio?”
“Yeah, I just figured—”
“Daddy, he likes you!”
Mike guffawed. “Honey, that’s crazy. What reason on God’s green earth could a world-famous opera singer have to be interested in a guy like me? Also, why am I having this conversation with you?”
“A couple of other teachers stopped by the workshop today. Everyone called him Mr. Boca. They seemed kind of afraid of him, actually. But he asked you to call him Gio.”
“He was probably buttering me up,” Mike said. “Oh, hey, look who’s at bat!”
The game went into extra innings, and Mike ordered Emma to bed when it was over. Sandy helped him clean up. Mike was showing him out the door when Sandy suddenly turned around and said, “I still miss him sometimes too.”
There was that wave of panic again, making Mike feel a little nauseous. “I know.”
“It’s been so long that I almost forget sometimes. I really am sorry for what I said.”
“I know. I almost forget sometimes too. Don’t worry about it.”
“He’d be really proud of Emma. And you. You’ve done great things with her.”
Mike forced a smile through the sadness that threatened to weigh him down. “Thanks. I think he’d be proud of her too.”
They hugged and Sandy left.
Mike lay awake in bed for a long time that night. This was nothing like the profound loneliness he’d felt just after Evan’s death, when Evan’s clothes were still in the closet and his scent still on the sheets. This was a whole new apartment, in fact, in a different neighborhood, with different furniture, different linens, different scents. Evan’s death didn’t weigh on Mike like it used to. He missed Evan, sometimes deeply, but he’d moved on with his life. He’d raised a great daughter without Evan, built a thriving business without Evan, carved out a life for himself without Evan. Evan was now nothing more than a memory.
Mike’s thoughts drifted to Gio as he finally started to fall asleep. Gio, who was alive and not eleven years dead. Gio, who was handsome and interesting and completely unlike any man Mike had ever been with. Gio, who was Emma’s teacher. Gio, who was worldly and rich and not building kitchen cabinets to pay the bills.
A fantasy, in other words. But if thinking about that fantasy got Mike to sleep at night, then he was willing to embrace it.