hand, my audience was nothing as homelike and relaxing as Nazi soldiers. My audience wasn’t even human. There weren’t eight hundred of them, there were only six. But, oh Lord, I’d rather have faced the Wehrmacht. One member of my distinguished audience was shapeless and slimy, two were spidery, and the other three were even worse. (I mean just to look at. I’m not saying anything about the smell.)
The man named Shipperton didn’t give me time to get set, or even to eat. These people, he said—he actually used the word “people”—were very busy, and you had to perform for them when you could, because you might not be able to get them together later on. So I performed. I chose a number at random, and for them I sang the “Catalogue Aria” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni —Leporello’s song about the Don’s many conquests.
It wasn’t my favorite aria, not to mention that it wasn’t even in my proper range. It was just the one that I was most sure I could get through without rehearsal, because I had done it so often in the shower.
I didn’t have a stage, just a sort of cleared space in a viny, greenhousy chamber, which was not at all drafty. It was closer to the temperature of a steam bath. The arrangements were as peculiar as the circumstances. There weren’t any rows of seats. One member of the audience actually sat in a kind of a chair; two hung from tree branches. A little black shiny thing that more or less resembled an oversized bedbug scurried in and perched on the piano as I sang. I was on a sort of dais, or maybe a kind of slave block, rather than a stage. Heaven knows what the lighting system was. I didn’t see any spotlights. The light seemed to come from the air around us, not from a projector, which had the effect that I could see the audience clearly—not in this case an advantage. And my accompanist was a woman named Norah Platt. She knew the Mozart score well. She’d played it in London when it was new. She looked no more than middle-aged, but she was, she told me, two hundred and fourteen years old.
CHAPTER
9
O nce my “audition” was over, I got ordered around a lot. For hours. By everybody. It was “Wait here,” and “Get in there,” and “We’ll be ready for you in a minute”—over and over, while I was hustled into things like elevators (only I never felt them move) and out of them into places that smelled funny and looked worse.
I didn’t really make much sense out of what I was seeing. Two questions kept pushing themselves to the top of my mind. Neither of them had anything to do with the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran. The first question was, would Marlene be ticked off at being left to deal with the post-filing problems of our clients? And the second was, what in the world had got into me to get myself into this fix?
I didn’t have good answers for either of them, or, indeed, to any of the million lesser questions that kept bobbing up. I don’t remember when I noticed that I felt curiously fight. I don’t know at what point it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get a chance to slip into a phone booth (because there weren’t any phone booths) and call the cops (because there wasn’t anything that looked like a cop, even a French one) and get rescued, because nobody seemed to care about the fact that I needed rescuing. Everybody appeared to have concerns of their own.
When I say “everybody,” I am including some mighty strange bodies. There were other people around—people who sometimes looked at me curiously and sometimes said, “Hi.” But sometimes they weren’t people at all—didn’t even look like people—looked more than anything else like the kind of things you see on Saturday morning television.
Of course, I wasn’t in really good shape for any of this. I was still catching up from the little difficulty in front of the Hotel Negresco. My head hurt, and I was still dizzy. After you get coshed you’re
The man named Shipperton didn’t give me time to get set, or even to eat. These people, he said—he actually used the word “people”—were very busy, and you had to perform for them when you could, because you might not be able to get them together later on. So I performed. I chose a number at random, and for them I sang the “Catalogue Aria” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni —Leporello’s song about the Don’s many conquests.
It wasn’t my favorite aria, not to mention that it wasn’t even in my proper range. It was just the one that I was most sure I could get through without rehearsal, because I had done it so often in the shower.
I didn’t have a stage, just a sort of cleared space in a viny, greenhousy chamber, which was not at all drafty. It was closer to the temperature of a steam bath. The arrangements were as peculiar as the circumstances. There weren’t any rows of seats. One member of the audience actually sat in a kind of a chair; two hung from tree branches. A little black shiny thing that more or less resembled an oversized bedbug scurried in and perched on the piano as I sang. I was on a sort of dais, or maybe a kind of slave block, rather than a stage. Heaven knows what the lighting system was. I didn’t see any spotlights. The light seemed to come from the air around us, not from a projector, which had the effect that I could see the audience clearly—not in this case an advantage. And my accompanist was a woman named Norah Platt. She knew the Mozart score well. She’d played it in London when it was new. She looked no more than middle-aged, but she was, she told me, two hundred and fourteen years old.
CHAPTER
9
O nce my “audition” was over, I got ordered around a lot. For hours. By everybody. It was “Wait here,” and “Get in there,” and “We’ll be ready for you in a minute”—over and over, while I was hustled into things like elevators (only I never felt them move) and out of them into places that smelled funny and looked worse.
I didn’t really make much sense out of what I was seeing. Two questions kept pushing themselves to the top of my mind. Neither of them had anything to do with the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran. The first question was, would Marlene be ticked off at being left to deal with the post-filing problems of our clients? And the second was, what in the world had got into me to get myself into this fix?
I didn’t have good answers for either of them, or, indeed, to any of the million lesser questions that kept bobbing up. I don’t remember when I noticed that I felt curiously fight. I don’t know at what point it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get a chance to slip into a phone booth (because there weren’t any phone booths) and call the cops (because there wasn’t anything that looked like a cop, even a French one) and get rescued, because nobody seemed to care about the fact that I needed rescuing. Everybody appeared to have concerns of their own.
When I say “everybody,” I am including some mighty strange bodies. There were other people around—people who sometimes looked at me curiously and sometimes said, “Hi.” But sometimes they weren’t people at all—didn’t even look like people—looked more than anything else like the kind of things you see on Saturday morning television.
Of course, I wasn’t in really good shape for any of this. I was still catching up from the little difficulty in front of the Hotel Negresco. My head hurt, and I was still dizzy. After you get coshed you’re
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