One of Ours

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Sophia Fontaine’s final trip to England didn’t go as planned. Not to put too fine a point on it, the country was not her cup of tea, and it had nothing to do with that disastrous Tosca at Covent Garden in ’99 when she’d tripped over Scarpio’s outstretched leg and fell, face first, onto the stage, breaking her nose. She remembered all too well, while nursing her aching nose and even more severely bruised psyche, how the sun seldom came out from behind rain-soaked clouds. London was always damp and cold — the houses and hotels vastly under heated — and everything was horribly expensive. 

But Sophia had to go to England. It was her last chance — well, truthfully more like her last gasp — with a role as Azucena in Il Trovatore. After that, La Fontaine would do the dignified thing and “retire” to coaching other singers with only the prospect of an encore appearance now and then at one of the second-tier opera companies around the country or, she desperately hoped, at the Kennedy Center, should she ever be honored for her contributions to opera.

She booked a flight, which wasn’t easy, considering that La Fontaine’s agent had always handled the logistics. The agent had retired several years ago, and Sophia had never bothered to line up someone else. Well, that wasn’t quite true. She had bothered. Only nobody seemed interested in taking on a singer whose best days were clearly behind her. Brutes.

After much searching on various travel sites, Sophia found a hotel that didn’t cost the equivalent of a home mortgage for one night’s stay and girded her loins for the humiliating, exasperating ordeal that surely awaited her at the hands of the Transportation Security Administration. She’d been advised to get to the airport at least four hours in advance. Just to be safe, she got there six hours early. She checked everything but her purse since the instructions about what could and could not be carried aboard — and in what quantities and sizes — were more than a woman of her standing should have to deal with. Previously, there had always been some sort of sherpa to guide La Fontaine through her travels — another sign her star was losing its luster. 

Over the course of her career, she’d flown from one end of the opera world to another — from Milan to Paris to Vienna to Berlin to London to New York (often) and even Moscow once. Thankfully, that meant she had the frequent flier miles for an upgrade to Business. But it had been quite a while since she’d flown across the Atlantic, and she was tired. The journey from house to airport and through security had drained every ounce of what little stores of energy she still possessed. Then there’d been that brief moment of panic when she thought she’d left her passport behind only to remember that she’d shoved it into her jacket pocket so she wouldn’t have to rummage around in her purse, holding up the line of impatient travelers, while she searched for it.

After dinner, Sophia wisely skipped the movie, lulling herself to sleep by running through the notes of Ai nostre monti, the tricky duet with Manrico. During rehearsals, she’d have to make several adjustments — both of them would — before their song took on that seamlessly blended perfection that so thrilled opera audiences.  It seemed like only two seconds after her eyes closed when the flight attendant came by, lifting the shades on the windows and announcing that breakfast would be served shortly.

The wait at Customs was horrendously long, mostly because Sophia sorely needed to use the bathroom. Then the ride into London seemed to take forever, at a pace that would make snails appear to be running the hundred-yard dash. The taxi nearly bankrupted her supply of pounds sterling, so she was grateful to see a foreign exchange sign on the building next door to her hotel, which turned out to be a decrepit, teetering building of ancient vintage that appeared to be propped up between the foreign exchange place and an eatery straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. Bowker’s Bistro, said the pitiful sign. So much for travel sites promising “elegant West End accommodations.” Well, it was too late to do anything about it now.

Through a glass door smeared with fingerprints, Sophia entered a lobby permeated by the smell of stale cigarettes and cigars. The mildewed carpet looked as though no one had ever tried to rid it of ground-in chewing gum and stains that one could only hope came from spilled food or beverages. Her room wasn’t ready and wouldn’t be ready until two o’clock London time. She wasn’t about to wander around the neighborhood, trailing her wheelie bag. 

With a sigh, she settled herself into the lobby’s least-stained chair, an unforgiving chintz-covered affair with a cushion like concrete. Checking her watch, she noticed that it was only ten-thirty. Four hours of sitting here after seven hours sitting on an airplane. She could get that blood clotting disease if she wasn’t careful. She stood and began to stride around the lobby, hauling her bag behind her. Let the management think she was crazy. It was their fault, after all, that her room wasn’t ready.

In a room next to the lobby, there seemed to be some kind of café that might serve lunch when the time came. It was now being vacuumed in a most desultory fashion by a very dark woman with dreadlocks and smelled faintly of rancid grease. Returning to her chair, Sophia placed the suitcase nearby with her handbag on top and then tilted her torso to the side in an attempt to use the bag as a pillow. If they didn’t want people sleeping in the lobby, they should let them sleep in the rooms they had reserved and for which they were paying what Sophia could already tell was far too much . . .

“Magnifico,” said the beaming maestro, as La Fontaine finished rehearsing Azucena’s famous aria, Stride la vampa. “You will steal the show from Leonora.”

“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” Sophia replied, knowing full well that one should never attempt to upstage the lead. On the other hand, La Fontaine had never dialed it back. This was probably going to be her swan song, so why not go for it?

The maestro’s baton hit the conductor’s podium with a loud crack, and Sophia jerked her eyes open. There, not ten feet away from her stood — no, pranced up and down like a fractious pony — the most amazing creature. A young woman who… No. It was a young man, unshaven, with black hair that straggled down almost to the middle of his back. He had scrawny, heavily tattooed arms and was wearing cheap jeans with holes in the knees and a torn T-shirt. Both of these garments were black, although there were pink flip-flops on his disgustingly filthy feet. 

“… could eat a fucking hippo, I’m so fucking hungry,” he was saying to an equally astonishing creature who had just materialized from out of the lobby’s gloom. This one had wild curly red hair and was wearing some kind of patterned Indian tunic over black jeans that disappeared into the tops of a pair of scruffy boots with pointed toes.

They were both real skinny, almost anorexic, and embarrassingly — at least to Sophia — American.

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