“Sing for me,” my friend the painter said on the first morning of my visit, smiling fondly at me across the wide wooden desk that took pride of place in his office full of books and art and pale blue light.
I froze, then shook my head, caught between nervous laughter and the threat of tears. Some sort of fumbling excuse came to my lips, awkward and sad and afraid. My friend graciously let the subject lie, and said nothing more, though I knew he meant what he’d said.
I wonder if there’s a word for it, a word that means “something afraid to be seen.” The Germans are usually good for this, what with their ineluctable knack for coinages like “schadenfreude,” but the Langenscheidt dictionary on my office shelf turns up nothing, and so I will try to explain.
This thing with my voice, this thing where I am returning to using it in awkward fits and sometimes rapturous, sometimes agonizing starts, is not just about letting the sounds I make be heard. It is also about letting myself be seen. Seen as the source of those sounds, those specific noises, seen as someone who has trained in such a specific way, whose throat betrays her long allegiance with something so elitist, so arcane, so beautiful, so often pompous as classical vocal music. To be seen as a vessel of something like that makes one—and now we have a German word that fits—a bit seltsam, a combination of rare and odd and strange.
I have been singing again, off and on, for seven months now. Seven months of flirting and feinting, with occasional interludes of intensity where for days in a row I sing, really sing, full-throated and honest, with as much technique as I can muster. Seven months, mostly, of trying to figure out how to practice again, but without force, approaching my singing voice like I would approach a feral cat, slowly and quietly without staring, so as not to startle it.
It should not still be so delicate a thing. It should not still feel so hard. It wouldn’t be, either, if I did what I was trained to do. If I approached singing as an item on my to-do list—as a function it is my job to fulfill, as a matter of discipline and accountability—I could override everything else, including the fear. Some days, I wonder whether I shouldn’t do just that. It’s not so hard to be seen singing if you don’t really have anything to do with it. If it’s just a job, just your role to play, then all that matters is that you do your job well.
But this is not that. There are years and years of silence between the version of me for whom singing was a duty and the version of me that sits here now in my red wooden desk chair, red-painted fingertips resting lightly on my throat, humming experimentally as I try to figure out how to explain why it is so hard to let myself be heard, and harder still to let myself be seen singing.
It is not stage fright. I started performing too young for performance to feel anything but normal. And there’s the rub: singing now is not a performance. It is not a duty, not a job, not a responsibility. There are no reviewers, no teachers, no coaches, no one to hold me accountable or demand a particular sort of performance.
If I sing now, it’s just me, making whatever noises I make for whatever reasons I have. There is nothing to hide behind. I have nothing to practice for, no scores to learn by such-and-such date, no blocks of rehearsal time marking my throat’s obligations to other people. It is my own desire, whatever form it may take, that opens my mouth now, not duty. That makes it another thing entirely.
I have little practice with this, and less comfort, and I do not know what to do with what it makes of me, how it inevitably puts me on display. Even when singing was obligatory, the sense of exposure could be torture. Now that it is not obligatory at all, it can be paralyzing. No, there are no expectations. I have the putative freedom of my own voice, but I do not feel freed. I am in my forties now and I sang for my supper for many, many years, but this skin is still new. It is mine, yes, but I haven’t yet learned how to live in it.
My friend the painter has the soul of a pirate. He knew what he was doing when he looked at me and said, “Sing for me.” Had I been nude in his bed I would not have been as naked as I was then, stripped down to my brand new skin.
There were tears in my eyes when I said no to him, when I made my excuses, shook my head, tried to quiet the agitated fluttering birds in my heart. In my bones, though, I know that figuring out how to bare this new skin is the only way back to the thing I used to do when it was good, when it felt like God and thunder and the security of long practice meant I could sometimes slip, subtly and magnificently, from being a singer to being the singing.
In that place, I have no fear of exposure. In that place, I have nothing to hide. In that place, I don’t care who sees me. The memory is close, and cherished. But I don’t have the map to get there.
I do, however, know it when I find that my feet are pointed down the right path. I cooked dinner that night, a Turkish meal of meat and chard and cucumber salad. At first, I asked my friend to stay and keep me company. But it would be so sweet, I thought, to sing as I sometimes do, while washing the greens and chopping the salad, and to share it, in that way you share a morsel of tuna sandwich with that feral cat, setting it down beside you without looking. I wanted to give that to him, for the pleasure of it, for the easy way he said things like, “I love birds that sing.” But I also wanted it for myself, to sing because I could and not because I should. I needed to know that it could be all right if I sang, even if it were unserious and simple and little, even if it were just goofing around while I cooked dinner.
So I shook my head. “No, I’ve changed my mind. Leave me be. There’s a much better chance of singing.”
With my back to the hallway that led to the office and a knife in my hand, chance turned to song. I did not sing with what I think of as my real voice, the opera-trained, rich, dark, big mezzo that fills the house and brings such shame and joy. But with the smooth jazzy thing that lives in my chest—the voice that laughs and leans in with a knowing wink to Cole Porter, Gershwin, Ellington—I could sing, and I did.
I added the allspice and coriander, minced the parsley, rolled leaves of chard into cigars and fluttered the knife through them until I had a chiffonade. I leaned into the swallow’s-flight loops of “the thrill when we meet is so bittersweet / that darlin’ it’s gettin’ me down” and the easy shuffle of “couldn’t bear it without you / don’t get around much any more.” I stirred the onions until they browned and swung through the delicious lazy swing of “Stars over Alabama.”
Had I been braver, there might’ve been a different voice from my throat. There might’ve been Bach, or Schubert, maybe Bizet or Mussorgsky or Tchaikovsky. One day, I think, there will be; I find that my desires have begun, a bit unexpectedly, to run toward the recital hall. But such urgent earnest depths are precisely what Porter’s witty, pretty rhymes and Ellington’s urbane detachment are made to protect us from. In my friend’s kitchen, in order to sing and be seen, I needed them.
Then there was dinner, that same big wooden desk for our table. Later I slipped into my friend’s hot tub, nude beneath a spreading pecan tree in the boundless August evening. I was quite nude, in fact, but no longer so naked, and glad to have been asked to sing.
