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  • Vainglory
  • James Magruder (bio)

for Sanford Sylvan (1953–2019)

Fall semester ‘92 was over, and Keith Batson had turned in his grades at the cow college outside of Amarillo where he taught music appreciation. He was in Paris now, after a nine-year absence, the guest of the Magic Flute company. The prestige surrounding this particular production of Mozart’s allegorical jape added to the sense of glamour he felt in taking this trip. Wunderkind director Marc Desco’s Flute had elicited hisses and bravos across the globe (and turnips in Buenos Aires) for its postmodern visuals, including a Queen of the Night dressed as Marilyn Monroe, and a serpent that could be construed as the OPEC pipeline or the Berlin Wall or both.

Van Reeves was the Papageno and Keith’s boyfriend of 10 months, or to put a finer point on it, six dates spread over 10 months. Keith was there on Van’s dime. His French had held up, so he was relieved to be able to sing for his supper a little bit by helping cast members purchase trinkets and hire taxis, and he had been the one to translate the mostly rapturous reviews for everyone in the breakfast room. Now, navigating a noisy corridor in the bowels of the Bastille Opera on the night of the third of five sold-out performances, he was fretting about Van’s vocal cords.

“Où est la loge de Monsieur Reeves?” he asked a stagehand who stopped chattering on headset long enough to point out the correct dressing room. Keith nodded to the singers playing Monostatos and [End Page 113] Tamino, but, transformed by ego and bizarre costume pieces, they didn’t seem to recognize him.

Keith knocked and entered. Van’s eyes and lips were rimmed in black. His face was painted the orange-pink of a Smithfield ham, a shocking contrast to his bald crown, which glowed silver under the artificial lighting.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

Keith, not expecting this neutral-to-negative greeting, reached back for the doorjamb. “I hadn’t seen you all day. I missed you. I was worried about your voice.”

“I don’t allow visitors backstage before a show.”

Why hadn’t he known that? Theirs had been an epistolary beginning. That January, his friend Janice had lent him the money to storm the American Musicological Society conference in New York and try to land a decent academic post. One of his old buddies from the Indiana School of Music had an extra ticket for the infamous Marc Desco Magic Flute. Keith was more than prepared to inveigh against what he might see—his talent for naysaying had only sharpened since grad school—but then Van Reeves’s Papageno had lent him new ears, touched, held, then released him as no singer ever had. His performance as the earthy bird catcher had basically commanded Keith to write out his vacated belief in the power of music. He had framed his testament, his first ever to an artist, rather as if Van were a votary to St. Cecilia, so he wasn’t prepared for a frank letter of reply, or a meeting in Houston, or a surprise kiss in St. Louis, or a weekend in Philadelphia, or now, instead of another futile go-round at the AMS slaughterhouse, a holiday from his current half-life in Texas.

“I’m sorry,” Keith said, with a “Don’t shoot” lift of his hands. “So . . . I’ll see you after then? Sing the shit out of it.”

Van blew out his breath.

“Wait. You’re more than a visitor. I can—let’s see how this feels.”

Keith relaxed a little. “Kick me out when you have to.” He noticed Papageno’s orange bird boots, with talons the size and color of Spanish [End Page 114] onions, set next to a folding chair. Van, standing on his prayer mat in sweatpants and a ribbed undershirt, was barefoot.

“Aren’t your feet cold?” Keith asked.

“Socks and boots go on last. My feet sweat.”

That Keith did know. He tapped his own neck. “But still, your cold, your cords. . . la voce?”

“Crisis over...

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