Rearranged: An Opera Singer's Facial Cancer and Life Transposed

By Kathleen Watt

Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books of the Year (2023)
PenCraft Book Award for Best Nonfiction (Winter 2024)
In lyrical prose, with musical allusions, clinical references, and a bit of comic relief, Rearranged follows Kathleen Watt's plunge from the operatic stage into the netherworld of hospital life through the devastation of cancer, and out the other side. Kathleen was a New York opera singer at mid-career, with a steady, lucrative chorus job at the Metropolitan Opera and solo gigs elsewhere, anticipating her best year ever. Instead, a vicious bone cancer blew her plans to smithereens, along with her face. Bit by bit, through a brutal alchemy of toxins, titanium screws, and infinite kindness, she discovered new arrangements for old pieces, in a life catastrophically transposed. Not only a heart-wrenching medical odyssey, but an ultimately joyous personal journey of transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heliotrope Books
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781956474350

Book preview

Advance Praise for Rearranged

Watt is a sharply descriptive writer who is unafraid to address the horror of her treatment … Unapologetically frank, the author also has a wry, sometimes self-effacing sense of humor that brings levity to a distressing subject. … The result is a finely textured and courageous literary memoir that is inspirational and, at times, darkly amusing.

—Kirkus Reviews

A gripping portrayal of the devastation cancer can spread in one’s health, relationships, and dreams, and Watt’s sweeping storytelling will transport readers to each procedure and hospital room alongside her. She provides insights into the medical torment involved with her treatment, such as being comatose and experiencing ICU psychosis, and ultimately gifts readers with front row seats to her most triumphant performance to date—surviving cancer and having the strength and courage to relive the harrowing journey within the pages of this story. The end result is both heart-breaking and uplifting and will touch the heart of any readers affected by a life-altering illness.

—Publisher’s Weekly

Kathleen Watt’s narrative memoir reveals her indomitable humanity, indefatigable spirit, and remarkable endurance. She has written with transparency, bravery, honesty, and fairness. The rhythm, cadence and artistry of her words embodies her forever-musicianship, and she has deployed her gifted voice in a tour-de-force written performance. Patients, health care professionals and every-day folk alike will benefit greatly from her lessons imparted and her wisdom shared.

—Douglas Brandoff, MD, FAAHPM, Attending Physician, Palliative Care Clinic, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Alumnus, Juilliard Pre-College Division, cello

Kathleen Watt has turned her harrowing experience as an opera singer diagnosed with facial bone cancer into a story that is fresh, captivating, and also remarkably entertaining. Her voice—smart, funny, and disarmingly forthright—makes this book shine. I find myself in awe of her sheer bravado and resilience in overcoming all odds to share her story and hard-won wisdom with all of us.

—Helen Fremont, award-winning author of national bestsellers After Long Silence and The Escape Artist

Watt’s account of her experience with Osteogenic Sarcoma … is a very intimate portrayal ... Anyone going through something like this will absolutely benefit from reading this beautifully written book.

—Peter D. Costantino, MD, FACS, Brain and Spine Surgery of New York

"Rearranged is a ... memoir of a heart-wrenching battle with a rare facial cancer that derailed Watt’s singing career and her life. Her astonishing honesty in recounting the details of her journey was sometimes horrifying, often humorous, but always truly inspirational."

—Lori Laitman, acclaimed composer of operas, choral works, and art songs

Funny, profoundly moving and leaves the reader gasping at the … treatments and setbacks Kathleen endures … [A] must-read for anybody interested in the fortitude and generosity of the human spirit, in how our identities adapt to illness—and for all doctors and professional caregivers.

—Mark Gilbert, PhD, Portrait Artist, Professor of Medical Humanities; University of Nebraska, Omaha

Watt perfectly captures the exhilaration and madcap excitement of life backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, where she was a member of the Extra Chorus. Her writing about the singer’s life is so vivid and personal that when she discovers [she has] aggressive facial cancer, it hits the reader hard. I’m bowled over by Watt’s bravery in having lived to tell this harrowing tale, and for sharing it all so candidly.

—Amy Burton, leading lyric soprano at major opera companies and in recital and cabaret around the globe

"Kathleen Watt’s courage, energy, curiosity, and sheer engagement with life have carried her through challenges that would be unimaginable—except that her clear, lively prose and precise, fearless medical descriptions make it impossible NOT to imagine her experiences. Candid, unsentimental, and vivid, Rearranged is an inspiring book on multiple levels."

—Rachel Hadas, Rutgers University classics professor and award-winning author of more than twenty books of poetry, essays, and translations

"I am writing in praise of Rearranged to testify that a facial-cancer memoir by an opera singer can be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Kathleen Watt takes the reader through her vivid, painstaking, occasionally self-mocking, excruciating, ecstatic journey… [as] an author who pushes through…to emerge with resolutions intact; and ever-grateful for her passion, so do we."

—Neil Baldwin, author of Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern

What does it mean to be de-faced: to have your neck, throat, nose, eye sockets, eyelids, cheeks, tongue, and teeth disfigured? A harrowing account of the toll taken by treatments of osteogenic sarcoma—told by a woman who brings the same grit to the ordeal that she exhibited in becoming a chorister in the Metropolitan Opera Company.

—Susan Gubar, Professor Emerita at Indiana University, author of Debulked, and Living with Cancer series for The New York Times online

Kathleen Watt has written a brave and honest memoir about her battle with facial cancer, [which] upended her career as an opera singer and her marriage, and required adapting to life with a permanent disfigurement. [A] fierce examination of our culture’s…obsession with female beauty and the perils of our convoluted healthcare system… [Y]ou’ll also find moments of surprising lightness and humor, and a willingness to stay open to the possibility of a new version of joy.

—Julie Metz, author of The New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection, and Eva and Eve

"In Kathleen Watt’s world of protracted illness and recovery, body-wrenching chemotherapy is seen as character-building, and humor as life-saving medicine...[Rearranged is] about what illness changes, but even more so, what remains."

—Sara Arnell, author of There Will Be Lobster: Memoir of a Midlife Crisis

Clear-eyed curiosity and indefatigable engagement propel Watt’s memoir... Courage, loyalty, medical expertise, and determination seal the cracks of a well-examined life…[A] story told with grace, honesty, and the humor necessary to survive becoming, as expressed by Montaigne, ‘one of those monsters’.

—Don Cummings, author of Bent But Not Broken: A Memoir

"The unforgettable, often funny, sometimes catastrophic, story of a life rearranged by more than thirty surgeries ... With the odds repeatedly stacked against Watt, Rearranged affirms that warriors and heroes still walk amongst us."

—Glenn Alpert, Former Metropolitan Opera Tenor, Life Coach

A rare facial bone cancer derails Kathleen Watt’s life as an opera singer, but with an indomitable spirit, Watt fights back, enduring some thirty surgeries and countless rounds of chemotherapy. Watt uncovers a deep well of compassion and support from her family and friends, propelling her forward … despite whatever storms may howl."

—Faith Wilcox, award-winning author of Hope Is a Bright Star: A Mother’s Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning to Live Again (She Writes Press, 2021)

"...Kathleen has subverted the well-worn tropes of medical memoir, instead writing a story that trills with candour and authenticity. The writing itself is lyrically evocative, affecting and profoundly moving, while the story is one of true grit…Rearranged is a story of hope … a worthy and much needed addition to the canon of medical memoir … Rearranged is set to become a seminal memoir on not just what it is to have cancer and survive, but what it means to be human."

—Carly-Jay Metcalfe, author of Breath, forthcoming March 2024 from University of Queensland Press

Copyright © 2023 Kathleen Watt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by an information storage or retrieval system now known or hereafter invented—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper—without permission in writing from the publisher.

Heliotrope Books LLC

[e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-956474 34-3

ISBN 978-1-956474 35-0 eBook

Cover by Kathleen Watt

Interior photos courtesy of Kathleen Watt

Typeset by Heliotrope Books

Oh for a cinnamon scone

Contents

Foreword by Cori Ellison

Book I – Diagnosis

Chapter 1. The Bump

Chapter 2. Dentists I

Chapter 3. Dentists II

Chapter 4. Dentists I Redux

Chapter 5. Then What?

Book II – Prepped and Draped

Chapter 6. Head Shots

Chapter 7. Meeting the Big C

Chapter 8. Doctors I

Chapter 9. Doctors II, or Caveat Emptor

Chapter 10. Like the Gonzalez Boy

Chapter 11. Dancing Day I

Chapter 12. Tidings from All Over

Book III – Hospital Time

Chapter 13. Monday

Chapter 14. Family Waiting Room

Chapter 15. Surgery I

Chapter 16. Surgery II

Chapter 17. Friday

Chapter 18. The Two-Handed Yankauer

Chapter 19. Trach Life

Chapter 20. Déjà Vu

Chapter 21. Helping Them Help Me

Chapter 22. First Do No Harm

Chapter 23. Room 203

Chapter 24. Angles of Repose

Chapter 25. Ahoy from the Bed

Chapter 26. Thirst

Chapter 27. Prepped, Draped, and Accompanied

Chapter 28. What Can I Get You (How am I Doing)?

Chapter 29. Life on the Cot

Book IV – Unexpected Visitors

Chapter 30. Reality Bites

Chapter 31. The Wedding Suite

Chapter 32. The Piers

Chapter 33. Football and Trash

Chapter 34. Super Mario Brothers in My Pump

Chapter 35. Man from Psych

Chapter 36. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Chapter 37. Fashion Shoot

Book V – Homecoming

Chapter 38. Dip and Switch

Chapter 39. Gracious Living

Chapter 40. Packing

Chapter 41. Sashay

Chapter 42. Scribblings

Chapter 43. New Life Skills

Chapter 44. Going Home

Chapter 45. Generous Margins

Chapter 46. Definitive Obturation

Chapter 47. Dancing Day II

Chapter 48. Sound Bites

Book VI – A Wing, A Prayer, and A Portacath

Chapter 49. Talking to the Man

Chapter 50. Taking a Measurement

Chapter 51. Protocols | Consequences

Chapter 52. Ifosfamide, Or Baldy Upstairs

Chapter 53. Adriamycin: Here’s Looking at You, Kid

Chapter 54. Jane, Or My Hat is Full

Chapter 55. Pirate

Chapter 56. Way Cool in the Key Food

Chapter 57. AGMA

Chapter 58. Victoriana

Book VII – Hospital Time, Overheard

Chapter 59. Honey, I’m a Monster

Chapter 60. In the Waiting Room

Chapter 61. The Fabric

Book VIII – Cancer Free Hospital Rat

Chapter 62. Willy Nilly

Chapter 63. A Way Forward

Chapter 64. Gilda’s and the VFW

Chapter 65. Scripted Miniseries

Chapter 66. The Rule of Three

Chapter 67. The Brazilian Way

Chapter 68. Teeth By Night

Chapter 69. Good Humor at Home and Abroad

Chapter 70. Saws, Bores, and Needle-Nose Pliers

Chapter 71. Inch by Inch

Chapter 72. Another Flap in the Face

Chapter 73. On the Town

Book IX – Surgery to Infinity

Chapter 74. The Wound That Wouldn’t Heal

Chapter 75. Shareholders

Chapter 76. September Monstrosity

Chapter 77. Sequestered Shard, Or The Surgeon’s Workbench

Chapter 78. Roxy

Chapter 79. Ars longa, vita brevis

Chapter 80. Adjuncts

Chapter 81. Circling the Drain

Book X – Enough to Go Around

Chapter 82. View From the Pew

Chapter 83. Worlds Colliding

Chapter 84. Back to Work

Chapter 85. The Drain

Chapter 86. Rich Soil

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Sources

Resources

Foreword

More decades ago than I like to admit, fresh out of music school, I had the crazy good fortune to land smack dab on the very stage that had obsessed me since the age of seven: the Metropolitan Opera. My entrance wasn’t the grand one of which all singers dream; rather, I tiptoed on as a member of the Met’s Extra Chorus, a lucky band of freelancers hired for industrial-strength shows like Turandot, Aida, Parsifal, Boris Godunov, and Peter Grimes, beefing up the company’s already huge regiment of lifers, the Regular Chorus, a larger-than-life family of talents who might themselves have been famous soloists if not for fill-in-the-blank.

If I wasn’t, like my childhood idols, striding downstage center to let fly a glorious solo high B-flat (Cut me a break. I’m a mezzo.), I was at least sharing that massive stage with some of them, seeing the same thrilling, terrifying vista, and most importantly, observing their astonishing artistry up close and personal. It was the world’s best opera school.

A few seasons into my Met tenure, the fun element increased exponentially when a new soprano joined our ranks: the elegant, effortlessly stylish, curiously intriguing Kathleen Watt. Different as we were (and are), we bonded durably through our commonalities: the slightly snooty intellectualism, the quick and somewhat subversive wit, the 1990s version of out-and-proud, and colloquies so absorbing that an upcoming musical cue felt like a rude intrusion. I’m not proud of it, but once we even missed an offstage choral entrance.

Inevitably our friendship extended beyond the Met Stage Door. There were cheap, exotic dinners with Kathleen and her then-partner, visits to their Brooklyn home with my amazing dachshund companion Puckie in tow (much to the chagrin of their two cats), picnics and boat rides with Puckie and the lasses in Central Park. There was their unforgettably joyous wedding in a Hudson Valley winery. And, oh yes, there was once an inordinately fancy birthday dinner for me which was followed by the most epic hangover I’ve ever experienced.

Back at the Met, on one ostensibly ordinary day, as we contemplated the comparative edibility of the cafeteria’s offerings, Kathleen casually mentioned an oral irregularity that her dentist was exploring. Not long after, our merry world imploded. I’ll let Kathleen tell you the rest of that story, because she’s better at it, and it’s hers to tell.

I’m writing this foreword, though, because I was there, witnessing from a fairly safe and helpless distance, trying to ride that tidal wave with her in whatever small way I could. And eventually trying to shepherd her manifold gifts toward some new modes of expression. That wasn’t always easy; we had our ups and downs, as friends sometimes do. And Kathleen’s life and mine have since diverged in many ways, have indeed become almost converses. I continued my operatic career, she her pursuit of domestic stability and strong family ties. I’ve remained a staunch City Mouse, while she has become a keen Country Mouse. Yet we’ve always managed to reconnect, picking up as if no time or distance has intervened. These days, it’s mostly over sporadic Zooms and periodic urban sushi dinners. And now I have the honor of introducing you to this treasured friend who has become a formidable writer, and her remarkable book.

Unfolding against a deftly drawn backdrop of 1990s New York City, Rearranged, Kathleen Watt’s gripping memoir, is much more than an account of her long, winding struggle with, and steep eventual victory over a deadly disease. It is also an honest glimpse at the life of an aspiring opera singer and its august pinnacle, the storied Metropolitan Opera—a world exotic to most, but instantly recognizable and perfectly normal to anyone who has lived in it, like the back of a piece of scenery (…twenty-some-odd feet of plastered plywood, buttressed by two-by-fours, secured with sandbags and sub-contracted stagehands standing by with Phillips-head drill-bits, as she puts it).

Not long after making us comfy in her world, Kathleen abruptly conjures the split seconds during which all normalcy was shattered by a terrifying, out-of-left-field cancer diagnosis first delivered via an ordinary, everyday 1990s telephone answering machine. From there, we hurtle along with her into an uncharted sea of bewildering new medical minutiae, discomfiting hospital life, and impossible choices for which nobody is prepared.

That absorbing main narrative is seamlessly interwoven with essential backstories and side stories of her remarkable New England family, quietly heroic medical professionals, and a fiercely stalwart life partner, who help to propel her toward her new normal, disfigured but triumphantly reconfigured, and healthy.

This unforgettable memoir is eloquently written, keenly observed, and intellectually imposing. Yet it reads with the swift pace, dramatic clarity, and enthralling suspense of a page-turner novel. By turns, it may make you think deeply, laugh out loud, tear up, or even flinch. But you cannot look away.

—Cori Ellison, New York City, 2023

Kathleen Watt: The last head shot

Kathleen Watt as Carmen

Book I

Diagnosis

You don’t really know you’re ill until

the doctor tells you so [and]

the knowledge that you are ill is one of the

momentous experiences

of your life.

—Anatole Broyard

Intoxicated by My Illness, and Other Writings on Life

Chapter 1 • The Bump

What a glorious day! I cried, just as my mother had, all my life, any day the sun shone, whether breezy and balmy, boiling-hot, or bone-chillingly cold, as it was that January day in 1997. I was ditching my daily practice to drive upstate with my partner Evie, for a mid-week ski holiday on her thirty-fifth birthday. Sportswomen we were not. But we liked the outfits, we liked the weather, and we liked each other—a lot.

Evie and I had been fundamentally coupled ten years by then, and I knew her indomitable spirit. It was as easy to overlook as it was impossible to miss, once you knew her. Slight and quiet, she presented a gamine figure in a crowd, open-faced, soft-spoken, wide eyes bright. Who would believe that little peanut is a lawyer, cooed my father. But Evie was a canny native New Yorker, disarmingly self-assured, with a profound appreciation of life’s dark comedy, which regularly expressed itself in a clap of irrepressible laughter that I loved. 

We hit the slopes at an unpretentious resort behind the Shawangunks—she a fearless beginner, I a rusty novice—our form shaky, our gear kinda goofy, and all of it unabashedly fun. Après-ski, après dinner and cognac, after the glowing fire in the hearth, but before the spa, the jammies, and the rest, I thought of sharing my secret.

Keeping secrets? We don’t keep secrets. Do we?

Evie, give me your finger, I said, shoving it into my mouth. Feel that? You feel anything? What do you think that is? 

Hmm. Yeah, that bump in the gum there? Does it hurt? No? Okay, good. You better ask the dentist when you see him next month.  

Aha! It wasn’t my imagination. There was, in fact, a bump, in the gumline at the back of my upper jaw. My mind eased just to have my suspicion corroborated, and by the one person who would cheerfully finger my molars on demand. We drifted blithely through the rest of the evening and woke to another shimmering winter’s day. We carved out a few more pretty good turns, packed our rental for an early drive back, and pulled into Brooklyn with just enough time to regroup for the Met’s Cavalleria Rusticana. 

*

The subway station-stop serving the New York Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center is called, helpfully, Lincoln Center Station, and gives directly onto the wide corridors beneath Lincoln Center Plaza, which lead eventually to the Met’s underground maze of rehearsal halls and practice rooms. This goes a long way to allay the aggravation of a commute from Brooklyn, always subject to the vicissitudes of New York’s antiquated transit system. En route to Lincoln Center, at least you can know that when you get there, you’re there. 

Consequently, I usually cut my timing recklessly close. My arrival too often became an indecorous sprint from the station platform, down a flight of stairs on the uptown side of Broadway, crossing the Great White Way through the tunnel beneath, and up another flight on the downtown side, two steps at a time. In long strides down the corridor, dodging sightseers and theatergoers, I passed the Lincoln Center Parking Garage, and the loading dock where costumed animal handlers receive the day’s co-starring livestock, then through an unglamorous double door to the Met’s signature interior of garnet-red. In the outer lobby, a few vaguely familiar stage-parents attended to gifted offspring. I paused at the chorus sign-in sheet, one photo-copied page clipped to a music stand, where a No. 2 pencil dangled by a string, totally old-school. Finally I waved my laminated picture-ID toward a friendly uniformed guard who buzzed me through the traffic-scuffed swinging half-door. 

That Saturday I was in for a quick and easy matinée with Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry). This popular one-act is an archetype of the verismo genre, featuring naturalistic realism, where coarse country folk burst onto the stage with boisterous laughter, lusty jealousies, blood and guts. Verismo opera gives to ordinary human drama the same high-art treatment once reserved for the rarified demigods and royalty of earlier styles.

Impassioned, sometimes rough singing supplants the flawless vocalism of the bel canto ideal, and all other production values likewise collude toward verisimilitude. Sand is strewn among the cobblestones, awnings, and fish stalls of a Sicilian-style cathedral square. Shovel-wielding vendors follow a clattering buckboard drawn by a pair of live burros. Peasants mingle, merchants haggle, voices of an Easter choir ascend from within the soaring cathedral.

Most of this is stage-magic, of course. The buckboard is real enough, and the burros (thus, the shovels). But these uncouth villagers are NYC opera singers, sophisticated and style-savvy. The wine flasks are authentic, but they dispense a soft beverage of principals’ choice—anything other than wine (insurance issues). The cathedral belfry rises high out of sight, twenty-some-odd feet of plastered plywood, buttressed by two-by-fours, secured with sandbags and sub-contracted stagehands standing by with Phillips-head drill-bits. Fan-blasted incense and backstage voices complete the illusion of a vast sacred interior where a choir rehearses for Easter Mass.

My three years in the so-called Extra Chorus taught me to appreciate these off-stage assignments, for they make up in expediency (no costume, no makeup, no waiting around) for what they lack in glory—and pay the same scale as a six-hour Parsifal. I could sign in and pop over to my place among the two-by-fours under the main stage without even stopping by my cubby in the Chorus Women’s Dressing Room. This afternoon, I’d be able to drop in, sing my bit, hop a train, and be home for supper.

Were this an evening performance, mind you, I would have driven my car into Manhattan from Brooklyn, just because of the return. For each night, beneath the city that never sleeps, after theaters have drawn the final curtain, before the clubs’ last call, the subway system assumes its most erratic idiosyncrasies. And late nights under NYC are less perilous than non-New Yorkers might imagine. For one thing, there’s safety in the sheer numbers of homeward bound theatergoers, shift-workers, and clubbers who crowd station platforms into the night. But the crowds thin as the tracks fan toward the outer boroughs. Trains become fewer and farther between, and protocols lag. At one outlying stop, three or four transit cops might step from each of three or four middle cars, falling into step on the platform, doors agape behind them, delaying us for some mysterious minutes, until returning with the last of a pizza slice in hand. Our ride resumes. Time slows. Ridership dwindles. On the station platform where I transfer to the Brooklyn line, I’m often waiting alone. 

A windowless armored car of mustardy yellow known as the Money Train lumbers from station to station, on an ever-changing nightly schedule (until the modern MetroCard eventually forces its retirement), lingering at each for armed guards to collect a padlocked canvas cash bag from each token booth. This would be the unluckiest timing. Stuck behind the Money Train, the remaining riders of a late-night Brooklyn-bound train would drag home later than ever.

So, for evening performances, I would drive. Inbound I would encounter foreseeable bottlenecks at Brooklyn Bridge and on the FDR South, looping around the toe and up the west side of Manhattan. Plus, I’d have to calculate extra time for the shark-like prowl around a block or two for parking on the curb (either that or spring for the pricey Lincoln Center Garage). But West Street would be free of its worst weekday tangles. And after the performance, my drive back along the pitch-black Hudson River would unfurl for miles ahead, a broad, empty expressway festooned in long strings of green traffic lights, spared the surging sea of rush-hour headlights and braking taillights. A silky asphalt straight-shot home to bed.

*

The only reason to do that job is for the money, said my principal coach and main champion.

As a New York solo singer, my coaches and some colleagues heartily discouraged me from auditioning for the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. For despite its many splendors, the impetus of choral singing is the obverse of solo singing. Solo singing, to a principal soloist, is a solemn calling, a vocation of service to song, a delicious labor of love. The labor is the hard work of accounting for both a physical gift and a creative troth—a distinctly individual mantle, and the dogged dedication to magnify it. A dedication that sooner or later, in careers large and small, gives way to an inevitable reckoning, usually preceded by a period of disillusionment, or concession, and always of soul-searching. Unlike in a singing job, where singers en masse ply their vocal mechanics uniformly, under direction, for remuneration. A job like (forgive me) the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. 

Or so I had come to believe.

Personally, I hadn’t even considered the money—only the imprimatur of singing at the Met—until my mentor said it out loud. Standing before him, I strained to dim the dollar signs I knew flashed in my eyes.

It would be nice to be able to pay the bills on time, for once.

So one brilliant April afternoon, I slipped into the queue of overdressed hopefuls winding through the Met’s underground warren, and out onto the sun-splashed plaza of Lincoln Center. My ambivalence about accepting the job, were it to be offered, liberated me into confidence and cheeky insouciance. When my turn on the stage came, I led with In questa reggia, Turandot’s big aria, a showpiece so virtuosic it risks provoking the audition gods. I routinely opened with this stentorian aria anyway, less for effect than for the way it centered my voice, especially when adrenalin was running wild (in extremis, one needs a strategy). And on that day, even my high C rang out with authority.

❧❧❧

Chapter 2 • Dentists I

Evie’s January birthday always arrived as a welcome remedy to the post-holiday blahs. In 1997, we returned from our getaway to our cozy Brooklyn brownstone, refreshed for the winter ahead. We took up our regular round of subways to and from our city jobs, with the occasional dip into grand opera, warming in a glow of busy domestic tranquility.

Next up on my calendar would be that dentist appointment. I’d have my annual cleaning and get the scoop on the innocuous bump. I looked forward to the date, though it would cost me a gig-day’s wage.

The dentist’s office in Hadley, Massachusetts, was a long drive from Brooklyn, but—though my siblings had long since flown, my mother was more than six sad years gone, and my father already a year in the ground—I had yet to replace the family dentist.

Twelve miles and ninety minutes north of New York City, the RFK Memorial Bridge (née Triborough) offers the first opportunity to exhale. Pulling out of Yonkers traffic, I left behind the clutter of shoreline industry which had once all but killed the Hudson. I liked to imagine the river as the Rhein and picture the cliffs of the Palisades as framed by Bierstadt and Gifford and the other painters of the Hudson River School—almost all European émigrés—and try to encounter afresh this American Eden.

I made my way north through a sloppy wintry mix to the I-91 exit that for so long had led me to my parents’ house on Cherry Lane, but now, eerily, took me only to the dentist. Passing familiar road signs—Soda & Pet Food City, Northampton Tubs—I realized I looked forward to seeing Dr. S., although I’d never known him well. In the graveled lot where chickens once ranged all over an old New England farmstead, I turned off the motor and let my bones rattle to a stop along with the car. The characteristic veranda of this farmhouse-turned-dental-office seemed to make even a visit to the dentist feel like going home.

In the rearview mirror, I refreshed my lip-liner and took another moment to fluff, hoping to suggest, in the unforgiving glare of the examining light, I had at least made an effort. Unfolding my legs, I stepped into the frozen slush of midwinter with the self-assurance of a just-checked face. I climbed the farmhouse treads, crossed the porch, and let myself into a magazine-strewn country parlor.

A row of hydraulic examining chairs faced enormous windows overlooking broad fields of fallow rows running out to a tall hedge on the horizon. Patients faced a sweep of sky as they waited to recline and open wide. How often I’d felt my heart rate slow before that framed expanse, sometimes an infinite flat blue, or busy with scudding cumulonimbus puffs, sometimes heavy and low with tomorrow’s snow, as on this February day. I had relocated to New York years earlier, and two hundred miles across three states was a long way to go for a cleaning. But where else would I find a comparable view from the chair?

Not far into the exam, my dentist saw something to quiet the office chatter. Ah! The bump. The thing Evie had scoped out for me after skiing, consulting in the offhand way any couple might, leading to this overdue appointment. Somewhat irregularly, my dentist then and there sent me for a further consult.

Across the field from the farmhouse was a modern dental suite with low walls of red brick and frosted glass. How smooth of my dentist, I reflected, to consult with a trusted colleague before going one step further. As my dentist called ahead, I returned through the slush to my car for the short hop to the endodontist around the corner.

Ho! What good sense! How prescient of me to have maintained ties to civility and grace, physicians who cooperate in efficient, expert care, in bucolic fields of Massachusetts under snow-laden skies. Not only was I unreasonably self-satisfied, but also, I was certain these collegial dentists would figure out the problem and fix me right up.

Inside the more clinical but no less convivial offices across the field, the staff had seen me coming and straightaway led me to an examining chair. Once seated, I learned the endodontist had an urgent commitment that afternoon and would not be able to see the job through, but because my dentist had pressed him, he would take a look. The bump, the thing I had laughed about with Evie, which had given pause to my family dentist, now seemed to be troubling his pal, the endodontist.

Yes. I see it now, he said. And you say you feel no pain? Honestly, you know, you should consider finding a local dentist. That would be my recommendation to you, because, you know, this is going to take some time.

Time? No problem, Doctor! My time is all flex.

"But perhaps several visits…A root canal, a recovery period,