The Realms of If: AU for the ‘Maybe’ Challenge

by Ian McDuff

‘It’s your deal, dear.’ The three elderly ladies – plump, comfortable, genteel: Miss-Marple-ish – were in seemingly fitting surroundings. Overstuffed chairs with antimacassars; Dresden shepherdesses flanking an ormolu clock on the chimneypiece; a large cat purring on the fender of the hearth, and a large pot of tea, duly tea-cosied, close to hand, with choccy biscuits on a Delft tray…. Three benign little old ladies playing a genteel game of cards.

It made rather a change from their younger days: from the aromatic scrub of Greek hillsides, the bitter wind of Ultima Thule, that blasted heath in Fife. But they were still playing their same three-handed game of cards, the one they’d been set to In the Very Beginning, in the High and Far-Off Days, O Best Beloved.

‘Atropos, dear, it’s not like you to be wool-gathering.’ Clotho had a vein of mild sarcasm she mined at times.

Atropos looked at her five cards and dithered.

‘Same pair as your last hand, darling?’ Lachesis winked at Clotho.

‘Quite,’ Atropos said, laying her cards out with decision.

The press lapped it up. At first, the jokes were mean-spirited, and not without a certain suggestiveness. But winning covered a multitude of sins. If ten men on the forty-man roster harmonized in the clubhouse – hell, in the dugout – they were due for some bench-jockeying, and opposing ballclubs and even their own fans began by impugning their manhood. By June, though, with the club leading the division by twelve games, the Songbirds were a hit. After all, baseball has had its characters, and prides itself on them. The refulgence of Ruth. The antics of the Cards’s ‘Gashouse Gang.’ Mantle’s incessant and ill-conceived pranks, the syntactical Surrealism of Dizzy and Stengel and Scooter and the Yog’. The Goose. Ryne Duren. ‘Professor’ Moe Berg. Baseball, traditionally, glories in its lunatics.

And Baltimore, when the drought finally broke and the glory days of the ’70s and ’80s seemed to be returning at last, took the ‘Trilling Orioles,’ the ‘Singing Birds’ of their beloved Birds, their Own Hometown O’s, to its brawling, burly, blue-collared bosom.

Most of all the press and the fans adored their new young pitching ace, their true hometown hero, Joshua ‘JC’ Chasez. He was a lefty, for one thing, and Everyone – everyone in the Bigs and everyone in the pressbox – knew, as an article of faith, that Southpaws Are Strange. It is part of the settled order of nature. Incoherent, inarticulate, wildly off-center: lefty pitchers are expected to pitch wildly and live erratically. When he whom the local writers loved to call ‘that bundle of Bowie-bred whipcord’ took the mound, excitement soared; when he was in front of a camera or behind a microphone, gleeful anticipation mounted. There were two sorts of office pools concerning the O’s, these days: sports pools, and What Will C Say Next pools. His battery-mate, the professorial Mississippi-born catcher, was the one who caught him and backstopped him off the field as well as on: some of the writers thought of Bass as Chasez’s interpreter, if not his designated Keeper. When Chasez would compare an opposing batter’s swing to Modigliani, and then start off on an increasingly disjunctive ramble, it was always Bass who stepped in with a Southernism that then segued into a precise analysis of the mechanics of baseball.

Even hard-bitten sportswriters got a good feeling when they saw the obvious protectiveness Bass had for his pitcher, and the warm gratitude with which Chasez always acknowledged being rescued by his catcher. It was, after all, Teamwork In Action, a Great Baseball Friendship.

Well, it was. But it was more. JC wasn’t as loopy as he chose to seem. And Bass, normally the most private of men, had had his own reasons for taking the other eight into his and JC’s confidence from the get-go, and in making sure the press played up the closeness, the harmony, between all ten of them. It was his means of ensuring he and JC could hide in plain sight.

It was a glorious summer at Camden Yards. Lou Pearlman’s miserable, brief tenure was but a dim memory of an old nightmare that had vanished in a dawn. Johnny Wright, the skipper whom some were already comparing to the legendary Earl Weaver, was Th’ Man, and his Birds were this season’s Boys of Summer.

The AL East was suddenly no longer owned by the Yankees, and the BoSox, too, had lost their second mortgage on it.

That was why the crazy story, the notion that ten of the players – the starters, at that – were a freaking choir out there, had gone from bad joke (with all its insinuations of gayness) to Cherished Eccentricity: Baltimore was winning. And the press and the fans gave the Songbirds the same sort of devotion they’d given Brooks or Cal in past glory days.

Johnny Wright had had only this to say. ‘Look, these guys, they’re the first crop from rebuilding the farm system. They came up together. Fine, they started singing everything from doo-wop to Motown to gospel on bus-rides, from rookie ball in Bluefield through Double-A in Bowie and Triple-A in Rochester. Great for them. Good for teamwork, right? I tell you what, I wish they’d teach everyone in the organization to sing, it gets these results, huh?’

Not that it had been quite like that.

They’d come up through the farm system together, true enough. But Richardson and Littrell, McLean, Carter, and Dorough, had been Keys – alums of the Frederick farm team – while Chasez, Timberlake, Fatone, Kirkpatrick, and Bass had been Delmarva Shorebirds, in One-A. Even before that, in rookie ball, they’d been separated, though in slightly different groupings: Chasez, Timberlake, Kirkpatrick, Littrell, Richardson, and Fatone as Bluefield Orioles, Bass, Dorough, Carter, and McLean in Sarasota, in the Gulf Coast League. They’d met back up in Double-A, as Bowie BaySox, but by that time, they’d formed some cliques. It was sheer happenstance – or perhaps the Fates, those three old women having a sometimes pawky sense of humor – that had drawn the ten together, simply because Bowie was Chasez’s hometown. Aspiring big leaguers have little money and huge appetites, and a player who has parents (and a Mom who loves to cook) in the town that hosts a farm club, is likely to be befriended. It was through Chasez that the ten had become friends, getting home-cooking together and bonding and finding a shared talent for and interest in harmonizing off the field.

Bowie, their AA farm stint, was also where James Lance Bass and Josh Chasez discovered each other, on the field and off.

That part of the story, of course, could not be told, could not be whispered, and their eight teammates banded together to shield them. Part of it was friendship, even then, though Richardson, Timberlake, and McLean especially had issues with it in the beginning. Part of it was calculation: Timberlake, especially, had hitched his wagon to Chasez’s rising star. And he had had Bass as a battery-mate himself. The two biggest obstacles to JC’s becoming a dominant starting pitcher in the Bigs were wildness and a mercurial temperament, capable of going from self-reliant coasting to deep funk so fast it made a manic-depressive yo-yo look like a carpenter’s level. Behind the plate, Bass was the only catcher in the organization who could catch C, make him look good even when he wasn’t bringing his good stuff, and stabilize him with a simple stroll to the mound. Behind the scenes, if Bass could play pitcher to C’s bedroom catcher and leave him still, peaceful, and serene, giving him a Zen calm that baffled outsiders, well, Timberlake and the rest of the guys were all in favor.

But the public part of the story – the farm club buddies now made good, who played and ate and caroused and sang together – that was something else again, a budding legend and no longer any cause for jest or opposing dugout chatter. Not when the Orioles came into September with a .689 winning percentage and a divisional lead that was just short of their Magic Number.

Johnny Wright, again: ‘Out there, out there is where we win games. I’m no genius. All I do is fill out the lineup card and give a signal or two. When these guys are on, baby, I’m in a rocking chair.’

That was the other thing. The Singing Birds were idols. An interleague game in Florida had been interrupted when lithe, beach-bunny young women had started throwing half the items in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue onto the field. An interleague game in San Francisco had followed, the next month, and everyone had had to laugh when some young gay men had tossed several pair of thongs at the O’s.

Not since Jim Palmer had started a second career as a briefs model had the Orioles been this sexy. It was great for the gate. All the guys had their fans. JC of course was the matinee draw – even for ‘fans’ who had never heard of the infield fly rule and who were completely oblivious to his being on track to win twenty-two games that season. But the hotshot closer, all attitude and sneer and malicious glare into the batter’s box on the field, the master of intimidation and thrower of sheer heat, Justin Timberlake, turned on the Boy Next Door charm off the field, and women swooned. Right-fielder Kevin ‘Train’ Richardson, noted equally for his eyebrows, his obsessive fitness regimen, and his cannon of an arm, had been offered a sum that would startle even a major-leaguer to pose in Playgirl, but the Commissioner’s Office barely edged out his wife in the race to Have a Hissy Fit.

Baseball purists as well as fangirls (and fanboys) adored Howie Dorough. ‘Sweetness,’ they called him, and it had nothing to do with his irenic personality or sheer goodness of heart, even though he was the poster-boy for MLB charities. Johnny, again: ‘I tell you what, up the middle is where it matters. I don’t care if Dorough hits a buck-eighty-five all season, not that he will, you just take a Gold Glove shortstop like that as the gift from God that he is. Damn, he has a sweet arm, and damn does he have instincts. You can’t buy that sort of play on the field, huh?’

Then there were the Bad Boys and the Saint. AJ McLean prowled center like a panther, or a lone wolf, and the gossip columns attested to it that he lived his life the same way. Sometimes, it seemed that the only thing that kept him from falling into real trouble was the steadying influence of his unlikely friend, the ‘Little Saint,’ hard-charging left-fielder Brian Littrell. Littrell, Richardson’s cousin, was the feel-good story of the year: the one everyone liked and respected, the little guy with the big throws and the wheels to cover every inch of his position, the boy who would not let even a heart defect, much less his size, deflect him from his dreams. The All-American Boy playing the American sport, the National Pastime. It was sportswriter heaven – and open season on clichés.

The prior Great Hope, hot-prospect-straight-from-high-school outfielder Wade Robson, had not been able to overcome that, had not been able to retain his starting position in the face of Littrell’s sheer determination, and was now the most overpaid (and quietly jealous) DH in the American League. The odd man out amongst the Songbirds, the one whose effortless talent had not been able to match Littrell’s sheer grit, Robson had lost the fans’s hearts as well as his spot in left.

Fans – mostly the female ones – gave AJ their cell numbers. Brian got marriage proposals – even after his own wedding.

McLean wasn’t the only Bad Boy. Wilder yet milder was the Ruthian, Rabelaisian first-baseman, Joey Fatone, the classic Good-Hearted Lunk From Brooklyn, the sort of player Central Casting would have sent the Dodgers in the old days at Ebbets Field. Joey carried on with a stereotypically Italian gusto, an appetite for ladies, food, and wine, that was admired in every rowhouse and won him the hearts of all Pratt Street. And when Joey took – and reveled in – the spotlight, singing impromptu arias at Sabatino’s in the middle of a meal, say, he was always flanked by his fellow infielders: Big Nick, the linebacker-built blond with deceptive range who held down the Hot Corner at third and batted cleanup, and scrappy second-sacker Chris ‘Critter’ Kirkpatrick, the Merry Prankster who played for blood on the diamond itself, who had already sacrificed his knees to the cause, who had paid longer dues in the minors than the others; Kirkpatrick, who cared for nothing but winning and would spike you as soon as look at you if tried to break up the play by sliding.

And then there was The Bassman. The ‘Bengal Lancer,’ as he’d been called since his college days at LSU. ‘Best damn defensive catcher in the AL,’ Johnny said, and the writers agreed. He could frame a pitch, stare down a plate umpire with his icy green glare and rumbling bass growl, call a game so well your grandma could be the starting pitcher and notch a win, settle the nerves of an entire pitching staff with two, drawled words, and throw out the fastest of base-stealers without standing. He was the public epitome of Deep South, cane-pole fishing, deer-hunting Good Ol’ Boy manhood, the hero of every sandlot kid. He was universally regarded as the captain on the field, to whom even the third-base coach deferred, and regarded, too, as being in the line of ‘intellectual’ catchers – like Berg, and Tim McCarver, and Brad Ausmus – one of the Smart Ones. Catchers are always expected to be either absolute goofballs (Berra, say) or guys who get PhDs in the offseason, a là Moe Berg: and Bass in fact had come to the Bigs through a college career that had included getting a Masters in Mechanical Engineering along with his BA in just five years. He was country boy archetype and Diamond Genius in one, an All-American Ideal, and invariably excellent copy for the writers. He had never been charged with a passed ball in his life.

This was – Bass was – the bedrock. This was how JC had become an ace, had become a focused player, a control pitcher – and his own man at last, privately, a Man in Full.

And now it was October, the air electric under the lights, Camden Yards packed, breathless, standing. Now it was white-hot on the field in the coolth and crispness of the early October night. It all had come down to this, at last. Top of the ninth. The seventh game of the World Series. Orioles ahead, 2 to 1. And Timberlake, the stud closer, was out of gas. He was a power pitcher, a fireballer, and tonight the youngster was finally low on fire, unable to blow the ball past the batter by sheer force. The bullpen had been used into the ground in the past two games.

And Mathers – the declared enemy of the Songbirds, the controversialist who was the last yet to mock their manhoods, Rocker-like – was up to bat. Mathers, a notorious prick, but a damned dangerous batter, picked up on the cheap in the off-season from the Tigers and now having his Career Year.

JC was a starter, but this was for all the marbles: he had an entire off-season to rest, after this. The Giants had one away and two on as Mathers stood in the box: a bloop single, and a walk issued by Timberlake. All the O’s needed was two outs.

Chasez came in in relief.

Bass gave him the signal. He shook it off. Bass called for the slider. Again, Chasez shook him off. Bass trotted to the mound. There was a lurking uncertainty in JC’s eyes. He wasn’t a reliever. He wasn’t warmed up the way a starter warms up.

Bass fixed him with a cool, emerald gaze. Both men had their gloves up to their mouths: standard procedure to keep the opposing runners or bench from stealing a sign. It had a special advantage here.

‘Baby,’ Bass said. Chasez sighed, and relaxed, fractionally. That one word, in that voice, always unknotted him.

‘Baby. When we’ve won this, and we are a-fixin’ to, you and I are going to celebrate. Our way. But out here? Baby, out here you pitch, I catch. Means I call ’em. Don’t shake me off out here. Not ever. Not because you’re chokin’. Now. They sense that.’

The ump was walking out to break it up.

‘So we use that. Now. Here’s what we’re goin’ to do.’

The call has become historic now. Everyone knows it, they way they know Hodge’s call for The Shot Heard ’Round the World, Bobby Thomson’s homer off Ralph Branca, the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff. The way people can recite the call of the play when Mazeroski beat the Yanks at Forbes Field in 1960 with his bottom of the ninth homer. You hear it everywhere; it’s played for visitors at Cooperstown.

What passed unnoticed in the seething mob of humanity that tried to rush the field and were held back by police with clubs, what passed unnoticed even by the cameras as the dugout emptied and the other eight ‘Songbirds’ were the first to surround and shield Chasez on the mound as he jumped into Bass’s arms as the catcher raced out there, was the other historic event of the night. It’s commonplace for battery-mates and teammates to fall on one another in a mass hug when an important game is won. But the betting here is that this was the first time – even if they made sure nobody saw it – that the winning pitcher’s embrace by the winning catcher in a World Series involved a kiss. With tongue.

The ladies sighed, and Lachesis riffled the deck. ‘Let’s see if we can’t deal a better hand for you this time, dear.’

It became known as the ‘Year the Stars Fell On the Met.’ Under its new director, R. John Wright 3d, a man determined to be the new millennium’s Rudolf Bing, the Metropolitan Opera was committed to new approaches and new talent.

Take, for example, the two countertenors who suddenly made countertenors cool, that year. C. Alan Kirkpatrick – whom only his intimates called ‘Chris’ – became notorious when he took on the traditional Hosenrollen of Octavian in Rosenkavalier and Cherubino in La Nozze de Figaro, while Howard Dorough embarked on his illustrious career as the foremost modern interpreter of old castrato parts with what has become the benchmark Idomeneo, in which Kirkpatrick and he traded performances in the title role and that of Idamantes (another Hosenrolle). Both were celebrated for their range, though there was outrage, also, over the loss of the titillations of roles in travesty, and, among its devotees, over the Met’s increasing flexibility as regarded the Fach system.

The tenors were exceptionally well-represented that year. There were Heldentenors, lyric tenors, character tenors…. Wagnerians everywhere became positively orgasmic over the possible future of Nick Carter, big, blond, and Nordic, a born Siegfried in looks at least, even if his voice was still maturing and he was wisely confining himself to bel canto thus far. As it happened, Dorough was privately privileged to have the actual orgasmic moments with Carter: they were a settled couple of long standing. It was Howard Dorough, surely, who soothed ‘Klaus’ Carter’s nerves when his star seemed likely to be eclipsed by that of J. Randall Timberlake, whose youthful vitality and presence made up for the occasional thinness and nasality of his tenor, and whom directors whose emphasis was on casting and acting tended to prefer for plum romantic leads. But both, of course, deferred to the two new star tenors of their generation who between them bestrode the stage like colossi.

These were the unlikely friends Brian T. Littrell and Joshua Chasez.

Littrell, whose interest in opera had been sparked by his older cousin, the rising basso Kevin Richardson, had a purity of tone and an angelic persona that compensated for his physical unlikeliness in dominating a stage. He was certainly handsome enough to be the hero, but he was a trifle on the short side. All of this, though, was forgotten when he sang, particularly in bel canto roles, or in Mozart. His Belmonte, in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, had been deemed the best of the past decade, and he owned Donizetti parts: his Nemorino, in L’Elisir d’Amore, had made his name. Most recently, he had established his ability to take on darker roles, with a notable Don Alvaro in La Forza del Destino.

His counterpart was of different mold. Enigmatic, intensely private, eccentric, Chasez was capable equally of earthiness and ethereality, on stage and off. He had won raves both as Léopold and as Eléazar in a very somber production of La Juive, had been noble as Arrigo in I Vespri Siciliani and been a perfect cad as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, had suffered as Vladimir in Prince Igor, had – trading off each performance with Littrell – been a poignant Monostatos and a compelling Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, and had brought down the house as a triumphant Calaf in Turandot.

And he was the cynosure of all eyes, capable of dizzying changes from broad-shouldered masculinity to seductive androgyny, and if Littrell was the All-American Boy of the opera, Chasez was the shape-shifting incarnation of polymorphous sex. It was superb box office.

In these triumphs, he and Littrell, themselves oddly complementary friends, had forged fast friendships with the others of the ‘new crop,’ not least the rising baritones Alex McLean and Giuseppe Antonio Fatone.

McLean, who had come out of nowhere to face down all opposition to his unlikely dreams, had something of Kirkpatrick’s drive and something of Chasez’s raw sexuality, combined with a post-modern sense of cool and an unexpected gift for rubber-faced comedy. The last had been his ticket to the Met, when, as Harlequin in Ariadne auf Naxos, he’d stolen a scene so thoroughly the house erupted. He’d shown the extent of his powers with an Ezio, in Attila, that audiences still spoke of with awe, and he was a favorite – if unpredictable – participant in the quiz when Texaco broadcast the Met and he was not in that day’s ensemble. More recently, he had moved from triumph to triumph, as Amonasro in Aïda, Escamillo in Carmen, and von Faninal in Rosenkavalier, culminating in a popular turn in the title role of Die Fliegende Holländer. His Rigoletto was eagerly – and by some, who thought it too much too fast for his young voice, anxiously – awaited this year.

At the same time, his friendly rival, Joe Fatone, big and burly and notoriously happy-go-lucky, with truly operatic appetites for food and women, excelled in the sort of roles that gave free range to his dramatic instincts and Italian warmth. (One critic had said it was a shame that even a Met that played fast and loose with the Fach system couldn’t quite make a bass of Fatone, as in all other respects he was ‘born’ to play Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier.) He’d shone as Simon Boccanegra, Don Giovanni – which was typecasting – and a truly villainous Scarpia in Tosca, stood several critics on their ear as Purcell’s Aeneas, and even made them think twice as Alberich in Das Rheingold. He was happiest, though, with such ornately Italianate roles as Gianni Schicchi – and Figaro.

There was an excitement in the air at the Met, a sense of new beginnings too great to be named, and the rising generation were – with two exceptions – something of a ‘band of brothers.’

The real daggers were drawn in the struggle for roles that erupted between the new generation of basses. It began with Boris Godunov and reached a head with Die Zauberflöte.

Littrell’s cousin, the tall, dark, broodingly handsome Kevin Richardson, was more a bass-baritone than a bass, but he used his presence – and a well-filed tongue – as a weapon and a means of ascent. For reasons no one was quite sure of, and which may have been rooted simply in a mutual personal antipathy, a natural clash of personalities, he had become the sworn enemy of his rival basso, the true basso profundo James Lance Bass. Their ongoing sniping and manœuvering, which left the rest of the new generation walking very warily around them both, was exacerbated by the comparative lack of truly good roles for bassos.

Bass, for his part, was regarded by some as a plodder, a man without artistic temperament and its tantrums, who simply possessed – almost as a freak of nature – a basso that caused building foundations to shift three blocks away. Those who knew him better – his fast friend Joe Fatone, for one, who considered him an honorary Sicilian – thought ‘plotter’ was closer to the mark. And Richardson soon found, to his discomfiture, that he had nothing on Bass when it came to sharpness of tongue. When Richardson had condescendingly asked him if it were true that he’d come to opera as a fallback once the country group Alabama broke up and his dream of becoming their new bass-in-the-background had been shattered, he’d replied that even dirt-farmers in Mississippi knew enough to see that Julliard tuition was damned expensive training for a man like Richardson, whose true destiny was doing local theater productions of Kiss Me, Kate in Bowling Green.

Bass also possessed the saving graces of a dry sense of humor, which he had used to considerable effect as Osmin to Littrell’s Belmonte in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and a relative freedom from temptations to diva-hood and dramatics. He was as arrogant as they all were – no one got as far as they had without colossal self-confidence – but he expressed his arrogance differently, and it had different roots than that of most of the others.

He was also – and this hardly raised eyebrows in their world, though Littrell, who tried to be a peace-maker (Littrell was in some ways the natural successor to Jerome Hines as the Christian conscience of opera), suspected that it had its part in Cousin Kevin’s bouts of attitude – Bass was also matter-of-fact about his being gay. This was a non-issue, except perhaps for Richardson, as was only natural in their milieu. After all, Dorough and Carter were effectively married to one another, Chasez was presumed by everyone to be gay, Timberlake, Kirkpatrick, and McLean were rampantly bisexual, and only ‘Don Giovanni’ Fatone and the Richardson-Littrell cousins (both of whom had wives) were at all straight.

Yet in fact, Bass’s sexuality did have consequences, in the end.

After being edged out by Richardson for the title role in Boris Godunov, in which instead he sang Pimen, and retaliating by being the audience favorite when the two alternated as Leporello to Fatone’s Don Giovanni, Bass had rubbed Richardson’s nose – by now seriously out of joint – in it by excelling both as the buffo Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte and as Wotan in Siegfried. This season, the two were head-to-head over the two great plums: Sarastro, and Mefistofele. Richardson regarded both roles as his lawful due, particularly when it came to acting them. Bass was equally determined, and made no secret of his conviction that Richardson was a baritone in basso’s clothing, unable to muster the lower register both roles demanded.

It was a steely, cold, blustery day, overcast, the snow dirty and lingering, when the casting of the tenors was announced. The role of Faust in Boito’s Mefistofele went to Chasez, who did ‘tortured’ superbly. Tamino, in Die Zauberflöte, would go to Littrell this time. No one noticed the exchange of glances between Chasez and Bass when they passed each other backstage. No one: save the man who had been noticing such quick and covert glances for seven months now: Dorough.

That afternoon, everyone – except Howard Dorough – was stunned when Bass voluntarily stood down from competition for Sarastro’s role in Die Zauberflöte. Everyone who’d heard his O Isis und Osiris had agreed that it had a gravity and heft Richardson’s did not: everyone – even, in a private admission to his cousin Littrell, Richardson himself. But the part was to be Richardson’s – and Mr Wright wasted no time in stating that, as that was the case, Bass would of course take Mefistofele’s title role. Richardson had plenty on his plate with the planned production of Die Zauberflöte, after all, which was always a showpiece.

When Richardson preened a little at Bass’s having blinked, Dorough – the sweet one, friend to all, the one who never took sides – laughed in his face.

‘Howie?’

‘Kevin. Darling. Do think. You got a nice plum. But Bass got a title role in the last of the operas that Texaco will broadcast for the season. You both won. Or at least Bass did.’

‘Why that Mississippi backwoods son of a –’

‘Of a Kentucky moonshiner? Honey, you’re not exactly from the Social Register yourself. You both won, and that’s good for the company. Now, please, sweetie, both of you get over yourselves, hmmm?’

But it was that night, in their loft, as they snuggled close, that Dorough told ‘Klaus’ Carter the kicker.

‘Baby. You’re such a Watson. You see, but you do not observe. Those two have been dancing around each other for months.’

‘JLB has the hots for Kevin?’

Howard rolled his eyes. ‘I love you, baby. Never change.’

‘Okay, fine, so I’m blond. Explain it to me. Small words.’

‘Baby, who is playing Faust?’

‘Oh. Oh. Oh, my.’

‘Bass made the decision solely on the basis of the tenor castings.’

Dorough was right. Even as he spoke, the enigmatic, uncatchable Chasez and the Machiavellian Bass were leaving a lengthy first run-through. As they headed toward the exit, Chasez smiled, shyly. ‘I’m glad you finally picked up on. Things. You know.’

Bass laughed, richly. ‘I’m playing to type. So. May I tempt you?’

Chasez just threw his arms wide and threw back his head; and the Met’s favorite new Calaf sang, perfectly, the final, exultant phrase of Nessun, dorma:

‘Good heavens,’ Clotho said. ‘Perhaps in the next hand…. I mean, I can’t see how – perhaps a courtroom drama –’

‘Too much Unresolved Sexual Tension,’ Lachesis warned.

‘Oh, dear. Well, surely there’s no way, in the Big Band era –’

‘I’d wager they’ll manage,’ Lachesis said. ‘I think perhaps a whole new deck may be in order. Do you think you might get a different hand to play then, Attie, dear?’

‘Well, no, really, dear,’ Atropos said, with wry resignation. ‘It hardly matters how the hand is dealt, or from what deck. Character, after all, is destiny.’

END