actually binding her to anything.
I open the plastic box and I take out one of the shiny discs. I hold it up in front of us and we look at our reflection, our two heads together, in the spectrum-split plastic of the first half of the opera.
So is marriage a matter of chains? I say.
Eh? you say.
Or a matter of the kind of faithfulness that brings dead things back to life? I say.
I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, you say.
I lean my head back on your collarbone and turn it so that my mouth touches the top of your arm. I feel with my teeth the front of your shoulder.
Don’t bite me, you say.
Marzelline. That’s her name.
Gershwin wrote six prayers to be sung simultaneously, for the storm scene in Porgy and Bess. As an opera, Porgy and Bess did comparatively badly at the box office. So did the early versions of Fidelio; it wasn’t till 1814 that audiences were ready to acclaim it. At the end of one, all the prisoners are free and all the self-delusion about love is irrelevant. At the end of the other, there’s nothing to do but go off round the world, on one good leg and one ruined leg, in search of the lost beloved. I guess you got me fo’ keeps, Porgy, Bess says, before she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.
Will I dress as a boy and stand outside your house, all its windows lit for your Christmas party, its music filtering out into the dark? Will I stand in the dark and take a pick or a spade to the hard surface of the turf of your midwinter back lawn? Will I dig till I’m covered in dust and earth, till I uncover the whole truth, the house of dust under the ground? Will I shake the soil off the long iron chain fixed to the slab of rock deep in the earth beneath the pretty lavenders, the annuals and perennials of your suburban garden?
It is Saturday night. It is summertime on a quiet hot street in a port town. A man plays a sleepy lament on a piano. Some men play dice. A woman married to a fisherman is rocking a baby to sleep. Her husband takes the baby out of her arms and sings it his own version of a lullaby. A woman is a some-time thing, he sings. The baby cries. Everybody laughs.
Porgy arrives home. He’s a cripple; he rides in a cart pulled by a goat. He goes to join in the dice game. A man arrives with a woman in tow; the man is Crown and the woman is Bess. His job is the unloading and loading of cargo from ships. Her job is to be his, and to keep herself happy on happy dust, drugs. These dice, Porgy says shaking them, are my morning and my evening stars. An’ just you watch ‘em rise and shine for this poor beggar.
But Crown is high on drink and dust. When he loses at dice he starts a fight. He kills someone with a cotton hook. Get out of here, Bess tells him, the police will be here any minute. At the mention of the police, everybody on the street disappears except the dead man, the dead man’s mourning wife, and Bess, who finds all the doors of all the houses shut against her.
Then, unexpectedly, one door opens. It’s the door of Porgy, the cripple. She’s about to go in, but at the last moment she doesn’t. She turns and looks at the side of the stage instead. Everything on stage stops, holds its breath.
The orchestra stops.
A white girl has entered from the wings. She is standing, lost-looking, over by the edge of the set.
Bess stares at her. Porgy, still at his door, stares at her. Serena, the dead man’s wife, stares at her. The dead man, Robbins, opens his eyes and puts his head up and stares at her.
The doors of the other houses on the set open; the windows open. All the other residents of Catfish Row look out. They come out of the houses. They’re sweating, from the heat under the stage-lights, under the hot summer night. They stand at a distance, their sweat glistening, their eyes on the white girl with the iron in her hand.
The girl starts to sing.
A brother has come to seek her brothers, she sings. To help them if she can with all her heart.
Everybody on