Such love breeds loyalty, and Mr. Hosokawa was a loyal man. He never forgot the importance of Verdi in his life. He became attached to certain singers, as everyone does. He made special collections of Schwarzkopf and Sutherland. He believed in the genius of Callas above all others. There was never a great deal of time in his days, not the kind of time such interest clearly merited. Custom was that after having dinner with clients and completing paperwork, he would spend thirty minutes listening to music and reading librettos before falling asleep. It was impossibly rare, maybe five Sundays a year, that he found three consecutive hours to listen to one opera start to finish. Once, in his late forties, he ate a spoiled oyster and suffered a vicious bout of food poisoning that kept him home for three days. He remembered this time as happily as any vacation because he played Handel’s Alcina continually, even while he slept.
It was his eldest daughter, Kiyomi, who bought him his first recording of Roxane Coss for his birthday. Her father was a nearly impossible man to buy gifts for, and so when she saw the disc and a name she did not recognize, she thought she would take a chance. But it wasn’t the unknown name that drew her, it was the woman’s face. Kiyomi found the pictures of sopranos irritating. They were always peering over the tops of fans or gazing through veils of soft netting. But Roxane Coss looked at her directly, even her chin was straight, her eyes were wide open. Kiyomi reached for her before she even noticed it was a recording of Lucia di Lammermoor. How many recordings of Lucia di Lammermoor did her father own? It didn’t matter. She gave her money to the girl at the counter.
When Mr. Hosokawa put the CD in the player and sat down in his chair to listen, he did not go back to work that night. It was as if he was a boy in those high seats in Tokyo again, his father’s hand large and warm around his own. He set the disc to play over and over, skipping impatiently past anything that was not her voice. It was soaring, that voice, warm and complicated, utterly fearless. How could it be at once controlled and so reckless? He called Kiyomi’s name and she came and stood in the doorway of his study. She started to say something—yes? or, what? or, sir?—but before she could make out the words she heard that voice, the straight-ahead woman from the picture. Her father didn’t even say it, he simply gestured towards one speaker with his open hand. She was enormously pleased to have done something so right. The music praised her. Mr. Hosokawa closed his eyes. He dreamed.
In the five years since then he had seen eighteen performances featuring Roxane Coss. The first was a lucky coincidence, the other times he went to the city where she would be, creating business to take him there. He saw La Sonnambula three nights in a row. He had never sought her out or made himself to be anything more than any other member of the audience. He did not assume his appreciation for her talent exceeded anyone else’s. He was more inclined to believe that only a fool would not feel about her exactly how he felt. There was nothing more to want than the privilege to sit and listen.
Read a profile of Katsumi Hosokawa in any business magazine. He would not talk in terms of passion, as passion was a private matter, but opera was always there, the human interest angle to make him appear more accessible. Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo system behind him. There were the inevitable questions about favorites. There was the inevitable answer.
For a price that was considerably more than the entire cost of the rest of evening （food, service, transportation, flowers, security） Roxane Coss was persuaded to come to the party, as it fell in between the end of her season at La Scala and the beginning of her appearance at Teatro Colón in Argentina. She would not attend the dinner （she did not eat before she sang） but would arrive at the end of the meal and perform six arias with her accompanist. Mr. Hosokawa was told by letter that he could make a request upon accepting the invitation, and while the hosts could make no promises, the request would be given to Miss Coss for her consideration. It was Mr. Hosokawa’s selection, the aria from Rusalka, which she had just completed when the lights went out. It was to be the end of the program, though who is to say if she might have sung an encore or even two had the lights remained on?
Mr. Hosokawa chose Rusalka as a measure of his respect for Miss Coss. It was the centerpiece of her repertoire and would require no extra preparation on her behalf, a piece that surely would have been included in the program had he not requested it. He did not seek something achingly obscure, an aria from Partenope perhaps, so as to prove himself an aficionado. He simply wanted to hear her sing Rusalka while standing close to her in a room. If a human soul should dream of me, may he still remember me on awaking! His translator had written it out for him from the Czech years ago.
The lights stayed off. The applause began to show the slightest downward sweep. People blinked and strained to see her again. A minute passed, then two, and still the group remained comfortably unconcerned. Then Simon Thibault, the French Ambassador, who had, before coming to this country, been promised the much more desirable post of Spain （which had been unfairly given to another man as a payoff for a complicated political favor while Thibault and his family were packing） noticed the lights beneath the kitchen door were still on. He was the first to understand. He felt like he had been startled from a deep sleep, drunk from liquor and pork and Dvo?ák. He took his wife’s hand, reached up for it in the darkness as she was still applauding, and pulled her into the crowd, dark bodies he could not see but pushed himself into. He went towards the direction of the glass doors he remembered being at the far end of the room, craning his head to try and catch a glimpse of starlight for orientation. What he saw was the narrow beam of a flashlight, one and then another, and he felt his heart cave down inside his chest, a feeling that could only be described as sadness.
“Simon?” his wife whispered.
It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him. Better not to draw attention to yourself. Better not to be an example. Somewhere in the front of the room the accompanist was kissing the opera singer, and so Ambassador Thibault drew his wife, Edith, into his arms.
“I’ll sing in the dark,” Roxane Coss called out, “if someone will get me a candle.”
With these words the room stiffened and the final moment of applause turned to silence as it was noted that the candles, too, were dark. It was the end of the evening. By now the bodyguards napped inside limousines like great, overfed dogs. All across the room men slipped their hands into pockets and found only neatly pressed handkerchiefs and folding money. A surge of voices went up, there was some shuffling, and then, as if by magic, the lights came on.
*
It had been a beautiful party, though no one would remember that. White asparagus in hollandaise, a fish course of turbot with crispy sweet onions, tiny chops, only three or four bites apiece, in a cranberry demiglaze. Usually struggling countries longing to impress the heads of important foreign corporations chose Russian caviar and French champagne. Russian and French, Russian and French, as if that was the only way to prove prosperity. On every table sprays of yellow orchids, each flower no bigger than a thumbnail, all locally grown, trembled and balanced like mobiles, rearranging themselves with every exhalation of a guest. The effort that had gone into the evening, the positioning of each stem, the sweeping calligraphy of the place cards, had been lost without a moment’s appreciation. Paintings had been borrowed from the national museum: a dark-eyed Madonna presenting a tiny Christ on her fingertips, his face oddly knowing and adult, was placed over the mantel. The garden, which the guests would see only for a moment when they walked the short distance from their cars to the front door or if they happened to glance out the window while it was still light enough, was polished and composed, birds of paradise and tightly wrapped canna lilies, banks of lamb’s ear and emerald fern. They were not far from the jungle, and even in the most domesticated garden the flowers strained to overtake the dull stretch of neat Bermuda grass. From early in the morning young men had worked, wiping the dust from the leathery leaves with damp cloths, picking up the fallen blossoms of bougainvillea that rotted beneath the hedges. Three days before they had put a fresh coat of whitewash on the high stucco wall that surrounded the home of the Vice President, careful that none of the paint should fall on the grass. Every element was planned: crystal saltcellars, lemon mousse, American bourbon. There was no dancing, no band. The only music would be after dinner, Roxane Coss and her accompanist, a man in his thirties from Sweden or Norway with fine yellow hair and beautiful, tapering fingers.