The Most Beautiful Thing

Chapter One: The Camera

The offices of the Corbin Opera Ensemble occupied the third floor of a converted tobacco warehouse on Broad Street, and on the morning of April the fourth, 2023, Shirin Mossavi climbed the stairs because the elevator had a handwritten sign taped over the call button that read OUT — CALL ROGER.

She had shot in war zones. She had shot in a shuttered chemical plant in Ohio where the floor gave way under her tripod. Nothing had prepared her for the particular sadness of an arts organization in liquidation. The stairwell smelled of dust and old paper. On the landing, someone had stacked framed production posters against the wall, face-out, in no order: a woman in a red slip against a black field, screaming; a woman in a nun's habit with her hands open; a woman in a beaded gown holding a hand mirror as if it were a weapon. The same woman, over and over, across seventeen years.

Genevieve Thorpe. Twenty-nine in one poster, thirty-six in another, thirty-eight in the last. The Ensemble had never bothered to hang anything else.

Roger Keane met her at the door with a coffee in each hand, which struck Shirin as the gesture of a man who had spent thirty years making other people comfortable in rooms he did not control. He was sixty-one, thick through the middle, with reading glasses pushed up into hair that had gone entirely white.

"You're early," he said. "Nobody's ever early here. Come in before I lose my nerve."

The main office was half packed. Banker's boxes lined the wall beneath a whiteboard that still carried a rehearsal schedule for the previous September in three colors of marker. A young woman was pulling scores from a shelf and sorting them into piles: keep, sell, recycle. Shirin's camera operator came up behind her, breathing hard, hauling the case with the good lenses.

"You should know," Roger said, "that about half the board would rather you weren't here."

"And the other half?"

"The other half signed the release before you asked." He handed her the coffee. "People want the record. Even when the record isn't kind. Especially then, maybe."

Shirin set up her first shot in the empty rehearsal hall down the corridor: a long room with a scarred wooden floor, mirrors on one wall, a battered upright piano shoved into the corner with its lid down. Tape marks still crossed the boards in yellow and blue, the ghost of a set that had never been built. She held the shot for a full ninety seconds with nothing moving in it. She had learned that empty rooms tell you what people are going to lie about.

"What was the last thing rehearsed in here?" she asked.

Roger stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.

"Nothing yet," he said. "Turandot starts Monday. Then that's it. Then this room's a yoga studio, probably."

—

The farmhouse was twenty-two miles west of the city, down a gravel road that ran between two fields of new soy. It was not the kind of house a famous woman lives in. It was rented, white, low, with a tin roof and a porch that sagged at the east end, and an above-ground pool in the side yard that had been drained and left to fill with leaves.

Genevieve Thorpe answered the door herself, in jeans and a gray sweater with a hole in one cuff, and Shirin's first thought was that photographs had been lying about her for twenty years. In photographs she was severe: cheekbones, throat, a mouth built for consonants. In person she was smaller and warmer and much more careful.

"You brought three people," Genevieve said.

"Camera, sound, and me."

"I assumed there'd be a person whose only job is to make me feel understood."

"That's also me," Shirin said. "I'm not very good at it."

Genevieve laughed — one short syllable, low in the chest — and stepped back from the door.

They lit the parlor. It took ninety minutes. Genevieve made a pot of tea, then a second one when the first went cold, and stood at the window watching a man on a tractor at the far edge of the field while the crew taped a diffusion panel over the glass. There was a piano in the room, an old Baldwin baby grand, closed, with a stack of unopened mail on it and a boy's flannel shirt over the bench.

"Do you play?" Shirin asked.

"Badly. Enough to teach." She did not look at it. "It's Louis's shirt. He's fourteen. He leaves everything everywhere, on principle. I've decided the principle is admirable."

"Will he sit for an interview?"

"No," Genevieve said, in the voice of a woman closing a gate.

At eleven forty they rolled. Genevieve sat in the armchair with her hands loosely folded, her spine long, her feet flat. Shirin recognized it as stage posture, the body's oldest habit, and understood that this was going to be harder than she'd hoped.

"Say your name and what you do," Shirin said.

"Genevieve Thorpe. I teach voice."

"And before that?"

"Before that I sang." A beat. "You want me to say soprano. Fine. I was a soprano."

"Are you not one now?"

"I have a voice. Everyone has a voice. Mine used to be able to do a specific set of things and now it can't do them." She said it evenly, the way a woman reads a grocery list. "You'll want more feeling in that than I'm going to give you today."

"I'll take today's version," Shirin said. "Why did you agree to this?"

Outside, the tractor turned at the fence line and started back. Genevieve watched it for a moment through the diffused window, and Shirin let the silence run, because the silence is where people decide.

"Because for seventeen years, other people described what happened in that company," Genevieve said. "Critics. Board members. Two very persistent bloggers. My husband, mostly — my ex-husband, and he's a genius with a narrative, he really is, he could make a canceled production sound like Prometheus stealing fire. There's a mythology. It's flattering to everyone, including me. I've repeated it at donor lunches with a glass of white wine in my hand and believed every word." She turned back to the camera. "I want somebody to write down what it actually was. Not the mythology. The truth. The parts that were the best thing that has ever happened to me and the parts that took something out of me I'm not getting back. I'd like both in the same paragraph, if you can manage it."

"Can they be in the same paragraph?"

"They were in the same afternoon," Genevieve said. "Every afternoon, for years."

Shirin leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.

"People will want to know if you hate him."

"People always want that." Genevieve considered the question longer than she'd considered the last one. "I loved him for eleven years and I have not spoken to him for four, except about our son and about money. What I feel is more complicated than hate and less flattering. Hate would let me off. Hate would mean I was standing outside it, being done to. I was inside it. I helped build it. I was the one who said yes."

"Yes to what?"

"To all of it," she said. "Start with 2006 and I'll show you."