David T. Little, composer. What Belongs to You, 2024. Opera for tenor and sinfonietta.
Based on a novel by Garth Greenwell.
THE SECOND SENTENCE of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You is tiered, the clauses drawing you down like descending stairs: “But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there.” The whole book is in this sentence: the narrator’s fraught relationship with Mitko, a Bulgarian hustler; the implicit dangers of desire; and the subterranean urges that simultaneously vex and enthrall us. It is this sentence that made me bend over the novel for an entire afternoon, devouring it whole. It is the lack of this sentence, and others like it, that I felt most keenly when I watched the opera adaptation of the novel at its world premiere at the University of Richmond last September.
Greenwell, who most recently won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his third novel, is a poet by training. He is concerned with the possibilities contained in the minutiae of language (he has published close readings of single sentences taken from entire novels). He is also concerned with desire: how it disrupts and unveils. This concern has led Greenwell to a deep engagement with Augustine, despite his own atheism. In an interview with James K.A. Smith in this journal, he says, “I find desire humiliating. I find it humiliating to be overpowered by something I have not chosen and do not will. Augustine feels that too.” This Augustinian approach to desire, this feeling that desire is the “great disorderer,” echoes the faith language of my childhood. Greenwell takes seriously the moral implications of desire and, in doing so, his fiction implicitly engages with the same questions Augustine asked two millennia ago. This is not to say that Greenwell’s fiction, in being morally serious, is dull or dry. Indeed, the pleasure of his language felt too rich to me, almost too compelling—hence my special trip to see the opera adaptation.
The opera begins with the orchestra seated on a dark stage, lights from their music stands illuminating their bow movements. The first lines of the libretto, sung while “The American” is still obscured from view, establish the stage as the subway bathroom into which he is descending: “Even as I descended the stairs / I heard his voice, / Like the rest of him, too large / For these subterranean rooms.” Karim Sulayman, the tenor, enters slowly from stage left, weaving through the string and woodwind sections before ascending and descending two risers, the only set pieces.
Just before the lights went down, a young man, maybe a University of Richmond student, sat down directly in front of me. He was wearing a T-shirt from a conservative Pentecostal church and a trucker hat turned backward so I could read it: Jesus Loves You. In other words, not the type of person you expect to attend an opera about a gay affair that ends in the narrator’s treatment for syphilis. It wasn’t so long ago that I, too, would have been an unlikely member of this audience. As I watched him settle into his seat, I felt the tension in his body almost as if it were my own, as if in his taut shoulders and straight spine he was holding himself rigid against the enormity of desire pressing down on him, as I had at his age. So I was half-watching the man in front of me with a mix of anxiety and curiosity while Sulayman sang the extended, loving description of a sexual encounter in a men’s bathroom that makes up the first half of act one.
Sulayman sinks to his knees, his face raised, and sings: “necessary nourishment from an inadequate source.” It is obvious he is receiving a blessing.
But have you read it? I wanted to ask the man in front of me. But do you know how Greenwell says it?
One of the fiercest pleasures of Greenwell’s prose is his illumination of desire, especially the moments where competing desires conflict. When the narrator first meets Mitko, he doesn’t intend to pay for sex: He hasn’t before, he’s still attractive enough not to need to, and paying signifies a new relationship to sex he had hoped to avoid for a few more years. But his desire for Mitko overrides this. The narrator pays, and then pays more: “Really what did it matter, the sums were almost equally meaningless to me; I would have paid twice as much, and twice as much again, which isn’t to suggest that I had particularly ample resources, but that his body seemed almost infinitely dear.” When I first read the novel, in the doldrums of the Covid-19 lockdown, I cried at that line.
The dearness of another body is somewhat lost in the translation to opera. Having only one singer on stage means Mitko is a ghostly presence, summoned only by description. The score and the force of Sulayman’s voice, gestures, and expression must make up for the lack—an effort that is mostly successful. The novel is, after all, obsessed with the gaps between Mitko and the narrator, the myriad ways they cannot fulfill each other’s needs. Mitko as invisible man is an elegant solution to the problem of how to adapt a plot based on the looping, digressive interior monologue of the narrator.
Yet, although the narrative of What Belongs to You is deeply interior, it is also deeply about the consequences of bodily embrace—the difficulties of embodied desire. So the choice of a solo staging causes some unintentional gaps: In the scene where Mitko denies the narrator sex, after he has traveled all day specifically to see Mitko, the American “concentrated on his warmth, / where our bodies touched. / Closed my eyes, / as I brought myself off.” Just before this, Sulayman pauses before the line: “I was alone in my longing.” He sings this sentence lying on a riser that has been covered with props that suggest a cheap hotel bed, his face turned toward the pillow and rumpled sheet that represent Mitko’s presence. There is a long pause after the line, a silence that makes the American’s loneliness physically and aurally present. The scene is meant to show the rising tension between the American and Mitko, which erupts in violence just two scenes later. But as Sulayman simulated masturbating, the audience laughed. In the moment, the laughter surprised me; later, I wondered if the presence of another body, another voice, might have added the necessary pathos.
The second act is composed of the second and third parts of the novel, in which the narrator reckons first with the death of his homophobic father and then with the revelation that Mitko has given him syphilis. Sulayman must portray the American as a child, a teenager, and an adult, at turns enraged and wracked with guilt. Here Sulayman’s skill and David T. Little’s score merge to transcend the absence of other singers, and the formal inventiveness of Little’s adaptation truly shines. Sulayman sings in a slightly higher register as a child and teen, shedding the blazer and glasses of the adult American, but it is his gestures and expressions that truly sell the flashbacks. As the nine-year-old narrator, Sulayman hugs himself self-consciously, knees to chest, while he watches his father stargaze, confused and intrigued by the change he senses in his father’s emotions. As the teenage narrator, Sulayman’s eyes become impossibly wide, his delighted face beaming the fervor of first, adolescent love to the back of the house. In these moments, the score lifts into a major key, lazy trills from the woodwinds evoking breezy summer evenings in Kentucky.
In a scene that made me shiver, the narrator’s father is voiced by the entire orchestra in a kind of Greek chorus: Every person on stage stands in unison and, speaking in one loud, deep, slow voice, tells the American they wish he had never been born. Surrounded, Sulayman looks terrified yet resolved—angry. He stands, straight-backed, at the top of the tallest riser, almost dead-center stage, and sings: “I thank this rage. / For without it I would have lost myself altogether.” Sulayman’s smooth tenor trembles at this line, the hint of vibrato almost buzzing in my own chest, making me feel both the rage and the wound that created it. In an earlier scene, Mitko was also voiced by the orchestra in a moment of violence, creating a more explicit connection between Mitko and the father than the book allows. But in the face of his father’s homophobia, the narrator doesn’t waver. The scene works retroactively, turning the earlier moments when the American submitted to Mitko’s anger into a more explicit study of the willing humiliations of desire.
I read What Belongs to You for the first time in 2021, just as I came out as trans. This is why I drove to Richmond from my home in North Carolina to see an opera, an art form I know barely anything about. It is why I applied to doctoral programs in English to write a dissertation about this novel. It is why, even though I sat two rows behind Garth Greenwell in the theater, and he stood within six inches of my seat to speak to the people in the row behind me, I could not bring myself to speak to him. There was too much to say, and too much that would have been embarrassing to admit to a stranger: how deeply faith still ordered my life, and how desire, Augustine’s great disorderer, turned my life upside down just as I picked up What Belongs to You.
Or: Transitioning, for me, was submitting myself to the mortifying ordeal of making my desires explicit. I wanted to be a man; as I read What Belongs to You, I was simultaneously realizing that I had come to the end of my comfortable identification as a lesbian—I wanted to be a man, and more specifically a man who wanted other men. But the intense connection I felt to What Belongs to You is not about something so clear cut as identification or representation. Rather, the novel understands the seismic shifts in self that can constitute submitting to a desire.
The young man in front of me left at intermission and didn’t return. I worry that he understood this too.
C.J. Surbaugh is a writer and librarian with degrees in literature and theology from the University of Texas, Seattle Pacific University, and Duke Divinity School. His work has appeared in Earth & Altar and the music-zine Rainbow Rodeo. He lives in North Carolina.
Photo by Stefan Vladimirov on Unsplash
