The Metropolis (19 page)

Before any of this erupted into open warfare, John came in to say good-bye, as the next day he had his weekly inventory meeting at the company and the idea of disturbing Maria at six o’clock in the morning held no appeal. “I’m hitting the sack,” he said with a yawn. “Remember, if anybody gives you a hard time for being from Pittsburgh, just mention Franco Harris and Jack Lambert.”

Maria looked at Gina, and they both laughed. “Dad, I’m sure the admissions committee isn’t too concerned about the Steelers.”

“Then maybe this will help you,” he said and flipped her an Indian-head nickel that he explained had been his good-luck charm when he was a kid. “The day after I found it I hit my only home run.”

Maria thanked him and even shared a smile with her mother before she popped it into one of the penny loafers Gina had bought her for the trip, and John kissed her on the cheek and went to bed.

The next day, Gina drove Maria to Cedar Village, where the snow-dusted trees glistened in the morning sun. She remarked how beautiful it would be on the turnpike, a comment not acknowledged by Maria, whose morning stupor prevented her from thinking about anything except whether the stupid snow might stop her from getting to New York City. Gina sighed, remembering her daughter before they had grown so distant. Her baby was about to leave for New York, and it seemed like only yesterday that they were dancing together in front of the hi-fi, Maria perched on top of her shoes with her thin arms wrapped around the backs of her legs, Bea hollering out from the kitchen to turn it up,
prego!
Gina reminded herself that Maria was a teenager, and at least she wasn’t running around with some long-haired boy doing who-knew-what like those kids she saw hanging around the shops on Castle Shannon Boulevard. Nor did she forget that this was exactly what she had always wanted for her
daughter, from the second she saw the picture of Callas—God rest—almost two decades earlier, and though she could feel the old, familiar emptiness, she tried to console herself with the thought—in fact, she had just read an article about this while waiting in line at the grocery store—that this angry insolence was a cultural phenomenon, that mothers everywhere were letting go of their teenage daughters with the expectation that one day soon they would all come home.

M
ARIA AND
K
ATHY
drove east under a looming sky that extended into the curving climbs through the Appalachians of central Pennsylvania. Maria began to feel better as they descended from the mountains and passed Harrisburg, and by the time she caught her first glimpse of the World Trade Center from Route 80 and then the entire skyline, glimmering in the last speck of sunlight like a long diamond necklace, her spirits were flying. After they crossed the George Washington Bridge and made their way down the West Side Highway, she expressed surprise that New York City was so close to such a big river, something she had never really considered, though it was perfectly obvious from a map. “It’s like New York has everything Pittsburgh has,” she exclaimed, “except ten times bigger!”

“Just remember,” Kathy noted, “that goes for singers, too.”

After checking in at the hotel—the Callaghan, across from Lincoln Center—Maria happily agreed to Kathy’s suggestion to opt out of the hotel’s dining room in favor of an exploration of the neighborhood. On Broadway, Maria was enthralled by the parade of business suits, dresses, tracksuits, platform shoes—even in winter—and shearling coats. Everyone, it seemed, had a “look”—some combination of fear, aggression, and street couture—unlike anything she had known in Pittsburgh, which made her worry about her lack of the same, and how she would have to go about changing that unfortunate condition. She was struck by how the many different shops on Seventy-second
Street—shoes, a butcher, a diner, buttons, beds, televisions—had no intrinsic order but still seemed to fit together like the ingredients of one of Bea’s leftover stews. She enviously watched a woman perhaps a few years older than she was hurry into a dry cleaner’s, pick up some garments, and rush back out onto the street, which was filled with the honking of countless yellow cabs swerving through traffic. She inhaled the smell of pizza from a nearby parlor and laughed at a fat, old man waving his hands in the face of a teenager with a large Afro who appeared somehow to have offended him. Kathy pointed out different buildings, some with flat, modern façades, others dripping with the carved monsters and deformed gargoyles that seemed at first to leer at Maria but then with a wink to tell her, no, she was one of them.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
they went to Juilliard, where at the appointed time, Maria took an elevator upstairs and followed signs through several long hallways to another waiting area filled with her fellow young prospects, who sat in a collective cloud of body odor and perfume. At some point her name was called and she stepped into the room, where she felt like a speck looking up at the faces of Mt. Rushmore until she recognized Anna Prus beaming down at her. As she sang, she imagined taking Anna’s proffered hand and together arriving in the center of a circle of twelve marble statues, all of which Maria faced one by one as she made a slow 360-degree rotation. And as her eyes met with each frozen woman, the woman’s mouth would open and add her voice to Maria’s, pianissimo and then forte, so that by the end of her piece she heard a chorus that awed and terrified her, for while their mouths moved, their eyes remained lifeless and cold.

Back downstairs, she found Kathy and burst into tears: she cried inconsolably, so that all who walked by the young teacher holding the hand of this girl and gently reassuring her must have thought the kid had really blown it. They walked all the way across Fifty-seventh
Street to Madison Avenue, where Maria—now more composed—gasped at the prices of silk scarves and a gold pen, which she knew would amuse her father. She called home twice, but the line was busy both times, and then—because she still felt uncertain about her audition—decided it would be better anyway to wait until the next day so she could tell Gina about
A Chorus Line
, which she and Kathy planned to see later that night.

At dinner, they rehashed the audition and decided that it had probably gone better than Maria initially thought. Kathy ordered her red wine, and Maria loved the way it sat placidly in its enormous glass, which became cloudy and opaque as she ate. Slightly drunk, she floated through the cold night air to the theater, where she watched the crowd of people milling around in front of the box office with a sense of disbelief that anyone could be lucky enough to experience this more than once. But the intensity of the show made her nervous, and she had to resist the temptation to chew on the ends of her hair; watching professional performers, she could not help but envision herself among their ranks—given that this was now her aspiration—yet they were so polished and unguarded, as if they had not the least trepidation about revealing the darkest corners of their souls for everyone to see.

M
ARIA WAS STILL
in bed when the harsh ring of the hotel phone abruptly awakened her, and she opened her eyes to the opalescent light of dawn. She felt a pang of guilt—she should have called home again—even before she saw Kathy reach from the adjacent bed to answer. Already hoping it was a dream and knowing from the brittle texture of the bedspread it was not, she heard a hushed gasp and two footsteps, followed by Kathy’s fingers, first touching the top of her head and then her shoulder.

Maria sat straight up, her stomach in knots even before she saw Kathy’s face, quivering as she wiped tears from her eyes and tried
to mouth the words. “What?” she asked, her voice a round whisper absorbed by the upholstered headboard and the crumpled sheets and blankets.

Still unable to talk, Kathy looked away, shaking her head back and forth.

“Kathy?” Maria cried.

Sinking to her knees, Kathy leaned on the edge of Maria’s bed and looked up. Her lips moved, and even before a sound reached her ears, as if her nightmares had preordained it, Maria knew the word was
fire
.

PARIS, 1860. As Codruta did every December on St. Ignatius Day at the Georges, she hosted
a fête des rêves
, at which, per the custom in her native Romania, she served roasted pig and plied her guests with plum brandy and mulled wine. Lucien halfheartedly performed a selection of Christmas songs before helping himself to two glasses of each, which left him pleasantly drunk but still estranged from the festivities. He stood at the edge of the ballroom among the potted palms and banana trees as a couple drifted past on the dance floor—heads back and laughing, they were in perfect step—and he felt a twinge of sadness as he pictured himself the previous spring, enthralled by Wagner’s new opera and certain that falling in love was as imminent as the end of the piece.

He wasn’t sure exactly what the problem was; unlike many others,
he was not ashamed of his romantic interest in men and had never hidden his inclinations from those nearest to him, whether his friends from the conservatory, his colleagues at the St.-Germain, Codruta—who in any case had surmised years before—or even his father, who as a man of science did not believe that such a well-documented aspect of human behavior could be ascribed to a “perversion” and moreover was obviously not unfamiliar with the mores of the theater in which Lucien had always felt most at home. Nor did he lack for opportunity; at her
mercredi
, Codruta regularly introduced him to painters, poets, and rich young aristocrats, an endeavor undertaken with the understanding—and in this she was like most members of her artistically oriented milieu—that he would always be a “bachelor,” an oblique but convenient term that would allow him to move through both theatrical and civilized society (where it was not uncommon for two such bachelors to share an apartment) without undue controversy of the sort that would arise in more restrictive quarters. Which is not to say he—or she—was naïve, or had any misconception that such arrangements were not to be shielded from large swaths of the population. Every situation, he knew, called for a different level of discretion: as Gérard had taught him, Paris was filled with bistros, parks, quais, and tunnels where he could go without fear of being harassed, while other places were to be avoided at all costs unless he wanted to be beaten or arrested (which he did not).

Whatever the broader implications, the fact remained that while he had met any number of men who he felt sure would be considered by most to be handsome, intelligent, and artistic, none had ever set his heart on fire. Even worse—for there was no logic to support this—he still could not shake the feeling that his fate was tied to that of Wagner, who over the same period had managed to get banished from the city. This had occurred following a disastrous
Tannhäuser
run at the Paris Opéra, where a claque of conservative apes from the
Jockey Club had ruined the performances with shouts and whistles, leaving management—via the dictate of the emperor—no choice but to cancel. While this fiasco was bad enough, what was still more demoralizing to Lucien was that everyone—even Codruta—seemed to agree that
Tristan
would never get produced, in Paris or anywhere else; the composer was too old and too controversial to be headed anywhere but obscurity and ruin.

The only good to come of it, at least from Lucien’s perspective, was a
Tristan
score, which Pauline Viardot—going beyond her promise at the reading—had ended up giving to him after he confessed to her the extent of his infatuation for the piece. No matter what anyone said, he still planned to study it closely. To console himself, he sometimes leafed through it, fantasizing about the day when he would be famous enough to demand a production of this forgotten opera, thus resuscitating Wagner’s reputation, where it would shine next to his own.

J
UST AS
L
UCIEN
was on the verge of slipping away, Codruta appeared to announce her intention to lead him on a short tour of the room. “I want to perform a little experiment,” she proposed. “Stand up as tall as you can—as if you were about to sing—and turn yourself in a circle.” Lucien gamely followed her instructions as she gently pushed his right arm. “Not too fast,” she continued as he turned. “Now tell me—and don’t think about it—who catches your eye?”

Having finished one revolution, Lucien indulged her by completing a second; and while most of the room passed in a blur, he found his attention—just for a second—focused on a short, compact man who stood on the periphery of a group perhaps thirty feet away. Oddly enough, he seemed to observe Lucien at the same moment, although with perhaps a trace of ridicule, if not disdain, which sent
a shiver of embarrassment through Lucien as he considered that he was literally being turned in circles by the princess.

Lucien returned his attention to Codruta. “Okay, him,” he said as he bent down to speak into her ear, where from behind the mass of her hair he could more surreptitiously observe the man, whose evening wear displayed a hand-tailored quality typically acquired on the Rue St.-Honoré.

“You don’t know who that is?” she asked, smiling benignly as if she could have predicted this all along.

“Obviously not,” Lucien muttered, for once impatient with her.

“How charming—I seem to have struck a nerve.” She looked through him toward a group of dancers exiting the floor before she continued. “His name is Eduard van der Null. He’s Austrian, he comes from a noble family, and like you he has inspired heartbreak among some of my more desperate peers. He’s also involved in the opera, but unlike you, he’s no longer aspiring.” She fixed her inscrutable eyes on Lucien. “If only he lived in Paris, he would be perfect.”

Lucien could not restrain himself from looking back at the man, though his gaze was no longer returned. “Is—is he a singer?”

“Fortunately no. As we’ve discussed, that’s rarely a good idea.” She paused and shook her head, as if the question required some consideration. “He’s an architect,” she murmured. “Probably the most important outside of Paris—at least on the continent. He’s been commissioned, if memory serves, to build the new opera house in Vienna.”