The Metropolis (21 page)

He officially wavered and for a few minutes swore that he was
done with this business once and for all, and that under no circumstance would he show up at the coffee shop on Third between First and A he had suggested as a meeting spot. That night, in the effort to atone for his misdeeds—hypothetical as they remained—during sex with Amanda he kissed her with such intensity that she asked him if something was wrong, which annoyed him just enough so that the following day he began to reconsider his earlier decision, as if she now deserved to be cheated on; not like a major affair or anything, he again reasoned, but a dalliance, something that would be a little secret with himself.

He pretended to debate the issue, going back and forth like this for the rest of the week, until to his alleged shock he found himself at the appointed time outside the appointed coffee shop, where he spotted in a booth a man who more or less fit the description of the ad. He decided to leave, but as he walked past the doorway, his legs made a right turn and carried him through, and the guy nodded at him in a casual but conspiratorial way to confirm that he was indeed the object of Martin’s epistolary desire. Though momentarily disconcerted, Martin managed to reach out and shake the man’s hand as he slid into the other side of the booth, as if they were old friends.

Between his signal to the waitress for a cup of coffee and a comment on the weather, he examined “Boris” and decided that he was not bad-looking, Russian or Polish maybe, with the stained fingers of a working-class man and a wiry build that appealed to Martin. “I’m a little nervous,” he confessed. “I’ve never really done this before.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Engaged—you?”

Boris raised his left hand to display a wedding ring. “Married.”

“Does she know?” Martin whispered.

“Are you fucking crazy?”

“Just paranoid. So where is she right now?” Martin thought of Amanda at work at Louise Bourgeois’s studio in Brooklyn.

“Out of town.” Boris frowned. “So you really haven’t ever done this?”

“No,” Martin responded a little aggressively, as if the idea were insulting. “You?”

Boris stirred his coffee. “So you want to come over?”

Martin started to say sorry, he didn’t but once again was vetoed by something else that directed him to pause for a few seconds while he looked at the last rays of daylight reflecting off the back of a spoon on his saucer. “Okay, sure,” he said, as if accepting an invitation to go play a game of checkers.

They soon arrived in the apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up on Tenth Street. Breathless from both anticipation and the ascent, Martin followed Boris through a rusty kitchen and a cluttered bedroom to a living room, this last space illuminated by a dusty twilight that filtered through a pair of large windows, which judging from the coagulated paint around the frames, were sealed shut. Boris wordlessly began to unbutton his shirt, prompting Martin to do the same, which led to a rather somber removal of pants and underwear, this last item providing a stark reminder of what exactly they were doing here and led them to approach each other, tentatively at first and then with the overwrought ferocity of bad actors as they fell groping onto a brown corduroy couch.

Even as it happened, Martin felt perplexed by what had driven him here and wished that he could fly back to his apartment, purged of all desire except for Amanda. He remembered getting wasted in college, those magical nights when, two-thirds of the way through a party, at say 2:00
A.M.
, he would arrive at a perfectly lambent moment of intoxication and desire, when the world became plastic and
surreal as he fell into the arms of his teammates, sliding down their sturdy, muscular frames to his knees as they caressed his thirsty lips with the end of the beer tap. At the time, there was nothing he wanted more than to cross that unspoken line, yet now that it was happening, exactly as he had fantasized, he could barely stop from laughing at the disappointment he felt, and was consoled only by the growing certainty that he would never do this again. But determined to go through with it, he felt a saliva-moistened thumb twist his nipple, a tongue in his ear, his cock being gripped by a hand that looked like it could break it; he saw himself as if from afar, in a series of freeze-frame poses that both alluded to and mocked the pornographic overtones of the encounter, until at last he gave up and for the briefest of seconds knew what it meant to be tied to the tracks as a train roared overhead, giving him a taste of what his dreams had long promised and for once did not fail to deliver.

As soon as it was over—and though it felt like an eternity, only six minutes had elapsed—he returned to his senses. To see their naked, cum-streaked bodies made his spirits plummet, and as he glanced around the room, he was convinced that, as at any crime scene, the arrival of the authorities was imminent. Feeling polluted and ruined, he made his escape as quickly as possible with no objection from Boris, who watched him leave with a knowing—and to Martin, annoying—smirk. He hated Boris at that second almost as much as he hated himself.

Walking home, he began to feel better; after all, he had gotten away with it, and Amanda would never have to know. There had been no fucking, and he felt confident that there never would be, so for once AIDS was not a concern—to the extent that the disease was always lurking, even in his fantasies, as the inevitable outcome of such twisted desires—or more to the point, he would not be dying from sex with Boris. Thus his disgust quickly mutated into a more
familiar detachment. He decided that gay sex was not unlike a drug; he was happy to have tried it but did not see himself becoming addicted. He replayed the previous hour in his mind with the sort of satisfaction of a job well done, and, for the first time since he could remember, felt certain he was completely and permanently free from desire for another man.

A
S
M
ARTIN RETURNED
to the present on a very different walk home, he found himself in a less compacted crowd, and one that on the whole seemed more sullen and reflective than the one he had encountered earlier, as if the reality of what they had collectively witnessed was finally starting to sink in. As Martin continued to dwell on the episode with Boris—along with the many more that followed, most with men he could no longer begin to recall beyond the vaguest details—he felt relief and a form of gratitude (to the extent that such things were even possible in the larger context of this moment) in light of the murky, delusional waters from which he had arisen. For many years, sex had presented itself as an ordeal through which he could never pass without “collateral damage”—in his case a combination of guilt and denial—which over time had impeded his ability or desire to distinguish between what was “safe” and “unsafe,” at least in the heat of the moment, and it was only after testing positive that he learned to act with more patience and consideration, for himself and for others.

Similarly, in a way that had been far beyond him twenty years earlier, he could now appreciate the advantages being gay offered him, not only in terms of access to the infinite reserves of seriously attractive men in New York City—some percentage of whom could be counted on to return his interest—but also for allowing him to see the world through different eyes—his own—to find beauty that in the past he would have overlooked or ignored in the effort to appear
different than he really was. As Martin considered this, he felt a spark of desire—though more abstract than physical, a form of optimism, really—that he knew would be difficult if not impossible to reconcile with everything he had just witnessed (both in the present and in his memories), not to mention the accompanying waves of shock and sadness that continued periodically to wash through him and make him weak in the knees as he headed north. However small or illogical, he knew it was there, and he did not want to question or—worst of all—malign it; instead he resolved to keep it burning in a remote corner of his mind, unexamined for the moment but somehow reassuring as he returned his attention to the more pressing problem of getting home.

He was distracted by the sight of a young suit, maybe in his late twenties, in a double-breasted coat and a candy-striped tie, with shaggy hair and aviator shades; he wasn’t walking with anyone, and his vaguely distracted, antagonistic aura seemed both appropriate and frankly seductive to Martin. But now that he was forty-one and not, say, twenty-nine—when the fate of the universe had so often seemed to hang in the balance of possessing a stranger—Martin easily restrained himself from making any kind of overture. There would be other days, perhaps, but what could he possibly say today—a disaster day—that wouldn’t sound ridiculously trite and mundane, so that he would be left wanting to slit his wrists the second the words left his mouth? He again considered the multitudes around him and realized that each person had a story, yet—at this juncture—he could not bear the thought of hearing a single one.

NEW YORK CITY, 1978. In the fleeting image of a dream, Maria could see her parents at home asleep, in their bedroom underneath the attic. On the roof, a little silver light landed like a snowflake and burrowed down to ignite an exposed electrical wire next to a shopping bag full of old Popsicle-stick stage sets. While the first flames seemed innocent enough, small and curious as they explored their new surroundings, licking here and there, in just a few seconds they grew into a crackling fire and then a rabid inferno that ate through the ceiling to ravage John and Gina, whose souls had departed long before their bodies dissolved into the molten memories of their daughter’s childhood. Delivered to her in the hazy fog of awakening, this image was as ephemeral as a black-winged moth in the night, and so it fluttered away before Maria was fully conscious of it, although she knew it was true because Kathy was holding her and they both were weeping inconsolably. Maria already felt the shock and grief and worst of all the guilt, which made her long to follow her parents in death—but not her grandmother Bea, who was safe visiting Maria’s uncle for the weekend—and not painlessly, either, but like Saint Hippolytus to be drawn and quartered by wild horses.

Though she did not die in the hours and days that followed, a period that took her back to Pittsburgh to witness the charred remains of her home before she was shuttled around by an assortment of relatives, Maria felt increasingly numb, so that there were many times when she was sure her heart was beating slower and slower, and she was led to wish that it would stop completely. She was installed in her aunt and uncle’s house, where she shared a bedroom with Bea,
and where the two of them were prone to view each other with a mix of shock and a kind of wariness or survivor’s guilt as they were to find themselves clutched in each other’s arms with tears of disbelief running down their cheeks, just as they had done when Maria was a child but now without any acting. When she thought of her old life, the one she had inhabited just a week earlier, Maria saw two versions of herself—a singing one and a nonsinging one—and she could remember thinking that the singing one had taken her to beautiful, peaceful sanctuaries, whereas the nonsinging one existed in the boring and functional world she had otherwise tolerated; but in her new life, both of these seemed to be disappearing islands from which she had been cast adrift.

She managed to sing one last time, at the funeral, and even those most disinclined to the emotional tides of music marveled at the power of Maria’s voice in the coruscating light coming through the stained glass above the altar, a sign that the deceased had not, after all, lived in vain. For a moment Maria forgot where she was, seduced by the familiar scent of flowers and the iridescent pinwheel spinning before her eyes; except as she sang, the smell made her nauseated and the colors made her dizzy, so that she had to put out her hand to steady herself, and though she wouldn’t have thought it possible, she was left more bereft knowing that this magical landscape was no longer one in which she felt at home.

W
HEN
M
ARIA RETURNED
to school the following week, she went to her classes and ignored the stares of the students who often regarded her with less sympathy than awe, wanting to involve themselves in the fanfare surrounding such a tragedy. In the past, there had been much she hated about her life—school, her classmates, her summer job—and things she loved: mostly singing, but also her parents, the thought of whom now filled her with guilt and regret as she
remembered what she had done to exclude her mother from the trip to New York. It made her feel reluctant to do anything but float through the day somewhat aimlessly, like a fallen leaf in the wind. There were those, she knew, who detected this change in her and tried to console and reassure her. Her aunt and uncle and grandmother spoke to her about God; Kathy Warren, who drove her to the mall and helped her pick out new clothes, encouraged her to sing; Anna Prus, who called from New York, prodded Maria to describe the most mundane details of her day. Maria did not resist these conversations but found herself saying things to please her audience and then doing quite the opposite, such as when she told Kathy and Anna that she was starting to practice when in reality she would sit in her room and absently stare at the Indian-head nickel her father had given to her. It was not a malevolent form of lying—she said these things with a vague intention to follow through—but a resistance to returning to her old self that she ultimately had no desire to overcome.

There were implications to this change at school, where her former, monolithic disdain for her classmates was also something she no longer had the energy to uphold, particularly when she was the center of so much perverse attention. A pudgy girl named Rhonda, who sat next to Maria in the back of her math class, one day invited her out to the smoking area, and Maria shrugged and went along, and didn’t really mind when Rhonda taught her how to inhale and hold the smoke in, so that it made her throat and lungs burn and her stomach queasy. Nor did she refuse when Rhonda—who wore black eyeliner and sometimes smoked her cigarettes through a long filter like rich people in old movies—asked Maria to go to a party that weekend. It wasn’t that Maria particularly liked Rhonda, but she didn’t hate her, either, so it was just easier to tag along and listen to her pronouncements about how most people were stupid, selfish losers. They went to the house of some kid whose parents were
away or upstairs, and although Maria didn’t say more than a word to anyone—except a few to Rhonda, who periodically appeared with things to smoke or drink—she liked that nobody hassled her about singing or anything else from her past or (former) future life. She sat on a windowsill, all but invisible in the dark, waiting for the next thing to carry her away.