The Metropolis (23 page)

When he considered differences between his old life and his new, the most important was not the atmospheric light, or the Turks and Arabs who ran the markets—or even the Viennese themselves—but Eduard. To say they had fallen in love undoubtedly captured the intensity of their first months together, when even the briefest separations—during a phase when they had traveled back and forth between the two cities—had been enough to send Lucien into despair and for the first time he had understood what Gérard had meant on that night at the St.-Germain; and now that he and Eduard lived together, Lucien felt he could have predicted the more mundane if pleasurable aspects of love, the obvious and expected benefits of sharing a bed and meals and evenings at the theater, along with the trivial annoyances and spats that occasionally accompanied the same.

What he could not have predicted, and what he thought about as he walked up the stairs laden with spices, flowers, and pastries, was how to live with someone was in effect to become that person; it was not just that he sometimes threw his shoulders back or held his teacup in a way that mimicked Eduard, or even the uncountable number of small jokes and shared gestures that seemed to carry one day into the next, but most of all how Lucien found that he could—when alone, walking through the city or sitting in a café—observe a scene with Eduard’s brand of intellectual objectivity. Just as Eduard professed to admire the fire Lucien brought to his singing—which he assured Lucien would be reflected in the final plans for the opera house—Lucien
knew that Eduard calmed him down; he was less likely to find himself in tears, and his dreams were no longer filled with endless hallways through which he ran panicked, unable ever to find the door.

He remembered the first time he had seen one of Eduard’s buildings, a church a few kilometers west of their apartment, just off the newly widened Lerchenfelderstrasse. The structure was not particularly remarkable—as Eduard had warned him, his original design had been scaled back by church officials for both aesthetic and financial reasons—but inside he was confronted by a staggering display of stenciled patterns spiraling up each of many walls and braided columns, painted in soft hues of gold, teal, and burgundy, and interlaced with repeating motifs of flowers, leaves, and fleurs-de-lis; above it all hovered an enormous dome that resonated with the mottled blue tone of a robin’s egg, as if to beckon those below with the luminescent promise of emancipation.

“I feel like I’m flying,” Lucien remarked as he made a wide circle before taking a seat on a pew next to Eduard.

“That’s the idea.” Eduard grinned bashfully, clearly pleased to have made a favorable impression.

“I can’t believe it was controversial,” Lucien noted more seriously, for Eduard had described to him in some detail the factions who had objected to the design.

“I couldn’t believe it, either,” said Eduard, in a harsh whisper that Lucien had never heard, while staring through him with a dejected anger that seemed improbably close to the surface, given that the building had been completed several years earlier. Eduard briefly shook his head as if to drive the vision away before he smiled at Lucien and continued in a more placid, resigned tone. “Honestly, there’s no accounting for taste—or bad taste, as the case may be. They wanted angels and cherubs, and I—or we—insisted that color and pattern were more than enough.”

“Sometimes I really do envy my father,” Lucien noted as he again looked up. “At least his work is measured in numbers and results. Even if it takes a long time—and I know from him that it usually does—eventually either you cure a disease or you don’t.” Since moving to Vienna, Lucien regularly received updates from Guillaume, who in his son’s absence continued to work as feverishly as ever, both in his own lab and at the university, on the same projects that had occupied him for as long as Lucien could remember. Although Guillaume frequently emphasized that a cure for any of his diseases—this was how he often referred to them, as if they were his charges—remained on the distant horizon, he seemed satisfied with his progress. Or maybe, Lucien sometimes considered, his father didn’t really care about finding a cure for cholera—much less aging—so long as he was engaged in the work, which because it was driven by a love for his dead wife, brought him closer to her. But it was a solitary endeavor, and Guillaume—and in this respect he was very much a scientist, at least as Lucien understood him—showed no sign of suffering from the kind of artistic angst to which Eduard had just alluded.

Eduard nodded. “What’s also good about science is that it’s constantly expanding—adding new knowledge on top of the old, or replacing it—which is something a lot of art critics—the same ones constantly bemoaning the slightest change because it offends a nostalgia they hold for some lost period of their youth—would be well served to understand.” He smiled wryly at Lucien. “Look at what happened to Wagner.”

“Don’t remind me.” Lucien rolled his eyes. “But how do you know if it’s good—if it’s really original and not just contrived—when you’re doing it? Nobody sets out to make something limp and derivative, right?”

“In my experience, you never really do,” Eduard mused, and
Lucien could not help but note a certain melancholy that seemed to hover over him as he spoke, as if the obvious success of the result had been tainted by the ordeal of getting there. “You just have to trust a gut feeling—an intuition—and hope.”

T
HAT NIGHT AT
dinner with Eduard, as they reflected on the previous three years, Lucien playfully tested the hypothesis that he had changed—and for the better—since coming to Vienna.

“You think?” Eduard replied. “How so?”

“I’m more mature,” Lucien ventured. “Don’t you remember how, when we met, you were always saying how young I was?”

Eduard laughed. “That’s because you were always in tears.”

“Yes, I suppose I was.” Lucien sighed, and smiled as he thought of himself breaking down at the door of Eduard’s Paris hotel, then again when Eduard took him to Beethoven’s apartment for the first time, and then when he first saw the green copper dome of the Karlskirche, built to honor the victims of a devastating plague in 1713, which had annihilated half the city’s population.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of—it was endearing,” Eduard said more reflectively. “You know, I also cried when you left for Paris the first time—”

“No you didn’t!”

“Of course I did,” Eduard said. “It may not have been an epic tantrum, but I can still feel the back of my hand as I held it up to wave to you, and how it felt as the tears evaporated in the wind.”

“I was on the train,” Lucien replied. “You never told me—you were always so stoic.”

“Well, one of us had to be.” Eduard grinned as he picked up his fork.

As Heinrich cleared their plates from the table, it occurred to
Lucien that—as with the city itself—it was impossible to know every facet of another person; it was a chaotic undercurrent of love that he wouldn’t have been able to predict but that he now felt able to embrace, given his faith in the venture as a whole.

Rather than expound on this thought, he turned the question around. “So—do you think you’ve changed?”

“Yes, I hope so,” Eduard said after a few moments. “Before, I was miserable, and now I’m—”

“Slightly less miserable?”

“Exactly.” Eduard leaned back in his chair. “Today after my meeting, I was talking to August,” he said, referring to an associate in his office, “and telling him about our dinner, and how three years had passed since you moved here. And he said he was quite aware of the fact, given that I’ve not really yelled at anyone during the same period, or at least not the way I used to.”

“You used to yell?”

“Not every day, but I was a lot more likely to snap.” He smiled at Lucien. “You might say it was the wrong kind of emotion—or at least not the sort of thing you want to put on display.”

“That’s hard to imagine,” Lucien admitted, although he felt pleased by the idea that he had affected Eduard in this way.

“What’s strange to consider now—or perhaps not—is that I really had no idea what I was like, or how miserable I was. I thought it was normal to scream at someone about stupid things beyond anyone’s control—a delay in a delivery or a shortage of materials, inevitable problems that crop up in any project. Or even worse—if you can imagine—were the days when I’d find myself completely incapacitated by pressure, whether real or not—or probably some combination—so that August would have to come over and get Heinrich to drag me out of bed to finish our plans on time or whatever else to make some deadline.” For a second he stared through
Lucien, lost in the memory. “It’s like I was possessed by demons, but didn’t know it.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Lucien woke up groggy; they had enjoyed more than a few glasses of absinthe before going to bed, which in combination with so many kisses and caresses never failed to leave him with the sense of having spent hours in a moonlit field of wild-flowers, pressed hard against the wet earth and staring up through the blossoms at the slowly spinning stars. He turned his head toward the clock; it was past nine, and Eduard—with his usual discipline—had already left for work; if a part of Lucien regretted his absence, he was also relieved that Eduard’s demons remained so far at bay.

At the breakfast table, Heinrich offered him a cup of coffee and a croissant with
confiture et beurre
, along with the morning newspaper. When a few minutes later he opened this last item, Lucien noticed a small headline that made him drop his butter knife on the table, where it landed with a clang. “Wagner Rescued by Ludwig,” he whispered, and then repeated it with more excitement to Heinrich, who was passing through the dining room on his way to water the orchids. Not believing it at first, Lucien three times read a short account of how Ludwig II, the recently ascended King of Bavaria, had in one of his first official acts summoned Richard Wagner to Munich to relieve him of his financial debts and to grant the composer an official position at the Munich Hoftheater, where his new operas would be produced.
Tristan und Isolde
was to be the first, with a world premiere scheduled to occur in March of the following year, assuming—and this, too, he read aloud, as if to confirm that he was not dreaming—suitable leads could be found.

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. Martin stood up from a park bench at 110th and Riverside Drive, where he had been resting under the Medusa-like branches of an allée of American elms. The unusual silence of the surrounding neighborhood—the empty playgrounds, the lack of stereos and traffic—made him think of the suburbs, and as he resumed his walk north, he wondered if the attacks would result in large numbers of people moving out of the city. It was an impulse he could understand, given that he had left the more manic environment of the East Village—where he had lived for close to a decade—for his current house in Washington Heights, this during a period of his life when he, too, had felt under siege—although he would not have used such an expression, he realized, until today—forcing him to take steps that might have seemed drastic, if not reactionary, to a younger version of himself. The most important of these steps, not coincidentally taken just a few months after he was diagnosed with HIV, had been the decision to switch law firms, effectively jettisoning his former career as an entertainment lawyer—i.e., representing bands—for a new (and ultimately, just as he had hoped, far more lucrative) practice negotiating technology ventures.

Of less practical importance, but equally emblematic of a larger need to “reshape” himself, was his growing appreciation for opera at a time when he had felt saturated with rock. Given this, it hardly seemed coincidental—at least in retrospect—that the opportunity to buy his house had arisen after he saw his first
Tristan und Isolde
, just a few weeks before starting his new job. He could still remember the performance; though he had suffered through much of the first act—the music felt lugubrious, and the vaunted dissonance failed to
impress him—he managed to return for the second, and as the piece moved deeper into the love duet, he felt his resistance erode, so that, as the doomed pair sang about their longing for love and death, the music seemed not only to locate the anger and grief that had been weighing on him like a swallowed rock but also to dissolve it into something benign, even potable.

Too stimulated to go home after the show, he left the Met and meandered down Broadway to Joséphine, the Viennese café on Fiftieth Street. Inside he admired the tall, beveled mirrors, marble-topped tables, and dark wood paneling, all of which seemed to recall old Europe perfectly without denigrating it, while the mix of decadent society types, artists, whores, and junkies added an intoxicating fin de siècle verisimilitude to the scene. He ordered an Irish whiskey and casually watched a table of attractive young men, whose animated conversation and games of flirtation further entranced and soothed him with the thought that there were some good things about the world that would never change.

The room was filling up when Martin was approached by an older woman—perhaps in her sixties—who caressed a long strand of black pearls in one hand as she addressed him. “
Excusez-moi,
” she began and then switched to English, “would you mind if my entourage joined you? As you can see, tables are now scarce, and I see no reason for a handsome young man to sit alone.”

Martin did not mind. “
S’il vous plaît,
” he responded in his rather tortured French.

“
Je m’appelle
Ghislaine,” she continued and nodded to a man who appeared to be around the same age, “and this is my husband, Arthur.”

Martin also nodded to the gentleman, whose intense eyes and lean body did not fail to catch his attention. Perhaps it was for this reason that he was less than surprised by Ghislaine’s next words:
“I am also accompanied by Jean,” she said and patted the hand of a younger man next to her, “who—because I believe in candor at my age—I will disclose is my
amant du jour.
” Martin nodded at this man, whose long chin and messy blond hair pleased him somewhat less, as Ghislaine turned to the fourth member of their party, a man who—thanks to his robust build, length of the nose, curve of the ear, and swarthy skin tone—bore more than a passing resemblance to Martin, as if they both had ancestral roots in the same village in southern Europe.