The Metropolis (26 page)

B
ACK IN
V
IENNA
, Lucien ignored Eduard’s advice not to think about it and gave himself fully to the torpor of the wait. He spent hours lying on the couch, where occasionally a cat walked across his chest or Heinrich delivered lemonade and ice. Even his father’s most recent letters from Paris were filled with an uncharacteristic degree of frustration—apparently Guillaume’s latest round of experiments had resulted in little more than new questions—that seemed to validate Lucien’s ennui.

As June gave way to July, the increasing heat left him wanting to do little more than watch the sweat form on his arms and evaporate in the twilight. He found it impossible to concentrate on anything but
the audition, and any earlier convictions about his performance gave way to new doubts and forgotten details, along with an inability to determine whether they were real or imagined. He could almost hear his voice wavering where it most certainly had not, and it seemed that Wagner had been less impressed than chagrined that Lucien—a detestable Frenchman—would dare to sing his work.

“Why haven’t they written?” he asked Eduard in a panic after most of July had passed—almost twice the length of time Bülow had initially indicated Lucien should expect to wait—and he had yet to hear a thing.

“Because they’ve completely forgotten you,” responded Eduard. “Didn’t you see the newspaper today? They cast someone else—another Parisian, I think?”

Lucien ignored him. “Do you think I should write?”

“Of course not,” Eduard said more earnestly as he shook his head. “I think they’re both very busy and perhaps have one or two other things to finish before they confirm that you’re the singer they want—”

“I’m tired of waiting!”

Eduard laughed—they had discussed this many times—and he pushed the rest of his strudel toward Lucien. “Here—eat this and you’ll feel better. I promise.”

“That would be nice.” Lucien sighed, but accepted the proffered remedy.

When he finally received word from Bülow in mid-August offering him the role, with rehearsals slated to begin in October, it didn’t quite meet Lucien’s expectations. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel a certain ecstasy or validation, or that he didn’t enjoy the party Eduard threw on his behalf, but he found himself worrying about leaving Eduard for so many months and about whether the Bavarian cuisine would make him sick; he perversely wondered if his audition had perhaps been too good, so that Wagner and Bülow would be disappointed when they
discovered his German was not as flawless as he had led them to believe, or his upper range not as uniformly consistent as the piece required.

W
HEN HE RETURNED
to Munich, the theater was already a beehive of construction. Ships, castles, and costumes needed to be built or sewn, and then rebuilt or resewn when they inevitably fell short of the maestro’s expectations, and with increasingly extravagant materials, including African mahogany, Mesopotamian lapis, Chinese silk, and the finest wigs from Italy. Although such expenditures were known to raise eyebrows among the king’s advisers, Lucien was pleased that his own fee was on par with those of leading singers in Paris and Vienna. Besides, his attention was fully occupied by the music and the staging, either of which could be maddening given that Wagner’s ideas for every word, gesture, and glance seemed to change on a daily basis. Lucien was regularly put under the microscope and was often left weeping—or seething—with frustration after having failed to deliver exactly what the maestro wanted.

“Do you want to know what your problem is?” asked his Isolde—a Berliner named Pelagie Gluck (who, despite sharing a surname, claimed no relation to the famous composer)—one day after a particularly grueling rehearsal.

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Lucien said as he removed a towel from his head. In contrast to him, she managed to make perfectly clear when she had been through a scene enough times, informing the maestro that he would have to wait until the next rehearsal if he didn’t want her to go insane.

“You believe in it too much,” she said, as she retied her black hair in a ribbon behind her head.

“And you don’t?”

“I’m here to sing, no more and no less,” she stated and then cupped her hands over his ears as she continued in a whisper. “If it
were me, I’d cut the whole thing in half—that would satisfy a lot of longing, right?”

Lucien could not help but laugh at the thought. If at first he had found her irreverence distasteful, and had even worried that it would somehow tarnish the production, by this point—in large part thanks to the strength of her voice—he was finding the opposite to be true; if anything, she made him understand that different avenues could be taken to the same place, with one not necessarily better than another. But like everyone in the company at different times, even Pelagie was not infallible, and there were days when he ended up consoling—or assuaging—her with the idea that they were doing something important and universal, even timeless and sublime, and for this reason owed it to the music—even more than to Wagner, as if he were a messenger and not the creator—to push ahead.

Except as often as Wagner preached that they were collectively engaged in the “music of the future,” and no matter how much Lucien was inclined to believe this, there were moments when he, too, felt crushed by a despondency that went deeper than his problems in rehearsal; it was the difference, he knew, between understanding the power of waves and actually being battered in the ocean. Gradually he came to attribute this lassitude to an almost constant exposure to the opera; it was not just the scale and its technical difficulty that were daunting—and different parts of the piece remained elusive for each musician—but an almost tangible weight that he had never before encountered, even during his many years at the St.-Germain. Like an airborne sickness, the music seemed to infect everyone—the singers, the crew, even the administrative staff—with a form of despair that drained them of any energy even before the day’s work began, as though they were hacking through a malaria-infested jungle. The sad wistfulness that came from constant exposure to a story of love and death was a component but in no way explained the overwhelming
sense of futility under which they labored, as if they were required each day to explain the ultimate purpose of life while knowing that the previous day’s answer was no longer viable.

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. It was close to three o’clock when Martin made it home. Already anticipating the cool air inside—which he kept at a constant sixty-seven degrees from April through October—he paused at the front door to take the keys out of his pocket when he felt something brush against his shin. “Whoa, Nellie,” he muttered as he looked down to find a very skinny gray cat peering up at him. Over the years, Martin had seen many strays cross through his front yard; at least a few of them, he knew, ended up in the basement of a nearby apartment building, where the super employed them to keep the mice and rats at bay. Because he had never been predisposed to pets, Martin pushed the cat away with his leg and was about to apologize for not being able to help when he examined it a bit more closely; it didn’t seem nearly as mangy as some of the others, and it occurred to him that maybe it had recently escaped from someone’s apartment, perhaps even in connection with the attacks downtown. The cat—clearly not afraid—looked back with a certain expectation and intensity that made Martin feel like he was being tested.

“Okay, wait here,” he said and went to retrieve from his kitchen a small plate, on which he poured some milk. While the cat drank,
Martin walked down the block to the apartment building, where he found the super’s wife watching television in the basement. She seemed a little dazed—like everyone, he supposed—as he briefly explained the situation and learned that she not only knew about the cat—and knew it was a “him”—but had been taking care of him for the better part of a week.

“So do you want me to bring him back?” Martin asked.

“No, not particularly.” She dragged on her cigarette and spoke as she exhaled. “Why don’t you keep him?”

“Do you think he belongs to someone?” Martin responded.

“Yeah—you.”

Martin made a low whistle. “I don’t know. I’m not really a cat guy—”

“Oh, Christ, have a heart.” She grinned luridly at him. “What is it, the goddam shittiest day in a hundred years or something? The least you can do is take care of a cat.” She disappeared into her apartment and returned carrying a few cans of food, a cardboard box, and some litter. “Look, try him for a few days, and if he doesn’t work out, bring him back—no questions asked.”

Martin felt powerless to say no as he reached through the door to receive the goods. “Okay, yeah—fine—a day or two,” he said when he recovered his voice. “Does he have a name?”

“You know, I think he does.” She put a hand on her hip. “What was my daughter calling him the other day—wait, I got it!—Dante.”

“Dante,” Martin repeated. “Why Dante?”

“Because he’s a poet?” she quipped and then shrugged. “I have no idea what goes through my daughter’s head half the time.”

Martin went back to his stoop, where he found Dante waiting for him in front of the door. “Well, go ahead then,” he said as he ushered the cat through. “I hope you like sixty-seven degrees,” he added,
thinking this might encourage the cat to find another arrangement more to his liking.

When Dante did not object, Martin invited him to look around. The cat—who seemed to understand the transaction—began to explore while Martin arranged the litter box in the downstairs bathroom and put away the food. He then spent a few minutes following the cat around as he tentatively poked his head into all of the rooms before going up to the living room, where he sat in front of the window. Given that this was exactly what Martin had been looking forward to—albeit with a drink in his hand, which he now prepared—he decided that, against all expectation, Dante actually had much to recommend him as a representative member of his species. He was attractive, with a bone structure more angular than round, and short fur, so that on the whole he resembled one of those ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs more than anything out of one of those idiotic Sunday comic strips. Furthermore, Dante’s large green eyes made him seem quite intelligent, or at least intelligent enough so Martin had to imagine that the cat—as though he were in fact the Italian poet after whom he may or may not have been named—would be able to speak a few words.

Martin finished his drink, pointed at his mouth, and patted his stomach. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Hun-gree?” he repeated, thinking that Dante might master the basics. “Shall we go see what we have to eat?” he added, and the cat amenably followed him downstairs into the kitchen, which at least partially confirmed Martin’s sense that he had acquired a seriously intelligent cat.

To Martin’s everlasting gratitude, he had replenished the refrigerator only two days earlier—and not two centuries, as it seemed—thanks to a trip to Zabar’s. He offered Dante a slice of turkey breast, which was readily accepted. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you could stand to put on a little weight,” declared Martin, who
then felt compelled to add: “You probably won’t be shocked to hear that I’m trying to lose a few pounds myself.”

Having addressed the needs of his new charge, Martin sliced himself two pieces of French sourdough; on one he spread his favorite Pierre Robert Camembert and on the other placed several slices of prosciutto di Parma and a sweet sopressata. These he took back to his study, along with a bottle of Shiraz he cradled in the nook of his elbow, a large wineglass, and an opener he carried in the fingers of his left hand, which in the course of the past hour or so had again started to ache. Dante, apparently full—although he did not say so, to Martin’s slight disappointment—sat quietly on the corner of the rug. “Good job,” he paternally addressed the cat, who looked through him with an utter lack of acknowledgment that Martin did not fail to appreciate, for it seemed to reinforce his expectation that Dante was not the sort who planned to run around breaking things, or even needed to be told otherwise.

After finishing his meal, Martin drifted into a state of semi-consciousness in front of the television and found himself confronted with alternating shots of the day’s video footage, first the improbable melding of an airplane with a skyscraper and then the tidal wave of rubble at street level. As disturbing as it was, he could not tear himself away from this waking dream; to hover over this unprecedented destruction was to appreciate its power, and even in his less than fully conscious state, he recognized the tug of addiction. This footage—more than nicotine, heroin, anonymous sex, alcohol, ibuprofen, processed sugar, Godard films such as
Contempt
and
Masculin-Féminin
, and the shrouded woman in
Infinite Jest
, but more beautiful and terrifying—had more damning allure than anything he had ever encountered. Were he to copy and edit it into a taped loop lasting an hour or more, he knew he would be doomed.

The ringing phone interrupted this chimera; he checked the
caller identification and saw that it was his sister. “Oh, shit, Suze—I’m sorry,” he apologized, explaining that he had walked the entire way home with no cell phone service and had just finished eating. “I also may or may not be adopting a cat,” he added before briefly describing how this had come about. “Which means I could need your advice.”

“Any time, big brother,” she offered reflexively, and in the next second mentioned that their uncle and aunt—i.e., Jane’s brother and his wife, with whom Suzie had lived during her high school years—had also been trying to reach him.

“Okay, thanks—I’ll call them,” Martin said.

Neither of them spoke for a few seconds, as though they didn’t want to acknowledge the real reason they were talking on a Tuesday afternoon, and Martin could imagine her running her hand through her short blond hair, the way she had always done when she was nervous. Unlike him, she was thin and waifish, with a button nose and impish brown eyes. Nobody ever believed they were related until it was explained—as if it weren’t obvious—that they were both adopted, and from different biological parents.