The Metropolis (33 page)

Back downstairs in his office, Martin stared at his bookshelves with relief and—to be fair—some sadness that he would never again consult
Corbin on Contracts
. He decided that he felt a new appreciation for Hank’s brand of pragmatism, which however crude contained an element of honesty that had long eluded Martin, at least until now. Beyond any nostalgia, he acknowledged a new desire to forgive Hank, and as the logical part of his brain asked exactly what for, it finally occurred to Martin that he was thinking not of his dead father but of himself.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, M
ARTIN
arrived home in time to take Dante to the vet, where he was promptly diagnosed with ringworm and taken to the back for treatment. By now, Martin not only had acclimated to the idea of permanently adopting Dante but also was even made so disturbingly bereft by this small separation that he wondered if he might be approaching some line of sanity.

“Do I look insane to you?” he asked the receptionist.

“Yeah, kind of,” she answered. “Do I?”

Reassured by this exchange, he sat down to wait and was distracted by a small “adoption center”—a few cages, actually, stacked on top of one another—that sat near the front desk and in which he noticed a cat that looked strikingly like Dante, i.e., small and gray, with the same bottle green eyes. Martin tried to ignore a nauseating certainty that like any obsession, his new one with Dante could be sated only by adding more to the mix, so he pretended to inquire casually with the receptionist about the cat, which he soon learned was a female; like Dante she was a Russian Blue, a year old, or slightly younger.

“And nobody’s adopted her?” Martin asked incredulously, as if the streets were not teeming with stray cats.

“Not yet,” she answered and added that the cat in question had been brought in from a Dumpster in Park Slope a few months earlier along with a litter of kittens.

“Where are the kittens?”

“They’re gone.” She shrugged. “Nobody wants a mother—she’s ‘used’—and she’s a little stunted from having kittens so early.”

Martin expressed renewed horror at the callousness of the world.

The receptionist laughed at him. “If you’re so upset, why don’t you take her?”

“I might,” said Martin, trying to sound like he needed to be convinced. But in a gesture to his more pragmatic side, he resolved to take a few minutes to ponder the idea.

He leaned back in his seat and observed an older woman sitting across from him who had four carriers in front of her, each with a different pair of eyes peering out. That’s me in ten years, Martin thought morosely as he noted her disheveled trench coat and the frayed navy blue scarf tied around her head, although on second glance he decided she was not inelegant and was even pleasantly reclusive behind a large pair of sunglasses. There was something familiar about her, and as he tried to figure out where he might have seen her, she pushed up her sunglasses and addressed him.

“You really should have more than one,” she stated, having obviously overheard Martin’s conversation.

After his earlier experience with Hank, Martin was not unprepared to recognize his dead mother, Jane, or an older version of her who had somehow moved to New York City to live with cats. It was not just her voice he recognized but her frank blue eyes, which had not aged at all. As he had done with Hank, he resisted the urge to shout or perhaps weep—or otherwise to demand an explanation for why this was happening—and instead considered how best to address her. Nor could he completely ignore a slight annoyance at the
intrusive nature of the advice, which as much as he wanted to hear he had not exactly asked for.

“How many—how many do you have?” he managed in what he feared might come off as a needlessly restrained, if not paranoid tone, after deciding that—at least to start—it would be best to keep the conversation on point.

“Seven.” Jane spoke softly but also slightly rolled her eyes as if slightly mocking herself—or possibly him—just as she used to do. “They’re my children now.”

“I can appreciate that,” Martin responded more affectionately, and then he told her how he had come to adopt Dante. He considered how much easier it was to talk to his mother as an adult and felt gratified as they spent a few minutes discussing cat food and—of all things—flushable litter. Then he remembered all that they had never said to each other, and unlike when he was a teenager, he saw no reason now to hide anything from her. “I’m never having real children,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”

If his intent was to surprise her, her placid smile contained no trace of anything but acknowledgment; she clearly knew what he meant. “I think you’re being a little too literal,” she replied. “Parenting is as much about responsibility—and not just for someone else—as it is about conception.”

Martin resisted the impulse to argue with her, to tell her that, except for a few admittedly serious mistakes, he had been responsible, or at least as responsible as most people he knew. The achingly familiar quality of her voice reminded him of when they used to discuss books, and he admired a degree of conversational finesse he now realized was very similar to what had brought him so much success in his work as a deal maker.

“You absolutely should adopt her,” she continued. “She’ll bring you a lot of joy.”

Martin nodded. Something had changed between them; she seemed so much less wounded and unhappy than in his memories, and he was encouraged by the idea that the same could no doubt be said of him. “What do you think I should name her?” he asked with a laugh, pointing at the cardboard sign attached to the outside of the cage. “She’s obviously not a Mango.”

“Given that you already have Dante, wouldn’t Beatrice be appropriate?” she proposed, using the Italian pronunciation.

“Beatrice,” Martin repeated as if hypnotized. He remembered how he and Jane had always shared an intuition, and if he felt some regret at how needlessly frightened of it he had been as a teenager, he was now consoled by the thought that they were more like reflections of each other, each able to follow where the other chose to walk.

He went to the cage where Beatrice cowered and trembled in the corner and looked up at him with wet eyes, much more fearful than Dante. Her face was also heart-shaped, but smaller and more angular, except for some very long and prominent nose whiskers that in the reflection of the light gave her the appearance of a walrus. She was really quite tiny, Martin realized, and a bit bedraggled, with some of her fur matted down on the sides of her face and along her belly. Her tail, he further noticed, appeared to be only five or six inches long—perhaps half the length of Dante’s—with a little knob on the end, which though not raw or infected made him wonder if it had been cut off in what he imagined had not been an easy life. She covered her face with a paw, and he noticed that this, too, was misshapen; it looked like a mitten. He counted at least seven toes, including one that had an impressive nail in the shape of a lobster claw.

“Did you see her foot?” he asked as he turned back to his mother, who had pushed the sunglasses down over her eyes again.

“She’s polydactyl,” she replied, her tone still recognizable to him.
“You get that in cats, but it’s good luck, I promise—take her home, and you’ll see.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON, THE
three of them—Martin, Dante, and Beatrice—arrived at Martin’s house, where he was disappointed to find that Beatrice was extremely skittish and refused to budge from a spot under the bed, even after he made clear his intention to rescue her from the cruel life she had thus far endured. Days passed, and he was at times disconcerted by his failure even to touch her. Dante by contrast was completely fixated; he spent hours roaming the perimeter of the bed and whining until she emerged to eat or use the litter box, at which point he stayed two inches behind her unless Beatrice—clearly ambivalent about the attention—lost patience and gave him a quick swat in the nose with one of her big paws.

As Martin remembered how much calmer things had been with just Dante, he questioned his attachment to the cats, not to mention his mother’s advice. Although Beatrice gradually emerged and began to explore the house, she still seemed petrified of Martin, and would dash out of any room where he happened to find her. After two weeks she still refused to eat if he remained in the kitchen, except when he offered her a piece of cocktail shrimp or a slice of turkey breast—but only from Zabar’s, and no more than one day old—which she would deign to receive after emitting a demure, plaintive meow, no louder than the creak of a closing door.

As more weeks passed, he knew that there was no possibility of giving her back; Dante would never have forgiven him, and his mother’s words about responsibility continued to resonate. He tried to be patient and remind himself—now that he was giving himself to the pursuit of art and maybe even love—that there was really no deadline. It wasn’t like she was ripping up the furniture or breaking
things, and he was charmed on those occasions when she did allow him to remain in her presence, for she did not seem ungrateful, just shy. If Martin was surprised to note the existence of such rarefied tastes in one whose life had to this point allowed so little opportunity to indulge—such as when he presented her with a plate of shrimp, cut into tiny bites—he in no way discouraged her, for he did not want to deny his own awakening in this regard.

NEW YORK CITY, 1981. Just as Maria had hoped, the resolve she felt after breaking up with Richie catapulted her into her final year at Juilliard with unprecedented confidence. She sang with more poise and clarity, had better timing, and mastered difficult coloratura that just a year earlier would have been beyond her, all of which more than compensated for the occasional pang of missing Richie. A few weeks into the semester, when she auditioned for
The Magic Flute
, she felt only a trace of suspense as she waited for the results: who, she asked, could be better suited for the Queen of the Night, the unhinged, vengeful matriarch attempting to incite her daughter to murder? The answer, at least this year at Juilliard, was nobody, and Maria promptly began work on her first fully staged production, complete with costumes, makeup, and sets; a famous conductor in residence who ran music rehearsals; and a famous director in residence who staged the singers.

The weeks rushed by in a frenzy of preparation; in addition to
her music and stage rehearsals, Maria studied biographies of Mozart, read theses on Egyptian initiation rituals and Masonic imagery, and scoured the Juilliard archives for audio and visual recordings, the highlight of which was a 1967 Lucia Popp “Wrath of Hell” aria. Except this aria was so excruciatingly wondrous that—as Maria absorbed it for a third time—she was literally knocked unconscious by the vengeance and fury on display. She slumped to the floor, where she remained until the next morning, when she was revived by an alarmed librarian who discovered her in the A/V room adjacent to the stacks. Apparently uninjured but groggy, Maria staggered back to her apartment, where in a state approaching the catatonic she realized that all of her brilliant plans over the past weeks were nothing but a flimsy façade. Her mind was a void; her ideas about how to bathe each note of her Queen of the Night in the mystical and Masonic waters from which the opera arose had vanished, and worse, the music now seemed inane and nonsensical, just as the idea of singing what was a very challenging part now fatigued her with its pointlessness.

Mystified about the reasons for this condition and increasingly demoralized, she slept for a few hours. When she woke up, she found Linda in the kitchen making toast. “I know what’s wrong,” her roommate declared after Maria had given her a sullen overview of the situation. “But you’re not going to want to hear it.”

“What? Tell me.”

“Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not—just tell me.”

Linda shrugged. “You’re blocked.”

“Blocked?”

“Yeah—it’s been what, like two months since Richie, and before that you were used to it all the time.”

Maria rubbed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you need sex.”

“Right,” Maria scoffed as she remembered why Linda’s refusal to take problems seriously sometimes got on her nerves.

“Sorry to break it to you,” Linda replied. “But you can only work so much.”

“So, what?” Maria replied, now irritated. “Am I supposed to just pick up some guy off the street?”

“Mope all you want,” Linda said as she rinsed her plate off in the sink, “but you’re the one who passed out in the library and spent the day walking around like a zombie only three weeks before your Queen of the Night.”

A
LTHOUGH
M
ARIA DID
not concede the point to Linda, the conversation motivated her to cast off the yoke of sedentary ambivalence in favor of a walk to campus, where she spent a few minutes idly staring at the bulletin board. She spotted an announcement for a master class being offered by Ronald Spelton and knew she should go—she had been planning to—given that Spelton was a Juilliard alum currently playing Rodrigo in
Don Carlos
at the Met. As she stood wavering, someone—and for some reason, she could tell it was a man even before she turned her head—walked up and addressed her. “If you’re weighing your options,” he said, nodding at the flyer and speaking with a slight accent she couldn’t quite place, “Ronald’s excellent.”

Maria tried to decide if she was annoyed that a stranger had offered unsolicited advice but figured that, under the circumstances, any distraction was a good idea. Also—whoever he was—he seemed important; he was maybe fifty or so, his wide shoulders and slight paunch giving him the look of a knighted actor of the British stage, while a bronze hue to his skin and an impressive nose made her suspect he was Italian or Greek. She guessed that he was a singer and—based on his first-name relationship with Ronald Spelton and a certain ease with which he stood, hands in pockets, as if above the fray—a
successful one. “Yeah, I might go,” she said and immediately regretted the impetuousness of her reply. “I’m sorry,” she quickly added. “I’m having one of the worst days ever.”