The Metropolis (37 page)

“Lovers? I don’t like the word either, if it’s any comfort to you,” Leo noted, “but yes, we’ve been together for quite some time.”

“But he’s really married to—?”

“Ghislaine? Oh yes—theirs is an old-fashioned alliance, which I think from the beginning dispensed with any pretense of connubial obligation. They occupy separate wings of the old house where they live in Paris—the Hôtel Georges—which is where I also stay for some portion of the year.”

Martin nodded. “Were you ever married?”

“Fortunately no—were you?”

Martin sighed. “Unfortunately yes.”

“So she didn’t know?”

“Well, no—at least not at first.”

“
Quelle catastrophe.
” Leo shook his head.

“I learned my lesson, so to speak.”

“I take it you rectified the situation?”

“I divorced, if that’s what you mean,” Martin clarified. “But I haven’t found anyone else.”

“
Le pauvre.
” Leo smiled but continued more reflectively. “Do you want to?”

“I think so.” Martin understood that Leo was indulging him but could not restrain himself in light of the odd exuberance and loneliness he felt. “But I’m not sure I’m made for marriage of any kind—I sometimes think it’s beyond me.”

“That sounds rather hopeless for someone your age,” Leo said. “Not that I’m trying to convince you.”

Because to this point he had told no one, not even his sister, about contracting HIV, Martin wanted to confide the true source of his doubts, namely his fear that he would be dead sooner rather than later. So he explained to Leo what had happened, how he had lived for the past few years, how he had resolved to change, and how—the second he saw it—this house seemed to embody such hopes. It was difficult going at first, because all of this had to be extracted from the mental safe-deposit box, but Leo was a receptive audience and reassured him in those places where he halted to find the right words. When, at the end of his story, Martin realized that they were both in tears, he laughed with relief at having finished and disbelief that he could have provoked such a reaction in a great performer.

“I know why I’m crying,” he said, “but why are you?”

“Why am I crying?” Leo repeated. “Because,
mon chère
, I’m old enough to remember myself at an age when a death sentence—
comme tu dis
—would have been something to be cherished, and it makes me sad to think how I arrived at such a point, not because I have regrets but because, as you’ve begun to understand, to live—to truly live, by which of course I mean to love—is to suffer. You’ve read Pascal, I assume—‘the soul is pained by all things it thinks upon’? When I was your age, I never thought it could be true, but the longer I live,
the more inexorable it becomes. But—
néanmoins
—as much as we can know this about ourselves, the nature of compassion is to wish that it were not so hard for others, particularly when we see ourselves in them—and it’s also true that, as painful as it seems, we get only one chance, as you are also now realizing.”

Martin had not read Pascal, but he felt as if Leo were shining onto his thoughts a light that both warmed him and made him want to turn away. “How—how exactly do you see yourself in me?”

Leo barely paused. “I see someone whose ideals have been tested and quite possibly broken, I see someone with a great capacity for work, and I see someone who desperately wants to love and to understand, but who thinks it’s—as you say—beyond him to do so.”

Martin could not understand how Leo knew such things, and how his words could resonate so strongly. “You don’t think it is?”

Leo’s eyes flashed. “Didn’t you feel it last night at the opera? Wasn’t that love coursing through the music and absolving you? And if not, what was it? And if so—and I know you agree with me that it was—doesn’t that demonstrate a capacity to give yourself to the irrational side of life, to throw yourself on its mercy?” He softened. “It’s not like you don’t have courage—you just have to find it when you need it most.”

Martin could agree that he had loved things in his life—music in particular—but also knew that this was not exactly what they were discussing. “But for someone else?”

Leo sighed but was undaunted. “Yes, that’s perhaps the rarest love of all, but it’s also the most damning, because it will often seem like a mirage and be swept away, and when that happens, you long for nothing but death. But—and this is the greatest irony of all—it’s really the only way to learn who you are.” Leo paused to wipe the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief as he continued. “When you suffer this kind of loss, you will know it, and until you have, love
is hardly beyond you.” He turned to Martin and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. “I know this because if it were,” he said very gently, “you’d already be dead.”

A
S
IF PROMPTED
by the disappearing sun, Martin’s thoughts drifted back to Keith Loris, with whom he had been so infatuated while living in the East Village. While they had started out as friends—“buddies”—it had quickly evolved into something more, as Martin both did and did not want to admit at the time. They went to the same bars and shows and record stores; they talked for hours about their favorite bands and the fallacy of trickle-down Reaganomics and the genius of Walter Benjamin; they walked around the East Village and discussed all the great things that had been done in the past and could still be done in the future. Like Jay, Keith knew a lot about music, but he possessed a serious, brooding quality that fueled Martin’s infatuation, although Martin dared not breathe a word of this to anyone besides himself, and then only in the darkest hours, when he fantasized about Keith’s eyes smoldering with desire for him.

One night Martin went to see Hüsker Dü at Folk City with Keith and Jay and a few others. He could almost see the air, blue with smoke and suspense, not only for those like Jay and Keith who had already seen the band but also for newcomers like Martin, whose veneer of skepticism belied a hope to be obliterated. At some point they decided to get closer to the stage, and Martin—anxious to impress Keith and the tallest of the three—eagerly led them into the compacted crowd. Though it was now impossible to talk to Keith, Martin continued to make sporadic eye contact, which seemed to establish an unprecedented camaraderie in what would soon be a roiling mosh pit. There were a few scuffles as people fought for space and air; empty beer cans were tossed around, and occasionally a “Hüskers!” or “Fuck Nancy!” chant made its way through the room; it seemed to
Martin that hours passed, and on the verge of suffocation, he began to question with some bitterness why the band was taking so fucking long; but at the same time, he was already looking forward to describing—sharing—every moment of this with Keith afterward.

Finally the band—there were three members: drums, guitar, and bass—appeared onstage and without a single glance at the crowd checked their respective instruments, before the drummer clicked his sticks one two three four and launched them into a maelstrom of sound more intense—faster, louder, angrier—than anything Martin had ever heard or, for that matter, imagined. A landslide of distortion crashed over the audience, which after a moment of slack-jawed paralysis erupted into a writhing mass. In the mosh pit, Martin gave in to the riptide of bodies and forgot about Keith for a few seconds, at least until their eyes again briefly met, conveying not just that this was a great concert by a great band but—and this, far more exhilarating and shocking—a naked longing that could be characterized only as desire. He was terrified to recognize this in Keith, and even more terrified to realize that his eyes surely reflected the same, and so he was grateful when the onslaught of music and flying bodies carried them apart.

Nor did they discuss it later, when they went with Jay and their other friends to Lucy’s bar, where Martin felt electrified when his thigh rested against Keith’s as they sat next to each other in one of the booths. They staggered back to Martin’s apartment—Jay was sleeping at Linda’s—and were listening to
Zen Arcade
, comparing the recorded versions of songs with what they had just heard, when Keith turned to him. “So, Vallence—I have a question for you.”

“Yeah?” Martin allowed his eyes to travel along the poster-covered wall of the living room before coming to rest on Keith.

Keith considered him for a second. “Have you ever slept with a guy?”

Martin felt a jackhammer in his chest. “You mean like fucking around …”

“Yeah—you know—sex.”

The room started to spin as Martin considered how to answer this, before he decided just to tell the truth, albeit with some hesitation. “Uh, no—have you?”

Keith shrugged ambiguously. “What do you think of us, Marty?”

“What do I think of us?” Martin was too stunned to manage more.

Keith’s voice became harsh. “Like what are we, exactly?”

“Uh, friends?”

“That’s it?” The edge to Keith’s voice was gone, and he spoke in a soft but insistent tone Martin had never heard him use before.

“I don’t know,” Martin said but hated the weakness of it. He had dreamed of this since he first saw Keith but felt completely unprepared; to give in, it seemed, would be the end of his longing, and as with any part of his body, he could not after so many years imagine himself without it. “I want to be—closer to you,” he ventured, his voice hoarse. He could barely believe that he had used a stupid word like
closer
, but it was nevertheless a relief to have made the point.

Keith nodded and did not laugh. “But not like friends …”

“No, not like friends,” Martin admitted and knew that he had finally crossed a certain line for the first time in his life.

Keith shrugged. “So what do you want to do?”

It was too late to go back, and Martin felt possessed by a new urgency to make himself clear. “I guess kiss you.”

“You guess?” Keith put his hand on Martin’s shoulder, and for a delirious second Martin thought that he was going to lean into him, that it was actually going to happen the way it always had in his dreams, but then he pulled back. “I’m sorry, Marty—I can’t.”

Martin froze.

Keith’s expression was distant, if not inconsiderate. “I can’t—you know—fuck around with a guy I’m friends with …”

“But …” Martin struggled to express the fear and betrayal he felt as his teeth began to chatter and his knee bounced up and down.

Keith’s demeanor had completely changed. “Relax, Vallence, it’s not the end of the world,” he said as he pulled at his scruffy beard, as if pondering a painting. “I’ve been with guys, so I know what it’s like—”

“You have? Since when?”

“When I first moved to New York—you know, there’s a certain class of men who will pay a lot of money to get their cock sucked by a twenty-year-old Harvard dropout.”

“You hustled?” Martin’s disbelief, as he considered it, was soon replaced by a certain perspective that made the fact that Keith had done this no less plausible than, say, sitting in an apartment in the East Village at four in the morning, surrounded by empty beer cans, posters of SST bands, and cigarette butts.

“I hope you’re not disappointed in me,” Keith said, in a somewhat mocking tone that Martin did not appreciate.

“Fuck you, Loris.”

“It was only a few times.” Keith shrugged as his eyes returned to a soft familiarity, which despite everything still tugged at Martin. “I was kind of curious, you know, to see what it was like.”

Martin felt mildly appeased by this, despite the continuing turmoil in his stomach. “So what was it like?”

Keith looked through Martin. “You’ll try it sometime, and then you’ll know.”

“Right,” said Martin, again angry.

“I don’t mean hustling, Marty—I mean sex with a guy.”

“I don’t want to have sex with a guy,” Martin said, as his annoyance gave way to paranoia. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“What’s to tell?” Keith responded. “Look, Vallence, don’t be a fucking girl. We’re still friends—I just wanted to clear the air.”

“Yeah, we’re still friends,” Martin agreed, but knew he no longer meant it, because he now hated Keith more than anyone he had ever known.

The next night, when they ran into each other at Lucy’s and Keith wordlessly offered him a beer, if a part of Martin felt nothing but dismay at the oily humiliation oozing through him, he found it wasn’t too hard to put that part in a box and toss it into the mental attic. Besides, he reasoned, Keith wasn’t egging him on; neither of them referred to the incident, and after a sufficient number of drinks, he felt the weight in his stomach dilute, until he was barely disturbed at all, as if it truly had been a nightmare with no connection to the waking world.

B
ACK IN HIS
house—Leo’s house—Martin stared at the mutating clouds as if the sky were a map. Dante brushed past his leg as Beatrice—just emerging from the shadowed perimeters—skirted by like a wisp. Although he rarely saw her for more than a few seconds at a time, just the night before, as he was going to sleep, she had jumped up on the edge of the bed and Martin had reached for her, so that his fingers had for the first time passed through the silver halo to her plush coat. It lasted only a second, during which he detected the frantic beat of her heart, before she grew claustrophobic and in her characteristic low crouch slipped away. Later, in an even more remarkable development, he had woken up to see her disappearing over the hilly terrain of pillows and blankets, while a slight coolness on his face led him to suspect that she had just placed a single delicate lick on the tip of his large nose.

Over the years, Martin had often remembered this episode with Keith, but this time for once he felt free from the shame and
embarrassment that had haunted him. His pain, it seemed, had evolved into something more wistful than wounded—something he could even smile at—and made his past feel more resolved, so that he was no longer agitated by a gnawing, debilitating sense of wishing things were different when they so obviously could not be. He poured himself another drink and settled into the couch, where he imagined driving over the glittering bridge to states he had never seen.