The Metropolis (40 page)

Gérard lifted his head and looked up with shining eyes. His lips barely moved as he fought to speak just a few words. “Did we win?”

With his free hand, Lucien wiped clear his own eyes and then leaned down. “
Oui, mon chère
, we won,” he confirmed, almost but not quite singing the words as he would a lullaby, and knew that like so many lies, this one resonated in the truth.

NEW YORK CITY, 2002. It was the beginning of May, and Martin’s new plants—a mix of dwarf conifers, Japanese maples, and alpine succulents—had arrived that morning in several large boxes from a nursery in Oregon. He’d spent the day, brilliant and warm enough to make the chill of April seem far off, on his deck replanting a collection of concrete troughs—also left behind by Leo—which he had already refurbished with new topsoil, sand, and peat. As he worked—unpacking each plant before carefully placing it in a designated spot and padding it into its new home—he had enjoyed an almost narcotic intoxication he had not experienced since pottery class in high school, or before that when he used to paint goalie masks. In many respects, it had been a perfect day, exactly what he had hoped to achieve when he left his job, and as he settled into a living room chair, from which he could admire his new botanical charges, the wet leaves of which glistened as the sun arced down toward the Palisades, he found it difficult not to contrast the tone of such thoughts with the wounded, bellicose state of the city—and even, or especially, the country at large—since 9/11, and for a second he wished that everyone could afford to take at least a few months off, to cultivate a plot of earth, to be reminded of the certainty that whatever happened, beautiful things could still grow out of almost nothing but air and dirt and water. It was a ridiculously naïve idea, of course—to think that society’s problems could be solved through gardening—but he smiled as he remembered discussing it online a few days earlier with a fellow alpine enthusiast and seeker of a long-term relationship. They had been chatting at regular intervals since “meeting” a week earlier;
the only negatives were that this guy lived in Brooklyn—effectively one hundred thousand miles away from Washington Heights, as they had joked—and that he was about to leave the country for three months. But they had agreed to get coffee when he returned, which represented the first concrete step in Martin’s “self-improvement program,” as he regularly referred to it—with only a trace of irony—in discussions with his sister.

H
E SIPPED HIS
whiskey, which transformed the encroaching stiffness in his fingers into something almost electric. He flipped over the My Bloody Valentine LP he had on the turntable and thought about Maria Sheehan—he had introduced her to the band—and made a mental note to send her an e-mail. He wondered if he might see her more than once a year now that he had more time, but then considered that her schedule would no doubt remain the limiting factor. He remembered the day he’d met her—or technically, remet her—in New York City, at Jay and Linda’s wedding, and how shocked he had been by her transformation into a striking and urbane version of the scowling girl he used to see at his father’s company in Pittsburgh. Her voice, of course, was mesmerizing, but there was also the way her lustrous black gown fit so perfectly, as if each reflection of light off the silver threading had been designed to elevate her singing into an effortlessly magnetic performance.

Going to Jay’s wedding had not been easy for Martin, not because he didn’t wish his friend happiness but because it drew into such sharp relief his own—and at that time, more recent—failures. This disconsolation had made Maria seem like a mysterious and regal countess from some forgotten country who could take him away from his troubles; and in a way, that was exactly what she had done, allowing him for those few minutes to believe that what he felt was more than a reactionary desire to love a woman, knowing that doing
so would make his life so much easier. It was more than just a fantasy on his part; he had genuinely fallen in love with her, if love was sharing that which cannot be shared, to the extent that the respective deaths of their parents had created some implausible bond of truth and experience. Or at least this was what Martin had told himself at the time, when he was confronted with the strange but miraculous revelation that he wanted her, not as a friend but in the most visceral, physical way possible, as if in the grip of a chemical addiction. He didn’t care that he was “in the closet” or having more sex with men than he wanted to admit even to himself, or that this sudden desire did not seem so far removed from the ridiculous notion he had long held about meeting the perfect woman who once and for all would “cure” him of his homosexual tendencies. If it meant a chance to resolve their shared grief, then to make love with Maria had at that second seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

W
HEN IT WAS
over, if some part of his vision remained—i.e., he could not escape the feeling of having experienced something magical and ineffable with her that went beyond having sex in a utility room at a hotel, even a luxury one like the Pierre—he knew it was not something that could ever be described as love, or at least not the romantic kind. So when she stared up at him unblinking and motionless, he pushed himself off her, still wanting to be near but not to touch. He caught his breath and became aware of the sounds of the hotel: the mechanical click of the air-conditioning, the distant clanging of pans from the kitchen below, the thud of music from the ballroom. Maria sat up and looked at him as she removed her underwear from her foot. “Well—that’s what I call fucking,” she said.

Martin laughed at the brazen quality of her statement and helped her to regain her balance. They returned to the hallway and parted ways to go to their respective bathrooms, where as Martin looked in
the mirror, he admitted that not even Maria Sheehan would ever be “the one” for him, and although he had come to terms with this certainty in the past—or so he believed—he felt inspired, or altered, enough not to want to hide it from Maria or anyone else. He owed this to himself as much as he owed it to her, and the second it was acknowledged, it felt like a fait accompli, so that he looked back at who he had been a minute earlier and wondered why it had taken so long.

He met her back out in the hallway. “I have to tell you something.”

“What now?” Maria stepped around him to a mirror, where she reattached to her ear a dangling hoop of an earring.

“Uh, well—I’m gay,” Martin said, and laughed at the ease with which it slipped out, newly amazed that two words could ever have caused him so much grief.

Maria gave him an odd look in the mirror. “Really? And here I thought I was a woman.”

“I’m serious,” Martin insisted. “I don’t know what happened, it’s just that—”

“Wait.” She now turned to face him. “You’re really gay? Like—” Maria frowned. “I’m not going to catch anything, am I?”

“You might.”

“You better be kidding.”

“I am.” Martin had in fact recently received a clean bill of health; at this point, he still labored under the impression that a single kiss with another man could leave him infected with any number of gruesome diseases—besides AIDS—which sent him to the doctor with hypochondriacal frequency.

This seemed to satisfy her. “So nobody knows? Not Jay, not Linda? What about your ex-wife?”

“She knew,” Martin admitted. “She took me to the cleaners when we got divorced. But nobody else.”

“Good for her,” Maria remarked, severely. “You could have said something before—before we fucked.”

“I’m sorry—it wasn’t premeditated,” Martin offered. “Or at least not consciously, and I didn’t want to wreck it by pretending it was something I would ever want again. Does that make any sense?”

“No—not really—but sort of.” Maria placed a hand on the wall as she reached down to adjust her heel. “It’s just that I had my own little drunken fantasy.”

“What was your fantasy?”

“Oh, just that we would get married and be like best friends with Jay and Linda.”

“Is that something you want?”

They were now at the doors to the ballroom, where she stopped and shook her head. “No, I’m never getting married. There—that’s my coming out.” Maria said this with the perfect amount of conviction and humor, without any self-pity or bitterness. “I decided that a long time ago. I just had a moment of weakness when we met.”

“I have that effect on a lot of people,” Martin tried to joke.

She smiled wanly. “You wish.”

“I could really use another scotch,” Martin responded as he held out his arm. “Join me?”

They found a table in view of the dance floor. New drinks in hand, they talked aimlessly about the past; about Pittsburgh, about Juilliard and Maria’s nascent singing career, while he mentioned his stint as a music writer and his latest incarnation representing bands in major-label record deals.

“So you were into punk rock, like Jay?” she asked. “Mohawks and safety-pin earrings?”

“Not as a fashion statement, but the music—yes—for a while. More or less. Punk, post-punk, hard-core, post-hard-core, new wave, no wave. There’s a lot I was into.”

“I saw the Beach Boys once,” Maria joked. “And some of my burnout friends in high school were into Pink Floyd.”

Martin put down his drink and took Maria’s hand. “Do you have plans for later on?”

“Uh, maybe?” she said.

He laughed and shook his head. “Seriously—do you want to go see a band?”

“Really? What kind?”

“A rock band,” Martin said and thought about it for a few seconds. “But a good one. My Bloody Valentine. They’re very melodic—kind of psychedelic—but also dissonant without being abrasive.”

“Melody and dissonance,” Maria mused, and Martin was happy to note that she seemed intrigued. Although it was in no way a quid pro quo, after what she had done for him, he wanted to offer a piece of himself, and taking her to a show by a band he loved seemed like a perfect opportunity. “Do you know
Tristan und Isolde
? Richard Wagner?” she asked.

“Uh—well—not really,” Martin stuttered and briefly explained that only recently—thanks to Jay—had he started listening to opera with any seriousness. “I wish I knew more.”

“That’s okay—”

“It’s really not,” Martin disagreed. “But if you come with me tonight—or even if you don’t—I promise to check out
Tristan
as soon as I can.”

“You don’t ‘check out’
Tristan
, big guy,” she replied. “You become it.”

I
T WAS NOT
until after one in the morning that the band—two women and two men, equally androgynous in shaggy haircuts and T-shirts—shambled onto the stage. When a few seconds later they launched into their set, Martin reached out to steady himself on the railing; it was
not just the volume but a density that seemed to envelop and move the audience as if they were all part of a giant coral reef. He felt the tremulant distortion rush into him, flooding over and then through the walls he had spent so many years constructing. He closed his eyes and saw the city on the backs of his eyelids, the way it looked from an airplane at night, splayed out like neurons pulsing in time with the booming, hypnotic drum beat, and as he strained to decipher the weightless vocal lines, he knew he would never forget this moment, that he would always associate it with a sense of being scrubbed clean of the past. He looked at Maria, and she nodded back, her eyes silver with revelation and—just as he had hoped—a hint of gratitude that he completely understood, for it was the currency of being introduced to music or art that you had never before encountered but that felt like it had arisen from within you. As the band arrived at a frenzied, orchestrated drone that to Martin resonated not so much with sound as with the truth, Maria reached out her left hand, which he in turn held with his right.

BAYREUTH, 2002. The morning of what was being billed as the performance of her career, Maria dragged herself out of bed, wrapped herself in a hooded cloak, and donned the biggest, darkest sunglasses she could fish out of the bottom of her suitcase. In her dressing room at the theater, after taking a long shower, she barely noticed when a dresser came in to make a final adjustment to her robe and another appeared to tie her long black hair up into a Grecian knot;
as she stared into the mirror and absently continued to warm up her voice, she felt as if she were looking at herself through a deep pool of water.

All preparations came to a halt less than thirty minutes before curtain, when the sound of frantic feet and muffled shouts jarred her from the fragile tranquillity she had worked so hard to attain. She threw open the door and grabbed an intern, an epicene, straw-haired youth not older than seventeen, who in fits and starts explained that the man playing Tristan—a Dane—had toppled off a scaffolding he had climbed in order to retrieve a sword that someone had placed there—nobody knew who or why—with the intention of demonstrating to his cover an irrelevant point about how some props were better made than others. The Dane had lost his footing and fallen from a height of ten feet onto the understudy, who in his attempt to back out of the way had tripped over his feet and landed on his back. The injuries were not minor: the Dane had apparently broken his wrist attempting to brace the impact, and the understudy also claimed to have cracked a rib from absorbing the weight of a 250-plus-pound man falling on him from such a height.

Maria released her captive and listened to the shouts for medical personnel. She went back to her dressing room, where after deciding not to suppress an urge to smash something, she threw against the wall a small glass water bottle, which exploded in a satisfying pop. She knew it was a ridiculous thing to have done, but it somehow felt necessary at this point, and the fact that it actually did calm her down seemed to justify the act. Then she thought of her Tristan—to whom minutes earlier she had been ready to devote her entire being—and wanted to scream at him for being so stupid. And why couldn’t he simply ignore the pain? Tenors were such fucking babies! She could have snapped her own wrist in half right there in the dressing room and held on long enough to get through the show. In fact, she had
practically done just that in a Covent Garden
Elektra
a few years earlier, after severely twisting her left knee in a fall over a loose wire as she made her entrance. As excruciating as it had been—and she had later required arthroscopic surgery to repair the tendon—she had put the pain in a mental box for the duration, allowing it to burst open only after the final curtain came down. Then she pictured him again—her Tristan—and knew that not everybody had her freakish ability to withstand physical pain, and she wanted to hold him, to comfort him, to tell him that they would sing together soon, even if he had to perform with a cast on his wrist and a bandage on his nose after she had punched him for being so careless.