The Metropolis (12 page)

Guillaume barely lifted his eyes from the table, where he was comparing two leaves and entering figures into a notebook. “So you’re going to be his student?”

“Yes, exactly!” Lucien cried, as if to make up for his father’s lack of enthusiasm, “and if all goes well I can expect to enter the
conservatory in two years.” He stood facing Guillaume for several more seconds and realized that he had yet to deliver the most important—or at least controversial—element of the news. “Which means I don’t have to return to lycée this fall.”

“Is that so?” Guillaume responded quietly as he folded his hands in front of him and looked directly at Lucien. “And what if I said you did?”

“Do you understand who Manuel García is?” Lucien challenged. “I would be one of his youngest students ever—it’s practically a guarantee.”

“Surely he doesn’t expect you to train with the same rigor as a more mature singer, much less drop out of school,” Guillaume pointed out, with a degree of insight Lucien found maddening because it was exactly what the professor had said; that he was not to sing too much—beyond basic exercises and the occasional recital—and instead should focus his attention on learning as much theory as he could, to provide a sufficient foundation for the conservatory.

Lucien tried to explain all of this, but Guillaume interrupted him. “Lucien, my objection has nothing to do with your desire to sing or to learn everything you possibly can about music. I love your voice, not only because it’s yours but also because it reminds me of your mother. But she was married to me, most obviously, and so could afford to fail—singing was a passion, not a necessity.”

“It’s a necessity for me,” Lucien insisted.

“I mean an economic necessity.” Guillaume shook his head and waved at the mansions that loomed up behind them. “As we’ve discussed many times, despite our surroundings, I’m not a rich man, and—”

“Codruta has already promised to be my patron,” Lucien responded. “She’ll provide whatever I need.”

“Yes, she mentioned something to that effect.”

This information rendered Lucien speechless for several seconds. “She did? When?”

“A few weeks ago, before she arranged the audition.”

“So you knew about it?” Lucien felt betrayed by both of them.

“Don’t be angry. It was the right thing for her to do—”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I encouraged her to set up the audition, because I didn’t want to deny you the opportunity to meet and possibly work with the famous professor, but I also told her that you’re too young to accept her patronage,” Guillaume replied more gently. “I know it’s difficult, but try to think of yourself at the age of forty, and what you would do if singing wasn’t enough. Think of the thousands of young men and women who come to Paris each year with the same dream—you’ve seen how they line up outside the theaters for even the smallest roles—and most are starving! Half the drunks and beggars in Paris are failed singers.”

“Most of them don’t know anything, and none of them has Manuel García—or Codruta!”

“I understand the man’s reputation,” Guillaume said, “but what if you lose your voice? Or what if something happens to Codruta?”

Lucien steeled himself. “Do you really think that three years of lycée will make a difference?”

“Yes, I do,” Guillaume insisted. “It’s a natural breaking point; it establishes that you attained a certain level of scholarship—”

“Only because of you!”

“That’s what parents do.” Guillaume sighed. “We work to give advantages to our children.” He focused more intently on his son. “You need to be able to support yourself without relying on your voice—at least until you’re older.”

Lucien stared at the ground as it swirled in front of him. As much as he wanted to leave school, he knew Codruta would never help him
if he made a rash threat to disobey his father. He wasn’t sure if he was angrier at Guillaume for being so stubborn, at Codruta for conferring with Guillaume, or at his mother for not being alive to help; but as this last thought crossed his mind, he stumbled upon a third option, as though she had whispered it into his ear. “What if—what if I get a job at the theater?” he ventured, tentatively at first but then with more enthusiasm as the idea materialized. “With props or costumes, maybe even with the stagehands! I could begin as an apprentice—it wouldn’t cost anything—and then I would earn enough. And just like you said, I wouldn’t rely on my voice.”

Guillaume pondered this for a few seconds. “Well—it’s a thought.”

“I could become a carpenter!” Lucien begged his father as tears of relief and certainty escaped his eyes. “Please—I’ll go tonight and speak to some of the men. I’m sure I could do something.”

After considering him for a few more seconds, Guillaume nodded. “Okay, go see what’s available,” he said. “If you can get an offer at the theater—in carpentry or some other area; it hardly matters what, as long it’s a skill or a trade—I’ll consent.”

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. Martin entered his office building with enough time to buy and then drink a double espresso from the coffee shop in the lobby, and then—because the first went down so well—a second, along with a chocolate-chip muffin that unfortunately looked much better than it tasted and—because he was
trying to eat less junk—a banana and an apple. While this breakfast vanquished all remnants of his hangover, he considered the hordes of the nine o’clock rush with less enthusiasm as he tried to remember what had prompted him to agree to a conference call at this ridiculous hour, especially on his birthday. After easing himself back into the lobby—and perhaps there was a god—he spied not one but two empty elevators, the closer of which he ran to catch in the hope of avoiding a clump of office workers chattering away not far behind him. He reached it at the same time as a tall, excessively thin woman in a business suit whom Martin recognized from another firm. She pressed the Close Door button so that the doors clunked shut only millimeters beyond the zebra-striped fingernails of a secretary attempting to trigger the sensor. “Oops,” she said to Martin as she extracted her cell phone from her bag and flipped it open. “Wrong button.” He smiled benignly at her but felt queasy as he observed her dark hose, closed-toe leather heels, thin pinstripes, and network-anchor hair; while they rode up in silence, he could not shake the feeling that she might turn on him with some sort of perfectly constructed opening statement that would expose him as woefully unprepared for the day ahead.

He was reminded of his ex-wife, Amanda, whose appeal had been similarly imperious and unreal. Before they met, during Martin’s junior year in high school, Cranbrook had offered Martin everything he—and his parents—could have wanted (except for his actual presence, in Jane’s case): as a sophomore, he had made the dean’s list and the varsity hockey team, and as a junior, he was well positioned to be the starting goalie. Living away from home had also made him more forgiving toward Hank and Jane; as his roommate, Jay Wellings, pointed out, there wasn’t much point in rebellion when your parents lived three hundred miles away. But for all that was good, he could not escape a longing for something more than schoolwork and hockey, or
even getting high, listening to cool bands with Jay, or messing around with girls, all of which he had done with varying degrees of success and satisfaction. After considering the problem, he concluded that it might have something to do with having a more “serious” girlfriend; while the thought of becoming a drooling, love-struck dimwit held no appeal, he began to scan the crowd more earnestly, with the hope of finding the perfect girl staring back.

He first noticed Amanda in his second-semester pottery elective, where he was intrigued by her thin shoulders, boyish hips, and long, slender neck, and over the course of a few weeks, he grew more entranced as it became clear that she was a goddess of the ceramic studio, able to transform mountains of clay into spinning beehives and then one perfectly formed cylinder after the next, which in turn were followed by massive pitchers, urns, and vases. While he often allowed his eyes to linger on her, she seemed oblivious; there were no accidental glances or nods hello, just an inscrutable gaze with her sleep-deprived eyes that sent twin shivers of adrenaline through him, one at the thought that she wanted nothing to do with him or anyone else, the other at the prospect of doing something—anything—to ingratiate himself with her.

He turned for advice to Jay, who assessed the situation: “For you and many others in this warped environment, her appeal lies in her aura of decadence,” his roommate said. “You understand that, right? That for someone like you—varsity hockey, dean’s list—she represents the underlying fatigue you feel for your superficial displays of perfection.”

“Who says I’m fatigued?”

“My point exactly,” Jay rejoined. “Nevertheless, your plight has moved me to pity, and so I can do some reconnaissance. Very discreet to spare you the agony of a public rejection, though I must go on record to say that you will not be the first or the last to lose your
bearings navigating the shoals off the rocky coastline that is Amanda Perry.”

That Friday, Jay caught up with Martin on the quad. “Good news, Vallence: Ms. Perry is amenable to a brief excursion. You are to meet her at the pottery studio tomorrow at four, after which I would suggest something informal, perhaps a stroll through the woods—bring some entertainment, of course”—he tapped his backpack, where he kept his one-hitter—“to determine if there is the necessary rapport.”

The next day Martin met Amanda at the studio, where they talked about music—she liked Roxy Music and David Bowie—which seemed to confirm that they were two lost souls who against incalculable odds had found each other. Still, because there was a part of him—even deeper and less acknowledged—that was afraid of exactly what Amanda might help him find, he remained somewhat aloof and was careful to mask the depth of his feelings for her as he mentioned older or more obscure bands—the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Big Star—that he professed to love more than any others.

They eventually left the studio and walked around the lake to the Greek amphitheater in the woods behind the girls’ campus. In a shaded alcove next to the stage, Martin extracted a joint from his pocket. As the sun disappeared below the tree line and the forest around them became somber, the smoke they exhaled mixed with a wet mist that covered the entire theater in a shroud. Martin was struck by how attuned she seemed to his desires; like him, she was not incapable of enthusiasm but never appeared too earnest or overbearing. When they kissed, her mouth fit over his in a perfect mix of cool passion and—somehow, again—detachment that left him simmering, if not quite ignited.

This “date”—a word they never used—was followed by others, until at some point, back at the amphitheater, she mysteriously
extracted a foil-covered package—a rubber—and pressed it into his palm. When he admitted to her that it was his first time, she tore it open and unrolled it into place before she pushed him onto his back.

“Don’t worry—it’s a lot easier than calculus,” she teased before she kneeled down and officially began the exercise.

At first, as she rocked back and forth and he tried with mixed success to match her rhythm, he feared that this, too, would join the decidedly muted delights offered by—among others—Monica Gittens and his first hand job; Julie Hayes, who had kissed him for an hour; and Barb Peters, who had somewhat presciently put a finger up his butt. Then he detected something dispassionate in Amanda—never once did she lose that faraway look, even when she came a few minutes later and instructed him to do the same—which seemed to be the perfect complement to his own ambivalence and—miraculously—left him wanting more.

S
HE BROKE UP
with him just before graduation. They had been accepted into different colleges, and when Amanda declared that a long-distance relationship would be untenable, Martin listened to the words as if they were being whispered at him from across a desert. Though he felt sorry, he was not close to tears, for it had already occurred to him over the last few months that his feelings for Amanda had not crossed—and would not cross—into the realm of serious love or infatuation.

A decade later, when one day on the subway platform he heard a low female voice, eerily familiar, which did not so much call out his name as state it—“Martin. Martin Vallence. Hey, Martin, over here”—he was no longer so presumptuous, and his longing for Amanda was not so obtuse, but rooted in a more tangible hope to alleviate the far more acute desires that had taken hold during the intervening period. So when he confirmed that it was Amanda, still
vaguely but unapologetically masculine in the manner of certain runway models, and she examined him with the same passive but not displeased expression he remembered from high school, he felt more than grateful; he felt redeemed. He had staked a lot more on meeting the girl of his dreams—or his past dreams, which in Amanda’s case meant the same thing—and his hands trembled, so certain was he at this moment that her arrival was predestined to save him from the parade of men who increasingly inhabited his thoughts and fantasies.

He restrained the urge to touch her. “Amanda?” he asked, although he already knew the answer. “What the fuck?”

“Nice to see you, too, Martin.” She pushed a strand of hair—still the color of wet sand—behind her ear and spoke in the same faintly mocking yet seductive tone he remembered.

He looked into her shadowed eyes, which made her face seem even more appealingly gaunt than he remembered. He quickly explained that he lived in the city now and worked as a rock critic, the New York correspondent for the British weekly
Music Machine
, a job he had inherited from Jay Wellings. “So do you live here?” he asked, trying to seem nonchalant but praying that she would say yes.

She nodded and explained that she was an assistant to Louise Bourgeois and also had her own sculpture studio on East Broadway in Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge. “Give me your hand,” she instructed as she fished a pen out of her pocket and quickly scrawled a number across his palm. “Call me,” she said before jumping through the closing subway doors with the offhanded grace of a gazelle.