The Metropolis (20 page)

“You mean he’s like Garnier?” Lucien asked, incredulous.

“Effectively, yes—that is my meaning.”

Lucien brushed away a pang of something that felt like stage fright: “Is he attached?”

Codruta nodded. “I expect this will be your biggest challenge, with Herr van der Null.”

Lucien was unabashed. “Who’s his lover?”

“Not who, but what,” she answered while casting a stern eye at Lucien. “Like someone else I know, his first love is his art.” Hearing this, Lucien could not resist another glance toward Eduard van der Null, who in light of this information—and also because he was probably a decade older—seemed to possess a dignified reserve that inspired Lucien with a sense of understanding, as if they belonged on two sides of the same coin.

After a slow procession across the floor, during which Codruta paused not so much to greet as to acknowledge several guests—with whom she shared opinions about anything from the unseasonably frigid weather to the quality of the
mousse au chocolat
—she and Lucien reached their destination, a perfectly timed arrival that led her to envelop Eduard as he stepped away from a conversation. “Herr van der Null, what a delightful honor to see you this evening,” she greeted him, in a tone that managed to convey both intimacy and hauteur, as if they were cousins who as children had shared summers in some distant castle. “I’d like you to meet Lucien Marchand, who in case you missed him earlier is one of our most promising young singers.” Lucien extended his hand for Eduard to shake as she continued. “Which is to say that I expect he’ll be singing in your new opera house.”

“I would look forward to that,” Eduard replied as he released Lucien’s hand and seemed to wink—or perhaps it was just a raised eyebrow—which pleased Lucien, who understood the gesture to represent the formation of an unspoken alliance in this repartee with a grande dame, notwithstanding the fact that she had clearly intended this. “And I would hope even more,” he added, “that you would be there to witness it.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Codruta frowned. “But I regret to say, at my age, I don’t travel as well as I used to. Tell me,” she said,
“do you still have that lovely café on Kärntnerstrasse, perhaps a block below St. Stephen’s?”

“You mean Joséphine?” Eduard suggested.

“Yes, that’s the one.” She beckoned for them to lean in. “I have an amusing story for you. I went to Vienna as a girl before I had ever been to Paris, and so when I arrived here, I was rather shocked to see the same thing everywhere. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ I said to myself, ‘how all of these cafés are just like the one in Vienna?’ Of course, that was before I realized that all great ideas originate in Paris and go on to enlighten the rest of the world!”

The two men laughed, at which point Codruta turned away—with a slight tilt of her head as if someone had just called her name—and extricated herself from the conversation. As they watched her part the sea of guests, Lucien realized that he liked Eduard’s voice—not only for the deep tone but also for the faint Austrian accent of his French—and that he was pleased by his lips, which were not as thin as he had initially thought, and the grayish hue of his blue eyes, which except when lit by amusement were wolfish and melancholic.

Lucien wanted to impress Eduard—somehow to address him as more of an equal than as an awestruck child—but felt momentarily at a loss with no script to follow or notes to sing. It helped that he was taller than Eduard and aware that—thanks to his beard—he looked older than his years. “Have you known Codruta for very long?” he began and felt good about the question, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances.

“Oh, about three minutes,” Eduard admitted, and again they laughed in appreciation of her performance.

“She knows a lot about everyone,” Lucien noted.

“It might be offensive if she didn’t use such tact,” Eduard responded, an observation that impressed Lucien not only for its accuracy but for the succinct manner in which it was delivered, a quality
he knew was often lacking in himself. “Have you known her for long?”

“I suppose I have.” Lucien explained how and why she had come to assume a role of such importance to him.

“I can attest to the importance of good patrons,” Eduard nodded. “You can never have enough of them—or at least in my work.”

“Have you designed many buildings?” Lucien asked, trying to sound more confident than he felt, given that he had not studied architecture with any seriousness. He and Gérard sometimes argued about the merits of different buildings they encountered in their wanderings around Paris, with Gérard predictably favoring more utilitarian structures, such as warehouses and factories, while Lucien tended to prefer the ornamental and baroque.

“A handful—or five to be exact.” Edward paused and seemed to consider Lucien before he continued. “It seems hard to believe as I stand here now, hundreds of miles away from any of them, if that makes any sense, but each one was really an odyssey, if not an ordeal. Though in retrospect it becomes more inconsequential, just another thing that people pass on the street.”

“That’s how I sometimes feel about singing,” Lucien said, trying not to be awed, less by the extent of Eduard’s experience and how much it eclipsed his own than by the older man’s ability to reflect on what he had done—and with such lack of conceit—in a way that impressed Lucien as an ideal measure of both an artist and a person.

With better sense than to elaborate on this idea, he asked Eduard about the opera house in Vienna, and they spent several minutes discussing the project, which had not progressed beyond drawings and models. Lucien had always been curious about the acoustic properties of different theaters—specifically, why some were so much better than others—a topic about which Eduard not surprisingly displayed a lot of expertise, while Lucien was not shy about voicing
his opinions concerning what did and did not work with regard to ideas Eduard mentioned. This led to a wider discussion of opera—they heatedly debated the merits of Wagner, with Eduard displaying somewhat less enthusiasm than Lucien, although he understood Lucien’s disappointment about the Parisian fiasco—and then a more specific discussion of Lucien’s own training and aspirations as a singer.

Before Lucien knew what had happened—for it felt like just a few seconds earlier that Codruta had introduced them—he heard applause on the dance floor and realized that more than an hour had passed; the party was ending. While they had talked with some intensity, Lucien was unsure if Eduard had any desire to continue the conversation beyond the party; in fact, the pensive coolness that had initially attracted him now made him nervous as he tried to ascertain Eduard’s intentions.

“Well, it seems to be winding down here,” Eduard remarked with a shrug that seemed to confirm Lucien’s fears. “But I’ve very much enjoyed meeting you.”

“Likewise,” Lucien offered tepidly, dismayed by the ambivalence he detected. “Are you going back to Vienna soon?”

Eduard nodded. “Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Tomorrow afternoon!” Lucien cried, unable to restrain himself. “Will you be coming back soon? I’d like to see you again—I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed talking to someone so much.”

Eduard pursed his lips and considered Lucien for a second before he laughed. “I find myself oddly defenseless.” He looked at his watch. “I really must get back to my hotel to supervise the packing,” he explained, “but if you care to come along, I could be persuaded to share another drink.”

Lucien nodded—of course he would go, and might have killed himself had Eduard not invited him—but if in one second he felt
as if he were made of light and air, and was tempted to mock the moody, downcast version of himself who had been moping around under Codruta’s wing just a short time earlier, in the next he felt his throat constrict, less in anticipation of the night ahead than with sadness as he envisioned the next morning, when he would have to say good-bye. It pained him to think of living so far away from Eduard, but he decided it was a good, universal kind of pain—a pain of real love, perhaps—and one that needed to be experienced to be understood.

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. The towers were gone. Martin turned away, no longer able to watch. He spent a few minutes on the Internet, where he read that the attacks appeared to be over—a fourth plane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania—but the city was effectively paralyzed. He gathered some documents from his desk, inserted them into his briefcase, and paused: did he really need any of this paperwork, filled with the hieroglyphics of law and business? He remembered Jay’s suggestion that he quit his job, and far from fanciful, it now seemed necessary, as if having witnessed such a radical event demanded from him an equally radical response. He considered his office, and already it resonated with the sepia tones of a faded photograph.

He walked empty-handed toward reception, observing desks
covered with half-eaten muffins, uncradled phones, open spreadsheet applications, and other evidence of evacuation. He rode down the elevator and walked through the lobby and he tried not to think about anything—especially what he suspected would be a seven-mile walk home—as he inched forward in the compressed isolation of the glass chamber of the revolving door. The sidewalk was both better and worse than anticipated, for while the day remained pristine, and demanded to be acknowledged as such, the sun was too bright, which made the acrid smell of burning chemicals and broken gas lines—not to mention the unprecedented sight of the thousands trudging past, diverging around him as if he were a rock in a stream—all the more surreal. He stood paralyzed by the procession: although a few people here and there seemed to be heading east or west, hardly anyone went south, with the great majority marching up Seventh Avenue toward Central Park. Again Martin condemned the terrorists for destroying the ordered chaos of the city, the hypnotic ebb and flow that bore no relation to this muted, downtrodden parade of refugees, but with no choice in the matter, he immersed himself in their ranks.

He had taken only a few steps when his attention was diverted by a pickup truck, the bed of which held an assortment of ghostlike figures whose dust-covered clothes led him to assume that they had been much closer to the site of the falling towers. While this scene aroused his sympathy, he found himself distracted by a second group—civilians, as far as he could tell, and apparently uninjured in any way—running alongside of and in front of the truck, furiously waving and shouting at those before them to move out of the way. The ardor expended on this task hardly seemed necessary given how willingly and without exception everyone stepped to the side, but every member of this fanatical troupe of directors wore an identical expression of importance—each a self-anointed model of altruism—as they
cleared a way for the victims, who had already taken on the aura of martyrs surrounded by acolytes.

As Martin watched a second truck drive by, he heard a woman next to him quietly remark to her colleague: “Do you think we could hitch a ride if we poured vacuum cleaner bags over our heads?”

Martin could not help smiling to himself, comforted by the thought that whatever else the terrorists had accomplished, they had failed to destroy the New York City hallmarks of sarcasm and irony, whether employed in the spirit of irreverence or to mask the more painful and traumatic implications of what had happened. Nor was he sorry to be subsequently absorbed in a tangential and equally facetious discussion taking place among an attached group of cynics and misanthropes; they spoke about famous death marches—Bataan, the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust—and concluded with great certainty that this present walk out of Manhattan would surely be listed among them before they next engaged in a series of quips about how lucky so-and-so was to get out of a presentation for which he was not completely prepared, which led someone else to complain about all of the truly shitty buildings in New York City that could have been destroyed in lieu of the towers.

How true, Martin thought, grateful for the distraction and unable to restrain himself from mentally adding Madison Square Garden to the hypothetical list. As for the World Trade Center, the consensus was that while the view from the top could be impressive, nobody was going to miss the trashy mall in the basement.

“Oh my god—do you think anything happened to Century 21?” another woman interjected with the true pain of calamity.

Martin remembered shopping there, as much for the clothes as for the cruising, when a shared glance seemed to offer the potential fulfillment of a lifetime’s worth of pent-up fantasies. This period had lasted through his marriage until some years after, a predictably
adolescent phase of his life—and surely his “sluttiest”—during which (particularly after his divorce) he had maintained a large divide between his ideals and his actions. Most naïvely, he had assumed that after coming out, as a matter of course he would find the male equivalent of Amanda (or at least the Amanda of his dreams), who would guide him through the haze that seemed to surround the question of exactly who he was. As this person failed to materialize, he alternated between periods of despondence and periods of manic anger—these latter episodes marked by increasingly reckless behavior—but without (and this was most problematic of all) acknowledging either.

H
E REMEMBERED THE
first time “it” happened—for he used to think about these encounters with the passive quality of an innocent bystander—not long after his engagement, when in an impressive feat of wayward logic, he had reasoned that, with things going so well, it would be a good time to have sex with another man—just once, he reminded himself—to confirm that his fantasies were merely the products of an immature version of himself about to be permanently outgrown. The decision made, he took the necessary steps with surprising ease: one afternoon after Amanda left for work, he turned to the personal pages of the
Voice
, scanned through the “bicurious” offerings, and selected one that quickened his pulse—28yo WM 6′0″/165 br/br. He jotted down a short response with his own statistics—27yo WM 6′3″/215 blk/bl—before he sealed it up and took it to the nearest mailbox, where he inserted it with shaky but determined hands. This small but symbolic deed accomplished, he returned home in a state of breathless arousal, which after handling in the usual manner led to an intense guilt as he reflected on his incipient betrayal of Amanda—his fiancée!—only weeks before their wedding.