The Metropolis (27 page)

“So …,” she finally said, “are you feeling okay?”

“Honestly? I’m a bit scattered,” he admitted, and resisted the urge—for both of their sakes—to tell her about watching the towers, and how he had been delivered into an omniscient state in which he could almost feel the hissing pavement of the Ohio Turnpike under his knees and palms. “I’m having a hard time reconciling what happened with sort of—well, I guess—functioning,” he explained. “Like one second I’m slicing bread and the next I’m thinking about … not good things.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, and he did not have to ask to know that she was also thinking about their parents, and the grief-stricken period after their deaths—in some ways, it had never really
ended—when life went on in the most mundane ways until for no apparent reason you found yourself thinking about what had been lost.

“What about you—what’s it like up there?” he managed and felt more focused as he listened to her describe the details of her day (she was home working on her dissertation), and how her girlfriend, Caroline—a junior high school math teacher—had been confronted with a small legion of parents coming to rescue their children, which—as Martin wryly pointed out—sounded at least ten thousand times more stressful than anything he had endured.

As his sister quietly laughed—although it was closer to an exhalation of relief—he was reminded of another life that seemed very far away, when he was in college and would visit her at their aunt and uncle’s house in Connecticut, and how they used to stay up late listening to records. He knew this was a sanitized and nostalgic version of the past, but he also knew that at this point he would gladly take whatever solace he could find.

A
FTER HANGING UP
with his sister and checking in as promised with his aunt and uncle, Martin retrieved a pint of ice cream (vanilla truffle) from the freezer. He returned to the couch and resumed watching the television but with a thought to avoid more disaster footage, switched the feed to the VCR, where he found himself perhaps an hour or so into
Ludwig
, Visconti’s bio-epic about the last king of Bavaria. Martin had watched it countless times, not just for his long-standing attraction to the Austrian lead, Helmut Berger—whose high cheekbones and serious eyes, at once sadistic and vulnerable, never failed to entrance—but for the story of King Ludwig, a monarch tortured by homosexual urges (and in this regard, Martin understood the movie to be an accurate representation of history) who cast aside his political power in favor of financing Richard Wagner and building
increasingly extravagant castles. (Ultimately declared insane by the state legislature, the king was deposed only days before his dead body mysteriously turned up in a lake.)

Though Martin understood why the movie was not exactly acclaimed—even among Visconti admirers—for its long detours into melodramatic camp, he had always been hypnotized by the decadent beauty of the king’s crumbling empire, at least as it was rendered by the Italian director. Watching now, he was eerily reminded of the Twin Towers footage, except the film was less disturbing to the extent that it struck him as more a reflection of a universal condition than a window through which to observe its horrors. As the credits rolled over the final shot of the dead king sinking into the lake, his face illuminated by watery sunlight, Martin’s mind began to churn, as if he were just beginning to acknowledge the implications of everything that had happened on this seemingly endless, unforgettable day.

He thought about Ludwig’s mad willingness to do anything, even die, for his art, and recalled the famous photograph of Candy Darling—who along with Edie Sedgwick was his favorite Warhol “superstar”—the one taken in the hospital only weeks before her death from a form of leukemia caused by gender-reassignment hormones. In this photo, she was more beautiful and tragically glamorous than ever, the pallor of her skin luminescent against the cruel and sterile white of the sheets and the drooping roses. Martin had often considered her gaze along with the words she had written at the time: “Even with all my friends and my career on the upswing I feel too empty to go on in this unreal existence. I am just so bored by everything.” He had initially found these words tragic and callow, like those of an insolent teenager, until upon further reflection he remembered a scene in the film
Dishonored
, when Marlene Dietrich, distant and defiant, lifted her veil just prior to execution, and it occurred to him that this was the role Candy Darling had adopted for her entire
life, and that her eyes were haunted by the same cerebral and pessimistic desire on display in Visconti’s film, to inhabit another time better than the one in which she was so sadly imprisoned. That Dietrich, like Garbo, died a recluse—and that these two women had most influenced Candy Darling could hardly be a coincidence. As Martin considered this now, immersed in the aftermath of both
Ludwig
and the New York City disaster footage, he understood better than ever the desire to escape and for a second, he, too, wanted to meet death head-on but in the least violent of ways; he wanted to withdraw, to upraise his existence, to remove himself as much as possible from the mindless cruelty of the present. He wondered if he would have any choice going forward but to resign himself to the past, which made even the prospect of love—which just a few hours earlier had felt relatively, albeit vaguely, enticing—seem hopeless.

Distracted by the rattle of the empty carton against the floor, Martin looked down to find Dante with his head buried in it, lapping up the last drips of the ice cream. “It’s pretty fucking good, isn’t it?” Martin said, unable to resist a wry smile, and as the words bounced back at him off the blank screen of the television, it occurred to him that maybe—just maybe—he was talking about his life, or at least its potential.

NEW YORK CITY, 1979. If Maria, as she entered her second year at Juilliard, rarely had the sense that her move to New York was a dream from which at any moment she might be shaken
awake, she continued to have doubts. Linda, for one, seemed so much happier than she was, and the same could be said of many of the other students, who while clearly devoted to their practice regimens, managed to find time for friendship and dating in a way that still felt largely beyond her. As often as she craved having more friends or—a much keener desire—a boyfriend, the singer in her would belittle such wants or needs as childish or irrelevant, or at best subordinate to the more important ones dictated by her art.

Linda encouraged her to take chances, to talk to guys instead of just watching from a distance, as they liked to do in the school cafeteria over lunch or tea. While Maria’s stock response was that she was too busy or too “stressed” from work, the truth—which she admitted only to herself, at least at first, and only late at night, as if it were a secret even to her—was that she was very much attracted to certain guys and—again, in secret—was not above paging through the student face book to figure out exactly who they were. Coincidentally or not, almost every one of them was a brass player; these were guys who tended to swagger through the cafeteria looking hungover but unrepentant, like they had just rolled out of bed after sleeping in their clothes, which may have been true, given rumors of whiskey-fueled jam sessions in smoky jazz clubs, but which Maria also liked to consider because it seemed to make the strict adherence to her own training somehow more tolerable. And while she would have had no problem walking up to one of them and singing an aria, the thought of having a conversation—of being “normal” for just a few minutes—petrified her, so for a long time she did nothing at all, and resigned herself to playing out these meetings in her fantasies.

O
NE NIGHT AT
school, as she walked by a rehearsal room, she noticed the muffled strains of a trumpet and, peering through the window, spotted one of the brass players just as he was emptying his spit
valve onto the wooden floor. This particular guy had already caught her attention, and was at or near the top of her list: an unabashedly beer-bellied trumpet player, he was at least seven inches shorter than she was and had a full, bushy beard that in a certain light looked almost red. His name was Richie Barrett, and—as much as she would have preferred not to spend the time thinking about him—she liked his sleepy and somewhat disdainful eyes; that he was black added to the sense of curiosity and transgression as she thought about what it would be like to meet him, and possibly more. On the verge of walking away, she found the courage to push open the unlocked door and walk through as though—or so she told herself—she were taking the stage.

He didn’t even look up. “Sorry—I still have seventeen minutes.”

“I just wanted to tell you,” Maria declared with an expression halfway between a grimace and a smirk, “that other people, who might not like the idea of wading through your drool, use these floors.”

“What? A little spit never hurt anyone,” he said and dipped his finger in the puddle, then raised the finger into the air with a grin, as if to offer it to her. “Want some?”

In response, Maria cleared her own throat and disgorged a fairly sizable ball of phlegm, which landed at her feet. “You first.”

Laughing, Richie left the room and returned a few seconds later with a stack of paper towels, half of which he handed to Maria, and together they kneeled to mop up. “I don’t know if we’ve officially met.” He held out his free hand for her to shake. “Richie Barrett.”

She felt dazed from the apparent success of her entrance and resisted the temptation to take a bow and leave. “Maria Sheehan,” she replied, and liked the weight of his hand in hers. “Second-year soprano.”

“I know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, let’s see, that you’re a hot-shit soprano who almost got kicked out for punching Judy Caswell.”

“So not true,” Maria objected, employing one of Linda’s expressions. “I tapped her on the shoulder when she tried to step in front of me during a scene rehearsal. She tripped and hurt her toe, and the whole thing got blown way out of proportion. And I didn’t almost get kicked out for it, either. Anna saw the whole thing.” Everyone in the school referred to “Anna,” so there was no need to explain the reference.

Richie nodded. “Well, between you and me, I think Judy Caswell’s kind of a bitch.”

“Between you and me,” Maria said, lowering her voice to what she liked to think was its most sultry tone, something she had also practiced in front of the bathroom mirror, “the top of her range isn’t bad, but her middle sounds like a dying cow.”

“Can I quote you on that?” Richie responded as he stepped around Maria and blocked the door so that—when she did not move out of the way—only inches remained between them.

Maria felt seasick with physical longing. “Unless you want to die,” she said, “you better move.”

“Maybe I want to die.”

Moving closer, she tilted her head down. “Maybe you want to kiss me?”

“I think a cup of coffee would be more appropriate,” he said and pulled back just slightly. “I hate to play the stereotype.”

Maria stepped back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, we only met five seconds ago and you’re already hot and heavy? You don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that I’m black?”

“I never thought of it exactly like that,” Maria admitted, as she
tried to decide if he was insulted or not, or if she was insulted or not. “I see your point, but I can tell you that of all the black guys at this school, you’re the first one I’ve ever wanted to kiss.”

Richie’s smile contained a mix of wry skepticism and intelligence. “So what do you have against black guys?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said and laughed a bit uneasily.

“If you say so,” he said and inched closer to her, so that she now was in a position to kiss him again.

“You’re sending very mixed signals,” she whispered.

He looked at his watch and then reached behind her, locked the door, and then pulled a cord to close the blind on the small door window facing the hallway. “We only have fourteen minutes.”

They kissed for a few seconds as Maria, gripped by something magnetic and propulsive, leaned into him. She loved how sturdy he felt on his feet and the sight of her own blue hand against the russet folds of his neck added to the excitement, as did his beard—softer than she expected—when it brushed against her face. She knew what she wanted and decided there was no point pretending; he was obviously thinking the same thing. After a furious removal of shirts and unbuttoning of pants, Maria was on the floor, and for once remembered her experience with Joey Finn with appreciation as—with Richie’s hairy gut spread out over her—she wrapped her hand around his dick to help guide him into her, where after a few seconds she found it very much to her liking. As he began slowly to move, she dug her hands into his back and in an urgent whisper reminded him that time was at a premium; he responded in kind, pushing to
allegro
for a few minutes before a
molto vivace
finale that left her pleasantly numb and transparent, after which she reluctantly watched her body reappear from somewhere else.

He rolled off, and she tried to speak. “That was—”

“Intense?” Richie looked at his watch. “Shit—we have to clean this place up.”

Maria looked at the clock. “Relax—we have four minutes,” she joked with the cavalier grace of a veteran before they threw on their clothes, wiped up the floor (again), and—in Richie’s case—packed up his music and instrument, which left ten seconds as they walked out past a violinist who appeared at the end of the hall.

Exhilarating as the night had been, by the time Maria got back to her apartment, she felt uncertain. As she considered what had happened, she knew it had been a performance of sorts—and one she had enjoyed—but this also made it feel untenable. She wanted to show Richie a fuller picture of herself, except she worried that it would conflict with the earlier one she had offered of someone strong and brash, with the gumption to push through the door and have sex on the floor of a practice room. For the first time in a long time, she found her coin and let thoughts of nothing carry her away as she fell asleep with it gripped in her hand.