The Metropolis (31 page)

“So we’ll deal.” He tapped his fingers against her arm. “We’ll be long-distance for a while, that’s all.”

“Long-distance,” Maria scoffed. “My only regret is that I didn’t see from the beginning that we were doomed, not for some stupid reason like the fact that you’re black and I’m white, or that I’m taller than you, but because you’re a trumpet player, and I’m a fucking soprano, which—”

“Why are you so upset?” Richie laughed, and seemed truly perplexed as he squinted at her. “Isn’t this exactly what we said we wanted for each other? Would you really want me to pass this up?”

Maria felt a line of dominoes topple over in her stomach. “No, I’m just worried about how I’m going to handle next year without you,” she admitted. “Is that selfish enough?”

“Next year will be fine,” he said and placed a hand on her thigh. “Just because we’re musicians doesn’t mean we don’t love each other or that we can’t make it work.”

As much as Maria wanted to believe this—and even went through the motions of believing it, to the extent that they made love during the weeks before he left and made all the necessary plans to write and talk and see each other as much as possible given the practical constraints—she still felt jarred and unsettled, so that when she sat in bed and looked through the various lenses at her life, it appeared blurry and flawed. She really hated Richie then, and told herself that what they shared was not worth anything, or certainly not the return of that dreadful feeling that made her throat hurt, as though it were coated with her regurgitated past.

T
HE DAY HE
left, Maria turned off the air-conditioning in her room and buried herself under the covers. She slept, and in her dreams she watched him walk to the gate over and over, and each time she felt something different—relief, hatred, sadness, doubt, and finally ambivalence—so that when she woke up, she felt more confused and exhausted than ever. She went into the kitchen, where she found Linda brewing coffee and opening a bottle of red wine. “There’s only one cure for what you have,” her roommate remarked as she took out two glasses and two mugs. “The coffee-and-red-wine diet.”

“I’ll be okay,” Maria sighed, but she had her doubts. “You know,” she mused, “what he said is true—I can’t deny it anymore. I mean, here I am lying in bed with a shattered heart, and the truth is I’m freaking out because I haven’t practiced in two days. That’s not exactly normal, is it?”

Linda brushed a strand of greasy hair away from Maria’s sweaty face. “When were you ever normal?”

“I know, never,” Maria replied with a fraction of a smile. “Except with Richie—what we had was normal, and it still would be if he hadn’t left.”

“Maria, you scheduled sex around practice,” Linda pointed out. “Not normal. But not wrong, either.”

In the ensuing weeks, Maria often returned to this idea as she struggled to maintain her attachment to Richie. When she thought of him, she couldn’t decide if she missed him or only wanted to miss him, because she hated the pressure of talking on the phone when it was so expensive, and writing letters was not something she had ever enjoyed. She felt an undeniable tedium as she did these things, which led her to question how much she had loved him in the first place. When she began to suspect that she had not, it sickened her to think that—just as Anna had insinuated—she had exploited Richie in order to taste love, rather than given herself over to it entirely, until it occurred to her that he was doing the same thing to her, which made her angry. Then she would remember waking up next to him and—far removed from any music at all except for the vague symphonies that never really left her head—how much she had loved those moments, and she wanted to run away to Paris, no matter what the consequences, until she remembered that Richie had rented a room in a tiny apartment in the 20th Arrondissement, which was supposedly like the South Bronx of Paris, and she knew she didn’t really want to trade in her current life for that.

W
HEN
R
ICHIE CAME
back to visit for a week in August, Maria took the bus to Queens to meet him at the airport, where he already looked very much
le jazz man
in his chinos, dark green fedora, and goatee. While she wanted to be a little cold, when he smiled sheepishly in the way she had always adored, she rushed into his arms and felt awash in love, so that all her fretting and doubting the past few months seemed inconsequential, and she was glad not to have mentioned any of it to him.

It was a perfect moment, this reunion, which led to a series of
even more perfect ones as the days unfolded. Everywhere they went, it seemed, was marked by a memory of a kiss or a laugh or even an argument, so that Maria felt as if they were continually looking through a scrapbook. Even when they went to a jazz club on St. Nicholas in Harlem with a few of his new Parisian friends, it felt to her like the creation of a perfect memory as she drank wine and spoke French in the smoky haze of the room. They even reprised some of their old walks through the dead heat of the summer nights, and Maria felt as if the buildings now watched them with a sad if appreciative sense of nostalgia until she promised them that, no, this was the beginning of something new.

It was not until the last full day of his trip that this tapestry began to unravel. Though Maria had been determined not to let any of her fears or uncertainties spoil anything, she woke up feeling feverish and lonely. “Why can’t you stay for another week or two?” she cried, pinning him to the bed.

Richie smiled as he rolled her off and pried her fingers from his arm one by one. “I’ll be back—
je te promis
—and right now, we have to get going or we’ll be late.”

“Okay,” she sighed, somewhat regretting the plans they had made to meet Richie’s friends for lunch at a café in SoHo. Though she had fully endorsed the idea earlier in the week, now she didn’t want to share Richie, particularly with people who would presumably be seeing him all the time when they were back in Paris.

Her mood did not improve at the café, where she felt isolated by her lack of real proficiency in the language—Richie’s friends had invited two other French friends—and the discussion veered into a Marxist analysis of modern socialism. After lunch she felt better strolling along the West Side piers with Richie, at least until the leg of her jeans got caught on a cleat and ripped the seam almost all the
way up to her butt, which even though they both laughed made her sulk on the train ride back uptown.

Back at the apartment, Richie tried to reassure her. “Maria, come on, don’t be upset.”

She tried to smile. “Who said I’m upset?”

“You did. This morning.” He spoke a little shortly, so that she could tell he was also agitated, but then he sighed. “Look, you’ve been moody all day.”

“Well, you’d be moody, too, if you’d had to sit through that pretentious lunch and then had ripped your jeans.”

Richie smiled and caressed her arm. “I’m sorry about lunch—and your jeans. I thought it was just going to be the four of us, like last night.”

“I know. I don’t care about lunch—or the jeans.” Maria looked at him and for a second hated herself for acting imperious and ungrateful. But as she considered the greater uncertainty of their relationship, she felt tentative and precarious, as if she had just crashed through one floor and another was about to give way. This vision was quickly replaced by one of her the following year, rehearsing for what she—and to be fair, everyone else at the school—expected would be a leading role in her first production, and she felt a familiar if somewhat crushing sense of resolve as she spoke. “Richie, we need to break up.”

“What? Why? Everything has been so perfect, until today—”

“I know. That’s just it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean it was too perfect. It’s unreal; it’s dangerous. It makes me want to throw my life away and never sing another note.”

“Christ, it’s a vacation, Maria. Why can’t you give yourself a break?”

“No, it’s more than a vacation.” She bit her lip. “Nothing feels real to me anymore, like I’m dreaming or maybe even dead. I fantasize about moving to Paris with you, and it scares me. It’s like there’s this temptation to forget everything I need to start doing as of next week, because it’s going to be a lot, but I have to do it and I can’t afford to be lovesick anymore.”

“I understand, but you don’t have to do this.” Richie pulled her into his arms. “You’re being extreme. You don’t have to destroy yourself to sing.”

“How do you know?” she demanded as she wrestled free to face him. “How can you say that when you just don’t know?”

“Okay, I don’t.” He shrugged. “But for both of our sakes, I hope you’re wrong.”

W
HEN MORNING ARRIVED
, it would have been hard to believe that this day was any different from so many others except they now looked at each other shyly, more like new lovers than like old, and the conversation was generic and forced, related to the weather and the mundane details of how Richie should pack and get to the airport. Though determined not to go back on her decision, Maria felt sadder and weaker than she had the previous night. She interrupted Richie and filled every pause with her own voice, which sounded shrill and artificial.

At JFK they spent a few more awkward minutes at the gate until they heard Richie’s boarding call.

“That’s you, isn’t it,” she managed with a gulp.

“Maria, whatever happens—”

“Don’t,” she begged. “Last night, I didn’t—”

“No, you did,” he said. “You were right.”

She took a deep, trembling breath and began to respond.

“Don’t. It’s okay,” he said, but his eyes didn’t quite meet hers.

She understood that to survive these next few seconds she would have to be bigger and stronger—even inhuman—and for once did not have to summon any courage to make this part of herself appear but simply allowed it to happen, even though there wasn’t the remotest chance she was going to sing. As if she had put on a costume or a coat of armor, it was someone new—or at least in disguise—who gingerly wrapped her arms around him, though they barely touched as she bent down and kissed both of his cheeks for what she knew would be the last time. With a distant and bemused smile on her face, she straightened up and addressed the air over Richie’s head. “Good-bye, darling,” she said and kept her eyes from meeting his as he walked around the barrier to hand his boarding pass to the attendant.

She waved one last time and was halfway back to the terminal exit before she leaned against a dingy pay phone and laughed: when had she ever called him
darling
? The answer, of course, was never; yet it had come out so effortlessly, like she had rehearsed it a thousand times. She turned around with the faint expectation that the footsteps she heard behind her belonged to Richie. Seconds passed; he didn’t appear, and—as she had to admit—she didn’t want him to. She pushed through the glass doors and from the buzz in her ears knew she might have been crying except for the lack of tears.

On the sidewalk, she listened to the empty honks of taxis and the intermittent roar of a passing bus as she waited for her own. It was over ninety degrees outside, and though she could not completely escape the sense of having succumbed to something, it was also a transformation that left her impervious to the hot, muggy air, which seemed like a blanket that could easily be thrown off the bed. Her heart raced as she considered what had just happened, along with the thrilling certainty that whatever grief or loss or failure she felt was momentary, nothing but clouds that could be burned away in the blazing sun of a gigantic career.

VIENNA, 1865. When Lucien returned to Vienna at the end of July, he learned that Eduard’s difficulties at the opera house were more severe than he had let on. The foundation and exterior walls of the structure were complete—and the addition of the roof imminent—but a committee of retired military men and architects, all of whom Eduard knew and detested but who had managed to get the ear of the emperor, were attempting to mandate design alterations—ranging from the addition of a huge pediment on the façade to a large outer staircase leading up to the entrance—to enhance the “imperial aura of the monument.” While their jurisdiction to issue such an edict was being scrutinized by Eduard’s allies both in and out of the government—with newspapers running editorials both for and against—the tension throughout the city was palpable; when they went out in the evening, Lucien could feel the stares of Eduard’s enemies boring into their backs, and rooms were divided into clusters of those who could or could not be trusted.

One morning—not long into September—Lucien woke up and found Eduard still in bed beside him. “Are you sick?” he asked.

“I’m sick of fighting,” Eduard mumbled.

“I know you are,” Lucien sighed. “But you can’t give up now.”

“I can’t?”

Lucien laughed uneasily. “I’m not even going to answer that—”

“Why? Just because everything has worked out in the past?” Eduard rolled away. “There’s a first for everything.”

Lucien ignored him. “Don’t you have a meeting?”

“I do,” Eduard confirmed. He sat up for a few seconds and then collapsed. “But I need more sleep.”

Lucien put his hand on Eduard’s shoulder. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

Eduard pulled away. “Lucien—please—you’re not helping.”

“Okay, then—I’ll leave you alone.” Lucien went to the dining room, where he sullenly ate breakfast, trying to decide if he was more angry about Eduard’s dismissive tone or fearful about his despondency. When Eduard emerged some time later, Lucien was relieved to see him dressed, but with his feelings still raw from the earlier exchange, he made a point of ignoring his lover as Eduard rushed out the door.

As it turned out, Eduard managed to make his appointment, and when he returned home that afternoon was contrite. “I’m sorry about this morning,” he said. “Don’t worry—I’m not giving up.”

“Your demons?” responded Lucien, also regretting his earlier anger.

“You might say that.” Eduard nodded and smiled slyly as he accepted Lucien’s outstretched hand and brought it to his lips.