The Metropolis (45 page)

T
HE YACHT STOPPED
next to the Statue of Liberty, whose long gown seemed to soothe the surrounding bay, which was as flat and reflective as the September sky. The engines were turned off, and Linda led everyone into a ballroom off the main deck, where she gave a short tribute to Anna. This was followed by the musical portion of the program, sung by a selection of Anna’s former students. Maria was by far the most accomplished among them and also—not coincidentally—the most daring, to the extent that she was the only one to venture outside the classical repertoire. She had chosen “Sunday Morning” by the Velvet Underground, not only because she felt confident Anna—who claimed to have seen the band once—would have appreciated the gesture but also to acknowledge Martin’s role in the events surrounding Anna’s death.

As she sang—a cappella, in a soft echo of a voice without a trace of vibrato—Maria’s thoughts drifted back to her mother. She smelled the mix of mild soap and tangy perfume that used to hover around Gina before she went out with John on Saturday nights, followed by images of her and her mother madly cutting up construction paper for one of their backyard productions and then—going even further back—being lifted through the air, stuck to Gina’s feet as she danced through the hallways of the house in Castle Shannon. She thought of
her grandmother Bea—who had died peacefully in her sleep one night, not too long after Maria’s graduation from Juilliard—tottering around the house with a drink in one hand and their favorite book of saints and martyrs in the other. For once Maria felt completely embraced by these memories, and she wanted to preserve them, to care for them in the same way her parents and Bea had done for her. She felt a particularly renewed sense of gratitude toward her mother—given the sometimes contentious nature of their relationship—knowing that, even if she hadn’t been eloquent or refined, she had instilled in Maria the aspirations that Anna, and ultimately Maria herself, had been able to mold into the most important part of her life.

She was transported to her backyard in Castle Shannon, except it was lush and manicured like a French garden, and as she stood on one of her old stages to sing, she saw Gina, John, her grandmother, Anna, and everyone else she had ever loved—and who had loved her in return—beaming up at her. She remembered what Anna had said to her after the fire about her gift, and Maria knew that it had happened just as Anna had predicted. It made her wonder where she would go now—what her island would look like in ten years—and how long she would have the strength or the desire to maintain it before—as would one day have to happen—she let it go. She felt a pang of sadness as she considered this—which was to say, a life without her voice—but as soon as she saw it, it was gone, and she felt none of the incapacitating detachment that had so often accompanied her memories of Pittsburgh. As she continued to sing, her voice trembled with revelation; she knew that by reconciling her past, she had done the same for her future.

She arrived at the last set of the lyrics, and as she repeated the word
morning
or, as it now occurred to her,
mourning
, she knew that, in the course of singing this simple song, her grief for Anna had opened a passage to this other grief, much deeper and unresolved,
at least until now. A seagull passed overhead, and its shadow crossed her face before it disappeared into a speck on the horizon. As she watched it go, Maria filled the final notes of her song with hope and redemption, so sure was she of having found both.

NEW YORK CITY, 2002. Martin was tempted to laugh when he recognized what Maria was singing, particularly when he realized that Leo—who was standing beside him—did not. But he was far too entranced to do anything but listen; she sang it perfectly, transforming the droning and understated cheer of the original into a melancholy but serene lullaby. He was reminded of how his own musical tastes had changed over the years, from punk to hard core to indie to opera to—lately, in the wake of Beatrice—nothing at all. To hear Maria made him want to abandon this silent, grief-stricken phase—in fact, with the realization, it was already gone—and to resume the explorations that had marked so much of the past year. It had never occurred to him that music could be so much more than a sound track to his memories, that in addition to providing a means of transport, it could also steel him for what he might find and even deliver emotions that had once been beyond him to acknowledge. While Maria—and for that matter, Leo—had long alluded to possessing a faith in performance—and by extension music—Martin had always felt more agnostic. It now seemed he, too, held a certain belief that—as with any intuition—if you could figure out how to listen to these songs, they would take you to places you needed to go, even before you knew why, and once
you were there might offer a few small threads of beauty—or even purpose—that on balance could make the difference between wanting to go on and wanting to disappear.

While the vast expanse of the horizon filled him with a certain fear of the unknown—his ability to breathe, it seemed, was also his ability to doubt—he took comfort in knowing that the past year had been valuable. It had changed him in ways he had hoped for, if not exactly anticipated; he was physically healthier—to the extent that his hands and feet no longer ached, and he could sleep through most nights—and less emotionally wounded, this all the more remarkable given that he had been largely oblivious to the condition. To know that he had confronted some of the most painful episodes of his past and survived gave him confidence; it wasn’t broad or far-reaching, certainly, but rather struck him as the opposite of the muted despair he now understood—underneath the more superficial measures of success—had marked so much of his life.

Many times in the past few weeks, surrounded by the glass windows of his living room and the views of the city, he had been tempted to think that he could spend his final decades there alone, or at most in the company of a sad succession of cats, sifting through his memories in the continuing attempt to ascertain exactly who he was. But out here on the bay, listening to Maria and with Leo at his side, he knew it was an untenable proposition. It was just as Leo had said: there was only so much you could uncover on your own. If Beatrice had taught him anything, it was the need to reach outside, to search patiently for what he was looking for, whether it was love or faith or anything else that might give his life meaning. He had done this with her, and while it may have been a tentative and crippled form of love, it was for him pure and forgiving, and he had cried the tears to prove it.

He was still only forty-one years old, and the city, splayed out in front of him, beckoned with possibility. He remembered his high
school longings for a girlfriend, and how he had always been drawn to the idea of someone molding the spinning mass inside him into something artistic and refined and—most of all—human. What he realized now was that he had presented not just a mound of clay but a wildly off-kilter wheel, so that, no matter how gifted anyone might have been, there was no way to center him. Now, perhaps, the wheel was at least level and spinning in the right direction, and he could almost feel his hands pulling himself up into something to behold.

A
T LUNCH BEFORE
the service, Martin had described to Leo some of what had happened since 9/11 to him and to the city itself. If not quite sanguine, Leo had been philosophical about the terrorist attacks; as he pointed out, many if not most cities throughout history had suffered far worse mutilations—he specifically mentioned the 1871 Commune, where thousands of Parisians had been killed by their own countrymen in the course of a day or two—and while some of these cities had died and were buried, many had recovered, and still more had been born. They talked about Anna Prus, whom Leo had seen at the height of her career, when—as he assured Martin—she had been most impressive. Martin in turn had described her death, and Leo seemed genuinely astonished, or at least very much intrigued, to learn about the
Tristan
manuscript. Martin offered to show it to him, but Leo demurred, saying that he wanted to wait for Maria; the three of them had already arranged to meet after the service.

Martin returned his attention to Maria’s song and soon found himself thinking of Anna. At first the accident had been terrifying to consider, not only because of what it conjured up in terms of Hank and Jane but also because of the thought of an old woman—alone and lonely—getting killed like this, another life ending in a most undignified way, her remains swept up like a pile of garbage. As he
reconsidered it now, in the fragmented and dreamlike sunlight reflecting off the water, he felt certain that Anna had not been afraid, that she had possessed an unlikely tranquillity as she flew past, almost as though—he realized with a start—she had arrived at the same conclusions about life and death as he had while awaiting the inevitable, i.e., death in the form of a speeding taxi, but unlike him had made the choice to succumb. Although he continued to resist the idea that she had been looking at him—as opposed to anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity—he did not find it difficult to entertain the notion that she had at least considered him, in the way two people passing each other in a narrow hallway might, with a nod of recognition and understanding that each was now headed in the direction from which the other had just arrived.

NEW YORK CITY, 2002. Leo Metropolis ushered Martin and Maria into a small cabin on the upper deck and invited them to sit. They began by talking about the weather, about Bayreuth, about Martin’s “retirement” and Maria’s facetious desire for the same. Leo complimented Maria on her tribute to Anna and admitted that the significance—if not the beauty—of the song had been lost on him, and as he listened to Martin and Maria discuss its larger meaning, he almost forgot what he was here to do. He remembered what it was like before he had seen anything painful and destructive, when he was young and in love with music, and learning how works of art can sometimes mutate or evolve into other, equally beautiful pieces.

With the cabin infused by the bronze light of the setting sun, Leo raised the topic of the manuscript. Martin abashedly confessed—given how little sense it made—his suspicion, or perhaps hope, that Anna had died in a state of bliss, which led Maria to describe how she had heard a second voice at the end of her
Liebestod
in Bayreuth, and how she had somehow known—even before she got the phone call—that it had been Anna. It pleased Leo to hear this, for it seemed to confirm that in the beckoning aura of the approaching night, there would be a familiar, theatrical sense of possibility, a necessary suspension of belief that would allow his audience to understand his story—just as he had understood theirs—without questioning its plausibility.

Martin opened his briefcase and handed the document to Leo, who—and this was a conscious decision on his part—flipped through the pages not with the reverence of a scholar or the greedy fingers of a dealer but with the easy assurance of one who had handled it hundreds of times. Although he had not expected to have this document at his side and was prepared to tell his story without it, its appearance struck him as a fortuitous break, and one that the performer in him felt obliged to use to his advantage. As Martin and Maria silently watched, he took a breath and began to speak, looking at them each in turn and explaining that he had wanted to talk to them about something for quite some time but that circumstances—along with a certain cowardice on his part that he hoped they would soon understand and forgive—had prevented him from doing so until now. He asked for their indulgence—which they appeared quite willing to give—and begged them not to jump to conclusions; he assured them that he did not want to convince them of anything but only to offer his service and perhaps—in return—ask for their help.

This moment—the beginning of his story—was one he had rehearsed many times, at least in his head, and he welcomed a familiar
weightlessness that allowed him to craft every phrase, to fill each syllable with as much love and nuance as he could—at least without singing—as if he were taking the stage for the greatest role in his life. He started quietly, with a more distant, objective tone, not unlike the narrative in his mind when he recalled episodes from his past but could not afford to delve into the accompanying emotion. From his pocket he withdrew an envelope, which he set on top of the manuscript and encouraged them to examine. These notes, he explained, which had been in his possession for a very long time, represented a formula for a vaccine against aging, discovered by a French scientist in the nineteenth century, who coincidentally—and here he nodded at the score—was the father of Lucien Marchand, the French heldentenor who had created the role of Tristan. As Leo said this, he glanced at Maria, who just as he had hoped instinctively nodded—she had obviously heard of the man—while Martin watched pensively beside her.

Leo briefly explained how Lucien had come to possess the score and then offered a few details about his life; he described how Eduard had jumped to his death from the scaffolding of his opera house, and how Lucien had carried his lifeless body through the streets of Vienna to the steps of the palace, as if to indict Franz Joseph, after which he remained in a state of grief-stricken paralysis, unable to sing. He told them what had happened one summer when Lucien returned to Paris, where his father, as per the French emperor’s edict, had taken the vaccine, and how Lucien had also taken it, with the unexpected result that Guillaume had died while Lucien had not.

Whether Martin and Maria believed him, Leo knew he had at least captured them—he could feel them wanting to know what had happened to Lucien—and he felt sustained by the artistic alchemy that allowed him to distill so much life into the words and images rolling off his tongue. He told them that Lucien eventually came to New York
City—carrying little more than a
Tristan
manuscript and his father’s last words, the formula for the vaccine—where it didn’t take long to realize that what he had taken had worked; while those around him aged, he did not (or if he did, it was imperceptible). He lived a solitary life and refused to consider the prospect of sharing his fate with anyone else until he understood it better himself; he changed his name twice, first to Luke Merchant and then to Lawrence Malcolm; he worked as a furniture maker, a shipbuilder, and—finally—a dealer of antiques. He imposed upon himself a spartan discipline and routine; he read thousands of books and studied inventions; he went to museums and gallery exhibitions, he observed the construction of ever-taller buildings and wider bridges in the city; he reflected on his past with as much objectivity as possible, writing and rewriting episodes in notebooks like the ones his father had once used and, over time, grew confident that he, too, was on the cusp of great discoveries about the nature of life, as if he had melded all of his experience into an eternal, golden ring he could offer to those who continued to suffer.