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.
20
A Section That May Be Skipped by Anyone Not Particularly Impressed by Thinking as an Occupation
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.
HE 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.
He officially wavered and for a few minutes swore that he was done with this business once and for all, and that under no circumstance would he show up at the coffee shop on Third between First and A he had suggested as a meeting spot. That night, in the effort to atone for his misdeeds—hypothetical as they remained—during sex with Amanda he kissed her with such intensity that she asked him if something was wrong, which annoyed him just enough so that the following day he began to reconsider his earlier decision, as if she now deserved to be cheated on; not like a major affair or anything, he again reasoned, but a dalliance, something that would be a little secret with himself.
He pretended to debate the issue, going back and forth like this for the rest of the week, until to his alleged shock he found himself at the appointed time outside the appointed coffee shop, where he spotted in a booth a man who more or less fit the description of the ad. He decided to leave, but as he walked past the doorway, his legs made a right turn and carried him through, and the guy nodded at him in a casual but conspiratorial way to confirm that he was indeed the object of Martin’s epistolary desire. Though momentarily disconcerted, Martin managed to reach out and shake the man’s hand as he slid into the other side of the booth, as if they were old friends.
Between his signal to the waitress for a cup of coffee and a comment on the weather, he examined “Boris” and decided that he was not bad-looking, Russian or Polish maybe, with the stained fingers of a working-class man and a wiry build that appealed to Martin. “I’m a little nervous,” he confessed. “I’ve never really done this before.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Engaged—you?”
Boris raised his left hand to display a wedding ring. “Married.”
“Does she know?” Martin whispered.
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“Just paranoid. So where is she right now?” Martin thought of Amanda at work at Louise Bourgeois’s studio in Brooklyn.
“Out of town.” Boris frowned. “So you really haven’t ever done this?”
“No,” Martin responded a little aggressively, as if the idea were insulting. “You?”
Boris stirred his coffee. “So you want to come over?”
Martin started to say sorry, he didn’t but once again was vetoed by something else that directed him to pause for a few seconds while he looked at the last rays of daylight reflecting off the back of a spoon on his saucer. “Okay, sure,” he said, as if accepting an invitation to go play a game of checkers.
They soon arrived in the apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up on Tenth Street. Breathless from both anticipation and the ascent, Martin followed Boris through a rusty kitchen and a cluttered bedroom to a living room, this last space illuminated by a dusty twilight that filtered through a pair of large windows, which judging from the coagulated paint around the frames, were sealed shut. Boris wordlessly began to unbutton his shirt, prompting Martin to do the same, which led to a rather somber removal of pants and underwear, this last item providing a stark reminder of what exactly they were doing here and led them to approach each other, tentatively at first and then with the overwrought ferocity of bad actors as they fell groping onto a brown corduroy couch.
Even as it happened, Martin felt perplexed by what had driven him here and wished that he could fly back to his apartment, purged of all desire except for Amanda. He remembered getting wasted in college, those magical nights when, two-thirds of the way through a party, at say 2:00 A.M., he would arrive at a perfectly lambent moment of intoxication and desire, when the world became plastic and surreal as he fell into the arms of his teammates, sliding down their sturdy, muscular frames to his knees as they caressed his thirsty lips with the end of the beer tap. At the time, there was nothing he wanted more than to cross that unspoken line, yet now that it was happening, exactly as he had fantasized, he could barely stop from laughing at the disappointment he felt, and was consoled only by the growing certainty that he would never do this again. But determined to go through with it, he felt a saliva-moistened thumb twist his nipple, a tongue in his ear, his cock being gripped by a hand that looked like it could break it; he saw himself as if from afar, in a series of freeze-frame poses that both alluded to and mocked the pornographic overtones of the encounter, until at last he gave up and for the briefest of seconds knew what it meant to be tied to the tracks as a train roared overhead, giving him a taste of what his dreams had long promised and for once did not fail to deliver.
As soon as it was over—and though it felt like an eternity, only six minutes had elapsed—he returned to his senses. To see their naked, cum-streaked bodies made his spirits plummet, and as he glanced around the room, he was convinced that, as at any crime scene, the arrival of the authorities was imminent. Feeling polluted and ruined, he made his escape as quickly as possible with no objection from Boris, who watched him leave with a knowing—and to Martin, annoying—smirk. He hated Bori
s at that second almost as much as he hated himself.
Walking home, he began to feel better; after all, he had gotten away with it, and Amanda would never have to know. There had been no fucking, and he felt confident that there never would be, so for once AIDS was not a concern—to the extent that the disease was always lurking, even in his fantasies, as the inevitable outcome of such twisted desires—or more to the point, he would not be dying from sex with Boris. Thus his disgust quickly mutated into a more familiar detachment. He decided that gay sex was not unlike a drug; he was happy to have tried it but did not see himself becoming addicted. He replayed the previous hour in his mind with the sort of satisfaction of a job well done, and, for the first time since he could remember, felt certain he was completely and permanently free from desire for another man.
AS MARTIN RETURNED to the present on a very different walk home, he found himself in a less compacted crowd, and one that on the whole seemed more sullen and reflective than the one he had encountered earlier, as if the reality of what they had collectively witnessed was finally starting to sink in. As Martin continued to dwell on the episode with Boris—along with the many more that followed, most with men he could no longer begin to recall beyond the vaguest details—he felt relief and a form of gratitude (to the extent that such things were even possible in the larger context of this moment) in light of the murky, delusional waters from which he had arisen. For many years, sex had presented itself as an ordeal through which he could never pass without “collateral damage”—in his case a combination of guilt and denial—which over time had impeded his ability or desire to distinguish between what was “safe” and “unsafe,” at least in the heat of the moment, and it was only after testing positive that he learned to act with more patience and consideration, for himself and for others.
The Metropolis Case Page 16