Similarly, in a way that had been far beyond him twenty years earlier, he could now appreciate the advantages being gay offered him, not only in terms of access to the infinite reserves of seriously attractive men in New York City—some percentage of whom could be counted on to return his interest—but also for allowing him to see the world through different eyes—his own—to find beauty that in the past he would have overlooked or ignored in the effort to appear different than he really was. As Martin considered this, he felt a spark of desire—though more abstract than physical, a form of optimism, really—that he knew would be difficult if not impossible to reconcile with everything he had just witnessed (both in the present and in his memories), not to mention the accompanying waves of shock and sadness that continued periodically to wash through him and make him weak in the knees as he headed north. However small or illogical, he knew it was there, and he did not want to question or—worst of all—malign it; instead he resolved to keep it burning in a remote corner of his mind, unexamined for the moment but somehow reassuring as he returned his attention to the more pressing problem of getting home.
He was distracted by the sight of a young suit, maybe in his late twenties, in a double-breasted coat and a candy-striped tie, with shaggy hair and aviator shades; he wasn’t walking with anyone, and his vaguely distracted, antagonistic aura seemed both appropriate and frankly seductive to Martin. But now that he was forty-one and not, say, twenty-nine—when the fate of the universe had so often seemed to hang in the balance of possessing a stranger—Martin easily restrained himself from making any kind of overture. There would be other days, perhaps, but what could he possibly say today—a disaster day—that wouldn’t sound ridiculously trite and mundane, so that he would be left wanting to slit his wrists the second the words left his mouth? He again considered the multitudes around him and realized that each person had a story, yet—at this juncture—he could not bear the thought of hearing a single one.
21
The Past Unfolds in the Wax Museum like Distance in the Domestic Interior
NEW YORK CITY, 1978. In the fleeting image of a dream, Maria could see her parents at home asleep, in their bedroom underneath the attic. On the roof, a little silver light landed like a snowflake and burrowed down to ignite an exposed electrical wire next to a shopping bag full of old Popsicle-stick stage sets. While the first flames seemed innocent enough, small and curious as they explored their new surroundings, licking here and there, in just a few seconds they grew into a crackling fire and then a rabid inferno that ate through the ceiling to ravage John and Gina, whose souls had departed long before their bodies dissolved into the molten memories of their daughter’s childhood. Delivered to her in the hazy fog of awakening, this image was as ephemeral as a black-winged moth in the night, and so it fluttered away before Maria was fully conscious of it, although she knew it was true because Kathy was holding her and they both were weeping inconsolably. Maria already felt the shock and grief and worst of all the guilt, which made her long to follow her parents in death—but not her grandmother Bea, who was safe visiting Maria’s uncle for the weekend—and not painlessly, either, but like Saint Hippolytus to be drawn and quartered by wild horses.
Though she did not die in the hours and days that followed, a period that took her back to Pittsburgh to witness the charred remains of her home before she was shuttled around by an assortment of relatives, Maria felt increasingly numb, so that there were many times when she was sure her heart was beating slower and slower, and she was led to wish that it would stop completely. She was installed in her aunt and uncle’s house, where she shared a bedroom with Bea, and where the two of them were prone to view each other with a mix of shock and a kind of wariness or survivor’s guilt as they were to find themselves clutched in each other’s arms with tears of disbelief running down their cheeks, just as they had done when Maria was a child but now without any acting. When she thought of her old life, the one she had inhabited just a week earlier, Maria saw two versions of herself—a singing one and a nonsinging one—and she could remember thinking that the singing one had taken her to beautiful, peaceful sanctuaries, whereas the nonsinging one existed in the boring and functional world she had otherwise tolerated; but in her new life, both of these seemed to be disappearing islands from which she had been cast adrift.
She managed to sing one last time, at the funeral, and even those most disinclined to the emotional tides of music marveled at the power of Maria’s voice in the coruscating light coming through the stained glass above the altar, a sign that the deceased had not, after all, lived in vain. For a moment Maria forgot where she was, seduced by the familiar scent of flowers and the iridescent pinwheel spinning before her eyes; except as she sang, the smell made her nauseated and the colors made her dizzy, so that she had to put out her hand to steady herself, and though she wouldn’t have thought it possible, she was left more bereft knowing that this magical landscape was no longer one in which she felt at home.
WHEN MARIA RETURNED to school the following week, she went to her classes and ignored the stares of the students who often regarded her with less sympathy than awe, wanting to involve themselves in the fanfare surrounding such a tragedy. In the past, there had been much she hated about her life—school, her classmates, her summer job—and things she loved: mostly singing, but also her parents, the thought of whom now filled her with guilt and regret as she remembered what she had done to exclude her mother from the trip to New York. It made her feel reluctant to do anything but float through the day somewhat aimlessly, like a fallen leaf in the wind. There were those, she knew, who detected this change in her and tried to console and reassure her. Her aunt and uncle and grandmother spoke to her about God; Kathy Warren, who drove her to the mall and helped her pick out new clothes, encouraged her to sing; Anna Prus, who called from New York, prodded Maria to describe the most mundane details of her day. Maria did not resist these conversations but found herself saying things to please her audience and then doing quite the opposite, such as when she told Kathy and Anna that she was starting to practice when in reality she would sit in her room and absently stare at the Indian-head nickel her father had given to her. It was not a malevolent form of lying—she said these things with a vague intention to follow through—but a resistance to returning to her old self that she ultimately had no desire to overcome.
There were implications to this change at school, where her former, monolithic disdain for her classmates was also something she no longer had the energy to uphold, particularly when she was the center of so much perverse attention. A pudgy girl named Rhonda, who sat next to Maria in the back of her math class, one day invited her out to the smoking area, and Maria shrugged and went along, and didn’t really mind when Rhonda taught her how to inhale and hold the smoke in, so that it made her throat and lungs burn and her stomach queasy. Nor did she refuse when Rhonda—who wore black eyeliner and sometimes smoked her cigarettes through a long filter like rich people in old movies—asked Maria to go to a party that weekend. It wasn’t that Maria particularly liked Rhonda, but she didn’t hate her, either, so it was just easier to tag along and listen to her pronouncements about how most people were stupid, selfish losers. They went to the house of some kid whose parents were away or upstairs, and although Maria didn’t say more than a word to anyone—except a few to Rhonda, who periodically appeared with things to smoke or drink—she liked that nobody hassled her about singing or anything else from her past or (former) future life. She sat on a windowsill, all but invisible in the dark, waiting for the next thing to carry her away.
There was a boy—Joey Finn—who like Rhonda was a freak and sometimes smoked with them after math class. He lived down the street from Maria’s new house and was famous for having convinced his parents to let him install in their basement “den” four couches—one on each wall—a television, a two-hundred-gallon fish tank with a pair of oscars that made short work of goldfish, and a stereo with two speakers, each the size of a sma
ll car. Maria started going to Joey’s after school and learned to get high; once she even dropped acid and watched the massive subwoofers morph into faceless lips mouthing the words to The Dark Side of the Moon. Usually there were other kids around, but one day Maria was the only one, and when Finn sat next to her on the couch and started to rub his hand up and down her leg, she didn’t stop him, and soon enough he was kissing her, and even though there was a part of her that didn’t want to kiss him back, his more obvious desire easily outweighed her reluctance, so that she didn’t really mind when he pulled his pants down and told her to suck it, because this was where her life was taking her, and it didn’t seem any better or worse than anything else.
It was also how a few days later she ended up back at Finn’s—she walked past his house twice a day—and he said he wanted to go all the way and she didn’t really care about that, either; even the pain when he awkwardly rammed into her, or the vague disgust she felt as her hands traveled from his long, greasy hair over his acne-covered back and bony ass, seemed far away, really no more than distorted images to accompany the dull and muted strains of music she could barely hear, as if her life were being played in a movie theater three doors over from the one in which she sat.
MEANWHILE IN NEW York City, Maria’s name had already acquired an almost supernatural aura, thanks to her mind-warping audition—which was saying something at Juilliard—and news of the fiery death of her parents. There were those who denied her existence, an urban myth that gained traction after her failure to respond to the acceptance letter was leaked from the admissions office. There were times—given what Anna suspected about her own relationship to Maria—when Anna was inclined to believe this as well, which always led her to pick up the phone and call Maria, because to hear even a few syllables in that voice reminded her of what she had witnessed in Pittsburgh—and then later at the audition—and increased her resolve to bring the girl to New York. With a thought to counter the inevitable chorus of doubters—all of whom had their own agendas to promote—Anna staged conversations with her friends in the Juilliard lobby in which she referred—in full voice, almost singing—to “this little robin’s remarkable determination” and her “unrelenting desire to make a new start at Juilliard,” and informed admissions that Maria would in fact be attending in the fall but needed an extension to supply replacement copies of papers lost in the fire.
Though she didn’t want to alienate Maria—whom she did not begrudge this period of mourning—Anna worried that Maria’s grief would lead to other, more active forms of self-destruction. Such fears were confirmed when she called Kathy Warren and learned that Maria had skipped chorus a few times and had also been seen smoking outside the high school, which though not alone a cause for panic was enough to make Anna think the time had come to intervene. She considered a visit to Castle Shannon but ultimately opted for the phone, reasoning that it was best to engage Maria voce a voce.
Bea answered and made the sign of the cross. “Thank you and please—you must save her,” she pleaded. “Every day I am more—comment dire, j’ai peur—” Once again Bea was reverting to the language of her childhood, as if speaking in French would erase the memories of what had come after. “C’est trop dur.”
“Je comprends, je comprends.” Anna tried to reassure her, though she was also nervous. “Ne vous inquietez pas—est-elle chez vous?”
“Momento.” Bérénice went to retrieve Maria, while Anna listened through the line. “Maria, bella, is the nice German lady singer.”
“Tell her I’ll be right there.” Even through the phone, Maria sounded far away to Anna, particularly when she remembered how excited she had been at the Heinz Recitals and before the audition.
“Merde! You tell her yourself,” Bérénice said, after which there was a long pause before Anna heard footsteps approaching and the clank of the receiver knocking against a wall, or perhaps some cabinets.
“Hello.”
Anna took a deep breath. “Maria, it’s Anna. How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“How’s school going?”
“Not bad.”
“And your singing?”
“It’s okay,” Maria said.
“Well, there’s certainly no need to push yourself right now,” Anna replied, “but I was a little concerned that we didn’t receive your acceptance letter. Did you mail it?”
There was a long pause before Maria answered. “No, I guess I didn’t.”
Anna let some time pass before she spoke. “Maria, my heart breaks every time I think about what happened to your lovely parents, but there’s no reason to compound this tragedy. I can’t imagine they would have wanted anything except for you to sing, don’t you think?”
“That’s true.”
Anna knew she was not reaching Maria and tried a different tack. “When I think of your voice, it’s a little painful for me, and not just because of what happened, or because I think you’re beautiful and talented, but because it reminds me of when I was your age—or perhaps a bit older—and trying to come to terms with what it means to have this; except for me, it wasn’t so much a talent or a skill as a secret language, a way to describe the world that made it seem wonderful and the rest of my life dull and drab by comparison. But after I lost my parents, life became painful for me, and I really struggled for a few years. I could barely sing—my voice felt lost to me. Do you understand this?”
“I’m not sure,” Maria said, but there was a trembling, hesitant quality to her response that Anna found encouraging, since it seemed to reflect the churning of real thoughts.
“We’re born with a gift,” Anna continued, “and for a while it seems magical and gives us great pleasure, but there comes a time when it no longer satisfies us, except unlike a toy or a dress it’s not something we can just outgrow, because it’s part of us, and when you first begin to understand this, it can feel like a curse, so that you regret having been given the gift in the first place. If your voice feels different because of what happened to your parents, that’s natural—it’s part of growing up. And though you can never go back, you have the option of really learning how to use it in a way that will still bring you—and countless others—a lot of joy. Because—trust me—most people don’t have it, but it’s through us that they find at least a little piece of it in themselves.”
For a long time there was no sound, until Anna heard the raspy choke of tears. “I wanted it so much,” Maria sobbed, “but I just don’t know if I can anymore.”
“It’s okay,” Anna reassured her and listened until Maria had stopped. “I’m here.”
“How?” Maria asked miserably, and Anna resisted an impulse to cry, as much with empathy as with relief at having broken through.
“First I want you to send in the letter,” Anna said with hope and encouragement, knowing that Maria only needed to grasp the life preserver in front of her. She outlined a plan to bring Maria to New York after graduation; she would get her a part-time job and an apartment—with a roommate, another incoming singer—before classes began in the fall. “I’ll be here whenever you need to talk,” she added quietly, almost wistfully, as though speaking to a younger version of herself.
MARIA HUNG UP and felt stunned, but in a very different way than she had a few months earlier. She looked down expecting to see fragments of whatever it was she had been encased in exploding around her on the floor and then went into the bedroom, where her grandmother was lying on her bed, rosary beads in hand, her wrinkled cheeks wet from tears. “You spoke to the frau?” she asked. “She is vraiment not so bad for a German, mia bella. I hope—”
“I’m going,” Maria said as she retrieved the Juilliard letter from under a stack of books, the exact place she had put it a month earlier, when it arrived. She sat down next to Bea and showed it to her. “This summer—she’s helping me. I start school in the fall.”
“Dieu merci,” Bea responded and kissed both of Maria’s cheeks before she insisted upon kneeling nex
t to the bed and saying a prayer of thanks.
As Maria watched her grandmother, she felt a familiar exasperation but was thankful that it was not marked by the same ambivalence that had so recently clouded her thoughts. As she listened to her grandmother’s incantations, and remembered how much as a child she had loved praying with Bea, like two performers before an audience of God, she realized that what she felt was something entirely new, a combination of exasperation, ambivalence, nostalgia, and even a certain detachment, as if these were all different hues of paint on a single canvas, which she had the sense to step back from so that she might appreciate it.
She considered the letter, which continued to feel heavy in her hand, but less with obligation than with portent. She thought about what Anna had said about her “gift” and how she could have been describing the musical landscapes that Maria had inhabited for as long as she could remember but that had seemed so foreboding and unattainable at her parents’ funeral. She knew she was still adrift but was more determined, even if the thought of finding something she might not recognize frightened her almost as much as not getting there at all.
22
Original Stories from Real Life
VIENNA, 1864. Though it was February and the temperature outside well below freezing, Lucien was not deterred as he trotted down the spiral stairs of his apartment building, two steps behind Eduard. He knew that, despite the cold, stepping out into the open air—where the winter sun refracted through the mist to create an almost perpetual twilight of orange and pink pastels—would be like stepping into a dream. It was one of his favorite things about Vienna, and something he often thought about when he was inclined to miss Paris.
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