The Metropolis Case

by Matthew Gallaway

  “Really—photocopying?” Linda asked with a raised eyebrow. “I thought I was going to be giving a master class with Leo Metropolis!” Linda had already discussed her admiration for the heldentenor, whom she had seen perform the previous spring in Milan but whom Maria—again to her chagrin—had never even heard of.

  Anna smiled at Linda and responded in kind. “My understanding was that Mr. Metropolis was all set, but your agent skewered it by asking for too much money.”

  As Maria observed this and other such exchanges throughout the meal, she began to understand that the conversation often worked on two levels, and perhaps even three, as Linda managed to acknowledge her subservience to Anna, to mock it—but lightly—and yet to draw Anna in, which made them seem more like equals, if only for a few seconds. Though Maria chimed in a few times, she felt that everything she said was a beat too late, and when Anna and Linda smiled at her, their smiles were rooted more in indulgence than in appreciation. It made her feel weighed down, and try as she might, she could not help brooding as she wondered if her past would inhibit her in ways she could not even predict. Several times she tried to laugh—to at least convey her understanding of a joke—and it got stuck in her throat, and she was always relieved when the waiter arrived to fill their water glasses. As much as she wanted to join in, she found she could do little more than wrap her hand around the icy glass, as if to prevent her new life from slipping through her fingers.

  AS THE SUMMER progressed, she began to feel more comfortable—in her apartment, at her job, at dinners with Anna, and with Linda—or at least more able, so that after only a month in the city she looked back at the nervous girl who had frozen up at dinner with pity and disdain. Because New York was so different from Pittsburgh, her past began to feel more like a harmless callus than a malignant growth; she often felt as if she had died in the fire, and could now discuss her former self with a certain objectivity, a distance that sometimes made her wonder if she had ever lived there at all or was just now waking up from a bad dream. When the subject of John and Gina came up—as it invariably did, since she was introduced to many new people—she learned to explain that they had died some time ago in an accident, and for the uncouth who couldn’t resist pressing her, she made it clear that she didn’t feel comfortable discussing the details. She found that with practice—and she did practice, alone in the bathroom, in front of the mirror—she could convey the information without seeming too vacant or needy, like it really had happened to someone else.

  She struggled more when classes started in September, particularly during the first few weeks, when she walked past the practice rooms and heard the muffled strains of a Paganini violin caprice, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, a Rossini aria, and other offhanded feats of musical genius. Several times she found herself alone in her room, absently examining her father’s Indian-head nickel, thinking about nothing, just the way she had done during those months after the fire. She remembered what Anna had said to her about the musical language of her childhood, and how it required more work to understand as an adult, and she would feel motivated by the diagnosis. She would set down the coin and stand up with greater awareness of her spine, the position of her head and neck, the way the air moved in and out of her lungs—or any number of other things about posture and technique that she had learned—and walk out of the room as if taking the stage, already transformed into who she wanted to become.

  Of the new singers, Linda was the quickest to establish herself among the faculty, and moreover—in addition to having a gorgeous voice that sounded like it belonged to someone twice her age—she knew about all the big singers and had managed to see quite a few of them, not only in the United States but also in London, Paris, and Milan. If this occasionally made Maria jealous, it inevitably gave way to a fascination with and even admiration of her roommate. Maria was particularly interested in Linda’s ability to convey a hypnotic melancholy that seemed to have no relation to her sunnier personality, which led Maria to hope that, once she figured out exactly how to go about it, she could make the veritable wealth of sadness at her disposal that much more powerful.

  She mentioned this idea to Anna at one of her lessons but in the next breath confessed a new fear. “I’m worried that I’ll never be able to do the same thing,” she confessed, “because—well—”

  “Because you lost so much?” Anna suggested.

  “Yes.” Maria nodded.

  Anna took a few seconds before she responded. “First of all, I want you to remember that there’s never been a singer who has not spent decades learning how to breathe—with consistency—and you are just getting started. And right now, that’s all you should worry about; questions of interpretation can come later. Eventually your singing will need to be personal, but for now, it’s not a problem that you are so detached.”

  Given that Maria had never told Anna about her episodes of slipping away—when she would lie in bed absently rubbing her coin—it frightened her to think that her teacher could detect this in her singing.

  Anna placed a reassuring hand on Maria’s elbow and spoke in a more consoling tone. “Try not to compare yourself to Linda. It’s a process, and eventually you’ll understand not only what it’s like to build up walls but how to knock them down, though not completely, because you always have to hold something back, too.”

  Maria felt tears about to spill and knew she was on the cusp of something, though as much as it felt like a revelation, she feared it could just as easily be a breakdown. “Will it have to be my parents?”

  “That will be for you to decide,” Anna replied, even softer. “It might be a boy you used to like, a lost love. It might be someone who was mean to you in elementary school, or even someone you were mean to.” She smiled. “It took me forty years before I learned how to tell my story.”

  Maria nodded. It was such a simple concept to understand, and it even gave her a certain appreciation not only for what she had endured but also for what she would continue to face going forward. But the idea that she would regularly have to embrace her life like this made her uneasy; if experience was a bridge to her island, it felt increasingly rickety as it crossed over deep chasms she was just beginning to detect.

  25

  The World as Will and Representation

  MUNICH, 1864. Lucien paced back and forth in front of the Hoftheater and tried not to be too nervous about his audition. It helped to think of Eduard, who while unable to join him on the trip but having been to Munich many times before, had gently derided the design of the opera house for its stilted resemblance to the Greek Parthenon. Lucien spent a few minutes absently watching Bavarians—including some very attractive young men in lederhosen—stream across the plaza before he checked the time and made his way to the Maximilianstrasse, the grand boulevard that ran adjacent to the theater. As he walked along the sidewalk, he dragged his fingertips against the rough stone foundation for good luck and tried to imagine doing this every day on the way to rehearsal, if only he could get the part.

  At the stage door, he was greeted by Hans von Bülow, the Kapellmeister of the Munich Opera, with whom he had arranged the audition. As Bülow led him backstage, they talked about Lucien’s train ride, the beautiful weather—it was now June, and much of the English Garden was in bloom—and other innocuous subjects, all of which helped distract Lucien from the task at hand. After being escorted into a rehearsal room, he recognized Wagner, who jumped up from his seat and vigorously shook his hand. “Well!” he exclaimed. “If your voice matches your build, then we should be in luck.”

  Although the composer displayed a leering, adolescent grin that might have bothered Lucien under different circumstances, at present it felt closer to a relief than an affront. It gave Wagner a pedestrian quality that seemed absent in his music, and made Lucien think he could actually impress the man.

  “You look familiar to me,” Wagner continued, examining him more closely. “Have we met?”

  “Yes, maestro.” Lucien nodded. “I
was at your reading in Paris—the one hosted by Princess Mil—”

  “Yes, I knew it! How is La Codruta? Have you seen her?”

  “Good, yes, I—”

  Wagner interrupted him with a wink. “You wouldn’t know it to see her now, but in her youth she was—well—not to be ignored, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I’m sure I do,” Lucien offered benignly. “I saw her last month in Paris, and she said to send her warmest regards.”

  “I’ll make a note to write to her as soon as I have a minute to spare,” Wagner promised, but in an absent tone that made it seem as if the thought had already slipped his mind. “She was always a bright spot for me in that miserable city.”

  Lucien resisted the temptation to agree with the composer and an even stronger one to disagree—it occurred to him that he was already being tested—and instead summoned the spirit of Codruta as he responded. “Maestro, I’m sure the princess would be most pleased to hear from you, just as she was overjoyed to learn about your recent success.”

  “Very good,” Wagner replied. “But Herr von Bülow tells me you’re not living there anymore?”

  “That’s right—I moved to Vienna a few years ago.”

  “So that explains your German.”

  “As with my voice, it’s been a subject of much study,” confirmed Lucien, pleased by the compliment.

  There was a conspicuous throat clearing from Bülow—now at the piano—and Wagner’s expression grew stern as he stepped back to direct the proceedings. After Lucien had warmed up with a few short songs and exercises, they turned to the third act. They worked for close to an hour, a process that to Lucien felt more like a rehearsal than an audition, particularly when Wagner barked at him to repeat something. A few times Lucien lost his bearings and was unsure of exactly what the composer wanted, but any confusion did not seem to hold them back for more than a few seconds. When they finished, they stood speechless for a few seconds, until Bülow and Wagner nodded at each other and Lucien discreetly wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Oddly, he felt more nervous now that it was done, and had to subdue his shaking knees and chattering teeth as he shook Wagner’s hand and allowed Bülow to escort him back to the stage door. As much as he longed for some affirmation, he refrained from asking, knowing that doing so would make him appear weak; instead, after Bülow pleasantly thanked him for coming and allowed that Lucien should expect to hear from them soon, whatever that meant, Lucien nodded back and firmly—but not too firmly—shook his hand and said in an equally pleasant tone that he hoped he would.

  BACK IN VIENNA, Lucien ignored Eduard’s advice not to think about it and gave himself fully to the torpor of the wait. He spent hours lying on the couch, where occasionally a cat walked across his chest or Heinrich delivered lemonade and ice. Even his father’s most recent letters from Paris were filled with an uncharacteristic degree of frustration—apparently Guillaume’s latest round of experiments had resulted in little more than new questions—that seemed to validate Lucien’s ennui.

  As June gave way to July, the increasing heat left him wanting to do little more than watch the sweat form on his arms and evaporate in the twilight. He found it impossible to concentrate on anything but the audition, and any earlier convictions about his performance gave way to new doubts and forgotten details, along with an inability to determine whether they were real or imagined. He could almost hear his voice wavering where it most certainly had not, and it seemed that Wagner had been less impressed than chagrined that Lucien—a detestable Frenchman—would dare to sing his work.

  “Why haven’t they written?” he asked Eduard in a panic after most of July had passed—almost twice the length of time Bülow had initially indicated Lucien should expect to wait—and he had yet to hear a thing.

  “Because they’ve completely forgotten you,” responded Eduard. “Didn’t you see the newspaper today? They cast someone else—another Parisian, I think?”

  Lucien ignored him. “Do you think I should write?”

  “Of course not,” Eduard said more earnestly as he shook his head. “I think they’re both very busy and perhaps have one or two other things to finish before they confirm that you’re the singer they want—”

  “I’m tired of waiting!”

  Eduard laughed—they had discussed this many times—and he pushed the rest of his strudel toward Lucien. “Here—eat this and you’ll feel better. I promise.”

  “That would be nice.” Lucien sighed, but accepted the proffered remedy.

  When he finally received word from Bülow in mid-August offering him the role, with rehearsals slated to begin in October, it didn’t quite meet Lucien’s expectations. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel a certain ecstasy or validation, or that he didn’t enjoy the party Eduard threw on his behalf, but he found himself worrying about leaving Eduard for so many months and about whether the Bavarian cuisine would make him sick; he perversely wondered if his audition had perhaps been too good, so that Wagner and Bülow would be disappointed when they discovered his German was not as flawless as he had led them to believe, or his upper range not as uniformly consistent as the piece required.

  WHEN HE RETURNED to Munich, the theater was already a beehive of construction. Ships, castles, and costumes needed to be built or sewn, and then rebuilt or resewn when they inevitably fell short of the maestro’s expectations, and with increasingly extravagant materials, including African mahogany, Mesopotamian lapis, Chinese silk, and the finest wigs from Italy. Although such expenditures were known to raise eyebrows among the king’s advisers, Lucien was pleased that his own fee was on par with those of leading singers in Paris and Vienna. Besides, his attention was fully occupied by the music and the staging, either of which could be maddening given that Wagner’s ideas for every word, gesture, and glance seemed to change on a daily basis. Lucien was regularly put under the microscope and was often left weeping—or seething—with frustration after having failed to deliver exactly what the maestro wanted.

  “Do you want to know what your problem is?” asked his Isolde—a Berliner named Pelagie Gluck (who, despite sharing a surname, claimed no relation to the famous composer)—one day after a particularly grueling rehearsal.

  “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Lucien said as he removed a towel from his head. In contrast to him, she managed to make perfectly clear when she had been through a scene enough times, informing the maestro that he would have to wait until the next rehearsal if he didn’t want her to go insane.

  “You believe in it too much,” she said, as she retied her black hair in a ribbon behind her head.

  “And you don’t?”

  “I’m here to sing, no more and no less,” she stated and then cupped her hands over his ears as she continued in a whisper. “If it were me, I’d cut the whole thing in half—that would satisfy a lot of longing, right?”

  Lucien could not help but laugh at the thought. If at first he had found her irreverence distasteful, and had even worried that it would somehow tarnish the production, by this point—in large part thanks to the strength of her voice—he was finding the opposite to be true; if anything, she made him understand that different avenues could be taken to the same place, with one not necessarily better than another. But like everyone in the company at different times, even Pelagie was not infallible, and there were days when he ended up consoling—or assuaging—her with the idea that they were doing something important and universal, even timeless and sublime, and for this reason owed it to the music—even more than to Wagner, as if he were a messenger and not the creator—to push ahead.

  Except as often as Wagner preached that they were collectively engaged in the “music of the future,” and no matter how much Lucien was inclined to believe this, there were moments when he, too, felt crushed by a despondency that went deeper than his problems in rehearsal; it was the difference, he knew, between understanding the power of waves and actually being battered in the ocean. Gradually he came to attribute this lassit
ude to an almost constant exposure to the opera; it was not just the scale and its technical difficulty that were daunting—and different parts of the piece remained elusive for each musician—but an almost tangible weight that he had never before encountered, even during his many years at the St.-Germain. Like an airborne sickness, the music seemed to infect everyone—the singers, the crew, even the administrative staff—with a form of despair that drained them of any energy even before the day’s work began, as though they were hacking through a malaria-infested jungle. The sad wistfulness that came from constant exposure to a story of love and death was a component but in no way explained the overwhelming sense of futility under which they labored, as if they were required each day to explain the ultimate purpose of life while knowing that the previous day’s answer was no longer viable.

  26

  What Fun Life Was

  NEW YORK CITY, 2001. It was close to three o’clock when Martin made it home. Already anticipating the cool air inside—which he kept at a constant sixty-seven degrees from April through October—he paused at the front door to take the keys out of his pocket when he felt something brush against his shin. “Whoa, Nellie,” he muttered as he looked down to find a very skinny gray cat peering up at him. Over the years, Martin had seen many strays cross through his front yard; at least a few of them, he knew, ended up in the basement of a nearby apartment building, where the super employed them to keep the mice and rats at bay. Because he had never been predisposed to pets, Martin pushed the cat away with his leg and was about to apologize for not being able to help when he examined it a bit more closely; it didn’t seem nearly as mangy as some of the others, and it occurred to him that maybe it had recently escaped from someone’s apartment, perhaps even in connection with the attacks downtown. The cat—clearly not afraid—looked back with a certain expectation and intensity that made Martin feel like he was being tested.