The Metropolis Case

by Matthew Gallaway

  “Jesus,” Martin muttered.

  Klint exploded. “Do you think this is some kind of joke?”

  “No, I kind of think it’s pathetic.”

  “Well, if you think it’s so pathetic, maybe you shouldn’t be working here.”

  “I didn’t say you were pathetic,” Martin replied, drawing smirks from the rest of the paralegals.

  “It’s fun to be a wiseass, isn’t it? But in the real world, which you obviously haven’t quite joined, our client pays my salary—and yours—which doesn’t include making stupid mistakes like the one you just made. So don’t do it again.”

  Martin had visions of smashing one of the office chairs through the plate-glass window. It would be so satisfying to see everyone’s expressions as they witnessed an act of violence that served the bottom-line interests of nobody except for maybe the chair company and whoever repaired the glass, but it was really the riffing distortion of the previous night that inspired Martin as he addressed Klint: “This is fucking bullshit. I quit.”

  “Ouch—I’m so hurt.” Klint stepped back to address the remaining paralegals. “Does anyone else want to join Martin? If so, please—the door’s open.”

  In fact, nobody did want to join Martin, which barely tempered his joy as he was escorted off the premises; he couldn’t wait to tell Jay—and Keith—about it. But as he was pulled uptown by the somber streetlights of the nighttime city, he began to worry about the implications of what he had done; not in terms of work—quitting had never been more satisfying, and he was already writing music reviews—but in terms of what he realized with a shudder might be love, at least as he understood it; or at least some form of it, because how else could he explain the queasy anticipation he felt even now as an image of Keith drifted past him, and the sense that this entire day had been a performance for Keith’s benefit?

  As much as he recognized this, Martin was terrified as he envisioned the walking skeletons, many no older than he was, staggering through the city. He saw a future in which, no matter what he did, he would be branded: the homosexual doctor, the homosexual athlete, the homosexual music critic. Martin Vallence, homosexual. To get AIDS, which seemed like an inevitable consequence of his feelings for Keith, was not just to join the ranks of the walking dead in New York City, with their skin sallow and drawn, their eyes intense and hollow, their limbs wasted and starved, but to be a dead homosexual, as though, no matter what else he did with his life, illicit sex—i.e., abnormal, perverted, immoral, unnatural sex—would always be the essence of his lost existence.

  RETURNING TO THE present, Martin—while remaining cognizant of the attacks, and everything they represented—could not help but consider the many ways in which his life—or just life in general—had changed since that night, and mostly for the better. For one thing, AIDS—though hardly a laughing matter—was not the specter it had been; in his case, the medicine had worked, and—except for those first few weeks, when he suffered from fever and aches—he had remained free from symptoms since his diagnosis, almost ten years earlier. Above all, he did not feel “branded,” or at least not in a bad way.

  This shift in perspective had taken many years, of course, and—as he reflected on it now—went a long way toward explaining why he had embraced a career that had seemed anathema to him after college. His decision to go to law school had occurred roughly when he began having sex with men, and while at the time he had framed the issue in financial terms, it now seemed that the former had been done as a way to compensate for the latter. By pursuing a more conventional career, he could prove to himself—and those around him, or at least as he imagined them—that even a “homosexual” was capable of acting in a “productive” manner, doing his part to oil the gears of innovation that pushed society forward. For many years, he had in fact relished the broader approval and prestige that came with a high-paying position in a Manhattan law firm but with the passage of time and the accompanying acclimation to his desires, this motivation had waned; he no longer relied on his career as a crutch for his identity, to justify his existence, gay or otherwise. Although he could understand why others might view a decision to abandon his job at the height of his earning power—to quit, to give up—with a certain disdain, as if even to consider it at such a point in his life (not to mention what was going on in the rest of the country) was somehow inappropriate or even offensive, he now appreciated that by “coming out,” he had largely removed himself from such expectations (putting aside the question of whether they were real or imagined to begin with); in effect, for the first time in his life, he felt liberated, free to do what he liked.

  He didn’t hate the firm—to the contrary, on many days, he enjoyed it—but there were so many other things he wanted to do in the time that remained to him (and here, HIV was a consideration, given that there was no telling how long the drugs would work); he wanted to plant alpine troughs, to cultivate orchids, to learn to speak Russian and maybe Chinese, and perhaps even to quilt; these were only a few items on a long list. And it was not just a desire to cultivate new hobbies that quickened his pulse with anticipation; as much as he liked and admired some of his legal colleagues, the demands of his practice had relegated even the possibility of almost any new relationship to the margins for many years. Besides Jay Wellings and his sister, he rarely talked to anyone outside work with any regularity, while his dating record had been even more sporadic. Although he—like some significant percentage of nonheterosexual men, in his experience—generally enjoyed sex whenever it suited him (this, too, was a perquisite of gay life he had not initially appreciated), simply by going to a gay bar or (more recently) a website, he wanted to learn more about someone else and (by extension) himself, to—why not just say it?—fall in love for more than a single night or—more typically—a single hour. It was a thought that both excited him and—if he wanted to be perfectly honest—made him nervous, as though he were just seeing the infinite horizons of the seas he hoped to sail.

  He considered the many things in his life he had quit—marriage, music writing, the East Village, cigarettes, and more—and concluded that no matter how painful at the time, in retrospect it was always the better course of action. “Quitting is seriously underrated,” he noted to Dante, who slowly blinked and yawned, stretching his mouth to its widest point before delicately snapping it shut.

  30

  Ce Livre pourrait s’appeler Les enfants de Marx et de Coca-Cola

  NEW YORK CITY, 1981. As Maria approached the end of her third year at Juilliard, she thought of her old life in Pittsburgh with a sense of accomplishment at having put it so far behind her. When she went back to visit—usually for a few days at Christmas and at the beginning of each summer—she could not believe she had spent so many years in a place to which she now felt so little connection. In contrast to New York City, Castle Shannon seemed depopulated and uninviting; it made her think that, even if she didn’t become a singer, she would never leave New York, any more than she might cut off one of her arms or legs. Just as she was now part of the city, it was now part of her; this was apparent even to her grandmother and Kathy Warren—the two people she cared about most in Pittsburgh—who noted that she was a different person now, more confident, mature, and well-spoken. She still missed her parents on these trips, but even here their absence seemed less an open wound than a dull ache. At night, before she fell asleep, if she occasionally felt a tremor of uncertainty about the future, she was consoled by the idea that she no longer felt so detached, and was able to think concretely about the steps she would need to take to become a professional singer. This, too, was an improvement over her first two years at Juilliard, when the nuances of technique had threatened to drown her, so that she would wake up in the middle of the night, panic-stricken and gasping for air. If her past had once weakened her, she now believed the opposite to be true; in comparison to her peers, she felt she could get by with less, in both material and emotional terms. She loved Linda like a sister but did not go out of her way to
find other friends; if she relied on Richie, she felt that she gave as much as she took, and that they provided each other with an equilibrium that would be important as they approached life after graduation and the looming prospect of launching their careers.

  This sense of direction and well-being lasted precisely until one day at the end of her third year when Richie came over to the apartment with startling news: he had been offered a job with a jazz band in Paris. Maria wasn’t exactly sure why she was so shocked, given that Richie was finishing up his fourth year and—as she knew but had not really acknowledged, at least to herself—had been auditioning with many bands outside the city. But it made her angry, so that when he sat down and began to discuss how they would visit each other as much as possible, and that his plan was to be back in the city within two years at most, she snapped: “Don’t even start—because you don’t know. You could end up in Turkey or Sweden or Japan.”

  “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.

  THE 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.

  WHEN RICHIE 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.”

  WHEN 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.