“It’s not an easy question,” he said before reflecting. “Right now I’d say yes—there’s nothing I would rather do—but if you had asked me at another point in my life, I would have said something very different.”
“Why—what happened?” asked Maria, at once incredulous and despondent, because she had been expecting a more reaffirming answer from someone in his position.
“When I was your age—maybe a little older—I thought everything was perfect with my career and my life, and maybe it was—I don’t know, it’s always hard to judge, except for those few minutes right after a performance, when every doubt seems far away—but then I had some real problems, not so much with my singing but with the relationships in my life, and I wasn’t old enough to understand that turmoil is inevitable—especially for those of us in the theater—and I ended up in a crisis. I was so sure that my voice was hurting me—or more important, those I cared for—that I gave up singing. I vowed never to enter an opera house again.”
Stunned by this information, Maria took a moment to respond. “But how—how was it hurting you?”
He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “I didn’t think I could do both—sing and live. I thought that to sing with any passion was making me too vulnerable, so that I felt wounded both on and off the stage, and also too self-centered, oblivious to the suffering of those around me or—even if I was aware—incapable of helping. When you perform, everything seems so alive, and—as much as I tried—I couldn’t make myself acknowledge real life because by comparison it was so tedious and messy and unrehearsed.” He laughed quietly and sighed. “It took me a long time to learn how to separate the two, which also isn’t easy, because you can’t be two completely different people—you have to give yourself to the stage, obviously, but you have to maintain some kind of distance, too.”
“How did you come back?” she asked and already felt a little bereft as she considered the answer, and what it might entail for her or, for that matter, already had. For years she had told herself that there was nothing she wouldn’t do to be the best singer she could be, yet the resolution now sounded hollow and frightening.
“One night I went to the opera, and I realized as I was watching it—I was sitting there with tears streaming down my face the entire time, just shy of sobbing, much to the horror of those around me, I’m sure!—I realized it was killing me not to sing. I knew I had ostracized myself from what I loved most, and for those few hours I saw my life the way you sometimes do—like you’re viewing it as another person—and I knew that I was barely going through the motions, not really enjoying anything or anyone, like I was already dead. There was no love in my life! I knew that I had to sing, that it was the only way I could offer myself any kind of beauty or forgiveness, which is ultimately what mattered most. I thought singing was the problem—and maybe it was—but from then on, I knew it was also the solution.” As he finished this thought, he focused his attention on her. “Was that more than you expected?”
“I’m not sure,” Maria said, “but thank you—it’s helpful.” As she spoke, she felt a shift in her perspective, something indefinable but present, so that the previous hours seemed no more consequential than a few errant clouds crossing the vista of her life. As she and Leo spent a few more minutes idly chatting—about some of his favorite roles and her upcoming Magic Flute—she could imagine herself like him, a working singer with a battle-weary sense of pride and resignation, which was an end that—at least for now—seemed better to justify the means.
A FEW MINUTES later she arrived at Ronald Spelton’s master class. She found a seat near the back of the amphitheater—not surprisingly, it was crowded—and tried to enjoy the mild buzz of affirmation that continued to spread through her in the wake of her conversation with Leo Metropolis. She felt like she had taken a big fall but with his help had landed safely in a pool of water. The only problem was that not more than two seconds after Ronald stood up and began to speak, her resolve was shattered by a dry-throat, finger-biting, twirling-the-ends-of-her-hair kind of attraction for him that had her fanning herself in a room not much warmer than a refrigerator. Despite her earlier talk with Linda—which she now remembered with renewed annoyance—this desire was as completely unexpected as it was undeniable, and she could not take her eyes off him as he paced back and forth in front of the room, lecturing and singing in what might as well have been Martian. Beyond her long-standing attraction for solidly framed men, she wasn’t exactly sure why he did it for her; he was probably thirty years older than she was—even older than Leo—and more than a bit trollish, with thick eyebrows, lumpy shoulders, and the perpetually surly leer of someone about to tell a dirty joke; but she could not deny the intensity of his bleak, serious eyes, or how his clothes were tight in all the right places, and she mentally undressed him a thousand times in an equal number of seconds.
When the class ended, she lingered in her seat for several minutes before she went to the front and carved out a position on the outskirts of a ring of students. She stared down at least two others—did they have the same idea?—who tried to insist they were in back of her, but she exerted her seniority to push them ahead. Finally it was her turn, and she plied him with a series of questions related to interpretation, agents, and possible career trajectory—the answers to all of which she already knew—as they walked out of the building.
They paused in the somber glow of the November sunset. “I don’t know why,” Maria remarked, “but this time of day makes me feel seasick.”
“Transitions are tough.” Ronald nodded. “Let me guess: you’re a night person?”
“I am,” Maria confirmed. “I’m always in a daze until three or four in the afternoon.”
“That’s not a bad thing for a singer, although it can be hell when you have a matinee.”
“Or a final dress,” Maria pointed out.
“Or a final dress,” Ronald agreed.
The conversation seemed to have reached a dead end, and as they stood on the corner of Broadway, Maria decided to move beyond this charade of pleasantries. “So where are you headed?”
“Back to my hotel for a few minutes, then I’m meeting some friends for dinner—”
“You don’t have an apartment?” Maria interrupted, determined to keep the conversation on point.
Ronald appeared to hesitate for a second, and Maria wondered if he was on to her, for his tone was perhaps a trace more seductive as he explained, “I always stay at the Callaghan.”
Maria suppressed a shudder. “What’s that like?”
“It’s not bad. I have a little suite with a kitchenette, and there’s a nice view of Central Park from the balcony.”
“I bet I’ve seen better,” Maria declared in a display of truth and confrontation as she thought of Anna’s apartment.
Ronald grimaced and scratched at his tooth, which gleamed through a slightly oily five-o’clock shadow surrounding his mouth. “It’s only two blocks away if you want to see for yourself.”
Maria looked at her watch. She was supposed to meet Anna in just over an hour. “Okay,” she said. “Lead the way.”
A few breathless minutes later they were at the hotel, and after what seemed like seconds after that they were on the elevator up to his suite. Then they were inside, and Maria heard the click of the door over the internal din of her racing heart. As she looked past the foyer toward the bed, where the floral print on the bedspread started to kaleidoscope, she wondered what she was doing here, and whether she should politely excuse herself and leave like a fellow guest of the hotel who happened to have stepped into the wrong room.
Ronald tossed his coat on a chair and invited her to do the same. “Um, I don’t—,” she began to say, hesitating.
“Don’t worry, I won’t bite.” He winked at her. “Unless you ask me to.”
“Cut the crap.” Maria looked back at him and frowned as she wondered how she could be so attracted to such a lecherous character, yet at this same moment she could not resi
st finding out what he really looked like under those ill-fitting clothes, and whether he was as good in bed as he was on the stage.
“I sincerely apologize,” Ronald said, his tone dripping with insincerity as she dropped her coat and then allowed him to take her hand in his own and bring it to his lips. He looked up at her, and it was only at this moment that he, too, seemed to waver. “Just so we’re on the same page,” he went on as he lightly kissed each one of her fingers in turn, “this is why you’re here?”
“I thought,” Maria responded in a low, breathy tone that almost made her laugh at the idea of playing such a sexpot, “you were going to give me the name of your agent.”
She pulled him up to her and leaned into him, close enough that his taut belly jutted up against her own, close enough that she could see the wrinkles around his eyes and his thinning hair, and so that she could even smell the slightly foreign and mildewed aroma of a man so much older than any she had ever experienced, and like a cheap wine all of this left her both nauseated and intoxicated. She was filled with suspense as she again wondered whether she was actually going ahead with this, but as she lowered her lips to meet his she knew the answer was yes, apparently, she was.
Ronald returned the kiss with some violence before he pushed her away. “Let’s not rush,” he said as he unhitched the top button of her jeans and caressed the small patch of exposed skin above the line of her underwear. He fell back onto the bed and pulled Maria on top of him, where she straddled him for a few seconds before he rolled her off and then somewhat more forcefully unfastened the remaining buttons on her jeans, which he removed one leg at a time and then dropped, inside out, onto the floor. He dispensed with his own clothes with the calculated speed and acuity of one who had been through thousands of costume changes, first his shirt—to expose a fat, hairless chest of fish-belly white—then his pants, and finally his socks and underwear. For a second he glowered over Maria, who was now flat on her back, before he collapsed onto her in what was practically a body slam—not that she minded, since she was a lot taller than he was, although he definitely weighed more—and attacked her with his tongue. He quickly traversed her body, a strategy that soon delivered her to delirious heights she had never suspected could exist until she realized that he was fucking her with the slow, heavy force of twenty elephants.
The frame of the bed was knocking furiously against the wall, which made her hope that the neighbors were out to dinner. She gasped and writhed under his weight, smothered by a mix of pain—his dick was not long but, like the rest of his body, squat and almost grotesquely hard—and bliss unlike anything she had ever experienced. When, however many minutes later, she regained her senses, she felt more calm than frightened, although both emotions were present. She turned to Ronald and noted how his eyes—shiny, black, and limpid, like those of a seal—stared up at the ceiling as he softly hummed to himself. She observed his bloated body with renewed admiration and disgust. “I can’t tell you how much I needed that.”
“Uh, anytime?”
Maria laughed and ran her pinkie over the hill of his stomach. “You’re married, right?”
He turned toward her abruptly. “Why?”
“No reason.”
“That’s not exactly an innocuous question.”
“Does your wife know that you—?”
“No—and I’d like to keep it that way.” He sat up on the bed, his back to her. “It’s not like I do this all the time.”
“I wouldn’t care if you did,” Maria said with genuine nonchalance as she got up and went into the bathroom.
After a quick shower, she peered at herself in the mirror and was surprised—but pleased—by who stared back: not only was she older than Maria had imagined but there was a graceful quality to the way she brushed the hair away from her face and turned the spigot on the sink, a physical maturity she would not have believed possible had she not just seen it herself. If there was something flawed about what she had done—to the extent that it was not very romantic—it struck her as a necessary flaw, rooted in a spirit of pragmatism that she would need to balance the rather many uncompromising facets of her future. She thought of Ronald in the next room, old as he was and at the height of his career, and how she had seduced him, and it made her realize that she was no longer a child, or even a student. She felt confident, as if she had mined an intuition on which she would have to rely to motivate and guide her—particularly after she left Juilliard—to practice, to choose her roles, or to make any number of other important decisions related to her prospective career. That she had discovered this in the course of having sex with Ronald, she knew, was not an accident; she saw her father’s coin, except she was not holding it in her palm thinking about nothing, as she usually did, but it was slowly flipping through the air—as when he had tossed it to her on that last night in Pittsburgh—and she could see her embossed silhouette as much on one side as on the other.
34
Into the Millennium (The Criminals)
PARIS, 1870. After his arrival at the Gare du Nord, Lucien took a carriage to the Île, where he found his father about to sit down for lunch. As much as Lucien might have wished otherwise, his gaunt expression could not disguise a continuing struggle with grief, even now, four years after Eduard’s death.
“I wish you could find a way out of this,” Guillaume said as he pulled the cork out of a bottle of red table wine. “I’m sure when you were a teenager you never would have predicted the day I would say this, but you should be singing.”
“I’ve tried,” Lucien replied, “but it’s not there—I still can’t seem to breathe.”
Lucien’s grief had not been constant; in the first days, his friends had to prevent him from jumping out the window like a trapped animal, and then he had been gripped by an irrational belief that Eduard was not actually gone, so that he ran through the apartment opening and shutting doors. During the funeral cortege, which had snaked all the way from the opera house to St. Stephen’s—an honor decreed by the emperor himself—Lucien had bit the insides of his mouth to resist the temptation to wave and laugh at the Viennese who lined the route, absently nodding with their vacant, dull expressions. This initial phase eventually gave way to a more reflective but guilt-driven state, in which he sat for hours, obsessively replaying not just the day in question but their entire past, looking for clues to exactly what had gone wrong—besides the rains and the flood—as if there were still a chance of doing things differently. He could not imagine, for example, why he had not woken up on the morning in question but managed to sleep while Eduard walked out to be shattered by a chance conversation with the emperor; and if their exchange in the flooded opera house had been a final performance, it didn’t prevent him from revisiting his lines over and over, like a mad composer writing for the dead.
Guillaume considered him for a few seconds. “When your mother died,” he said, “it was devastating in ways you now appreciate, but there’s a limit to how many times a young child can see his father in tears.”
“How did you manage it?”
“Do you think you’re the only actor in the family?” Guillaume gently chided him. “I’m not saying I was very good, but children can be—or at least, you were—a forgiving audience. They’re naturally happy; they cry for a little while and get over it—they become distracted by their curiosity about the world and their place in it. You might even say they’re little scientists.”
Lucien nodded; it made sense, not only in terms of scientific inquiry but also with the kind of larger meaning he had always ascribed to music.
“I’m not saying it’s easy,” Guillaume continued, “or that you should act like a child—or for that matter, have one—but you have to find something. As I’ve said to you before, we only get one chance at life, so there’s a limit to how much we can squander. I’m not saying you have to sing, but if you stop trying to understand—well, then—”
“You’re dead,” Lucien concluded, and he did not protest when his fat
her left him to sit alone in the sunlight.
THE NEXT MORNING, Lucien had breakfast with Codruta in the main residence of the Georges, where a retinue of servants was busy preparing for her imminent departure to the Loire Valley for the summer.
“I apologize for the lack of tranquillity,” she noted with a wave of her hand at the hallway behind them, “but I appreciate you arranging your schedule so that I could indulge my continuing interest in your affairs.”
“It was far from an imposition,” Lucien offered truthfully, since he always made a point to visit Guillaume for a few weeks at the beginning of each summer. “My father was also anxious for me to see you.”
She nodded. “I won’t pretend he didn’t ask me to talk to you,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat his advice.”
“No, I don’t think so, either,” Lucien glumly agreed.
“Not that I’m questioning his motives,” she added pensively. “He’s worried about you.”
“I know—I understand.” Lucien nodded. “And I wish I could be more like him—I wish I could work through my grief in a more productive manner—”
“That can be admirable,” she offered, “but I don’t think that kind of sublimation—while suitable for a scientist—necessarily conforms to an artistic temperament, do you?”
Lucien considered this. “No, or at least not for me,” he admitted. “I want to sing—I’ve tried—but I can’t. I think back to Munich, and how at the time it felt like something crystallized in me—as a singer and a person—and though I thought it made me stronger, since Eduard, I feel like it turned me into someone I don’t want to be.”
The Metropolis Case Page 27