The Metropolis Case

by Matthew Gallaway

  She looked longingly at her folder, which the man in the street had snatched out of the air and now held on his hip. She imagined the manuscript inside, a marvelous tome, bound in a mossy and only slightly matted titian velvet that had barely faded during its long existence, its heavy pages inscribed with elegant staff lines, musical notations, and directions from the composer. To lose it like this was admittedly bothersome: if only she hadn’t been hit by a taxi, she lamented, she would surely be in one, en route to Juilliard, a mere eight blocks away, where she had recently made known her intention to donate it, along with the rest of her collection, to the school’s library. A part of her had always wanted to give it to another singer, but Maria had preferred the Juilliard idea, which Anna could appreciate; Maria’s sometimes startling lack of nostalgia or sentimentality was undoubtedly one reason she seemed destined for the kind of career that Anna suspected might even surpass her own.

  She tried to remember if she had placed the address of the school anywhere on the folder, or what stationery she had used to write a short and slightly sarcastic note—Enjoy!—to the librarians, whom she had always found a bit too reverential. As for the man who caught it, unless he possessed an all too rare combination of intelligence and integrity—and how could one be optimistic, after he had drifted like such a hayseed onto the street?—he could just throw it away. It could easily end up on the black market or in a landfill, covered with all sorts of unpleasant stains, odors, acids, and residues that would destroy it well before someone might stumble across it in ten thousand years, on an archaeological dig of Fresh Kills. These regrets felt more wistful than wounded; no matter what happened, she was ready to be released from its relentless, eternal weight, and she understood better than ever why Lawrence Malcolm had lent it to her that afternoon in his antiques shop. She loved Tristan and had given herself to it many times, but it now seemed like an unnecessary instruction manual as she considered her own imminent return to the noumenal with something close to relief.

  She took a moment to examine the man. Her eyes traveled up his arm, over the madras fabric of his short-sleeve shirt to his collar before finally arriving at his face. Despite wearing an open expression of dismay—which was never becoming on anyone—he was not loutish or unattractive. Perhaps in his forties, with nothing boyish about him, he was tall and broad, not a man who would have been so easily launched into such an airborne arc. He had a closely shorn beard, and his short hair reflected silver in the sun; he wore light khaki pants—like her own—and leather sandals, which she also noted with approval, as he looked somewhat more continental, perhaps even Mediterranean.

  And then a disturbing realization: he looked exactly like Lawrence! Her mind began to spin furiously in a way it had not done for many years as she considered whether this man could be Maria’s twin brother. Though stunned by the improbability of it, she resisted the impulse to question this deus ex machina. What she felt was not a crushing, panic-stricken regret—Anna was not about to throw open the entire trajectory of her life for reconsideration—but merely a sense of wonder at the infinite threads of life, and her inability ever truly to predict when and where they might or might not be woven together. Sobering as the thought of her death was—and unlike certain other characters throughout history, she did not feel like laughing—she was inspired by the idea of meeting her son like this. She looked into his eyes, and if they did not offer the absolute truth of their relationship, she felt she had achieved a certain understanding with him. She decided to believe he was her son, after all, and was it her imagination or was he even nodding back at her? And if so, wasn’t it even better that he now held the manuscript?

  INSPIRED BY THE thought of meeting her son like this, she wanted to sing, and with no cause for restraint, took a last, deep breath and delivered her final aria. She opened on a full, sumptuous C-natural before nimbly sliding up the scale to land on an unwavering F-sharp that would have been at home at the nearby Metropolitan Opera. She nailed it, and even better, she knew it. Her thoughts turned to Maria, who was making her debut in Bayreuth, and as Anna sustained her F-sharp, she knew that, just as she could hear Maria, at this second finishing her Liebestod, Maria could hear her, and for the last time they embraced.

  Professional that she was, Anna projected the novelty of the experience, the way time slowed as Death teased her forward with the most sensuous caress, so that each of these final seconds seemed an eternity, while her life to that point—all eighty-two years—seemed no more than a second. She took a moment to acknowledge the appreciative nods of the many classically trained musicians who in the midst of their unemployed wanderings on the Upper West Side recognized a final performance of one of their own, a fellow obsessive who had spent a lifetime on scales and arpeggios, and who to her eternal credit had not choked or clutched in this farewell.

  The sound of her voice made her pause; she knew its allure stemmed not only from her superb technique but also from its ephemeral nature, which made its brilliance that much brighter. She felt all of her wants—for this man, for Maria, for the manuscript, for the city, for the grand opera itself—give way to calm resignation. Her faith both lost and restored, she stepped back from the canvas of her life and like a master painter made some minor adjustments, dabbing here and there in a state of mindless serenity, not unaware of her fast-approaching death, but not particularly bothered as she entered a last, blissful trance, confident that her voice was an endless ripple in the sea of time.

  43

  In Distortion-Free Mirrors

  NEW YORK CITY, 2002. The day was perfectly clear, but as Maria looked back over the harbor at the Twin Towerless skyline, she almost wished that Linda had scheduled Anna’s memorial at night—or better, in the fog—when it might have been easier to ignore such a stark reminder of loss. Still, she was relieved to be on the water, which at least gave her the opportunity to think for a few minutes, something that, between getting back to New York and helping Linda plan this event, hadn’t happened since long before Bayreuth. Even—or especially—now, with her thoughts on Anna, the memory of her Bayreuth Isolde made her smile; it had been a preposterous night, on which so many disasters had somehow, miraculously, added up to the best performance of her career. She considered the guests milling about on the decks below and realized that she was looking forward to singing for Anna, to saying good-bye properly. She saw Leo Metropolis, whom she had made sure to invite, knowing that he was in New York. He had mentioned this after the show—before she got the call about Anna—and suggested that they meet, a proposition to which she had been more than amenable; even after the performance, she wished there could have been more time to talk—she wanted to ask how much of their conversation at Juilliard he remembered—but there had been a swarm of patrons and management—all of whom seemed to need reassurance that the performance was in fact as great as Maria knew it had been—to attend to.

  Leo, who seemed to detect her thoughts, glanced up and waved at her from a lower deck, where he was talking to Martin Vallence. He looked better than he had in Bayreuth, or at least in the minutes after the show, when he’d seemed so much older than in the dressing room, much less during the performance. At the reception after the opera, he had seemed distracted and forlorn in a way that made her suspect that—despite his incredible voice—he was well into his sixties, if not older. She wanted to ask if he planned to sing again; a part of her doubted it, and even hoped he wouldn’t. As she envisioned her own career, she liked to think about painting her voice on the ceiling one last time, so that future audiences might look up and remember a time when they, too, had been young, and the world and its cities had seemed so much bigger and filled with potential, and the great operatic voices had reflected this.

  She waved back, and Martin—now also looking up at her—pointed at his briefcase. She still didn’t understand exactly how it had happened, but he had witnessed Anna’s accident and recovered the Tristan score; he had brought it to the service with the intention of giving it to
her here, which was the first opportunity for them to meet since her return from Germany. The coincidence might have shocked her more except that her relationship with him had always resonated with an inexplicable sense of fate that—in light of where they both came from, as if they had been pulled here together out of the suburban swamp of their youth—struck her as implicitly urban, permeating the city like stray bullets and shared glances on crowded streets. Perhaps more startling to her—as she considered Martin and Leo together—was how much the two men resembled each other, with the same barrel-chested build, buzzed hairlines, and intense expressions. She did not consider this for long—she was about to sing—except that, as she turned away, she remembered that Martin had made an allusion to this resemblance years earlier, in the context of buying Leo’s house, as if one had been a condition of the other.

  THE YACHT STOPPED next to the Statue of Liberty, whose long gown seemed to soothe the surrounding bay, which was as flat and reflective as the September sky. The engines were turned off, and Linda led everyone into a ballroom off the main deck, where she gave a short tribute to Anna. This was followed by the musical portion of the program, sung by a selection of Anna’s former students. Maria was by far the most accomplished among them and also—not coincidentally—the most daring, to the extent that she was the only one to venture outside the classical repertoire. She had chosen “Sunday Morning” by the Velvet Underground, not only because she felt confident Anna—who claimed to have seen the band once—would have appreciated the gesture but also to acknowledge Martin’s role in the events surrounding Anna’s death.

  As she sang—a cappella, in a soft echo of a voice without a trace of vibrato—Maria’s thoughts drifted back to her mother. She smelled the mix of mild soap and tangy perfume that used to hover around Gina before she went out with John on Saturday nights, followed by images of her and her mother madly cutting up construction paper for one of their backyard productions and then—going even further back—being lifted through the air, stuck to Gina’s feet as she danced through the hallways of the house in Castle Shannon. She thought of her grandmother Bea—who had died peacefully in her sleep one night, not too long after Maria’s graduation from Juilliard—tottering around the house with a drink in one hand and their favorite book of saints and martyrs in the other. For once Maria felt completely embraced by these memories, and she wanted to preserve them, to care for them in the same way her parents and Bea had done for her. She felt a particularly renewed sense of gratitude toward her mother—given the sometimes contentious nature of their relationship—knowing that, even if she hadn’t been eloquent or refined, she had instilled in Maria the aspirations that Anna, and ultimately Maria herself, had been able to mold into the most important part of her life.

  She was transported to her backyard in Castle Shannon, except it was lush and manicured like a French garden, and as she stood on one of her old stages to sing, she saw Gina, John, her grandmother, Anna, and everyone else she had ever loved—and who had loved her in return—beaming up at her. She remembered what Anna had said to her after the fire about her gift, and Maria knew that it had happened just as Anna had predicted. It made her wonder where she would go now—what her island would look like in ten years—and how long she would have the strength or the desire to maintain it before—as would one day have to happen—she let it go. She felt a pang of sadness as she considered this—which was to say, a life without her voice—but as soon as she saw it, it was gone, and she felt none of the incapacitating detachment that had so often accompanied her memories of Pittsburgh. As she continued to sing, her voice trembled with revelation; she knew that by reconciling her past, she had done the same for her future.

  She arrived at the last set of the lyrics, and as she repeated the word morning or, as it now occurred to her, mourning, she knew that, in the course of singing this simple song, her grief for Anna had opened a passage to this other grief, much deeper and unresolved, at least until now. A seagull passed overhead, and its shadow crossed her face before it disappeared into a speck on the horizon. As she watched it go, Maria filled the final notes of her song with hope and redemption, so sure was she of having found both.

  44

  La vraie douleur est incompatible avec l’espoir

  NEW YORK CITY, 2002. Martin was tempted to laugh when he recognized what Maria was singing, particularly when he realized that Leo—who was standing beside him—did not. But he was far too entranced to do anything but listen; she sang it perfectly, transforming the droning and understated cheer of the original into a melancholy but serene lullaby. He was reminded of how his own musical tastes had changed over the years, from punk to hard core to indie to opera to—lately, in the wake of Beatrice—nothing at all. To hear Maria made him want to abandon this silent, grief-stricken phase—in fact, with the realization, it was already gone—and to resume the explorations that had marked so much of the past year. It had never occurred to him that music could be so much more than a sound track to his memories, that in addition to providing a means of transport, it could also steel him for what he might find and even deliver emotions that had once been beyond him to acknowledge. While Maria—and for that matter, Leo—had long alluded to possessing a faith in performance—and by extension music—Martin had always felt more agnostic. It now seemed he, too, held a certain belief that—as with any intuition—if you could figure out how to listen to these songs, they would take you to places you needed to go, even before you knew why, and once you were there might offer a few small threads of beauty—or even purpose—that on balance could make the difference between wanting to go on and wanting to disappear.

  While the vast expanse of the horizon filled him with a certain fear of the unknown—his ability to breathe, it seemed, was also his ability to doubt—he took comfort in knowing that the past year had been valuable. It had changed him in ways he had hoped for, if not exactly anticipated; he was physically healthier—to the extent that his hands and feet no longer ached, and he could sleep through most nights—and less emotionally wounded, this all the more remarkable given that he had been largely oblivious to the condition. To know that he had confronted some of the most painful episodes of his past and survived gave him confidence; it wasn’t broad or far-reaching, certainly, but rather struck him as the opposite of the muted despair he now understood—underneath the more superficial measures of success—had marked so much of his life.

  Many times in the past few weeks, surrounded by the glass windows of his living room and the views of the city, he had been tempted to think that he could spend his final decades there alone, or at most in the company of a sad succession of cats, sifting through his memories in the continuing attempt to ascertain exactly who he was. But out here on the bay, listening to Maria and with Leo at his side, he knew it was an untenable proposition. It was just as Leo had said: there was only so much you could uncover on your own. If Beatrice had taught him anything, it was the need to reach outside, to search patiently for what he was looking for, whether it was love or faith or anything else that might give his life meaning. He had done this with her, and while it may have been a tentative and crippled form of love, it was for him pure and forgiving, and he had cried the tears to prove it.

  He was still only forty-one years old, and the city, splayed out in front of him, beckoned with possibility. He remembered his high school longings for a girlfriend, and how he had always been drawn to the idea of someone molding the spinning mass inside him into something artistic and refined and—most of all—human. What he realized now was that he had presented not just a mound of clay but a wildly off-kilter wheel, so that, no matter how gifted anyone might have been, there was no way to center him. Now, perhaps, the wheel was at least level and spinning in the right direction, and he could almost feel his hands pulling himself up into something to behold.

  AT LUNCH BEFORE the service, Martin had described to Leo some of what had happened since 9/11 to him and to the city itself. If not quite sanguine, Leo ha
d been philosophical about the terrorist attacks; as he pointed out, many if not most cities throughout history had suffered far worse mutilations—he specifically mentioned the 1871 Commune, where thousands of Parisians had been killed by their own countrymen in the course of a day or two—and while some of these cities had died and were buried, many had recovered, and still more had been born. They talked about Anna Prus, whom Leo had seen at the height of her career, when—as he assured Martin—she had been most impressive. Martin in turn had described her death, and Leo seemed genuinely astonished, or at least very much intrigued, to learn about the Tristan manuscript. Martin offered to show it to him, but Leo demurred, saying that he wanted to wait for Maria; the three of them had already arranged to meet after the service.

  Martin returned his attention to Maria’s song and soon found himself thinking of Anna. At first the accident had been terrifying to consider, not only because of what it conjured up in terms of Hank and Jane but also because of the thought of an old woman—alone and lonely—getting killed like this, another life ending in a most undignified way, her remains swept up like a pile of garbage. As he reconsidered it now, in the fragmented and dreamlike sunlight reflecting off the water, he felt certain that Anna had not been afraid, that she had possessed an unlikely tranquillity as she flew past, almost as though—he realized with a start—she had arrived at the same conclusions about life and death as he had while awaiting the inevitable, i.e., death in the form of a speeding taxi, but unlike him had made the choice to succumb. Although he continued to resist the idea that she had been looking at him—as opposed to anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity—he did not find it difficult to entertain the notion that she had at least considered him, in the way two people passing each other in a narrow hallway might, with a nod of recognition and understanding that each was now headed in the direction from which the other had just arrived.