The Metropolis (41 page)

Her reverie was interrupted by a knock on her door, which she opened to find a contingent of festival heavyweights: the intendant, the conductor, the stage director, and a fourth man who looked vaguely familiar. “Is it true?” Maria demanded, after they had filed in. “Did those
Dumpfbacken
really fall on each other?”

“Unfortunately, they did,” the intendant confirmed and then gave a brief account of the accident, which more or less conformed to the intern’s version, before getting straight to the point: neither Tristan was available.

Maria could barely bring herself to speak. “So we’re canceling?”

“Not necessarily. We have a replacement.”

“Someone I’ve worked with?”

“No—”

“Or rehearsed with? Even once?”

“No—”

“My fucking God.” Maria pounded her palm against the wall. She desperately wanted to sing, but not with some third-tier crackpot. “So I get to make my debut with—”

The intendant flashed a thin but indulgent smile and gestured toward the fourth man. “I presume you know Leo Metropolis.”

“Leo Metropolis?” Maria repeated and realized why he looked so familiar: she had met him almost twenty years earlier.

“Maria.” Leo smiled, and to hear his voice made her head swim with the memory of her final year at Juilliard, after she had been knocked out by Lucia Popp’s Queen of the Night. She could almost taste the accompanying malaise, which made her detest him for a second, until she remembered how he had helped her and considered whether he might be able to do it again. A few seconds passed, and nobody spoke. Maria stared at Leo and tried to reconcile the man who stood in front of her with the one from her memories. She regretted that she had not seen him since, either onstage or off, to give her a better basis of comparison. Although Anna had never heard Leo, Linda had always claimed that Leo was the best Tristan she had ever seen, and Martin Vallence had not only seen him perform but also—in an even stranger coincidence—had bought Leo’s house in Washington Heights; lovely as it was, Maria had visited only once, which given her schedule was not exactly surprising. So it wasn’t that she hadn’t heard about Leo during these years, but that he had simply hovered somewhere just beyond her immediate attention, which made his appearance now feel almost inevitable.

What was almost odder than his presence—and perhaps unfair—was that twenty years seemed to have barely changed him; he was still big and fierce-looking, with intensely angled eyebrows, a high forehead, and the kind of short silver hair that allowed certain men to appear relatively ageless. She would have been surprised if he was sixty, but that made no sense given that he had been singing dramatic roles from at least the late 1960s, when she had to assume he would have been in his late thirties or forties. Then again, there had always been something elusive and eccentric about his career, and it occurred to her that perhaps he had started singing at a younger age than she could have imagined, or than conventional wisdom—especially
for Wagnerians—would dictate. She also knew that when she was twenty, most thirty-five-year-old men looked much older to her than the same age difference would appear to her at forty-one; so maybe he was forty in 1981, which would now make him a young-looking sixty or sixty-one, which was not entirely implausible.

In any event, it was his ability—not his age—that ultimately mattered, and for her to claim anything else would have been hypocritical, given her own refusal—like most singers she knew—ever to discuss the topic of age, at least publicly. She opened an unsmashed bottle of mineral water and swished the bubbly liquid around in her mouth; to flatten the carbonation made her feel a little better, a little tougher, that much more in control of the situation as she addressed him. “So—Leo Metropolis—I didn’t know you were still singing.”

“If the opportunity arises,” he said, and nodded slyly.

“And you’re ready?” Maria went on a bit dreamily as she tried to rein in her thoughts. “No rehearsal?”

“I’m always ready,” he responded with an arrogance that under almost any other circumstances would have irritated her, to say the least, but at this moment left her more unnerved by the thought that it was a challenge she would have issued herself.

The intendant clutched his hands together in front of his chest and made a slight bow. “I’m sorry, but under the circumstances—”

Maria watched his lips move and weighed her options. She could imagine general managers throughout the world getting wind of this and reasoning that if an opera could be pulled off without any rehearsal at all, why not make no rehearsals the rule instead of the exception? She knew on one hand she could balk—she could push them out the door and say no fucking thanks—and count on any number of sympathetic ears; accidents happened, the opening would be pushed back to the next scheduled performance, and the house would have to take the hit. On the other hand, it was the sort
of unpredictable event that made Maria love the theater, where accidents could—and did—happen, even at the highest levels; that they were in Bayreuth, with its perfectly manicured flower beds and sepulchral Wagnerism—a place where such rituals were
never
supposed to go wrong—was not lost on her.

Leo stared back with a salacious expression in which she recognized an obsessive desire to sing that mirrored her own, and she felt all of her objections gather like lemmings and run into a chasm of irrelevance. She took a few moments to compose herself and then looked at each of the men in turn. “Gentlemen, despite the short notice, and because I have no reason to believe that something so idiotic could have been planned, and because I have, up to this point, been treated with nothing but respect by everyone here at the theater, I will sing with Mr. Metropolis.” She listened to the collective sigh of relief that filled the room and then addressed the last thread of a practical thought related to how her decision might be perceived. “However!” She held up her hand, not wanting to be upstaged by a wave of Leo Metropolis hysteria. “There will be nothing said about this—that is, no announcements—until after the show, because I am looking forward to performing in an opera, not a circus.”

T
HE LIGHTS WENT
down, and a hush swept across the sold-out auditorium, quieting the buzz about the mysterious accident, which in the end delayed the curtain by only fifteen minutes. Maria/Isolde took her place on the stage, in the ship’s aft quarters. She did not have to rely on great reserves of acting ability to look at Leo/Tristan with an appropriate mistrust, knowing that she planned to poison him in a murder-suicide as vengeance for killing her first betrothed and taking her to marry his uncle, the hated King Mark. That was all to come; as she waited, she gently rocked on her feet and took deep breaths, filling every available space of her body like an accordion, until, in
response to the opening notes of the sailor offstage, she sang. The audience ducked to avoid the beam of sound that splayed across the theater like the first bolt of lightning in a night sky. Maria ignored the conductor—who wore the expression of one savoring the first bite of a spectacular crème brûlée—and the collective murmur that went up in recognition that—
wow!
—the American diva was really on this afternoon.

She paused when the lighting shifted to Leo, who with the lithe bearing of a toreador took three steps forward to hear—in case he was deaf—the news from his second in command that Isolde was not happy. She took in the lines of his face and the dark circles under his eyes and was impressed; he looked like a man who had endured his share of suffering, and in no way like someone walking into a role with exactly no rehearsal. None of which, however, prepared her for what happened when, a few seconds later, he began to sing; as soon as Maria heard him, she gripped the lines of the ship and whispered, “Holyfuckingchrist,” as if her entire life were a thin sheet of paper about to be tossed into the flames. Here she was at the height of her power, and the legendary Leo Metropolis had just materialized to step on her like a bug.

Filled with fear and doubt, she hated him and whatever or whoever was responsible for this moment; she leaned precariously over the rail, seasick with futility, until her Brangäne pulled her back into position, where—perhaps aided by the touch of a fellow singer—she began to concentrate. She spent a few seconds analyzing his voice, the way it seemed to weave through the house, around the columns, and under and over the wooden-backed seats. It was big and stentorian, but not shrill or athletic; his diction was perfect, and she decided he must be German after all, or Viennese. She remembered what he had said to her—not in the dressing room but twenty years earlier—about his belief in performance, and she felt a spark. Maybe—no,
what was she fucking thinking?—
definitely
like him, she could not live without opera; in fact, everything she had ever done—and more than that, everything that had ever happened to her—was in preparation for this moment. She now saw Leo less as a challenge than as a fellow acolyte, ready to welcome her into the fold. She stood up and—beaming with reverence—sang with a conviction as intense as the corresponding anger and doubt that had preceded it. Bombs and missiles could have exploded around her and left her unfazed; she could have played hopscotch or walked a tightrope over a deep canyon, all without missing a single note.

T
HEY SHARED THE
love potion, which poured down her throat like hot poison, and then became an open wound of desire that grew more infected with each passing second. When the act ended and she was ripped from Leo’s arms, it was an apocalypse: writhing, she had to be passed to her dressing room like a bucket of water by a line of production assistants and there propped onto a couch and spoon-fed sips of tea to keep her throat moist. Outside the theater, the audience ran laps around the gardens, reviving an old German tradition as they considered what they had just witnessed and, even more important, prepared for what was still to come.

In the final minutes of the intermission, Maria galloped to the stage. She hardly noticed when the curtain parted and the music began, as she sat with Leo under the cloak of moonlight. They sang to each other while he removed the pins and combs holding up her long black hair, then wrapped it around his hands, pulling her closer and closer, until Maria was sure that their hearts had been fused. That their love was an illicit betrayal of the king only heightened her sense that every second spent with him was more valuable than an entire lifetime apart, and she knew she would rather die than endure another separation. When the king’s man drew his sword and plunged
it into Tristan, Maria looked down at her own body with disbelief; the pain she experienced made it impossible not to believe that she, too, had been impaled, and that her blood also ran down the stage. After the curtain closed, she staggered as if newly blinded back to her dressing room, clutching the walls for support.

During Act III, listening from the wings to her mortally wounded Tristan, she had to be restrained from taking the stage to comfort him. At last freed, she rushed out, only to realize as she saw his ashen face and held his limp hand that it was too late; she heard the echo of his dying words. Tristan was dead, and now it would be Isolde’s turn: she turned to face the audience one last time and began her final song of love and death, her
Liebestod
. As Isolde prepared to die for Tristan, Maria—now but a dim star on a misty night—expected to follow. What was the point of living? She had given everything to her voice and to the music for which it was made; she felt exonerated from the pain of life, and could not bear the thought of renewing it; she had never felt so exhausted.

She entered the last bars of her aria, and as her heart slowed—the ultimate control of an involuntary muscle—to a final beat, she closed her eyes and savored for the last time the awed silence hovering over the theater. She heard someone else singing, and—like two shafts of light refracted into a single beam—this other voice joined hers in a perfect unison that gradually softened into an exquisite pianissimo. She assumed it was death, because nothing, not even Leo, had ever sounded so sweet and strong, but it was a female voice, and like a maternal hand, it reached into the deep water and clasped Maria’s fading consciousness to pull her gently to the surface.

T
HE CURTAIN CAME
down, and Maria lifted her head from where it had fallen on Leo’s chest. She stood up and shivered as she tried to find her balance. She watched Leo follow her to his feet; just as
unsteady, he seemed exceedingly frail, nothing but costume and makeup as he collapsed against a boulder, breathing hard. Maria tried to catch his attention, but he was inaccessible, his eyes rheumy in the light. Neither moved until a group of stagehands appeared from the wings to help them down to the front of the stage, where they split the curtain and gingerly took their bows. Maria had never seen an audience in such a frenzy, rioting and screaming as they begged not to be dragged back to the dungeon of existence from which they had been so briefly rescued. They buried the stage in red roses for love and black delphiniums for death, and still they called for more. It was easy for her to imagine that soon they would go home to change careers and conceive children, to call long-lost relatives, to divulge their darkest secrets, and to forgive unforgivable sins. It was, she realized, just as Anna had predicted so many years earlier, when she had first spoken to her about their gift, and the potential it held for those who did not share it. Maria had no doubt that those who had seen this performance would never forget how the opera can make and alter history, and how, on this night, history had been made and altered.

PARIS, 1871. The commune was over. Bodies were retrieved from the rubble, buildings—charred from fire—torn down, and empty lots cleared of debris. The nobility returned from their summer estates, while the architects and bankers surveyed and measured as they began to raise capital to rebuild what had been destroyed. As much as Lucien understood that all of this represented a resurrection
of sorts, to witness it repulsed him, as if he and his fellow citizens were maggots eating away at the dead parts of the city to make way for the new, while the constant hammering and scraping together of bricks and stones created a cacophony that invaded his dreams.