The Metropolis (44 page)

NEW YORK CITY, 2002. On her way out of the apartment, Anna paused in front of a mirror in her foyer, where she ran a hand over her silver hair, tied up in a simple bun, and briefly examined her khaki pants and zippered black lamb’s-wool cardigan. She had sustained this uniform for enough years that those who knew her at Juilliard took it for granted, while to her former students she appeared most miraculous, as if she had somehow not aged while they had succumbed to the effects of a thousand intercontinental flights and opening night banquets. Whenever she met one of her exhausted protégés, she felt grateful to have worked when widespread jet travel was still a novelty, when singers weren’t expected to perform in Los Angeles one night and Paris the next.

She heard the clock strike four; it was beyond time to go. She yelled good-bye to the domestic, double-checked her handbag for keys, and—most important—picked up the brown string-tie folder with the
Tristan
manuscript inside. As she waited for the elevator, she assessed her chronic health problems—tendonitis in the left ankle, arthritic knee, leaky bladder—and was happy that they all seemed to be in check, if not remission, this particular afternoon. In the lobby she smiled at the doorman, a ruddy-cheeked Irishman who jumped up from his desk to hold the door, and once outside allowed herself a few seconds to adjust to the blast of hot, muggy air she knew would be her companion outside. As she put on her sunglasses, a large white frame of two oblong ovals she had worn well before Jackie made them famous, Charlie asked if she wanted him to call her a cab, but she waved him off, explaining she would get one on Columbus.

She stepped out from under the portico and turned right, where she noted a distant honk and a car speeding by—as usual, much too fast—and then the murmured conversation, first distant and then close, of a pair of women headed in the opposite direction. Her thoughts were interrupted by a squeal of tires and the sound of a something heavy thumping over the curb, and before she could even turn it was upon her. She instinctively jumped to the side, an impressive leap that showcased her strength and agility even at eighty-two, but Death, who clearly enjoyed this kind of spectacle—and was very comfortable in the heat—had already arranged for the taxi to buck up and down like a mechanical bull, so that it caught Anna at just the right angle under the fender and catapulted her backward into the air.

She began her flight, a long and—she could only hope—not ungraceful arc, an almost horizontal dive, during which her feet traveled up behind her ears and back down again, as her arms—having released her handbag and folder, the latter of which sailed directly toward a man who, as far as she could tell, had caused this calamity,
for he stood dumbstruck in the middle of the street—fell freely to her sides and provided the axis to the spinning wheel of her body. Anna allowed her eyes to take in the sculpted frieze of a Beaux Arts building she had always admired, and with the hazy sky beyond, she couldn’t help but note with a certain reverence how the city never ceased to be full of surprises.

B
ECAUSE SHE HAD
long prided herself on a forthright ability to confront even the most unpleasant of truths—particularly when it came to her students, whose years of hard work could never obscure the fact that, as much as she loved them, only the smallest percentage would be able to enjoy a real career—she did not try to pretend that this accident could lead to anything but her death. While she permitted herself some sadness at the thought and even allowed for an instinctive fear of the unknown, she felt more reflective than alarmed. As she thought of her life as a whole, she was thankful to have been graced with such good fortune while others had suffered, not that there weren’t a few things she would have done differently. She sighed, a breath that mingled with the heavy air flowing past her, and was again amazed at how in the desert of life, happiness, satisfaction, well-being—whatever she might call it—seemed like an oasis at which she was always pleased to arrive but where the water, no matter how deep, always ran through her fingers when raised up to drink.

She thought of the dead friends and relatives she hoped to see in the afterlife (though in limited doses, of course, and with certain subjects still off-limits). And her twins! Perhaps, wherever she was headed, she would find out what had happened to the boy; as for the girl, well, nothing had ever happened to lessen her conviction that it was Maria. Though Anna had never anticipated that one of her children might someday—and not just in a daydream—come back to her, never mind as a singer of such talent and fury, she was proud not
to have disclosed her suspicion; she loved Maria and had told her so countless times, had hugged her and warned off the bad spirits with a “ptoy ptoy ptoy” before her performances, had brushed away her tears over the inevitable disappointments delivered by the men she was fated to love. All of this, Anna knew, had taken place through the prism of Maria’s career, and Anna had always been careful to maintain a certain distance to prevent her relationship with Maria from extending too far into the maternal; she felt confident—given where Maria was now—that, if given the chance, she would have done the same thing again.

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?

I
NSPIRED 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.

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.