The Metropolis (7 page)

He wondered if all adults felt this way and just lied about it, and if the most he could expect from life was a flicker of whatever was supposed to make it worth living. The question made him feel weak and dissatisfied until in the next second he concluded that to experience
this type of ambivalence—and more important, to be conscious of it—was, if you could look at it from another angle, sort of a revelation, because at least you could pinpoint a few things that didn’t make you incredibly happy, which in theory should expand the pool of things that might.

A
LMOST THIRTY YEARS
later, Martin grew aware of the bleating alarm clock. It was beyond time to get up, and even though the aspirin had effectively transformed his hangover into a distant and not entirely unpleasant thud, he felt troubled by many things: it was 7:45, and he was running late to a job—and a career—that no longer thrilled him; he was now forty-one, which for all intents and purposes made him a senior citizen in gay years, and which—though he had never had any trouble before—made him worry whether or not he would still be able to attract the kind of man, almost always younger and without exception thinner, he tended to prefer. And while he was rarely inclined to regret being single, this, too, was beginning to feel like a liability as he considered the vague outlines of his future. Or if being single wasn’t a liability—because he frankly enjoyed the freedom it offered—the uncertainty he felt, in either case, demonstrated how complicated the variables of time and experience made the calculation of what made life worth living.

Given all of this, he would not have predicted that he was about to launch himself off the bed to face the day—his birthday—with a smile. Yet to his own surprise, this is what he did. On his feet, he wobbled for a few seconds with a hand on the wall and considered that, if nothing else, at least he could state with greater certainty any number of things that did not make him happy, e.g., sex with men who didn’t kiss, extreme temperature fluctuations, postwar American political hegemony, and the color beige, to name just a few. He pinched the ends of his fingertips and was relieved to feel them; after staggering
to the bathroom, he presented himself to the mirror, where he pulled his face back and forth and rubbed his hands over the silver-tipped hair of his buzzed head.

“I look like shit,” he admitted but detected something in the air—if not redemption, at least curiosity and maybe even some desire—which no doubt explained the mischievous glint in his slate-blue eyes.

PITTSBURGH, 1965. By the time Maria was five years old, she had developed an amazing ability to sing in Italian and French. “
Chants, mon petit oiseau,
” said Bea, who reverted more and more to her native French when she spoke to her granddaughter, as though it were the language of children, and Maria would almost always oblige, offering up any number of things she had memorized from the records that were always playing.

As much as Gina appreciated her daughter’s talent and her mother’s encouragement—which mirrored her own—she was bothered when Bea told Maria that the best singers gave their voices to God. Gina was starting to hate church; nothing Father Gregory said resonated with her, and she could barely listen as he droned on about the evils of communism and the deteriorating moral fabric of a country where so many young people had clearly fallen into league with the devil. I’m one of them, Gina thought as she visualized her own nonprocreative acts in the bedroom. Even the memory of his voice—nasal and all-knowing—made her skin burn, so that she feigned
sickness on many Sundays as the rest of the family got ready to go to mass.

“This is how you thank the good people who brought you this child?” Bérénice whispered to her daughter’s unresponsive back on one such morning.

“Ma, drop it,” Gina whispered back. “I’ll go next week.”

Because she didn’t want to influence Maria negatively, however, Gina didn’t stand in the way when Bea brought Maria to church, sometimes three times a week to make up for Gina’s neglect. Nor could Gina deny that Maria seemed to love it; nothing outside of
La Bohème
made her happier than to sit in a pew transfixed by the agonies of the wasting man nailed to the cross, or to allow her eye to wander between the stained glass and the antiquities that glinted in the filtered sunlight as if placed there by the hand of the Almighty Himself.

At home Maria spent hours leafing through Bérénice’s saint-and-martyr tomes, dreaming of the day when she, too, might be pierced with iron hooks, mauled to death by beasts, or burned at the stake. Bea taught her prayers in Latin, the holiest language of all, dressed her up as a nun—a venial sin in comparison to the indulgences Bea could expect to receive for indoctrinating her precious Maria into the faith—and together they would recite the litany: “Mother, hear me, immersed in woes!
Ave, Mater dolorosa, martyrumque prima rosa, audi vocem supplicis,
” Maria cried, having memorized it.

“
Fac, ut mortis in agone, tua fidens protectione, iusti pacem gaudeam!
” Bérénice responded, as her black eyes beamed out of her wrinkled face with the fervor of salvation, though her command of the English was not so strong: “Only a death and agony we peace for our soul!”

They played this game until they collapsed onto the floor weeping, at which point they would crawl into each other’s arms, overjoyed with the promise of divine redemption. Though the five-year-old
Maria did not yet grasp the literal meaning of these incantations, she understood that, by repeating and memorizing whatever Bea placed in front of her, she was acting, which gave her a certain power over her grandmother, who most assuredly was not.

Gina suspected as much. “Ma, she only likes the costumes,” she protested to Bea. “Why don’t you play house or school with her?”

“What mother ever complained that her daughter prays too much?” Bérénice replied. “Besides, you think I make her to do this?”

“No, but she sees you and—”

“So now we’re ashamed?”

“I just want her to be normal,” Gina said, exasperated. “I don’t think most girls her age are memorizing Latin.”

“So she is not
normale.
” Bérénice shrugged. “
J’aurais dire qu’elle soit extraordinaire! Vraiment, je te jure, ma fille
, what is wrong with this?”

It was not a question that Gina felt comfortable answering, given her fear that there was something abnormal deep inside her, hollow and vast except for those few blissful seconds when she could fill it up with music. Gina wanted Maria to experience this bliss, but without the emptiness from which it seemed to arise.

A
FTER
M
ARIA STARTED
kindergarten at St. Anne’s, it quickly became clear that she was anything but normal. Her fellow five-year-olds were less than charmed by her tendency to walk like a penitent and to murmur in Latin, and she could not fade into the background when she was the tallest in her class, with skim-milk blue skin and straight black hair that reminded the other children of spider legs. One of the girls told everyone that Maria’s green eyes were the same color as her cat’s, which confirmed a collective sense that Maria was not quite of them, particularly after she made the mistake of telling them she was adopted.

In second grade she was dubbed Morticia, and everyone said she was from Transylvania and drank blood. Inspired by the deluge of house cleaners on the market, a group of enterprising girls invented an imaginary “Morticia Spray” to “disinfect” any chair or desk where she happened to sit and made money selling refills for the imaginary cans. Because Maria had so little reason to smile at school, she often wore the dazed expression of someone just hit over the head, which only egged the others on, given that their victim appeared so deliciously addled by their efforts.

As she got older, Maria occasionally devised plans to improve her lot. In third grade she decided to stunt her growth, thinking that if she were the same size as her classmates, they might not hate her as much. Gina was not happy when Maria announced her plan one night at dinner. “Maria, honey, you can’t change how tall you are,” Gina declared, putting down her fork. “Your size is your size. It’s just the way you are.”

“Then why do you try to lose weight?” Maria responded.

“That’s not the same. That’s because—”

“
On mange comme un cochon?
” interrupted Bea. Though pencil-thin, she had spent the past twenty-five years resenting that her daughter had inherited the buxom shape of her own mother-in-law, who though deceased remained an object of hatred because she had moved in with Bea and her husband in the years before her death to torment Bea with the same kind of comment she had just made.

Less affronted by these remarks since her marriage—John liked her figure—Gina stared at Bérénice with a mix of tenderness and foreboding before she addressed her daughter: “Maria, if anyone makes fun of you for being too tall, it’s only because they’re jealous.” She turned to her husband. “John, tell her.”

“It’s true, honey.” John nodded. “Someday you might be able to dunk a basketball.”

“I think what your father means,” Gina continued, shifting her glare from Bea to John, “is that it’s what’s inside of you that’s important.”

Completely unconvinced by her mother and secretly abetted by Bérénice, Maria was soon wrapping her feet like a Chinese princess and cramming them into shoes four sizes too small; she slept on the floor of her closet, her head and feet at opposite walls, hoping to compress the millimeters that were being tacked on at night. To her mother’s chagrin, not to mention her teachers’, Maria began to slouch, so that the instant she touched a chair anywhere, she slid down the back of it until her chin was only a few inches above the desk or table in front of her, her knees bent as if she had just been stabbed in the back during her nightly prayers. At school she began to walk like a victim of osteoporosis, which only made everyone hate her more.

Since Maria had no friends, Gina and Bea filled in as best they could. Gina took the secular lead with hopscotch, jacks, mumblety-peg, paper dolls, and cat’s cradle. They buried jars of cut flowers and months later rediscovered them. When the weather was nice, they sold leaves and grass, sometimes at exorbitant prices, to an assortment of blocks and dolls, or to John or Bérénice. Meanwhile, prayer sessions with Bea evolved into more complicated rites of communion and confession, not to mention the sacraments and gruesome reenactments of martyr deaths in the kitchen, which between the knives and forks and ketchup bottle offered all sorts of possibilities.

This was how Maria’s theatrical—and then operatic—skills began to develop; in fourth grade she suggested to her mother that they put on a play in which the characters sang to one another. Using color-coded crayons, Maria was soon writing operettas featuring anywhere from three to ten characters, all of whose vocal lines she invented and committed to memory, along with some written parts, always the easiest, which she reserved for her mother and Bérénice, whom she also
directed in the design and construction of sets and costumes. Each week Maria ran a rigorous rehearsal schedule that left her exasperated with the failure of the other actors—again, Gina and Bea—to master even a single note, but then on Saturday afternoons they held performances, with audiences comprising the same blocks and dolls—once again fleeced for tickets, although a few lucky ones were called upon to appear as supernumeraries—and John, who could be counted on to attend as long as curtain times were scheduled between innings of the game. Some of the more memorable productions included “Maria Grows Shorter,” “Maria Adopts a Baby,” “Suzy Polomski Gets Hit by the Bus,” “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” “Bérénice in Purgatory,” “Felix the Procurator and His Wife, Drusilla,” and “Maria Leaves Pittsburgh for a Vacation in St. Louis,” a somewhat controversial show because of last-minute changes imposed by censors alarmed by the original concept, “Maria Leaves Pittsburgh Forever.”

M
ARIA’S MUSICAL TALENT
never attracted attention at St. Anne’s because the subject was taught by a well-intentioned but tone-deaf nun who played the same six records over and over while the children followed along with a book. At home, Maria sang constantly, not just in the musicals but alone to accompany her imaginary wanderings with the saints and martyrs. In her room, the world dropped away and was illuminated by shafts of gossamer light; more rarely, it would all go dark and she would be left shivering and fearful, though of nothing she could identify or explain. Then in seventh grade, hope arrived in the form of a new music teacher named Sister Mary Michael, a relatively young and pleasant-looking recruit. For the first few days of school, Maria admired the new sister from afar and looked forward to impressing her with a song. She had listened to enough children—and worse, adults—to know that most were miles away from the notes, even when singing simple melodies. But on the
first day of music class, Maria discovered that Sister Mary Michael, despite her cheerful demeanor, was as tone-deaf as anyone she had ever heard, except even worse because unlike more modest souls, the sister seemed to have no idea how far off she was. She began the class by butchering one of Maria’s favorite hymns, “Tell Us Now, O Death,” in a monotone so flat and cavernous it almost knocked the wind out of Maria.

It occurred to Maria that she might impress the nun by offering to sing it herself, so that her teacher could perhaps hear the difference. The sister took this suggestion in exactly the wrong way: “Are you saying something’s wrong with my singing?”

“No, Sister.” Maria shook her head, regretting that she had ventured to raise her hand. “It’s just that—” Maria stopped, knowing she was trapped.

“Please … continue.”

“I—I don’t know.”

Sister Mary Michael’s smile froze on her face and she extracted a ruler from her sleeve with a deft agility that left the other children gasping in fear and delight at the anticipated flogging of Morticia. The nun shushed them before she addressed Maria: “Perhaps you’re right—you
should
demonstrate how it’s done.”