The Metropolis Case Page 10

  He first noticed Amanda in his second-semester pottery elective, where he was intrigued by her thin shoulders, boyish hips, and long, slender neck, and over the course of a few weeks, he grew more entranced as it became clear that she was a goddess of the ceramic studio, able to transform mountains of clay into spinning beehives and then one perfectly formed cylinder after the next, which in turn were followed by massive pitchers, urns, and vases. While he often allowed his eyes to linger on her, she seemed oblivious; there were no accidental glances or nods hello, just an inscrutable gaze with her sleep-deprived eyes that sent twin shivers of adrenaline through him, one at the thought that she wanted nothing to do with him or anyone else, the other at the prospect of doing something—anything—to ingratiate himself with her.

  He turned for advice to Jay, who assessed the situation: “For you and many others in this warped environment, her appeal lies in her aura of decadence,” his roommate said. “You understand that, right? That for someone like you—varsity hockey, dean’s list—she represents the underlying fatigue you feel for your superficial displays of perfection.”

  “Who says I’m fatigued?”

  “My point exactly,” Jay rejoined. “Nevertheless, your plight has moved me to pity, and so I can do some reconnaissance. Very discreet to spare you the agony of a public rejection, though I must go on record to say that you will not be the first or the last to lose your bearings navigating the shoals off the rocky coastline that is Amanda Perry.”

  That Friday, Jay caught up with Martin on the quad. “Good news, Vallence: Ms. Perry is amenable to a brief excursion. You are to meet her at the pottery studio tomorrow at four, after which I would suggest something informal, perhaps a stroll through the woods—bring some entertainment, of course”—he tapped his backpack, where he kept his one-hitter—“to determine if there is the necessary rapport.”

  The next day Martin met Amanda at the studio, where they talked about music—she liked Roxy Music and David Bowie—which seemed to confirm that they were two lost souls who against incalculable odds had found each other. Still, because there was a part of him—even deeper and less acknowledged—that was afraid of exactly what Amanda might help him find, he remained somewhat aloof and was careful to mask the depth of his feelings for her as he mentioned older or more obscure bands—the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Big Star—that he professed to love more than any others.

  They eventually left the studio and walked around the lake to the Greek amphitheater in the woods behind the girls’ campus. In a shaded alcove next to the stage, Martin extracted a joint from his pocket. As the sun disappeared below the tree line and the forest around them became somber, the smoke they exhaled mixed with a wet mist that covered the entire theater in a shroud. Martin was struck by how attuned she seemed to his desires; like him, she was not incapable of enthusiasm but never appeared too earnest or overbearing. When they kissed, her mouth fit over his in a perfect mix of cool passion and—somehow, again—detachment that left him simmering, if not quite ignited.

  This “date”—a word they never used—was followed by others, until at some point, back at the amphitheater, she mysteriously extracted a foil-covered package—a rubber—and pressed it into his palm. When he admitted to her that it was his first time, she tore it open and unrolled it into place before she pushed him onto his back.

  “Don’t worry—it’s a lot easier than calculus,” she teased before she kneeled down and officially began the exercise.

  At first, as she rocked back and forth and he tried with mixed success to match her rhythm, he feared that this, too, would join the decidedly muted delights offered by—among others—Monica Gittens and his first hand job; Julie Hayes, who had kissed him for an hour; and Barb Peters, who had somewhat presciently put a finger up his butt. Then he detected something dispassionate in Amanda—never once did she lose that faraway look, even when she came a few minutes later and instructed him to do the same—which seemed to be the perfect complement to his own ambivalence and—miraculously—left him wanting more.

  SHE BROKE UP with him just before graduation. They had been accepted into different colleges, and when Amanda declared that a long-distance relationship would be untenable, Martin listened to the words as if they were being whispered at him from across a desert. Though he felt sorry, he was not close to tears, for it had already occurred to him over the last few months that his feelings for Amanda had not crossed—and would not cross—into the realm of serious love or infatuation.

  A decade later, when one day on the subway platform he heard a low female voice, eerily familiar, which did not so much call out his name as state it—“Martin. Martin Vallence. Hey, Martin, over here”—he was no longer so presumptuous, and his longing for Amanda was not so obtuse, but rooted in a more tangible hope to alleviate the far more acute desires that had taken hold during the intervening period. So when he confirmed that it was Amanda, still vaguely but unapologetically masculine in the manner of certain runway models, and she examined him with the same passive but not displeased expression he remembered from high school, he felt more than grateful; he felt redeemed. He had staked a lot more on meeting the girl of his dreams—or his past dreams, which in Amanda’s case meant the same thing—and his hands trembled, so certain was he at this moment that her arrival was predestined to save him from the parade of men who increasingly inhabited his thoughts and fantasies.

  He restrained the urge to touch her. “Amanda?” he asked, although he already knew the answer. “What the fuck?”

  “Nice to see you, too, Martin.” She pushed a strand of hair—still the color of wet sand—behind her ear and spoke in the same faintly mocking yet seductive tone he remembered.

  He looked into her shadowed eyes, which made her face seem even more appealingly gaunt than he remembered. He quickly explained that he lived in the city now and worked as a rock critic, the New York correspondent for the British weekly Music Machine, a job he had inherited from Jay Wellings. “So do you live here?” he asked, trying to seem nonchalant but praying that she would say yes.

  She nodded and explained that she was an assistant to Louise Bourgeois and also had her own sculpture studio on East Broadway in Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge. “Give me your hand,” she instructed as she fished a pen out of her pocket and quickly scrawled a number across his palm. “Call me,” she said before jumping through the closing subway doors with the offhanded grace of a gazelle.

  THE WEDDING WAS held a year later in an abandoned synagogue on Ludlow Street, where Amanda and her friends installed close to a hundred piñatas featuring a range of fantastical creatures that created the illusion of a Miró sky. They were married by Amanda’s cousin—a mail-order minister—and during the ceremony, as Martin looked out at the guests and noted an assortment of bored, smiling, and tear-streaked faces, it occurred to him that underneath the ironic trappings of the event he and Amanda had so carefully choreographed, their wedding was not very different from the millions that had come before and would no doubt come after. While such a realization would have tainted his enjoyment of almost anything else—to wit: was there anything worse than seeing a favorite band appropriated by the shallow mainstream of popular culture?—deluded by his desire to escape himself, he felt only happiness as he kissed the champagne away from Amanda’s lips amid the calculated mayhem of the moment.

  It took not even six months for this phantasm to be obliterated by the prospect of an entire life together. At first he pretended as they went to art openings and rock shows, and made the rounds of their usual East Village haunts. He strained to imagine her as aloof and imperious, and devised a million new ways to please her; he took her to Sammy’s Roumanian, he surprised her with dozens of black tulips, her gave her advance copies of new albums by the Cure, Kate Bush, and Echo and the Bunnymen. At home in bed, he assiduously licked every pore of her body as she lay impassively under him, while in public, he always marked her with a touch of his finger on her arm, a kiss on the shoulde
r, even as he unconsciously shied away when she tried to reciprocate, so that in his mind she retained the magnetic yet feline quality he had always admired. None of it worked for long, and unlike in the past, he saw himself in her hands no longer as a spinning mound of unformed clay but rather as a horribly deformed pot—slimy and off center—with no destiny beyond the slop bucket.

  Martin’s decision to go to law school the following year proved even more problematic when Amanda showed no enthusiasm for discussing the basic tenets of the law he was obliged to acquire. Her power over him waned to new lows, and as he thought about her during the day, or passed her sleeping body on his way in or out of the apartment, he felt disgusted with himself. He started having sex with men—secretly, of course, but so detached from any sense of Amanda’s reality that carelessness was more a given than a question—which both exacerbated the situation and perversely made it more exciting, as if he really were getting away with something.

  One afternoon toward the end of his first year, she came home and tossed her bag with some violence onto the bed before she sat down across from him and drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. They had been bickering about something the night before, and she was annoyed that a gallery owner had blown off a studio visit with her.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked, petulant. “I’m trying to work.”

  “I don’t know why you ever went to law school,” she answered, less aggravated than fatigued. “You actually used to be kind of fun.”

  He responded as if she were responsible for his hidden and unceasing desires. “Fuck off, Amanda.”

  “Martin, what the fuck is wrong with you?” she yelled back, provoked. “You look at me like I’m a piece of shit. Do I make you sick? You make me sick! We never talk, we never fuck—are you gay, Martin? Is that why I make you sick?”

  “You wish,” he responded, trying to control himself but shocked that she had seen through what was apparently little more than a thin veneer. He felt an urge to make angry love to her, which he knew was idiotic, rooted in nothing more than a desire to prove her wrong, but which in turn made him even more irate. “Is there anything else you want to blame me for?”

  At this point her anger seemed to break as she beat her hands against the table in frustration. He was horrified to see real tears emerge from her eyes and spill down her cheeks. Until this moment, it had not occurred to Martin that she had also been losing patience with him, that he was actually the one who had taken on the exact characteristics—cool and aloof, vaguely angry—he had once found so beguiling in her.

  He felt a newfound resolve and addressed her calmly: “Aman—I’m sorry—I think we made a mistake—”

  “Fuck you, Martin,” she said, in exactly the same tone he had used a few minutes earlier. “You think an apology for wasting three years of my life is enough?” She now continued without emotion, flat and distant as a mirage. “You have these expectations, Martin, and I’m not sure where you get them, but I always get the sense that neither one of us is living up to them, so how can you ever be happy?”

  “That’s a good question,” Martin admitted, passing his hand in and out of a beam of sunlight on the kitchen table.

  She winked at him. “So you really want a divorce?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “You bet, but it’s going to cost you.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “No, I’m telling you. I want this apartment, Martin, and you’re going to give it to me.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Because I already know, Martin.”

  “Know what?”

  “I know you haven’t exactly been at the library studying all these nights—”

  Martin felt the hard metal of the gun she had placed at his temple. “What are you talking about?”

  “What part of not being at the library didn’t you understand?”

  There was a part of him that wanted just to admit it, to confess, but at the last second he panicked and offered a dose of feigned sarcasm: “I love it when you condescend to me, Amanda.”

  She shrugged. “Fine. Let me spell it out for you—you’ve been having sex with guys you meet—”

  Martin interrupted her. “You’re making this up—”

  “Am I?” She flipped open a nearby copy of the Voice. Her tone was shaky but rehearsed, and he realized that she had planned this. “Hmmm—this one sounds good, doesn’t it? Bi-curious MWM—married white male—seeks same …”

  He felt a strange sense of dislocation, the way he imagined it might feel to have his head cut off but to retain consciousness for those several seconds as it rolled across the floor or stared up at the sky from the wicker basket. Except the numb quality did not fade to black but continued for what felt like years and years, as though he were living every second of his life in reverse. Unable to talk, he staggered to the bathroom, where the deception he saw in these images of his past seemed to accumulate into something visceral, so that he could no longer contain it. To be sick was actually a relief, because it was a distraction from the reverberating echo that each of his many professions of love for her now seemed to hold; it was really the cruelest kind of lie, something you wouldn’t wish on an enemy, let alone someone you had shared a bed with for three years. He realized that if someone were to ever do the same to him, he, too, would be filled with rage, except even as this occurred to him he knew he had done this to himself, which was exactly why he was kneeling here on the bathroom floor with his head in the toilet like a strung-out junkie.

  Yet after a few minutes, when he was in every way purged of his desire for her, he was struck by the idea that however torturous and ugly the route had been, she had in fact guided him to a certain truth; granted, it was ugly and rough, but it was his to own, and his relief at finally admitting this—of finally grasping this most basic idea, i.e., that he was incapable of loving Amanda—made his tears feel almost hopeful as he allowed himself to be comforted by the cool porcelain against his cheek. His head stopped spinning, and for at least a little while the future seemed ordered and attainable, even when he returned to the kitchen and found Amanda gone, having left only a note with instructions to call her lawyer.

  MARTIN’S ELEVATOR STOPPED and his legal colleague exited, leaving him alone with his memories. He had not seen Amanda since the divorce settlement—a dreary session in which they signed documents in her lawyer’s conference room and did not once make eye contact—but from periodic reviews of her art had gleaned that she subsequently married a prominent dealer and otherwise appeared to lead the life she had always seemed—if not quite professed—to want. Although the settlement had been financially punishing for a few years, as he thought of her now, he could only admire the manner in which she had eviscerated him, exactly in the way—he could now admit—he had always hoped she would. If she had not appeared, he would have needed to invent her; otherwise, he might have languished even longer in the purgatory he had fashioned for himself. In the silver reflection of the metal doors, he saw an image of the two of them at an outdoor café on Bleecker Street, where they used to go for espresso after shopping for used records. She was sitting across from him, her legs crossed and one elbow resting on the table, a cigarette dangling from her fingers as she looked past him at nothing. He was pleased to detect a continuing resonance in her angular beauty and indifference, the way her placid expression betrayed just a trace of exasperation at the poor service delivered by the world around her.

  14

  The Experience of Our Generation: That Capitalism Will Not Die a Natural Death

  PITTSBURGH, 1976. If Maria, once she joined Kathy Warren’s chorus, did not consider her voice to be particularly beautiful—or at least not as beautiful as Kathy’s—its sheer size and agility in comparison to the wobbling, scooping efforts of other students was obvious, and so she was not surprised when Kathy began to ask her to demonstrate certain passages for the rest of the class. In contrast to how she felt about speaking, Maria neve
r felt any anxiety about singing; she opened her mouth and her voice appeared. But as much as she tried, she inevitably failed to summon this fearlessness on those rare occasions when she was called on in her other classes, or when talking to a boy, or doing anything else that made her nervous, all of which left her feeling at odds with herself as she tried to understand why she could be so able in one respect and so limited in others. Because singing was so easy—and because those who heard her regularly expressed their appreciation of her talent—it often seemed that in the rest of her life, she was just acting and—judging from the audience—not doing a particularly good job of it, either.

  At the end of the semester, Kathy rewarded her with a solo at the school’s graduation. For the student body at large, this was the first chance to hear Maria, and when they realized it was Morticia on the stage, singing with an impassive confidence that made the leaves around the stadium seem to rustle—especially for those many who were tripping through the ceremony—on what was otherwise a stifling day, there was a collective whisper of astonishment. Though it quickly gave way to boredom and impatience, Maria savored this wave of attention even as she saw an infinitely flat sea behind it.

  After the ceremony, Kathy unveiled her plan to have Maria enter the following year’s Heinz Recitals, a statewide high school competition whose winners received scholarship money for college or conservatory. When Maria heard this, her mind began to simmer with implications that went far beyond the competition; she saw herself leaving behind so many things—her home, Castle Shannon, her family—traveling the world, stepping off airplanes and being taken to important theaters, where her voice would create riotous storms among countless admirers.