The Metropolis Case Page 7

  “She’s most gracious,” Lucien responded as he leaned to the side to allow room for his own tea to be poured.

  Madame smiled indulgently. “Do you have a teacher?”

  “My mother was a singer, but she died when I was three, so some of her friends at her theater—the St.-Germain—have helped me.”

  “How kind.” She glanced at her daughter. “We’ve not been to the St.-Germain, have we?”

  “It’s not—” Lucien stopped as he realized that he was about to disparage his mother’s theater for no good reason. It was not the Peletier, to be sure, but it was far from the worst opera house in Paris, with a respectable repertoire of bel canto, romantic, and patriotic fare by the likes of Delève, Theron, and a few other Parisian composers.

  The St.-Germain was also where he had made his best friends as a child. He fondly remembered scurrying through the backstage tunnels and corridors, where he used to hide in the props, collect fallen flower petals from the soprano’s bouquets, dress up in wigs, and spy on the singers as they made costume changes or—just as frequently, it sometimes seemed—made love, often in unconventional arrangements that Lucien had long understood (even before such things were made explicit to him) were not always appreciated beyond the society of the theater.

  “It’s not far away,” he finally concluded with more confidence to atone for his initial hesitation.

  “We’ve been so busy lately,” Madame continued in a distracted manner.

  Lucien turned his attention to Daisy. “Do you have a teacher?”

  Marie-Laure replied on her daughter’s behalf: “When Daisy started singing I thought nothing of it, but then a friend of mine—regrettably not here today, or I’d introduce you—pulled me aside and said, ‘Your Daisy has the voice of a nightingale,’ and insisted that we immediately present her to Monsieur García.”

  “You’re a student of Manuel García?” Lucien again addressed Daisy, amazed that someone so young could have been taken on by the famous teacher, although as soon as he said it he began to worry about how he would sound in comparison.

  “Well, no.” Marie-Laure shook her head. “Or at least not yet. He assured us that Daisy has enormous reserves of untapped potential but cautioned against singing too much. I suppose you’ve heard what happened to Jenny Lind?”

  “Yes, madame,” Lucien said, now disappointed, for despite his nerves he had begun to think that if he impressed them, his performance might open an avenue to the professor. He watched Marie-Laure turn to her own daughter, as if to say “You see?” Daisy in turn smiled with just a trace of disdain as she directed her gaze past her mother’s clucks.

  Daisy had pretty eyes—they appeared almost turquoise against the pale green satin of her dress—and he wondered if she might like to kiss him, and if he would want to kiss her back; he thought of another game he used to play at the theater in which the loser (or winner) was locked in a closet for a few minutes with another chosen at random. He found that when he was given the chance to be alone with one of the girls, most were more intent on giggling and squirming away from him than actually kissing, but a few times he and another boy had snuck away to do the same, and they had kissed much harder, so that Lucien could still remember the unsettling sensation of their teeth clicking together. As for Daisy, while he decided that any verdict would have to wait until he heard her voice, he smiled back at her with gratitude. Their moment of shared impatience with adult superficiality made the room seem less constrained as he sipped his pomegranate tea and helped himself to a second macaroon.

  CODRUTA SOON REAPPEARED to announce the commencement of a musical interlude. “We are very fortunate this afternoon to have Daisy de Vicionière, who I have been assured has a talent to match her most youthful beauty—does anyone detect a note of jealousy?—and Lucien Marchand, who in the most neighborly of gestures—and I mean that quite literally—has agreed to sing for us.” Daisy arose from her chair and curtsied before she went to the piano, where she accompanied herself on a pair of popular songs by Gustave Theron. Lucien relaxed the second she opened her mouth, for her notes neither pierced his heart nor hovered like trembling soap bubbles; she did not lack talent, but to hear her gave him nothing beyond a somewhat tedious sense of enjoyment, the way he sometimes felt sitting through a tired production at the St.-Germain.

  After Daisy had finished and received a polite round of applause, Lucien’s turn came. He went to the piano, where he delivered Gluck’s “O del mio dolce ardor” followed by Monteverdi’s “Lasciatemi morire.” Although Lucien at fourteen was only a fraction of the singer he hoped to become, it was obvious to all present that his voice already possessed an intrinsic beauty and a natural legato that were the hallmarks of real talent. As his last note hung in the air, even before Codruta approached to embrace him as she whispered “Bravo” into his ear and presented him with a dozen white roses, he knew that he had accomplished exactly what he had hoped. Turning back to her friends, the princess dabbed at her eyes with a napkin and thanked the two young singers for raising the spirits of all present on what otherwise could have been a perfectly drab afternoon.

  10

  Rembrandt Pussyhorse

  NEW YORK CITY, 2001. It was eight o’clock by the time Martin had showered, dressed, left his house, and lunged into a waiting car service. On the West Side Highway, he watched the river glide by under a startlingly clear sky and continued to feel nicely sedated by the aspirin he had taken, at least until the car accelerated out of the Fifty-seventh Street exit heading crosstown and went directly over a crater-size pothole, which launched Martin several inches off of his seat, not once but twice, as both axles traversed the gulley. “Jesus-fucking-christ,” he muttered with a laugh and was reminded of the “brain damage” he had suffered as a child as a result of the vaunted potholes of Western Pennsylvania.

  “That’s a Pittsburgh pothole, Marty,” his father, Hank, used to say as he barreled right through on the way to a game or to practice, usually at around eighty miles an hour. “Our tax dollars hard at work.”

  “Why didn’t you go around it?” the ten-year-old Martin responded, as he did on such occasions.

  “Potholes are like problems.” Hank gripped the steering wheel with his muscular hands. “You gotta meet ’em head-on.”

  Usually Martin would have accepted this advice with an affable grin, but on this day—as he now remembered—he was planning a minor insurrection, at least as far as Hank was concerned. “Dad, I want to play goalie,” he declared.

  “You mean permanently?” Hank grimaced as the car bucked up and down. “You’re one of the best skaters on the team.”

  Martin was prepared for this. “I thought you said goalies have to be good skaters.”

  Hank frowned, obviously regretting the adage. “That’s true,” he admitted and rubbed a finger against one of his sideburns. “You also have to be kind of crazy, right?”

  “Yeah, so—I’m crazy,” Martin said, trying to joke.

  Hank was not amused. As every hockey player knew, goalies were strange, aloof loners who displayed all sorts of freakish behavior, e.g., talking to the goalposts or knitting sweaters between periods in the case of Jacques Plante, probably the best goalie in the history of the National Hockey League during his tenure with the Montreal Canadiens. Hank’s theory was that the stress of the position would make anyone a little “wacky,” something he did not want happening to his son.

  “Is this because of the mask thing?” Hank asked. “Because being in the net is different, you know. You’re in the firing line—front and center—and those pucks can really sting.”

  “So?” Martin responded with a level of disdain he knew—because of the implication that Hank felt otherwise about physical pain—would effectively transform the discussion into a dare. He referred to a practice a few weeks earlier when he had taken a turn in net. “You saw me—I was good.”

  Hank did not admit or deny this. “Well, let me talk it over with your mother,” he said. “I have a
feeling she’s not going to be too comfortable with you between the pipes.”

  Martin shrugged, because he had already talked to Jane, and as expected, she expressed no preference about what position he wanted to play. Though he had yet to question the dynamic between his parents in which Hank—who had played at the University of Michigan, where they met—was as obsessed with the sport as Jane was ambivalent, much less how love could bring together such very different people without any consideration of what the union might look like fifteen or twenty years later, he was quite aware that they said things to him that they did not necessarily say to each other. When he took advantage of this discord to achieve his own objectives—or “goals,” as he would years later realize in a frisson of Jungian insight—he began for the first time to note within himself a certain disdain for his parents (although it was far too amorphous for him to identify as such, again until much later), as though their failure to communicate was an expression of their stupidity, and not their humanity.

  Martin offered his opinion that Jane would not object.

  “We’ll see,” said Hank. “But promise me one thing: no knitting, okay?”

  Martin laughed. “Don’t worry—I’m not that crazy.”

  WHATEVER THE UNDERLYING motivation for the switch—and there were probably several—the goal crease proved to be the best place for Martin. The on-and-off nature of the position gave him plenty of opportunity to daydream when the action went to the other end of the rink and even—to Hank’s chagrin—sometimes when it was in his own.

  “What happened, Marty?” Hank liked to ask after a soft goal. “You were on another planet out there.”

  “Entropy,” Martin stated succinctly, one of his stock answers to avoid explaining that a loss could not be avoided when the Zamboni had not circled the ice ten times. In an early and unconscious attempt to reconcile his conflicting affinities for art and logic, he spent a lot of time developing an intricate set of superstitions, which he liked to believe could dictate the outcome of a game far more than his performance, e.g., each of his pads had to go on and come off in the same order, he never allowed the bottom of his stick to touch anything but the ice—but if it did, he would have to tap it against the ceiling three times to “purify” it—and before the first face-off of each period he always skated back and forth between the goal pipes exactly seven times. He also preferred to be the last one on the ice at the beginning of a game (but the first one off at the end), and he was always careful not to touch any of the opposing players’ clammy hands during the traditional postgame handshake. None of this he divulged to his father. “Sometimes it’s inevitable,” he said.

  “It didn’t seem too inevitable for the other goalie,” Hank noted. “He looked pretty sharp.”

  “You mean my opposite?” Martin said, using a terminology he had likewise developed, albeit for a different—but equally unconscious—reason, namely to distance himself from his father.

  “Yes, your opposite,” sighed Hank.

  “He did look pretty good,” Martin admitted and softened a little before he continued. “Next game you can be sure that my opposite’s opposite will prevail.”

  Any aggravation these tics caused Hank, however, was exceeded by the pleasure he took in his son’s talent and skill as Martin—despite the occasional lapse—continued to improve. “You may be adopted, but when it comes to hockey we have the same DNA,” he declared.

  “That’s for sure,” Martin responded eagerly. At this age, because he was adopted, he liked to acknowledge the influence of his parents, as if he were no different from any other kid. That he even resembled them in some ways—e.g., his blue eyes were very much like Jane’s and he often wore the same serious and intense expression as Hank—also made him happy, and sometimes he liked to surprise people with the truth of his adoption, as if to prove a point about it not making a difference.

  AS MARTIN GREW older and detected a growing tension between Hank and Jane—albeit one, in keeping with the mores of Cedar Village, they were not inclined to display—he began to hope that he would not end up like them after all. Except, already more similar to them than he realized, he did not directly address the issue but rather exploited it, particularly after he tried out for and made Pittsburgh’s most elite “travel team,” the Royal Travelers, which took him—and Hank—out of town quite a bit more than Jane would have wanted. On any given weekend beginning in the winter of sixth grade, Martin found himself in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Philadelphia, or any other city within a seven- or eight-hour radius from Pittsburgh. While this traveling entailed many hours in the car, most of which he spent either reading or goofing around with other kids on his team, he liked the sense of escape that came with it—although from exactly whom or what was not a question he was yet asking—so that he inevitably felt let down when he and his father pulled into the driveway on Sunday night.

  One Christmas break, when he was fourteen, his team made the finals of a tournament in Buffalo, which meant that he had to skip a Prokofiev ballet—something “cultural,” as his mother liked to say—Jane was planning to take him to with his sister. At the hotel, Martin overheard his father on the phone in a relatively heated discussion with his wife: “This is a big tournament, and thanks to Marty, we’re doing a lot better than expected. We beat the Junior Sabres, honey! Do you really think it’s fair to ask him to leave now?”

  Martin was struck by the way circumstances so often contrived to make things as difficult as possible; it was almost as if he had known this would happen the second his mother had ordered the tickets a few months earlier, even though the tournament had not yet been on the calendar. While it pained Martin to picture his mother on the other end of the line, he also didn’t want to leave, and he appreciated his father’s ability to deal with a thorny situation.

  This admiration lasted until they were in the car on their way to the rink a few minutes later, and Hank tried to joke about it. “So, I guess you’re disappointed you won’t be able to see all those pretty little ladies prancing around onstage?”

  Martin found himself incapable of playing along. “What if I told you that they’re incredibly limber?” he responded in an ironic tone meant to downplay the lack of irony. “Or that I actually like Prokofiev?” The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted it: any loyalty to Jane aside, defending ballet was a tricky proposition for a fourteen-year-old hockey player—even if he was a goalie, of whom some eccentricity was expected and for whom limberness was a necessity—particularly one who was not totally unaware of his ambivalence toward girls and everything that implied. In effect, he had drawn into sharp relief a difference between himself and his father, but one he could view only with discomfort.

  Given that Martin—at least at the time—could barely appreciate his need to employ these conversational hedges, they were completely lost on Hank. “Well, let’s just say that anything’s better than opera,” Hank offered. “All those nuts running around screaming their heads off really give me a headache.”

  “That is stupid,” Martin agreed, now deciding to take a different tack and outdo his father. “Who ever came up with the idea of people singing to each other anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you who”—Hank leaned over in his seat and ripped a fart that, remarkably, was louder than a passing truck—“there’s a kiss for you—some group of queers who got together in Europe and wanted to torture us American men three hundred years later.”

  Martin rolled down the window. “Then why do you even go?” he asked, alluding to Jane’s subscription to the Pittsburgh Opera and the fact that she required her husband to attend.

  “The same reason you’re going to go, too,” Hank said. “Because your mother likes it, and it’s our job to keep her happy. Believe me, kiddo, if they’re happy, you’re happy. That’s lesson number one in relating to the other half of the species, Marty. You gotta keep ’em happy.”

  ALTHOUGH MARTIN DIDN’T respond to his father’s comment at the time, over t
he course of the following year he would often think back to this advice, particularly since Hank seemed so disinclined to follow it himself. Once again, hockey was—at least superficially—the source of conflict, after Hank proposed sending Martin to boarding school beginning in tenth grade. Despite Hank’s best efforts, hockey remained a “second-class” sport in Pittsburgh—unlike in his hometown in Michigan, where hockey was a “religion”—and so he concluded that the solution was not to bring hockey to Pittsburgh, as he once hoped to do, but to send Martin to hockey. It did not occur to Hank that by doing this, he would lose the very thing that had allowed him to remain largely oblivious to his wife’s frustrations with their marriage but instead justified the idea with the noble and even sacrificial overtones of acting in his son’s best interest.

  Jane didn’t buy any of it and expressed her displeasure to a degree that Martin had never before witnessed. “I can’t believe you want him to leave home to play hockey,” she cried more than once. “What about meeting his teachers? What about his first girlfriend? I want to take pictures of him with his date for the prom. I want these things to be part of my experience as a parent, as a mother—does that make sense to you?”