The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [107]
THE DAY HE left, Maria turned off the air-conditioning in her room and buried herself under the covers. She slept, and in her dreams she watched him walk to the gate over and over, and each time she felt something different—relief, hatred, sadness, doubt, and finally ambivalence—so that when she woke up, she felt more confused and exhausted than ever. She went into the kitchen, where she found Linda brewing coffee and opening a bottle of red wine. “There’s only one cure for what you have,” her roommate remarked as she took out two glasses and two mugs. “The coffee-and-red-wine diet.”
“I’ll be okay,” Maria sighed, but she had her doubts. “You know,” she mused, “what he said is true—I can’t deny it anymore. I mean, here I am lying in bed with a shattered heart, and the truth is I’m freaking out because I haven’t practiced in two days. That’s not exactly normal, is it?”
Linda brushed a strand of greasy hair away from Maria’s sweaty face. “When were you ever normal?”
“I know, never,” Maria replied with a fraction of a smile. “Except with Richie—what we had was normal, and it still would be if he hadn’t left.”
“Maria, you scheduled sex around practice,” Linda pointed out. “Not normal. But not wrong, either.”
In the ensuing weeks, Maria often returned to this idea as she struggled to maintain her attachment to Richie. When she thought of him, she couldn’t decide if she missed him or only wanted to miss him, because she hated the pressure of talking on the phone when it was so expensive, and writing letters was not something she had ever enjoyed. She felt an undeniable tedium as she did these things, which led her to question how much she had loved him in the first place. When she began to suspect that she had not, it sickened her to think that—just as Anna had insinuated—she had exploited Richie in order to taste love, rather than given herself over to it entirely, until it occurred to her that he was doing the same thing to her, which made her angry. Then she would remember waking up next to him and—far removed from any music at all except for the vague symphonies that never really left her head—how much she had loved those moments, and she wanted to run away to Paris, no matter what the consequences, until she remembered that Richie had rented a room in a tiny apartment in the 20th Arrondissement, which was supposedly like the South Bronx of Paris, and she knew she didn’t really want to trade in her current life for that.
WHEN RICHIE CAME back to visit for a week in August, Maria took the bus to Queens to meet him at the airport, where he already looked very much le jazz man in his chinos, dark green fedora, and goatee. While she wanted to be a little cold, when he smiled sheepishly in the way she had always adored, she rushed into his arms and felt awash in love, so that all her fretting and doubting the past few months seemed inconsequential, and she was glad not to have mentioned any of it to him.
It was a perfect moment, this reunion, which led to a series of even more perfect ones as the days unfolded. Everywhere they went, it seemed, was marked by a memory of a kiss or a laugh or even an argument, so that Maria felt as if they were continually looking through a scrapbook. Even when they went to a jazz club on St. Nicholas in Harlem with a few of his new Parisian friends, it felt to her like the creation of a perfect memory as she drank wine and spoke French in the smoky haze of the room. They even reprised some of their old walks through the dead heat of the summer nights, and Maria felt as if the buildings now watched them with a sad if appreciative sense of nostalgia until she promised them that, no, this was the beginning of something new.
It was not until the last full day of his trip that this tapestry began to