The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [11]
“Bien dit,” she concurred and stood up to retrieve her own clothes. She went into a small bathroom, where she took a quick shower. As she dressed, she savored a sense of exhaustion that had escaped her earlier in the day and knew that the performance had finally ended; her Isolde was gone, or for now at least sated.
When she returned to the front, he offered her a package. “I thought you might like to spend some time with this,” he said, and she didn’t have to look inside to know it was the Tristan manuscript. If it was an extravagant, improbable gesture, she appreciated that it resonated with the same spirit with which they had just sung to each other and made love in the back of his antiques store.
“Thank you.” She nodded, then winked at him. “And when should I return it?”
“Whenever you’d like,” he said, before alluding to a trip he was about to take to Europe—something he did every year for his business—that he expected to last almost three months.
“Three months!” she cried.
“Three months,” he repeated as he kissed her good-bye. “If I know anything about the opera, it will go by much quicker than you can imagine.”
As Anna rode back uptown, any disappointment she felt was allayed not only by the afternoon she had just spent but also by the prospect of looking forward to something beyond—and outside of—the impending performance run, which as Mr. Bing had confirmed was now hers. She felt happy; it had been a perfect day after a perfect night, and she did not want to be greedy. She considered the manuscript on her lap and absently contemplated the spinning galaxy of light—from the buildings and storefronts, the surrounding cars—splayed out across her in the backseat of the slowly moving cab.
5
The Marble Index
PITTSBURGH, 1960. On September 13, two days after her birth in a hospital near Warren, Pennsylvania, an infant girl was brought home to Castle Shannon, a small town built on a former strip mine southwest of the city. The Sheehans lived in a split-level ranch on Hamish Road, which—like so many streets in Pittsburgh—began and ended at no particular point but could be found on the curve of a steep climb before quickly disappearing over the hill or winding into a ravine. John parked the car in the driveway to let Gina out so she could go in the front door instead of through the garage. Like her husband, Gina was on the short side, and despite years of trying to lose weight would never be described as thin. As much as she regretted that, she was thankful for her long lashes and large, expressive eyes, which she had liked to think of as “doleful” ever since her seventh-grade boyfriend had learned the word in a poem. She was also proud of her mane of black hair—inherited from her Italian father—which was tied up in a white silk ribbon she had worn for the occasion because it matched the buttons of her powder blue dress.
She had met John at the same industrial-supply company where they still worked. John, after starting out in the warehouse, had recently been promoted “upstairs” into purchasing, while Gina was in accounts receivable. They had been married for almost three years with no luck getting pregnant—and not, as John was quick to point out, for lack of trying—before consulting doctors and, with all the tests inconclusive, deciding that adoption was the best option. Their priest had put them in touch with an order of Dominicans located about halfway to Erie, and just a week earlier they had finally received the call. Everything inside was already done, from the crib to the border of little yellow ducks John had stenciled over the pale green walls. “John, did you ever cut these back?” Gina called down to her husband as she walked up the sidewalk with the baby cradled in her arms. Though it was a small thing, she had dreamed about this day for a long time, and not once did her fantasy include a straggly yew blocking her entrance to the house.
Her mother, Bérénice—or Bea, since nobody could say anything but Bernice, which she hated—pushed