The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [116]
33
This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother
NEW YORK CITY, 1981. Just as Maria had hoped, the resolve she felt after breaking up with Richie catapulted her into her final year at Juilliard with unprecedented confidence. She sang with more poise and clarity, had better timing, and mastered difficult coloratura that just a year earlier would have been beyond her, all of which more than compensated for the occasional pang of missing Richie. A few weeks into the semester, when she auditioned for The Magic Flute, she felt only a trace of suspense as she waited for the results: who, she asked, could be better suited for the Queen of the Night, the unhinged, vengeful matriarch attempting to incite her daughter to murder? The answer, at least this year at Juilliard, was nobody, and Maria promptly began work on her first fully staged production, complete with costumes, makeup, and sets; a famous conductor in residence who ran music rehearsals; and a famous director in residence who staged the singers.
The weeks rushed by in a frenzy of preparation; in addition to her music and stage rehearsals, Maria studied biographies of Mozart, read theses on Egyptian initiation rituals and Masonic imagery, and scoured the Juilliard archives for audio and visual recordings, the highlight of which was a 1967 Lucia Popp “Wrath of Hell” aria. Except this aria was so excruciatingly wondrous that—as Maria absorbed it for a third time—she was literally knocked unconscious by the vengeance and fury on display. She slumped to the floor, where she remained until the next morning, when she was revived by an alarmed librarian who discovered her in the A/V room adjacent to the stacks. Apparently uninjured but groggy, Maria staggered back to her apartment, where in a state approaching the catatonic she realized that all of her brilliant plans over the past weeks were nothing but a flimsy façade. Her mind was a void; her ideas about how to bathe each note of her Queen of the Night in the mystical and Masonic waters from which the opera arose had vanished, and worse, the music now seemed inane and nonsensical, just as the idea of singing what was a very challenging part now fatigued her with its pointlessness.
Mystified about the reasons for this condition and increasingly demoralized, she slept for a few hours. When she woke up, she found Linda in the kitchen making toast. “I know what’s wrong,” her roommate declared after Maria had given her a sullen overview of the situation. “But you’re not going to want to hear it.”
“What? Tell me.”
“Don’t get mad.”
“I’m not—just tell me.”
Linda shrugged. “You’re blocked.”
“Blocked?”
“Yeah—it’s been what, like two months since Richie, and before that you were used to it all the time.”
Maria rubbed her eyes. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you need sex.”
“Right,” Maria scoffed as she remembered why Linda’s refusal to take problems seriously sometimes got on her nerves.
“Sorry to break it to you,” Linda replied. “But you can only work so much.”
“So, what?” Maria replied, now irritated. “Am I supposed to just pick up some guy off the street?”
“Mope all you want,” Linda said as she rinsed her plate off in the sink, “but you’re the one who passed out in the library and spent the day walking around like a zombie only three weeks before your Queen of the Night.”
ALTHOUGH MARIA DID not concede the point to Linda, the conversation motivated her to cast off the yoke of sedentary