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By Root 407 0

rush into him, flooding over and then through the walls he had spent so many years constructing. He closed his eyes and saw the city on the backs of his eyelids, the way it looked from an airplane at night, splayed out like neurons pulsing in time with the booming, hypnotic drum beat, and as he strained to decipher the weightless vocal lines, he knew he would never forget this moment, that he would always associate it with a sense of being scrubbed clean of the past. He looked at Maria, and she nodded back, her eyes silver with revelation and—just as he had hoped—a hint of gratitude that he completely understood, for it was the currency of being introduced to music or art that you had never before encountered but that felt like it had arisen from within you. As the band arrived at a frenzied, orchestrated drone that to Martin resonated not so much with sound as with the truth, Maria reached out her left hand, which he in turn held with his right.

39

On Fire

BAYREUTH, 2002. The morning of what was being billed as the performance of her career, Maria dragged herself out of bed, wrapped herself in a hooded cloak, and donned the biggest, darkest sunglasses she could fish out of the bottom of her suitcase. In her dressing room at the theater, after taking a long shower, she barely noticed when a dresser came in to make a final adjustment to her robe and another appeared to tie her long black hair up into a Grecian knot; as she stared into the mirror and absently continued to warm up her voice, she felt as if she were looking at herself through a deep pool of water.

All preparations came to a halt less than thirty minutes before curtain, when the sound of frantic feet and muffled shouts jarred her from the fragile tranquillity she had worked so hard to attain. She threw open the door and grabbed an intern, an epicene, straw-haired youth not older than seventeen, who in fits and starts explained that the man playing Tristan—a Dane—had toppled off a scaffolding he had climbed in order to retrieve a sword that someone had placed there—nobody knew who or why—with the intention of demonstrating to his cover an irrelevant point about how some props were better made than others. The Dane had lost his footing and fallen from a height of ten feet onto the understudy, who in his attempt to back out of the way had tripped over his feet and landed on his back. The injuries were not minor: the Dane had apparently broken his wrist attempting to brace the impact, and the understudy also claimed to have cracked a rib from absorbing the weight of a 250-plus-pound man falling on him from such a height.

Maria released her captive and listened to the shouts for medical personnel. She went back to her dressing room, where after deciding not to suppress an urge to smash something, she threw against the wall a small glass water bottle, which exploded in a satisfying pop. She knew it was a ridiculous thing to have done, but it somehow felt necessary at this point, and the fact that it actually did calm her down seemed to justify the act. Then she thought of her Tristan—to whom minutes earlier she had been ready to devote her entire being—and wanted to scream at him for being so stupid. And why couldn’t he simply ignore the pain? Tenors were such fucking babies! She could have snapped her own wrist in half right there in the dressing room and held on long enough to get through the show. In fact, she had practically done just that in a Covent Garden Elektra a few years earlier, after severely twisting her left knee in a fall over a loose wire as she made her entrance. As excruciating as it had been—and she had later required arthroscopic surgery to repair the tendon—she had put the pain in a mental box for the duration, allowing it to burst open only after the final curtain came down. Then she pictured him again—her Tristan—and knew that not everybody had her freakish ability to withstand physical pain, and she wanted to hold him, to comfort him, to tell him that they would sing together soon, even if he had to perform with a cast on his