The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [142]
Her reverie was interrupted by a knock on her door, which she opened to find a contingent of festival heavyweights: the intendant, the conductor, the stage director, and a fourth man who looked vaguely familiar. “Is it true?” Maria demanded, after they had filed in. “Did those Dumpfbacken really fall on each other?”
“Unfortunately, they did,” the intendant confirmed and then gave a brief account of the accident, which more or less conformed to the intern’s version, before getting straight to the point: neither Tristan was available.
Maria could barely bring herself to speak. “So we’re canceling?”
“Not necessarily. We have a replacement.”
“Someone I’ve worked with?”
“No—”
“Or rehearsed with? Even once?”
“No—”
“My fucking God.” Maria pounded her palm against the wall. She desperately wanted to sing, but not with some third-tier crackpot. “So I get to make my debut with—”
The intendant flashed a thin but indulgent smile and gestured toward the fourth man. “I presume you know Leo Metropolis.”
“Leo Metropolis?” Maria repeated and realized why he looked so familiar: she had met him almost twenty years earlier.
“Maria.” Leo smiled, and to hear his voice made her head swim with the memory of her final year at Juilliard, after she had been knocked out by Lucia Popp’s Queen of the Night. She could almost taste the accompanying malaise, which made her detest him for a second, until she remembered how he had helped her and considered whether he might be able to do it again. A few seconds passed, and nobody spoke. Maria stared at Leo and tried to reconcile the man who stood in front of her with the one from her memories. She regretted that she had not seen him since, either onstage or off, to give her a better basis of comparison. Although Anna had never heard Leo, Linda had always claimed that Leo was the best Tristan she had ever seen, and Martin Vallence had not only seen him perform but also—in an even stranger coincidence—had bought Leo’s house in Washington Heights; lovely as it was, Maria had visited only once, which given her schedule was not exactly surprising. So it wasn’t that she hadn’t heard about Leo during these years, but that he had simply hovered somewhere just beyond her immediate attention, which made his appearance now feel almost inevitable.
What was almost odder than his presence—and perhaps unfair—was that twenty years seemed to have barely changed him; he was still big and fierce-looking, with intensely angled eyebrows, a high forehead, and the kind of short silver hair that allowed certain men to appear relatively ageless. She would have been surprised if he was sixty, but that made no sense given that he had been singing dramatic roles from at least the late 1960s, when she had to assume he would have been in his late thirties or forties. Then again, there had always been something elusive and eccentric about his career, and it occurred to her that perhaps he had started singing at a younger age than she could have imagined, or than conventional wisdom—especially for Wagnerians—would dictate. She also knew that when she was twenty, most thirty-five-year-old men looked much older to her than the same age difference would appear to her at forty-one; so maybe he was forty in 1981, which would now make him a young-looking sixty or sixty-one, which was not entirely implausible.
In any event, it was his ability—not his age—that ultimately mattered, and for her to claim anything else would have been hypocritical, given her own refusal—like most singers she knew—ever to discuss the topic of age, at least publicly. She opened an unsmashed bottle of mineral water and swished the bubbly liquid around in her mouth; to flatten the carbonation made her feel a little better, a little tougher, that much more in control of the situation as she addressed him. “So—Leo Metropolis—I didn’t know you were still singing.”
“If the opportunity arises,” he said, and nodded slyly.
“And you’re ready?” Maria went on a bit dreamily as she tried