The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [145]
THE CURTAIN CAME down, and Maria lifted her head from where it had fallen on Leo’s chest. She stood up and shivered as she tried to find her balance. She watched Leo follow her to his feet; just as unsteady, he seemed exceedingly frail, nothing but costume and makeup as he collapsed against a boulder, breathing hard. Maria tried to catch his attention, but he was inaccessible, his eyes rheumy in the light. Neither moved until a group of stagehands appeared from the wings to help them down to the front of the stage, where they split the curtain and gingerly took their bows. Maria had never seen an audience in such a frenzy, rioting and screaming as they begged not to be dragged back to the dungeon of existence from which they had been so briefly rescued. They buried the stage in red roses for love and black delphiniums for death, and still they called for more. It was easy for her to imagine that soon they would go home to change careers and conceive children, to call long-lost relatives, to divulge their darkest secrets, and to forgive unforgivable sins. It was, she realized, just as Anna had predicted so many years earlier, when she had first spoken to her about their gift, and the potential it held for those who did not share it. Maria had no doubt that those who had seen this performance would never forget how the opera can make and alter history, and how, on this night, history had been made and altered.
40
Fashion Is a Canon for This Dialectic Also
PARIS, 1871. The commune was over. Bodies were retrieved from the rubble, buildings—charred from fire—torn down, and empty lots cleared of debris. The nobility returned from their summer estates, while the architects and bankers surveyed and measured as they began to raise capital to rebuild what had been destroyed. As much as Lucien understood that all of this represented a resurrection of sorts, to witness it repulsed him, as if he and his fellow citizens were maggots eating away at the dead parts of the city to make way for the new, while the constant hammering and scraping together of bricks and stones created a cacophony that invaded his dreams.
As soon as Codruta arrived at the Georges, he went to see her.
“So you’re back,” she said, as if he had not spent much of the previous year on the sinking ship of the Île while she had weathered the storm in the Loire Valley.
He shook his head as if to say no, he was not back at all, except for the fact that he was sitting here in this room, where despite everything he was soothed by the familiar clink of her spoon against the teacup. It almost made him angry at her, until she offered her condolences about his father and her hope that he would remain in the apartment, at which point he saw her as if he were a child and felt vaguely—nostalgically—enthralled by the gilt trim of the windows and mirrors, which still gleamed in the bronze sun.
“Yes, I’m back,” he said, but then reconsidered. “But I’m leaving Paris,” he added, and the second the words left his mouth he knew it was true.
She smiled gingerly. “Nonsense.”
He continued more gently: “I wanted to say good-bye.”
Her hands trembled as she raised the cup to her lips, and it occurred to Lucien that she, too, was afraid, not only for herself, because she was getting rather old, but of everything that had happened to the city that she loved and that to some extent she no longer recognized. He also knew she understood his intent and was only acting now, because she had always refused to argue about anything, and at this moment—most certainly their last together