The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [42]
He restrained the urge to touch her. “Amanda?” he asked, although he already knew the answer. “What the fuck?”
“Nice to see you, too, Martin.” She pushed a strand of hair—still the color of wet sand—behind her ear and spoke in the same faintly mocking yet seductive tone he remembered.
He looked into her shadowed eyes, which made her face seem even more appealingly gaunt than he remembered. He quickly explained that he lived in the city now and worked as a rock critic, the New York correspondent for the British weekly Music Machine, a job he had inherited from Jay Wellings. “So do you live here?” he asked, trying to seem nonchalant but praying that she would say yes.
She nodded and explained that she was an assistant to Louise Bourgeois and also had her own sculpture studio on East Broadway in Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge. “Give me your hand,” she instructed as she fished a pen out of her pocket and quickly scrawled a number across his palm. “Call me,” she said before jumping through the closing subway doors with the offhanded grace of a gazelle.
THE WEDDING WAS held a year later in an abandoned synagogue on Ludlow Street, where Amanda and her friends installed close to a hundred piñatas featuring a range of fantastical creatures that created the illusion of a Miró sky. They were married by Amanda’s cousin—a mail-order minister—and during the ceremony, as Martin looked out at the guests and noted an assortment of bored, smiling, and tear-streaked faces, it occurred to him that underneath the ironic trappings of the event he and Amanda had so carefully choreographed, their wedding was not very different from the millions that had come before and would no doubt come after. While such a realization would have tainted his enjoyment of almost anything else—to wit: was there anything worse than seeing a favorite band appropriated by the shallow mainstream of popular culture?—deluded by his desire to escape himself, he felt only happiness as he kissed the champagne away from Amanda’s lips amid the calculated mayhem of the moment.
It took not even six months for this phantasm to be obliterated by the prospect of an entire life together. At first he pretended as they went to art openings and rock shows, and made the rounds of their usual East Village haunts. He strained to imagine her as aloof and imperious, and devised a million new ways to please her; he took her to Sammy’s Roumanian, he surprised her with dozens of black tulips, her gave her advance copies of new albums by the Cure, Kate Bush, and Echo and the Bunnymen. At home in bed, he assiduously licked every pore of her body as she lay impassively under him, while in public, he always marked her with a touch of his finger on her arm, a kiss on the shoulder, even as he unconsciously shied away when she tried to reciprocate, so that in his mind she retained the magnetic yet feline quality he had always admired. None of it worked for long, and unlike in the past, he saw himself in her hands no longer as a spinning mound of unformed clay but rather as a horribly deformed pot—slimy and off center—with no destiny beyond the slop bucket.
Martin’s decision to go to law school the following year proved even more problematic when Amanda showed no enthusiasm for discussing the basic tenets of the law he was obliged to acquire. Her power over him waned to new lows, and as he thought about her during the day, or passed her sleeping body on his way in or out of the apartment, he felt disgusted with himself. He started having sex with men—secretly, of course, but so detached from any sense of Amanda’s reality that carelessness was more a given than a question—which both exacerbated the situation and