The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [51]
“What about love?” Lucien responded, for although he appreciated the gesture, he still wanted to pout.
“Don’t worry—you’ll have your heart broken like the rest of us, and then you’ll wonder why you spent so many years craving it.”
“But how do you find it?”
“It’ll find you. Trust me.”
The agitation he sensed in Gérard pleased Lucien, who felt reassured that, whatever the nature of their relationship, it was at least not marked by ambivalence or boredom. “But not with you?”
“I can love you,” Gérard sighed, “but just a little bit, and only once in a while.”
WHILE LUCIEN AT twenty-three was still friends with Gérard—and had enjoyed similar encounters with a number of others—he had yet to fall in love, or at least in the way Gérard had described. Though he tended to justify this defect by reminding himself how busy he remained between work and singing, he sometimes feared his continuing isolation, not only on those nights when his bed seemed vast and lonely but also when he considered his development as an artist. Every music teacher he had trained with inevitably and repeatedly made the point that the greatest opera singers were not necessarily the ones with the strongest, most talented voices but those who could convince an audience that they had been subsumed by the characters they portrayed, a process that required great reserves of both empathy and experience. Like a painter with only two colors at his disposal, Lucien worried that he would never be able to express himself fully if he had not experienced the complete gamut of emotion.
But with nothing to be done at the moment, he buttoned up his shirt and turned his attention to the evening ahead. He had been interested in Wagner since the composer first arrived in Paris with the hope to mount a production of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra, and had become something closer to obsessed after attending the symphonic concerts at the Théâtre des Italiens; unlike so much French fare these days, this music had nothing quaint, charming, or airy about it, which made him feel young, reckless, and invulnerable, immune to the conventions of polite society, as if he should be scaling mountains, hacking through dense forests, or perhaps writing tomes of scandalous epic poetry.
Along with his black shirt, Lucien opted for black pants, a black cravat, a black overcoat, black shoes, and—to complete the effect—black kohl, which he rubbed around his eyes. “My dear, you look like an opium addict,” Codruta observed a few minutes later when he presented himself in the music salon of the Georges, where she was arranging chairs, or rather dictating the arrangement to a pair of her domestics.
“You don’t approve?” Lucien responded. “I thought we agreed that Wagner’s music was romantic and funereal.”
“At my age, I don’t like to be quite so literal,” she remarked, although as Lucien knew, her interest in Wagner was also relatively unrestrained. She had seen his operas in Vienna and was said to have been instrumental in convincing the emperor to offer the Tannhäuser commission. More recently, she had taken the unusual step of publicly allying herself to his cause—by way of a petition of support signed by more than fifty of her noble peers—to counteract the more conservative elements in Paris, who were scandalized by everything from Wagner’s nationalistic tendencies to his penchant for expensive clothes—he reportedly ordered thirty tailored suits from Charles Worth in a single visit—to his refusal to insert a ballet into the second act of his opera, as per the French tradition.
Without waiting for a response, Codruta officiously guided Lucien to a settee positioned at an angle to the back wall and an adjacent bay window, thus offering him a clear sight line to the piano and the view outside. “Do you think your romantic heart can withstand the burden of being extremely quiet for the next few hours?”
Lucien nodded, knowing that only four others—all important musicians—were slated to attend. In recognition of Codruta’s patronage and