The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [60]
Maria regained her composure and took her position with an improbable if no less alluring stillness; she did not look nervously at her shoes or at the piano, or concentrate with furrowed brow on some point in the middle distance. Her expression was both less aware and more self-absorbed than those of the other girls, almost as if she were granting each member of the audience the honor of entering her cocoon. Anna wondered if this girl would be the first of the day to possess a voice to match her intriguing aura, and—though barely conscious of this—also began to formulate a question about who Maria might really be; at this point, it was mostly in the spirit of curiosity, such as sometimes happened when she saw an attractive young man or woman on the street, perhaps walking out of a store, hailing a cab, or even standing beside her on an elevator.
She remembered her tryst with Lawrence Malcolm, which occupied the same realm as the Isolde debut with which it would always be linked, existing somewhere between a memory and a dream. For a second she was there, in the back of his store, overflowing with confidence about her burgeoning career and a belief that she could bring this kind of serendipitous, passionate love affair along with her, so that her future had seemed like a precious metal untarnished by any difficulty or regret. In the weeks after Lawrence left for Europe, she wrote to him several times and he responded with cheerful postcards from abroad, the stamps of which she caressed as though touching his lips. Which is not to say her interest in him was obsessive; as he had predicted she had too much else to think about between singing and the endless complications of her new life, which—intoxicating as it had been to consider in the abstract—was nerve-racking in the actual flood of offers, counteroffers, and agreements, not to mention unceasing demands for interviews and information said to be required by the insatiable public in light of her new status as a “sensation.” But to know it was just a matter of time until he returned had been—just as she had hoped—a kind of palliative or life raft in these first few months, as she—like any singer who had ever gone through this phase of initial scrutiny—struggled to keep her bearings amid the turbulence of so much attention.
When complications—if one could use such a term to describe an unexpected pregnancy with twins—had arisen, their lives together, albeit largely imaginary at this point, became fraught with difficulty, and Anna could no longer envision them together on a sort of oasis. She debated whether even to tell him—this was part of a larger and more painful debate about how to proceed, if at all, with the birth—and ultimately decided to write to him, less with the intent of gaining his approval than out of her consideration of what it would be like to be in his position; she would, she reasoned, want to know. So she informed him of her intention to give the children up for adoption—though not opposed to abortion in theory, she hated the illegality of it—while offering the hope that he, as someone who seemed to appreciate the demands of her art, would understand; as she wrote these words, she began to feel a new hope that the event might even bring them together in unexpected ways.
On the day she mailed this letter, fate again intervened and delivered to her a notice from his law firm informing her that Lawrence had died in a car accident on