The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [78]
That he was still singing—albeit again, more in German than in French—added to the sense of having lived nowhere but here, as if his art trumped—or transcended—any geographical consideration; it also helped that, since arriving in Vienna, he had achieved a consistency in his upper range that allowed him to entertain the idea of tackling certain roles that would have been quite beyond him at the conservatory. In addition to performing periodically at recitals and salons hosted by a number of Eduard’s friends, Lucien was working with a new teacher, who agreed it would not be unreasonable for him to start auditioning in the very near future, possibly as soon as the fall.
When he considered differences between his old life and his new, the most important was not the atmospheric light, or the Turks and Arabs who ran the markets—or even the Viennese themselves—but Eduard. To say they had fallen in love undoubtedly captured the intensity of their first months together, when even the briefest separations—during a phase when they had traveled back and forth between the two cities—had been enough to send Lucien into despair and for the first time he had understood what Gérard had meant on that night at the St.-Germain; and now that he and Eduard lived together, Lucien felt he could have predicted the more mundane if pleasurable aspects of love, the obvious and expected benefits of sharing a bed and meals and evenings at the theater, along with the trivial annoyances and spats that occasionally accompanied the same.
What he could not have predicted, and what he thought about as he walked up the stairs laden with spices, flowers, and pastries, was how to live with someone was in effect to become that person; it was not just that he sometimes threw his shoulders back or held his teacup in a way that mimicked Eduard, or even the uncountable number of small jokes and shared gestures that seemed to carry one day into the next, but most of all how Lucien found that he could—when alone, walking through the city or sitting in a café—observe a scene with Eduard’s brand of intellectual objectivity. Just as Eduard professed to admire the fire Lucien brought to his singing—which he assured Lucien would be reflected in the final plans for the opera house—Lucien knew that Eduard calmed him down; he was less likely to find himself in tears, and his dreams were no longer filled with endless hallways through which he ran panicked, unable ever to find the door.
He remembered the first time he had seen one of Eduard’s buildings, a church a few kilometers west of their apartment, just off the newly widened Lerchenfelderstrasse. The structure was not particularly remarkable—as Eduard had warned him, his original design had been scaled back by church officials for both aesthetic and financial reasons—but inside he was confronted by a staggering display of stenciled patterns spiraling up each of many walls and braided columns, painted in soft hues of gold, teal, and burgundy, and interlaced with repeating motifs of flowers, leaves, and fleurs-de-lis; above it all hovered an enormous dome that resonated with the mottled blue tone of a robin’s egg, as if to beckon those below with the luminescent promise of emancipation.
“I feel like I’m flying,” Lucien remarked as he made a wide circle before taking a seat on a pew next to Eduard.
“That’s the idea.” Eduard grinned bashfully, clearly pleased to have made a favorable impression.
“I can’t believe it was controversial,” Lucien noted more seriously, for Eduard had described to him in some detail the factions who had objected to the