The Metropolis Read Online Free PDF Page A

him and hesitated, recognizing the incongruity of uttering a note in such a venue, never mind that her voice was in strict recovery. A day earlier, she never would have done it, but after her Isolde—or perhaps
because
of her Isolde—she no longer felt constrained. She saw herself after the show in her dressing room and knew that under the piles of roses and the fading roar of the audience, there had been the tiniest doubt, not about the quality of her performance but about the rest of her life, and how it could ever measure up. Now, to feel so exquisitely alive—so full of suspense, this far removed from the theater—made her grateful.
    She made her entrance, barely marking the notes, after which—as if she had decreed it—Lawrence responded in turn. Enshrouded in the music, they marched forward as a virtual orchestra seemed to attach to his fingers. No longer concerned about the wear of her previous performance, or the impact on the one scheduled three days later, she sang—“
Lass mich sterben!
”—and he responded with equal force. She lost all sense of time beyond a dim awareness of the twilight slowly giving way to the dark. Their voices so clearly belonged to each other—“
Hehr erhabne Liebesnacht!
”—that it felt equally inevitable, however long after they stopped singing, but before they had exchanged a single word, to find herself in his arms, their actions scripted but uninhibited, like they had rehearsed this scene a thousand times, crossing into the vaunted territory of instinct that every singer craves as they tumbled and groped toward an equally foregone but necessary conclusion. She still heard music, slowly receding as they kissed, violently at first and then with more tenderness, as she gasped under his weight and gave into the desire to possess him—
höchste Liebeslust!
—in the same way he possessed her.
    W HEN A NNA AWOKE , the room was black except for a rutilant glow around the windows, the last remnants of the dying sun. Lawrence gently pushed himself away from her, and they sat for a few seconds on opposite ends of a couch across from the piano. As she caught her breath and listened to him do the same, she tried to imagine how she would have reacted the previous day if someone had described this scene to her, which made her smile. “That was unexpected but wonderful,” she said as Lawrence lumbered across the room and switched on a torch lamp next to the piano; the light filled the space with shadows.
    He turned toward her as he picked up his pants from the floor. “Magical music can sometimes lead to magical acts,
n’est-ce pas
?”
    “
Bien dit,
” she concurred and stood up to retrieve her own clothes. She went into a small bathroom, where she took a quick shower. As she dressed, she savored a sense of exhaustion that had escaped her earlier in the day and knew that the performance had finally ended; her Isolde was gone, or for now at least sated.
    When she returned to the front, he offered her a package. “I thought you might like to spend some time with this,” he said, and she didn’t have to look inside to know it was the
Tristan
manuscript. If it was an extravagant, improbable gesture, she appreciated that it resonated with the same spirit with which they had just sung to each other and made love in the back of his antiques store.
    “Thank you.” She nodded, then winked at him. “And when should I return it?”
    “Whenever you’d like,” he said, before alluding to a trip he was about to take to Europe—something he did every year for his business—that he expected to last almost three months.
    “Three months!” she cried.
    “Three months,” he repeated as he kissed her good-bye. “If I know anything about the opera, it will go by much quicker than you can imagine.”
    As Anna rode back uptown, any disappointment she felt was allayed not only by the afternoon she had just spent but also by the prospect of looking forward to something beyond—and outside