The Metropolis (30 page)

M
ARTIN’S FIRST “REAL”
job after college, as a paralegal at the downtown office of his uncle’s white-shoe law firm, had been marked by a similar—if somewhat more complicated—anomie. At first he enjoyed his immersion in the “high-stakes” atmosphere, where millions of dollars were tied up in lawsuits and corporate transactions; as a government major with a concentration in international relations, he felt it was important to understand whether corporations could be said to act more or less rationally than the countries they had displaced. But over a relatively short period of time—perhaps an hour, he joked to Dante—he grew to dislike the work, not so much because it was boring and draining—which it was—or because he had been required to wear a coat and tie—bothersome as that could be—but
because everyone at the firm viewed him as a recent Cornell grad and Division I hockey player, which were two facets of Martin Vallence that had begun to resonate with him less and less as he spent more time in the East Village.

He was living with Jay Wellings in an apartment on Second Avenue and St. Marks, surrounded by random flea markets—full of doll heads, bent silverware, and porno mags—junkies and punks, boarded-up storefronts, and anarchist graffiti. Almost every weekend they went to hard-core shows at the Shoe, an abandoned tenement on Tenth and A. The ground floor was essentially a plywood cave with a small riser in the back covered by doormats stolen from restaurants in SoHo, lit by a single naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and adorned with a couple of very tortured-looking microphone stands that seemed to be held together with duct tape and admonition. The smell was sour and rank—they smoked cigarettes as “air freshener”—while the bands were loud and fast and violent. Martin loved it; he threw himself into the mosh pit and emerged bruised but scrubbed, ready for revolution.

This process was not without unexpected repercussions, not only in terms of his increasing displeasure with his law firm work but in a seriously lamentable disinterest in girls and a corresponding desire for the opposite. Given this tension, it could hardly be considered a surprise—although it had felt like it at the time—when one night he found himself smitten by a friend of Jay’s named Keith Loris, who helped run the shows. With sunken eyes, a boxer’s nose, and a full black beard, Keith had the idealistic and slightly sadistic aura of a young Fidel; he seemed to be everywhere at once, helping the bands set up, checking the PA, and even selling beer. Martin was officially introduced when Jay ordered a few cans of whatever, and during this transaction—they had shaken hands—Keith seemed to regard Martin for perhaps a whole second, a gesture Martin barely acknowledged as
he turned away, taking care not to move too fast or too slow, with a calculated air of indifference that he hoped in the deepest corner of his heart might make an impression, though to what end he could not even begin to think about.

T
HE NEXT DAY
at work, with his ears still ringing and his thoughts infected by visions of Keith, Martin found himself unable to bear the more immediate and conceptual proximity of certain associates, partners, and—worst of all—senior partners, all of whom at one point or another in the previous months had corralled him into their offices for teeth-grinding sessions in which they had reminisced about their own glory days overlooking the Cayuga (or the Charles or wherever else), on the ice, or both. Which perhaps wasn’t so horrible—i.e., the talking or the listening part—except for what Martin had noticed was an assumption held without exception by every single lawyer that his paralegal position was simply a year or two’s hiatus between college and law school, after which he would follow in their footsteps and—as if there could be no higher calling—become a practicing attorney.

To make matters worse on this particular afternoon, Martin was informed by the supervising associate that he, along with a team of his fellow corporate slaves, could expect to remain on the premises for at least the next twelve to fifteen hours, and probably most of the weekend as well, in order to execute some “important” redactions on a mountain of evidence scheduled to be turned over the following Monday to opposing counsel as part of a complex trade-secret litigation between the two largest lipstick manufacturers in North America. In practical terms, this meant cutting out blocks of white paper and pasting them over portions of documents deemed irrelevant—i.e., unresponsive to the opposing party’s discovery requests—by the team of associate attorneys and supervising partners, and then
photocopying said documents, skills that Martin, along with 99 percent of the population, had mastered in kindergarten.

It was after midnight when an associate named Joe Klint—a tall, preppy guy with an aggressive chin and Clark Kent glasses—stormed into the conference room and threw several sheets of paper down onto the table where they were all working. “Someone’s not doing their job,” he yelled as he pointed to a highlighted portion of the text that had not been covered. “Wake up!”

“Jesus,” Martin muttered.

Klint exploded. “Do you think this is some kind of joke?”

“No, I kind of think it’s pathetic.”

“Well, if you think it’s so pathetic, maybe you shouldn’t be working here.”

“I didn’t say
you
were pathetic,” Martin replied, drawing smirks from the rest of the paralegals.

“It’s fun to be a wiseass, isn’t it? But in the real world, which you obviously haven’t quite joined, our client pays my salary—and yours—which doesn’t include making stupid mistakes like the one you just made. So don’t do it again.”

Martin had visions of smashing one of the office chairs through the plate-glass window. It would be so satisfying to see everyone’s expressions as they witnessed an act of violence that served the bottom-line interests of nobody except for maybe the chair company and whoever repaired the glass, but it was really the riffing distortion of the previous night that inspired Martin as he addressed Klint: “This is fucking bullshit. I quit.”

“Ouch—I’m so hurt.” Klint stepped back to address the remaining paralegals. “Does anyone else want to join Martin? If so, please—the door’s open.”

In fact, nobody did want to join Martin, which barely tempered his joy as he was escorted off the premises; he couldn’t wait to tell
Jay—and Keith—about it. But as he was pulled uptown by the somber streetlights of the nighttime city, he began to worry about the implications of what he had done; not in terms of work—quitting had never been more satisfying, and he was already writing music reviews—but in terms of what he realized with a shudder might be love, at least as he understood it; or at least some form of it, because how else could he explain the queasy anticipation he felt even now as an image of Keith drifted past him, and the sense that this entire day had been a performance for Keith’s benefit?

As much as he recognized this, Martin was terrified as he envisioned the walking skeletons, many no older than he was, staggering through the city. He saw a future in which, no matter what he did, he would be branded: the homosexual doctor, the homosexual athlete, the homosexual music critic. Martin Vallence, homosexual. To get AIDS, which seemed like an inevitable consequence of his feelings for Keith, was not just to join the ranks of the walking dead in New York City, with their skin sallow and drawn, their eyes intense and hollow, their limbs wasted and starved, but to be a dead homosexual, as though, no matter what else he did with his life, illicit sex—i.e., abnormal, perverted, immoral, unnatural sex—would always be the essence of his lost existence.

R
ETURNING TO THE
present, Martin—while remaining cognizant of the attacks, and everything they represented—could not help but consider the many ways in which his life—or just life in general—had changed since that night, and mostly for the better. For one thing, AIDS—though hardly a laughing matter—was not the specter it had been; in his case, the medicine had worked, and—except for those first few weeks, when he suffered from fever and aches—he had remained free from symptoms since his diagnosis, almost ten years earlier. Above all, he did not feel “branded,” or at least not in a bad way.

This shift in perspective had taken many years, of course, and—as he reflected on it now—went a long way toward explaining why he had embraced a career that had seemed anathema to him after college. His decision to go to law school had occurred roughly when he began having sex with men, and while at the time he had framed the issue in financial terms, it now seemed that the former had been done as a way to compensate for the latter. By pursuing a more conventional career, he could prove to himself—and those around him, or at least as he imagined them—that even a “homosexual” was capable of acting in a “productive” manner, doing his part to oil the gears of innovation that pushed society forward. For many years, he had in fact relished the broader approval and prestige that came with a high-paying position in a Manhattan law firm but with the passage of time and the accompanying acclimation to his desires, this motivation had waned; he no longer relied on his career as a crutch for his identity, to justify his existence, gay or otherwise. Although he could understand why others might view a decision to abandon his job at the height of his earning power—to quit, to give up—with a certain disdain, as if even to consider it at such a point in his life (not to mention what was going on in the rest of the country) was somehow inappropriate or even offensive, he now appreciated that by “coming out,” he had largely removed himself from such expectations (putting aside the question of whether they were real or imagined to begin with); in effect, for the first time in his life, he felt liberated, free to do what he liked.

He didn’t hate the firm—to the contrary, on many days, he enjoyed it—but there were so many other things he wanted to do in the time that remained to him (and here, HIV was a consideration, given that there was no telling how long the drugs would work); he wanted to plant alpine troughs, to cultivate orchids, to learn to speak Russian and maybe Chinese, and perhaps even to quilt; these were
only a few items on a long list. And it was not just a desire to cultivate new hobbies that quickened his pulse with anticipation; as much as he liked and admired some of his legal colleagues, the demands of his practice had relegated even the possibility of almost any new relationship to the margins for many years. Besides Jay Wellings and his sister, he rarely talked to anyone outside work with any regularity, while his dating record had been even more sporadic. Although he—like some significant percentage of nonheterosexual men, in his experience—generally enjoyed sex whenever it suited him (this, too, was a perquisite of gay life he had not initially appreciated), simply by going to a gay bar or (more recently) a website, he wanted to learn more about someone else and (by extension) himself, to—why not just say it?—fall in love for more than a single night or—more typically—a single hour. It was a thought that both excited him and—if he wanted to be perfectly honest—made him nervous, as though he were just seeing the infinite horizons of the seas he hoped to sail.

He considered the many things in his life he had quit—marriage, music writing, the East Village, cigarettes, and more—and concluded that no matter how painful at the time, in retrospect it was always the better course of action. “Quitting is seriously underrated,” he noted to Dante, who slowly blinked and yawned, stretching his mouth to its widest point before delicately snapping it shut.

NEW YORK CITY, 1981. As Maria approached the end of her third year at Juilliard, she thought of her old life in Pittsburgh with a sense of accomplishment at having put it so far behind her. When she went back to visit—usually for a few days at Christmas and at the beginning of each summer—she could not believe she had spent so many years in a place to which she now felt so little connection. In contrast to New York City, Castle Shannon seemed depopulated and uninviting; it made her think that, even if she didn’t become a singer, she would never leave New York, any more than she might cut off one of her arms or legs. Just as she was now part of the city, it was now part of her; this was apparent even to her grandmother and Kathy Warren—the two people she cared about most in Pittsburgh—who noted that she was a different person now, more confident, mature, and well-spoken. She still missed her parents on these trips, but even here their absence seemed less an open wound than a dull ache. At night, before she fell asleep, if she occasionally felt a tremor of uncertainty about the future, she was consoled by the idea that she no longer felt so detached, and was able to think concretely about the steps she would need to take to become a professional singer. This, too, was an improvement over her first two years at Juilliard, when the nuances of technique had threatened to drown her, so that she would wake up in the middle of the night, panic-stricken and gasping for air. If her past had once weakened her, she now believed the opposite to be true; in comparison to her peers, she felt she could get by with less, in both material and emotional terms. She loved Linda like a sister but did not go out of her way to find other friends; if she relied on Richie, she felt
that she gave as much as she took, and that they provided each other with an equilibrium that would be important as they approached life after graduation and the looming prospect of launching their careers.

This sense of direction and well-being lasted precisely until one day at the end of her third year when Richie came over to the apartment with startling news: he had been offered a job with a jazz band in Paris. Maria wasn’t exactly sure why she was so shocked, given that Richie was finishing up his fourth year and—as she knew but had not really acknowledged, at least to herself—had been auditioning with many bands outside the city. But it made her angry, so that when he sat down and began to discuss how they would visit each other as much as possible, and that his plan was to be back in the city within two years at most, she snapped: “Don’t even start—because you don’t know. You could end up in Turkey or Sweden or Japan.”