The Metropolis by Matthew Gallaway Page B

now fooling around with girls—that would give him any great pleasure. Not that he would necessarily object to any of the above, but if he were asked whether he was happy, or nervous, or excited in the middle of doing said activity, the answer, even in the best-case scenario, would be something along the lines of “possibly.”
    He wondered if all adults felt this way and just lied about it, and if the most he could expect from life was a flicker of whatever was supposed to make it worth living. The question made him feel weak and dissatisfied until in the next second he concluded that to experiencethis type of ambivalence—and more important, to be conscious of it—was, if you could look at it from another angle, sort of a revelation, because at least you could pinpoint a few things that didn’t make you incredibly happy, which in theory should expand the pool of things that might.
    A LMOST THIRTY YEARS later, Martin grew aware of the bleating alarm clock. It was beyond time to get up, and even though the aspirin had effectively transformed his hangover into a distant and not entirely unpleasant thud, he felt troubled by many things: it was 7:45, and he was running late to a job—and a career—that no longer thrilled him; he was now forty-one, which for all intents and purposes made him a senior citizen in gay years, and which—though he had never had any trouble before—made him worry whether or not he would still be able to attract the kind of man, almost always younger and without exception thinner, he tended to prefer. And while he was rarely inclined to regret being single, this, too, was beginning to feel like a liability as he considered the vague outlines of his future. Or if being single wasn’t a liability—because he frankly enjoyed the freedom it offered—the uncertainty he felt, in either case, demonstrated how complicated the variables of time and experience made the calculation of what made life worth living.
    Given all of this, he would not have predicted that he was about to launch himself off the bed to face the day—his birthday—with a smile. Yet to his own surprise, this is what he did. On his feet, he wobbled for a few seconds with a hand on the wall and considered that, if nothing else, at least he could state with greater certainty any number of things that did not make him happy, e.g., sex with men who didn’t kiss, extreme temperature fluctuations, postwar American political hegemony, and the color beige, to name just a few. He pinched the ends of his fingertips and was relieved to feel them; after staggeringto the bathroom, he presented himself to the mirror, where he pulled his face back and forth and rubbed his hands over the silver-tipped hair of his buzzed head.
    “I look like shit,” he admitted but detected something in the air—if not redemption, at least curiosity and maybe even some desire—which no doubt explained the mischievous glint in his slate-blue eyes.

8
The Diary of One Who Disappeared
    PITTSBURGH, 1965. By the time Maria was five years old, she had developed an amazing ability to sing in Italian and French. “
Chants, mon petit oiseau,
” said Bea, who reverted more and more to her native French when she spoke to her granddaughter, as though it were the language of children, and Maria would almost always oblige, offering up any number of things she had memorized from the records that were always playing.
    As much as Gina appreciated her daughter’s talent and her mother’s encouragement—which mirrored her own—she was bothered when Bea told Maria that the best singers gave their voices to God. Gina was starting to hate church; nothing Father Gregory said resonated with her, and she could barely listen as he droned on about the evils of communism and the deteriorating moral fabric of a country where so many young people had clearly fallen into league with the devil. I’m one of them, Gina thought as she visualized her own nonprocreative acts in the