The Metropolis by Matthew Gallaway Page A

thanked the two young singers for raising the spirits of all present on what otherwise could have been a perfectly drab afternoon.

10
Rembrandt Pussyhorse
    NEW YORK CITY, 2001. It was eight o’clock by the time Martin had showered, dressed, left his house, and lunged into a waiting car service. On the West Side Highway, he watched the riverglide by under a startlingly clear sky and continued to feel nicely sedated by the aspirin he had taken, at least until the car accelerated out of the Fifty-seventh Street exit heading crosstown and went directly over a crater-size pothole, which launched Martin several inches off of his seat, not once but twice, as both axles traversed the gulley. “Jesus-fucking-christ,” he muttered with a laugh and was reminded of the “brain damage” he had suffered as a child as a result of the vaunted potholes of Western Pennsylvania.
    “That’s a Pittsburgh pothole, Marty,” his father, Hank, used to say as he barreled right through on the way to a game or to practice, usually at around eighty miles an hour. “Our tax dollars hard at work.”
    “Why didn’t you go around it?” the ten-year-old Martin responded, as he did on such occasions.
    “Potholes are like problems.” Hank gripped the steering wheel with his muscular hands. “You gotta meet ’em head-on.”
    Usually Martin would have accepted this advice with an affable grin, but on this day—as he now remembered—he was planning a minor insurrection, at least as far as Hank was concerned. “Dad, I want to play goalie,” he declared.
    “You mean permanently?” Hank grimaced as the car bucked up and down. “You’re one of the best skaters on the team.”
    Martin was prepared for this. “I thought you said goalies have to be good skaters.”
    Hank frowned, obviously regretting the adage. “That’s true,” he admitted and rubbed a finger against one of his sideburns. “You also have to be kind of crazy, right?”
    “Yeah, so—I’m crazy,” Martin said, trying to joke.
    Hank was not amused. As every hockey player knew, goalies were strange, aloof loners who displayed all sorts of freakish behavior, e.g., talking to the goalposts or knitting sweaters between periodsin the case of Jacques Plante, probably the best goalie in the history of the National Hockey League during his tenure with the Montreal Canadiens. Hank’s theory was that the stress of the position would make anyone a little “wacky,” something he did not want happening to his son.
    “Is this because of the mask thing?” Hank asked. “Because being in the net is different, you know. You’re in the firing line—front and center—and those pucks can really sting.”
    “So?” Martin responded with a level of disdain he knew—because of the implication that Hank felt otherwise about physical pain—would effectively transform the discussion into a dare. He referred to a practice a few weeks earlier when he had taken a turn in net. “You saw me—I was good.”
    Hank did not admit or deny this. “Well, let me talk it over with your mother,” he said. “I have a feeling she’s not going to be too comfortable with you between the pipes.”
    Martin shrugged, because he had already talked to Jane, and as expected, she expressed no preference about what position he wanted to play. Though he had yet to question the dynamic between his parents in which Hank—who had played at the University of Michigan, where they met—was as obsessed with the sport as Jane was ambivalent, much less how love could bring together such very different people without any consideration of what the union might look like fifteen or twenty years later, he was quite aware that they said things to him that they did not necessarily say to each other. When he took advantage of this discord to achieve his own objectives—or “goals,” as he would years later realize in a frisson of Jungian insight—he began for the first time to note within himself a certain disdain for his