"Who is he?" her boyfriend asked innocently.
Helena looked up almost guiltily from the picture of Valentine she'd been doodling absently on a napkin.
"I mean, I've seen him on your wall..." he continued cautiously, sensing he was treading on unsteady ground.
Her brow furrowed with something he couldn't read and she smiled tensely. "Just someone out of my head," she said evasively.
He frowned ever so slightly. Normally, Helena was happy to explain her odd little illustrations... This is a sphinx; they eat books, you know... Of course the towers can fly. How else could you take all your stuff around?...
But this was something untouchable and he didn't know what to do with it.
"May I take your order?" the waiter interrupted. They both looked up in surprise and suddenly studied their menus. Helena put her drink over the unfinished sketch.
He never mentioned it again, but it slipped between them like a bit of sand in an oyster, and they both built layers of avoidance around it from then on.
"Who is he?" Valentine asked, annoyed. He stared at the photo of her and some squishy, maskless man.
"He's my boyfriend," she said with exaggerated patience. "I didn't expect you'd understand."
"Then why'd you show me?" he asked petulantly.
A quick stab of hurt showed in her eyes for a second. "Because you're my friend."
"Er..." Oh, hell. How did he always manage to say the wrong thing every time with her? "I'm... happy for you?" he tried, laying a hand on her shoulder.
"A little sincerity would be nice," she said irritably, but the hurt was vanished. She didn't shove his hand of as quickly as she might have, either.
She plucked the photo from him and tucked it away into a pocket.
He was glad she did. He didn't want to have to look at it and see her happy with some strange man from the weird realm she lived in, where buildings and books never moved on their own and nobody had a proper face.
It made jealously rise in his throat like bile.
So they whisked away to do dream-things in a dream-land and he tried not to think about it any more.
It almost worked. But not really.
"Who is he?" he boyfriend asked tiredly. They were arguing about something entirely unimportant and his sudden question made her stop.
"What do you mean?" she asked, thoroughly confused.
"Oh, come on, Helena... It's so obvious. There's someone else. I don't know who he is, but it's obvious you're in love with someone else."
"I don't..." She trailed off, because even as the words "love anyone else" formed behind her lips she suddenly knew them to be false. She did love another, and had for a very long time.
"You don't love me." It wasn't a question. Hurt was think in his voice.
She lowered her eyes. "No, I don't."
"Why then? Why stay with me?"
"You... remind me of him. A little. But you're not him." Tears formed. "I... I'm sorry."
He shook his head. "I don't want to be a placeholder, Helena," he sighed, and walked away.
Tears came faster, and Helena didn't know whether she was sorrier that their relationship had crashed or that it went on so long on a lie.
"Who is he?" Morris asked his daughter, gesturing to the strange man.
"A new act. The man of a thousand masks. Show him, Valentine." She nudged him forward.
The masked man shrugged and peeled off a mask. Underneath was another. He did it again. Same result. Another time left him with three, and he juggled then for a few turns, then put them all back on.
"Ta-da," he said, spreading his arms to finish. Helena grinned widely.
"How'd you do that?" Morris asked, genuinely impressed.
"A magician never reveals his secrets," Valentine chided with a smirk in his voice.
I've always liked this kind of story, where the same line gets interpreted a bunch of different ways, and I finally worked out one that sort of went right. The bit about Valentine having more masks under his mask was actually in the storyboard of the movie, but it got cut out. Which is a shame, because there was a rather good scene where he vocalizes an internal conflict by having a converstion with two of his masks (a kind of angel/devil or id/superego thing), but I can see why it was cut.