Harem of One

A/N: The first year of the new millenium is 1901, not 1900. Raoul's last Twelfth Night is in 1913.

In the twelfth decade of the new millenium, on the Twelfth Night of his last Yuletide on this earth, Raoul brought home a Victor Talking Machine. When we returned from hearing the Holy Mass of the Epiphany, he and Jannecke busied themselves in the closed-off drawing room. The grandchildren danced around impatiently, demanding to know what Grandpapaand their father were doing. Martine and I quieted them marzipan and cookies. Then Raoul ceremoniously opened the wide sliding doors, and the children were finally allowed in.

There it sat on the side table. Its squat horn and bulky wooden box of a body attracted the grandchildren, who clustered around it but dared not touch the glossy surface. Then, smiling and giving a wink to Jannecke, Raoul placed a black disc on the platter, turned the crank, and set the needle onto the whirling circle.

I stood transfixed, for from the ungainly horn came the purest tenor, a molten cascade of sound. That soaring tone was joined by a soprano, poured out like cream. Raoul and I had heard the incomparable Enrico Caruso in Milan, and here he was, bodiless as a ghost, yet singing in our drawing room with the American soprano Nellie Melba.

Mathilde, Martine's youngest, began to cry. She kept looking for the source of the sound, for some person behind the invisible voice, but finding nothing, retreated in tears to the safety of her mother's arms.

"Where's the man?" her older sister Lilli asked. Coaxing her sister from her mother's lap, Lilli lured Martine around the room to look for "the man's voice." When none was to be found, Lilli came up to me and asked, "Grandmama, is it an angel? Mama says the angels speak to us, so is this one?"

I gave Martine a hard look, and she jerked her head back, indignant. Gathering the little ones on either side of me on the divan, I said, "When the angels speak to us, little ones, they touch us directly on the heart, not on the ears. When we hear something with our ears, it's because of sound. The needle scrapes over the disk, and makes a sound. That sound gets made bigger by the horn, so we can hear it. That's where the sound comes from, that black disc."

"Is the man in the disc?" Mathilde asked solemnly. Across the room, Raoul laughed and it was his turn to repel arrows from Martine's sharp blue eyes.

"Of course the angels speak to us," she said abruptly. "Mother, I don't know why you would tell them that."

Raoul watched me from across the room with an intent gaze. "Well, in any event, there's no angel in that talking machine over there," he finally said, firmly.

"So how does the sound get in there?" Lilli wanted to know. She ran over to Raoul and reached around his leg. "How does sound come out of a round black circle? Grandpapa, how do you know it's not an angel?"

I looked helplessly at Raoul, who smiled back at me with his eyes as he picked Lilli up in his arms. He had grown broad in his later years, and Lilli rested comfortably on his stout stomach. "Lilli darling," he said, "I know the machine sounds like magic. Sometimes when you are young, it is hard to tell the difference between something enchanted and something that comes from nature."

"So how do you tell, Grandpapa?"

"Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes you have to ask someone that you trust. That is why you have a Papa and a Mama, and your grandmother and I."

"Mama thinks there are angels that speak to us," Lilli objected. "But Grandmama doesn't."

Raoul laughed and bent down to bring Mathilde up into his arms as well. He spun them around and said, "But Madame Melba sings like an angel, doesn't she? Your grandmama used to sound like that, too."

He tried to set them down, but they clamored, "Spin us again!" A little red-faced, he took them around a few more times under Martine's disapproving eye, while Jannecke busied himself with the next selection from a box of black discs which had come with the talking machine. Panting, Raoul sat down next to me, and I clasped his hand.

That night he took me with unexpected energy and I clung to him like a starving woman, astonished at my own hunger and sorrow. Outside the bedcurtains the air was chill, but under the covers we explored a tropical country, yielding and expansive and warm. I drifted away into darkness, still quivering. Usually it was he who slipped into sleep first, but that night he lay awake, shifting against me. His movements disturbed me and I asked him what was wrong.

"I want to thank you," he said softly.

"For what?" I said, half in dream. "I should have thanked you for bringing the Victrola."

"No, it's not about that. I mean for all this. For everything." He pulled me to him, suddenly intense. "I saw your face tonight, when the girls started prattling. Christine, let it go. It's been three decades. You're not protecting me anymore, because I'm not that boy stabbed with jealousy. You're not that girl led around by illusions."

"You never speak about it. This is the first time, since ..." I had to think hard. "Since we were first married."

"I thought it would hurt you to stir things up. I didn't know if I should. But tonight when you looked so forlorn, when the silly and innocent belief of a child could remind you so much of your own gullibility, something had to be said."

"The memory still oppresses me," I said, pulling my body up to his as close as could be. "I go for months, not thinking of it, and then something happens to remind me. I hide it inside, because it seems so horrible to bring into the light of day, into our lives. It's as if I'm still not free."

"Well, you are," he said, half-resting his weight on me, eyes closing.

"Because of you," I whispered.

"Because of yourself. You did what you could. You did what you had to. Besides, you aren't the only one with something on your conscience. I have a weight on mine, too."

"What do you mean?" I asked, sitting up a little, alarmed. I had seen women in shops, in the theaters, look at my glossy husband and then look pityingly, condescendingly at me, the little mouse, the old wife.

He settled down into his pillow. "I've confessed it," he said, "but still it hangs there on my soul, like the pains a man has in a limb that has been long sawn off. Don't look so worried, Christine."

"Should I be?" For I was. God, I prayed, not that. You spared me so far, I can't imagine why. Practically every woman I know has a husband who keeps another woman. Please, not that.

He laughed a little and kissed me so that his moustache, no longer silky, no longer blond, rubbed up against my cheek.

"That tickles," I murmured, anxious.

"It's meant to."

"So on with your confession."

I could feel his warm, comfortable body tense a little.

"No, Christine, I'm serious. I think I shot a man once. I never saw his face, only saw the blood on the lintel and sill of my window in my brother Philippe's old townhouse."

"What? You never told me this," I slowly said, suddenly sick. A rising vertigo claimed me. Thank God it wasn't a mistress, but what did this now mean? The room began to spin, even though I was lying down. "When did it happen?"

"It was long ago, the night before ... your performance as Marguerite, the night before your capture. We had talked on the roof of the Opera, do you remember, when I told you I would take you away? We did more than talk, as I remember. I came home in a terrible mood, determined that you would go with me the next night, stricken that you hadn't left with me then and there."

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "How often do I have to say it?"

"No recriminations," he said seriously. "I tell you just to let you know how it went. Philippe was home, which was unusual, and he had just opened a bottle of wine, some kind of sweet dessert wine that tasted like syrup. He saw my mood and kept filling my glass, thinking it would calm me down. Instead, it inflamed me, and we quarrelled. No, quarrelled isn't the word. He shouted, and I yelled back at him in rage." He shook a little, and I knew then he fought back tears. Philippe, so loved, so mourned.

"Philippe slammed the door to his study shut. I could hear the servants running through the hall, no doubt all clustering outside the door to listen. I slapped him with my glove, my own brother, and he stood up, his eyes terrifying. It occurred to me that if he took up my challenge he would certainly kill me, because he was a far better shot than I, deadly at fencing, and probably almost twice my weight. Then he started to laugh and called me an insolent young pup, one who hadn't thrown him the gauntlet like a man, but instead was simply a little dog who brought his master his own glove and laid it at his feet. That was the kind of challenge I presented, he said, and I would get a fitting response.

"Furious, I told him I was going to marry you the very next night.

" 'Idiot,' he replied. 'You can't get married like that in France. That's in romantic novels read by shopgirls. The Republicans have put the pay to clandestine marriages.'

" 'Then I shall go to Belgium,' I answered. 'At least that is still a Catholic country. Not that you care.'

" 'You will go nowhere,' he said quietly and coldly between clenched teeth, 'except to bed. We will talk in the morning.'

"I continued to rail at him, but he brushed me off, calling for his manservant to help take me upstairs. Philippe took one arm, Julian the other, and between the two of them lifted my feet nearly from the floor.'

"In the corridor the butler interrupted. 'A gentleman here to see you at this late hour, Monsieur le Comte,' he said, anxious and disturbed.

" 'Who is he? Tell him to be off, to come back at a civil hour.'

" 'I didn't recognize him, your honor, as his face was heavily bundled against the cold. He insisted on seeing you. He said it was about the unfortunate business at hand, and that you would know what he meant.'

" 'Well, let's get this whelp to bed first,' Philippe said, gesturing towards me. 'Tell this late visitor that I will see him in the blue salon.' You never saw it, Christine, as I couldn't take you there, but it was all done in deep blue silk damask ... oh, I am sorry."

I rested my head on his chest, listening to his strong, steady heart. Philippe would not have a light woman from the opera in his family's Paris townhouse. There were apartments for that sort of thing. "It's all right. It was long ago. By the way, who was it that came to visit?"

"I never found out," he went on. "I've wondered about that, and for awhile in Paris even tried to find out, when we were ... waiting. Before we were engaged. But the servants had all been dismissed, and the house shut up. The servants I could find mostly wouldn't talk to me, and the one who would wasn't that helpful. All he said was that a tall man had come to call, one with a wide black hat, and a black woolen scarf covering his face for the cold. But apparently Philippe had taken too long to put me to bed, for when he returned to the blue salon, the stranger was gone. 'He was no gentleman,' the cook's assistant said. 'He was in a hired carriage, he was.'

"Yes, servants can tell things like that," I mused, not liking the path on which my thoughts took me.

"Servants know more about class than anyone," Raoul said. "The fire roused by the wine had since died down, and Philippe knew exactly what he did, for all I wanted was sleep. They must have undressed me, although I don't remember it. I do remember pulling off my nightshirt, even though it was the dead of winter, like now. Had I been my own father, I'd have thrashed me for risking pneumonia like that."

"You have never thrashed a child in your life. Besides, you have me to keep you warm."

"True," he chuckled, "although I think that works the other way around. Heated with wine, I kicked off the covers, for they lay all about the floor. Some scraping noise woke me, a slide of furniture or a window in its frame, I don't know what. The sense of being watched was very strong, oppressive. Then there were the eyes, yellow-gold like a cat's, and the sound of breath. I leapt from the bed and almost fell over, because my head still reeling from drinking. I cried out, upon which those glowing lamps winked out. The lamp must have been out of oil, for it wouldn't light when I turned the key, and I cursed the servant who let that happen.

"Naked, I crept out of bed, sliding along the wall, feeling for the bureau dresser, dangling in the breeze and bumping into furniture. In the top drawer I found my revolver. Then I saw those eyes again, at the window. I fired. Glass went everywhere, the servants came running, and there was the blood. A cat, Philippe said," and Raoul laughed bitterly. "Perhaps it was. My head was still spinning with wine. I don't know what I shot. My mind said a cat, but my senses said a man, a prowler who entered my room and stalked me like prey as I slept, who took or disturbed nothing."

I lay back in the darkness, Raoul's full warm body stretched out half-on mine, and I said nothing. It was no cat, of that I was sure, sure with the certainty of the grave. But let the dead bury their dead. "I think it was a cat," I said. "A burglar would have taken your cufflinks, your wallet, your coat. You were angry, you'd had too much to drink, and under those circumstances, even the most ordinary things look threatening." Then I kissed him, and whispered, "You're welcome."

"You're welcome?" he repeated, confused.

"Didn't you thank me 'for everything?' a few moments ago? Well, you're welcome. For everything."

On my breast he rested. Slow breathing told me he was gone into his own depths, leaving me to think of a prowler on the balcony, a gunshot, and a festering wound that never healed.

Two months later Raoul was dead.

Now the talking machine sits covered by a thin white cloth. Jannecke promises to come and fetch it, as well as the box of platters that Raoul brought with it. I have no desire to listen to opera singers. I sing, but only alone, trying to recreate long wordless laments I heard underground so long ago.

The mirrors are still covered as well, and I have worn nothing but deep black for all these months. Martine tells me that it is old-fashioned, that only old women wear black in the year after the death of their husbands. She says that it's simply barbaric, to wear widow's weeds the rest of your life, as some do. I smile at her and say, I am an old woman. No, she protests, because if you are, then I am on my way.

It's not because I'm an old woman that I wear deep mourning, that the mirrors are covered, and Raoul's photographs put away. It is because through his death I have to die as well. The woman I was is no more. You would think that casting aside the woman that was, putting on the woman yet to be, should not be difficult. After all, I've already done it several times. There was the night when I discovered Erik's terrible secret, the death of the innocence of mind. There was the shredding of my virginity, and the death of the body's innocence. There was the opening of my womb, and the death of the girl in the birth of my first little boy.

Each of those deaths resulted in the birth of something new. When I saw Erik's face, I decided to live. In me grew the conviction, not of Raoul's and my shared faith, but of my own deep personal experience, carved into my own flesh as it were, that I would live. Not only did I decide to keep my body alive. It was as if I found once again my mind, after all those years of dark superstitious obscurity.

Over those nights of becoming a woman, that was the birth of the life of the flesh, that awakening that Erik would never directly taste himself.

The mother births her child in the midst of death. As soon as I could walk, I came to the church door leaning on Raoul's arm, the baby nurse carrying a heavy white bundle of blankets with Philippe nestled in the middle. The priest sprinkled me with holy water, and led me into the nave, where kneeling before the altar he blessed me, and Philippe and Raoul as well. Still faint and weak from the birth, I swayed and Raoul noticed. He came to kneel beside me at the rail of the high altar, propping me up with his shoulder. The priest shook the hyssop once again, sprinkling us with soft sweet-smelling rain, and while I had known myself a mother before, with the first sound of Philippe's cry, all through me it felt fierce and certain and final, that the girl was dead, and the mother was born in blood and pain along with the son.

And Erik's death itself, oh, I cannot write it yet. It will come, with the dying glory of autumn when I go back to Perros-Guirec. It's a seaside resort now, but in October the bathers all go back to Paris and London, leaving the hotels and rock-strewn beaches silent except for the clamoring waves. Go there I shall, for I have not been since that icy winter when Erik played my father's tune for me, over my father's bones. I want to see again that churchyard full of skulls where Erik the Ankou, the Brittany demigod of death, terrified Raoul. I will sit on that rose-red coast where the giants have tumbled stones for their game of bowls, and write his passing. What has been birthed of that death I do not know.

Now comes the latest death, the death of the wife. I already knew the silence that shrouds a house when children are grown and gone, but there was still Raoul rustling newspapers in the morning, lingering over coffee, long evenings of conversation before the fire, letters to read to each other, letters to write, the garden to dig. There were grandchildren to tuck into the narrow nursery cots when they came to stay, and Grandpapa telling them the story of The Wild Swans. For he would not read it to them, as I did, but told it, draping his arms out like dispirited wings, or huddling them close to his body as the girl and her brothers clung together on the rocky island in the middle of the sea, or clutching one arm with the other as one brother lived with his feathery wing the rest of his life. I was the actress in one of those former lives of mine, yet Raoul brought the story to life with his body.

There was night after the fire was banked, after the house was darkened, the drapes and bedcurtains drawn, and the explorations of that tropical country begun, sometimes with the long hot thrust of love and sometimes simply with hands and voices and hushed conversation. I rarely sleep in our bed since he died. Instead I sleep in the nursery, in the iron cot used by our night nurses, long ago. Mathilde and Lilli will come to stay when Jannecke takes the Victrola, and they will marvel that Grandmama will sleep in the nursery with them. But that big curtained bed is so hard to bear. Even in summer that room is cold, no matter how high the fire.

I wish I could see the creature dragging its feet towards birth when the wife I was finally gives up the ghost. I know that woman in me still lives, that she has not surrendered yet, for I as yet do not know what I will become. When you know your fate, you know you have truly died. It is the end of questioning, the end of expectation, the end of anxious waiting.

How many times will I die before I die? And what will I become?

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The unmasked Erik, more naked without his mask than a man without clothes, had softly closed his door, filling the rooms with silence. Slowly I pulled myself from the carpeted floor of my bedroom, trying hard not to look at the sharp little points of the scissors on the vanity. Instead I stared at the faded rose Aubusson rug, so luxurious, yet so trite. If I'm going to do it, it should be now. It seems a shame to get blood on this rug, but it deserves it. Seventy years ago someone thought this would be a fine rug for a girl on the verge of womanhood. It represented hopes – a good marriage, suitors from the ranks of the petty bourgeois. Or perhaps it was a present from a young husband, anxious to show that his pretty wife, despite her humble origins, was entitled to good things.

From the writing desk I pulled out foolscap and pen, and began to write.

It went something like this:

Dearest Raoul,

If you receive this, it will mean that I am dead, and that my captor has shown a rare mercy that might even save his soul from final damnation. For it is only through his good graces alone that you will even see this, and I beg of you to show him consideration, and not blindly strike out for vengeance.

Pray for my soul, even though by our faith you are not supposed to, for shortly after I finish this letter, I plan to take my own life. I have been kidnapped by this terrifying man of brutal genius, and have uncovered a terrible secret of his, a secret he wishes no one else to know. While he has not ravished my body, he intends to ravish my spirit, and keep me with him a prisoner forever. He has laid at my feet a great love, a love that to him stretches around the world, and now that I have discovered his secret, he says he will never let me go, and I believe him.

Dear friend, I know that God has prepared the eternal fire for suicides, but I am in despair and see no escape. You remember when we were children and played on the rosy coastline, how I would never follow you when you crawled into caves? This is like a cave, only worse, because I fear being buried alive more than anything. Sweet Raoul, I could sing Aida, but never could I share her fate. I would have done anything to avoid being shut up in the tomb, as she was.

My head spins, and there's no up or down, everything I learned of right and wrong is gone. We light candles to a saint who let a man kill her rather than let him force her to open her legs (forgive my crudity, but I feel my death very near and can't waste time with pieties.) Was that not a form of suicide? Yet Holy Mother Church has raised Maria Goretti to the altar. This man wants me as his paramour, perhaps even as his wife, but I will not let him pull me down into a grave with him. If I go into a grave, it shall be a grave of my own choosing, in my own time.

Raoul, please sell my fur, my gold chain and pearl earrings in my carved Bengali box at home, and give the money to Mama Valerius, as I fear she will be cheated if she tries to sell them herself. Give her the opal brooch to remember me by.


This silver filigree ring is yours, for your own remembrance of me. It belonged to my mother; it's all of her I have. If Philippe should find someone suitable for you, and you become engaged (and I hope it comes sooner than later, because I don't want you to pine for me too long), take my ring to Perros-Guirec and throw it into the sea, so that you will not trouble the heart of the girl you come to love.

You cannot believe how the prospect of life's end terrifies me. Sweet Christ, sweet friend Raoul, I beg you both to forgive me, for I have failed you both miserably.

"Remember me, but forget my fate."

Your little Christine.

When I had finished Raoul's letter, I wrote a much shorter one for Erik, roughly as follows, for I do not have those letters. I wish I did, but somehow they have been lost.

Erik:

I cannot live in a tomb, nor can I wait to die slowly in one. Don't confuse me with Aida.

If you have a scrap of honor in you, you will deliver this letter and this ring to Monsieur le Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, if only for the sake of my poor Mama Valerius. Send it to the townhouse owned by Raoul's brother, the Comte Philippe de Chagny. I don't know the exact address, but a man of your talents can surely find it.

I swear by the angels and saints that if you do not do this, I will do all in my power to see that your seat in hell is hotter and even more painful than mine. Think on that, Erik, that I would choose an eternity in flames over life as your prisoner.

C.D.

I sat for a long while, looking at these letters, while the blood and tears all over my face, my dress, my hands dried and grew stiff. I was becoming accustomed to the funereal silence of these rooms, and no longer listened for clattering hooves or chatter from the streets. Absently I touched my shoulder where a great stain of Erik's blood was, and thought, blood will set in wool if it's not washed out.

My thoughts elsewhere, or nowhere at all, I slowly undid the dress and had it half-off when I said to myself, You are going to kill yourself in a few moments. Why do you care if the dress is soiled? Then I laughed, long and loose like a madwoman. Filling the tub with cold water, I rubbed the dress until all the bloodstains came out. Off came my stained chemise as well, and I continued to wash the garments, naked as the day I emerged from my mother, not caring, because what does a woman about to die care for anything?

I thought the dress would soak up water and be too heavy to handle, but it wrung out beautifully, half-dry already. Not a seam was ripped, not even after that struggle. Who made this, I wondered, not for the first time, and that set off another round of maniacal laughter. What, are you going to engage her as a dressmaker? Perhaps she can sew your shroud.

Throwing one of the thick Turkish towels over myself like a gravecloth, I lay on the bed naked, pretending to be dead. Where shall I do it? I wondered. On the bed, so that this lovely eiderdown is soaked with my blood? In front of Erik, on that beautiful carpet? In a warm bath, like the decadent old Romans? Shivering, I crawled under the down comforter and thought, to kill myself I have to get up. Perhaps I don't have to kill myself right this very instant, I can just close my eyes. Perhaps killing oneself goes better after a nap.

When I woke, it was with that terrible distortion that comes from having no idea of the time, no knowledge of whether it was morning or evening, or how long had passed. My dress and underclothes were only a little damp, and a flush of pride touched me as I saw how well I'd gotten out the blood, as there wasn't a trace of it left. I dressed nervously, wondering why Erik was so quiet, where he was. Perhaps he had decided to wall me in after all, and my stomach clenched.

He had cleaned up the drawing room. The sheet music from the broken piano bench had been stacked neatly on one of the sideboards, and the bench itself sat on the pedestal table, glued and held together with clamps. If any blood stained the carpet, it was invisible in the swirling maroon and dark blue patterns. The apartment was utterly still.

Then from his room came a creak, some rushing air like a bellows being pumped, of a large amount of air compressed into some space, a few soft knocks, and I knew at once what I heard. He was pulling out the organ stops, preparing to play. A moment later, as if the earth had opened and Hades himself had burst forth in his black chariot, one chord crashed through his closed bedchamber door, then another. As the organ rested against the wall shared by the drawing room and his bedroom, the drawing room acted as a gigantic sounding board, filling with the sound and amplifying it. It was as if I sat in the lap of music itself.

I wish I could say that those chords were beautiful. Truth be told, they were not. Sevenths, ninths, elevenths multiplied up and down the scales. Their harsh ugliness rang with deep passion, however, to make Otello and Desdemona's struggle sound weak and contrived. These chords told of naked feeling, black and bleeding and broken. He did not sing, and I could not imagine what melody would match those progressions that sounded so chaotic, but were actually masterpieces of exquisite structure.

He is an architect of music, I thought. Some men build with stone, as he has, but he carves the stone of sound and forms from it a great cathedral. But not some filigree Notre Dame or fat-cherubed baroque confection. This is a cathdral in hell, black and soaring, radiating with dark light, built of rough-hewn blocks of dark granite glittering with lacerating flakes of mica.

Then came a lyric passage, meltingly sweet, that brought a lump to my throat. It's the woman's theme, it must be. She's a desert woman, I can see her gauze veil sewn with little gold bangles, and she sways on a camel. How can he make an organ sound like an orchestra?

Without words, the story unfolded itself in the ringing walls that surrounded me. One night under a moon white and heavy as a pregnant woman's belly, he stole up to her chamber and kissed her on the balcony. They saw, and hid her away. He broke into the palace, stole her, killed her father when he tried to prevent the escape. Every other woman whom he had loved had died, but not this one, he wasn't going to let her die. But her jealous father wouldn't stay dead. While they thought they had found some happiness on the other side of the desert, the father's spirit entered a great stone statue like those of the Egyptians. It stalked across the dunes looking for Erik's Don Juan and his stolen bride.

Hours he played on, and in that cathedral of sound I listened and absorbed, letting the images play on the back of my lids like puppets, but with life and dimension. There was a final confrontation, where the great dead weight of the father and all his past confronted the defiant man. Who would prevail? Don Juan's theme swelled up again, deliberately composed to clash viciously and fiercely with the father-statue, until at Don Juan's feet the statue lay, collapsed into dust, the mute dead weight of tradition's centuries fallen before the hero.

Then the desert woman's theme rose up sweet (it would be an oboe solo, it would have to be), and with it rose the red sun over the Egyptian sands, the great birth cry of a new god, born triumphant with his queen at his side, who had looked upon the face of fate, of predestination, of convention, destroyed them all, and yet lived. Don Juan's theme and the desert woman's blended, merged into something new, a new creation of one where there had been two, one new being that moved under the silk of the tent canopy, until the final veil came down to conceal the mystery within. The curtain fell.

I knocked on Erik's door. In a dry, strangled voice he said, "Come in." He stood at the bench but didn't turn around. His whole body shook.

"I have never heard anything like that. You have managed to tell a whole story, a huge story of sorrow and passion, without beauty, without prettiness."

"Without sentimentality," he said, softly.

"That's right. It's brutal, but I understood it."

He let out a long sigh, as if he had held his breath. "You will forgive me if I don't turn around. My mask is gone, and while I have others, that one irritates the least."

I reached in my pocket and touched the mask, a little wet from having gone through the wash, but didn't give it to him. "It doesn't matter," I replied. "It's all right, you can turn around." Inwardly I braced myself for the sight, telling myself, I will not flinch, I will not wince, if I do he'll see it, and all will be lost.

He came toward me, his eyes in the red shadows looking like two coins of brightness floating in sockets filled with blood. He can't help it, I repeated silently, he can't help how he looks, don't look away, don't close your eyes. He put his face very closely into mine, testing me, and he looked far worse in the gloom than in the bright-lit drawing room, with his deepset eyes and collapsed nose, that looked almost as if it were not there in the black. His face was covered with long red weals, some ragged and deep, where he'd forced me to scratch him.

For his face to be on the same level with mine, he leaned down with his hands resting on his knees, and he crouched there for some time, just waiting, and then I noticed he was shaking like a dog left out in the rain, his teeth clicking in staccato.

"It is a splendid opera," I whispered. "There's none like it on the earth," and I wasn't flattering him to soften him up, to better beg for freedom.

"It's not finished," he said.

"What do you mean? It sounded finished to me."

"But the last act, where Don Juan fights the statue and wins. That wasn't written down. It has to be scored for the orchestra as well." He spoke just like a child, with a child's insistence on the obvious, even if it isn't obvious to anyone else.

"You played that all from memory," I stated, and he nodded solemnly. "But then you'll take it to the grave with you, so perhaps you shouldn't finish it," I said gently.

"Would you like it if Erik finished it?" he said simply, in a tone I'd never heard before. It reminded me of a child wheedling his governess. A little flash of fear went through me, that perhaps our scene had unhinged his mind.

"I would like an end to all this talk of graves," I answered. "Yes, I think you should finish it, and live." Then I flushed, for I remembered the two letters lying out on the writing desk.

"You want Erik to live," he said in the same childish sing-song, "even after last night."

"Yes," I said patiently, more unnerved by his helpless tone than his frightful face. Then I handed him his button, and dropped it into his outstretched hand, where he stared at it for a moment before putting it away. "Did it damage my coloring any?" I asked.

He shook his head and brushed back one of his long black strands. "What?"

"Your opera. You said it would burn me, damage me. I don't feel burned. I don't look damaged."

"How would you know?" he asked in a sly voice.

"There's a mirror that you forgot to remove, inside the armoire." He moved as if to retrieve it that instant, and I said quickly, "Please, leave it. I need it to dress."

"Of course," he said, relaxing a bit.

"I understand why you wouldn't want it."

"Do you?" he said sarcastically. "You will be a toothless hag of seventy, and you will never understand it."

A sudden flash of anger went through me. Petulant, wilful, childish, those words came to my lips and I held them in. You've decided to live, so live. "As you can see," I started afresh, "your music has moved me beyond words. I want to work with you on it, and sing it with you. It hasn't harmed me, just as the sight of your face hasn't harmed me."

He gazed at me full of hope, but said nothing. I went on, "What you taught me in my dressing room were the nursery scribblings of a child. What you've produced here is the unmeasured passion of the adult. If I shake before you, Erik, it's not with terror. It's because of what you have produced, and that I can look upon it, and you."

"Pretty words," he said finally, "from one whose eyes still dart towards the door."

I flew up, and started to walk towards the drawing room, headed for the fireplace. He leapt up to stop me, and I whirled on him, "Where would I go? You can bind me, or you can let me walk freely around your rooms. I know I can't get out." He followed me closely, ready to restrain me again if necessary. From my pocket I pulled the silk mask, and quickly threw it into the fire, where it spurted up in a snapping, snarling display of sparks, and then was gone.

"That's it," I said. "No more masks between us."

He gave a cry and moved towards the fire, making as if to thrust in his hands and pull it out, but it was already gone, the flames changing back from blue to yellow. Then, slowly, like a mountain that had fallen into the sea, he crawled over to me, picked up my skirt, and hid his face in it.

"You can't," he said, muffled. "You can't look on me. No one can look at me full, in the face."

"I can."

"How?" he whispered.

"I won't pretend, Erik. You are the ugliest man I have ever seen in my life. But you have eyes that see, a mouth that speaks, ears that hear. You have a voice that comes from heaven itself."

"None of that means anything, if you won't love me."

I sighed. "Don't speak of that. You promised."

He sniffed the hem of my dress, running his face around it as if memorizing the scent. "Erik is sorry, but it's so hard not to. I won't mention it again, I promise. Only let me make you happy. I will make you the happiest of women," he said in between the kisses he placed on the cloth.

"Then to make me truly happy," I said, and he jumped up, ready to act, "don't starve me to death."

He practically flew into the kitchen. But he never apologized for buffeting me about like a rag doll. I think he saw nothing wrong in it. I was his, I had defied him. Just as you slap a puppy to make it behave, or rub its nose in its own mess, he had shown his mastery of me.

From then on we followed no particular rhythm of night or morning. I asked him the time, and he said it was unimportant. What mattered, he said, was that we work together, and that I be happy. He liked it when I made little demands, but some he would not honor, like the request for a time piece, or a newspaper, or my freedom. Those he brushed off, as a parent whose child asks for the moon to be caught on a string, or for a pet unicorn. We treat these requests with the mock-seriousness we show towards children at their work, which is play, but take them not at all seriously ourselves.

I had lost all sense of time, and couldn't tell whether it was night or morning. My watch had stopped again, and he wouldn't rewind it for me, no matter how I pleaded. The Ormulu clock had been allowed to run down as well, and no longer struck the hours and half-hours. For as we had no night or morning, our meals followed whatever pattern Erik wished, sometimes breakfast, sometimes a light supper, sometimes simply fruit and cheese. It was impossible to tell night or day, morning or evening, by what we ate and when.

We sang together, even a few arias from his composition. It was a highly unusual creation. Instead of a complicated, overworked plot with sidelines and distractions, his story was simple and straightforward, like a fairy tale. Rather than moving from scene to scene in organized narrative, it seemed more like a series of episodes loosely linked around the theme of the young man who runs off with the harem girl.

His libretto was remarkably small, just twenty or so pages written in impossible-to-decipher scrawls. Practically every aria contained long wordless cadenzas, and some were marked for the singers to improvise. "I want each performance to differ from the others that came before," he commented. He had me sing the desert woman's part, long breaths or wails or deep sensual moans, singing that came from the soul and bypassed words entirely.

He refused to practice what he called condescendingly "upstairs music," music from the opera repertoire. Instead, he improvised on the piano, weaving long expressive phrases without melody or harmony, like conversation rather than music. Sometimes he played Russian composers with whom I wasn't familiar, like Balakirev or Borodin.

He had an odd-looking oboe called a rhaita, which he said came from Morocco . Long phrases flowed from it, and he had me follow them faster, higher, until my head spun and the room seemed full of unseen beings moving through the shadows. But then I coughed and sounded strained, so he proclaimed that I was to rest my voice for a time. He sat at my feet, playing his rhaita or his harp, until I sank down into the timeless dream that had become my life so many stories below.

I was used to waiting. I had done so much of it, waiting while other blocks of singers rehearsed their parts; waiting in the green-room to go on-stage; waiting in the long evenings at home when there were no performances and Mama Valerius snored. There was no tedium in this waiting, unless he read poetry to me. Baudelaire revolted me, and once I commanded him never to recite it in my presence.

"Oh, you want something sweet," he mocked. "You have St.-Sulpice taste in poetry as well as music, don't you?" He meant the gilded, pastel-painted holy cards of childlike Virgin Marys, and chubby bright-eyed cherubs dropping lilies around her.

"You're unromantic, Erik," I retorted, and he gave a disgusted half-roar, half-snort.

"You know so little. The sultans and shahs of the East believe that if you won a woman 'with the effort of your own hand, as they put it, she was yours. You were free to do anything with her you pleased, use her as a temporary wife for an hour, make her your concubine, or make her your queen. She didn't need to be seduced with syrupy-sweet poetry. She was the one who had to seduce, to win her captor's favor."

"Is that how you see me," I cried, "as your concubine?"

He turned that ravaged face towards me, white and ripped beyond belief, and said quietly, "I will have nothing less than a queen."

"You call it queendom, but it sounds like slavery."

"What you do upstairs is slavery."

"You want me to be an Oriental woman, hidden behind a screen, behind a veil."

"What do you think the veil is for? Behind the veil is protection, tender care, the deepest regard. Yes, wicked men abuse it, as they do so-called 'Christian marriage.' I have seen wickedness like that in the Shah's court, where women were deposited in the andarun, the harem, and then discarded. Men are vile, as you no doubt have seen in the corridors and dressing rooms of the Opera. It's for your own good that I am keeping you, Christine. For I will never neglect you, or abandon you, or give you any reason to doubt my faithfulness."

He lowered his ugly head, showing me his scabby, ragged skull. I bit my lip, and closed my eyes.

Weeks must have passed, if I could tell by my periods of sleep and waking. I didn't even wake on my own accord. He always woke me now, knocking gently on my door, calling softly, "Christine, open your eyes, Christine." Sometimes I woke refreshed, other times I felt as if I'd slept only a few hours. But if I wanted to sleep more, he would insist and then forcefully demand that I get up.

I awoke once and found myself in the monthly way of women. There was nothing there for me to use, and sick with embarassment, I knocked on his bedroom door. He came out in a dark blue silk dressing gown, looking vulnerable and smaller in the shoulders when not in frock coat or tuxedo. He never removed his jacket in my presence, not even while cooking, and he hung behind the door, clutching his dressing gown around his throat. He dressed quickly, and as he was about to leave, I stood between him and the front door. "Let me go with you. I know what I need."

Brushing me off, he told me commandingly to stay in my room, which was his practice when he wished to conceal how he opened his front door. He was gone a long time, or what felt like it in my pain and anxiety. When he returned, he had everything I needed.

"Where did you get these things?" I asked, amazed.

"From my laundress," he answered. When I looked surprised, a laundress? he said, "Do you think I do my own washing in the lake?"

"She thinks you have a mistress, then," I joked, embarrassed that the mundane question of our laundry never occurred to me.

The dough-white skin of his cheeks reddened. "She doesn't ask questions."

"Even when she's washed my shifts?" I asked, wanting to provoke, to see what he would say.

Instead, he walked into the kitchen, where he steeped herbs into fragrant tea. Fearing to be drugged again, I asked what was in it, and he answered, "Two kinds of raspberry leaves, crampbark, chamomile, and valerian." Knowing my thoughts, he said, "It will probably make you sleepy."

He prepared the divan for me by the fire and bade me lie there with tea in hand. For what might have been the next two days he waited upon me hand and foot, as if I were an invalid. When I drank the brew, he came over and sat with me, close but never let his hand graze mine. We did not touch after we grappled that night, which seemed so long in the past.

As the langorous warmth of the tea went through me, he talked to me in soft, low, hypnotic tones. Sometimes I listened, sometimes I didn't, and thought of how pleasant it was to lie there under a thick wool blanket, instead of struggling to rehearsal, always having to wear a black skirt for fear of an embarrassing accident, hating to stay at home "sick" for fear of the teasing and catcalls of the other girls in the theater.

I never washed a rag. I assumed he sent them out to his laundress, and tried not to think of what must have crossed her mind.

As I lay on the divan, a thought sliced through me like a knife. Perhaps I can make a mess of my bed, and give him my sheets. On the sheet I can write a message, in ink, down in a corner perhaps. The laundress will see it and read it, and send for help. My limbs were still heavy and languid from the valerian tea, and I couldn't imagine lifting my head, much less concocting an escape plan. Behind me, I heard him setting the table for a meal.

I looked around that room, with its exotic rug and its beautifully simple furniture. Through the open door of my bedroom, the eiderdown coverlet lay on the bed. Someone had embroidered it with remarkable skill, working ribbons into the shape of roses, and twists of lace into borders. I thought, it's been so long since I've been here, Raoul has probably forgotten about me and gone to sea. It's where he was headed anyway. I discouraged him one too many times. He must be gone. No one in Carlotta's group misses me, and I'm no doubt making some understudy very happy.

Then tears came to my eyes, little self-pitying stings that wanted to know, who cared for me, after my mother was no longer there to braid my hair, when first her legs failed, then her hands, then her sight? Who cared for me, when my Papa and Professor Valerius died within a few months of each other, and Mama Valerius took to her bed in a deep strange mood that had never lifted?

Erik's rough fierce temper seemed long in the past, almost forgotten. He spoke to me gently, followed me everywhere, and watched me ruthlessly for any deviation or suspicion of insincerity. He had performed offices that would have sickened and shamed most men. It felt good to be cared for in this ukiyo, this floating world he had created all for me. I leaned back, and slept.

It sounds idyllic. It was not, because underneath, like the drone of a bass just slightly off-key from the rest of the orchestra, hummed all the wrongness, the inconsistencies, the guilt. When I let myself reflect, it became clear that I missed Mama Valerius not at all, and lashed myself over it. Cruel, brutal shirker of duty, I told myself. He's infected you with his cynical sensuality, as he cossets you like a pet monkey on a golden chain. Like the prize possession in his harem of one. And the question still remains unanswered, when do you get to leave? And do you even want to?

Of Raoul I tried not to think at all.

After supper one night, or perhaps morning, he told me he had a treat prepared. We were going out. He had engaged a carriage.

(continued)