Skin to Skin

The ring glowed blue in the moonlight. With wasp-like speed you flew naked across the room to where I sat.

"The damnable and insufferable curiosity of women," you hissed. "What were you doing in there? Give that to me," and you snatched it out of my hand. Over me you towered, every hair crackling with anger, and the sight of your maleness shocked me as well as your temper. No statue or Greek vase in the Louvre could have prepared me for the fierce energy in your uncovered flesh.

I felt like cowering. I decided not to.

"What was I doing?" I said. "Looking for this," and I tossed the apple lightly up toward you, where it bounced off your stomach and rolled on the floor. "Or maybe some of this," and I got ready to heave the brick of cheese, but you held up my arm and your face lost some of its fire.

"Will you excuse me? I feel at a distinct disadvantage here," and you retreated to the bed to pull on your underdrawers, the ring grasped tightly in your fist.

"You might as well put these jewels away, too," I said, as I tossed the leather pouch over to you. As you reached to grab it, your half-buttoned drawers slid down your hips, and the pouch fell to the floor.

I watched you struggle with buttons and keep hold of the ring at the same time, and something inside me broke like a twig. In two long steps I advanced over to you and spoke in a cool, conversational tone.

"I'm hungry. I'm cold. My bottom feels like it's been rubbed with sandpaper. I go to find something to eat, but instead I find that," and I pointed to your clenched fist. "And is that the worst? No, the worst is that you snap at me as if I were a disobedient child."

You opened your fist and looked at me, at the glimmering ring, and back to me again. Even in shadow the ring still faintly glowed, as if it had some odd life of its own.

I grabbed your free hand and put it up to my neck, squeezing your fingers into my skin. "Go ahead," I said softly. "You've shown you're capable of it. So just get it over with. Or let me live. But I won't live my life in fear of you. I won't let you bully me."

You slid your hand off my neck and squatted down to retrieve the little pouch. As you tucked the ring away I watched an entire battle play out on your face. Warring feelings twisted themselves this way and that. Your eyes followed me, black and reptilian, as if I were an insect singled out by your appetite.

Up against my neck your hands slid, almost gripping. You teased around my neck with your thick fingers, and I held my breath, waiting for the fatal squeeze. Oh, God, had I pushed you too far? Your grip turned to a rough caress, and panting as if you'd been running, you pulled your face into mine and kissed me wildly, deeply.

The ache down at the pit of me flared up, opening wide. Over me fell your cloak of sweet, rough madness, and you drew me right into it, and on that narrow moonlit bunk, I drew you into me.

Later I gasped, "You'll stay in me? You'll not pull away?" and you breathed from deep down in your chest, "Yes," and then we slid back and forth in time with the waves.

I heard wild cries, and, surprised, knew that they were mine. I rose up to match you strength for strength, until from far away came a ripple, next a closer flutter, and finally, right there on top of me, came a breaking wall of feeling that shook me into the bed. I collapsed into the soft center of a widening whirlpool of pleasure that opened, closed, opened again around you, only you, always you.

You looked down at me with an expression first quizzical, then delighted. Half faint, I saw every surge deep in my flesh reflected on your face.

"So that's what it's like," you whispered to yourself, and I didn't know what you meant, but it didn't matter, because the pulsing weight of the waters of the deep pressed all thought out of me.

You shuddered massively twice, three times, and a flicker of mind returned to me, afraid you would die, that we both would die under the onslaught. But we didn't die; instead, you clung to me like a drowning man, murmuring, "Thank you, thank you," into my neck.

I thought you would slide immediately into sleep, but you lay next to me, holding my side, taking me apart with your eyes, as if you had never seen a woman glowing from the pleasures of love before. I stroked the back of your neck and said softly, "I had no idea."

"You don't know what it meant to me, to see your face at that moment."

"I'm glad," I whispered. "I'm glad I made you happy."

I drifted down to rest upon the broad beach of your chest, rocking gently on the up-and-down waves of your breath, and the open circle of tenderness inside me stayed wide like a floodgate. We lay there quietly together, skin to skin, just breathing.

Then you gave a little shift, and I didn't have to see your face to know that restless thoughts moved through you like fish through the deep.

"I have to get up," you said.

When you returned, you brought several apples, a little pot of honey sealed with wax, and your long sharp knife.

"We should talk. I can tell you want to, that there are so many things you want to ask me."

"So many," I answered, still flushed with love. "But I can wait."

"That night of the fire … that night of Don Juan Triumphant … you don't know what happened, of course. Do you want to know?"

"I want to know what you want to tell me," I said. "Is honey in bed a good idea? This is wonderful with the apples, though."

"I don't want to hurt you. I have so much blood on my hands already."

"It hurts me more to imagine."

"Very well," you said. "What can I tell you?"

"Why was Christine found wearing a wedding dress? And why do you have her ring?"

"It's ugly, Meg. Are you sure you want to know?"

"Yes. I do. I don't want to imagine it any more."

"Do you hate her?"

"No, I don't. She was my friend for many years, remember."

"So you feel kind to her, even now."

"I feel kind to everyone right now," I said. "I've never felt such happiness before. But yes, I feel kind toward her."

So you told me how you had the dress made for her, but couldn't bring yourself to openly ask for her hand. Then, after you took her by force down into the bowels of the Opera, you angrily thrust the dress on her, thinking you could make do what she had already refused. You told me of the ring, how you had kept it since the night of the Masked Ball, taking it out and turning it over and over in your hands, loving and hating it at the same time.

When she was all dressed as a bride, you gave her the ring, but placed it in her hand, waiting to see what she would do. She closed her fingers around it but wouldn't put it on.

"I think the only time it has ever been on a finger," you said, "was when she kissed me, to keep me from killing Raoul de Chagny."

When she kissed you. Then something odd overwhelmed me, and I felt her in the room, closer than when we shared a dormitory bed on cold nights, as close as if she lay right on top of my skin. As if she were in this bed, in this room, in your arms, or that she could have been.

You lay your head on my knee and put your arms around me. A drop of honey hit your shoulder and I wiped it off absently. You said softly, "It's a tale best told in your arms. Now do you hate her?"

"Why should I? I'm in this stateroom, not her." Then, after a few heartbeats, "Were you really going to kill Raoul deChagny?"

"I'm afraid I was."

"Until she kissed you."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know, really. I mean, the situation was plain. I wanted to kill him, and she didn't want me to. If she could have physically stopped me, she would have. She told me she hated me, that I'd lied to her and deceived her, and I had, it was all true. Then, she walked up to me and … you can't want to hear this, can you? It has to hurt."

"If it hurts too much, I'll tell you to quit."

"She wanted me to stop, to just stop. I wanted it to stop, too, all of it. I almost laid myself down face first in the water, just to make it all end. Then, it was as if a hand was laid on me, a hand I couldn't see or feel, and something broke inside of me. After that, I knew I couldn't force her anymore, or myself, for that matter. So I told her to go. Not because I didn't want her anymore, no … now look, you're crying."

"No," I winced, "I'm not. You wanted her, but you weren't going to try and make her, anymore."

"That's it, exactly. So when she came back, I thought, I've done it, I've won, she's come back on her own. Then she gave me back the ring, which was really hers anyway. She folded it into my hand as if it was the most precious thing in the world, and then walked away, dragging those heavy wet skirts behind her. I can still hear them scraping on the stone."

I held you against my stomach as you sat, cradling your head in my arms, shusshed you, and you wept a little, but nowhere near as deeply as you did that first night on my breast. Unspeakable cruelty, oh, unspeakable. Better she would have just thrown that cursed object in the lake. And now it's with us in this very room, like an albatross, dead and stinking.

"Why would she do that?"

"I don't know. Guilt, or confusion, or one last look at the freak in the cage before disappearing forever. But when I knew she was truly gone, I put the ring in my pocket and decided to live anyway."

"I don't understand that," I said. "I'm glad that you decided to live. But why do you keep it?"

"I wish I knew. When we get to America, I'm going to put it away, and I don't want you to ask about it, or look for it, or even think about it again. I never intended for you to see it or find it."

"So you wanted to deliberately hide it from me. That shames me. Give me one reason I shouldn't throw it in the Atlantic right now," and I pushed you away, suddenly angry.

"Meg … " you said, so forlorn I had to turn back to you.

"Well, I don't want to see it. And don't try to hide something that big from me again."

From the shadow where the moonlight didn't reach, you said, "You have no idea, the depths of what I'm hiding from you."

"Everyone has something they hide," I said. "I don't know who my father is, for example."

"Your mother told me she was a widow."

I sat up like a bolt, and the empty honey pot rolled onto the floor. "You knew my mother? All that business with notes, I knew she was your go-between, and I never believed in this 'ghost' business, but you knew her? Talked to her face-to-face?"

Confused, you said, "She never told you?"

The soft well-being after love was gone. "She never told me anything about you. Everything I learned of you, I learned on my own, by watching, or from … other people."

"She never told you how she found me, as a boy?"

"Nothing, not a word. So she knew you when you were young? Oh, how I hate her. All her sighing, her staring into corners," and as I pulled the sheet around my shoulders I started to cry.

"Do you want to know what happened?" and I nodded fiercely.

"My father was a peddler, in Brittany. My grandfather was going to kill him for dallying with my mother and giving her a child, and since he liked living and liked my mother well enough, I suppose, he married her. Then there was the unfortunate curse of my birth. My grandfather died, and my father left. My mother despised me, so at ten I ran away."

I started to protest, that your birth was in no way a curse, but you held up a hand.

"I joined a band of gypsies, looking for adventure. What I got was a cage, and a place as an exhibit in their freak show. They were outcasts from various gypsy tribes, felons who had joined with each other to put on a travelling circus. My face was worse then, far worse, raw and dripping. They kept me in a cage filled with straw, and beat me to make me take off the burlap bag they threw over my head.

"They had never been in Paris before, and were slavering like animals over the thought of more money than they'd ever dreamed. One night a group of girls came in, and I think my keeper was shocked. He was used to the rabble, the ignoramuses, but a troupe of schoolgirls undid him. The show was over, but he forgot to knot the rope that tied me to the bars at night. I strangled him with it and escaped. Your mother led me to the Opera Populaire, and showed me how to get into the cellars."

"I'm glad you killed him," I said. "Aren't you?"

"I used to be, although now I'm not so sure. But his death freed me, and without your mother's help, I would have died."

"My mother knew you as a boy. I knew she was a sphinx, but this … I used to ask her so many questions, and she would never answer. But she knew, she knew all along."

"I thought you knew, and that you followed me out of pity, because that seemed to be the only emotion I could inspire in a woman."

"Pity! I had always wanted to see you, when you slunk around the Opera. Then, when I did see you on the bridge on stage … No, not pity. Not at all." Then something occurred to me. Softly I asked, "Were you in love with my mother?"

Astonishment twisted your face. "Your mother? What an idea! She was like a sister to me. She showed me where the Opera kitchens were, and the prop rooms, and the costume shops. I think for her at first I was an interesting pet, and her secret. But when I was sixteen, I told her I was leaving, to board a ship for somewhere, anywhere. She cried and acted as if I were betraying her. I didn't understand it at all."

"I do. She was in love with you. I even noticed it myself, when I was old enough to pay attention to these things."

"In love with me? Impossible."

I let it rest. "Where did you go?"

"I signed on as a cabin boy on a merchant ship that went between North Africa and Europe, all around the Mediterranean. I travelled all over Northern Africa - Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, all the way to Egypt."

"But you came back to Paris."

"After ten years I was sick of humanity, sick of what I saw in Africa, sick of myself. I had been gone a decade. When I came back, there was your mother, now mistress of the ballet, and there were two little girls with her."

"Christine and I."

"Yes. I knew your mother had married while I was gone. At first I thought you were sisters, but then learned that she had taken in an orphan. Not that I paid much attention to ballet rats. I had my own preoccupation, carving out a little kingdom for myself in the deepest recesses under the Opera."

"Then one of the little girls grew up."

"Both of them grew up," you replied. Then something crossed your face, and you said, "Why do you not know your father?"

"The numbers don't add up. Mother married her husband, he went to Quebec for a year, and while he was gone, she got with child. He died soon after I was born. I don't know who my real father is." Then a black horror struck me, so powerful it threatened to make me throw up all the apples and honey I'd eaten.

"You swear you didn't love my mother?" I gasped. "What year did you leave Paris? What year? Tell me, I have to know."

"Calm down. What irrationality is this? Let me think, it was in the summer, the summer of 1853 that I left Paris for Marseilles. It took about a month to get there, but I wasn't going to get caught again. I learned to use a knife. You don't want to know about it."

I buried my face in my hands. "Oh, thank God. I was born in December 1854."

You pulled back as if a snake were suddenly thrown down between us, and then laughed loudly, crazily. I had never heard you laugh, and I jumped. You laughed until you choked, rolling over on your side like a boy who's pulled the most absurd practical joke, and at once I could see the boy in you, the boy you'd been.

"No," you gasped out, still rolling on your side. "I didn't love your mother."

"I don't think it's funny," I sniffed. "Do you realize …"

"Yes, I realize, and I too can count backwards from nine. I've read Oedipus Rex. It would make a perfect opera." You climbed back up and said firmly, "Meg, you were the only woman I've known, in the flesh."

"Impossible," I said. "Especially if you'd been on a ship. My mother would make us cross the street when sailors walked by. And then there was that night, the night after the Gala, when Christine stayed with you."

You looked away. Ah, ha, a nerve. "It's all right," I said. "It's different for men."

The room rang as you smacked the bedpost, hard. You flew from the bed and paced, really angry now, slipping into your rich Bretagne accent. "Do you have to pile it further on top of my head? Do you lead me out of the dark to convince me that I'm not a monster because of my face, only to shove me back in, because you think that I'm a monster of lechery? And not only a lecher, but a liar besides? That I would lie to you?

"Do you know how easy it is to buy flesh in Africa? Of course you don't. You're a girl who's spent her summer holidays in Wales. You and Christine were what, nine or ten when I came back? If you were poor girls in Alexandria, you'd have been sold to brothels around age eight.

"Boys used to expose themselves on the street, with their painted eyes and nails. Some were made into eunuchs, to give greater pleasure. You think Montmartre is full of prostitutes. You should have seen Algiers. It wasn't what I wanted. I didn't fear God, but I did fear infection, and above all I hated the ugliness of it all, the brutal squalor.

"You don't think I could have had flesh whenever I wanted it?"

You fell silent but kept pacing like a wild thing in a cage.

"Please," I said quietly. "Don't be angry with me. I believe you."

"But not about Christine."

"It's so hard to. Please understand. Mother and I found her right after dawn, in the corridor. We saw her face, her clothing. How she stared at us, as if in a dream. I didn't realize then, but now I do. How a woman could look that way."

You came back to the edge of the bed, your face in your hands. "Meg, I swear to you, I never entered her body, neither by force nor by her consent. The Vicomte de Chagny will have no strange eggs in his nest. Please don't ask me any more about it. There are some things that a woman should not ask a man. Please don't."

"Would you tell me if I did ask?"

A long silence, followed by "Yes."

"I'll lie for you, to keep you from being caught. I know I'm just as guilty as you. But I won't lie to you. I can live without you saying you love me," and you twitched as I said it, "but I can't live with untruth."

"I've lied out of sheer habit," you said baldly. "Untruth has been in my bones for so long."

"Somehow I believe you," and we both laughed a little.

The porthole was rimmed with pale grey dawn. I said lightly, "What lies do we tell today?"

"Surprisingly few. My name is listed the ship's manifest, and you are right under me as 'Mrs.' Don't tell people I'm a musician or that you're a dancer. Passengers, especially second-class ones, are a bored lot, and they'll want us to lighten their hours. They're mostly teachers, clerks, ministers - in other words, they have the brains that crave stimulation, but lack the money to regale themselves with the entertainments of first class.

"So it's best that we be something very dull to them. If anyone asks, I'm a stone mason, and you're a former lady's maid who's married up. Everyone will snub us and think we belong in third class, and no one will think we have a single interesting thing to say."

"A lady's maid?" I said, surprised.

"It's in the hands. A farm girl or laundress would have hands like lobsters. Yours are soft. It's believable that you would comb out hair and lace up corsets, but not scrub linens or hoe potatoes," and you ran your mouth around the tips of my fingers, making me shiver.

"Let me see your hands. They are rough, aren't they? From holding a quill, writing operas?"

"From carving, from digging, from building, from climbing up and down ropes."

I caressed your hand, running my fingertips around the thick muscle below your thumb. "So we just go up, mingle with the passengers, show up for meals, act normally?"

"Exactly."

"It's like hiding in plain sight, then."

"Not hiding," you said as you delicately lowered the sheet wrapped around my shoulders, and worked your mouth down my neck to the warm crevices beneath. "Living."

After a few minutes more of soft nuzzling I shifted, a little impatient. "Do you know what I'm thinking of now?" I asked.

"Ummm?"

"Coffee, about half milk, and very sweet. Biscuits with butter and jam. And I want you to tell me everything you know about America. About New York, and what we're going to do when we get there."

There was that look I'd come to know, the look of distant resolution that hid your thoughts like a curtain. "I'll tell you what we'll do when we arrive," you finally said. "First, I buy a violin, and you buy a pair of toe shoes."

I brushed your blue suit for you and we dressed. You adjusted your cravat, and I took your arm as we climbed up to the dining room. The cut-glass door swung open, flooding us with smells of fresh bread and bacon, and through the dining-room windows I caught a glimpse of the pounding swell of the gray ocean, its thin skin covering the fathomless surges of the deep.

(Finis)