Pars Quattor

It was early morning, still dark, but Christine's mind snapped awake as though she had never slept at all. Engaged. ENGAGED? How can that be possible? The wind whipped Christine's face as she walked toward the carriage house, insulting her for believing it impossible that Erik should find love anywhere outside her own heart. Could he be lying? He must be lying. What woman would have him? She would. Almost.

She climbed into the carriage, still trying to convince herself that it was all for the better, that he would be happier with a wife of his own. Her breathing was thin. She went home and to bed, though she had not eaten, and woke the next morning feeling as though her body were made of stones.

Raoul looked at her as he always looked at her, the way he looked at the pet Italian greyhounds which skittered about their feet, the way he looked at the paintings along the wall and the porcelain in the cabinet—he looked at her with a love and a self-satisfied triumph which was almost disgusting to look at. She hated the way the corner of his lip just barely turned up into that half smirk, the way only two or three of his teeth peeked out from between his thin pink lips to gloat at her. But she loved Raoul, perhaps because she couldn't imagine what her life would turn into if she stopped doing so. In the last weeks of the Populaire's existence, she had clung to Raoul the way she had clung to her innocence. Christine, like Persephone in the Greek myth, had resisted the pull to Hell, but found the absolute power and the haunting beauty of the Underworld impossible to settle. With Hades himself bending and asking for her to be his queen, it is amazing that she managed to cling onto the world above long enough to avoid eating the pomegranate seeds of that dark place. Or had she failed to resist? Had she failed to stay her hunger for passion when she kissed him, thinking that she was only doing him a kindness that she owed him? No. No, she had chained herself to the world of dark music when she fed herself upon his lips, and now he was turning on her and marrying another? Engaged?

But Raoul is of concern now. He has noticed that Christine is in a frenzy, that her hair is not tied up and that two of the buttons on her dress were missed in her haste to meet him for breakfast.

"How was Mademoiselle Giry? Did you send her my regards?" He looked up from his paper.

"She was fine. She wishes you well." She was staring intently at the toast she was buttering. He yawned and turned the page. She managed to stifle her own yawn, which rose in her throat and threatened to expose the truth that she had not slept at all.

"Please don't forget, my love, that you have an appointment with that Doctor fellow today."

Her stomach turned over.

"Dearest," she began, putting down her toast, "I'm not feeling at all up to that today. Perhaps tomorrow…or next week?"

If he was suspicious, if he was even concerned, he did not show it. What was it to him if Christine wanted to make some decisions of her own for a change? Sometimes she amazed him and chose which jam she wanted with her crackers all on her own, but more often she just said, "Oh no, dear, you decide." That's the way everything had been with the wedding arrangements. Oh no, dear, you decide. He sometimes couldn't believe that Christine had had the courage not only to choose him down by that lake, but also to make a decision at all. But she made up for it in sweetness.

"Of course dear. I was hoping that maybe we two could spend the day together… go to the park or something."

"Yes, that would be nice," she simpered. Oh Lord, not the bloody park again.

Erik was leaving today, where to she did not know, but where he would be married presumably in one month. That was the custom. One month.

So, she went to the park, and it was just as boring and intolerable as she had expected it to be. How was she supposed to tell Raoul that she wasn't going to marry him, that she had met someone else, without getting Erik killed? There was no way.

They were sitting down to dinner that evening when Raoul asked her if she wanted to go to the opera house in Vienna. She said she would love the escape, that it would be quite a treat. She knew that any opportunity for travel would heighten the possibility of running into that man who accepted her embrace and then said he would turn her away forever. Somehow, when she had done it to him it did not seem nearly so despicable.

"Christine, what's wrong?"

"Nothing Raoul. Nothing at all."