Once again, thanks to everyone who was so patient with this site's downtime last week and came back to review! Extra special thanks to those who left such detailed, thoughful comments – these are always an honour and a thrill.
Please note that apparently this site is going to be experiencing downtime once AGAIN this weekend (grr!) so I wanted to get this chapter posted before that happens. It also means that you may not be able to leave a review for a while, but I would really appreciate it if you could come back and review when the site is back up. Thanks so much!
This week's trivia: Edgar Degas used to spell his name as 'de Gas'.
Chapter 9 – An Amusing Night Out
The Café de Suède turned out to be a large, boisterous establishment. Erik looked around as he, Fiaux and Choury came through the doors, already beginning to regret having agreed to spend an evening in this social hell. A crowded street was just another kind of solitude, an office was, well... an office was bearable. But a café bubbling with coquettish laughter, conversations, the knock of absinthe glasses against marble tabletops – this was something else entirely. The room was furnished lavishly with couches, gilded mirrors, a mosaic floor and white stucco garlands winding around the ceiling lamps. The bar was of immaculate dark wood, and each booth was filled with patrons, male and female, many looking as though they too had just come from the theatre.
"I must say I'm grateful to you for the suggestion, Andersson," Jacques Choury said as they found an empty booth and sat down. "I've forgotten how much I do enjoy the theatre: I have not laughed so well in many months."
"Oh yes," Vincent Fiaux agreed readily, grinning from ear to ear. "It was quite marvellous, especially when the husband's brother – Armand was it? – Armand discovers her little secret and everybody is quite..."
"Indeed," Erik cut him off. "I am delighted you enjoyed the play, gentlemen. I only regret that I was not able to join you."
"You mustn't let old Duchamp work you into the ground," Fiaux frowned. "He may look innocuous, but just let him see you're willing to work nights and he'll be piling you with sketches and calculations enough to bury you alive."
"Still sending you to Sedan, is he?" asked Choury, after the waiter left with their drink orders.
Erik made a cynical noise at the thought of being 'sent' anywhere. "I have chosen to examine the site in person."
"A bit of a dull town, I hear," Fiaux said. He tugged at his stiff collar, clearly not used to such formal attire. "Not even a theatre."
"Indeed? Then it shall make a pleasant change from Paris."
Choury looked amused. "Come, Andersson, confess it: there is another man entirely under that brooding façade you insist on showing the world! A chap who recommends a night at the Variétés, even if he steadfastly refuses to share it with his colleagues, is hardly the strait-laced workhorse Duchamp believes he has found."
"I confess it freely," Erik responded without a trace of irony, "I am in fact a rogue and a profligate, who loves nothing so well as a Variétés chorus girl."
Fiaux and Choury roared with laughter.
Erik looked back at them tolerantly. It was amazing how simply a truth could be masked, even a dangerous, closely-guarded truth. And yet he knew very well the gamble he was taking in saying those words, the same gamble he had taken in recommending the Variétés as an amusing night out. He could scarcely admit to himself how desperately he longed for them to talk of the dancers he could not see now, to paint for him the images which had sprung up unbidden before his eyes when he first read the terse lines in the Journal advertising the fate of the former employees of the Opéra Populaire.
The familiar name had stared back at him from the paper, branding the script into his vision: Mlle Christine Daaé has signed on with the Théâtre des Variétés.
He knew he should not be here now, hoping secretly for a word about her from these men – these strangers who somehow could look at her, up on stage, and yet see nothing at all. All of that had to be put well behind him, he could not afford to indulge the dangerous memories of the encounter with ... with the future Vicomtesse de Chagny. This new existence as an architect seemed to be shaping itself quite without his interference, and Erik had every intention of letting it continue thus, well aware that the smallest slip on his part, the smallest glance backwards, could make it unravel like a falling lasso. He had come much too close with the terrible error about Madame Giry and the residence of the old Comte and Comtesse de Chagny at Saint-Cloud. There would be no more mistakes.
Yet despite all these well-intentioned promises, despite all the effort he expended on creating sketches and models and keeping every moment of his life occupied with thoughts of the new courthouse he was to design for the provincial town of Sedan, he could not escape. His nights had become a writhing confusion of feverish, twisted sheets; he kept seeing his hands clutching Christine's bare shoulders in the silence of her room, kept hearing her angel's voice twisted beyond recognition by the discordant notes of his Don Juan Triumphant.
Before, he had found some measure of comfort in persuading himself that it was all over, that Christine was free of him now even if he would never be free of her. The memories of that night, of her wounded eyes and her fingers on his flesh demanding revenge, ripped that assurance from his soul and left him waking naked and terrified, longing to hold her and suffocating with the shame of it.
"Ah, Choury! I say, it has been a while!"
An impeccably dressed gentleman in his mid-thirties had stopped by their table and was enthusiastically shaking Jacques Choury's hand in both of his, beaming with the unfeigned joy of one seeing an old and much missed friend. A tall blonde girl behind him, evidently his companion, stood forgotten and ill at ease.
"Good God, de Gas!" Choury gripped the gentleman's hand delightedly, getting up. "How the hell are you? I've been hearing the world of you ever since Italy – the Salon now, is it?"
"Quite right, the Salon – trapped in the gilded cage among the usual suspects." The man laughed with a hint of self-deprecation. "I swear, they will still be painting Ruth and Semiramis and good old Apollo a century from now!"
"Forgive me," Choury said, suddenly recalling the other two at the table. "Allow me to introduce you to my colleagues – gentlemen, my good friend Edgar de Gas, another veteran of the old Beaux-Arts college days and I'm proud to say, the most talented of us all."
"Now really, Choury..."
"No no, it is quite true, I assure you! Edgar, my colleagues: Monsieur Vincent Fiaux," Fiaux rose briefly in his seat to shake the gentleman's hand, "And Monsieur Erik Andersson, with whom I daresay you should have a great deal in common: he is quite the theatre enthusiast!"
Erik felt every muscle in his neck go rigid with the effort of not turning his face aside to the shadowed safety of the wall at his right, knowing that in any case the action could not conceal his bandage from the curious eyes of the newcomer. He attempted a civil greeting, hating the enforced contact of a handshake and the man's clear, expressive eyes studying the bandaged half of his face with the practiced gaze of a painter.
"A pleasure to meet you, monsieur," de Gas nodded, releasing Erik at last from the almost physical agony of this scrutiny.
It was only then, while attempting to regain his composure, that Erik's gaze slid over the girl who had accompanied de Gas and he had a shock.
She was not looking at the bandage. Her grey eyes were aimed directly at his face.
Erik forced his gaze to unfocus and turned his head, pretending he had not seen her, but his heart was racing as though death was a step away and approaching at the gallop.
A ballet girl.
He could not recall her name – a German name, Eismann or Weissman or something of the sort – one of Madame Giry's charges from the Opéra Populaire. Weiss, he decided, that was her name, Helena Weiss. The one who would always be relegated to the back lines because of her height, but who had been cast in Don Juan because there were no chorus lines in the flamenco. This Mademoiselle Weiss had only to gasp now and point at him, shrieking with the all the repressed lung power of the eternally-mute ballet girl – "The Phantom of the Opera! He's here!" – and he was dead. Trapped in the corner of the booth he knew there was no escape.
He stared into his absinthe, seeing green murder. A confusion of sound told him the man de Gas had taken a seat at their booth and Erik did not dare look to see whether the girl had remained with him. He kept staring into the drink until with a start, he realised there was a conversation going on among the others, and nobody was shrieking at all.
"Very true, Andersson here was just telling us – what was it you were saying about the lyrics?"
Erik looked up at the four pairs of eyes turned towards him. If there was a hell, he was quite certain it would involve the eyes of a multitude staring at him expectantly in exactly this way. He tried not to think of the scream that seemed to hover inevitably above the four of them, like an exclamation point only he could see: He's here!
"The lyrics?" he ground out the words, cursing himself for the worst sort of imbecile. Surely they could hear the frantic harshness in his voice.
"Yes, you said before, the lyrics had been written by, what was his name now..."
"Halévy," Erik heard himself say, quite calmly. "An impressively witty libretto, despite the lamentable title."
"Oh, you are acquainted with Ludovic Halévy? A good friend of mine," de Gas enthused, giving Erik the impression that all of them were part of an absurd slow-motion farce, a comedy about the great fire of Rome: the world was burning down around them while they talked of operettas. The scene lacked only a fiddle. Any second now the girl Helena would scream.
"I regret I have not had the honour of meeting Monsieur Halévy in person," Erik replied.
"A pity, then. A man of rare intelligence – is he not, mademoiselle? A mutual friend," de Gas explained with a warm smile for the company. "Ludovic did me the favour of an introduction to Mademoiselle Weiss."
The girl's gaze lingered on Erik briefly, and then, to his astonishment, continued past him. She rejoined the conversation, which turned to an animated discussion with Fiaux about the design of the set, as though the concept of sharing a café table with the erstwhile Phantom of the Opera had proved too bizarre for her to consider seriously.
Was it possible, Erik thought numbly, that she had not recognised him? Could it be that even a dancer who had seen him unmasked in Don Juan could not see that faceless monster in the gentleman he now pretended to be? The audience had seen only his deformity, a brief glimpse of horror, but the dancers had seen the other side, the undamaged side – and yet this girl laughed and chatted amiably, and did not seem to know him. Had he changed?
Perhaps she was merely waiting for her chance to blackmail him. Erik considered how much it would cost to buy her silence. It was in the midst of those unpleasant calculations that a shout came from the middle of the room – "Le Soir! It's on the front page, gentlemen!"
Ripples of excitement flew from around the speaker, as from an epicentre of a quake, and everyone in the room seemed at once on their feet, clamouring to see the paper. Erik heard shouts of "At last!" and "Ha, I knew it could not go on this way!" and then the paper was being passed from hand to hand, the headline blared across the café in a hundred different voices: "Ambassador snubbed at Ems!" and "Prussia mocks French honour!"
"You fools!" shrilled a young woman somewhere, "This is Bismarck's doing, I tell you! This is exactly what he wants, a war to unite Prussia against us, and we're flying smack into his trap! Hold, I say!"
The crowd drowned her out; Erik felt finally his endurance snap under the pressure of so much noise, unable to stand another minute in the exploding crowd of the café.
He caught Choury's eye with some thought to explain his departure, but the man was not watching him; like everyone else he seemed determined to get his hands on the paper and see for himself this scandalous injury to France's pride that seemed cause enough for war.
Erik shoved people aside with no regard for their yelps and stumbles, cutting clear through the press of bodies with the blood-maddened urge of a caged animal trying to get out.
He could see the twin doors in front of him now but his progress was excruciatingly slow, forced as he was to push against the current of the movement – until someone outside shouted "Le Soir! Le Soir! Prussia throws down the gauntlet!". Within a heartbeat the direction was reversed, as people headed for the doorway where the fortunate paper boy was about to do spectacular business.
"Le Soir! Outrageous telegram from the King of Prussia! Full text inside!"
Cursing and fighting for a breath, Erik finally broke free of the doors and out onto the blessed openness of the boulevard.
He cast about for the most promising direction for locating a cab, his long strides taking him away from the worst of the café crowd, but at that moment other paper-criers emerged as though from underground, hawking their papers, and more people spilled from each doorway nearby, joining into bigger crowds and cutting off all obvious routes of retreat.
Erik looked back and forth along the teeming, gas-lit boulevard, searching for a cab or carriage or horse or anything at all that could take him away from here – until he turned and the pulse seemed to stop in his veins.
Not twenty paces from him, across the swelling torrent of hats and hairstyles and noses and opened mouths, there was a face he would recognise among millions: the only living face in a crowd of ghosts.
Christine; his Christine, on the arm of her Vicomte de Chagny.
It was too much.
Forsaking pride and sense, Erik stumbled backwards and leapt onto the back of a carriage, then another and another and then he was free and he ran, feeling Christine's familiar gaze all around him, her hair, her cheeks, her mouth, her beloved, perfect voice swelling in his chest. It seemed to him that he was condemned to repeat this horror again and again, each time fleeing wildly before her, always yearning fatally to stay.
He thought he heard her cry out his name, "Erik!" – but it could not be. He could not hear anything in this white noise of people, he had to escape the madness of Paris. Sedan, he recalled, turning into a cobbled alleyway. The first train in the morning would take him safely towards Sedan.
o o o
"Erik..."
The space in the crowd was closed over by the push-and-shove of chattering, excited people, and it now seemed impossible that someone who had stood there a moment ago could have simply disappeared. Yet Christine knew: he had been there. He had seen her. She had felt the frantic stab in her chest and the blood rushing hot to her face as their eyes met, caught together in that sudden, unguarded moment.
She had not meant to call out. His name was lost in the rumble of the crowded boulevard and the wheeled traffic, but she had felt it on her lips even if she had not heard it herself, and it frightened her that she liked it: the feel of her mouth shaping his name.
A pressure on her elbow made her look up.
"Raoul..." Christine whispered, coming to herself. And this name, also, was a guilty ache in her mouth.
Raoul's eyes found hers; his face wore a blank, tight-jawed expression. He had seen him, too.
He turned with a jerky movement, away from the spot where Erik had disappeared.
"Let's go home, Little Lotte. Let me take you home."
Christine sobbed once, and nodded.
They slipped through the crowd as easily as children through water, unmindful of everything except each other. There was the same bitter taste of the sea burning Christine's throat, the same shortness of breath as she had felt so many years ago, racing with this same boy along the black shoreline of the night-time sea. She had never been sure, then, how long she could keep running.
I love you! she wanted to tell him, and could not say it. Forgive me – but she could not even say that.
In the hansom cab, they sat close together on the padded seat as the driver struggled through worsening traffic. Raoul had his face turned away from her, watching the façades. He stopped the cab at one point, near a news kiosk, and bought a copy of Le Soir. The paper lay open before him the rest of the way, but Christine knew he was not reading.
Please, she begged somebody, neither her father nor God but some undefinable deity like the blind frozen angels at her father's tomb, please hear me. Take my heart, please, please take this worthless heart. Take it so I cannot hurt this boy, this man. Destroy me. Make me somebody else.
"I'm so sorry." She barely heard Raoul's whisper above the swish of the wheels of the cab and the rustle of paper. "Christine, forgive me."
"My God," she said, shuddering. "What for?"
"You warned me, and I didn't listen. You said... You said if you sang in the Phantom's opera, he would take you."
"Did I," Christine faltered. He'll take me, I know... We'll be parted forever. "I ... don't remember."
"You were right. I swore to protect you and instead I put you right in his path. If the Phantom had killed us both, it would have been because of me, only me. My foolishness."
"Raoul, don't say that..."
"And if we're free now, it is because of you. I owe you my life. And..." Raoul swallowed harshly, as though determined to get the words out without anger, yet Christine could not help but hear the hurt in his voice:
"He doesn't know it, but so does he. He's alive. You freed the Phantom, too."
"His name is Erik," said Christine before she could catch herself.
There was a long, empty pause. Then the cab jolted, throwing them both forward, and stopped moving. Christine saw that they had arrived outside her apartment building.
"When," Raoul asked finally, "did you find out his name?"