Lady Lazarus
I sat here for almost an hour at the writing-desk. The ink dried on the nib, the tea turned cold in the cup, but I was unable to write of that trip to the underworld where I found what I least expected, Erik still living.
Later, perhaps. It's as if Erik's hand itself rests on mine, long and white and deceptively delicate, and Erik's pure, clear voice says, Tell of me alive, first. Tell of me alive as a man, even though I lived and loved as a man for only a short time.
Do not introduce me as a walking corpse, or a stinking skeleton days from death, says that voice, lightly touching me with that restraining hand. Give me a little credit for my life, such as it was. Show how I loved you, first, before you show how I died. Give me at least that. I assent, and the white hand withdraws, caressing my hair in the movement of the breeze.
It occurs to me that I am about as old now as you were, Erik, when you died. How I wish I could talk with you about this fear that creeps up daily now, the cold breath that stirs the hairs on my neck, that leads me to calculate each grain of each minute that slips through the narrow waist of the day's hourglass.
How I wish we could have been the same age.
You felt this, didn't you, when you begged me, desperate and demanding, to love you, as if love was something you could command. You wanted to command everything, to drive time itself forward under the lash of your will, because you yourself were lashed by time, lashed by death.
Thirty-two years ago I returned to the land of the living, after crawling through the Rue Scribe gate for the last time. I blinked in the bright stabbing sunlight. Carriages, passers-by, street vendors and their urchin children all danced like living magic-lantern puppets animated by a giant lamp in the sky. No rough policeman seized my arm to drag me off for interrogation. No shroud covered my face. No one called me to come forth. I didn't even know what day it was.
The great iron key dragged at my pocket, and so I threw it into a sewer. Light as air I walked home. Nothing bound me to Paris any longer, but Mama Valerius didn't understand.
"What about your Angel of Music?" she kept saying, and I repeated, "You know there was no 'angel,' Mama, I explained it to you. There was only a man, and his name was Erik, but he's dead now."
"Dead?" she said stupidly. "How can an angel die?"
I pinched my nails into my palm; better to focus on that pain instead of her advancing senility. "I've just come from his funeral," I said. "Angels don't have funerals."
"So that's where you were," she said placidly. "I haven't been to a funeral in a long time. I love funerals. Such pretty singing. Oh, I remember now. He was the one you loved, when you wouldn't accept the proposal from that boy."
I told myself over and over, she's old, she can't help it, she's not responsible. "Mama," I said, "You must do this for me. He's dead, and you are never to speak of him again, do you hear? Never," and by some miracle of God she didn't.
I bathed multiple times, aired my clothes, cleaned and blacked my boots, but death hung all around me like a smell. Raoul expected me to write him when I came back from my charnel errand, but the pens sat untouched, the ink bottle unopened.
Perhaps he thinks Erik still lives, and that I've run away with him. That will hurt him, but less than he knows. I won't write him. If he thinks I've gone, he'll make a new life for himself. If he wants me, let him come. Not that it matters. With or without him, I can't stay here.
He came to see me the next day, the day after I staggered forth from that tomb. Earlier in the afternoon I'd spent hours trying to convince Mama Valerius that it was time to move, that we were leaving Paris, and my nerves rasped with tension and frustration. Uncomprehending, Mama toddled off for her nap, while Raoul and I sat in the parlor stiffly, not touching.
"So it's over," he said finally, staring at my hand now free of the round gold symbol of my bondage.
"Perhaps not quite. I didn't tell you everything," I said.
His pale, almost grey face shook and he said, "Look, I've had almost no sleep this month with the nightmares. It's only through Uncle Auguste's influence that I haven't been arrested. He's head of the family now, and I shudder to think what that means. He's suing me over the inheritance, and in the duration he probably won't give me a centime. The family have proclaimed me guilty and guillotined already, except for my sisters, and their husbands work on them night and day."
"Then," he went on, "you're living here with a woman whose mind fades by the minute. Your career at the Paris Opera is finished; they wouldn't have you back as a charwoman."
"I have a little money saved," I interrupted. "I can sell my fur and my mother's rings."
He twisted his hands into fists and pressed them into the velvet settee. "Now, as if this isn't enough, you tell me it's not quite over. Christine, he's dead now. It's supposed to be over. It has to be over or I shall go mad."
This in some ways was even harder than my descent into that necropolis below the Opera. Afraid to start, more afraid not to, I said in a trembling voice, "Raoul, about that ring. There's something I didn't tell you about it. It didn't just look like a wedding ring. It was a wedding ring."
He said nothing at first, then his face twitched. He clenched his fists and drew himself up, shivering as he tried to maintain control.
"Do you see that poker over there by the fireplace?" he gestured.
I looked over at the fireplace tools in confusion. "Yes?"
"Why not take it and run me through with it? It would hurt less." Then he sat for a few moments, running his hands over his face. Finally he said, still unbelieving, "You were secretly married, then? With all that implies?"
"I'm afraid so," I answered. "With all it implies."
He put his head down onto his knees, and when I tried to touch his shoulder, he shook me off convulsively. "You played me false all along," he said, muffled. "It's what Philippe always suspected, and what I was too blind with love for you to see."
The bright early spring sun mocked the cold, leaden atmosphere in that sad little room. Why isn't he getting up? I wondered. It would be so easy for him to stride for the door and disappear. But there he sits, hating me, yet staying.
He raised himself up, his face streaked with tears. "When, Christine? When did this happen?"
"The night of the Masquerade Ball," I choked out.
He sat, calculating days and weeks, counting months. "How could I forget that wedding night song from Romeo et Juliette? Erik didn't just pick that particular composition at random, did he, when he came for you that night after the Masked Ball? A man who sings 'Night of our marriage ... night of voluptuous delights' to a woman has to have only one thing in mind. It explains volumes, doesn't it? Only I was too blind to realize.
"It's why you told me you couldn't marry. I sat here in this very room the day after the ball, playing the fool with you and Mme. Valerius. Just out of curiosity, Christine, did Mme. Valerius know? Was that why she took your part that afternoon and practically showed me the door? Does she know now?"
"I told her then," I said sadly, "and made her promise to keep it a secret. But she's forgotten it, if she ever really comprehended it to start with. My Mama's mind fails rapidly, Raoul, as you have noticed."
Ticking off weeks with his fingers, he went on, "So when you took my hands and kissed me on the rooftop, you seemed willing to run away, but not as my wife. At least that shows some nobility of character. You were willing to abandon your husband, but not to implicate me in adultery." He looked away. "I suppose I can thank you for that."
"Raoul," I whispered, "I'm so sorry. I had to leave him. You don't understand."
He rose and stalked around the room. He'll wake Mama, I thought, but better he pace than throw something or hit me.
"If you had to leave him, as you say, then why wouldn't you leave right away? I begged to take you out of Paris that very night, but you refused. You gave me this impression that it was because you were so dedicated to your art! What were you thinking, to not tell me at all?"
I flushed down to the bone, because that was exactly what I had considered, exactly what I would have done. Silently I sat before him like a prisoner at the bench, and my accusers were the clean white rags that sat in my bottom drawer all that month, unused.
"I didn't want to hurt you," I said, stiff with shame because there was no help for it, I was going to hurt him whether I willed it or not.
"Why are you telling me now?" he demanded. "Perhaps I might have not wanted to know. It explains so much, but I am not sure the explanation was worth the price. So you couldn't have married me, not before God, because by our faith you already were bound."
"Bound by force," I said, "which you know in our faith makes no true marriage," but was that really true? How coerced had I been?
"The law of nature doesn't change," he answered. "You know that what makes a marriage is neither the priest, nor the church, nor the Third Republic. A marriage before God is made up of the promise and the consummation. Which from what you said obviously took place."
"I know my catechism as well as you. He's dead, so any binding there might have been is certainly loosed now."
Raoul looked at me with a stiff, twisted face, and from his lips came the cruel words, "Really, can I believe you? Or is he alive somewhere hiding out, laughing at my foolishness, waiting for you to return to him? You've already admitted to playing me false; why should I heed your words now? You've already shown yourself ready to leave one husband, why not me?"
"Raoul, you saw him. He almost killed us all. You would have wanted me to stay with him? It sounds like you are taking his side!"
"Didn't I give you to him, when I told you to turn the scorpion?"
"Yes," I said quietly, "you did."
"Of course, I didn't know then that you were already his. Christine, don't you understand? Why do you need a Rosetta Stone to decipher your own feelings? The months I spent in confusion, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say or how to act, and it was all so clear, so simple."
"If it was so simple," I sniffed, losing the battle against tears, "explain it to me. I seem to have lost the ability to tell if something is simple or not."
Besides the death of his brother Philippe, the worst devastation for Raoul over his whole life was the loss of his career as a naval officer. He would have been so brave, such a leader. In that desperate room so long ago he pushed bravely through pain, through his own devastation and loss, ignoring it all for what he loved. He wanted to know, to understand, to find me, and all I wanted to do was hide like a ship slinking around the corner of some dark granite-crusted fjord.
"It was the simplest thing in the world," he said, standing over me. "He loved you! I understand that, because I love you, and I will tell you honestly before God that some days I curse the fact that I do. I think I know Erik better than you, because I know what it is to feel a love that not only tears you apart, but tears apart the fabric of your life as well, a love like a fatal disease that no medicine will cure. Erik loved you like that. So do I. The difference is in how we express it. Erik killed for that love. I, on the other hand, am not planning on killing anyone."
"I don't need you to tell me that Erik loved me. God help the woman who is loved that way."
"But you loved him, too. I told you that more than once, do you recall? You denied it."
"I did. But it was true."
Onto my shoulders went his heavy hands. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for admitting it." He pulled me up to drape me tightly against his body, his comforting chest and stomach warm against mine. Where the cheek meets the mouth he planted a soft, swift kiss, brief but tender all the same.
Softly he said, "Please tell me. You accepted his ring, and you accepted the rest of him as well. No, don't recoil. You can't run from it, for I won't let you. After accepting him, you came to me and begged me to carry you off against your will, even if you refused to go. Why did you want to leave him? Yes, I know he was terrifying, and mad, but it is a peculiar kind of madness that seemed to turn itself on and off like a faucet. The man that carried me back from the Communard dungeon I would not have deemed mad.
"Do you understand why I ask, why I need to know?" he implored.
"Because you love me, and you still fear I will betray you," and he nodded, go on.
"I was so frightened, Raoul, because for every stroke of pain from Erik came also a stroke of delight," and he looked away. "You want truth? Here is the truth. I deceived him,and I deceived you. I won't blame you if you go, but if you go, go knowing that I love you more than anything, and that once I was willing to lay myself down in a living grave in exchange for your life."
"You should have gone with me that night we talked on the roof," he said, softening, still holding me against his warm front.
"Yes, I should have," I answered. "We were like children who scattered all their toys over the nursery, and now the governess has come in to make us clean them up."
He made a noise as if to say, what do you mean?
When you have come back from the land of the dead, you don't fear a second death. After that, there is nothing anyone can do to you. The rest had to come out.
"There could be a child. It's too soon to know for certain."
"Dear God," he said, and he dropped his arms. "Loving you is a blood sport, isn't it?"
I didn't think there was anything left in me to break after these past two months, but apparently there was, and it did. Between sobs, I told him that I loved him, that I had always loved him, and that whatever I had done, I did out of compulsion and fear for my life. I would release him from any promises to me, and if there was a child, I would find refuge in some convent somewhere and give it to the sisters, as it would be impossible for me to stay here.
How pale, how puffy in the face he had become in the past month, but his eyes were steady. "I can't let a child of yours go into an orphanage. My eldest sister and her husband were contributors to one, and I toured it once with them. I was around sixteen," and he laughed ruefully.
"Perhaps they intended it to be a lesson to me. If so, it worked. It horrifies me to this very day. To think of a child with your eyes, your face, your voice, left languishing in a crib like a cage, shivering in a ragged shift, left to cry year in and year out, never to be held … Christine, I can't bear it. Most of those children die, and I can't let that happen. I won't."
I had heard that tone before, when he convinced me to sacrifice myself to save not only his life, but the lives of hundreds of opera-goers.
"Marry me," he said. "Even though I may have no title if Uncle Auguste and the family council decide to strip me of it, even if they come to arrest me for Philippe's murder, marry me."
"And any infant? You'll raise it up as your own?" I asked.
"You have my word," he said. "I can't promise that I will love it. But I will treat it fairly and with kindness."
He took my hands, and then I wept openly, like a child who didn't know until just that moment how precarious her circumstances were.
Into his arms he drew me. I whispered softly, thank you, oh, thank you, and we held each other's broken hearts tenderly in our hands.
(con't…)