Snakes in the Grass
Deep happiness suffuses me when I stay at Philippe and Anki's house, and this visit was no different. That warm tenderness comes not from the rundown sprawling stone building almost 300 years old, nor the hastily-hemmed bright curtains that line windows of wide-open rooms, nor the old striped cat that purrs near the newly-blacked kitchen stove. It's not due to the row of little boots by the back door, stained red from being run around the clay-packed perimeter of the garden. Nor does it come from the worn farmhouse desk on which I write, the soft wood which has seen so many accountings, so many letters, and who knows what sighs and prayers over a flickering candle in the crevice of the night. It's born of the glowing core of Anki and Philippe themselves, two luminous flickers combined into one flame spread through time and space, leaving little brush fires of love in its wake, four so far, little fire-flowers.
"Go turn in if you like," I told my son and his wife after we finished our supper the other night. "Johannes and Genna will help me tidy up the kitchen." The children and I scraped and wiped and dried and swept. "When I was little," I said, "my mother told me that we must always keep the kitchen spic-and-span, or the house-troll would be upset. We didn't want him to leave our house and become a wild troll, you see. So we swept up every crumb, and then we'd leave him a little bowl of milk."
Genna's eyes grew wide. "Was that my grandmother who said that?"
"Silly," Johannes said, "your grandmother's right here."
"It was your great-grandmother."
"Did she ever see the house-troll?" Genna wanted to know.
"If she did, she never told me," I replied, then hit myself across the head inside, what am I doing? Fostering the same blindness that ensnared me? But unlike my Papa, unlike Martine, I leave them a way out. I leave them a way to make up their own minds.
"What happened to the milk?" Johannes asked.
"It was gone the next morning."
"Did you have a cat?" he asked, looking at me hard, hoping to catch me out. I knew where he was going with this.
"We did. We had barn cats who never came into the house, but one day one of the barn cats had a litter of kittens, and my mother brought me out there to look at them. Then she said, go ahead and pick one, but one that's nice, not one that fights or scratches at your hand. Their eyes had just opened and they weren't used to people. My mother made sure I picked the sweetest and gentlest one, and that became our house cat."
"So the house cat could have drunk the milk."
"Yes," I said, smiling at him, "she might well have done that."
"What was her name?" Genna wanted to know. "And where is she now?"
"Our cat? Her name was Minna. She used to chase the little mice that ran around behind the stove, where it was warm, and sometimes she'd even catch one and eat it on the hearth."
"Oh, horrid," said Genna. "Did your Mama chase her away when she did that?"
"Of course not," I said. "Minna was proud of her mice, and if she ate them, then they weren't spoiling our peas or barley. She's long gone, for that was what, almost five decades ago?"
"Now what about my great-grandmama?" she demanded in her insistent, piping voice. "Where is she now?"
"Here, Genna, watch that dish, as it's about to slip. Oh, my mother's name was Emma, and she died, darling, right about when I was your age."
"That's terrible," Johannes said.
"Yes, it was," and as I stacked the last of the dishes, inwardly I went back to those dark winter days, with Mother not even able to sit up by the fire any longer, but in bed all the time now, and her piteous cries one evening that she couldn't see the firelight anymore, the quick decline after that, the rough-planked coffin, the frozen ground and having to wait all those weeks until spring to bury her. Then there were the untilled fields, my father sitting with his head in his hands or absently playing the plaintive violin. The cow cried unmilked unless I took her udders in hand, until I struggled out of the barn with the heavy pail and spilled it all one day, right at Papa's feet, and him sitting unmoving as the white tide lapped over the edges of his wooden clogs. Minna came to lap up the spilled milk, curling her soft grey tail around Papa's unresponsive legs.
Not a story for children.
Johannes could ready himself for bed. Baby Roland's thick dark lashes rested on his round cheeks as he lay in his little cot , but unlike most two-year olds, his sleep would stay steady and unbroken until the sunrise. Thus Larissa and Genna could quietly whisper as they hung up their frocks, as I brushed and braided their hair for the night. They both had long hair, silky raven waves with a sheen of chestnut, a mix of their father's crow-straight and mother's curly black, lightened by some hint of their grandmother, no doubt.
Anki and Philippe were in their own room, voices coming from within, mostly quiet. Occasionally Philippe's would carry and I tried not to listen. Then, as I headed off to my old rope-bed in the little spare room with its shuttered windows open to catch the night breeze, I passed Philippe and Anki's door, left accidentally open. Swiftly I walked by, but not before I caught full sight of Philippe on his knees before her, arms wrapped around her full hips, his head buried in her bosom, her white hand stroking his head, soothing him in the dim room with no lamplight. The soft white moon so recently risen over the summer Flanders fields almost ready to drop their grain, stroked his hair too, making it shine with streaks of silver.
That was a good night, the night I slept under Philippe's low-ceilinged slate-tiled roof, the echo of children's arms around my neck, the goodnight kisses, the prayers, and then the sweet triumph of Anki's late-night visit. She came in dusted with love, a little rumpled and bearing the faint scent of the bed. Oh, Philippe was so happy, she said, she had hardly ever seen him cry, but he cried tonight, Mother de Chagny, and I cried a little with her, because she was with her husband and wouldn't lose any of that time, and they wouldn't be separated, at least not for awhile.
Don't waste it, I told her. Cherish every day, and she knew what I meant.
Then Philippe drove me in the trap the next morning to catch the train back to Brussels. We had the most peculiar conversation as we clopped through the soft morning air that threatened to flare up yellow and hot later in the day. "I may be traveling to Paris when we get back from bathing in De Haan," he said.
"Curious," I replied. "I've just gotten a letter from Raoul's solicitors. The lawyers need to see me about the final disposition of Raoul's estate. What lawyers are in Paris in August, though?"
Philippe's face darkened a little. "The real sharks, I imagine, the ones who don't mind hot waters. What a time to go to that city, but at least you'll have no difficulty finding a hotel. Will you need me there with you, to take care of affairs? I think I can arrange it."
"I don't think it will be necessary. It's probably something to do with the sale of the chateau. Anyway, I'm going as soon as I can, to get it over with. So what takes you to Paris, then?"
"Do you remember Professor Gagnepain from University of Louvain, the one who has gone on several expeditions to Asia Minor to excavate ancient human remains?"
"Of course. Do you remember that dinner party we gave for him, when he gave a lecture at the Lyceum in Brussels? None of the guests got to speak to him afterwards, as you and he played duets for the rest of the evening."
"I have never heard anyone play the violin as he does. Tears were running down my face, and I could scarcely read the music."
"You didn't notice we all came into the parlor to listen to you. That sarabande by Handel, I'll never forget it."
"Mother," he laughed, a little embarrassed, "We didn't even know you were there."
"What of Professor Gagnepain?" I asked.
"He wrote me last week. He's been working at the Paris University Medical School, helping design protocols for the detectives of la Sûreté to more easily identify the victims of criminals by analyzing the skeletal morphology of the remains. He's good friends with Dr. Locard, the one from Lyons who's just set up his own special medical laboratory to help police investigations. Anyway, some years ago, workers in the Paris Opera House were burying some kind of time capsule full of voice recordings in one of the sub-basements, and they found a skeleton in the bowels of the cellars there, in a most peculiar location, although Gagnepain didn't say exactly where. The incompetent bureaucrats immediately moved the skeleton from its location, making no sketches or notes as to its original provenance, and had it sent to the medical school. Then, because one swift decision a decade was all they could manage, the remains languished in a storage facility for all this time, while the Opera officials argued with the medical school over who was going to pay for the forensic examination. Now they want the remains catalogued and identified. It will be like a little symposium, and to meet Dr. Locard will be a great honor, for he's also agreed to come in for the exhumation."
"Why all this excitement about a skeleton?" I asked through a throat gone suddenly thick and dry. "And he wants you to come as well?"
"It's most likely due to that paper I read last year at Louvain, the one on using the thickening of the epiphyseal plates to determine skeletal evidences of aging." Philippe looked like a great elongated boy who's found a treasure, full of the same excitement. "Gagnepain thinks our mystery skeleton was left to sit for so long because no one in the French government wanted to stir up passions again about the Commune, especially with so much agitation in Paris now from that band, what do they call themselves? Marxists, something like that, the ones who've been causing no end of trouble in Imperial Russia. They've turned the Paris Communards into their idols. If it's really a dead Communard, they'll make no end of political hay over it and it will be in all the newspapers. But of course, if it's a dead soldier from that war of almost fifty years ago, no one will be interested, and we'll be left to study it in peace. My guess, even without seeing a thing, is that it's an ordinary victim of an ordinary crime. But that's what we're meeting in Paris to determine."
"And lay the poor soul to rest, I hope," I whispered.
"Of course, Mother," he said kindly, noticing my reaction for the first time. "Don't worry. The Third Republic may be content to put it in a museum as a display piece, or dump it into an unconsecrated grave, but Gagnepain and I won't allow that. We'll lay it to rest."
I didn't stop trembling until the rickety old train rattled its way over the Kleine Nete river, its shallow, slow-moving waters yellowing in the swiftly warming day.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooo
After leaving the devastated palace whose disgraced monarch had fled to prison and obscurity in England, Erik and I rode in the squeaky old carriage to the Bois des Boulogne, the great forested park on the western outskirts of Paris. It began to rain in earnest, and the cabman stopped briefly to put on his black oilskin coat and hat. He shook his head incredulously when Erik directed him to go on, yes, we were going to the Bois in the rain.
The splattering noise comforted me, those thousand little footprints of rain walking over the berlin's roof. Erik's ring was thick and just a little too big, so it forced the last three fingers of my left hand apart from each other. The inside of the carriage smelled like damp moldy leather, and a little rain leaked in on my side, a few solitary drips isolated from the rest of the downpour by the dusty, misty glass.
A wind came up, and as we turned onto the Rue des Tribunes the rain almost stopped, leaving only a vague mist. In the rising fog the forest itself seemed entirely isolated. It was easy to believe that Erik, the driver, and I were the only people left in Paris. The quiet between us had a reassuring quality. It played over me for awhile, relaxing me, until I said, "Thank you for your story, of the Persian girl. I think I understand a little better what your Don Juan Triumphant is about."
"I doubt it," he said, but without venom.
"So what shall we do?" I finally asked, waving my left hand before him. "Where shall we live?"
Nervously he twisted the top of his walking stick. "I must finish my opera completely, and then I must go to my bank and make a great withdrawal." He then started in on a long speech which impressed me, which I will never forget, due to the calm and rational tones in which he delivered it. He repeated how he loved me, he never tired of saying it, he was willing to die for me, he would give me everything. Two nights hence, after the Masked Ball, our betrothal would become real. Afterwards, I would live with Mama Valerius in the apartment until he could secure proper lodgings for us in the world above, where he wanted to reside with me, his wife, at his side. I would sing Don Juan Triumphant when my voice was sufficiently mature, and would become the greatest diva Paris, or the world, had ever seen, for there was no reason for us to remain in Paris if we did not wish. If he did not wish, that is.
No longer did he want me to sing only for him; instead, he wanted me out in the world with him at his side. He would be my maestro, my impresario, my teacher, my lover. Then he went on about how I was to be with him forever and exclusively, "Like a rare jewel in a case of velvet," were the words he used.
I was young. Is that an excuse, that I could believe that a man could want to keep me entirely to himself, to be seen by no one else, and to take once again to the stage, adored by all the world? It was as much a contradiction as believing that he could hunger for my hair, barely restrain his hands from moving through it like trout through the stream, and yet not make the demands of the flesh that husbands made, even old ones. Something flashed in me, a warning that these two extremes couldn't both be satisfied within the same marriage, but I pushed it down.
Surely I had seen all that he had done underground, he went on. What didn't I think he could do? All that accomplishment was to be nothing in comparison to what he could do with me at his side. As he talked, his eyes glimmered fiercely in time to his spastic movements. No husband would be as devoted as he; none as faithful; none as dedicated to my every comfort and wish, so long as I remained faithful to him. So that foolish girl who thought that it was possible to have a whole bag of sweets and dinner at the same time assented with her lips to what she had already shown with her gesture, the gesture of putting his thick and unwieldy ring upon her finger.
He thrust one arm out dramatically and whispered, "The city is yours, I put the whole city at your feet." All the kingdoms of the world lay before me, and I saw myself a decade hence, robed in brocades, swathed in diamonds, bowing from Berlin to London before weeping audiences. No more for me the fatigue of long rehearsals, of bit parts and breech roles, no more the contempt of the leading lady. Some understudy would cater to me, so his extravagant gesture seemed to promise.
As a woman who's shepherded children, negotiated with tradesmen, took on Raoul's family and won, steered the ship of marriage through rocks and shoals, listened to my share of lies and deceits and more than enough self-deception, today I would know the exaggerated absurdity of Erik's words. But not then. I was young then, so young, and believed that if a man offered something with convincing masculine enthusiasm, that he had it in his hand to deliver. Or perhaps then I saw more clearly than I do today, blurred as my vision is now with doubt and timidity. Perhaps we could have taken Paris on the strength of Erik's will alone.
I'll never know.
We came to the vast and deserted Hippodrome Longchamps, the convoluted race track that stretched between the Seine River and the edge of the forest. A solitary carriage sat at its edge, its driver like ours swathed in oilskin against the mild drizzle, and some distance from the carriage stood a figure, a man, moving about, pacing as if looking for someone, waiting for something. Our carriage pulled up alongside the stationary one, and the two drivers exchanged some friendly words. A little moon peeked through the mist, and I opened my window and leaned my head out to get a better look at the pacing man. Erik shifted and muttered with impatience, but I shushed, him, saying, "I want some fresh air, it's humid and stuffy inside this coach." Leaning my head out further, I took in deep draughts of the cool moisture rising from the damp ground.
"Pull your head back in here," Erik protested. "You'll catch the catarrh in your throat."
"Ridiculous," I said. "It's dry air that makes my throat sore, not moist." Then I fixed my gaze on the strolling, strangely familiar figure. He walked under the only nearby gas light for a moment, and my heart gave a huge leap, clattering against my ribs like a runaway train. I would have called his name, but my tongue seemed to swell in my mouth, blocking any air and sound. It couldn't be, yet it was. A moonlit aureole of fair hair bordered his head from behind, while the gas light showed me the long slender nose, the wide carved jawline, the small silvery flake of moustache. He wore neither overcoat nor hat and must have been cold, for he rubbed his hands and circled back and forth. Suddenly he came out of his reverie and stared intently at our carriage still parked next to his.
Having exchanged pleasantries, our driver jerked to a start. The movement startled us both into action at the same time. "Christine!" Raoul called out, breaking into a run towards our carriage. "Wait! Stop!" I leaned out the window as far as my shoulders would allow, but fear strangled the cry in my throat before it could emerge. A loud roar came from behind. Erik had used the full force of his voice to command the driver to leave at once, and that fulsome noise could have filled double the auditorium of the Garnier Opera, had he so chosen. Pain split my ears from his fierce call, and then he jerked me back into the cabin so that I fell hard against the back of the seat, shaking my head against the daze.
Through my open window I could hear Raoul's cries fade behind the clattering hooves. The cabman had urged his horses on, and we sped out of sight as fast as a rattletrap berlin pulled by two worn old horses could go. The lonely figure dashing behind, trying vainly to keep up with a team of horses, soon vanished into the night.
Erik leaned over me and shut my window with such vehemence, I feared it would break and scatter glass all throughout. His skewed false nose made his face look cruelly deformed and distorted, his moustache like a caterpillar climbing crookedly up his face. He groped his face as if blind, then cursed when he realized that the whole contrivance was about to fall off. Sweat, or perhaps a fresh start of tears, streaked the greasepaint concealing the unevenness of his skin, and the black rings around his eyes stood out starkly. Shocked and terrified at what he would do, I cur1ed in the corner of the cabin and peeked out at him occasionally, not wanting to be ambushed from behind by a blow or something worse, but not wanting to stare at him either.
Then I did stare. He drew from his pocket a little pot of what looked like salve, but was apparently some kind of spirit gum, which he applied anew to his nose. He tried several times but it wouldn't stay, so he erupted into a volley of fresh curses. Finally he managed it to his satisfaction, but glared at me fiercely as I fixed my glance on the cracked upholstery, sneaking an occasional glimpse of his furious, glowering form. He snarled at the driver to take us back into Paris, back to the Opera.
Raoul, whom I never thought I would see again, was at the park behind the race track. Why? I played over in my mind the sight of him, fair and wide-shouldered, just pacing back and forth opposite the road from from his carriage. So many times had I envisioned him walking up the gangplank of a warship, a column of sailors behind him in their jaunty hats, row after row of moustaches, scarves around their necks, and him all in blue. Then in my imagination he sailed over some dim horizon, leaving me as he had when I was seventeen, the day he kissed my hands outside the garden gate of our summer house in Perros. But he wasn't wrapped in furs, keeping watch on some frozen deck of a ship heading for the polar ice cap. He was here, in Paris. He had seen me, called for me, chased after me.
Many a time I have played out the events of that night before the investigating magistrate of my heart. Erik filled the carriage with anger, a cold blue fog that surprised me with its sullen silence. I expected him to lash out at me, but his control over his rage was vast. We turned slowly onto the broad and shining Rue Hausmann while he simmered, saying nothing, and his silence terrified me more than any raging. The rain had started again, a light rain that I couldn't hear inside the carriage, one that left only faint outlines of drops on the wet streets.
"You lied to me," he hissed. "You said he would be sailing, and gone."
"I didn't know exactly when he was to leave. I thought it was soon."
"What do you think he was doing under that lamp, in that lonely part of the Bois? Do you suppose he was simply taking a constitutional, out enjoying the scant moonlight? How stupid you are, Christine, not to understand what a man does in this remote part of the woods late at night?"
"I saw no woman there," I sniffed. Erik's words bored into me with unpleasant accuracy. "He wouldn't do that."
"Man is not a biped, little professor of innocence. Man is a triped, and sometimes the third leg dominates all others."
"What does that say for you, then?"
"It says that I am not a two-faced little hypocrite and liar, saying one thing and doing another. As poor a 'specimen' as I am, to quote that great bitch-mother of Persia, my heart is true. I would hearken to no one else that I happened to spy on the boulevard."
"Not even your Persian girl?"
"Don't speak of her," he snapped. "You have no right to speak of her. Her blood is on Erik's hands, and only Erik has that right. If Erik has lost an occasional battle against the flesh, it was never a defeat suffered under the banner of true love, for never did Erik seduce with false words or actions. Why do you continue to deceive yourself? You know that I see and hear everything that goes on in that great mausoleum we call the Garnier. Often have I seen your sailor boy roaming the corridors with that gross pimp whom he calls brother, the elder looking for just the right combination of garter and hair and crevasse into which the younger de Chagny could pour his pent-up innocence."
"You never saw Raoul with another woman. He came to my dressing room, and mine alone."
"The panderer had your little friend in the dancers' salon almost every week, letting him know in no uncertain terms that any woman would be at his disposal there, save one, the one he had claimed for himself."
"I'm sure he did nothing."
"How do I know what he did behind my watchful eyes?"
"I thought you saw and knew everything."
"If his brother the Comte managed to stir his lust with visions of the ballet corps, how do I know what he did afterwards in the Pigalle? Or in the Bois, for that matter? Flesh can be bought anywhere in Paris for very cheap coin. Your little friend may wear the scapular but he also wears something between his legs that sends men out into the tenebrous night."
Was it true? There was no way Raoul could have come to the Bois that night solely to anticipate me. Erik and I had only decided to detour there on the spur of the moment. Raoul did have the look of a man waiting desperately for someone, or for something to happen. The seventeen-year old boy I knew would not have cruised the Bois close to midnight. But what did I grasp of him now? Almost five long years had passed, during which time he had gone to naval school, ventured on expeditions, pulled into port with other sailors, no doubt lived a man's life. Yes, he seemed to have this passionate devotion to me, following me to Perros, sending me notes, trying to waylay me in the corridors, professing undying love – but was that not what men did when they wanted something? Here I was gone a little over two weeks, and since I was out of sight, was I out of mind as well, only to rekindle his interest by the merest coincidence?
Erik, however, Erik was different. Even when I lay sleeping in his apartments, or defenseless in the bath (for I had long since given up the illusion that a pair of scissors could stop him) he did not reach for me. Oh, he stared – those stares and sighs horrified and pierced me with pity at the same time, but he did not reach, or touch.
He sensed my hesitation and sinuously leaned forward to strike the final blow. "He would have never married you."
I leaned back as if hit. Why else would Raoul have pursued me, if not with marriage in mind? Anger against both men surged up in me, and since Raoul was not there, I had only one outlet for it. "You are horrible," I said, getting louder as I went on. "Nasty and low-minded, thinking the worst of everyone."
"You suspect I am right, or you would not blame me for your doubts. Do you question for a moment that I love you with an entirely faithful love?"
"Do you?" I asked, sarcastically. He had forbidden me to mention the Persian girl, but she hung suspended in my tone.
He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me to him, quite close to his face. I had never been kissed, save on the hands tenderly by Raoul, and as Erik's great skull-like face loomed ever closer, a tiny shocked protest flailed about inside of me, this is not how it is supposed to happen, it can't be this way. But he did not kiss me, only held me up to the brutal wreck of his face, a hulk as tragic as the "coffin of Paris" we had just viewed earlier. Twisted with anguish, his nose had once again started to slip, but he ignored it.
"Never doubt me," he said savagely, "Or I'll ..."
But what he was going to do I never heard, for the carriage pulled to the side of the boulevard and stopped. Erik flung me back into my seat and snarled, "You obviously need a more convincing demonstration, and you can rest assured before the night is over I will provide one." Then he opened his window and called out in a tight, furious voice, "Why do you stop?"
The cabman said coldly, irritated at Erik's tone, "I have to check one of my mares. Her gait's not right."
Erik cursed under his breath, glared at me, and hunkered down in his side of the bench. He hammered his walking stick on the floor of the berlin, an infuriating, irritating noise that made me want to rip the stick away and throw it out the window, but I dared not speak. Then the cab driver came to Erik's side, and knocked lightly on the door. "I need you to hold the lantern for me, monsieur," he said stiffly, eyes searching back and forth between Erik and myself. "One of my mares has a stone, and it looks like it's wedged underneath her shoe. I can put it to rights if you help."
Erik cast wild exasperated looks at the driver, interspersed with sending daggered expressions to me.
The cabman bristled. Big and broad, he pushed his substantial stomach through the open carriage door with a crackle of oilskin. "Perhaps, monsieur, you would like half your fare back. You and your lovely companion can catch another cab back to the Opera. I'll even throw in my umbrella for the mademoiselle. It's only two kilometers or so. But I hope you understand, I'll not lame a horse for a lover's quarrel."
Erik collected himself and said to the cab driver, "Give me your lantern, and I'll hold it." Shooting one last resentful scowl in my direction, he flung himself from the berlin, almost knocking the big man over. The afflicted mare was hitched to the right side of the carriage, so I scooted over to Erik's side and opened his window a crack, peeking out to see the two of them better. Erik held the lantern and also the mare's reins as he shushed her gently, reminding me of how gently he touched and handled the great Andalusian, Cesar. The mare's warm breath steamed around him and they seemed to calm each other. The cab driver muttered something, apparently the stone had not only wedged itself in, but loosened the shoe a bit as well. He could fix it, but it would take a bit of time.
An idea formed in my mind, inchoate at first, then more solid. Pulling my stationery kit from my purse, I hastily scribbled a note and addressed it to Raoul de Chagny. The cab driver and Erik talked in low tones, the cab driver softening as Erik no doubt promised him a generous tip to oil over the earlier tension. I had finished addressing the envelope when I realized I had no stamp, and even if I had one, there was no way to get it to a postal box without Erik noticing. Frustrated tears sprang to my eyes, and then I jumped with fright, as footsteps clattered near my open carriage window and a big shaggy head poked inside.
It wasn't Erik at the window, but instead the cabman carrying a metal box, hands covered with road mud. I looked out the other window where Erik still stood at the horse's head, almost leaning up against it, his eyes closed. The big black animal seemed to give him some security, some comfort that he could not get from me. The cabman whispered quickly, "Are you all right, Mam'selle?"
An inspiration spurred me on. I handed him the letter and said with quiet haste, "Take this. Don't let him see." He grabbed it with his muck-smeared paw and shoved it into the pocket of his oilskin, then moved smoothly on. Erik soon joined me in the carriage, and because the traffic was so light, we shortly found ourselves once again at the Rue Scribe side of the Garnier Palace.
Erik said nothing to me even when we came to the great iron gate. This time, when he thrust the key into my grasp, I was able to open it on the first try. In his drawing room he hung up our coats on hooks, and then rounded on me with redoubled fury. All the rage and jealousy he had suppressed during our return poured out of him pungent and boiling. What exactly had I let Raoul do to me when we knew each other in those Perros summers, he demanded to know.
"Do you still love him?" he hissed under his breath, then gradually getting louder and more impassioned. "Of course you do, what woman can resist a fair face and skin tender for the caressing, blue eyes as beautiful as yours, like lakes to drown in, eyes unrimmed with the hollow of the grave? I know you don't love Erik. Erik has accepted that, but Erik will not tolerate deceit," and fear speared through me, that he had seen me pass the letter to the cabman. "Tell me what else he did, I know there has to be more. And while your father sat right there, how could you, Christine? But now you must forget him. You're mine now, oh not completely, not entirely yet, but almost mine, this close."
Now that there was no one to hear, our quarrel blazed up again loud and fierce. He knew so much about whores, I retorted, how had he come by that knowledge? His normally pale skin went red with rage, and he pushed me up against the stone wall, howling that if he ever caught me deceiving him, ever, he would drag me to the roof of the Opera, swing me around by my hair and throw me off, then jump from that precipice himself, because he had no life without me, and would not live in a world where I was faithless, or where I didn't exist at all.
I struggled against his restraint, so once again he pushed his stiff hand up high under my breastbone, so hard that even the corset bent with the force. When I tried to squirm away from him, he drove in a swift unsparing blow. The room went black, the air left my lungs, and horror upon horror, I could not take a breath. It was as if that large muscle inside my body, upon which I depended for life, for voice, for air, hung flabby and useless. Down I went upon my knees, in terror that death had shoved itself into my ribs. Then that bruised and paralyzed muscle came back to life, and I inhaled a great whoop of air that tore my lungs and brought tears to my eyes, then slumped to the floor sobbing.
He pulled me up to a sitting position, crying himself now. The gutta-percha nose hung by a string of adhesive, so he ripped it off and flung it onto the dining table.
"Kill me," I screamed. "Get your catgut, or whatever it is. Go ahead, kill me as you did her."
His shocked face opened like a bivalve, revealing the horrid clammy softness inside. He begged my forgiveness, he couldn't stand himself, when Erik got that way it was horrible, speaking in that odd way he had of referring to himself as though someone else were in the room. He would kill himself that very night, and I would be free of him forever. He tried to wrest the ring off my finger, saying that he would swallow it and then throw himself off the roof of the Opera, and I fought him, not letting him have it, fearing that if he removed it (and it was so loose) that he would indeed put an end to himself, and shrieking that I could not bear to have his suicide on my head.
"I'll show you," he whispered hoarsely. "When there's a snake in the grass, you reach for a hoe and chop off its head. I'll remove the serpent from our Eden, Christine, and then it will be up to you to do your part, and remove yours."
Up he leapt. He seized my arm and dragged me towards the tapestry behind which he concealed his room full of automata. Yanking so hard on the wall hanging that its frame broke free and fell to the floor, he raved, "It is all my fault! I know why you doubted me, I am so stupid, I have the brains of a child. This should have been obvious to me from the start. Of course you hung out the window of the cab for that boy. What kind of example have I shown you? Erik will remedy it. Erik will show you that you have nothing to fear, that Erik really will have no other women before you."
He could not even wait until the door swung open on its counterweight, but had to force himself in as quickly as he could, hauling me along behind him. The gaslights had been turned on, and harsh white light sharply outlined the silvery wiry insides of his creations, all disassembled on table tops and benches. Stumbling with blind emotion, he went over to one of the benches, where he cut sheets of foam-pink rubber into skin. A small glittery-sharp sculpting knife rested there, and he swiftly grabbed it. I cried out in fear – was he going to cut me?
Instead, he flew over to the sheet-covered form of the Persian girl. She fell to the ground as he ripped the sheet off her with dreadful force. Pulling her limpid figure up by the hair, he turned to me and screamed, "No woman stands between you and Erik! Forgive me, forgive me for keeping her, I didn't know the effect she would have on you, that of course you could not live with another woman, even if only an image, a pale simulacrum. You were not faithless, I made you that way." Then, to my horror, he gouged a deep circular cut around the automaton's face, starting at the forehead, slicing around the chin, and ending up back at the crown where the black hair emerged. I almost expected to see blood seep through that olive slit. A ripping sound, and he peeled off the very rubber of her face in a single gesture. A few wires refused to come free, so he sliced them effortlessly with his blade so sharp it cut through metal. What was left was a horrible silver skull-face with two staring ivory eyes that watched him accusingly, as the once-living girl had stared at him under the hot plaza sun so long ago.
Roaring and sobbing, he held her detached face up before him like a grim, horrible mask. "Do you see this, Christine? This is what she means to me. Now will you trust Erik? Now will you believe me?" and he sliced the rubber face to ribbons before my eyes.
He took a step towards me, still holding the knife and a few shreds of what had been the image of a human face, but I could bear no more. I picked up my skirts and fled that room as fast as I could, hearing him cry my name behind me. Into my room I charged, slamming the door, locking it but knowing he could enter anytime he wanted. All I could think of was my own face under that knife. Terrified, irrational as a child, I dived under the tall Louis-Philippe bed.
Erik tapped on my door, but unmoving I cowered in that hiding place which provided no concealment at all. The lock clicked as he opened my door with one of his keys. Into the rug I hid my face, feeling a little breath of wind as the door swung open. He stood staring in the doorway, but didn't come in. "Please," he whispered hoarsely. "Please."
I didn't want him in my room, and didn't want to leave the ephemeral shelter of the bed, and so covered my face, hoping he would go away. His knees scraped the carpet as he sagged down, whimpering pathetically for me to come out, Christine, I've put the knife away, please forgive me, please.
From the vantage point of years I have wondered, what if at that point I had taken him in my arms to comfort him? All this life I have built, that Raoul and I built over the decades, would have been swept away like a dream. What would have replaced it is unimaginable to me, for how can one anticipate a life one has never had? But as things stood, fixed and unchangeable in the cold marble of time, I waited for a long time while his softly-moaned entreaties and apologies gradually quieted down, then stopped. Presently I crawled out from under that bed, brushed the dust from my dress, and stepped over Erik half-lying down, half-bowed, face in hands, silently shaking.
I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine from an already-open bottle. Sensing him come up behind me, I braced and readied myself for death. But when no blow came, I asked him if he wanted one too.
"Don't bother drinking that, as it's a spoiled bottle that's just for cooking. Here, let me open another."
Sighing, I put my glass down. What Erik considered unfit for consumption, three-quarters of Paris would have swallowed without a thought. If a bottle was open for half a day, into the sauce it went.
He rummaged in a closet where it was always cave-temperature, where the fire did not reach. "Here's a fine Tokaji, a sweeter one this time. We haven't had one since you first ... visited me." He uncorked the bottle and set it on the marble counter top. Seeing my impatient glance, he said, "It has to breathe first."
"No, it doesn't. Please pour me some now. You can let yours breathe all it wants."
Looking hurt, he poured out a glass for me and sat at the small kitchen work table, arms crossed, his face unashamedly streaked with drying tears.
"Please tell me everything that passed between you and that sailor," he begged. "Everything, Erik wants to know everything. Every caress, every love letter, every conversation."
Writing that note to Raoul suddenly seemed terribly foolish. So we sat in that tiny kitchen, where Erik loomed over me like a vulture pecking at the corpse, pecking, insisting, asking the same question repeatedly in different forms, where was it exactly we had stayed in Perros as children, what was the name of his aunt, were we alone together when exploring the beach grottoes or climbing on the rosy round rocks, did he try to kiss me, did he touch me. On and on we went for hours, and not because there was so much to tell that passed between Raoul and I, but because Erik wanted everything repeated, examined from every angle, analyzed and scryed and picked over, until fatigue and the wine rasped at my temples like a saw on wet wood. I got up to move to the drawing room and he followed me like a nagging child, demanding to know what Raoul had said in every note he had ever written me.
"You wrote him, telling him you were going to Perros, didn't you?" he asked again and again, until finally in tearing frustration I admitted that I had.
"How do you know these things?" I sobbed at one point, for as far-reaching as Erik's silken web might have been woven through the Opera, I had no illusions that he could tweak the Paris postal service itself.
"Never mind that," he said. "Just know that trying to deceive Erik is a fatal error on your part."
Now that I am Erik's age, I laugh at my childishness. Many of the things I thought Erik knew, he really didn't. I too over the years have learned to make guesses, throw them out like clay pigeons, and watch to see if they fall with a thunk to the grass below, or explode in a hundred fragments when the shot hits its mark. Erik had watched me for months behind a screen of glass, locked in an andarun of his own making, honing his powers of observation to knife-sharpness. How many times had he watched me read a letter, arrange the flowers that on some evenings filled the room, unhook my corset and put on a robe, lift my feet so they hung over the edge of the settee? He knew my sighs, every lift of the brow or roll of the eye. He knew when I was lying, even before I did.
So I told him. He acted as if he knew most of it, and his sad, pathetic aspect changed. He put on a wise old monkey face that said, I know far more about him than you do. "Let me tell you, for instance, about the fateful conversation that made your beloved little friend a habitue of our temple of pleasures. It was shortly after you had signed your contract, but before I worked my magic on your frozen instrument of a voice. Comte de Chagny brought his younger brother with him one night, and took him to the dancer's salon after a production of Don Giovanni. You understudied that week for Maria Contelli, do you remember?"
"The murdered singer, how could I forget? It was a dreadful way to get a part."
"More dreadful was how she met her end, as punishment for deceitful straying from her husband. Mark it well, Christine. But back to the saga of the de Chagnys. There the older brother introduced his young charge to the illustrious Sorelli, she whose long dark eyes and white arms are worthy of Hera, but is stupid as a calf being led to the slaughter, after the farmer has hit it square between the eyes with an iron mallet. She flirted with that blond young man, untying the ribbon of her shoe and running it around his face and shoulders, and the harder he blushed, the deeper she laughed, and the closer to him she leaned, until it became clear that the Comte found it no longer amusing.
"But so prettily she talked to him, pointing out one dancer after another, saying, which do you prefer, Monsieur le Vicomte, I can introduce you to any of them, but your friend sat still as a block of wood. Sorelli and the Comte drank champagne, but the Vicomte sat clutching the little scapular he wore as if it were a talisman, hoping it would protect him from the wickedness fulminating all around him. Frustrated at the Vicomte's lack of interest, Sorelli made a comment, one that I hope the Comte in private came to make her regret, for she leaned over to Philippe de Chagny and whispered loud enough for the Vicomte to hear, 'Perhaps the girls are not to his taste, perhaps he might like to meet a boy?' "
"That's a horrible suggestion," I interrupted.
"You are very young," he said. "In time you will come to understand that lack of desire is not virtue."
"Besides, how do you know all this?" I demanded.
"I already told you that every wall in this great whitened sepulcher belongs to me."
Realization spread through me like icy rain down a gargoyle's throat. "You can listen in on all the rooms, not just mine. The salons, the lounges, the managers' offices ... Just like in the Golestan palace. You can hear everywhere."
"Congratulations. You have more brains than La Sorelli, although that's not exactly a stellar accomplishment."
"Erik, tell me, please. If this opera house is truly yours, then I beg you, as my former angel of music in whom I believed, tell me the truth. Since I have been here with you, has Raoul de Chagny come looking for me, or inquired about me?"
"Not at all," he said offhandedly, as if it was of no importance to him. "You expected him to? I can assure you that you were not the one he was waiting for tonight in the park. But as I was saying, the Vicomte sprang to his feet and charged directly for the door. Sorelli and the Comte looked at each other for a moment, and then the older man headed out after his brother. It was from that point on that de Chagny brought his brother with him to practically every Friday performance, and an occasional Wednesday one as well. He feared he'd raised un gai, and wanted desperately for some scrap of evidence otherwise. That may well be why the juvenile de Chagny has pursued you so assiduously, Christine, to prove to himself what his brother has long suspected, and what common observation has shown to often be the case."
"Hideous," I said, trying to conceal the welter of confusion that rose in my breast, not knowing which I found worse, Erik's insinuations or the possibility they might be true.
"He was weak like un gai in Perros," Erik went on. "I did nothing to him, threatened him in no way. In the church he laid hands on me, attempting to rip off my cloak, and then he fainted at the sight of Erik like a little schoolgirl when a caterpillar in the springtime falls onto her hair from the tree above. Even you did not faint, Christine, when you saw me, the day you became Erik's forever, because you unmasked Erik's face."
Seeing me sit stone-faced, blank on the outside but churning inside with outrage, disappointment, disgust all at once, he pressed his advantage a little too far. "One evening during intermission, when you had once again refused to answer one of his begging letters, he cried in his brother's arms. Oh, I know you did not answer them, because the hallways here are mine, and he loudly complained about that whenever he got the chance, how heartless you were for refusing to see him, or even send him a token or acknowledgment. Personally, I think it shows your good taste, and gives independent proof of your devotion to your art, and to your concern for me. In that brotherly embrace, the Vicomte did not see the expression on the Comte's face, but I did, and it was one of relief and disappointment all swirled together like vanilla and chocolate cream when the pastry chef marbles them together but does not blend them. Relief that it was a woman his younger brother sought, and disappointment at his so-ready tears."
"If tears are a mark of inversion, what does that say about you?" At once I clapped my hands over my mouth, weak with terror at the possible consequences of that bird flying from the nest, never to be recalled.
A terrible silence followed. The dead weight of soundless air was lifted only when the Empire-style clock on the mantelpiece began to chime five. We had talked and argued all night. My head throbbed, my foul tongue clotted my mouth with sourness from the too-sweet wine, and my limbs hung limp with exhaustion. He rose without speaking, his ravaged corrugated face an expressionless mask. I thought he would rage or even hit me for making such a suggestion, but he did neither. Instead, he stalked off silently towards his work room where the slashed remains of the Persian girl lay in a heap on the floor. The door swung silently shut, leaving me alone in the sudden vacuum of rooms where he was not.
I tried to sleep curled up on the drawing room settee, but as soon as I closed my eyes, another stab of fear went through me. What was he doing in there? He stayed there for hours, but I had no way to tell, as the mantelpiece clock had run down and I could not find the key to rewind it. Although I periodically rose and rapped on the door, he gave no answer. For all I knew, he had another unseen exit from that room as well, and could have left me here while he traveled about anywhere. I already knew there was another hidden door in my own room, although I had never been able to open it.
My fingers flew over the latching mechanism for his front door, but I didn't know what odd sequence of movements he used to open it. So I went from the front door, where I vainly tried to make it spring openly as easily as it did for him, to his workroom door, where my dispirited poundings and shouts grew fainter, and then to my own room, and back again, beating against the bars of my cage with hysterical fluttery chirpings. He had left me here to die. I would be buried alive after all.
So I went on, back and forth, until hunger drove me into the kitchen. There was little in the larder except some dried cheese and a few hard biscuits, as he had neither gone out marketing nor cooked that day. I soaked the tough biscuits in a little cooking wine and ate the remains of the cheese, trying to choke them both down with my terror. I almost wished he would come out and pull my hair or beat me, anything except this cold devastating silence that screamed his absence, where the walls closed in on me, where the awareness of layers of earth and steel above me threatened to crush me with with anxiety.
A sudden noise startled me from a long leaden sleep in my clothes, half-sitting in a chair in front of the fire. The door to his workroom was open now, and I wrinkled my nose at the sharp peculiar smell that wafted through the opening, an odd chemical mix both bitter and burning at the same time. Shaking off the sleep, I crept to the door, afraid to see him, more afraid not to. I hung at the entrance to the room where he crouched at a bench, hunched over a pile of wires and colored paper cylinders as he twisted wires together.
"Christine!" he said when he saw me, and ran towards the door where I stood. I backed out and he swiftly activated the door to swing shut behind him. My sleep-stunned head swam and I shook it, but it wouldn't clear. His clothing smelled of the same burning witchery as the room where he had shut himself for so many hours, and his hands were stained with black powder.
He looked at me coldly, but not unkindly. "Pack your bag, Christine, with whatever you want to take. I will send for a carriage and have you delivered to Mme. Valerius's apartment."
"What?"
"Today I prepare my costume for the Bal Masque, and you obtain yours."
"You're letting me go," I said, at once alert and anxious. What new twist had Erik devised now?
"I will be at the Bal Masque at midnight, and no one there will forget my presence. If you are there, if you see me, do not approach me or act as if you know me in any way."
"How would I know you anyway, if you're masked?"
He laughed from his chest, full of sarcasm and bitterness. "Oh, you will know me, Christine, for I will give you a hint. Of everyone there, I will be the only man who dares to come unmasked. The rest you may figure out for yourself."
"You want me to come to this masque, but I have no costume."
He handed me a piece of paper on which was scrawled an address, in his large but almost unreadable hand. "She will have costumes."
"At this short a notice? No one can find a costume to rent in Paris so close to the beginning of Lent. How is that possible?"
"She will have one for you, I can assure you. Pick one, tell her your name, and she will send the bill to me. I will come for you in your dressing room tonight after I have made my appearance. If you are there, I will bring you back here, and our betrothal will be complete, and you will be mine in every aspect."
I said nothing, so he continued. "And if you are not there, oh, if you have decided to do something foolish like find the Vicomte, or run away, or show yourself fickle and capricious like every other woman on this earth, then you will see something spectacular, something beyond anything you have ever experienced. Your poor miserable Erik will fall like a star, fall blazing like Lucifer straight into the arms of the hag you Scandinavians name Hel, because life without you would indeed be a hell, a hell on earth, and if one has to choose between hell on earth, and the flames that never die, then one might simply bypass the miseries of earth and get right down to the business of serious suffering itself. In other words, Christine, if you do not return to me, there may very well be no Erik to return to, and a great tear in the fabric of Parisian humanity besides. Further, if I see you with that brat of an aristocrat, just remember that when I find snakes in my domain, two deceitful snakes, actually, I will crush them under my heel and then make an end to myself, because no torment conceived for me by the malignant mercy of God could equal that sight."
He said the last without rancor, almost calmly, as if it was something he had considered long ago, and was only now ready to put into practice. "He was supposed to have left the country by now," I prevaricated, desperate to calm him and turn his thoughts aside. Guilt pricked at me for planning a rendezvous I didn't even know that I could keep. The cab man had been genial and kind, but just as well could have opened the note, laughed at its contents, and threw it down with the other rubbish that blew into the corners and crevices of the Parisian streets. Continuing the farce, I went on, "He will no doubt leave very soon, probably within the week. You know his ship. Make inquiries if you like."
"That will be easy to check," he said. "The manifests are all on record and if the departure is indeed soon, it will have been filed with the Paris harbor master by this time."
"So you see? There is nothing to worry about."
"And likewise nothing for you to worry about, if you stay true to me." Then he shivered, overcome by some deep emotion. "Christine, please come back to me tonight," he sighed. A few tears leaked from his black-sunk eyes, but this time, most unexpectedly, he turned away as if ashamed I might see them. Before, Erik cried shamelessly before me, or sobbed without restraint. His tears of the past had lacerated me, but the pathetic attempt to hide them battered through my resolve.
Did I not say earlier that the heart can thrum with pity as well as desire? I had no urge to kiss him, or take his hands rapturously in mine, or press him to my breast. But there was no name for the deep heartful emotion which seared through me, not then. Now I would recognize it as the sword which pierces a mother's breast when her child falls from a tree, and wailing clutches his broken arm, or when she sees a soldier stumping along on a wooden leg, wincing with pain, or catches a glimpse of a little shrouded corpse sliding into an unmarked grave and thinks, that could have been my child.
I wish I could tell the girl who was myself that pity alone cannot make a marriage. Oh, I knew desire then, even if I could not name it - the hastening pace of the heart when a trim, black-moustached soldier eyed me appreciatively on the street, or waking from an exciting, tangled dream all warm limbs and longing, or throbbing with the stage passions stirred by the plump, grizzled tenor Fonta with his deep laughing eyes and hot grip. But back then it was all unfocused, an arrow loosed upon no target. It had descended, free-floating, on Erik in those moments before I took off his mask, and then had vanished in the shouts and blows and terror. Now I was left with this great burdensome love, this prey laid at my feet the way Minna brought my mother mice, laying them before her as if to say, praise me, love me, my goddess of the hearth, I worship you. That was the great love Erik dropped at my feet, bleeding like a heart ripped from the body of prey run down in the hunt. In those vain naive days I had no idea that to lift up that burdensome offering and claim it for my own required desire as well as sympathy.
So he hid and wiped his tears, walking me to the iron door that led to the Rue Scribe, and as I opened it to slip through, I turned to him and said quietly, "I will come back." And he cried a little again, turning away so I would not see.
(continued...)