Sabine Woman
A/N: A tip of the hat to Jennie for showing me Ivar Arosenius's painting, "Romance."
I don't remember Paris in August being so cool, yet today it was. The stiff breezes from the sea never slackened. I pinned my black-netted hat on securely and went to meet M. Peillard at the little café on the corner. Its wood façade was old and worn, its blue paint peeled in the eastern sun, but the awnings of bright blue and gold glowed shiny and fresh. Chattering women held their rose-bedecked hats with one hand and demitasse cups with the other. He sat reading a newspaper, a red-brown fox among a sea of pink or white doves. His glasses glinted in the morning sun.
When he rose to greet me he took both my hands into his plushy warm ones. The wind flung his newspaper away, and it caught on the wire legs of the next table. He apologized with ruddy blushes, and I reassured him, "It's quite all right, M. Peillard, no one can hold onto anything in this wind. But it keeps the city tolerably cool." Having secured the paper, he looked at me expectantly, wanting me to start. But start what? "I'm surprised to find you in Paris during this season. No one else is," I remarked after a long moment.
"Look around, Madame," he said with twinkling eyes. "What do you see on the street?"
"The crowds that throng Paris day and night."
"Do they seem less to you, or more than at other times?"
"Less, I suppose."
"But crowds, nonetheless."
I laughed. "Indeed, Monsieur. Were everyone to desert Paris in August, we would be alone in this café," and then flushed cold and hot at the same time at my indiscreet remark. "That doesn't answer my question, however."
"It wasn't a question," he answered, trying not to grin but failing. "It was an indirect remark, and thus seemed to require the same in return."
"Oh, nonsense," I said, suddenly not caring about my embarrassment or hurting his feelings. "By all rights I should have been with my children and their families in De Haan, and yet here I sit, wondering about my sanity."
"And mine too? After all, I'm here as well."
"Yes, yours too, if you must."
"I hate sea bathing, and the mountain air doesn't agree with me. I suppose I could visit Copenhagen or Stockholm for the cool air, but having no one to accompany me, I might as well remain here. Even in summer, the well-appointed old need someone to look after their affairs."
"To be honest," I answered, "I don't much like the seaside either, not at least since the coasts have been taken over by resorts and the sea itself filled with bathing machines. It's odd you mention Stockholm. I have not been back to my native land since girlhood."
"You're Swedish?" he asked, all feinting courtesy gone now.
"Indeed," I said. "My French has never lost its accent."
"I wouldn't call it an accent, Madame, but rather a lilt, as if you sang your words rather than spoke them. It's most pleasant to the ear."
The curse of pale skin is that every emotion plays on the surface. I used to think Erik could almost read my thoughts, but it was not my thoughts he read, simply my face. "I did used to sing, long ago."
"I can believe it, a chanteuse. But no doubt your duties at home kept you from it."
"Certainly," I remarked, wanting to stay vague.
He ordered coffee and brioche for us. "Turkish style?" he asked, and I nodded. Erik had made the thick kahvesi for us every morning. "How sweet would you like it?"
"Orta şekerli," I answered, and he looked surprised.
"You've had this before, I see. Sweetened, then, for the lady. And sade for me."
"Brave you are, to drink it black. I never got the hang of that. Have you stayed among the Ottomans, then?"
"On an assignment last year. A wealthy Frenchman spent his last years in Constantinople and died there, leaving everything a-tangle. I took advantage of every spare moment," he answered, and his large brown eyes grew dreamy. "Don't tell M. Gagnepain, but I have the ambition to travel in the East and write about it. I had an article published in the magazine Le Ronde when I returned, but under another name. M. Gagnepain didn't want clients to think we drones in his hive had anything else on their minds besides the law."
"Drones, then?" The coffee came, dark and very sweet. "But certainly there is more for you in life than work."
"You were an artist, Madame, and lucky to draw your daily bread from your creations."
Was I? "Singing at the Opera is not that creative," I remarked. "Mostly, it's brute memorization of complex music in a language you don't understand. Then there are all the movements, the blocking, the gestures that have to be precisely replicated. Sometimes I used to feel like a puppet on strings."
"That quality in your voice," he mused. "It must have been glorious. I can hear it across the years." Then his eyes changed rapidly from soft to sharp, as they had in his office. "It must have been what, thirty-some years ago?"
"Yes," I said, not sure I wanted to follow down this path.
"But of course you weren't Madame de Chagny then."
"No, of course not," and I said nothing else in that vein as I buttered a slice of brioche. "See, they didn't disappoint us. These currants are almost the size of my thumb. Where were you thirty-some years ago, M. Peillard?"
"A few years out of short pants," he laughed, "A gymnasium student preparing for the university."
"How old are you, then? It would be entirely rude for you to ask me that, although in your sly way you already have, but I'm thoroughly within limits asking you. I want to make sure my attorney has enough years to make him sober and responsible."
His eyes got a little wide at first, then he laughed. "Forty-eight. Although that bit of etiquette always seemed to put the rougher sex at the disadvantage."
"Balanced by so many of your other privileges, so no disadvantage whatever. You're well-preserved, Monsieur."
"You are beyond well-preserved, Madame, you are radiant. I sincerely did not take you for the mother of a man Dr. de Chagny's age," and he gave a little bow of the head. "More brioche?" The steady breeze cooled our coffee and he called for the waiter to replace it.
"So what was your magazine story about?"
"The French and German engineers who worked for the Ottomans in the mid- to late 19th century. I toured fortresses, shipyards, spoke with military men. There were some remarkable inventions, more than few of which the Ottomans wished to keep strictly secret, for fear of inflaming the Americans and British. Governments were involved in the secrecy, as they always are."
I started to tremble a little, although it was far from cold. "So these are your 'other pursuits' you mentioned two days ago."
He nodded seriously. "Someday I will be free to investigate and write what I choose. So much goes on beneath our very noses, and the powers that be would like us not to notice. Take, for instance, that mysterious skeleton found in the Garnier Opera."
"Not so mysterious, I would think," I remarked, wary.
"I would imagine your son would know," he offered.
"How did you hear about it in the first place?"
He leaned forward, looking like a great boy. "Surely you know, having been a performer yourself, how theater people talk. In addition, I helped the investigating magistrate find the men who dug it up." A puppy bringing his favorite ball to his mistress's feet could not have looked happier.
I set my coffee cup down, for fear of dropping it. "You! Philippe mentioned you. You're telling everyone you were there when it was uncovered! He said it wasn't true," and now I was really angry.
"No, no," he protested. "That's not the case, not the case at all. The newspapers reported that, but they got it all wrong. I wasn't there when they uncovered it. I went to the site a few days later to see for myself, and that's when the Opera police threw me unceremoniously out."
"Why should I believe you over my son?" I pulled my purse close to me, ready to leave in an instant.
"Because no man is omniscient, and reporters do get their facts wrong. I swear to it. Come with me to the Opera Garnier and we will talk to them. Madame de Chagny, I cannot bear you thinking that I would lie to you. I have no need to lie to any man, or woman for that matter, especially a beautiful one. Don't toss your head like that, it only convinces me the more."
"So you admit you are the one snooping around, interfering with the doctors' investigations."
"I wouldn't put it quite that way."
"Monsieur Peillard, how exactly would you put it?" He was outrageous, like Louvel when he was an adolescent, all impetuous passion.
He leaned toward me as if the rose-hatted women at the neighboring tables might hang onto our every word. "There is something in the Garnier that they are trying to conceal. I spend my days searching through the business of people who have something to hide - men who are spending their wives' dowries on mistresses; fathers trying to cheat sons of their inheritance; businessmen siphoning money from their partners. I earn my daily bread uncovering deception, not spinning it. One would expect to find a body or two in the Garnier. You can't imagine how the cellars go down many stories beneath the street. It's a labyrinth down there, and every labyrinth has a minotaur or two at its center. That they've only found one body amazes me, for I would suspect far more. But in any event, the management and investigating magistrates all clammed up over what should have been a simple exhumation. Their response was inordinate, given the circumstances. A man who overreacts has secrets, Madame, and bureaucrats even more so."
"What exactly do you suspect?" I said, fearing to go with him but drawn on all the same.
"A conspiracy," he breathed. "There is something down there, or was, that they want no one to see. And I am going to find it. I was hoping your son would help me."
"I don't think Dr. de Chagny is interested in conspiracies. He was more concerned about the individual they found, who she was, how she died, and how she would be treated when the investigation was over."
"She? So it was a she," and he stroked his side-whiskers as he thought. "How did she die?"
I kicked myself under the table, literally. He thought he would trick me, did he? "I'm not at liberty to say. I've been indiscreet as it is."
"No, of course not." His warm smile held not a trace of chicanery. Nonetheless, a cold suspicious embarrassment covered me. I had stared at his back, at his thighs like a moon-struck girl just off the farm. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I said to myself. He probably has a mistress half your age. This doesn't concern you, or your voice, or whatever's left of your beauty. He's weaseling his way into your confidence to feed his obsession.
"No doubt there will be a report, and you will be the first to read it," I said drily. "Imagine, Philippe wanted to come along to our meeting at your office. That would have been an interesting sight had you interrogated him there." At least if he had come with me, a younger man wouldn't now be playing me for a fool.
"You're angry with me."
The time for coquetry was past. "Yes, I am. You used me to get to my son."
"No," he said, and his face grew really ruddy. "I wanted to meet with you before I found out that you were Dr. de Chagny's mother."
"It didn't seem like that in the course of our conversation."
"I'm clumsy with women, so you were right to wonder why I am not married. Yes, I know that's what you thought, as I saw it in your eyes the other day."
"I appreciate your honesty. Yes, that's true. I did wonder." The sour tense anger and strong coffee had clenched my stomach, but now it relaxed a little.
"It's my nature to investigate. I should have been a journalist or writer or traveler. But my father insisted I read the law, and he was a man of powerful persuasive energy. That and the tears of my mother set me on my course. It took me a long time to find my true nature, and late in my life the desire is stronger than ever. I am cursed to ask questions, and if I cannot find the answers, I am inclined invent them."
"You said that you did not lie. What else is that, if you invent solutions you cannot find?"
"When we invent a fictional story, we spin carefully controlled lies."
"But that skeleton is not fictional, nor is the story of how it got there. You hardly look to be at the end of your life." But then, Raoul did not look that way either, when he was struck with that fateful bolt from the blue. "And what has this in any way to do with being married or unmarried?"
"Women don't like questions," he said, rubbing the soft fold under his chin.
"Some think women do nothing but ask questions."
"No one has accused me of being a woman yet, but questions are my life. I am polite to clients out of long habit. But my great passion in life is to know, and to tell others about it. Women don't want to be known. They hide behind custom, behind artifice, behind false lashes and promises."
"Someone has hurt you," I said softly.
He looked away. "Yes. Forgive me, you can't want to hear any of this."
"That's not so. Perhaps sometime I do. You must understand though, we don't often want to be known. What's underneath is painful or unseemly, and we have no defense against the consequences."
The two of us suddenly jelled into an island of intimacy at our small metal table, screened off from the other café-goers by the warming sunlight. "You're going to leave, aren't you? To catch your train?" he asked after a moment.
"Yes. You sound disappointed."
"You're leaving because I'm asking too many questions."
"Perhaps a little. There's also the small fact that trains depart at fixed times rather than at our convenience." Then an irresistible mad thought occurred to me. "I will however leave you with one thing," and he looked up alert as a fox who's scented the hare. "Think of it as a souvenir of our meeting. You asked about my singing career. The name I sung under was Daaé."
" Daaé," he whispered, looking as though I had struck or kissed him, I couldn't tell which. "It is you. Christine Daaé."
"Good luck making any use of it, Monsieur," and I left.
Before I entered my hotel, I had an overwhelming impulse to look back. He was still sitting at the metal table, staring at me through the interplaying weave of the street's throngs.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
The summons from Erik came. Margot insisted on sending Adèle for a cab, and so I waited in the vestibule, a few things packed in a small satchel, watching the children up the street play one last game of stickball before their mothers called them in to supper. Mine rested heavily inside me and I longed to walk to my meeting, but the cab was coming, and so I looked up and down the street until the creaky black brougham appeared.
The driver helped me in as I clumsily tried to keep the carriage mud off my skirts. It was early in the evening but tiredness already plucked at my sleeve, and I had to shake myself awake when we reached the Rue Scribe. "You sure you want this side, Mam'selle?" the driver asked. "No one goes in here."
"It's all right," I answered, handing him his fee and a generous tip besides. He doffed his hat and went around to the front, where there was more chance of catching a fare. When he was gone, I ducked into the arched entrance and began my long slow descent into the cool, dark tunnels beneath the Opera Garnier.
I had my key ready, that heavy iron thing with the grinning satyr on its head. However, the Rue Scribe gate was open. I pulled it shut behind me, intending to lock it, but something wouldn't line up and no amount of pushing would make it budge. So I left it closed as best I could and surrendered myself to the dim blue shadows. The corridor swallowed me like a throat. Tiny jewel-like flames spurted up from the gas pipes that ran down the stone. It felt good to move after so many inert days, and the walk was easy.
As I got closer to the hallway that opened onto the lakeshore, side corridors began to appear. I looked down one. Cold air wafted out at me as I peered into a gloomy pass, where water plopped slowly out of a leaky pipe to make a shiny pool. Blackness lay upon it like a skin. I pulled away quickly from the next one I peered into, because there were no lights at all, only a hole of velvet black. Waves of cool, musty air blew out of it. "Erik?" I called into the darkness and my voice came back mockingly. At the sight of that long inky hole I hurried on, imagining something coming out of it that would slither up my skirt before I knew it was there.
I stopped, my heart pounding. There had been a noise that I didn't imagine. Then my fancies raced like horses free of rein or bridle. What if there was an accident and the gasmen shut off the lines down below? I would flounder in a passageway as dark as the one I had just fled. Blind, I would stumble round and round in circles until the pressing dark fell on me and squeezed out my last breath. Cursing myself for not bringing even a box of matches, I hurried now, with no more leisurely progress through the corridor. Around the lake there was that narrow stairway to navigate. The threat of darkness descending over the whole underground spurred me on.
Cloth scraped stone, this time to the side. I walked even faster now, frightened but growing angry besides. Erik told me that if I wore his ring I would be safe, yet something other than my own fears pursued me. Something stalked me in the dark, and why should that creature of the underground respect Erik or his ring?
Perhaps it's Erik himself, I thought. The skin on my neck shivered, as if I were observed in the dark. "Erik?" I called out. "Is that you?" Only echoes answered.
A final corridor met with the walkway before the lakeshore. I steeled myself to pass it, shrinking to the wall on the other side, feeling my own skirts slide over the dripping stone. Go quickly, I told myself. The faster you go, the sooner it will be behind you. Then that rustle came again. My heart pounded so quickly that it almost hurt. There was something within that corridor, something black and shadowy. I stopped, immobilized by fear. A tall, slender form emerged to stand square in my path. In my fist I gripped the great iron key, ready to slash it like a knife if I had to, but my hands shook convulsively and I could scarcely lift my arm.
The black shadow spoke. "Mademoiselle Daaé," came a lilting, accented voice. I shrunk back out of reach, and into the perimeter of flickering gaslight stepped a man. His silvered black hair glimmered in the dim corridor light.
"Who are you?" I cried out, and then remembered Erik's ring. You are safe as long as you wear it, he had told me, and so I thurst my hand into the dark stranger's face. "Look," I said, feeling like a child waving around a toy wooden sword, not good for anything. "Let me pass."
He chuckled to himself, "So he told the truth after all." He stepped aside, but not far enough for me to get by. His pale olive face with its black-lashed almond eyes looked familiar but I couldn't place him, and didn't want to try. "I had to see it for myself."
"What are you talking about? You have no right to stand in my way."
"Of course not, Mademoiselle. My apologies," and he nodded his head to me as if we were on the boulevard rather than five cellars below the Opera House. He had a short well-groomed beard, iron-grey in the gloom. "You look like you know the way."
"Which way I go is none of your concern."
"Erik's concerns are my concerns," he answered.
The leaden weight in my stomach seemed to double in size. "You know Erik," I breathed, suddenly light-headed. I wanted him to go away, for I feared to meet him on that narrow walkway, or worse yet, have him pursue me when I ascended the stairs that ran alongside the lake. If he engaged me in some kind of struggle, I might plunge into that icy green-glowing water.
"I do know Erik," he said in the same strangely musical tones, making no effort to move.
"Then you know he will not tolerate having me interfered with." Instead of brave, my voice came out weak and short of breath. "Anyway, I'm late. Please step aside, as I don't wish to brush the walls with my skirt."
He shook his head as if puzzled, gave a mocking little bow, then slid back into the niche from which he'd come. His long dark eyes were naggingly familiar but I could not place them. Anxiously I looked behind me several times, but he did not follow.
As I crept around the lake, the slow ponderous chords of the middle of Beethoven's Appassionata echoed off the stone. They drew me forward, my steps quickening of their own accord as the notes did themselves. It was as if Erik sensed my coming and allowed himself this brief but urgent musical interlude between heavier and more ponderous deliberations.
His front door was open, and the light from inside bathed the surrounding rock with a soft yellow glow. My steps echoed elephantine across the threshold. Should I announce myself? Tapping on the stone hurt my knuckles, and my faint raps made no sound that could be heard over the final thundering rolls coming from the piano. So I strode directly inside, not calling his name, knowing that he would not want his practice interrupted.
The third movement erupted into a bat-swirl of notes that surged around the entrance and out into the cavern beyond. To the slow beat I crept inside to stand at the entrance to his drawing room, to watch his erect back as he played. His arms crackled as if animated by lightning, but his shoulders remained as relaxed as a man who enjoys the summer sun, drifting lazily in a little boat. His poor scraggy locks blew around with his rapid movements. How can he make the piano sound like an enormous resonating harp? I wondered. From behind he was beautiful to watch as he teased the frantic tickle higher, then lower, then up the scale again. Yet he never hurried, even though the music did.
Again he spun out that thick harplike roll, and something inside me rolled along with it. He had to know I was there, for he started to show off a little, still unhurried though his fingers flew. His back drew up a little higher, and notes cascaded from those energetic arms. The paisley patterns on his dressing gown danced, those fat embryonic forms with little swirls of their own. He hammered, he flew, what little hair he had blossomed around his head until down he went, down, down until he rested in the thick rich chordal conclusion and the ringing silence that followed.
He closed the folio and turned to me like a man in a dream. In his robe he looked smaller, almost frail. His face was thinner than before, brutally ravaged but suffused with the pure light of naked emotion. Never had I seen him in his drawing room without a coat, and the intimacy bore my breath away. It was like seeing him undressed. With hands spread out as if he were stretching them, he drank in my whole appearance from crown to toe. His breath stood suspended, too, because after a moment he let it out in a long sigh. "Beautiful," he breathed. "Erik has cared for you well."
It broke the moment. When I laughed, "You haven't even seen me for several weeks," he flinched a little.
"And a miserable pile of bones you were, as pale and lifeless as your poor Erik," he retorted, his face no longer shining and revealed, but as ordinarily ugly as usual. "Now you look at least as if you might live, and even have the energy to crawl up on stage a few more times." He licked his lips as if he wanted to say something more, wanted to ask something, then thought the better of it. A remnant of passion still shook him, for he trembled when he rose from the bench, and his hands still quivered from the swirling notes as he took the coat from my shoulders. Uninhibited as a child he buried his face in the fur, rubbing his waxy cheeks back and forth in it, breathing in its scent deeply, caressing it with his hands. Then, as if aware of what he had done, he turned away, shamed, and wouldn't look at me as he hung the coat up.
He bade me sit, then went back to the piano and improvised for another hour or so, interspersing his keyboard ramblings with bits of Beethoven. The fire was very warm, and I started to drift. The soft yielding beginning of the "Quasi una fantasia" reminded me of the first days I stayed with him, when there was no difference between night and morning. I thought of moonlight on that glaucous water outside Erik's door, its surface coated with shivering light that had to fall so far through barred grates to reach it.
"You should write these passages down," I commented when he rested his hands on his long thighs. "The ones that are yours, at least."
"Before," he said, "you would have felt compelled to pace the room or hover over me. Now you stretch out as sleek and contented as a cat by the stove."
Before what? I thought, but he didn't expect me to speak. He closed the piano and from him again came that wave of bare emotion. Sitting at my feet, not touching me, he said over and over, "I can't believe you're here, that you came back. It would have killed Erik had you not returned. Don't send your Erik away, your poor Erik," on and on like that. While he muttered, he picked at the carpet as if the fat pears, flowers, and birds would come off into his hands.
I ignored him, closing my eyes until his scratching on the rug stopped. Then I said, "There was a man in the tunnels, on the way down."
"A man?" he said, all alert interest now. "Where?"
"When I came down through the Rue Scribe passageway. He came out of the shadows, out of a cross-tunnel, I think. He sounded foreign, and he was tall, with a little black beard. He said, 'Erik's concerns are my concerns.'"
"He would," Erik growled a bit, under his breath.
"Who is he? And how does he know you?"
"He used to be Erik's friend, but now he spends his time pestering, sneaking about, stalking."
"He did say some odd things." Rather than ask him directly, I just let him ramble.
"Did he approach you? Did he ask you what you were doing here?" In his tone was neither jealousy nor idle curiosity, only cold scrutiny.
"He came out of the shadows and startled me. He knew my name."
"Everyone around the Garnier Opera knows your name, and more will know it in a few days. Pay him no mind. He hangs about spying on people, insinuating his way into their love affairs because he has none of his own," and he gave a dismissive wave.
It wouldn't rest in my mind, though. "Who is he, and where is he from?"
Glaring like the criminal brought before the magistrate and made to grudgingly tell everything, Erik said, "He is from Persia, and you may call him 'Daroga.'"
"What a queer name. He looks so familiar, too."
"I'm sure if you saw him in his customary habitat you'd recognize him." He left his spot at my feet and went over to his desk, where he began to scratch musical notes onto a piece of staff paper with a dark-leaded pencil. As far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.
"Wait," I said as an idea pushed its way through the languid mental heaving which passed for my thoughts these days. "Your Persian friend, the one from long ago. He's here, in Paris?" How odd, that Erik would have something ordinary like a friend. Then one consideration even sharper pierced through the sleepy muck. "No wonder he looked familiar. I've seen him upstairs, watching the ballet dancers practice. Sometimes he chats with that funny man, the one who sits in the auditorium and sketches the ballerinas as they rehearse."
Ignoring me, he continued to write for another moment and then said, "I knew you would recognize him. However, like so many women, you don't know what you want. You tell me to put my musical thoughts down, and then you interrupt me when I do so. Make up your mind."
I nestled in the arms of a soft calm born of the fire and the caress of the most comfortable chair. Sometimes Erik yipped like a puppy whose tail had been trod on. I stretched like a pampered cat and yawned, "Please yourself, then. You always do."
He filled a stack of paper with hastily scrawled musical notes, then tossed the pile aside. "Satisfied?" he said, trying to sound accusatory but not really meaning it.
"I suppose. That reminds me. You are done with your opera? Really done?"
His pique forgotten, he pushed an ottoman over to me, and I put my feet on it. "Twenty years of work," he said in a singsong voice. "But no, it is not yet done, but almost. Close, very close, and then what will become of Erik? Now I have come to a convenient stopping point. I've written an appassionata of my own, slow like the Beethoven, but more tender, and woven it into an aria. I want you to sing it with me."
I used to walk all over Paris. Now the trip on the Rue Scribe path and lazing before his fire had tired me out. "Oh, not tonight," I breathed, drifting again. I had become accustomed to sleeping early in the evening, and sleep I would, though not in my clothes and boots, stiff and uncomfortable. Were I back in the apartment in Paris above, I would simply undress and crawl under the covers. I didn't know what to do here. The rhythm we had created on our earlier days no longer seemed to fit. For one, there was that dressing gown. For another, there was Erik's change of mood. He still snipped at me sarcastically, but it was half-hearted like an old habit. There seemed to be no reason to sit there any longer. "I'm going to retire, Erik," I said as neutrally as I could.
"Do you need a sleeping draught?"
"Hardly, as I can scarcely keep my eyes open."
"Let me prepare one," he said, rubbing his hands together anxiously, a hopeful expression on his face. "It will keep you from waking ... later."
I knew what he meant, and I shook my head, No. Pain I could bear, but not the thought of lying under his body like an inert cushion of flesh. Then my body remembered the heat of his in mine, and it struck me what it meant to "know" someone, to "know" a man. Even if I were unconscious he would plumb me to the depths, search every scrap and particle of me without the necessity for speech or acknowledgment. If that was going to happen I wanted to be part of it, to share in that knowledge too.
He sighed, disappointed, but said nothing. I glided past him into my room with its glossy bright wood. A new lamp sat on the bedside table, with cabbage-fat roses etched into the cloudy glass. At its lowest setting it cast a dim, comforting glow over the warm, rich-textured room.
As I slid into bed, it was as if my flesh felt the luxury that surrounded me for the first time. Nothing had changed; the sheets were still the smoothest Egyptian cotton, the eiderdown coverlet warm and thick, the goose down pillows plumped up softly. The bed welcomed me into its soft embrace, the sheets caressed my limbs, and I responded in turn, nestling down into its charms. No knock came on the door, to be followed by whispered begging. Eventually, cocooned in well-being, I slept.
A rhythmic tapping awakened me. Half in dream I wondered who that could be, and why doesn't Adèle answer it? Then I knew where I was. That tapping could mean only one thing. I crouched under the covers, thinking not to answer. Then his soft and suppliant voice called my name, asking to be let in, could Erik please come in? He would do nothing, he promised. He just wanted to see me.
Hesitantly I agreed, foggy with sleep. He unlocked my door with his key and with equal timidity entered, still in his silk gown and lounging trousers. Looking a little unsure, he stood at the foot of the bed. When he spoke his voice was shy as an adolescent's. "Will you unbraid your hair? I promise Erik will not touch you. He wants only to look."
Confused, I undid it, and draped it all around my shoulders. Since he made no sudden moves I sat up, more awake now and also curious to see what he would do next. Then he began to pull down the covers, and I tugged back, trying to keep them up. "No, no," he said soothingly, "I won't touch you." So I let him pull the covers down entirely, until I sat on the bed with my arms and legs crossed over each other, feeling bare and exposed, embarrassed by the fleshy little belly roll that folded over as I sat. I covered it with my arms.
"Arrange your hair," he whispered.
"How?"
"Like a shawl all over you," he answered, and his breath was very rapid now. "Now, lie down, yes, like that, oh, exactly like that, with your arms at your sides," he said in his most hypnotic, tender voice, and I did.
Little in my life has been stranger than lying beneath Erik's gaze, quivering and naked under a scrap of silk. He went over me like a doctor looking for a tiny malformation on the skin that everyone else has missed. As he swept my flesh with his gaze he murmured under his breath over and over, "So much more beautiful than I had dreamed, it's unimaginable." His soft repetitive chant relaxed me, and I looked at the rough-hewn ceiling as he satisfied the desire of his eyes.
Then he placed his hands on the hem of my chemise, and I tensed. "Please," he begged, again promising, "Erik will not touch you." I trembled so hard that the flesh of my belly and thighs shook without control. There was a watercolor painting on the wall to my left. Ladies of the Sun King's court with high stiff wigs posed unconcerned with my frightened flesh. When he made no move to touch my chemise again, the shaking slowly stopped. "Please," he asked one more time, and I nodded. Unresisting I let him raise my shift to right above my breasts. He held his hands carefully so as to touch only the cloth and not my skin. I fixed my eyes firmly on the watercolor ladies, trying not to hear the rapid intake of his breath as he studied me in the dim flickering light. "Beautiful," he breathed in his lowest and most lyric voice. "A rose-tipped goddess fresh from the sea."
I could not recall ever having been naked in front of anyone since my youngest childhood. Drafts played over my breasts and made them crinkle at the tips, pert and tingly. A little breeze stirred my curls down below, or was it Erik's breath? I did not look, but stared at the watercolor women instead. They had large black beauty moles painted on their tumbling bosoms. "Roll over," he begged, "Oh, please," and so I did, hating the way the flesh on my hips shook, yet drawing a little lick of pleasure from how he gasped when I lay prone and passive on my stomach, naked and defenseless from the back. I was an odalisque on display, hanging on a Salon wall, whose smooth white waist tapered and then swelled into sleek hills round and full. Into the pillow I buried my face, but I couldn't hide from the way it felt to be consumed by eyes, devoured by sight. I felt almost sorry for the intensity of his desire. Then I started to tremble again, for I felt him closer, closer still.
His breath caressed me without touch. Even without seeing them, I knew his hands hovered in the air above me, rounding my contours, setting up miniscule breezes of sensation. Where his hands passed over my skin it warmed of its own will, and when he whispered, "Beautiful," I felt it in the hollow of my spine.
He touched me and I flinched. "No, no," he said in a voice made of warm milk laced with honey, "I am just pulling down your chemise," and if his hands grazed round hips or hills as he traveled downwards, it could just as well have been an accident. He felt close again, terribly close. At any moment he could unbind himself and slide swiftly into my soft center from behind. All he would have to do would be to lift my hips a little, open his clothing, and bury himself in me. A pause. The air turned to jellied desire and we hung suspended in it like the small bits of meat that we were. He gave a long sigh, and with a shift, a vibration, he left the bed.
"Don't turn around," he said, and so I buried my face even more deeply into the pillow. Then the covers slid up over me, first the slippery cotton sheet, then the warm weight of the coverlet, as he lightly tucked me in without touching me, so careful he was. When the lock clicked I knew he was gone. Turning over, I gulped down the long breaths I couldn't take when under the spell of his ghostly palpations.
My room, my bed, my body no longer felt like mine. Fingers shouldn't go between the legs but mine did anyway. I yanked them away quickly, but not before some of the slippery moisture between my thighs coated them. It frightened me a little. He hadn't entered me, so from where did that wetness come? Did women make a kind of seed, too? It was briny and alkaline in smell, slipperier and not so jellylike as his. That unknown, unseen opening hung wet and loose between my fingers. I pulled my hand away again but reluctantly this time.
Such a small opening, such a little space, and everything for men, it seemed, hung upon gaining access to it. Ships were launched, wars fought, kingdoms leveled, that a man might immerse himself in that slick wet flesh. Why, I said to myself. Why? Stranger still, why had he not availed himself of his "marital rights," as that Dominican of my innocence had called it, and pushed himself up into me from behind, covered me like the stallion does the mare, uttered his low weird cries? He had never seen me unclothed. Did he not like what he saw, even though he had called me a "rose-tipped goddess?" Perhaps he found me repugnant. Perhaps he compared me to other women taller of stature, fuller of body, darker of hair or skin.
Hurt began to steal over me, along with resentment. He has no right to demean one for their looks. I was often praised for my delicate features, my unusual coloring, my elf-like appearance. Why would he scrutinize me so carefully and then walk away? Was there some flaw in me I'd never before noticed? My hands strayed over my arms, breasts, belly, soft and tender, and I stopped, panting. Everything felt dangerous, overwhelming. The pillows mocked me, mountains of desire. The sheet and coverlet conspired to molest me with surreptitious unwanted caresses. My own flesh sold me out. How dare it grow this strange alien opening which dripped moisture, bore an odd ocean smell, became a sea-purse into which might slide the swift pounding thrust of the man.
Bewildered, troubled, slippery of flesh, I slept.
I thought Erik would wake me in the morning with his soft call, "Christine, it's time to rise," but not this time. Voices came through the open front door, two men. One's was soft and lyric, patiently asking, explaining, I couldn't tell. The other voice, overriding and sharp, was Erik's. I crept mouselike to the front door, not wanting to be seen.
"You expect me to believe that?" the soft voice came.
"Believe what you like," Erik retorted. "You have decided to think the worst of me."
"You have to forgive me for being unsure. She's very beautiful, so much more so than on stage."
Erik exhaled a long dry hiss, and I shivered a little, because I knew the thinly suppressed rage which it implied. "You have no right to talk of her beauty."
"When women go about openly as they do in your country, my friend, their beauty is for all to sample," and he laughed a little. Then I knew who it was, the man who had met me in the passage. The one Erik called Daroga. "Did you take at least some of my advice?"
There was a long silence. "In your country, no one would blame me if I killed you for that question."
"Ah, but we are not in my country, are we?" The Persian man's voice rang like soft little bells. "That is obvious, with your barbaric European notions of architecture. Were she not in your rooms now, I would be sitting in front of your fire instead of shivering out here. Perhaps now you appreciate the convenience of our approach, keeping the women tucked comfortably away."
"Perhaps I will kill you anyway, you meddling fool, especially if you refuse to stay away from her."
"You haven't killed me yet. I consider that progress."
"Why do you persist in coming back?" As Erik's rage faded, it seemed like a little fear took its place. "You know how precarious my position is here."
"I would say you're very well-fortified. I'm almost dry now after that soaking. Thank you for saving me the disappointment of meeting my Creator, in any event. I had my doubts about whether there were really any gazelle-eyed beauties awaiting me in the beyond. But why did you stop?"
"I shouldn't have. There is a lot of water in that lake, and you wouldn't displace much."
"Erik, this bitterness is beneath you. Understand my position."
"I understand it perfectly. You showed up here in 1878, after how many years? Fifteen? I don't even remember anymore. You could have been dead for all I knew, but there you were, hanging on to that pompous windbag Nasir-al-Din when he dragged his tail through the muck of Paris. And you, so upstanding."
"Well," the other voice came lightly, "Our people were always more free in the capitals of Europe than at home. Do what you want in Paris, I remember my father saying, but just don't bring it back to Tehran."
"He should have told you not to bring Tehran to Paris, either. But as I was saying, when Nasir's retinue made a grand entrance into the Dancer's Salon you were right behind him, carrying his skirts. Paris still talks about it, how you wore a circlet of diamonds, how Nasir's braid on his uniform was really gold, and not just dyed rope. There you sat, several beauties hovering around each of you as the ballerinas bragged and chattered, each one more anxious than the next to draw your eye."
"You speak with such assurance, as if you were there."
"Oh, Daroga, I was. You did not see me, but I was. I hoped your delegation would take some of those brainless, noisy parrots back to Persia and stuff them into the gilded cages you had prepared for the women of your households, the ones who lived, at least. Instead, they sat on your knees and regaled you with stories of 'The Opera Ghost,' and you, Daroga, who have always hung suspended between belief and doubt, perked up your ears. Then that one line-dancer, now our exalted prima, the queen of the ballet corps, the white-armed Sorelli, chirped up that new trap doors had appeared throughout the backstage, and even on the main floor of the stage itself. I saw your face, Daroga, it was clearly in my view, and your eyes lit up with a fire that even La Sorelli could never engender in you. I don't know what you promised Nasir, to make him let you stay in Paris and hunt the man he thought had betrayed him."
"You did betray him."
"I had a right to leave your country. I was neither your slave nor your prisoner. He was ready to kill you right along with me."
"It was my weakness," and that gentle voice grew a hard, sharp edge. "Because you suddenly developed a conscience. You could no longer finish the tasks that had been assigned to you."
"As the Emperor's executioner."
"You were skilled at it. You did not protest. In fact, you seemed to relish it. How is it more barbaric than what you French do, when men slice each other with swords or shoot at each other with pistols over trivial matters of honor? Our courts had convicted those men. Have those tribunals less standing in your sight than your own?"
"I was blinded by sorrow. How can you still be unmoved, after all these years? You had a family, Daroga. I had none. My mother packed my things for me. She thrust them into a little bundle and said, 'Take these, leave, before he gets home.' I walked down the dirt road that led from our house and gazed back until the road curved and the house vanished from sight, but she did not even look out the doorway to watch my passing. You had not one mother, Daroga, but four."
"Don't idealize it. Mine cared for me, but the others would have as soon strangled me at birth."
"You had a home. And she was your sister. Can you forget that? Why should I have borne that sorrow alone?"
"I barely knew her, Erik. She grew up at my father's other house. She had a prestigious marriage arranged, and she destroyed it, destroyed everything in a moment of female weakness, foolishness. And the man she was to marry, the Khanum's nephew - he never forgot it, either."
"Which is how my drawings wound up in that diplomatic pouch, the one bound for the British embassy."
The other man gave a soft sigh. "What did you expect? Sooner or later he would have his revenge." Then his voice grew rich with entreaty. "You were a brother to me, Erik. But the Shah was my king, and we have a saying, our country is our mother. What was I to have done?"
"Trusted me. No one trusted Erik, not then, not now." That plaintive whine, I could almost see the expression on his face as he wailed it out, the mouth downturned, the eyes large black pits.
"You knew my responsibilities."
Their voices muted as they walked away from the door. A little later, the other man's musical voice said something like, "And what if she leaves you?"
Erik replied, sharp and fierce, "Then Lucifer will fall from heaven once more, and Paris will burn. But she will not. You will see." Then after more soft murmurings the Persian man's voice got suddenly sharp, then there was silence.
I sat, and the room seemed to contract around me. The Emperor's executioner? What did that mean? There was another reason the strange man looked familiar. Yes, he wandered the Opera House, a figure of fun for the opera girls now that he wore an odd sheepskin hat instead of a diamond circlet, and had traded diplomatic braid for a shabby black cloak. That wasn't it, though. He and she were children of the same father. His long almond eyes stared deeply like hers, the same eyes that rested in the face Erik had torn to shreds before me.
Erik came into the drawing room, tall and forbidding in his black afternoon coat. Anger hung over him and he slammed the piano lid open. "Time to get to work."
I didn't move. "That was a strange visitor."
"Nothing of your concern." He sat at the piano and kicked the bench with his heels, first one foot for a few staccato beats, then the other, but did not play.
"He seems like he would be a good friend," I said, trying to keep my voice low and even. "Yet you quarrel."
"What were you doing, listening at doorways? Another endearing characteristic of women, to always be spying."
"I thought you started your career as an architect helping women to better spy. Anyway, it was hard not to overhear."
"Leave it alone, Christine," he said coldly, and pressed out random plangent chords.
This line of conversation was hopeless. All my warm well-being gone, I shifted restlessly, feeling suddenly confined and constricted by my own indolent flesh, the too-warm fire, Erik's sullen hostility. "I thought you were going to play your appassionata for me."
"You seemed to have dismissed my composition altogether, being more interested in that miserable Persian than my labors of the past two weeks." But after a few sulky moments he brought out the thick red Don Juan Triumphant folio, and began to play. He had rewritten his long lyrical arias so that they suited my voice as precisely as the best dressmaker fits a gown. Sound poured forth from me all through that afternoon and into the night with virtually no strain.
He spoke the truth, too, for the sections he wished to have played "passionately" were deeply so. He wove a spell of vision so that the events in his opera came to life behind my closed eyes. Flower-laden vines embraced a tower that glowed almost blue under a fat bright moon. As the flutes swirled like fireflies on the grass, the young man flung up a ladder and climbed, climbed, until he reached the window where his beauty sat. They sang, the moon shone, a soaring oboe solo marked their kiss, and they sang again afterwards. Neither noticed how her dark-bearded father crept on the ground below, the moonlight glinting ominously on his sword. Neither saw him stay his hand as the lovers took their leave. Neither heard the angry father's sharp intake of outraged breath as the lovers promised to meet again tomorrow, where they would flee the kingdom forever.
Later in the evening he played for me passages from the ballet. It was an unusual one. Men danced instead of women, but a parenthetical note in the folio said that female dancers in male dress could serve as a substitute. The dancers wore the long skirts and tall pointed hats of the Turkish "whirling dervishes," and they were to swirl around each other in elaborate patterns of reds and deep blue. In the margins he had little sketches of the dancers. The music built up, climbing higher to promise a fierce climax, but before that pinnacle was reached, Erik abruptly stopped.
In amazement I watched as he yanked down a drapery and tied it tightly around his narrow waist. Then, silently, listening only to the fierce throbbing rhythm in his head, he raised his arms and spun wildly to the music in his mind. Faster and faster he turned, so that the velvet "skirt" flared out almost parallel to the carpet. On and on he danced, circling to music none but he could hear. His rooms were gone, I was gone, there was nothing left except his devastating dedication to space and movement.
He made me dizzy, and a slow sick feeling spread through me. Never had I watched someone dive so deeply into the recesses of his own mind. A memory stole out from around a corner. Papa and I had just moved into the Valeriuses' Göteborg apartment. As I dried the breakfast dishes, a little noise caught my ear. There on the floor was a mouse, running in circles. I laughed, for the little creature seemed to be chasing its own tail, and I bent down to get a closer look.
Mama Valerius heard me laughing. She came in, took one look at the mouse, and pushed me away roughly. Broom in hand, swiftly she brought the straw bristles down on the little whirling creature. I cried out in anger and indignation. Again and again she hit, until it lay broken and still on the kitchen floor. I started to cry. She explained that it most likely had hydrophobia, nothing else would make a mouse spin like that out in the middle of the floor in the bright morning sunlight instead of skittering around the baseboards in the dark of night. If it had bitten me, she said, I could have died horribly. There was no medicine for hydrophobia, no cure, only the welcome release of death.
The poor mad mouse and the poor mad man spinning before me merged into one. Who was this man, and what yoke was I forging to bind myself to him? Was he as incurable as that poor creature squashed beneath Mama Valerius's broom?
He must have stopped while I was lost in my thoughts. His cessation of movement changed the air. Slowly he removed the drape, threw it aside, and without looking at me walked into his room and quietly, almost tenderly shut the door.
Later he emerged immersed in melancholy. I knew it was fruitless to speak to him when in that state. He took a small volume from the shelf, poetry, probably, but did not read to me as I expected. Instead he sat staring into the blue and gold flames with the book open in his lap.
His burst of fierce whirling activity followed by brooding silence made my skin creep with anxiety. I tried to read myself, but Erik could fill a room with his mood, be it elation or sorrow. No one was allowed to possess any other when he was in the thrall of his own. No longer could I relax mindlessly in front of the fire. Restlessness seized me. "I'm going out for a walk around the lake," I announced.
"No, you aren't," he said with a new heaviness I didn't recognize. "Sit down. Whether you walk or don't walk, do or don't do, it doesn't matter. In a week it will all be concluded anyway."
In a week I was to sing in Faust, in the coveted role of Marguerite. "What will be concluded?" I asked, trying to keep the irritation and the boredom out of my voice.
"My funeral Mass," he said to the fire. "It won't take long, not more than a week, certainly. And I bequeath it to you, so you will be free to use it as well."
Irritated and sick of his morbidity, I snapped, "And who's going to sing this funeral Mass for you?"
"Oh," he laughed a little, "the choir at the Madeleine, who else? It will be such a beautiful Mass. Shall we make it one coffin, or two?"
Vexed beyond measure, I stood up and announced that I was going to bed. Without waiting for his reaction, I headed for my room and shut myself in. For a long time I brooded in bed without sleep. When he tapped on the door I called out with irritated resignation, "Oh, come in if you must." Shyly he approached in his dressing gown, as he had the night before.
"Erik wants to see you again," he said in a voice full of embarrassment. It was his shame that made me cringe, while my breasts and belly and flanks trembled at the thought of being seen again in that way. So once again he uncovered me, and again I lay naked and exposed as a plump oyster on the plate, ready to slide down the throat. Again I stared at the courtesans of the Sun King, until the rustle of silk hitting the floor made me close my eyes.
The sound of a cork being pulled out of a bottle, another rustle of cloth, and a strange sweet odor caught my attention. I looked over without thinking and gasped, for there he stood naked below the waist, rubbing some kind of oil onto his maleness. The sight of that long reddened shaft squeezed a little moan of fear out of me. It was nothing like the innocent marble members of statues, discreetly sheathed and no thicker than a man's finger. I stared, and that unwinking merciless eye stared back at me out of an inflamed head crowned with bunched skin, a naked uncovered instrument of desire.
The pendulous sacs below contrasted veined and violet against the patchy whiteness of his thighs, those pale patches in turn broken up by darker skin covered with black hair. "Turn your head," he choked out, but far too late. "Erik only wanted to see you. You should not look on Erik or you will burn. But Erik wants you so badly, he does not want to burn you, that's why he risked you seeing him, oh, please let him in," and again he entreated me until I silently opened my thighs to him.
His nightshirt thumped on the floor. I caught another glimpse of his patchy, ragged skin with its alternating crazy-quilt pattern of mottled light and hairy dark. He mounted me. Then I cried out once more but not in pain, for in he slid smoothly and without resistance. The long spear of pain became an urgent thrust of heat. Almost against my will my flesh welcomed and pulled him in. He moved slowly, taking his time. I breathed in deeply and noticed he had bathed. Mixed with the sweet oily odor was one pungent and musky, but not unpleasant.
I remembered the Opera girls giggling around one little minx who said that with her lover, "It was far better the second time, you just want to forget about the first," and then I didn't think at all, for my body opened up to his deep slow pressure, and that secret place grew full and tightened around him, making him groan. His chest and belly slapped against me, and under each slap I opened to him further. Then, to my horror and delight, he pulled out almost entirely and slid in again, over and over, and each time he did, that hot thrusting pierced me right up the middle.
When he buried himself in me as deeply as he could, that was a different delectation, one which filled me from the inside out. Deeply embedded now, he pushed on with shallow tireless motions, and from far away a thundercloud of pleasure descended heavy and wet onto the horizon of my body. As he moved faster, tiny cries escaped from me and they filled him with wild delirium. Inside me he swelled with heat, burst, howled out my name, wailed without reserve.
He lay on me unmoving for a few seconds, his teeth resting up against my neck. As he shrank and withdrew, my flesh cried out silently in protest. Nothing could have forced me to say anything, so swollen was I with desire and shame at the same time, but I wanted to cry, Wait, there has to be more, this can't be it, no, wait.
"Erik will go now," he whispered. "Please turn your head, Christine, please close your eyes, don't look, Erik cannot bear it," and so I scrunched them tightly shut. He didn't even wait to put on his nightclothes, but simply grabbed them and left. Then I knew that his shame was as great as mine, greater perhaps.
As soon as he was gone, I staggered dripping to the tub, for his slippery gel coated my thighs and bottom. I was a creature possessed, and the slightest touch would have catapulted me across the room. Somehow in my tumbling thoughts, in chaotic flesh maddened with desire, it seemed that if I could get his slime off of me, somehow I would return to myself. Without even waiting for the tub to fill, I climbed in and worked great mounds of the lavender soap into the soft sponge to cleanse myself of his last trace. Over that hidden maw I slid it down, over that mouth which ached and cried for something unknown, which gabbled with a hunger I couldn't name.
At the first slide of the sponge a lightning bolt of pleasure crackled through me. Sensation mounted over sensation. Then against my will my body recalled him inside of me, felt once more his heat and slow, hard, rhythmic energy. That memory was too big for my flesh to contain, and as I stroked, something unbelievable happened. One wave of unimaginable delight overflowed and then another. As they poured forth they shook my legs and back, and then all of me.
Elation and terror pinned me down. It seemed that these wild convulsions would never stop. The secret heart of my body opened and closed, closed and opened, and to its great will I surrendered, possessed fully now by delight. Then the tremors weakened, and I pressed the sponge into that secret mouth of shame until the flutters echoed weakly, then faded away altogether.
In the bath I lay. I felt every drop of water on my flesh, every particle of air which filled my starved lungs, and then I knew. It's what he felt. It's what made him cry out like a dying animal caught in a trap. Yes, he loved me, and few women were loved as I was loved. It wasn't just love that drove him to me, though, but also the hunger for this convulsive pleasure of the body that only men and the most debauched of women sought.
I pulled my hands away in horrified shame, and the sponge plopped into the water. The rest of me moved heavily, placid and drugged with delight of a different sort. How many shades of pleasure were there in the body's palette? A sleepy well-being carried me on its stream in the lavender-scented bath, but underneath a tiny flicker of warning poked insistently. Then I knew as day follows dawn that those frenzied convulsions brought the mindless satiation which followed.
An image flashed before me. Years before, I had seen in the Louvre a painting of the Sabine women carried off by Roman soldiers. They struggled, they fought, but the strong men were made fierce by desire. The women weren't small like myself, either, but broad and big-hipped, the buttocks of one lapping over the arms of the man who bore her off. I had never understood before how they could have accustomed themselves to their fate, how they could have actually stood in between their fathers and their former spouses to fight for their new Roman husbands. Now I knew.
Margot's words came back to me. You have the heat in you, she said, and her words became clear. It was bitter knowledge, worse than when Erik had first split me apart with male flesh, because this I could not blame on him. Instead, the taint rose up from deep inside me. Had he gone on but a few seconds longer, this frenzy would have happened during the act itself. Like Erik, I too could come to crave this most indecent of pleasures. I too could ache for the flesh that bestowed it, as unlovely as that flesh might be to look upon, as tortured as the mind might be that animated it. And were he to lie with me and bring about such deep tumult, after it ceased there would follow the tender submission. With what resolve could I resist, if he lay on me while both of us basked in this soft glow?
Rings, words, these were nothing. Pleasure was the noose hanging before me. Pleasure would seal my fate and bind me to him forever. The game was over, the holiday concluded. I had left the nursery to join the adults at the table for the first time, and the banquet spread before me was not to my liking. I had to escape, before my body betrayed me.
(continued...)