Tenderness
As our taxicab puttered through the Père Lachaise cemetery, a sick feeling of dread washed over me. Père Lachaise was like a small city, almost toy-sized, like one of the miniature towns Philippe and Louvel used to construct from blocks on a spread-out colored counterpane. Inside little tombs like houses the dead slept, and there were even neighborhoods – the homes of the rich were set inside wide parks or on broad tree-lined avenues, while the homes of the poor were jumbled together in narrow by-ways, and some of the stone tombs were even crumbling. I looked away for fear I would see a hand or foot emerge from a toppling pile of stone.
All the tombs were smaller than a house, far smaller, and at any minute I expected their carved doors to open and little wizened people, brown and bony, to dart out and run into their neighbor's house, or stroll arm in arm down the miniature streets.
"You look pale, Christine," Jacques said, squinting through his glasses. Then to the cabdriver he called out, "Just park the car, my man, there's no need to circle a dozen times." He took me gently by the arm. "Are you sure you have the strength for this? Because if you feel ill or faint, there's no reason to go on."
Philippe had seen our taxi pull up, and already was striding over on long swift legs. "Jacques, I'll be fine." As I drew from my reticule a little bottle of smelling salts, Philippe pulled the cab door open a little too hard, and the frame shook.
"Mother, what's this?" he said, not looking at Jacques. "Sal volatile?" He wrinkled his nose at the pungent combination of ammonia and lavender.
"Don't fuss, Philippe, I'm fine," I said. Jacques had already exited the taxi, and for a moment the two men bumped into each other as both tried to help me emerge. "Stand back, both of you, or you shall knock me onto the pavement!" I looked over Jacques's wide shoulder, and the little old priest, I saw with irritation, was trying to keep from laughing. "You act as if I were Methuselah's grandmother," I said in irritation, and flung myself out of the taxi, almost dislodging my hat in the process.
The two men stared at each other, and Philippe let out a long held-in sigh. "You," he said coldly to Jacques. "Of all people whom I never expected, and never wanted to see again."
"Philippe," I began, but Jacques waved me off.
"Monsieur Doctor de Chagny," he said, and thrust out his hand to Philippe, who stared at it as if a brown bear from the Paris Zoo had done the same. "Madame de Chagny invited me to accompany her to the interment of the unfortunate girl all of Paris now calls 'The Unknown of the Opera.' We have had our misunderstandings, my good doctor. We have expressed our differences and disagreements, and I am hopeful that now we may re-introduce ourselves basking in the grace of this lovely lady."
"Don't flatter me or my mother," Philippe said, darting a hostile glance in my direction. "Mother, why did you bring him here? He has interfered in our forensic investigations, and tomorrow's fish-wrap will have some popularization with his name on it, making a mockery of what we do both in the laboratory and here today."
"Indeed!" Jacques said, pulling his waistcoat around his stomach. "I make no mockery, monsieur."
"You have an article?" I said, staring at him. "On what?"
"On the revolutionary new techniques in medical science that will make the flight and concealment of criminals a thing of the past."
Philippe gave a little snort. "Vulgar sensationalism."
"Philippe," I said, using the same sharp voice that got his attention when he was a gangly youth grown too tall too fast for his legs to carry him gracefully, and no longer wanted to listen to a meddlesome female. "Stop it. We're here for a burial," and as if on cue, the priest shuffled forward.
He put one hand on Jacques's shoulder and another on Philippe's arm. The hand that rested on Philippe was weathered, the arm twisted within the black broadcloth of his worn soutane, and I wondered that he was able to serve at the Holy Sacrifice. Priests must be able to hold the Host in both hands, with both arms upraised during the Mass. His almost-bald head was covered with brown age spots, and his face sagged into a loose bag of wrinkles. But he had kind eyes, bright despite his advanced age.
"My son has forgotten his manners," I said. "I'm Madame de Chagny, and I do not believe we have been introduced, my Father."
"Father Durant," he said, and bowed a little, just a slight nod of the head.
"You know this place well, I've heard," I answered.
"I laid my first soul to rest here in 1861."
"You've served long in the vineyard," Jacques remarked, and Philippe shifted in impatience, but said nothing.
The old priest just bowed a little again and smiled. Then he pulled the two men gently towards the empty vault that lay gaping as a wound amidst the small and poor sarcophagi in the low-rent district of the Père Lachaise necropolis.
In a voice only slightly quavering with age, he chanted the Deus, cujus miseratióne ánimæ fidélium requiéscunt as he shook hyssop soaked with holy water over the crypt's yawning black opening. He sprinkled with his intact left hand, staring ahead as if lost in his own voice. He did not chant, but instead sang in beautiful tones which pulled at me from the inside. He had no boy to assist him and so Philippe held the bowl. Sonorously, hypnotically, the voice lifted, then fell, caressed the ear while cooling it at the same time. Philippe stopped glaring over at Jacques, and Jacques stopped sneaking looks at his pocket watch. Where had the old priest learned to sing like that?
The cemetery men removed their hats and brought forward the simple wooden coffin. Fr. Durant raised his mangled right hand and arm in the sign of the cross over her remains, that poor unknown girl found in a shallow grave beneath the Palais Garnier. Had they sewn her back together after looking through her body? Did she reek of preservatives, and would they keep her as a kind of secular "incorruptible?" I hoped they had buried her with her ring. Something made me think of Isabeau, so small at age six in her tiny coffin, and then Martine's pinched, bitter face came to mind. She wouldn't approve of this burial. I could hear her in my thoughts. What if she had been a suicide? What if she hadn't died in the graces of the Church? At once it washed over me, I wish so badly that Isabeau would have lived. She would have been a beautiful woman, tender and kind. And I began to cry.
The old priest looked up briefly but went on. In Latin he sang, "Grant her eternal rest, O Lord," and dutifully we answered, "And let light perpetual shine upon her." The stone lid scraped over the top, that old familiar sound of stone on stone, and after the last "Amen," I took a step forward, breathed in deeply, and out of me poured the Regina Coeli, the ancient hymn to the Queen of Heaven.
Everyone stared, but Father Durant put his mangled hand to his withered old chest and gasped out loud. Tears stood in his eyes. The grave-men had departed with their cart, and no one heard them go. Then the priest looked at me and his eyes were like the black holes that men opened in the earth or stone in which to place the fragile bodies of the dead. I gazed back, calmly.
After a long moment he stuttered, "It's not possible ... So long since I have heard anything like that ..."
"Yes," I interrupted, not wanting him to say any more in front of Jacques or Philippe.
My son shrugged as he did when a boy, trying to pull himself out of some disturbing dream. "Heard anything like what, Mother?" he said. Jacques looked lost in thought. In the air before my eyes hung a prison cell with its two doomed souls, cries in the night, a hymn sung so beautifully a man cried, then a snapped arm never rightly set.
You never came back, I thought silently. He could have used you over those lonely years. I could have used you at the end. But of course it wasn't your fault. You didn't know. Each thought the other was dead. It was a good assumption in those days. Oh, Erik, the friends you pushed away. The friends you never found. The friends you never thought you had.
I felt suddenly cold as the marble around me. The air grew violet, and I shivered with terror, feeling suddenly exposed and vulnerable, as if all my insides were laid out on a cold slab as neatly as those of the poor girl in the coffin. What would Philippe find when he plunged his gloved hands deep into me? What foul and contorted masses would he pull out?
Jacques caught me in his arms, and near me Philippe stood, eyes blazing black with streaks of gold.
Father Durant patted Philippe gently on the sleeve. "She's just swooned. Women do that here, you know that. Look, her color has come back. She will be fine. Doctor De Chagny, do you remember that you promised to come by the rectory and drink a glass of wine with me afterwards?"
"Yes, yes," Philippe said absently. "Mother, I hope you go back to your hotel and rest." Philippe used the same tone when he sent sick or irritable children to bed, and inside I bristled.
"Can you stand?" Jacques asked, and I nodded.
"I'm fine. I just lost a little breath there. Philippe, go have your wine, and take a nice luncheon along with it. Father Durant, I hope you did not mind my voice after you were finished. It just seemed ... fitting." I hoped I sounded calm, hiding my hands in my sleeves to disguise their trembling.
"It is never wrong to honor Our Lady," he answered, and his eyes were warm. "But a most unusual tune, quite unique. A remarkable composer, no doubt." He turned to Philippe. "I would ask your mother to grace us with her presence, but I believe she has other plans." Then, to me, "But tomorrow, Madame, if you wish you may come by the rectory and see my garden. There is not much else for me to do these days, the occasional memorial Mass, sometimes a funeral."
"Mother," Philippe said, and at first I didn't think he would kiss me, but finally he did, a good full smack on each cheek, and he gripped me tightly. I wanted to comfort him, say something to cut the thin wires of tension between us, but he looked away hastily and told his man to bring the car around to the rectory, as he and Father Durant would be walking. With a stiff nod towards Jacques he turned away and the two went off among the copper rooftops of that little stone city.
Suddenly I wanted to call to him, summon him back, tell him it would all be better. But what, exactly? He flew out of my hand, that long dark bird, the son of his father. He and Father Durant turned on a street or alleyway, for that city of the dead had them too, just like ours of the living. Soon they disappeared from sight, the short wizened crow and the tall black stork.
o o o o o o o
The cab-driver was snoring lightly when Jacques ushered me into the taxi. Flushed and confused, he patted my hand as I inhaled a little of the smelling salts. "He doesn't like me," he finally said.
The sharp smell pulled me forward into the present. "No, he doesn't. Something you did really angered him. He used to do this as an adolescent, get himself into these stubborn moods, and it was impossible to dislodge him until he decided to break free of it himself." I rested against the leather seat back and closed my eyes, feeling naked and revealed, as if all the skin had been peeled off me.
Jacques said softly, "Do you want to go back to your hotel?"
Noonday was hot, especially in a black dress. "I want to see you," I whispered. "I didn't come to Paris just for this," and waved my hand at the cold stone boxes of the dead.
"The Bois de Vincennes, perhaps ..." but then he stopped when he saw my face.
"Not the Bois, not a restaurant, nothing like that." Then at once I lay on his chest, and would have burrowed myself into it if I could have. "I don't want to see anyone but you. There's no privacy in this city. I feel on display, like some kind of sideshow entertainer that people come to gawk at. Perhaps later, Jacques, I'll want to roam about Paris. But not now."
I couldn't see his face, but could feel him thinking, trying to hold in his breath.
"There is someplace, even though perhaps you might not find it respectable. However, we can talk, or sit, have a meal. Anything you wish."
"Respectable," and I laughed a little. "I used to dance on tables in little towns outside of Uppsala. I was eight or nine and still wore my hair down. Papa would play the fiddle or the nyckelharp, and I would whirl around but I never fell off. When I was sixteen, the man who later became my husband would have proposed to me, but he couldn't, because I was a peasant, you see, and everyone knows peasant girls are good for one thing." Then the urge came over me again, tell him, tell him everything. "I would like to talk to you, away from eyes and ears and out of the sun. But I can't imagine where we would go, were it not a cafe or restaurant." He said nothing, only looked at me with soft brown eyes, and I noticed his lashes were dark, not red like his brows. "I think I'm a little too old to be seduced," I finally said.
"It's the only place I can think of where we can be alone. I don't want you to go back to the Cotillion, or take the next train for Belgium." He stroked my face and I felt tears come up from somewhere, deep down.
"Wherever you wish, then."
He gave instructions to the driver, and the engine started with a jerk. We turned down one narrow street, then another, until we came to a small, old building that seemed to have escaped the Hausmann renovations. The driver turned into the back, where a canopy sheltered the carriage from prying and indiscreet eyes.
I almost laughed out loud. Jacques had brought me to one of the few maisons des rendezvous left in Paris, no doubt. "Wait here," he said, and I could imagine Martine's glittery eyes taking in the whole scene, disapproving. Moments passed, and the sweat started to trickle down the back of my heavy dress. This is mad, I told myself, trying to suppress all the warmth I felt inside. I'm about to go into a disreputable hotel with a man. Although it looks decent enough, and that's beautiful ironwork around the gate, vines with big flat leaves and thick symmetrical blossoms.
"It's ready," he said when he returned, and when I took his strong round arm, he trembled a little.
The little parlor and bedroom both had balconies and windows. They looked as if they'd been furnished from the Maison de l'Art Nouveau emporium from two decades ago. I took off my hat, and pulled the curtains covered with lilies. Behind me, Jacques lit a pipe and the fragrant apple-smoke smell filled the room.
"Would you like to rest?" and he gestured towards the small boudoir almost entirely filled with a bed and its curved wooden headboard. The thick curtains kept out the afternoon, filling the room with a glow that would have been twilight, had it been violet and not green. The fabric rippled in the breeze like waves against the side of a boat. I shook my head. "I'll sit here with you."
In a Japanese silk-covered armchair he spread himself by the cold fireplace, puffing slowly, his tobacco pouch resting on his thigh. The remote and narrow street had little traffic, and somewhere, perhaps in the linden trees outside the windows, some squirrels chattered. The silence was sweet, like a warm green bath. Then he said, "I think I saw you perform once, long ago in Paris. I wasn't sure at first. That's why I stared at you so, when you first came into my office. When you sang that hymn at the cemetery, though, then I knew."
"So long ago. You must have been a schoolboy."
"I was sixteen. Some aria from Sappho, do you remember it?"
"How could I forget? It wasn't really a full performance, but a mélange of Maestro Gounod's pieces put on for the subscribers so to raise money. Maestro loved that work as we love our first child, even though Paris didn't. He came himself to conduct, and I remember him praising me for "O my lyre immortal. The leading soprano at the time, a great Messalina of an Italian named Carlotta, would have done it herself if she could have been bothered to sing for subscribers' benefits. So your father must have brought you, then?"
"They introduced you as new, as I recall, and said you were full of promise."
"Then, I wasn't, really." I had not yet met Erik and thus had sung a cold and remote Sappho, with none of the passion I found later in her poetry. "She had a warmth I lacked at the time."
"Later my father met a group of his friends who poked me and asked me how I liked the singers. To them, the poetess was simply an obscene joke, but I listened anyway." He reddened, but didn't look away. "It was Monsieur Gounod's 'first child,' wasn't it?"
"An orphan, you might say, one not as loved as it should have been. Like Sappho herself."
"Your first child is loved."
A little startled, I said, "Yes, he is."
"I bear him no ill will, I want you to know that. He has a sadness about him, perhaps from the loss of his father, perhaps because of a fundamentally melancholic nature. If there is to be a rupture between you two, I will withdraw."
"You know I don't want that. You have to understand Philippe. He's not overly sensitive or embarrassed. We had no storks visiting at our house. If Philippe attended a lying-in, the children knew that meant he'd delivered a baby. I don't think he resents you. But he has a strong feeling of everything in its place, and you just didn't fit."
He smiled, and it seemed we had been sitting in that warm verdant room forever. "He hasn't said anything to you about looking for another solicitor?"
"No," I said, hesitant. "Has he said that to you?"
"In yesterday's mail. I wrote him at once and told him that it wouldn't be necessary, as I was selling my share in the firm and retiring from the practice of law."
"What? That's incredible, Jacques, why?"
"It's what I wanted to tell you, one of the reasons I asked you to come to Paris. A letter didn't seem fitting, entirely, and I only wrote your son because he seemed so anxious to sever his tie with the firm. He holds a grudge, doesn't he?"
I felt as if I were being pulled in two. There was the old priest – it had to be him, didn't it? The one who knew Erik back during the war? And Philippe's fit of sullen temper against Jacques, and his stubborn refusal to break out of it. Then there was this latest shock, that Jacques was no longer serving as an attorney, no, more important than that, was no longer my attorney. I moistened my handkerchief with cologne and dabbed it around my lips, almost too surprised to speak.
When I didn't, he went on. "I imagine you will want to know how I am to live. It was simple, really. The article about the British secret service trying to learn French war secrets regarding automated soldiers produced more of a stir than I realized. Then someone at Les Temps put the two articles together in his mind – the military technology one, and the buildup of tensions between Germany and Belgium and France. They want me to write for them on military matters in a regular column, and will leave me free to take other assignments if I wish. I can't believe it, Christine, it's something I've wanted for years. When that brass ring came around the carousel, I didn't stop to think, I simply grabbed ahold and swung myself up onto the platform."
He almost rose out of his chair, so full of vibrant life he was. But I only half-heard him, because the priest still stood before me, eyes bright with tears that did not fall, and the request issued so calmly, yet with such suppressed urgency. Finally I managed, "I'm happy for you," and then the thought came to us both at the same time.
He was first to voice it. "Les Temps will pay me to travel. They want me to go to Berlin and write on German militarization. That won't be popular, I can assure you, but this is a progressive publication and they don't believe all those old warhorses left over from the last war with the Prussians, who never learned the first lesson and are about to have a second one drubbed into them. It's not elan vital that wins wars. No one cares how much 'spirit' you have – it's a matter of men and materiel, of strategy and tactics. But then," and he held his hand out to me, but instead of taking mine pulled me close to him where he sat, "there's also talk of us opening an office in Brussels."
I curled up against him, comfortable on his lap. "But you told me to leave Brussels, as I recall." He rubbed my shoulder with his free hand as he set down his pipe, and squirmed a little, so I asked, "Am I too heavy?"
"You are perfect," and he took off his glasses, rubbing the two little indentations on either side of his nose. "Yes, I did tell you it would be best to leave. But I might need to be there."
"I would like that," I whispered, and then I knew he had been tight with tension because he now relaxed, and his warm soft front became softer still as he folded me up close. I kissed the little sore points on his nose.
Then he said into my neck, "I wanted to hold you like this all morning. Thank you for coming to see me, for coming with me," and then we said nothing for a long time in that soft green room with the curtain-cushioned breeze rippling through like waves. He tasted like the sweet tobacco, too, and I rubbed my face like a cat on his sidewhiskers in between kisses.
He carried me to the sculpted bed and unbuttoned my shoes, then rolled my stockings down. There was something slow and shy in his movements, and I laughed when he ran his hand up my thigh and said something in a startled voice about the slit in my pantalettes.
"I'm old-fashioned," I said. "This always made more sense. I never understood the young girls who wanted to practically disrobe every time nature called."
It took a long time for us both to undress. We slid under the sheets and his body hit me like a shock of soft-skinned warmth. He smelled like apples and sweat and I breathed him in like a drowning woman inhales the ocean. Then he was touching me where no fingers other than my own had ever gone and I reached for him as well.
That part all men share with Adam was like a club, rounded and powerful and thick. He closed his eyes and groaned with pleasure under my hand, and his thighs trembled. I cupped him in my hands gently and said softly, "The little bag of life," and he chuckled, "I suppose so."
I wanted to feel his flesh on my face and so I went everywhere. It was marvelous to run my cheek over what had before only revealed itself to the eye. His thighs were as delightful as I had thought, strong and full of muscle but a little soft where they met the body, and between them pulsed that energetic stalk.
Without shame we threw off what covered us, and with my cheek I felt the smooth hot line of hard flesh that quivered as it waited for me to take it in hand or mouth or my own hungry cleft.
"Christine," he breathed, begging, and so up his body I ascended, pulling myself up over his flesh arm by limb, cheek by lip. As I climbed I passed the deep sweet gulf of his navel and slid along a forest of slithery bronze hair which adorned the mound of his belly. Between his breasts fluffy hair glistened red-gold in the green-filtered sun. Under my fingers the little pearly nipples grew firm.
Deep beneath that landscape of flesh and fur he called to me from the chest. At the peak I had arrived, and so with a shudder he pulled me down onto him in one firm swift swipe.
My arms were all full of him, and my body as well. "Sit up," he said, and so I rose and straddled across his wide hips. Then like little mouths his fingers kissed me everywhere, pulling tenderly on the tips of my breasts, flickering down my belly until he found that secret spot again. As he gently thrust he stroked, holding me with one big arm and touching me gently, expertly with the other. Then there was no speech between save cries and whispers and tiny moans. Pleasure exploded first in my back, far down, then opened up like a blossom of delight all through my clefted hips, and I fell on him, clutching him like a hand.
He rolled me over in one fast motion, and pressed me under his heaviness, thrusting hard while I still pulsed blindly like some sea creature. "Can you bear my weight?" he asked in between hard breaths, and I didn't answer, just pulled him deeper into me with arms and legs and two grasping mouths.
Deeper and harder he went, and a few drops from his brow fell onto mine. Then I closed my eyes and fell into that rhythmic dark of pull, push, inside, then slightly outside only to push all the way in again. A deeper pleasure arose from far down inside of me, something primitive and almost painful in its intensity, and then I spent myself again when he did. It was like being underwater, so much wetness everywhere, his and mine. He lay gasping at my side and when I lay on his chest and licked the pink tip of his breast, I tasted salt like the Brittany sea.
I had been over oceans, waded up to my waist in waters on three continents, but no salt from any of them tasted so warm and familiar as that on Jacques' body, the salt of a seacoast from long ago that bathed pink rocks with its grey-green shimmering light.
He took my hand and rested it on the curve of his side. It was like sitting in a rain puddle, but neither of us cared, and the early fall air wafted over and cooled us. From a small bedstand he took a towel and dried me.
"I should do that," I murmured.
"Why?"
"No reason," I said sleepily, and when I looked around the room again, the sun had long since gone, and the green-lit curtains now shone dark, almost black against the night sky. Somewhere on the street below someone was playing an accordion, and a girl laughed. I watched the streetlights below cast moving patterns on the wall as the curtains shifted.
Jacques gently snored, and I pulled his heavy sleeping arm around me. He's going to Berlin, I thought. It's like putting your head into the lion's mouth. Then I remembered that when the new day came, I was to go see Father Durant at the rectory where he stayed, and I shivered a little when I thought of what I had done, the love Jacques and I had made together. It made me a little afraid. Then I slid back under his arm and pressed my face into the soft flesh of his side, and slept again until some time in the very early morning, when the moon had shifted and the accordion no longer moaned.
He awoke full and urgent and took me in the night, and this time I cried out because the deep delight swept through me as if I wasn't there at all, as if there was none of myself or my history or anything left, only a deep-splitted body receiving a large and full one, and I did not care if my cries were heard on the street below. I don't know how I got on top of him, or even who was inside whom anymore. At one point it felt as if I had mounted him and was thrusting myself between his legs, as if his thick maleness was something we shared between the two of us. I pinned him down and held him by the arms until he himself cried out with abandoned helplessness.
Then we clung to each other with no life raft. Night's ocean swallowed us and didn't spit us out until the dawn shone cool and pale through the windows.
"Are you thirsty?" he asked, stretching himself awake. "I'm parched myself. I haven't been so dry since I sailed from Libya to Constantinople. You've wrung every drop from me," and he smiled widely.
He went away for a little while and I dozed until he brought a tray with soda water and some juice. He mixed up spritzers and I used his linen shirt for a robe while we sat and drank. "I'm having breakfast sent up, too."
"I have to go back to the Cotillion sometime." I hated the thought of putting on that hot black mourning dress, and wanted a light batiste summer frock instead. "Then I am to visit Father Durant."
"Not to confess, I hope," he said, but he looked a little nervous.
"What would be the point of that? Because I can't promise not to do it again. That is, if you can't."
He looked a little shocked. "You think I'm going to discard you now? Christine, don't even think it. I want you to stay with me, no, don't interrupt, I know that each of us has the destinations to which we are called. Not just for a few days, either. But for now we can ring the Cotillion and have your things sent over, or if you don't like this place, I can find another ..." but I raised a finger to interrupt him.
"I'm not good at this. I've never been anyone's mistress," and as I said it, I realized with a shock that it was true. Erik might have bought love in the thick woods of the Bois de Boulonge or in some house in the Pigalle where a mask was one of the less unusual things a man might wear, but he had never made me his mistress. It was a strange feeling, unsettling, yet freeing too.
"You think I brought you here simply to seduce you."
"If you did, that was all right. I wanted you to."
"I think of it as more than a seduction. I love you, I told you that. If you don't love me now, or yet, then I can accept that too. When you love me, you will say it."
"I know," I answered. "Don't look sad. Then something occurred to me. "Jacques, I won't do what she did, tell you that I love you when I don't. You and I have come to a point in life where we both have hurts, old wounds that have scarred over and some which never have quite healed. I have burdens I've never let down, never shared. So I can feel them in another person, in you."
He took me in his arms, then, and I played with the fur on his chest for a few minutes. Once Raoul and I walked out onto a dock on the Brittany coast, and he pulled off his shirt and shoes. In his flapping white undershirt he leapt into the cold water. I had no shoes to kick off, for I went barefoot as a peasant all summer long. Infuriated with jealousy, anxious to keep up with him, I ran as fast as I could and jumped heedless in the water next to him. My skirts dragged me down and I had to struggle for the shore. Wet, dripping, he laughed and said there were some places I could never follow him, and to sea was one. But I didn't care, because I had done it, even though it was wet and sandy and uncomfortable.
"I have something to tell you, Jacques," I said, and he saw my seriousness. "A story that I've never fully told anyone, not even my husband."
"Christine," he said, putting his finger on my lips. "It isn't necessary. You don't need to tell me just because you think it will keep me. I'm not going anywhere, unless you send me away."
"Yes, it is necessary. I want you to know. But it has to be between us, because my children don't know it. Philippe doesn't know it."
"Ah, Philippe," he said. "I understand."
"Hear it first, and then see if you understand. Because it's been over thirty years, and I don't know if I do, not entirely."
He sat up and pulled me against him. "It's all right. Just tell it how you will."
I inhaled deeply, feeling as I did when I looked over that dizzying ledge on the roof of the Palais Garnier, only what met me below was a great beating heart instead of cold slush-streaked pavement. It's been a long time since I jumped, I thought. Now there are arms to catch me.
"It was the autumn of 1880, and I had just signed the first season's contract as a soprano at the National Opera. I'd only been out of the conservatory a short time. I had stopped by my dressing room to hang up a costume, and sat for a moment at my dressing table to freshen up. I heard something come from far away at first, the most wonderful singing, not quite a man's voice but it didn't sound like a woman's, either. I ran into the empty hall and looked right and left. Soon it filled my room, and I listened to it for several minutes, forgetting that I should be afraid. Then a voice came, so soft, and it called my name ..."
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Erik had taken Raoul to the Communard cells, and I sat alone in his staid rooms, looking into the fire that never went out. He had said that if I would only love him, he would do whatever I wanted. In my shock and horror, I had kept myself cold and distant. When he came after my body, I lay there like a corpse, unresistant, unmoving, trying as hard as I could to not feel or hear or smell the man pounding away at my flesh. When I glowed with desire the last time he covered me, it was not of my own will.
But could I give myself without reserve to that motley mass of tearful passion? If he thinks I will stay, if he thinks that I truly can be his "living wife," and not simply an unresponsive body, perhaps I can convince him to let Raoul go. Before, when I was tied to the chair and showed him my throat, it stemmed his anger. Perhaps I should now show him more than my throat.
I carefully undressed and wrapped up my nakedness in his embroidered silk robe. Undone, my hair fell all over my shoulders, for I remembering how moved he was by the sight of my hair. Then I sat on that old-fashioned curved Louis-Phillipe bed whose red mahogany gleamed in the lamplight, and waited for a long time.
The outside door scraped open. I called out that I was here, in the bedroom, and would he like to come in? He held himself up on the doorframe as he came into the room, breathing in great gasps. At first I thought it was because I was arrayed like an odalisque on the bed, but he clutched his leg as if some pain or pressure deep inside it refused to let him go.
He walked over to me slowly, looking at me as if he were dreaming and something had happened for which he had no plan, no scheme, no ready retort. His mouth moved senselessly, then he said, "He's safe." A great wave of pity came over me. I was the one sitting almost naked and defenseless on the bed, but his masked face was far more unclothed, more undone than any attitude of mine. His deep eyes searched my face for something, some meaning, some new explanation.
I held my arms out to him. He bent toward me, closer. "Take it off," I said quietly, lifting the lower flap of black silk away from his face. "You don't need it with me. Don't you think I know what you look like?" He shook his head a little, but didn't resist. "May I?" I asked, ready to drop the delicate flap at the least sign of hesitation on his part.
Finally he nodded, and I slipped it off. The band had cut a deep groove in the skin of his scalp and I rubbed it gently. Skin came off in flakes, and absently I brushed them away. He looked ill and exhausted, his skin whiter than I had ever seen. Two rosy circles glowed in the middle of his cheeks, and a faint sheen of sweat shone across his forehead.
"Don't burn this one," he said weakly.
"I won't," I answered. The mask was moist from his breath, and I laid it on my pillow. His head will rest there tonight. He'll seize my hair in his hands and clutch it all night the way a child clings to his mother's skirt. He will wind his limbs around mine and together we'll sink to the bottom of some turbulent mud ocean where the storms rage even more fiercely beneath the surface than above.
Gently I massaged around his mostly-bald head, rubbing the spots sore from the mask, stroking the few silver-black curls. He sat next to me on the bed and rested his head on my shoulder but didn't touch me otherwise. His body was so long that he bent over, and when he lowered his head into the cleft of my neck, I rubbed his wide shoulders lightly, feeling the rigid muscles shake underneath.
He was shivering, although the room was warm, warmer than it had ever been.
I kept waiting for him to demand to lie with me, but he just pressed his face into me, and when my arms went around him he gave a deep sigh. Then he took my face in both his hands, and a little fear flashed up, was he going to kiss me, or bite me? I tried not to flinch, afraid that if he did attempt to kiss my mouth and I shuddered or remained unmoved, that he would exact some terrible revenge, and so I opened my mouth a little, waiting for him to take it, but he did not.
His hot breath wafted over my chin, then my cheek, and suddenly, almost abruptly, he kissed me on the forehead, his teeth pressing me through the skin. Then his hard, almost lipless mouth softened, and his lips remained, unwilling to break the contact with the skin of my brow. He explored all around my forehead with his mouth, breathing in the scent of my hair, tasting my skin with his tongue rough and hot like a cat's.
It's all he wants. It's all he thinks he deserves, and to my astonishment, an enormous sadness at the malice and malingering of God overcame me, that his spirit should be mired in such a ruin. The tears flew from my eyes, and I began to sob with exhaustion, with pity, with terror, with love.
"Poor, miserable Erik," I said, and then he began to cry, too. He slid down over my body and off the bed in a kind of collapse. My bare feet dangled over the edge of the tall bed and he took them in his hands, caressing them with his face, crying on them and watering them with tears. Then with soft movements he brushed my feet with the long unkempt patchy locks that stuck out of the sides of his head, weeping tears and wiping. He held my tear-soaked feet in his hands and kissed them. His touch was not only hot, it burned, and I knew at once that he burned not from desire but from fever, hot and dry.
I stood up from the bed and let the robe slip from my shoulders down to my waist. He slid up to me, his flesh hot through his own clothes. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he reached with blind sorrowful fingers for the mask on the pillow. I pushed his hand out of the way, and this started a fresh flow from my eyes.
I cried for him, for me, for whatever horror and madness my life held from this point, for the child I suspected lay in my womb, and for the child on my bosom whose mother covered him up, who pushed him away, who drove him out.
He touched my nearest breast hesitantly, as if afraid of being slapped. I laid down on the bed and he crawled awkwardly in next to me, pulling his leg up and over with his hand. I offered my breast to him. My chest was wet from our sorrowing, and a teardrop balanced on the tip of my breast, his or mine, it didn't matter. He took both tear and tip into his mouth and held them there gently, not sucking, only resting, while I caressed the flaked and scaly top of his head.
His lips weren't fleshless after all, just inverted to the point that the soft pads barely emerged from the tight-drawn skin, and as he held my breast in his mouth I drew him toward me in a deep embrace. Under the fine linen of his shirt I could feel the sharpness of his bones, the ridged spine, the shoulders like axe-blades; the accordioned ribs, the muscle taut under the shirt. He was being consumed from within.
Never before had I, or probably anyone else, so tenderly stroked his flesh. He nestled next to me and I rubbed his arms and breast and back, everywhere I could reach. I pulled his loose shirt up and ran my hands up under, all around his back and shoulders. I did not desire him, but if he had wanted me, I would have opened to him and taken him in my arms. He lay quietly, with just a tiny tremor now and then. Then he seemed to sleep a little, for his breathing grew soft and regular, and his limbs relaxed until they rested on me heavily. I caressed his neck and the back of his head, feeling the coarse ripples of that fractured skin, my heart sorry and sad and consumed with tenderness all at the same time.
I closed my eyes and dozed too, never quite sunk into sleep, always aware of his arms around my waist and his head defenseless and buried in soft flesh. He breathed in the deep sleep of the completely exhausted.
I pulled his head, that hideous thing, tighter to my chest and gently rocked him back and forth. Later my own babies would hold my breast in the same way when they were all full of milk and sleep, just holding onto the end for comfort, for contact. As the babies slept, I would remember that stony room so long ago, when Erik ceased to be a terrifying man of unrelenting ugliness, and became simply a child at the source of life, holding on even in sleep.
I don't know how long we lay there, but my arms and legs were stiff when he finally began to stir. When his eyes opened again, he looked up at me without tears this time, for all the old ones had dried. One new wet bead still stood in the corner of my eye, so he wiped it and placed it in his mouth.
"Hold me," he said very low, and he shivered a little as he explored my face and neck with his mouth, then lay for a long time just stroking my hair, his face pillowed on my breasts.
Something quiet and final hung in the room, and I knew he wouldn't try to push open my legs or enter my body.
"I'm very tired," he said, after awhile.
"You need rest." I wondered if he'd had to carry Raoul, or had struggled with him.
"Rest will come soon enough." He said it with such finality that I feared for him a little.
"You made me promise not to kill myself. You have to promise the same."
"Erik won't kill himself. It won't be necessary. Nature is economical, and we all end up feeding her worms whether we hasten the process or not. That is, unless the pain is too great, and then Erik might elude her talons." He stroked my breast gently. "So soft. They're softer than when you let Erik hold them last."
I thought back to the first time he had taken them in the scales of his hands, weighing them like chicken fillets at the market. "I've put on flesh since. That's why they're softer."
Instead of answering, he closed his eyes and I could tell he was far away, in a liferaft adrift on the sea of his own thoughts. I barely heard him speak since his face muffled in my breasts again, but it sounded like he said, "Your boy will like that."
My boy? Did he mean the child I suspected of hiding under my heart? He couldn't mean Raoul, locked up until I somehow proved to Erik that even if I did not love him, I would show him tenderness. Then a little despair tugged at me, because I had lied to him about having my courses when I didn't. But since I'd lied, I didn't want to tell him otherwise, and anyway, no one really knew if a child grew in the womb until the mother felt it quicken.
I sighed and Erik nuzzled down further, still muttering into my flesh and barely audible. "He won't appreciate what Erik gives him. Boys are never appreciative. They don't understand the sacrifices others make for them. But I can be generous, even if Erik doesn't want to. I can show him," and on he went like that. He must be talking about his own father, I thought, and how he will do things differently when he has a son of his own.
Ignoring his odd murmurings was impossible. So I leaned over to listen more carefully as he mumbled. "It's not possible to keep them down here, even if Erik was generous. It would be tempting to visit them and watch them as they grew up together. It could be a sort of compromise. Then Erik could at least see, there would be some time to see, if nothing else," and he shook with a little private laugh. "But no. Birds need the air of the forest, not the fire in the bowels of the earth that fuels the iron trees of the jungle. Birds need sunlight and a life of their own. They want to ride in the park with the top down on the carriage and feel the wind in their faces. This is no place for them, even if they would let me keep them. If they would let me keep them both."
It was as if he argued with himself. "Erik would need a mask all the time. No, he wouldn't, because she's seen and she doesn't need it. But he hasn't, and how will he ever get used to it?"
I could bear it no longer. I shook him a little to dislodge him from his dream. "Erik. Listen to me. If we have a child, a son, you do not need to wear a mask for him."
He pulled me up and looked at me with the most anguish-filled eyes I will ever see, in this life or the next. All the dreamy relaxation of his sleep in my arms was gone, but he wasn't angry. He was sad. Tears filled his black eyes and rolled freely down his cheeks. "A son?" he said, with no sarcasm or bitterness, just exhausted sorrow. "There won't be a son, Christine. Everything's changed. There won't ever be a son."
"What are you talking about?" I put my hand towards his shoulder, but he waved me off. "I don't understand. I don't want you to wear a mask, and any child will not know his father's face to look any different. Children grow up with things and they get used to them." But my words made no mark on him as he hung his head silently and soaked the front of his own shirt with tears. Then fear seized me violently around the middle, and that which I had never let myself think of or see, slithered out like a snake that crawls out across the highway and stops the carriage, because the horses simply will go no further.
He thinks a child will look like him.
"No child of yours will ever wear a mask," I said firmly.
"Oh, God," he cried, his face in his hands now. "Don't make this any harder. As it is, it's like tearing off limbs. Good-bye, soft ones," he said, pulling my robe shut and patting the front. Then he whirled off the bed in a fit of violent agitation that almost made me lose my water, as I had when he first tied me to that chair. "No, Erik!" he shouted. "You cannot keep them both! The boy had to go no matter what, you always knew that. There was never any question of keeping them here together! They would sicken and die, I told you, or they would conspire together and kill you, not that it matters anymore anyway."
Up and down the room he marched, tearing at his clothes, dragging his wounded leg, stopping occasionally to grasp it and catch his breath. Then, as if some part of him had given up the struggle and slunk away in resigned surrender, he sank onto an ottoman and rested his head on his knees, breathing heavily.
I pulled his robe tighter around me, wishing I was dressed. Somehow he seemed colder, very far away. "The boy always had to go," he said quietly to his knees. "She will go with him too," and then my heart took a great confused leap, not wanting to believe it.
This was some new trick of madness or deception, some new test of loyalty. He was going to pretend to let me go with Raoul, then wheel on me if I showed myself at all anxious. Anger rose up in me, and I felt cheated out of the tender defenselessness that caressed us both when he lay in my arms. No wonder no one has loved him, I said coldly to myself. How could anyone, when he pulls them forward and pushes them back all at the same time? So this is the ploy. Well, it's not going to work this time.
He sat there for a long time, arms wrapped under his knees, gently rocking, while lightning flashes of feeling erupted through the clouds surrounding my heart. Then he looked up. He hesitated, but I could tell that he was calm now. "You still sit there?" he asked. "I thought this is what you wanted, that you would be out of the door like the horses at the Longchamps gate when they hear the crack of the bullet."
"Erik, don't mock me. What more do you want? This is just cruel, the worst mockery of all."
He rose up painfully. "It is no mockery, no jest. I thought you understood. I love you, Christine, and you don't love me. Erik cries inside at the thought, it's like being killed, but at least with death there is blackness and the end to pain, but while I live this anguish will never cease, that you don't love me."
I opened my mouth to speak, but he turned away. "Don't say it. That was not part of our bargain, that you would lie to me and say that."
"All right. I won't."
"Thank you. Leave me that shred of dignity as a man, at least. So why aren't you getting dressed?"
"If you wish me to, I will. Are we going somewhere?"
"You are going somewhere."
"Where, Erik?" I asked, choking down a rising anxiety.
"To the Communard cells."
The room grew dim. Oh dear God, was he going to lock me up in there too? How could he, after resting so trustingly on my breast? We were right back where we started, in the terrible dilemma of my fear of terror beyond imagining, and Raoul's life in the balance. He cannot lock me up in there. He can't. I don't care what I promised, or what I said, or even about Raoul's life anymore. This isn't like dying in a flash of smoke and fire. He couldn't do that, he couldn't, not lock me up in a windowless dark pit, to slowly go mad and die. The shards from that shattered basin are still in the waste can. I can get to one, I know I can. But he will not take me there.
Erik had showed me how to calm myself with long deep breaths before going on stage. I drew in a few long ones, and then breathed them out. "I won't go. You can't make me. I will fight you."
Astonished, he looked up. "But that's madness," he said, and he sounded so reasonable I laughed like a madwoman myself, a high mirthless shriek. "You don't love Erik," he said. "Why wouldn't you go?"
"What?" I wailed. "If I'm mad, you've driven me to it. Why would you lock me up in a cell? Isn't it enough that I am with you now, that I will stay with you here and honor my promise? Do you have so little regard for me, so little trust that you would do that?"
Wringing his hands, he stood before me. "Lock you in a cell? It's not to put you in one that I take you with me down there. It is to take someone out."
"What?" I said weakly, collapsing onto the bed. "You mean Raoul?"
He nodded.
"Why?"
"Because you love him. Erik saw you on the rooftop. He heard the boy when he was in the iron forest give you to Erik. Shall I let an almost-beardless youth show me up in matters of generosity?" The last part tore out of him, ragged and full of pain. "Unless you want to let him sit in there, of course. He can't be terribly comfortable, chained to the wall like that." Then he turned to me, ripped between sarcasm and tenderness. "I can't go get him alone. The Mazendaran perfume has worn off by now, and he would struggle. If I kill him, then that would serve as a severe impediment to our marriage, would it not?" His voice was dry and harsh. "If he kills me, then he wanders around down there, perhaps finding the way back, perhaps not, and there would be no hope for him should the others that roam this darkness track and find him."
Did he lie? How could I know? If he was indeed lying, he could stuff me in a living crypt, and there would be no refuge in a swift death. If he told the truth, one or the other of them might die, and even though Erik shook with fever and was weak, it would probably be Raoul.
He held his hand out to me, and I saw in my mind that first time he had tried to take my hand, when I had shrunk from the memory of its clammy coldness and its smell. I took his now, because there was no other choice than to trust him, and his flesh wasn't cold anyway. He pulled me towards him in a full and final embrace, and all on their own my arms went around him, and pulled him up to me. His chest was hard and flat and my tears wet it a little, because there was nothing else to do but trust him. There were no ribs to be felt on his side, just thin plates of muscle like hammered armor, the skin thickened in some spots, pitted in others.
"Don't," he said, and pulled my hand away from his side.
But I wanted to give him something more than that flat and fleshless hug. I took his face in my hands and drew it to mine. He wouldn't let me kiss his mouth. Turning away he said, "I can't bear it." My lips grazed the side of his forehead, and then he stopped and turned that long mournful face slowly to mine again. I kissed him on the brow and tasted salt, for he sweated heavily. He straightened up, staring at me as if seeing me for the first time. Then he turned away slowly, and even from an arm's length distant I could hear his heart break.
"I'll leave you to dress," he said in a voice toppled and broken, a tower struck by lightning collapsing into rubble.
(continued...)