Christine awoke alone the following morning, the space next to her made up neatly, as if by a benevolence passing through in the night. She sat up, the blankets sliding off her naked form as she floated her fingertips across the bed spread in dazed confusion. The sheets held only the ghost of heat, a small piece of the man she swore had made his home beside her. A hand wandered up to her mouth, as if it might find such warmth on her lips, as Christine recalled every individual bit of Erik's body like she was remembering herself— remembered how greedily she'd held all of it against her own. Remembered that, however strange and grave the circumstances of their not-coupling, she'd been the one shunting them both into that dark direction. And then she remembered that her husband was more than mere memory, but a man who made himself sick for the sake of touching his wife. Only then did the blind panic come, the one that threw her into the same salted and stinking dressing gown and nightshirt she'd worn for the last two nights without shame. On freezing toes, Christine flew down the stairs with a speed that surprised her—one that nearly stripped the lime wash from the hallway walls.
She found Erik in the sitting room, perched over the writing desk and fully dressed in a dark jacket and trousers, a coat hanging over those razor shoulders of his. Like the edges of a nightmare seeping into waking life, Christine noticed the edges of the old black mask hugging the angles of his face. A small terror came over her—it had been months since she'd last seen him with it, let alone in the privacy of their home. There was no happy reason Christine could come up with for its presence, and such potential for misery sapped her of the previous evening's golden thrum within moments.
"Good morning," Erik said after a long second, without bothering to look up from the piece of paper he'd been scratching away upon. "I've left you some coffee in the kitchen, my dear—although my little Marie-Antoinette has slept in so late that it might as well be ice." As he laughed to himself over his little joke, Christine felt her body tingle at his nickname for her, to say nothing of his clipped tone; dread—long departed—now came flying right back to roost.
"Good morning," Christine responded in turn, her hands fidgeting with the sash of her dressing gown. She watched for several moments longer as the muscles along his shoulders and upper back moved with his writing, transfixed and strangely terrified of what was to come next. What did one say in the face of such strange and awful walls? "You seem well."
"A testament to your deft hands," Erik muttered, as he folded the note in front of him, before jamming it into his coat pocket. Her deft hands—like he hadn't placed his own monstrous ones all over her, slid them into her very core like he owned it. Even with his back turned, her husband seemed to sense the blush rising in Christine's cheeks, for he suddenly slammed his hands against the desk, head stooped low. "Forgive me. I only speak of your judgment concerning last night's tea—you've a chemist's sensibilities. I thank you for your discretion, my dear." He said those last words with such reeking condescension that Christine had to suppress the urge to turn him around by the shoulders and shriek like the damned soul she was.
"Is that all you wish to speak of concerning last night, then," she asked instead, her face aglow with embarrassment. Erik said nothing, only tapping a long finger against the brazilwood of the furniture, the rhythm of which threw the grandfather clock's ticking into complete disarray. Faintly, she felt the overture of a magnificent headache.
"I wish for nothing," he finally answered. "Wishing is for children and fools. Tell me, Christine—are you either one?" When she refused to answer his nonsense, her mouth condensing into one thin line, Erik sighed. A gloved hand pressed its fingertips to the brow of the mask. "I am off to Paris for a couple of days. That is all. You will mind yourself while I am gone, please."
After letting her husband all but take her last night, Christine thought little could shock her; here, however, she paled. "You— what?" While Erik had been more than happy to leave her by her lonesome for a few spare hours here and there, he'd never given her such ample freedom as to abandon her for a few days—let alone in the middle of the woods, the enticing road which circled their house leading her to freedom. His pronunciation was dynamite.
"As I said—I am off to Paris," he repeated, turning around to face her, all the while folding his arms in front of his bony chest. Christine could not help but notice how tired he looked, his limbs clumsy and loose as a shield bug flying around the kitchen. "To tie up some loose ends on my part. I regret that I must go alone, as much as it would please Erik to have his pretty wife dripping off his arm."
Christine blinked again. Visions of his broken mouth, his serpent's tongue, running over body filled her head. "Erik—did I do something wrong, to have you acting like this?"
"Nothing," he shot back, too quickly and too loudly for her comfort. "You did nothing. Is that answer to your satisfaction?" When Christine noticeably bristled at his voice, the whole room seemed to sigh in tandem with her husband—like the house itself was exhausted by this fresh game. "Why don't you sit and write to your young man, my dear? Take up your trowel to your little sprouts and flowers? Go into town, make all of those peasants there envious of your smile. Only leave me to my own business, I tell you."
"I don't understand! Last night, you were perfectly happy to keep me close to you," Christine pressed on, closing the distance between the two of them—her, bleached by disbelief, him swaying on long feet like faded and forgotten laundry on the line. She grabbed Erik by the forearm with as much tender force as she could summon. "Erik, what is all of this about? Why are you wearing that dreadful thing?"
A loud, awful laugh filled the room. Golden eyes exploded into mortar shells.
"Perhaps Christine wishes for her husband to take his mask off, so that she might kiss him goodbye." Erik snapped, shaking off her hand like it was Death. "Alas, no! But fortunately, there are plenty of other places on his body that Erik's wife has no problem kissing—"
Though it failed to so much as dislodge Erik's mask, the slap that followed was loud enough that it frightened them both—her by how her once-soft palm was now imbued with every drop of the wretched man's malice and mistrust, him by the notion of his own natural awfulness. Both embarrassed by the long, rocky slide downwards they seemed to be traveling.
"I must go," Erik said after an eternity, a hand covering his face in splayed shock. His voice was a soft, shaking hiss, a snake writhing back to its awful den. "And I mean to depart alone. I've left you a little pin money on the desk, to spend yourself silly in my absence. Honor your vows and be a good wife."
And thus saying, he walked past her in a cold and clipped fashion that left Christine frozen with rage, before neatly snatching up a small valise by the foyer. The front door slammed shut, the lock—oh, the horrible, metallic groan of the thing—sliding into place with the brusqueness of a punch to the nose. And even though there was no conceivable way Erik could have trapped her in such a small, ordinary home, a long-forgotten burst of panic blew through the cracks of Christine's heart.
She stood statue still for some length, too shocked to cry, too angry to even watch as Erik marched down the little private path that would ultimately lead to Bourron-Marlotte and from there, freedom. He might as well have locked her five stories beneath the ground again—the mask, the sneering condescension, the strange, abstract language—to say nothing of the painful sensation that quivered through Christine every time she thought of what had transpired the previous night. Music fled. All was the groan of the wind, the creaking of the floor, the rustling of leaves in the distance. Even her own heart seemed to have quit with its sluggish banging.
It was only when her limbs began to ache that Christine remembered herself. Remembered that she was in a normal house, on a normal little road, and that there was no one there to lock her away, let alone touch her. She gathered herself up, wiping her nose, and tiptoed over to the desk in the corner; for a few minutes, she admired every single brass knob, counting every little nook, noting every knot in the brazilwood, before she could bring herself to look at the contents on its surface. Her humiliation blossoming, Christine realized that the pin money Erik promised was another one of his unpleasant jokes—for what lay upon the table were a near score of franc note bundles, each as thick as her wrist.
With mild, slow horror, Christine realized she had never seen such a ridiculous amount of actual money in her life, let alone sitting in her parlor with all the commonplace aura of a doily. For a woman like her, it was a life-changing amount—the sort of number that might let her live comfortably, if not frugally, for a decent chunk of what life Fate alloted to her; she picked up a single stack, took in the papery death rattle as she flicked through it, before carelessly dropping back to the desk. When it jostled a nearby catchall dish, Christine's eyes flicked back down. A folded piece of stationary sat catty-corner to the pile of the franc notes. With a shaking hand, she snatched the paper up and read the devil-scrawled sentence within:
Honor your vows.
There it was again—all of this talk of vows and honor, and for the life of Christine, she could only half-understand why. Had she not stayed? Had she not given Erik everything left to her—from her companionship to her body, with more than a little joy and tenderness? What of vows, when what passed for their wedding had been nothing more than Erik's hands sliding that cursed and lovely ring back onto Christine's finger, while she gagged on her own bitterness. She sank down to the carpet, clutching at a desk chair leg like it was her husband's. It had originally been a relief when Erik failed to materialize the grand wedding he'd painted for her, outside of the blood-wrung wedding dress—when he simply shoved that cursed band onto her little finger and said that his authority was enough. It was a gift then, to know that she wouldn't have to bear the extreme mortification of his grandiose visions—the Madeleine, the wedding mass, a false smile plastered to her face. To know that she would not have to wed him before anyone else—let alone before the presence of her own mind. And now Christine wondered if that curt gesture of a ceremony was because Erik had second-guessed himself—a contingency plan.
It was a strange feeling, realizing that someone was running away from you.
Does he love you so much, Christine? The agony in Raoul's question only now struck her fully, the memory of her reply—he would murder for me—galling in its irony, after her own treachery. If it was even treachery. Surely, a part of Christine whispered, she would have been right in killing her husband as he slept. And yet, Vicomte's question caused her to worry all over again, albeit in an entirely unexpected manner.
"I love you," her husband said, so many times the previous two nights that Christine pondered the inherent silliness of words themselves. I love you—she had always known, from the moment the angel had first begged for her devotion. I love you enough to take your own destiny out of your hands. I love you enough to kill us both. A faint nausea came over her, as every instance of the dread phrase falling from Erik's lips struck her. I love you, he whispered against her skin, wrapped in blankets and the kisses she'd left upon the planes of his neck. What motley he'd made from those words, of the very concept of love—foul and threatening, all the while his music gave her meaning. And now he had fled the house entirely, as if such humble and comfortable means were beneath him. Only a man could have the audacity to reckon her the perfidious one in their relationship—a joke.
Slowly, Christine rose to her feet. The air moving through the house was brisk, the slow death of autumn the blink of an eye away. She took in the little bucolic paintings hanging around the room, the soft Persian carpet beneath her feet, the gauzy curtains rising and keeling with the breeze. Her bride price, paid for in sunshine and shouting over the table. Every nasty and tragic and wonderful moment in her life had walked her to this embarrassment of bourgeois riches, and now that Erik had abandoned her, she wondered if that was all love was for most people—if they were lucky. A pile of things, and none as sweet as sincerity and reliability. She sat down at the piano bench, exhausted and finished.
Cry, that small voice said. You are allowed to cry. Cry and break every awful piece of porcelain in this house. Tear each lamp off the wall. Turn over the furniture. Let the house burn down to the ground and run. It droned on and on, this voice, so sweet and so like her own, so sure in the belief that ruination would be the only release from this miserable cycle of affection and agony. And what temptation there was—to destroy everything, to begin again with nothing, like a primordial godling crawling out from some egg laid at the beginning of time. Christine's lip bobbed and quivered. Her fingers twisted into her dressing gown as sharp and sure as bayonets. Every single object in the parlor, from the piano to the little chintz dishes and candlesticks, seemed to vibrate with sick life—as if begging her to end them, to show them mercy. A hand hovered in front of Christine, trembling—let this die—only to crash down upon the keys before her.
"This is my house, too," she said aloud, the piano ringing, her speech thick. "This is my house. And I will not ruin it because of a ghost." There was no sudden light that went off at her revelation, no cosmic phenomena to mark her words. There was only the smell of the coffee Erik had mentioned and the cool ivory keys beneath her fingertips—all as plain and mundane as Christine once dreamed her life might be. It was only a moment, after all. One moment in a chain of countless others that had come before, that would follow her to her grave. There was no spirit in the wallpaper or the end-tables. There was only a woman in desperate need of a bath, who'd left the garden unattended in her days-long foray with madness.
And so, Christine stood up, her shaking limbs regaining some of their old sturdiness, and went upstairs to the bedroom—to wash her face, to dress, to sink back into her own skin. In the moments that followed, she caught herself running a hand over the length of the mattress upon which her husband, only a handful of hours earlier, cleaved himself to her very being. And she remembered that her anger was her own and no one else's, as much the same as her own happiness.
#
The first few days of solitude passed in a bored stupor; there was little point in cooking for one person, when there was bread and wine—let alone fussing with dishes or sweeping a floor that had been swept over more times in the past month than Christine had celebrated her birthday. For better or worse, Erik's music and the strange mixture of ecstasy and torment it brought was gone; what little noise Christine made on her own left her with a detached feeling: the few pieces of Schubert she remembered how to play from her days at the Conservatoire were as disinteresting as the sound of her own breath. Even the flowers, beginning to wither under the mere thought of oncoming October, seemed to shy away from her touch.
The only sensations Christine felt with her whole body sprang from memory, like spring traps in a thicket—Erik's kiss upon her sex, Raoul's forehead under her palm. It was only in the middle of undressing for bed, a hand lazing down her body, that Christine fully recalled—realized, perhaps—that Erik had left her intact. Blood freezing, she was utterly stricken by this understanding; while those strange nights together bore the facade of coupling, they were still a sham. One that rocked her entirely, but a sham all the same. A funny thought—one's virtue being yet another lie. She remembered how her husband loved her with those poor bones of his, and wondered if it was all an ugly dare, the smell of money and ink filling the room.
He wants you to run.
But as she switched off the lamps and crawled into bed, Christine knew she would not. She thought of the Opera, the immense lies it represented outside of her own warped marriage, and laughed into the darkness. This world—their world—here was clean, hollow, and empty. And it was hers. And for once, she felt entitled to such blissful nothingness without any sense of shame.
That second night apart, Christine fell into a dream—or else, a distant memory came to make itself known, like an old and unpleasant family member who comes calling at the precise moment one is cherishing the quiet. It was not by the green chintz wallpaper covering the parlor that she knew it to be a fancy of sleep, nor was it the piercing glow of paraffin throwing itself across Mama Valerius's form as she began to nod off in the Professor's old armchair—one of the few relics of the old man they could afford to keep upon his passing. No, it was not the vision of their old flat by Buttes-Chaumont, which Christine found herself thinking of often in waking—the last place she might have been happy, before necessity required Mama Valerius sell it for smaller lodgings closer to the Opera. Rather, it was by the sound of a violin dispersing itself throughout the little flat like a malevolent fog, billowing out from her father's bedroom; it was the familiar and forgotten sawing of horsehair and rosin, poised only a thumbnail's distance between rustic genius and clumsy screeching. It was Papa's music, as unsettling and peculiar as she remembered it—the sort of music only dreams could begin to conjure—and it was closing in around the three of them like a cyclone, until a knock at the front door blasted through its spell.
Mama hardly stirred from her torpor at the intrusion, but Christine felt it in the same way certain folk could feel oncoming rain—perhaps that had been her greatest gift, knowing when she sat upon the precipice of horrible change; the violin had ceased, and all she heard was the sound of Agathe's murmurs as she went into the hallway to greet whoever came calling. In a few short moments, the door was shut again, the maid's little footsteps pattering down the smoky hallway with an urgency one could have hardly paid her to show otherwise.
"My goodness," laughed Mama, as Agathe nearly tumbled across the parlor in her haste. "What stomping, my little dear! What is this, the zoo?"
"A message for Miss Daae," Agathe said with a perfunctory curtsy, a crooked smile pushing through her usually pinched face as she held out a thick envelope in her trembling hands. Even her father's playing had ceased, the flat as calm and charged as the eye of a storm. Christine turned upon her little stool, felt her eyes go so wide that the little spheres themselves might have rolled out of their sockets—a missed blessing that it never happened. Anything that might have spared her what followed. For though Mama wept jubilant tears as Christine opened the letter and read it out loud, her wrinkled hand weaving its way into one of Agathe's, there was a pervasive current roaring down her own blood—as oppressive and terrifying as the music that filled the apartment only moments earlier.
"You must go tell your father the news immediately," said Mama, dabbing at her eyes, pretending that she did not understand the dread worming its way into the room. "How delighted and proud of you he will be! How happy my Magnus would have been—after all of those hours of long, hard work! Go to him, my child!" And despite the old woman's enthusiasm, it was not lost upon Christine when she refused to follow the young girl out of the room. When she reached the end of the hallway, Christine knocked as softly as she could manage, hoping with all her heart that Papa was resting or too worn out from coughing to open the door. Yet after a long moment, he appeared before her, cheeks gaunt, whiskers curling in thousands of directions, eyes wild.
"What is it, lillan, " Papa rasped as he welcomed her into the bedroom, eyes narrowing in the manner one unusually reserved for a landlord or a tax collecter—not a terrified seventeen-year-old. He knew . He always knew. Whether she had left the apartment to go stare into temptation at the shop windows along the Marais, or had skipped voice lessons to go sit in the park and swoon over the little Roman temple therein—Papa knew whenever she had disobeyed. Whenever she had turned away from the music that spurred them onward. Do you mean to leave me alone? Are you so eager to join your Mama? Even in the dream, the taste of mushrooms found its way into her mouth.
"It's the Conservatoire," Christine breathed, lowering herself into the plain chair crammed into the opposite end of the room, like she was delivering news of death itself, as Papa sat on his little bed. "They've accepted my application for the coming term." For a long moment, the only noise was the refrain of Papa's winded breath, the sound of pots and pans clanging and screeching out from the apartment beneath them. There was a brief instance where Christine thought he might clap her around the shoulder and congratulate her, as he might have done only a few short years earlier.
"That is well and good," he said, throwing his slippered feet on the bedsheets sullenly. "I am happy for you. And I expect you to do well enough by them and their own ideas of art. But I will tell you this once, and only once—theirs is a music of conscription and vanity. To them, you will be little more than a soldier, however decorated you might be. And what are the grapes of wrath besides fodder for the press? Do not go into such music lightly, or you will be lost." She remembered how hard she had tried not to feel disappointed—how she patted her papa's paling, clammy hand and nodded through the advance of bitter tears.
"Of course, Papa," she whispered.
"Always remember me and your mother," he said, looking at the wall and resuming his violin—the only true child who bent to his will, Christine realized some years later. "And you will remember your art. And if you have truly done as I've asked, the Angel of Music Himself shall reward us both." And thus saying, Papa continued away at his fiddle, already shrouded in the hospice it offered—a comfort Christine could never hope to understand. How did she not know then that he was dying, by the way he played—like each note was one last, pleading breath for mercy? Was it only because she had grown accustomed to it, molded herself around it—if only to make her Papa happy? Perhaps , Christine realized as she mechanically shut the bedroom door behind herself, the same tears she had dreamed of a hundred times over running down her face again. Mama could hardly look her in the eye by the time she returned to the parlor, face as long as an open grave—and all the while Papa's dirges wreathed around the little ramshackle family like thorns.
It was the same then as it was now: How Christine longed for the music of life.
—
She woke the next morning with Papa's plaintive song still buzzing in her ears, the calamity of trapped boredom and Biblical purpose coiled around her body like wire. The sunshine spilling across Erik's pillow was too bright, and was with the mildest of shock that she watched her fist collide neatly with it, feathers spraying her in the face. It was somewhere in this hateful dance that Christine worked out her vexation—that she was smacked by the revelation that her husband was a coward. It was one thing to be conniving and duplicitous. It was another to be cruel and cold. But to run away from her, the moment that happiness finally managed to show itself to them—that was the final insult.
Instead of sulking, however, Christine resolved to walk into town—her fear that Erik might spring upon her long gone as his money jingled in her reticule—and committed all of the little wonders she might have were she a free woman: staring at a bolt of deliciously buttery silk for hours, a dress that lived in her imagination taking on new life. Drinking enough sherry at the little bistro to kill a small animal, the whole time wondering what had happened to the pimply waiter who had waited on her months earlier. Laughing when she realized she did not care to know at all. Walking home with a bottle of the nicest bottle of wine she could find in Bourron-Marlotte tucked under her arm, her boots splattering in the mud all the while. It was a miracle she hadn't wandered into the woods, or else been struck by a carriage, how crudely she loped home. And yet, what a way to die! A young woman, unescorted, turning the heads of every nosy set of eyes in the village, drunkenly flashing her wedding ring like it was nothing more than a joke. There Christine was, the mistress of her own actions, for once in her own little life, no better than any common trollop and still her most perfect self.
She knew only a small piece of Erik's life, but there were enough bits and pieces of the man he once was bubbling under that skin of his to make a guess of it; in watching him long enough, from across the dinner table or as he read to himself, she could begin to imagine a point in his past where her husband might have felt similarly. A point where he laughed easily at the nothingness of the world, the nothingness of everything—the confines of existence mundane and stupid and small, despite his own peculiarity. Why worry about things like wedding masses and ironing, the stares of strangers. Why at all, when their grotesque relationship was beyond most understanding, including their own.
As the house came into Christine's view, she found herself wondering what her afternoon in Bourron-Marlotte might have looked like with her terrible Erik remaining by her side. What it might be like to laugh together over the fussy old women who watched the curbs like peregrines as the two of them drank themselves silly. What it might be like to argue lightly over the cost of fabric and new shoes, to cow him into surrender over her smallest caprices. She felt a pull through her whole body, like the very fabric of tendon and gristle within was being unraveled. It was the sensation of useless shame fleeing into the ether. Kissing Erik had once seemed horrible, hadn't it? Yet while the memory of his lips still made her body tense and quiver, it was with a different sort of sensation—a sadness, a grief. A longing for all the banal and pleasant pieces of being alive that circumstances had not alloted to either of them.
The notion followed Christine as she unlocked the front door, chasing her into the parlor, where she crumpled onto the couch, shopping pressed against her lap like a small dog or a baby. It teased her as she gagged down dinner, the sherry reminding her of its sick presence. It tormented her as she smelled herself, realizing how much she'd been neglecting her own happiness while she worried over disappointing men. Too tired to boil water and lug endless buckets upstairs, she snatched the copper tub sitting uselessly in a corner of the kitchen and dragged it before the massive fireplace. As she waited for the water to warm, Christine uncorked the bottle of wine she'd bought that afternoon and thought of everything and nothing. The pimply waiter. The gurgling and crying men from behind Erik's walls. Her Papa promising his daughter missives from the beyond. Such a bevy of ghosts chasing her about—and none that could even sing half so well as the man she married. All that agony, all that wretchedness—she'd given all of herself to that and more, with nothing left to show but a puking husband who ran away from her embrace.
You married an absolute coward, Christine thought as she finally slid into the tub, the kitchen hearth making gold out of her body. Such revelation was, perhaps, the most foolish and humbling quality of her whole marriage. She sloshed and bullied the water around her in shame, like a child kicking at rocks. But if you can make him weak, you might yet make him brave. It is your marriage, too.
It was a foolish thought—one wrapped in so many hurtful questions, with nothing but half-answers—but it sat sweet as honey on the tip of Christine's tongue. With each pull from the bottle, such insanity took root in something real and true, something deep within her very being. By the time the water had cooled, her gooseflesh a noticeable but pale imitation of Erik's own skin, Christine knew what must be done. Knew how to sever the cord which kept them both tethered to relentless misery. Knew that she must embrace the last lifeline her husband flung at her, like a key to a different, easier existence—if only for their own happiness.
It was time to write the Vicomte.
#
Christine awoke the next morning, eyes crusted over, ink stains posing as stigmata on her hands. For a long moment, she tried to forget her light headache by basking in the scent of soap and linen, indulging in the warmth of her bed; the rain drumming against the window stirred something in her blood. Something soft and sweet and strangely melancholy—the music of an old, forgotten memory, old enough that it had been scrubbed of pain. The fleshy palm of someone who loved her smoothing back an errant curl. The smell of fresh greasepaint and body powder. She lay swaddled in that sensation, remembering the small bits of loveliness that had passed her by, that were to come—and then she thought of her letter, dashed off under the ramshackle guidance of wine, crammed into the bedside table drawer like a filthy joke. The Vicomte stood before her, a windswept and smiling boy, guiding her by the elbow as the two of them gamboled around the rosy cobbles of Ploumanac'h, the ocean nothing but endless opportunity stretched before them.
It was with even greater pain that Christine saw him again as a young man, or, at least, the broken remains of himself chained to a wall meters under the dirt— wrists pinioned behind his back, pleading with her to reconsider the grave and unfortunate choice she had made for them all. There, too, was Erik, looming over her shoulder throughout the whole freakish goodbye, unboastful and strangely quiet for once. The lantern swayed in his hands, and, oh, how she wanted to throttle him for even having the audacity to tremble. Christine had never despised the corpse so much as she did in that moment—not just for the nonsensical, lugubrious pain he inflicted on others, but for the way he simpered in the corner the moment someone was there to send him even the slightest measure of disdain. They were all here because of the monster's machinations, and now was the only moment where Erik actually made himself an honest shadow—quiet, obsequious to the motions of another. A coward.
"What has he done to you," Raoul shouted, the lonely light of her oil lamp little more than a pittance in the darkness of the cell he'd been tossed in. Tears had carved out channels in the dirt caked to his wan face, writing out his disbelief. "Christine—I don't understand? How could you?"
"It is not what he has done to me," she'd said, feeling herself diminished by full inches. "It's what I have done." To him. To you. To myself.
"I would rather be dead than see you married to him," Raoul moaned, as if his own demise would not have meant the ruin of them all. It occurred then to Christine that all of the men who had ever inserted themselves in her life intimated similar thoughts. Erik had said as much days earlier—I wish you had killed me. And then, at the first sign of happiness, of some revelation she couldn't quite label, he'd abandoned her to their cottage. Papa talked and talked of the Angel of Music, how the spirit would take care of her and usher her to glory after he was dead. Perhaps that was the curse—or just the nature of things. That all men wanted to run the moment she began to understand herself.
Christine pondered this revelation the whole long day, as she rinsed out her rank mouth, as she righted upturned furniture, as she set the kitchen table for two out of pure muscle memory. While going about her lonesomeness, Christine noticed the copper tub was still sitting before the hearth, the bathwater from last night now cold and oleaginous as old soup; throwing open the back door, she dragged the heavy and cursed thing until one end poked out from beneath the timbered lintel. While catching her breath, a soft glittering along the water's surface caught Christine's eye—a galaxy of dead skin and shed hair swirling together in strange communion, as if to say you are as much us as you are not us. We are the remains of yesterday's you—a you that no longer exists.
Christine would have kicked the rusted thing in annoyance, for it was as if Erik was whispering his nonsense in her ear—filthy water that talked, bronze grasshoppers that threatened and menaced. But she supposed it was better to be made silly from a bath, rather than break a toe—and thus, with the last scrap of energy she could summon, she lifted the tub and spilt the leftovers of herself into the yard, watching in grim satisfaction as the stew made mud out of the earth.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she noticed how the rain had made utter chaos of her garden—how it bent and battered the flowering kale, how it desecrated the already battered petunias and Black-eyed Susans without a second thought, how the vines of verdant ivy clung to the walls with their very life. A younger Christine might have wept over such natural destruction; this Christine, however, sighed and folded her arms while thinking of the spring ahead, before shutting the door behind her and crossing to the front of the house. The plants there were hardier there—stinking bugbane, sprawling iris, purple-tipped fingers of wild hyssop; the rain lashed down upon them with all its fury, and yet they rested safe in endurance's cradle. She pulled a little ottoman up to the parlor window and sat at a hollow loss, elbows resting clumsily on the sill. She felt her eyelids flicker downwards, felt the weight of sleep coming upon her, and let her chin rest upon her forearms.
"What has he done to you?" Christine could scarcely understand. If she were truthful, perhaps the honest question would be to ask what the world had done to her—as surely as her husband had not always been the terrified and awful shell of something once good. It hurt to think of them both in that way, as lesser versions of themselves, haphazardly smashing against one another in some desperate attempt to feel human. It hurt to think of Raoul and the happy boy he'd once been, destroyed in the wake of what the two of them had done to one another. It hurt to think of Papa, a stranger in his own existence, whose only joy after the death of his wife and the re-molding of his child was in his music. Even Mama Valerius herself once entertained designs for the stage, for her own lovely contralto, that were ultimately dashed into pieces upon marriage.
Oh, to be a flower, Christine thought, the storm against the window something like a lullaby. To live and die, and live and die again. To know your season, to let it pass without complaint. To trust that the world will right itself again, somehow. Loneliness had made a poet of her, amongst other things; it had made her wrathful and hungry, a spirit roaming the hallways of an empty house in want of release. It had made her kiss a man she hated, made her take his body into her mouth. It had smashed and reshaped every bit of her, time and time again—from when the Valeriuses first took pity on a poor old man and the ragged wretch he called his daughter, to the shaking boy dripping with sea water and smiles, twisting a red scarf in his hands. How she acquiesced. How she still thrived when they all finally departed. What was the Angel of Music but the crowning achievement of solitude's deft hands? One untethered boat mooring into another. Two sets of roots twining around each other in the meager soil allotted to them.
What has he done to you?
Lightning cracked in the distance, answered by the call of consorting thunder. A turbulent and perfect marriage that shook the windows and raised every single hair on Christine's arms. She opened her eyes, only to nearly fall backwards onto the floor from her perch; there by the front gate of the house stood Erik, a long lashing of ink amidst a canvas of trees. Despite the distance, those golden eyes found hers immediately, staring in wonder and hunger, as if he had not eaten the whole time since he'd first departed. Christine felt herself rise to her feet, a palm pressing against the window, as if she might smear him out of existence with a wipe of her hand. Erik ripped off his mask, hurrying down the path to the front door with a fluid pace that both frightened and dazzled her; as he crossed up to the doorway, every contusion and malformation on that face seemed to throb with life, the flesh honest. She waited for him to yell at her—his emotion was written across those strange features as plainly as surprise was on hers, the struggle between human anger and bodily discord fascinating and frightening. Yet he said nothing, only gliding across the floor, coat dripping, until the two of them were backed against the wall of the foyer. A long hand perched itself on the stonework, mere inches away from Christine's face, while the rest of that body hovered above her own. Dimly, she heard the sound of her husband's valise crashing to the ground.
"You're here," Erik said, his voice flat, bereft of blood. The rain beat against the roof, loud enough to drown out the panicked beating of Christine's heart. She was on the edge of something grand—an absurd thought, considering how the last year of her life felt like one long and painful fall into hell. But here, now, in the little foyer, she surveyed all of it like an eagle lazing on a current.
"I am here," Christine answered, unblinking and unafraid, jostled onward by a mixture of exasperation and homecoming. For a moment, the tragic pair went still, each daring the other—to fight, to cry, to say aloud all of the awful thoughts that drifted through their conscience over the past week. Him stooped over, her as tall as her little frame would allow. Erik leaned in closer to her, and she caught a wild tang mantling his body, seeping from his clothes—the idea of sodden wool and sweat, along with the scent of life and rot that permeates any healthy forest. Its appeal was hard to describe, only that it reminded her of the little garden out back. The best of her days on the road with Papa. The wind gasped through the entrance, whistling through the lintel as a surge of rainfall ripped into them both.
"The floor," she murmured, wide eyes never leaving the awful face inches from hers. "The rain—it will ruin—"
Erik laughed suddenly, peeling off his Ulster coat and tossing it to the ground. "Yes, yes," he said. "What about the god-damned floor?" And with one fluid kick of his right leg, the front door slammed shut. There her husband stood, all of the adoration and disbelief dripping off him with the rain itself. "Christine stands before me, as beautiful and miraculous as the Virgin herself, and worries about the floor. What a lark! Now give your husband a kiss—he has missed you terribly." And here he pressed against her, eyes wild and brimming with defiance, as if willing her to fight. The grin on his face was stilted, the corner of his mouth crooked and sharp like a butcher hook.
And for a moment, Christine almost did. In her mind's eye, she saw herself giving Erik the rejection he so desperately wanted. Saw herself fleeing down the hallway on bare feet to take refuge in the pantry, while he hissed at her and cursed her cunt—or worse—cried. Heard his knees, hard and round stone fruit pits, clashing against the floor as he begged to enrobe her in his dark and desperate pith. I would give up the night itself this vision said, his heart unraveling before her eyes, if only you would love me as I love you. And Christine would comply, exhausted and starving as she was for even the barest trace of the feelings he promised her—however sanguine and Stygian their conjuror. Run from me, if only so that I might catch you.
It would have been quite easy, Christine thought—Erik taking her against the wall, hands wrapped around her neck. Erik claiming her right there on the soaking wet floor, mud and all, or else on the Persian rug in the parlor. Her mouth went dry, thinking of her husband like that—stinking and steaming, sitting atop her mons like a king, the plush pile of a distant world digging into her back. Him carrying her into the kitchen and—here Christine blushed— fucking her, as he liked to say. Devouring her right on the massive table within. It all came back to the kitchen, in the end—her betrayals, his broken admissions, the way the two of them could only consume and be consumed alike by the other.
But Erik was her husband, and this house belonged to them both. And, for once, Christine felt the slowness of time. For once, she felt like she was no longer living solely to survive—that there was no longer a long dirt road ahead of her and little else. That there was more to look forward to than hard beds and hard faces. That not all sweetness was fleeting or untouchable. Pain was inevitable, but it now seemed as distant as the sea. And with pain departed, the awesome void before them both no longer frightened her. There was time to plunder such strange and forceful depths, together.
And so Christine kissed her husband, right there on the sopping and muddy floor; perhaps the rain cast everything in the veneer of melancholy, and perhaps he stank from the road, but it was a kiss unfettered by the bonds of deceit, unclouded by the bloom of drugs—honest and awkward, like they were nothing more than children trying to catch a glimpse of some new phase of life. That tongue of his, once so wicked and languid against her own under the influence of fungi, was now mild and devout. A worshipping soul experiencing plain and powerful awe after years of fruitless devotion. Erik ran it along her bottom lip with all the care a man like him could muster, like he was writing her some message, before Christine took it into her mouth entirely. She gave the tissue an earnest, if not clumsy, suckle, and could have screamed with delight at the poor man's response—the way he writhed and gasped and yelled like a dog, before pushing himself away in broken heat.
"My beautiful wife," Erik shuddered, his voice as slick and lovely as the sweetness pooling between Christine's legs. The young woman closed her eyes, if only because she was scared of the reflection she might catch in her husband's gaze. Twin images of want, she imagined, just as she felt his warped mouth below her left ear. "My awful, awful wife." Before she could so much as bristle at his insult, Christine was stunned by a long lick gracefully swathing its way from the pulse point at her jaw to the very crest of her clavicle, a blade's blessing. "My awful, foolish wife," he sighed in velvet, before repeating the gesture on the opposite side of her décolletage. "My Christine, who kisses her Erik like that and doesn't run away." A hand, shaking with lust and hope, traced the lines of saliva glistening on Christine's neck, like it was admiring a rope of diamonds. "My awful and foolish Christine." An arm, all sinew and silk, curled around her waist, snatching at her attention.
"Christine," that voice breathed—the beginning and ending to all of the heartache and pain she'd been put through. As the sharp and relentless planes of that body closed in against hers, she felt her nipples harden beneath her tea dress, felt herself blushing as the telltale pulse of ruination overcame her. The fulcrum that was her desire, the very balance point that sent her plummeting to the lowest depths possible, now seemed to lift her skyward. "Look at me, my darling girl. How your Erik has dreamt of your face all week."
As her eyes fluttered open, Christine readied herself for all of the old, terrible emotions to come to their own nasty conclusion. What she saw, however, took what little breath was left to her away. For there was Erik staring into her very being, a sentiment written across his features that almost shocked her with its novelty; it contorted the face she'd gotten used to into something entirely new and enthralling, in spite of its undeniable outward ugliness. "How quickly she responds to me now," he said, lips twitching, fingers curling against her cheek. It was then she realized that he was smiling, in forthright adoration. And—God damn her to the ninth ring of Hell, if He hadn't already—she smiled back at him.
"Lost," Erik murmured again, unbuttoning her collar with an ease that might have otherwise frightened her, showering her now-exposed collarbone with his affections. He was not quite singing, yet there was still an uncanny sort of musicality to his mantra—like wind over the lip of a bottle. Solemn and devoted, the end of a midnight mass. Christine supposed there was some unspoken truth to his chanting—how else to explain the want, the disappointment, the full-throated anticipation? "You are lost, lost, lost."
"So you say," Christine sighed. At this, her husband paused and regarded his wife, eyes shining apprehensively through the drizzled din; for a quiet moment, they stared at one another knowingly, the razor thin line between communion and chaos vibrating like a cello string. "Erik," she continued, her own hand lifting to graze above his heart. "If that's what you believe, then why don't you find me?"
"Christine speaks in riddles," he said, a confused laugh casting shadows on both of their confidence. "Alas, but her poor husband is growing old and tired." His mouth resumed its life's mission. "She must tell him what she wants."
"I want—," she gasped, between the lopsided and pluvious kisses Erik planted along her neck, her hands tearing at his waistcoat. "I want you to take me upstairs, Erik." She felt him pause in his ministrations, his breathing ragged, hands conjuring nervous circles alongside her waist. A flash of blind panic almost overtook the young woman, a sick wonder at her own words flooding her being. Christine waited for him to say something awful—to push her aside, to accuse her of mockery or plotting. When there was only silence, she said a quick prayer for her courage, enough to split between them both. "Yes, Erik. I want you to take me to bed." Though his lips remained at her throat, Christine felt the hand at her waist slide down, disappearing into the nothingness around them.
"There is something else you want," he responded. When Christine did not answer immediately, Erik turned out of her embrace, head stooping in defeat. "Come, come—have it out now. Tell your husband. Christine must want something from her old corpse, or else why does she not run?"
What did she want? Why did she not run? They were the little quandaries that had dogged Christine all week, that sat on her heart from the moment she flung herself into insanity and accepted Erik's tragic proposal. She thought of poor, dead Mama Valerius, warning a younger version of herself to take care around the dancers at the Opera—telling her that the foyer de la danse was little more than a rabbit warren and La Sorelli its fattest doe; those words set upon her almost daily as she traversed those long corridors, shrieking and slashing at her conscience like a magpie; the offensive, glittering creatures she once hurried past were now nothing more or less than other young women: some bending to the duress of money and men, the lucky few chasing their own happiness.
What has he done to you?
How droll it was—that paranoia, that iciness—when Christine was now lost to the woods and the little den they shared therein, her buck having touched her in ways that would make those ballet rats scream with scandalized delight. How tragic that it had been Mama who encouraged the belief in the angel, who now lapped at Christine's throat like she was made from honey. How deeply sad that even the most sincere affection she could offer her husband was met with disbelief and suspicion. But Destiny loomed thick in the air, and Christine was finally ready to give herself over to it.
"I want you to take me to bed," she repeated, the palm against his ribs shaking as she tried her best to strangle the quaver in her voice. "But under two conditions, and only after they have been completed." Christine heard his fist beat against the wall in agitation, felt the floor tremble beneath the soles of her feet.
"Speak, then." Ah, yes. There was the man she had always known.
"The first—I want you to make me a glass of tea," she blurted out, her hand unconsciously stroking where Erik had touched her only moments ago. A deep breath followed, the last sparking bit of wick before the impending explosion. "The special tea." The pits of Erik's eyes sockets widened into dumbstruck gyres—a dare. She thought of her own strength, the stone foundations of the house, and her voice. "The second: I have written a letter to the Vicomte, just as you've insisted. And I want you to read it."
"Christine," Erik murmured sadly, his fingertips flying to the massacre of his face. Oh, how quickly he crumbled the moment she made herself known. How submissive and raw the man became at the precipice of great change. "I will grant you the second request, even if it means my ruin—if only because I promised you. And Erik seldom makes promises." Christine's heart rippled, her mind's eye conjuring the same outcomes flying through her husband's, all discord and salted earth and violent goodbyes. And in that moment, she felt the same earnest pity which compelled her to marry a monster in the first place. Those irregularities he called hands, holding onto the front of her wedding dress for dear life. The staccato of his harsh, exhausted tears. The natural conclusions to so much useless awfulness. "But to hurt you in such a manner. I don't understand—"
Christine sighed, loudly and rudely enough that Erik stopped in his protestations and debasements of both of their faculties. She cared little for such dramatics now and yearned for the bald truth. Craved it. Would live the rest of her life in want of it. And it was time to say her piece, lest she be lost to lies and half-hearted smiles for the rest of her life.
"I will go upstairs," Christine continued, grasping her husband's chin as gently as she could muster, willing him to tilt his face back to hers. "And I shall change into my nightclothes and fetch you my letter. And when I return to the parlor, my tea will be ready and waiting for me. And I will drink it, because I trust you." A soft gasp interrupted her words. Gold filled her vision. As she ran her index finger across one of the countless, tragic divots in his jaw, Christine felt, rather than heard, the thick swallow that followed. "And you, in turn, will read every single word of mine out loud, so that we may both hear what I have to say. " And with a boldness that surprised them both, her unoccupied hand reached out to palm Erik in that most grotesque and fascinating spot tormenting them both.
A stifled gasp ripped from Erik's lungs, his body almost lurching into the grandfather clock in the corner of the room; an expensive heirloom, to be sure, but Christine would have smashed every precious thing in their home, if it meant watching the wretch crumple like that. Palms sweating, thighs shaking, Christine released her hold on her husband and turned on her feet. Bravery, she was beginning to understand, was seldom complicated. She had seen it in Erik, as he implored her to abandon him to his cellar, all the while weeping into her skirts. She had felt it in herself—a strange power that made men say yes to her demands, without the need to lie or cheat. It was a sad and rare alchemy of honesty and confidence, but both components were unmistakable and mundane. Much in the way that making music was fundamentally not so complicated: nothing more than air and a level, determined head and time.
But unlike music—the master that siloed them both off from a normal life, that sent them swiftly to their best and worst selves—bravery was a new art. And the two of them would have to practice it together.