No More Gifts
"The Opera"
(Part IV)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ'S (SECOND) JOURNAL

"Erik!" I whispered, yanking him backwards. "There are other people in here!"

Erik blinked at me twice, before peering over his shoulder to look back out at the two people who'd apparently been sitting in the second row of Box Seven this entire time. They were a pair of widows, or so I assumed, for they both had dark tulle veils swaddled about their faces and wore these unfashionable dresses that were so black they nearly melted into the shadows of the box around them. One was old and one was young, as told by their hair, and both sat with a posture so rigid I humored myself to wonder if they might be made of porcelain rather than flesh. I could not tell if they had listened to a word either Erik or I had said, for they faced the stage with such great stoic attentiveness that I figured they were either too invested in the plot occurring down below or were otherwise too polite to admit to overhearing such an intimate exchange.

After making his own lengthy study of these two patrons with whom we apparently shared a box with, though, Erik turned back to me and blinked once again, staring at me vacantly for another excruciatingly long period of time before finally answering: "Well, did you expect me to buy out the entire box?"

Considering, to the best of my knowledge, that he had not actually purchased the tickets we held? "Honestly, yes."

This irked him, for I could see his tense fingers squeezing at the velvet of the curtain still snatched in his grasp. "Did I not tell you we were to play pretend as a normal couple, Christine? Just while we are in this box, I said. Let us attend this opera and pretend we are normal, just for tonight, I said. Let me not be a ghost. Let me not be a phantom. Understand that this is all I have ever wanted to be: something less than phenomenal. Remember that normal people do not buy out an entire box when they attend an opera. They mingle with the rest of Paris, and they let themselves be seen by others. Let us be seen, Christine. Just for tonight. Could you be willing to try? I trust it is not so much to ask… there is nothing really to fear from the Parisian gaze, nothing at all, especially if you know how to alter a mind's perception of a thing that's put right in front of it. Recall that I am the first magician in the world and I can work wonders beyond your realm of understanding. Only trust me, Christine, and let us enter into this illusion together."

I knew I had no say in the matter, of course, and Erik knew it as well, for he did not wait for my answer before grabbing up my wrist once again to pull me out to the box's bay. I waved awkwardly as we crept by the two stoic widows, hoping to smooth over our interruption, and for good measure added in a courteous, "Good evening, excuse us…"

"Shush!" Erik hushed me harshly, louder than I had spoken. "They're trying to enjoy a show, if you wouldn't mind not bothering them!"

Suitably chastised, I took my seat in the row in front of them and tried not to feel their glances upon my back. They were looking at me, I thought, but were they actually upset at my disruption? I would have liked to think they were not! I, personally, would not have been bothered by such an inconsequential thing as a couple quietly taking their seats during a performance!

…Or perhaps I would? Suddenly I feared their vexation, imagined though it must have been, and I felt my stomach turn over at the thought. How could I bear to share a box for the next several hours with these two women who already so clearly detested me? No part of me wanted to remain in that box; no part of me wanted to remain in that chair while they burned holes in the back of my head with their combined total of eight eyes (both women were wearing spectacles – of the most useless prescriptions I might add, as I noted in my inspection of them later on that night). How I wished I could have left – disappeared – died, right there!

But at least they weren't looking at Erik, who I knew wouldn't have been able to handle the contempt, especially after the incident in the corridor. Thankful for that at least, I put my hand down on the armrest between us and offered it to him silently…

"Oh! Is Erik taking up too much room?" he asked, shifting away from me. "Does Christine need more space?"

Somehow I resisted the urge to sigh. "No, Erik. I just want to hold your hand."

"My hand?" he said, as if it were the most foreign concept in the world. Then he settled a bit, seeming to understand. "Is your hand very tense, my love? Would you like me to massage it for you?"

As much as I loved Erik's massages, hands and elsewhere, I was growing quite exasperated with him at this point. "Why must every little pleasantry I attempt with you devolve into such a pain?"

"I pain you?" he asked, entirely dumbfounded.

I was about to retort back with something cruel but honest, when suddenly I caught a steel glare in his eye, marring his perfectly stupid expression. Yes… from behind his innocence, there was the clear, sharp warning:

Remember your promise.

"I – I misspoke, dear," I therefore said. "My hand hurts. It - it is what pains me, you see? I only meant that it has a cramp, and that is what pains me, not you. Hold my hand and make it feel better, in that gentle way you do."

"But Erik is never gentle," he chided me. "You must try to be more convincing if you're going to lie to your poor husband."

Ah! What was I to do now? It seemed that all my efforts with him were to be futile on this front. I had tried subtlety; I had tried reason; I had tried fakery. Nothing worked. Nothing would convince him to hold my hand.

Except perhaps… force?

It would be dangerous, I knew. I had tried force with him before and it ended quite disastrously. But that was a different time. Perhaps I hadn't tried hard enough back then. Perhaps I just needed to be a little more assertive…

His hands were folded in his lap, two stacks of bone layered one on top of the other. I eyed the pile of them carefully, like a cat stalking its prey, before lifting my hand and pouncing on them with such speed he hardly had the time to move his hands out of my grasp.

But move them he did! And with those piles of bones freshly dug up and exhumed, my hand was sent down into the spot of their vacant grave – down, until at the very bottom of the plot I scraped my fingers on the hard soil that had been packed beneath and touched hot earth. Immediately I made to spring my hand back to my own lap, utterly horrified at myself for my own hubris, but at the very last second Erik reached over the armrest to stop me.

"You really are a troublesome girl!" he told me in a severe tone, as he clasped his chilled hand around my own. "Here, you have my hand. Are you happy now, wife?"

He must have known he was hurting me. The grip was too tight, his palm too clammy, his nails too sharp. He was capable of softer touches, which I knew because he had bestowed them upon me many times before; and yet even as my little tendons and finger bones rolled over each other within his grasp, I could not find it in myself to ask him to let go. This was the hand he was giving me; this was the hand I had asked for. He was holding my hand, and I was holding his, and I would have gladly suffered far more than just this small shred of pain if it meant he'd give a little bit more of himself to me.

"Completely," I thus replied.

I could see he wanted to argue. He wanted to accuse me of something, anything, and shake his hand free of me. He wanted to leave this box and be done with this whole charade. He wanted to go back into the ground and play his requiem mass, and then shut himself up in his coffin and go to sleep forever. All these things he wanted… but in the end, he must have seen something in my eye that finally convinced him to stay, for a little while more, one way or another… for he loosened up the grip, but still held on, and sagged back into his velvet-lined seat.

"Let us watch the opera," he muttered, his hand now a limp thing in my own. "It's what we came here to do."

I watched him for a minute as he proceeded to completely neglect the opera in favor of staring out at absolutely nothing at all. His naked face, usually so expressive, told me nothing of the thoughts he had absorbed himself with. I could see an upset within him, but I could not tell which of all his life's struggles were bothering him at the moment. Eventually I made myself give up the effort; guessing at his thoughts was a futile task I'd never been able to figure out. Thus I turned my attention to the opera being performed below us.

Down there, a crude display of debauchery was unfolding. It must have been one of those newly-fashioned works, I thought, for I knew of no historical piece that would throw the fits this one did. The music was uncharmed; the lyrics were prosaic; and the orchestration was thoroughly tasteless. I knew our company to employ twenty-seven musicians, yet this production seemed only to use fourteen of them; how they expected to produce the same lush, resplendent textures of sound the audience was used to, I have no idea. I would not be surprised if this was yet another creative decision inspired by the managers' ledger books… for, even more so, I was stricken at the lack of appropriate costuming assumed by the cast. Where was the opulence? The gaudiness? Every dress, every suit, every wig seemed tawdry and cheap. It was as if the characters had become like real people, wearing the same thing as all the rest of us, wandering a naked stage full of underwhelming set pieces and backdrops that transported us nowhere new and instead kept us all acutely aware of our presence within that giant globe of a theatre. This paltry composition was nothing in comparison to the likes of Mozart's or Bizet's or even Wagner's overplayed operas; and in all honesty, I would have rather preferred a night of silence enduring Erik's stony-faced scrutiny over this trite display of humiliating parsimony.

Even still, it was not all bad. The performers did what they could with the roles they were handed, and sang every note with expert capability born from years and years of tutelage and training. I did not understand the plot, which swooped and swerved in such dramatic tailspins that even if I saw it from the beginning I doubt I would have been able to follow its course. Despite that, the eagerness of every performer involved made me wish I did. As such, I leaned close to Erik and asked in his ear, quietly so as to not disturb the ones behind us: "What are we watching?"

"L'Homme," Erik supplied – uselessly, as it turned out, because I had never heard of such an opera and so knowing the title did nothing to explain the scenes unfolding below us. Thankfully, he noticed my continued confusion, and began to explain (in, I might add, a manner that betrayed none of his earlier moodiness): "It's an idiotic production, written by an even more idiotic composer, but somehow it seems to have become quite the rage in recent months. Every opera house across Europe is putting this shit on."

"Why have I never heard of it?" I asked him, hoping not to sound too accusatory. "My own company is putting it on. How is it I've never heard of it before this night?"

Erik laughed, thankfully. "I made sure never to bring you upstairs for these rehearsals. After all the work we've done together, I assumed you were hoping to retain your reputation as a respected performer."

I watched as a woman from the fifth row of the audience suddenly leapt from her seat and ran up to the stage, just in time to begin belting out a beastly aria di bravura. Not one soul in the cast flinched, and as the strings of the orchestra screeched on it became horrifyingly apparent that what I thought was a bizarre disturbance of the peace was actually a scripted part of the show itself.

"This must be a very new style of opera," I observed, hoping to sound kind. "It looks… fun."

"You can be honest, my girl," Erik said. "Just admit that you have a certain taste when it comes to opera. It isn't wrong to have a preference; it's simply the mark of a well-studied musician. You spent so long as my pupil, it isn't surprising we'd have the same opinions after all this time."

"Yes, but I don't exactly like everything you like, Erik," I muttered, taking a little offense to his insinuation that I couldn't form my own opinions. I was a graduate of the Conservatoire, for heaven's sake. "Anyway –" (I said this quickly so he couldn't argue back) "– perhaps I should just keep my thoughts to myself until the show is over. I'd hate to disturb the women behind us."

Erik was silent for a moment as he considered this. He had a seeming about him like he was reaching near defeat in a very grave matter, as if I had checked him without realizing we were playing a game of chess at all. But then those amber eyes flamed with inspiration, and he leaned in close to mutter a question in my ear: "Do you think it's strange they haven't said anything about my face?"

"Please, Erik," I replied, the exasperation getting difficult to keep out of my voice. "It's dark. I hardly think they can see you."

"Erik knows them," he whispered further, "quite intimately. He's seen them around this place, in other parts of the Opera house… though, admittedly, this is the first time they've sat in this particular box. They're sort of like you, Christine… and sort of like Erik… but not anything like you or Erik, if you understand what he means?" He chuckled humorlessly. "Of course you don't. It's one of Erik's little jokes. Would you mind laughing for him, even if you don't understand? He'd feel better about it if you pretended to get it."

At his command, I laughed, even daring to get a little louder as he conducted me with a raised hand. For good measure, I added, off-script, "Ah! You're so very clever, dear husband Erik!"

His translucent, thin lips stretched taut as he smiled, apparently satisfied with my performance this time around, and so he leaned back to his own chair to resume his observation of this travesty of an opera. We did not speak for perhaps another twenty minutes, during which we suffered through a drudge of aimless soliloquies and dirgelike marches, but all the way he seemed to vibrate in his seat with an uncanny sort of ecstasy.

Had I done that to him, with nothing but that single lie? Was pretending for him, just that once, at his request and on his terms, enough of a service to last him a lifetime? Erik had been a man, afflicted with the most heartbreaking case of loneliness ever seen in this world, when he had come on his bony, scraped-up knees begging me for marriage. He had asked for me to love him, and I did – I did! – but then all at once it was too overwhelming for him, and he rejected me fully. He called my love a delusion, of his own and of mine. And yet, here we were now, with us both in full agreement, knowledge, and willingness with one another to play pretend with our hearts and to spurn any thought of true love… and at last he was finally satisfied!

Satisfied, appeased, mitigated, whatever you want to call it except happy… but I suppose it would only be fair if I said the same for myself in that moment. I gave up the chase for happiness long before that night, some time around when I last walked free on this earth, but I couldn't help but admit to feeling some sort of strange fulfillment at this gentle company we held between us. It seemed fitting that we could only find peace when neither of us got what we wanted.

And such a beautiful peace it was. The world fell down as Erik and I sat with our hands clasped together, the nightmare of marriage forgotten completely, with only our pulses against the other's hand to speak for our hearts. I cared nothing for any of our previous struggles and I cared nothing for the future. All that I felt was Erik at my side, and that alone was enough.

I do not know how long we stayed like that, but I wish it was forever. In the present, I can reach my hand over to Doctor Gradus's patient lying on the cot beside me and lace my fingers between his. His hand is cold and clammy, his fingers nearly all bone... and if I squeeze a little tighter, like this, it almost feels like we never stopped holding hands at all.