Music of the Night (18 page)

Instead, he was crushing me slowly to death.

The following night he came again and set the candle down. “Christine, take off your gown.”

I answered, “Erik, you are my husband. Take off your mask.”

A frozen moment passed during which I dared not breathe. Then he tore off the mask, in his agitation dropping it on the floor. He managed not to snatch after it but stood immobile under my scrutiny, his face turned away only a little.

When I could gaze on that grotesque visage without my gorge rising, I knew I was as ready as I could ever be. I shrugged out of my nightdress, and taking his hand I drew him toward me. With a sharp intake of breath, he reached to pinch out the candle.

“No,” I said, “let it burn,” and I turned down the sheet.

After that he always came to my bed unmasked. He would lie so that I looked straight into his terrible face while his hands touched me, rousing and warming the places where his mouth would soon follow, that hideous mouth that devoured without destruction all the juices, heats, and swellings of passion. He proved a barely banked fire, scorched and scorching with a lifetime of need. And I—I went up like summer grass; I flamed like pitch, clasped to his straining breast. As beginners, everything that we did was unbearably disgusting to us both, and so frantically exciting that we could not stop nor hold back anything. My God, how we burned!

Knowing himself to be only a poor, rough sketch of a man, he had few expectations and never thought to blame me for his own shortcomings (or, for that matter, for mine). He was at first too swift for my satisfaction, but he soon set himself to master the gratifications of lust as he might a demanding musical score. Some very rare books appeared on his shelves.

He studied languor, lightness of touch, and the uses of raw energy. I discovered how to lure him from his work, to meet his advances with revulsion and open arms at once, and to invite to my shrinking cheek his crooked kisses that came all intermixed with moans and whisperings and that seemed to liquefy my heart. I learned to twine my legs ’round his, guiding him home to that secret part of myself, the odorous, the blood-seeping, the unsightly, puckered mouth of my sex. To whom else could I have exposed that humid breach in my body’s defenses, all sleek with avidity? With what other person could I have shared my sweat, my spit, my rising deliriums of need and release filled with animal cries and groans?

Initially, I suffered the utmost, soul-wringing terror and shame. But then came an intoxication which I can only compare to the trance of song, and this was the lyric of that song: my monster adored the monstrous in me.

Oh, he enjoyed my pretty face, my good figure, and my long, thick hair, all the simple human handsomeness denied him in his own right. But what he craved was the Gorgon under my skirts. His deepest pleasure depended on the glaring difference between my comely outward looks and the seeming deformity of my hidden female part. He loved to love me with his twisted mouth, monster to monster, gross and shapeless flesh to its like, slippery heat to slippery heat, and cry to convulsion. We awoke new voices in one another. To the slow coiling of our entangled limbs we crooned like doves. His climax wrung from him half-strangled, exultant cries like those of a soul tearing free from its earthly roots. In my turn, I sang for him the throaty songs of a body drowning rapturously in its own depths. I commanded, praised, begged, and reviled him, calling him my loathsome demon, my leprous ape, my ruined, rutting angel, never stooping to the pretense that he was other than awful to look at. I felt that if I treated his appearance as normal, he would begin by being grateful; but in time he would come to hate and despise me for accepting what he hated and despised in himself. A man who feels this way will beat the woman who shares his life, whether he is a handsome man or an ugly one. Erik did strike me once.

It was quite early in our life together. We were studying Antonia’s trio with her mother’s ghost and Dr. Miracle, from
The Tales of Hoffmann
, which Erik had heard at its Opéra Comique premier some three months earlier. From memory, he played Dr. Miracle’s diabolical music on the piano; and he sang the dead mother’s part, transposed downward, with an otherworldly sweetness and nobility that greatly moved and distracted me.

I struggled vainly with Antonia’s music (which he had written out for me), until Erik’s largely unsolicited advice spurred me to observe rather tartly that he was very arrogant in his opinions for an ugly man who lived in a cellar singing songs and writing music that no one would ever hear. He leaped to his feet and, sharp as a whip, he slapped me. I stood my ground, my cheek hot and stinging, and said, “Erik, stop! By the terms of our bargain, you are not to be that sort of monster.”

“Am I not?” he snapped, glaring hatefully at me. “You go tripping out onstage in your finery and you open your mouth and everyone throws flowers and shouts the house down. I have twice the voice of any singer in Paris, but as you so kindly remind me, no audience will ever hear me and beg me for an encore!

If you write a little song that is not too terrible, they will say what a clever creature you are to be able to sing songs and make them too. But they will never be brought to their knees in tears by my music. So what sort of monster will
you
allow
me
to be, Christine?”

“I am sorry for what I said,” I muttered. I could not help but see how his lips gleamed with the saliva sprayed out during this tirade; repelled, I thrust my handkerchief toward him. He snatched it from me and blotted his mouth, snarling, “Oh, spare me your so-called apologies! Why should you care for the feelings of a miserable freak?”

“I have said that I am sorry for my words,” I retorted with some heat. “I have not heard you say that you are you sorry for your action. Do you understand that the next time you strike me, whatever the provocation, I will leave you and I will never, ever come back? You will have to kill me to stop me; and then I will be revenged in the pain it will cost you if I die in your house, at your hands, which are beautiful and strong and that wish only to love me.”

He stared down at the handkerchief clenched in his fingers, and I saw by the droop of his shoulders that the perilous moment was past. Still I forged recklessly onward, for my heart was in a turmoil of confused and painful emotion. “If you must hit something go and beat the couch cushions until your rage is spent. But never raise your hand to me again!”

In low tones he began, “Christine, I—”

“It is all your fault!” I burst out. “You should not have sung her music, the dead mother’s music!”

“Ah,” he said. “The dead mother’s music.”

I stiffened, seized with dread that I had exposed a weakness to him that he would savagely exploit. But he only raised his head and sang once more, unaccompanied and more gloriously than before, that same lofty music of the ghostly mother urging her daughter to sing.

“Now,” he said afterward, “if you are moved to say cutting things to me, say them. I will endure it quietly.”

My eyes stung, for the music had again affected me deeply. So had the realization that he of all men knew why it did so, for surely his own mother had been dead to him from the day she first saw his terrible face. In his way, he was offering a very handsome apology indeed.

I shook my head, not trusting my voice.

He nodded gravely. “Very good, your restraint is commendable. After all, Christine, it is our task to master the music, not to let the music master us. Now, let us begin again.”

We began again.

Other crises arose, of course. His habitual cruelty and malice inclined him toward outrageous gestures of annoyance, as when I found him one afternoon preparing to burn alive a chorus girl’s little poodle that he had lured away for the purpose. The animal’s backstage yapping had disturbed an otherwise unusually good
Abduction from the Seraglio
.

I tore the matches from his unresisting hands. With my shawl I blotted as much lamp oil as I could from the dog’s coat. Then I carried the terrified creature up to the appropriate dressing area and left it there, its muzzle still tied shut with Erik’s handkerchief (the dog was not seen, or heard, at the Opéra again). Returning, I found Erik in an agony of penitence, offering to drink lamp oil himself or to wear a tightly tied gag for as long as I wished, to redeem his transgression. He showed no remorse for the agonies he had meant to inflict on the dog and its owner, but he was deeply agitated at having once more nearly failed his promise to me, and in such a spectacular fashion.

I approved the gag as a fitting punishment. That night the Opéra Ghost cried like a cat into the layered thicknesses of cloth crushing his lips, while on my knees I ignited our own sweet-burning immolation. Don’t misunderstand: in music he was my master and would be my master still if he stood here now. His talent and learning were broad, discriminating, and seemingly inexhaustible. It was he who led me to the study which came to absorb me, of the sorts of chromatic and key shifts that irresistibly evoke powerful emotions in the listener.

But his violence was mine to rule, so long as I had the strength and the wit to command it, by the submission I had won from him with that first kiss.

Between us we sustained a steep pitch of passion despite the muting effects of familiarity, I think because of the time limit I had set. “Never repeat even the prettiest melody more than thrice at a go,” my father used to say. “Knowing it must end enhances its beauty and prevents boredom in its hearers.”

* * *

Domestic chores gave Erik’s life a sense of normality; he yielded them only reluctantly to me. Nor did I wish to become his drudge.

However, his standards of housekeeping and cooking (two areas in which he had no talents whatsoever) were far below mine; and I did not expect him to wait upon me as he had when I was his guest. I had chosen a life (albeit a truncated one), not an escapade.

We wrangled cautiously over household duties and came to a rough arrangement, with many exceptions and renegotiations as circumstances required. When his compositional impulse flagged, if he could not relieve his frustration by prowling the upper floors of the opera house, I did not hesitate to assign him extra chores down below. More than once I sent him out of the house with a dusty carpet, a beater, and instructions to vigorously apply the latter to the former.

Having had none of the normal social experience that matures ordinary people, he could behave very childishly. This lent him an air of perennial youthfulness at once attractive and extremely trying. His emotions, when tapped, poured from him like lava, and he had great difficulty mastering the molten flow once it began. Physical work, like the demands of operatic singing, helped to bleed off at least some of his ungovernable energy.

In our leisure time I ventured to inquire about his past. His answers surprised me. I had thought him an aristocrat, but his arrogance was that of talent, not of blood. He was the son of a master mason in Rouen. When he was still a child his parents had either given or sold him (he did not know which) to a traveling fair.

As a young man he had ranged far and wide, living by his wits and his abilities as an artificer of ingenious structures and devices. He regaled me with tales of his exotic travels before he had settled in Paris, where, commanding some Turkish laborers (whose language he spoke) at work on Garnier’s great opera house, he had secretly constructed his home in its bowels. He had always worn a kerchief over his nose and mouth “for the dust,” but his workmen had been less interested in his hidden face than in the extra wages he had paid for their clandestine labor.

Given my knowledge of his character, I guessed that he omitted much repellent detail from these lively narratives. Though troubled I never pressed him, reasoning that such matters lay between him, the souls of those he had harmed, and God.

In my turn, I read aloud to him from the biographies and travel books that he favored, or repeated anecdotes of café life and gossip (no matter how stale) about composers and performers whose names he knew. I taught him some Swedish, a language of interest to him because of its strong tonal element, and he enjoyed hearing songs and legends of the northern lands, which he had never visited. As a child I had absorbed many tales, from folk tradition and from books, which now stood me in good stead. People raised in countries with long winters treasure stories and tell them well. Outside of music, Erik was not so widely read as I had supposed. Many of the volumes on his shelves had only a few of their pages cut, for though he hungered for books he was impatient with their contents once he had them. In the first place, he was sure that he knew more about everything than anyone else did because he was a prodigy and well traveled in the world.

And then, he spent far more time roaming “his” opera house, or working on the various small mechanical contrivances that he was always inventing and refining, than he did reading. Indeed, he was in a continual ferment of activity of one kind or another, from the orbit of which I sometimes had to withdraw simply to rest myself.

I came to regard him as a flood of notes and markings falling in a tempestuous jumble upon the blank page of his life. He had instinctively tried to create order in himself through composing, with limited success: a well orchestrated life is not typified by ferocious obsessions and quixotic crimes. I believe he submitted to my scoring, as it were, in order to experience his own melody, in place of a ceaseless chaos of all but random noise.

Weeks and months passed, bringing our scheduled parting closer by increments almost too small to notice, and never spoken of. Even inadvertent allusions to my future departure sent Erik storming off to work on the darkest of his music, with its plunging, wheeling figures of mockery and despair. It hurt me, that music. I think it hurt him. I never tried to sing any of it, nor, despite his previously stated intentions, did he ask me to.

In his opera,
Don Juan Triumphant
, Don Juan seduces an Archangel who helps him to master the Devil in Hell. From this position of power, the Don decrees a regime of true justice on Earth that wins over Heaven also to his side; whereupon God, dethroned, pulls down Creation in a mighty cataclysm in which all are swallowed up. A moral tale, then (as operas tend to be), the music and lyrics of which combined wild extremes of fury, yearning, and savage satire.