Music of the Night (23 page)

Age robs me of easy sleep, and many nights I lie awake remembering the little glass shoe full of centimes; and the shivering poodle stinking of lamp-oil; and the brush being drawn through my hair by a man who sits behind me, where I cannot see his face until I turn. In the dark I listen for some echo of the radiant voice of my teacher, my brother, my lover and accomplished master of my body’s joys, that dire, disfigured angel with whom I wrestled for over a thousand days and nights, in all the youthful vigor of my hunger and my pride.

My hair is short now, in the modern style. It has turned quite white. The Comte de Chagny (Raoul’s title since his elder brother’s death) arrived this month from America to see to his French holdings. He came to the Opéra asking after me. I avoided him, and he has gone away again.

Awaiting my own exit, I live my days in this brash and cynical present as other people do. But I nourish my soul on the sweet pangs of looking back, more than forty years now, to the time when the Opéra Ghost and I lived together underground, in a candle-lit world of passion and music. I have thought of writing an opera about it, but time seems short and I know my limitations. Someone else will write it, someday. They will get the story wrong, of course; but perhaps, all the same, the music will be right.

A Few Parting Words

Not an essay, just some thoughts

Like most of the writers I know, I learned to write by reading, and by going to plays and movies (stories in dialog and pictures—good training for the visual imagination and the plot-and-action sector of the brain). I always adored fantasy and horror, even though—or maybe because—they gave me nightmares; literally. For six months after an older cousin took me to see
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
, I would wake up at six in the morning and lie petrified in my bed, certain that the Frankenstein monster was about to lurch around the corner from the hall and into my bedroom. And that was
Abbott and
Costello
, folks.

Well. And Frankenstein’s monster. And the wolfman, and Dracula, come to think of it. But it was
Abbott
and Costello
. What can I say; I have always been rather impressionable. It comes with the territory. At any rate, just like everybody else (albeit in fear and trembling and with my hand ever ready to whip off my eyeglasses so that the screen became safely blurred and vague) I kept up with the monster movies and the monster reading, too, because I couldn’t stay away (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have a lot to answer for). I saw poor old “Larry Talbot ” turn into what looked like a gummy bear that had rolled on the floor of a hair salon before clean-up time; I read Mina Harker’s journal and saw all the film-Draculas ever played; I read the Oz books and watched Judy Garland’s Dorothy with her witches, both friendly and evil; and I read Leroux’s fusty, goofy, clumsy novel about the Paris Opéra and went to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage version of that story (once on each coast).

In fact I went so far as to visit the Paris Opéra last time I was in that city, just for its “Phantom”

associations.

So it’s perfectly natural that from time to time I should turn to writing stories with strong horror elements, some borrowed, some made up fresh (or what I think is fresh, anyway). I always have a wonderful time doing it and am sorry when the story is finished. Still, I feel like a bit of a fraud when people refer to me as a “horror writer,” because I’m not—not in my mind, and probably not in anybody else’s either. To start at the lowest end of the “horror” scale, I have to admit that I don’t even read there; I am easily bored and irritated by tales (onscreen or on paper) of victimized, terrified women, or victimized men for that matter; or towns with evil black gunkus oozing out of the light fixtures; or whole “secret” communities of languorous vampires exhibiting all the ennui of confirmed French persons (excepting only the endless smoking of cigarettes and the long, long silences).

Afflicted priests rushing around chasing or being chased by demons (or angels) that speak in funny voices do not turn me on, gangs of cannibal zombies bore me blind, and when I read Steve King I usually skip the blood and gore and look for the social observation, which he does better than anybody else. Frankly, I’ve reached a stage in my life where the drama, the tension, the
interest
of a story is what happens
between
the action-packed moments of mayhem. I mean the pauses for breath, when the characters, if they are worth their salt to begin with, understand and attempt to grapple with what the “action” means to them, for them, and about them and those close to them.

Remember a strange little movie called “The Sweet Hereafter”? A school bus crashes into a frozen lake, and the kids are killed. That’s the horror element. The
story
is of a townful of people left behind and trying to deal with the event in some way that will make it less horrific (and failing). The crash is glimpsed now and again, mostly from afar. It is a glyph, a sign of ruin and despair, but it’s the ruin and despair that are interesting. The bus-crash is just an incident, too sudden and too shocking and too swiftly complete to reverberate much in and of itself.

That, to my mind, is a fine horror-story, albeit of a quotidian kind—no ghosts to speak of, no dripping child-zombies. Except that they are all there, of course—in the voices, the blank or twisted faces, the shocked eyes of the parents. If you perceive them there, and you should. So I guess the usual run of horror fiction is not my métier.

On the other hand: I love to play. What I love to play with most is some stodgy cultural trope that needs a good shaking to get the dust out of its ears, e.g., a planet of women, say a society of Amazon warriors—only what kind of life would that
really
be in and of itself, not just as an exotic and perverse locale for our intrepid hero to stumble into, strut his stuff, and teach them (oh, rapture!) how to kiss?

How would they, seeing themselves not as perverse at all but as the norm, order their politics, their economy, and their personal lives?

Or the world ends, but suppose all our unhoused souls are indestructible and have to go somewhere else to continue evolving. Or here’s this dashing space pilot with flexible ethics, only she’s driven to seek help on a planet settled not by engineers and scientists but by African market women with deep-rooted customs (and shrewdness) of their own.

Turn ’em upside-down and see what falls out of their pockets, that’s what I say; otherwise you’re just putting hoary old basic ideas through their time-honored paces yet again, and what’s the point of that?

Hence, my forays into what gets classed as horror. I am drawn to fascinating characters or beings that have most often been presented—your monster, your vampire, your werewolf, your witch—as shock material, something to give us a good jolt in the perfect safety of the movie theatre or the chair in the living room beside the good reading light. Nothing falls out of their pockets if they’re not wearing something like their usual clothes (rags; fur; cape). We all know there’s more to them than just the jolt, or they wouldn’t persist in our cultures with such immense verve and color.

So sometimes I get curious about the rest of the baggage your teen werewolf, say, is carrying with her, or your twisted musical genius with the awful face and violent habits.

Luckily, the stories of this type that I love best always set up questions in my mind (maybe that’s
why
I love them). They are not dead, perfect objects, all shiny and cold, but fertile and warm and messy, fermenting away in my mind long after “the end” has come and gone. I turn the problems of “Dracula,”

say, over and over mentally, for the sheer pleasure of remembering how it went and where it was at its most tasty for me.

I think about the answers offered—poor old Larry can never escape his fang-and-fuzz destiny, the Phantom gives Christine to his rival out of sheer nobility—and after a while other possible answers occur to me, and other questions that weren’t asked. Or questions with no answers at all. Like most writers who work in an exploratory rather than an outlined fashion, I come up with a situation that will bring the questions in my mind to bear on the characters, and then I stand back and let my imaginary people work out their own answers.

What’s being a werewolf
good
for?

Why would a schoolgirl be really,
really
angry?

How might a child use great power if she had it?

What is “enough” punishment for the torments of the schoolyard?

The “idea” of “Boobs” is that a schoolgirl turns into a werewolf instead of getting her period; but the questions about that situation are what generate the plot, the story itself. All I had to do was to make up Kelsey, out of memories of my own childhood, of other kids I’ve known and observed as a teacher, even of kids I’ve read about, and give her an ordinary family in an ordinary American suburb, and then turn her loose to create the story for me.

Maybe I don’t particularly like all her answers, but if they ring true, they stay. That’s really what the character is for: to chart an interesting course through the possible answers, a course that hangs together and adds up to the illusion of a real mind and soul and heart grappling with extreme situations. The character is the test of the questions and vice versa, and if it works, that’s success; you don’t mess with it to placate others’ tastes or preferences, if you can help it.

Which is what writers mean when they say the characters “come to life” or “just take over the story.”

Fictional characters are not real and they can not take over anything, but if they are well made and have a spark of vitality, they do acquire a powerful coherence that an author tramples over—for reasons of plot, or to make a particular effect, or to avoid developments that will offend some readers—at her peril. To create a character with this kind of integrity is most authors’ great desire and ambition, because these are the characters who live on in readers’ memories and bring those readers back to read more of that author’s work. These are the ones readers (and writers) talk to each other about. But characters like this—the “quick” ones, the vivid ones with quirks of their own that I don’t consciously know about till they surface on the page—are not manipulable in the same way that flat characters are—I mean the spear-carriers here.

If you push quick characters around they will go dead on you and create dead spots in your story. Right there, a sensitive reader will pull back out of your story (just what you
don’t
want to happen) and say,

“Whoa, wait, why would he do
that
?” or “Huh? She’d never say such a thing. Did I miss something?”

Or your reader will just close the book, wondering why the story has suddenly lost all its fizz. So you let the character fly through your first draft, and that tells you where her vitality lies, and what to leave alone or even to heighten as you go back over the work, revising for clarity, for smoothness (or roughness, or dreamy disjunction, etc.). That first-draft rush is for me the art-part, the release of the characters, be they monsters or just folks, to show me what they’ve got; then it’s my job to present what they bring me in the best way I can, which is the exercise of whatever craft I have developed for this work.

I’ve had readers object that Kelsey is too mean and cold. I remind them of everything we all know about the intense pain of suffering in childhood, whatever that suffering is, before we have racked up enough experience to put the wounds of insult and humiliation into what adults call perspective (in order to be able to maintain what adults call civilization, and because eventually time lays on so many of these moments that you grow calluses). I remind them of the tight horizons of the youthful mind (except for the dreamy parts, that float free), the narrowness of the focus (“I need exactly
this
right
now
”), and the paucity of empathy. I wouldn’t change Kelsey even if I could.

Is she a monster? Certainly, in the eyes of some—if only because she killed those dogs. You’d be amazed at the number of readers who can accept the murder of Billy but rant and rave about the deaths of assorted mutts and the Wanscombes’ miniature schnauzers (well, that’s in there because it shocks, because it feels true to events and conveys the uglier realities of what Kelsey has become, and because it will help you, the reader, believe that she
could
go on to do what she does to Billy Linden). And by the way, I got some interesting reviewer-comments on this aspect of the story when it was first published; people seemed to feel that while it’s okay for any male author to splash blood around for acres and pages, a couple of short, grim paragraphs by a woman are shocking, simply shocking!

Odd, isn’t it?

Anyway, if Kelsey doesn’t become a monster, if she runs into someone who jump-starts a more sensitive ethical system in her, what kind of future will she have, given this story as her past? Maybe she’s a victim in the making. Or maybe she’d become a hero, or a even saint, later in her life. As I said, the stories that I like tend to raise as many questions as they answer. It’s that cusp of possibility that I love, pathways of potentiality zigzagging off in all directions; and I like leaving them as potential, giving the reader those possibilities to play with in imagination. Why should creativity stop at the page, or at the story’s end? Stories make other stories, and we all have at least some idea of how to do that, developed from when we were little kids and didn’t know or care about copyright and didn’t hesitate to take our favorite characters and write them new adventures, on paper or in the mind’s eye. To some readers, this is an exciting, intriguing prospect; to others, it’s lack of “closure” or “resolution” or

“satisfaction,” and believe me, writers worry about that.

A story may be experimental, it may be deliberately ambiguous, it may be intended to disturb by leaving some elements unresolved; but it had damned well better feel
satisfying
to the reader when it’s over. I’ve read somewhere that women authors in particular are partial to “open” endings: resolutions that set some questions to rest but launch others, in a kind of unconscious mirroring of the common cultural experience of women—you get the kid’s fever down, and then it’s the cut knee, and then it’s the braces, and then all of a sudden it’s the anorexia, etc., etc., endless problems unfolding, sometimes right out of the previous problems’ solutions.