Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I looked away from his eyes as he said this.

He leaned forward, reached out, and lifted one of the stones at my neck. How she laughed that day at my gift. She wouldn’t laugh at this necklace now, I think.

He smoothed it back.

They say she’s dying now, you know, he said. Very ill, very poor. Perhaps we’ll go see her. Pay our respects once more. And tell her of our engagement.

§

As late as we were, a fierce rainstorm came and made us even later, though it left as we arrived at the estate.

The pale golden wet bricks of this baroness’s château were like the scales of a dragon, and her gardens were wreathed in clouds of red roses. It was the home of a beautiful monster from myth.

In the distance I saw her stables, something else for which the tenor said she was famous, some forty horses it was said were kept in perfect condition, and I could see the deep woods beyond.

As we entered, the tenor reached with a dagger and cut a rose. He twirled it for me. Your prop, he said.

I took it. How does she have roses? I asked him. It’s nearly the end of autumn.

The devil is her gardener, I’m sure, he said. But ask her. I believe the secret is the roses are Chinese. He winked.

She herself was a handsome apparition that day. She had a delicate color to her cheeks, which she’d set off well with a pale afternoon dress that looked to be a Worth, a green chiffon-and-silk confection. Her dark hair was curled and arranged prettily, an ivory comb completing the effect. She was not a young woman, but she had kept herself very carefully.

When I entered, Aristafeo stood near her, dressed in a simple dark suit. He smiled at me familiarly and saluted.

La Générale, he said, and then bowed.

I mastered my face so as not to laugh — he had seemed briefly comic — but the rose in my hand trembled. His eyes went to it as he stood.

How kind of you to come all this way, the Baroness said. I offered a grave curtsy to her.

The tenor apologized and asked as to whom else might be presenting but there was no one else; the hostess had decided it would be a private audience for the famous voice. She explained, as she brought us into the music room, how she was only recently interested in opera despite her family box and was so honored I could attend. My appearance at the ball in the Marquise de Lambert’s home had so impressed her, she had wanted to attempt something like it here in her salon. She hoped the arrangements were appropriate.

She had seen, then. She had seen it all. Here she was, the woman he had been ready to leave at once for me. The woman who had kept him all this time.

I tried to remember if I’d seen her, but she was entirely unfamiliar, and in any case, I was more preoccupied with the sense of the tableau we presented, two women in front of a room full of men. Her light toilette beside my dark one.

We will be in the ballroom, she said. You are acquainted with my guests, yes? Now that you are here, we shall begin.

We passed through then into the ballroom, the men following the two of us.

A beautiful piano waited under an enormous crystal chandelier in a ballroom to rival anything I’d seen — delicately painted frescoes and friezes in an Italian style decorated dark gray walls, the windows opening out to a formal garden with a maze. The chandelier was lit with candles and blazed brightly in the light of the late afternoon rain. Around the piano in a perfect half circle were arranged delicate gilt chairs. I did know her guests, all of them, and most of them were the men who mattered most to opera in Paris. I smiled and waved at them as they took their seats. She’d made an impressive display, and it could only be the work of the Baroness he’d told me of so long ago, and this was precisely the sort of support I would have expected her to offer Aristafeo, who I then noticed had seated himself in the back.

He smiled at me and I to him.

This was not her Paris ballroom, where he had first met her; we were in Rouen. Here was at least a little of the rest of the story his expensive jacket had told me at my ball, the answer to the question as to where he had hidden all this time. These rooms, these gardens, these forests.

Since you are late, perhaps you can shorten your program, she said. Her gloved hand executed a wave.

I went to stand near the piano. I meant to begin with “ Casta diva ,” from Norma, “Carlo vive? ” from I Masnadieri, then move to Aida ’s “ O patria mia ,” and then finish with the Habanera; but after her remark, I was now anxious to leave. I handed the music to just the Habanera to the accompanist there, waiting as he reviewed the pages and set them down.

In the long moment between when the pages left my hand and the first notes on the piano began, I thought of how unaccustomed I was to seeing the faces of an audience as I sang, or even sunlight. The engagement at La Scala would begin soon, Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera —singing for this group was a little beneath me and another violation of my voice’s need for rest. I had told myself I was behaving cautiously, that I was making sacrifices for this love of mine, but now I was in the home of his lover, about to sing for him in front of my soon-to-be fiancé, here despite his vow not to speak to me again. His ring in the waist of my gown again.

As the introit began, I prepared the breath, inhaled. Velvet curtains, the rain, verveine, carefully dried cigar tobacco waiting to be lit later. The scent of the Rhône wine in the glasses around the room. I wanted a glass of wine right then, though the thought was interrupted when I felt with a little surprise how the movements of the music, perfunctory to me, still moved me. Even if I did not care to feel the song’s flirtatious sentiments now, the music assured me that I would be made to care against my will, the care corseted into each note. The first syllable formed in my mouth.

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.

I looked past all of them out to the gardens visible through the windows, where branches of the roses tapped wetly on the glass. I watched the blooms wave as I pressed on, even absent-minded as I anticipated the glass of wine and, perhaps, something to eat later that I might get, and then I concentrated on the piano arrangement, admiring it as it ran under my voice, as well as the tidy playing of the accompanist, and passed out of the sadness into the realm of the music. By the end, as the tenors sing, when she passes, Carmen, sur tes pas nous, nous pressons tous.

Carmen, we all follow, wherever you go.

At the last notes, in the silence at the close, I whirled, the dress moving exactly as Félix had planned, and as I came to a stop, I threw the rose.

It slid over the wood floor to Aristafeo’s feet. There was laughter from the men. As he picked it up, the sun came through the roses behind him, and he stood in their green-red shadows and smiled as the men in the room behind me threw me to their shoulders and ran with me out into the garden, cheering.

I ducked through the windows, thrown open, and was able to notice with a little pleasure that the train of my dress still reached to the ground behind me. The roses, beaten by the rain, had given their petals to the wind that comes constantly through Rouen and mixed with the leaves falling from the trees to make clouds of them drifting in the air around us. From that height, I could see the entrance and the garden maze that reached back into the property behind, where the forest caught at the setting sun, cutting the gold light as it fell over us.

They set me down on the ground again only when we were within the maze out of sight of the château. Aristafeo stood there in front of me, the rose I’d thrown in his hand. The men, all smiles, offered laughing apologies, stepped back, and were gone, shouting as they ran through the maze.