Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

You, I said. If I will marry him, he lets you live.

He laughed. What then?

I let my head rest on his chest.

Leave with me, I said. If not today, soon. Leave with me and I will create the role. But not here. London, Saint Petersburg, Rome. Anywhere but here. If I leave, you must also.

Are you mine, then? he asked.

Yes, I said. I knew it as soon as I gave the ring back. And you, are you mine? What of this? And her? I waved at the woods.

He took the ring from his pocket and slid it back on my hand and pulled the tenor’s ring off, handing it to me.

Yes, he said. I’m yours. I will always be grateful to her, he said. Because of her, I was able to grow strong enough here to find you. But I’m yours, always yours.

§

I saw the old friends, as the tenor had put it — he and the Baroness — emerging from the house as we approached.

She had already dressed for dinner.

I dismounted and Aristafeo ran off and returned with a black blanket warmed at a fire. Behind him came men carrying hot-water bottles. When I slid the blanket over my shoulders, I could smell his verveine and something else, of neither Rouen nor Paris. Him. His own blanket then? I wondered.

He looked down and to the side as I wrapped it around myself.

A pity, the Baroness said, as she walked toward me. Your dress! I will pay for it.

I shook my head, for it felt like bad luck to take any money from her in light of what I had just taken.

She relented a little and allowed me to undress in one of her apartments with the help of her maids, who clucked over the ruins of the dress and prepared a hot bath for me. When I was warm and dry, they dressed me in a muslin shift and wrapped me in hot blankets again.

Her carriage would take us home.

From inside it, as the driver’s whip cracked, I did not look at her or Aristafeo as we left, or at the tenor, who prattled on as to the party and the Baroness, saying, I’m ashamed to say it was some sort of audition. I’m very sorry, I was not told, not until after, when she bragged to me of it.

The tenor was changed. He was speaking as if to someone else in the cab. Your composer apparently told her he needed to hear you without the costumes and the lights, he said. To which she said, Then she will come and sing for us, and if she must, she’ll appear naked.

He laughed. Now look at you!

I laughed as well, but my thoughts were of Aristafeo now. The tenor had not noticed I was sitting there waiting for him to turn to me, to acknowledge me. He was only speaking, saying things he thought I would want to hear. Something in all of this had frightened him and now it frightened me as well.

By the time we were in Paris, he seemed himself again, but I was not. I could feel the seal of the life I had led until that afternoon press back over me, insistent, asking that I return to it, and to the little prison hidden within it, where there was no room for Aristafeo, no room even for me. Here was the door to it, the door of the apartment on the avenue de l’Opéra, the place I had thought I could keep somehow and not also keep all that had come with it. I entered the apartment to the shocked exclamations of Doro and Lucy, who undressed me and made horrified faces at the dress’s condition as I unpacked it from the bundle of its ruins while they tried to set me in my own bath. I refused it, though, and asked for a fire and gin.

When they left me, I saw, as if for the first time, the dove-gray walls of the place — I had thought I was so different from the Comtesse. I had found her living crypt pitiable; I had not seen my own.

If she had buried herself alive there, I was entombed within my own life as well. She had, perhaps, taught me even this.

What was my own, though, was the plan we had begun. I would finish Carmen and he would finish the opera, and then he would suggest a plan.

I will take care of it, he had said. I know how long you have waited, wait just a little longer. I will send you a message next week. Wait for my word.

§

Perhaps the very last person I expected to see a week later then was the Baroness, and so I was incredulous when Doro brought me her card and I insisted she at once show her in.

May I speak to you in private? she asked, as she sat.

Of course, I said, ringing the bell and telling Doro and Lucy we would not take tea.

Monsieur Cadiz has challenged our tenor friend to a duel, pistols at dawn in Rouen the morning after Carmen concludes, she said.

When was this challenge issued, I asked, and for what?

When you were in Rouen, of course, she said. As we rode into the woods, he reached over and struck the tenor with his riding gloves and issued the challenge there in front of witnesses.

The strangeness of the tenor in the carriage. Aristafeo’s assurance he would take care of it.

By the time he came to me in the woods, this had all happened.

It is to the death, she said.

Why are you here? I asked.

I am here… to beg you to end this. Yes, that is what we can call it. I am here to beg you, I who have never begged, not once. She said it coolly, levelly, her eyes averted at first.

He cannot fire a pistol quickly, she said, as she turned back to me. Not as an uninjured man would. For this reason, he never accompanies me on the hunts with weapons. He only rides. He will… he will die.

Does he have no second? I asked.

He will accept none. It is for your honor, she said. He is insisting, insisting he will prevail again.

Again? I asked.

Again, she said. He was the lover sent away after the duel with my late husband.

And he was also then…

The very same. I arranged for him to receive the Prix de Rome, she said. And so he was the lover I sent away, and the new one as well, on his return. Easy enough. No one had met him before that except the police. I couldn’t introduce him before.

What would you have of me? What brings you here? I asked. For I could not understand why she was not angrier, why she had come at all — it was an insult to her.

The duel is for the honor of your hand in marriage, she said. If you accept the tenor, it will be off. Accept the tenor and spare his life.

The tenor has not proposed to me, I said.

He has not but we both know he means to, she said. Please, I beg of you. Accept the tenor and spare Aristafeo’s life. I beg this of you. He will die.

She leaned forward. My husband was no match for him. I could have shot my husband. Your tenor friend is a former officer who has seen combat in Africa, has killed in battle. He will not hesitate the same as an aging aristocrat once did. Aristafeo will die.

She stood and pulled on her gloves. No, she said, I cannot marry again — this is true. He will never be my husband. But I do love him. I love his music. As I think you also do. And I have a hope of saving him, she said, and it begins here, asking this of you.

Good day, I said.

She left, showing herself out.

§

Name the hour you will accept, the tenor had asked.

So I did.

Three nights before the closing night, backstage at his dressing room, his door opened and Maxine exited angrily, coldly, as he laughed behind her.

As he came to his door to close it, he saw me standing there, having witnessed the scene, and gave me a little wave as though I were a child, as he smiled and closed the door.

I hesitated, then knocked on his closed door, and he opened it, a questioning look in his eye.

I have something important to tell you, I said. I am naming the hour. Dine with me after our final performance?

I’ll reserve a private room at the Café Anglais, he said.

§

A note came at last from Aristafeo via the oboist. He mentioned nothing of the duel; he only suggested a plan: that I leave at once after my last performance in Carmen and wait for him in Milan, and if he was delayed, to go to visit the Verdis in Italy in Sant’Agata. Their home there had recently been finished, and they could now have visitors. We could go together and receive their blessing, he said. We should leave after my final Carmen performance.