Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Here I am, I said. Will they come to London?

The Paris papers publish stories on the murder each day. The police patrols along the Seine have doubled as they search for what is now believed to be a savage band of killers. They have questioned his mistresses, his household staff, and now they search for you. He nodded his head as he said this, as if toasting me.

His mistresses. This amused me. Of course there would be many.

You smile, he said. Why?

How do they say he was he killed? I asked. For I knew I should ask.

Someone slit his throat and then set him on fire, he said, and then they tossed him in the Seine. When the police found him, they only knew him by a letter in his coat’s pocket, his address there. It was dry enough to read.

He paused here. The newspapers say it was from you.

I never wrote to him in advance, I said, but even as I said it, I knew the note was my own, accepting him, telling him to meet me that night. The meeting he had abandoned for the duel I had kept him from fighting.

Worn over his heart.

Aristafeo picked up his glass, and looked deeply into the wine inside, and then added, I would have given him a better death; I would have shot him just the once. This was what I told the police when they questioned me.

I said nothing, for there was nothing to say to this.

They told me they found his money on him — he had not been robbed. Who would kill him and take only his life?

So he was killed by a rich man, I said. Someone who wouldn’t think to rob him. He had many enemies, and only a very few of them needed his money.

You must write to the police, he said.

Of course, I said. Of course.

It can perhaps wait until we return to Paris, for we must find a theater there now. But you could write in advance that you will come and answer questions.

And here it was. I could not go back to Paris. Already our little dream of a life here in London was dead.

Of course, I said, instead. I will write to them. I’m not the killer. If I’d wanted to be rid of him, I would have married him.

The joke was wrong even as I said it, as the silence after it told me. We finished the dinner this way, quietly, alone again with what I could not say and what he would not ask.

I would not go back to Paris, and I would not write this letter, and I think he knew this also.

I’ve upset you, Aristafeo said finally, setting his fork and knife down, and patting his mouth with his napkin.

No, I said. I came to dinner upset; I am much the same.

Do I have your word you will write the police and clear your name? he asked.

Yes, I said. I will explain how I was en route to Milan.

Any witnesses? he asked.

My maid, I said. The one who left. But perhaps they can find her.

He asked the waiter for our bill and waited for it to be brought, unable to look at me.

I was like the cat pretending it had not swallowed the bird or, really, the bird who had swallowed the cat and was now too heavy to fly away. He was tired of these lies and so was I, but still I could not tell him the truth.

§

After dinner, as we ascended the stairs, he told me he would be leaving Brown’s for cheaper rooms until our return to Paris. He went down the hall, and I waited for him after I had undressed; when he did not appear at my door as was his habit, I went to him, letting myself in after he did not answer my knock.

I nearly feared he had already left, but when I let myself into his suite with the spare key he’d given me, I found him asleep, the smell of brandy sweet in the air, rising off him.

I sat in the chair beside the bed, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I remembered the way his music sprang up from under my fingertips that day in my own Paris music room, it was like the visit from his ghost I had never had.

All because he was alive, of course.

And yet while that ghost had never visited me over the years, his phantom had never left my side.

There had never been a place for that impossible life born all those years ago in that kiss. All those years he had worked in secret in that woman’s château to prepare a glorious future for us, he had been so sure it was only waiting for us to step into it. What was increasingly clear, however, was that the ground behind us was vanishing as quickly as the ground in front of us was refusing to appear. And the sacrifice I had made to the gods out of the tenor, it would not be enough.

It seemed the gods would take this, too.

I would not be questioned, I knew. There would be no mercy. Yes, the brute who had killed the tenor was surely a monster. No clean death, no; there was no honor to it; but I had wanted to do more than kill him. I had not wanted honor. I had wanted to remove him from this world. I had made myself that monster with my long tongue of flame burning through the night to chase him from this life. Burning, it seemed, even my voice.

Or the pétrole was not to blame. Or I had sung too much this season. Perhaps my adventure outside my Fach as the Queen of the Night had truly changed my fate, if for the worse — my voice breaking on it like so many others had.

I was sure Aristafeo heard it; the voice now lacked the liquid quality it once had. He had never said if he ever wondered whether the rejections were due in part to this, but I had. There had been no cracks since the one in Carmen , and I could hide the loss some in vibrato, but the voice’s little failures terrified me for the way they signaled this other end I knew was near, an end I knew he would hear approaching. I could pretend for a while it was due to fatigue after a heavy season, that the voice could heal with rest, but only for a while.

Without my voice, I would soon be only that hated thing, an eccentric courtesan in her twilight. I was pretty enough still; I always had been. But any true beauty I had was here in my throat — all those gentlemen admirers had taught me that, looking at me as if the one thing they could not see were right before them. Once it was gone, even if I had murdered no one, I knew what the Comtesse knew, what Eugénie knew, what Cora Pearl surely knew — what we all sought to forget.

In this world, some time long ago, far past anyone’s remembering, women as a kind had done something so terrible, so awful, so fantastically cruel that they and their daughters and their daughters’ daughters were forever beyond forgiveness until the end of time — unforgiven, distrusted, enslaved, made to suffer for the least offenses committed against any man. What was remembered were the terms of our survival as a class: We were to be docile, beautiful, uncomplaining, pure, and failing that, at the least useful. In return, we might be allowed something like a long life. But if we were not any of these things, by a man’s reckoning, or if perchance we violated their sense of that pact, we would have no protection whatsoever and were to be treated worse than any wild dog or lame horse.

A woman murderer, she would be treated the worst of these. I could not be caught.

If the loss of my voice was the only price I paid for killing the man who had made me a singer, I might still be a fortunate woman. But it wouldn’t be nearly enough to be fortunate this way at all.

I could wake him, I knew. I could ask why he had not come to me that night. He would protest, insist it was only drink and tiredness. I had been waiting for him to say he needed to go back to Paris to placate the Baroness — I had thought he would slip away, run from his failure, and mine, and return to her, beg her forgiveness. I never wanted to hear him say it and preferred, if he was to leave me, that he did so without explanation or even a good-bye. Now he had mentioned Paris tonight, and here he was, in his room and not mine. A first, tiny departure.