Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Only I knew this to be true, however. He never knew. Just as I never knew what, if anything, Pauline had been told of my situation when we first met. Her mock hurt at the thought the tenor and I might marry and not announce the news to her in person told me she still believed the tenor and I might still be the happy lovers she met when we went to her in those last days of autumn in 1868. Yes, if we were to marry after all this time, she would have to be included in some important way. And certainly, the tenor believed in our love then, and so why wouldn’t she?

I never once suspected her as having a role in the events surrounding me now because she was too good to me, too purely my teacher — my only good teacher — to concoct schemes of that kind. And she would never endanger even one of us for fear of losing even the smallest piece of what remained of our time there.

But, certainly, I suspected her then.

It amuses me to remember how suspicious I was of her, just as I was suspicious of all I saw, convinced I moved through a country populated entirely by the Comtesse’s plan for me. From the train to Baden-Baden, as I watched through the window, this country seemed made of an unbroken forest braced for the coming winter, bordered by meadows with the grass gone brown and wet from the rain. Baden-Baden, the tenor assured me, sat at the edge of the Black Forest, just over the border from France, in Germany, in a valley of extraordinary beauty and mild climate.

He had been speaking of Baden-Baden until then and describing its various virtues and history, but these had slid across me like the rain on the window at my side.

We were at luncheon, nearly at our destination, seated in a luxury dining car at the table assigned to us for the trip. I was afraid and also afraid I could not hide this fear; I had the feeling of riding an angry horse indifferent to its rider. Behind the tenor was a mirror set into the wall, and so when I did not look out the window to the landscape during our meals, I used the mirror to help me modulate my expressions so as to better perform the part of his interested fellow traveler — our meals on the train like rehearsals for the days ahead.

I was almost accustomed to him again. He had changed during our time apart. His beard had darkened and grown longer, though his hair was still golden, still worn past his ears and swept back with pomade. He still wore evening dress often, though not for this trip — he had dressed the part of a proper Prussian gentleman in a beautiful traveling suit of a dark blue wool and a waistcoat embroidered with flowers. This drew attention to how he had thickened as well, but it suited him. He seemed less a former soldier and more of a tenor.

All of this activity with the mirror, to which he seemed oblivious, sometimes distracted me from his actual conversation, and so I found I had not been listening carefully to the description of Germany, and this was in part because I was indifferent to its details for not having chosen to come — it was the same as any other confinement to me. With some surprise, then, I understood he had finished speaking to me of Germany and Baden-Baden, and turned to the subject of me.

When you died, or when I believed you’d died, he said, I couldn’t tell anyone. So I invented a story that you’d gone to Baden-Baden, to study with Pauline Viardot-García. I’m so happy I can make this true.

He said this ruefully, quietly — we were surrounded by fellow travelers — and pushed at his wine glass.

Neither of us said anything more for a moment. I sat back again. There was only the unearthly sound of the crystal and silver set on all the tables ringing as we went, as if the train were a mystical bell of many parts. This strange concert was oddly comforting.

The instinct I’d had to simply act with him as I once had, to resume our easy banter and nicknames, was more difficult as time went on. Sustaining it meant some part of me had already papered over the rupture, but at moments like this, scenes from that other time intruded, alien and alarming, which chilled me, though I knew he meant his remarks to please me.

Grateful but contrite happiness , I told my face in the mirror, as if I were again in Delsarte’s classroom and he was pointing to my next expression. Though I was well past his room of portraits, deep inside my own. I reached for the tenor’s hand. Please forgive me, I said.

I have, he said. And I hope you also will forgive me. Madame Viardot-García is the greatest voice teacher in all of Europe, you see, he said. I have sung with her informally and learned something even just in singing across from her. I hope, in introducing you to her, she will make up for the mistakes I made earlier with your training. Also, she is not so concerned as to whether you have a proper French education; and she has room for you and was moved to hear of your situation.

What is my situation? I asked, and smiled as our soups were set down in front of us.

Wurstsuppe, the waiter said, and then left.

That you were rejected from the Conservatoire, the tenor said. And could lose your voice. She can teach you to be a Falcon properly.

I nodded.

I do this for love of you, he said.

At this, I smiled with the appropriate expression of gratitude but looked down to the creamy surface of my soup. I did not want to speak of or lie about loving him yet. But I could see he also wanted to be complimented so very much for having chosen this voice teacher, and I did not want to do it, not yet. I was still afraid of her precisely because he had chosen her.

Another maxim of Odile’s came to me then: If you cannot compliment a man but you must, ask him to speak of himself instead, this has the same effect. I remembered I had meant to ask him of his Fach, and so I did.

Please, tell me what is a heldentenor?

He smiled the more, nearly preening.

I am the tenor version of you, he said. A tenor who is almost a baritone, deeper, richer in the lower range, but with a seemingly hidden high range that surprises and can sustain high notes with force.

What does this mean, helden ? I asked.

Helden means hero, he said, making a fist and shaking it playfully, as if to smite an enemy. It is the voice you hope to have if you are a German tenor. This voice is for singing Mozart, he said. And for singing Wagner, too. I think in Germany men who can give voice to tragedy, those are our heroes or, at the least, that is how we want our heroes to sound when they sing.

He grinned at this, and his eyebrows rippled as if he had surprised himself.

I was always hoping to find someone like you, he said.

So we could give voice to a tragedy together, I said, trying my hand at banter.

Yes, he said. That is exactly right.

Before this luncheon, I had wondered who I was now. The question was not a simple one. Now I knew.

The tenor had not installed a new woman in my place during the time he believed me dead. Whatever it was he felt for me, it had not dimmed, not once, not even in death. I found the apartment kept like a mausoleum to me when he brought me there proudly that first night after we left the Café Anglais. The furniture shrouded, the clothes still there, some of them packed into three trunks, waiting by the door for the footman, who loaded it into the carriage. As I peered into the apartment from the foyer, he assured me all would be kept as it was until my return. Only as he locked the door and we descended the stairs did I understand I was the woman he was installing in my place; Jou-jou’s life, for I did not think of myself as her anymore, was truly over, and whoever I was to be next had been given her things.

We then set off for the tenor’s own apartment, where he showed his trophies to me: his antique swords and pistols, the stuffed kills from his hunts, the relics of his family. We drank a liqueur made from mirabelle plums from tiny glasses, and he told me the story of the boar he’d killed as a boy, which stood by the entranceway, a sentinel shaggy with age, along with his more recent prize, an elk head mounted on the wall. The taxidermist had given the elk some serene gaze as it no doubt looked somewhere into an eternal Germany, which I now entered for the first time at his side.