The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

Nothing she would fear you knowing, he said. Le Cirque du Monde Déchu is being taken to the stage as an opera, however, and despite her recent refusal, it is still my hope she will have a change of heart and originate the role.

  Ah! It is that protégé of Verdi’s, Euphrosyne said, and ran to the stairs, a conqueror’s gleam in her eye. I will introduce you.

  Simonet and I looked at each other and smiled, nervous. I’d heard nothing from him since the rejection I sent, not a single note to complain, nor was he to be seen out—not in the theater, not in the balls, not at the dinners, not in the salons, not in the restaurants. Until now.

  In an opera, masked balls only ever hide lovers and assassins. I’d thought only of assassins. I saw Simonet’s expression become very grave as he watched over my shoulder as Euphrosyne drew near.

  Who is this? I wondered to myself. And then came that refrain, Is it you? And just this once, it was.

  It was him.

  The mystery composer I had been so sure did not exist was on her arm, neither young nor old, his hair dark but gone silver in a distinguished way at his brow. He had dressed in elegant white tie, his vest a pure white also, and he walked with a slight limp, using a cane.

  On his lapel, like blood, the ruby rose pin sat glittering.

  The reason his ghost had never appeared to me in dreams was that somehow he was alive.

  Did I love him already, before I knew him?

  Yes, yes I did. But I also knew him.

  My dear, he has been talking of nothing but you, Euphrosyne said. Lilliet Berne, may I present Aristafeo Cadiz.

  We had both passed through Death’s land and returned, then.

  Too late, you’re too late came the thought as he crossed the room to me, smiling, tentative. I nearly laughed to think of it. You’ve made your miraculous return to me from the dead and you’re too late.

  He was the very picture of the twinned joke of it—he there with the flower, this his own sly joke, and then all around him in the air, Fate’s joke on me.

  I wanted to make you something worthy of your gift, he said. Once you had become my patron, too.

  Three

  MAY I HAVE this dance? he asked. He stood before me, impossible and mortal at the same time, and set his cane on the rail.

  I said nothing—I could not speak—but I could not be in front of Euphrosyne and Simonet a moment longer, either, and so by way of consent, I instead offered my arm to him, and he took me down to the floor below.

  At the least I wanted proof he was mortal, and I had it when he took the lead.

  His clothes, under my hands, were new and well made, even expensive, and the wings of hair I remembered so well were combed close to his head with pomade, his whiskers evenly trimmed. He had come from nearby, it seemed, neither reborn from the bones I had sometimes imagined to be still on the roof of the Paris Opera nor having clawed his way through the earth from the underworld. He had made some other bargain, a more ordinary one, and had chosen to live in secret, apart from me, and so the shock I felt, and the happiness, transmuted from happiness to fear and then anger. The sight of him alive burned me as his death had before.

  We danced silently at first, his hands on my hands, his face glancingly touching mine, and then he said, You must leave him and come with me, tonight if possible. He must not stop us.

  I could see the tenor along the far wall, seated, speaking to someone I could not see.

  I cannot, I said.

  Hear me out, then. If you do not leave with me tonight and you marry our tenor friend, if this is true, then I will never speak to you again so we must speak now instead.

  Speak, then, I said. Tell me everything.

  The crowd swirled around us, their faces flashing by in the turns of the dance like a storm of masks. I watched them as he told me of his time away from me.

  The knife wounds had taken away his playing somehow—the hands were mute. But my cries that day had been heard and saved his life. Eugène, hearing them, finally guessed Aristafeo’s identity and stopped himself before he made the killing blow.

  He was not, as he’d hoped, about to murder the Prussian spy.

  It’s your ring she wears, isn’t it? he’d said. When Aristafeo weakly nodded, Eugène swore and said, My friend, I’ve cut you badly. I apologize. Let me help get you to a hospital.

  Aristafeo never saw him again. His attacker brought him to the temporary hospital kept in the home of the courtesan La Païva, who took an instant liking to him and made him her new cause. When she understood he was too badly wounded to likely play again but that he was a composer, she was moved and became one of his biggest supporters and eventually brought him to the attention of Verdi.

  Verdi’s protégé, after all.

  While he would never again play as he once had, he did thrive all the same, though his wounds and long convalescence had changed him. His hair had gone silver; he walked now with this limp and a stoop, the wolfish confidence changed into something else, something more forlorn, even a little ragged.

  His time as a Prix de Rome winner afforded him travel after a long struggle. There, encouraged by Verdi, he collaborated on the libretto with this new friend, a French novelist he’d met who was in need of a story and who then bought the house Aristafeo once owned in the Marais after he’d told him the story of his affair with me. With the help of their powerful friends, the opera was under commission to the Imperial Court of Russia as an entertainment for the young Alexander, to be presented in honor of his birthday.

  On the night of the Sénat Bal, he had waited upstairs for me and had meant it to be our grand reunion.

  As he’d waited on the Luxembourg Palace balcony amid new friends, he’d found himself next to the tenor, who did not seem to recognize him; his habits of long nights and drink meant he lived in a steady riot of acquaintances, everyone equally familiar and unfamiliar, with friends of longstanding whom he could not call by name and strangers he was sure he loved. The tenor relied constantly on his celebrity to keep up his friendships. That evening he had been busy narrating the evening for the party of men on the balcony that night and never once recognized Aristafeo.

  Aristafeo, however, knew him instantly.

  As my fame had grown, the tenor’s had as well, as someone who dined out on his stories of me. Earlier, over dinner at a restaurant in Les Halles with these same men, he had begun with the story of how, after attending a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, I had turned to him and tried to make him laugh by, with no training whatsoever, singing in imitation of the diva in the street outside the Paris Opera and he believed I had surpassed her. To his amazement, the other theatergoers mistook me for her in the dark, thinking perhaps she’d come outside to greet her fans.

  A lie told to hide my past at the Majeurs-Plaisirs.

  He described the secret lessons inside the unfinished Garnier and the first audition, the discovery that I was a Falcon and the rejection by the first jury, at which they all shook their heads in amazement.

  Over the second course, he told a false story of my childhood, one I had not heard: that I was the illegitimate daughter of a former nun, fathered on her by a man of the cloth, the powers of my voice the Lord’s way of being merciful to a girl otherwise innocent of sin—this I attributed to some fantasy of the tenor’s. Because of this unfortunate childhood, it had been his duty, he said, on discovering my voice, to train me, and it had been his pleasure to introduce me to the great Pauline Viardot-García, who had graciously taken me on—and then provided the vindication of bringing me with her to study at the Conservatoire once she had assumed the directorship there after the war.

  Alexandre Dumas, fils, had added, for the tenor’s new friend mostly, that he’d known me to move both assassins and those who commanded them, and had watched surprised as his friends wept in the dark boxes of the theater around him like children. They talk through the other singers, but when she sings, the theater is otherwise silent, he said. I like to imagine she could stop an execution.

>   This was met with both general laughter and agreement.

  By the time the wine was nearly gone, there came a friendly argument about recent reviews hailing me as the greatest voice of my era, saying that I was a sign the north of Europe had been civilized at last and that the light of that civilization was alive in my voice, moving now through it to the rest of the continent. The world could only be next.

  On the balcony at the palace afterward, as the men smoked, the tenor kept his new friend company with a few glasses of cognac.

  You want to know more? he asked Aristafeo as I came into view.

  I do, he said.

  He told of the men who had seized my carriage the night of my debut and carried it through the streets, whipped by my driver to let go and whose hands still bore the scars.

  Others were more impertinent, he added, and so she lives at a carefully guarded secret address as a result, known only to her closest intimates.

  The tenor traced for him what he knew of my days: I did not speak between morning and my arrival at the theater, my servants were instructed to attend to my needs by leaving me notes and returning for my written answer. The same acts were performed at the same times of each day as if to a metronome, meals prompt and unvaried, the foods to fit the needs of a performer who could not gain weight or afford the slightest cough. I gave my costume mistresses the tiny weights used in the nets of Brittany fishermen to help give my costumes their slow, wheeling movements as I walked the stage, and my preference was for only the best jewelry for presents when it was not couture.

  Is it true her maids have found diamonds in her garbage? Aristafeo had asked.

  A bluff. She told them to search for them there afterward, the tenor said. She is pure theater.

  What gift do you suppose she’d prefer? Aristafeo asked.

  I couldn’t say, the tenor said. Nothing I do seems to please her.

  They laughed. The other gentlemen joined them, taking in the view of the guests arriving; each outdoing the other to tell the new friend, this protégé of Verdi’s, something more interesting or sad or scandalous about each person. As the breeze moved the smoke of the cigars along and the view of the crowd was commanding, the group stayed content.

  From there, he saw me announced. He watched as the writer made his plea to me and became worried as I left with him for the garden. He waited for me to appear again, even saw me emerge briefly before turning back. He waited for the writer also. When he saw neither of us, he even suspected us of beginning an affair, but he had come this far, and so, having worked up his nerve, he waited.

  And then I did reappear.

  That is her, indicated the tenor.

  His eyes searched the gardens and the crowds of celebrants wandering through. The trees were strung with paper lanterns and lamps burned brightly along the edges, candles lit throughout the garden, but he did not see me until the aisle of raised swords told him I was returning from the palace.

  But she was here earlier, Aristafeo observed. Had she left?

  Yes, the tenor said, and grinned, slapping his arm. Though in quite a different gown altogether. It would appear she’s had some sport. He then addressed the reputation of the dukes at my side.

  That dress is the better one, Simonet said, having rejoined them.

  Aristafeo held himself in place, gripping the rail as I was announced a second time and entered to applause, the crowd shouting my name. La Générale! La Générale! The men and women standing on their seats to see in the uproar had the men on the balcony joined by their dinner companions, all anxious to see me as well. They screamed with laughter as the one woman’s dress caught fire and she was rushed to a fountain.

  When I began the Jewel Song aria, the voice in the night came with a green flash through the dark, the ring he knew well finally on my hand as I waved my hands to the song’s gestures in the gaslight below.

  Always, the tenor said to him, as he took out his handkerchief. Always she is giving the performance of her life.

  The tenor then joked to the assembled gentlemen that I had done him the favor of agreeing to become his wife. Some of the group demanded the truth; the rest, who knew better of our history, laughed, and he refused to say more, only grinning.

  Here then was the real source of the published rumor that I was to marry him, this joke.

  This news from the tenor, for Aristafeo, it was as if he’d been thrown from the balcony.

  When the writer reappeared and offhandedly said our meeting had gone well and that he would speak to me again after he had sent his novel, Aristafeo thanked him and then asked if he had obtained my address. When the writer apologized for not having obtained such a thing, he fumed.

  The tenor, overhearing this, slid a card into Aristafeo’s hand. My good friend, the tenor said. On seeing it, Aristafeo raced away before the ball was done.

  He knew the address too well. He went and waited in the street for me to return, smoking himself sick.

  Now he believed the worst. He wanted to be free of the errand that had brought him out that night, but instead, he stayed, helpless, determined to see it through.

  How could I be there still? Why would I stay there of all places? He had put me in that balloon, and yet he found me again in my cage.

  Somewhere near dawn, my carriage returned.

  He had meant to cry out to me as I stepped out, to confront me, but he could not think of what to say; he then thought to go to my door or return in the morning. But in each instance he could not bring himself either to speak or leave, and so instead he stayed there through the night. He followed my progress in the distance, me moving through my rooms by the light of my taper until I blew it out and the shades were drawn.

  He had asked the Verdis to say nothing of him to me, and so when I arrived at their house that night for dinner with no apparent knowledge of his return, they then affected ignorance, improvising, believing he’d had a failure of nerve and wishing to protect his wishes.

  Do not blame them, he said to me.

  By now we had danced together for nearly the entire hour previous to my concert. We had allowed each other no other dance companions, and so there was talk at the edges of the floor. The most recent music finished and this last dance concluded, I brought my head up to meet his face.

  He led me back upstairs, back to our party.

  The opera was his, then, the mystery solved, and he was here in answer to my rejection of the role—the counteroffer I could not turn down. Or so he believed.

  §

  Upstairs, his general aspect seemed restored—he believed himself close to success and exerted the magnetism I remembered. He bowed and kissed Euphrosyne’s hand, and then mine, then embraced the novelist, smiling.

  You must tell us more of this opera, Euphrosyne said to Aristafeo, before turning to me and chiding me, You never spoke of this to me. Perhaps we can convince her of the wisdom of it, she said, turning back to the men, conspiratorial. They had enlisted her, or she had volunteered, or both.

  I would like her to create the role of the equestrienne dance-hall queen in our opera, Aristafeo said.

  So you must, Euphrosyne said to me. It’s perfect.

  But she is leaving the stage, Simonet said. Or so I’ve heard. Is this true, the curse?

  What is this talk of leaving the stage and of a curse?

  A rumor, nothing more. But she is leaving the stage, I said. This one, at least, for now. If you’ll excuse me, I must prepare.

  With that, I turned, picked up the train of my dress, and walked away from them, making my way toward my dressing room and Lucy and Doro, as it was time for the mounting of my headdress.

  Aristafeo ran after me and reached out for my arm. I paused. From behind him, over his shoulder, Euphrosyne did her best imitation of indifference, and the novelist tried as well.

  I must sing, I said. This must wait.

  I continued away, but Aristafeo walked behind me still. A banquette of young women in dresses the colors of macarons, loo
king for all the world like a set—as if they should be consumed together—followed us with their eyes.

  We had the air of something about to happen.

  I stopped again. Nothing of this is as it seems, I said. But you must wait for my story. I paused by the entrance to my dressing room.

  In the dark, his face briefly silver again as it had been that night in the woods at Compiègne, my anger at him softened.

  You are angry at being deceived. Forgive me. I couldn’t bear to return to you and have you only pity me, he said. I wanted to return with the opera I’d promised you. I wanted to return in glory.

  The rest, then, after, I said, and he nodded.

  He came closer then for a kiss in the shadow of one of Euphrosyne’s palms there in the hallway.

  His hand felt for the ring on my hand and it was not there.

  Did I imagine it? he asked.

  No, I answered. I brought his hand to where it sat hidden in a pocket at my waist. It is here, hidden to be safe. After I sing, I will explain everything. Promise me you’ll stay, I said. Stay and hear me out, as I have heard you.

  I promise, he said.

  §

  The kiss had felt almost like nothing at first, but as I sat down before the enormous mirrored Louis XVI vanity in the guest apartment Euphrosyne had assigned to me for a dressing room, and watched as Lucy and Doro briskly brushed my hair and attached and styled the hairpieces that they then crowned with the diamond tiara and then draped the resulting tower of hair with that rain of crystal stars, I was like the wick that is slow to light, which, as you reach for the next match, has instead guttered into flame.

  They were rapid and clever, my maids; they had prepared the hairpieces in advance with irons, knew my hair and even my hairpieces intimately. As we admired the result, the many glittering stars drew my attention to my own hand, where the little green light of the emerald from Aristafeo’s ring had always been, now strangely bare.

  Is it lost? Lucy asked. Do we need to look for it? She had noticed my sadness, also guttering within me.