Music of the Night

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  To create a character with this kind of integrity is most authors’ great desire and ambition, because these are the characters who live on in readers’ memories and bring those readers back to read more of that author’s work. These are the ones readers (and writers) talk to each other about. But characters like this—the “quick” ones, the vivid ones with quirks of their own that I don’t consciously know about till they surface on the page—are not manipulable in the same way that flat characters are—I mean the spear-carriers here.

  If you push quick characters around they will go dead on you and create dead spots in your story. Right there, a sensitive reader will pull back out of your story (just what you don’t want to happen) and say, “Whoa, wait, why would he do that?” or “Huh? She’d never say such a thing. Did I miss something?” Or your reader will just close the book, wondering why the story has suddenly lost all its fizz.

  So you let the character fly through your first draft, and that tells you where her vitality lies, and what to leave alone or even to heighten as you go back over the work, revising for clarity, for smoothness (or roughness, or dreamy disjunction, etc.). That first-draft rush is for me the art-part, the release of the characters, be they monsters or just folks, to show me what they’ve got; then it’s my job to present what they bring me in the best way I can, which is the exercise of whatever craft I have developed for this work.

  I’ve had readers object that Kelsey is too mean and cold. I remind them of everything we all know about the intense pain of suffering in childhood, whatever that suffering is, before we have racked up enough experience to put the wounds of insult and humiliation into what adults call perspective (in order to be able to maintain what adults call civilization, and because eventually time lays on so many of these moments that you grow calluses). I remind them of the tight horizons of the youthful mind (except for the dreamy parts, that float free), the narrowness of the focus (“I need exactly this right now”), and the paucity of empathy. I wouldn’t change Kelsey even if I could.

  Is she a monster? Certainly, in the eyes of some—if only because she killed those dogs. You’d be amazed at the number of readers who can accept the murder of Billy but rant and rave about the deaths of assorted mutts and the Wanscombes’ miniature schnauzers (well, that’s in there because it shocks, because it feels true to events and conveys the uglier realities of what Kelsey has become, and because it will help you, the reader, believe that she could go on to do what she does to Billy Linden). And by the way, I got some interesting reviewer-comments on this aspect of the story when it was first published; people seemed to feel that while it’s okay for any male author to splash blood around for acres and pages, a couple of short, grim paragraphs by a woman are shocking, simply shocking!

  Odd, isn’t it?

  Anyway, if Kelsey doesn’t become a monster, if she runs into someone who jump-starts a more sensitive ethical system in her, what kind of future will she have, given this story as her past? Maybe she’s a victim in the making. Or maybe she’d become a hero, or a even saint, later in her life.

  As I said, the stories that I like tend to raise as many questions as they answer. It’s that cusp of possibility that I love, pathways of potentiality zigzagging off in all directions; and I like leaving them as potential, giving the reader those possibilities to play with in imagination. Why should creativity stop at the page, or at the story’s end? Stories make other stories, and we all have at least some idea of how to do that, developed from when we were little kids and didn’t know or care about copyright and didn’t hesitate to take our favorite characters and write them new adventures, on paper or in the mind’s eye. To some readers, this is an exciting, intriguing prospect; to others, it’s lack of “closure” or “resolution” or “satisfaction,” and believe me, writers worry about that.

  A story may be experimental, it may be deliberately ambiguous, it may be intended to disturb by leaving some elements unresolved; but it had damned well better feel satisfying to the reader when it’s over.

  I’ve read somewhere that women authors in particular are partial to “open” endings: resolutions that set some questions to rest but launch others, in a kind of unconscious mirroring of the common cultural experience of women—you get the kid’s fever down, and then it’s the cut knee, and then it’s the braces, and then all of a sudden it’s the anorexia, etc., etc., endless problems unfolding, sometimes right out of the previous problems’ solutions.

  Women’s experience, so this theory goes, is not perceived by women the way most men perceive their experience (problem, struggle, solution, phew that’s done, now let’s watch the game—or get on to a whole new project that advances us toward our Big Goal/climax). A woman’s work is never done—it just pops up again in another guise, needing to be done all over again because so much of it is chores, which are by their nature endlessly repetitious. So maybe it’s true that women authors, like me, get to see the world that way; that nothing really ends, events and situations just develop one after the other (in overlapping bunches, actually). It all may stop in a satisfying place for a bit, but that’s not an ending, only a pause before the next convolution of the ongoing story.

  Whatever its source and its disposition between the sexes, you can acquire a real inclination toward this open-endedness. I know I have. I like stories that extend beyond the last page. It feels like getting a prize in the crackerjack box: there’s more than you bargained for.

  I’m not talking, mind you, about the clichéd non-ending that became all but ubiquitous for a while there in dark fantasy—the monster is dead (but no, he isn’t, that baby of the heroine’s is his), the virus is gone (but survives secretly, being carried around the world in the dog’s paw-sweat), the dinosaurs are left on their island (but their eggs are floating out to sea), etc. That was a sort of gesture of ironic awareness by the author that he knows that evil can never be truly banished or destroyed; and he gets a kick out of reminding you of that, just to jerk your chain and add that last little shiver (which very soon became a shrug; so what else is new?).

  “Boobs” is the prelude to a further phase of Kelsey’s life that I leave the reader to imagine. In “Unicorn Tapestry,” we end with two adult lives parting ways after a moment of hot fusion, going off in unknowable directions (well, one of them; the other continues, the vampire’s own tale that is, in further chapters of a novel called THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY).

  What will Weyland do now? Can he carry on successfully as he has done in the past, or is he subtly altered, even derailed? Is his comfortable human identity still viable for him? Will he come back to Floria, is he hooked on her, is his neat pattern of living disguised as a human being hopelessly compromised?

  This story began with questions about the viability of being truly unique, alone, and secret in a world of social beings; and about intimacy as an exchange of truths, and the power of truth to bind souls together. And, I guess, about the corrosive power of memory, in a human history so fraught with horror, loss, and pain. I wanted to know how these elements would fit into the outline of the thing we call “vampire,” only presented as a natural being, not a ghost or a revived dead man, and how such a creature would adapt, in his solitude, to this modern life that we speak of as so isolating to the individual.

  And, of course, I just wanted to play around with the idea of the vampire in love: what would that be? What could stand for “love” to a saber-toothed tiger engaged with its prey outside of the ordinary boundaries of predation? I wanted to put him to the test as hard as I could, to see how well he could weather and survive something that for him counts as love.

  At the end, the auguries are, to say the least, ambiguous, as Floria has the wit to understand. In order for her to be a worthy opponent/ally of my clever monster, I made her smart, I made her sensitive, I made her formidable enough to test him truly, and I think she does her work with flair and effectiveness.

  And, by the way, what the Hell is Floria going to do with the rest of her life? He
r professional reputation is shot, but her paralyzing fear of death has been confronted and beaten back (for the moment anyway). She looks as if she’s about to take on the problems she has with her daughter—problems she’s been avoiding for years because they’re so painful, and so intractable, and she doesn’t know what to do. But she trusts herself more now to come up with workable solutions, because she’s just found a way to survive close and perilous contact with a lethal predator in her own life. Under threat of death, she’s found her strong, inventive, daring inner self again, and her confidence is beginning to return. Out of that confidence, and the basic honesty that prevents her from trying to just go on as if nothing significant has happened, she’s about to start building a new life for herself.

  As what, as who? What do you think? I left the question open because it’s open to her, she has no brilliant ideas about this—yet. That’s how it would be for someone like her, so the choice to leave matters like that is a choice about verisimilitude as well as about my own tastes in fiction.

  The ending of “Beauty and the Opéra” is almost a full stop. The great love is long over, the life of the narrator is very close to over too, and she is leaving us an account of something that happened almost half a century before the time the tale is supposedly set down on paper. The story-frame is meant to be 1927 or ’28, just after the release of the Lon Chaney film, which (along with Raoul’s recent visit) has presumably been the stimulus that sends Christine to her writing desk and the inkwell in the shape of a spaniel’s head. Her marriage to the Phantom occupied the first five years of the decade of the 1880s, forty years before the post-war Bohemianism and high living of the nineteen-twenties; back then, where she’s looking, Europe was still in its Fin de Siècle stage, horse-drawn, unrefrigerated, and gas-lit.

  So we have a long, long perspective here, which in part I tried to indicate by the deliberate use of old-fashioned language that today’s readers are meant to find a bit stilted; a word about that—it is also the only language that I think I could have used for the more lush and outré parts of this story. That language simply came as needed, thanks to what I had soaked up from all my youthful reading of Dumas and Wilde and Buchan and Elliot and Stevenson and Sabatini and all. Around the time of its first publication, I did some live readings of this entire story at fantasy and science fiction conventions, and audiences stayed put in utter silence for the nearly hour-and-a-half that this takes; so I know how well it works. Try reading some aloud, in a thoughtful, quiet, adult voice, and I think you’ll hear what I mean.

  At any rate, in the present frame around this long look backward we have old matters that have re-emerged with new resolutions, like the whole question of Raoul’s character and actions. And we have the unavoidable necessity that our aged, reminiscing Christine will lay down her pen before long, and fade quietly out of existence, her life well and truly spent to the last passionate drop. Doesn’t that sound like a rounded, finished, even polished ending?

  But I couldn’t resist a tiny glance forward, far forward, to the time when her story, gentrified and cranked up into melodrama, becomes the armature for a wildly successful musical staging. The future is already unfolding on the last page of the story: the future without the living Christine in it anymore, yet one that she can foresee because she is an intelligent woman, an experienced woman, a woman with secrets she has kept for decades. I mean the future in which the stage musical of Leroux’s novel is a worldwide hit.

  I did that little forward stab because I didn’t want to just end Christine and her demon lover there, as if the waves we make in the world stop when we stop or when a particular phase of our life stops. This is not true of real people, and one way of giving convincing life to fictional people is to make it not true of them, either.

  Christine was very real to me, partly because of that steady, reflective voice (not mine, I assure you!). She sprang from a very precise set of questions provoked by what I saw of reactions to the stage musical, in particular to the character of Erik, the Phantom. There were (and still are) many Internet pages devoted to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show, most of them put up by adolescent girls. By and large, they are steeped in the most idealized romanticism: Erik is just a poor, misunderstood, tormented creature, sweet and soft within, who just needs a persistent, bold, completely devoted woman (me, oh, me, please!) in order for him to become a contented husband with a normal home life.

  I found this formulation alarming. It’s the kind of notion that leads women in the real world to attach themselves to spoiled, abusive men whom they are sure will reform if surrounded with true love. Spoiled, abusive men thrive on this drivel; romantic girls drown in it, and bob up years later—if they bob up at all—worn out, scarred, embittered, and, often as not, trailing skeins of kids they didn’t particularly want but thought would somehow “fix” their bad relationship with their spoiled, abusive man.

  When you add the idea of genius, the idea of the man as truly gifted as well as deeply wounded by cruel circumstance, you get not a story but a truth: the lives of the real women who stuck by exploitive, drunken, syphilitic, or just plain crazy men of talent, women we know about because of who they paired up with. The wife of Frederic Delius comes at once to mind; the first wife of Richard Wagner, and the wives and mistresses of many 19th-century composers, sculptors, and painters, not to mention 20th century artists and intellectuals as well.

  This is not a benign cultural pattern; it’s seductive and destructive, and it still operates in the world real women and men live their lives in.

  I meant to put this template under the microscope and see what was really in it; not just the attractive, stimulating high drama of kidnapping and obsessive love, but the harder truths of daily life in the “happily ever after” that so many young “Phans” sighed over in the ’90’s, writing fictions of their own in which Christine decides to stay with Erik instead of running away with Raoul.

  So I thought, first of all, what kind of guy would this Erik be, at best, given the life he has led? We know a little about what happens to people who endure great suffering; these days we call it post-traumatic stress syndrome. Ever hear of handing on suffering to your helpless dependents in turn, whether you mean to do this or not? Alas, one hears far too much about it. Saints are the people who take their lumps without turning mean, paranoid, and selfish. Saints are, understandably, rare (and they don’t make very interesting characters usually; there are exceptions, though). Abused people who become abusers in turn are all too common.

  So here’s our Erik, genius, freak, and world traveler: he’s demonstrated, by the time the story starts, some pretty savage traits. Is there any sweetness left in him, and how might it be got at and expressed? Let’s dispense with the wailing cries of thwarted love and look at him as a whole human being, not a cardboard cut-out of a desperate lover: what does he think about, what are his politics, how does he run his secret life, who is his tailor for pete’s sake?

  And what kind of woman would you have to be to live with him and not just be his victim? That was the major question that led me to Christine, the young Christine, the Christine who finds herself in an impossible and hair-raising situation and makes of it the glory of her life because of how she responds to it. She takes control of as much of her circumstance as she can and finds that in so doing she can love her madman and survive his madness; just. It’s by no means a foregone conclusion; it’s an ongoing struggle, and I wanted to explore that struggle in detail.

  I hope this story leaves its female readers with a question: could I be that strong? Am I that steady, that resilient, that sharp and perceptive? Could I be that brave, and would I want to be? And how much honorable behavior can I really expect from a man like this, genius or not? I’d like to think that the story raises these questions, without denying the powerful hold that male suffering has on susceptible female souls. That power is real; but so are the limitations, in real women, of the courage, resilience, and hope it takes to cope with badly twisted men.
Real, too, is the need for women to master their own lives, instead of choosing male masters to run—and ruin—their lives for them.

  Christine is a monster herself in some ways because it takes one to match one; but she’s also a child of my heart. So, of course, is Erik, but I know whose side I’m on when we come down to the wire.

  It’s not so easy with the women in “Evil Thoughts”; matters are murkier here, and this is to my mind the one true “horror” tale in this collection.

  It came to me not as a response to somebody else’s story, but with the sproutings of mushrooms that popped up one rainy spring on our lawn. I’d never had a lawn before, big city kid that I was, so I kept whacking the mushrooms down because they looked nastily leprous, and they kept coming back (and yes, there was a crazy lady who lived up the street and who used to screech at people from her porch or her kitchen window when they passed by her house).

  I pointed out those recurrent fungi to my husband, saying, “What the hell are those damned things, that they just keep coming back?”

  “Oh,” he said with a mischievous grin, “those are your evil thoughts.”

  And a story grew from that remark like—like a fungus, very fast. This one has an ending, no two ways about it: our poor heroine is blown away in a puff of fungal spores (or loses her mind in this imagined event), driven by sexual insecurity over the age-gap between herself and her innocent young husband. At the end of the story, one way or another, she is ended, gone, destroyed.

  So there, I did it: a real horror story suffused with real, old-fashioned, creeping horror, and with a “real” ending, because that’s where the story was headed from word one. Fran is doomed from the get-go by her own weakness and her fears. Her adversary remains closed and enigmatic to us, as to her.