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, looking 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.
No, I said. No, it is not lost.
But you’re never without it, Doro said.
It’s not in the costume tonight, I said, and they humored me, acting as if of course this was reason I did not wear it even though I wore it always.
The ring had kept me company for so long there was the faintest print of it by the knuckle from the many years of twisting it around and around, as if it could loosen the sorrow. Sometimes, as I did, I remembered the night he sank down before me and believed in his love for me enough in the face of death to ask me to be his wife. I would remember all of it: all of the nights, even when I had fled from his side into the dark, off to the Tuileries, which set me on that trail that led somehow here.
Here was the return of what I had lost, the loss of which had driven me mad, and now his return threatened to drive me just as mad as well.
I think you can never know what you can live without. I think you can never know what you will live through. Only when the disaster arrives and you are there does the depth of your real inner resources reveal itself, and not a moment before.
The disaster was here.
I had thought I could not live without him, and then I had lived on, creating the world around me now. A world that had no room for him—and this was perhaps worse than losing him the first time.
Did I still love him? Yes. Yes, I did. When he had asked me to leave with him, I had wanted to, at once. I always would love him in some way I would never be able to change and that might never die. If only he had come to me directly . . . He was so proud of what he’d done, so sure he knew my fate, he could never have known that nothing on this earth had the capacity to injure what I once felt for him quite like his returning to me this way.
As much as I had longed to be in his arms again, to see him live again, as I had danced with him and listened to him and his account of his long misunderstanding of me and my life, a sickening sort of pity had grown up in me, much like I had once felt for the tenor. I pitied him, and I also feared him now—yes, I feared him, and feared the immensity of what he’d done. This elaborate plot of his to surprise me with this opera told me he was not so different from the tenor, preparing a rival imaginary landscape for me to inhabit with him, sure all the while that I would join him once all was ready—and unprepared when I did not or could not.
I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed he loved.
And so I felt more alone than before his return, and I was no longer sure what I was protecting or why. My earlier piety on his behalf for nothing.
Were we at last in that garden, then, the tenor, Aristafeo, and I? The one I had fought so hard for us to avoid? But the black knight was on the balcony with his love; the duke was in the garden, raging alone. And Leonora wanted only to leave them both to their duel and be done.
If this had been funny at all, it would have been opéra bouffe. What was opéra bouffe when it turned tragic? Did such a thing exist? My Leonora was in her own duel, to be fought with Fate instead, which could choose any weapon against her. Even her own life, even the man she loved.
Cursed indeed.