I slipped carefully to the top of the stairs.
I was truly a guest, then. A guest of honor, no less, the welcome protégée of the celebrated tenor. Of course. Of course they would make a fuss over him, and of course they would make a fuss over me as well. The performance in our honor! Pauline was greeting me, greeting us both, with even more attention than the tenor had predicted, the tenor who seemed delighted at the prospect of joining her Haustheater and the newest endeavors of her famous family troupe. And this confused me—was he really here only to look after me? And yet, if so, why was his door still closed and he asleep?
I could walk out, go downstairs, at will. Ask to take my tea in the parlor.
Leave for the station.
I had already plotted one escape, done as Pauline led us through the garden to our rooms. I could claim exhaustion, stay in my room, and, as the performance began, leave for town with the emerald earrings and the rose pin and find a jeweler there I was sure would give me an excellent price, perhaps even better than in Paris, given the casinos. Between out-of-luck courtesans and suitors eager to impress, I was sure the jewelers here did a brisk trade. I could hire a carriage that might take me directly back to Paris that night, I was sure of it. With the tenor asleep, the temptation, tired as I was, was to leave for the jeweler’s now.
I could make an excuse, a need to shop for the evening’s event, or affect some eccentric desire to be fulfilled in the town beforehand. By the time the tenor woke, I could be on a train headed anywhere. Though for now there was only one place that mattered.
Still, even as it amused me to think of the Comtesse at the Café Anglais watching as some other woman, fresh from Baden-Baden and dressed in her earrings, walked across the room, I wondered how far I could go before I was stopped. Before the Comtesse discovered my betrayal, before the mechanism she had set in place caught me. To go now, provided I could stay hidden, would turn Paris into a lonely vigil, and me in it with a single task: hoping to see my composer sometime before the spring, otherwise waiting until then for the Bal Mabille to reopen. If I left now, all I would leave with would be my freedom, and only for as long as I remained far from Paris, far from all of France, Germany, Italy—and I was not sure this was enough.
The only real escape, it seemed, was to go through with this to the end.
The house began to fill with the sounds of scales being played on a piano and a woman singer’s voice warming up. I guessed she could only be Pauline.
I returned to my room and closed the door, locking it myself.
§
I opened one of the trunks, curious to see what had been brought from the avenue de l’Opéra and if any of it would be suitable for the evening’s performance. A fragrance of lavender and bay escaped, and I felt a pang of loneliness—this fragrance would always make me lonely. All had been carefully folded in papers and laid with sachets. A deck of cards sat on top, strange to me until I recognized it as the deck Doro and Lucy had used in our games.
I picked the deck up.
Had those two packed this, then? Where were they now?
The hardest part of service is that when you serve you are a custodian of something the master or mistress you serve cannot bear or they would do it and you would not be there. The cooking, the cleaning, the lighting of a fire. The taking off and putting on of clothes. Sometimes you served their loneliness or an exotic appetite, impossible or forbidden until your arrival. Whatever it is, ordinary or obscure, it becomes the center of your life, requiring all of you.
And you must bear it, this thing they cannot bear—and, in turn, bear what you become as you do so.
That first night on the avenue de l’Opéra so long ago, when I crept into the kitchen, lonely, hoping to surprise my maids at cards, I wanted to explain I was no lady to be waited on, even if the three of us were made to pretend it was so—that I was a servant, too. Yet when they let me sit and play, I knew they only humored me, and we played a lonely game. To receive the cards now told me they understood my meaning at last.
I gave the deck a little kiss and set it down on the writing desk.
This would make this easier to bear, but what exactly did I now bear? I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what it was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once. And why was he here, my tenor friend, and not in Paris? Why had he been trained around me this way and I around him? What did he serve that he also could not see?
I went to the window and opened the shutters to see the view. The sun had begun to set, the sky darkening. A stream gleamed silver in the distance, visible at the edge of the meadow that began past Turgenev’s garden wall, but his gardens were blue with shadow.
From here I could see how fine the garden was and the true size of it. The grounds extended well past the corner through which we’d passed—for watching the Nereid fountain as I’d approached, I’d missed the pond below it farther down the hill, lined with stone walls and speckled with golden drifts of new-fallen leaves and, here and there, water lilies. A few leaves still clung to the branches of the trees like tongues of flame to a fire that was almost out.
I no longer felt as if I were onstage in a play unknown to me—I knew this play—this opera—Il Trovatore. From the moment I had left on this journey with the tenor, I knew what Pauline’s letter to him had joked of as we arrived—I was his Leonora-to-be. He wanted me to sing her part opposite him; it was clearly the reason he’d had me brought to see him at the Théatre-Italien. He had wanted this of me perhaps since he first met me. And I did want to sing it at last, just not to him as my trovatore. I would never sing it to him; I meant to keep the vow I made that night I first knew I would ever want to sing it. And yet this was precisely what he hoped for most. I was not his Leonora, I could never be, but for my own sake I would now need to be. And in the meantime, around us, the world seemed to take on the shape of the opera. Pauline for our Gypsy, and here a garden in which I could hope someday to see my lost love emerge from the trees and serenade me.
All was almost ready. All this lacked for was the composer, in a mask and cape, singing below my window, the tenor hidden and waiting to challenge him to a duel.
Our little tragedy.
If this were an opera, I knew, it would end with my being forced to play the role I had vowed not to play as the audience reflected on the hubris of my vow.
Victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat.
Before I could ever hope to fear that an opera role would control my life if I took it up, I feared this role already controlled me, choosing me before I chose it, as if the opera hid some god of the ancients inside it, determined to make me his plaything. This was no punishment, no price to be paid, this hand was not my mother’s God, nor her ghost, nor did it seem providential—the spiritual mechanisms I knew or feared previously were not engaged here. This was something else altogether, determined and intent on its own satisfactions.
Whatever the tenor wanted from me by way of making me his Leonora, on stage with him or in life, it seemed all of this was a mask for some other force now grinning out from behind him.