I was only back in his little theater again. I had never left it, not really. I would need to, for it would soon fill with death.
I did not understand his apparent nonchalance at the prospect of the war, and I did not understand how to ask after the source of it, and so I could only pretend to share it and hope to learn in the process.
You are so quiet, he said. Have you tired of me, then? He said it lightly, but he did not look at me.
No, no. This place saddens me, I’m afraid, I said. Please take me home.
He offered me his arm again, and together we returned to the apartment.
§
The very next morning, having slept the night beside me, something he rarely did, he slunk from the bed, looked at my clothes, and said, I buy you all the dresses you want, but I shouldn’t.
The tenor had taken to saying this often.
I shouldn’t buy you any dresses at all, he continued. You are better nude. But these Baden-Baden dresses will not do.
I sat up.
You can wear them once more to be fitted for new ones, he said. Order at least a dozen. Go to see someone decent, have them present the bill to this address. He slid a card onto my vanity table. Go to your favorite.
He fitted his collar into his shirt, tied his tie, and then sat to put on his stockings and shoes. As he stood and straightened himself, he turned back to me, and said, Welcome back to Paris.
I presented myself at the dressmaker who knew me well, the only place I knew to go, the one the Comtesse had sent me to—Félix. Jou-jou! he said. Welcome back. It has been so long! How was your time in Baden-Baden?
Fantastic, I said. I did not bother to correct him as to my name.
It has agreed with you, he said. The Comtesse said you were very happy there.
I smiled as if I knew this. I look forward to calling on her shortly, I said, though I knew I could not bring myself to do so. I gave him the tenor’s card. He handed it back to me. I looked at him questioningly.
He laughed. My dear, we have his card already—we expected you! He wrote just the other day that we were to see you soon. Follow me, he said. This time I will show you the new fabrics. They have just come in. And it’s just as well, he said. These may be the last dresses made in Paris. He pushed back the curtain to his atelier and withdrew his tape ribbon from his watch pocket. I have not even seen the orders yet for the Empress’s series at Compiègne.
§
After the constant company in Baden-Baden, Paris felt empty. I went to see Euphrosyne’s barman, to leave her a message with him, but when I entered the café, another man stood behind the counter. I left at once.
I returned again another time at a different time of day, and it was still the same stranger. Again, and it was yet another stranger. There was no sign her friend worked there any longer.
I had not written to Euphrosyne during my absence, for I blamed her for what had happened—for her advice that I go to see the Comtesse. But it was the summer again, and I was sure the Bal Mabille would be full. She would be there. As would my fantasy composer.
For I did think of him as a fantasy now. I had imagined him so often, he had become a figure of imagination, almost as remote and mythical to me as my hidden god. That old fantasy, my imagined flight from Baden-Baden, in defiance of my circumstances, had been a hopeless one. It is better, I had told myself, to wait. You would be destroyed. By waiting, I hoped we would be reunited in some future where I was finally a singer and he a composer. The Empress dead, the Emperor also.
Would we recognize each other then? I wondered.
The belief we would be reunited, that the world would organize itself to bring us together, this seemed comic at best set against the very real city around me now. All I risked, if I went to the Mabille that night, was to enter and find another woman beside him, leaning over the piano, pushing his hair back as he played—though that still had the power to keep me away.
This, at least, was what I told myself each time I took out and then put away my cancan shoes, which were too old now and, no doubt, out of style. And besides, it would be August; the city would begin to empty from the heat.
I instead took to returning to the opera house on my own, to sit outside of it, almost as if I were keeping it company; soon it became a regular pilgrimage. I stood on the sidewalk opposite the entrance and imagined my own likeness there, not among the busts of the composers, but along the roof, perhaps in the place of the golden Apollo, or joining him. I’d once thought the Empress to be ridiculous, having herself painted as a goddess, and yet there I sat at a table outside of a bistro sipping a coffee and imagining an image of myself shining down from the top of the Opéra Garnier.
After a month of these visits, I heard a voice behind me say, Can I enlist you to help me knock some of them off the roof?
I turned. My composer sat at the table behind me. He raised his glass and nodded at me.
There’s no room for me up there, he said.