Here I am, I said. Will they come to London?
The Paris papers publish stories on the murder each day. The police patrols along the Seine have doubled as they search for what is now believed to be a savage band of killers. They have questioned his mistresses, his household staff, and now they search for you. He nodded his head as he said this, as if toasting me.
His mistresses. This amused me. Of course there would be many.
You smile, he said. Why?
How do they say he was he killed? I asked. For I knew I should ask.
Someone slit his throat and then set him on fire, he said, and then they tossed him in the Seine. When the police found him, they only knew him by a letter in his coat’s pocket, his address there. It was dry enough to read.
He paused here. The newspapers say it was from you.
I never wrote to him in advance, I said, but even as I said it, I knew the note was my own, accepting him, telling him to meet me that night. The meeting he had abandoned for the duel I had kept him from fighting.
Worn over his heart.
Aristafeo picked up his glass, and looked deeply into the wine inside, and then added, I would have given him a better death; I would have shot him just the once. This was what I told the police when they questioned me.
I said nothing, for there was nothing to say to this.
They told me they found his money on him—he had not been robbed. Who would kill him and take only his life?
So he was killed by a rich man, I said. Someone who wouldn’t think to rob him. He had many enemies, and only a very few of them needed his money.
You must write to the police, he said.
Of course, I said. Of course.
It can perhaps wait until we return to Paris, for we must find a theater there now. But you could write in advance that you will come and answer questions.
And here it was. I could not go back to Paris. Already our little dream of a life here in London was dead.
Of course, I said, instead. I will write to them. I’m not the killer. If I’d wanted to be rid of him, I would have married him.
The joke was wrong even as I said it, as the silence after it told me. We finished the dinner this way, quietly, alone again with what I could not say and what he would not ask.
I would not go back to Paris, and I would not write this letter, and I think he knew this also.
I’ve upset you, Aristafeo said finally, setting his fork and knife down, and patting his mouth with his napkin.
No, I said. I came to dinner upset; I am much the same.
Do I have your word you will write the police and clear your name? he asked.
Yes, I said. I will explain how I was en route to Milan.
Any witnesses? he asked.
My maid, I said. The one who left. But perhaps they can find her.
He asked the waiter for our bill and waited for it to be brought, unable to look at me.
I was like the cat pretending it had not swallowed the bird or, really, the bird who had swallowed the cat and was now too heavy to fly away. He was tired of these lies and so was I, but still I could not tell him the truth.
§
After dinner, as we ascended the stairs, he told me he would be leaving Brown’s for cheaper rooms until our return to Paris. He went down the hall, and I waited for him after I had undressed; when he did not appear at my door as was his habit, I went to him, letting myself in after he did not answer my knock.
I nearly feared he had already left, but when I let myself into his suite with the spare key he’d given me, I found him asleep, the smell of brandy sweet in the air, rising off him.
I sat in the chair beside the bed, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I remembered the way his music sprang up from under my fingertips that day in my own Paris music room, it was like the visit from his ghost I had never had.
All because he was alive, of course.
And yet while that ghost had never visited me over the years, his phantom had never left my side.
There had never been a place for that impossible life born all those years ago in that kiss. All those years he had worked in secret in that woman’s chateau to prepare a glorious future for us, he had been so sure it was only waiting for us to step into it. What was increasingly clear, however, was that the ground behind us was vanishing as quickly as the ground in front of us was refusing to appear. And the sacrifice I had made to the gods out of the tenor, it would not be enough.
It seemed the gods would take this, too.