Wurstsuppe, the waiter said, and then left.
That you were rejected from the Conservatoire, the tenor said. And could lose your voice. She can teach you to be a Falcon properly.
I nodded.
I do this for love of you, he said.
At this, I smiled with the appropriate expression of gratitude but looked down to the creamy surface of my soup. I did not want to speak of or lie about loving him yet. But I could see he also wanted to be complimented so very much for having chosen this voice teacher, and I did not want to do it, not yet. I was still afraid of her precisely because he had chosen her.
Another maxim of Odile’s came to me then: If you cannot compliment a man but you must, ask him to speak of himself instead, this has the same effect. I remembered I had meant to ask him of his Fach, and so I did.
Please, tell me what is a heldentenor?
He smiled the more, nearly preening.
I am the tenor version of you, he said. A tenor who is almost a baritone, deeper, richer in the lower range, but with a seemingly hidden high range that surprises and can sustain high notes with force.
What does this mean, helden? I asked.
Helden means hero, he said, making a fist and shaking it playfully, as if to smite an enemy. It is the voice you hope to have if you are a German tenor. This voice is for singing Mozart, he said. And for singing Wagner, too. I think in Germany men who can give voice to tragedy, those are our heroes or, at the least, that is how we want our heroes to sound when they sing.
He grinned at this, and his eyebrows rippled as if he had surprised himself.
I was always hoping to find someone like you, he said.
So we could give voice to a tragedy together, I said, trying my hand at banter.
Yes, he said. That is exactly right.
Before this luncheon, I had wondered who I was now. The question was not a simple one. Now I knew.
The tenor had not installed a new woman in my place during the time he believed me dead. Whatever it was he felt for me, it had not dimmed, not once, not even in death. I found the apartment kept like a mausoleum to me when he brought me there proudly that first night after we left the Café Anglais. The furniture shrouded, the clothes still there, some of them packed into three trunks, waiting by the door for the footman, who loaded it into the carriage. As I peered into the apartment from the foyer, he assured me all would be kept as it was until my return. Only as he locked the door and we descended the stairs did I understand I was the woman he was installing in my place; Jou-jou’s life, for I did not think of myself as her anymore, was truly over, and whoever I was to be next had been given her things.
We then set off for the tenor’s own apartment, where he showed his trophies to me: his antique swords and pistols, the stuffed kills from his hunts, the relics of his family. We drank a liqueur made from mirabelle plums from tiny glasses, and he told me the story of the boar he’d killed as a boy, which stood by the entranceway, a sentinel shaggy with age, along with his more recent prize, an elk head mounted on the wall. The taxidermist had given the elk some serene gaze as it no doubt looked somewhere into an eternal Germany, which I now entered for the first time at his side.
I had given no further thought as to who I was—it was easy to forget that it even mattered. But the question had returned just before this luncheon, in the form of the conductor, who appeared at the door to our compartment asking for our papers. The tenor had supplied them immediately and did not look at me once, and neither did the conductor, who examined them and then bid us a good day.
This had been the most telling detail to me. The woman who had left him, that woman was still legally dead and could not be resurrected without questions neither he nor I wanted answered. And she had no papers, could cross no borders on a train. I had papers, however. Or rather, the tenor had them, and he returned them to his coat. I thought to concoct ruses in order to read them. What did they say? What name was there? When he would introduce me to Pauline, what name would he use?—but I would know then, it seemed to me. And perhaps it was better, quieter, to wait. The thought of asking what my name was now seemed likely to pull this little world asunder.
After the conductor left, I understood I was still waiting for the tenor to show some sign that it was all just a game, that he would return to our old ways, but the longer he did not, and the more he continued to be tender to me, and kind, the more curious I became.
This would be easier if I could love him, I thought, as we finished our luncheon, stood, and returned to our cabin to prepare to disembark. And could I love him or grow to love him? He was handsome, devoted to me, willing to spend a considerable sum of money on me and even to forgive that I had run from him as I had twice now. He had made a case for me with this foreign voice teacher and was now accompanying me to her side.