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Raoul cannot stop smiling, because Christine cannot stop smiling. She hasn’t looked so happy in ages, all because of the sum they finally saved up.
“First lessons, and – oh, then maybe I could sing at church!” she claps her hands excitedly.
“Church? No, you’re going to sing in operas and world fairs! You’ll tour the world, Christine!”
She scoffs.
“I’ve toured enough, I think. It’ll just be good to have my voice again.”
Her smile flickers, but doesn’t fade.
“That’s what’s important,” he says, wrapping her in a hug.
Then they sip their sparkling juice as Christine absently sets a hand on her stomach, and they listen to the drunken cheers outside as the clock ticks the first few seconds of the new century.
+++
After several weeks and a steady stream of ill-fitting tutors, Christine is nearly out of hope. But then she sees something in the classifieds, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it advertisement at the very bottom corner of the page, with a mailing address and a single line of text: Inquiries for music lessons .
“What kind of music lessons?” Raoul asks.
“I don’t know.”
“It seems odd, doesn’t it? There’s not even a name.”
“There’s no harm in mailing something.”
“There’s actually plenty harm in mailing something if you expect to get anything mailed back. You really want to give this person our address?”
“What about your office address?”
“That could work.”
+++
“Christine…”
“Yes?”
“I hate to say this, but you’re not taking lessons with this person.”
“Who?”
He hands her the letter. She takes it out and scans through it. Whoever penned it seemed to learn how to write using a misprinted book and a mirror. The letters are jagged, pressed too hard into the paper, in all capitals, in all print. In all red ink, as though the paper was living skin, scratched to ribbons all for the sake of a deranged note.
“Why not?” she asks.
“Do you see his handwriting?”
“I do. What about it?”
“Note that he doesn’t sign a name.”
“Noted.”
“This doesn’t unnerve you in the slightest?”
“It probably would if I hadn’t met him.”
Raoul nearly faints.
“You what ?”
“I visited his address after work on Wednesday. He’s harmless, Raoul. Just a little strange in the head.”
“Is that not an oxymoron? Harmless, and strange in the head?”
Christine frowns.
“No, it’s not. My own papa was strange, you remember.”
“Your papa was telling stories,” Raoul tries.
“Stories he thought were very real,” Christine’s eyes grow wide, “So real that sometimes they became real.”
“Christine, if you’re going to bring up the korrigans again, I’m going to pull my hair out.”
“But you remember that night.”
“The world does not revolve around korrigans. You’re changing the subject.”
“But you do admit you saw something too?”
“I admit nothing.”
“One lesson. You can be there.”
“No.”
“What if it takes place here?”
“You want me to let this madman into our house ?”
“He’s not mad. He’s eccentric.”
Raoul sighs. Artists and their obsession with the eccentric. Why can’t Christine have any normal friends?
“Okay. Just… I will be watching.”
+++
If Raoul’s parents were alive, and if his brother did not disown him and force him off the continent for marrying a chorus girl, they would most assuredly die and/or disown him for his lack of manners at this present moment.
There is something immensely wrong with Christine’s teacher, but like the bullfrogs and earthworms and alley cats she lovingly picks up with her bare hands, she doesn’t seem to notice.
He resembles a flagpole, or one of those stick insects (Christine likes those, too, even though Raoul firmly believes a moving stick goes against the laws of God and man). His clothing is worn, maybe thirty years out of date, and hangs off him like he’s a poorly-made coat rack. He smells like a cave. It’s not exactly unpleasant, the cool and dark and the damp, but it is equal parts unnerving and baffling. Most concerning, if the list can even be ranked or quantified, is his coloring. His liver must have run away at a young age, because never has Raoul seen someone so jaundiced. Even his irises are yellow, which Raoul did not think was possible.
His jerky movements, unblinking eyes, and subterranean smell, almost completely distract Raoul from the coup de gr â ce, the full-faced mask, something that’s equal parts tacky costume and funeral shroud.
Raoul stands there, gaping, not offering a handshake or a greeting, not even a nod.
“What the hell are you wearing?” is what comes out of his mouth. Christine slaps one hand over her mouth and one hand over her stomach, as though the unborn child is just as outraged as she is over Raoul’s lack of manners.
“I assume you’re referring to this,” the tutor says, brushing the mask with his fingertips.
“Yes.”
“It’s a mask.”
“A ma– yes, I see that. Why are you wearing a mask to a music lesson?”
“I am hideous,” he intones matter-of-factly. Christine is beet-red. Raoul also feels beet-red. The tutor is still an unhealthy yellow-green, or at least from what Raoul can see from his neck and his spindly hands.
They file into the drawing room, where the upright piano lives, and Raoul sits in the corner, where he is deftly ignored.
“I would like to hear your range,” the tutor says, and they perform drills for the better part of an hour. Raoul will never tire of Christine’s voice, but there are only so many times he can hear the tutor say the word “diaphragm” before he goes insane. Luckily, soon the hour strikes, his hands still over the piano, and Christine’s voice dies in her throat.
“Are we done?” she asks, bewildered, “I thought the lessons went to two hours.”
Raoul nearly bursts into tears, but he will not leave Christine alone with the bizarre man.
“Yes, they do,” the tutor says absently, “But your clock is three minutes fast.”
He pulls out a pocket watch he may as well have found at the wreckage of Atlantis, it’s so beaten-up and outdated, and shows Christine.
“What if your watch is just three minutes slow?” Raoul offers helpfully.
“It can’t be. I wound it just this morning.”
“It could be broken. It does look rather old.”
The tutor presses the pocket watch to his ear and seems to count on his fingers.
“No, my watch is fine. Your clock is the problem,” he says with some finality, “Madame, you are a coloratura.”
“Really?” she ghosts her fingers over her throat.
“Yes.”
“What pieces should I work on, then?”
“I have a few in mind.”
He says nothing beyond that. The silence is oppressive. Until:
“Yes, that’s it,” he says. And more silence.
“What’s it?” Raoul asks. The man pulls out a tiny notebook and a red fountain pen, and begins to scratch all over the paper. He rips out a sheet and hands it to Christine.
“Are there lyrics?”
“There could be.”
“What are they?”
“I don’t know yet. Use your vowels. Come in on eight.”
Raoul knows Christine makes several mistakes, but only because of the way her hand flies up to smooth down her hair. It’s her tell.
Meanwhile the tutor has turned the piano into a machine of divine sound, miraculous sound, so all-consuming Raoul feels guilty for hearing it and guilty for never hearing it before. Christine’s voice rises above it, celestial, and the twinkling notes dance around her like raindrops in spring.
Raoul understands madness now, and he understands why artists love eccentricity so much. But he also understands nothing. He wants to crawl under a table and kill himself.
“That wasn’t terrible,” the tutor mutters, plunking out a few chords.
“I’ll say,” Christine grins, holding the paper to her chest. The tutor startles so hard it’s like his whole body jerks forward.
“No, no, no, Madame, your voice was nearly perfect. It was my arrangement that was… clunky.”
“What did you arrange?”
“A untitled piece.”
“Who composed it?”
“I did. Just now.”
Raoul’s jaw is on his lap. He hasn’t blinked in seven minutes. What is happening.
“Just now? But– how?”
“How do you breathe?”
“I just do.”
He shakes his head.
“A singer has to breathe with purpose. Do you want to try again?”
She nods. They play. The clock chimes the hour, and they stop.
“What’s the rush?” Raoul cries. They both startle, as if they forgot he was there.
“The clock’s three minutes fast, you said. Three minutes!”
+++
The tutor’s name is Erik. He plays every original tune as if it were made long before he gave it an existence. He plays every old tune like new. After the fourth lesson, he runs into a lamppost halfway down the street. Raoul knows this because he watches him leave from the window.
Christine glows more each day. Her friends are throwing her a baby shower.
“Should I invite Erik?” she asks Raoul.
“Yes, you should.”
So she does at their next lesson, and he declines. Raoul feels like he’s mourning someone. The party goes well, though. There are sandwiches and little cakes and presents and balloons, and it’s warm and cheery in their drawing room despite the cold rain outside.
The following lesson, Erik has a present. It’s a mobile, with little rounded wooden figures of horses and dogs and butterflies. He shows Christine the mechanism he installed, where if you pull on a cord you can tie all the chimes together, into silence, and if you pull on it again the chimes are released and will make shimmering songs as the mobile spins lazily over the baby.
The baby is born, healthy and safe.
He loves the mobile, can stare at it for hours and hours. The baby does, too.
“Raoul, can you stop gawking at Gustave’s toys?” Christine calls as she cuts open an envelope.
“Why is he a voice teacher and not a toymaker?” Raoul asks, wrapping his arms around her and leaning his chin on her head. He looks at the scribbled red writing on the page in her hand without really reading it.
“He told me once that kids don’t like him.”
“Oh.”
She gasps as though she’s been stabbed. Raoul holds her tighter.
“What’s the matter?”
“I– It–” she gasps again, throws the letter to the floor, and storms off. Raoul picks it up, examines the smudged red ink, tearing through skin-like paper. It’s formal. It’s stilted. It’s saying Erik is no longer interested in being her tutor.
+++
It only took a few short months, but he never changes. Erik falls hard. He pretends he doesn’t, ignores his feelings, and all is well. But when he stands beside her in their freshly-painted nursery, looking at the ridiculously small child grasping at the mobile above him, he cannot stand it anymore. No more games of make-believe. No more pining and yearning, no more festering in her presence, or else he will ruin her life like he ruins everyone’s lives.
But Erik is not a brave man, and he’s not an honest man, and he’s hardly a man, hardly a person. Whatever he is – a worm, maybe – he is ashamed of it. He has so much shame that he wraps himself in it, and he sends the letter saying there is nothing more he can teach her. That much is true. The rest is not. But it’s good if she hates him, if she knows that it’s his fault and not hers. As if anything could ever be her fault.
And then he returns to his drab three-room flat, and he leans against the cracked wall, and slides to the floor, and he weeps.
+++
And she weeps.
The baby cries, too, and she soothes it even as her face is pink and hot with tears.
Raoul feels like he’s been slapped with a fish. And not a minnow, either, but one of those great Atlantic salmon, or maybe a swordfish. To think, after all these months, after all those times of letting Erik into their house, of shaking his hand, of watching him leave, of offering him coffee he never accepts, of falling in lo– why, of practically falling into debt paying him! (Raoul does not pay for the lessons. Christine stopped paying at Erik’s insistence a long time ago).
The stinging (from the hypothetical fish that figuratively slapped him – keep up, now) grows into burning, and the burning bubbles into boiling. Raoul checks on the baby – still asleep, still chubby, still baby-shaped – very good. He checks on Christine – in bed, cocooned in blankets, staring at a wall – not good.
“Hey,” he says, brushing hair out of her face. She hums in response. Her eyes are dead.
“I’m going out to buy some treats. Do you want some chocolates?”
“No, thank you,” she says – recites, more like it. Her eyes are dead.
“Cake? Cookies? Sweets?”
“No, thank you.”
He’s at a loss.
“Cocaine?”
She rolls on her side, facing away from him. Now her eyes are alive, filmed with tears that seem endless. Everyone always leaves her. What’s so broken about her that everybody leaves?
“Well, I’ll go and see what they have,” Raoul says, “And I’ll be back soon.”
He’s going to beat that stupid man.
+++
Or not. It seems, or Raoul suspects, that life has already beaten Erik sufficiently. He can only be proud he doesn’t blanch at the wretch who opens the door. His shirt is unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up, revealing skin dotted in bruises and tract marks and slashed and re-slashed with scars and burns and brands and the marks of heavy cuffs.
“Can I help you?” Erik says blandly.
“Why, yes, you can,” Raoul wants to snap, “You can start by telling me why you broke my wife, you son of a bitch.”
But he only gets the first word out in a squeaking yelp.
“Why?”
Erik shuts the door on him. Raoul waits a few seconds, and upon not hearing any locks clicking, lets himself in. Erik hovers in the doorway of what must be the bedroom, stiff and grim like a man on the gallows.
“Tell me why, dammit!” Raoul says shrilly, surprised that Erik flinches.
“You read the letter,” he says, “There’s nothing else to say.”
“She needs you.”
“She’s ready.”
“No, she needs you. Y-you’re made of the same stuff, you and her.”
“She.”
“What?”
“You and she, not you and her,” he traces a tear in the faded wallpaper with his finger, “Learn some grammar.”
“And I think you need her,” Raoul folds his arms, “Judging by the way you’re holding up.”
“Don’t taunt me,” he hisses.
“You need each other,” Raoul continues, “To make music. And Gustave needs you to make toys for him and to teach him piano or whatever that big violin’s called. Cello. And– and I need- I… I need you to be there for Christine.”
Raoul feels like a fly in a web. With every word he says, Erik steps closer, until they stand half a foot apart and Raoul realizes just how much height Erik has on him.
“Go home to your wife,” he rasps, “Leave me be.”
“Do you like to hurt her?”
Erik recoils, and then he slams his arm against Raoul’s sternum, pinning him to the wall.
“I won’t say it again. Leave .”
Raoul’s had enough of all this mess. Artists and their moods, he swears… he rips off the mask and chucks it across the room. It slides underneath a cabinet. Erik tracks it with his eyes like a raptor, and when it vanishes, he wheels back on Raoul. For his part, Raoul’s not entirely sure what he had in mind when he did that, but now he knows he’s surely going to be mounted on Erik’s wall like a pathetic piece of wild game within the hour.
The face is stripped of all flesh, only paper-like skin covering the bones and tendons. The way it’s distorted in anguish makes Raoul’s stomach turn, because it’s so exposed, so accusing, so vulnerable and human, and Raoul wants to run away. There’s a high keening sound, like an old dog who got lost, without a collar or an owner or even a bone to gnaw on, and he realizes it’s coming from Erik the same moment he realizes he’s wrapped the man in a bone-crushing hug.
It only seems right to Raoul that some warmth will break a man who grew up eating other people’s fists and jeers. It doesn’t feel right, though, to witness such a thorough collapse.
They’re sitting on the dusty floor. Erik is babbling through his sobs. Raoul can’t understand him over the hammering of his heart.
“Take a breath,” Raoul tells himself aloud. It’s convenient that Erik takes the advice, too. They breathe with purpose, until the world seems a bit steadier.
“I’m in love with your wife,” Erik says. The world is less steady now.
“I’m also in love with my wife,” Raoul says faintly.
“You see the problem.”
“I do.”
Yes, they each see a problem, but not the same one.