Music of the Night Page 12

  “Oh, right, sure, I noticed that myself,” she stammered, straightening up quickly. “They only last a day or two, and they just sort of wilt and shrivel up—”

  Like an old man’s cock, she thought, though these words didn’t get out, thank God. Worse and worse. She stood there smiling sickly and thinking, I’m as loony a spectacle as the crazy lady herself, in my own way.

  As the sprinkler man drove off, Fran saw cigarette smoke curling up from the shadows under the porch of 408.

  Jeffrey only had time for a short stroll that night, up to and around the park where a couple of dogs were chasing each other, no owners in sight. He remarked that people sure didn’t take care of their pets around here, letting them run loose like that. Fran thought about having seen the crazy lady’s other dog and not saying anything to her. She drew Jeffrey home along a parallel street two blocks away, so as not to pass the crazy lady’s house.

  “Too bad we can’t eat those mushrooms,” Jeffrey said as they walked back up toward their front door. “We’ve sure got a lot of them.”

  The uplifted caps shone like pewter in the lofty radiance of the corner street light. Fran found herself oddly relieved that Jeffrey noticed them too, that he saw them. What would he say if she told him he was seeing her evil thoughts?

  “What are you smiling about?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “A secret joke too dumb to say out loud.” She dug her keys out of her pocket and unlocked the front door. “I hate those damned mushrooms. I think I’ll see if I can buy something somewhere, some kind of poison I can use to get rid of them once and for all.”

  Jeffrey laughed. “You want to poison some mushrooms? That’s cute. Speaking of food, by the way, my mom wants us to come for Thanksgiving.”

  “What, already?” Fran said, instantly deflated and anxious. They stood in the dark little hall. “It’s still September, for God’s sake!”

  He took her hand and squeezed it softly, thumbing her knuckles with sensuous pleasure. “She just wants to make sure we don’t make other plans first.”

  “But I want to make other plans,” Fran said, shrinking from the prospect of an evening of being delicately put down by Jeff’s blue-haired and protective mother for being an “older woman” instead of some fresh young thing.

  “She’s not going to be around forever, you know,” Jeffrey said a bit plaintively, “and I’ve gotten to be, well, better friends with her now that we’re living in the same city.” He turned on the hall light, and they trailed through the house getting ready for bed and wrangling in a desultory way about Thanksgiving.

  I look like shit, Fran thought, staring despondently at her haggard reflection in the cabinet mirror as she brushed her teeth. He’s getting fed up with me.

  Had that vein been there before, a bluish-gray pathway under the skin of her neck? Just wait till his mom sees that!

  Later on in bed, in a wave of guilt and self-disgust Fran pushed him away when he touched her breast. They slept with their backs to each other.

  Two more of the rounded, gourd-like things lay among the dangling corpses of the silver bullets next morning. Fran interrupted her work several times to go look at them, unhappily walking around and around the small, cursed spot on the lawn.

  Last night she had dreamed of Jeffrey sleeping splayed on his back, a bullet-shaped metallic mushroom growing upright between his legs.

  And these roundish ones, moored to their twisted scrap of vine and showing faint dark patterns under their greenish skins: were they her evil thoughts about Jeffrey’s mother?

  The crazy lady must see the mushrooms when she minced down the street with her one dog from time to time, smoking and throwing her hips from side to side like an old cartoon whore. No doubt she looks and tells herself, Goodness me, look at that—my new neighbor has some very evil thoughts.

  “What’s the matter?” Jeffrey said at dinner. “I’ve got cases to work on and you’re pacing around like a panther. Please, Fran, I can’t concentrate.”

  “Carmella returned some of my work today,” Fran said angrily. “Too sloppy, the doc said, do it better. He should try making out all that slurred muttering he puts on there.”

  “Why don’t you go watch TV for a little while?” Jeffrey said.

  “Thanks,” she snapped, “have you looked at what’s on tonight? Just because I’m not in school, that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot, you know, to sit glassy-eyed in front of an endless parade of sit-coms and game shows.”

  “Jeez, I never said—”

  He stared up at her, open-mouthed, and for a second she stared back in blazing contempt. God, what a whiny, moon-faced child he was! No wonder he clung so hard to his mother’s apron-strings!

  Then the hurt in his expression melted her into a shuddering confusion of fear and contrition—what in the world was wrong with her?—and she hugged him and apologized. They ended up in front of the TV together, murmuring and kissing on the couch, neither of them watching the screen.

  “I think moving here was harder on you than you realize,” he said. “You look tired, Fran. I wish I could have been around more to help you with the details of settling in, but with starting school and all . . .”

  She wished he hadn’t noticed the marks of strain in her face, the ones she noticed every morning.

  Age, real age, so soon? She was only thirty-four, for Christ’s sake! It had to be just strain, as he said. And he was so sweet about it, how could she resent his remark?

  But she did.

  It turned really cold that night for the first time that fall, and the wind blew. Leaves covered much of the lawn in the morning, and all of the mushrooms had withered and vanished, except for one of the ovoid ones. Its sibling on the same desiccated vine had shrunk to a wrinkled brown nut, but the survivor was now the size of a tennis ball and shone livid white in the dark, rough-cut grass.

  Like an egg, Fran thought uneasily, studying it. A green nest with a giant, monstrous egg in it—a bad egg (naturally). Already a dark veining of decay was visible, like crazing in old porcelain.

  No other growths had appeared. Pretty soon the frost would kill this one too, and Fran’s evil thoughts would be private again, invisible even to the greedy, smoky gaze of the crazy lady in 408.

  Fran asked Betsy and her housemates to a Thanksgiving party, and Carmella too. Jeffrey said he didn’t know what Fran was doing or why, but he meant to go across town to his mother’s on Thanksgiving. Fran had a lot of evil thoughts about that, but no more mushrooms came up.

  The next time she looked, the one remaining fungus was as big and white as a baseball, and marbled all over with black. There was a delicacy of great antiquity about it now, an almost ethereal look, as if the bluish-white and shining shell glowed coldly from within, silhouetting the darker tracery.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” she muttered, and she gave the thing a sharp kick.

  The pale shell disintegrated without a sound, releasing a puff of thick black dust. In the wreckage stood a sooty stub, a carbonized yoke, which yielded, moist and pulpy, when she kicked at it again, frantically, in a rush of horror and disgust.

  The shrunken black knob emitted another breath of inky powder under the impact of her shoe, but clung to its twist of vine. She had to trample it for long moments before she was able to flatten the whole mess into a dark stain on the earth, through which splinters of the rotten root beneath protruded palely like shards of bone.

  She gasped and realized that she had been holding her breath to keep from inhaling the spores, or whatever the black dust was that had been packed between the decayed center and the outer shell.

  Who was watching, who had seen her mad dance on the front lawn under the old cottonwood?

  No one. Betsy’s house was quiet, the people across the street were doing whatever they did all day. The crazy lady’s driveway was empty, her old gray Pontiac absent.

  How ridiculous, that a person as crazy as that was allowed to drive!

  No more mushr
ooms sprouted.

  “It’s too cold for them,” Jeffrey said. “Don’t tell me you miss the ugly things! A little while ago you wanted to poison them.”

  No, Fran didn’t miss them. But she found herself wondering, in a nagging, anxious way, where her evil thoughts were growing now that they weren’t showing up on the lawn.

  After all, the thoughts didn’t stop.

  Like when she saw Jeffrey with Betsy one evening while he was setting out the bagged garbage on the curb. The two of them stood chatting there, and Fran saw a spark of easy warmth between them and cursed it to herself.

  He said, “Maybe we should drive somewhere over the Thanksgiving break, to hell with your party and dinner at Mom’s and the whole thing. This is a tough term for me, I’m all frazzled. And you’re not in top shape yourself, Frannie. Look at yourself in the mirror. I’m afraid you might get sick.”

  She did look, and she knew it wasn’t that she was getting sick. She was worrying too much. She was becoming more sensitive to noise, too, and woke up often at night. She would get up alone, careful not to disturb Jeffrey, pour herself a glass of wine in the kitchen, and go look at herself in the bathroom mirror until she’d drunk enough to stumble back to bed and fall asleep again.

  Carmella said, “You better pull yourself together, Fran. I’ve had some complaints from the docs you type for.”

  The docs who mumbled, the docs who paid too little out of their immense incomes for the services they couldn’t get along without, the docs who rattled along about burned kids and dying old people and all the rest as if the sufferers were sides of meat. The docs should feel the pain their patients felt.

  That was an evil thought, wasn’t it?

  Fran ordered a turkey at the supermarket, for her Thanksgiving party. Jeffrey wasn’t going to his mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner after all. His mother had had a fall and was in the hospital with a broken hip. Jeffrey spent a lot of time there with her now, which Fran resented. She soothed herself with dark imaginings of death, an ending between Jeffrey and his mother once and for all.

  But where were these evil thoughts? The dead roots on the lawn stayed bare, like bones worked to the surface of an old battlefield.

  The turkey was ready to pick up well in advance of Thanksgiving. She hoped it would fit; she had only the freezer compartment of the mid-sized fridge that had come with the house to store it in.

  On her way back from the supermarket, Fran pulled up in the street. The crazy lady was on the steps of her porch, screeching dementedly, “Get back here, you hear me? You get back here this minute, you filthy thing!”

  The one little dog she had left was down at the edge of her ragged brown lawn, alternately turning its rear to the questing nose of a brisk gray poodle, and sitting down to avoid being sniffed. The poodle pranced and wagged with delight, and darted at the smaller dog with stiffened front legs, trying to turn it, mount it, hump it there in the gutter.

  “Get away, get away from her!” shrieked the crazy lady, waving her hands wildly, though apparently she was afraid to run down there and chase the poodle away. She thrust her head forward and screamed at the poodle from a rage-distended mouth, “Don’t even think about it!”

  Fran knew she would explode if she had to hear that raw, mad voice for another second. She leaned out of the window of the Volks and yelled, “For Christ’s sake, lady, will you shut up? Let them screw if they want to screw, they’re just dogs, that’s what they do!”

  The crazy lady stood still and lifted one bony hand to shield her eyes from the bright fall sunlight. Her other hand stayed at her hip, cocked at an angle, a butt smoking between the thin fingers.

  Fran recoiled from the unseen glare of those shadowed eyes. She drove quickly on to her own driveway, where she sat afraid to move for some time. She watched in her rearview mirror until the crazy lady, trailed by the little dog once the poodle had lost interest, withdrew into 408 without another word.

  Jeffrey said, “I got an A. You’ve brought me luck! I love you.”

  They were up late, kissing and sighing and stretching against each other’s warm skins. A steady breeze blew all night, hissing and seething like surf. Fran listened and drowsed, lulled by the sound, but not sleeping.

  Jeff left early for class, bouncing with energy. Fran lay in bed late, luxuriating in the languor of the night’s long loving and heartened by the shimmer of sunshine glowing through the drapes: not winter yet.

  After a steamy shower, she stationed herself in front of the mirror to rub moisturizer into her damp skin. And stopped, staring, frozen by the hammering recognition of something that could not be.

  Her skin was an unearthly pearly color, moist and shining, like the skin of a soprano dying endlessly in Act Three of consumption, like the skin of a delicate Victorian lady vampire, like the skin of a guest made up for a Halloween party. But Halloween was past.

  The lines and smudges the mirror had been showing her for weeks had spread and joined each other in a flowing network of shadowy tributaries that covered her features from her throat upward and spread away past her hairline, onto her scalp. The lines were mauve and blue and gray, and when she turned her agonized face so that sunlight fell on her cheek, there was a slightly greenish tinge of iridescence to those veinings under the translucent surface of her skin.

  She ran to the mirror in the bedroom, and the one in the little bathroom near the kitchen, her eyes glaring in disbelief out of smoky pits in the horrible mask. Her voice creaked and wheezed desperate protests in her throat, her hands fluttered nervelessly—her own pink-knuckled, flesh-tinted, still youthful hands that didn’t dare touch the ancient, marbled pallor of her face.

  This was where the evil thoughts had been growing, in their true home, their natural seat, their place of origin. Nothing lay ahead but inevitable disintegration of the outer shell, exposing the blackened, shrunken ruin of the brain still damp and clinging with feeble persistence to the quivering stem, the living body.

  On the wild winds of her panic she tossed to and fro in the sunlit rooms of the house, screams dammed in her throat by her own terror of what the force of them would do to her fragile shell of a face.

  Stifling, she flung open the front door and plunged outside into the cool, bright morning. She stumbled across the lawn, past the big tree with its leaves rustling in the soft breeze, and flung herself down at the dead root on which her evil thoughts had first appeared.

  As soon as her forehead touched the bleached, bare wood, she felt the eggshell of her face soundlessly break and fall away. A swirl of sooty powder choked her breath as darkness broke in her and from her and bore her down into bottomless night.

  Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast

  For the first few months it was very hard to take my meals with him. I kept my gaze schooled to my own plate while he hummed phrases of music and dribbled crumbs down his waistcoat. His mouth, permanently twisted and swollen on one side, held food poorly; unused to dining in company, he barely noticed.

  But to write of such things I must first set the stage. No more need be known, I think, than anyone might learn from Gaston Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opéra, which that gentleman wrote using certain details he had from me in the winter of 1907 (he was a convivial, persuasive man, and I spoke far too freely to him); or even from this “moving picture” they have made now from his book.

  M. Leroux tells (as best he can in mere words) of a homicidal musical genius who wears a mask to hide the congenital deformity of his face. This monstrous prodigy lives secretly under the Paris Opéra, tyrannizing the staff as the mysterious “Phantom” of the title. He falls in love with a foolish young soprano whose voice he trains and whose career he advances by fair means and foul.

  She, thinking him the ghost of her dead father or else an angel of celestial inspiration, is dominated by him until she falls in love—with a rich young aristocrat, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (the name I shall use here also). The jealous Phantom courts her for himself,
with small hope of success however, since, according to M. Leroux, he sleeps in a coffin and has cold, bony hands which “smell of death.”

  Our soprano, although pliant and credulous, is not a complete dolt: she chooses the Vicomte. Enraged, the Phantom kidnaps her—

  It was the night of my debut as Marguerite in Faust. I replaced the Opéra’s Prima Donna who was indisposed, due perhaps to the terrible accident that had interrupted the previous evening’s performance: one of the counterweights of the great chandelier had unaccountably fallen, killing a member of the audience.

  Superstitious people (which in a theatre means everyone) whispered that this catastrophe was the doing of the legendary Phantom of the Opéra, whom someone must have displeased. If so that someone, I knew, was me. Raoul de Chagny and I had just become secretly engaged. My eccentric and mysterious teacher, whom I was certain was the person known as the Phantom, surely had other plans for me than marriage to a young man of Society.

  Nervously, I anticipated confronting my tutor over the matter of the fatal counterweight when next he appeared in my dressing room to give me a singing lesson. I was sure that he would come when the evening’s performance was over, as was his habit.

  But just as I finished my first number in Act Three, darkness flooded the theatre. Gripped in mid-breath by powerful arms, I dropped, a prisoner, through a trap in the stage.

  I was mortified at being snatched away with my performance barely begun, but knowing that I had not sung well, I also felt rather relieved. It is possible, too, that some drug was used to calm me. At any rate I did not scream, struggle, or swoon as my abductor carried me down the gloomy cellar passages at an odd, crabwise run which was nonetheless very quick. I knew it was the Phantom, for I had felt the cool smoothness of his mask against my cheek.

  No word passed between us until I found myself sitting in a little boat lit by a lantern at the bow. Opposite me sat my mentor, rowing us with practiced ease across the lake that lies in the fifth cellar down, beneath the opera house.

  “I am sorry if I frightened you, Christine,” he said, his voice echoing hollowly in that watery vault, “but ‘Il etait un Roi de Thule’ was a disgrace, wobbling all over the place, and you ended a full quarter tone flat! You see the result of your distracting flirtation with a shallow boy of dubious quality, titled though he may be. I could not bear to hear what you would have made of ‘The Jewel Song,’ let alone the duet!”