The Mercury Waltz (17 page)

“Your halo’s crooked, parson,” pleasant from Istvan, but Rupert without warning stops and bends to the man, mouth close to his ear, and “Lot’s wife,” says Istvan admiringly as they walk on, for the priest has apparently been turned to salt, or stone, or something equally white and silent and immobile. “Whatever did you say to him, Mouse?”

“I said,” Rupert without a smile, “that I’d buy him a drink or break his neck, his choice, but either way he must stop that noise. —Come on then, we’ll be late if we don’t hurry,” taking Istvan firmly by the elbow, his other hand raised high to hail a cab.

In the false dusk of dimmed electric light, the overture rises: violins and dark tympani, to warn that the tale to come will be a tragic one. Conversation quiets in the seats and boxes, all the way up to the Lords’ Box of Cupid’s-eye view and red velvet, dressed in sprays of balsam fern and white freesia, occupied by de Vries and de Metz as well as several lesser courtiers, like Tibor Banek, all taken by the honor and determined to make the most of the company; Benjamin de Metz is in particular demand, like royalty come from afar. Frau de Vries sips iced champagne, already her second glass, and wafts a fan of feathers so massive and unwieldy they repeatedly obstruct her neighbor’s view; Christobel de Metz folds away the playbill, the only one in the box to have consulted it at all.

Tomas the baritone enters, singing of war and conquest, trailed by a litter of choristers: he is some amalgam of Antony, Caesar, and possibly Alexander or Tamburlaine; what he sings is historical nonsense, but his silver breastplate gleams and his voice rolls out like thunder, to much impressive effect, especially amongst the ladies of the audience. In the back, the very farthest of the cheap seats, where not a few playbills are deployed furiously as fans, Haden sweats in his brocade as Frédéric whispers something of the story, tells him to mark how the music will change at Cleopatra’s arrival, and when Dolabello creeps in stage left; Frédéric’s warm lips brush against Haden’s ear, once is an accident, twice is deliberate; is it? Haden grips the playbill in his fist.

Istvan and Rupert sit far down front, between a tired banker and his sparkling wife, and a matron who wears on her lilac bosom a gold brooch in the shape of an ankh. Entering, there was some rustling recognition of these men of the Mercury, murmurs and raised eyebrows and even a dash of applause, Istvan acknowledging all with a gentleman’s bow, Rupert with a guarded nod; now Rupert watches the show, Istvan the crowd; both are engaged. When Miss Annelore Bart enters, to audible gasps—descending, singing, from the ceiling, on a cloud-draped contraption much like a trapeze artist’s swing—they share a little look, a little smile, Spinning Jennie come back to life with unmarked skin and a glass-cutting soprano; the mirrors sewn cunningly to her skirts glitter and flash, like something Puggy might have dreamed to life. And the orchestra would have pleased Jonathan Shopsine, its cello-rich moans and cries, its banshee violins…. Rupert, listening, recalls a tune played in a drawing room, four hands on the keyboard, white keys and black; Istvan muses on the music for the roulette show, such violins perhaps? or the rowdy squeezebox squawk? to befit a pair of gods in rude disguise.

Cleopatra, upon reaching the stage, falls almost at once into the grip of passion, represented by the grip of her co-star, who had eaten a hasty meal of garlic cod less than an hour before curtain; their clinch requires more acting prowess than normal from the exquisite Miss Bart, who grits her teeth and forces herself to think of her divine dresser’s assistant, whose fingers are like little mice, capering up and down in her skirts, ah, the pleasure of it awaits at intermission! as she surrenders herself to the embrace of bold Antony or Caesar, who thinks bitterly of his business manager while his mouth cries out his love. Backstage, a props runner faints from the heat, dropping his armful of balsa spears with a thud barely masked by a soaring high C; a tin of kerosene spills and nearly catches flame; the stage manager calls upon the Devil to witness his manifest misfortunes; on the stairway servants pass and scuttle, as more iced champagne is delivered to the Lords’ Box.

“Upon the Nile we dream,” exalts the soprano.

“Upon the Nile we die,” mourns the baritone, as evil Dolabello enters like an asp through the stiffened paper reeds, their motion glimpsed before his own; it is a wonderful effect, appreciated by Christobel, attending to the show as those around her drink or sigh or murmur one to the other, Herr Banek to Herr de Vries; only Benjamin is still and silent, a new silence—cloven, impatient—that troubles his wife, whose glance touches him again and again, her rubies glowing sullen as blood in the shadows of the box.

As Dolabello reveals the extent of his dreadful duplicity, the wailing Cleopatra is dragged off to the underworld by several helmeted actors, one of whom treads too hard on her costume and partly rips the mirrored hem. Caesar attempts to follow but is trapped by the waving reeds, themselves revealed to be infested by agents of Dolabello, the actors rising up with long stalks pinned fore and aft, that they must detach before they can begin to do battle. Most are deft and successful but two are not, for several frantic song-filled moments, as confused laughter sparks from the audience; finally the grand and terrible tympani crash again, covering the noise and ending the first act. As the house lights rise, Istvan reflects cheerfully upon the superiority of puppets as actors, as Rupert tilts his head, taking in the architecture of the building with a professional’s eye, the flies and the lights, the painted balconies, the half-curtained Lords’ Box—

—where, champagne in hand, Benjamin stares down at the empty stage: and sees that tilt, that turned head, that profile and that face: and turns at once as if in summons from a god, abandoning his seat and the box and Frau de Vries in mid-sentence, as if all have ceased in that moment to exist. Christobel leans to the railing, to see what has so entirely claimed her husband, and sees instead Istvan alone, whom she recognizes at once, that cold player’s grace unchanged—then turns a brusque, distracted look on the man now introduced to her by Herr de Vries, his upright lieutenant Herr Eig: whose gaze at Christobel de Metz is so palpably dumbfounded it is as if he, too, has seen an immortal, some goddess of the truth in tea-colored silk, whose handshake is as firm as any man’s.

Heading up the aisle for the refreshments in the lobby, Istvan’s lips twitch to glimpse what first seems to be an actor strayed from a circus tent, for what mere groundling—and these are the groundling seats—could ever appear so hectically arrayed? But it is Haden in his blinding tailcoat, with Frédéric beside, Istvan stopping to chat with both and take in the heat between them, stir the pot a bit with a naughty aside, another quote from the ancients—“
Accedat, sine: laxior redibit,
”
Let him draw nigh: the laxer he shall go
—to make Frédéric blush as he translates for Haden, whose face is such a crossroads—of embarrassment, ardor, umbrage at Istvan—that it is practically a show in itself; as behind the trio, a red-coated servant of the Opera approaches, bearing a folded note.

Outside on the portico, Rupert stands with a cigar, taking the air amongst, it seems, more than half the audience, ladies with fans and dewdrop bottles and the occasional dainty cigarette, men with their hats beneath their arms, the lobby orchestra a-saw again at something meant to be exotic. Past the portico’s white marble, a small army of dark figures waits and shifts and reconfigures, cabdrivers and whores and bored snatchpockets and boys bent on disruption, several of them Haden’s boys set there to wait in case they might be needed. Some are merely citizens loitering as the evening cools, enjoying the drifting strains from the orchestra; some of them love the opera, its music and its beauty, and wish that they could afford to attend. Others think that such lavish entertainments are a folly for the rich and a thumbed nose at the poor, who can barely pay for loaf or lager, let alone the coin it takes to take up space in such a hothouse; and others still who see those yearnings and divisions as helpful fissures and tools for a sundering, a rendering, a hard reapportioning to come, if all the new men are true to their new ideals. Let the old world roll itself clean of lords’ boxes and spilt champagne, and let the liberty and largesse accrue instead to the honest sons of honest toil—or the ones styled so, as the
Globe
takes care to do, whether they are honest or not, toilers or not; it is the naming that matters, and if most of those who shake their fists long secretly to sit in those boxes and drink that champagne and throw the empty bottles at their brethren on the sidewalk, is that not the nature of Man, to seek to better himself? And there are so many men now, so adrift and anxious to be directed, as this new world schools itself daily how to spin, and for whom.

Smoke drifts in puffs and clouds; a young woman laughs, rather too loudly; the lobby orchestra begins the prelude for the second act. Benjamin passes again through the crowd, jaw set, looking, looking, searching for Rupert who has already gone inside, gathering Istvan, who tosses back the last of his kir, the note from Christobel de Metz folded into his breast pocket,
Please join us for a cordial after the performance:
shall they go, shall he show it to Mouse or shall he not? And how very enormously strange it all is, that the Snow Youth has come to the Opera after all.

Mr. and Mrs. Cowtan also retake their seats, Mrs. Cowtan avid for the gowns she sees around her, the creamy silks and jewels, as Cowtan eyes Blum, that scribbler who fronts for the so-called “Seraphim,” who did not even bother to attend the opening of the Cleopatra’s
Lear;
and whose identity, Cowtan is sure, is really that of editor Hebert, pretending to stand for civic discourse while using controversy to sell more copies of his fishwrap. Some men, it is plain, have no moral compass at all.

And Frédéric, flushed from the heat and the wine drunk in the lobby, two glasses gulped much too quickly, quotes to Haden—as a cosmopolitan man should do, boldly and with humor—more from M. Hilaire and the ancients, that even bawdier bit of the paltry gods and the ne’er-do-wells, Haden’s gaze somewhat glazed for his forte is not forbearance, and there is only so far he can go without going too far, without putting his hands to either side of that face and his scarred mouth to Frédéric’s own, and let whatever hot disaster befall—

—as the lights go down again, as Benjamin with singing nerves reenters the box past Martin Eig unseen and dismissed, Martin Eig whose life’s horizons have just been forcibly altered by the conversation of Christobel de Metz, Martin Eig propelled fully out of the building into the bawl and mutter of the streets, pushing past the whores and loiterers, as Cleopatra appears onstage in purple velvet, romanced by Dolabello with all the cruel allures of the afterlife.

And as the story wends through catastrophe to
denouement,
as Dolabello is stabbed and then resurrected as a capering demon, as Antony who is not Antony sacrifices himself to that demon to save his lady-love, floating now on a barge pulled by a dozen perspiring supernumeraries, Rupert pats his forehead with his handkerchief and murmurs to Istvan, who nods very slightly, as Cleopatra’s path to expiration or triumph begins its third interminable hour. The moment she dies and the applause begins, Rupert stands over Istvan, who smiles—“Love to Mab; don’t wait up”—thinking to sample that cordial solo, and see what it is that brings the Happy Prince and his princess to town. But first, a fortifying taste of brandy as he assumes the mask, stepping lightly past the clamor of departure into a far side aisle—

—where to Istvan’s surprise Haden stands as if waiting for him, his face perfectly unmasked, all woe and passion and “Milord Peacock,” says Istvan with some hilarity, “where’s your good angel?” But seeing that Haden is incapable of speech, he links arms with him instead and “Come with me,” for why not find out, now, just what this kit knows of Benjamin de Metz, whose name he is so pleased to feint with, and “Try to smile, yeah?” as together they cross the main aisle, together mount the stairs to the Lords’ Box, stopped by a frowning usher, who, appeased then by the note, lets them pass as if to the very Throne of Paradise itself; that passage watched from below by Cowtan and his lady with shared incredulity, for why should that dirty-minded puppet-dandler go so freely where Cowtan, in his loyalty a friend, almost, is not invited at all?

Herr de Vries and his lady have already departed to usher in the supper guests, Herr Banek not to be part of that supper, either; even loyalty has limits. But as sole hostess in the box, Christobel offers the smile she imagines Isobel would have, Isobel who so prized these men, this curious M. Dieudonne and his
cher ami
—but no, for here enters another beside him, a man much younger in a wild gaycoat, who for one disorienting moment Christobel sees as a double of M. Dieudonne’s: not that they look alike, for they do not, yet somehow—is it the eyes?—are manifestly the same.

As Haden, confused to total silence, bows over her hand, Istvan looks to Benjamin de Metz, Pluto’s son more formidably handsome than ever, his eyes blank as if in fever as he looks past Istvan’s outstretched hand; while Christobel, her voice calm and steady, offers to the two men her greetings, and tiny silver glasses of the tart local wine: “Please refresh yourselves, gentlemen,” as she watches her husband’s face.

In the exiting crush of the lobby, Edgar Rue, having found Miss Bart amenable to an invitation for a late aperitif, smiles in Olympian enjoyment at a bevy of young operatic nymphs, when a sudden body passes him swift as a thief’s; he in fact even checks his billfold in the wake of that passing, but sees after a startled moment that it is the writer Blum, though in obvious distress, is he ill? Loudly he calls after: “Herr Blum! Herr Blum, are you quite well?”

—but Frédéric does not answer, Frédéric so beside himself with shame that he wishes the stained pavement would crack in two and the earth swallow him whole, exactly what he deserves for what he has done, the mad lunge of it, the—hunger, oh, it is incredible! He could blame the heat or the drink but it is himself who has done the deed, who has entirely sullied and ruined what was beautiful beyond belief, beautiful as Haden’s eyes, as his face turned to Frédéric’s to speak, the two of them stepped out from the crowd into a dim side aisle, when without any warning he—say it, he leaned forward and kissed his friend, kissed those soft and smiling lips he has longed for so long to taste, then jerked back to see Haden staring at him in utter shock, Haden who surely will never speak to or look at him again, no, all is over, over—