Chapter Text
The knock on the door startled Christine awake, and it took her a second to orient herself.
Unmade, rumpled bed. Gentle sunlight streaming through the windows. Prisms of color on the floor and walls from the suncatchers she’d made over the summer, Meg’s attempt to cheer her from thousands of miles away.
Her nap had lasted a bit longer than she’d intended.
There was a second knock on the door, and, groaning slightly, she pulled herself to standing and picked her way to the front door. She narrowly avoided the pile of dirty clothes she still needed to wash, and managed to topple over the pile of clean-but-not-folded clothes that she’d tossed on her loveseat the night before.
She made a disgusted sound and reminded herself that she was supposed to be trying to get back into a regular routine. Or at least something resembling one. She grabbed the hoodie slung over the back of the chair and shrugged it on, and then pulled the disposable mask off the hook by the door and put that on, too.
She peeked through the peephole and saw a man dressed in a brown uniform, holding a black box. Frowning, she slid the bolt chain in place and pulled the door open a couple of inches.
“Yes?”
The man stood a respectful distance from the door. “Miss Christine Daaé?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Delivery,” he said. “I was instructed not to leave it on the doorstep, but to ensure you were home to receive it personally.”
“Do you need to see ID?” she asked, and eyed the box. She couldn’t recall having ordered anything recently, but who could say what she might’ve done in a late night, wine-soaked haze.
“No, miss,” he said. He placed the box on the ground and stepped away. “Only to ensure you were home. Have a nice day.”
“Thank you.” She waited till he’d walked away, then closed the door. She went into the kitchen and opened up the big disinfecting lightbox that Meg’s mother had sent her weeks ago, thinking that the delivery box might be a tight fit, but it should work. Then she grabbed a pair of disposable gloves and retrieved the box from her doorstep, noting it was about the size of a big shoebox and heavier than it looked.
She kicked the door closed behind her and put the box in the disinfecting box, then turned it on and set the timer for an hour.
While she waited, she did the yoga routine she’d been supposed to do when she laid down earlier, and scrounged through the fridge. There wasn’t a lot there, but she had some leftover takeout from a local Lebanese place. She made a wrap out of her leftover falafel with tzatziki, tomatoes, and goat cheese, remembering how last week Meg had scolded her for thinking six gummy worms was an appropriate dinner. When she’d snarked it was really more like lunch for her, Meg had responded that it wasn’t an appropriate lunch, either. She grabbed her phone and checked it for this session’s cocktail recipe.
“Aviation martini,” she muttered, and rolled her eyes. It had been Jules’s turn to pick, and he liked to go old school on them. She gathered the ingredients and shook the mixture in her martini shaker, then poured it into the fancy martini glass that Jules had also insisted they needed for these sessions. She garnished it with a couple of dirty cherries, then carted both plate of food and cocktail over to the table.
The disinfecting box chimed, indicating it was done, so she grabbed that and put it on the table too, certain that it had something to do with either Meg’s or Jules’s shenanigans, and then opened Zoom.
Meg was already waiting, her own dinner and cocktail in front of her. “Did you get one?” she asked without preamble.
“A box? Yep.” She hefted the box and showed it to her. “Just finished disinfecting.”
“Awesome, I thought we’d open them together,” Meg said excitedly. She sipped her cocktail and made a face. “What the fuck is this?”
There was a chime, and Christine punched the button to let Jules in. “It’s called an aviation cocktail, you heathen,” he said. “Some of us are looking for a bit more culture than you get with Long Island Iced Tea.”
“Okay, that was one time,” Meg said. Jules shuddered.
“One time too many,” he said. “Back me up, Chris.”
“It was college,” she said. “Anything goes in college.” She and Meg had ended up roommates their first year, and they’d met Jules just a week after that, and the trio had been inseparable ever since.
"Whatever,” Meg said. “You got one too, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “Delivered by the yummiest guy I’ve ever seen. Tried to get him to come in for drinks, but he said no.”
“We’re still in lockdown, Jules,” Christine said.
Jules sniffed and took a sip of his own drink. “He was welcome to join my pod,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s right,” said Christine. “Weren’t they calling it a bubble?”
“Sex den?” Meg offered, and she and Christine snorted with laughter.
“Anyway,” said Meg when their mirth had died. She had what looked like a colorful garden salad in front of her, while Jules had opted for some kind of panini sandwich. “So, recap: this whole week sucked and all I did was rattle around my apartment. I’m pretty sure I danced the Nutcracker by myself about five times. How about you guys?”
“Well, I’m trying to seduce the UPS guy, so that should tell you how things are going for me,” Jules said.
“And Christine? How’s everything with you?” Meg asked.
“Well, I did yoga today,” she said. “So I figure that’s a win.”
“What about the voice lessons?” Jules asked.
She shrugged. “I have a few students,” she said. “Some of them are…well.” She winced, thinking of her most recent student, a teenager who was convinced she was the Next Big Thing in the opera world when in reality she sounded like a screechy cat in heat.
“I mean, if they pay,” Jules said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. Rent wasn’t cheap, after all. “Oh! And I finally heard back from the people at the Manhattan. They said that once lockdown is over, they want to offer me that secondary spot.”
“Way to bury the lede! Congratulations!” Jules said.
“Yay! And then we’ll all be working together,” Meg said happily. She was the prima ballerina at the Manhattan, so she had been the one who’d told Christine about the secondary soprano opening and gotten her the audition.
Of course, her audition had been the week before the lockdown had been implemented, so very little had happened over the last year.
“True,” said Jules. “Whenever that happens, I guess.”
“I think they’re starting to say maybe in a few months,” Meg said. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Well, if it’s up to the WHO, we’ll never reopen for business,” Jules said with a scowl. “At this point they’ve got the vaccine, and cases have gone down a lot. There’s really no reason to keep dragging this out.”
Christine shifted uncomfortably. “Nearly ten percent of the world’s population has died,” she said. “I can understand them being cautious.”
“Hmm. Well, it’s just as well. Once we’re back to work, I’ll probably have to stop posting so much.” He worked in costuming at the Manhattan, but when they’d all been furloughed he’d started a TikTok where he made clothes and told gossipy stories about performers he’d worked with in the past, giving them all bitchy little nicknames. He’d had a million subscribers by the end of his first month.
“Oh, but I love Stitchertea!” Meg complained.
“You won’t even notice,” Jules said. “You’ll be too occupied with being able to have your sugar daddy in the same room with you to even care.”
“Jealous?” Meg teased. For the last few years, she’d been sponsored by the Comte de Chagny, an obscenely wealthy French aristocrat who’d decided Meg was his soulmate when he’d visited New York and seen her dance as both Odette and Odile in Swan Lake.
“Obviously,” Jules said. “For all your bitching, you’re living in a Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking Central Park, and I’m in a rundown loft in Brooklyn.”
“Yeah, we’ve all seen that particular rundown loft,” Christine said. Jules had inherited a fortune from his grandfather, and had invested in a brownstone in Brooklyn. “I’m the one living in a studio.”
“And all the way across the country,” Meg said. They’d all three attended Juilliard, and while Meg and Jules had found work in the city, Christine had pitted the Met and the San Francisco Opera against each other, and San Francisco had offered her more, so that’s where she had gone. It had only taken her a couple of years to determine she missed her friends and the city too much, and just when she’d thought she’d be able to come home, the lockdowns had hit.
“Ooh!” Meg suddenly perked up, and picked up her tablet. “Want to see your bedroom?” Christine watched as Meg’s apartment flashed by, and she caught the barest glimpse out one of the windows until they stopped in an empty room. The walls were a silvery gray color, the floor the same dark hardwood that ran through the rest of Meg’s apartment. “I’ve got all the furniture picked out, I’ll email it to you so you can see it. If you like it I’ll get it ordered.”
“Meg,” Christine said. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Thank Philippe, not me,” she said. “He’s bankrolling all of this, after all.”
“Shameless,” Jules said.
“It’s really sweet of you,” Christine added.
“It’ll be like school, except better, because we’ll have more room,” Meg said. “And you’ll have this view.” She walked over to one of the big windows and Christine looked down the dizzying height toward the park.
“Very nice,” she said.
“You could always live with me instead,” Jules said. “Those Park Avenue Princesses are gonna get tiresome real quick, and they won’t be as nice to you as they have to be to Meg.”
“He just wants to lure you into one of his orgies,” Meg said.
“Obviously,” Jules said. “Attendance would go way up.”
They all laughed, and Christine finished her drink.
“So,” she said. “What exactly is this box for?”
“It’s from Philippe,” Meg said with a grin. “You’ll have to open it up to see what it is.”
"Ten bucks says it’s a wedding invitation of some kind,” Jules said. “He’s going to lure you to France and then tie you to his bed so you can’t escape.” The Comte had not been subtle about his desire to make Meg his wife, having proposed to her several times already with a succession of larger and flashier diamond rings. Meg had joked that she was holding out for a pink multi-carat radiant-cut ring like the one Ben Affleck had given to Jennifer Lopez on their first go round, but Christine knew it was really because she and Philippe had a conflict about whether she would continue to dance once she was his Comtesse.
“On three,” Meg said. “One, two, three!”
Christine cut through the brown paper it had been wrapped in to discover a black box. She shook it slightly and loosened the lid, then pulled it off.
“Oh,” she said. The box was lined with deep, black velvet, with fancy red glittery party confetti dusted over it. Inside were a medium-sized black velvet hinged box, a large black velvet drawstring pouch, and a square black parchment envelope sealed with a red wax seal with a fancy, curly C pressed into the wax.
“What should we open first?” The inside of Meg’s and Jules’s boxes looked identical to hers.
“The invitation,” Meg said. She held hers up and showed it to the camera. ‘Miss Megan Giry’ was written on it in fancy calligraphy.
“Not Ms.?” Christine asked as she picked hers up. “How not-modern of him.”
“He’s a French aristocrat who longs for the days of Napoleon, what do you expect?” Meg asked.
“Well, go on and open it,” Jules said, and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Twenty bucks is about to be mine.”
Christine rolled her eyes and broke the wax seal. She pulled out a stiff piece of red cardstock with deep black lettering.
“‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’” she read. “‘You are cordially invited to step Below and witness the magnificent and the macabre.’ There’s nothing on here about a surprise wedding. I think you owe us both ten bucks each.”
“Twenty,” Meg said. Jules waved his hand impatiently.
“We’ll see,” he said. “A wedding could be macabre.” He picked up his levered box and opened it. He whistled, then turned the box to show off a pair of gold cufflinks, a gold pocketwatch, and a small gold ring that Christine assumed was a pinky ring, all inlaid with red stones. “Fancy.”
Christine picked up her box and opened it and gasped.
Black fire opals. A long necklace of hundreds of tiny glimmering stones, strands woven together like a rope that would likely loop over her neck several times, a set of drop-style earrings, and a set of gorgeous opal bangle bracelets.
“Do you think they’re real?” There was a little card beneath the necklace, and when she picked it up she realized it was an authentication card, proclaiming the stones to be genuine Lightning Ridge opals. She couldn’t comprehend the thousands and thousands of dollars that a man she’d never met had just casually spent on her.
“Of course they’re real,” Meg said. “He’d consider it gauche to send anything fake.”
“So they’re like, to borrow or something?” Christine asked. Meg laughed.
“I guess if it makes you feel better, you can think of them as loaners,” she said. Christine gingerly put down her box.
“And?” Jules asked expectantly, as Meg hadn’t opened her own box yet. He started to hum the wedding march, and she flipped it open and showed them. Her jewels were diamonds, earrings with dangling clusters, an Art Deco collar-style necklace, a bracelet with gems so large they looked like rock candy, and of course, an Art Deco style diamond ring.
“Very pretty,” Christine said. “But I still don’t understand what all this is for.”
“It’s a Halloween party,” Meg said. “All of this is just…Philippe. He likes to get generous, you know.”
“I don’t,” said Christine, suddenly feeling a little awkward. They’d all been so busy – and mostly so broke – that they hadn’t had the chance to see each other in person much since Christine’s move to California.
"Did he say much to you the last time you guys talked?” Jules asked Meg, clearly unaware of Christine’s sudden internal conflict.
“No,” Meg said. “But we didn’t do a whole lot of talking, if you catch my drift.”
“Dirty,” Jules said. “Well, this has certainly improved my week.”
“Yeah,” Christine said softly. “Is this…like, will it be safe?”
“Oh, totally,” said Meg. “We’ve all had the vaccine, right? And he’s going to send a private car and his private jet. In two weeks, so we’ll have all been properly quarantined, too.”
Christine chewed on her lower lip. “And where is it?”
“In northern France, near a little commune called Perros-Guirec,” Meg said. “He’s got this massive chateau – I haven’t even seen it yet, but he’s sent pictures.”
“I’m sure he’ll be really careful about all of this,” Jules added. “When he did that get together over the summer, it was super private and really safe.”
Christine remembered. She hadn’t gone, obviously, but she’d seen the social media posts – and all the articles and comments, deriding the Comte and his friends as out of touch, privileged rich people who were selfishly endangering everyone else.
But at least nobody had gotten sick. That she’d heard of, at least. And she thought it probably would’ve been reported, since at the time it was such a big story. So it seemed that even if the Comte thought he was above lockdown requirements, he at least was really careful about it.
“Who all do you think will be there?” she asked.
“Oh, his usual crowd,” Meg said, as if Christine knew who that was. “His brother, I’m sure, some friends from Paris and elsewhere.” She glanced at her tablet and met Christine’s eyes. “It’ll be totally fun, we can people watch.”
“I wouldn’t have even met some of them,” Jules added.
“I don’t have anything to wear with all this,” Christine said.
“Oh, don’t worry about that, he’ll make sure you have a dress,” Meg said. At Christine’s surprised look, she continued, “It’s what he does. Just text me your measurements and he’ll get it done.”
“Oh, do you remember when he did the after party for The Sleeping Beauty?” Jules asked eagerly. “He had them design an entire ballroom in the Plaza to look like a real forest! Brought in trees and everything.”
“I remember seeing the pictures,” Christine said.
“It’s going to be so much fun,” Meg said. “Don’t worry about anything. And I’ll be so glad that you’ll finally get to meet him! You’ll love it, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” Christine said. “What about this other thing?” She picked up the black velvet drawstring pouch and opened it and withdrew a Colombina mask made of dark silk, dotted with tiny opals in a scroll pattern.
“Ooh, a masquerade,” Jules said. His own mask was more a Bauta style, but only a half mask like Christine’s, and Meg’s was a Colombina as well, but made of white silk and shaped like a butterfly with real feathers and tiny diamond accents. Jules held up his mask over his face and smiled wickedly. “One can be whomever they please, at a masque.”
“Yes,” Christine murmured, and looked at her own thoughtfully. Anything could be hiding behind a mask.