Dateline Paris, February 9th
I saw the Phantom of the Opera tonight.
He’s given up on the old opera house, you know. Left it and its Chagall ceilings and history and heartbreak behind, packed up his kit and made his way to the Bastille. There’s a newer opera house there now, a curved edifice of grey stone and glass that’s a little more to his liking.
He’s given up on opera, too, gone looking for something that lets him find his own audience. No more Christines for him, no more training thankless ingénues and working through others and waiting for the grand production to find his voice. No, he’s got a Gibson now, and a ratty little amp. There’s a CD player that jacks into the amp so that he can crank out whatever he wants to hear sans the guitar line, and then tear into it on his own. That’s all he wants; it’s enough to get the job done.
There’s no mask these days. He’s got no use for it now, not with the way he plays. Sometimes he paces – prowls, really – up and down, his back to the world and face bowed to the guitar. Sometimes he squats down over the amp and adjusts his instrument minutely, alternating between delicate tweaks and blistering runs as the mood takes him.
You can see his fretwork. It’s out of this world. But you won’t see his face. He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t need to, you see.
You won’t find him out in front of the opera house. At least, I didn’t. Instead, he was at the bottom of the stairs that lead down to the basement entrances and the Metro, a clean sweep of pavement thirty feet below street level. He sets up down there and lets it rip, and the hell with what’s going on inside. It was Don Giovanni, but I’m sure he didn’t care. He’s seen it. Hell, he’s lived it. And the fine and fancy folk up top gave the edge of the stairwell a wide, wide berth as they waited for the doors to open and offer them an escape inside, where they’d find a much more refined kind of fury.
He was already playing when I went out tonight, left the hotel and the laptop behind and went hunting something to remind me I was in Paris after all. My route took me past the opera house, and the sound pulled me closer. For an instant, I didn’t realize who he was, this guy with the thinning mane of silvery hair and a rough-looking down jacket. I saw him move. I saw him pace. I saw him play. And I saw the way his reflection kept skipping off the chrome of the doors that he always faced, and knew him for who he was.
I didn’t go down the steps. I didn’t dare. I just listened. There were a couple of kids down there with him, and I figured that if they were close to him, then I didn’t need to be. They were standing, watching, dressed in that combo of hip-hop and AC/DC that someone, somewhere had decreed was cool, and he ignored them. They watched and listened and swayed, and he let them, his incidental audience.
Maybe five feet separated them. Maybe ten. It was enough. As close as they might have gotten, he was alone.
I left him to them, and moved on.
They were still there when I came by again, a couple of hours later. The opera was letting out, the streaming patrons flowing out and around the cone of sound that he was still letting flood into the night. I fought the current and breasted clear into the empty space. He was playing the same song, or maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter. He was playing what he was playing, and more kids had drifted down to see him. A couple of dozen, maybe, all sitting there, silent, on the steps.
I didn’t go down to join them this time, either, just moved to the low stone wall that marked one side of the stairwell and leaned on it, listening. And when the song ended, I was the only one who clapped.
He looked up at me then. Just for a moment, and in a way that let none of the spectators on the steps see his face.
I saw him, though. I saw him, and nodded recognition. He nodded back, for one endless second, then started playing again. I moved on. The kids stayed. And his new song followed me off into the night.
