"I had become no more, you know, than a poor dog ready to die for her.... I mean it, daroga!..."

-Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

The turning page is a curtain drawn
in Emma's coffee-table book of silent film
and Lon Chaney's face is different
in every greying photograph.
The Man With One Thousand,
the greasepaint makes them all
rubber masks, lantern-lit,
and maybe it's really ten-hundred-and-one,
if you count the private face that
cameras never catch, the Constant,
the Firm, the Solid, and the Fixed.
Here in a cape, and the caption reads
The Phantom Of The Opera, 1925,
with Mary Philben.

Down on the floor, he exhales.
There is a bare matress, too, on the floor,
but he does not lie on it, lies beside it
on the hardwood, flat on his stomach,
his face pushed into a red pillow,
unseen beneath the sound of turning pages.

The heroine wilts in the foreground,
and what Emma took at first to be a nightgown is,
she decides, probably actually a ballet frock,
as ladies don't wear nightgowns to the opera,
and once, when she took dance lessons
as a little girl, she wore something like that
(though the hem was higher,
in keeping with the times).

Again, into the pillow,
made mouth-hot and mouth-moist,
he exhales; and she thinks,
he wants me to hear him,
it is intentioned, "Are you okay?"

Mary Philben's rolled eyes betray
her swoon, the touches of her captor
too much for her to take. Emma thinks,
he is a brute! wiry, animal-strong,
could sling her over his roundy shoulders
like a coil of rope, so light and limp,
bearing her down with him,
well beneath those dungeonous cellars,
where, surely, he will rape her, though offscreen.

He groans her an acknowledgment
if not an answer. The floor knows
the weight of his body, the pillow
knows his face's press, so many times
has he done this before in her company,
has heavied the air she breathes
with his unhappiness. Even the sobs,
when they come, are anticipated.
No longer a captive of his moods, Emma feels no obligation
at the sight of him crumpled and collapsed,
is not moved to touch him by the noises he makes.

The least of the many misunderstandings at play
is that what Emma takes for idiot lust in the photograph
is really the terror of escape and that, in the Gothic novel,
the eponymous Phantom's motives are as innocent
as wanting to "have a wife like everybody else
and to take her out on Sundays,"
the pleasures of deviant sex not being a big draw
for a troubled genius desiring only to be normal.

Emma notes a felt cruelty for refusing him
bodily comfort in his despair, though she
resents that he has made her feel cruel--
or, worse still, obligated.

Perhaps even less than this, as misunderstandings go,
is that Mary Philben's dress is, in fact, a nightgown,
the opera dormitories being housed within the theatre in those days,
dancers and divas sleeping on site.

Emma's fingertips push white crescents into her palms
as she holds herself separate, looks at her book,
remembers when she used to give what never was enough.