The Vexations Read online

  Fortin began to cast his net farther afield, to past associates or fellow photography hobbyists. We entertained more often, single men for weekday dinners or weekend lunches. It was a burden on Estelle, given that Fortin had fired the maid when I finished school. He said because I was home all day I could help more, but Estelle was the one who rose every morning before dawn to light the stove and start the coffee, grumbling about having been made a charwoman at her age. I was not privy enough to the household finances to know whether this was an essential economy or one of Fortin’s petty privations.

  Whenever I tried to rise before her she chased me back to bed. “You need your beauty rest,” she said, not teasingly. She was the closest thing I had to a mother, and I was the closest thing she had left to a daughter, and she had solemnly shouldered the responsibility of securing me a future.

  One night we hosted a Monsieur Auguste Cannu, visiting from Cherbourg. A pharmacist and a fellow amateur photographer, which is how Fortin knew him. I’d worried their friendship meant Cannu was closer in age to Fortin than to me, but he was young. He had a sharp nose, very thin lips, and slightly thinning hair. None of this I held against him, but his conversation was indescribably boring. Once he had exhausted photographic plates and exposures and lenses, he cataloged the important people he’d prepared medicine for while they vacationed in Cherbourg.

  I was already well practiced in listening sympathetically to Estelle’s and Fortin’s various ailments. I had looked with anticipation to a future in which dinner conversation no longer revolved around backaches and boils. I could not imagine smiling forever through the dyspepsia of France’s largest silk importer or the yellow toenails of Countess F____. Worse, none of the stories had endings: after he delivered the medicine, the patients returned home or resumed their travels, and we never learned whether their condition had improved or worsened, although of course we were meant to assume they’d been cured by Monsieur Cannu’s expertise.

  After dinner Fortin gestured for the customary decampment to the living room, and my turn at the piano. This was the part of the evening where I generally made my best impression. I knew I was playing for my future, and sometimes during easy passages my mind wandered to Eugénie, performing for her past self, her past ambitions. I didn’t know if it was sympathy or scorn I felt in those moments, and before I could figure it out, the difficulty of the music would claw my attention back.

  “Might we just have a drink?” Cannu said, gesturing at the calvados Fortin was pouring. Estelle had already settled into a chair with her needlework and looked up in surprise.

  “Without any music?” Fortin asked.

  “I don’t really care for it,” Cannu said.

  “You mean all music?” I asked, surprised into speaking. “Music in general?”

  “Yes,” Cannu said.

  “The man needn’t defend his opinions,” Fortin said.

  “I’m just trying to understand,” I said. “‘Music’ is…rather sweeping.”

  “I prefer silence,” Cannu said. “Is that a problem?”

  “Of course not,” I said automatically, though of course it was.

  We had a strained game of cards, Estelle recruited from her needlework and Cannu and Fortin talking about the Universal Exhibition opening in Paris. Their opinions were in accord: the Eiffel Tower sounded uninteresting beyond its height, but both the Machinery Hall and the Human Zoo might be worth a visit. I said very little.

  Two days later Fortin opened his mail and said, “A bite at last. Our little fish. Monsieur Cannu wants to see you again.”

  I tried to conceal my dismay. Tried to conceal it all the way through another dinner and a tea with Cannu, followed by a photography exhibition at the city museum. Arranging the first visit, Cannu had claimed to have other business in Le Havre, but the second was made specifically to see me. This was as close as I had come to a proposal, and I was twenty-one. I’d heard girls only a few years older than me described as old maids, unmarriageable even with advantages—money, family, great beauty—that I didn’t have. Nor did I possess property or profession or any great talent that might earn me an income. If I ever hoped to have a roof over my head that was not my great-uncle’s, it would need to be a husband’s. I knew I should have found Cannu acceptable: he wasn’t a drunkard or a profligate or a brute. But the prospect of being his wife felt like drowning. I wouldn’t even have the piano to retreat to, to make music when I’d run out of polite words.

  He wrote to suggest an excursion to Paris, with Estelle as chaperone, to visit the Exhibition. As Fortin read the invitation aloud I started shaking my head. At first I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but then I felt the motion of it, back and forth, the weight of my tightly pinned hair, the collar of my dress against my neck. I couldn’t stop it, no no no no no no. I even started crying, which I couldn’t recall ever having done in front of Estelle or Fortin. As a child I’d kept myself so guarded I wept only in bed or outdoors, where I could blame my watery eyes on the sea wind.

  “What on earth?” Fortin said.

  “Please don’t make me.”

  “Make you what?”

  “Go to Paris. With him.” But it was clear enough that I meant more than Paris.

  Fortin wanted a rational debate, a listing of positives and negatives. He allowed that Cannu’s distaste for all forms of music was unfortunate. But unfortunate enough to let such a chance slip by? I did a poor job holding up my end. Some sentences dissolved into sobs, while others, even when I could get them out, expressed sentiments I knew he found vague and unconvincing. I was losing, which made me even more distraught and less able to argue.

  Estelle finally cut in. “If she feels like this, whatever her reasons, are you really going to make her marry him?”

  There was a long silence as Fortin eyed us both. “No. I suppose not. I think she’s being completely irrational, but—I wouldn’t force…the issue.”

  He wrote to Cannu, saying that he didn’t think the Human Zoo would be fit entertainment for ladies, since the natives would be in states of undress. I don’t know what else he said, to put off Cannu but still salvage their association, and I didn’t care.

  Fortin never meant to be cruel. His cruelty, when it came, stemmed from his trusting his own intentions more than he trusted me. I think he even wanted me to be happy, though his vision of happiness was so solemn and severe it could be hard to recognize.

  A year later I was still unmarried, and Cannu sent us a matrimonial announcement, along with a picture he’d taken of his new home in Cherbourg, a spacious house with a pharmacy on the street level and two floors of living space above. He claimed this was so Fortin could admire some technical achievement in the photograph, but it was clear enough, even to Fortin, that he was showing off the building. Cannu had made a rather spectacular match, Fortin said, trying to convey the stupidity of my rejection. The daughter of a very old family, with an estate on the Cotentin Peninsula. Not as flush as they used to be, perhaps, but then few grand families were. This news didn’t sting as much as Fortin thought it would—I didn’t want Cannu any more than I had before—but I was curious as to what his appeal had been to the grand lady.

  I would have been content for this to remain a permanent mystery, but Cannu wrote a few months later with an invitation: he and his wife had rented a villa in Deauville, he said, and there was plenty of room. He would be honored to welcome us as guests for a few days in July. The invitation put Fortin at war with himself. On one side was his miser’s enthusiasm for any vacation that would cost nothing more than the fare to Deauville, a seaside town to the west. On the other was his general scorn for vacations and the lazy people who took them, as well as recognition that Cannu’s motives were impure, the latter of which I preyed on.

  “You know he’s only showing off,” I said. “It will be impossibly awkward.”

  Ultimately Estelle put her finger on the scale again, this time against me. She hadn’t traveled since her wedding, she said, and she’
d been working like a drudge. She wanted a holiday.

  We began packing to join my spurned suitor and his new bride. Deauville, though only forty kilometers away, was much more popular with Parisians than with locals. We already had as much sea and fresh air as we knew what to do with, although Le Havre had given too much of its shoreline to shipping and industry to be a truly pretty town. Deauville had beaches, and thermal spas where people went to take the waters for their health, and in the summer tourists lined the long terrace along the water to watch fireworks displays. Deauville had been purpose-built as a resort town, to profit from the popularity of neighboring Trouville-sur-Mer. Trouville had the same sandy beaches, snapping banners, and canvas bathing cabins, but it had once been a fishing village, and had the residual air of a real place, whereas Deauville felt like no place at all. This had made it very fashionable.

  I assumed that the town’s having become vogue was why Cannu and his wife had chosen it, but it still seemed odd. Cherbourg itself was already on the water, and what was the point of money if it couldn’t carry you out of Normandy? Why not Marseilles or Nice, or even Belgium? I had never traveled, but I nevertheless had strong opinions about how it ought to be done.

  The trip ended up costing Fortin more money than he’d planned, because Estelle and I didn’t have any of the right clothes. We both needed canvas bathing slippers for walking on the beach, and I needed a flannel swimming costume. Estelle bought a sun hat with a brim the width of the rings of Saturn. She added a little bunch of mock grapes to the hat, and an extra red braid to my slippers, because she was determined for us not to be shamed in front of Cannu’s bride, although I suspected the entire purpose of the invitation was to shame me.

  The party when we arrived was small, only Cannu and three members of the Lafosse family: Cannu’s wife, Albertine; Albertine’s brother, Pierre; and their mother, Madeleine. Albertine was polite enough, though baffled by our presence. They’d been hosting a string of visitors, the goal apparently being for Cannu to extract as much social advantage out of the villa as he could, to be traded on later in Cherbourg. Albertine could see no advantage we would offer, nor was there one. Madeleine and Albertine offered perfunctory tours of the house and town, then left us to our own devices.

  Fortin spent his mornings scrounging newspapers from hotel lobbies and dining rooms that other guests had left behind. He read Estelle and me every single obituary in a newspaper from Brittany, simply because it seemed far away to him, and here were all these poor dead Bretons, who’d lived and died in a place nobody ever thought about.

  “We live in a place nobody ever thinks about,” I said, and Fortin protested.

  Each day, after luncheon, he and Cannu hauled their photography equipment around town. Fortin’s pictures of the casinos and hotels and bath lobbies gave no sign as to whether he admired them or was assembling a vast documentary of human foolishness.

  Nothing could entice Estelle to sea bathing, but she did not object to my going in the water. Albertine was free to walk straight into the sea in the women’s section, but Fortin expected me to use the bathing machines, little wheeled sheds that squatted on the sand like tortoises. A bather climbed in the front door and changed clothes in private while the shed was dragged out into the water. Then she climbed out the back door, the shed between her and the shore, so that no one could see her in wet, clinging flannels.

  I lied to the attendants that I could swim, so that they wouldn’t tie a rope around my waist. I’d been told once that my mother had been a strong swimmer, and I hoped I might already have the knack. When strong waves knocked me off my feet and thumped my body into the sand, I learned I was wrong. The impact was terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. The first few times I lurched up immediately, panicked. But then I learned to pause for a moment on my knees, trusting that the sky would still be there above me. The sound of the waves underwater made a pure and obliterating music that I tried to imagine was my mother’s voice, whispering that she would keep me from drowning.

  The days were so pleasant that I even began to wonder if I’d made a mistake in rejecting Cannu, although I knew the money for the villa was Albertine’s, not his. Fortunately the evenings were excruciating enough to fortify me. Albertine was a hypochondriac, which explained Cannu’s appeal as a font of health advice and solicitous concern. He was also full of veiled slights for me, peppered through the awkward hours.

  Albertine’s brother, Pierre, seemed nice enough, though he took breakfast in his room and did not appear until dinner. He always had dark circles under his eyes, which I imagined meant he was up all hours in the casinos, slinking home late, but Albertine laughed at the thought. “My brother?” she said. “A choirboy.”

  A doctor at the central hospital in Le Havre, Pierre was the only member of the family who worked. His medical anecdotes were often the saving grace at dinner, much more entertaining than Cannu’s, although they occasionally stopped abruptly when Pierre realized he had strayed into a degree of gore or anatomical detail unsuitable for the company.

  After all of Fortin’s economizing, the food was also a grace. “Pineapple! There’s a treat,” Estelle exclaimed one night. “I can’t remember the last time I had pineapple.”

  “You’ve never asked for any,” Fortin said defensively.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, not at all, dear.”

  “Is this one of your father’s?” Madeleine asked, and Pierre snorted.

  “A shame he couldn’t join us,” Fortin said, although the us sounded wrong, as if he was trying to force his way into the company.

  “He couldn’t leave his plants,” Albertine said.

  “He didn’t want to,” Pierre corrected.

  I asked Pierre if his father really grew pineapples.

  “He has a soft spot for exotics,” Pierre said. “The more quixotic the better. But I doubt the plants will fruit.”

  “Your father’s got the magic touch, though,” Madeleine said. “Don’t count him out.”

  “Of course not, Maman. If there’s a man in La Manche who can grow the world’s most expensive, pointless little weather-blasted runt of pineapple, it will undoubtedly be him.”

  “Pierre.”

  Everyone except mother and son looked down at their plates and for a moment I was back in Paris, in the days right before I left, when Eric was recovered enough for gladiatorial arguments with Eugénie while Conrad read a book hidden beneath the edge of the tablecloth. Rich families were as squabbly as any other, I realized. I looked up, and among all the lowered heads Pierre’s eyes met mine, and we smiled at each other.

  It took me until the next morning to realize that Pierre’s absence during the days was more than an idle mystery to me—I wished he would tell me where he went, and then I realized that I wished he would invite me with him. Was this what it felt like, a woman’s wanting? Lord knew I’d done enough wanting of other kinds, but romance was so alien to me that I had trouble recognizing it. Why would my treacherous heart want me to feel something for Pierre? The match was impossible. Albertine and Cannu was improbable enough, and he brought a business to the partnership. I had nothing.

  It grew late in my day of nothing, of sleep and hiding. The Italian girl and her beau started enjoying their afternoon very enthusiastically in the room next door. A hazard of boardinghouse life. All in all, I was happy for them. They seemed very compatible. But it was awfully loud, and it went on for an awfully long time, and then after a pause it seemed as if it might start up again, and I thought a little fresh air might do me good after all.

  I wrestled myself into stockings, into girdle and skirt and square-toed shoes and hat, and walked to the evening Mass at San Isidro Labrador. The new priest with the unplaceable accent performed the consecration, and in his odd Latin I heard neither French nor Spanish, but a lovely floating anywhere, a no-place in which I felt very much at home. I was glad I’d come. I even found myself humming as I walked the few blocks home, although as soon as I realized I was doin
g it, I lost the tune.

  Dinner was on the table when I arrived home. Home, I thought, and didn’t mind. It neither stung nor felt cozy. This was where I lived. This is where I live now. No one commented on my absence at breakfast, and I didn’t know if I wanted them to or not. The Italian girl and her beau sat close. He isn’t going to marry you, I thought. But you might as well enjoy yourself. Hold him close, for as long as you can.

  Our last night in Deauville there were fireworks, but Albertine, Cannu, and Madeleine said they’d already seen them and didn’t want to fight the crowds. Pierre had been in Deauville for several weeks by that point so must have seen them as well, but he said he’d accompany us anyway. We walked up and down the terrace, trying to find a place to sit. Estelle finally shamed a group of young people into vacating a public bench by limping exaggeratedly past them several times, sighing.

  Fortin sat at one end, then Estelle and me and then Pierre. There wasn’t really enough room for all four of us, and I could feel Pierre’s leg alongside mine until he drew away to the very edge of the bench. Even so my skirt, squashed between us, fell against his thigh. It seemed very intimate for the fabrics to be touching, my cotton twill to his gray summer wool. When I finally glanced up he was looking at me. The sky was still more blue than black, but twilit enough that Pierre seemed a little ghostly, his gray face and narrow neck floating above his crisp collar. His suits all hung off him, and Albertine was constantly waving food in his face, trying to fatten him up. He crossed his legs and put his hands on his knee. His fingers were very long and very white, as pale as my own hands in their gloves. I arranged and rearranged my fingers in my lap. I wanted to say something, but more so I wanted there to be something to say. I couldn’t think of any scenario in which I would ever see him again after tonight.