The Vexations Read online

  “Why are you here?” I asked, very quietly, although I had to assume Estelle at least could hear me.

  “In Deauville?” he asked, and I let him think that was my question. “Doesn’t everyone come here for the same reasons?” But the way he’d spoken of his work at the hospital made it seem far more important to him than the pleasures the town offered to vacationers, none of which I’d seen him partake in.

  The crowd near the water stirred in anticipation. Then a crunch and a whistle and finally the flowery bang of an orange flare, and I put my hands over my ears, my arms as tight against my sides as I could keep them. The fireworks were famous for their colors, pink and red and green and white and violet, new and expensive like everything else in town. In the din and glitter, the clashing hues did not flatter Pierre. Rather they made a strange gleam in his eye, like fever. I wondered about my own coloring, and I hoped he would understand it was the fireworks and not my face.

  During the finale—thunder all round and the sky a bouquet of burning flowers, with tendrils of smoke hanging like stems beneath them—he uncrossed his legs, and his thigh lay again near mine. After the flurry of noise, in the pool of silence as people waited to be sure the show was over before clapping, I lowered my hands from my ears just as he was raising his, and our arms banged together. He stood, then reached down and put his hand around my elbow, as if it might require medical attention.

  “I would like to see you again,” he said, without cleverness or artifice or any chance of his intention being mistaken.

  “I would like that,” I said, wishing to make myself similarly plain.

  Back in Le Havre, a dinner was arranged. Pierre brought a pineapple—a sense of humor?—and we ate it sliced with cherries. He smiled at me three times, once when I passed him something at the table, once when I managed to say something amusing, and once for no particular reason.

  “It’s going well, don’t you think?” Estelle whispered to me, when we stood to move to the parlor.

  Fortin poured calvados for himself and our guest and gestured that I should play something.

  “What would you like?” I asked, assuming he had the rest of the evening programmed.

  “I suppose we should let our guest choose,” he said.

  “I couldn’t,” Pierre said. “I enjoy music—I’d like you to play—but I don’t know enough to be qualified to tell you what.” Fortin, who had never felt unqualified to tell me what to do, was opening his mouth when Pierre added, “You should choose. Play your favorite.”

  But I was scared of selecting the wrong thing. “That’s too hard,” I said. “Please, choose something.” Here I’d thought I was fed up with being told what to do, but the moment disarmed me. I hadn’t realized how safe it was to hide behind Fortin like a shield.

  “I insist,” Pierre said, and now if I tossed the question back again I’d be making a quarrel. It occurred to me that perhaps he couldn’t think of a piece by name, and thought we were trying to embarrass or test him.

  “All right.” I swept my skirt against the back of my legs, sidestepped and angled myself onto the bench, and rotated my torso toward the keys, my right foot tipped up and ready for the pedal. I’d made these gestures ten thousand times, but now I was terribly conscious of my body, how it moved, how it might look from behind.

  With so much of my mind occupied, I didn’t dare try to play by memory. I grabbed at the books nearest to hand, on top of the piano. Plenty of Chopin, but the études I’d been working on most recently I didn’t know well enough to play with any polish, and the preludes I’d done before that were rusty. A polonaise, all jaunty and martial, would ruin the mood. Fortin cleared his throat. I couldn’t dither any longer.

  I picked a nocturne, by Ignace Leybach, No. 4, Op. 36. Nobody seems to play it anymore, but I liked it then and still do. I especially liked the way I sounded when I played it, which is a hazard of practicing music: admiration gets tangled with narcissism. Do I like a piece for how it’s written, or for how neatly I can play it? But given the occasion, that seemed a more-than-reasonable criterion. With Estelle’s help I’d curled my bangs to their best effect, and now my job was to play something pretty and accomplished, something of a type that Pierre might want to hear regularly in the evenings, with a fire roaring and the children playing—oh Lord, I was ahead of myself! I erased our imaginary children and focused on the music in front of me, making sure the treble melody sang out above the low notes without the left hand going muddy. When played well, the piece was sweet and dramatic, but not too sugary.

  I finished and Pierre applauded. This was not the usual custom in our house, but Estelle and then Fortin joined in, the latter only a little grudgingly.

  “Another?” Estelle asked, but it was unclear to whom she was posing the question. It didn’t seem to be me.

  “Please,” Pierre said. “That was lovely. You’re very good.”

  It was a general rather than specific compliment, the kind that people make either when they’ve never thought enough about music to have opinions, or when they have opinions they aren’t going to share and are choosing easy insincerity instead. But Pierre seemed sincere.

  I kept on with Leybach, Nocturnes No. 1 and No. 5, and then Estelle dealt a hand of cards and gestured for me to trade places with her. She brought out a book of pieces simple enough for her, neatly tucked under my regular music, and I knew she’d stashed it there, ready.

  Fortin started to complain that Estelle had mistakenly dealt only two hands for the game.

  “You were going to fetch some of your photographs, dear, to show to our guest.”

  “Was I? Are you interested in photography?” he asked Pierre.

  “You have never let the answer to that question sway you one way or the other,” Estelle said. “Go upstairs now, and take your time.”

  Conversation with Pierre was awkward at first, but the cards gave us things to say, and eventually my questions about his work bore fruit when he mentioned he was planning to leave the hospital for private practice.

  “Oh?” I had no idea what response he wanted, so I said as little as possible.

  It wouldn’t be in Le Havre, he said. He would establish himself back in Saint-Côme-du-Mont, where his parents lived.

  But his parents didn’t live in Saint-Côme-du-Mont by choice or chance—it was where the family estate was—and I didn’t know what to make of his oblique phrasing. “You’re close with your parents?” I said.

  “Not particularly. But it’s a lovely region. I’d like the slower pace. And I think I’ll make a better country doctor than a city one. Healthy air and house calls.”

  Compared with Paris, I hadn’t thought of Le Havre as a city so big a person might need to leave it, nor our air so polluted. But his reasons for leaving didn’t matter to me, only his reasons for saying so. Was this an announcement that he was not looking for courtship before he left, or the opposite: an attempt to learn my feelings on country living?

  “That does sound lovely,” I said.

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “Saint-Côme-du-Mont? No.”

  “Then…?”

  “I’m taking your word for it.”

  “That’s very trusting of you.”

  “You’ve given me no reason to doubt.”

  “But you—do you wish to move back to Paris, eventually?”

  I snorted, and it was not a ladylike snort, if such a thing exists. “It’s too crowded. No room left for me.”

  “Then we agree,” he said, and left it undefined as to what exactly we agreed on.

  He admired Fortin’s photographs and made his goodbyes at a savvy hour, not so early it might seem he’d had a poor time, and not so late as to risk imposing. Once the door had closed safely behind him, I collapsed into a chair. I felt like I’d run a footrace or performed the lead in a difficult opera, Norma or Lucia di Lammermoor, where I was onstage the entire time, singing my heart out.

  “That was well done,” Estelle said. “W
hatever happens. You did well.” She touched my hair gently, as if I were a little child. As if I were her daughter Berthe, I thought, and wondered how many evenings like this she’d already choreographed.

  “Did Berthe play the piano?” I asked. I’d inherited her old exercise books, with fingerings penciled in, but I didn’t know if she’d played beyond childhood, performing for a future she’d never have.

  We almost never spoke of Berthe, but Estelle did not seem surprised at the question. “Yes.” After a long pause, she added, “Though not so well as you do.”

  I reached up and touched her hand, still resting on my head, and hoped she could feel passing between us this sensation that was so nearly like love.

  That night I finished a long letter to Conrad, about Deauville, and the sea bathing, and the fireworks, and about Pierre. He responded with a treatise on explosives: did I know, he wrote, that until the 1830s fireworks had come only in orange and white? Green came from barium, red from strontium, blue from copper.

  Don’t you understand? I wanted to write him. I may have met the man I will marry.

  Conrad’s letters were often hopeless, although of course I appreciated that he wrote. In the three years since I’d left Paris, my father generally didn’t, beyond short postscripts added to notes from Eugénie. The letters sometimes had spots of tea or food, and I imagined them languishing on the table as she nagged him to add at least his name. Eric wrote rarely, though both Conrad and Eugénie provided updates, often differing in either fact or tone. He’d managed to reenroll at the Conservatory but wasn’t there any longer: Eugénie said tossed out, Conrad said quit. Now he was living in his own apartment: Eugénie said seeing private piano pupils, Conrad said working as an accompanist at the cabarets in Montmartre. He was calling himself a composer, although Conrad shared this with pride and Eugénie with great skepticism. Eric’s occasional letters were filled merely with doodles and cartoons, mock-epic poems or the lyrics to fake hymns, the bylaws of fictional societies or the minutes of their meetings. They were quite funny, but he said nothing at all about himself, and I wished for a sincere letter, because then I could write back one of my own. I felt foolish, answering doodles with confidences, yet if I tried to write back playfully, we could both tell I didn’t have the knack.

  I supposed I was doing the same to Conrad when I wrote very personal things. An adolescent boy, he couldn’t find the right words to respond. He wrote about what he called “feminine chemistry,” which was not a real field but simply topics on which he thought we might find common ground. He had a great deal to say, for instance, on the subject of fabric dyes. I learned from him that mauve was invented in 1856 by an Englishman, but that most of the later advances were made by Germans; Frenchmen had patented few shades apart from methyl green and diphenylamine blue, which Conrad seemed to consider a source of abiding national shame.

  Pierre’s first gift to me was a shawl, brilliantly green (methyl? malachite?—Conrad might have known, but I didn’t). “I noticed you didn’t have anything like it,” Pierre said. “But I couldn’t decide if that meant it would be a good gift or a bad one.”

  “A good one,” I said.

  After Deauville, Pierre’s courtship was as precise as a piece of Baroque music, regular in its intervals, measured in its timing. He came regularly to the house, sent letters and flowers, and Estelle chaperoned a few walks around town. He proposed several months later. Estelle had cake and champagne ready, and I realized that I was the only one of the four of us who hadn’t known. Pierre had visited Fortin at his office to arrive at the customary agreements. He’d been so certain I’d say yes that he’d already bought the corbeille, which he proudly announced he’d assembled himself—stuffed with gloves and fans and a hat and a little embroidered purse full of coins, to give to people outside the church after the ceremony—rather than merely picking a ready-made basket out of a department-store catalog. These were all very traditional engagement gifts, and custom dictated that they shouldn’t change hands until the marriage contract was drawn up. But Pierre couldn’t resist telling me how he’d packed them into a large, sturdy trunk, because he wanted the outside of the present to be as useful as the inside. It had a solid lock, he said, and I thought that was a good sign, both that I would own things worth keeping safe and that he would allow them to be mine alone.

  After the champagne, I played piano both terribly and as well as I’d ever played in my life. Pierre stood at my shoulder, and I kept missing notes, but every so often I made a passage float. I got up after only one song, the Leybach nocturne I’d played the first time he visited.

  Pierre peered down at the piano stool. “A pineapple!” he said. I tried to figure out what in the world he meant, and finally followed his pointing finger to the embroidery on the seat. “I never noticed,” he said. “That’s a neat coincidence. Fate.”

  “Is it? A pineapple?” I bent closer to examine. I’d been sitting on the stool every day for more than fifteen years and had always thought it was a hedgehog.

  “A hedgehog!” Estelle protested, then explained, with some embarrassment, that it had started off as a tree but had gone a bit roundish. It was a beginner’s effort, from before she and Fortin were married. He’d had the stool upholstered with it as a surprise for her. She hadn’t realized they’d be using it for the next forty years.

  “It’s a tree?” I said. “It’s been a tree all this time?”

  We were all laughing, even Fortin, once he was sure that Estelle wasn’t upset, and I felt a little wistful, wondering why we couldn’t have been this kind of family all along. I liked this side of us. Of myself. The way it felt to give and receive affection, the warmer, sillier person I became.

  All my Leybach sheet music is in tatters now, but there’s nothing in print anymore except the fifth. You can’t get No. 4 anywhere. Leybach’s No. 5 is pretty enough, but I can’t hear whatever supposedly sets it apart from his others. Every time I have a student I think would be suited to one of the first four nocturnes, and it to them, I have to take the risk of lending it out. Then I have to decide whether to mark it with notes, and whether to write over or around the notes from the last two students, which I didn’t erase because I’d erased the last several before that and grew worried about erasing the paper into nothing. Why couldn’t the students at least make the same mistakes, requiring the same corrections?

  The music shop on Calle 25 de Mayo has my name on file in case any copies come through the doors or appear in the catalogs for a price I can afford. I’ve picked up extras of the first and third this way, but still own just one copy of the fourth, and none of the second. In Paris it would be easier to find them, but much like the people here, music arrives unpredictably. We disembark with whatever is in our baggage or on our backs, and sometimes the objects of our old world trickle in after us, and sometimes they don’t. The fourth nocturne arrived in my trunk, the same one Pierre gave me. My current landlady offered to put the trunk in storage for me, but I use it in my room as a bedside table. I like keeping it near.

  If I want that fourth Leybach nocturne to have a future, then which choice is the better part of valor: to keep lending it out, knowing that someday some student, even one of my best, will spill juice on it or drop it in a puddle? Or for me to keep it locked in that trunk, preserved?

  I know the “correct” answer to this. I know there is no virtue or life in music left moldering. I know children are the future and so on and we must take our chances with them. But I don’t feel it. Instead I want to hold the pages tightly, pressed close to my clenched heart. That way I can hold on to the person I was when I played them, giddy with champagne and good fortune. And with love. I can say now what I would not have allowed myself to say at the time, for fear of greed or jinxes: I would have accepted much less out of a match, but I loved Pierre, and I believe he loved me.

  I can never play those pieces now the way I did then. Nor can I play them better—they’re romantic pieces, and bitterness does not mix well w
ith them. Sometimes I think I have kept the songs back from my students because I am trying to protect them—not the songs but the students. From heartbreak? From disaster? From needing to learn how to live a life that is not the one they hope for?

  But then, that’s every piece of music. There’s the way my students hope it will sound, and the way it actually sounds, banged out and lurching and full of mistakes. I throw them into that frustrating gap, over and over, and tell them this is how they learn. Some of them do. But many of them drown there, in that space between what they imagine and what they have.

  Philippe

  — 6 —

  On the tips of your back teeth

  THE CHAT NOIR SHADOW THEATER STARTED AS A CYNICAL puppet show, something to offer guests who couldn’t be crammed into the main floor, or who had already seen those acts too often. Some of the sock puppets were plain socks, pulled directly off feet a few minutes before the sketch began, and smelled like it. Less malodorous were the shadow puppets, made of cut cardboard or zinc glued to sticks. The shadow plays cast an eerie but familiar magic, like telling ghost stories by firelight. Salis set the regulars to work making puppets, payment in beer, and the wooden tables became flecked with knife cuts. Philippe wrote pompous but sincere articles predicting for the shadow theater a long and monumental future.

  In five years no one would care about the shadow theater. In ten years, after the turn of the new century, they would all be at the movies. But for now, the Chat Noir’s shadow shows were so lucrative that Salis created a specially darkened theater upstairs, and Tomaschet, the owner of the Auberge, finally paid to have the cesspool regularly emptied and the cellar drained. Philippe and Erik were working on a show for Tomaschet called Pierrot Pornographe, which thus far consisted of fastening phalluses to the puppets from The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Philippe had suggested bent pins instead of glue, to make a hinge on which the phalluses could swing out and in. Philippe had been in Paris for almost four years now, and if Pierrot Pornographe ever launched, this would be his most visible contribution to the Parisian cultural scene: movable cocks on card-stock puppets in a cellar. If he thought about this too long his stomach lurched, as if he were running sickeningly late for an important appointment. As if he were running as fast as he could but might not make it.