The Vexations Read online

  Erik and Philippe had worked on biblical plays and novel adaptations and classic comedies. With only shadows at your disposal, it was difficult to tell a story other than one the audience already knew. They’d done political shows like The King Disembarks, Napoléon’s campaign narrated in twenty elaborate tableaux accompanied by gunfire and screams of victory. The puppeteers practiced making cannon blasts with their mouths, and the ones who had never heard such a sound took notes from the ones who had. The youngest men, or the provincials, privately regretted that they had missed the siege of 1870.

  Philippe suggested recycling the animal puppets made for a Noah’s ark play into one about the siege, when Parisians ate horses, then dogs and cats, rats and pigeons, then the carp from the ponds in the Tuileries, then the exotic animals from the zoological gardens: yaks and buffalo and zebras, and finally the two beloved elephants, Castor and Pollux. By the end of the siege the only stocked butcher shop in town was on the Boulevard Hausmann, where Pollux’s skinned trunk was nailed to the wall, available in razored slices, and the fancy glass cases were full of elephant-blood sausage and camel kidneys. The meat had been far too expensive for most people to afford, but the shop had become an attraction, and many of the men at the Auberge carried childhood memories of visiting. Despite all the human deaths in the weeks during and after the siege, it was that skinless trunk on the wall that brought death close.

  The butcher shop seemed to Philippe the key tableau of the entire play, but Tomaschet demanded a heroic ending. Philippe pointed out that the siege had not ended in heroics but in surrender, followed by the Communard uprising that had killed another ten thousand people in the two months after the siege ended. The Montmartre Butte had been central to the battle between the Commune and the national army, the streets choked with barricades, then bodies.

  “You can do a scenario on spec if you like, and I’ll take a look,” Tomaschet said, “but I think it’s too soon for a play like this.”

  “It’s been twenty years,” Philippe said.

  Tomaschet agreed. Apparently they had very different ideas about the length of twenty years. “Also, you’re foreign,” Tomaschet added. “People might not take it well.”

  But everyone here came from somewhere else, even the French people. Almost no one had been born in Montmartre. Tomaschet himself was from Switzerland. Who was he to lecture Philippe?

  Erik meanwhile had moved to a cheaper apartment, 6 Rue Cortot, at the top of the Butte. “I’ve come up in the world,” he said. Speaking vertically, this was true.

  Philippe still rented the same lightless, heatless room whose bleakness was softened only by the bowl Erik had given him, which Philippe put on a shelf next to a marble toe he’d brought from Tarragona. They were the prettiest things in his room, the only pretty things in his room, the white toe and white bowl printed with small white flowers on pale green stems. The restraint of the bowl had seemed silly at first (white on white?) but came to feel elegant, restful, a corrective to everything else around him. The bowl was the opposite of the cancan girls’ glass jewelry, just as it was the opposite of the cabaret costumes so ruined that the girls posed only at certain angles, to hide what could no longer be mended, and of Tinchant, ruined from nearly every angle, so that people tried not to look at him anymore. The bowl had nothing to hide.

  At first Philippe didn’t trust his luck, and confirmed with Erik repeatedly that Eugénie didn’t need or want it back. “It’s just a bowl,” Erik finally said. “Take it and shut up.” But to Philippe it wasn’t just a bowl. He wrote odes to it, unembarrassed rhapsodies, his love for it exceeding that for the pretend girl Sylvie. The song had been published, though he still didn’t know whether the sale had come before or after the night Erik had paid him. The printed sheet music carried a dedication to someone named Louise.

  “Oh ho,” Philippe said, thinking he was finally learning something about the heart Erik kept so closely guarded.

  “She’s my sister,” Erik said, rolling his eyes.

  “You have a sister?” Philippe reread the lyrics, even though he’d written them. Yes, definitely still a love song. “That’s a little odd, then.”

  A dedication didn’t mean the song was about the person, Erik said. His Gnossiennes and Sarabandes had dedications, too, and they weren’t about anything.

  Philippe didn’t want to hear Erik’s thoughts on about-ness. He wanted to hear about Erik’s mysterious sister. If he counted those old conversations with Miguel, he’d been talking about about-ness for half his life and had come to no conclusions.

  Alfred had bought a few more songs, here and there, and with each one Philippe tried not to hope too desperately that he might hear his words paired with those strange notes of Erik’s wafting from café and apartment windows. When, inevitably, he didn’t hear them, he told himself he might be in the wrong neighborhood. The songs were probably catching hold in places like Erik’s old street, where the sidewalks filled up with round black hats every morning, neighborhoods in which Philippe was so ill dressed that people sometimes stepped aside to avoid him, or fingered the coins in their pockets, either protecting them or preparing to bestow a few upon him if he asked. He considered asking, but didn’t. He was not yet a beggar. Whenever he walked back into Montmartre it was with relief, a sense of returning not so much to where he belonged but to the only place that would have him.

  None of the songs earned enough for royalties, so there were only the advances. With the latest, Erik and Philippe decided they needed new clothes even more than they needed food. Erik’s top hat had long since been crushed, and the velvet ribbon on his glasses was frayed. Philippe was down to only one complete outfit, which meant he had to use the Laundry for the Unforesighted, an establishment catering to a clientele who more often than foresight lacked any change of clothes. The windows were covered with old newspapers to conceal the waiting area full of half-naked men, smoking and scratching.

  At a used clothing market Erik and Philippe rooted through enormous piles of wool popping with lice. The only purchases they could individually justify were barely nicer than the clothes they had. They decided that the money was best pooled for a single good outfit that could be traded between them. They were approximately the same size in the shoulders and chest, though Erik was rounder in the belly, and he sewed a second button onto the waistband to accommodate Philippe. The suit, they decided, would be awarded to whoever had the best place to go in it that day.

  Now that they were neighbors, this could be decided in person, and Philippe showed up at Erik’s apartment in the mornings to compare agendas. On many days neither of them could make a compelling case for the suit, and they either flipped a coin and headed out to the cafés or ended up on Erik’s floor in their underwear, trying to make progress on a shadow play. Erik’s apartment was spartan, though the building was still significantly nicer than Philippe’s, with both a water spigot and a single toilet on the ground floor. Philippe took advantage of the indoor facilities until the concierge yelled at him for depositing his nonresident waste in the private cesspool.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” Philippe had said that night Erik sewed the button on his trousers and gave him the bowl. It had taken him a long time to realize that the last four years were the answer, Erik’s only answer: he wanted someone with whom he could make and talk about art, and as little else as possible. In this way he differed from Miguel. Although Philippe had been afraid at first to write to Miguel, given all that had happened, he’d decided to send the Rat Mort postcard after all, and had spent an entire day on the message: A real place after all, it turns out. It would have been nice to see it together. I know I ruined everything. I’m sorry. As he’d expected, there was no reply, but he still mailed the occasional letter. Why not? No one had written back to tell him to stop. He mentioned the casual friends he’d made, the men he drank with or carved puppets alongside, often so drunk they didn’t remember each other’s confidences the next morning. He never wrote about
Erik, for reasons he did not examine.

  The messages were coins dropped down a dark well, rattles in the offering box, candles lit in penance.

  Erik spoke rarely of his family. He pretended he had come into the world fully formed, as though spawned by Muses and sprung from Zeus’s head. When they went out he was charming, with a talent for wordplay that no amount of alcohol ever blunted. In private he spoke of nonartists as irrelevant and of fellow members of their Montmartre circle with corrosive jealousy. Nearly the only person he admitted any particular admiration or affection for was a composer named Claude, whom Erik met at the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant to play duets on the piano in the back room. In his bleaker moments, Philippe suspected that his own friendship with Erik survived only because Erik didn’t feel threatened by him and his spare portfolio of publications. Erik was not charismatic in the usual ways, not handsome, not reliably kind, and only spasmodically generous. But perhaps because he was so prickly, his approval was rare coin—a childish, total enthusiasm that warmed like sunlight. One wanted more and more of it.

  Philippe thought of him sometimes as a soul mate and at other times as a broken stove into which he threw his best ideas and only occasionally received warmth in return. He’d made other friends, but no one else with whom he would share a pair of trousers, the buttons sewn beside each other on the waistband with an easy intimacy that their actual friendship only sometimes achieved. If Erik wanted to pretend he barely had a family, Philippe didn’t feel he could talk about his own.

  He’d nearly stopped writing home now that his pretense of prosperity had become too hard to maintain. One of his sisters was sick, and his parents had asked for help with the doctor’s fees. He couldn’t decide what would be worse: to tell them he simply didn’t have it, which would demonstrate that he’d been lying all these years, or to let them think he was unwilling to share. He knew that he was a colossal disappointment either way: what had all his parents’ years of scrimping for school fees and books been for, if not to launch him into a position that would benefit the whole family? Certainly they had not done it for poetry, a word his father wrote in outraged capital letters: POETRY??? You are still making POETRY? What good is POETRY to us?

  Of romantic encounters, there was little news to furnish. In four years Philippe had managed to have sex with two women: one avoided him afterward, until he was forced to conclude that the experience had not been quite the poetry-inspiring encounter for her that it had been for him, and the other became the mistress of a wealthy man who did not wish to share. After the initial sting, Philippe was glad for her. He was painfully aware of how little he could offer: he was a man who owned a bowl, a marble toe, and now one half of a half-decent suit. “And words,” he whispered to himself. But finding the girl who would value those more than a decent meal had been hard going. Montmartre’s reputation for free affection was, he’d discovered, nearly as flashy and fake as its costume jewelry. Affection was never free.

  There’d been men who promised otherwise, with looks or drinks or questions about him and Erik, which Philippe always answered truthfully: they were only friends; he had no idea what Erik liked. Philippe had been unsure enough of what he himself liked to let a man take him into his mouth once in the Saint Vincent Cemetery. The place was safe at night, the man had guaranteed him, hidden from passersby. But it was also directly behind the giant basilica being built on the Butte, and Philippe couldn’t shake the feeling that he was sinning on God’s very doorstep. There’d been pleasure, but also so much furtiveness and fear that he’d not wanted to do it again. The man had called him a coward later, and maybe it was true. Maybe Miguel had seen him correctly, and Philippe lacked the nerve to be that person. Maybe with Miguel he could have tried, or with Erik, if that was what Erik had wanted. But not in the Saint Vincent Cemetery, not with the damp stone tomb against his back and his body tensing at every sound, terrified of discovery. Women were hard enough, he decided. Coming to Paris, broke and staking his hopes on art, weathering his family’s utter disappointment—surely he’d made the rest of his life sufficiently difficult already.

  The division Erik maintained between their artistic collaborations and what Erik called the mundanities of life, a category into which he placed all women and most men, made the party invitation all the more surprising: a reception in honor of his sister’s engagement, at Alfred and Eugénie’s home.

  “Did they invite me, or are you inviting me?” Philippe asked. He tried not to let his imagination run wild, but he was already envisioning soft chairs with upholstery, wallpapered walls, carpeted floors. Clean windows and forks and cups. A laden buffet table.

  “They said I could bring someone. And Claude was busy.”

  Philippe felt slapped.

  “I’m joking. And you can wear the suit.”

  “What will you wear?”

  “I have hidden reserves,” Erik said, although his hidden reserves turned out to be merely his father, who bought him new clothes for the occasion.

  When he arrived the morning of the party to pick up Philippe, he was a freshly shaven, clean-scrubbed, well-dressed stranger. Which was the costume, Philippe wondered, this one or the top hat? Was Erik a bourgeois playing a bum or a bum playing a bourgeois? Or an artist playing a bourgeois playing a bum? An artist playing a bum playing an artist? Was that just an artist, full stop? Philippe’s thought ate its own tail, swallowed, shook off the indigestion.

  The sky threatened rain, but the family apartment wasn’t far. The two of them never had any money for tram fare anyway. Down the Butte they walked, out of Montmartre and Pigalle, to the Rue de Maubeuge to the Rue d’Abbeville, to the Boulevard de Magenta, a wide avenue lined with shops and peopled by ladies in progressively more imposing hats. Philippe felt he was entering enemy territory.

  “Who’s she marrying? Your sister.”

  “I have no idea.”

  They passed several florist shops. Philippe, growing increasingly uneasy about their empty-handedness, asked if they should bring a gift.

  “I am.”

  “Is it from both of us?”

  “No. It’s from me. It’s personal. And it’s really more for her birthday.” Erik jammed his hand into his pocket and produced a small, dingy pocketknife, as if that was some kind of explanation. Surely it couldn’t be the gift.

  “It’s her birthday, too? So I’ll be doubly rude if I show up empty-handed.”

  “Not today. Next Wednesday. She’ll be twenty-three.”

  Erik sounded rueful at the number, and Philippe remembered what a disaster Erik’s own birthday celebration had been a month earlier. He’d been so unrelentingly maudlin about turning twenty-five that Tinchant, fed up, knocked Erik’s hat off his head and it landed in a pile of horse manure in the Place d’Anvers. “A bad omen for your waning years,” Tinchant said, sarcastically, but Erik merely nodded.

  Now, at Philippe’s urging, Erik veered into a florist’s. The shopgirl talked them into roses—extravagant, but it was June, and roses wouldn’t be this cheap again for another 358 days, she told them, with strange precision. “Depending on the weather, of course,” she added. She wrapped the flowers, and Philippe was relieved to see Erik pull enough money out of his jacket.

  At the party, a maid met them at the door and took the flowers to put in water. Since they hadn’t written a card, there would be no easy way for her to announce whom they were from. Erik sighed, clearly ruing what he now considered an unnecessary expenditure.

  Philippe had worried about how he would know who anyone was, but Louise, at least, was obvious, in an ostentatious white dress. Any white dress was ostentatious, since it was a color that dirtied so easily. The cut was already a bit out of fashion, rounder at the hips than the newest silhouettes, which were narrow except for the bustle. Provincial, Philippe thought, noting his own arrogance. This was as Parisian as he ever felt—when he was judging other people’s clothes.

  The groom, Monsieur Pierre Lafosse, was thin as a reed and pale a
s a mushroom. Do better, Philippe urged himself. You can do better than reeds and mushrooms. He tried to combine them into a single image. A tree root, or a white-painted flagpole. Or perhaps a single stick of dry, unboiled noodle, jaundiced and brittle.

  “The roses,” Erik said urgently, as soon as he’d kissed Louise on the cheek. “Those are from me.”

  Not us? Philippe thought.

  “The pink ones,” Erik said.

  “All right,” Louise said, and looked around the room. Erik and Philippe followed her eyes, taking in the profusion of pink roses clustered on side tables and the closed lid of the grand piano.

  “Well,” Erik recovered, “one of those is ours.”

  Now it was ours, Philippe observed, when the gift was worthless.

  Louise smiled at him—genuinely, he thought. The groom, too, was polite, though reserved, and Philippe noted his unimpressive handshake. Noodle indeed.

  Philippe had heard only slightly more about Conrad over the years than the mysterious Louise. Erik seemed fond of him, but everything he’d ever said of Conrad—the excellent grades, the admission into the finest chemistry program in the country, his easy good looks, his strength at swimming—associated Erik himself with bourgeois respectability. In person, Conrad was the star of the otherwise rather awkward party. He circumnavigated the room, having conversations about sports, then about chemistry, then politics (carefully: Carnot and Freycinet were safe, the clerical question was not), and then local municipal improvements. He charmed Eugénie’s young pupils, then he charmed their tight-lipped mothers.