The Vexations Read online

  He’s soon accompanying a song about Lou-Lou-Louise, instead of Ai-Ai-Aimée, a cancan dancer who raises her legs just a bit higher than all the others and wears just a bit less underneath. But oh that bit, that little bit, it makes a big, big difference. With every Lou-Lou-Louise, Bruant grabs his crotch. At first Erik doesn’t notice the gesture—Bruant’s pushing the tempo faster than Erik’s ever played it. Then the audience’s laughter goes up a notch, but Erik knows there aren’t any great lines in the third verse. He finally looks up, straight into Bruant’s face. The man is nearly draped on the piano, rubbing against it. He puckers his lips obscenely around Louise’s name.

  Erik keeps playing. Don’t try to leave, he thinks toward Louise, remembering the girls from the first show. This could all get worse. He thinks it toward her the same way he used to push his thoughts toward the mermaid. Maybe it’s working, because Louise stays seated.

  But he has forgotten about Pierre. He stands and reaches for Louise’s arm, and Erik can’t tell what’s happening, whether she wants to go or stay. Then Pierre starts to push his way out of the room, leading her by the elbow.

  “You forgot your stick,” Bruant shouts, which is true, a fashionable walking stick still hanging on the back of Pierre’s chair. “Presumably it goes up your ass?” But this is too easy—so easy that Bruant’s already losing interest as Conrad grabs the stick and holds it out to Pierre over the heads at the next table. “Why this one?” Bruant calls out. After all, there were racier songs earlier in the evening. Pierre doesn’t bother to answer and Bruant just shrugs, then turns back to Erik, who remains the most rewarding prey on offer.

  The rest of the set is a blur. “Good night!” Bruant finally yells. “Show’s over! Don’t come again!” The old hanging chair from the Chat Noir, a parting gift from Salis when Bruant struck out on his own, spins slightly in its wires as the crowd rises to leave.

  Bruant picks through the final take from the hat, counts out Erik’s wage. Instead of reaching for it, Erik sulks. “You already paid me.”

  “No, I insulted you. Here’s what we agreed on. The rest is extra. Fun show, in the end. I don’t ever want to see your face again, but I had some fun.”

  Reluctantly, Erik takes the money.

  “What was that piece you played?” Bruant asks. “The slow one.”

  “A gymnopédie,” Erik says, not without a little solemnity, as though trying to slip back into his dignity like it was a jacket he removed at the beginning of the evening. “What did you think of it?” he ventures, even as he’s unsure he truly wants to know.

  “I think you brought the room down so far I had to haul it back up with both hands. Melancholy is a dangerous mood. People like a wallow, but they don’t open their pockets for it.”

  “Is money your only measure?”

  “It’s the most useful one I’ve found. What are you, really? You’re barely an accompanist.”

  “I’m a composer.”

  Bruant looks at him for a long moment. “I got pieces of music in the hat once. Little fiddly bits of paper, all rolled up. Initialed E.S. Was that you?”

  Erik swallows, tries to discern which answer is the least bad. “Yes,” he admits.

  “I tried to play it, out of curiosity. I couldn’t even figure out what order the lines went in.”

  “It was just a joke.”

  “Was it?”

  Erik says nothing.

  “I don’t know if you’ve got a hundred-thousand-franc piece in you, but those scraps of paper weren’t it.”

  “I know,” Erik says, truthfully.

  “Good luck with your wallow,” Bruant says.

  Outside the Mirliton, Conrad is standing by himself. Erik didn’t really expect Louise and Pierre to still be here, but where is Philippe? He’s annoyed that Conrad’s been left alone in this neighborhood, though Conrad is older now than Philippe was when he moved here. Why does Conrad, for all his competence, seem like he still needs looking after? Is it just because he’ll always be Erik’s kid brother? Conrad probably feels like he is the one who needs looking after, Erik thinks. Conrad’s face as Erik approaches looks unusually like Alfred’s, and Erik realizes it’s because of the disappointed expression.

  “That was awful,” Conrad says.

  “Believe me, I know. I told you it would be.”

  “Not the show. What you did to Louise.”

  “What I—what? You think I planned that? Does she think that?”

  “How could she not? Didn’t you?”

  “I had no idea what Bruant was going to do!”

  “Really?” Conrad seems skeptical.

  “I have to talk to her. Where is she staying?”

  “The Hôtel Continental. But it’s late. You can’t go there now.”

  Erik is always up at this hour. It doesn’t feel late at all. And he hates the idea of Louise thinking for another minute, let alone all night, that he meant to humiliate her.

  “I wouldn’t risk it,” Conrad counsels. “They could be in bed already.”

  “I assure you that waking them up won’t be nearly the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever done.”

  “I mean…in bed. They’re newlyweds, remember?”

  “I suppose we shouldn’t,” Erik says grudgingly, then insists on walking Conrad home. “What did you think of it? The original composition I played?”

  Conrad isn’t at all musical, the only person in their family who isn’t, but Erik will take any opinion to wash away the taste of Bruant’s. “The slow one?” Conrad says. “It was really pretty.”

  Erik is silent for a couple of blocks.

  “What else did you want me to say?” Conrad asks.

  “I don’t know,” Erik says, and doesn’t.

  At the apartment’s front door, Conrad points out that it doesn’t make any sense for Erik to walk all the way back up the Butte, then down again in the early morning to the Hôtel Continental. “You’ve still got a bed here. Just stay the night.”

  It’s the logical thing to do, but after Erik enters his old bedroom (which became his sickroom) and climbs into the bed he almost died in, he can’t sleep, wondering instead whether he’s truly accomplished anything since.

  The two brothers arrive at the Hôtel Continental the next morning with pastries, bought with Bruant’s hat money. But Pierre and Louise are already eating room service. Erik explains everything as he stands there holding the pastries, the paper going shiny with butter, and he can tell that Pierre and Louise don’t quite believe what he’s saying. Louise seems to want to, but she’s already spent all night with a certain story in her head, a certain idea of him, and she can’t write over it completely. Pierre resumes eating while Erik is still speaking, a clear dismissal.

  Erik wants to give Louise their father’s old pocketknife, which he’s kept all these years, ever since those horrible early days of boarding school in Honfleur. He even went to the trouble days ago of chipping off the rust and oiling the hinge. But he can tell this isn’t the time. He also wants to ask Louise what she thought of the gymnopédie, of course, but it isn’t the right time for that either. He should have come last night, he thinks. Stupid Conrad, stupid caution.

  “How long are you in town for?” Erik asks, wanting to arrange another meeting, to try again.

  “A few days,” Pierre answers, “but I’m afraid we’re fully booked.”

  Louise looks down at her plate.

  “Another time, then,” Erik says. Leaving the hotel, pastries still in hand, knife still in his pocket, he feels very alone, even with Conrad walking along beside him.

  Louise

  — 8 —

  Weep like a willow

  PIERRE’S PLAN, HE’D EXPLAINED BEFORE OUR WEDDING, WAS FOR us to live at his family’s château while he settled into his medical practice. Then I could choose: we might rent a house in Saint-Côme-du-Mont or stay at Château Bellenau. In our conversations I had a bad habit of following the word “château” with a nervous giggle, as if to acknowledge that
no one like me had any business living in anything called a château.

  “You need to stop laughing at yourself and enjoy it while you can,” Pierre finally snapped at me.

  “Do you plan to divorce me?”

  “Of course not. You’ll outlast the house by far. We’ll outlast it.”

  “That’s either a very strong marriage or a very shoddy house.”

  “The house will still be standing, but someone else will be living in it.”

  His family had been in the house since 1717, and I didn’t understand why that would change. As it turned out, he’d already explained the whole matter to Fortin, wishing to be honest about his prospects, but Fortin—perhaps worried I’d throw away my chance with Pierre the way I’d irrationally thrown away Cannu—had decided the matter wasn’t my concern. Pierre, to his credit, was horrified when he realized Fortin hadn’t told me. The family estate was catastrophically indebted, he now explained, and the loans would come due upon his father’s death. His family would have to start selling land to satisfy the creditors, and then there wouldn’t be enough income to maintain the estate.

  He told me I could still call the wedding off. His circumstances were not what I’d thought they were, he acknowledged, and he didn’t want me to feel misled.

  I was furious with Fortin, but not with Pierre. I wasn’t marrying him for an inheritance, I said. I was marrying him because I wanted him, and he wanted me back. That alone seemed a better, more miraculous fairy tale than any castle.

  I thought back to Deauville. What I had then imagined as very different personalities between Pierre and his sister now seemed like different understandings. She was living like someone who’d been raised in a château and couldn’t imagine anything being different, and he’d already begun building a life that would survive its loss. Or was it a difference not in understanding or personality, but in sex? That men could build something, and Albertine would have to wait and walk through whatever doorway she could?

  I asked him if his sister knew about this.

  “Nobody ‘knows’ it,” he said. “Not officially. My father’s been insisting for thirty years that everything will be fine, and everyone except me has been choosing to believe him. Who knows—perhaps it will be.”

  “You seem very sure, though.”

  “The garden alone is enough to warn anyone who’s seen it with his eyes open. Like you. You’ve got your eyes open. I couldn’t marry anyone who would be expecting too much.”

  This was hardly romantic, but I felt more relief than disappointment or anger. Now I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering why in the world Pierre had chosen me. He needed a hardy weed rather than a hothouse pineapple, to prepare for the disaster he thought was around the corner. He was preparing for the wrong disaster, as it turned out, but a weed is a weed, and he proved right about me—I can take root far from where I was planted. I also liked that I wouldn’t have to spend my life feeling as grateful to him as the world would think I should. Once the estate was gone, we’d be a housewife and a country doctor, a more comfortable match than an heir and an orphan.

  After our visit to Paris, Pierre and I returned to Le Havre only long enough to pack our trunks for Château Bellenau. I wish now that I could have seen it just once without knowing what I did. What Pierre told me was a veil I couldn’t lift, and after we arrived I saw everything at Bellenau through that shadow. Which was of course why Pierre had told me, but Bellenau’s brightness would have had its own truth.

  Behind a stone wall and iron gate, the front of the house was elegant in a very traditional way: a packed dirt courtyard encircled a round central planting of neat shrubs and flowers girding a small fountain on a pedestal. The house comprised two stone stories plus a third row of windows in the mansard roof, two towers at the corners. Eight broad windows across, times the three floors, times a four-sided building, plus the little dormers in the tower roofs: I couldn’t help calculating how much the house must cost in window tax alone. There was a stone balcony above the front door, where I briefly imagined myself being presented as the new bride of the heir to the manor, but presented to whom? The only visions my imagination could supply were eighteenth-century images—either stolid, unwashed peasants or an unruly mob with pitchforks raised.

  I had practiced for my arrival, hoping to banish from my face any hint of goggle-eyed intimidation, and I mostly succeeded, until I was whisked by my new father-in-law, Pierre-Joseph, through the house and out the back doors. Every generation had its own Pierre—my husband was number six, and the family resorted to the use of second or middle names to keep everyone straight. Madeleine followed us, fussing about offering refreshments first, but with the daylight fading, Pierre-Joseph insisted we see the garden before sundown.

  At the time I thought my shock was in part my own naïveté. I had seen no place like the garden, but then I had not seen many places. Pierre-Joseph’s garden was a tropical jungle crossbred with Venice, grafted to a fairy hollow and a botanical museum, then spliced with Hameau de la Reine, Marie Antoinette’s pretend village at Versailles, where she dressed up like a milkmaid so she could wear another life. It remains the most impossible, most wondrous place I have ever seen, and I am someone now who has voyaged over an ocean. Now that I have seen at least a little of the world, I understand there are no other places like Bellenau, nor ever were, nor will be again. Not even Bellenau is Bellenau any longer.

  I don’t know how long it takes a garden to fall to ruin, but the tropical plants at Bellenau wouldn’t have made it through their first winter uncared for—they had to be trimmed or bound and wrapped, tucked in blankets like children. In the spaces they left after freezing and dying, weeds squeezed out for half a century would have rioted the following spring. Could the palms survive without tending? The yuccas, or the Argentine pampas grasses in the meadow? If the big plantings failed, how soon until the marshy soil eroded from around their dead roots? Until the rivers, the whole system of man-made canals, slackened and silted up? Until the banks crumbled, leaving the tree roots to clutch at nothing, and the trees fell gasping into the water, splintering the footbridges? Until the hand-built grottoes flooded and birds nested in the little stone house perched on the Island of the Birds? Until the Island of the Birds itself dissolved, because it was not a real island but a hillock built on pilings? Until the little pleasure boats sank and the statues tipped off their pedestals? Until the inscriptions blurred and chipped away?

  Now I’m getting carried away, because I doubt enough time has passed to erase the stones themselves. And the statues are likely just fine, or at least the serene Our Lady sheltered in its underground niche. (She was a gift from the villagers, ostensibly for Pierre-Joseph’s support of renovations to the village church, but really I think for his several decades of employing their fathers and husbands and sons as gardeners and laborers.) At least some of the canal system must have held its shape, although the word “canal” suggests something squared off and industrial, locks and mule paths. These were purposefully crooked, sinuous, interlocking rivers that could be navigated with the little rowboats kept moored throughout the garden. Some of the oldest trees were probably well enough established to survive unscathed. The sequoias were already fifteen meters tall when I arrived, confirmed in their implacable mission to grow ever taller.

  Pierre-Joseph could remember when each stand of each variety had been planted, down to what the weather had been like that season and where the seeds or cuttings or seedlings had been acquired from. Some trees’ planting dated to a specific day, commemorating his wedding, or the visit from the Linnaean Society, which awarded him a medal for being the first person in France to successfully grow Chinese palms. He had even named some of the individual trees, like a Wellingtonia specimen he called The Patriarch.

  Pierre-Joseph was an exhaustive tour guide, and it grew dark before we could return to the house. He led us into a small stone building to retrieve a lantern. I had assumed it was a potting shed until the lanter
n was lit and a dozen white skulls flashed out of the darkness, causing me to shriek.

  “I should have warned you,” Pierre said. “I didn’t realize it would all still be here.”

  “I kept it for you,” his father said.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Pierre said, and I already knew him well enough to hear something slightly different—an unspoken I wish you hadn’t.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “My father’s effort to find something we’d have in common.”

  It was a naturalist’s studio, Pierre-Joseph explained. He thought if his son insisted on medicine, and pigheadedly resisted botany, they might meet in the middle. Pierre would get practice with dissections, and Pierre-Joseph would end up with specimens of the garden life. So he built this. “The gardeners have been keeping tools in here,” Pierre-Joseph said, “but now that you’re back, it’s yours again.”

  “None of this was ever mine,” Pierre said.

  That night, getting ready for bed, I could tell Pierre was annoyed. I had praised the garden too much, seen too much beauty in it. But how could I not? And how could I ignore what I’d seen? I wished to be polite to my new father-in-law and I wished to be honest, and by a miracle those two aims were not at odds. I regretted only that my comments were so shallow, the kinds of comments Pierre made about music: that a piece was pretty, or fast, or that it sounded difficult. Such words were sufficient for my level of playing, but insufficient to describe the garden.

  “It’s impossible,” I had told Pierre-Joseph at dinner. “It’s an impossible place.”

  “It is,” he said with satisfaction. “But I made it.”

  “It’s a ridiculous place,” Pierre said that night in our bedroom.

  Parts of the house had been shut down to economize, but there was still plenty of distance between our rooms and Pierre-Joseph and Madeleine’s. We could argue freely; we could do other things freely. A benefit to Pierre’s anger was that he was too preoccupied to notice me staring as he changed out of his clothes into pajamas, something I was still too shy about to be brazen.