The Vexations Read online

  Before we were married I had pictured him in a nightshirt: pajamas still seemed avant-garde to me. “You pictured me in my nightclothes?” he’d said, when I admitted it, and I blushed. Neither of us knew what we were doing, but apparently we did it well enough, because I was pregnant within a month of the wedding. Once it was clear that I was with child, Pierre was afraid of hurting the baby. I was vomiting too often to argue the point. Joy and regret were mingled that it had happened so soon—it would have been nice to enjoy each other as only husband and wife for longer. On the other hand, there was a satisfaction in knowing that our bodies worked as they ought. Also, my life at Bellenau still felt so strange and accidental that I couldn’t help worrying one of the Lafosses might toss me out on my ear. But surely that wouldn’t happen to the mother of Pierre-something the seventh. I hoped for a boy, for that reason, though I also already imagined other children after this one. I wanted at least one girl, if only because then the Lafosses might allow me to name her what I liked.

  Bellenau was famous in the district, and people often showed up hoping for tours. Pierre-Joseph didn’t care for the gawkers, but he loved serious guests, men in good boots and sensible hats who could speak intelligently about acclimatization and drainage. The horticulturists were sometimes asked to stay for a drink or a meal, which gave the days more liveliness than they would have had otherwise. The conversation might have been about invasive weeds or pest damage, but at least there was conversation. If they came with their wives, I asked the women questions about the places they were from or had traveled, and my world grew. Nights without company usually found us all reading together, separate books, in companionable silence. I played the piano sometimes, but I also plunged into the library, agog at the choices after Fortin’s slim clutch of edifying books. It was a very easy life, and eventually I became comfortable enough in the house to stop being intimidated by it, to find the corners and rooms and paintings I liked best, and even to allow myself some dislikes.

  I was not overly fond of the dining room, whose walls were covered in enormous equestrian paintings. Pierre’s grandfather had been a keen horseman. He’d sponsored purses at the local racetrack and had run a stud farm nearby. Although he had kept the saddle and carriage horses, Pierre-Joseph had sold the racehorses off two decades earlier and still cited this as evidence of his fiscal responsibility. Even that sacrifice must have weighed on him, however, based on the quantity of horse memorabilia scattered throughout the house, rubbing shoulders with horticulture specimens and awards, and with the more ordinary decorative objects—vases, clocks, candelabras—that accumulate when a wealthy family has lived in one house for a very long time. Nothing went together except that it was all muffled in the same dust that collects when the wealthy lady of the house is worried for that wealth and retrenches the household staff. The scrollwork on the gold frames of the paintings had nearly disappeared under a fur of gray dust.

  Happy to have Pierre back at home, his parents fussed over him inordinately. Pierre, though still kind and even-tempered with me, grew more and more snappish toward them. The doctor he was supposed to be replacing in the village had begun having second thoughts about retirement, and Pierre wasn’t sure whether to wait him out or look for a job elsewhere. Then the old doctor proposed keeping his office hours, while Pierre, as the younger man, traveled to the house calls. There wasn’t really sufficient work for both of them, but in an optimistic frame of mind Pierre informed his parents that he would need the use of a horse.

  “Absolutely not,” Madeleine said, with genuine shock. “Out riding? In all weather?”

  “Just until the bicycle I’ve ordered arrives,” Pierre said.

  “A bicycle!” Madeleine yelped, at an operatic pitch.

  They seemed to want Pierre to content himself with a sedentary, gentlemanly life. They were happiest when he spent all day in the library reading medical texts. The house-call plan disintegrated in large part because Pierre-Joseph threatened to sell all the saddle horses out from under Pierre if he borrowed one. Then the bicycle, a new and popular model, was on indefinite back order.

  “This is a beautiful time of year in the garden,” Pierre-Joseph said. “Why not just enjoy it for a little while? Spend time with your new bride? Someday it’s all going to be yours.”

  “Someday it’s going to belong to the bank, and someone in this family needs to establish an income.”

  “Calm yourself,” Pierre-Joseph would say whenever he encountered such a protest. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  This was a very old argument between them, and Pierre felt his anger was righteous, not on his own behalf but on Albertine’s, our child’s, all the future generations of Lafosses, and the people in the village who depended on the estate for work. But I could understand the other side—why should the money be Pierre and Albertine’s? Just because it had been Pierre I’s through Pierre V’s, what law said it had to be Pierre VI’s? Natural law, Pierre would say, the natural concern of a father for his offspring. But Pierre-Joseph had three children: twice he had only planted the seeds and let his wife do the rest of the work. The other he had formed and raised himself, to his design and specifications. A human child, by comparison, was both ordinary and faulty.

  The worst fights Pierre and I ever had were about the garden, about how he couldn’t view it with anything other than resentment and I couldn’t help loving it at least a little. For his father I felt both affection and deference. Pierre-Joseph was the first person I’d ever met who had done something truly extraordinary. Eric was full of talk, but Pierre-Joseph had done it.

  “What do you expect of him, really?” I said. “At this point he could never just stop the work and let it die.”

  Is there any legacy so fragile? You cannot walk away from a garden like that for even a week. You cannot put it away in an attic and hope someone finds it fifty years after you die and makes you famous. If music had already seemed to me a vulnerable, unlikely way to fashion fame or greatness—dependent as it was upon other people to find it and to play it well and feelingly in front of a crowd who could tell other people about it, who would purchase the sheet music, teach it to their students, and schedule it for their concert seasons—then by comparison a garden was much, much worse.

  I wanted to invite Eric to visit. He would see what I saw in the garden, and then some. I imagined it inspiring music as strange and singular as the place itself, the kind of music he said he wanted to write, the kind I’d glimpsed during the terrible show at the Mirliton. I would be doing them both a favor, Eric and Pierre-Joseph, although I couldn’t tell either of them. How does one say immortality and not sound daft?

  But after the “Lou-Lou-Louise” song, my husband wanted even less to do with Eric than he did with the garden. At first I found his chivalry charming, but it came to wear on me. If I could create a whole other being inside me, surely I could choose whether or when I ought to be offended. The embarrassment of the prank paled in light of the song Eric had played beforehand—it was the best thing he’d done, and how frightening it must have been to play it out like that, hoping it would be admired.

  When I told Pierre, he said he doubted my brother had ever been frightened of anything in his life.

  “You’ve got him completely wrong,” I said. “I’d guess he’s terrified at least one-third of the time. May we please invite him? It isn’t as though there’s any lack of room.”

  Pierre relented, and to follow etiquette asked Madeleine to write, since it wasn’t our house to invite people to. I wished I knew what she’d written, or what Pierre had told her, because all Eric sent back was a very short letter to me: Don’t think I can fit it in. Working on my application for election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. I’m spelling it Erik now, by the way.

  Annoyed and feeling cheeky, I wrote back an even shorter letter: Why?

  He wrote back in turn: Why which? Académie or spelling?

  —Why either? You’d have better odds running for the National Ass
embly, and a K looks Scandinavian.

  —The answer to both: because I want to.

  —That’s your only reason?

  —You are wasting a lot of stamps.

  —Well, so are you.

  No reply came. I’d gotten the last word, but it wasn’t much of one, so I wrote once more: I’m going to have a child.

  Instead of a letter I first received a telegram: DIDN’T THINK YOU WERE SERIOUS WHEN I WROTE BUT CONRAD SAYS YOU ARE STOP SORRY STOP CONGRATULATIONS! STOP ERI(C)K

  His letter arrived shortly thereafter: Do you think it will be as insufferable as you?

  Because Pierre wanted to share news of the baby with his family all at once, we waited until Albertine planned a weekend visit with Cannu. I had my doubts about this plan: Albertine was not expecting, as far as we knew, and I worried our announcement might be salt in a wound. Pierre thought there was no wound. That there were ways to prevent conception I understood only vaguely. There was no knowing which of us was right, though personally I would have been in no hurry to bring a tiny Cannu into the world.

  When we finally told Pierre’s family, they were ecstatic. If Albertine was anything other than pleased for us, she didn’t show it. The intensity of their joy took me by surprise. Was this the way a family like theirs welcomed not just a child, but a prospective heir? Or had they worried I’d be somehow deficient? Pierre merely basked in their approval, with uncomplicated satisfaction. He was at odds with his father so often that this change was pleasant to see. I did this, I thought. My body was creating the person who was making this possible. What other miracles might I perform?

  Albertine invited me out on a walk the next morning. “Just the two of us,” she said. “Sisters.”

  She knew the winding paths through the garden much better than I did, and I was soon lost. She took us to a boat tie-up I couldn’t remember having seen before, with a rowboat painted in red and green stripes like a toy.

  “Let’s row back to the house,” she said.

  “Is it…seaworthy?”

  “I used it all the time as a girl.”

  This did not fill me confidence, but we managed to get in without soaking our skirts. We each faced toward the middle, our knees nearly touching. The boat rode low but didn’t take on water.

  “I’ll row,” Albertine said, grabbing the oars. She promptly rammed us into the bank. “Just give me a moment. I’ll remember the hang of it.”

  I gripped the sides, but she caught on quickly enough, and the boat stopped rocking once she found her rhythm. She pulled us smoothly past stands of palms and a kind of fern that went nearly translucent in sunlight. Neither of us could remember the name of it. She slipped past the Island of the Birds, where the canal branched and narrowed, and the little stone chapel with its stained-glass windows. It was quiet except for the dip of the oars, fluted birdsong, and the whir of insects. The birds and insects were ordinary native species, and I wondered if Pierre-Joseph considered this a flaw in his Eden, that there were sparrows nesting in his tropical plants instead of parrots or macaws.

  “We’re so pleased Pierre has you,” Albertine said. “Really.” She added the Really after a pause, as if to acknowledge that there were reasons they might have felt differently and both of us were clever enough to know it. I too was a plain sparrow, building a nest in the sequoias.

  As the boat passed beneath a low stone footbridge we both lowered our heads and leaned forward, nearly into each other’s laps. Albertine brought the oars alongside and I reached up to touch the stone, damp and soft with moss. The mortar felt crumbly, and I wondered if I ought to tell Pierre-Joseph.

  “We weren’t sure he’d find someone at all, with his health. And then we didn’t know if— We’re just so excited, that he’s doing so much better. Even starting a family.”

  “His health?”

  “We were so worried, by the time he went on leave from the hospital to take the waters in Deauville. The doctors had recommended somewhere farther south, with drier air, but Pierre’s so stubborn you take what you can get. As I’m sure you know!”

  I lowered my right hand, let the water run through my fingers. I wanted to come up with some wild excuse and run from the conversation, but there was nowhere to go.

  “It hardly seems fair. I was always the sickly one, as a child. He caught this on the ward, you know, at that awful hospital. Once he left, he started improving immediately. Anyway—thank you. Not every girl would have said yes.”

  I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even catch my breath. I pressed my hand to where the child was growing, still too small to feel, to be anything other than a hope. Just then we rounded a bend into a labyrinth of downed tree branches, and it took all of Albertine’s attention to navigate around them. By the time we reached a clear stretch, the stately gray house visible in front of us, I’d composed myself.

  “There,” she said. “Almost home. And I didn’t dump us out once.”

  I had to consider the source: Albertine routinely made her headaches sound life-threatening. “What was the original prognosis?” I said. “When the doctor sent him to Deauville? I’ve wanted to ask Pierre, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  Albertine held the oars out of the water and we floated in place. There was silence except for the birds, which sounded far away now, back where the garden cover was thicker. “Not good,” she said finally. “But as I said, there’s every reason to think it’s all behind him.”

  I nodded, unable to do or say anything more. I thought of Madeleine, shrieking with horror about bicycles and weather, and of how much I hadn’t understood.

  “We’re just grateful you saw the real him,” Albertine said. “All of him, more than just the consumption.”

  I felt like I’d never seen him at all. And what had he seen when he’d looked at me and lied?

  After Albertine and I returned to the house, I pleaded nausea and retreated to my rooms. She sent Cannu for a consult, but he was as relieved to be sent away as I was to send him. Pierre was in Saint-Côme-du-Mont for a rare day of work, consultations the old village doctor had requested; on his parents’ insistence he’d taken the carriage, and now I was glad for the protection it offered him from the weather, even though it was a warm day. In the space of half an hour my husband had become both fragile and a liar, and I wanted to swaddle him in cotton wool and dash him against a rock in equal measure.

  “I never lied to you. Never,” Pierre insisted when he returned to our room.

  “How can you say that?”

  “I didn’t deny that I’d been ill.”

  “How could I have known to ask?” I said. “Was I supposed to have a questionnaire?” That seemed like the sort of thing Fortin might have done, and I had a new, terrible thought. “Did you tell my great-uncle? Did he know and keep that from me, too?”

  “There was nothing to tell him. Nothing to tell either of you. I was ill, I recovered.”

  “Consumption isn’t—you’re not…It can come back.”

  “So you would have refused me? If you’d known?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why does it matter?”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I’m fine. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “You sound like your father.”

  I hadn’t realized the blow I was landing until Pierre turned bright red. “So you think I’m fooling myself? That’s why we should have discussed it? Because you think I’m going to die?”

  I shook my head, but his death was all I’d been able to think about. Imagining it, fearing it, wondering what might happen to me and our child without him. I’d assumed we would grow old together, baggy and wrinkled and content. I’d envisioned us on the far side of a lifetime of lovemaking. It embarrassed me, how much I kept thinking of his body, now that I knew it was vulnerable, had been vulnerable since I’d met him. In the weeks before my pregnancy I had not lost my awe of the act itself, the profound strangeness of being touched and entered. The stran
geness had a sweetness, but I had looked forward to learning what came after. Now that we might not have more time, I wanted us to have made more of the time we’d had. Frankly I wished we had rutted in every room at Bellenau, in the garden grottoes and the outbuildings, under the trees and on blankets in the park. But that was not who we thought we were. Or that was the couple we thought we had time to later become.

  “You’re not a doctor. I am, and I’m telling you I’m fine.”

  He came close and kissed me, hard, as if trying to convince us both. When I didn’t stop him, he began to unbutton my dress, as if he’d somehow heard my thoughts, or been thinking the same. He was rather hasty, ungentle, but I didn’t say anything, lest he stop altogether. I wanted us both to believe him for as long as we could. He hadn’t been laughing at or deliberately deceiving me during our courtship, I decided, just hoping that there was nothing to tell. I tried to trust him, but I couldn’t help thinking of all the things I had wanted ferociously as a child, to no avail.

  Wednesday afternoons: Alejandro, Jacob, Fleur, Serge, Diego. The only way I can pull it off is that Alejandro and Jacob both live in the same building, and Serge is only one stop farther on the same bus line from Fleur. Alejandro’s family has a terrible piano, Alejandro has a terrible ear, not sure why they bother. Jacob’s apartment always smells like soup. Fleur’s mother is always desperate for chitchat in French, but Serge’s parents speak only Russian, so if I’ve gotten behind and need to make up some time, I can usually exit quickly there. I have no idea what Serge tells them about our lessons, but they pay every week and seem happy enough. The poor child is supposed to be speaking English with me, but the family arrived only six months ago and he’s got his head full trying to learn Spanish. It’s a service I offer—piano lessons in French, Spanish, or English—but usually I just reply in whatever the child speaks to me. Argentina is a mongrel nation, myself included.