The Vexations Read online

  “Bellenau,” I said. “I’m so grateful, for everyone’s help. But as long as we’re welcome we’ll stay at Bellenau.”

  “Of course you’re welcome,” Madeleine whispered. I was too afraid to do more than glance up at Fortin. His face was strange to me. Mixed with his disapproval, which I had seen a thousand times, was hurt.

  “Then this seems to me a routine proceeding,” the justice said. “The state is not in the habit of snatching nurslings from qualified mothers.”

  From the way he said it I could tell I was supposed to be flattered. But flattery was fragile: if the law could deem me qualified, it could also deem me unqualified.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Eric said afterward, when I shared my concern. “There’s no question you’re fit.”

  “For now. ‘A Family Council can be reconvened at any time, by any member,’” I parroted. I hadn’t known, until the justice announced it at the end of the hearing, that my guardianship was contingent rather than permanent.

  “Any other hearing would go the exact same way,” he assured me.

  “But there’s no guarantee. He’s my child, and there’s still no guarantee.”

  “I think you’ve had troubles enough. Do you really need to borrow more?”

  He said this gently, and I wanted to believe him more than I wanted to be irate. I’d had enough indignation. I’d been burning up with it, mostly at God but sometimes at Pierre himself, which made me feel terrible, and sometimes at the baby, for all his howling, which felt worse.

  After the Council we all traveled back to Bellenau. Lunch was nearly pleasant. It was by far the most company hosted since Pierre had died, and the cook, perhaps pleased to be busy, outdid herself. Eric was too stunned by the surroundings to say anything inappropriate, and Fortin and Cannu conversed with each other instead of boring the rest of the company.

  I tried to apologize to Estelle and Fortin, to tell them how grateful I was that they would open their home to me again. Estelle waved a hand dismissively. “Oh pooh. Just look at this place. Of course you should stay.” Fortin looked like he had more to say, but swallowed it back: whatever mistake he thought I was making, he would let me make it without a lecture.

  After lunch I wanted to show Eric the garden, but Pierre-Joseph said he was feeling poorly—too much rich food, when he’d barely been eating since Pierre’s death. He offered to enlist the head gardener for a tour but we refused. I could get us in and out without getting lost, and I didn’t think Eric would have the patience for the horticultural details anyway. I left Madeleine and Estelle dandling the baby.

  I tried not to watch Eric’s face too nakedly as we walked. Did he find the garden as miraculous as I did? Did he find it miraculous in a way he could use? What did inspiration look like, igniting on someone’s face? It was February, which I’d somehow forgotten. I’d been almost entirely indoors since September, tending Pierre and then the baby, and still pictured the summer garden. In winter the palms remained green, but little else. Nothing was flowering.

  Eric seemed indifferent to everything except the chapel. The door had been left open or blown open, and eddies of leaves had heaped around the legs of the half-dozen pews. Birds had been trapped inside or chosen to nest there, and our arrival startled them into a frenzy. Owing to the cloudy day, the stained-glass windows were subdued. Bright white bird droppings glowed on the floor, the pews, even the altar. The place wouldn’t have looked like this if grief hadn’t been keeping Pierre-Joseph from his work, and it was sobering how quickly the garden was defiled without him. I had no desire to linger, nor to collect bird droppings on my head or cape, but Eric shuffled to the altar and kneeled to pray. Was this for my benefit? Was his solemnity in the garden really a lack of enthusiasm, or the way he thought he was supposed to act, given the cataclysm that had brought him here? Was I supposed to join him at the altar rail? I didn’t have it in me, not that day or for a long time afterward. Any prayer I might have made would have been just another angry, unhinged letter. I simply waited for Eric to finish, and after he rose we exited the chapel in silence. I wouldn’t have wanted my own prayers questioned, so I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t offer any explanation.

  I was ready to turn us toward home, but he spotted the studio building and asked about it. I hadn’t been inside since Pierre had stopped going, and I feared what might be there, whether feral invasion or homely still life, perhaps Pierre’s handwriting on unfinished specimen cards. But I decided that entering with Eric would be easier than walking in later alone. I needn’t have worried, it turned out—the door was unlocked but tightly closed, and the interior remained undisturbed. Pierre had put everything away neatly, as if he knew he wouldn’t be back to continue his work. The skulls had been moved to an upper shelf, replaced by a selection of books that Pierre had either brought from Le Havre or removed from the library in the main house.

  “May I?” Eric asked.

  I gestured in invitation at the skulls, but he reached for the books, and I gave up predicting what he would or wouldn’t find interesting. I stared out the lead-glass windows while he read. My breasts were growing heavy with milk and I said I needed to get back to nurse the baby. Eric nodded distractedly, absorbed in a book full of anatomical sketches of sea life. I had no idea why it was here, sea life being nearly the only kind of life not found in the garden, and I suggested he keep it. I didn’t know if the books belonged to Pierre, or Pierre-Joseph, or the estate, or what the difference might be. But I knew I would never read them, not as a scholar or a scientist, and they would only remind me of Pierre. Eric wouldn’t read them as a scientist either, but he might be able to make something out of them, and I thought Pierre would like that, his book escaping from this place he’d resented.

  When we got back to the house a carriage was already waiting to take Estelle and Fortin to the train station, but Albertine, Cannu, and Eric were all staying until the morning, and we lingered awake together. Albertine told stories about Pierre as a boy, and the baby fell so peacefully asleep in my arms that I was loath to move and risk waking him. Eventually Albertine and Cannu retired.

  “You should go to bed as well,” I told Eric. “You’ve got an early train.”

  “I’ll keep you company. I could show you what I’m working on,” he said, admiring the fine piano, “but I don’t want to wake him.”

  “When he’s this asleep, nothing wakes him,” I said. “It should be fine, unless you’re planning something Wagnerian.”

  Eric gave a mock shudder and sat at the piano.

  The music was spare but slowly stomping, a march falling asleep on its feet. It was finely filigreed at best and droning at worst. Not at all what I’d expected. I wanted to ask him to play again the piece I’d heard at the Mirliton, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  “Shall I play the next one?” he asked. “That was ‘Air of the Order.’ Then comes ‘Air of the Grand-Master’ and ‘Air of the Grand-Prior.’”

  “The Grand-Prior?”

  He looked at me, confused. “I really don’t ever tell you anything, do I?” He explained that he’d been appointed resident composer for a Rosicrucian religious order led by Sâr Joséphin Péladan, someone Eric clearly thought I should have heard of, though I hadn’t.

  Fortin had once ranted that the only thing preventing Rosicrucians from being heretics was that they were firstly fools, so steeped in occult mysticism they were worthier of pity than of excommunication. “Do you believe in the teachings?” I asked. “Or is it just a job?”

  “How could I have ‘just a job’ writing ceremonial music if I didn’t believe in the ceremony?”

  Perfectly easily, I thought. Even I could say one thing (“Albertine, what a lovely new hat!”) and believe another (“Albertine, it looks like a bird fell into a tar pit and died on your head!”). Let alone Eric. But I supposed his lingering prayer in the chapel was explained, and sincere.

  “I used the Golden Ratio in planning the development. I got the idea
from Claude Debussy, but don’t tell anyone.”

  “Who would I tell? I don’t even know who that is.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t.”

  “Should I? Is he famous?”

  “Not yet,” Eric said, and I had a glimpse of his life, how he and Claude and their friends lived in the yet: not now, but soon. The world was going to come to them, and it would lie down at their feet.

  “Are you famous yet? Did the Académie des Beaux-Arts select you after all?” I hadn’t planned on saying anything like it, but it felt like he’d opened the door on a way to ask, lightheartedly, how Greatness was proceeding.

  “The fools turned me down,” he said airily. “But Sâr Péladan should be able to open some doors.”

  “I thought you were composing the music for God.”

  “The music is an aid to mystic contemplation. If me becoming known means more people will hear it, then I think God will be entirely in favor.”

  My brother might have joined a cult, but he hadn’t surrendered the devotion to his original gods: art and fame and cleverness. I suspected they would win out over the mystics eventually.

  “I’m not ignoring it,” he said, after a pause. “What’s happened. I just don’t know what to say.”

  I rose and sat beside him on the piano bench, although the baby shifted restlessly at the movement. I leaned into Eric’s side, and thought about how I hadn’t been this near anyone other than the baby since Pierre’s death, and wasn’t sure when I would be again. Eric didn’t lean back into me, but he didn’t move away. “There’s nothing to say,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “Shall we put the baby on the lid and play a duet?”

  “Then he’d definitely wake. Besides, I don’t know any duets.”

  As if he knew we were speaking about him, the baby opened his eyes. There was a moment of breathless stillness, as Eric and I looked down at him, hoping he might fall back asleep. Then, of course, he tugged air into his lungs and screamed.

  I waited for the garden to show up in Eric’s music, hoped that something good might yet come out of my personal disaster. For the first years I told myself that inspiration must be allowed to take its sweet time; beyond that I assumed the garden hadn’t provided any inspiration at all. But then twenty-odd years later, plus the months it took for Conrad to send me a copy, Eric wrote a trio of pieces about sea creatures, titled with their scientific names, introduced with made-up facts and false descriptions. Beneath the lines of music there were little exhortations supposedly from the crustaceans themselves: It was a really pretty boulder! Nice and sticky! or I have no tobacco. Good thing I don’t smoke.

  The pieces were collages, with phrases shamelessly lifted from Chopin and music-hall numbers, not particularly crustacean-like, but twirling like sea foam in a shallow tidal pool. Conrad thought they were some of Eric’s best work, and I tried to hear them that way—to separate them from the page of biological sketches I’d seen him admire in the book of Pierre’s that I’d given him. If I hadn’t known where the seed had come from, maybe I could have heard the humor or delight. But for me the pieces were muffled in the circumstances of their making, and all I could think was that he’d picked through the wreckage of my life and made of it only these three little cartoons. Why had I thought I could show a composer something and dictate what he made of it? Was I angry because the pieces were funny, or because they were so small? Did I want to think my life was an opera, a symphony?

  One of the great lies of tragedy is that it means more than comedy, when its greatest lie is that it means anything at all.

  Philippe

  — 9 —

  Haggard in your body

  COPYEDITS TO TWO SEPARATE TRAVEL GUIDES (MUSEUMS OF Madrid; walking routes of Catalonia) were due by the end of the week, but Erik wouldn’t leave him alone about Uspud, for which he was demanding a final act so that he could offer it to Tomaschet for a slot in the shadow theater the following month.

  “I have no idea how it ends,” Erik groused. When Philippe promised he’d get it to him in a week, Erik insisted that wasn’t nearly enough time.

  “You always do everything at the last minute anyway,” Philippe said. “I know you.”

  “If I’d realized you were going to get so boring, I’d never have sent you to wait in line at the Mirliton.”

  Given how the night had gone, Erik had multiple reasons to rue that particular plan. But Philippe’s launch into occasional paid employment had been, oddly, the most enduring of Erik’s complaints. Philippe had met more money in front of the Mirliton than he’d met in Paris in the previous four years combined. Standing there in his semi-decent shared suit, apparently a man who could afford Saturday night at the Mirliton, he looked the part of someone to whom the money might deign to talk. The money asked him to hold a spot so it could run to the tobacconist’s down the street, and then the money passed him a cigarette. The money asked him what he did. A writer, he said, since that sounded marginally more respectable than “a poet.” The money asked him where he was from. Did he do any translation work? Some of the money worked for a publishing house that was partnering with a Spanish press to translate a series of travel guides. Absolutely, Philippe said. He did translation work. He did any kind of work. Well, in that case, other money that edited a political journal chimed in, perhaps Philippe would like to query sometime, an outsider’s perspective on French affairs? The other money’s wife even read poetry, and she and Philippe chatted about Mallarmé.

  Philippe had run into the nearly-as-famous Verlaine a few weeks earlier but didn’t know if the man was considered too disreputable to bring up in polite society, whatever his past renown. They had literally run into each other, as Verlaine was drunk and head-butting people at the Café François I for no apparent reason. Verlaine had a famous head, stupendously round and hairless, with a cramped little face, and in the end Philippe couldn’t resist recounting the way it had smashed into his skinny midsection. The story was a hit—a relief—either because the crowd saw itself as too fashionable to be scandalized or because Verlaine had passed beyond mere scandal into legend.

  When Philippe contacted the travel publisher the very next day, he’d tried not to assume the man would remember him. But the response came right away: Of course I remember you. How many people do I meet who’ve been head-butted by Verlaine? Then the publisher offered several hundred pages of translation work, paid by the page.

  Had he been doing Paris wrong this entire time? Philippe wondered aloud later, sitting at a celebratory meal with Erik and a couple of other friends. He didn’t regret his single-minded march across the city into the chaotic embrace of the Chat Noir. And drinking in the same café where Verlaine was slowly killing himself was what had clinched his good fortune. But where had all these people been? How had he never spoken with them until the Mirliton?

  “You weren’t looking for them, and your clothes were too awful,” Erik answered, though Philippe had been posing the question only rhetorically. “So you managed to meet a bunch of boring people, and they offered you boring work. Why are we celebrating?”

  Philippe had invited Erik and their friends Alphonse and Narcisse out to dinner and offered to pay, in honor of the simple fact that he was capable of paying. A language textbook for which he’d helped to write exercises the previous year was going to have a second edition. They were at the Taverne du Coq d’Or, on the Rue Montmartre, where the food was good enough that respectable people came to eat it. Philippe was wearing the shared suit plus decent black shoes he’d bought with his first paycheck, and was feeling nearly as if he belonged.

  But Erik wouldn’t stop complaining about the food, a prix fixe menu where every course was apparently something he hated. “Snails? Eating them is like chewing pencil erasers. No one really likes snails.”

  Philippe didn’t care for snails himself, but he didn’t understand why Erik was being quite so petulant. He kept needling the table, then the tables next to them, about snails. Was any creat
ure fouler? If snails were fit food for humans, why not eat bees? Earthworms? Why not dogs and cats? They both had to be tastier than snails, yes?

  “No!” someone at another table shouted. “No, they’re not!”

  The tables were very close together. Everywhere in Paris the tables were close together, and the chairs, and the plates and the bowls, and Philippe was always getting jabbed by somebody’s elbows.

  “An expert!” Erik shouted. “We’ve found an expert!”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” The man was older than most of the dinner crowd, not really old, but of their parents’ generation. He had steely hair and crow’s-feet around his eyes, deep furrows in his forehead and around his mouth, a nearly worn-through handsomeness. He was alone at his table and didn’t look as if he was expecting anyone else. He looked like he was done expecting anything or anybody.

  “I’m just chatting with my friends here,” Erik said. “Sorry if we’ve disturbed your dull supper.”

  Rather than the prix fixe, the man had a carafe of wine and a single serving of fish in front of him, nearly demolished, with a pile of pinbones heaped at the side of the plate. He picked one up and bent it between his thumb and forefinger. “You chat very loudly.”

  “We’ll keep it down,” Philippe said.

  “We’ll keep him down,” Alphonse said.

  Erik’s response was to climb on top of his chair. This would play just fine after midnight at the Chat Noir or the Auberge, or a dozen other places, but dinner hour at the Coq d’Or?

  Philippe didn’t want to get kicked out, at least until the cheese course. After that, maybe. But he was very much looking forward to good cheese. “This isn’t a show,” he hissed. “It’s just dinner.”

  “It’s always a show,” Erik hissed back in an incredibly loud stage whisper meant to be heard by both their table and the curmudgeon next to them.