The Vexations Read online

  “You should listen to your friends,” the older man said.

  “You should enlighten us on the subject of dogs and cats,” Erik said.

  “What about them?” the man asked.

  “Between snails, dogs, and cats, which would you eat?”

  “Are we considering personality, or purely taste?” Narcisse jumped in. “Because I’d rather kill a snail than a dog any day.”

  “Speaking only to taste, dog’s the one you want,” the man said. “Tastes like mutton. Cat’s dry. Like sucking on a wire.”

  Alphonse, several years older than the others, shifted uncomfortably, with recognition, and touched Erik’s elbow.

  Erik didn’t notice. “A taste for the exotic, eh? What else have you eaten? Can you enlighten us on giraffes?”

  “You’d have to find someone richer,” the man said. “The zoo meat was too dear. The rest of us ate whatever we could. Sawdust bread and rats, when we could get them.”

  “The siege,” Alphonse said.

  “You are such fucking children,” the man spat. “All of you.” He considered the fish bone, laid it back down, picked up another.

  “Yet you’ve come here to drink with us,” Erik said. This would have been reasonably accurate at the Chat Noir, but most people ate at the Coq d’Or for the food, not the atmosphere.

  “I come here and wonder if my boy would have ended up like you. I try to decide which is worse—to think that he would have, or that he would have been a better man than the whole worthless lot of you. And yet here you all are instead.”

  “I’m sorry about your son,” Alphonse said, giving Philippe a plaintive look, a plea for help.

  Good Lord, Philippe thought: I’m the second most responsible person at this table? “Please,” he told Erik, who was squatting on his chair seat, chastened into no longer standing but not ready to sit back down. “Please don’t get us kicked out before the cheese comes.”

  Alphonse appeared unimpressed with this reasoning, but Erik sat back down.

  The older man gulped the last of his wine directly from the carafe, then banged it back down on the table. Philippe wondered if he had watched his son starve to death, or lost him to the shelling, or the street violence afterward. The man sucked one of the fish bones clean, put it in his jacket pocket, and patted it. He took his strange souvenir and left. Philippe, along with the others, slowly let out his breath. He felt shame, but also annoyance at having been made to feel shame, a grievance that seemed to be shared around the table.

  Narcisse was first to recover. “It’s settled, then. Dogs win on taste, but cats or snails on lesser personality. So it’s really a question of the heart versus the stomach.”

  “That’s the only choice there ever is,” Erik said sourly. “The heart or the stomach.” He glared at Philippe, an accusation.

  Philippe pictured himself as a giant walking stomach squirting acids, an image both unpleasant and, he thought, undeserved. He rejected the premise: why did there have to be a choice? This was one more of Erik’s aphorisms that sounded less wise the longer you actually thought about it.

  “This one’s true,” Erik responded when Philippe tried to argue. “You just wish it weren’t.”

  When the cheese course came, the waiter was very proud of the Livarot, a regional specialty brought in from Normandy, and Erik and Alphonse toasted to it. Philippe found it toxically smelly, like a dead animal pulled from the insides of a cow.

  “Look,” Erik said, “if you can’t get me the full libretto for Uspud, at least tell me what happens at the end so I can sketch it out.”

  “He dies. Everyone dies.”

  “Is that really what happens, or are you foisting me off?”

  “That’s the way everything ends, if you wait long enough.”

  Erik rolled his eyes. “If I could afford to pay you by the page I bet I’d have it by now.”

  “I bet you would,” Philippe agreed.

  “How about I just finish it myself?”

  Philippe could tell this was meant to shock him into possessiveness. But the prospect didn’t alarm him. It didn’t make him feel anything. He had only vague memories of dreaming up long lists of fictional saints and gruesome deaths very late one night at the Auberge as they sorted through the pile of leftover puppets from The Temptation of Saint Anthony that hadn’t already been mutilated for use in Pierrot Pornographe. He didn’t feel any more loyal to Uspud than he did to the travel guides or political analyses or the language textbook. It was neither a chef d’oeuvre nor his heart’s desire. What was the last project he’d really loved? Certainly not Pierrot Pornographe, although it had debuted to a certain kind of acclaim.

  His siege play, he realized, and his face burned, thinking of the man at the next table. Tomaschet had been right all along. Just as well Philippe hadn’t managed to finish it. “Go ahead,” Philippe said. “You’re welcome to end Uspud.”

  Erik sullenly ate through the rest of the cheese.

  As they left the restaurant, Philippe caught sight of the fish-bone man. He hadn’t left, just moved to the bar area, where he was bent heavily over another carafe of wine, now empty. Philippe shooed his friends on and stayed behind. The bar had the same mixed clientele as the main dining room, bohemians and businessmen, though with more single women. Or at least unaccompanied women. No way of knowing who was genuinely single.

  Philippe sat at the bar, next to the man, and ordered two glasses of wine. “For you,” he said, sliding one over on the marble counter. “I wanted to apologize. For my friends,” he added, cowardly, because although he hadn’t said anything offensive in the restaurant, his shadow play, if he had finished it, would have been worse than anything Erik or Narcisse had said.

  The man slid the glass back without drinking.

  “I’d like you to have it,” Philippe insisted.

  The man took the little fish bone out of his pocket and pushed it under his left thumbnail, as if he was scraping dirt. The nail was clean, but the man kept pushing. “You want me to tell you I was wrong about you.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “I don’t have it in me, all right? I don’t know you from Adam, and I don’t have it in me tonight.”

  “I was sitting here,” a girl said, from behind them. “If you don’t mind. I just slipped out for a moment. That’s my shawl on the peg.”

  Philippe slid off the stool with relief. She was dark-haired and very young, with an accent he couldn’t place. Short, only up to his shoulders, until she climbed onto the seat and looked him directly in the face.

  “This yours?” she said, of the wineglass.

  “You can have it.”

  She eyed it suspiciously.

  “It just arrived,” Philippe said. “He can tell you.”

  He gestured at the man, who was standing now, buttoning his jacket.

  The man nodded to Philippe and the girl, a stiff farewell. “I’m going to leave you two to it,” he said.

  Philippe and the girl looked at each other, and Philippe wondered if she was as perplexed as he was by what “it” they were meant to be getting to. The girl shrugged and Philippe sat down. Along with the untouched wine, the man had left the fish bone, its tip pink with blood.

  She turned out to be from Gipuzkoa, Basque country, which explained the accent. They switched to Spanish, which she knew much better than French, although Philippe, with a mixture of fascination and alarm, found himself stumbling over phrases, groping for words that came to him first in French. Five years. Was that how little time it took for his old self to disappear? Could his family tell, even through his short, uninformative notes, how his grasp on his own language had loosened? No wonder their disappointment in him was undimmed. His freelance work had been enough to keep him clothed and fed, but he still lived close to the bone. The little money he’d sent back had not impressed them.

  Philippe and the girl—Alazne—commiserated about this, about their families back home, the unreasonable expectations, the un
certainty as to what “home” meant anymore. He bought them more rounds of drinks, after which she suggested they go together to her room.

  So easy? But so little else had been. Philippe had earned something easy, he thought, a night with a girl who fancied him, and didn’t bother to make a show of waiting, didn’t bother with questions about the future. Didn’t bother about the future at all. The sex itself was easy, Alazne reading him so well he knew he would once have been discomfited with her apparent experience. But why? What good did keeping girls in the dark do for anybody? All hail Montmartre, where a girl could learn what a man liked without being married to him.

  The sex was not tender, exactly, but it did not feel transactional, so he was confused and a bit hurt when she began to dress immediately afterward. Confusion that turned to horror when she asked him for payment. He had not understood that this would happen, had thought the interest, and the pleasure, were mutual. He burned with shame, both for the misunderstanding and for the fact that he had no money to give her. He’d brought enough cash to pay for the dinner and had planned to go home straight afterward. He’d barely had enough left for their drinks at the bar.

  Alazne glared at him with a contempt that tipped over into rage. He could tell she didn’t believe him and thought he’d deliberately cheated her. She slapped him, then cowered, and he saw in her eyes a blunt appraisal of her odds. Could she hurt him worse than he was capable of hurting her? No, she would not make that wager.

  A door slid shut across her eyes. “Get out,” she said.

  Upon realizing the misunderstanding, he’d wanted to make arrangements to send the money to her somehow—he was a fool but not a cheat—yet once she was afraid of him all he could think of was to get out of the room as quickly as possible. Not to spare Alazne her fear, but so he could stop being a man that a woman was afraid of.

  He replayed their flirtation at the Coq d’Or over and over, trying to figure out how he was supposed to have known. Montmartre prided itself on being a place where all the usual rules were suspended, but Philippe could see how a few more rules would be useful. When nobody was respectable, how did one tell the free spirits from the working girls? She’d thought he was a bourgeois, working for a publisher, an immigrant made good. Would she have seen him differently if she’d known he was a poet? Sure, Philippe thought: she would never have willingly taken him to bed.

  Of course he tried to write a poem about it. But he was so ashamed of what had happened in her room that he could barely stand to think about it, much less write about it. The poem he came up with was nothing but an opaque blur of abstractions. All scrim, all puppets, no flame.

  He wrote another postcard to Miguel, who had not written him back a second time. He felt as if he were waiting for lightning, standing in a clear field and willing the wind to rise. I met Verlaine, he wrote. He says his current project is a series of essays about “cursed poets.” He means the tortures of genius, but perhaps I can still qualify via gross incompetence.

  This time Miguel bit: Verlaine? Have him sign something for me. (Though if you’re really that miserable, why not leave?)

  One afternoon Erik finally invited Philippe to join him and Claude at the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant. The Librairie was both a bookshop and a boutique publisher specializing in elegantly produced books by obscure poets and foreign writers. Philippe had had his eye on the place since moving to Paris, although the longer he went without his work appearing on its shelves or in its catalog, the wider the berth he’d given it, until he sometimes avoided the street entirely. But the chance to meet Claude, whom he’d heard so much about, lured him past the elegant wooden tables piled with books for sale and into a plush seating area where the owner held salons and invited select artists to linger and work.

  Claude turned out to be a mop of dark hair and a rather elfin beard, with no hint of competition or possessiveness over Erik. He was friendly and self-assured, and according to Erik did very well with the ladies. Claude had bedded a married woman when he was only sixteen, Erik had once confided, and was currently living with the pretty daughter of a tailor without having bothered to propose.

  “So the two of you aren’t…?” Philippe had trailed off.

  “Aren’t what?” Erik said, and if his innocence was a con it was perfect, without cracks or clues.

  “Never mind,” Philippe said. Erik’s heart remained as mysterious to him as ever.

  At the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, Erik introduced Philippe as “an occasional poet.”

  “As in, you write poems for special occasions,” Claude said, “or you write only occasionally?”

  “Neither’s true,” Philippe said. “But I assume he meant the second.”

  “It is true,” Erik said.

  “I write all the time.”

  “The first is a rather good idea, though,” Erik said. “Poet for Special Occasions. I should take an ad out in the papers.”

  Likely no one who would hire a poet out of a café paper would have the money to pay one, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad idea. Erik was writing nearly as much as Philippe did these days, humor columns and treatises on music that might or might not be meant as humor pieces. He’d broken with the Rosicrucians and gotten so much attention for his scathing open letters to Sâr Péladan that Philippe wondered if that hadn’t been the plan all along. Erik’s primary complaint, rather than anything about the group’s mystical beliefs, seemed to be that Péladan hadn’t given his compositions enough attention.

  Whatever his complaint with Péladan, most of Erik’s new pieces still had the sound of his Rosicrucian ceremonial music: spare, slow, everything played at the same volume. Philippe found himself longing for a story—for a dramatic, swelling crescendo, a dewy-eyed melody, or the palpable melancholy of the Gymnopédies as some clue to what he was supposed to feel, or as a prompt to feel anything at all.

  His current, half-finished libretto for Uspud was overcompensating. If Erik wanted to explore what happened when music and words were at odds with each other, well, Philippe could certainly play along. Shadow plays often used spoken narration, and he’d filled the slow silences in Erik’s score with gore and mayhem. It was hard to top the travails of actual Catholic saints, but he’d invented some saints of his own, then obliterated them one by one. Of course Uspud was meant to die at the end—had Erik even needed to ask? Uspud was the only character standing after the second act, a lamb to the slaughter.

  Listening to Claude and Erik talk about music, Philippe was lost within minutes. He thought of Erik’s face the one time he’d ever heard Philippe speak anything other than French, to a Catalan dancer they’d run into at the Moulin Rouge. “You turned into somebody else,” Erik had said. “I looked for you but you were gone.” With Claude, Erik became somebody Philippe only partially recognized. Both of the composers blossomed in the easy conversation. Claude had won the Prix de Rome several years earlier, making him permanently suspicious in certain quarters of Montmartre. Surely one of the Conservatory’s golden boys couldn’t also be one of their own tribe. Why not? said Erik, whose own dismal time at the Conservatory had been forgiven. Why not, when Claude made music like this?

  Claude played a work in progress for them, asking for feedback, but the piece sounded finished to Philippe. It was pretty in the way some of Erik’s music was, but denser, shimmering. He thought of the paintings that looked simply like a landscape from ten paces, but once you got up close the blue of a river or the green of a field was made up of ten other colors and a thousand individual brushstrokes, a disorienting dazzle of lines that both did and did not fit together. Claude’s music made Erik’s sound like line drawings or prints. Still pretty, but the same saturated blue all the way across the page.

  Claude asked Philippe for recommendations of poems to set to music. Philippe knew Claude had already done Baudelaire, because he’d dedicated a copy of the suite of five poems to Erik, who’d shown it around to everyone, as giddy as a boy with a long-desired birthday gift.


  Philippe suggested Verlaine. His second book, Fêtes Galantes, rather than anything newer.

  “Why didn’t you recommend yourself?” Erik asked him later, after Claude had left to go home to his not-wife. “You should’ve offered him your own poems.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to Philippe. “If he’d been interested in my work he could have asked. It would have been pushy to bring it up myself.”

  “So push! No wonder you aren’t getting anywhere.” When he got no rejoinder but an aggrieved stare, Erik mentioned that he’d finished Uspud but that Salis and Tomaschet hadn’t gone for it.

  “That’s too bad,” Philippe said, and meant it, but the last five years had been such a constant stream of rejection that this one didn’t even dent him.

  When Erik said he’d asked the Paris Opéra for a meeting, Philippe thought he was joking, but Erik insisted he’d demanded an audience with Director Bertrand.

  “But it was written for puppets. It was never a ballet.”

  “Dancers can’t be that different. I told the director if he refuses to meet I’ll report him to the Minister for Education for failure to foster new work. We’re never going to get ahead of Germany if the only music anyone gets to hear is a century old. At least. And sung in Italian.” Erik thumped the piano self-importantly.

  Maybe Erik had managed to do the impossible and transform Uspud into a brilliant full-length ballet. Or it was still the violent, semi-incoherent shadow play that Philippe remembered.

  Since there was no way the director of the Paris Opéra would look at it either way, Philippe supposed it didn’t really matter.

  Two weeks later Erik was pounding on Philippe’s apartment door in the middle of the night. After subbing at the Divan Japonais, Erik explained, he’d arrived home to find a note from Director Bertrand. They had an appointment! It had taken threats, but finally something had worked!

  The mention of a threat jerked Philippe fully awake.

  “A duel’s not a proper threat, really,” Erik reassured him. “Especially since I don’t know how to duel. Not that he’s likely to know how either, the coward, but it’s just as well he didn’t take me up on it.”