The Vexations Read online

  “You challenged the director of the Paris Opéra to a duel because he wouldn’t look at your score?”

  “Our score. You could be more grateful.”

  “I could be deported.”

  “I did everything on the up-and-up. If he wanted to have me arrested, he’d already have done so. You’re wasting time. Our audience with him is first thing in the morning. So, six hours.”

  “We can’t show him that.” Philippe pointed at the score stuffed under Erik’s arm. It was a battered sheaf of papers covered in corrections in both pencil and pen, strike-throughs and arrows and rearrangements. The libretto and the music alike were barely legible. To Bertrand it would resemble a madman’s scribblings.

  “We’re going to recopy it,” Erik said. “I’ve brought fresh paper.”

  But he hadn’t brought any light. And how could they both work on Philippe’s single small table when he had only one chair? (Although he’d moved to a marginally better room in the same building, he still didn’t spend enough time there to justify furniture.) Together they dragged the table over to the bed, where Philippe sat, trying to write from an uncomfortably low level, his elbows cocked, while Erik took the chair. A café would have been more comfortable than this cramped table by candlelight, but it was so late that even the Butte was asleep.

  Philippe forced his attention to the blank sheets of heavy, crisp, cream-colored paper. Erik had beautiful handwriting and serious taste in stationery, and Philippe didn’t want to let him down. The copying went more quickly than he’d expected—in addition to being gorier than he’d remembered, Uspud was much shorter. Nowhere close to a full-length ballet. Bertrand wouldn’t even have to open the folder to know they were frauds; he’d see the skinny stack of paper and roll his eyes.

  Erik was writing furiously on staff paper. Philippe still didn’t really read music, but he didn’t see how the tower of treble lines could be correct.

  “I’m orchestrating,” Erik explained.

  “Now?”

  “Only for harp, strings, and flute. There’s time.”

  Philippe looked where Erik was pointing for the flute line. He was pretty sure a flute could make only one sound at a time, not the several simultaneous notes on the page. His stomach hurt. Then he remembered that he didn’t know how Erik had chosen to end the play.

  He flipped to the back of the libretto. Uspud did indeed die, but not before tearing a basket of puppies apart with his bare hands and watering the ground with their blood. Presumably the puppies were meant to be disguised demons and not actual puppies? Then another pack of demons in monstrous form—dogs stitched to fish stitched to bird wings stitched to bull heads, snorting fire through their nostrils—took their revenge and tore Uspud limb from limb. It was disgusting and unstageable but not, Philippe saw as he read the whole thing backward, any more so than the rest of the play. Even Uspud’s Act II conversion was symbolized by a woman taking out a knife and stabbing him through the heart: the Holy Spirit penetrates. The whole thing was ridiculous, and copying it out cleanly on expensive paper just made it look worse, too sincere and self-important to be passed off as a joke.

  “What are you doing?” Erik said. “There’s no time for new text. Copy!”

  “I have to fix the puppies. The puppies at least. I’m drafting out a new third act and then I’ll copy it all down neatly.”

  “I like the puppies. You said I could finish it.”

  “What is this? ‘It rains blood, severed heads, and shreds of burnt flesh, for a very long time.’ How is the Opéra supposed to stage that? How were we ever going to stage it, even for shadow theater?”

  “Why are you worrying about this now?”

  “Because someone else is going to see it!”

  A lot of people had seen it already, Erik assured Philippe. He’d done play-throughs for both Salis and Tomaschet, with Narcisse reading the narration aloud. Philippe was not assured. Narcisse and Salis and whoever else had been hanging around on an off night had seen stranger things—perhaps not bloodier, but stranger—and they would have recognized the piece for the bit of frippery that it was. Putting this in front of Bertrand, however, would imply they believed in its alchemy, that their game had magically turned into a ballet, and that this was the best they could do.

  “Honestly?” Philippe said carefully. “The third act as it reads right now is ridiculous.”

  “Honestly? It’s no worse than the first two.”

  They looked at each other in the dim light of the candle. Philippe didn’t disagree, but still felt as if Erik had punched him. If he thought the whole play was ridiculous, why challenge Bertrand to a duel just to show it to him?

  So he could say he’d challenged Bertrand to a duel, of course. The third act didn’t matter because this was the fourth act, Erik’s threat of violence against the Paris establishment, with Philippe his unwilling second. But how far did Erik plan to take it?

  “You don’t own a gun, do you?” Philippe asked, the edge of worry plain in his voice.

  “Of course not. You mean for the duel? I suppose I pictured us with swords.”

  “You own a sword?”

  Erik admitted he did not.

  “You were going to—what?—poke him with a walking stick?”

  “We’ve got an appointment with him, so it’s moot. Nobody has to be stabbed.”

  Just humiliated, Philippe thought. They’d all live to see another day, but they’d have to leave their careers for dead on the steps of the Palais Garnier.

  “I thought your ‘career’ was translating travel guides.”

  “That’s not fair.” Was this whole stunt meant to punish him? Philippe wondered. But what for?

  He recopied the libretto, with some judicious edits to the third act, aware even as he made them that he was touching up the paint on a burning building. Erik was still working when Philippe finished. He felt guilty for stopping, but realistically there was nothing else for him to do, and he crawled into bed for an hour.

  Erik woke him, looking as though he hadn’t slept at all. It wasn’t a long walk to the Palais Garnier, half an hour along the Rue des Martyrs, and Philippe wished it were longer. It took them forever to find the side business entrance, and the golden angels and white columns at the front seemed to mock them every time they circled the building without success.

  “The siege of the Opéra,” Erik said, and Philippe winced. “We’re testing for a break in the walls.”

  They finally found an unlocked door and asked the man in the nearest office for directions to Director Bertrand’s office.

  “I know he’s expecting you,” the man said, and smirked.

  Bertrand’s secretary showed them into a room with groaning shelves and a massive desk covered in stacks of correspondence, bound scores, and piles of loose paper. Philippe realized he’d been expecting a stage set of an office, some gentleman’s velvety redoubt. Bertrand might not have been promoting French youth, but clearly he didn’t spend all day sipping wine and cackling about wrecking their hopes, either. This was a real office, for a real person with a real job. Philippe wondered what it would be like to have one.

  Bertrand’s gaze flicked over them, perhaps checking for weapons. “Gentlemen,” he said. “My apologies that you had to ask so…strenuously for an appointment. I’d written you earlier, but apparently my first letter went to the wrong address. It just came back to me yesterday.”

  “Oh,” Erik said, already deflating.

  “Now—you said you had a ballet you wanted me to look at?”

  Bertrand cleared a channel in the middle of his desk, sat down, and gestured at two chairs. Philippe sat but Erik hovered, clutching the score to his chest. Were his fingers shaking a bit as he finally lowered himself into the chair and put the music down on the desk?

  When Bertrand reached for it, Erik laid his hands flat on top of the folder. “Just to warn you,” he interjected. Followed by nothing.

  “Yes?” Bertrand asked, still leaning forward.


  “This work is not for the masses. In fact, we can say with great confidence that this will make no money at all.”

  Bertrand leaned back in his chair. “While of course we have staged some challenging material, I can’t say I’ve ever knowingly programmed a work that can’t pay for itself.”

  “It’s not only a matter of not paying for itself,” Erik amended. “This will almost certainly lose you a great deal of money.”

  Bertrand glanced at Philippe, who kept his face blank and serious. Bertrand appeared to suppress a small smile. If this was the game Erik wanted to play, his air suggested, it was an easy one for Bertrand to go along with. “Why is that?”

  “The needs of this particular show are extravagant,” Erik said, stumbling over the word “show,” aware that it was wrong as soon as he’d said it. “Ballet,” he corrected. “This ballet requires formidable stagecraft.”

  “Then there is of course no company in the country better qualified to stage it than we.” Bertrand reached again for the score, and Erik pulled it back toward himself.

  “Yes, but we are also unwilling to give up artistic control of such a masterpiece. We would demand final say over everything: casting, costumes, scenery. I would conduct the orchestra myself.”

  “That, gentlemen, is an absolute impossibility. As I’m sure you know.”

  Philippe could have sworn the man winked at them, but it happened too quickly for him to be sure.

  “Well, if you are going to be so totally unreasonable,” Erik said, “I suppose we have no reason to take up more of your time.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to take up more of yours. But if you arrive at a more conventional proposition, please feel free to try me again.”

  “Do you mean that?” Erik asked without bluster, with a hopefulness so naked it made Philippe uncomfortable.

  Bertand was agreeable and seemingly sincere, although he recommended against further threats of violence. He walked them as far as his secretary’s outer door and shook their hands gravely.

  Philippe felt both mocked and relieved. They got lost in a warren of hallways trying to find the exit and crossed paths with dancers arriving for a rehearsal. The dancers were in street clothes, but too lean and graceful to be anything else.

  Try to enjoy this, Philippe told himself, because this is as close as you are ever going to get to premiering a work at the Paris Opéra. He couldn’t decide what if anything to say to Erik once they finally made it outside and beyond earshot of any Opéra employees, but Erik spoke first, as if knowing exactly what Philippe was thinking.

  “We couldn’t leave it there. He might really read it.”

  The obvious next question was why spend all night copying it out if they weren’t going to show it to anybody, but Philippe could guess the answer. He knew how it felt to read back over something you’d cared about and see it all gone to ashes, to rags and blood and fart jokes. Or worse, to see that the idea was still sound and that it was one’s words that were lacking. He wondered what kind of dark night of the soul Erik had endured while Philippe had taken his hour of sleep.

  “Don’t laugh, but I might need Bertrand someday. And you can’t tell anyone I said that.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Definitely not Salis. Or Tinchant. Or Narcisse. Or—anyone, really. Absolutely not my stepmother.”

  “Your stepmother thinks I’m a thief, remember? We don’t chat.”

  Erik gave him a quizzical glance that suggested he did not in fact remember. “It might have turned out all right for you, showing him, but I couldn’t chance it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘all right for me’?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “I don’t.” But he could narrow it down to two possibilities. There was Erik’s opinion of Philippe’s distractedness, the way he thought a foot in the door of travel publishing was a foot out the door of Art. And there was the possibility that Erik had come to believe Philippe had never had any business inside the door of Art at all. He’d shown Erik hundreds of lines by now, and the only words his friend had ever wanted were for cheap love songs, shadow plays, or jokes.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Erik said.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yes you are. Maybe I am too. I’m not sure.”

  “We’d still be friends. Even if I quit the shadow theater.”

  “I suppose,” Erik said, in a voice that lacked all conviction. Clearly not wanting to talk anymore, he started humming with gusto.

  Philippe recognized the song Claude had played, the work in progress. He tried to join in, but couldn’t remember it well enough, not the way Erik apparently did. The music darted ahead of him like a fish, glittering beyond his reach. Was that why he hadn’t suggested his own poetry to Claude? Because he could hear how far beyond him the music was? Existing in a whole different element, when all he could breathe was air?

  He mourned the person he’d been when he’d offered his poems to Erik, blissfully unaware of any possible divergence between the two of them, in either sensibility or ability. No, he corrected himself, remembering. He hadn’t offered his poems to Erik. Erik had asked for his work. It was Erik who with that invitation had either overestimated Philippe or underestimated himself. Maybe the sooner Philippe quit the shadow theater, the sooner he’d be setting Erik free.

  Erik paused in his humming. “You can keep the suit.”

  Philippe thanked him.

  “It always looked better on you,” Erik said.

  “Liar.”

  Suzanne

  — 10 —

  From the top of yourself

  SUZANNE WAS WEARING A CORSAGE OF CARROTS. SHE’D bought them that morning, washed them clean in a Wallace fountain in the Place Émile-Goudeau, tied the three ends together with a ribbon, and pinned the bow above her heart. Now, nearing midnight, the shorn yellow stubs of the carrot tops had begun to shed, falling and sticking to her dress. Adrien, the only one of her crowd still left at the table, reached to pick them off her. She was comfortable with most of her old lovers this way. They continued hiring her for modeling jobs, continued painting her unlaced with her hair down, and sometimes that led to something more, and sometimes it didn’t.

  The orange of the carrots was bright in the sooty cabaret. With wood so expensive in the city, most winter fires burned foully from bricks of compressed coal dust. There was none of the cheerful crackle she still remembered from her childhood village. She hadn’t returned since her mother had brought her to Paris, hoping for more lucrative work than her position as a linen maid in Bessines-sur-Gartempe. Her mother had failed utterly at this mission, but Suzanne had eventually been hired by a circus. She loved that she could tell people that she’d joined a circus and it would always be true.

  “The only thing more fun than a good lie,” the ringmaster had once told her, “is a truth so fantastic people assume you’re lying.” She hadn’t been sure this was true, or even what it meant, but she’d nodded along. Her most vivid memory of him was of how stiffly he waxed his mustache. She still remembered that poke of little sword points of hair on her cheeks, her hands, her stomach, her thighs. She’d been fifteen years old.

  Only later, after a career-ending fall from the trapeze, after the ringmaster had started spending nights with one of the high-wire girls, did she start to understand how he might be right about the most delicious lies being the true ones. The truths of her childhood had ranged from the ordinary to the embarrassing (charwoman mother; absent father; jobs as a dishwasher, seamstress, fruit seller, and factory worker weaving funeral wreaths, all before the age of fourteen). Her circus life was, in its own way, just as ordinary: when you were a trapeze girl, you were merely one trapeze girl in the company of other trapeze girls, high-wire girls, tumbler girls, cigarette and beer girls, all of them there to earn a living. But if you left the circus for the outside world, you became a former trapeze girl, a fact that was, Suzanne thought, the single most valuable thing she might ever own. The
story had won her drinks and meals and nights in warm apartments. It had allowed her to choose which warm beds she took her sleep in, or her pleasure. It had allowed her to demand pleasure, which she did forcefully enough that this became the third or fourth thing many men learned about her in Montmartre: artist’s model, sometime artist, former trapeze girl, serious inquiries only.

  She generally preferred brasseries to cabarets, but she and Adrien had run out of things to say to each other years earlier. Tonight she was content to sit back and watch the acts. Adrien kept her glass filled.

  “Are you coming to the studio again this week?” he asked, between songs. “I have to send the curtains back soon.”

  He was in the midst of painting her as an odalisque, beneath a ridiculous set of canopied bed curtains in damask and gold that he’d seen in a painting at the last Salon and tracked down to a studio rental office. She’d seen the work taking shape on the canvas: the incredibly ornate curtains, then the curve of her bare body, at present just a few penciled lines, an afterthought on the bed. Adrien had never sold a painting, but he had family money and was always renting exotic props and people, gold platters loaded with imitation grapes, buxom girls to pretend to eat them. Suzanne was bartering her own buxomness in exchange for the opportunity to paint—to use Adrien’s paints and brushes and try her hand at replicating the particular drape and nap of the curtains herself.

  This was much of the difficulty of becoming a painter, the learning not only of brushstroke and blending but also simply of seeing, of being able to look long and hard and purposefully. What she saw when she sat in her apartment with a pad of drawing paper was her son demanding her attention, the sideboard with last night’s carrots wrinkling, the lump of burnt candle she’d warned Maurice not to light, worrying he would either fall asleep and set himself on fire or fall asleep and waste the light.