The Vexations Read online

  Adrien glanced over and snorted. “That’s a fancy bed for a cat.”

  “That’s a fancy bed for an invisible woman.”

  “I gave him your address. Erik, from last night. I hope that’s all right. He was very taken with your carrots. He’s harmless, or I wouldn’t have told him anything.”

  “I know,” she said, and mentioned the pneu and the celeriac. “‘Harmless’ doesn’t sound terribly exciting.”

  “Is that what you want? Exciting?”

  She listened beneath the words, to whether he was saying them with mockery or private longing, or whether he had other friends to set her up with, depending on what she wanted.

  “He’s a composer, if that makes a difference,” Adrien added. “He isn’t just an accompanist.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “I don’t know, honestly.”

  “Do you have anything else to sketch?” Suzanne asked, changing the subject. “Anything other than carrots, nine-year-old boys, or goats. I could sketch you,” she added. “You wouldn’t even have to stop painting. I’ll just do The Artist at Work.”

  Why did he look so surprised? After all, how many times had he drawn or painted her? She needed the practice, because although she could have a career without being able to paint fancy curtains, she doubted she could have one without being able to paint men, something she currently didn’t do well. Maurice had once told her, in tears, that a canvas in their apartment was giving him nightmares, the way the men’s arms sprang from their shoulders at graceless angles, their buttocks thrust backward, their necks long and columnar. In the few biblical scenes she’d tried, it was Adam who wore a fig leaf and Eve who was unashamed.

  “I suppose I could use a break,” Adrien said. “I’m going cross-eyed trying to get this gold right. Where do you want me?”

  “On the bed?”

  Adrien laughed. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not?”

  “Men don’t really lounge about seductively on beds.”

  “You think women do?”

  “Fair point. Am I being seductive, or just sleepy? Or perhaps I’m tragically ill.”

  “I am curious to see you attempt ‘seductive,’” she said.

  More game than she’d dared to hope, Adrien started to strip his clothes off. Shoes first, then painter’s smock, then collar and waistcoat, then shirt and socks and trousers. In a burst of bravado he whipped off his long underwear and jumped backward onto the bed. The frame creaked. He sprawled unashamedly for all of a moment before he started rearranging himself.

  “What about the classic smirk over the shoulder?” he asked, pulling up his knees and turning his back toward her.

  “You had me facing forward.”

  “I also had the stove roaring. It’s freezing in here now.”

  She offered to build the fire back up.

  “Don’t bother,” he said, and wormed his way under the top coverlet.

  “That’s hardly fair.”

  He relented, slightly, turned toward her and leaned his head on one arm and pushed the coverlet down to his hips with the other. His skin was nearly as pale as the sheets. Dark hair stretched across his chest and in a line down his stomach. He had no idea what to do with his face, but the pose itself wasn’t awful. In fact it was so ordinary it looked bizarre, a position she’d seen often in real life and never, not once, on a canvas.

  She sketched as quickly as she could, not sure how long he’d play along. As she drew, his expression got more and more strained. He shivered, and she could tell from his gooseflesh that he wasn’t just whining. But if she stopped drawing long enough to feed the fire, she knew he’d get up.

  “I’m bored,” he whined.

  “No fortitude. Clearly not cut out for this line of work.”

  “I’m not cut out for any line of work. You know that.” He grabbed the edge of the sheet and flicked it at her.

  “You’re moving,” she complained.

  “It would be warmer in here with two. Aren’t you finished yet?”

  She wasn’t, but felt she was pressing her luck. She put the pad down. She didn’t owe him anything, she thought. But he was a friend. Adrien had never laughed at any of her paintings, even her worst beginner’s efforts. He’d never made fun of her wanting to learn how to paint in the first place. Maurice wasn’t his, but she wouldn’t have minded if he had been. Besides, Adrien had always shown her a good time.

  “I suppose it is a little cold in here,” she said.

  She took off her shoes and smock, crawled into the bed fully dressed. Adrien reached for the buttons on her dress, but she caught his hands and held them. She wanted to see what it felt like, to be clothed with a naked model. It hadn’t ever happened before, probably wouldn’t happen again.

  “Only with a sheath,” she warned him. She kept track of the days of the month, and this should be a safe one, but after Maurice she didn’t take chances. She loved him, but that didn’t mean she wanted another.

  Erik showed up yawning and disheveled for the breakfast date they’d planned. This was early for him, he apologized—cabaret work had turned him semi-nocturnal. “I’m an owl,” he said, “except not at all wise. I suppose you’re the lark.”

  “Painters live and die by the light,” she said. “You can go back to bed and we’ll try another time, if you like.”

  Erik wouldn’t hear of it, especially now that he’d kept her waiting. He was determined to give back the minutes he’d been late. He led them east, behind Sacré-Coeur. Parts of the basilica were still hunched under a tortoiseshell of scaffolding, but the interior had finally opened for services, and the snowfall of white construction dust that had coated her early years in the neighborhood had slowed to flurries. She was gradually getting used to the church, however strange the shape. Some people described it as a giant white pope’s hat. Others, who had been here during the Commune, said it was a bulbous fat cock pointing straight up into the sky, the government’s hard-on for God.

  She had no idea where Erik was leading them. Breakfast in Paris was not usually a formal or substantial affair. Suzanne had spent a handful of nights in beautiful hotels, and the morning tray still held only breads and jam, coffee and hot chocolate. Each time, the man had ordered her hot chocolate without asking and had drunk the coffee himself. How determined he must have been to look at her and see nothing but sweetness.

  They crossed over Clignancourt, then Boulevard Barbès. It wasn’t a long walk, but it seemed unnecessarily far to travel for a bread roll.

  Erik was still striding purposefully just ahead of her, so there was no conversation between them. “Nearly there,” he said, and turned alongside the Hôpital Lariboisière.

  On the other side of the street, train tracks splayed like finger bones, a hand laid flat behind the Gare du Nord. She still didn’t expect it when he led them through the front doors of the train station. The morning rush had slowed, but trains still screeched and puffed at the platforms, disgorging dark wool coats and hats. He picked a table at a traveler’s café near the front doors, utilitarian and grimy, and ordered them each the same thing. The bread was tasteless. The coffee had a bitter bite that was not unpleasant but did nothing to explain the venue.

  “Station time,” Erik said. “I brought us here so we’d be on station time.” He gestured at the enormous clock, deliberately set, like all station clocks in France, five minutes slow. Station time was permanently five minutes behind the time in the outside world. A grace period to allow travelers to buy their tickets, find their platform, say their goodbyes. Trains arrived and departed from a special realm, he said, a land where everyone had just enough time to buy a newspaper, read the signage, get lost and unlost. There were always people rushing, of course, counting on the extra five minutes and then some. But in train stations you could feel as though there might be just enough time for everything. “Time travel,” he concluded. “I’m making up for my lateness.”

  “But don’t we just leap five minutes f
orward again when we leave?” Suzanne asked, then stopped herself. She hadn’t been playing dumb, that time-honored way to keep a man talking. Erik’s rhapsody about station time had actually caught her off guard, briefly confusing her into wonder. It had seemed possible, for an instant, that there were folds in time, seams engineered into the fabric of her life that she’d never noticed. Now she scolded herself, and played along. “We have to stay inside, then,” she said. “Until breakfast is over.”

  Breakfast was technically already concluded—she’d finished hers while Erik lectured, and Erik had inhaled his the moment he’d stopped talking, seeming barely to chew. He looked at their empty cups and plates, then cast about the station for what else they might do. They ended up at a newsstand, where he translated the English papers for her—every story ended with a sea monster rising out of the Thames. Sometimes it wiped London off the map, and sometimes it simply demanded a ticket to Charley’s Aunt, which was breaking sales records at the Royalty Theatre.

  A rail-sea-rail London–Paris service arrived on platform 10, and as the people streamed out of the carriages, Suzanne said they must be refugees, fleeing the monster.

  “You’ll be safe here,” Erik reassured them, in French and crooked English, standing at the platform exit with his arms outstretched in welcome. “Though you’ll need to mind the werewolves.”

  At the expressions on the passengers’ faces, Suzanne laughed harder than she had in a long time.

  The conductor of the London service walked over to ask Erik what he was thinking, frightening good fare-paying passengers.

  “I know you’ve had a narrow escape,” Erik said. “Please just take a few deep breaths and you might not feel so unreasonable.”

  “Do you have a ticket?” the conductor asked.

  “To London? God, no, not with a rampaging monster on the loose.”

  “To anywhere.”

  Erik insisted he wasn’t trying to board the train, wasn’t even properly on the platform, and had every right to stand there.

  The conductor was unamused, and Suzanne bent down and raked her fingers along the floor. There were discarded tickets everywhere. “To Dunkirk,” she announced, holding one up like a trophy. “We’re newlyweds. On our honeymoon.”

  “You’re honeymooning in Dunkirk?” the conductor asked, and grabbed the ticket.

  “We are people of unusual tastes,” Erik said.

  “You must be time travelers as well. This ticket is for yesterday.”

  “We are,” Suzanne said. “That’s exactly right. We’re time travelers.” She reached for Erik’s hand and took it in hers, startling him, and she felt both the moment he started to pull away and the moment he stopped himself, clumsily threading his fingers through hers.

  They had the regular sort of dates—dinners, drinks—and some stranger ones: a pet store and a cemetery and the Luxembourg Gardens, where Erik rented two small toy sailing boats. In the slack breeze, they used long sticks to nudge their ships around the duck pond.

  “My family came here once, when I was a child,” he said, and she thought she could hear in his voice how it had only ever been the once.

  One Sunday he escorted both her and Maurice to Notre-Dame de Paris, which made her suspicious: she did not need a missionary in her life. As they stood outside the soaring facade, the towers and saints and the enormous rose window, she asked why they’d come.

  He looked at her like he didn’t understand the question. “Because it’s beautiful,” he said, and she took his hand again as they went inside.

  He never reached for hers, which was strange to her but not unpleasant. A gentleman, she thought. A novelty. He was in every other way so obviously besotted with her that they became a very public item very quickly. He dedicated songs to her from the stage, published drawings of her in the café papers. They were caricatures, like everything else he drew, giving her a serious face and a high helmet of hair, puffed sleeves like little epaulets. He took out ads in the café papers touting their imaginary business partnerships: FORTUNES TOLD, read one, BY THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN TO THE FUTURE AND SEEN IT ALL.

  One warm weekend in early spring, Suzanne, Maurice, and Erik took a train outside the city to a fête foraine. It was early in the season and most of the fair’s caravans and tents were still locked or packed away, but Suzanne thought Maurice had been looking even paler than usual and wanted to get him some fresh air. The carnival exhibitors would shake off the last of the winter mud soon enough, set up for a month or so here outside Paris, then tour through France the rest of the summer, returning to the city in autumn. At least the carousel was operating, and Maurice enjoyed it so much she bought him three straight rides. They strolled then through the overpriced game booths, and Maurice and Erik both proved terrible at chucking balls into a distant row of tin pails.

  The game operator handed Erik a consolation prize, a printed cartoon of a dog that was really just an advertisement for the booth. “For your boy,” he said.

  The three had spent very little time together as a group, let alone a family, but Suzanne noted that Erik didn’t correct the operator, and that Maurice didn’t protest.

  Farther down the midway they found the animal exhibitors. Many of the caged beasts had bald spots or rheumy eyes, but one enclosure in particular contained two bears so skinny and forlorn that Suzanne wanted to whisk Maurice and his soft heart away as quickly as possible. The keeper limped down the steps of her shabby caravan and offered to prod the bears into tricks. Suzanne declined, in an effort to hurry their group along, but Erik lingered, staring at the keeper. Suzanne looked at her more closely now. Though she was worn, her eyes dark with hunger, the woman was very beautiful under the mishmash of shawls she’d wrapped around herself.

  If the bears didn’t interest them, the keeper said, she had a hyena around the back.

  Erik paid her the fee, but Maurice didn’t want to see the hyena and couldn’t be coaxed. The keeper grudgingly offered their money back but Erik told her to keep it.

  Suzanne had a flare of jealousy. Was this pity or desire? If it was the former, fine, but if it was the latter, she didn’t understand. Why the keeper and not her? Her confusion at Erik’s gentlemanly restraint had passed from admiration to impatience and was now a source of growing frustration.

  “Have we met before?” Erik asked the keeper. She shook her head and scurried inside with his money.

  That night, after Maurice had fallen asleep, Suzanne walked to Erik’s apartment carrying a candle in a saucer to light the way. The front door to the building was propped open, either by a resident or by a concierge sick of being woken by a hodgepodge of tenants who kept odd hours and constantly lost their keys. Erik had told Suzanne he had the night off, but when she knocked, no one answered. She waited, knocked again, pressed her ear to the door. Perhaps she’d misunderstood him, or he could be out with friends, of course. But she thought she heard the faintest of noises, a floorboard creaking under the foot of someone trying very hard to be still.

  She shouldn’t have to stoop to it, Suzanne thought, but she plotted. She asked Adrien if she could use his studio for an afternoon, uninterrupted. With its stove and soft bed, it was so much nicer than her apartment. He agreed, but with an expression that made her wonder, reluctantly, if she might be cracking his heart a little.

  She told Erik she wanted to paint him. Not just a sketch, a real sitting, with good light and the supplies she needed. She bought a bottle of wine. On the way to the studio she bought another, in case it was needed. They could both drink heroically. The fancy curtains had been returned to the rental office, but the bed was made neatly, with crisp white sheets and a woolen blanket. When Erik arrived he ignored the bed, sat squarely on a bare wooden chair in the middle of the floor.

  The day was balmy, the stove unlit, the sun warm through the windows, but he wouldn’t remove so much as his hat. “You said you wanted to paint me, and this is the way I dress.”

  “Indoors?”

  “When I’m work
ing, I do.”

  “This isn’t your official state portrait. We’re not recording you for posterity.”

  She was joking, but Erik was miffed. “Then what are we doing?”

  Good question, Suzanne thought. Fine, she said, leave the hat and jacket and glasses on. “You couldn’t have worn a brighter waistcoat?” she complained. His entire torso was lost in an expanse of faded black. He sat there combing through his beard with his fingers.

  She folded blue into the dark of his waistcoat, red into the dark of his suit jacket, so the fabric came alive. She thought of Renoir while she did it. She thought of Puvis de Chavannes, which made her think of the goat. The trees were budding. If the goat could hold out just a little bit longer, it would make it through the summer at least. And next fall? She couldn’t think that far ahead. The midwife hadn’t thought Maurice would make it through the night, and he had nearly made it through the decade. He would be sixteen when the new century came, a man at the edge of something extraordinary.

  While choosing colors for the face, she noticed how pink Erik’s lips were, almost red. There was pink in his cheeks too, and while it might have been the wine she guessed he was getting hot. “Aren’t you warm?” she asked. “Don’t you want to take your jacket off?” How many times had artists invited her to relax, unpin her hair, unbutton her costume, make herself more comfortable? She felt like an understudy in an old melodrama, taking on an unfamiliar role. Everything was a struggle: persuading him to take his jacket off, convincing him to sit on the bed. She had to tell him that the sun had moved, that the light would be better if they repositioned. Then he tried to drag the chair with him. “Just sit on the bed,” she barked.

  He sighed but kept up his chatter. They should mount a gallery show together, he said, paintings and music specially written to go with them. He’d tell the audience not to listen, not to sit and watch the musicians, but to keep standing and looking at the pictures. “So your paintings would be the most important thing,” he said. The music would worm into the ears of the audience sideways. He liked the idea of music that no one was quite listening to but that they heard all the same. “Furniture music,” he said.