The Vexations Read online

  “I think that’s plenty for today,” she said finally. Her bad shoulder was aching, and enough of the picture was done that she would be able to remember where she wanted to go when she picked it up again.

  Erik asked if she wanted to eat dinner somewhere. Maurice could join them, he offered.

  Suzanne had had lovers who couldn’t remember she had a son, or whom she’d never even told. She was touched at how carefully Erik considered Maurice, his needs. But no, she didn’t want to take her son to dinner right now. “We can stay here a while longer,” she said.

  “What is this place, anyway? Whose is it?”

  “A friend’s.”

  She poured them each more wine and sat beside Erik on the bed. She kissed him. He let himself be kissed. His beard and mustache were very soft. He let her unbutton his waistcoat, and his shirt. His hands lay beside him on the bed. He kissed her back once, hesitantly, and she put her hand on his waist. His skin was clammy. She started to move her hand lower.

  “Do we have to do this?” he asked quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  He repeated himself, asking it as a real question, and waited for her answer.

  She pulled her hands back into her own lap, feeling a little sick. She had convinced herself, every time, that she wanted it, or that she was at least willing. Mostly she was. The ringmaster? Her body had been still a girl’s body, narrow limbs exhausted from training. But all right, yes, why not. Why remember it differently now, when she didn’t have to? Why remember it at all? Twelve years later and here was a lover in her bed asking if he had to. “No, we don’t have to,” she said. “Of course we don’t have to.”

  “But you want to.”

  “You don’t?”

  He thought about it, looking as if he’d thought about it before, as if he kept checking back with the question, hoping to arrive at a different answer. He shook his head.

  “I see,” she said, although she didn’t. “Is there someone else?” she asked, although she knew there wasn’t. It just seemed like the question to ask at a moment like this, to try to turn it into the kind of moment that she could recognize.

  “Of course not,” he said. “I love you.” It was the first time he’d ever said it plainly, directly.

  “But you don’t want to.… Not now? Or not ever?”

  “If we have to, I could—”

  “Please stop saying have to. I’m not a monster.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say. I don’t know what you want.”

  “I think it’s obvious.” It was humiliatingly obvious—to have wanted and not been wanted in return. She had never in her life not been wanted. She had built her whole life on being wanted, and built it well, so that she could do the work she wished.

  “I want you, I just don’t want—” He cut himself off, then tried again. “I love you. I love your carrots. I love your paintings.” He said this tenderly, trying to offer her something precious. And it was precious—but not in the way that he wanted it to be.

  She understood that she could say she liked his music and he would take more pleasure in that than in anything she might do with her hands. He would praise her mouth for the jokes it could tell or the praise it could deliver him, not for any other reason.

  “Is that enough?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it will be,” she amended, trying to gentle it with future tense, although it was as true now as it would be later. She didn’t want to seem so sex-starved as to end things with him that moment, for that reason, on Adrien’s borrowed bed.

  They kept trying for a while at—something. She wasn’t sure what it was. Many evenings Erik brought armfuls of rotting produce for the goat, now that it was early summer and the pushcarts were laden with more than they could sell. Suzanne couldn’t tell if these visits were a pretext to see her or if Erik was really that fond of, or concerned for, the goat. He offered her greenery to weave jewelry from, but she refused.

  “You’re unhappy,” he said to her. “You’re different.”

  “You’re unhappy, too,” she said, although he shook his head. “We’re not going to be able to make each other happy. It’s no one’s fault, but there it is.”

  “It’s your fault,” Erik said, and she sighed.

  He told her he wouldn’t stop her if she wanted to take her pleasure elsewhere, but when she was seen in public with other men Erik savaged her about it later, either in person or in the papers, where his cartoons of her grew uglier and uglier. He blew up the imaginary businesses he’d created one by one: their fortune-telling enterprise ended when the clairvoyant couple traveled to the future and boarded a rocket to the moon. They sadly wouldn’t be returning to Paris, the ads read. They were lost forever, somewhere out in space.

  She continued to work on his portrait. At first her frustration twisted it, made his skin sallow and his eyebrows devilish. But in the end she remembered her loyalties. Not just to Erik, but to Renoir, to de Chavannes, even to Adrien, she thought, as she folded colors into each other and made the background glow. To all her teachers, both the generous ones and the accidental ones. To posterity, she thought wryly. Just in case Erik ever did become famous, here would be an accurate portrait. Hat and all. Warm face and full, untouchable lips.

  The picture was finished, leaning against a wall in her apartment, when there came a knock at the door one night. In these summer days she’d been working long hours in the long light, as both model and painter. For the first time in her life, a little more of the latter than the former. She’d arrived home to find Maurice missing, but it hadn’t been dark long, and she wasn’t yet worried.

  Erik stood in the hallway, obviously drunk, a candle wavering in his hand. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said urgently. “We should do it.” He reached clumsily for her waist.

  “You can’t even say it.”

  “Who ever says it? No one really says it. I want to.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “Admit it. Admit that you loved me.”

  Admit? What was an admission of love, as if some crime had been committed? “It’s not going to work,” she said. “We’re just not going to work.”

  “Let me come in,” he said, and peered past her.

  Without turning she cataloged what he might be able to see. The table and chairs, the edge of the bed, a white canvas on an easel. The pencil lines would be invisible in the dimness, and the piece would appear as nothing more than a giant white rectangle, a portal to some possible future. As he tried to push inside the apartment, she turned and blocked him with her hip. “Please don’t. Maurice went to bed early. Don’t wake him up.”

  “He’s not here,” Erik scoffed.

  “Yes he is.”

  “You’re lying. I know you’re lying.”

  His tone of voice made her pause. “Where is he?”

  “Same place he goes most nights you’re out. Sometimes afternoons. He’s got a tab at the Lapin Agile. Most of the drinks he gets for free. People feel sorry for him. Nine years old and cadging beer.” Erik swayed.

  Her face burned. Was this true, or was Erik taking his revenge? Was it both?

  “You’re a terrible mother,” he said. “You can’t even take care of a goat.”

  She slapped him, then drove a shoulder hard into his ribs. Her good shoulder, with all her strength behind it. He staggered backward across the landing and hit the opposite wall. The candle flew from his hand and guttered out. They stood in the pitch-dark, both breathing hard.

  How dare you? How dare you? her heart howled, but she kept her voice flat and calm. “The Lapin Agile, you said? I should fetch him.” She reached behind her to pull the door shut. It wasn’t locked, but what would Erik take? The wrinkled asparagus on the table? His own portrait? Let him. She didn’t want to look at it again. She started down the stairs, leaving him breathing heavily in the darkness.

  There was almost no moon, but the Lapin Agile was lit up brilliantly. The famous sig
n, the cheerful rabbit leaping out of a frying pan, creaked on its iron hooks. She walked in the front door. Adrien was there playing a card game with other men at a large table. She asked if he’d seen Maurice, and the hush that fell over the table gave her her answer. Her son was hunched at a corner of the crowd, thin as a shadow, with a large glass of beer in front of him.

  “Come here,” she said.

  Maurice slowly stood and began circling the table. He wasn’t walking straight.

  “Which of you bought him the beer?” The men shuffled their cards in strained silence and her eyes burned. “You son of a bitch,” she said to Adrien, because if it hadn’t been this glass it had been some other, and he’d known and not told her. Maybe she was the reason he’d done it.

  At the apartment, Maurice staggered forward, bounced off the edge of the table, caught himself, and sank into a chair. She thought of how he would bruise where the corner of the table had jabbed him, partway up his rib cage; she thought of how small he still was, how the table that fit her at the hollow of her hip came up only to his side. She remembered him even younger than he was now, seated at the table that came up to his chest, with a carrot in his mouth, and his shoulders pushed up around his ears. There should have been some cushion for him to sit on, to raise him up. There should have been milk. There should have been warm curtains that could keep out both the light and the cold. It was an abstract, wistful sort of wishing—not that she could have provided those things, because she’d had no way of doing so, but that the whole world should be different, that it should be the sort of place where a boy could have a cushion to sit on. Even to drink his beer like a man.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She thought of all the nights he’d spent in the dark, told not to light even a candle. Of course he’d sought out light and warmth wherever he could find it. She could imagine the men finding it funny, even generous, buying beers for this boy who might, for all anyone knew, have been their son.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she thought there should be more that came after that, but she didn’t know what else to say. “Let’s get into bed.”

  Maurice toed off his shoes, then climbed straight in, still in his clothes. She climbed in after him, pressed her nose into his hair, its lank thickness smelling of smoke. She remembered when his hair was a fuzzy halo that smelled only like her. She squeezed him, trying to find, under his clothes, the shape of the body she’d made. He was a language she’d invented but no longer spoke. On his skin she found the scents of cigarettes and cigars and pipes and cigarillos, but no coal soot, no wood smoke. They’d all survived another winter, another cold, rainy spring. She whispered to her son that it was summer now, and everything might be different.

  Erik

  — 11 —

  Apply yourself to renunciation

  SUZANNE BEQUEATHS HIM HER GOAT, VIA THE PREPAID REPLY card to the first pneu Erik ever sent her, adding that she doesn’t want to see him again. Erik is pleased about the goat, though not the rest of the message. He wants the goat to have a happy life, and perhaps a happier life than Suzanne. Biqui, he names it, which was once his private pet name for Suzanne. He calls the goat loudly in the garden behind her building, on hot days when all the windows are open, and hopes she hears him and is angry. He brushes the goat’s hair—glossier, surely, since he took over?—and thinks how he’s proving Suzanne wrong. But wrong about what? Arguably, she ended things after they finally saw each other correctly.

  Her pneu should no doubt have noted that the goat is pregnant, which Erik learns only when a neighbor, now an acrobat but a shepherd in his boyhood, comments on how unusually late Biqui must have bred, if she hasn’t kidded by now. Goats are already so wide, the shape of olives on toothpicks, how was Erik supposed to tell? When her time comes he enlists the help of a midwife (for babies, not goats, she warns him sourly), and the acrobat. Between the two of them Biqui comes safely through, but they lose the kid. No matter, the acrobat says. Her milk’s come in all right. And she’s got plenty of years left to try again.

  “How many years?” Erik asks, and is rather dismayed to learn that a doe can breed for a decade.

  He tries to picture his own life in a decade, and can’t. Or rather, he pictures too many things at once, a ballet at the Paris Opéra, plus tremendous sales for his cabaret compositions, plus election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and before the solemn ceremony at the Institut de France there will be a parade down the Butte, with Erik hoisted up in a chair, crowned king of composers, prince of all the reprobates. After the ceremony, Bruant will beg him to accept a commission for a song for the Mirliton, and Eugénie and his old Conservatory teachers will apologize for all their nagging. He’ll walk home that night (having turned down a flood of offers for transportation, of course) and hear his music, four different kinds, pouring out of the Salle Érard, the Mirliton, a piano student’s family apartment on the Rue Magenta, and an Incoherent Art Exhibition, where he’ll be awarded best in show. The reviews will discuss how he’s created something utterly and irrefutably new. He doesn’t know what it is, this new thing he’s made ten years from now, and he’d rather not wait ten years to figure it out. He’d like to know now.

  In none of these fantasies is he accompanied by a goat, and it seems like one might get in the way. In none of these fantasies is he partnered with anyone, man or woman, and it seems like one might get in the way.

  He isn’t opposed to the idea of company, exactly, but they’d have to part ways on that triumphant walk home, because he can’t bear the prospect of anyone moving his things; or throwing out any of his letters, pneus, and newspaper clippings; or speaking to him when he’s trying to compose in his head. He doesn’t want anybody in his living or working space, and he doesn’t want anybody in his bed. He just doesn’t. He’s not even sure what it’s supposed to feel like, that kind of wanting, which has made its absence difficult to fully recognize or explain. Suzanne is as close as he’s come, and look at how well that went. He thinks of her as a failed experiment, and he has listened to Conrad natter on about his research often enough to fear the specter of “reproducible results.” If the experimental conditions remain unchanged, why repeat the experiment with hope of a different outcome?

  She was one of so many people here who used their bodies for work—he thought that perhaps he’d be relieving her of an obligation. He pictured them in adjoining studios, making their art. There were enormous, bright glass windows, and birdsong outside. She and Maurice would knock on his door whenever they needed him and wait for him to emerge, rather than barging inside. He’d visit her studio to examine her latest paintings, with their unsentimental, even ugly, bodies in jarring colors. He’d already started writing furniture music for her gallery shows, compositions with just enough of their own strange, jarring texture to complement her work but also fade behind it. His music would creep along the walls and ceiling like ivy, seep across the floor like fog, until the attendees were breathing it more than listening to it, and he was in their lungs every bit as much as their ears.

  That kind of touch is one he might enjoy, he thinks, the way he enjoys the thick velvet corduroy of his suits, a comfortable armor. He bought the baggy suit several years earlier and loved it so much he ordered five more. They now constitute his entire wardrobe, and in summer sweat trickles down his back and sides, his body touching itself. He loves a crisp collar, pushes his throat forward into it just to feel the starched edge of it push back, hard as a fence rail. He loves the smell of the starch, and he loves the way smells touch the inside of his nose. In this way he loves even bitumen and bleach, night soil and soured milk. He steps off a curb and into horse manure, and the smell greets him for hours afterward. He touches the city and the city touches back.

  Biqui’s coarse hair is a touch he loves, her soft, dry muzzle, her grasping lips and blocky teeth. The gaze of her strange eyes, yellow with black rectangular pupils, vaguely demonic—is that a kind of touch? Erik imagines that he can feel the go
at’s stare. He is sorry for the loss of her kid, which the acrobat has wrapped in a towel, and says he’ll dispose of on his way to work. He’s late, he says, and needs to be going.

  Erik asks the acrobat whether Biqui is at the start of her decade, or well into it.

  The acrobat calls over his shoulder to check her teeth.

  But check them for what? It’s not as if they have numbers written on them.

  Erik and Philippe never touched each other, and Erik wonders if they might have lived the life together he pictured with Suzanne, in side-by-side studios. Has he missed an obvious solution? But probably Philippe wants to be touched, even if he doesn’t always seem sure whom he wants to do the touching. Besides, what would Philippe be doing in his studio? His travel books would be a waste of the windows and birdsong. Erik thinks this derisively, but he misses Philippe, who has moved out of the neighborhood into an apartment beyond the Rue Drouot, which both men once considered the edge of the allowable world. Everything with him is less now: less time, less laughing, less drink, less work. Philippe has publishing friends now. He has friends who aren’t Erik. Erik wonders, with an uncomfortable mix of jealousy and contempt, if he’s happy. If all Philippe wants out of life is a steady paycheck, well, ambition achieved.

  Wine is touch, and liquor. On the tongue, in the belly and brain, the slack sponginess in his hands when he’s had too much, the slowness in his mouth. The way the bartender at the Auberge sometimes hesitates to slide the glass across the bar, or the way a waiter makes eye contact with Tomaschet for permission to serve him. Erik recognizes that look, and goes to visit Albert Tinchant in Lariboisière, the charity hospital. Erik brings him socks and magazines and handkerchiefs. He knows no other way to care for someone than the ways he would want to be cared for. Tinchant is angry that he didn’t bring liquor.