The Vexations Page 24

  “It isn’t good for you,” Erik says limply, because Tinchant looks awful, bloated and yellow and as much like a corpse as Erik’s ever seen a living man. How much difference can a drink make now?

  Biqui and Tinchant together make for an awful lot of caretaking for Erik, who finds it easier to care for no one but himself. How does such a squat little animal eat so much? Why does it need to be milked each morning, when Erik has finally crawled into bed for the night after work? There aren’t many children in the neighborhood, and he’s trying to avoid Maurice, but he puts together a squad of junior goatherds to tend the animal, invites them to drink whatever milk they can get out of her. He keeps a metal bucket, wooden stool, and tin cup stacked neatly in the garden behind Suzanne’s building. There are a handful of articles about his goat in the local papers, none written by either him or Philippe, and he’s embarrassed to realize that they’re all sincere and approving, celebrating the charity of a local benefactor. He doesn’t want to be known as a local benefactor; he wants to be known as a composer. This, as much as the prospective cost of feed once winter comes, is what drives him onto a tram one day in late summer, headed outside the city to the fairgrounds.

  She might be out touring, but he hopes to find the familiar sullen bears, the gypsy caravan painted in stripes. It’s early in the morning—he’s tried to arrive before the crowds—when he finds the closed caravan and bangs on the door. The bear keeper opens it rumpled and blinking. He can’t decide what to call her, her real last name, or informal first, or her stage name, which is what everyone called her when they first met. Or maybe he was wrong when he came here with Suzanne and he doesn’t know this woman after all.

  “La Vorace?” he says, choosing the stage name, and her breath bursts out and in like he’s shot her. “Lisette?” he tries again. She still doesn’t speak, and he starts explaining how he once accompanied a handful of her performances at the Divan Japonais.

  “What do you want?” She cuts him off.

  At least she’s not going to pretend he’s wrong. He tells her he’s giving away a goat and that she is the only person he could think of who might want one. He refers to the goat by name, and Lisette hesitates. Does he understand, she asks, that she can’t afford to keep a pet?

  Biqui can be milked, he says, realizing Lisette is thinking of the goat as prospective bear food.

  How old is the goat? How much milk does it give? Lisette rattles off more questions, and it’s clear she knows a great deal more about goats than Erik does. La Vorace a country girl? Who knew?

  The Voracious, she was called, because she always entered from the back of the house, sashayed her way up to the stage through the tables, stealing sips and swigs from audience members’ glasses. The second half of the show Erik had accompanied started with a number called “La Vorace Goes to Bed.” There was a halfhearted stage set, painted like a bedroom wall bearing a single nail from which hung a limp cotton nightgown. La Vorace entered bundled in clothing and began removing layers. As she started unbuttoning her dress, the crowd was enraptured. Erik had been told to play a popular waltz tune, but he realized he could play almost anything and it wouldn’t matter. Only Lisette seemed to hear the music, swaying her hips as she loosened her stays. When she was nearly naked, her corset gaping open, she reached for the nightgown on the nail and slipped it over her head. It covered her ankle to neck. There were some men in the audience who groaned aloud, as if in agony, and others who found themselves strangely comforted. They were not really going to see a naked woman on the stage. Even in Montmartre, there were still rules.

  Erik congratulated La Vorace after the show, knowing he’d seen something special. Maybe not his kind of thing, but he could recognize its genius. Within a month, half the music halls in Paris were doing a striptease: “Clarice Goes to Bed.” “Aimée Is Visited by the Physician.” “Alice Goes to the Beach,” which ended in a swimming costume.

  Soon after that La Vorace was performing in theaters with orchestras instead of pianos, and her path and Erik’s did not often cross. He assumed she had retired to be a kept woman—some rich man’s mistress or, if she’d gotten very lucky indeed, a rich man’s wife. A more tactful person would ask this in a different way, or not ask it at all of a woman bundled in moth-eaten shawls beside a bear cage, but Erik says, “What happened?”

  She invites him in. She pours them each a drink, into dirty glasses. She saved up her money, she says, retired when she had enough to buy a business. But she had a run of bad luck. There were two panthers, originally, but they died of distemper; then a lion with a wonderful mane died of parasites. After that, one of the bears took a swipe at her ankle. It healed badly and now she can’t go back to dancing even if she wanted to.

  Erik notices her dark brown front teeth and the deep grooves in her face, and suspects she wouldn’t be able to go back either way.

  There was never as much money as he might have thought, she says. There were only so many numbers she could perform half-clothed, and the theater owner told her she needed new costumes befitting her new celebrity. When her name was famous enough to mean something on a poster, she was asked to pay for the posters. Now she makes ends meet, she says. She gathers herbs in the forest to brew health tonics. She has printed labels with her face on them, smiling, teeth all white. She tells fortunes.

  “Are you any good at it?”

  “Give me your hand.”

  He unfolds it slowly. She catches his fingers and draws them toward her. When her index finger traces his palm it tickles, and his hand curls up like a hedgehog. Lisette starts to force the fingers flat and he yanks his hand away.

  “No,” he says. “No thank you. But I’ll buy a tonic.”

  She offers him several different formulations, and he selects one meant to be rubbed into his scalp, to save his thinning hair.

  “You’re not giving me the goat, are you? You’re buying this to apologize.”

  “I don’t think I can. I’m sorry. Not to kill. Are you angry?”

  “I didn’t have a goat before, and I don’t have one now. I’ve got other things to be angry about.”

  He returns to Lariboisière that afternoon with a flask, but the bed is empty and neatly made. Erik walks next to the Chat Noir, both to submit an obituary for the café paper and to ask about funeral arrangements. As far as he knows, Tinchant doesn’t have any family. The old regulars at the Chat Noir are probably the closest thing.

  Salis comes out to see him and pounds him heartily on the back. “It’s been ages,” he says. “We miss you.”

  “No you don’t,” Erik says. “You never miss anybody.”

  “Not true.”

  “Maybe you miss them when they won’t work for free anymore.”

  “You wound me,” Salis says lightly.

  “You did this,” Erik says, with helpless fury. He wants a gun, a sword. The siege of the Chat Noir.

  Salis starts laughing. “Tinchant? How do you figure that?”

  “You couldn’t have just paid him? Instead of keeping him drunk.”

  “Tinchant made his own choices. You’re not a child anymore, Erik. Don’t act like one.”

  Biqui’s next kid dies, as does the kid the spring after, and the spring after that. He doesn’t know if they’re dying because of something he’s doing wrong, or because of something wrong with Biqui, or if it’s just three years of bad luck. He would consult with Suzanne, but she isn’t in the neighborhood anymore; she’s living north of the city at a country house in Montmagny with her rich stockbroker husband, to hell with them both. Erik publishes an open letter in a café paper excommunicating her from the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, whose address is his apartment, and whose single officiant and congregant is himself. His church exists so that his enemies—Suzanne, then several music critics, then the jurors at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, who have rejected him a second time—can be publicly excommunicated from it, an act he performs with gusto.

  He pushes more of Biqui�
��s care onto the neighborhood children, even asking if their parents might have a little something to put toward her upkeep. He’s out of money. He can’t make rent, and his landlord offers him another room in the same building. With the door opening directly onto the bed and the piano, there isn’t a scrap of floor to stand on. The apartment is a literal closet, where the building concierge used to keep maintenance supplies. Erik is at first relieved that the landlord is willing to negotiate, to find him a space he can afford. Then he realizes the landlord is probably thrilled to have a chump willing to sleep in a closet.

  Eugénie continues to send him home with leftovers from Sunday dinners, and does not touch him. She kisses only Conrad’s cheeks, then regards Erik from a wary, mutually agreed distance. Conrad, near the top of his class, is nearly done with his graduate chemistry degree. Erik listens very dutifully but doesn’t understand any of it well enough to retain. He supposes, a little guiltily, that this is what Conrad or Philippe feels, listening to him talk about music. He resolves to blather less, but then there isn’t enough left to talk about. Conrad’s courting a girl, Mathilde. Erik doesn’t know where he found her but he’s pretty sure it wasn’t in chemistry courses. She’s dull as a custard. He made the mistake of telling Conrad that, and now, for possibly the first time in their lives, Louise is the person in his family least annoyed with him.

  He sends his sister some of his new music. He wants to know what she thinks, but she writes back that she can’t play it. The intervals are too big for her hands to stretch across. I can manage a ninth if I get the angle right, her letter says. Everything else I had to arpeggio, so I know I haven’t heard it the way you want it to be heard. How strange, and accidental, the way he’s left traces of his body, his long fingers, on the page. For weeks he doesn’t write anything new, unsettled by the idea that the shape of his hands is present in the arrangement of the notes. What else can a person tell about him, just from playing his music?

  When he starts writing again, he makes a running commentary along the staff lines, questions or commands or exhortations intended for the player. There is an intimacy in having one’s music played, and he would like to control what sort of intimacy it is. If pianists are feeling the shape of his body, he wants at least to have a conversation with them. Texts are not to be read aloud during performances!!! he writes. These performance indications are just for you. A piece ought to be played, he suggests, Like a nightingale with a toothache, or Like a door opening. Some of them are comparatively practical: Peacefully or Grandiosely. Some are trickier: Hypocritically or Learnedly. Some are threats. Some are…he isn’t sure what they are, but often the directions are his favorite part of whatever he’s working on. Words come more easily these days than notes, which he doesn’t like, hasn’t wanted, doesn’t know what to do with.

  Claude finds the performance indications amusing but gimmicky. He plays through some of Erik’s music and they have a fight about whether he’s following the instructions.

  “Don’t tell me that was your best stab at Obligingly,” Erik says.

  “You’ve got me. I did not attempt Obligingly because I have no idea what that means.”

  “You didn’t do Mysterious and tender, either.”

  “Look, the feel of a piece is either mysterious and tender, or it isn’t. That isn’t something the musician should have to be told.”

  Erik is rejected a third time for election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He thought of the application as a lark, the sort of thing he did only so he could write about it later, but when the rejection letter comes he feels kicked in the gut. He shows up at Philippe’s door with a bottle of brandy, wanting to be comforted. He’s already knocked when it occurs to him to worry about whether Philippe has other company.

  “Are you alone?” he asks, when Philippe opens the door in his shirtsleeves.

  “Usually,” Philippe says, and lets him in.

  He pours brandy into glasses and makes a show of commiseration, but Erik can tell his friend doesn’t understand why they’re mourning the entirely predictable outcome of a joke. It’s the siege of the Opéra all over, but this time they aren’t out afterward with friends, aren’t drowning their sorrows in the din of some Montmartre hole. Philippe has an obnoxious clock on the mantel (since when does Philippe have enough money for a clock, let alone a mantel, let alone a fireplace for the mantel to sit over?) and the room is so quiet Erik can hear it tick every time either of them stops talking.

  “This is awful,” he says. “Can we go out?”

  “I’m too tired. I have to work in the morning.”

  “You monster,” Erik says.

  But he’s awfully tired too, and when Philippe suggests they both go to bed, offering him the sofa (Philippe owns a sofa?), Erik wakes up the next morning feeling better than he has in weeks. He credits the sofa, the modestly sized room, so much better than his closet.

  “Maybe,” Philippe tells him. “But it might also just be sleeping. Turns out it’s important. Who knew?”

  The way Claude’s music feels is a kind of touch, and when he orchestrates Erik’s Gymnopédies, with Gustave Doret conducting at the Salle Érard in February 1897, Erik could weep. The strings wrapping around him, the draped curtain of the harp, the oboe breathing the melody in and the flutes breathing it out. All of it is touch. The velvety chair and the air full of women’s perfume, and the gold leaf winding across the walls and trim and pillars, the twinkling chandelier and the ceiling painted like sky. He’s barely been inside a room like this since leaving the Conservatory. Now he’s listening to his music fill the air between the glittering walls, and it hugs him, dives into his lungs, the muchness of it hard to breathe through.

  Gymnopédies 1 and 3 have been programmed as part of a longer concert, but he can’t bear to sit through anything else after hearing them. He is greedy, afraid that the next notes will knock the sounds from his head and he’ll never get them back, never have this experience again. The audience thinks him arrogant and ungrateful to leave right after his own piece has been played, but it’s fear, not dismissiveness, that has him jumping from his seat and nearly running from the room, tripping over knees and ankles. He has such gratitude that his throat clamps down and his heart closes up. He can’t get the words out to thank Claude in the way he knows he should, which is to acknowledge that he couldn’t have done this on his own. Orchestration can be a favor or a chore, a playful or ornate twist on someone else’s melody; it can even be work for hire, the kind of task a composer might manage himself but doesn’t want to bother with. But what Claude has done with the Gymnopédies is a gift.

  “It was your music,” Claude tells him in the lobby afterward, with the kind of magnanimity that comes only from having plenty of music of one’s own.

  Erik wants to scream so loud that the chandelier falls and crushes them both. That would be a kind of touch too, broken glass and obliterating weight, the opposite of the touch inside the recital hall, where he just experienced one of the most intimate moments of his life, and it was with Claude, and Claude doesn’t even know. Erik understands the narcissism in this scenario, namely that as much as he admires Claude’s music, what he loved most was listening to his own melodies made grand and expansive.

  He goes to the bookshops near the Conservatory, hoping not to be recognized, and researches what texts are being assigned in the composition courses. There he buys an introductory text that includes charts of the capabilities of different instruments, what notes each makes comfortably, which additional ones can be eked out at the top or bottom of the range, depending on the skill of the player.

  Later he expresses to Claude a fiendish desire to set everything just there, in the danger areas, barely playable.

  “That’s not clever, it’ll just sound ugly,” Claude counsels him, inspecting a draft. “And be monstrous to the poor musicians. Take that high B from the clarinet and give it to the flute. There’s no prize for being an asshole.”

  “But that’s a prize I could actua
lly win,” Erik mourns.

  He waters down his ink to save money and returns to some of his older compositions. He digs out a piece he once started for Suzanne, back in that unbearable, galling summer after she broke things off with him. It’s only two lines, four if the player repeats the bass motif between them, and he tries to lengthen it, but he can’t get anywhere. He was playing with mirrors and rhymes, writing chords that sounded the exact same way even though they were made with different notation. He was making creeping ivy and fog, but also a compact sort of limerick, once you saw it on the page, and the whole thing is so tightly wound up in itself he can’t make it do anything else. Vexations, he writes across the top, and wonders how many times you’d have to repeat it to get through a whole gallery show. Too many, and the attendees would start scratching at their ears, aware something was wrong but not sure what it was.

  Then why stop at a gallery show? What would happen if they kept scratching, scratching, scratching, into the third hour and the fourth and beyond? At the top, to the right of the title, he writes out an instruction: In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.

  In order to doesn’t mean he imagines anyone bothering to do this—but if anyone did commit to the twenty-four hours he calculates the repetitions would take, that player would indeed need to prepare himself. With at least a jug of water and a cushion, let alone the recommended deep silence and serious immobility. Erik has no intention of doing it himself either, until one night in his closet it feels as if the walls are closing in on him, and he kneels on the mattress by the keys, shuffles through the folder where he files his strangest ideas. The title and performance indication for Vexations are in brown, not the black of the original notes that were written when he at least had money for undiluted ink. The whole page is a portrait of frustration, of his fear that his art is not just standing still, it’s moving backward. He decides to play it a few more times—maybe tonight he’ll hear a way forward. But then he’s just playing it over and over and over and over, no longer sure what he’s listening for, or what he’s hearing.