The Vexations Page 25

  He’s grateful when the concierge eventually bangs on his door, telling him to knock it off. He almost balls up the page to chuck it into the latrine, but he can’t do it. He files it instead into a folder of things he’s resolved not to return to. He never throws anything away.

  La Vorace’s tonics are available at a handful of stores in Paris, and when Erik has the funds (a payment for a cabaret commission, usually, or sometimes a gift from Alfred), he dutifully travels halfway across the city to purchase them. As far as he can tell, they do nothing for his hairline, but he feels good when he buys them. It’s something of what he still sometimes feels when he lays down fresh hay for the goat. He is tending something that needs tending. He is helping a creature worse off than he is.

  He thinks more and more often of Albert Tinchant. Erik is still playing many of the same pianos that Tinchant played, and he imagines Tinchant’s body there, feet on the pedals, hands on the keys. A hard wooden piano bench is a kind of touch, as is the smooth surface of the keys, the thin ledge at the ends of the white ones, the angled fronts of the black. The brass ball of the damper pedal under his right foot. Erik starts wiping the instrument down before he plays every night, regardless of who played before or who’s playing after him, and while he comes across as a germophobe, what he’s really afraid of is ghosts.

  He challenges Salis to a duel, issues the demand in a scroll tied with a long velvet ribbon. Erik has gotten a tarnished military sword from his old friend Alphonse and stuck the hilt awkwardly through his belt. The duel is a righteous cause, he explains to the costumed doorman, not merely for personal satisfaction but for back wages owed to half the neighborhood. Erik represents the cry of the people. The people need more than liquor to survive. The people need food, and sleep. Maybe even sofas.

  The doorman, the plumes on his helmet waving, takes the scroll. “No second?” he asks, reading through the declaration. “I thought that was customary.”

  “I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t try to talk me out of this.”

  “Salis is gone,” the doorman says, off in the provinces with his touring show, an all-star lineup of Chat Noir chansonniers. Or, he acknowledges, performers whom Salis can pass off to the provincials as his all-stars. Having brought the world to Paris, apparently Salis has decided there’s even more money to be made in bringing Paris to the world. “It’s just as well for you,” the doorman tells Erik. “That’s a cavalry saber, my friend. Not the easiest choice for dueling.”

  “Does Salis know how to fence?” Erik asks, caught off guard.

  “If you drew a sword on him, he would probably shoot you.”

  What will he do, then, when Salis returns? Beat a shameful retreat, or risk getting shot?

  But he is spared having to decide when Salis catches ill and dies suddenly in Naintré, in western France. It should have been in Paris, Erik thinks, both relieved and crestfallen on hearing the news. The death doesn’t feel real if it hasn’t happened in Paris. He can’t wrap his head around it. It seems possible that Salis might still come striding through the door, asking Erik what he’s done with his life so far. Or Salis might still walk up and shoot him through the chest.

  “He’s gone and died without giving satisfaction,” Erik says to Philippe. “I am without satisfaction.”

  The two of them raise a glass to their former boss, their matchmaker, the person who made their friendship possible by luring Philippe all the way from Spain to a single, bizarrely decorated building on the Rue Laval. Montmartre is a greenhouse, and Salis seeded and tended so many of the plants. Then he tried to carry them back out into the world, caught a chill, and died. Erik thinks of Louise’s garden, the tropical foliage hunched shivering through winter, the eerie impossibility of the place. If even Salis couldn’t leave Paris without dying, what did that mean for the rest of them?

  “He had a good run, I suppose,” Erik says.

  “He was forty-five,” Philippe says, disagreeing. Now that they are both over thirty, some numbers have started to look different.

  The goat is swollen on its left side. Bloat? Erik has no idea, and the shepherd-turned-acrobat has moved away and can’t be asked. Erik ties a rope around the goat’s neck, leads it to the tram stop, and is relieved that it can walk up the stairs and into the car. He pays two fares, looks around as if daring anyone to stop him. If he were dressed like a peasant, somebody might, lecturing him on city etiquette. But in his baggy velvet suit, he’s betting no one will do anything. They’ll see that he knows city etiquette perfectly well and has just made a conscious decision to ignore it.

  When they debark, Biqui seems to be struggling on the final walk to the fairgrounds, breathing heavily. It’s autumn now, and some of the acts are still touring, still winding their way back to Paris for winter, and Erik is hoping Lisette’s there. Those who have already arrived are open for business, and he drags the goat past a rickety carousel, past games of chance and strength and aim, plus two other animal exhibitors. He finds a single skinny bear in the cage beside Lisette’s caravan. No sign of customers, but he doesn’t know whether that’s because it’s a weekday morning or because Lisette’s encampment has reached the point of no return, too sad to draw spectators, so that it becomes ever sadder, and so on into oblivion.

  “Not good,” she says, palpating the animal’s sides. Bloat, she confirms. Advanced. And by the looks of the teeth and the teats, the animal’s old.

  She didn’t breed the past season, Erik says, and her milk dried up.

  “But you kept her?” Lisette asks.

  Erik can do nothing but nod.

  “Soft heart,” she says. “Soft head.” They could give baking soda and mineral oil for the bloat, she offers, and puncture the rumen as a last resort.

  “Stab her?”

  “If you’re set on trying to save her. But there’s a high risk of infection, and as I said, she’s old.”

  Her practicality is exactly what he’s come for, yet he’s annoyed. He wants some sympathy out of her. Not for him, but for the goat. No one took La Vorace out behind a gypsy caravan and shot her when she was done with dancing. And what is she good for now? Her tonics don’t even work. He’s being unfair, he manages to remind himself. Lisette is a person, not a goat. But he likes Biqui as well as or better than he likes most people.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asks. “While you decide what to do?”

  It’s only midmorning. Is she offering because she wants one, or because he’s got a look to him, something stamped across his forehead, where his hair no longer hides it? He doesn’t care. “Please,” he says.

  This time, when she offers to tell his fortune, he doesn’t refuse. He lets her hold his hand, flat and open, and her fingers are warm as they touch his palm.

  “You’re searching for something,” she starts.

  “Isn’t everybody?” She isn’t going to charge him for this, is she?

  “No,” she says, seriously. “They aren’t.”

  “Am I going to find it?”

  “Are you giving me the goat, or not?”

  “Let me guess: if I do, it’s all laurels and champagne?”

  “And if you don’t, you’re going to die a shriveled-up old man, bitter and alone.” She says these damning words with a wink. We’re playing, her eyes say. You know how it is. You’re a performer, too, even if you keep your clothes on.

  “How can I trust that fortune when you haven’t even said what I’m searching for?”

  “You’ve figured that part out yourself. Not everyone does. But I think you know what you want. You just aren’t sure how to get it.”

  “I think everybody feels that way.”

  “No, darling. They really don’t.”

  He makes her promise to do it cleanly and to wait until he’s well out of the fairgrounds, on a tram headed somewhere else. He’s so eager to be somewhere else he takes the first tram that arrives, with no idea where he’s going. He debarks at Gentilly out of the same impulsiveness and wanders. He’s
playing at the Auberge tonight, but there are a number of hours until then, and little to fill them. He should be composing, he supposes. That’s what he’s meant to be filling the days with.

  He walks half an hour and arrives at a small town square: a church and a municipal building and a café with no stage inside, just seating and a long bar, and outside a striped awning sheltering chairs and tables in its shade. He has to ask someone where he is, and is told Arcueil-Cachan. It’s an industrial suburb, but the center feels like a little village. He imagines plank tables of fish guts and oyster shells, boats and sails knocking in the wind. He hasn’t thought of Honfleur in a long time, and this place, really, is nothing like it. The nearest water is the Bièvre River and the viaduct that crosses it, a march of stone arches across the river valley. No one knows him here. There’s no one to scold him or send him back to school or fish him out of the basin. He might look at basic orchestration guides to his heart’s content, in public, without being embarrassed—everyone here will still think he is an expert. His idea of the people here is narrow and dismissive: factory workers and the unemployed, people squeezed out of the city proper. Uneducated and uninteresting. In time he’ll realize he’s wrong, but for now he’s right enough: there are no other composers. The only musicians here are the people who play dented instruments in the volunteer brass band on public holidays.

  He orders a glass of wine, pulls out his notebook. He has always liked the touch of fine paper, the firm slide of a good ink pen. He loves cracking the leather spine of a new notebook, the weight of the compact pages in his pocket. He taught himself how to cut quills out of cast-off feathers from the plucked birds at Les Halles, to see if the fragile scritch might make a difference to the things he wrote. Thus far: no.

  The sun is on his knees, the gray fabric stretched tight across his legs, and he begins to cook slowly in the unseasonably warm weather. He shifts, pulls the fabric away from his skin. His cheeks are getting red and tight, as is his scalp where his hair has deserted him. He should retreat, but the tables under the awning are full. He listens halfheartedly to the conversations, shuffles through them for one into which he can insert himself, and either entertain the patrons into generosity or act such a pest that the party will leave and he’ll inherit the table. But no one is talking about art, or music, or any of his usual subjects. No one is talking about art. It takes him several moments to process this, then he listens with anthropological pleasure. The talk is of local factories, a local sports league. Somebody’s wife, somebody’s mistress. A new rubbish-collection system, and how angry the ragpickers will be to be cheated out of a living. No one is talking about art. No one is talking about art. Its absence makes a wondrous silence in which he can hear his own breath, his heartbeat. A pack of children roars into the square kicking a rag ball, and he listens to their shouts, the thump of their feet kicking the ball, slapping the ground. Touch and sound. Joyful noise.

  He rises, turns around, and carries his glass to the table behind him. “I’m looking for a room,” he announces.

  Louise

  — 12 —

  Outward, painfully

  I FINALLY SETTLED ON CALLING HIM JOSEPH, PLUCKED FROM THE clutter of Lafosse family legacies that constituted my son’s name. It would have annoyed Pierre: it was too close to his father’s name, too unvarnished a tribute. But his father had failed everyone except me. He had owed me nothing and given me great kindness. He provided me and my son a life in an extraordinary place and held the gates against the wolves. Occasionally I remembered they were out there, waiting, but I did not have to look them in the eye. I was a kept woman, and no one asked me for any kind of payment.

  I knew it was for Joseph’s sake more than mine. We all fed off what seemed to be his unshakable happiness. As far as I could tell, he had wants but no longings. He shrieked for desserts but not for a father, because he had neither memory nor context for one. He had a mother and two grandparents. He had sturdy legs, large feet, long-fingered hands. He had our features, mine and Pierre’s mingled, but he always looked so happy that he never looked quite like either of us. He had endless hallways and pathways and rooms and garden grottoes. In choosing the largesse of Bellenau over the privations of Fortin and Estelle, I felt I had done something good for my son, although none of what I had thereby given him had been mine to bestow. Having granted it, though, I couldn’t do anything else without taking it away, since to remarry would be to disinherit Joseph.

  When Fortin and Estelle came to visit, Estelle would wring her hands about my isolation. At first she asked only whether I had enough company. But after a party for Joseph’s third birthday, she wondered aloud where and how I might ever meet someone else. “You may not be ready now, but someday you’ll want to marry again.”

  “Lightning doesn’t usually strike the same place twice,” Fortin said. He meant nothing of love, but money. “Unless you’ve got a duke in your coat pocket, it would be a mistake. You’d be cheating Joseph.”

  However steeply Fortin looked down his nose at luxury, he would never countenance the whims of my heart, or any heart, overriding the security of a son’s inheritance. Anyone who was apt to marry me was not likely to be able to provide us with a life remotely as good as the one we enjoyed here. I was trapped, and I knew I was trapped, but the cage was very beautiful. Besides Estelle’s and Fortin’s visits, I corresponded with a few school friends in Le Havre and received occasional letters from Eugénie or my brothers. Sundays I went with Joseph to the church in Saint-Côme-du-Mont. But the longer I lived at Bellenau, the more the rest of the world receded. The slower I was to write back, the more slowly the letters arrived. I kept reminding myself I was providing for Joseph all the things my childhood had lacked.

  When Joseph was five, his grandfather suffered a sudden apoplexy while digging a hole to transplant a greenhouse seedling, an end that I think would have pleased him, had he the opportunity to express an opinion. The aftermath of his death was slow and orderly, like a surgeon’s scalpel rather than a ripping of wolf teeth. I suppose Cannu deserves credit for that, though he did it for his and Albertine’s sake, not for mine or Joseph’s or Madeleine’s, and certainly not for the garden’s. As soon as Pierre-Joseph was buried, Cannu divvied the estate into parcels and sold off the farthest reaches first, the best farmland and pasturage. He schemed, playing neighboring landowners against each other to drive up the prices. Within the space of a year he transformed the Lafosse family from benefactors to local villains, but he did not line his own pockets. All the proceeds went toward servicing the estate’s debts, which turned out to be even more vast than Pierre had once feared. I was ashamed when people turned away from us in Saint-Côme-du-Mont, but since my fortunes were fixed to the Lafosses—since I was, in my own shabby way, one of them—I did not entirely disapprove of Cannu’s tactics.

  Madeleine drew certain firm lines and held them, to Cannu’s exasperation. He couldn’t touch the house or the heart of the garden, for example. I didn’t know if this was out of loyalty to Pierre-Joseph the visionary, or to Pierre-Joseph her husband, or to the vision itself. Maybe it was loyalty to her own desires; perhaps what had looked like long-suffering acquiescence to Pierre-Joseph’s eccentricity had really been a kind of ownership this whole time. Every night that he was at dinner, Cannu lectured her on how much better off we’d all be if we sold and left now, rather than sinking the proceeds of the land sales back into an estate that slurped up every franc poured into it and remained thirsty. The rotting château was, in his terms, a “depreciating asset.” But the depreciating asset was also Madeleine’s home, and she offered Cannu only a blank, agreeable smile that infuriated him, the same expression that had once infuriated Pierre, because it looked so much like stupidity. I think I was the only one who recognized it as strategy: she understood what Cannu wanted as well as she knew that she would not consent to it, and she was choosing the kind of fight they would have. Let him keep lecturing—it was more comfortable than a battle of wills.

&nb
sp; Bellenau was like an onion growing smaller and smaller, with Cannu peeling away the outer acres. What was left was woefully understaffed, and as a literal jungle began to close in, I realized that Pierre-Joseph had created only the outline of one, not the real thing. Now the paths grew narrower and narrower as some plants collapsed and died and others ran riot. Joseph, who was five, loved it. As the spaces of the garden shrank, they also became more secret, as if the place, in its dying, was being made over to child-size. Inside the house, Joseph found mushrooms growing in the carpets of distant rooms whose windows were so loose in their frames that rain streamed down the walls. He sank his fingers into the rotted sills, soft as cheese. He collected pieces of different wallpapers as they tattered and made a scrapbook for Madeleine, who cried when she paged through it. This frightened him, as it hadn’t been his intention, and he climbed into her lap to try to kiss away her grief.

  As Joseph grew, he began to need things for which Cannu had not budgeted. The village school would have been free, but none of the Lafosses could stomach the idea of sending him to be educated alongside the sons of the gardeners. Pierre and Albertine had had governesses and tutors in the house, but there was no longer money for that. A boarding school was the most logical option, Cannu announced. Fortin even suggested the collège in Honfleur, thinking the choice would make me like the idea better. He volunteered to pick Joseph up every weekend to spend Sunday in Le Havre.