The Vexations Read online

  “Hush now,” the doctor said. “If he’s still as ill as all that…”

  I let myself be placed on the sofa, a cold cloth on my forehead, my top buttons undone. The doctor told Eugénie to unlace me once he left, see that I got some rest to recover from the strain of nursing my dear elder brother. The two of us were clearly so close. Eugénie gave me a long, skeptical look. The doctor thought me a hysteric. But he wrote and signed a letter.

  “To Louise,” Eric added now to our celebratory toast.

  “Hear, hear!” Conrad said, without asking why, and I was flattered to be found so generally worthy of toasting.

  “Did you really—” I wasn’t sure how to put it, though, and wasn’t sure Eric would even remember most of our night-fevered, cough-spattered conversations. I took a gulp of the wine. “You said you tried to fetch me once. From Le Havre. With Osprey’s boat. That you fell into the harbor instead.”

  Eric and Conrad both tilted their heads like dogs—like brothers.

  “Was that true?” I said. “It’s all right if it isn’t.”

  “It’s true,” Eric said. “Why would you think it wasn’t?”

  “You really did that?” Conrad asked, but Eric was looking only at me.

  “It seemed like something you might just say. But I believe you,” I said, and stuffed a forkful of potatoes into my mouth and chewed.

  “Do you?” Eric said, every furrow of his illness plowed across his face. He looked much older than the twenty-five he was so afraid of turning.

  “Please don’t fight,” Conrad said, and I felt, for a moment, like we were real siblings.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For trying.” Even if it was a fantasy, he’d been dreaming about me. My rescue was a story he’d told himself for years. I owed him that doctor’s letter: for the attempted rescue, for my jealousy and bitter anger. “And now I’ve saved you. I’ve given you back five years. Maybe more, since you might’ve ended up with jail time for desertion. What are you going to do with the time?”

  “I’ll be king of France,” he said. “No, emperor.”

  “Do something,” I told him. “Do something, and we’ll be even.”

  “I’m not sure yet what I’m good at,” he confessed.

  The statement seemed miraculous to me, implying as it did that he was so sure he was good at something, without any evidence as to what.

  “You’re good at lots of things,” Conrad offered. “You’re terribly good at music.”

  “Not really,” Eric said.

  Conrad shook his head. “You too, Louise. You’re good at lots of things.”

  But how would he have known? We both understood it wasn’t really true. I was and always had been dutiful and ordinary. Little Mother, perhaps one day Little Wife. But there are many, many worse things to be. Had Le Havre been a door or a window? It had felt at the beginning like an oubliette. But there had always been a view across the water, a window from which I might someday fly. If not noticing was a form of permission, as Eugénie claimed, who might my father’s uncaring allow me to become?

  “I missed you,” Eric said. “I missed you a lot, after she sent us away.”

  “Me too,” Conrad said, unwilling to be left out.

  “You don’t even remember me,” I told him. “You were too young.” In truth I wasn’t sure how much I remembered him and Eric. My memories of them were hopelessly intertwined with the brothers I’d imagined later, the ones I’d dreamed, the ones I’d wanted.

  “I know I missed you. I must have,” Conrad said.

  “I missed you both, too,” I said.

  This, at least, we could know was true. We’d all missed each other, and now those child selves had disappeared forever, devoured by these awkward giants: erratic Eric and clever Conrad and livid Louise, like the stars of an unpopular novelty song that Alfred might try to sell, one where all the jokes were a little too bitter. In the final verse the elder prince slays death itself and rides his own ambition into the sunset. The younger prince proves kind of heart and voracious of mind. The princess returns to her tower in the city on the other coast, and it will feel both farther and nearer than it did before. That they all lived happily ever after I cannot attest to, but they did all live after.

  Philippe

  — 4 —

  Like a nightingale with a toothache

  WHEN PHILIPPE LATER TELLS THE TALE—THE STARVING, SHABBY years of his youth—he can’t help telling it wrong. He starts out correctly, all nostalgia and self-deprecation. He imitates his younger self’s shuffling walk in broken-soled shoes, every pebble in Paris bruising his feet. His audience usually laughs. Not his children, because although Philippe will turn out to be a fortunate man in that he has children, he is also an ordinary man in that they rarely find him (intentionally) funny. But guests, they laugh. They want to know what the city was like then, and Philippe answers in the only way he knows how—by explaining who he was when he wanted so badly to live there. He mocks the teenager who stepped from the train already asking directions to the Chat Noir, before he’d asked after boardinghouses or cafeterias or jobs or Spanish aid societies. And what did he know of the place? A sleek cat on a poster. Rumors of Sodom, Gomorrah, a Garden of Earthly Delights. All the cleverest people in the cleverest city in the world, talking over one another in conversations like sea waves—the crash, the pull, the effervescence.

  Philippe knows his older self should acknowledge that of course the Chat Noir was never quite like that. No place in the world could ever really have been like that. Yet everyone knows exactly the sly black-cat logo that Philippe remembers, the arched whiskers slicing across a dark-yellow background. That this cat means anything to anyone, so many years later, is a miracle. There are religions that have not lasted so long. The indelible figure is like a church, a shrine, an altar to his younger self, to all those younger selves, all those eager pilgrims.

  A fool, he is supposed to say, and does, “I was a fool,” but he says it with befuddled respect. Who was that boy with the wrong accent, the wrong currency in his pockets, and so terrifyingly little of it? Every letter home for years was a lie: Yes, I am warm enough. No, I am not hungry. Yes, everything is as beautiful as you’ve heard. His bad shoes nearly cost him three toes his first winter. He had never felt cold like that, didn’t realize it could gnaw off whole pieces of a man. He was an idiot, but so brave. So confident he could throw himself into Paris and that the very air, like water, would bear him up. He has never been that brave, or trusting, since. And maddest of all, wasn’t that boy right? His toes stayed attached. His belly got filled, one way or another. And everything he’s loved in his whole life since then started over drinks at the Chat Noir.

  He was desperately thirsty, that first afternoon. Exhausted by the journey, he had a headache so severe he could feel his heartbeat at the back of his eyeballs. He set off for the Chat Noir on foot from the train station, asking directions every few blocks. Like going to see the local lord, in a feudal age. “Or in Spain five minutes ago,” French listeners sometimes joke, and Philippe pretends to find it funny, his country’s distress, the way he walked away from it and never looked back.

  The café’s front was narrow and half-timbered, its wooden shutters splayed, though nothing was visible in the squares of darkness save a stray elbow or a cigarette ashing over the sill. From the open door crawled a smell of beer spilled so deeply into the floorboards there was no point in ever trying to mop it up. Something golden glinted in the rank-smelling doorway, and as his eyes adjusted Philippe realized it was a man in a metallic medieval costume. When this man asked for his name, Philippe froze in terror. Was there a list? For the first (and what would turn out to be nearly the last) time in Paris, he sputtered out his full real name, all ten words of it.

  The doorman asked for the long string of foreign sounds to be repeated. Finally he recited it to Philippe ceremoniously, knocked the base of his halberd against the floor three times, and bowed. “Your Lordship,” he said, and gestured Phili
ppe inside.

  It was a slow hour, midafternoon, but eventually enough patrons entered for Philippe to overhear that the doorman’s greeting to him was the one used for everybody. The solemn inquiry, the pounding of the halberd, the courtly words—all ritual. He felt reprieve more than disappointment. There’d been no misunderstanding; he wasn’t in danger of being kicked out as an imposter. They’d known he was a nobody and still they let him in. Some of the arrivals, clearly used to the routine, gave professions as well as names, either real or imagined—sculptors, beekeepers, kings of Tahiti. There were two separate popes. Philippe rued his missed opportunity to call himself a poet, to be announced as such to these people he was sure held his future in their hands. Or would they have mistaken it for a joke? How did one communicate the desperate seriousness of Art?

  Philippe was relieved that the barman didn’t pressure him into ordering a second beer, but was dismayed that there was no food to be ordered, for any price. His hunger passed from desire to discomfort to real pain, until his stomach began to clench desperately. Still he lingered, waiting for his future to present itself. He curled his toes over the canvas bag at his feet like a mother bird with an egg. Everything he owned was in there—every item of clothing, every word he’d ever written. What money he had, in a mix of pesetas and francs, was distributed across trouser and jacket pockets, tucked into his shoes, and sewn into his hems. His mother had even pinned a few bills in the waistband of his underwear, but the pin had come undone, jabbing him, and the bills had migrated uncomfortably downward.

  He pulled a notebook from the bag and a pencil from his pocket. Now a moment of paralysis, because what were the correct words to note on the first page of the first afternoon of the next, best part of his life? The date and place he recorded with a frisson of terrified delight, but what next? He could describe the room, that would be easy enough—the medieval bric-a-brac, the grimy portraits, the fake coats of arms, a wooden throne suspended by wires from the ceiling, spinning slowly in the slim breeze from the doorway. The doorman’s ridiculous plumage. But Philippe already suspected that if he looked too hard, by daylight, the charm of this place would fall apart in his hands. Instead, he tried to describe the sensation of his hunger—scissors, stoning, a tiger’s teeth. He made a parade of words down the page, in French, then crossed them all out. They weren’t any good, and he wanted anyone who might be watching—the barman? God? Rodolphe Salis, the café’s famed founder, somehow peering over his shoulder?—to know that he knew they were no good, that he had the discernment to be capable of better.

  He was loath to abandon his vigil in favor of a meal, but he eventually stood, promising himself he could come right back. As he approached the front door he overheard a conversation between the doorman and a manager about the night’s impending cover charge. When he learned how much it would be, he realized he was effectively trapped inside the Chat Noir for the night.

  At sundown, finally, the crowds came. Men wearing peasant smocks on top, but with thin city shoes and store-bought trousers underneath, like confusing centaurs. Painters, he understood as he eavesdropped, their smocks left on as laziness or fashion, so they might know each other, so others might know them by sight, so that they might be excused from the door charge levied on the bourgeoisie gathering on the sidewalk outside. He had never dreamed of seeing so many painters in one place, flocking as common as sparrows. He’d known just one back home in Tarragona, an old man still eking out a living on portrait commissions. It was only the very ugliest or most narcissistic rich people, Philippe had thought then, who would bother with portraits in an age of photographs. Only people who needed to be lied to, and who would want to paint for them? He was not sure whom he wrote his poems for, but surely not people like that. Not, he had to admit, that people like that had ever offered to pay him. Nobody had ever offered to pay him, for anything he’d ever written, but he hoped that was about to change.

  “You a writer?” a man asked, glancing at Philippe’s notebook. The man was wearing a jacket, not a smock, and his collar was gray and crooked. He made a strange tinkling sound as he leaned over the bar, as if he were strung with wind chimes. His nose was a nearly bloody-looking red, and his eyes were already glazed.

  Still, Philippe thought this was possibly the best single thing anyone had ever said to him in his life. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’m a writer. What are you?”

  “A drunk,” the barman said, refusing to serve the man the absinthe he’d requested. “Salis’s orders, Tinchant. You know that.”

  Tinchant didn’t seem angry at either the description or the refusal, just shrugged in agreement and drifted away. But Philippe wanted to come to his aid. He ordered an absinthe himself and, when it arrived, stood to deliver it.

  “Bad idea,” the barman said. “If he’s too drunk to play tonight, it’s on your head, not mine.”

  “Play?”

  “He’s the house pianist. For the cabaret.” Both men looked across the room to where Tinchant was producing stoppered vials of liquor from his pockets and hems, stashed clinking all over his person as if he were some mad scientist. The barman sighed. “Looks like it may be a lost cause tonight. I’d say one more won’t kill him”—he gestured at the drink in Philippe’s hand—“but someday one more’s going to. You probably don’t want it to be tonight, and you probably don’t want it to be yours. You seem like a nice kid.”

  In a moment, Philippe had been demoted from “writer” to “nice kid.” He knew instantly where his loyalties lay. He walked across the room to deliver the drink. Behind him, the bartender yelled for the errand boy to go find someone named Eric and tell him he’d almost definitely need to play the second half, maybe the first too, and that he ought to get here by the top of the show.

  The bar was packed by the time Eric showed up, but Tinchant had managed to keep an empty chair at their table, growling like a dog at anyone who’d tried to take it. The guests filtering in now were not wearing smocks. They were finely, even elegantly dressed, and they didn’t play games with the doorman, who’d since been joined by a knight in chain mail collecting a hefty cover charge. The guests’ names and titles were ordinary, and if they had given their occupations, Philippe imagined, they would be a string of bankers and shopkeepers. Not his people, he thought. Amazing how clear the lines were between the bourgeoisie and the artistes, so stark that even a foreigner could see them snaking through the room, glowing like the tracery that hung in the dark behind the doorman’s torch.

  Eric, when he arrived, muddled the lines. He looked slightly older than Philippe, with shaggy hair and an unremarkable face. His clothes were the puzzlement. Suit, linen, shoes, all looked as if they had been well made, even expensive, before being caught in some mysterious natural disaster—there was no sign of wear in the normal places, at the elbows or cuffs, but one breast pocket was nearly ripped off, dangling by threads, and one of the lapels had been neatly slashed. He carried a rolled towel under one arm, tucked beside him as he sat next to Tinchant. Eric gave the older man a complicated stare. Pitying and contemptuous, envious and sad, all at once. An expression almost too complicated for a poem, Philippe thought. He’d need a whole novel.

  “This is my understudy,” Tinchant said, leaning hard against Eric.

  “I’m really a gymnopédiste,” Eric said. “But yes: I take over when he gets too drunk to play.”

  Philippe assumed gymnopédiste was a French word he didn’t know but should, and wondered whether to admit his ignorance or hope the meaning eventually became clear. His mother had grown up in a border village in the Pyrenees where the people spoke French and Catalan and Spanish, all flawlessly, or so she claimed. She’d told her children she was raising them to be fluent in three languages, and Philippe had believed her. His poetry was in French—he prided himself on his command—but conversation at the Chat Noir hovered at the edge of his comprehension. He could keep up, but barely, guessing at all the fast, slick slang, and only with an effort that had sent his headache
surging.

  When a waiter came by the table, Philippe ordered an absinthe, this time for himself, willing to dull his comprehension if it meant also dulling the pain. He’d thought absinthe was a popular choice, an artist’s drink, but Eric raised an eyebrow. “Starting early?” the gymnopédiste said.

  Was it early? It felt so, so late. He hadn’t slept on the train, except for a few accidental minutes against a stranger’s shoulder that had lulled him with its smell of dirt and sunlight. When the farmer eventually shook Philippe off, it was with such violence that he fell from the hard bench onto the floor of the fourth-class carriage. At least the farmer gave him a hunk of bread and cheese in gruff apology. It was the only food he’d had since the border, when he’d finished the paper packet of olives his mother had sent him away with.

  He asked Eric if there was anywhere nearby to get a meal.

  “Of course. Lots of places. Are you visiting?”

  “I think I’ve moved here,” Philippe said. “But that was only four hours ago.”

  “Then if you don’t mind the advice, I’d keep to wine or beer, especially here. The weekend prices are extortionate. If you can wait to eat until after the show I’ll take you somewhere for supper.”

  “Why are you so sure you’ll be paid tonight?” Tinchant said. “I’m fine. I’m feeling fine.”