The Vexations Read online

  “If you’re still able to walk to the Auberge later,” Eric said, “I’ll buy your meal too.”

  “Actually, he doesn’t even need money,” Tinchant confided to Philippe. “He’s got it from his father. But that doesn’t keep him from coming here every night like a vulture, circling, just waiting for me to play a wrong note.”

  “No one minds a wrong note,” Eric said. “Salis only minds when you piss the piano bench in the middle of a show.”

  “And then you sit in it,” Tinchant hissed. “You may think you’re better than me but you sit in it all the same.”

  Eric held up the towel. “Salis keeps one for me in the Institute.” He gestured at a low door nearly behind the bar, which, he explained, led to a special, invitation-only room for regulars, the closest thing the place had to an employee lounge or greenroom. Eric’s welcome at the Institute was meant to flatter him into overlooking the fact that he earned nothing for whole nights spent on standby, when Tinchant successfully finished the show.

  “He thinks he’s going to be a composer,” Tinchant said. “But he flunked out of the Conservatory.”

  “What are you?” Eric asked Philippe.

  “A poet,” Philippe said, having screwed up his courage to say it.

  “That’s fantastic,” Eric said.

  Philippe tested the words in his head, searching for sarcasm. He couldn’t hear any.

  “Twice, he flunked out twice,” Tinchant said, throwing an arm around Eric’s shoulders.

  Eric reared up and out from the embrace like a skittish horse. He’d been looking for new poems to set to music, he told Philippe, because he couldn’t afford the rights to anything published. Would Philippe want to collaborate? he asked.

  “But you don’t know my work at all,” Philippe said, trying to check Eric’s enthusiasm for him, if the would-be composer didn’t have the sense to do it himself.

  “His family begged his way back in after the first time,” Tinchant said, “and then he played just as badly.”

  “What’s your name? I’m Erik, spelled with a K. I’m descended from Vikings.”

  Philippe gave a shortened, more French version of his real name, and Erik-with-a-K explained to him that his father owned a music-publishing business and that there would be money in it for them if they could give him something he could use.

  “He mentions the Conservatory whenever he advertises for private piano students,” Tinchant griped. “Says he ‘attended,’ leaves out that he never finished. It’s false advertising!”

  Ignoring Tinchant, Erik acknowledged to Philippe that he hadn’t read his work, but no matter: Philippe could do his part first, then Erik would compose to suit the words.

  “What sorts of poems did you have in mind?” Philippe asked.

  “Plus it doesn’t even work!” Tinchant said. “Salis told me he’s only got two students.”

  “We should start with love,” Erik said. “Or flowers. But probably love.”

  “Love!” Tinchant howled.

  But Philippe was filled with love at that moment. He loved Tinchant, for introducing him to Erik. He loved the Chat Noir, for being everything he’d hoped it would be. He loved Paris even more than he had dreamed he would, and he had dreamed long and hard and eagerly.

  “Love,” Philippe said. “Yes. Love.”

  Tarragona, Spain, had once been a Roman capital, before the Visigoths and the Moors and the Reconquista. There’d been an amphitheater and a circus and a forum and temples, aqueducts and good roads and formidable walls. That had been thirteen hundred years before Philippe was born, and the general agreement was that Tarragona had been declining ever since. More than a millennium ago, Philippe’s hometown had been as great and important and populous, as beautiful and civilized and entertaining, as it was ever going to be. Even as a child, Philippe found this crushingly depressing. Many of the town’s modern buildings were made of stones harvested from Roman ruins, with Latin inscriptions peeking out from cornerstones and lintels, or scuffed into nothingness on front stoops. The ruins within the old medieval walls had been pillaged centuries ago, but when Philippe was small, the town fathers, in a burst of unfounded enthusiasm, decided to expand the modern street grid westward. Philippe’s father was employed on the building works, clearing ruins previously left unmolested, and occasionally carrying home to his children fragments of inscriptions or statuary, disembodied numerals and toes. Philippe thought he would rather have been born in his mother’s village, where there had never been any great monuments, where people built and repaired the same plain houses and stables and sheds, with no reminders of another, better world.

  Philippe had one close friend, a fair boy who burned so easily in the sun that he crept along the shady side of every street. Miguel’s parents were generous with spending money, which allowed Miguel to subscribe to slim French publications full of cartoons and humor columns, dirty poems and event listings that might have been weeks or months out of date by the time they reached Spain but were nonetheless miraculous for their evidence that such events existed. Miguel’s subscriptions were mostly for in-house publications from music halls and cafés whose rivalries threaded through their newspapers in dizzying, baffling detail. The boys formed loyalties, decided which cabarets were worth the admission fees, which cafés they would be regulars in when (not if) they moved to Paris. They studied the newspapers more diligently than their textbooks, and their marks began to suffer. This did not dampen their obsessive research, their plans for future glory.

  Not sure which poems Erik might want, Philippe swept into his bag the whole row of notebooks on the single shelf in the room he’d rented at an address Erik had suggested, near the top of the Montmartre Butte, the highest point in the city. The pricier, flatter part of the neighborhood lay at the bottom of streets so steep that Philippe had to throw his weight backward from his hips as he walked, wary of his slick, worn shoes on the cobblestones. Happily, he’d had no heavy luggage to bring up the hill, where horse-drawn cabs refused to go. Like all the other men and women who filled the streets around the Place du Tertre, he lived lightly, with what he could carry on his back.

  He met Erik at the Auberge du Clou, the same place he’d eventually been taken to eat the night he arrived in Paris, two days earlier. The Auberge was a quieter café than the Chat Noir, decorated like an alpine farmhouse with farrier’s nails for coat hooks and horseshoes hung over the bar. After pleasantries, Erik began flipping through the notebooks, but Philippe couldn’t stand to watch him. When Miguel had read his poems, Philippe used to wander the apartment into the living room or kitchen, where Miguel’s mother usually gave him a sweet as consolation against the admirable but problematic honesty that the boy she’d raised was sure to mete out. Most of the time Philippe could steel himself to acknowledge the accuracy of Miguel’s disapproving critiques. Most of the time he could even manage to be grateful.

  Now he left Erik reading at the cramped table and wandered to a front window covered by cheerful, red-checked curtains, and from there to the bar, then to the back wall and its framed pictures of cows. There was nothing else to look at, though, without intruding on the handful of other occupied tables. Philippe was homesick, he realized, for the first time since leaving Tarragona. He felt guilty that it was Miguel’s mother he was missing and not his own, who’d had no sweets to spare. Back at the table, he blanched to see Erik poring over forgotten schoolboy rhymes on the earliest pages of the earliest notebook, festooned with doodles and dirty Catalan insults, free of Miguel’s editorial interventions.

  “Never mind those,” Philippe said, resisting the urge to yank the notebook away.

  “I rather like this one,” Erik said.

  “Really? Which?”

  Erik turned the book sideways and Philippe leaned in and pushed their beer glasses to the edge of the table to make room. It was a love poem to a woman with a mouth made of rubies, a voice sweeter than honey, smile like a rainbow, hair dark as…darkness. So beautiful she made the an
gels jealous. Philippe imagined what Miguel would say. Maybe that the only possible object of jealousy in this poem was the rhymes—very neat and regular, if unoriginal.

  “‘Sylvie,’” Erik read the title aloud. “Was she a real person?”

  “Based on one,” Philippe lied. “She died,” he added, thinking to avoid further questions on the fictional Sylvie.

  “I’m sorry,” Erik said, sincerely.

  Philippe tried to look bereaved.

  “It will inspire me,” Erik said. “Her loss.” He was clearly struggling not to ask more—how she’d died, or how far she and Philippe had gone down the road of love before she expired.

  “Not my best work,” Philippe said. “I can’t say I did her justice.”

  It was a love poem, though, Erik said. It would do.

  Philippe had assumed there would be some kind of ongoing collaboration, but Erik disappeared with his notebook, leaving him sitting like a fool by himself with beer he couldn’t afford. For three days he heard nothing. He still didn’t even know Erik’s last name, or where he lived. Philippe thought about all the cafés he hadn’t seen yet because he was stuck at the Auberge, too new for Miguel to have subscribed to its paper, much less for either of them to have developed any affinity for it. Philippe started to detest the clean curtains, the pictures of cows, the stupid woven baskets of fabric wildflowers taking up space on the tables. He detested the regulars, who came here to get away from the dank, boozy glitz of the other cafés and didn’t trouble themselves to be friendly to a stranger. Philippe hadn’t experienced nearly enough dank, boozy glitz to grow sick of it. He thought of all the sights he and Miguel had planned to visit, and how little he’d seen so far.

  On the fourth day without any sign of Erik, he gave up on the Auberge and ordered lunch at the Rat Mort, where everything from the décor to the names on the menu had a theme of dead rats. Miguel had never been quite sure from the newspapers whether this was an actual place or a joke, and Philippe was both charmed and unsettled to find that it was quite real. The café sold postcards, pictures of the dead-rat-festooned interior, and he bought one for Miguel. He ordered something called rodent piss and, after two more glasses of it, asked the first person who sat down beside him if he knew where Erik-with-a-K, understudy pianist and gymnopédiste, lying composer and thief of notebooks, might live.

  “He’s at the Auberge du Clou right now, if you’re looking for him.”

  Armed with this information, Philippe tried to decide whether he was, in fact, looking for Erik. He’d wanted only to learn where Erik lived, so he could steal his notebook back from an empty apartment. He’d been imagining the most embarrassing of his old poems showing up in the café papers, plastered all over the neighborhood, read aloud as comedy acts at the cabarets.

  “He might have been looking for you, actually,” the man beside Philippe said. “A Spanish poet, he told me. Bad shoes and big hair?”

  “That’s me,” Philippe said, reaching up to touch the dark mane he should perhaps have had tamed before he left Tarragona. Haircuts, like everything else in Paris, were expensive.

  At the Auberge, Erik showed off the rough draft of his composition, the staves furry with notes. He was giddy about the opening. “A striking thirteenth!” he said. He didn’t want the root-position tonic stated clearly until the very end, he said. He also preferred not to do a strophic piece, if that was all right with Philippe. “It should be through-composed instead. What do you think?”

  “That’s fine,” Philippe said, terrified, now that the rodent piss was wearing off, of revealing his ignorance. Was he supposed to know what any of that meant? He pressed his hair down with a sweaty hand. At least, Philippe thought, cheering himself, Erik had turned out to be a real composer. He had no idea what a thirteenth might sound like, but the name of it alone was intimidating.

  Erik announced that he’d begun more songs based on poems in the notebook: one about angels, one about flowers, one about death, and one just called “Song.” Miguel had made comments so scathing about three of the four that Philippe had abandoned them without revision. The poem about death, Philippe remembered, had eventually met with Miguel’s grudging approval. Erik showed off the drafts to Philippe. “Sylvie” was fully harmonized, he said, but “Song” was so far nothing more than a few musical phrases in the treble clef. Not that Philippe understood what “treble clef” meant until Erik pointed at the handful of dots on the top set of lines running across the page like fence rails. Erik seemed to think Philippe could translate the black dots, that they all resolved into sounds in his head the same way they did in Erik’s. But Philippe might as well have been looking at a page of Chinese characters.

  Finally Erik realized that his written drafts were not having the desired effect. “Sorry,” he said. “I assume everyone reads music. Everyone I grew up with did. It was the only thing we had in common.”

  “Makes sense, I suppose, if your father’s a music publisher.”

  “A recent development,” Erik said. “My stepmother put him up to it so she’d have someone to publish her own compositions. Then she finally realized she was awful, but they’re still at it.” When Philippe asked if he’d sold them things before, Erik said he’d never been interested enough in popular music to try. His usual work was more ambitious, he said with a sniff, but he needed the money.

  Was this a clue as to what a gymnopédiste did? Philippe wondered. But if gymnopédistes didn’t usually write popular music, what did they aim for instead? Unpopular? Unpleasing?

  “Here,” Erik said, and rose abruptly from the table. “Let me show you what your poems sound like.”

  The Auberge didn’t mount a regular cabaret and Philippe followed Erik to the freezing basement, where huge puddles of rank water pooled on the stone floor and the café piano sat on a low wooden platform serving as a stage. Philippe leaped from the bottom of the stairs to a wooden bench and pulled his feet to safety, sitting cross-legged, an expectant audience of one.

  The songs were meandering, in a pretty way, the tempo at times excruciatingly slow. The rhythm of the accompaniment was mechanical, the notes spare but full of eerie, almost abrasive harmonies. A thirteenth, Philippe learned, sounded like a songbird dipped in lye. The arrangements didn’t highlight his poetry so much as make it strange. He was startled at first, even a bit offended, but the odder the songs were, the more he began to appreciate them. In Tarragona, he had been strange without meaning to be, without aspiring to it. In Montmartre, where a concentrated number of people were all trying very hard to be very strange at one time, the result was that nothing was very strange at all. Philippe had heard no songs like these, with their square, solid rhymes and gaunt melodies. He wasn’t sure what Erik’s parents would think, whether these could be moneymakers, but he decided he liked the songs regardless, liked them more and more as they unfurled, lovely and strangled.

  When Erik finished playing the last one, or rather told Philippe he was finished, because the piece was incomplete and it wasn’t clear it was over, Philippe applauded loudly.

  “Thoughts? Suggestions?” Erik said.

  Philippe wasn’t sure what to do. It seemed lazy to say no, arrogant to say yes. “One or two of them might work better a little faster?” he tried. “Not the death one, of course, but the flowers one, perhaps?”

  Erik’s face instantly closed, and he balled his hands and pressed them against the sides of his thighs. Philippe understood then that he wasn’t to critique but to praise, and tried to repair the damage with a flood of compliments—What did he know about technique? He couldn’t even read music! At first Erik seemed mollified, but when he proposed they work through the pieces phrase by phrase, Philippe suspected a trap. “Wonderful,” he said at every pause. “I can’t hear anything I’d change.” But Erik kept playing the same lines over and over, demanding advice.

  Rescue came from the day manager, who clomped downstairs and told Erik to shut the hell up—people came to the Auberge to get away from self-indu
lgence like that. “If you want to play something fun, you can play, but you can’t just noodle around. We can hear it upstairs and it’s driving everyone mad.”

  “For free? You want me to play for free?” Erik asked, choosing to ignore the insults.

  The manager didn’t particularly want him to play anything, he said. But if Erik insisted, he ought to play something that actually sounded like something.

  Erik flipped to a blank page in his staff notebook and titled it in block letters so large the manager could read it from the bottom of the stairs: SOMETHING. The piece, when Erik played it, sounded much like “Chopsticks.” He banged through a reprise until the manager asked him to leave. Philippe followed his friend two blocks into exile, until Erik plopped down on a bench in the Place d’Anvers.

  “They never mean it,” Erik said. “I’ve been thrown out of loads of places.” He kicked lazily at a bustle of pigeons that barely scattered in response. “Say, did you ever find a room to rent?”

  What would Erik say if the answer were no, and Philippe had been sleeping rough? Philippe thought about lying, just to find out. Then he weighed the prospective humiliation of Erik’s indifference against the odds of guilt or apology, and told the truth.

  “Good,” Erik said. Nothing more.

  In Tarragona, Miguel had cut out pictures and headlines from the Paris café papers and pasted them into collages. He propped up the cardboard panels in a triptych on his bedroom dresser. The central panel, where a crucifixion would have been, or a Madonna and Child, was instead a drawing of a jaunty rabbit leaping out of a frying pan. Mostly Miguel chose animals, or music notes and disembodied words—Refreshing! Shocking! Delicious!—but on the left panel there was a small cartoon of a priest peering up the skirts of a cancan girl. Philippe had never been especially devout, but the cartoon troubled him. He cringed when Miguel began lighting candles in front of the triptych like a real altar, praying for deliverance from their stolid hometown. After Miguel mentioned that he was pocketing the candles from the cathedral, Philippe began to fear in earnest for their souls. Miguel’s only fear was what his parents might think, and he began closing the door when the candle was lit. With the window shutters pulled against the afternoon heat, the room was stifling, and Philippe didn’t understand why the altar was worth it. Did Miguel really think there was another god, some giant Parisian rabbit in the sky, that would answer their prayers with train tickets? That would spirit them off to Paris and then lie down in its frying pan and let the boys eat their fill of its crackling flesh? Offer its body and blood? Philippe cringed at his own blasphemy.