The Vexations Read online

  The longer the door was closed each day, the more suspicious Miguel’s mother seemed whenever Philippe emerged. If he roamed the apartment while Miguel read his poems, she sometimes shamed him into helping with chores, rather than offering him sweets. He steeled himself to stay in the bedroom as Miguel’s narrow fingers ran down the pages, tapping out all the clichés and sentimentality, the unearned wisdom about age, or manhood, or romance.

  “Is this even accurate?” Miguel asked one afternoon, of a couplet about what it felt like to kiss a woman’s lips.

  A poem wasn’t about “accuracy,” Philippe tried to argue.

  “This poem isn’t ‘about’ anything except maybe the fact that you’ve never gotten laid,” Miguel retorted.

  Though Philippe knew for a fact that Miguel had never gotten laid either, this was a critique too far. He left furious, and avoided Miguel for days.

  Finally Miguel dragged him into an alley near their school. He pressed a nectarine into Philippe’s hand, the fruit so soft and nearly overripe he could have crushed it by accident. “He said it’s like this,” Miguel said. “My father. Kissing a girl.”

  “You asked your father what it’s like to kiss a girl?”

  “Who else would I ask?” Miguel said matter-of-factly. Both boys were reminded, yet again, that they had no other friends. “Kiss it.”

  “I’m not going to kiss a piece of fruit.”

  “You’re supposed to kiss it, then bite into it.”

  “I think your father’s confused about some things.”

  Miguel rolled his eyes. “I thought you could wrap your head around a metaphor. But maybe not.”

  Philippe sank his teeth into the fruit spitefully and tore away a bite, then another, barely taking time to chew. Juice runneled down his chin so fast it dripped onto his clothes before he could catch it. The nectarine was delicious, intensely sweet. When he’d swallowed the last of the flesh and skin he sucked the pit clean, then took it out of his mouth and threw it hard at Miguel’s head. The pit struck him smack between the eyes and ricocheted audibly.

  Miguel yelped, but a moment later both boys were laughing. The pit was too ridiculous, rolling away down the alley. The rift between them too ridiculous, when there was no one else in town who understood them a fraction as well as they understood each other. Miguel took a clean white handkerchief out of his pocket. Philippe held out his hand for it, but Miguel reached up to clean Philippe’s face himself. The juice was sticky, and Miguel spit on a corner of the cloth. He held Philippe’s jaw steady with his other hand and scrubbed. Philippe stared up at the strip of sky above the alley, so bright it looked white instead of blue. He felt the white scalloped ends of Miguel’s fingernails against his jawbone, running across the margins of him like a poem. Finding something to like, something to correct. Reading, always, with rapt sincerity.

  Despite Erik’s help, Philippe landed more meetings with editors who were interested in publishing his poems for free than for cash. He hadn’t understood that the bulk of a café paper was written by a single café employee using multiple pseudonyms, and much of the rest by drunks, who churned out pornographic cartoons for free. Even Erik contributed occasional articles under the byline Virginie LeBeau, who hated Prussians and custard apple tart, but particularly loathed the work of the Chat Noir’s second pianist, that talentless Viking upstart Erik. A huge portion of the Chat Noir paper turned out to be written by Albert Tinchant, who accepted payment exclusively in liquor. Philippe couldn’t quite believe that the first person he’d spoken to in Paris turned out to be the author of so many of the articles and dirty poems that had consoled his adolescent self. No, it was more than consolation, he thought—Tinchant had authored his actual adolescence, his whole idea of what he wanted his life to be.

  “That’s terrifying,” Tinchant said.

  “I’m trying to thank you,” Philippe protested, describing the articles as polestars, or the lantern of a lighthouse, beckoning him into harbor.

  “Lighthouses warn people away, pissant.”

  “Ignore him,” Erik said. “He’s drunk.” Which was of course the reason Erik was there in the first place, all three of them back at the Chat Noir, waiting for the cabaret to start, waiting to see how far into it Tinchant would last. He was fading out earlier and earlier as the weeks passed, until Erik was covering the majority of every show. Salis had hinted that he would grant Erik a promotion to first pianist if Erik would simply ask. But not only did he not ask, Philippe had even seen him tuck some of his earnings into Tinchant’s pocket while the man slept, slumped in a corner of the Institute using a discarded cabaret costume as a blanket, a mock royal robe with ermine trim made of towel strips dotted with black ink.

  “You’re one of the reasons I came to Paris,” Philippe told Tinchant, wanting him to believe it.

  “And now you’re trying to take away my job. I’ve only got two and you’re each trying to take one.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Salis told me. He told me you think you can fill the whole bloody paper.”

  “That’s not true,” Philippe said, although it was in fact a little true. The betrayal was that Salis had revealed it, no doubt knowing how Tinchant would react.

  “This place doesn’t work like that. No one comes here and gets what they want,” Tinchant said, then paused. “I mean, not right away. You have to work for it.”

  “I want to work,” Philippe said. “I’m trying to work.”

  The most accomplished poet he’d met so far, a man who had won serious literary prizes in Lyon, was making a living selling olives for two francs a kilo, wrapping them in pamphlets of his own poems, hoping someone would read them after eating. That discovery had depressed Philippe for two whole weeks: the first week at how low the poet had stooped; the second, that Philippe had no capital with which to import his own olives. The writing business was his only business, and it was a bad one.

  “If you’re so hard up you’re begging Salis for work, have him bail you out,” Tinchant said, waving his hand toward Erik, who had sat by silently during Philippe’s paean to Tinchant. “He’s got family money. So much he doesn’t want anyone to know where he lives. But Salis sent me one day to drop off some songs he didn’t trust me to learn. And I went. Like an errand boy,” he added, with an air of astonishment. “I really went.”

  Philippe stared at Erik, waiting for a joke or protest, a story about squatting in a rich widow’s apartment, maintaining his vows of artistic poverty. Literal vows, which Philippe had seen him make one night during the Chat Noir cabaret. One of the singers had been dressed in rags for a skit, and Erik borrowed a wedding veil from a pile of costumes in the Institute. He played his own wedding march, put a twist of paper round the woman’s finger, and kissed her on the lips. It was the only time Philippe had ever seen Erik touch a woman, much less kiss one. “My bride,” Erik yelled, then looked dismayed at the crowd’s joyful roar. “Not her. An idea. I’m marrying an idea. She’s simply a representation.” It was the only night that Philippe had ever seen Tinchant, after several cups of black coffee, swapped back in for Erik.

  “Maybe I did mean it the first way,” Tinchant said, looking back and forth at the two of them: Philippe’s wounded expression of betrayal, Erik’s of guilty discomfort. “Maybe no one gets what they want. Maybe that’s the way this place works after all.”

  One afternoon when Miguel had run out of new café articles to decode and Philippe had no new poems for him to praise or disparage, Miguel pulled out a battered guidebook to Paris, nearly thirty years old, and the boys tried yet again to plan their futures. But that day the conversation felt threadbare, ridiculous. They’d been doing this for years, Philippe thought, playing children’s games, but they weren’t children anymore. He asked if they could do something else instead.

  Miguel looked surprised. When he offered a pack of playing cards, Philippe didn’t have any better ideas. They played Truc into the evening, until they could barel
y see the numbers and suits, tilting their hands toward the orange glow that seeped through the wooden shutters closed against the heat. Finally Philippe stood, unlatched the window, and leaned out to feel if the air had cooled. On the street below a fruit vendor’s horse stamped and flung its tail across its hindquarters, sweeping off flies that settled again immediately. A faint breeze reached the window, and Philippe felt how his hair and shirt refused to move, stiff with dried sweat. He heard the squeak of the bed behind him as Miguel rose and placed a hand on Philippe’s shoulder, urging him backward. Miguel reached past him to pull the shutters closed again, and snicked the metal latch into place.

  “It’s dark,” Philippe said.

  Then Miguel kissed him. Of course Philippe should have realized this was coming. Their own parents had known, he understood later, and Philippe wondered which would humiliate his father more—thinking that his son was a sodomite, or that his son was so naïve he hadn’t even recognized the possibility. How had he convinced himself he would thrive in Paris when he didn’t even understand what was happening in Miguel’s bedroom? He was a fool, and he was going to live and die a fool, in this forsaken town in Catalonia.

  He pushed his embarrassment away. At least, this is what he told himself later about that moment. What he really pushed was Miguel, who staggered backward into the dresser and jostled the altar. The central cardboard panel, with the cheerful rabbit, fell forward over the candle flame. The candle went out, and the room was barely light enough for Philippe to register Miguel’s expression of abject hurt. Then the cardboard caught in a puff of smoke and flame. Miguel snatched it up and blew on it, which only made the flame leap higher, whereupon he unlatched the window and flung it outside. While Miguel had his back turned, Philippe grabbed his schoolbag and ran. He nearly collided with the fruit vendor in the street. The horse was nudging a hoof at the burned triptych, the scandalous pictures still unburned, and Philippe darted under the horse’s legs to grab it. The vendor shouted at him—was he trying to get his head kicked in? But Philippe emerged safely from beneath the horse with the cardboard. He burned the rest of it in the stove at home, destroying the evidence. But of what? he wondered. He was unsure what to call it. Miguel was going to hell, he decided. But Philippe couldn’t go to hell with him. Philippe needed to get to Paris.

  Erik invited Philippe to join him for long collaborative work sessions at the Auberge or other cafés, hours spent sketching out musical plays or ballets or full-length operas. They ordered drink after drink to hold their table, and staggered when they rose at the end of the day. They were often interrupted by friends of Erik’s doing the exact same thing, drinking so they had a place to work, and drinking too much ever to finish the work. These were invariably men with grand ambitions and terrible apartments. Stoveless, waterless, lightless rooms, cold enough in the winter to kill. The men gathered wherever they could and paid whatever it cost for the privilege. They ordered cheaply, sipped slowly, and tried to be so entertaining that the proprietors wouldn’t notice how little they drank. This was one reason, Philippe learned, that Montmartre had developed its international reputation for charm: everyone was afraid of being thrown out and having to go home.

  The ideas that came out of these café days felt to Philippe like vegetables—good only until they wilted or browned, sometimes all at once, sometimes over days or weeks, until even a sniff of his own work revolted him. We’re trying for a potato, he thought, or an apple—something that could last a long time, if properly stored. Something firm and fleshy and satisfying. Something people would pay for.

  At least, Philippe assumed they were trying for a potato. When he shared this metaphor, Erik looked nonplussed. “A potato? Really?”

  Erik never suggested they work at his apartment, which, if Tinchant was to be believed, would have offered plenty of room. Tinchant had given Philippe the address in an effort to enlist him as co-conspirator for a break-in. Erik went out every Sunday to eat a home-cooked dinner at his father’s apartment, Tinchant explained. “We won’t take anything, we’ll just cut all the piano strings. He’ll think it’s funny.” Philippe was pretty sure he wouldn’t.

  Philippe thought of his own father, who one evening had walked Philippe and his brothers to the harbor and asked them what was different. A stub of a Roman lighthouse had held vigil over Tarragona’s bay for more than a thousand years, until its final stones had collapsed into the water that afternoon. Philippe was the first to see the empty water and sky where the crumbling tower had once stood. His father told him with grudging approval that he was a boy who noticed things, and he went on to list for his son lucrative occupations where this talent for observation might be of use, poetry not included. In Paris, Philippe tried sometimes to conjure his father’s voice for comfort, for confidence: “You are a boy who notices things.” Boy, Philippe thought despairingly. Hopeless, helpless boy.

  A mutual friend, Alphonse, invited them both to an exhibition of “Incoherent Art,” to which Alphonse had contributed two paintings: First Communion of Young Chlorotic Girls in a Snowstorm (a blank piece of white paper stuck to a wall), and Tomato Harvest on the Shore of the Red Sea, by Apoplectic Cardinals (a solid red rectangle). On a nearby pedestal, beside a small label crediting Erik, sat a single baked potato. Philippe couldn’t decide how he felt. Angry? Foolish? Disappointed not to be given credit? Hungry, at the waste of a perfectly good potato, when he hadn’t eaten since yesterday?

  He glared at Erik, who was still standing in front of the red rectangle, chatting with Alphonse and another mutual friend, Narcisse, also an artist. Alphonse and Erik had attended the same school in Honfleur, although Alphonse had been several years ahead, and they’d rediscovered each other in Paris quite by accident. Philippe was terribly curious as to what Erik had been like as a boy, but hadn’t bothered asking; he assumed Alphonse would omit anything particularly revealing out of loyalty. This was an ongoing problem for Philippe—he’d made friends other than Erik, but they’d all been Erik’s friends first, which made them feel like they didn’t quite belong to him.

  “That was my idea,” Philippe protested, pointing at the potato when Erik finally turned around.

  “Not exactly,” Erik said.

  Philippe wondered if either Alphonse or Narcisse would acknowledge his claim, but neither had been present for the original conversation. Fair enough, he thought grudgingly. By potato, he had not meant an actual potato. He had not dreamed of an actual potato, baked or otherwise, being in any kind of art exhibition, incoherent or otherwise. Philippe was missing something, some instinct that Erik had in spades. He sometimes doubted Erik as a composer, but he never doubted his genius for incoherence.

  Philippe excused himself, gulping down a last glass of the gallery wine. On his way home he ducked into an alley to piss. As he opened his trousers, worn thread gave way and the top button popped off and skittered away into the dark. He crept after the sound, searching with his soles in the hope he might be able to feel the button beneath his disintegrating shoes. Not wanting to crawl—his trouser knees were nearly worn through already—he bent at the waist and pressed his palms to the ground, an awkward elephant walk. His right hand made contact with something wet and slimy he was glad he couldn’t see. A rat squeaked to ward off his groping left. He searched until his bent back was shrieking, his shoes and hands fouled. The alley had devoured his button. He tried to decide if there was a café-paper article in this, but he didn’t know how to make it funny. If it had happened to someone else, someone who had another pair of trousers, or sufficient remaining buttons on the fly to rearrange, a mother or sister or wife to do the mending, it might be funny. But this was happening to him, and he wanted to cry. He was hungry and exhausted and a failure, and now his trousers wouldn’t even stay up.

  He nearly greeted Erik with this litany—hungrytiredfailuretrousers—when Erik arrived home from the gallery to find him on the front stoop. Pride overrode misery, and Philippe managed to keep it simple: “Tinchant gave me your address
. Do you have any buttons?”

  “Buttons?”

  “For my trousers. I need a button. I don’t have needle or thread either.”

  “I do,” Erik said, after a pause. “I’ve got all those things.” He gestured Philippe inside and let the way upstairs to his apartment.

  Philippe waited just inside the door, his waistband gathered in his fist, until Erik, sure-footed in his own home, could make his way to a lamp and light it. The windows were heavily curtained, the room pitch-dark until the lamp flared. Light fell first on the piano Tinchant was so eager to sabotage, a walnut-colored upright with a bright, toothy keyboard, then on a plain wooden stool and a balding velvet armchair pulled up alongside, for a teacher or page-turner. The top of the piano was covered not just in folios of music but in teacups and plates and newspapers. As Philippe’s eyes adjusted, he saw that it was the only flat surface in the room. There was no other furniture.

  “Some trouble with my creditors,” Erik said. “I’ll be joining you on the Butte soon enough, but this address is better for attracting piano students. At least, that was the intention. As it turns out, the address doesn’t accomplish much. Plus the neighbors hate the noise.”