The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  Louise did not join him on the sofa. She sat in one of the wooden chairs at the nearby table and turned toward him. She looked at him appraisingly and asked if he had really bricked his wife into a wall and pushed chicken bones through a hole for her supper.

  He was at first baffled, then asked, “Do you mean the divorce papers? Is that what she wrote?”

  “You didn’t read them? That was brave. It must be nice not to have to care what anyone thinks.”

  But he did care what she thought. And he imagined the French authorities might care whether or not he’d bricked his wife into a wall. “I didn’t do anything to her. Is this public record? Could anyone read it?”

  “I wouldn’t be terribly concerned. I believe Cannu put some effort into locating the documents, to find out what kind of influences I am ‘so recklessly introducing into young Joseph’s life,’” she parroted.

  “Is there a private investigator crouched behind the drapery?” he joked.

  “He already thinks we’re sinning, so to hell with it. To hell with him.”

  Sinning? That was the word she chose? He didn’t want her regretting this, either dinner or whatever else she intended. “I should leave.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I can’t live the rest of my life as if Cannu might jump out from behind the sofa.”

  “It’s—what?—nine years until Joseph comes into his inheritance?”

  She looked at him, expressionlessly. “Could you stay afraid for nine straight years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You couldn’t. You haven’t even had practice.”

  “I’ve been afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  Of himself? His own desires? His own stupidity or cowardice? He thought how privileged that might sound to her, how modern, a man afraid of himself.

  She finally took mercy on his silence. “We’re only half-done. I can’t stay this afraid forever.”

  “Half-done?”

  “With life.”

  “That’s a cheery way to put it. Are you counting down?”

  “Not down, exactly. But I can count.” She sounded defensive, but he didn’t understand why. “Besides, we’re not doing anything wrong,” she said, as if convincing herself. “And if I am to be punished,” she added, pouring them each more wine, “I would like it finally to be for something I have actually done.”

  They ate dinner. It was awkward in places, but no worse than some of his other dates. Most of the evening wasn’t awkward at all. They both laughed easily, usually at some story Philippe had about Erik. She kept comparing his anecdotes to scenes from books, rather than experiences of her own, and he supposed this was evidence of how circumscribed her life had been. But gradually all he noticed was how well-read she was. They liked many of the same authors. This wasn’t something he’d had before, certainly not with a woman. There might genuinely be something here, he started to think. Not just some obscure maneuver against Joseph’s trustee, or against her own loneliness, but a struck match, a lit candle.

  It was this feeling that carried him into bed with her, against his better instincts. “I don’t want to do anything you’ll regret,” he said, feebly and awfully late, given that both of them were naked, his body hovering over hers, hard against the softness of her thigh.

  “Please,” she said.

  She’d talked very briefly about Pierre’s death at dinner, and it was strange to know, with such precision, how long it had been since she’d made love. At least, he assumed he knew. Louise was full of surprises, but Philippe was pretty sure she hadn’t invited a man over for the night before. When would she have had the chance?

  He’d been Camille’s first. He’d never done exactly this before, been someone’s second, and he was as slow and gentle as he knew how. It wasn’t like with Camille at all, when he started to move in earnest. Louise knew there was pleasure here to be had, and she wanted it, worked toward it with him. She put her legs around his back and pulled him in harder. This was better than he’d expected it to be. He reached between them to touch her, and after she came he finished into his hand. He almost didn’t remember to pull out—he and Camille had been taking their chances. But he had enough presence of mind to avoid unnecessary risks.

  The same philosophy should have propelled him out the door that night, but they fell asleep in each other’s arms and awoke to the sound of Joseph letting himself into the apartment. He had a stomachache and decided to walk home early, he announced. Louise flew out of bed quickly enough to close the bedroom door, but once they were dressed Philippe still had to walk through the apartment to leave. They both thought briefly of mad plots—rolling him in carpets, having him hide under the bed until Louise could get Joseph out of the apartment. Would Joseph at least go to bed with his stomachache? But then he shouted to complain that he wanted to play with his tin train set at the table, and why were two sets of dirty dinner dishes left out?

  “It will look worse if we seem like we’re hiding something,” Louise said.

  Philippe walked at a measured pace into the living room. The boy looked up like a fish pulled from the river, lips gaping silently. Philippe, trying to convey gentlemanly interest to Louise and absolute disinterest to the boy, took Louise’s hand, bowed, and let himself out.

  After that Louise disappeared, and by the time Philippe heard from Erik what had happened—learned of his own inadvertent role in the subsequent drama—it was too late. He said he wanted to write to her and asked Erik for her address.

  “I wouldn’t,” Erik said. “I don’t think she’ll want to hear from you, honestly.”

  “This isn’t my fault,” Philippe said.

  “I know. But I still wouldn’t write. Louise tends to stay angry at the wrong people.”

  There was an air of love, but also of superiority, in the way Erik said this, as if it was his own expansive ability to forgive that allowed him to recognize Louise’s faults.

  Philippe had let a hundred moments like this go by over the years. For the first time, he didn’t. “You cut people off for no reason at all,” he said. “You’re impossible.”

  Erik huffed, blew air out and down into his mustache and beard. If his friend held this brief moment of truth against him, Philippe decided, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. It might be nice to have a break from looking after him, worrying about him, buying him lunch. Maybe, Philippe admitted to himself, that was why he’d said it.

  Philippe’s second marriage lasted only slightly longer than his first, but the third one stuck. She wrote about the cinema for a ladies’ magazine—reviews and celebrity profiles—and published detective novels under a male pseudonym. When she got the idea for a new series with a recurring protagonist, a dashing Spanish investigator, she asked on a lark if she could publish them under Philippe’s original name, since he wasn’t using it.

  “Why not?” he said, but one of the strangest moments of his life was walking into a bookshop and seeing a book he hadn’t written with his old name on the cover. He thought about sending copies to Tarragona and pretending the novel was his. But the prose was, his wife would have been first to say, rather rushed, and the villain revealed rather clunkily. Philippe didn’t think he could do better, but he decided to let everyone back home keep thinking he could.

  He did write one final letter to Miguel, dropping any pretense of lightness, begging to know what exactly Miguel was up to: who he was with, how his life had turned out. This need to know the ending of the story he’d walked out of—was it the writer in Philippe, or the human, or the old friend? All three?

  The image on the card that came in reply was familiar: sun-faded Tarragona, blue water and yellowed stones. At least that was one thing he knew—that Miguel had stayed in their hometown. But then he had a sudden, paranoid suspicion that Miguel had moved away, that he’d hoarded a supply of Tarragona postcards before leaving and was forwarding his mail just to mislead Philippe, so that the one thing he thought he knew about Miguel’s life was wrong.
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  Philippe turned the postcard over to read the short message, neatly recorded in handwriting as familiar as his own: Don’t you understand by now? I’m not going to tell you. You don’t get to find out. You never get to know.

  Louise

  — 14 —

  So as to make a hollow

  FOR WEEKS BEFORE I ASKED PHILIPPE TO DINNER, I HAD dreaded reading the mail. Albertine’s letters, which accompanied the remittances from Cannu, informed me that Fortin had grown frail enough to employ both a full-time housekeeper and a part-time nurse at his home. His old business associates checked in on him often, she wrote, but no doubt he would benefit from family attention. His own letters mentioned nothing of this, and when I wrote offering to visit, he dismissed the suggestion. I could tell this was a test, and that I was meant to insist on coming. I could guess what would happen after that. He was too old for us to believe in a meaningful recovery, in the resumption of his solitary life. If he needed help now, he would need it for however much longer he had.

  I knew what I owed him. But my heart shriveled at the prospect of traveling from Bellenau to my father’s deathbed to Fortin’s, in a house that, even on its cheeriest days, had always felt like a mausoleum to me. I simply could not do it. No—I didn’t want to. If Fortin had demanded I come, or shamed me for my absence, I think I would have gone, too dutiful or too timid to refuse. But he insisted my presence was unnecessary, pretended that my avoidance did not trouble him, which allowed me to pretend the same.

  So I pretended, and pretended. I did not go even for a weekend, because I knew that once I was there our mutual lie would be exposed. It would be obvious that he wanted my help and that he expected me to provide it. I used Joseph as an excuse: I couldn’t pull him out of school now that he was, barely, applying himself. In truth, Joseph cared nothing for Paris or for his school, and continued to speak of Cannu as if he were some great mountaineer who had summited Mount Manhood and promised to belay Joseph up the slopes after him. I had hoped that Joseph could learn to look up to his schoolmasters, or the fathers of school friends, or pretty much anybody other than Cannu. The workers who drained our building’s septic tank would have pleased me better. But I didn’t feel I could speak against Joseph’s admiration without his contrariness making him cleave all the closer. If he thought so much of his uncle, perhaps he would think better of me the better I pretended to get along with Cannu.

  Fortin’s letters were prideful to the end, even as his handwriting grew slanted and spidery. When it was replaced with a feminine hand, the dictation full of misspellings, guilt overpowered me. I began making plans to come, trying to figure out what I might possibly do with Joseph that would meet with both his approval and Cannu’s. But first there was Eugénie’s concert, with Philippe standing there, looking handsome and, well, available.

  I had thought that once Joseph and I were finally on our own, I might have another chance at love. Or, since I am being honest, let us set the bar lower: another chance at romance. A man on my arm. A man who touched a strand of my hair where it came loose. It might have become love, but it wasn’t yet, not when I asked Philippe into my home and my bed. I was preparing myself to go to Le Havre, but not without something to fortify me for one more round of nursing. I wanted at least a taste of what my life might look like after this next death vigil was over.

  I assumed I would see Philippe again. I hoped to. I assumed I would see Fortin again. I did not expect him to die so suddenly.

  Joseph came home from school, unsuspecting, to a storm of grief. “I suppose he was like a father?” he asked, trying to understand.

  I shook my head, but struggled to offer another definition. My great-uncle would never have called me “Daughter,” but he’d cared for me when no one else had been willing to, and I had not done the same.

  Joseph was kind, truly kind, for days, and I was so relieved that underneath the surliness his heart was still one I recognized. He tried to make me dinner that night, although he didn’t so much as know how to light the stove. The soup was awful but I ate it ecstatically, and then he washed the dishes.

  I left him in Paris, with Conrad and Mathilde, to attend the funeral. At the service in Le Havre, I could feel the judgment, and I thought that I deserved it. Although Fortin had outlived many of the people I’d known as a girl and had never quite been friendly, he’d been esteemed in the town, and the pews were full of people outraged by my callousness. To show up only now? The dead were the dead. They were beyond our respects. I had failed to come when it counted. I could hear the whispers. Not just disapproval but surprise: little Louise, the dutiful orphan? Ran off to Paris and refused her obligations? Had I hid my black soul for all those years, or been devout then and become corrupted since? Or was I simply ordinary, and they had to fear that their own daughters might run away and not return? They decided, of course, that I was a demon.

  I slept at the house, in my old room. So little had changed. The rugs and drapes and wallpaper—all the same. Same linens on the beds, threadbare now and smelling of damp. The same pictures in the same places on the walls, only with a few removed, the rectangles where they’d hung much darker than the rest of the sun-faded walls. The house was as haunted as Bellenau had ever been, except that its ghosts were more modest. No crumbling elegance, just crumble. I found the missing photographs in the master bedroom, where a forest of framed pictures had sprouted on the dresser and the washstand, all of them positioned to be visible from the bed. Estelle and Berthe, mostly. Some townscapes, ones I knew he’d been particularly proud of, for their composition or technical achievement. There was one of Joseph, taken at a photographer’s studio in Cherbourg; in front of a silly painted backdrop of a country lane he stood stiffly in suit jacket and short pants, with white knee socks and shoes polished to a high shine. “I could have taken one better than this,” Fortin had said when I’d sent him a copy—I hadn’t meant any insult, but he’d taken the photograph as a professional slight.

  Still, the one photograph of Joseph was one more than I could find of myself. It was true that I’d never liked having my photograph taken; I could count on my fingers every picture that had ever been made. But there had been a wedding portrait, and pictures of Joseph and me together, when he was both an infant and a bit older. And there’d been at least a couple of Estelle and me, one when I was small and one shortly before she died. My great-uncle’s bedroom was a purposeful erasure, and I didn’t know whether he’d felt this way toward me for years, perhaps the whole of his life, or whether, alone during his final illness, he’d slipped some photograph from its frame to burn it in the stove or close it between the pages of a book. I looked for evidence one way or another, fanned the pages of his small library, flipped through boxes of glass plates, rifled every drawer. What was my place in this house? What had it ever been?

  It was in this way, with a snowfall of paper from an opened drawer, that I learned I was not his heir. As with the telegrams before the Family Council, I could think of nothing to do with my advance warning except arrive at the lawyer’s office with a stony air of respectability. Cannu all but rubbed his hands together in glee, though I don’t think he knew Fortin’s intentions before then, at least not for sure. There was more money than anyone had guessed, given how frugally he’d lived, and Fortin had bequeathed it all to Joseph. Because Joseph was a minor, access to the funds would rest with Cannu, as his financial and now, with the death of Fortin, legal guardian. I didn’t know whether Fortin had made the bequest before, or after, I’d failed to visit him. Did he think Cannu knew better than I what was best for all of us, or had he known this would be a disaster for me, and relished the thought of my punishment? If he’d somehow been there, I would have slapped him all over again, and as my palm itched I wondered whether I’d been right to distrust him then, or whether striking him had turned him against me. There was no knowing—neither the order of events, nor my own part in them—and there was no comfort to be found in any of the possible scenarios.

&n
bsp; Cannu wished to speak with me privately after the lawyer dismissed us. “Lunch?” he proposed.

  I laughed, sounding half-unhinged, and told him I already had my train ticket for the next departure and had to get to the station. This wasn’t true, but the only tactic I could think of was to run. Half of me worried I might arrive in Paris to find Joseph already snatched away. I knew that refusing to meet with Cannu was probably not a wise strategy, but at the same time I couldn’t see how any conversation between the two of us, on our current terms, would go in a favorable direction for me.

  “I see,” he said. “Busy as ever.”

  One thing I had rarely been, since marrying Pierre, was busy. How had I spent them, all those hours, at Bellenau and after? I had raised my son and tried to school him. But I had also read books, and taken long walks, and played the piano. During my father’s illness I’d taught some of Eugénie’s lessons for her, and tried to find some pupils of my own. But I knew no one in the city, had no music diplomas or prizes or references, and had largely failed. After my father’s death I’d signed up for a typing course, thinking I might find a secretarial job, but the instructor told me at the end of the session that I was ten times too slow, ten years too old, two-tenths too plain, and still wearing a wedding ring to boot: I’d never be hired. I had done nothing in my life, and the reason I could understand Cannu’s contempt for me is that I felt it too. I have hated myself as hard and as often as I have hated Cannu or Albertine, and I have hated them well and long and truly. I thought such hate must eventually burn itself out like an electric bulb, its glass blackened and ghostly. But somehow it kept glowing. Keeps glowing.

  In the earliest Spanish classes I taught at the resettlement center I began with what I thought of as the usual questions, the ones I remembered first learning to answer: How long have you been in Buenos Aires? Why did you come?