The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  The picture he made that day didn’t have anything to do with the garden, with the hedges or paths or scenery beyond. It was a picture of the Place du Tertre in late autumn. The trees in the middle of the square were barren, their dark branches splayed delicately across the gray sky, a few leaves still clinging. The colors were flat, the trees out of proportion, but for a very first picture it was extraordinary. The most striking part was how much Maurice remembered. The placement of the windows, the colors of the awnings, the size of the chimneys—everything was correct.

  “Do you remember everything like this?” Suzanne asked him. “So precisely.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Why would anyone use models? I wouldn’t have had a job.” Good Lord, she thought, no wonder he drinks.

  But that couldn’t be the whole reason. She’d known plenty of drunks, but never one like Maurice. His drinking seemed both reasonless and pleasureless, largely involuntary. At Montmagny, he’d leave for the day to paint en plein air with the neck of a bottle sticking out of his rucksack. She’d go out with the dogs to look for him before dark fell and find him sitting, head lolling, too drunk to stand, somehow still painting with the canvas laid in the grass beside him, because he could no longer reach the easel. The paintings would have bits of dirt and grass dried into the paint, and she despaired at the lost sales, but André managed to convince gallery owners the detritus was a selling point—intentional texture, traces of the painting’s terroir.

  She had wondered, of course, if she was the reason. Lord knew Maurice’s doctors had been ready enough to blame Suzanne: her inattention and her poverty and her “wantonness.” She had blamed herself hard enough for the guilt to eat a hole in her stomach, which burned when she drank coffee. But she’d come to question the Mother Theory. She rebelled at the idea that anything her own mother had done or not done explained who Suzanne herself became. She dismissed also the Gift Theory, to which more recent doctors had subscribed, suggesting that Maurice’s artistic gifts came naturally bundled with terrible tortures. Maurice was a person, not an equation, and whatever spurred him to drink seemed beyond anyone’s understanding, including his. Whatever it was, she didn’t know if he even wanted to be rid of it.

  Although it was March the weather was still more winter than spring. Outside the police station, Maurice shivered and asked his mother if she’d brought him a coat.

  “I assumed you had one when you went out last night,” Suzanne said.

  “Maybe I did. I don’t remember. I don’t have one now, though. Where are we? I want to stop and buy a coat.”

  “We should check at home first. It’s probably there,” she said, although she had no idea if that was true.

  “If it’s the money, I’ll just make another painting. I can have one done tomorrow.”

  Among Maurice’s gifts was his astonishing speed. He could start a painting in the morning with the goal of finishing it by evening—enough time to drop it by a dealer and receive money for a bender that night. Purely from a business perspective, it drove André and Suzanne crazy. As painters, it drove them even crazier that most of the pictures were still good. “You’re saturating the market,” André would scold, though the market for pictures like these seemed limitless—Maurice’s elegant, moody paintings were all of recognizable streetscapes and landmarks, infused with a palpable sense of place. His weaker paintings lapsed into picture-postcard nostalgia, but his better ones felt both atmospheric and somehow real. At a time when some pranksters at the Lapin Agile had tied a brush to the tail of a donkey and exhibited the results as exemplars of a new school of “excessivism,” the easy beauty of Maurice’s work was a potential gold mine.

  Damn, she’d briefly thought of the donkey, and wished she had put her goat to work all those years ago. But no—excessivism was a joke. She had not come all this way—this long, circuitous way back to the Rue Cortot—to make, or be, a joke.

  Maurice, because he’d tied himself into a series of outrageously bad business agreements, was neither a joke nor a gold mine. He’d signed multiple conflicting dealer-exclusivity agreements, putting himself on retainer to one of them for several paintings every month, and for a pitiful lump sum. Compositions he set aside as poor work he later removed from the studio late at night to barter for liquor. Suzanne started hiding both the worst and the very best of his paintings.

  Maurice had been livid when he realized his canvases were disappearing. He’d ransacked the apartment looking for them, ripped open the mattresses and knocked books and china off the shelves.

  “We need to protect your reputation,” André said. “For quality,” he added, since Maurice was at least as renowned a drunk as he was a painter.

  Maurice threw a vase at his head. André ducked and the vase exploded against a wall.

  “We’re trying to protect you,” Suzanne said to Maurice, and glared at André, who wasn’t helping matters. Quality made Maurice sound like a factory, with André and Suzanne serving as product inspectors.

  Maurice pulled a picture off the wall, a sketch of Suzanne that Toulouse-Lautrec had once made, and spat on it. Then he pulled down a Degas, a large oil of a dancer backstage that had been a gift to her from the artist. Maurice started ripping the backing from the frame, and Suzanne didn’t know if he thought his own paintings might be hidden inside or if he just wanted to destroy something that mattered to her.

  She and André both moved to stop him, but she got there first. “No,” she said, “no,” and grabbed at him, trying to pin his arms.

  He flung her away hard and she landed in the pieces of the broken vase, cutting her legs. André stood frozen, a seeming moment of indecision about whether to go to her or keep his grip on Maurice. Only once Maurice saw the blood seeping through his mother’s stockings did he apologize and begin to cry.

  Now, standing outside the police station beside her coatless son, Suzanne asked him who owed him the most money.

  “Nobody owes me. They’re all paid up.”

  “Who’s paid you the least for the largest number of pictures?”

  Maurice thought about it. “Libaude. But he’s been straight with me. He hasn’t violated the retainer agreement.”

  “Well, it was a terrible agreement,” Suzanne insisted, and started walking brusquely up the street.

  Maurice followed her like one of the wolfhounds and asked where they were going.

  “To Libaude’s gallery,” she said. “For money.”

  “For a coat?” he said, incredulously. “I’ll just make another painting. Actually, now that we’re moving, I think I’ll be all right in my jacket.”

  It wasn’t for a coat, Suzanne explained. They needed money for treatment. It was what the officer had recommended, before Maurice appeared in front of a judge. If they could show that Maurice was pursuing treatment, the officer said, they’d have a good chance at a reduced sentence, maybe only a fine.

  When he didn’t protest, she assumed the plan was acceptable to him. Then they were in Libaude’s gallery, asking for money in a horrible little back office that smelled of cologne and armpits, and Maurice asked, “A hospital? Who’s ill?”

  She and Libaude both looked at him.

  “You,” Suzanne finally said. “You are.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. Yes, my love.”

  He looked vaguely around the room. He didn’t disagree. “Not the first place. I don’t want to go back there. The first one was awful.”

  “I didn’t know it would be like that,” she said. “We’ll find a good place this time.”

  “First one? What number hospital would this be?” Libaude asked. When Suzanne declined to answer, he said, “No sense throwing good money after bad.”

  “You’ve been taking outrageous advantage of him,” she said. “You know it. I know it. André knows it. Maurice knows it, deep down.” She talked about Maurice as if he wasn’t there. “Do your buyers know it? How do you think they’d react, finding out your markup?”
r />   “Are you threatening me?”

  “I came here to appeal to your sense of fairness. But if you don’t have one, then yes, I’m threatening you.”

  Libaude looked at her appraisingly. She’d known variations of that look all her life and felt both pride and a little regret in the fact that Libaude was focusing it on her wits and her will, not her appearance. “How long’s he likely to go away for?”

  “Long enough that you’ll run out of his paintings to sell. In a hospital they’ll let him keep painting.” She hoped this was true. “In jail they won’t.”

  Libaude gave a wicked smile. “Ah. So that’s why you’re really here. It’s hardly my problem that you and your toy soldier live off of Maurice.”

  “André and I earn,” she said, indignant.

  Libaude looked skeptical.

  “If you want security, against a loan…” Suzanne had come here hoping for a grant, not a loan, but things were not going in her favor. She offered up the three pictures she’d accepted for the last Salon d’Automne. “I don’t have as much inventory as Maurice—no one paints as quickly as Maurice, you know that—but maybe we could arrange something.”

  Libaude asked if these were from the same lot that hadn’t sold during her show at the Gallerie Laffitte.

  They were. It had been such a victory, her first solo show—the first solo show ever by a woman at that gallery. But sales had been poor. Story of my life, she thought, meaning only her life as a painter. Sales had been great when she’d been selling her face, her figure, her ability to hold a pose. But her paintings were considered difficult, the colors rather startling, the bodies unsettling, the women’s faces harsh and unsentimental. She was so proud of them, and they sold so poorly. She wasn’t sure she and André could make rent on the apartment if Maurice went away for any length of time, and she was ashamed of this need, but there it was.

  “I don’t want your paintings,” Libaude said. “No offense intended, I just can’t sell them. And I don’t want anything else from you that you might have it in mind to offer,” he added, with a leer.

  Suzanne’s jaw went slack. Libaude? There had never been a time, ever, when she would have offered this weasel any piece of her. For nearly a decade she’d been with only Paul or André. Reputation, she thought bitterly, remembering the fight with Paul. Would people speak to her this way for the rest of her life? How old or accomplished or rich would she have to become before they stopped? She looked at Maurice, embarrassed but also wondering if he would defend her, and saw that he’d fallen asleep slumped in his chair. There was a bubble of drool at the corner of his mustache, which she wiped away with her handkerchief.

  “You treat him like a child,” Libaude said.

  “You treat him like an indentured servant, or an idiot.”

  “Idiot savant, maybe.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “Maurice told me once that you have extra inventory squirreled away somewhere. His paintings, not yours.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Bring me that. Bring me all of it, and I’ll pay to send him away somewhere.”

  She didn’t like that phrase, send him away, but she supposed it was accurate. “It needs to be enough for a private hospital,” she said. “A good one.”

  “And what’s the going rate on one of those?”

  “Three hundred francs a month,” she said, and Libaude raised an eyebrow. This was the cost of the priciest facilities she’d researched, and was astronomically more than Maurice’s current retainer. She’d started with the figure to leave room to negotiate, but when Libaude didn’t immediately refuse, she pressed. “He deserves the best, doesn’t he? We’d all benefit.” This was true, Suzanne reassured herself. She and André and Libaude would benefit, but Maurice would too—Maurice most of all.

  Libaude tapped his fingers rapidly against the desk in some inscrutable pattern that Suzanne guessed was a calculation, a projection of what the best might be worth to him in the long run. “Where is the best? Can paintings be fetched weekly, or did you mean to send him abroad?”

  “There’s a clinic in Sannois,” Maurice said.

  Suzanne and Libaude startled. She didn’t know if he’d woken or if he’d only been imitating sleep before.

  “It’s supposed to be the best,” Maurice said.

  Suzanne had heard of it, but how had Maurice? Had he consulted with someone independently, thought about admitting himself? Did he want to get better? If so, what had stopped him? Only the cost? Or did he feel he couldn’t leave her, couldn’t stop painting? She felt a fluttering of something inside her that had both wings and claws.

  She returned with Maurice back to the apartment, where he peeled off his jacket and shoes, climbed into bed, and fell asleep. He usually slept most of the day after a bad night. She hung his jacket up and put a glass of water on his bedside table. The fact that he had a bedside table, his own room, and a soft bed with white sheets was proof, she felt, that she hadn’t made a total mess of things. She kissed him on the forehead and left the door cracked open.

  Her mother had risen and made herself lunch, which she shared with Suzanne in near silence. Most of their meals were now silent. They’d once had a steady repertoire of recriminations over Maurice, over how one or the other of them might have prevented his drinking. Then her mother had made several years of threats to move back to Bessines-sur-Gartempe, to which Suzanne was supposed to offer reassurances that her presence was necessary and cherished. She suspected that her mother really did wish, at least sometimes, to return to Bessines, although nearly everyone she knew there had left or died. But there wasn’t enough money for either of them to live separately. Now they scraped their forks against the plates like the last two people left inside a dining car, riding together in uneasy companionship to the distant end of the line. The dogs came to beg, but her mother shooed them away and asked if she should make a plate for Maurice.

  “He’s asleep for now,” Suzanne said. After finishing lunch, she delivered a plate to the studio for André, leaving her mother with the dishes.

  André questioned the terms of the deal she’d struck with Libaude. “I wish you’d talked to me first.”

  “We don’t have to give him everything. He’ll have no idea what we’ve held back.”

  André offered to sort through the paintings with her while Maurice was sleeping. Suzanne declined his help, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. Was she that determined to protect his studio time, to keep him from resenting Maurice the way Paul had? Why didn’t she want him to know where she kept the paintings? She was relieved when André withdrew to his studio.

  “Did you turn the clocks back?” she asked, since he’d told her to remind him.

  “Not yet. I’ll do it later.”

  She left by the front door but then walked around the block and came through the back garden of the building across the street. She’d known when they moved back to Montmartre that she had to get at least some of Maurice’s paintings out of the apartment, ideally out of her building. The clumsiest ones had to be extracted before Maurice, in the grip of a thirst stronger than either his pride or his critical acumen, sold his own mistakes into posterity, and his bad days hung for decades in someone’s parlor. The best paintings she worried would be similarly sold for quick cash, when they deserved so much more. It would have proven difficult to remove large canvases to some bank vault off the Butte with any regularity. She’d tried some of the landlords of neighboring buildings, on the hunt for a storage space, however small, to rent.

  It was Erik’s old landlord who’d finally had something. The man remembered her from her first stint in the neighborhood, nearly twenty years ago now, and even commented on her and Erik having once been a couple.

  “Only briefly,” Suzanne said. “I’m surprised you’d remember that.”

  “If I’d ever seen him with anyone else, maybe I wouldn’t. But you were the only one.”

  Suzanne tested the words for blame, as if the
landlord might suspect her of doing something fiendish or irrevocable to Erik’s heart. But he sounded matter-of-fact; his old tenant’s solitude had been merely one eccentricity among many.

  He offered to show her a closet, a few feet wide and about the depth of a man lying down. There was a set of shelves on one side with maintenance supplies, but the left-hand wall was clear. The small, high window on the back wall let in so little light that she wouldn’t have to worry about any fading of the paintings, and only a little about moisture. This would suit her, she told the landlord, and thanked him.

  He should thank her, the landlord said. He hadn’t gotten any money out of this space since Erik, who was so desperate to stay in the building when he could no longer pay for his upstairs apartment, had agreed to move into this room.

  “You had someone living here?” Suzanne said, with horror.

  The landlord grew defensive. He thought he’d been telling a funny story, not a horrible one. “No one forced him into it,” he said. “He got a piano in here and a cot alongside. It was homier than you’d think.”

  But there was absolutely nothing homey about this oppressive closet. It was hardly fit for a stray dog, let alone a person.

  “Didn’t do him any harm,” the landlord said, squirming under Suzanne’s disapproving gaze. “He’s a published musician now! For Christmas my niece asked for sheet music of some piece he wrote.”

  Suzanne took in this information with surprise and dueling sensations of relief, on Erik’s behalf, and jealousy on her own. People were paying money for Erik’s music, but still weren’t paying money for her paintings. “What kind of music?”