The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “Who knows. I didn’t ask her to play it. The point is, he’s still at it. He’s doing all right.”

  Remembering this exchange now as she returned to the closet to catalog Maurice’s paintings, Suzanne reflected on how someone could be published and not be “all right.” You could have a solo show at the Gallerie Laffitte and still be financially dependent on your own son. You could love your son and not have any idea how to help him.

  Once in the storage room, she propped open both the window and the door for the afternoon light, but it was still dim. The worst paintings she should probably just destroy. But she couldn’t do it. His work, however little value he seemed to place on any of it, belonged to him.

  And the best of the pictures? They were so very, very good. So were her paintings, she thought, in their own hard-won and unmarketable way. She believed that. But she also worried that if people knew her name a hundred years from now, it was going to be as Maurice’s mother. She loved him and she hated this.

  She could destroy his best pictures too. He wouldn’t even remember he’d painted them. No one would ever know.

  She’d once marveled to Degas about her son’s bizarre, only recently discovered gifts.

  “He came by them honestly,” Degas had told her, surprised at her surprise. “Child of a painter. He’s got it in his blood.”

  Why was Degas so sure he knew who the father was? Suzanne wondered, annoyed, then with a rush of pleasure realized Degas meant her. Artist begetting artist. These paintings belonged to Maurice and to her in a way they didn’t to André, which was perhaps why she hadn’t wanted him to know where they were. She would never destroy these. She would safeguard these pictures as long and as well as she could, because she didn’t trust Maurice to and because she couldn’t imagine anyone else willing to put up with Maurice. Even so, she’d unsuccessfully tried to convince a succession of maids at Montmagny that he was fixable, a real catch, if they could look past the obvious. She was so afraid of him outliving her. If he were alone, she could imagine him ending up in a closet exactly like this one, painting picture after picture like an automaton in the near dark while Libaude dropped off bottles and took the empties away. In her imagination he wore an old frock coat like Erik’s, threadbare and foul.

  It was a vision from a nightmare, and a fear rose up in her so sharp and wild that she put her fist in her mouth to keep from making a sound. She finished her hurried inventory of the paintings, put the small notebook and pencil stub in her pocket, and backed out of the room. She didn’t want to avert her eyes, as if in a moment’s inattention she might glance back and find Maurice already there, imprisoned.

  So distracted and afraid was she that she walked straight out the front door, with no effort at misdirection. She stopped when she realized, and looked up at her apartment windows across the street. A face appeared in the glass at André’s end of the studio, but so shadowed she couldn’t tell who it was. She desperately hoped it wasn’t Maurice, that he wouldn’t put two and two together and ransack the closet cache. But even if it was André, or her mother, she felt exposed, as if she’d stepped carelessly from behind an atelier changing screen not realizing she was naked. There was always supposed to be a moment when she removed her robe or sheet. There was always supposed to be a decision.

  When she arrived home André was in the kitchen making coffee. He didn’t ask her why she might have been inside the building across the street—and wouldn’t he, if he’d been the one to see her?

  She felt the first flare of a suspiciousness that would come to plague them, although its later incarnations would be about other women: was there someone younger, prettier, less encumbered? For years and years there wasn’t, and by the time André admitted there was, he and Suzanne had been together so long that everyone was shocked by the divorce. It had been such a good match, their friends mourned: how rare it was to find someone who suited so well, and to have the strength to choose each other when everyone else thought the pairing must be a mistake.

  She declined the coffee André had made and went to Maurice’s door. It was cracked open the way she’d left it, and she peered inside. He was still asleep, still in his shirtsleeves and trousers, his breathing slack and slow. The glass of water on the bedside table was still full. Her mother was sitting in the room’s only chair. She held a book on her lap, but her gaze, once Suzanne noticed her sitting there, was on her daughter. “Have you been here long?” Suzanne whispered.

  Her mother shook her head. “I just sat down.”

  “You don’t have to stay with him.”

  “I can read here as well as anywhere. And you’ve got deadlines.”

  Suzanne nodded, but instead of going to her studio, she sat on the floor by the bed. She wanted so badly to touch and hold some part of Maurice, but she was afraid to wake him. She leaned her head on the edge of the mattress and closed her eyes. The chair creaked, and she wondered what complaint her mother was readying—whether about Maurice, or about her aimless days, or about Suzanne’s, full of striving, and how little it had gotten her. But there was only the rustle of her mother’s skirts, full and old-fashioned, and the flap of a blanket. Then a weight settled across her shoulders, and when she opened her eyes, her mother was resuming her chair, having risen to wrap the extra coverlet from the foot of the bed around Suzanne. The room wasn’t cold, but both of them knew that wasn’t the point of the gesture. Pierrot, the wolfhound, nosed into the room and lay down with his head on her thigh.

  Everything in this apartment was still taking place nine minutes and twenty-one seconds in the future, she thought, scratching behind the dog’s ears. Maybe that had given Maurice enough time to spy on her, dive back into bed, perfectly rearrange himself, and calm his breathing. Or maybe it had given André time to start the coffee. Or maybe the face had been a visitor from some parallel timeline, now collapsed into the ordinary day. She knew this was all nonsense, but she wanted it to be a magical avenue of thinking, a world tucked between worlds, like the morning she’d spent in the train station with Erik so long ago. Time travel. What might be possible in those nine minutes? Not much, she thought. But something.

  Suzanne would begin following Erik’s career in the years ahead, relieved there was enough of a career for her to follow, not so much for Erik’s sake as for Maurice’s. The only connection between the two was in her head, but she needed them both to stay outside that room, that terrible dim closet, and if Erik could make it, with what Suzanne believed was a mere fraction of Maurice’s talent (and hers, she thought), then maybe Maurice would be all right. She bought tickets to things like a Metachoric Festival, and a bizarre dance recital in which the star was bedecked in a tiered tulle skirt and midriff-baring top, her face a blank white mask with tiny, sinister eyeholes. La Belle Excentrique, it was called, and André agreed to go with her while Maurice stayed home. At least they’d left him at home, and she was hoping he would still be there when they returned.

  “Eccentric, yes,” André said afterward. “I wouldn’t have called it beautiful. Think it was supposed to be about you?”

  “I doubt it,” Suzanne said. But someone had chosen to stage it, and people had bought tickets, and when they walked out through the lobby, Erik was surrounded by well-wishers. She felt again the flutter in her chest, more wings than claws.

  If she could have predicted the plaque that would someday be placed on the little house in Bessines-sur-Gartempe where she was born, complete with a pompous unveiling ceremony, bunting, and speeches, she might have felt the same way about herself. Wings and claws, but mostly wings. The plaque would indeed identify her as Maurice’s mother, but it would also call them both painters: Maurice a “famous” one and Suzanne a “great” one.

  Erik

  — 16 —

  With amazement

  A PHONE RINGS. CUE TIN CAN. CUE RATTLE OF KNOB. CUE JAR of marbles, rolled across the floor, caught under a stagehand’s foot and rolled back again. Cue jar of marbles sliding past the stagehand and tang
ling in the curtain ropes. Cue cursing. Cue typewriter, even though no one can hear it, the sound buried in the din.

  Serge Diaghilev, founder and manager of the Ballets Russes, watches the rehearsal from the middle of the main floor at the Théâtre du Châtelet. He turns to Erik, sitting beside him, and shakes his head. Jean Cocteau, on Erik’s other side, leans in, and now both men are in Erik’s space, his air. In his way.

  “They’re drowned out,” Diaghilev says. “Your noises.”

  The noises were Cocteau’s idea, originally, and Erik doesn’t know whether to defend them or admit to being usurped. “If I remove some of the brass,” he says, “perhaps it will clarify the sound.”

  “Or we could add more typewriters,” Cocteau suggests. “You wanted it to sound modern.”

  Erik points out that Stravinsky managed modern, managed an honest-to-God riot, with the same orchestra instruments everyone else used. This seems the greater glory.

  Cocteau stares at him, his words hanging unspoken but deafening between them: Ah, but you aren’t Stravinsky.

  I could be better, Erik thinks, but cannot bring himself to say it aloud. His younger self would have said it. His younger self would have taken out an illustrated ad in a newspaper just to proclaim it and would have been satisfied at being known for the assertion itself: the terms by which he announced his greatness. (Let the greatness itself remain mercifully unexamined.)

  This ballet will be examined. Cocteau has seen to that, if not with the typewriter then simply with the scenario itself, a riff on the flashy publicity parades circus performers mounted. Erik first thought that Cocteau must mean the parade was only the opening choral, before the story shifted to some tender pas de deux behind the scenes, perhaps a trapeze girl turned delicate swan. Cocteau laughed. The parade was the story, the whole story: he needed Erik to write numbers for a Chinese conjurer, a master of ceremonies, a group of acrobats, an American ragtime dancer, and a horse.

  The scenario is nothing like anyone’s idea of a ballet, but maybe this explains why Cocteau approached Erik, who has never composed a ballet. No ballets unless one counts Uspud, which no one does. After several years’ study at the Schola Cantorum, Erik’s a walking contradiction, a rigorously trained music-hall composer. He’s capable now of so much more than cabaret commissions, but too few people are interested in paying him to do anything else. He’s still surviving off a handful of published solo piano pieces, his humor writing, and haphazard patronage: the singer Paulette Darty introduces him to music student Alexis Roland-Manuel, who introduces him to the mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori, who introduces him to the Princesse de Polignac, born Winnaretta Singer the sewing-machine heiress, who gives him a commission for a choral piece about Socrates, a setting of Plato’s Dialogues for female voices. Such connections form a web that keeps him aloft, but it’s a cobweb, not a fishing net. It’s vulnerable to wind and moth wings and Erik’s weakness for saying rude things to important people. It does not net him enough fish to ever really be sure where his next meal is coming from.

  He has also written a one-act play, both words and music, absurd without being absurdist, because there’s no -ist yet, no school of it, no philosophy, just Erik being Erik. Because no one has done it before, there’s equally no word for how he altered the piano to perform the play, inserting sheets of paper between the strings. The musical passages were meant to accompany the dancing of a mechanical monkey, a role inhabited at the debut by the child of the hosts, friends of friends who had agreed to mount the play in their living room. The venue was even more galling than the measure of gratitude he is supposed to continue to feel for Claude’s versions of the Gymnopédies, which still pop up in programs of new French orchestral works, sending a steady trickle of admirers Erik’s way. The pilgrims who manage to track him down in some café or salon (no one ever braves Arcueil, not since Louise) always seem startled, both by him and by his newer compositions. He doesn’t know why the person they find comes as such a surprise to them. Is it the bowler hat?

  His suits are all proper now, black wool, approximately tailored. He looks stuck between a banker and a clerk: too old to be the clerk, too shoddy to be the banker. “Are you dressed like that to make fun of me?” Philippe asked when Erik debuted the new outfit. He had simply been tired of his filthy gray velvet. He didn’t realize that everyone was going to think he was playing some kind of joke.

  Maybe the paper in the piano strings was what led Cocteau to think he could stuff Erik’s score full of a typewriter, a siren, a pistol shot. Erik has checked through the percussionists’ parts, making sure there are pairs of hands available for all the strange additions. A week before the debut the full score is still a work in progress, and now the time spent with the percussion notation is wasted, because Cocteau has gone and hired a separate typewriter operator. Not even a musician but an actual typist, a clerk from a law office who took piano lessons as a boy. Of all the typists who would wet themselves over being in the orchestra pit at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Cocteau has somehow found one who acts like a humorless older boy in a crèche, putting up with the infantile play only until some responsible adult can return him to his real life. Erik doesn’t know if Cocteau hired this sort of person by accident or on purpose. If the latter, is Erik supposed to convert him? Is that the challenge, that Erik’s music be sufficiently sublime to turn the typist into a musician? Or is the man’s sullenness supposed to remain intact, putting its stamp on the sound?

  “I like that,” Diaghilev says, after one of the percussionists bangs a lid onto a wooden box.

  It sounds like hooves to Erik. A sound from the past, from an age so recently departed that he is afraid to look behind him for fear he has accidentally scored Honfleur: fish slapping against plank tables, their guts pinging into metal pails. “I’m cutting the box,” Erik says, “and the marbles.”

  Diaghilev makes two fists, rubs his knuckles into his eye sockets.

  The stage manager calls to him, holding up a pocket watch, and Diaghilev reluctantly stands to send everyone home for the night.

  “Notes?” Léonide Massine asks from the stage. He’s lead dancer and choreographer, also Diaghilev’s lover, which Erik is grateful Cocteau mentioned to him, so he could remind himself not to say anything unpleasant to one about the other.

  “Notes first thing tomorrow,” Diaghilev says. “I have too many.”

  Erik rises and stands in the aisle, surveying the hundreds of empty seats, trying to make them feel familiar instead of intimidating. He’s unaccustomed to hearing music played in empty rooms. An audience changes the acoustics, all those bodies absorbing sound and making their own, rustling and coughing and drinking. Wait, no drinking in the main hall at the Châtelet, and Erik’s nervous all over again—he’s not used to a sober audience.

  He’s accosted by the typist, who is quite out of order in directly addressing Erik rather than the conductor. “Do you want me to type anything in particular?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “If it doesn’t matter, you should take out the paper and ribbon. It’s wasteful, otherwise.”

  Wasteful? A sheet of paper and a typewriter ribbon? One of Erik’s favorite things about Parade is that there is finally enough: the size of the orchestra, the size of the theater, the opportunity to send sound billowing up to the Châtelet’s gilt ceiling. Erik has not come all this way to be parsimonious with paper. “Use as much as you can. Pull out and replace the sheets, over and over. Just keep typing.”

  “That’s not what the other one said to do.”

  “The other one?”

  The typist points across the room at Cocteau.

  “You can’t even remember his name?” Erik says. Cocteau is twenty-three years younger but significantly more famous than Erik, his reputation as a writer and general provocateur sufficiently earned that Erik is affronted on his behalf. “What about that quote?” Erik asks. “From the book about the lady. The loose one. About bears dancing and banging on pots. You
could type that.”

  “A book about a loose lady who dances with bears? I can’t think my wife would have let it in the house.”

  Was the reference to his wife spontaneous or strategic? Did he say the same to Cocteau?

  Erik doesn’t often judge, but he supposes the typist is handsome. Cocteau would think so, anyway. This sort of thing makes Erik’s head hurt. This is supposed to be his ballet, his music, but he’s had to put too much goddamn time into thinking about whatever Cocteau might be thinking. Erik has arranged his whole life so as not to need to think this much about anybody else. Or did he arrange it that way because he so rarely understood quite what other people were thinking? Failure of consideration, or failure of empathy? The former makes him a hero, Artist Above All; the latter makes him something in need of repair. He is not broken, he tells himself. Just different.

  “Only the quote is about bears,” he says. “And pots and stars. Not the whole book.”

  “You’re going to add banging pots?”

  “You’re not listening.”

  The typist retreats back down the aisle toward the orchestra pit. Erik follows and they consult the remaining string players, who are still packing up their instruments.

  “It’s a kettle,” one of the violinists says. “It’s about language being no better than a cracked kettle, only making bears dance when we long to make the stars weep.” Gustave Flaubert, he adds, and the loose woman is Bovary.

  The cellists nod. They forgot the kettle, but they know the book, at least by reputation.

  Erik is jealous. That book is sixty years old, the author dead for nearly forty, and everyone knows his name. It has been living in the dark of their heads like a mushroom.