The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  At the front door, Philippe asked him why he’d come.

  Erik honestly didn’t remember. He’d just found himself walking in this direction. “You weren’t going to tell me that you were leaving?” he grumbled.

  “I didn’t know it would matter to you. It’s only for a few weeks. We should catch up when I’m back.”

  “You are coming back, aren’t you?”

  Philippe laughed, surprised. “My whole life is here, Erik.”

  Well, that’s something, Erik thought. His whole life is in Paris, and I am in Paris, and thus we are still part of each other’s lives.

  “I’ll send you a postcard,” Philippe said.

  With Philippe still in Spain, Erik decides to send a pneu, mockingly addressed to Claude D., National Treasure. Claude lives on the Avenue de Bois du Boulogne now, just west of the Arc de Triomphe. The address is intimidating, let alone the house. Erik starts walking, counting on the pneu to arrive just enough ahead of him that his sudden appearance will be only moderately impolite. Maybe Parade will be a smash—not just a succès de scandale, Erik daydreams as he crosses the Seine, but a purer, definitive sort of success, and he’ll invite both Philippe and Claude out to a twelve-course dinner, and it will be just like old times except with enough food. He plans the meal, the course of the conversation, as if that’s something that can be planned, and this pleasant exercise takes him through the Jardins du Trocadéro and north along the Rue Hamelin.

  He’s a block from Claude’s house when he wonders whether he owes Claude an apology for anything. For a while he was so careful, reminding himself not to say anything he might regret later, but Claude has been ill long enough that Erik can’t keep it up, and perhaps he slipped at some point.

  Claude has survived procedures barely invented, attempted in part to save him specifically, the calculus of butchery and risk altered by who Claude is and what he might yet create. “Borrowed time,” Claude once said, then corrected himself. “Not borrowed, earned. I’ve earned every wretched minute of this.”

  He agreed to the knife, to the radium, because he wanted time with his family, his second wife and child, gifts that, after the disaster of his first marriage, he cannot imagine leaving a second sooner than he has to. He didn’t do it for music. But he has kept composing. A set of sonatas, sketches for operas. A ballet for Diaghilev, although the reviews were poor. Including one from Erik, published under a pseudonym, but the voice made it obvious. “I didn’t say anything negative about the score,” Erik protested to Claude later. “Only the staging.” At the time the distinction made sense to him. But now he winces, knowing he will be held to account for Parade, both for the things he has control over and for the things he doesn’t—Picasso’s boxy costumes, the dancing horse, the whole lunatic circus in a blood-soaked season of war.

  It occurs to him only now, stepping through the iron gates into the front garden, that Diaghilev might have offered Parade first to Claude, who turned it down, and that’s why Erik received the job.

  A maid opens the heavy wooden door, which Erik once teased Claude was big enough to have a smaller door cut inside it, like the entrance to a medieval castle. He had kept the words light but couldn’t entirely hide the resentment curled inside them. The maid greets him politely by name and shows him to Claude’s study, where light from the tall windows falls on a brilliantly blue carpet. Claude sits in a green armchair like a frog stranded on a lily pad. He doesn’t stand to greet Erik, and Erik wonders whether it’s because they’re friends of so many years that Claude doesn’t feel the need, or whether he’d have difficulty rising from the chair. He’s too thin, but at least there’s color in his face. Don’t die, Erik thinks. Please.

  Without asking, the maid pours a glass of water for Claude, a calvados for Erik. He may never have his own maid, but Claude’s maid knowing him this well might be almost the same thing. Except that it isn’t at all the same thing. But this is pleasant, both the glass in his hand and its confirmation that he’s welcome here, still a regular guest after all this time.

  “Just tell me,” Erik says. “I wasn’t the first choice, was I? Was it you?”

  “Not me,” Claude says. Erik prods and he reluctantly adds, “I heard it was Stravinsky. But when he wasn’t available they came straight to you.”

  “Second choice. Not—tenth, or something?”

  “A firm second.”

  “That’s all right, then. But would you have taken it if they’d come to you?”

  “The circus piece? No, but you’ll do beautifully with it.”

  No doubt Claude has more opportunities than hours in a day, setting aside the calculation at this point of months or years. That he’s still composing at all Erik finds quietly heroic, more so than anything the sons of Conrad’s neighbors are doing at the front. The calvados is making his heart full and he tries to say this to Claude.

  “Stop,” Claude says. “Not from you. You’re the one person I count on to spare me that kind of nonsense.”

  “It’s not nonsense. I’m always full of nonsense, I should know.”

  “Seriously. Stop.”

  “I’m trying to tell you something true. I don’t do it often enough.” It isn’t just that Claude’s still writing, it’s that he’s still experimenting, dragging eighteenth-century styles into the twentieth with his sonata cycle. “I don’t know how many people would be able to do it. I don’t know that I could.”

  “Of course you could. You would.”

  “I’m flattered, but—”

  “It’s not a compliment, it’s a fact. Look at you. Look at your life. If you’re still composing now, there’s nothing that could make you stop. What else would you do?”

  Erik feels warm for a minute. He feels proud, feels seen. Even feels loved. But the longer he savors the comment, the heavier it grows. Does his life look as bad as a cancer diagnosis? His apartment isn’t that disgusting, even though he’s started letting stray dogs sleep cold nights inside. Does Claude imagine him writing into an abyss of futility every bit as dark as death?

  With a note of reluctance, Claude asks if he’s come for money.

  Erik says nothing. He hasn’t, but if Claude is going to offer, he won’t refuse. They always use the word “loan,” but Erik’s given up calculating the principal, let alone whatever theoretical interest might have accrued.

  “Because I’m afraid I just can’t. Not right now,” Claude says. “I’ve barely been composing, and the medical expenses on top of household—well. Don’t marry a banker’s wife, is all I’m saying. They’ve got certain expectations.”

  As a joke, or as advice, it falls flat, since both men know Erik isn’t looking for any kind of wife. But as a confidence, a revelation he’s sure Claude would not want widely known, Erik catches it and holds it tight, feeling trusted—and, if he’s honest, also feeling a hint of satisfaction. It pleases him to think that perhaps even Claude has been forced to pencil columns of numbers in the margins of his composition notebooks.

  “I only need to borrow a typewriter,” Erik says reassuringly, pleased that the favor he needs might now look like magnanimity.

  After Erik explains that the score for Parade requires a typewriter, Claude is silent for an excruciatingly long time. When he speaks all he says is “Really?”

  Which is less painful? To claim the idea as his, all his, or to blame Cocteau and admit to being bossed about? Cocteau wouldn’t have tried to boss Stravinsky. Probably no one’s tried to boss Claude in decades. And Erik has come around—he decided last night that he liked it. But Claude is making him unsure today, and why does Claude still have the power to make him unsure? “I’ll show you,” Erik says, and tugs the score out of his bag.

  He tells Claude where the typewriter comes in, but Claude starts at the beginning. “Does roulette wheel mean an actual roulette wheel?”

  “I wasn’t sure what the notation should look like. Trill on a sustained open notehead seemed right.”

  “Diaghilev can find a roulette
wheel but not a typewriter?”

  “I’m the one who fired Cocteau’s typist, so I’m in charge of replacing him.”

  “May I say something?” Claude asks.

  “Say it.”

  “I think it would be better without the unconventional instruments.”

  “Still good with them, good only without them, or not good either way, but better without?”

  “I think this is the best orchestral work you’ve done.”

  It sounds like praise, but most of Erik’s other orchestral work has been idiot-proof orchestrations of his popular songs, meant for cabaret ensembles with little or no rehearsing.

  “But these sounds are just clutter,” Claude elaborates. “They’re you, but not quite. They’re like somebody else’s idea of you.”

  Arrogant, to say there’s some idea of Erik which can be gotten wrong, and that Claude is the one who’s got it right. Claude, Cocteau: why do all these people think they get to have ideas about him? But Erik says nothing.

  “Has he been difficult? Cocteau.”

  Erik doesn’t want to explain the various ways in which Cocteau has been difficult.

  He looks out the tall windows. Trees wave at him from the garden and the avenue beyond.

  Eventually Claude takes mercy on his silence. “I can have it sent to the theater, so you don’t have to carry it. Why a typist, though? Surely one of the percussionists could do it.”

  “Cocteau’s idea,” Erik says, and stops there. If Claude thinks the typewriter is gimmicky, what’s he going to think about Erik’s plan to put an ex-dancer, ex–bear keeper, in the orchestra? It suddenly looks silly to Erik too, this desire to help out an old collaborator who could desperately use the work. He’s with the Ballets Russes now, a full orchestra and all the paper he wants. A modern girl might be all right, but a has-been? Lisette is no older than Erik, but he’s already the oldest person in every room at the Châtelet. La Vorace would just remind people of that, lurching up out of the nineties, hungry as ever.

  “You could ask Désormière,” Claude offers. “He’d be pleased for the introduction to Cocteau.”

  “He’s in town?”

  “On leave.”

  “Wounded, or—”

  “Just on leave.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He came for a visit. Have you really been telling your acolytes that I’m ‘a composer of the past’?”

  “Absolutely not. Who said that?” He aims for an outraged tone but can feel his cheeks flush red at being caught out. He has indeed been telling the young admirers—though acolytes, that’s nice, that’s a delicious word—that Debussy’s music is old-fashioned, that they should be looking to Ravel, Roussel, Stravinsky. And to Erik, of course. In truth it’s less to do with Claude being old-fashioned than with Claude being too good at what he does. You might be able to out-Cocteau Cocteau, but you cannot out-Claude Claude. He’s a dead end. Erik may or may not have explained things that way to the acolytes, though, and if not he should perhaps clarify. No good having them think he’s jealous.

  Claude reads in silence all the way through Parade, which is torturous. Erik wanders the room, drinking too quickly, trying to make the time pass. He refills his own glass and stands at the windows. Wherever else Claude might be economizing, the glass is immaculately clean, and sunlight pours fiercely over the blue carpet. Erik has a tickling sense of déjà vu and thinks suddenly of Philippe rambling around the Auberge du Clou, unable to sit anywhere near Erik whenever Erik was reading his poems. That was the early days, though.

  Erik realizes, decades belatedly, that he can trace when Philippe stopped caring about the work. It wasn’t when he started editing travel guides, or got married, or moved off the Butte. It was when he could sit beside Erik and drink or read a book or talk with mutual friends while Erik read drafts. Part of him had stopped caring about Erik’s reaction, and it was not the same part of him that still cared about Erik, but Erik felt the change, and was so confused, then incensed, when Philippe kept insisting there wasn’t one.

  So what does it mean now, that Erik can’t even make himself turn around while Claude reads, as if the man might be pulling faces behind his back, making fun of his efforts?

  “It’s good, truly,” Claude says, and Erik shifts to see him straightening the pages, so neat they appear unopened. “It’s clever. It’s…” Claude takes a drink of water. He looks tired. “It’s the wrong show, though. You know that, don’t you? The wrong show at the wrong time. It’s going to make people angry.”

  “Because of the war?”

  Claude apparently considers this too obvious to merit a response.

  “Apollinaire thinks it’s interesting.”

  “I know you open in a week, and it is what it is. You’re not in a position to change it. I just want you to be prepared. Depending on what you’re hoping to hear, you may not hear it.”

  “I would like to hear that I am a genius beyond all reckoning.”

  “Erik, you are a genius beyond all reckoning.”

  “Thank you.” Erik raises his glass in a toast. It’s full again, somehow. When did that happen? How many times has it been empty, then full again? “Why did Désormière come to visit you? I haven’t seen him yet. I didn’t even know he was in town.”

  “Probably to make sure he saw me before I up and died. Or maybe before he did.”

  “You’re not dying, though. Neither is he,” Erik says.

  “If you can wait a little longer until I’m actually dead, I really will be ‘a composer of the past.’ Then you can tell your acolytes whatever you want.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Erik insists. He’s still standing in the sunshine from the window, his face already so hot he can’t tell if he’s blushing again, giving away the lie.

  “I don’t want to argue about it, I just want you to admit it,” Claude says slowly, as if wondering what exactly he does want out of Erik.

  “Look, I drink too much and say all kinds of things. If I did say that, I didn’t mean it in…whatever way you’re thinking I did.”

  “I suppose I don’t care,” Claude says, like he’s figuring something out. “Not now.”

  Erik knows he’s being let off the hook, but it feels like a dismissal. It feels lonely, as if Claude has already floated somewhere far away and Erik is stranded on the far shore of the plush blue carpet.

  Erik is right about one of them: Roger Désormière has decades ahead of him. But Claude has only ten months.

  And Claude, meanwhile, is right about Parade. Audiences are not just mystified but angry. One critic says something anodyne to Erik after the opening performance and then publishes a negative review, and Erik writes him a string of open letters so abusive that Erik is hauled into court for defamation. He’s perfectly guilty, but everyone assumes he’ll squirm out of it somehow until the judge hands down a colossal fine and eight days in jail. Erik insists to anyone who’ll listen that his outrage isn’t about the critic’s opinion of his music, but about his duplicity. “If he’d had spine enough to tell me he hated it in person, that would have been fine. I wouldn’t have cared a bit.”

  Erik would still have cared. He would have cared a great deal.

  At the last moment, after a lengthy appeals process fails to go Erik’s way, the Princesse de Polignac intervenes and pays off the fine, buys Erik out of jail. She wants Socrate finished, the setting of Plato’s Dialogues for female voices.

  She invites Erik to a dinner party a few months later to check up on her investment. Erik sends word that to put himself in the right frame of mind to complete her commission, he is eating only white foods. She doesn’t know if he’s serious or not but tells the cook to make sole meunière with turnips. At the party, Erik eats voraciously, both because he’s so broke he’s been skipping meals and because the more he keeps his mouth full, the less he has to lie about the progress of Socrate, which has been minimal. The money he received for it is already gone. So is what he earned for Parade. He needs
to ask Conrad for another loan, but they’re in a quarrel. One step forward and two steps back, his entire goddamn life, he thinks.

  During after-dinner drinks in the parlor, a telephone rings and Erik is so startled by the sound he jumps to his feet, then has to sit down again with everyone watching. He has heard the sound as a theatrical effect, but he’s never watched anyone take an actual call. He listens to the Princesse with naked curiosity as she converses with an invisible someone. It could be anyone, anywhere in the city, this modern ghost on the other end of the line. Erik could sing into the round black mouthpiece, Future! Future, you’ve found me. In a little bedroom by the sea, I dreamed you up. But you’re still holding out on me, yes? There’s still better to come? I keep hoping but you never call.

  The Princesse, misunderstanding his attention after she hangs up the call, asks if he wants to use the telephone.

  His palms itch with anticipation and anxiety. Who might he know who would have a telephone? He reels silently through everyone he can think of, but for every name there’s a reason not to call. The acolytes gone to the war, the patrons to whom he owes work, the performers he’s dodging because the kind of work they’re offering he no longer wants. Friends, he’s always had friends, but he owes them all money. Philippe, but he’s long back from Tarragona and still hasn’t written, and Erik’s too proud to be the one to make plans. Conrad, but there’s the quarrel about Mathilde. Louise, but there’s an ocean, which the telephone cables can’t cross. That’s the real problem, Erik tells himself—nothing to do with him and everything to do with telephones. They’re terribly new, and the technology is limited, and of course he wouldn’t know many people both rich and fashionable enough to have a phone.

  Claude, he thinks at last. Claude really would have a telephone. But then he remembers that Claude is dead.

  Conrad

  — 17 —

  Visible for a moment

  WHOM HAD HE BOUGHT THE SECOND TICKET FOR? HAD IT merely been habit, buying two, or did he have someone in mind? He remembered worrying whether he could get tickets at all—Erik had always provided him with comps, and he didn’t know if ordinary people could simply walk up to the box office and get seats for a world premiere.