The Vexations
Page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Caitlin Horrocks
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photograph: Getty Images
Author photograph by Tyler Steimle
Cover © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc
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ISBN 978-0-316-31693-4
E3-20190613-NF-DA-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Conrad — 1 —: Like a door opening
Eric — 2 —: Looking at yourself from afar
Louise — 3 —: At the top of your voice, don’t you think?
Philippe — 4 —: Like a nightingale with a toothache
Louise — 5 —: Without your fingers blushing
Philippe — 6 —: On the tips of your back teeth
Erik — 7 —: Hard as the devil
Louise — 8 —: Weep like a willow
Philippe — 9 —: Haggard in your body
Suzanne — 10 —: From the top of yourself
Erik — 11 —: Apply yourself to renunciation
Louise — 12 —: Outward, painfully
Philippe — 13 —: Attaching too much importance
Louise — 14 —: So as to make a hollow
Suzanne — 15 —: Do not leave your shadow
Erik — 16 —: With amazement
Conrad — 17 —: Visible for a moment
Louise — 18 —: End for yourself
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Caitlin Horrocks
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for Leo
A Simple Question
Which do you prefer:
Music or Ham?
—Erik Satie
Conrad
— 1 —
Like a door opening
CONRAD DOESN’T HAVE THE KEY. HE STANDS AT HIS BROTHER Erik’s apartment door, waiting for one of Erik’s friends to pull it from a trouser or jacket pocket. It is 1925, and all the men are wearing suit jackets despite the July heat, despite the fact that everyone except Conrad is a composer or a musician, and Conrad had always supposed them to be a breed apart, unconcerned with propriety. The only composer he’s ever known personally was his brother, and how well did Conrad even know him? Not well enough for a key.
Erik’s friend Roger unlocks the door but does not open it. He steps aside, gesturing for Conrad to do the honors. No one has entered Erik’s apartment in the days since his death, and nearly no one in all the twenty-seven years he lived here. Conrad pauses to feel and then set aside the guilt of violation. With both dread and anticipation, he pushes the door ajar.
Dusty light filters in from the hallway, and slowly the contents of the apartment become visible: a great profusion of umbrellas and walking sticks; stacks of handkerchiefs (eighty-six, it will turn out); mountains of yellowed newspapers; a small table with a single chair; a battered piano. A wardrobe that, when they open it, will contain only six identical gray velvet suits. In the front hall sits a baffling gymnastic machine, like an insect of cracked rubber belts and leggy metal bars. Conrad steps in a pile of dog shit whose provenance is a mystery, since Erik never owned a dog. The waste is scentless, dried and crumbling. There is no stink, nothing on Conrad’s shoes except a light chalky powder.
The men move farther into the apartment, but there is no easy way to catalog Erik’s possessions under the filth. After some discussion, a couple of the friends leave to ask the building concierge for the loan of a broom, a dustpan, whatever else might be spared in memory of the neighborhood celebrity. Along with Roger, Conrad stays, searching in vain for some evidence as to how his brother could have emerged from this place every Sunday with his beard trimmed and collar white, standing on Conrad’s doorstep to be let in for dinner. He sits on a piano bench that groans under him, the joints gone so loose he stands again. Roger turns, frowning, even indignant, perhaps because Conrad knows nothing about music. Ignoring him, Conrad wonders if it should have been Philippe here with him instead. Or maybe not, because Philippe never knew anything about music, either. Conrad does not arrange his hand to make any particular sound, simply settles his fingers onto the white keys at the far right end of the keyboard. Roger winces, perhaps expecting a shrill, tinkling catcall, but no sound comes. Conrad taps, then pounds, his way up and down the keys. Silence.
Wordlessly, the two men lift the lid of the piano. Inside they find a morass of cut wires and scattered wooden hammers, the unstrung guts of the instrument mixed with drifts of paper, letters and unopened bills, notebooks and telegrams and pneumatiques. Conrad pulls the papers out by the handful, arranges them into piles on the piano bench, then gives up and allows them to scatter across the floor: empty, doodled-upon envelopes; drawings of tiny, elaborate castles; self-portraits of Erik wearing enormous spectacles; patent applications for inventions that never existed; a declaration of excommunication from a pretend church for a music critic; and hundreds of newspaper clippings, some so small they look like confetti, two-line notices of group shows or prizes, only some of them about Erik. Most of the names are unfamiliar to Conrad. They aren’t household names, although the men are all young enough to be aiming for it, and some of them may yet succeed. These are Roger’s friends, and he handles the scraps like relics, as if he sees in them proof that Erik cared about his acolytes, that surely he didn’t mean those things he’d said to them toward the end.
He did, Conrad thinks. He meant every word. And he is almost cruel enough to say it, to claw his brother back for himself. Ever since he was picked up this morning by Erik’s friends in Roger’s ludicrously bright yellow car, Conrad has been plagued by what he is only slowly allowing himself to acknowledge is jealousy. Erik would have dropped you soon enough, he thinks of the friends. But how could he possibly wish his brother any more alone than Erik already was? He doesn’t. He never did. Conrad has always wanted to believe that blood weighs more than music, but he knows that the metaphor, besides being off-kilter, is also probably untrue. Erik’s music, while light as laughter, was heavy enough to break even him in the end.
The piano keeps vomiting: steady letters from their sister, Louise. Earnest notes from Philippe: How are you, old friend? Tell me you’re well. Nothing from Suzanne, though why would there be
? Even Erik didn’t expect to hear from her after she married someone else, and expectation was Erik’s constant state. No one could measure up. Not Suzanne, nor Philippe, nor Conrad, although he’d tried hardest and longest. The apartment is an accusation, but what more, really, could he have done?
Roger marvels over an exercise book that appears to contain some manuscript long since thought lost. “He said he left it on a bus,” Roger remarks, and neither of them knows whether Erik thought that was the truth, or whether he invented the bus so that everyone would stop asking him about an opera he didn’t know how to finish. Many of the pieces in the composition notebooks are only a few lines long, and Conrad can’t tell if they’re deliberate sketches—Erik often worked in miniature—or abandoned efforts. One loose-leaf page contains two lines of music and a note about how to prepare oneself to play the piece 840 times in succession, as if Erik would ever in a thousand years have had the patience to do such a thing.
The air, tight with dust and soot, is full of smells Conrad does not want to think too long about. He forces a window, nearly sealed shut with old paint and dirt. On hot days in Arcueil-Cachan, this industrial suburb south of Paris, the smog is so thick that sunlight tumbles down through it like a bird with its wings wrenched back. A fly careers in as soon as the window squeaks open, as if it has been waiting politely for an invitation. Conrad sneezes and searches his pockets for a handkerchief, then reluctantly takes one from what he hopes is a freshly laundered pile on the gymnastic device. When he blows his nose the mucus is grimy. He examines it, both giddy and guilty; he is alive, full of warm, gray snot, sneezing the sneezes of the living. But when he imagines Erik’s innards, his drink-sick liver and smog-choked lungs, his gratitude feels unseemly.
Conrad resumes his place on the piano bench and the two men listen to the silence, which is really the sound of their own breathing. They listen to the children shrieking in the street outside, the factory whistles and the scrabble of pigeons on the windowsills, the single loud fly buzzing near the ceiling. Roger joins Conrad at the piano and curls his fingers over the disconnected keys as if he’s holding something priceless, the only precious thing in the room. What notes are the right ones to fill this miserable space, to say hello and goodbye? Both men grope for some music that can fill death’s mute wake, as if a life is anything other than noise.
Eric
— 2 —
Looking at yourself from afar
TODAY THE BOY IS ORDINARY. NOT YET EXTRAORDINARY IN ANY way, not someone you might one day care to read about. The accomplishment he is most proud of is winning a neighborhood farting competition back in Paris, and he was the favorite in an upcoming belching contest. He is missing it right now, he realizes, as he calculates the hours eaten by the train carrying his newly diminished family north. There have been so many sadnesses it seemed there was not room for more. But now they all squeeze together in Eric’s heart to admit another: this lost chance at glory. He confides in his sister about the contest, a plea for sympathy.
“Mother would be ashamed of you,” Louise hisses.
Eric is a boy magnificently without shame, but Louise’s statement at least makes him think. Their mother wouldn’t exactly be pleased, he decides, but she would not be ashamed. He would still be her little monkey, and he hears his name the way she said it, the R at the top of her mouth, the sounds of her language soft like raindrops on a muddy yard. He sticks his hand in his armpit, directs farting noises at his sister. Louise rolls her eyes, asks their father to tell him to stop. Conrad ignores them both, pulling his hat on and off his head with single-minded determination. He is nearly four years younger than Eric, his hair still toddler-fine and sparse, floating in a staticky corona around his face. Louise is the middle child, but her gestures are a disapproving old woman’s, all wagging fingers and pursed lips. Eric loves her anyway. When she bossed the neighborhood children, he would always persuade them to take her back, let her play again. The neighborhood parents liked Louise because she could always be trusted to tattle when something risky was afoot. Little Mother, the woman in the next apartment called her, and Eric cringes when he thinks of this, as if the word has been said aloud, as if their father could hear him hearing it.
Their father, Alfred, is a lightning-struck tree. It is November of 1872. In September, the family contained a fourth child, Eric’s infant sister, and now it doesn’t. In October, the family had a mother, and now it doesn’t. Alfred slumps in a corner of the train compartment, staring out the window at the black-and-white cows in the endless yellowing fields. “I grew up here,” he says, his palm against the glass, and the children glare. They were supposed to grow up in Paris. They feel kidnapped, not by fate or by their mother’s death, but by the only person present enough to blame. “Do you remember your grandmother?” their father asks them. He licks his fingers and tries to smooth down Conrad’s hair. Conrad twists away, removes his left shoe and puts it on his hand. Louise shakes her head.
Eric announces he’s hungry and Alfred sighs and takes a red apple from his satchel. Eric has already bitten into it when Conrad squeals in protest, and their father orders the children to share, opening up his pocketknife and holding out the handle. Eric doesn’t move. He’s never sliced an apple before, and if his father wants it done on a moving train, surely he can do it himself.
“That’s all right,” Louise says. “I’m not hungry.”
For once Eric wants her to go back to her bossing ways, to explain to their father that children shouldn’t be cutting fruit on their own laps.
“Take it,” Alfred says sharply, his fingers pinched around the flat of the blade. Eric does, gingerly, and Alfred settles back into his seat. “You mustn’t act this way at your grandmother’s house,” he says. “She won’t have it.”
Eric follows his father’s gaze as it returns to the window. Nothing but bare fields, bled of color in early November, stolid cows, stark stone houses and barns. The train curves and water appears below an indentation in the fields.
“The Seine,” his father says. “All the way out here.”
Louise slips the knife from Eric’s hand, folds the blade away, and tucks it in her skirt. Eric imagines wrenching the window open and flinging the apple into the river, flinging himself alongside it, and bobbing all the winding way home. He imagines a note in a corked bottle: Please help. Kidnapped to Normandy. Cows everywhere. He stands and moves close to the window.
His father puts a hand on his shoulder, leans into his ear. “It’s flowing westward,” he says gently, almost a whisper. “To Honfleur, then out to sea.”
“Oh,” Eric says. Has his father guessed his plan? Eric looks down at his tooth marks in the apple, whose white flesh is already browning, and gives the rest to Conrad, who takes the apple with both hands, presses his face to it, and gnaws. Eric thinks of his imaginary note moving helplessly into the great nothing of the Atlantic: Please help. Cows.
In Honfleur, his grandmother Agnès assigns Eric and Conrad a single lumpy horsehair mattress in the attic. The garret windows rattle in the sea wind, salty air eating at their wooden frames. Everything about this town feels wrong, blown raw and new each morning. There is no warm smell of sewage on the river, no coal dust collecting over the sills and doorstep. Even the milk is grotesquely fresh, with a grassy, fleshy sort of taste. The butter is of a color and sweetness like fruit. It makes Eric gag.
“Too fresh?” his grandmother says scathingly. “How about that. And the wind? You’re half Scottish, you know, so you should be all right with the cold.”
This quickly becomes the retort for everything. Eric can’t complain about the draft in his room because of his mother’s Scottish blood. He can’t complain about the scratchiness of the linens, or Conrad’s sharp, jabbing toenails, because Scots wear rough tartans. He can’t complain about the food, because Scots eat oats and sheep stomachs. Since Normans are supposedly of hardy Viking stock themselves, the children are effectively never allowed to complain about anything.
Eric cuts triangles of newspaper, rolls them into horns, and pins them to Conrad’s knit sleeping cap. “Conrad the Pillager,” he announces, but Conrad just cries. The boy asks, incessantly, for his mother, and the sound pierces them all, a knife in apples. “I’ll smother you,” Eric says. “I will.”
For the first few days Alfred seems to be pretending they’re on holiday. He gives them tours, pointing out where Champlain set sail for the New World, but also the home where Jane, their mother, was visiting when they met; the ship brokerage where Alfred was employed; the hotel where Jane’s parents stayed to meet him before the wedding; the Anglican church where Eric was baptized, whereupon the devoutly Catholic Agnès shrieked that neither she nor God would forgive Jane for this. Agnès never did, and while God’s opinion could not be known for certain, no doubt Agnès considered Jane’s death a kind of proof.
The church Agnès would have preferred was St. Catherine’s. As the largest wooden church in France, it is also on the tour. The old stone one burned many centuries ago, in the Hundred Years’ War, their father explains, praising the local shipbuilders who, rather than wait for the war to be over, for the Church to allocate funds and masons and craftsmen for a new one, built with what they knew. It was all ax work, he says, the beams and the thousands of wooden shingles covering the roof and walls. Towering straight oaks, trees of a sort that can no longer be found in Normandy, were used for the nave, the oldest part of the church. There is an obvious lesson here, says Alfred, about resourcefulness, about initiative. “They didn’t wait for someone else to help,” he insists. “They made the best of things.”