The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” she told Adrien. “But I should probably be getting home for now.”

  “The show’s almost over,” he protested.

  A professional farter took the stage and launched immediately into a rendition of “Les anges dans nos campagnes,” followed by a version of “La Marseillaise” that had the government censor in the corner scribbling furiously. Then the flatulist blew out a candle, not with his mouth. The flatulist and the accompanist got into a silent quarrel over who was responsible for relighting the candle so that the flatulist could do the trick again, from a greater distance, by shooting a jet of water sucked up from a bucket. The accompanist reluctantly performed the honors at arm’s length, match held with the tips of his fingers. Then he returned to the piano and resumed the jaunty background music, his body bobbing. His hair, nearly to his shoulders, brown and very straight, swung with the rhythm of the song. His face was a strange mix of concentration and absence. He was swinging a hammer, digging a hole. This was hard work, the playing, and it required a portion of him. But the portion it did not require seemed somewhere else altogether.

  No one wanted to follow a flatulist onstage, which meant this act was by default the finale. For the last number the accompanist and the flatulist led a sing-along of a particularly off-color song: a roomful of people could not be held responsible by the censors the way an individual performer could. Everyone joined in, voices raised in out-of-tune exultation, an agreement for all to be equally guilty. The flatulist, unaccustomed to having to remember lyrics, flubbed one of the verses, and the accompanist sang out the words. He didn’t have much of a voice, but his enunciation was clean and proper, even fussy, like a teacher delivering a strangely profane lesson.

  Both men stepped off the stage to applause, and Adrien waved the accompanist over to their table. Suzanne hadn’t been aware that they knew each other, but Adrien knew a lot of people. Anyone with money who was willing to spend it knew a lot of people. Adrien introduced Erik, and Suzanne complimented him on the sing-along.

  “I like your carrots,” he said, pointing at her corsage.

  She thanked him and said she had to go, and an expression of wounded surprise flashed across his face. She had a son, she explained. Nine years old. “I should make sure he hasn’t burned the building down.”

  “How old are you?” Erik asked.

  It was a forward question, but avoiding a response might make it seem like she was embarrassed by the answer. She wasn’t. Was she? “Twenty-seven.”

  “Oh. You must’ve had him terribly young.”

  She nodded. Shame was a wasted emotion, and Suzanne had pledged to rid herself of it.

  “I’m almost twenty-seven myself,” Erik said. “A few more months. Then we’ll be the same age. Unless your birthday is before May.”

  “September.”

  “Perfect. So we’ll be the same age for a bit, and then in the fall you can go ahead and report back to tell me what’s coming.”

  “Sevens are rather pointy. More savage than sixes. I think that’s all I have to report.”

  She supposed she was flirting, but it felt more like playing along with a child, entertaining Maurice’s latest conviction about fairies or teleportation. He’d recently become obsessed with the pneumatique system, which whisked messages sealed in capsules through narrow tubes underground. It was faster than the regular post but more expensive, so she hadn’t ever used it and was baffled by Maurice’s fascination.

  “Did you know you can send a message by tube?” she said. “There are kilometers of underground tunnels, just for letters, right under our feet.” It seemed the kind of thing this Erik person might find charming, and charm was a mode she assumed nearly automatically. One never knew when things might go in a useful direction.

  “The pneumatique? Sure. I don’t think the lines run up here, though.”

  “Water barely runs up here,” she scoffed, trying to sound cynical and expert.

  He scrunched his face in commiseration. The woes of water pressure united everyone on the Butte. You could sell a painting or land a dance gig, but you’d still be standing the next day in the same long line with all your neighbors to fill a bucket at the sluggish public fountain or apartment spigot.

  Suzanne asked Erik if he’d ever used the pneumatique.

  Of course, he said. It was very useful for canceling things. You could let someone think you’d be there right up until a few hours beforehand, and then when they received the pneu there would be no time left to scold you. “Letters come too early or too late,” he said, “and if it’s too late then you’ve been unforgivably rude.”

  “As opposed to an acceptable amount of rude.”

  “Exactly.”

  As Suzanne pulled her coat and hat on, Adrien and Erik discussed whether they wanted to stay for a nightcap or go elsewhere. “I wouldn’t mind a bite to eat,” Erik said.

  Suzanne unpinned her carrots, untied the ribbon, and pulled apart the corsage. “Here,” she said, holding out the smallest one.

  Erik grinned and bit into it, chewed like a horse. He had good teeth, she noticed. A wholesome face, although he dressed like he was trying to hide it, in an old-fashioned frock coat and battered hat, with pince-nez glasses on a long velvet ribbon.

  “Always prepared,” Adrien joked. “Whether it’s a midnight snack or breakfast the next morning.”

  Suzanne supposed this was meant to be racy—she could remember once sharing a radish crown with Adrien, unraveling it slowly in his bed while he stirred sugar into the coffee. Those months pricking her fingers on funeral wreaths had been good for something: she could weave nearly any kind of vegetation into nearly any accessory—edible wristlets, necklaces, brooches. She enjoyed having a look, a signature eccentricity, and it kept men from trying to ply her with jewelry. She could ask for gifts of art supplies instead. Or cash.

  “Am I stealing your breakfast?” Erik asked, appearing concerned rather than amused.

  He was, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him. Maurice would get the remaining carrots, and if she made it to Adrien’s studio early enough he’d probably offer her something. If not, well, it wouldn’t kill her to go without for a morning. Now that she was a painter instead of a trapeze girl she worried sometimes about her muscular body running to fat.

  Suzanne leaned very close to Erik, who was holding what was left of the carrot dumbly upright, like a scepter. She tilted her head and scraped her teeth along the side, a shallow bite. “You’re not stealing anything. I gave it to you,” she said, and left with shreds of carrot in her teeth.

  It was a nearly full moon, an easy walk home and so much light in the apartment through the ragged curtains that she decided to stay up to sketch her son, sleeping in their bed. At nine years old Maurice was becoming self-conscious, or perhaps just contrary. He rarely permitted her to draw him. “Stop staring at me,” he would complain.

  When she’d first started learning to draw, she’d gone dutifully to one of the free-entry days at the Salon to examine the paintings. She laughed aloud at the absurdity of the still lifes—golden bowls of jewel-like fruit—or the portraits of ladies in silk gowns, posed on upholstered chairs in chinoiserie interiors. She had never seen any of these things in real life, would never be able to observe any of them long enough to paint them. In the crush of people on a free-entry day there was no chance of pausing even to make a sketch. She went home and drew Maurice, used his elbows to teach herself elbows, his feet to learn feet; she labored over the curve of his back as he played with pebbles on the ground, or his hand around a stub of pencil as he made his own drawings, scribbled on the pamphlets the local Benevolent Society slipped under the doors in her building.

  The society offered fresh milk once a week at the local dispensary, watered down and tinged blue, but mostly they offered advice: against the demons of beer and absinthe; in favor of the virtues of factory work; partial to the conception of children in June and birth in March, to give them a long he
ad start on the following winter. Maurice had been born on December 26, 1883. He had turned nine a few weeks ago, her miracle.

  After the birth, Suzanne’s mother had quit her job to care for Maurice so Suzanne could return to modeling. Maurice had been a difficult baby, then a difficult child, and Suzanne’s mother grew increasingly bitter about the village job she’d given up long ago, as a maid at a large country inn. How had she come to Paris and ended up with even less to call her own? She fought with Suzanne constantly, and no one was surprised when, on Maurice’s eighth birthday, she announced that she’d found herself a job as a domestic. It was live-in, she said, but Maurice was eight now, and mother and son could manage without her. In Bessines, children were often sent out to work by the age of eight. If they could survive a blacksmith’s forge or a laundress’s scalding water, Maurice could survive aloneness.

  The blankets were up to his chin, so she drew only his face, dark eyebrows and hair, soft as duck’s down. The boy was her shadow, inky and forbidding, thin as a sheet of newsprint. He had her surname, which had shocked even the usually unshockable among her employers and fellow models. There were plenty of boys in Paris being raised by their mothers, but most of them had at least some man’s name, even if it wasn’t the right man. People looked to paintings for clues: Suzanne was especially beautiful in Renoir’s and in Puvis de Chavannes’s, but not in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas, who were therefore suspected less. She was not beautiful in Adrien’s paintings either, but because his lack of skill made everyone look unattractive, he could not be ruled out.

  Suzanne finished and hid her sketch, so as not to be scolded by Maurice in the morning. When she climbed into bed his skinny limbs wound around her. She caught a whiff of her own rank, fermented breath—she must have been drunker than she realized—and turned away to spare Maurice, who burrowed into her back.

  The next morning, a knock on the door: a uniformed deliveryman from the nearest pneumatique office, hand-carrying messages to their final destination. He handed her the card, postal stationery with elegant handwriting, her very first pneu. The card didn’t look special, only a bit curled at the ends, like a mustache, from having been rolled in the canister. The return address was on the Rue Cortot, less than a five-minute walk from her apartment on the Rue Girardon. The sender would have had to travel considerably farther to post the pneu than to drop it off by hand. In place of a message was a drawing of a bunch of carrots, one with a perfect crescent-shaped bite taken out of it, a tiny scalloping of teeth. Thank you, she read beneath the carrots. From Erik. She couldn’t help critiquing the drawing: as a cartoon, it was neatly done. But it was only a cartoon, no attempt at shading or texture. A prepaid reply card was enclosed, but she didn’t know what to reply. The pneu was a novelty, but too small and odd for her to discern either what Erik hoped she’d do or what she herself wanted to do in response.

  She had a flash of guilt that she hadn’t waited to open the pneu with Maurice. He’d somehow managed to sleep through the deliveryman. What time was it, anyway? She checked the sun outside the window.

  “Ah hell,” she said, and shook Maurice awake. “School. You’re late again.”

  In any other season she would have been late for work as well, but in winter the light was so short that the two or three daily sittings shrank to one, when the sun was at its feeble highest. Suzanne had managed to work steadily ever since her circus résumé had first won her jobs modeling for dancing paintings, or the ancient Olympics, holding action poses until her arms trembled and her bad shoulder, injured in the trapeze accident, ached. Her face at rest was surly, but she could strike her charm like a match. Her body was already electric. She was popular with both the denizens of the major old-fashioned ateliers and the lone artists in their grotty upstairs studios. She’d posed for whole rows of apprentices, all churning away on drapery in the hope of impressing a master enough to be tapped as a contributor to the massive history paintings the studio produced. Some of them intended to make a career out of a single specialty—lace or horses or human hands. In spring there were sometimes train rides outside the city to be painted en plein air by men who had either gotten fed up with history paintings or avoided the ateliers altogether. They had barely enough money for paint, most of them, but they could paint what they liked. They painted Suzanne, over and over.

  Her real name was Marie-Clémentine, but people had begun calling her Suzanne after she was hired for three separate paintings of Susanna and the Elders. She’d perfected a look of coy alarm, learned how to direct it at both the old leches inside the painting and the viewers outside it, lecherous in their own way. She posed as Artemis and Mary Magdalene; as nameless nymphs and wives; as ruddy young mothers, until it became too obvious that she was soon to be an actual mother and she was fired from a picture of the warrior mothers of Sparta. Somebody must have birthed all those warrior sons of Sparta, she pointed out, but the casting director wouldn’t yield. The studios wouldn’t touch her. Neither would any of the supposedly adventurous artists who had painted her as a morphine addict or whore. Nobody wanted to paint a pregnant woman.

  She’d tried the model market in the Place de Pigalle, but she ended up sitting in the cafés afterward with the other leftovers. One afternoon an older woman attacked a man for sketching her without permission. There were no people at all in his picture, he insisted, but she kept shrieking for money. He was vindicated by his sketchpad: an empty geometry of tables and chairs, smoke curling from a cigarette abandoned in an ashtray.

  “That’s my cigarette,” she said.

  Exasperated, the young man erased the ashtray, a gray smudge left on the page like a phantom.

  “You’ve burnt me up,” the woman said. “You’ve looked and burnt me all up.” She cast around for allies, sure Suzanne would take her part.

  Instead Suzanne complimented the man on how the rattan seat backs he’d drawn broke the light into curls like hair fallen beneath a barber’s chair. That was how she met Adrien—after she was pregnant, not before. He was still terrible at drawing people. He avoided it as much as possible, but still lifes were rather out of fashion.

  When she arrived back at her building that afternoon, her hair still elaborately curled and piled high from modeling as an elegant ball guest, she went first to the back garden. She was looking for her goat, but found Erik. He was wearing the frock coat from the previous night, the length so out of date she’d assumed it was a stage costume. The coat lessened her interest, which allowed her to recognize that she was, in fact, interested.

  He looked on in satisfaction at the brown-and-cream-colored goat, who was gnawing at a globe of celery root with a blissful look on its face. “I’ve seen it around the neighborhood,” he said, “but didn’t realize it was yours. One of the neighbors told me.”

  “You were looking for me?”

  “I wanted to make sure you got the pneu.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to write back.”

  Erik asked if the goat had a name and she said it didn’t. He frowned a little, but she couldn’t tell whether that was because he thought the goat ought to have a name or because he’d accidentally driven the conversation into a hole. He’d hoped to get celery tops, he said, so that she could make something out of them, but it was the wrong time of year.

  “That was kind of you,” she said.

  He’d bought the root anyway, he said, even though it seemed too ugly to do anything with, and when the goat tried to eat his coat, he’d distracted it with the celeriac to escape.

  “I’m sure it’s grateful. Since the weather turned, the poor thing has been subsisting on paper. First drafts—all my bad ideas.”

  The goat had been a gift last spring from Puvis de Chavannes, left over from a sitting for a country picture. The animal hadn’t been docile enough to pose, and the painter had offered it to her after it chewed the pocket off a jacket he’d left hanging on a chair. There was enough left of the little hill village which Montmartre had once been that a goa
t could survive. Suzanne’s own apartment building, hacked into artist apartments with large windows that boiled or froze the inhabitants, depending on the season, still had a grassy back garden. Other buildings retained courtyards, farm plots, stables, and sheds overgrown with weeds and vines. There were windmills, real windmills, not just oversize toys like the sign over the Moulin Rouge. The goat had had plenty of forage, and for the first time in his life since he’d been weaned, Maurice had good milk to drink. Since winter had fallen, though, the goat had been subsisting largely on trash and paper, plus the beer and stale bread that carousers thought it was amusing to feed it late at night. The goat had twice eaten all the squares of newsprint out of the building’s latrine, and her neighbors complained. Suzanne bought hay when she could, but the animal’s milk had nearly dried up. On especially cold nights Maurice tried to bring the goat inside to bed with him. The building concierge had heard hooves on the stairs and threatened to evict her.

  Erik offered to donate some potatoes to the goat, leftovers from a Sunday family dinner. “I still need to get you something, though,” he added.

  “You don’t need to get me anything,” she said, although she wouldn’t stop him.

  The next day, in the studio, Suzanne persuaded Adrien to lay some pillows on the bed in the vague shape of a woman. “I can tell you’re not even looking at me,” she said. “You’re concentrating on the curtains.” She could always tell when men were looking.

  Her freedom thus procured, she sat side by side with Adrien, painting the same set of bed curtains—tricky delineations where the gold velvet met the red silk, the snaky braid and tassels. She’d promised herself that she would look as hard as she could, capture as much as she could. But her fleurs-de-lis came out spindly, their curves swelling and shrinking out of sync with the movement of the drapery. She took a break, painted a cat in the middle of the bed, a marmalade with cool green eyes.