“I did what I thought was best. I know what it’s like to lose a child. I was trying to spare you. You can believe that or not.”
The slap had reddened his cheek above his gray whiskers, and his skin appeared fragile and thin there, crumpled with age. Because my great-uncle had seemed old all my life, I had missed just how very old he had gotten. If he was telling the truth, and had been nothing but my protector, what would happen to me when he was gone? He’d already outlived my grandparents, his wife, and daughter. He lived alone in a house full of ghosts.
“You want us to join you in Le Havre?” I asked, and thought that if the answer was yes, it might be so out of loneliness, not punishment.
He sighed. “Where do you want to live?”
“We were going to go to Paris.”
“So go to Paris.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Why do you always think the worst of people? The worst of me?”
“I don’t.”
“I think Le Havre would be good for you, and for Joseph. But if you want to go elsewhere, you’re free to. I didn’t ask for guardianship so that I could snatch Joseph, or become your jailer. I’m granting official permission to you to take him where you wish. Cannu will provide an allowance from the estate.”
“What kind of allowance?”
His lips pursed, as if he heard in the question traces of the feeble-minded leech Cannu had tried to paint. But was I supposed to pretend that I could raise Joseph on air? I needed a roof. I needed food. What I really needed was a husband who wasn’t dead, I thought, but by now I thought it without ache, without longing, with little more than a weary exasperation.
Philippe
— 13 —
Attaching too much importance
IN HINDSIGHT, PHILIPPE THOUGHT, HE SHOULD NOT HAVE GONE to the funeral. He had very well-developed hindsight, a writer’s occupational peril. Lives made much more sense at a distance; they had a shape and an arc. His foresight was less good, and his in-the-moment sight as panicky and poor as anybody else’s.
The day Erik told him that Alfred had died had no shape; it wasn’t a point on a line. It was just a day, with Erik wringing his hands in Philippe’s doorway, truly wringing them, and Philippe putting his own hand on top of them and saying, “Stop. You need those in working order.”
Erik laughed like a crow and Philippe realized he was drunk. “It’s true, isn’t it?” Erik said. “I’m a laborer. Break a finger and I’d be as far into the shit as any poor sod in Arcueil.” All those ideas rattling around in his head, and his body was what paid his bills. “No wonder my father was ashamed.”
“He wasn’t ashamed,” Philippe said, though he didn’t know for certain. “When is the funeral? I’d like to be there.”
In the moment, this wasn’t the wrong thing to say, which meant hindsight was just a great pile of useless. Philippe knew he would say the same thing again, show up at the church in the same black suit, hair neatly combed. He’d try to take his place toward the back, with the acquaintances and business associates, but Erik would see him and drag him forward, to sit directly behind the family: Eugénie; Conrad and his wife, Mathilde; Erik; and Louise and her son.
Louise had been living in Paris for over a year by then, but it was the first time Philippe had seen her since her wedding reception. Erik often forgot that he and his sister were finally living, once again, in the same city. “I suppose we could have invited Louise,” he said sometimes, with genuine surprise. Philippe understood from Erik that she and Joseph had planned to stay briefly with Alfred and Eugénie while they looked for an apartment. But by the time they arrived Alfred was so ill that Louise felt she couldn’t leave. She enrolled Joseph in a neighborhood school and spent her days nursing her father. Philippe had tried to tell from Erik’s accounting if there were familial duties that Louise’s help was allowing him to shirk, but heard no hint in Erik’s voice of guilt or obligation. To be fair, nursing was more properly a daughter’s duty than a son’s, even a son more suited to it than Erik. He cared about his father, but seemed to have convinced himself that in Louise’s capable hands, Alfred would live indefinitely.
In the church Philippe groped for the boy’s name, but it didn’t come. He kept kicking his legs, and Louise kept laying a hand on his knee, and he’d stop for a moment and then start back up. He was the only child in the family pew, which looked strange to Philippe. His own siblings had kept him apprised of the steadily mounting number of nieces and nephews born back in Tarragona. Philippe hadn’t met any of them, but he liked knowing they were there. If his parents had been depending on him to provide grandchildren, in addition to depending on his wire transfers and general report of having made good, he might have crumpled totally under the pressure. He and Camille hadn’t been trying, exactly, when things had gone sour between them, but they hadn’t not been trying. He still wondered sometimes if a baby would have saved them, but realistically, all they’d have now would be an unhappy toddler and a marriage even unhappier than it had been.
“You’re getting divorced already?” Erik had exclaimed, as if what surprised him was the timing and not the fact of it. “I’ve had warts last longer.”
“You’ve had three-year-old warts? Never mind, I don’t want to know anything more about any of your warts.”
Erik had made the right noises of sympathy, asked all the right questions, but Philippe, who’d thought he wanted this show of warmth from Erik, had no good answers. Camille was the friend of a secretary at the publishing house where Philippe had taken a full-time job. She was very pretty, with good teeth and glossy hair and a wonderful laugh. In Montmartre they might have gotten it out of their systems and realized quickly that their mutual attraction was nearly the only thing they had in common. But because Camille was a respectable girl, they’d married speedily so they could dive into bed. The first few months were rapturous, the first year tolerable. By the end of the second they were at each other’s throats. Camille had quit her job at La Samaritaine department store because, she said, married women did not work, and was lonely and stir-crazy in their small apartment. That seemed to be all she could talk about: the apartment, and her plans for nicer drapes or wallpaper or china. That or the wild Gothic romances she purchased by the stack, the only things she ever read.
Erik had been without mercy. “You wanted an ordinary life, and you got one,” he gloated.
It was Philippe who’d suggested the divorce. He’d tried hard to make it exactly that: a suggestion. Divorce had been legal for less than a decade, and if she couldn’t stomach the concept, he would stay. It had never been legal in Spain, and his family assumed that his wife must be a nymphomaniac or criminal for the courts to put asunder what God had joined. We just aren’t right for each other, he wrote to them. NOT RIGHT?? his father wrote back in bafflement, in the same block capitals he’d once used for POETRY???
In truth, even the French courts wouldn’t accept “not right.” Camille and Philippe were required to sign allegations of either adultery, gross criminality, or “cruelty or insult.”
“The third, I suppose?” Philippe said tentatively, looking through the paperwork.
“Which of us is the cruel one?” Camille asked.
Philippe sighed. Chivalry wasn’t dead enough not to make certain demands on a man. “It can be me,” he said. “I’ll be the cruel one.”
Camille threw herself into the task of cataloging his alleged cruelty. The pages mounted until she had at least enough for a shadow-play script, maybe the first part of a novel. The two of them had something in common, after all, Philippe thought, and momentarily reconsidered. But then he read the first few pages and abandoned the effort. Forsoothe, he’d apparently once told her, with labored spelling. I am feeling lustily toowards other women than you, uglee hag!
At the funeral, Erik bent forward in one of his grimy velvet suits, shoulders shaking. Philippe knew his friend didn’t have anything else to wear, but it was wrong for the occasion, and he wished E
rik had asked to borrow something. He reached forward and touched Erik’s shoulder. He meant to be comforting, but Erik started like a frightened horse. His arm came up as he turned, and he accidentally smacked Louise in the side of the head. Once Erik understood there was no one behind him but Philippe, he glared and turned back around, and all three tried to pretend there had been no commotion. Erik had knocked loose a thick strand of Louise’s blond hair, and Philippe watched it come slowly unpinned, unwinding down her back. He couldn’t tell if she was waiting until the service ended to try to repin it or if she hadn’t noticed. He rehearsed in his head how he might tell her if she stood to leave without fixing it. She had seemed, the last time they met, to be someone easily embarrassed, and he didn’t want to embarrass her.
He stared at her hair the rest of the service, his mind wandering. She had a very nice neck. Her posture was precise; he imagined he could place a yoke across her shoulders and it would sit perfectly level. Though in truth almost all women had good posture, because of their corsets. They couldn’t slouch if they wanted to. He pictured for a moment his ex-wife Camille lounging in their bed, and what a revelation that had been, a slouching woman with a waterfall of loosed golden hair. He pictured Louise’s hair, unpinned, cascading down her back.
When the service finally ended, she didn’t seem to have noticed the loose piece of hair. Like the colossal idiot he was, Philippe reached out and touched it, held the hank up off her shoulder like something he’d found. She retrieved it from him, gripping it like it wasn’t already attached to her head. Did she think he’d try to take it?
“Your hair,” Philippe said. “I’m sorry. I just noticed it had come undone.”
Her son gave him a look of loathing. Joseph—that was his name, Philippe remembered suddenly.
Philippe tried to sneak off after that, but there was a gathering planned at Eugénie’s. Erik insisted he come, and Philippe was still trying to be the right kind of friend. If he couldn’t be there for Erik after his father died, of all times, what was left of them? Who else did Erik have?
Vincent, Philippe thought. At least there was Vincent. Had Erik told him yet? Vincent had been a godsend, a breakout star from the Chat Noir, so loyal that he hired Erik to accompany all his bookings, not just cabarets but large music halls and private parties. He commissioned original songs and arrangements too, and liked to write his own lyrics. This was Philippe’s favorite thing about Vincent Hyspa: that he had caused Erik to stop asking Philippe for lyrics or scripts, and so Philippe had been able to stop making excuses for why he couldn’t or didn’t want to write them. As far as he could tell, Vincent had been near single-handedly keeping Erik from starvation, but Alfred had been the other hand, and Philippe didn’t know if Erik could manage without his father’s support.
Later the two men found themselves alone in a corner of Eugénie’s apartment. The room had barely changed, but Philippe didn’t see it with the same awe or hunger. It no longer looked like a foreign land of soft carpets and thick drapes. It just looked like a living room.
Philippe asked Erik if Vincent knew about his father.
“He’s touring.”
Vincent often left Paris for weeks at a time, engaging local accompanists and leaving Erik with no income, though he could hardly be blamed, given that Erik turned down Vincent’s offers to tour with him.
“I hate travel,” Erik said, every time Philippe urged him to accept one of Vincent’s invitations.
“How would you know?” Philippe said. “You never go anywhere.”
“Because I hate it.”
There’d been more and more of this reasonless rigidity. Philippe had tried to throw Erik a housewarming party when he moved to Arcueil. “To celebrate an apartment that more than one person can fit in,” which was the very nicest thing Philippe could find to say about Erik’s plan to live in Arcueil and commute, on foot, ten kilometers to Montmartre every night.
But Erik refused. The apartment wasn’t simply where he was going to live, he said, it was a studio. “I’m trying to compose music there. I don’t need people milling about making the wrong kind of noise.”
“They’re not moving in. It’s just for an evening.”
“The noise will still be there.” Erik wrinkled his nose like it had a smell, this noise, that his well-wishers would leave behind.
Noise doesn’t linger, Philippe thought, but held his tongue. Maybe for Erik it did. Maybe this was one of the things Philippe just wouldn’t, and couldn’t, understand, either about music or about Erik. Half the things Erik said were like those optical illusions that contained two truths: a duck or a rabbit. A dog or its master.
“You should tell Vincent,” Philippe said, in Eugénie’s apartment. “As soon as he’s back.” Philippe didn’t want to be alone with whatever Erik was going to need now, financially or otherwise. It was too much responsibility.
“Have you seen Joseph?” Louise asked, appearing suddenly at Erik’s shoulder.
Both men shook their heads and she sighed.
“Do you want help looking?” Philippe said.
“You should leave him be,” Erik said, and Louise paused, as if weighing Erik’s knowledge of feral boys, angry boys, boys with stitched-together families.
“He’s run off before. He usually just ends up playing marbles with the boys on the next block. But I’d better find him.”
It turned out Joseph was only in Eugénie’s bedroom, which Louise had been reluctant to check until the rest of the apartment had been scoured. He was lying on her bed on his stomach, reading a children’s magazine.
“You didn’t even take your shoes off?” Louise said, and Joseph waggled his feet in the air. “There are people who want to meet you.”
“I don’t want to meet them.”
“I wasn’t giving you a choice.”
“I don’t know any of these people.”
“That’s why they want to meet you.”
“Who’s that?” Joseph pointed at Philippe.
“A friend of your uncle Erik’s,” she said. Having registered his objections to the hunt, Erik was still in the living room. “This is Monsieur—I’m sorry,” she trailed off. “I don’t think I’ve ever known your last name.”
“Philippe is fine,” he said.
“But for Joseph to call you.”
“He can call me Philippe, too.”
Louise looked disapproving and Joseph unimpressed, but Philippe felt he couldn’t stand on ceremony now. Had he wanted Joseph to feel flattered? Why? Was he trying to impress Erik’s sister, of all people? Was he that determined to add one more mistake to his long list of romantic failures?
Joseph asked Philippe if he was a musician, too.
No, a translator, Philippe said, since Erik wasn’t there. If Erik was in the room, Philippe would still feel he had to say writer, to spare himself the worst of Erik’s razzing. But translation was most of what he did now, mostly of informational texts, mostly dull. He asked Joseph which comic was his favorite, indicating the magazine, Le Petit Français illustré, which published several regular strips.
“Plick and Plock,” the boy answered.
This of course meant nothing to Philippe. Where had he thought that conversation could go? “Are you a musician?” he tried again.
“No. I’m going to be a doctor, like my father. But also a real estate investor, because I’ll need more money than a doctor makes.”
When he was eleven, Philippe would have had no idea what an investor was. He almost laughed but looked at Joseph’s deadly serious face and bit it back.
“Then go out there and be polite and assume they’re all prospective customers,” Louise said.
“They aren’t. No one out there has any money. Not real money. Eugénie doesn’t know people with real money.”
“Neither do we,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“Uncle Cannu has real money.”
“He’s got your money,” she agreed sourly.
“You said he said he
was going to come for the funeral,” Joseph complained.
“He said he would. I don’t know what kept him, but I won’t say I’m sorry. And this is a spectacularly gauche conversation to be having in front of company,” Louise added, as if only then remembering that Philippe was there.
Joseph gave a dramatic sigh and rolled off the bed, landing somehow feetfirst, then walked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.
Louise closed her eyes for a long moment. Joseph had left the magazine on the bed, and she leaned over to pick it up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a hard year. For both of us. This was his room, briefly, when we moved in. Then my father got sicker and Eugénie needed somewhere else to sleep, so he and I squeezed in together. There was so much space, where we lived before. Not to make excuses for him. He should know how to behave. He does. He just chooses not to.”
“It’s the age,” Philippe commiserated, although he found Joseph a piece of work.
“Eleven?” Louise said, calling his bluff. “If this is what he’s like now, what will he be like at eighteen?”
At eighteen Philippe had been making plans to leave behind his country, his town, everyone he’d ever known or loved, possibly forever. At eleven? Comics and café papers in Miguel’s bedroom. They’d held everyone around them in contempt, they just hadn’t said it outside that room. Maybe there was hope for Joseph yet. He just needed to learn some circumspection.
“Everyone gets set straight eventually,” Philippe said. “If he still talks like that at eighteen, someone will come along and punch him in the nose, and he’ll start to figure things out.”
“That’s in part what I’m worried about.”
“Life punches everyone in the nose. Not much use trying to avoid it.”
“I suppose,” she said.
Philippe remembered that he was talking to someone who’d lost her husband, lost her home, lost her father only days ago. He didn’t need to explain things to her. “I’m sorry,” he offered. “About Alfred. I don’t want to pretend I knew him very well, but he came through for me and Erik, more than once. He was very kind. I don’t think we ever made him a franc.”
The Vexations Page 28