The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “What do you think Eric’s going to be able to do for you?” Conrad asked.

  For the first time I heard the exhaustion I would hear later in his letters, growing larger and heavier, a snowball rolling down through the years, swollen with ice and dirt and vexation. “I have no idea,” I admitted. “But if it’s more than nothing, he’ll be ahead of you.” I marched to the front hallway.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he called after me.

  I left without answering, because there was no answer. I wasn’t thinking anything. I walked three blocks south, toward the address I’d only ever written to, never visited, then remembered that it was a Friday night and he’d likely be working. I reversed direction for four blocks before pausing to imagine a night spent wandering into various nightclubs in Montmartre, with no money and the wrong clothes, hoping to stumble upon him. I turned around. I passed again in front of Conrad and Mathilde’s apartment, and thought I heard a voice calling to me, or maybe only imagined it. I walked faster.

  It was spring and there was at least another hour of light in the sky, but it was a long walk ahead. Eric had bragged about the length of it, about how strong his legs had gotten, his calves like cantaloupes. He’d also talked about the hammer he carried in a belt loop. “There can be shady characters, that time of night,” he’d said. “I look shady enough to dissuade most of them, but if someone comes too close, I brandish the hammer.”

  I hadn’t known if that was true, or warranted, or just an affectation, but as the light faded I found myself wishing for a hammer. I’d left Conrad’s apartment completely empty-handed, and I wondered if I’d rue the lack of a handbag or if instead I’d be relieved that it might make me less of a target. Obviously I had nothing to steal. I made my face as forbidding as I could anyway, as if it would matter.

  The streets I knew gave way to those I did not, but recognized in a more general way—the apartment houses were the same gray stone, styled with the same types of cornices and waterspouts and wrought-iron balconies. There were the same types of shops with the same lettering on the plate-glass windows. Then those gave way to utterly unfamiliar streets. I kept to the largest, brightest avenues I could. For several blocks the only other women I saw stood posed along the roadway in dresses bright as parrots. I rehearsed in my head what I would say or do if a man thought I was for sale, but no one inquired. I tried not to be wounded that even by the time I finally entered Arcueil, finally found Eric’s street, then his building, with its dull plaster and shuttered windows, no one had spoken to me at all.

  The building was wedge-shaped, filling the space where two angled roads converged. The hour was late and dark had long fallen, but a group of boys were smoking on the corner at the narrow tip of the wedge. I mean boys truly, no older than Joseph.

  When I asked if they lived nearby, they did not answer me at first, suspicious. The tallest one finally nodded. I told them who I was searching for. Could they let me into the building and show me to his apartment?

  “He won’t be there,” the tallest boy said. “He’s out.”

  “I’ll wait for him. It’s important.”

  “What’ll you give me? For showing you?”

  “I don’t have anything with me. I would pay you if I did. I could give Eric something for you the next time I see him?”

  He stood there cracking his knuckles and I guessed he was about to refuse, if for no other reason than because he could, when a smaller boy spoke. “This way,” he piped up, and the tallest boy rolled his eyes.

  Little Louise, I thought. They’ll like you better, little boy, if you learn to be meaner. But not yet. Not till I have what I need.

  The boy opened the front door and took my hand to escort me up a staircase. The interior of the building was very dark. The wall felt both greasy and powdery, cheap whitewash with a coating of smut, and I figured it was just as well I couldn’t see the rest of the stairwell or hallway. The boy took me to a door identical to all the others, and I knocked. No answer.

  “He’s working,” the boy explained. “He’ll be hours yet. Do you not have a key?”

  “I forgot it,” I lied, and tried the knob, not expecting it to turn. We both stood there, surprised, as the door swung open. Moonlight from the window spilled into the hallway and illuminated the boy’s small, round face. “Please don’t tell anyone that his door was unlocked. I’m sure he only left it that way because he was expecting me.”

  He clearly didn’t believe me. “Are you his mother?” he asked.

  “Do I look that old to you?”

  “No. But he doesn’t have a wife.”

  “I’m his sister.”

  The boy nodded. Finally, something for his trouble. He could at least go back to the other boys and report that the local composer, the neighborhood hermit, had a sister. “Does he have a mother somewhere else?”

  “Does he seem like he needs one?”

  The boy just stared at me.

  “We haven’t had a mother in a long time,” I said. “Do you have a mother?”

  I imagined him saying no, and had a passing fantasy of swooping him out of Arcueil, a playmate for Joseph, a helpless urchin graced with sensible moderation and piano lessons, which he would learn to love.

  “Of course,” he said. “Everyone has a mother.”

  I told the boy I appreciated his help and offered to look inside Eric’s apartment for something to give him.

  He peered into the room, calculatingly, then shook his head and was gone.

  I went inside and closed the door behind me, locking it lest the little boy come back with bigger ones to ransack the place. But once I’d found and lit a lamp, I could see what the boy had already guessed: there was nothing here to give him—nothing, anyway, that he might care to take. The room was a musical trash heap. An ancient upright piano was drowning in piles of paper. There were folios disgorging loose-leaf papers, plus teetering towers of twenty years’ worth of composition notebooks. Where had he put it all when he lived in the closet he’d bragged about? I soon realized the answer was that he owned nearly nothing else. A lumpy, narrow bed. His gray jackets, his only jackets, were piled on two pegs stuck in the wall. His trousers were flung across the back of a chair whose wicker seat was torn. There was no wardrobe. His shirts and collars and underwear lay stacked in broken crates pushed against the wall, somehow brilliantly white and carefully starched, while an enormous paper-wrapped mountain of clean handkerchiefs rose beneath a washstand with a bowl, brush, pumice stone, and pitcher of chill, murky water. A few dirty glasses stretched along the windowsill and on the writing desk, where they were accompanied by a pile of staff paper bubbled with circles of brown and red, all different sizes from a parade of wine carafes, glasses of calvados, small cups of coffee.

  In a separate pile I noticed the same work, recopied neatly, in his usual elegant hand, but without doodles or cartoons. The clean copies were titled with exercise numbers, assignments in counterpoint and voice leading. His homework, from the Schola Cantorum. He’d been doing it obediently. Drinking himself silly during, perhaps, but completing the work. I looked for returned assignments with markings from his professors, wanting to know what they’d said. What did they think about the compositions, about Eric’s prospects? About Eric? I longed to see him through someone else’s eyes, more expert than my own.

  I started to jostle open the small drawers of the desk before stopping myself. There was no lie I could tell myself to justify the intrusion. I had no business looking, no business in this whole apartment. The piano bench looked more solid than the single rickety chair by the desk, but even it creaked alarmingly when I sat. I calculated the hour, the likelihood of waking the neighbors, and pressed the keys slowly and gently enough to make no sound, as if I were trying once again to eavesdrop on Estelle and Fortin’s conversations about my marriage prospects. Now, with no other sound to overhear, the air was blank and empty of possibilities. Back then I’d had a future. A future whose unknowns terrified me, but
a future. And what future was Eric preparing himself for?

  I pressed my fingers slightly harder into the keys. The sound was nearly unbearable, so far out of tune I didn’t see how the instrument could be useful for anything. How could you compose on this? Every note would be only a guess, an approximation, of how you hoped it might sound later. In the lamplight my finger pads were dark with grime. The piano had gone long unused.

  Alone in the dark, I started to cry. I took a handkerchief, trusting their wrapped brightness in the filth of the apartment. Were his linens this well laundered because he wanted to keep people from guessing that he lived like this? Had Conrad known what I would find here? He’d known enough to tell me not to come. What do you think Eric’s going to be able to do for you?

  Nothing, I understood now. Nothing.

  Would Eric be angry, or embarrassed, to find me here? I thought about leaving, but I feared the walk back to Conrad’s this late at night. Besides, I imagined the boys would tell Eric I’d been here, and it would be worse explaining my absence than my presence.

  I played silently at the piano until I fell asleep sitting up and jerked forward into the keys with a yowl of notes, not just once but over and over. My body was emptying itself, of wakefulness, of hope. I investigated the bed. The sheets didn’t look as clean as the rest of his linen, but they didn’t look as foul as the rest of the apartment, either. I doused the light, pulled the blanket back, pushed off my shoes, then lay on the top sheet in my clothes. I fell asleep immediately.

  I have no idea what I dreamed that night, but let’s pretend it was something prescient, something wise. I have such dreams, sometimes. A few days ago, for instance, I dreamed again about Mrs. Valera. In the dream we were walking together in Palermo Park. We stopped at a café by a stone fountain. She ordered maté and I ordered coffee, but when our cups came they were filled with small stones. A cat wound around our ankles and we offered her the stones, but she had the sense to refuse them. We ate them ourselves, teeth cracking.

  Today, because my second-to-last Wednesday student—Serge, the Russian boy—canceled his lesson, I arrive early at Diego’s apartment. Mr. Valera opens the door and from the kitchen Mrs. Valera drifts in, back at home. I am irrationally proud, as if my dream has summoned her.

  Diego is at a neighbor’s, she says, but with strict instructions to be back in time.

  “I know I’m early,” I apologize.

  Mrs. Valera offers coffee and keeps insisting, even after I refuse, as if she’s insisting on something larger—on normality, or wellness, or her place in her own house.

  You don’t have anything to prove to me, I want to tell her. You don’t owe any of us anything. “Coffee at this hour will keep me up all night, really,” I say. “A glass of water, perhaps?”

  My brain rattles through things I know I won’t say to her, unless she opens a door she has no reason to open to me. I have no idea what she’s come through, or what she might still be trying to convince herself she can come through. I might tell her that we can lose what we think is everything, and that there is still a life left after. But then I realize that life—the boardinghouse, the buses, the boy at the resettlement center with his paper ball, the women in my language classes, the people I have not seen in forty years dying an ocean away—will not look like any kind of comfort to Mrs. Valera. Louise the oyster, gullet of sand, pretending she’s licked it into pearls.

  “It’s good to see you,” I say, which seems safe enough, and she gives a tight smile.

  “Diego’s been a mess at this week’s practicing,” Mr. Valera announces, tossing his grandson into the maw of the silence.

  “As in he hasn’t done any, or he’s struggling with the pieces?”

  “He practices,” his mother says.

  “But there’s no way they’re supposed to sound like that,” Mr. Valera huffs.

  “Do you know which ones he’s struggled with?” I drain the glass of water quickly because I don’t have a surface handy to set it on and I need both hands to brace myself up and out of the armchair I’ve been slowly sinking into. I tuck the glass by my hip and lurch upright. Once I’m on my feet I move easily enough toward the piano, then shuffle through the music on the stand.

  “I think that one’s the worst,” Mr. Valera says. “The green cover.”

  I flip through the piece, the doll serenade from Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite, trying to figure out what has befuddled him.

  “What’s it supposed to sound like?” Mr. Valera asks.

  “You’d like me to play it?” One should never assume anyone wants a concert.

  “Please,” Mrs. Valera says. “It would be useful to know how it ought to go.”

  Somehow her asking feels less strange to me than Mr. Valera’s request, and I sit on the stool. A sudden flurry of nervousness shoots down from my shoulders. Few, if any, of my families know how little I play anymore. I don’t own a piano, have never owned a piano, really—the ones in Le Havre, Bellenau, Paris, all belonged to someone else. Here in Buenos Aires I lived for a time in a boardinghouse that had one in the dining room. At the French Institute there’s one in the main reception hall, another shoved away in a classroom, often available but rarely tuned. I play sample phrases at my students’ homes, of course, sometimes longer passages, but rarely whole pieces.

  This piece, I am relieved to feel once I’ve started, is complicated enough to stymie Diego but simple enough for me. I have the stray thought that I must once have been rather good, if I can let myself get so rusty and still sound pleasant. The thought occurs to me as if it’s about someone else, the Louise I left in France, who cared for music in a different way before it became her livelihood. Who had no livelihood then at all.

  “You play very well,” Mr. Valera says at the end of the lesson, as he walks me to the door. “Now that Carmen’s back, I’ll be around less.”

  “A relief, I imagine.”

  “Yes and no,” he says, then pauses a long moment. “I would like to see you again.”

  It takes several seconds for me to discern what he means (perhaps he wants piano lessons for himself?), then to believe he means it.

  “And…from your silence,” he says, “perhaps I can assume that you don’t feel the same.”

  “No—I—the silence wasn’t my answer. The silence was me being…surprised.”

  “I figured at our age, I might as well be direct. If the silence wasn’t it, may I ask if you do have an answer?”

  I haven’t thought of Mr. Valera as a possibility, but it has been a long time since I have looked at anyone and thought of possibilities. The first emotion I feel after surprise is fear. What price might I be asked to pay for whatever happens next?

  “All right,” I say. “Yes.” Not because I find Mr. Valera particularly appealing, but because there is nothing anybody can do to me anymore.

  In the dingy apartment in Arcueil-Cachan, I half awoke to realize Eric was lying beside me, curled close in the narrow bed. He was wearing flannel pajamas, an arm flung across my side. It was cozy, and somewhere under his smell of beer and body and hair tonic was a deeper smell I convinced myself I still recognized. I fell back asleep, into the smell, into his warmth.

  When I woke again he was shaking me. “You’re really here? Louise?”

  I squinted up at him, still confused with sleep.

  “When I got home I thought I was seeing things, and I was too tired to do anything but ignore it. But you’re really here?”

  “I’m really here.”

  He was reaching for a suit jacket to put over his pajamas, as if they didn’t already cover him neck to ankle.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable. I thought I’d wait in the hall, but the door was open. Well, it was unlocked. I opened it. Then I got so tired. I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “You came to see me in the middle of the night, without telling me?”

  What to say? Everything sounded foolish. I could see that the s
un was well up. This is the morning of the day that I lose my child, I thought. “He’s taking Joseph. Cannu.” Eric waited, expectantly, for how this explained my coming to Arcueil. “I was trying to think of places to take him—” Eric was already shaking his head, and I said, “I know, I know. There’s nothing here for him. It was a mad, middle-of-the-night idea.” Him, I said, because I thought it might sound less harsh than me, as if I still expected something from Eric. I didn’t. Or I told myself I didn’t. I sat up, back against the wall, knees drawn to my chest. I wrapped my arms around my legs like a child.

  Eric sat on the edge of the bed, bundled in his jacket on top of his pajamas. “I wish there was something I could do,” he said. Out of anyone else’s mouth it would have sounded like a platitude, but Eric meant it sincerely. He did wish it, for my sake and for his. He wished he were a man with resources. He wished I had come to his doorstep and encountered something other than what I found.

  I’d asked him to promise me that he’d do something with his life, once upon a time, and this was how he lived. I wanted to reassure him that I had deeper wounds now, and I did not care in the same way whatever he did with his life. But then I thought—why was it still my job to reassure him, on this day of all days?

  “I do have something,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t fix anything. Please don’t get your hopes up. I started saying this the wrong way. But I have something I’d like to give you.” He was still talking as he backed out of the room, and I heard the drawers of the writing desk jostling open, being rummaged through. “Here,” he said, returning, holding out a tarnished pocketknife.

  “As much as I might like to stab Cannu,” I said, “it wouldn’t get me what I want.”

  “It’s the knife. Father’s knife, from the train. You left it for me in Honfleur. I knew I was supposed to use it to come get you, but I didn’t know how.”