“Is my typing meant to be the kettle banging, or the stars weeping?” It could be a legitimate question if not for the typist’s insolent tone.
A kettle, Erik thinks. Could a stove be installed in the wings, such that the shriek of the boiling is choreographed? He can out-Cocteau Cocteau. He can out-anybody anybody.
Now Cocteau jumps onstage to speak to Massine, who’s still in costume. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire is there too, standing on the floor and leaning heavily against the edge of the stage. He’s agreed to write the introduction for the printed program, for which he’s coined the word “surrealism.”
Erik stands next to Apollinaire and calls up to Cocteau that he wants the typist fired.
“Must we do this now?” Cocteau says. “I thought you’d come around on the typewriter.”
“I’ve made my peace with the typewriter. It’s the typist I want to replace.”
Cocteau surveys what remains of the departing orchestra and spots the typist folding his metal typewriter into a black leather case, as if it really were a musical instrument. “What’s your objection?”
“What’s the appeal?”
The men regard each other. They’ve danced around this already—Cocteau’s tastes, his assumption that Erik shares them. The more Erik tries to avoid the topic of sex, the more Cocteau seems to see him as a project. He can deliver Erik to the world, the world to Erik; get Erik’s music onto the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet, and a man into Erik’s bed.
“His playing not to your taste, Erik?” Cocteau asks.
Erik winces. He doesn’t like people using his first name. It’s intimate, tongues plucking at him. No thank you. He doesn’t even want his name in Cocteau’s mouth. In anybody’s mouth. He shakes his head.
“Suit yourself, Erik.” Cocteau mimes the buttoning up of a shirt, all the way under his chin, strangling himself. “Since you have such particular requirements, why don’t you hire the replacement? As long as he can be here for tomorrow’s rehearsal with a typewriter in hand, it’s fine with me.”
Dismissed, Erik lurks, wanting to see if anyone says anything about the costumes, which he considers a disaster, but one beyond his purview to mention. Massine is his best hope. Surely he recognizes how ridiculous Picasso’s designs are, great conglomerations of cardboard boxes the dancers can barely move in. That’s what you get when you hire a Cubist as costume designer, Erik thinks, as contemptuous of the word as of Picasso’s costumes. Everyone laps Picasso up, but he’s still an -ist. There’s a word that describes what Picasso does. It’s a word he originated, but still. There is no word for Erik.
“Did you have something else to say, Erik?” Cocteau asks.
Erik shakes his head and creeps away. If he didn’t owe Cocteau his professional future, he would ask him to stop with the name. The pilgrims who seek out Erik often call him “Maître,” or master, and even when they’re joking a little they mean it sincerely. There’s a small flock of them—mostly men, all of them young—and together they represent a hodgepodge of musical styles and influences and aims. The most flattering article Erik has ever read about himself turned out to have been written by a fourteen-year-old, which he realized only when he arranged to meet the author, and a boy, barely out of short pants, answered the door of his parents’ apartment. For a moment Erik crumpled, the universe one vast joke made at his expense. Then he decided that of course, of course! His legacy should rest with people barely out of short pants; adults, well, they’d had their chance to discover him and had largely missed out.
Georges Auric, the fourteen-year-old, is going to make a better critic than composer, but Erik plans to let the boy figure that out for himself. Same for Roger Désormière—he’s a better conductor than a musician but doesn’t seem to know it yet. Ah well. Erik had to figure everything out for himself the long, hard way, and likes the idea of his admirers doing the same. Not that he wants them to suffer, but he’s curious which ones will stick with music, and what parts of it they’ll stick to. Erik is the maître of stickiness. It’s his most extraordinary quality, but the young admirers can’t yet appreciate how painful and exhausting it is to beat your head against the same wall for years, even go back to school to learn how to beat it in better. They admire him now for other reasons, but when they’re old they’ll admire him for this. Assuming they get old. One by one, they’ve turned eighteen and been called up to the war.
It is May of 1917. Walking home, Erik buys a newspaper, dips into a café to page urgently through it. No major developments at the front, and he breathes a sigh of relief. He doesn’t want Parade to have to compete with the war news. He wants the city’s undivided attention. He knows he should be glad simply that men are not dying, or at least not dying in such vast numbers as they were in April, at the Second Battle of the Aisne. And he is glad—he wants Auric safe, Désormière, the other young admirers. He wants the men he conducted as boys in the children’s choir in Arcueil to once again sell loose cigarettes on the stoop outside his building. He wants his nephew, Joseph, home from the medical corps, even if the boy’s home is Cherbourg, not Paris. And probably not boy anymore, Erik corrects himself, doing the math because he hasn’t seen Joseph since before Louise left France.
For the last year, Louise’s letters have been relentlessly afraid for her son. Erik feels both frustrated and helpless when he reads them, as if Louise is expecting him to do something about Joseph, or about the entire war. He isn’t sure what to say, so only occasionally writes back. He’s got a letter half-finished on his desk, but his favorite bit has to do with earwax, and although it’s meant to be comforting, he isn’t sure it will land right. In a winter missive he suggested that Joseph make snow angels, or find a well-meaning sister to lie to the authorities on his behalf. He meant it as gratitude for Louise, perhaps also as mockery of his own lifelong unwillingness to be told what to do. I’ve always wished he had a sister, Louise wrote back, and Erik knew he’d said the wrong thing again.
When the Germans were within bombing distance of the city, early in the war, Erik volunteered with the Home Guard, but nothing much ever happened. The war is a distant performance: overly long, with no interval to stretch your legs, and terrible reviews. Dull costumes, mud backdrop, no applause. He cares about the outcome, but it’s gotten harder to care day by day. In the hour by hour he even forgets the whole thing is happening, until he sits to eat breakfast and there’s tallow on his bread, a splash of tinned milk swirling in a cup of something brown that everyone’s stoically calling coffee but is definitely no longer coffee, and newspaper articles straining to make glorious the acquisition of a few more feet of annihilated land.
Cocteau travels regularly to the front to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver, and describes the situation there as much worse than the heavily censored newspapers suggest. Apollinaire hasn’t been north since being wounded, the scar still angry across his shaved, shrapnel-laced head. He isn’t fully recovered, and everyone is happy when he manages to attend rehearsals, in part because he makes it all right, what they’re doing, putting a circus on the stage of the Châtelet while men are dying a few hours to the north. If Apollinaire, with shrapnel in his head, thinks this is worth doing, that gives them license to do it.
“Maybe it’s because he’s got metal in his head that he thinks it’s any good,” Mathilde said during one Sunday dinner with her and Conrad.
Erik still accepts the dinner invitations, depends on them, even admires what Mathilde can do with margarine now that no one can get hold of butter. But he and Mathilde have dropped any pretense of getting along.
“She’s a scrapper,” Erik said to Conrad, with Mathilde seated right there. “When you first married her I didn’t expect it.”
Mathilde rolled her eyes.
Changing the subject, Conrad mentioned Louise, although neither brother had more news than had been in her latest letters. “I know she wishes you’d write more,” Conrad said, in a careful tone that did not entirely conceal his chiding.
Erik neither made excuses nor promised to write more often, simply ran his fingers over the back of his hand, where her cut had faded to a long white line.
The brothers talked then of the war, but what was there to say? Their fighting years had come tucked between the siege and the current conflagration. Erik hadn’t thought about the army since he was invalided out, but Conrad, self-conscious about how little he’d been doing, mentioned the ages of every colleague or neighbor who’d joined the fight. At forty-seven, he hadn’t yet aged off the Reserve rolls.
“If you’re called up, we’ll know things are desperate,” Erik joked.
Conrad didn’t find it funny. He’d started exercising again, refusing to admit it had anything to do with the war. Rationing had already slimmed him down, and then he’d bought a membership at a neighborhood sports hall. Erik went to watch one practice and couldn’t stop laughing. The men with graying hair ran around in little shorts, tossing javelins and heaving shots, baring their pale chicken legs. If they were that concerned with proving themselves manly, Erik thought, they should just go to Belgium and get themselves blown up already.
He’d begun a series of little musical sketches, Sports et divertissements, before the war started. Then the magazine that commissioned them went on hiatus, and he made the mistake of showing them to Conrad, wondering if his brother might have any suggestions for what else Erik could do with them.
“Since when do you write about sports?” Conrad said, his voice thick with the suspicion that Erik was poking fun at him.
“I write about anything,” Erik objected. “I always have. None of these are about you.”
Conrad gave him a skeptical look.
Why, Erik wondered, did everyone always think he was making fun of them?
Erik finishes his drink (despite the food shortages, Paris is never short of alcohol), folds the newspaper, leaves it on the table, resumes his walk home. He’s not happy with the balance of the woodwinds in the Chinese conjurer number, and Cocteau has shoved a juddering roulette wheel into the forte passages. Now Erik has to find a new typist by tomorrow night. Tonight? He looks up at the stars, trying to guess the time. There were nights before the war that they seemed nearly blotted out by streetlights and smog, but tonight the city is crouched dark and still enough that the sky has its old milky sparkle, only a little blurred. Or is that his eyes? He takes his glasses off, cleans them with a handkerchief, puts them back on. No way of telling. His glasses are meant for close work. It would be unfair to expect them to show him the sky as well.
His feet hurt, his back. As plush as the seats at the Châtelet are, it’s been a long few nights, with more to come. All this rehearsing. Aristide Bruant would just walk on and own the whole place. What poor sod is accompanying him now? Out of professional solidarity, Erik would like to hire a pianist to operate the typewriter. Who does he know who most needs the wage? He so rarely has anything anyone would want. There’s a pleasure to it, heavy and satisfying, like the hammer in his belt loop.
Cue footfall on stone, on brick, on brushed gravel. Cue curb. Cue sewer plate. Cue the Arcueil-Cachan aqueduct looming like sturdy lacework against the stars; mmmmmmmm, the typist could write, the shape of the aqueduct. Sometimes by the end of his walk it is so late that it’s early, and Erik nods to milk carts, oxcarts bringing produce from the farmland around the city, ever farther out. There’s train service that didn’t exist when he moved here, between the suburbs and Gare de Sceaux. Or he can walk to the Métro at Porte d’Orléans, take line 4 all the way to Clignancourt if he wants, at the northern edge of Paris. Or transfer at Denfert-Rochereau, at Montparnasse, or Barbès-Rochechouart. He can be whisked through the entire city in a box underground, but he almost never takes the Métro. There’s the cost, of course, but it’s more that he’s come to need his long walks, the way his head empties and his body makes its own rhythm—heartbeat, footfall, the filling and emptying of his lungs. The young admirers think he lives in Arcueil as a political statement, Man of the People. When he was conducting the children’s choir some of the locals assumed the same, that he was a Communist come to earn his stripes. He would puncture the illusion if he ever revealed that he moved here only to hear himself think.
It didn’t do any good. Maybe it did a little good.
Oxcart, milk cart. Someday, he dreams, the world will not even need the words. They will be discarded like hooves, like sackbuts or harpsichords. Like steamships replaced canvas sails. And he remembers, still, the ropes slithering reptilian across the boards and the splash that night he fell off his uncle’s boat. Let those sounds perish from the earth and let them not be mourned. He makes a catalog in his head of objects he might score into music if he could decide what they sound like: the flaring of a bulb’s filament, a glass egg of light. An umbrella spun open in the rain, a dazzle of dark. Water disappearing down the new drain in his apartment, even if he still has to carry water from the fountain in the street. The street is named after the nearby Église Saint-Denis. In a century it will be named after Erik. This would give him such comfort, such vindication, if he allowed himself to believe it possible.
In the silence certain noises seem garish—a man pissing against a wall, a lover’s quarrel from an attic window. A woman stands alone in the dark with lipstick drawn like a laceration across her face. He does not want to look too long, to make her hopeful, but he swears he recognizes her. Did they perform together? Most of the women who ply this territory have long since come to recognize him, and know he never buys. But this one is new and puts a hand on her hip, lifts her skirt with the other, just to the calf. Her stocking is torn, the pale flesh puffing out like a wound. He makes an apologetic half smile, tips his hat, shakes his head. If she happened to own a typewriter, he could offer her the job. A streetwalker in the orchestra pit. That would out-Cocteau Cocteau. Or would it? He imagines Cocteau retaliating by replacing the corps de ballet with cancan girls.
This gives him an idea, and when he wakes later in the morning he nearly empties his desk looking for the letter. It can’t have come so long ago. The newspapers have barely begun to run preview stories on Parade. La Vorace saw one and sent him a letter, care of the Châtelet. She’d sold what was left of the animals, married a magician, and eked out a few good years. Now she was a widow and badly off. She was glad to see Erik’s star had risen. If there was anything he could see his way to doing for her, she’d be most appreciative. At first he disliked her presumption, then felt doleful that there was nothing at all he was in a position to do for anyone. He can’t even offer her Parade unless he can procure a typewriter.
Conrad? Usually his source for any and all items, to the point that Mathilde once scolded Erik for treating her apartment like a department store. “Except you think it’s all free. Anything you didn’t have to pay for yourself, you think it came freely.” But Conrad wouldn’t own a typewriter. He has the kind of job that comes with secretaries to type things for him.
Erik continues pondering typewriters while he packs a bag with the score for Parade, a notebook, and extra paper and pens, then hooks an umbrella over his arm even though the weather is sunny. There won’t be time to come home before tonight’s rehearsal. But he never comes home except to sleep anyway.
He has breakfast at his regular café, although many of its other patrons have already proceeded to lunch. He smokes a cigar. The bartender puts a good-sized splash of brandy in his coffee without his having to ask. If he ever meant to be a Communist, he took a wrong turn somewhere. Maître d’Arcueil, treated with deference like some lordly old coot.
Several of the young admirers probably have typewriters. Correction: their parents have typewriters, and to borrow one Erik would have to calculate who’s been called up, who’s still living at home, whose parents are supportive of their sons’ musical ambitions, and whose might see Erik as a villain, Pied Piper of wastrels. Why don’t the misfit children move out as quickly as possible and starve, as they did in his day? But where would they go?—tha
t’s the trouble. Montmartre’s over. The real artists are now in Montparnasse, which the young admirers wouldn’t be able to afford. Erik can’t afford Montparnasse.
Then there’s the possibility of accidentally calling on someone who’s been killed in action, splashing into a pool of family grief.
Philippe almost certainly owns a typewriter, but he’s out of town. Out of the country, actually, and Erik congratulates himself on knowing Philippe’s whereabouts, although he found out only by accident when he showed up on Philippe’s doorstep one night drunk and unannounced, and Philippe’s wife led him into a living room filled with half-packed suitcases. She was the third wife, but Erik called her by the second wife’s name and didn’t realize his mistake until Philippe corrected him.
“Where are you going?” Erik asked, and scowled.
To Tarragona, Philippe said, and Erik would have been less surprised if he’d said Tahiti. To see family, Philippe explained. His parents were both still living, but a brother had written him to suggest that if Philippe was going to come at all, he should come sooner rather than later.
“And I suppose you have about a hundred nieces and nephews by now.”
“Something like that,” Philippe said. It would be good to meet them, he added, but he didn’t sound like it would be good at all. He sounded terrified at the prospect of showing up after thirty years and inviting his family’s definitive appraisal of whether he’d made good use of the time.
Philippe’s older daughter came into the room to toss some schoolbooks into one of the suitcases, and Erik realized with a sick feeling that he could not quite remember her name. Neither hers nor her younger sister’s. Because he and Philippe had none of the same friends anymore, there was no one he could ask later.
With a meaningful look, Philippe’s wife said they would be leaving early in the morning and there was still a lot of packing to do, and Erik took his cue.
The Vexations Page 36