The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “Sure you can. For this show, anyway,” the ticket seller had said, and offered Conrad prime seats, orchestra front and center, for the opening night—December 4, 1924. The name of the show was Relâche, the word theaters used for “no performance tonight.”

  “How clever,” Conrad imagined Mathilde saying, all deadpan distaste. But it was a major production with the Ballets Suédois, who would debut the work at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It was Erik’s first commission with the company, and only his third ballet. Relâche might have a jokey name and slow ticket sales, but it was still a triumph. Of course Conrad would attend.

  But whom should he ask to go with him, instead of Mathilde? His closest friend was also his boss, which had never been a problem before, but things were not going well at work. Ernest Beaux was doing Chanel No. 5 down in Grasse, and Jacques Guerlain had Shalimar. Maison Jeancard had been in talks with Lanvin to collaborate on a new scent, but the latest rumor was that Lanvin would instead choose Fraysse and Vacher. Parfumerie was a small world. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew that Maison Jeancard was chugging along uninspiringly. It was still profitable, which meant that Conrad’s job as laboratory director was safe for now, but without any great triumphs that would not stay true.

  “I didn’t know perfumes were made by chemists,” Mathilde had said, back when they were courting.

  “What did you picture?” Conrad asked.

  “I don’t know. Elegant ladies examining flowers.”

  “It’s ugly men examining fractionating columns.”

  “You’re not ugly,” she said. And he knew he wasn’t, but had managed not to let it go to his head too badly.

  He was the coauthor, along with Paul Jeancard, of the Brief Guide to the Chemistry of Perfumes: A Scientific Encyclopedia and Study Guide. It had come out twenty years ago and Conrad still kept two copies on the bookshelf in the living room. One of his secret pleasures was to stay up late reading his own book, taking note of what information had become outmoded and how much of the book was still true, or had even anticipated later advances. It was holding up well, all things considered. He dropped this into casual conversation with Paul at work, how fine their book still was, but he couldn’t say it too specifically without admitting that he still liked to read it. There was nothing to learn, no second edition in the works. He just liked rereading the words he’d written and knowing he had written them.

  He’d given a copy to Erik, but he assumed his brother had never read it. To be fair, very little of it would have made any sense to him. Erik hadn’t questioned why his brother was giving him a book he couldn’t read. He knew. “Showing off, are you?” he ribbed Conrad.

  But Conrad let Erik show off all the time without calling attention to it. Why couldn’t his brother do the same for him?

  “Because he’s Erik,” Mathilde had said. They hadn’t been married long then, but she’d already gotten the lay of the land.

  Shortly thereafter Erik had invited them to an extraordinary dinner during which he ordered 150 oysters without asking.

  “I couldn’t possibly eat fifty oysters,” Mathilde protested.

  “You just do your best,” Erik said. “I’ll polish off whatever’s left. I can eat a hundred, easily.”

  This turned out to be accurate. The wine came in prodigious amounts, but it wasn’t until Erik asked for champagne that Conrad made a plea for moderation.

  “Nonsense. I’m flush,” Erik explained. An unexpected commission, payment up front. “This is all my treat. Such lucky timing!”

  “Lucky how?” Conrad asked. What new crisis was the money that was now being frittered away on oysters meant to alleviate?

  “Because of your book. So I can fête you properly.”

  Conrad, surprised, thanked him, then demurred. “We only assembled it. There’s no new research in it.”

  “Don’t pretend it doesn’t mean anything to you. That’s a silly thing to pretend.”

  “Hear, hear!” Mathilde said, and she and Erik clinked glasses.

  Conrad tried to remember when else they had agreed. Not often. From the beginning Mathilde and Erik had been oil and water, bleach and vinegar.

  Bleach + vinegar = chlorine gas. Bleach + ammonia = chloramine vapor, which, similar to chlorine gas, burns the eyes and respiratory system. Bleach + isopropanol alcohol = chloroform. Depending on the reaction, you could also end up with chloroacetone, dichloroacetone, or hydrochloric acid, all of which could cause agonizing chemical burns. Few people appreciated how many ways there were to die using common household chemicals, Conrad thought. After the Germans had deployed their chlorine-gas attacks at Ypres, Conrad had drawn up plans for converting the Jeancard parfumerie to a chemical-weapons lab.

  “You can’t be serious,” Jeancard had said. When Conrad’s uncomfortable shuffling made clear that he was, Jeancard added, “I want to help the war effort as much as anyone, but we’re not equipped for this kind of work. We’d gas ourselves, and probably half the neighborhood.”

  Conrad had applied to other jobs, both with the government and with private firms rumored to be working on weapons development. Efforts were sufficiently classified that it wasn’t always clear what he was applying for, and in any case no one bit. He was too old and too expert to be a laboratory monkey, one company suggested after interviewing him, and—given that he’d spent his entire career at Maison Jeancard—too narrowly experienced to join the lab as a chemist. He’d come close to begging for the lab-monkey position, pride be damned in the face of existential crisis, but then he’d run the numbers on the salary difference and realized he had to stay put. By then he was not only supporting Mathilde but also sending regular allowances to Erik in Arcueil and Louise in Buenos Aires, to Mathilde’s everlasting frustration.

  “Devote yourself to a wartime scent,” Jeancard said. “It’s not meaningless, what we do. We’re keeping spirits up.”

  But between the supply shortages and Conrad’s overly literal interpretations of “wartime scent”—muddy heart notes, panicky top notes tangy as air-raid sweat—they couldn’t get any traction. Then Maison Caron launched N’Aimez que moi, marketed specifically for soldiers to give their sweethearts to keep them faithful. Conrad thought the scent was a cheap wallop of roses in a vague cloud of violet, and found the entire commercial campaign every bit as tasteless as he’d found Parade. The name—Love no one but me—was downright threatening.

  “It’s a blockbuster,” Jeancard told him. “Get back to the bench.”

  Conrad had been a steadfast admirer of Erik’s music, the most steadfast, and he’d tried mightily to avoid telling Erik what he thought of Parade. Their relationship had already been strained after Eugénie died, with Erik so buoyantly griefless that it was hard for Conrad to be around him. But at a dinner with Mathilde and Conrad, Erik had pressed and pressed, and Conrad was unwilling to lie.

  “Parade is not ‘in poor taste,’” Erik lashed back. “You know what’s in poor taste? Spending a war making perfume.”

  “You asked for my opinion,” Conrad said stiffly.

  “I didn’t know your opinion was going to be so warped by your own guilt.”

  “Guilt?” Mathilde said. “What does he have to be guilty about?”

  “Mathilde, please.”

  “I want to know what’s wrong with making perfume,” she said, then turned back to Erik. “You’ve certainly never complained about reaping the proceeds.”

  “Mathilde. I can have my own argument.”

  “No, actually, you can’t. Not with your brother. You never stand up for yourself.”

  Erik veered into a monologue about an upcoming memorial concert for Claude Debussy, the politics of which was apparently endless: which pieces, played by whom, who would do the speeches and who hated the people doing the speeches, and why weren’t there more young composers participating, why all the old battle-axes?

  Conrad’s eyes were glazing over, but this was safer than being asked for opinions.

 
“I think that’s enough about a concert I’ll never go to,” Mathilde finally said.

  “What? I’m sorry. I can get you tickets. You can come if you want.”

  “I wouldn’t go if you paid me. I haven’t listened to a note of his music since the Lilly business. He may have skulked back to France when enough people forgot about it, but that doesn’t mean I did.”

  The Lilly business was Lilly Texier, Claude’s first wife, who’d shot herself through the chest in the middle of the Place de la Concorde after Claude left her for another woman.

  “He’s dead,” Erik said, genuinely shocked. “He’s dead, and Lilly was ages ago.”

  “I don’t have to forgive him just because he’s dead. I know my opinion of Claude Debussy doesn’t matter a whit to anybody, but I get to keep it.”

  “I spent a lot of dinner parties seated next to Lilly,” Erik said, “and trust me, she’s not worth it. She wasn’t worth five minutes of music from Claude. She was even more boring than you are.”

  Mathilde left the dining room, left the entire apartment, and Erik offered to clear the dishes but Conrad refused the help. Erik tried again to explain just how wrong everyone was about Lilly, how unequal she’d always been to Claude, how worthless it was to mourn what she’d done.

  “We’re not fighting about Claude Debussy,” Conrad said. “We’re not fighting about music.” He clattered dishes into the sink.

  “Aren’t we?”

  Conrad turned on the faucet and Erik stared balefully at the sink, as if he found the water suspicious or maybe presumptuous, simply showing up without needing to be brought from the hall or the street outside.

  “Then what are we fighting about?” Erik said.

  “You cannot speak that way to my wife.”

  “We’re fighting about Mathilde?” Erik said, with intense exasperation, as if unable to imagine who would ever bother to do such a thing, as if Conrad had somehow tricked him into having an argument about Mathilde when he had been trying to have an argument about art. He pulled a glass out of the pile of dishes and held it under the stream from the faucet. He rinsed it once, then filled it and took a drink. “It doesn’t taste any different from the water at the fountains,” he said.

  “It’s the same water,” Conrad said. “Did you want to take some home?” He held up the carafe that had been on the dining table, now empty.

  “Of course not,” Erik said, but the subsequent silence grew awkward, because if Mathilde had been here she would have packaged up food for Erik by now, the way Eugénie used to.

  Conrad started shoving leftovers into the carafe, pouring in peas and then jamming pieces of mutton through the narrow neck with his fingers. Once they were inside he held the carafe out to Erik.

  Erik took it, but asked how he was supposed to get the food back out again. “I mean, to wash and return this. I’m not complaining.”

  “Go home,” Conrad said.

  A few days before the premiere of Rêlache, a letter arrived from Joseph. He was grown now, married and working as a doctor in Picauville, a town almost exactly equidistant between Bellenau and Cherbourg. He had a small practice there that supported him and his wife. He would never buy back Bellenau, but if this bothered him, he’d never said. He mentioned in his letter that he’d be in Paris for a medical conference—would Conrad like to meet? Conrad wrote back that he had tickets for a ballet and asked if Joseph would join him.

  After he arrived in Paris, Joseph sent Conrad a pneu, and they made plans to meet directly at the theater. They had last seen each other at Joseph’s wedding a few years earlier, but both were at ages when faces changed slowly. They recognized each other easily. Joseph looked a little like Louise, Conrad thought, but probably more like his father. Conrad tried to call up the man’s face, but they’d met only the once. That was once more than Joseph had ever met him.

  The theater was plastered with signs reading relâche. Not posters advertising the performance, but hastily printed cancellation notices. Instead of leaving, however, the crowd just kept growing as people waited for the punch line.

  “Is there no show at all?” Joseph asked, confused. “The whole thing is a stunt?”

  Finally the house manager emerged to address the crowd: lead dancer Jean Börlin was ill, no understudy, apologies for the inconvenience. The opening was rescheduled for the following night. Still the crowd didn’t disperse. “I’m serious,” the manager said. “Relâche is relâche. We’ll be back on tomorrow. Tonight’s tickets honored then. This isn’t a joke.”

  People milled about anyway, waiting for something else to happen, perhaps a burst of confetti and dancers pouring out to reward the faithful, but slowly the December cold and the resolutely darkened theater drove everyone off. Joseph and Conrad found a nearby brasserie, occupied a table, and ordered.

  “I’ll be sorry to miss it,” Joseph said.

  “You can’t stay an extra night?”

  Joseph shook his head and explained that Nancey was expecting. She was pretty far along—he’d like to get back as quickly as possible.

  “That’s wonderful news!” Conrad said, aggressive in his effusiveness, trying to communicate both that it was genuinely wonderful and that it did not bother him to hear it. The pain of his and Mathilde’s childlessness, once it had persisted so long that everyone in their lives was aware of it, had become something like a bad knee or hip—he forgot about it for long stretches of time, then stepped wrong and his body was on fire. He knew Mathilde had never forgotten, not even for a day. Probably not for so much as an hour. He asked Joseph about the due date, Nancey’s health, nursery arrangements, names.

  “Pierre-something, if it’s a boy,” Joseph said. “No surprises there.”

  Their food came, veal cutlets with vinegary beans. They’d ordered the exact same thing without noticing.

  Joseph seemed to wait until Conrad’s mouth was full before speaking again, as if afraid of how he’d respond. “We were thinking Pierre-Conrad, actually, for the baptismal name. Would you mind? I know we haven’t had the chance to be terribly close, but we’d like to include this side of the family. We’d use Louise, of course, if it’s a girl.”

  Conrad chewed, swallowed. He was simultaneously confused and close to tears. “Erik’s the famous one.”

  “We prefer Pierre-Conrad,” Joseph said simply.

  “But I’m the boring one.”

  Joseph smiled. “I’m not saying I agree. But even if it were true, it seems like a perfectly good legacy. I think yours would be a pretty lucky life for our child to have.”

  Conrad had not felt lucky since Mathilde’s death, ten months earlier, of influenza, but he could step back from this year and understand, from that removed vantage, what his nephew meant. He had been lucky, all things considered. He had his work, a comfortable home, plenty of food and light and fuel. Luckiest of all was his marriage to Mathilde. He’d had a great love, Conrad thought, and felt a bit silly at the grandiosity of the sentiment, but it was true. They’d slept in each other’s arms, truly in each other’s arms, every night. Their bodies had worn a single deep furrow into the center of the mattress, an empty pool Conrad now found himself foundering in at night. But he was grateful to have had her, however it ended.

  “Have you heard from your mother?” he asked, changing the subject before he fell apart in front of his nephew.

  They compared the dates and contents of recent letters, found that she’d written them on more or less the same schedule, with about the same information: piano students, concerts, an excursion to the Iguazú Falls with two fellow teachers from the French Institute.

  “I saw an advertisement the other day,” Conrad said. “A promotion from the Blue Star line. Discounted sailings out of Boulogne.”

  Joseph pushed his last forkful of food back and forth across his plate before answering. “It’s not just the fare. I can’t lose weeks or months of income, plus the practice would fall to pieces. And especially now, with the baby…” He trailed off still st
aring down at his fork.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you defend yourself. I understand how difficult it is. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Someday, maybe,” Joseph said.

  They’d both finished their food, and Conrad didn’t want to end the meal on this note. “The name,” he said. “I’d be honored. I can’t tell you how honored I’d be.”

  It was nearly twenty years ago now that he’d had to fetch Louise from Cherbourg. She’d been standing outside Joseph’s new school for several days, shouting for him at the windows. The police were called. She’d run from them, managing to lock herself in her hotel room. Who knew Louise was that fast on her feet? The hotel owner had talked the police into leaving—a respectable-looking woman dragged through the lobby would be bad for business. But someone needed to come for her, the telegram read. Someone needed to pay her bill.

  When Louise opened the door to Conrad, he didn’t think anyone would be surprised to see her dragged through a hotel lobby. She was disheveled, distraught. He’d barely ever seen her with her hair down, and here it was tangled and greasy. She smelled, he was embarrassed to notice. Had the hotel owner meant for them to leave immediately? he wondered. Could she have a bath first? How might he talk her into the bath? And how in the world would he talk her into anything, after she’d tried to stab him?

  But she was strangely pliable. She seemed to have forgotten about Conrad’s betrayal in the face of a fresher one from Joseph; he’d had a schoolmate smuggle her a note, shoved under the hotel-room door: Please stop. I love you but you need to stop. Her hand and voice shook, with outrage or exhaustion or both, as she showed Conrad the note and wondered aloud how her son could betray her, too.

  “He isn’t betraying you,” Conrad said. “He’s right.” Remember when she’d been sent to Fortin’s house? What choice had she had, he urged, beyond to live the life she’d been given?