The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  But this line of argument failed. “I want him to know I care,” Louise said. “At least this way he’ll know I tried to get him back.”

  “And he’ll understand that you couldn’t. That there was nothing more you could do.”

  He packed her things for her while she bathed. She’d brought a lot for how quickly she’d left Paris. She hadn’t come to Cherbourg only for a last goodbye. She’d packed as if to start another life with Joseph, as a fugitive well dressed enough to cross borders unquestioned. There was even a small bottle of perfume, a newer Maison Coty scent, L’Origan. He’d gifted her various Jeancard bottles over the years, and although his nose had already told him she didn’t often use them, he would have thought L’Origan (spicy violet, moderate sillage) would be all wrong for her. He would never have picked this out as the bottle she’d pack for a renegade life. But then he’d never thought she would be a renegade. He felt clueless, as both brother and perfumer.

  She was subdued through the journey back to Paris, abusive once he told the cabdriver at the train station to deliver them to his apartment. “So now you want me to stay with you. Now that it’s useless. You’re useless. What are you even for?”

  “I’m not for anything. I’m just a person, Louise. I’m a person too.”

  Having her in the house was like living with an angry ghost. She barely spoke, but every drawer was jerked open, every door slammed. Her rare words were cruel ones, selected and delivered to hurt him. Conrad told himself that she was throwing herself against him like he was a window that might break and prove her right, that she was totally forsaken and could tumble unremarked to the earth. So he ignored her insults. The window held. He was patient. When was he not patient? Good old Conrad. Good old sap.

  Mathilde tried to lure her out for walks, meals, diversions, while Conrad was at work.

  One day Louise gave her the slip while the two of them were shopping near the Gare du Nord. Mathilde told him that evening that she’d found her inside the station, checking the departure board.

  When Conrad chastened her for not keeping a better eye on Louise, Mathilde rebelled. “I am trying to help,” she said. “You know I am. But you need to do something.”

  Conrad had no idea what to do. Not long afterward he came home from work and there was a bandage wrapped around Louise’s left wrist. She didn’t try to hide it. She was sitting on the sofa, reading a newspaper, while Mathilde prepared dinner. He supposed she’d say she cut herself accidentally, and it might be true and it might be a lie and he’d have no way of knowing. But when he asked she said simply from behind the newspaper, “I changed my mind.”

  He was quiet for a long time, then asked her if she was going to do it again.

  She promised him she wouldn’t.

  What was he supposed to say now? Was he supposed to believe her? He did, but was that only wishful thinking? “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you need,” he said finally. “But I think you should get away.”

  She lowered the newspaper and glared at him. “I did. I’m here, aren’t I? I left Cherbourg.”

  “Farther.”

  “How much farther?”

  “London, perhaps?”

  She barked an unamused laugh. “You’re trying to get me out of the country?”

  “I think it would help. Wouldn’t it? You need to go somewhere else or you’re going to lose your mind.”

  They left unsaid that she had half lost it already.

  “I’d never see him,” she said.

  “You don’t see him now. If you’re farther away, it will hurt less. He’ll find you when he’s able. Once he’s of age, Cannu and Albertine won’t be able to stop him.”

  “Twenty-one? He’ll be an entirely different person. He’ll have forgotten me.”

  “He won’t forget you.”

  “You don’t remember our mother.”

  “I was two. Joseph is thirteen. It’s completely different, and you know that.”

  She folded the newspaper smaller and smaller, into a tight rectangle. She chewed the inside of her cheek.

  “It won’t feel as long as you think it will,” Conrad said. “Not if you aren’t right here, waiting for him. You need some kind of life for yourself.”

  “Buenos Aires,” she said.

  He assumed at first that she was making fun of him somehow, and waited politely for the rest of the joke.

  “You said farther,” she finally added, not joking at all.

  “Argentina?”

  “It looks like Paris.”

  “Does it?”

  “There’s an opera house.”

  She sounded at best like an uninformed tourist planning a trip on the basis of a postcard. Except she was planning the rest of her life based on even less. Conrad insisted she do more research, and Louise dutifully brought home packets of information from the Argentine embassy. Everything she learned made the idea look more feasible, not less. Argentina was desperate for people. Certain kinds of people, anyway: the government had very specific ideas about the kind of country it was trying to forge, and as long as the descendants of the colonizers remained outnumbered by the descendants of the colonized, that vision was vulnerable. A city couldn’t have a European-style opera house, for instance, absent Europeans with the knowledge and desire to quarry and mortar the stones, to string wires for electric lights, to bring their musical instruments and play European music well enough for their new countrymen to buy tickets and fill the seats to listen. Louise met with Argentine consular officials dispatched to France specifically to persuade more French people to come to their country. There would be a guaranteed stay of several weeks in an immigrant hotel, paid for by the Argentine government, to help her get on her feet. Her musical abilities, modest by Parisian standards, might be genuinely marketable.

  The cost of emigrating was the major problem. Cannu should have helped, if only to be rid of her, but he refused. On principle, he said, without explaining what that principle might be. Getting Louise halfway around the world with what Conrad considered enough left over to establish herself safely would nearly wipe him out, and he and Mathilde retreated behind their bedroom door for debates that started in whispers and invariably rose in volume, so that Conrad felt doubly trapped, arguing with his wife and performing for his sister, who could no doubt overhear. The worst fights he and Mathilde had had before this, nearly the only fights they’d ever had, had been about Erik. About his neediness, and Conrad’s willingness to provide.

  Provide and provide and provide, Mathilde hissed, questioning both the sums he’d calculated and his willingness to spend them on his sister.

  “She can’t live in a hovel,” Conrad said.

  Well, she could, Mathilde’s expression seemed to say.

  “She isn’t going to live in a hovel.”

  What else was he supposed to do? Louise was a woman, alone, and Erik was an artist. They seemed equally helpless to Conrad, equally in need. He’d do with his money whatever he wanted. He was the one who earned it.

  “It’s our money,” Mathilde countered. “We’re husband and wife.”

  “And we have enough right now. The two of us. There’s no one else.”

  Her face crumpled as if he’d struck her. He felt like he had. Every conversation they’d ever had about children up to then had been flatly optimistic: If not this month, the next. If not the next, the one after. Any time now. But maybe they needed to start talking about never, Conrad thought. Maybe it was time at least to think the word.

  Mathilde agreed to the expenditure only if it was made clear to Louise that there would be no money available to do this again. “She can’t just decide she doesn’t like it there and expect you to wire enough to bring her back.”

  This was a heavy caveat, since it was unlikely Louise would stumble into any employment or a second husband wealthy enough to allow her to return on her own. She’d be stuck, waiting for whenever Joseph could someday come to her.

  Conrad wasn’t certain Louise
would really emigrate under such conditions, but she asked him to book passage for the earliest departure available.

  Was she sure? he asked.

  She was sure that she couldn’t stay here any longer, she said.

  “But what if you’re running from Scylla into Charybdis?”

  Even if she was, she said, anything would be preferable to bashing herself against the same rock until there was nothing left of her.

  Cannu allowed a brief farewell with Joseph, in a town halfway between Paris and Cherbourg. Before Louise left, Conrad checked her bag, making sure she wasn’t armed. She’d packed a few keepsakes to give Joseph—the booklet of wallpaper samples he’d made at Bellenau, his father’s old specimen cards. Conrad continued rummaging and in an interior pocket found the rusty little pocketknife she’d tried to stab him with. He removed it and hid it in his underwear drawer. She didn’t ask him about it later, which he hoped meant she hadn’t even realized it was gone. At least, Mathilde did not report to him any attempts at violence. Chaperoned by Mathilde and Albertine, respectively, Louise and Joseph had stepped off their trains, drunk hot chocolate at the train-station café, then re-embarked in their opposite directions. Mathilde mentioned to Conrad that Albertine had tried to make small talk with her in the café as they hovered near Louise and Joseph. “I told her I didn’t have anything to say to her. I told her I wouldn’t pretend what they were doing was normal. I wouldn’t pretend it was right.” Conrad worried Mathilde might have made more trouble for Louise by offending her in-laws, but mostly he was proud.

  A few days later he traveled with Louise all the way to the port at Le Havre, suspicious that she might still leap off the train and go looking for Joseph. Or just leap off the train and allow her body to be churned under the wheels. They played a few hands of cards. He ate an apple. Mostly they sat in silence, looking out the windows at the cow-dotted fields, the gray stone barns, the twisting Seine. It was the same route they’d traveled as children.

  “You don’t remember anything?” she asked. “From when we all lived together?”

  “No.”

  “Good old Conrad,” she said. “Honest to the end.”

  “The end of what?”

  Louise avoided answering, as if he were being obtuse, but he didn’t think he was. He and Louise had been siblings at a distance most of their lives. This was what they were. To say they were coming to an end implied they’d achieved something they hadn’t, reached some pinnacle of closeness from which they were now plummeting. But they’d spent nearly their entire lives staring at separate horizons.

  When Mathilde died, Erik delivered the same poor impression of grief he’d performed after Eugénie’s death, and Conrad couldn’t take it. Erik even showed up on the first Sunday after Mathilde’s funeral at the regular dinner hour, as if there was any food in the house. Conrad couldn’t imagine there being food in the house ever again. Or wait, there was something under a tea towel on the kitchen table. Madame Jeancard had brought it. He didn’t know what it was, though, or remember when she’d dropped it off.

  “I was planning to take you somewhere,” Erik said. “I wasn’t expecting you to have anything ready.”

  Conrad wanted to believe him. He mostly did. But it didn’t matter. “I can’t be around someone who hated her right now,” he told Erik.

  “Hate her? I never hated her. I just didn’t like her very much.”

  “See, that’s…the fact you said that. The fact you thought that was worth saying—I can’t deal with you right now.”

  “I wasn’t aware I needed to be dealt with.”

  “If that’s really true, then you don’t pay any fucking attention.”

  It had happened so quickly. Both he and Mathilde had always been healthy, no complaints beyond the occasional cold or fever—one more reason their childlessness was so maddening. Mathilde had never understood what could possibly be so faulty and yet so invisible. Neither of them had even gotten sick in the pandemic six years earlier.

  But one night she went to bed with a fever, coughing, and Conrad slept on the sofa. He almost didn’t check on her before he left for work—why risk waking her, when all she needed was some sleep? He found her with a gray face, her forehead slick with sweat, her breathing wet and strained. Downstairs he asked the concierge to hail a cab, then ran back up for her. He had the strength to get her to the street, but began to fade while the cabdriver argued with him about contagion. Hurriedly Conrad agreed to hold his handkerchief over Mathilde’s face to reduce the risk of transmission. But once she was lying across his lap in the cab, he couldn’t figure out how without making it even harder for her to breathe. In response to the cabdriver’s threats, he offered to increase the fare. At the hospital, Mathilde’s face went from gray to violet to blue. She never really woke up. He didn’t think she’d been afraid, which was some small comfort. But then he realized that whatever fear she’d felt had come earlier, in the night, while they’d lain in separate rooms.

  The nurses at the hospital were kind, but at least one of the doctors seemed a little impatient with his shock. Conrad was, or was supposed to be, a man of science. Had he forgotten ’18, or never paid attention? Millions of people had died in much this way, and more died this way every year. This was how influenza killed.

  “I make perfume,” Conrad said helplessly, and in the moment it sounded somehow ridiculous, as if that couldn’t possibly be how anyone, let alone him, would ever choose to spend a life.

  At work Paul Jeancard was encouraging Conrad to channel his grief into a great scent, something wistful and elegiac. But he kept getting mixed up as to whether he was meant to be making a perfume that smelled like Mathilde, or one that smelled like her absence, or one that smelled like their earliest, bubbly happiness, or the later, comfortable happiness. They’d had happinesses all the way through, hadn’t they. I need to make a perfume, Conrad thought toward Mathilde, but all his samples so far were too dark: chypre without floral, bergamot and musk with no top notes, heart notes clotted with fatty orris. Paul had always been the artisan, the better nose; Conrad was a technician. He was out of his depth, trying to put a smell to his sorrow.

  Conrad decided to go alone to the second opening night for Relâche. It wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to find someone else. Was he afraid of people at the show thinking he was lonely? Well, he was lonely. Who did it help to pretend? The cuff links he usually wore to the theater were missing, and he remembered that Mathilde might have put them away in her jewelry box. He hadn’t been to a performance since her death. He picked up the box from her vanity table and started sifting through it.

  I feel like a potato, she said.

  He heard the words so clearly that he gaped at the empty seat pushed under the vanity. Nobody there. Still dead. He checked the vanity mirror, looking for ghosts. Just his own face, haggard and anxious. Had he gone ahead and done it, with the bleach and alcohol, and this was what his brain was coughing up as he starved for oxygen? No, he reminded himself. He hadn’t. He’d thought about it, but not seriously, and not for long.

  He stared at the vanity table until she floated into focus. She was in her corset, stockings, and garters, her dress still hanging from a corner of the mirror. She was powdering her face, which he was so relieved to see was pink, not blue or gray. “We’ll be late,” Conrad told her. Whatever sort of falling apart this was, it was not unpleasant.

  I’m just trying to look presentable, she said. She took the jewelry box back from him, deftly found his cuff links and attached them to his cuffs. Then she plucked out the dangling emerald-and-onyx earrings she always wore to the theater. I’m going to be the oldest and dumpiest woman there.

  “Dumpy?” Conrad protested. “You’re not dumpy, love.”

  We’re not part of the smart set, though, are we? That was more or less true. They were not the type of people who usually attended the Ballets Russes, or the Suédois. The more avant-garde Erik’s collaborators became, the more ill at ease Mathilde had felt in th
e audience. The crowd kept getting younger and edgier as she and Conrad kept getting older. I look like a potato, whatever I wear.

  “You do not.”

  You couldn’t exchange the seats?

  “They’re excellent seats.”

  I know, but everyone will be able to see us. “Who’s the potato?” they’ll say. “And what does she think she’s doing, coming to a show like this?”

  “I don’t think anyone will be able to see you,” Conrad said. “I’m not really seeing you, am I?”

  But that was all right, wasn’t it? Erik wasn’t the only member of the family allowed to have an imagination. Louise wasn’t the only person allowed to grieve. It was his turn, wasn’t it? Except that he still had to go to work Monday morning and continue disappointing Paul, continue disappointing himself. Well, all the more reason to enjoy an evening at the theater with his wife. He helped Mathilde fasten the back of her green silk dress.

  Why are we going, when you aren’t even speaking with him?

  “He’s still my brother. And I do actually like his music, you know.”

  What do you actually like? Every piece sounds different.

  “That’s part of what I like.”

  On the way to the theater, she vanished from him and he felt a pang. He handed the usher only one of his tickets and took his seat, front and center. The seats must have all sold eventually, because the empty spot beside him stood out like a missing tooth in the gleaming smile of the crowd. He felt conspicuous and closed his eyes, summoned Mathilde back to him.

  “You look beautiful,” he whispered, eyes still closed, and beside him she huffed a gentle disagreement.

  Have you seen Erik yet?

  He scanned the audience, the wings of the stage, as much of the orchestra pit as he could glimpse, but didn’t see his brother. Then the houselights went down and a projector sparked to life, and there Erik was. The program mentioned two short films by René Clair, one at the beginning and one between the two halves of the ballet, but it didn’t mention that Erik made an appearance. He flickered on the screen, somehow both older and younger than Conrad remembered him; his beard was white but smartly trimmed, and his eyes were childishly gleeful behind small, old-fashioned spectacles. He stood on a rooftop, on opposite sides of a cannon with Francis Picabia, the painter. They leaped up and down, in and out of the frame, like demented little boys. Picabia was in shirtsleeves, his wide, short tie flapping as he jumped. Erik’s outfit—a high pointed collar, striped dark tie, vest, and jacket—was antique by comparison. He’d held on to the same staid ensemble so long that it had become another costume, even as he insisted it wasn’t. The two men took turns loading the cannon, which at the end of the film fired its shell directly into the camera and at the viewer.