The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  I almost ducked, Mathilde whispered, giggling.

  Conrad imagined himself on the same rooftop, jumping up and down and firing cannon shells into the city. It seemed like great fun. He wondered which of them, him or Erik, viewers would think the elder. The previous year had aged Conrad—last spring he’d thought the dark hollows under his eyes were from sleeplessness or grief, but then he’d done nothing but sleep and work all summer, and by autumn realized they were part of his face now, as permanent a change as the molar he’d had pulled recently, or his empty bed.

  That doesn’t have to be permanent, Mathilde whispered, because she knew what he was thinking, because she was what he was thinking, almost all he thought about. They’d been married for twenty-five years, nearly half of Conrad’s life. Maybe they’d gotten along too well, he thought, so satisfied with each other’s company that they’d let their lives contract around them. But that damage (if it was damage at all) was done. Their bed had its single furrow, and anyone new would roll straight into it, where Conrad couldn’t imagine wanting company.

  Conrad barely saw the first part of the dance. But that was all right. The dance didn’t make any sense. There was a flapper girl with a long line of men in tailcoats. Someone rode a bicycle onto the stage. Someone popped a red balloon. There was no set to speak of, beyond the massive wall of bare bulbs at the back of the stage. They were dark for now, but Conrad braced himself to be blinded. Someone behind him was arguing about whether the show was an example of Dadaism or Instantaneism.

  Oh, who cares? Mathilde said, and he snorted.

  After the first act there was another film, and Conrad searched eagerly for Erik. This longer film was still gleeful, but more unsettling: skyscapes turned upside down, dolls with inflating and deflating heads, a dancer spinning on a sheet of glass with the camera underneath her feet. Eventually there emerged a story of a funeral procession, the hearse drawn by a camel. Unless Erik was in the crowd scene, among a long row of top-hatted men running in slow motion after a runaway coffin, Conrad couldn’t spot him. The score Erik had composed for the film was relentlessly repetitive, eerie or dramatic phrases pounded out over and over. They were a fistful of earworms wriggling in one after the other. After a lengthy chase, the coffin crashed to the side of the road; a magician leaped out and made the top-hatted men disappear, one by one. Mathilde gasped as the men blinked out of sight, marveling at the effect. Then a giant sheet of paper reading Fin appeared, and Picabia clawed his way through it, after which the film reversed, sucking him back through a smooth, unbroken scrim.

  At the end of the ballet there were flowers for the lead dancers, the recognition of the orchestra and the conductor, Roger Désormière—all the little rituals Conrad had learned to love about the theater. The crowd acknowledged the choreographer and producer, and the polite applause began to run out of steam. Where was Erik? No one was standing. Apparently he and Picabia had managed to confuse even the smart set.

  Then, amid the waning applause, came the sounds of a tooting horn and the hum of an engine. Picabia drove a car onstage, a yellow Peugeot 5CV with the roof down. The dancers scattered before the car like a flock of pigeons. The driver made tight circles around the stage, and Conrad spotted Erik in the passenger’s seat. Same outfit as in the film, same outfit he always wore. He was even holding an umbrella. The car paused near the front of the stage and Erik gestured for the conductor to hop in. Désormière climbed out of the orchestra pit and into the cramped seat, and Erik ruffled his hair, as if Désormière was a little boy on whom Erik was conferring his approval. Conrad wished he could hear what they were saying to each other. Erik grinned and waved, grinned and waved and waved to the crowd.

  Some of the audience hooted in amused surprise. Others hooted in derision. “Cheap stunt,” someone muttered behind Conrad.

  Conrad stood, clapping furiously. He didn’t know if Erik could see him.

  He’s loving this, Mathilde said. Happy as a pig in shit.

  Mathilde never swore, and Conrad winced. But then again it was nice that she could still surprise him after all these years. Even after being dead.

  He still isn’t, Conrad said. Happy. It might have been nearly a year since they’d spoken, but he knew it was true. Some things stayed true. Some people.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mathilde stand and turn toward him, open her mouth to disagree, then close it. You can make up with him if you want to, she said. I won’t mind. She reached out and took his fingers. They kept clapping, palms against the backs of their joined hands.

  Not yet, Conrad said. Later, maybe. There’s time.

  Louise

  — 18 —

  End for yourself

  OVER THE YEARS THERE HAVE BEEN A HANDFUL OF BOYS WHO were already blazing. Miniature virtuosos, so short I put books on the piano stool, their legs swinging in the air, their fingers jumping like fleas along the keyboard. Wherever they learned this it wasn’t from me, but I’m the person who has to decide what to do with them next.

  In some ways, the prodigies are easiest: you send them to a conservatory teacher, posthaste. No dithering around with old women who make house calls by bus. But how am I supposed to recognize the Erics? The ordinary extraordinary boy, with a measure of talent but no willingness to practice, the boy who slouches at the door and keeps his hands in his pockets until asked to play. Who balls his fists furiously when I offer correction, nails cutting into his palms. But who has enough talent, or imperiousness, or impetuousness, or—I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know what it is. And if I find the boy, the Argentine Eric, what am I supposed to do with him? Does he need more training, or less? A taskmaster or a mother? Immersion in counterpoint or jazz?

  I wish I could ask Eric—well, Erik, I suppose. I should give him his K. I haven’t been withholding the K, exactly, just holding on to the C. I wish I could ask him what he would have wanted someone to do for him, but I’m sure I wouldn’t get a straight answer. He’d probably take offense, thinking I was suggesting that someone ought to have done something differently, that he needed to be saved from the life he ended up living. Thin-skinned as an egg, my brother. Plus now he’s dead, of course, and I can’t ask him anything.

  What I know of how it happened I know from letters. One long letter, really, because after Conrad had told me the story, neither of us was sure what was left to say. Erik was famous enough for music magazines and newspapers to carry obituaries, which is how I learned that he was dead. I was furious at Conrad for letting me find out this way, but then it turned out he’d learned the same way. He and Erik hadn’t been speaking, and Conrad had no idea Erik was ill.

  Cirrhosis of the liver, surprising only in the precipitousness of Erik’s decline. He’d been healthy enough to leap around like a maniac for Relâche, but a month later he was falling apart, at fifty-eight years old. The acolytes had installed him in a series of hotels, then the hospital. They wouldn’t let him go back to his room in Arcueil. Thank God for that, I thought. He wasn’t alone, Conrad wrote, trying to reassure both of us. The acolytes had taken charge of him, paid his hospital bills, brought him warm socks and fresh handkerchiefs. Probably they were the family, the siblings-in-art, he would have chosen. Maybe it was all for the best, we told ourselves.

  Once Conrad read the news and contacted the hospital, it turned out the acolytes had been trying to find him; they knew there was a brother, somewhere, and there were legalities to dispense with.

  If they knew Erik had a brother, why hadn’t anyone tried to find him before Erik died? Conrad had asked Roger Désormière.

  They had offered, Désormière told him. They’d even tried to insist. But Erik had told them he and Conrad had quarreled and that his brother wouldn’t want to hear from him.

  What in the world had Erik been trying to prove? Conrad wondered. Of course he would have wanted to hear from Erik, he told Désormière, still angry, but less upset with the acolytes than with his brother.

  Désormière offered his apo
logies, and his condolences, on behalf of the acolytes. If it was any consolation, he said, they weren’t Erik’s closest friends, necessarily. They were just the ones he happened to still be speaking to when he fell ill.

  Conrad didn’t know if that was consolation or not. He and a few of the acolytes set a day and time to go through the apartment. They met in the city and drove down together, in Désormière’s bright yellow car. It was a hot day, Conrad wrote. My hair flew straight up in the wind. I had a lion’s mane by the time we arrived in Arcueil.

  So Conrad still has hair, then, I thought, because I’d learned from pictures that Erik didn’t. Mine has thinned, but if I wear it up, the bun is still round.

  Once Désormière saw the neighborhood, he asked someone to wait with the car, so it wouldn’t be stolen. Of course that was just the beginning. It sounded as if Erik hadn’t cleaned or thrown out anything since I’d been there, just continued adding to the hoard. The acolytes were horrified. Conrad too, although he’d known enough to brace himself.

  Once the acolytes realized that Conrad wouldn’t fight them for the music manuscripts, they were warmer to him. They had a whole speech prepared, about “safeguarding Erik’s legacy,” about how perhaps as a nonmusician I didn’t realize what Erik had accomplished, blah blah blah. It was patronizing. I understand what he accomplished. Or, to be fair, I don’t understand what he accomplished. But I understand it was something, and they’re welcome to be the ones to try and figure out what it is.

  Finally, I need to confess to you that I told them a fib. Legally, half the contents of the apartment were yours, and you needed to make a claim or sign off on a public sale. I said you were unfindable, that you hadn’t been in touch with the family in years, so that the sale could proceed quickly. I hope this was all right? The prospect of letting all that garbage fester there for weeks or months, just to have our Ts crossed and Is dotted, felt absurd. I don’t imagine the sale will fetch much of anything, but certainly I’ll wire you half the proceeds. And if there are any little items you’d like to have, let me know? I’ve kept a few of his handkerchiefs, some books and sketches, personal effects, etc.

  Oh, Conrad. O! Unfindable? I’m right here. But I understand why he said it. I have no practical objection, just the sting of having been written out of the family once more. Plus, now all of Erik’s remaining friends, or the closest thing he had to friends, think I’m a ghost.

  I’d like the knife, I wrote to Conrad. I’d like the knife you stole from me, when you thought I might try to stab someone with it. Conrad dutifully obeyed, making no mention of the theft or how I knew he had it. Really, I’d only guessed. It came wrapped in a handkerchief I assumed was Erik’s, although it wasn’t personalized in any way, then wrapped again in many layers of newsprint from a very leftist local paper, which would not have had a circulation wide enough to ever make it deliberately to Argentina. I smoothed out the sheets and read every article, pretending it was the day’s news, happening just down the street, in my own language.

  The truth is that I haven’t felt properly French since the Great War. Once the scale of it was clear, I knew I’d missed too much, and that even if I were somehow to go back, I would always be a person who’d left before it happened, who’d sat out the whole thing safely at the other end of the world. It was a selfish little grief, the awareness that my exile had become undeniable.

  The worst of it had been when Joseph, having graduated medical school, wrote to tell me that he planned to enlist, would have already by the time the letter arrived, no chance to try to talk him out of it, not that he would have heeded me. He was enlisting as a doctor, he wrote, and I hoped this would keep him back from the front lines, but I felt superstitious about my self-pity. I’d been feeling excluded, and voilà: a son in uniform. I’d tempted fate as loudly and stupidly as fate could be tempted.

  I started going to Mass again every morning, then sometimes twice a day, if I finished my late lessons in time. I felt better there, praying for Joseph, not because I thought it would really make a difference, but because it felt like I was doing something. I lit the candles. I said the words. I kneeled and I stood. The priest suggested I visit the resettlement center. I clearly had time, and energy. And guilt. He didn’t presume to guess over what, and I hadn’t told him about Joseph, because then I would have had to offer some explanation for why we were in opposite hemispheres, on opposite sides of an ocean.

  After Joseph made it safely home at the end of the war, I didn’t feel like I could just stop going to church. God might find some other pretext to take him, as punishment for my self-interest masquerading as piety. My piety was self-interest at first, but I spent enough time trying to convince God and the priest otherwise that eventually it became habit, then solace.

  I had long ago tried and failed to bargain with God for my husband’s life. So when I prayed for Joseph, I prayed modestly, novenas and prayers of intercession to saints who looked after soldiers and doctors. I asked that he be allowed to do his duty, to be protected so that he could protect others, and protect his country. What I wanted most, of course, was for him to be protected long enough to come to me, then to live as nearly to forever as he could.

  He survived the war, as so many did not, and came home. He married and worked and had a son. But he did not survive the inheritance of his father’s bad lungs, and forty years old is nowhere near forever. When I received the news of his death from his widow, Nancey, I wanted to claw my own steady, strong lungs out of my chest, as if I might still be able to pass them along to him. Or perhaps I wanted only to disassemble myself, to become a heap of parts beyond any longing.

  Nancey enclosed the latest photograph of Joseph’s son, seven years old then, solemn in a dark suit. I added it to my small stack and thumbed through them like a flipbook, watching my grandson grow from baby to toddler to fatherless boy. This last one was not a happy picture, but in his face I could see Joseph’s at the same age, and console myself that at least they’d known each other, father and son. Seven would be old enough for the boy to remember, to carry Joseph with him. Nancey had written his name, Pierre-Conrad, neatly across the back of the photograph. She always did this, and once teased herself in a letter—who else might the photographs be of? I begged her not to stop. I loved reading that name, written out with both parts.

  Strangely, with Joseph’s death I could at last crawl into the finality of it and find the smallest bit of comfort. I could imagine my son with God, rather than with Albertine and Cannu. I kneeled in church and asked for nothing at all, and in the silence I listened to my own steady breathing. There was no more wondering whether I would see him again. Not in this life. I could set my hopes on another. There was a cleanness to it, a door open and then shut. My motherhood had banged so long on rusty hinges, smashing my fingers in the jamb. Maybe Joseph and Pierre were both waiting for me, somewhere else. I could choose to believe it.

  Oskar and I perfect the paper ball, move on to little animals. I found a paper-folding guide in a used-book shop, so battered and cheap that I could justify the purchase. Oskar’s mother has found a job in a laundry. She drops him off most mornings at the resettlement center, which is against the rules—we aren’t nannies. But Oskar is old enough not to need much attention, and I enjoy giving him what I can.

  He’s been practicing folding wolves and wants to show me, lecturing all the while about animals in a jumbled flood of Spanish and Polish. I know I should encourage him, be grateful that he’s blossoming, and I manage to smile. But I find lectures hard to take, even from little boys, already so like little men, so sure I do not possess their endless knowledge.

  “Do you know wolves?” he asks me, finally pausing, and I have no idea how to answer. “I mean: see them. You see wolves? Seen,” he corrects himself.

  I tell him I haven’t, though I have to think about it. It seems like one might have stalked through Bellenau, slunk through the palms or drawn up on its hind legs and joined us for dinner.

  “Wolves wil
l bite their own paws,” Oskar declaims, and runs his front teeth over his wrist. His Spanish has come along impressively. “To get out of a trap. All off, no paw.”

  “Do they live?” I ask. “Once they’ve gnawed off their foot?”

  “Paw,” corrects Oskar, little pedant, and I suppose I’m proud.

  “Can they run and hunt on only three?”

  “There’s a three-legged dog that lives by the bus stop. It eats its own poop.”

  “In a forest, I mean. In the wild.”

  Oskar is silent, unsure. Then he announces, “Absolutely,” with total authority. “They live a very long time.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” I say. “That’s good to hear.”

  For our first date Mr. Valera plans a film, with dinner afterward. The film is a romantic comedy, Mi novia es un fantasma—My Wife Is a Ghost. It’s funny enough, but I’m so quiet at dinner that Mr. Valera worries the newsreels beforehand might have upset me.