A History of Forgetting (3 page)

‘What?'

‘Fly off the handle when he sees himself?'

‘He expects to see someone younger.'

‘Don't we all?' Malcolm cried.

Her frown, if inverted, could have been a smile. She fished for her keys in her purse. ‘He's going to get more difficult to handle.'

Handle?
thought Malcolm.

‘Did you talk to him about a dog?'

‘Oh, you and your dog.' Malcolm opened the door and waved her out.

She stepped into the hall. ‘You know I love Denis.'

‘Yvette,' he teased. ‘Is this a confession?'

‘No. It's me telling you that the day I get caught in the crossfire, I'm out of here.'

He closed the door behind her, hoping she didn't see how her warning startled him. She would learn her true worth then and demand more. For this was the great irony of his relationship with Yvette: she thought she was fleecing
him
by getting paid to come here and be preened by a still-beautiful Frenchman and do not a lick of work. But what would they do without
Yvette? He could not believe there was anyone like her in the city—bilingual, certified, tolerant at the core. Leaving Denis with someone he couldn't talk to would have been unthinkable. Again, he chided himself for not going to Montreal.

He went back to the kitchen where Denis, at the stove, was melting a great white cube of lard in a casserole. ‘Now what can I do,' asked Malcolm, shamming a smile.

‘Rien du tout.'
Denis took a wooden spoon from the drawer,
patted Malcolm's cheek fondly with it, and began pushing
around the skating lard.

‘Yvette says you broke a mirror.'

Indignant, he turned to Malcolm. ‘I did not!'

‘She thinks a little dog would help calm you.'

‘Un chien?'

‘Would you like that?'

Denis would. He loved all creatures. He used to cup the trapped summer wasps in his bare hands to release out the
window, throw breadcrumbs down for the courtyard pigeons.

‘Would I?' He paused in confusion and scratched the very tip of his nose.
‘Quoi?'

‘I'll open the wine,' Malcolm said.

Three bottles were ready on the counter, one
vin ordinaire
and two Bordeaux. He drew the corks, three soft plosives.

In a bowl next to the sink the eel, flayed and segmented, soaked in water, waiting its turn at immortality. The decapitated head floated near the surface, the eyes little sightless beads. Denis changed the cloudy water then refilled the bowl from the tap. He couldn't always follow a simple conversation, or find his way out of the apartment on his own, but was able to execute the most complex of recipes without consulting a cookbook. Regrettably, he could not remember what last he cooked.

Drying his hands now, looking extremely pleased, he threw the towel over his shoulder.
‘Bon!'
He tried to dismiss Malcolm, but Malcolm went over to the cutting board and picked the onion off it.

‘Non! Non!'
Denis cried.

‘Oui! Oui!'
Malcolm pleaded.

A few exasperated words addressed to the ceiling, Denis threw the towel over his head, sighed loudly, tore it off, then went to hover around Malcolm chopping the onion. First he criticized how Malcolm held the knife, then the size of the pieces that he cut. Malcolm was crying, but it had nothing to do with Denis' carping.

All at once, Denis grew quiet. ‘Darling.' He lifted the towel from his shoulder and, tsking, wiped the onion tears off Malcolm's cheeks.

 

With the broom and dustpan, Malcolm went to the bedroom to clean up Denis' latest wreck. Oh, the foreign objects he'd hurled—a copper pot from Turkey, the Egyptian head!

He stopped in front of the mirror. The damage was centred on his face. He would not have called it a crack. He would have said it was a web. Each of his features caught between the strands, fragmented and at the same time brought together, he looked positively Cubist.

One day years ago Malcolm found himself standing before this mirror after work, blinking and rubbing his eye, then lifting the lid to extract the irritant—a minute particle of hair. His eye stung and he had to purge it with more blinking. He'd never stood so close to that mirror, never noticed that where the glass met the oval frame there was a liquid-looking discoloration, flat and unreflective as molten lead. In the worst of these patches the paint had chipped away entirely, exposing the wood backing and the illusion. Across the whole surface, scattered blemishes like mildew.

The simplest thing would have been to replace the mirror, but Malcolm took it first to a man who restored old furniture, nearby on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. He unscrewed the door and carried it down the street, suspecting the whole way that resilvering mirrors might be a dead art, like illuminating manuscripts or painting frescoes. But no, the man laid the door on a bench and with a few tools unfastened the mirror. He stood the glass up between them, its reflecting side facing Malcolm, Malcolm looking at himself. He must have been in his early forties then, a few threads of grey just starting to show at his temples, the different-textured strands, less obedient than the darker, springing up as if feeling for the light.

Before his very eyes, he disappeared. In one stroke, his face was swept away.

Then the man laid the glass flat on the bench and began brushing his hands together. Stuck all over him were scales off the mirror, little scintillant flecks of Malcolm's reflection.

In the kitchen, Denis was singing as he cooked,
‘Heureuse, comme tout
. . .
Heureuse, malgré tout
. . .' the heady perfume of garlic and onions wafting through. Blue shards of vase lay scattered at Malcolm's feet. So the sky was falling, too, he thought.

 

 

 

3

 

In Paris, he used to work with Denis in the salon they owned and ran together. Now he worked in the morning for a woman named Faye whose salon, Faye's of Kerrisdale, stood on the avenue between the delicatessen and the Shopper's Drug Mart. Weeks before he actually walked in and asked for a job, he had noticed Faye's, marvelled at it even, the plastic flowers and plastic smocks and the sun-faded sign that read WE ALSO STYLE WIGS. It had seemed to Malcolm that this was where he would have been all along had he trained in Canada in the fifties and stayed.

Faye, stationed behind the desk when he first entered, looked up at him through big rose-tinted lenses, listening and nodding as he explained himself and his credentials. After he had finished, she did a curious thing. She reached out both hands to him, as if imploring. She was showing him her rings, loose and sliding back and forth, trapped between her swollen knuckle joints.

‘This is my lucky day. Sometimes I can hardly get my fingers in the scissors. The standing kills me, too. How about working half the day?'

‘Perfect,' Malcolm said.

She stood and gave him a hobbling tour. ‘Here are the
smocks, as you can see. The dryers are there. With experience like yours—Paris of all places!—I guess you'll want to charge more.' They had come to the sinks. ‘You have to watch the noz
zle on this one. It can shoot off to the side and soak you.'

‘I'll charge what you charge,' Malcolm said.

‘You are too good to be true.'

Malcolm had been thinking the same thing about her.

‘Of course, I don't know if they'll agree. They're old, you know, my girls. All of them.' Faye, Malcolm had guessed, must be nearing seventy herself. ‘They don't like change. You can't even get them to change their hairstyle, let alone their hairdresser.'

‘We can give it a try.'

‘We'll have to push them. Of course, you're so young, they just might thrill at the attention.'

‘Young?' He laughed. ‘I'm fifty-six.'

‘Fifty-six! Younger than I thought! How long have you been grey?'

The next morning, Faye was there when he arrived, telling him, ‘Here he is. The answer to my prayers.' She had come early to unlock and get the coffee things assembled—the right number of mugs on the tray with Taster's Choice spooned in so Malcolm only had to add the boiling water. She didn't believe him capable of the task. ‘I'm sure you've had a hundred pretty girls making you coffee all your life.' She scheduled the appointments—everyone seemed to know to phone first thing in the morning—did the accounting from the
previous day, then left him on his own until the afternoon.

The clients
were
old, some of them very. His first, Mrs. Parker, required motorized assistance to keep her out and about. Malcolm was laying his own tools across a folded towel when she arrived, hammering faintly on the glass door with her fist. As he hurried over to open up, she reversed the scooter, then drove it in, the tremendous whirring sound it made amplified indoors.

‘You are he?' she asked in a voice both sceptical and barely there.

‘I am. And you must be—'

‘—the guinea pig.'

Malcolm, who had to lean down to hear what she said, laughed.

‘She's made me go first, hasn't she? I said I'd do it, so long as I wasn't first. But all she did was schedule me a little later, thinking I wouldn't notice.'

She pulled off her tam. If he had known her better, Malcolm would have shielded his eyes as a joke. Her hair, besides being flattened by the tam, was the exact shade of an apricot. ‘I have a bone to pick with Faye now,' she muttered, whirring over to a station.

‘I'll take you here,' said Malcolm, referring to where he had his tools already laid out.

Mrs. Parker said, ‘Faye does me
here.'

So he simply rolled everything up in the towel and carried it over to Mrs. Parker. ‘Can I give you a hand?' She took his proffered arm, gripped it tightly. She was, he understood now, as much afraid as cranky.

He swung the chair around for her, but she turned towards the sinks. ‘Please, Mrs. Parker, have a seat.'

‘What?' she said. ‘Aren't you going to shampoo me?'

‘Of course, but I thought we'd have a little chat first.' Still clinging to him, she shuffled round. ‘About what?'

‘Why you, of course.'

‘Me? There's nothing to say!'

‘Now, now,' he chided. ‘No modesty, please. We are in a house of vanity.' He patted the chair back. She laughed then and, letting go of Malcolm to clutch the armrest, dropped herself into the chair.

With her permission, he removed her glasses, then very lightly began to comb out her hair. He was careful not to catch a knot, not to cause her any pain. ‘How long have you been coming here?'

‘Years and years,' she said. ‘Faye took over as my bridge partner after Albert passed away.'

‘Albert was your husband?'

‘Yes. It was years ago he died.'

‘You miss him just the same, I'm sure.'

She looked at Malcolm in the mirror, but could probably not see him clearly. ‘Oh, I do,' she said. ‘It never goes away.'

‘You have beautiful bones, Mrs. Parker.'

‘What?'

‘Your bones are your best feature, apart from, of course, your eyes. You were probably aristocratic-looking even as a child.'

‘I don't know,' she said.

‘As you're wearing it now, your hair detracts from these assets. We can't see your lovely jawline for all this . . . fluff. Might we shorten it?'

‘What will Faye say?'

‘She has given me
carte blanche,
I assure you.'

‘All right, then.'

Next he hinted at changing her colour. ‘Something more
subtle,
say?' But he had gone too far. She dug her heels in. ‘I have been this colour for so long, if I changed it now, people would notice.'

He helped her up and over to the sinks, grandly covering her with the plastic smock. She leaned back; he was very nearly cradling her, bird-light, in his arms. When was the last time a man had held her like that? Shampooing, he saw the smile come and go, and come again, dreamily.

As he cut, he drew her out again by asking about Mr. Parker. Her eyes, which were deep brown, each iris haloed by a fine line of smoky blue, began to tear up as she talked. The loneliness would never go, she said, but at least she had Mitzi.

‘Your daughter?'

‘My dog! If my daughter were half as good to me as Mitzi, well, that would be another story.'

At the end of the hour, he felt he had won her over, or at least got back to where he'd been before mistakenly mentioning a change of colour. Mrs. Parker looked a different person. If it were not for the fruity colour, she would have looked chic. Chic!—at what? Eighty? Malcolm, pleased with himself, passed her the hand mirror so she could see herself from all angles as he slowly turned the chair.