A Very Bold Leap (37 page)

The next day Charles showed up at the
Villeray Siren
with a copy of
The Quiet Rip-Off
under his arm, which he showed to the businessman. Vanier flipped through a few pages, enough to see that the style was more than passable and that there were no glaring errors in the French, which pleased him enormously, since the majority of the pen-pushers he’d hired till then had given the impression that they hadn’t made it past primary school. He sensed a windfall. A long conversation with Charles convinced him that the young man was clever, resourceful, and ambitious; with careful handling, he could be a godsend. He would have to shape him, but that didn’t seem difficult since the lad was obviously eager to learn the ropes. Because of his inexperience, he could only offer Charles a job for two days a week, at forty dollars a day. The quickness with which Charles accepted the position made Vanier like him all the more.

Charles would begin work in two days’; time. Happy as a clam, he went straight to the sporting goods store to announce that he was quitting, news that was not taken well, as he might have expected. But the feeling of inadequacy he’d been having when hanging out with Stéphanie and her brother began to dissipate. And since it never rains but it pours, that same day Bernard Délicieux called Charles to announce triumphantly that he had finally managed to get him a position
at Artist’s Life
. The charming seventy-year-old woman who for twenty-two years had been bravely writing the bleeding-hearts column had fallen down some stairs and fractured her wrist, and so would be unable to work for several months. When he’d heard of the accident, Délicieux had gone straight to the editor and remarked, à propos of nothing, that, not to say anything against the excellent old dear, the column had become a tad moribund over the years, and that this might be a good opportunity to give it a bit of a youthful kick, and he happened to know of a young man who would be brilliant at it, and he was only twenty-two years old!

The editor had laughed in his face, but then (oh, the mysteries of the human brain!) the next second had thought it was a good idea. Although there had been a long period of mistrust between the two men, the editor had slowly found himself appreciating Délicieux more and more, and had even taken to asking him for advice once in a while. Charles could come in to show him some samples of his work anytime.

“So what would I have to do?” Charles asked, perplexed.

“You edit questions sent in to the magazine, and you write the replies to them. In other words, you make up the questions and then you answer them. Nothing to it. I could do it in my sleep. Okay, I can tell you’re still confused. Come down to the office now and I’ll show you how it’s done. In half an hour I’ll make you an eminent psychologist. It’ll be a good chance for me to introduce you to the boss. Just be yourself, and be confident. You have to give the impression that you could take on work that’s a thousand times harder than this.”

Sitting in the journalist’s office, Charles listened nervously but with full attention as Délicieux explained his duties.

“People,” Délicieux said, “especially women, love to read the bleeding-hearts column, but whether out of laziness or for fear of being recognized, I don’t know which, they are very reluctant to express themselves on paper. And so, from time to time, the flow of letters slackens a bit, and when that happens you have to put your shoulder to the wheel and come up with some real doozies. It can be a lot of fun.” Délicieux himself had written the lovelorn column for a women’s magazine a few years before and he’d enjoyed the heck out of it. “But there are rules to follow, and if you step outside them, all hell will break loose.” There were, he said, five basic rules:

1. Use common sense.
   

2. Employ a mixture of cruelty and compassion in order to appeal to the masochist and the wimp in all of us.
   

3. Take your letters to the very edge of vulgarity, but never cross the line: as long as it doesn’t go too far, a juicy little detail sucks the readers in — and on that point, the grand old dame who used to write the column had been coming up short for the past few years. However, out-and-out obscenity will completely turn off your female readership.
   

4. Keep your answers practical, concrete, and down to earth. And avoid like the plague anything that reeks of philosophy or any other useless, smoke-and-mirror nonsense.
   

5. Be concise. Long letters or responses make readers turn the page. Besides, you don’t have much space for the column.
   

Charles would be writing as Maryse: the column had always been called “Letters to Maryse,” and there was no way that would change.

“So, are you okay with that?” Délicieux asked, standing up; he had to leave to conduct an interview. “Tomorrow I want you to bring me in two questions and two replies, and we’ll go over them together.”

“Tomorrow?” Charles said, fearfully.

“Hey, have a bit of faith in yourself, Charlie my boy. With all the talent I know you’ve got, you could do this with your hands tied behind your back. And just think, a week from now you’ll be consoling every forlorn lover in Quebec — at fifty bucks a column!”

Charles hurried from the office and went into the nearest newsstand to buy every magazine he could find with a bleeding-hearts column, and settled down to study his new craft. Halfway through the night, his downstairs neighbour could still hear Charles’s typewriter clacking away; the poor man got up, made himself a cup of herbal tea, then, gripped by a sudden wave of anger, started pounding on his ceiling with a broom handle. Charles gave a start, then heaved a sigh of resignation and carried on working with a pen. The next morning, closing in on eleven o’clock, he brought Délicieux the following:

The journalist looked up, smiling radiantly.

“Bravo, Charles! I knew you had it in you! Everything’s perfect, except for one small thing: I’m talking about the last bit in your response to the Married Widow, where you say, ‘if I may put it like that.’ Never, and I mean never, make jokes in a bleeding-hearts column. Bleeding-hearts columns have to be as serious and straight-laced as a letter from the Pope. If not, your readers will think you’re making fun of them — of course you
are
, but they must never know that, Charles. And that’s the end of our collaboration! Let’s go have a drink to celebrate the great career that lies ahead of you!”

V
ictor Vanier, the founding editor of the
Villeray Siren
, was a man of great resourcefulness who enjoyed a high reputation in his part of the city as well as in certain sectors of neighbouring parts. He was justly known as one who enjoyed high living and was very partial to the pleasures of the table. Nothing made him salivate like a huge slice of tourtière swimming in grease and buried under a mound of glistening Heinz ketchup. The name of his newspaper always inspired in him a deep pride, and he considered his editorship of it the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him.

With remarkable agility, Vanier played on the two meanings of the word “siren,” giving it deep, semantic richness by planting, in the top right corner of the front page, a drawing of a beautiful, well-endowed mermaid holding in her right hand the bold device that had stopped the hand of many a newspaper thief with the journal’s motto:

That being said, however, the pages of the
Siren
were filled for the most part with tepid articles of purely local interest; simple, practical pieces culled from the Keystone wire service; and advertisements for brassieres, used-car ads, and notices of supermarket sales.

Charles worked at the
Siren
on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The paper was printed Wednesday night and distributed on Thursday. He quickly learned how to lay out pages on a tabloid grid — four pages to a folio sheet — by first placing the ads in their proper spots and then filling the gaps between them with articles either expanded or cut to fit the available space. When
desperate, he filled small holes with a “Thought du Jour” or a “Your Weekly Smile” or one of a sheaf of poems supplied by two local poets whose struggles with the Muse were, it seemed, regularly successful.

With time he learned how to toss off short pieces inspired by events of the week, to track down gossip and make it sound like news, to conduct telephone interviews with local community leaders (who usually proved to be indefatigably talkative), to feign deep interest in the most mundane and insipid topics, which sometimes put interviewees sufficiently at ease that they might say something interesting.

Victor Vanier, meanwhile, would make the rounds of the local businesses selling advertising space, an essential task in a weekly publication like the
Siren
, which was distributed free of charge. Advertising was its sole source of income. When he wasn’t out visiting clients, he was on the telephone, using all his charm on his regular customers. His assistant in this work was Francine, a dry, slight, ageless woman of a sensitive character, a total chatterbox who also functioned as the weekly’s receptionist and secretary.

When the ad spaces were filled, Victor Vanier sat himself down before his computer and composed his weekly editorial, in which he generously shared the wisdom he had accumulated over his twenty-seven-year career.

Vanier vigorously encouraged sports, and was therefore fiercely opposed to video arcades, which he viewed as dens of iniquity for the young. He was tolerant about smoking, so long as it was done in moderation, and he hated anything that resembled progressive thinking. His two political idols were the Leader of the Opposition in Ottawa, a loudmouth who, for reasons unknown, had been nicknamed Flabotte, and Anatole Flingon, his favourite commentator, a political science professor at McGill University who was much in demand as a speaker at certain types of conferences, and was famous for his corrosive style and his tendency to take cut-and-dried positions on complicated issues. Both Flabotte and Flingon were ferocious opponents of Quebec separatists, who for the past twenty years had been disturbing the country’s peace with their dark plots and continual recriminations.

Charles loved his work. It was almost like being a writer. Despite the admittedly narrow influence of his activities, he sometimes had the feeling that he was making a small difference in his community. When he banged out a short piece that wasn’t too badly put together, that here and there showed
a bit of spunk or a nice turn of phrase, and then saw it reproduced seventeen thousand times — the usual print run for the
Villeray Siren
— a flutter of pride brought a smile of satisfaction to his lips, and he told himself that it was, after all, only a start. “They ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

On nights when the paper went to press he would often work well into the wee hours of the morning and end up sleeping in the office, since the metro would have stopped running and taxis were too expensive. Vanier had set up a camp cot in one of the storage rooms, and allowed Charles to use it whenever necessary.

“When Pierre Péladeau founded the
Rosemont Journal
, he would often sleep in the office,” Vanier told Charles, knowing it would kindle his zeal and flatter his self-esteem. “People who want to get ahead in life don’t sit around staring at a clock, do they, my boy? No. This is the only one way to get to the point where people are going to greet you with respect!”

Vanier himself would stretch out on the cot nights when one crisis seemed to follow another. But more often he used it when in need of a short nap after a long liquid lunch with a client.

Within a month of starting work at the journal, Charles had gained the complete confidence of his employer and even the occasional friendly nod from Francine, who had seen so many journalists come and go (since Victor Vanier paid so little, the paper was like a revolving door) that she had developed a stony indifference to her fleeting workmates.

On Thursdays and Fridays, when he was free of the
Siren
, Charles put on his bleeding-heart hat. Writing this column gave him even more pleasure than working at the newspaper, since he could indulge his imagination to its fullest and have the fruit of his labours appreciated by a much wider audience than that reached by Monsieur Vanier’s weekly;
Artist’s Life
, one of the flagships of the Québécor fleet of magazines, reached a market of more than a hundred thousand readers.

And these readers lost no time in appreciating Charles’s efforts. Three weeks after his first column appeared, the number of letters he received had doubled, and his boss had intimated the possibility of his receiving a raise in pay. He took his new responsibilities seriously, and began reading popular books on psychology, despite being ragged about it by Délicieux.

“It’s just that I don’t want to cause anybody any problems,” Charles explained to the newsman. “How would you feel if you found out that by giving
someone some bad advice you had led them to commit suicide, or murder, or to get a divorce?”

“I’d feel totally fine about it,” Délicieux replied, “because during my long career I’m sure I must have caused all of those things many times. There are so many idiots out there who are incapable of reading two lines without getting confused that my articles must surely have provoked some damage.”

Charles shrugged and stuck to his humanitarian principles.

A month later, as a result of the “Letters to Maryse” column’s growing popularity, slightly more space was given to it in the magazine. When she learned of this development, the former columnist felt the rug being pulled out from under her and called the editor. The latter told her in effect that perhaps the time had come for her to redirect her many talents, but that the magazine would of course continue to value her services, if that was what she wished. What did she think, for example, of crossword puzzles?

The grand dame refused outright, and without ever having laid eyes on Charles, began nursing a smouldering hatred for him. Over the next few weeks, the editor received several letters from various sources criticizing Charles’s judgment and his use of vulgar language. The editor contented himself with a smile, and whenever he passed Charles in the office would pat him on the back or address him by his first name, an honour he very rarely accorded to his employees.

Such marks of favour, however, don’t show up on the weigh scales. After several months, Charles was beginning to grow tired of seeing his rent and groceries accounting for three-quarters of his take-home pay. It wasn’t that he wanted to live higher than he’d become accustomed to, but the stringent lifestyle he had adopted while working for Father Raphaël wasn’t stringent enough to let him make ends meet now that he was working as a journalist. He started looking for a third job, one that would pay well enough that he could afford to quit the
Siren
, which more and more he was beginning to see for what it truly was, that is, not very much. He was in a hurry to advance his career, and felt that opportunities were passing him by. And then there were all those novels he hadn’t even started to write!

“Do you think there’s a chance of the magazine taking me on full-time?” he asked Délicieux one day.

“Don’t even think about that for at least five years, my boy. Getting a full-time job here is about as hard as becoming an archbishop. Besides, what are
you complaining about? You like your work, you’re learning a new trade, even if it doesn’t pay a whole lot. Youth is supposed to be a time of champing at the bit. That’s what makes you strong.”

Screwing up all his courage, Charles went into the editor’s office and asked him if the magazine could give him a second job other than his bleeding-hearts column.

“Sure, why not?” said the editor. “How about the editorial page?”

And he burst out laughing.

From time to time Charles would share his financial and professional concerns with Blonblon, but he carefully avoided talking about it with Stéphanie, not wanting to lower himself in her eyes. He went to great lengths to give the impression of being on top of things, sufficient unto himself and engrossed in his career, which would soon propel him into the limelight. He could not see many other ways for someone like himself, who though not uncultivated had only a high school diploma, to keep up a relationship with a university student who would one day be a member of the Association of Psychologists and have legions of patients filing into her elegant office, where she would study the torsions and contortions of their souls in exchange for ten times the money that he, Charles, could ever dream of making.

In any case, his relationship with Stéphanie was hardly satisfying for either of them. It was one of those affairs that, never having really started, could not therefore really come to an end, but simply stretch out into avoid of indecision and a vague sense of disappointment. She slept with him not so much because it gave her pleasure as because that is what one did these days; only turkeys and donkeys reserved their virginity for marriage anymore. All her friends were having sex left and right, some of them at a dizzying pace. She’d decided to be like them but at the same time to conserve her sense of stability and moderation.

Perhaps as a result, a deeper problem was coming between the young couple: Stéphanie had decided to “remake” her partner. She loved him, yes, she believed she loved him very much, but above all she mostly loved the man she thought Charles could become — the man she could turn him into. According to her, Charles had to change certain aspects of his personality, to
develop his potential, in order to
become the person he truly was
, an initiative that was seized by too few people, in her view. She encouraged him at every turn to go back to school so that he could take his true place in the world, lead a calmer life, which would allow him to reflect, to
interiorize his experiences
, to regularize the contradictions within him that had, for example, separated him for so long from his father (he had made the mistake one day of filling her in on the whole story), so that he would talk less and listen more, get to know other people better, although she admitted that his articulate-ness and his sense of humour were two of his best qualities.

In short, she loved him as much as she possibly could, but she would love him much more if he were someone else.

Charles admitted that her advice and her observations were well-founded, but they still irritated him, and their discussions would sometimes turn into quarrels, which were followed by long periods of sulking, which gradually gave way to reconciliations. His liaison with Stéphanie began to seem to him to be tiresome and filled with insoluble complications.