Appropriate Place (2 page)

Gabrielle has occasionally run into the shadow who lives in 404, with
a view of the sunset but also of the row of apartments opposite, all the way to the
highway ramp, on rue des Mélèzes, rue des Érables, rue des Lilas, rue des
Amélanchiers, though none of these trees grows in Laval. He's old, he wears thick
glasses of a kind that opticians don't sell any more, he looks like an activist in
her party who kept pondering the same books, though at least he could quote them in
timely fashion to young people devoid of memory, which was reassuring. She'll ask
him about the boy. It will all work out, the eyes of Fatima's daughter are still
just as scathing, but they're focussed now on a commercial for La Ronde and its
water slides. Timidly, Gabrielle finally dares to ask her name. “Virginia,” Fatima
replies. Virginia is the daughter of a remote cousin, now American, who shipped her
here for the summer. Actually, Gabrielle had been under the impression that Fatima
didn't have a husband and therefore, most likely, no daughter.

The fourth floor has the disadvantage of being the top one; in return
for its guaranteed silence, there is the summer dampness, which comes in through the
insulation in the roof. Someday she'll have to replace the beautiful neutral grey
carpeting, which is starting to fade despite the museum-quality sheers that she's
hung on the windows to protect her paintings and the original colours of the big and
very costly antique armoire that had travelled via an Outremont antique dealer from
a seigneury to an apartment in Laval. She should have insisted on oak floors, but
the carpet was included in the price of the apartment, she hadn't anticipated the
musty smell that was trapped there in winter and did not disappear altogether in the
spring. There are decorators nowadays who are bringing back a kind of linoleum with
a permanently waxed finish on which to lay Oriental carpets woven of strong silk
that won't wear out. That's something she'll have to look into.

Finally, into a tall glass Gabrielle pours Pernod and orange juice,
drops in ice cubes one by one. She has never developed a liking for the liquorice
taste, first experienced in France. But it's what you drink in the summer when you
finally settle into a white wicker chair with an apple green cushion, looking out on
the Rivière des Prairies at the testosterone-powered boats. At least from here she
can't hear the roaring made by men who wouldn't dare to live by themselves in a
fourth-floor apartment in Laval, who'd think they were surrounded and would break
things to prove otherwise.

For her, so sure of herself, this is an appropriate place. A honeycomb
cell where Gabrielle can finally experience the “after.” She sips her drink. She
contemplates putting on music, the posthumous
Nocturne
by Heinrich Wilhelm
Ernst, played by Midori at Carnegie Hall, one of the few discoveries made through
her membership, now expired, in the Columbia Record Club. But if she did that, at
the beginning of this evening that's so bare, in her mind's eye she would see the
slender image of a foreign woman straining over her strings, and the crowd at the
concert. And there would be noise.

The ice cubes dissolve, the water dulls the accents of orange and
liquorice, the caned chair back scrapes the shoulders of Gabrielle Perron, who
thought that she was capable of existing amid silence.

She has nothing to think about. Nothing. A very beautiful spider,
pitch black, clings to the railing, apparently without a web. Five more hours till
midnight. She really should have some ivy on the eastern exposure and, in the flower
boxes, red geraniums. She has always been able to think about something, but never
about meaningless things like Jean-Charles's knee or the oozing brains of a calico
cat. She gets up to open a tin of white asparagus and the new bottle of
cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oil, uncork the Sauternes, light the broiler.
She'll see tomorrow. The salmon steak — it's perfectly normal in this heat, which is
definitely outrageous — tastes slightly off. It's just as well that there were no
choux à la crème
, they'd have gone bad.

Two

A MONTH LATER,
Pierre has brought the
place under his control. He has transported gallons of paint, bought brushes and
rollers, piled and protected the furniture in the middle of the living room. His
dexterity is remarkable in a boy his age, who's not supposed to know how to work. He
has respected Gabrielle's silence on the days when she was listing her entire
library on computer, he even helped her modify the program to add
cross-references.

Outside, there's a drought. The river will become a prairie, Gabrielle
predicts, when they meet on the balcony at noon, where he has helped her put up an
awning. She prepares lentil salad, cold pasta with clams, roasted peppers, sugared
raspberries. He joins her in drinking light sangria. They had very little to say to
each another until the day when he began to show an interest in her paintings.

First, in the retriever portrayed by Anne Ashton between two
rosebushes, a dog indifferent to the hunt, posing on the tips of his long, arched
legs, a print for the boudoir of a marquise. It wasn't modern art, he was surprised
to note, claiming that he'd spotted some everywhere else in the apartment and that
he preferred a beige and silent Gaucher, so brilliantly closed around its interior
folds that it takes away your appetite for images. “What he's done is give a colour
to a bad mood,” said Pierre in the tone of a budding connoisseur, already a touch
snide. Anne Ashton's dog provided an opportunity to put him in his place, to explain
to him that Gaucher's terrible break with the living could be found just as well in
the rendering of an animal from another century, whose artificially arched posture
in a fake warren questioned any wish to paint reality, world without end, then and
now. And had he not noticed the insect on a rose petal that didn't correspond to any
known species? It would take a great deal of subtlety to grasp the new directions of
art, the deceptive return to the anecdotal that seemed attractive, sometimes witty,
but that always carried with it an impression of death.

He had to struggle to listen, no doubt because of his lack of
vocabulary, and afterwards he avoided expressing an opinion on the works
prematurely. Instead, he let his opinions fall as questions until he finally
approached the most intimidating, the series of paintings in the corridor,
near-frescoes that seemed to be formless beings intertwined, hairless and with heavy
stomachs, neither men nor women, breasts wounded, sex gashed, lashing under a pale
sky shot through with thorns. “Still, you could think that the painter used velvet
brushes,” he ventured to say. Gabrielle taught him that this expert, amorous series
was the work of a young woman. Laurence Cardinal's line, shot through like the mind
of a medium, had more to say about the gentleness and the cruelty of lovers than she
would ever learn, though artists' loves are supremely tormented.

Pierre had become obsessed with these uninhibited canvases that seemed
to move as he walked past them. And Gabrielle had been caught up in the game of
educating him, to the point of mentioning without embarrassment the desire
smouldering under the ashen grey of the faces, the shudder that flowed beneath the
light brown of the thighs, the orgasm that cut the red, colour of blood and of sex,
of the flesh — all that linked by a furious charcoal that had streaked the scenes as
if they were the last ones.

“You can't know,” she'd begun without thinking, in the middle of a
leaden Friday. And now, because it was the logical next step, he wanted to know. As
if he were inquiring about another painting, he had asked her to make love. Because
the time had come, he said, and because girls his age paid no attention to him.
Anyway, it was reciprocal, he preferred the company of older women, like his
mother's friend who had taken him in for the summer and was now all wrapped up in
her lover's recent death.

Gabrielle had given in without a fuss, perhaps a competitive spirit
still inhabited her, she'd be a contrast with the weeping widow. Besides, she'd felt
an urge for that particular game, belly and legs abruptly hot, it would be good on
the floor, on rough sheets smelling of camphor already stained with ivory white, he
could spill himself onto them without embarrassment because she'd throw them out
afterwards, she had planned it.

Gabrielle brought their plates inside, turned off the air conditioner,
joined Pierre in the shower to be at the beginning no more than a shadow, matte and
brown, against his, pale and musky. It would be best to hide from him the creases
under her breasts, at her knees, at the place where shoulder meets arm. She'd have
hidden them even from a man of fifty, she wasn't one of those women who enjoys bites
— the light is one. She rubbed him slowly, then soothed him while she guided his
hand towards other creases, those that stay beautiful, that open and flow with her
particular milk in the lavender-scented foam and the fingers of an overexcited boy.
She pressed her sex at length against his thigh because later, in the living room,
it would be too quick. He lay down awkwardly in fact, didn't know how to caress her
in the open air, she'd teach him in the days to come. She guided him into her, and
his slight movement before he collapsed created a flash in her belly, made her flow
again, so wet. She was surprised and still hungry, she mustn't.

Madeleine would have recommended buying a vibrator instead. After
wearing out a good many overly young lovers, she had something against them all —
youngsters who interfere with your life for months, who insult the rules of spelling
in their love notes that take the form of praise of older women, and then one
morning, with their bare eyes, look you up and down with contempt, leaving you more
withered than you are. And that's without counting the sense of incest, which makes
you come with guilt. But Gabrielle would say nothing to Madeleine, this one was
going to be brief. It would be over when the painting was, and the apartment wasn't
all that big.

Around three o'clock, after Pierre had left, she poured herself some
ice water and savoured her new life, resign-ing herself to her recent folly. This
child whom she'd teach about sex, everything she had sought and so rarely found,
would be a mere rite of passage. He had the eyes of autumn, of a wolf, maybe, as in
Peter and the Wolf
, do you remember, Gabrielle, Prokofiev and the
night?

Oh yes, she remembered, the first of the wolves.

There is winter and a girl of sixteen, neither very pretty nor very
tall, and she's spending the weekend at her friend Guylaine's. They are studying
piano, but they consider the lessons old-fashioned and prefer gatherings where you
mix with boys and with ideas about resistance. That day, in Guylaine's enormous
bedroom — she has rich parents and a house in the suburbs with a driveway so long
that they need a snowblower — they are drawing up the bylaws of their student
association, copying them from a model being used at the university, everything from
obligatory dues to rules of meetings, from election regulations to the disciplinary
committee. They have hopes of retaining the key elements when the time comes to
adopt them. The nuns are leaving the veil one by one, only the last holdouts are
still at the college, the chaplain preaches a secular moral code and the nuns don't
dare to stop him from discussing democracy with girls who are, even so, not as
rebellious as Marie-Claire Blais, whose novels are beginning to win praise.

Guylaine's mother has a maid who makes beds and does dishes, to
Gabrielle her friend is a princess. Guylaine though is modest enough to serve her.
For it's Gabrielle who knows everything, why to found associations, with whom to
correspond to register for the national congress, how to start the fundraising by
inviting a chansonnier, the shyest of them, the one who sings about the sea without
grumbling, he won't cost too much. Gabrielle intends to dress all in black to meet
his agent, she dares to laugh at the lace that fills her friend's bedroom, that
trims the dressing table and the windows and the canopy bed. Guylaine doesn't defend
herself well, except for the Icart prints, they're worth a lot of money, her father
chose them, he's a connoisseur of everything. The father is a pharmacist, that's the
only thing that is clear in Gabrielle's eyes, he doesn't say much, is lost in
thought behind his cigarettes and his books, an avant-garde Christian, says his
daughter. Gabrielle sees him as a kind of hermit, resigned to his women — wife,
daughter, maid — in another life he'd have been a saint, he sighs constantly and
goes to the art galleries by himself on Saturdays, where he unearths old works. He
says that art is now deteriorating, and his daughter repeats it.

Gabrielle doubts that, because the new art appeals to her, but
Guylaine's father is the sole authority she dares not take issue with, she'd be
afraid of losing her friend, who is so gentle and who listens to everything with
fervour. She envies her that father whose silence is so laden with thoughts, while
her own father doesn't have a single one. He extricates himself from his eternal
bus, the number 50, only to stumble through a moronic account of his day, then start
again on the morrow. His schedule, the inspector, worn brakes, road maintenance,
lost old ladies, bawling children, insolent students. He doesn't wonder if the world
is deteriorating, he's not in it, his eyes shine only when he talks about an
imminent move to Montréal-Nord where Italian builders are finally putting up houses
a person can afford. Gabrielle will loathe Montréal-Nord.

On this Saturday night, as on all the others, the pharmacist goes down
to the basement, an entresol fixed up according to his canons. They aren't his
ancestors although they give that impression — the two portraits of anonymous
dignitaries of Nouvelle-France that flank a rough antique buffet. By Jean-Baptiste
Roy-Audy, according to the bronze plate on the jigsawed frame, a man in black with a
collar so high he could have been a priest, and a woman in rusty green, her hair
pulled back so tightly she must be the mother of priests. A rosary drips from her
fingers, she prays eternally for the salvation of colonial souls. The buffet in fact
has something of the sacristy about it, even the blue-fringed lamp was made from a
ceremonial candlestick; antique dealers don't have to empty the churches, they're
doing it themselves, for next to nothing. In the pharmacist's den the armchairs are
wingbacks, he calls them
voltaires
but neither Guylaine nor Gabrielle is
familiar with that name, the writer is not to be found in the convent library. As
for the pharmacist's, it has rows of
Les semaines
sociales du Canada
, bound by year, in the company of everything by Claudel,
Péguy, Mauriac. But he considers them too young and too girlish to enter there, they
have to play the piano while he reads Bernanos,
Les grands cimetières sous la
lune.