Last Night in Montreal (6 page)

9.

At the end of November, Eli received a postcard from Montreal. There was no return address. The front depicted a pretty line of grey stone houses with flowerboxes and iron staircases that spiraled from the second floors down to the street, with
Montréal
in drop-shadowed italics across the bottom. The back held a peculiar message, scrawled in what very clearly wasn’t Lilia’s handwriting:
She’s here. Come to Club Electrolite on Rue Ste.-Catherine, and raise a white flag on the dance floor. I’ll see you. Come here soon. Michaela.

If the whole business of life on earth had ever made sense to him, it ceased to at that moment. She unmoored him, her departure made him want to disappear, et cetera—but if the world was askew in the time after he met her, in the time after she left, the postcard spun it entirely from its axis. The day at the gallery passed like a dream. He took the postcard and the continental map to the usual café, where Thomas had been camped out for two weeks trying to pick up a new waitress. Thomas stared at the postcard, whistled softly and shook his head.

“What would you do?” Eli felt fairly unhinged.

“I’d tear up the postcard and go find another girl. Or if you can’t do that, at least forget about this one.”

“What if she needs help?”

“What if she doesn’t? This isn’t a ransom note, it’s just a weird message on the back of an ugly postcard. What if this is some kind of sick joke she’s pulling, some ploy to get you back?”

“I have to go to her.”

“No, you have to move on. What kind of a person disappears like that? Look, things happen. Life continues. So you had a girlfriend who disappeared.”

“Easy for you to—”

“Do you think no one’s ever left me? You can’t chase after them,” Thomas said. “When they leave like that, they’re screwed up, and when they’re screwed up, you can’t save them. You can’t save them. You just have to let them go.” He made an airplane-like letting-go motion with one hand, jetting off to the left. Eli followed it with his eyes and then looked at the postcard again. “You just have to put your life back together and move on and pretend you never knew them, you just have to let them do whatever it is that they can’t do with you around. It’s the way it is.”

“Thomas, this isn’t her handwriting. Leave aside the fact that she left me, I have a postcard that someone’s written about her from a foreign city.”

“She left you, and you want to go
find
her?”

“I just want to make sure she’s okay. I know she left me, it’s just, I don’t think she has anyone else.”

“She might be
with
someone else, have you considered that? Some other guy could just . . . Eli, I’m sorry, wait . . .”

Eli stood up and pulled his coat from the back of his chair, the map in his other hand. Thomas made a grasping motion at his arm, which he evaded. Out through the warmth of the café with the map crumpled in his fist, Thomas calling after him, and outside night was falling and it was far too cold. He had a frantic desire to get out of Williamsburg, out of Brooklyn altogether, and found himself walking quickly toward the L-train stairs. There was a girl playing a guitar on the subway platform, sitting on a folding stool. She was singing soft songs about love and pay phones, almost to herself, until the sound of the oncoming train canceled everything. In the crowd that spilled out through the train doors there was an old woman pulling a little boy by the hand; the boy had a harmonica and played a long, wavering note in a minor key as Eli stepped into the train. He sank down onto a plastic bench and stared up at an overlit advertisement for skin care (“Dr. Z sees every patient personally!”) for all of the long clattering journey under the river, and then up the stairs into the lights and sounds of the Manhattan street. He walked aimlessly down First Avenue against the wind.

He stopped at a
Don’t Walk
signal somewhere deep into Chinatown, waiting for the direction of traffic to change. A bottle had been smashed in the gutter. He stood staring at it for a while, the mesmerizing sparkle of broken glass. A van paused a beat too long in the intersection and was attacked by a blaring cacophony of car horns. The sound brought tears to his eyes. He stood on the corner while passersby streamed around him like ghosts and lights changed from green to red to yellow to green again and the stream of traffic before him continued unchecked. He looked down and flecks of glass on the pavement sparkled, like crystal, like ice, tears blurring the pinpoints of light. It was a long time before he could force himself into motion.

. . .

“TELL ME ABOUT MONTREAL,”
he said to Geneviève. Thomas and Geneviève had been arguing earlier, but the argument was lost in passion and long words. Now they were both a bit flushed, mutually offended, and reading different sections of the same paper without speaking. Geneviève was making occasional notes in a weathered spiral-bound notebook. She had a scribbly, doctor’s-prescription way of writing that produced long lines of cramped hieroglyphics, and he had been watching her write. It was the first thing he’d said in an hour.

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten how to talk,” she said. “Why Montreal?” But her eyes held a sudden light. She loved talking about Montreal. She’d spent the early part of her life there. Her parents had moved her to Brooklyn when she was nine, but she still considered herself something of an expatriate and took enormous pleasure in pronouncing her name in French.

“I’m curious. I’m thinking about going there.”

Thomas was giving him a dangerous look. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” asked Geneviève, who didn’t know about the postcard.

“Because it’s fucking cold,” Thomas said, without taking his eyes from Eli’s face. “That’s all anyone needs to know about it. You’d be insane to go there this time of year.”

“I doubt you’ve even
been
.” She was always ready to pounce on an opportunity to argue with anyone, but especially with Thomas. “You should go. It’s a city with a probably doomed language. The Quebecois are speaking French with an accent so ancient and frankly bizarre that the actual French can’t understand it. It’s like a fortress in a rising tide of English. It’ll be like research for you.”

“What do you mean, a fortress?”

“Imagine a country next to the sea,” she said, “and imagine that the water’s rising. Imagine a fortress that used to stand near the beach, but now it’s half underwater, and the water won’t stop rising no matter how they try to fight it back. Eventually, in the next century or so, it will more than likely rise over the top of the walls and overwhelm them, but for now they’re plugging the cracks and pretending it doesn’t exist and passing laws against rising water. I’m saying that French is the fortress, and English is the sea.”

“I don’t get it,” said Thomas, without looking up from his paper. “That’s a stupid metaphor.”

“I think I do,” said Eli quickly, trying to avoid losing them to another fight, but Geneviève had ignored Thomas anyway.

“You’ve spent your whole academic career thinking about dying languages,” she said. “Thinking about doomed languages, shamelessly romanticizing doomed languages, picking up girls with doomed languages, and imagining what life played out in a doomed language might be like. Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to
live
in a city with a doomed language?”

“I would,” he said. “I really would. Although I’m not sure that
career
is exactly the word for my academic situation. How cold is it?”

“Arctic,” she said, “but it’s worth it. There’s no place like it on earth. I try to go back there every year. It’s a great city.” She was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said, “provided you speak French.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” Thomas asked. He was still flushed and still wouldn’t look up at her. “Eli, you can’t chase them. We talked about this.”

“Chase who? What are you talking about? What it means is certain laws are in place to protect the French language,” she said. “Like I said, it’s a fortress. Whether or not the scope of them is justified is somewhat controversial, but anyway, the English are more conservative, whereas the French . . .”

This sparked an instant argument on the subject of cultural stereotypes; they barely noticed when Eli walked out. There was a bad moment out on the street, where the fact of her absence slammed into his chest and he had to sit on a park bench for a while until the exhaustion lifted enough for him to stand up and get home. He spent the afternoon staring at the bedroom ceiling.

An envelope arrived the following morning. It was postmarked Montreal, and Queen Elizabeth II half smiled against the sky-blue background of a stamp. The envelope contained a page torn from a Bible, with a child’s awkward ballpoint-pen letters scrawled bluely over the surface of the Twenty-second Psalm:
Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.—Lilia.
The page was thin and slightly yellowed, and it trembled in his hands. There was nothing else in the envelope, but a phone number was scrawled on the inside of the flap with the message
Call me when you get to Montreal,
and he recognized the handwriting and the return address, Michaela, c/o Club Electrolite, a street number on Rue Ste.-Catherine. He was still staring at the envelope when the phone rang.

“Hello, Eli,” his mother said.

He sank into the desk chair, closed his eyes, and lowered his forehead into the palm of his left hand. He clutched the phone white-knuckled with his right.

“Hi.”

“You sound strange,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

He told her that he was slightly tired. This seemed to be her cue. Did he know that it had been
two months
since he’d called her last? She was serious. Two
months!
She was only up in the Upper West
Side,
you know, not in
Siberia,
he
could
visit sometimes, or at least
call,
but
any
way. She just wanted to know how he was. How was the thesis coming? How was life in Brooklyn? She’d been out earlier, running a few errands, and on the way out of Zabar’s she almost got hit by a taxi. On a crosswalk, on the walk signal! Manhattan taxi drivers are homicidal. She was thinking of writing to the mayor. But anyway, her friend Sylvia’s daughter was having a baby, did he remember Sylvia’s daughter? Red hair? Blue eyes? Yes, everyone was excited. She was the one who was right between Zed and Eli, agewise. And that bloody tap in the bathroom had begun dripping again, but she wasn’t complaining. Because life’s too short to complain about small things, especially if you’re going to practically lose your life to a taxi on the way out of Zabar’s,
c’est la vie,
et cetera.

She faded in and out, like a shifting and unreliable radio signal. The monologue eventually subsided, and a silence settled over the line. He didn’t speak.

She began speaking again all at once, fast and nervous. She just
worried
about him, she said, out there in the boroughs like that. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed. Eli transferred the phone into his left hand and held the torn page in his right. He turned the page over to read the rest of the psalm.
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.
When he held it up to the window, Lilia’s childhood handwriting was a backward shadow on the other side of the page. His mother wanted to know if he’d heard from Zed lately; at last word he was headed for Ethiopia, although she couldn’t remember what he was doing there. It wasn’t that she
entirely
disapproved of Eli’s brother, although she wished he’d go to college; she was glad that he was seeing the world (incidentally, had Eli considered travel? Maybe a month or two abroad would do him good, perhaps focus him a little), but she worried about Zed. She did. She worried that Zed was getting too radical, too mystical (or was
spiritual
the right word? She was never sure what the difference was), just the way he wandered around biblical countries talking about
God
like that. Did he seem at all unhinged? Had he been heard from lately?

Eli turned the page over again. The first part of the psalm was partly lost under her handwriting, but he could still make it out:
. . . I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t heard from Zed for a while, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He doesn’t just talk about God, he talks about Buddhism and Taoism at least as much. What he suffers from—” He listened to his mother’s interruption for a second and then interrupted her. “No, he’s not an extremist, you’ve got it all wrong. I was going to say what Zed suffers from is a pathological sense of democ racy. He’s too democratic to even choose one individual religion to be extreme and radical about. He’s probably an atheist.”

This last sentiment triggered a longish pause, in which he imagined her switching the telephone from one ear to the other and mentally rewriting her will.

“Eli,” she said, “sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just don’t think we’re in any position to judge his life.”

The pause lengthened and grew black around the edges. No, she told him, she was serious. She wanted to know what was wrong, with no diversions this time.

“My girlfriend disappeared.” Eli listened for a moment and then interrupted her. “Yes,
Lilia,
the one I was living with, you think I’d have more than one? She didn’t just leave me. I mean she disappeared.”

His mother offered her opinion that girls don’t just disappear, unless they’ve gone and gotten themselves—

“This one does.”

Then she
did
go and get herself—

“No,” he said, “she wasn’t
preg
nant. For God’s sake.”

Her son, she felt, deserved better than that. And what did he mean by
disappeared,
exactly?