The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (29 page)

I
WENT TO LOOK FOR
R
APHAËL AT THE
P
OLISH
Social Club a few days later. He hadn’t come home the night before. There was a woman singing on the stage. She strummed a ukulele and pouted her lips abruptly as she said each word, as if she was spitting out sunflower seeds. It was a style of French singing where you spoke the words really emphatically, as if you were lecturing a child.

A cat was in the corner, yawning. It looked like an insomniac in striped pyjamas.

Raphaël was drunk. He was sitting with a blond girl on his lap. I walked over, took a drink off their table and threw it on her. Everyone was startled and started to laugh, even the girl, who shook the beer off her hair like a wet dog that had just come in from the rain. I had thought that we were happy again. It had been the loveliest thing on the planet. That was the last time we were happy in the city.

After that night Raphaël would check his horoscope in the mornings as if he was checking his stocks. He bought six different
newspapers and had a Spanish man help him translate the horoscope from a paper from Mexico City.

He started laughing at odd times. There was something a little terrifying about people who laughed at a joke too long or at jokes that weren’t funny.

“Are you going to work?” I asked him as he was leaving the apartment one night.

“No. I’m all washed up. I’ve got a Grade Eight education. The only work for me is robbing jewellery stores. And my heart’s just not in it.”

“Weren’t you going to go back to school, for nursing?”

“There’s a reason for you to go to school. You write all those clever essays in your notebooks. You know how to do something like that. It is very hard for a person to go to school once they have rejected the linearity of time. It presupposes that we are moving forward through time and that a gradual accumulation of facts is necessary. Some of us are going backwards through time. As such. We are unlearning loads of information.”

He walked out the door. He frustrated me the way that Nicolas did. They didn’t act as if they would ever be twenty-five. They didn’t have any sort of long-term plan. They were just trying to get through the day. They were often involved in plans that weren’t actually plans. Complicated plans that left them exactly in the same place that they started out. They put on all sorts of costumes and affectations, but they couldn’t get away from the idea of who they were as children. Nicolas was Peter Pan. Raphaël was Captain Hook. But it was the same old story being told by a slightly different character.

It would be okay—we could make it—if we both did something small every day to make sure that we were getting our lives together. I wanted to have some fun in life too. I didn’t
want to have to do all of the work while he got to go mad. I didn’t like to be like the ant, all industrious and worried, while Raphaël went around being a grasshopper, all wild and upset and singing at the moon. I felt terribly selfish thinking this way, but I couldn’t go down with Raphaël. I had to have my own trials and tribulations. Jesus, I was twenty years old!

I walked into the kitchen one night. Raphaël was naked and running a magnet from the fridge door that was in the shape of a pina colada all over his body. He wanted to see if he could detect any magnetism. I glanced at the workout sheet he’d put on the fridge. He had been up late the night before and had apparently done three thousand sit-ups. He told me that he thought that some scientists had put a transistor in him when he was a little kid so that they could monitor the effects of child abuse. He said they were writing a book about him. He was going to ask at the hospital if he could have his whole body X-rayed so that they could find the receiver and remove it.

Try as I might, I could no longer make sense of Raphaël’s behaviour. In retrospect, I should have done something. But he had been to the doctors and that hadn’t worked. His family was useless. What other options did I have? There was a cult around the corner, where a twenty-seven-year-old who wore a pair of pants without a belt lectured about macrobiotics. There was a hypnotist above the legal clinic who wiped away all your problems for sixty-five dollars. There was a tarot card reader on the first floor of our building. None of them seemed like viable solutions.

Instead I hid some extra money from my paycheque in a tin with roses on it under the bed. I didn’t want to admit to myself why I was hiding it. I was hiding it in case I left Raphaël.
I had started to do it since I found out that I was pregnant, just in case. But, actually, I knew that he was going to fall apart. I looked around the room guiltily when I was done. No one was there.

F
OR
F
RENCH CLASS WE WERE ALL SUPPOSED TO
write a book review and then go up in front of everyone and read it out loud. Instead of writing a run-of-the-mill report, I decided to get creative. My story was a retelling of
Cyrano de Bergerac
. In the original tale, he feeds all these wonderful and romantic lines to his friend to recite to a girl named Roxane, who he has a crush on. In mine, Cyrano comes up with the tackiest and crudest come-ons possible—something that I was an expert on, having grown up on Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

A couple of students in the class who were going to school to get bigger unemployment cheques slept through the tale. But the others laughed and clapped at the end. The girl my age with giant gold hoop earrings almost fell off her chair and started whistling during my reading. After the class, some of the students came up and told me that they had really enjoyed the story. The teacher took my hand and said that I certainly had a
way with words, not unlike the original Cyrano. She wanted to know if I planned to continue on to university after I graduated. I told her I did. She was the first person that I had said that to. I liked the sound of it.

I walked home with a skip in my step. Oh okay, so they were only twenty-four people. They were not exactly literary critics or a crowd of refined aficionados. But it was the first audience that I had captivated on my own. They were not Étienne Tremblay fans. I hadn’t written the story to somehow neurotically capture my father’s fickle love. I had written it for myself. I felt very good about it, indeed. It was something that I could get better at. And if you don’t have something to try and get better at when you are twenty years old, you are lost.

I got home. The referendum was back on and it was going to be in the fall. There was an article in the newspaper talking about how there was going to be a rally of Québec artists and poets to speak out for separatism. I saw that Étienne’s name was on the list.

Oh là là!
I thought. What would Étienne do? He wouldn’t have anything prepared. I had seen his notebooks in recent years. He was incapable of sustaining a thought for more than a few lines. His brain was like a bucket with holes in the bottom. It would suddenly be filled with brilliance, but that would all quickly leak away. I didn’t want him to make an ass of himself. He had been such a great orator. I didn’t want him to go out with a whimper. Oh, who knows why I cared, but I did.

I took out a pen to jot down some notes. Why did Québec want to separate this time? We were the original descendants of the losers of the war between England and France for Canada.
We had been shit upon for generations. But we were proud and we had finally built our own culture in the sixties. We became urbanized, and in apartments we sat up late reading philosophy books. We got rid of the church, but we stuck to our nationalism. Many of us wanted to leave Canada.

In 1980, after the loss of the first referendum, our premier René Lévesque had famously said,
“À la prochaine fois.”
Then Québec didn’t sign the new constitution that was drafted in 1981. René Lévesque had the Québec flag flown at half mast.

Finally, a few years ago, Québec made some propositions for constitutional amendments. We wanted it in writing that we were distinct, that there was something weird and special about us. Since we didn’t have our own country, at least we could have some sort of other protection. But Canada said no. They scoffed. We had asked for a consolation prize and they had laughed in our faces.

If they didn’t think we were going to react badly, they were mistaken. We were going to react badly, Nicolas Tremblay–style. We were leaving this damn country that went around calling itself the greatest country in the world.

We were packing our bags. There was nothing that they could say now. Now they were trying anything to make us stay. Like a lover who was trying to talk reason into you as you were throwing your clothes into a suitcase, they went from saying soothing, reconciliatory, sweet things to calling you a complete idiot and telling you that you’d regret it for sure. Well it was too late for all that.

We would go off on our own. We just wanted to speak French in peace. We wanted to whisper dirty things to our loved ones in French. There was a certain kind of love that could only be expressed in this way.

There was no difference between the expressions
I like you
and
I love you
in French. You could never declare love like that in English.

We loved in a self-destructive, over-the-top way. A way that was popular in sixties experimental theatre and certain Shakespeare plays. We loved like Napoleonic soldiers in Russia, penning beautiful letters while seated on the corpses of our dead horses. We were like drunk detectives who carried around tiny notebooks full of clues and fell for our suspects. We were crazy about the objects of our affection the way that ex-criminals in Pentecostal churches were crazy about Jesus. We went after people who didn’t know we existed, like Captain Ahab did. We loved awkwardly and hopelessly, like a wolf ringing a doorbell while wearing a sheepskin coat that is way too small for him.

How could you explain that in a political platform? I wondered. I began to write a speech for Étienne. The only way that we would win the referendum would be if the speech-makers came out. Only poetry could win the vote.

They didn’t want to hear these words from a young, silly girl, pregnant with her first child. They wanted to hear it from a man with a huge nose and wild hair. Who tossed women aside and went out into the fray. Everybody wanted Cyrano to show his ugly face and scream his beautiful words. We all knew what a revolutionary looked like, the same way that we knew what a lover was supposed to look like. I knew that I was writing this for Étienne to read. I used to be his mouthpiece. Now he’d be mine.

R
APHAËL SAID THAT HE WANTED TO GO OUT AND
have some fun with his gorgeous pregnant wife. He watched me getting ready. He was drinking Scotch out of a glass. I put on my red dress and was leaning over the bureau to look in the mirror while putting lipstick on. He was wearing a shirt that was the colour of robins’ eggs. The sole was hanging off the bottom of his shoe. It looked like an alligator with its jaw hanging open.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?” I asked.

A skinny girl in a wife-beater T-shirt in Saint-Henri appeared in the mirror. Her stepmother was yelling at her in the background.

“I don’t know why you even spend one second fixing yourself up,” Raphaël said. “You look fantastic all the time. I am going to draw you eight hundred hearts on a piece of paper. And I’m going to mail it to you. And you’re going to open the mailbox and the hearts are going to fly right out of it like hornets coming out of a hornets’ nest.”

“That’s sort of beautiful, baby,” I said. It was actually something that my Cyrano might have said.

I put the lipstick down and turned around with a flourish to indicate that I was ready to go. I was willing to forget everything. If there was one thing that I knew how to do, it was to live in the moment and have a kick-ass time.

“Look at you! I have to take you out into the world. I have to let other people look at you because it’s only fair. You’re so pretty it’s breaking my heart just to look at you. I think that I can see your aura. Glowing out of you.”

“What colour is it?”

“The colour of daffodils, I think, except pink.”

We went dancing at the Armenian Confederation Ballroom. He sat on a chair as I danced the sweetest, tightest lap dance in the history of mankind.

We probably looked like the most romantic couple on earth, like we were having the best time that any two people could possibly have. Really, we were going someplace where the music was loud, loud, loud, so that we didn’t have to hear the anxious mutterings of our psyches. And if we partied and went out dancing and made love often, didn’t it mean we were okay?

When we got home, Raphaël told me not to turn on the lights yet. I stood in the dark as he ran to the window and opened the blinds. He told me that he was certain we’d been followed. I told him that he was imagining things and flicked on the light switches. But for once he actually turned out to be right. Even a crazy clock is right twice a day.

A week later I saw a photograph of me dancing against Raphaël at the ballroom on the corner of the cover of a tabloid. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I opened up the magazine, and inside there was a blown-up photograph of Raphaël
as a little kid wearing a silver spandex tuxedo and matching top hat. He had a gold medal hanging around his neck. His father was standing next to him, looking like the proudest man in the world. As I stared at it, I realized that it was one of the pictures that Raphaël had thrown away. In fact, the entire page was covered with photos that Raphaël had crammed in the bin that day on our way home from Véronique’s house. Someone had gone into the garbage and taken out his secret history. I never thought they would go that far.

According to the writer, Raphaël was a tortured genius. He had gone mad doing pirouettes. They found some doctor to say that training children to be professional athletes was a form of child abuse. Supposedly, figure skating was one of the few professions that could lead you to catatonic despair. Space travel was another one. Maybe now that he was with Nouschka Tremblay, he would get his life back on track and he would join the exhibition circuit. I wondered if there was a possibility that Raphaël wouldn’t see this magazine.