I wanted to have a job that was farther downtown. I wanted to make a bit more than minimum wage, which wasn’t even five dollars an hour. I was going to see about a receptionist job at the opera house downtown.
I looked through all my clothes to make sure that what I was wearing didn’t have any holes. I had spent so many years perfecting a look of being cool that it was difficult now to go the other way around. It was hard to not look like a rebel. I spent fifteen minutes trying to comb my hair and make it look straight. Hopeless. It was far too in love with the wind. If I had a mother, I would know how to fix my hair.
The bricks on the metro wall were painted a bright blue and there was a mosaic of an explorer over the tunnel that the train travelled through. All the metro stations were completely different from one another, each having been designed by a different architect in the late sixties. Mad architects were all the rage back then. They had enormous moustaches and wild hair, and were considered geniuses. Étienne’s generation had been a very busy one. The whole city reflected their strange talents and tastes.
I got off at the metro stop right underneath the opera house. I wasn’t sure how the interview would go. I didn’t have a high school diploma. I didn’t know how to type. My English was shitty and they apparently had a lot of English clientele. But the job was certainly worth trying for. And it would make me feel like I was an adult, and that it made perfect sense to be getting married. Ha, or maybe I was just building up a case for when I told Loulou that I was engaged!
CHAPTER 26
The Collected Works of the Grim Reaper
LOULOU ALWAYS GOT DRESSED UP WHEN HE WENT to visit our grandmother’s grave. He had put on his fedora and his navy blue suit. He was wearing a giant gold watch that never told time properly. He had taken his weekly shower and didn’t have his usual vague odour of cat piss and dead things. Instead, he smelled like the breath of someone who was sucking on a hard candy.
It was September. It was already getting chilly. I kept waiting for the right moment to tell Loulou that I was getting married. I felt like I had to confess something bad that I had done, as if I had been expelled from school.
We had to walk over the park on the mountain in order to get to the cemetery. The police went around on horses. There were old men who had their pants pulled up inexplicably high and had plastic bags filled with apples hanging from their wrists. Young people were sunbathing in the cold. Little children were gathered around the brass statue of a lion. They stroked the lion’s mane and blew into its nostrils. They begged it to awaken from its terrible frozen spell and come home with them.
Loulou was having more trouble walking than ever. He would stop, hunched over, and look all around him as if he was taking in the magnificent view, as opposed to being tired.
“Clouds don’t look like much anymore. When I was a kid, you could look up and see adorable white goats running around. It was lovely. You see anything up there?”
“There’s a naked woman taking a bath.”
“You’re a pervert, Nouschka. You and your brother.”
There was a man on a unicycle balancing a hat on his nose. After the 1980 referendum, everyone with prospects left the city. Everyone here now was a direct descendant of a daydreamer. A disproportionate amount of people in the city were planning careers in the circus. We passed by the giant pond.
“There used to be puppet shows in this park all the time when I was a kid. Of course, there was a Punch and Judy show. There was also a Lush and Trudy show.”
“A what?”
“Lush and Trudy. It was about a puppet who drank too much and cheated on his wife.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, it was very popular. There was a puppet named Putz, who wore a trench coat and exposed himself.”
“What did they have at the big amphitheatre?”
“Oh! All sorts of things. There was a magician who was able to swallow birds and then crap them out of his ass, still alive!”
“That’s disgusting!” I laughed.
“Oh no!” he said. “Look, swans!”
I’d heard his stories about swans for years. Loulou said that once when he was little, he passed by a pond on a rainy day, and a swan fell madly in love with his umbrella. Loulou said the swan decided that it wanted to marry the umbrella and keep it as his wife. The swan chased him all the way home.
I thought about the swans that were in the pond when Raphaël asked me to marry him. If things went badly, would I have a horror of swans, I wondered.
I looked over at Loulou. He was also lost in thought as he looked at the birds. The shape of his fedora was ruined, like he’d worn it in the rain. His brown tie was flying and twisting in the wind like a seal performing tricks. I suddenly realized, for the first time, how sad he was. He had never recovered from our grandmother’s death. I felt sorry for him and didn’t want to tell him about the wedding. He’d been upset enough for one lifetime.
He bent over to talk to babies in their strollers. “Have you tried Rogaine for your hair loss?” “Lost all your teeth? So have I!” “Come on, get out of there. It’s my turn!” “I hope you’re not drinking and driving.”
Then he would look up at the mothers and laugh his head off. It was impossible for me to know what people thought about him.
“I went and bought a stationary bicycle. I rode it all day and I got nowhere.”
He had to tell jokes to everyone. He was lonely. He wanted to get in all his talking for the day. He wanted complete strangers to love him. He was the last vaudevillian star in the world. It’s harder to be funny when you’re older. You’ve lost touch with the zeitgeist, to put it mildly.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.
“Oh, what? What the fuck now? Jesus Christ. Here we go. Let me get off my fucking feet before you tell me.”
“Raphaël and I are getting married.”
Loulou looked like he was going to have a heart attack. He opened his mouth and shut it before he was finally able to compose a sentence.
“I hear people say that you’re good-looking,” he said. “Why can’t you date a doctor or a lawyer?”
“It’s too late for that. Besides, Raphaël’s smart.”
“You’re just like one of those girls who gets kidnapped and falls in love with their kidnappers.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“And I think that he is slightly retarded, if I may speak freely,” Loulou continued. “You were such a cute baby. Why did you settle for the first guy who asked you?”
“I love him.”
“He’d better take a trip to the Wizard of Oz for a brain. On second thought, he should go there with a grocery list. He should ask for a backbone while he’s there. And the ability to get a job.”
“Oh stop. He can do anything when he wants to. Look how far he went with figure skating.”
He was quiet again for a bit. He raised his shoulders and then dropped them, as if he was giving in to an argument.
“I think that if there was a weather report on his mental state, I would say eighty-five percent chance of crazy. He’s a ticking time bomb. Is that fucker skating again a possibility?”
“No. He’ll never skate again.”
“He’s too proud for the Ice Capades, eh?” Loulou shook his head.
We walked into the graveyard. If I had come on any other day, I would have stopped to read the tombstones. Here lies Joachim Renault, who drank three beers then went to play hockey on the lake that was not quite frozen. Here lies Xavier Therrier, who never got over his wife having left him and just didn’t have the strength to fight his fever. Luc Dionne, who was loved by all his family, died trying to rescue the family cat from a tree.
“I don’t know,” Loulou said. “Did I raise you properly? Did I not tell you two little assholes that you could be astronauts? Isn’t that the philosophy? Tell your kids they can be dentists when they can’t even pass third-grade math.”
“Not rea
lly. You were obsessed with Étienne.”
“You said such cute things on that radio show. I thought for sure you’d grow up and be a politician or something like that. You read all those pretty poems.”
“I’m finishing school. I’m going to be a professional something or other. I want to maybe be a journalist, a political commentator, a writer. Something like that.”
“You’re sensible. Except when boys come around. Then you’re fucking nuts.”
I stood there second-guessing my decision to marry Raphaël, as I had done a million times that week. Maybe I was afraid to ever just be alone. Perhaps I needed to have a man in my life as a cowardly backup plan.
“What about that rich little Jew you were going with. Why not marry him? Don’t tell me. He turned out to be gay, am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“I’m old, but I still know what is what, don’t I?”
He looked around to see if anyone had heard his joke, but everyone there was lying six feet under the ground.
Loulou let it go at that. A proper parent would have been able to end it all there. Loulou could never get angry or lay down the law with Nicolas and me. He just stopped seeing us when we became adolescents. How could I avoid getting married young? This way I could start a brand new family, where everyone would notice me.
CHAPTER 27
Nouschka Tremblay Says, “I Do!”
WITH IMMIGRANTS COMING FROM ALL OVER, IT was a while before they settled on what would be the appropriate marriage ritual in Montréal. You carried a rooster under your arm all the way around the house of your betrothed. You rode a white horse over a chalk line in the street. For a while, if you jumped over a tool box, you were married.
I knew I was young to be a bride. Québécois did everything so young. We lost our looks young. People died at forty-nine from drinking and lung cancer and a steady diet of white bread and Jos Louis cakes. Getting married so young was like robbing a bank or getting a tattoo.
We weren’t having a Catholic wedding, since Raphaël refused to set foot in a church. Nicolas had had a field day with this, saying that it was because Raphaël had been born in Hell and would start puking blood if he tried to enter a house of God. We got married in Raphaël’s cousin’s living room. It was a medium-sized apartment with ceramic tiles on the floors in the hallways and lots of tacky vases with fake flowers in them. The carpets in the living room were thick and nice to run your toes through.
I had a baby blue dress with cloth flowers all over the front of it. Raphaël’s second cousin had made it for me. At first I was disappointed and wouldn’t put it on. It looked like a pile of Kleenexes on a nightstand when you are sick. But oddly it looked really good on.
Strange relatives of mine were there. They were all square and pale. One of them had a glass eye. We hadn’t seen them in years. I didn’t even know how Loulou had managed to track them down to come to this.
Loulou came over to continue to try to talk me out of marrying Raphaël, who was standing on the other side of the room. He made sure to turn his back to Raphaël, in case the man I was about to marry was able to lip-read.
Loulou was holding a paper plate with a piece of lasagna that he had probably found while snooping in the fridge. As he was lifting the fork up to his mouth, he leaned over and said, “You know, what’s a guy like that going to do for a living? Don’t you want a guy who can support you? Why don’t you go for a guy with steady work?”
“Knock it off, will you,” I exclaimed angrily. “Can’t you see that it’s too late?”
I walked away from him and over to Raphaël and his mother. They weren’t exactly having the most normal conversation themselves.
“Raphaël, this means you’re a big boy now. You’re really grown-up if you’re getting married, huh?”
“Oh please don’t make me feel like shit.”
“Raphaël has always been guilty,” Véronique explained to me. “He always felt guilty about everything. He would feel terrible about going to school in kindergarten.”
“The reason I would feel guilty about going to school,” said Raphaël suddenly, “was because you cried every morning that I went for the first week. And all those guys started crying too.”
“Well, they were sad to see their big brother go.”
“They just started crying because you started crying.”
Raphaël was his mother’s favourite by far. In this neighbourhood, it was a curse to be your parent’s favourite. You just sort of wanted to keep under their radar. It was like being picked out as a favourite by a psychopath who went by the name Mr. Mom in prison.
Raphaël’s younger brothers didn’t look anything like him. They all had their heads shaved and were wearing turtlenecks, as if they’d agreed on a uniform for the wedding. His brothers had always been out of step with whatever was going on. They missed school field trips. They would show up at school on holidays. Once, they got a ticket for calling 911 too often to find out what street they should go to to see the fireworks.
Raphaël’s family was much bigger than mine. He had the type of family where people claimed to be related to one another even though they clearly were not. If you inquired a little, you would find out that their parents had lived across the street from each other in the fifties or that they had worked in the same restaurant for twenty years.
A cat that was annoyed by all the commotion leapt up onto the bureau and slipped into the mirror and disappeared.
At that moment, Raphaël’s father walked into the living room. He had his thin black hair slicked back. He was with a new girlfriend. She was skinny and was wearing heels that made her taller than anyone else in the room. He tucked an envelope into Raphaël’s inside pocket. He kept whispering to him while his hand was on Raphaël’s shoulder.
Raphaël’s father had been the greatest figure skater to ever come out of Saint-Pierre-de-la-Laundrette. He fixed cars for a living. His whole life had been devoted to making sure Raphaël went to the figure skating championships. He had been so disappointed that Raphaël had prematurely ended his skating career that they were barely on speaking terms.
Raphaël wasn’t saying anything back. He fiddled with a white paper napkin with a print of roses on it that was tucked into his breast pocket. I didn’t like how quiet he was being.
Someone gave us five dollars in an envelope that had a drawing on it of me and Raphaël naked and having sex. He had mixed up the wedding with a stag party. He thought there were supposed to be strippers coming out of a cake.
Loulou kept giving the guys playing guitars dirty looks. They had begun playing “Stairway to Heaven” even though they had been specifically instructed not to.
Raphaël used the music as an excuse to walk away from his father. He had a bottle of beer in each pocket of his jacket. He took out one of the bottles and opened it with a key chain, walked over to his best man and put his arm around him.
It was the first time I had ever seen the guy who was acting as his best man. No matter how much time I spent with Raphaël, he still had best friends who would come out of the woodwork. They were always being released from prison and then going back in for something else a week later. The minister was a friend of Raphaël’s as well. He drove a truck around downtown and served hot dogs to street people.
Nicolas arrived with a bottle of orange soda in his hand. Someone went up and safety-pinned a carnation to his sweater. Then they let him be.
Nicolas wasn’t speaking to anyone. At one point Raphaël walked by him and he said, “Why are you all gussied up?” Raphaël didn’t even turn his head.
Étienne wasn’t there. But he never showed up at stuff like this. He thought family gatherings were destructive to the soul. But I had hoped that he would make an exception and come sing his wedding song. There was a bar from one of his songs that people used to shout at weddings back in the seventies. For once I wanted him to just show up in his former glory. Who could actually get Étienne Tremblay to perform his weddi
ng song in the living room at their wedding? It would be better than having a five-tier wedding cake with blue roses on it. It would be better than having a ten-thousand-dollar dress and tables covered with crab cakes and cheese soufflés.
The minister, looking at his watch, motioned for everyone to gather around.
Someone put a Charles Aznavour song on the record player. It’s what I wanted played while I went down the aisle if Étienne didn’t show. There was all this laughter and excitement coming from the front door. I knew what it meant right away. Suddenly no time had passed. It was just as if it was 1972 and who could believe it was Étienne Tremblay in the flesh? Here he was, right before us, the same size as all of us.
He was smoking a Gitanes cigarette and grinning wildly.
“Turn this shit off!” Étienne cried.
It was magic. I should have known the whole time that all I had to do if I wanted Étienne to come was play Charles Aznavour. He had a heightened sense for Charles Aznavour. If you put on a Charles Aznavour record anywhere in the city, Étienne would pop out of nowhere to yell at you to take it off the turntable and break it in two. He hated Aznavour because he was so much more famous and respectable. And he made all the old people cry.
Someone turned the record player off immediately, the needle making a loud scratching noise. I clapped my hands in delight.
Étienne looked fantastic. His hair was combed back. Lord knows where he’d got the suit he had on, dark grey and pinstriped. He had a burgundy tie and a matching burgundy carnation as a boutonniere. His boots were polished shiny black. He looked healthy and well fed. You wouldn’t have known that he had spent the last decade in rooming houses, writing unreadable poetry.
All Étienne needed was for the whole room to declare their undying love for him and he was fine.