The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (16 page)

There were some rides in the parking lot. There were those cheap rides that they drive in on trucks from one day-long fair to the other. The Ferris wheel looked like it had been set up by an eighty-year-old janitor.

The sun started going down. The red and yellow light bulbs on the sides of the rides turned on. All of a sudden, everyone looked like they had black eyes. The calliope blared. The bingo machine sounded like an army of horses was coming. The angels were arriving to judge us all.

They were moving the Virgin Mary. She was teetering, on the verge of toppling, when I saw Raphaël. Good lord, I thought, what did you have to do in Québec to be kept in jail for more than a week and a half?

He was leaning against a car and was drinking from a giant can of beer. I loved those cans. You felt like a little kid when you held a can that big. You felt the same way as you did when your legs were hanging off the edge of an oversized chair.

Raphaël had on a pair of alligator shoes that made his enormous feet look even bigger. The laces seemed too thick for the dress shoes, as if he’d pulled them out of running shoes. He was wearing a white dress shirt that was unbuttoned. You could see that he had a tattoo of Jesus on his chest. There wasn’t much scarier than a tattoo of Jesus. It meant that you were spiritually inclined. And if you were spiritually inclined around here, it probably wasn’t Sunday school that got you that way. Rather, it was a combination of hard drugs and deep injustice to yourself. It was the last resort.

Raphaël’s hair was already shot with grey, even though he was only twenty, and he was smoking a menthol cigarette. When he exhaled, the cigarette smoke looked like a girl doing rhythmic gymnastics with a ribbon. If you smoked menthol cigarettes, people wouldn’t bum them off of you. He knew all the tricks for being alone.

Once, years before, I had run into him and he had the biggest hickey on his neck that I had ever seen. But I never knew him to have a girlfriend. Now he was just staring right at me.

And I smiled back: a smile that I knew he couldn’t resist. You should beware of motherless children. They will eat you alive. You will never be loved by anyone the way that you will be loved by a motherless child.

Nicolas noticed me smiling at Raphaël.

“Oh my God,” Nicolas said. “Don’t talk to Raphaël. He believes in aliens and shit. I’m not even kidding. In high school he was voted most likely to become an axe murderer and stab his innocent wife in the fucking shower. No no no, he was voted most likely to end up with duct tape all over his mouth in the trunk of a car.”

“I don’t know. He seems kind of interesting.”

“He doesn’t believe in dinosaurs. For me that’s a deal breaker. What? You don’t believe in dinosaurs? Get the fuck out of here. That’s just me. If you’re going to fuck a guy who doesn’t believe in dinosaurs, that’s your own business. But it reflects poorly on me, being your twin brother.”

“He does have a nice car though, no?”

“He just doesn’t strike me as an upstanding guy, Nouschka. All joking aside.”

Then Nicolas got up and walked away, like he just couldn’t take it all of a sudden. There was something about Raphaël
that caused me and Nicolas to separate. It was what elementary school teachers had been trying to do for a hundred years. Raphaël put his hands in his pockets and walked over and stopped right in front of me. We stood smiling at one another.

“What’s with your brother?” Raphaël asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did you see the horses earlier?”

“No. When did they have horses?” I asked, genuinely disappointed. “Show horses?”

“I was looking for you anyways. I saw your brother; I thought you might be around.”

“Oh.”

“Are you still banging that old guy? No. Well, that shit never works out. Kind of strange. You’re an odd bird, Nouschka. I always liked you. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Did you get my Valentine’s Day card?”

“When was that?”

“Grade Three, I guess. I didn’t sign it. I just wanted you to guess it was from me.”

“How am I supposed to remember something like that?”

“What was he, like, Russian mafia? I figured that he must be to go out with a girl like you. Did he buy you lots of stuff? Like clothes. Whatever it is that girls like?”

“No.”

“Did you, like, win a beauty pageant or something? I thought I heard that. Like you were Miss Montréal or something. Then I thought, now she’ll never go out with a guy like me.”

“Are you confusing me with somebody else?”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I like dancing. I like movies. I like that band playing right now. I’m no different from anybody else.”

“So are you going to live on this block the rest of your life?”

“Are you?”

“I try to leave, but every time I do I get thrown in jail. I didn’t realize it was illegal.” He tossed his finished cigarette butt over my shoulder. “How many kisses do you think it takes to make a girl fall in love with you?”

“I never counted.”

“Fifty?”

“Not that many.”

“Thirty-five?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Then how many?”

I raised up my index finger to indicate just one. He smiled. And then he pulled my face to his and we kissed.

It was all too late after that kiss. I already knew what his breath smelled like. I already knew what he looked like in his pyjamas. I already knew what he sounded like when he spoke in his sleep. I was already his girlfriend by the end of the kiss.

We went to get Raphaël’s car. He drove a beat-up green Cadillac. A steer’s skull was airbrushed onto the hood. It was a really shitty car, but the skull really distracted you. You didn’t know what to think about the car coming down the street. It defied all your preconceived notions. The back seat was filled with paperback books. He had a suit hanging from a wire coat hanger so that it wouldn’t get too creased. There were some dog toys and a box filled with dog biscuits.

When you hear that there’s been an apparition of the Virgin Mary, you don’t care where it is. You don’t worry that it’s in a
bad neighbourhood. Or that in order to see it you have to go into a living room with shag carpeting or televisions piled on top of each other and busted-up couches and neglected babies crying in their cribs. The Virgin Mary trumps all that. You make your pilgrimage. It’s the same thing with true love, which is just as rare.

As we were driving he put his hand on my knee. I liked that. It was like we were already lovers. It was as if we had been lovers for a very long time already. It felt like we were a married couple. He ran out of the car and into a corner store to buy condoms. The door had so many bells that clanged together as he opened the door that it seemed to be waking up the entire neighbourhood. I liked that. They never rang the church bells in this city for anything exciting anymore.

We rented a motel room.

“Take your clothes off for me,” he said as soon as he shut the door.

I felt as if my dress must have weighed hundreds of pounds, because I suddenly felt so much lighter. I was wearing these polka-dot underwear. I hadn’t expected to have sex that night. They had been pretty once, but they had a tear and the lace trimming had come loose. When I took them off, I was so naked that I felt transparent. I don’t think that I had ever felt so naked. I had on one single blue sock that was clinging to my foot for dear life. This was the first time that sex meant anything.

He took off his shirt and pants. He was really handsome. I don’t know what on earth other girls would make of him, but I just found him so handsome. I would not change a single
thing about his appearance. He was all skinny and fit still from having been a figure skater all those years. He didn’t have any chest hair. He just had a black line going down from his belly button into his pants. I even thought that his ridiculously bad tattoos were so sexy. They were sort of beautiful to me. And whereas most people would liken them to drawings in ballpoint pen on the walls of a public bathroom, I would liken them to Renaissance paintings of serious girls holding ermines.

When he took off his underwear he reached out his arms and pulled me close to him. We made love on the pink flowers of the bed cover.

After I climaxed, Raphaël pulled out and took his condom off and came all over my tits. It was wonderful. He stepped into his pants and went into the bathroom. His pants were half down, below his ass, and he was walking on his pant cuffs. He came out with a cigarette in his mouth and a hand towel with orange roses and he wiped me off with it. I don’t know why, but it was so tender.

The curtains at the motel were covered in little pineapples. The trucks kept passing by outside, creating an infinity of sunrises and sunsets. It seemed like the world was orbiting really quickly. Shadows like black panthers crept in the window every time a car passed. This was what it must have been like to hang out in a motel room after robbing a bank, when you had no idea whether or not the police and detectives were surrounding the place or whether it was simply the night outside, which was filled only with crickets and lost keys.

The mini-bar was filled with tiny bottles of booze, like the ones that Alice in Wonderland found. They could either make your heart enormous or tiny. He turned on the light next to the bed so that he could set the alarm on his wristwatch. He turned the lamp off, but his body seemed to continue to emanate light as if he was incandescent.

Raphaël put his fists to his mouth and made a perfect mournful trumpet sound. When he closed his eyes, he looked like he just received a guilty verdict. Then he fell asleep. And like that, we were madly in love. They say that Jesus loves you, but will he come down and say that he loves you the most?

I
WAS GETTING DRESSED FOR OUR DATE
. I’
D TOLD
Raphaël that I would meet him on the corner, but he said he’d knock on my door. Why he thought he had to come and knock on my door was beyond me. Our family had always considered manners to be sort of on the phony side.

It made me nervous, because Nicolas had been insulting Raphaël ever since I went off with him at the fair.

Nicolas came in the room. He took off his sweater and lay down to rest in his undershirt. He had had that same undershirt with Papa Smurf on it since he was ten years old. He lay there with his boots still on. He lit up a cigarette and watched me while I buttoned up the back of my dress.

One of our own cats walked into the room at that second, to see what was happening. It was Johann, a black cat with perpetual bed-head. He looked like a splotch of ink that was appearing through a pocket in a shirt. Nicolas looked at the cat for a second as if he was going to pick a fight with it, and then he turned back to me.

“Man, what a low-life,” Nicolas said. “I mean low class. You might try and meet somebody who has a real job.”

“You don’t work at all.”

“He has to punch a clock or he goes back to jail. Wow! He’s a Fortune 500 man. A most eligible bachelor.”

“You might like him if you got to know him.”

“Frankly, I can’t stand the motherfucker. I mean, who does he think he is walking around like that. I’ll tolerate that kind of shit from those exiled Vietnam vets but nobody else. Did you know that the U.S. government cheaped out and gave the vets Edgar Cayce and
I’m OK—You’re OK
books on tape instead of proper psychiatric treatment?”

“Where did you hear about this?” I asked.

“A library card is no cure for mental illness, that’s for sure. When vets come back, they should not have library privileges. If I have to stand in the line for the bus and have a Vietnam vet behind me talking about Tolstoy, I’m just going to go move to the Northwest Territories. It’s why I don’t take public transportation.”

“Why would you, when you can drive in style on your bicycle?”

“How do you know Raphaël hasn’t been lobotomized? People with lobotomies don’t know they’ve been lobotomized.”

“So what if he has?”

“I should have known! You’ll go with anybody!”

I tied a ribbon in my hair and wagged my head back and forth in the mirror to see if it would stay on.

“How do I look?” I asked.

“Really, in all honesty, he’s a dick. I told you in Grade One and I’m telling you now.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Nicolas would develop irrational hatred for people when he was a little boy and he would not let it go. It was very important for Nicolas to always be infuriated by someone. It allowed him to externalize some of the hatred that he felt toward himself.

“Why do I feel like your relationship with Raphaël is just to spite me?”

I stopped, startled. There was some strange truth in what he said, but I didn’t want to explore it. Nicolas seemed to think that my relationship with Raphaël was a punishment for his having lied about Adam and dragged me to see Lily with no preparation. He couldn’t believe that it didn’t have anything to do with him. I also had a hard time believing that this relationship had nothing to do with Nicolas.

Everyone had always given Nicolas and me a hard time about sleeping in the same bed together and changing around each other. There was never anything about it that gave me a feeling of indecency or self-consciousness. But the idea that Nicolas had orchestrated my sex life creeped me out. Maybe it was about time that I wanted privacy. Even though
Le Journal de Montréal, La Presse
and
Le Devoir
had all described us as precocious, Nicolas and I were late bloomers, emotionally speaking.

The doorbell rang. Nicolas sprang up out of bed and ran down the hall to the front door. The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn’t accept it. I ran after him, but it was too late, Nicolas had swung open the door and was leaning out of it. Raphaël was standing there, expressionless, in sunglasses.

“Yes, can I help you?” Nicolas asked. “Are you here to convert us to Jehovah’s Witnesses? You guys should put a little more something something into those magazines. Like maybe you should have a comics page. And some horoscopes. I’m just
saying, if you’re looking to attract more converts. Or have a telethon. Everyone loves a good telethon.”