The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (17 page)

“Funny.”

“Whatcha guys gonna do tonight? Drink some Kool-Aid with Jim Jones?”

“I’m here for Nouschka. Tell her I’m here.”

“Were you here last night? On no, that was another guy.”

“What’s with you? Still sticking up fourteen-year-olds in the metro?”

“I’m going to let that go. But let the record state that I resent it.”

I pushed Nicolas out of the way. He seemed resigned to being shoved aside. I trotted down the steps next to Raphaël. I liked the way Raphaël was dressed all in black except for a pair of brown running shoes with red laces. I don’t think I’d ever seen him in the same pair of footwear twice. He put his arm around me as soon as we were outside.

Suddenly we heard Nicolas call out, “I’m looking right at you!”

We looked up and he was on the roof. It was sort of startling that he’d gotten up there so fast.

“Just because my sister’s stupid enough to date you, it doesn’t mean anything. I’m going to come and kill you one of these days.”

“You talk pretty tough for an asshole all the way up on a rooftop,” Raphaël called back.

“Just because you’re fucking Nouschka doesn’t mean you’re fucking me.”

“Doesn’t he care what the neighbours think?” Raphaël asked me, actually looking shocked.

“They’ve heard everything,” I said.

“He’s disrespecting you, you know.”

“I don’t know how you can like me if you hate Nicolas. We’re like the same person.”

“No, you’re not.”

“We were having conversations before we were even born.”

“You guys aren’t alike at all. You’re opposites.”

“How so?”

“You love everybody and he hates everybody. Sometimes I don’t even know which is worse, because I feel like both of you might want to show a little bit of decorum and equilibrium.”

We spent the evening in a motel. I threw my peacoat on over my underwear and went out onto the street and stuck my thumb out as if I was a hitchhiker. The minuscule twinkles were all over the sidewalk, reflecting moonlight. Raphaël got into his car and drove around the block. He was going to pretend to pick me up and then drive me to the outskirts of the city and rape me, or something like that.

A police car came around the block before Raphaël’s car. The police officer got out and started asking all sorts of questions. He wanted to arrest me. The officer assumed that I was a prostitute because I had no clothes on under my pea jacket. Raphaël got out of his car and managed to convince the officer that we were just perverts. The police officer told us to keep it to the bedroom.

We went to a tiny underground restaurant that had mirrors on all the walls. It was one of those end-of-the-world Chinese restaurants. If you were a respectable citizen, you would never even notice that it was there. There were small
bowls of water with rhododendrons floating in them on the tables. None of the menus had the right prices. They had the prices from 1975 on them.

I looked over at Raphaël. He had a pack of cigarettes in each of his pockets. It was a bring-your-own-wine joint. Raphaël unscrewed the lid and took a long drink right from the bottle.

“Disgusting!” he yelled.

We ate salt and pepper squid with chopsticks. The place was filled with actual prostitutes. One girl, who looked twelve, was wearing a fur hat and a T-shirt. She was so stoned that she couldn’t tell whether she was hot or cold.

There was another girl with a turtleneck sweater and tiny shiny pants. She had ordered a plate of dumplings but couldn’t eat them. She was biting her fingernails and looking out the window. She had a terrible cough, the way that pretty fifteen-year-olds who smoked in the wintertime and had sex with grown-up men did. The bottom of her face was all red around her mouth as if someone had been kissing her violently. A pimp was with her. He looked about eighteen years old. He had on a black sweater and sweatpants and poofy light blue sneakers.

There were horses on one of the girls’ T-shirts. If you put your ear up against her chest, you could hear them galloping. It was here on Rue Sainte-Catherine that the most beautiful kisses in the world were grown.

Raphaël had stopped taking his medication. He told me that the drugs screwed up his perception of time. One particular Wednesday had lasted for a year. And once, three days went by in five minutes. He said he was looking out a window and saw a rose bloom and wilt right in front of him. And the drugs messed with his erections.

We both had this strange intensity when we were making
love. As if we hadn’t quite figured out what it was for. As if we pinned too much of our hopes and dreams on it. I was thinking that sex could cure all sorts of things. But the girls here knew exactly what sex was worth. They knew that sex cost forty dollars and could be bartered down. If you took one of the girls up to a hotel room, and she drank a glass of water while sitting on the ledge of the bathroom sink in yellow polyester underwear, did it look much different than true love?

I wanted to tell Raphaël about my mother. I thought it was that time of the relationship where I could bring up serious things instead of just flirt and have sex. And I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. In his own way, he could be quite brilliant at summing things up.

“Do you know that Nicolas and I met our mother for the first time last month?”

“Really? How the hell did that go?”

“She didn’t even want us there. There was this look on her face like we could destroy her life. We were, like, the worst things that had ever happened to her. She would have opened up her pocketbook and given us all the money in it, just to get rid of us. She looked like we were going to blackmail her.”

“That’s got to make you feel low-grade lousy all the time.”

“It sort of makes me feel like I’m kind of creepy? Do you know that feeling that I’m talking about? It’s hard sometimes to put it into words.”

“You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual to how to be likable,” Raphaël said, “but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.”

I wouldn’t have used those metaphors exactly, but he had actually sort of captured that icky feeling. That’s what it felt like when the little tank that contained your self-esteem was running on empty and you needed to somehow fill it up.

And that was what all the girls sitting in this restaurant were also feeling. They were very, very pretty, but they felt so ugly. They looked into their bathroom mirrors in the middle of the night because they had to pee for the twelfth time because of a bladder infection, and they saw ghouls and hideous things.

I didn’t know what sort of memories had driven Raphaël to such insights. I was about to ask, but he had already stood up and swung his jacket on in a way that somehow implied that the subject was closed. He had no intention of delving into his own psyche that night.

“But you don’t have to worry about how the rest of the world sees you. You just have to think about how it is that I think about you.”

R
APHAËL AND
I
STARTED SPENDING ALL OUR
nights at the motel. We couldn’t go to his parents’ apartment or mine if we wanted to be alone. We were blowing the little money that we had, but we didn’t care. The belt slid from the loops of his pants like a snake through the grass. We lay facing each other with our foreheads and knees touching. We lay in the shape of a heart. I started to have the first inkling of why it might feel good to leave home and be part of a different family.

We left the motel one afternoon and went for a walk in the park. The clouds were like a group of sheep that was gathering to be shorn. There was a scent called Five Minutes Before It Rains. If you put it on your neck, whoever kissed you would cry.

All the people in the street had to rush up stairs and more stairs to close all their windows before the rain flew in. The laundry was being pulled in so violently that it screamed.

“Everyone to the lifeboats! Everyone to the lifeboats!” a boy was yelling.

Children who just wanted a few more minutes were still outside playing. Their mothers’ voices calling them in were like pieces of paper. The wind crunched them up and threw them away before they could get to the children’s ears.

Raphaël stood at the side of the pond and began throwing bits of bread into the water for the swans. They all started heading toward him. They looked like they were on their way to devour him. One stepped out of the water with its large black feet. It held its wings in front of it, like a naked girl with only her socks on, holding her hands over her privates. Raphaël turned toward me.

We started to feel a few drops of rain. We ran and climbed onto the merry-go-round just to keep out of the rain. We sat on a chariot that was being pulled by two zebras. Raphaël pulled a tiny box out of his pocket inside his jacket. It was a little brown cardboard box that had a drawing of a mourning dove on it.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

I felt a rush flood through my heart. I didn’t know whether the feeling was love or whether it was the excitement you feel when you are doing something that you know is stupid but you are doing it anyways.

He put the ring on my finger. It was a mood ring. It was turning green and yellow. It was turning every colour in the rainbow. Sometimes I was so afraid of love. It gave you the feeling you had when you were shoplifting and you were walking out of the store with something concealed under your jacket.

There was a drug dealer who sold a kind of acid called Happily Ever After. That was the only time I had ever heard that term applied to anything in real life. Everything I knew about marriage pointed to it being a horrible, hateful endeavour.
And if there were any two people who would be incapable of a stable marriage, it had to be Raphaël and me.

It felt like I was doing something terrible when I said
oui
. But God help me, I wanted to see what was on the other side of that word.

The rain started coming by in gusts, like groups of frightened deer. We sat on the horses, holding each other’s hands, and looked out at the world. It rained all day. Later it was reported that the rain had taken down a whole fleet of newspaper ships in the pond.

I
WAS DOING WELL IN SCHOOL
. I
T WAS MAKING ME
feel like I had a future opening up before me. I was tired of working at the newspaper stand. I was tired of every Tom, Dick and Harry coming in and telling me who I was and acting as if I was their very best pal. And maybe I didn’t need every man with a grocery bag telling me his theories of time travel.

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!

L
OULOU 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.”