The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (26 page)

“The ship sank.”

“Exactly. It didn’t stand a chance.”

“Were the twins okay?”

“There was a cello case. They climbed up onto the instrument. They floated on it for weeks.”

The conversation itself was just like a cello on the water, and it was going in whatever direction the current took it and was drifting out farther and farther into a strange ocean.

“All alone? How did they have anything to eat?”

I kept asking him these questions to egg him on. I did not want him to stop.

“They made good friends with a pelican that would bring them fish. There was a hundred-year-old turtle that taught them their school work so that they wouldn’t fall behind.”

“Who else?”

“There was a walrus that was always trying to get the girl to marry him.”

“Did she return his affections?”

“No. But she would make daisy chains to go around his neck.”

“Were they happy?”

“I mean, they were affected by melancholia the way that anyone who is stuck on a deserted cello island would be. They missed going to school and riding the city bus and having tea parties with their friends, stuff like that.”

“Was there any hope of rescue?”

“They put letters in bottles and tossed them out to sea. Then the bottles washed up on the shores of France. They were published in a collection that won the Prix Goncourt!”

“Oh mon dieu! Quelle histoire!”

I clapped my hands because it was a marvel of a tale. I had tears in my eyes. My heart had slowed and I had stopped shaking. Adam and I had always wanted to swap our memories, as if we were kids trading cards at the back of a school bus. He had wanted to have a memory of being famous. And I had wanted a memory of feeling secure.

I think he realized that he didn’t actually want my memories. They were the type that mocked you as you grew older. They were like ex-lovers who had dumped you. Adam’s, on the other hand, got better with age. They were memories that you
could blow on gently, like a dying ember, and they would light and make you feel warm and wonderful.

And now he had managed to bring us even the voice of our mother and spread it out at my feet like a fantastical tapestry from another land.

Adam put his arm around me because I was crying. He wasn’t doing it in a romantic sort of way. I realized that I had actually stopped being attracted to every boy I met. I had just thought it was a myth that people might only ever be attracted to one person.

“So you’re living at home again now?” I asked when I was able to wipe the tears from my eyes.

“Yes, for now. I’ve returned to the rest of the world but I just can’t seem to fit in. It was a lovely place, your make-believe kingdom.”

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was indeed almost midnight.

“Oh, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to make it back. If I don’t get back and kiss my husband by New Year’s, then we’ll have bad luck in bed all year.”

We laughed.

“I’m going to go out the back way. I don’t want to risk running into Raphaël. He’s a hair-breadth from going over to the dark side.”

Suddenly the blaring music that was coming from down the hall stopped. There was a woman’s voice on the loudspeaker telling everyone to get ready because midnight was about to be here. Her voice cracked and she sounded like she was a hundred years old. Everyone started whistling and cheering. I hurried down the corridor, my boots making fantastic noises, like a herd of wildebeests.

Then a drum roll sounded and everyone yelled,
“Dix!”
I could see the giant open doors to the ballroom. I could see all the people with their sparkly top hats.
“Neuf!”
they were shouting at the top of their lungs. By
“Huit!”
I was halfway across the ballroom.
“Sept!”
I was almost up to Raphaël. At
“Six!”
I flung my arms around him. He was happy to see me and held me in his arms. I yelled out the rest of the numbers with everyone in the room.

We held our plastic flutes of champagne up in the air. Heaps of confetti blew all around our heads. I was buoyed up by my new memory. For a little while, it was going to feel as if this memory were really mine. The same way as when you snort a line of coke, for a few moments you believe that you are experiencing real happiness.

Raphaël put his arms around me and lifted me off the ground. As he spun me around, I raised my arms up in the air to catch all the silver and gold squares of confetti falling from the ceiling. The music was booming. Raphaël had one of his big smiles on his face. He rarely smiled, but when he did, it was beautiful and enormous.

We could have our own memories. How hard could it be? Wasn’t our wedding a good memory? Even with Raphaël’s fight with Nicolas. Even if it had cost about three hundred dollars and everybody had pitched in for it, and there were plastic forks.

This night was another happy memory too! Happy memories were easy to come by.

I was sitting on the toilet seat, singing a song and staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I was feeling confident. I was
glowing like a girl with a lovely childhood. I was feeling very pretty. I couldn’t wait to open the bathroom door for Raphaël to see just how lovely I was. How lovely was I? When I crossed the street, people would slam on their brakes just to get a better look at me. I knew that he wouldn’t be able to resist me tonight.

I tiptoed out of the bathroom on my stockinged tippytoes. I started getting undressed in an extremely suggestive way. My shoe hit the window. It rattled. I paused for a second to make sure that I hadn’t broken it. I flung my bra across the room. It ended up hanging from a nail on the wall. It was perhaps a tad dangerous to be performing a strip show while I was this drunk.

But when I climbed into bed he just wrapped his arms around me and closed his eyes. I felt really, really exposed and awkward after my performance. But what was a little humiliation if one day we could have sex again? The snow was falling outside. I wondered if, when Noëlle told that tale to Adam, she had imagined Nicolas and me squished up with them on the bed too. We would all fall asleep together on that tiny cello as it rocked up and down and back and forth on the waves.

N
ICOLAS HADN
’
T SEEN
P
IERROT IN MONTHS AND
he had stopped bringing him up. Nicolas’s spirits seemed to have risen, though. Or in any case, Nicolas started to act as if his spirits had risen. Whenever something was really bothering Nicolas, he got this weird version of happy, which was more like hyperactivity.

I put on my coat and hat and boots and stomped off through the snow to find Nicolas on a windy winter day. I couldn’t hear myself think because the wind was so loud. It took forever just to get to the corner store because my boots kept getting stuck in the piles of snow that I was trudging through.

By the time I found Nicolas at the Portuguese bakery, my eyelashes were frozen and I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers, even though I had gloves on. My tights were covered in slush right up to my knees. I pushed open the glass door and hurried inside. The tiles on the wall were all blue. They served pastries
that were as hard as rocks, and teeny tiny cups of espresso that could make you completely insane.

Nicolas was sitting at a table. His big overcoat was slung over the back of his chair. There were some young guys sitting with him at his table, listening to him avidly. One waved his hands around madly whenever Nicolas made an interesting point. The other boy had a fine moustache and a cast on his wrist, which he had drawn little ships all over. I guess that if his childhood had been better, he might have become a sailor. There was a big puddle underneath them from the snow that had melted off their boots.

Nicolas’s head was lowered as he talked to them. He had a piece of paper with a diagram drawn on it. As I approached the table, he quickly folded up his paper and stuck it into his pocket. He smiled at me as if he wasn’t doing anything at all.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Nicolas said. “Here she is, ladies and gentlemen: my marvellous sister. We once had a fabulous show together. Unparalleled.”

Nicolas stood up and started walking in an exaggerated manner, and then he got slower and slower, until he bent over and hung forward like a windup doll that had petered out. I stared at him for a while. Then I stood up, walked over and stood behind him. I turned an imaginary key around and around on his back. He stood up and started moving again. Everyone in the café applauded. He was doing it for my benefit, of course.

It was a routine that we’d performed on the talk show
Midi plus
. We had these routines stuck in us like refrains from songs that we couldn’t stop singing, or nervous tics. Anyways, this time it was fun to do one of our old shticks together.

Nicolas brought me over to a table in the corner where we could talk alone.

“You’re miserable. That’s why you came looking for me, isn’t it? You can move back home if you want.”

“No. Raphaël and I are doing fine.”

“I saw your husband reading the newspaper in his pyjamas at the Polish breakfast place. He was making one of the waitresses nervous as hell. And you’re going to tell me that your marriage is okay?”

“Things are really good between us; just the other day I said that it was like we were still on a honeymoon.”

“God, how tacky.”

I didn’t want to let Nicolas think that it had been a mistake to leave home. I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I wanted to keep moving forward, even though it might be awful and strange and difficult.

“Why are you lying to me?” Nicolas asked. “You think that I’m going to judge you? You think that I’m going to give you a hard time about your relationship not working out? There hasn’t been a relationship that worked out on this street since 1973.”

“Do you want to do something together?” I asked. “We could go see a movie or a show?”

“No, no, no. I’m through with that Everyman shit.”

“So what does that mean? You want to go read philosophy or jump out of airplanes?”

“No. What I think we should do is pay our mother another visit.”

“Oh no, that’s not a good idea.”

“Come on, Nouschka. We can’t just leave it the way we left it.”

“No way, Nicolas.”

“You’re afraid of your own mother?”

“First of all, she’s not really our mother; Loulou is. And I’m
not afraid of her. She expressed that it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to go and see her, and I’m not.”

“Fuck that. Why does she get to have the final say? This time I’m going to show up at dinnertime and I’m going to scream my motherfucking head off until she comes out and falls on her hands and knees and weeps. What do you think about that?”

“I think you should calm down, Nicolas.”

“I am going to show up on the lawn and I am going to masturbate right in front of all the children. After I have gone back to the city, an army of ugly, dirty boys that nobody will want will sprout out of the ground.”

He tapped his index finger against my chest.

“We have to go back there, Nouschka.”

A woman passing by looked at him. He pointed his finger at the woman and she immediately jerked her head away.

I thought about telling him the story about the floating cello. My idea of who Noëlle was had changed now that I knew she was a storyteller. I had always thought that Étienne’s attraction to her was one hundred percent based on her being young. But maybe she whispered something into his ear that had made her seem completely unique and different from all the other girls crammed into that house in the country. Maybe she told him that he looked like a pirate who had lost his treasure map.

Somehow I liked that idea. I think that all kids—no matter how acrimonious their parents’ relationship is—want to believe that at the point of their conception, their parents had been in love.

But this sort of wistful thinking wouldn’t cut it for Nicolas. What he was looking for was something real. He wanted change. He wanted confrontation. He seemed to be offering
me a choice, or a dare, rather. I could either go with him to see our mother, or he was going to stay at the lovely Pâtisserie Gourmande and continue orchestrating his mad Children’s War.

“Everyone is always telling me about what a shitty parent I am. But why do my parents get away with bloody murder? Why do I have to come up with three thousand dollars? Why do I have to prove myself? She’s a terrible parent. She completely abandoned us, so why don’t they take her kids away? Will you explain that to me? Why does she get to have Little Fishstick and Dumont or whatever the fuck their names are?”

“Did you just call her kids Fishstick and Dumont?” I started laughing.

“I don’t know what their names are. I’m just guessing.”

We started laughing hysterically at these two strangers out in the world, who we could think of in a hundred ways but never as siblings.

“But that’s what they looked like in the photographs, no? Didn’t they look like a Fishstick and a Dumont?”

We laughed so hard that we cried.

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” I said. “You’ve completely lost your noodle.”

“My bananas have fallen completely out of my banana tree.”

Nicolas was wearing a Oui button on his pea jacket. I pointed to it. He took it off and put it on my jacket. We were still fighting on the same side of that war. But I wasn’t ready for Lily. Maybe once I had lost everything like Nicolas had, then I would be able to face her again.

A
LL
I
SEEMED TO HAVE THAT NIGHT WAS
Raphaël. We hadn’t made love since he told me about what had happened to him as a little boy. When we were first married, he would come home and start kissing me and trying to put his hands up my shirt before he had even taken his coat off. I would scream bloody murder because his hands were so cold.

But the worst of it now was that he was obsessed with me having an affair. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to me.