The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (34 page)

I thought that going to school was somehow part of being a good parent. Someone had to go through a lot of screwdrivers and screws and instruction manuals before they were able to build a rocket ship to the moon. I had to do a lot of practical stuff so that my baby would be able to daydream worry-free for years.

Later that night I started working on a history essay that was supposed to have been handed in the week before. It was on Henry Hudson. Henry was a brilliant seaman and explorer. He was obsessed with finding a Northwest Passage.

Henry Hudson hired handsome, ne’er-do-well gentlemen instead of reliable mariners. He looked for men who woke up with prostitutes’ ringlets all over their pillow and who spent hours getting dressed in the morning. He looked for men who looked the way that men were supposed to look. He took on men who had lovely turns of phrase. He adored men who seemed as if they should be extremely talented at something or other, although no one could figure out what that was. He took on men who showed up at his door with glorious smiles and notes from aristocrats and their mothers recommending them.

He went to great pains each time he went out on a voyage to assemble the crew that was most likely to mutiny against him. Of course they ended up mutinying. But the thought of setting out into the unknown with these men filled his heart with such a surge of blood that it made him weak with terror. It made him feel as if he was plunging to his death from a window. This is an incredibly unpleasant feeling, but you get addicted to it just the same.

I
WENT TO PICK UP MY LEAVE CHEQUE FROM THE
post office downtown. The city was getting out of control. The rest of Canada had thought that the separatist movement was a fringe element. Now polls were showing that there was a very definite possibility that we had every intention of leaving Canada.

The streets were suddenly filled with people from other provinces. Since we obviously weren’t going to listen to reason, they were trying another tactic. They were going to come and get down on their hands and knees and pray for us to stay. The airplane companies had reduced prices of flights to Montréal by ninety percent to encourage everyone to go to Montréal to convince us to vote Non.

A family walked past me waving paper Canadian flags over their heads. A man was holding a placard saying
QUEBEC WE LOVE YOU! DON’T LEAVE US!
They might have thought to write it in French, but what can you do?

They were having a giant rally that day that was going to
outdo any of the ones that we had had. Well, that’s what the English had going for them, wasn’t it? They had numbers. They were actually proving to me, at least, what I had always known: that we were a minority that was in danger of being overwhelmed. Our culture could disappear and all that would be left of it would be little French-Canadian bobble-head dolls dressed in lumberjack shirts next to the polar bear clocks in the tourist shops.

I walked in the other direction. Nobody recognized me. There had been an article in the paper that morning saying that Étienne Tremblay had no right to be participating in the rally since he had been in prison and had been living a dissolute lifestyle. No one from outside of Québec had ever heard of Étienne Tremblay. If that didn’t prove we were a distinct society, I didn’t know what did.

That night I couldn’t sleep. It was strange to lie in bed all alone. I woke up with a chill no matter what the temperature was. The baby was squirming around so much. It was tossing and turning all night. It kicked like the neighbour banging for us to keep down the music. But it only made me feel lonelier.

I hadn’t heard anything from Raphaël. I really didn’t know anyone who could vanish into thin air like Raphaël. I always heard girls bragging about how their ex-boyfriends were stalking them and wouldn’t leave them alone. And about all the terrible fights that they would have when their husbands showed up. I was sort of envious. Anything was better than this silence.

I knew that I was as responsible for the breakup as Raphaël was, but I felt abandoned. And I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I sat on the kitchen floor and wept like a fifties housewife whose husband had run off with his secretary. Then I got bored and lonely. I couldn’t exactly go out dancing, could I?

It was almost midnight, and I knew that Étienne would
likely be found at a twenty-four-hour diner called Madame Lucie. Hugo told me that Étienne had been eating at this diner all week. They had put a huge
OUI
sign in the window. Étienne thought that it was bold and that he should support the establishment. Hugo had filmed him from the outside, with the
OUI
poster in view. He had showed me the footage and asked if I thought it looked at all like the famous painting
Nighthawks
. I had just shrugged. I didn’t like being asked whether or not my father was a work of art.

It only took me ten minutes to walk there. I saw him through the front window, illuminated by the restaurant’s fluorescent glow. I slid into the booth, across from Étienne, as gracefully as I could given the enormity of my belly. There was a jukebox at that table that only had songs from the seventies. It had all of his songs on it, which was one of the reasons Étienne was such a strong supporter of the institution. There was one song about a turtle that was so slow, it took him eight years to go from Montréal to Chicoutimi. There was another song about a man who had twenty-five kids. Étienne sang their names really, really fast. Everyone would try to remember and sing the names in the right order when the song played on the radio. Sometimes Loulou would sing this song while mopping the floors:
“Rita! Marie! André! Mario! Sebastien! Eloïse! Louise! Louise! J’ai déjà dit Louise.”

It was probably a good thing that the English couldn’t make out what these songs were going on about. There was a song about a man whose hat got blown off by the wind. It blew all the way to New York City. He ended up there selling Christmas trees for a living. There was a song about a lumberjack who went mad. It was a traditional song but Étienne had recorded a new version of it.

“Put on the song about the unhappy piece of tourtière that’s in the fridge and nobody will eat it,” I said as I settled in. I was nervous and my first reflex was to draw his attention away from my belly. There was no better way than to bring up his music.

The waitress came up and served Étienne a beer that he had already ordered. I watched him take the first holy sip. The one that makes you feel the same way as when someone is playing the trumpet in just the right way. It was as if he had been dying to take a piss and had just found a urinal. As he drank, his pupils dilated and the blue of his eyes disappeared.

Étienne put down his glass and looked hard at me, trying to figure out what on earth would be the perfect thing to say at this juncture. He wasn’t an idiot. The man could intuit that I would be hitting him up for some emotions any minute now.

“I’ve been feeling a little bit blue,” I said, getting to the point.

“People can’t even look at me,” Étienne said. “I remind them of the ravages of time. I am everything that they are going to lose. I am the inability of love to last. I had the most beautiful songs in the world—but this is something that you can’t own. I sang them until they just stopped coming one day.”

This was the only way Étienne could give advice: by describing his own hardships. His ability to feel sorry for himself was truly epic.

This was the kind of conversation that we had been having for years. It was fancy talk but nothing specific. Sort of like how fencers swirl their swords all over the place but never actually pierce each other through the heart.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life,” I insisted. “I don’t know how to go about doing anything. You see that I’m having a baby?”

“I heard,” he said, nodding toward my belly. “I thought a lot about it, too. You don’t have to raise your children, really. They raise themselves. You’re a writer,
pour l’amour de dieu
!”

It was out of the bag! Wanting to be a writer was the sort of thing you might be reluctant to admit, especially in Québec. Look at our very first great poet, Émile Nelligan, who went mad at twenty trying to write a book of poems about angels. That Étienne knew my secret was surprising to me. But he was good at intuiting what people’s talents were. He was abominable at recognizing their feelings, however.

“You’re too intelligent to be changing diapers. Why don’t you give the child to your mother-in-law to be raised? Don’t feel guilty if you have to do it. It’s for a higher calling.”

I wasn’t sure that I had heard what I thought that I had heard. Étienne seemed to think that he was on some sort of roll. He just continued in the same vein.

“If you have a baby, you’re supposed to be their slave from here on in? They come first? But why? If Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives birth to a sadistic petty thief, then the sadistic member of society is more valuable than the most important philosopher on earth. Rousseau should stop writing in order to worry about his waste-of-space son? No, children don’t come first. A person’s raison d’être must always come first.”

I was insulted. He was basically saying that Nicolas and I had been a waste of time and his talents. I was in an indignant mood that night. I started shifting toward the end of the seat in order to leave.

“I wrote you some notes for a speech,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re interested. You’re probably not interested. You’ve probably already prepared something. You probably already have something that you want to go ahead and say.”

“Show me what you have,” he said seriously, holding out his left hand. With his right, he reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and took out a pair of reading glasses.

“Fantastic, fantastic, my darling,” he said, not even having read it yet. “You stick to this. You’ll go far.”

I looked at Étienne poring over the scrap of paper. All that he valued in me was that I was some sort of artist too. So I decided to forget for a moment that I was a human being. We were just two poets sitting at a diner in the middle of the night, discussing our work. It offered me a respite. Anyways, it was better than going home to be alone in my kitchen, experiencing emotions. It must be nice sometimes to have an all-consuming philosophy that includes not really caring about anyone other than yourself.

I
TRIED TO FIND
R
APHAËL
. I
CALLED HIS DOCTOR
at the hospital, the one who had given Raphaël the job as an orderly. The doctor had no idea where he was. I called Rosalie’s ex-girlfriend, whom I’d gone to high school with. She said that Raphaël would turn up eventually.

I didn’t even know if I wanted him back. What would happen if I did find him? He would be back in the apartment, installing locks on the doors and wanting to change our name every morning. Our kid would come and say, “There’s a monster under the bed.” And Raphaël would say, “You’re probably right, my son.” And the house would be so full of night lights that it would seem like we were lost in the Milky Way.

Maybe I should have just considered my escape from the country a lucky break. I could be out there taking the damn lion for a walk. Imagine having to scoop that poop?

I had to go on with life regardless of the men in my life. I went the next morning to the university to talk to an adviser. I had never been inside the big building on the other side of the
small mountain that is in the middle of the city. I stood in front of it, looking at its sprawling wings. There were hundreds of bicycles locked up outside the building. There were kids of all different races—Asian, black, Arab—hurrying down the hallways with their books and their school bags. The adviser was wearing a brown suit and had her hair swept up into the tidiest bun in the world.

“You were out of school for a while?”

“I had an unstable upbringing. I wasn’t really encouraged to stay in school.”

“Hmm,” she said.

Then she just smiled as if it wasn’t a big deal and we got down to the practicalities of me going to university. She told me that there was a good daycare at the school and there were loans and scholarships that were available to me as a single mother. She made me an appointment with a financial adviser. As she explained these very basic things to me, I realized that there was so much about society at large that I didn’t know anything about.

I asked for an application and took away a huge book with all the courses in the French Literature Department. I didn’t need Étienne to tell me I was a writer. My own sense of who I was had begun to speak up lately, even though it didn’t speak that loudly. I was listening to it as best I could. I was not going to define myself by the traits that men found adorable in me. I was pushing myself to get on with life and to not chicken out. I warned myself not to be afraid of people who lived off of Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

As I read through the great big book of course descriptions on the metro back downtown, I was overwhelmed by excitement.

Jules Verne: Why bad science makes for wonderful fiction. Arthur Rimbaud: Why a sordid teenager is still being read today. Guy de Maupassant: A classic, but still dirty. Molière: Comedy in an age of very big wigs. Colette: A lady in a top hat turns Paris upside down.

A parade of motorcycles passed by me as I waited for the green light outside the school. For a moment, Lord oh Lord, I missed Raphaël.

What sort of strange malevolent plots were the bikers up to? Maybe they were going to terrorize a kid who was selling his ADHD medication at school without giving them a cut. Or perhaps they were trying to get a corner on the bingo market. When they were done, they would head home, where they would go down on some long-haired, underage nymphet.

I felt the rumble of the motorcycles in my groin. I just wanted to throw my life away. I wanted to get my thighs covered in rose tattoos. I wanted to be making love to Raphaël. I suddenly pictured myself on top, riding him violently as he held my hips in both his hands, lifting me up and then slamming me back down.