The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (6 page)

“Don’t be an idiot,” I answered. “I’m not being paid. Get lost, will ya?”

He was addressing the people in the crowd and telling them I must have bribed the judges.

“This is your queen? This is the most beautiful girl in the neighbourhood? Have I died and gone to hell? Come on, people!”

An old man from the Shriners Hospital tried to catch him. Two clowns on a double bicycle chased him around and around the car. A police officer came on a motorcycle to herd Nicolas off.

“Vive le Québec libre!”
Nicolas yelled with his hands up in the air and then he sped off.

I watched Nicolas cycling away. I was annoyed with him. Now the parade would seem boring without him. I felt like climbing on the back of the bicycle and going off wherever he was going.

As I was heading home later that night, fireworks were going off in the sky. They looked like there were construction workers soldering the heavens. They sounded like a necklace had been broken and all the pearls were falling on the ground.

People were sitting on their kitchen chairs on the rooftops. Montréal summer nights were always lovely. The breeze was
perfect. You could make a paper airplane and throw it in the air in Saint-Léonard and it would fly all the way to the Quartier Latin.

As I turned up Boulevard Saint-Laurent, away from the crowd, the fireworks were reaching their peak. I passed a black cat in the alley. It was trying to do some sort of fancy tango with a piece of ribbon.

As I stepped in, Nicolas jumped out from the kitchen, grabbed me by the waist and spun me around. He was wearing a paper crown from the Valentine hot dog joint and was drunk. He danced me around the living room and spun me down the hallway. He had got himself all worked up.

“Pass me the caviar!” Nicolas was screaming. “Why won’t anyone pass me the caviar! Okay, okay. Who stole my Grey Poupon! We are kings and queens. The kings and queens of beauty.”

“Let me go,” I begged.

“Adam’s waiting for you in the bedroom.”

“What! How’d he get here?”

“I invited him. I told him you’d been pining for him.”

“You’re crazy. I’m going to go throw him out right now.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

Nicolas hurled himself down on the living room couch. A calico cat was sleeping on its back, like a girl in grey stockings with her skirt pulled up over her hips.

It was practically impossible to avoid Adam because he was such good friends with Nicolas. They would sit squashed in the loveseat
in the living room, waving their arms maniacally over their heads, excited by their idiotic ideas. They could talk and talk for hours. He got on my nerves. Every time we had sex I would always promise myself not to ever do it again.

I had no idea where they met, because Adam grew up in Westmount, the wealthy English neighbourhood. René Lévesque had ranted long ago that there was no reason why the English in that neighbourhood should be running the show and had put a stop to it. They were still pretty damn rich though. Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was a state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.

Adam’s family lived in an enormous house with a beautiful garden in front, which a gardener worked on every day of the summer. Once, Nicolas had driven me past it, just so I could get a look at it. His house was part of a walking tour that people went on during the summer. Adam had been one of the most successful children who had ever existed. He had gone to elite private schools and had had an unnecessarily comprehensive education.

He had music appreciation lessons where they would ding a xylophone while he tiptoed around the room trying to get better acquainted with the note. He took fencing lessons where he wore a mask over his face and yelled, “En garde!” He took wilderness survival lessons and he got to have wee badges with fires and bears’ heads on them sewn onto his sleeves. He
took tennis lessons where he called out, “One love,” and took home trophies. He took photography lessons where he would walk around taking pictures of flowers and pigeons and would develop them in a sink in the basement of city hall next to other overprivileged children.

Here was the result of all that education, lying on my bed with a white shirt unbuttoned, his arms opened in some sort of posture that was halfway between benevolence and unconsciousness.

“Get out, Adam,” I said as soon as I walked into my bedroom.

Although he had a noble way to describe it, Adam was slumming. He got a social assistance cheque at the beginning of the month, but he would spend it in a single day. He’d sit on a bench and drink a thirty-dollar bottle of wine while reading Romain Gary’s
Les Mangeurs d’étoiles
. It aggravated me that I was attracted to him.

“Why can’t you just love me, baby?” he said.

“Because you’re ridiculous. And you get on my nerves.”

“I think we should get married.”

“Why?”

“I saw you in the car as Miss Montréal and it turned me on.”

“That’s hardly a reason for two people to be together.”

“Can I at least sleep over?”

“No.”

I flopped down on the bed, kicked off my running shoes and lay next to him. The black cat Johann was purring like it had engine trouble. His tail kept reaching round like an arm scooping up all the poker chips off the table.

“You drive me crazy, Nouschka. Why can’t we just spend the rest of our lives together? Do you know how cool we’ll look in the history books?”

“Ridiculous.”

“What is this novel that you’re working on?” he asked, pointing to my school notebook that was lying on the floor next to my bed.

“It’s not a novel. It’s a brief history of the fur trade. It’s called ‘Raccoon Hats and Cabin Fever.’”

“Write about our great love affair. How there was never anything like it in all the history of Montréal.”

“No, that’s not true. We haven’t even got a relationship. Now you’re making me unhappy.”

“You’re mistaking happiness for unhappiness. That’s why the French are so melancholic. Everything beautiful makes them cry. They invented existentialism as an excuse not to love their wives.”

“I thought it was because one of them was upset about not making the soccer team.”

Adam threw back his head and laughed.

“Why won’t you marry me?” he cried.

“I can’t marry someone English.”

“I never feel like myself when I’m speaking French.”

“Who do you feel like?”

“Jean-Paul Belmondo. I feel like I’m in a French film, which means that you are unfaithful!”

“It’s not possible for me to be unfaithful. I can’t be. I told you, we’re not in a relationship.”

“It’s a shame. You’ll only learn to love me when I’m gunned down by the Parisian police.”

He climbed over me off the bed and stumbled over to the closet. He dragged out a toy piano and sat down on the floor in front of it. Adam was always trying to get in our family act, always composing scores for Étienne to consider for a comeback album. This time he started playing a tiny twinkly
Mozart tune on it. I don’t remember what it was called. He was just tickling the keys. It sounded like change being put in the peep show booth. Like belt buckles unbuckling. His ridiculous production was turning me on. Adam always succeeded in seducing me.

“What’s that called?” I asked.

“‘The Mouse with a Broken Heart Finally Has Its Day in

Court.’”

“That’s beautiful.”

“What? The tune or the title?”

“You are. You’re beautiful.”

“Just give me one single kiss and I’ll go away.”

“I don’t think so.”

“One fucking kiss and then I’ll leave you alone. It’s because I haven’t been kissed in a while. There is scientific documentation that proves the body needs kisses. I just need one. Then I’ll go find a high school slut to have sex with.”

We kissed for a long time. I couldn’t stop once I’d started.

“You give the greatest kisses on the planet,” I said. “They should hire you at the palace to kiss the princesses.”

He kissed me again. He put his hands underneath my dress, grabbed my hips and pulled them toward his own.

“Tu m’aimes?”
he asked.

“I’m mad about you. I’ve never been as crazy about anybody as I am about you. Touch me. I feel so pretty when you touch me.”

I couldn’t believe how stupid I was being. I wished that I could eat my words as they were coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t the sex that I was going to regret in the morning. It was going to be all these ridiculous words.

He squashed into the single bed with me. We were finished making love by the time Nicolas came into the room. He
crawled into his own bed. Adam was the only guy Nicolas didn’t toss out on his ear.

There were a million and one things that I liked about Adam. The way he smelled like black licorice. The way we curled up together. We were always so peaceful when we just lay together. He still had his suit jacket on. His pants were around one ankle he hadn’t been able to kick his shoe off of.

Nobody was as fetching as Adam when he was sleeping. He slept in his clothes in odd positions, sometimes halfway off the bed, as if he had been shot to death in a duel. No one sleeps like young sociopaths meditating on the wonders of being themselves.

We all passed out in the same room; odd as that might sound, it seemed natural. Nicolas pushed the pile of clothes half off the other unused twin bed and crashed in it, the way he always did when Adam slept over.

Adam’s suitcase was next to the bed. He clearly needed a place to stay. I never trusted love as a motivation for someone wanting to sleep with me. The cat’s purring made the sound of a motorboat’s engine, taking us off into the deep, deep waters of sleep. While the cockroaches put on their minuscule armoured plates and helmets and ventured out on the counter, looking for cookie crumbs.

My flight instinct got crazy the next day. I kept trying to kick Adam out all morning, but he wouldn’t go. I threatened to call 911 because he was taking so long putting on his shoes. Nobody else minded that he was there. He declared that he was going to make eggs florentine. You never knew when he was going to
decide to whip up a plate of eggs florentine. It could be at five in the afternoon. I found it irritating, but Nicolas and Loulou clapped in delight.

I was about to tell Adam to get out again, but he turned on the old record player and put on Jacques Laframboise, a popular Québécois crooner who had walked in front of a train one night. The song was about his wife, Madeleine, who cheats on him all the time. We all started singing along to it no matter what else we were doing.

“This is a formidable record collection. You should have your own radio show called
The Loulou Tremblay Hour!
You’re an archivist! In a hundred years this apartment is going to be a museum. They won’t move a thing.”

Loulou beamed because he was proud of his trash. Adam looked at me and winked. I smiled back. I found his arrogance attractive despite myself. Rarely had such confidence been seen on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. He had imported it from Westmount, all sparkling and glorious, like Marco Polo returning from the East with the first plate of spaghetti and meatballs that anyone had ever seen.

I liked that he was full of possibilities. I wanted to be full of possibilities too. I wanted to travel the world and be an intellectual too. I liked what he was throwing away. Most of all, I wanted an education. I was envious that he had one. As the music blared, I realized that it was time to go to work at the magazine store.

I didn’t know why my temper was so short with them all these days. I calmed down as soon as I was out of the apartment and in the lobby. I stopped for a minute to breathe and then went outside, feeling that I had escaped the noisy Tremblays.

I
STEPPED OUT OF MY BUILDING AND SAW A CREW
of film people standing next to a beat-up van. One of the crew members had a camera on his shoulder, and a girl was holding a clipboard. A man with a microphone in his hand and a tape recorder in a leather bag approached me. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans. He had thinning black hair that he combed upward and glasses. He looked a few years older than Nicolas and me. He looked very eager.

“Who the hell are you guys?” I instinctively put a hand out in front of my face.

“My name’s Hugo Vaillancourt. I’m a filmmaker. I was to do a brand new Tremblay family documentary. Sort of in the spirit of the one that Claude Jutra made a dozen years ago. You know the one!
La famille Tremblay dans l’hiver
.”

“Nobody cares about that documentary anymore.”

“You’re kidding. That documentary was like … I don’t know the word … classic … genius. I watched it every year
when they played it at Christmas. It’s like eggnog to me. Do you know what I mean?”

“I don’t, but you’re making me very uncomfortable.”

“The way your family interacted. There was so much warmth. And funny! You guys were hysterical. You were like everything that’s unique about being Québécois.”

They never realized that hundreds of people before them had said just the same thing. People who came up in the supermarket while you were looking at the rows of canned soup would say what giant fans they were of Étienne Tremblay and how some of their fondest memories were of watching us on television at Christmastime.

I started walking down the street. He started following after me, waving his crew along. He had known that Nicolas and I would never co-operate if he asked us in advance. That was why he was outside our door with all the cameras.

“I’ve been pitching it as an idea for
Le Téléjournal
,” Hugo said. He was kind of breathless from having to talk while running after me. “They’re looking for a topical hook. But I saw the photo of you on the cover of the newspaper and I thought, the time is now. And if I don’t start on this right away, well somebody else will. That would kill me. I’ve had this idea in my head for years, since film school. It belongs to me.”