The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (7 page)

Someone from the crew hurried in front of us, to film while we were walking. Another girl stuck a boom mic between us from behind.

“What photo are you talking about? Actually, never mind. I don’t want to hear about it. I really can’t be standing here talking. I’ve got to get to work.”

“Can we film you at work?”

“No!”

“Can I see if Nicolas wants to talk?”

“Are you insane? You can’t talk to him. You know this. You must know this!”

“Yeah, I guess I’m a little intimidated by him. Do you think that’s crazy?”

I looked at Hugo. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Judging from his pudgy belly, he had never missed a meal in his life. His kind mannerisms implied that he had had a perfectly normal, happy middle-class upbringing. This led me to believe that he couldn’t actually handle the Tremblays. He had only seen the Tremblays on television and had no idea what he was getting into. He had never encountered narcissism quite like that embodied by my father. And he certainly had had no prior experience of the sort of hysterical fits that my brother was capable of.

He was after a fairy tale, but there was only tragedy, chaos and squalor behind the doors that he was knocking on.

Every time I said anything, Hugo held a large microphone up to my face. The other members of his crew were following us down the street. It was drawing attention. And despite the fact that I had been recently riding in a convertible and waving wildly at everybody passing by, I suddenly felt a deep, deep need for anonymity.

“Nobody cares about the Tremblays. Everything that there is to say has already been said.”

The neighbour was beating her Indian carpet violently with a broom. One of the birds burst off the pattern and flew into the air. It circled around my head and went down the street toward the river. I followed after it and the crew went sadly back to their van.

The first thing you saw when walking into the magazine store where I worked were all the piles of newspapers by the
door. I was on the front page of one of them with my robe and sceptre. The headline read, “
NOUSCHKA LEADS SAINT-JEAN-BAPTISTE CELEBRATION
.”

The article beneath the photo was about the referendum that would be held in the next year for Québec to separate. I hoped people would concentrate on that and never mind me. I stared at the photograph. There was my face right next to all the Québécois cinema stars screaming at me from the covers of magazines. Those guys had so many problems. They had been molested by their managers. They had been forced to sing Christmas carols so often that they couldn’t enjoy the holiday. They had had to pass themselves off as twelve for six years in a row. They had been addicted to cherry bombs. They were wonderful. I wished I hadn’t been a minor celebrity, so that I could enjoy this world like everybody else.

I went behind the cash to await the customers. There were lucky dollar bills Scotch-taped to the wall, alongside some old Polaroids of shoplifters from twenty years before. The owner had stuck photographs of babies under the glass of the counter. There was a photograph of the owner’s four-year-old son dressed in a suit for a wedding. He looked like a Mafia don.

I had worked there since I dropped out at sixteen. Nicolas would come into the store all the time and sit on the other side of the cash, reading
Le Soleil
newspaper. It was one of those newspapers that have articles about alien landings and women who gave birth to dogs. We had read those since we were little kids.

Porno magazines were a big seller. At first I would get shy when people asked for them, but eventually I got used to it. I met millions of people while working there. The men who stopped by would hit on me and say that I was wasting my time behind the counter and that I should go to Hollywood and
become a movie star. It made me think that there was a paperback bestseller that they had all read called something like
1001 Compliments
.

One guy kept pulling quarters out of my ears. He pulled out about four dollars before I told him to knock it off. He was going to pay for his magazine and milk that way.

Today they were bothering me more than usual, buying the newspaper and asking me to autograph the front page.

“Little Nouschka Tremblay! Montréal’s sweetheart! What the hell are you doing working in this hellhole? I can’t believe it. It’s like Brigitte Bardot working the cash at the Supermarché Quatre Frères!”

“Yeah, it’s just like that,” I answered.

“Shouldn’t you be married to a millionaire?”

“The minute one walks in and asks me, I’ll say yes.”

“Ha, ha, ha. You’re funny.”

People figured that when you were in the public eye they could walk up to you and say anything that they pleased and you would have to listen and smile, which is what you pretty much ended up doing.

Raphaël walked in without looking at me. I felt like someone had just pulled a fire alarm. My heart started beating like crazy and there was almost a ringing in my head. He was chewing on a toothbrush while flipping through magazines in the rock and roll guitar section. He had a half-smoked cigarette butt behind his ear and a Remembrance Day poppy in his jacket lapel even though it was five months away or seven months ago—I wasn’t sure which. Two dogs were on the sidewalk waiting for him. One of the dogs was a good-looking German shepherd. The other was a hound dog that looked like a man who had lost a lot of weight but hadn’t had time to buy himself a new wardrobe.

He picked up the newspaper with me on the front cover. He held it up for me to see.

A police officer passing by outside spotted Raphaël and came in. The officer asked Raphaël if he could search him. When Raphaël consented, the officer patted him down and confiscated a doorknob that he was carrying in his pocket for some mysterious reason.

“What is this, a weapon?”

“Actually, it’s for opening doors.”

“Wise guy.”

I was about to go after him down the street when the telephone rang. The phone was covered in stickers advertising restaurants that no longer existed. I walked over to the wall and picked the receiver up. Nicolas was on the other end, yelling.

“Channel ten, motherfucker!”

I hung up the phone and climbed up onto the counter in order to turn on the television that was balanced on a thin metal shelf. A little black cat with white paws fell off the counter and whined. It looked like a boy at a funeral whose suit was too small for him. I glanced down at it for a second until it righted itself and then I flicked on the television.

The news was showing footage of me in the parade. Then it cut away to old footage of us on television talk shows, a “best of” reel. I put my hand over my mouth. We’d been out of the spotlight for a long time and now look what I’d done. There we were, up on the television screen, seven years old and singing for our supper, trying to distract the city from how we had come into this world. I suddenly remembered the film crew and how enraged Nicolas would be if he knew of it.

Our father never cared about anything other than his career. The only time he had any use for Nicolas and me was
when we added to his TV performances. Étienne bought me a little black beret to wear and gave me a daisy to hold in my hand. He was going for the look of Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde
. Étienne was a master of image manipulation. It was a gift. Or maybe it was a side effect of being one of the most shallow men to walk the face of this earth.

Étienne would get me to read a poem that I had written. The audience would ooh and aah, and sometimes they would laugh their heads off. Delightful, how delightful, talent certainly runs in the family.

But Nicolas often refused to go on. He was unpredictable. Once he styled his hair with Crisco at the last minute and nobody could get it out. Once he went on wearing a T-shirt that he had custom-made himself, with lightning bolts on it. Once he said he would only go if he could demonstrate his karate moves and be given six Milky Way bars. Étienne could tell right away that Nicolas was too difficult to work with and stopped having him on after a while.

Nicolas would give long-winded answers to the interviewers that would break off into lies and silly flights of fancy. He liked to complain about all sorts of things. The audience would go wild when he complained about how our gym teacher made us do running backwards laps. Nicolas thought they were all beneath him, laughing at his idiotic jokes.

“I would like to either drive a snowplow or be a politician,” Nicolas said.

“And what does a politician do?”

“They meet with the foreign ambassadors. They make it so that Québec can be our own country. I think that will be a very good thing because we will make our own laws.”

Nicolas became a favourite with separatists because of the
opinions that he voiced when he was seven. René Lévesque quoted a line from one of my poems in a speech on Québec separatism and then we were immortal.

Back in the seventies, Étienne thought that if Québec separated from Canada, it would infuse his career with new life. He thought that he would be able to write the new national anthem. He spent weeks working on a victory song. People would stand in the streets and sing his song the day after the referendum. It would be the first song to be sung in a free Québec.

But we didn’t separate. And then the next year, Étienne got arrested for having an affair with a fourteen-year-old girl named Marilou, who was round and plump and blond like a baby and who nobody on earth could resist. She was on the front page of the newspaper. She was trying to parlay the scandal into a modelling career. She ended up in a root-beer commercial and Étienne had to serve eight months in prison.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, WHEN
I
WENT INTO THE
kitchen, I saw that Nicolas had cut out the photograph of me from the front page of the newspaper and had stuck it up on the fridge with magnets on every corner. He had written, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” all around the photograph.

I knew that the crew would for sure be going to see Étienne. My father would not turn his back on them. He would be ecstatic and want to expound all his ridiculous thoughts until the tape ran out. He would show them baby photos of us if he had them, but I was quite sure that he did not.

I was distracted from these thoughts as the day unfolded. Something much more interesting happened. I saw Raphaël three times that day.

In the morning, as I was about to leave the lobby of my apartment, I noticed him through the glass door, sitting on the front stoop of his mother’s building. He looked like he hadn’t washed his hair, because it stuck straight up above his head. He was wearing a suit jacket but no shirt underneath and purple
track pants with yellow piping down the sides. He had a pit bull that was carrying a Cabbage Patch doll in its mouth. The dog had a face like a fist. It would put the doll down for a moment and bark like someone trying to plunge a toilet.

I moved out of the way to let an exterminator pass. He was there to see about an infestation. A puzzle box had spilled and the pieces were multiplying and living in all the cracks. I pushed on the door, trying to open it, even though I was supposed to pull on it. I had no idea how something like this was possible since I had lived in the same building my whole life. I felt so self-conscious when Raphaël was around that my IQ dropped a hundred points.

As soon as I turned the corner, I took a pocket mirror out of my purse to make sure that I had looked all right. What the hell? I thought to myself. I had never felt that anxious around a boy before.

Then, in the afternoon I saw him at the grocery store with a white Pomeranian that had a face like a chewed-up toothbrush. The small dog was sitting in the part of the grocery cart where you ordinarily put a baby. The dog was trembling with excitement, wanting to hop up, like he was waiting to add a detail to your anecdote.

Raphaël was wearing enormous sunglasses. Nobody in the store would dare say anything to Raphaël about having a dog in a place where you sell food. He opened a bottle of beer while in line at the cash and drank it while flipping through a magazine about homes and gardens. They just wanted him to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible. It was hard to imagine what would happen with a guy who looked like that, if he was provoked. There was this feeling of an electrical storm everywhere he went.

Then, after work I saw him at the Portuguese café. He was drinking a cup of coffee and reading
Papillon
. You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels. Raphaël would buy paperbacks that the homeless people were selling for fifty cents each on the street corner. He walked down the street with paper bags filled with books like groceries.

I got two cups of coffee to bring home, one for me and one for Nicolas. I looked over at Raphaël again while I was in line, and he was scribbling on the front page of his book. He got up to leave and left the book lying on the table. After I watched him leave, I went over and picked it up. I opened up the book and read the inscription: “If a broken fool with broken teeth and broken tonsils were to go all the way out of his way to say hello to her, what on earth would she say back, I wonder?”

I slapped the cover of the book down, startled, as if I had just opened up the door on someone changing and quickly closed it.

Was that a message for me? It had to be. I looked at the book cover, which was a photograph of a hard-ass dude with a butterfly tattooed on his chest. He refused to tell me no matter how I begged.

I
HATED BEING WOKEN UP BY THE NEWS ON THE
clock radio. I always meant to change the station to one that only played music. But I hadn’t gotten around to it, although I had been meaning to do it for three years now. My laziness was astonishing sometimes. I lay there listening to the voice speaking.

“A
chansonnier
is different from a rock and roll singer because he is also a poet, he is also a philosopher, he is also a medium through which the people are able to voice their own fables, their own fears, their time and zeitgeist. That’s why Étienne Tremblay was so important for the separatist cause.”