The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (20 page)

“Change is good,” Raphaël said.

“I don’t like it. I think that everyone should eat off the same plates their whole life. And you shouldn’t ever change
your kitchen chairs. I don’t like when people talk about moving to new cities. Everybody should stay exactly where they were born.”

“What are you worried about, Nouschka? You shouldn’t be worried, baby.”

Who are we other than our roles? I had gone directly from being Nicolas’s twin sister to Raphaël’s wife. For that one second earlier I was alone. And it was atrocious. It was unfathomable. Just being one’s self, utterly abandoned, with no man wrapping his arms around me like a straitjacket.

A photographer in a car drove up next to us. He took a couple photos. I didn’t think anything of it.

I was happy now, I guess. Who can tell what certain emotions are. Happiness, terror, joy, hatred—they’re all so incredibly alike. We walked for a couple more blocks to a building that Raphaël had signed the lease for. He had put all the money that he had on the first month’s rent. I was glad that he had done it on his own. I never would have had the courage to sign a lease without Nicolas. We walked slowly up the stairs to the new apartment. The moon came down low over the buildings. A housewife came out on her fire escape and pushed it back up into the sky with a broom handle, and bats flew by.

Raphaël was too drunk to have an erection. I sat on his face while he was still dressed in his wedding suit, a white carnation in his lapel. And that is how a marriage is consummated on Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

T
HE PHOTOGRAPH THAT THE MAN TOOK ENDED UP
on the cover of a tabloid. What with the attention from the documentary and a wedding, how could I not have expected to land in the magazines? It really was a lovely photo. I even bought myself a copy. The problem was, of course, that the tabloids were in our life; they were impossible to shake. They were waiting for an arc in the story. They were ecstatic that we were married. But now the only thing that could make them happier was if we divorced. The trick to outwitting the tabloids is to lead a well-adjusted, serene life, which I hoped to do.

I was moving out that day. I was in the kitchen, wrapping up my favourite teacup in newspaper. Loulou was wearing a yellow toque with the logo for the Boston Bruins on it. Sometimes he liked to wear it to be controversial. Younger men would scream obscenities out their car window at him. He was having trouble opening a can of peaches, quite possibly because his can opener was at least twenty-five years old. I flung my arms around his neck.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Nouschka. You’re moving around the block. You’re too emotional. You’ll be an alcoholic by the time you’re forty.”

I walked into my room. I was surprised to see Nicolas there. He was wearing the same outfit from the wedding. Nicolas gave me a look that indicated that he knew I wasn’t expecting to see him there.

“You can run but you can’t hide. What’s the deal? Are we, like, mortal enemies now? Are you going to cross the street and duck into a store when you see me from now on?”

“How could you even ask me that?”

“Well, we were getting creepy close anyways, right? I think that you were cramping my style. When people see us together they always expect us to start tap dancing or something. I’ve got to go out on my own.”

He had come ahead of me so that he could already start packing. He wanted it to be clear that he was leaving me and not the other way around. He had a gym bag that was filled with clothes and sunglasses.

I started putting dresses into my flowered vinyl suitcase. Everything else there belonged to children. We couldn’t really bring the plastic horses on the windowsill or the mobile of birds that we had cut out of the pages of a children’s magazine, or the shoebox full of Hot Wheels cars.

I suddenly felt full of incredible doubts. The entire city had told us over and over again that we were lovable and special. Why didn’t I just remain a child like they had wanted!

“Actually, do I have a tie anywhere among my things?”
Nicolas said. “I might actually need that. I don’t know. I don’t want to just get married and settle down right away like some people. I need to make my first million before I do that.”

It suddenly felt as if we had been at war for a hundred years. I wanted to surrender, to throw in the towel and just let Nicolas have his way, whatever his way was. But that wasn’t even an option now.

We walked out of the apartment together and stood on the sidewalk, just staring at each other. For a moment it felt as if we were waiting for one another to call each other’s bluff. We didn’t say anything. As soon as we went in different directions, it would be the end. We just turned and walked off like duellists who, after a certain amount of steps, wheel around and fire bullets into one another’s hearts.

Our new apartment was in a building that was surrounded by a wrought iron fence that looked like something a girl had doodled in a notebook. There were twenty doorbells on the door of the building, with names next to some of them written in pencil or stuck on little bits of red tape.

Raphaël was being sweet to me that evening. I sat on the new bed next to my suitcase, waiting for the whole world to tumble down while he stood at the stove making spaghetti sauce and smoking a joint. But it didn’t. There is nothing in the world as pretty as the smell of marijuana and spaghetti sauce. If you wanted the simple things in life, then you could be happy. He had already started working as an orderly at the hospital. This delighted me because Loulou’s prediction that Raphaël would never work had proven to be false. He had been given a pile
of pamphlets on studying to become a nurse. I thought it was a good idea. I wanted our lives to be normal, because for me
normal
meant that anything was possible. It meant that I could continue going to school. It meant that I could find a job that I liked to do.

Raphaël was a bookworm. One of my favourite things was to lie in bed and listen to him tell me about books that he had read. He had enormous bony feet. I liked that I could look at his naked feet all the time. I liked that I was married to somebody with those feet. He was reading a detective novel by Simenon.

“He goes home at night and weeps. He thinks that if he can figure out why it is that people die, then he can figure out why it is that people are born. He was born not of woman. Instead he was created out of garbage: an old trench coat and some scraps of pornography and leftover bones from a dog. That’s what Maigret is made of. When he solves crimes, he is really making his confessions. It is only by solving crimes that he is able to prevent committing them.”

Every two people, when they grow intimate with one another, begin to construct their own language. For Nicolas and me, our grammar manual had a chapter on advanced sarcasm, a chapter on absurd associations, six chapters on humour, a chapter on inappropriateness and an appendix on bragging and general know-it-all-ism.

In the manual for Raphaël and my language there would definitely be a foreword on flattery, a chapter on mysticism in a downtown environment, one with words to help define the existential condition, a chapter on pseudo-intellectualism and a 1995 afterword on the conjugating of dirty French words.

I didn’t like to read books after he had told me about them, because it always seemed that they would never be quite as good.

He got a book at Ben Noodleman’s pharmacy. Mr Noodleman gave out tiny candies in prescription bottles to kids for Halloween until some mother complained. The book was called
How to Keep Your Love Life Alive
and had been published in 1973. Raphaël was determined to try every trick in the book.

He climbed in from the window. He declared that he was a pirate and that he was coming in to ravage me. The tip of his shoe got caught on the radiator and he fell on the floor. We tried making love in our little shower. The flow from the faucet was so weak that one of us was always trembling and trying to get under the warm flow.

He took all the petals off a rose. He scattered them on the floor around the bed. It looked as if someone had been stabbed and ran out of the room. He carved our initials into the wood slats of a bench. I don’t think that he could have done that to a tree—the trees on the block were spindly and had tiny black gates around them.

He talked this limousine driver into driving us around and around the block on his hour off. He got this old man from next door to come and sit on the couch and play classical guitar while we slow-danced around the coffee table.

He was wearing a tie when he came to dinner, even though the shirt that he was wearing had permanent sweat stains under the armpits. He had a huge silk handkerchief tucked in at his neck. We had a spaghetti dinner. He put it on a big plate and put it in between the two of us. I’m not sure if he got this idea out of his paperback book or
Lady and the Tramp
. He ate much faster than me, being an athlete and all, so he ended up eating most of the spaghetti and I got hardly any. He lit up so many votive candles, which he bought at the Polish grocer’s, that I
was seeing black dots in front of my eyes the rest of the night.

We spoke on different pay phones so that we could have phone sex. I sat in the phone booth in the library with the glass door closed while talking in whispers. He spoke from the phone booth on the corner. He had to shout out dirty things above the noise of the trucks.

He came home with a cardboard box shaped like a heart. When I opened it, there were heart-shaped chocolates. They all had the most repulsive centres. I tried to guess the flavours.

“Cough syrup?” I asked.

“No, cherry.”

“Powdered toothpaste.”

“Mint.”

“Dried-up jam on the side of the jar?”

“Close, strawberry.”

“Bruised plums?”

“Marzipan.”

“Burnt butter?”

“You’re right, caramel!”

There was a feeling, when we were together, that we were little kids dressing up as adults. That the universe was something that we drew with crayons and there was no such thing as tragedy. Maybe he had taken a book about time travel out of the children’s public library when he was seven, and he had skipped over all the difficult parts and here he was.

Where did he get all this crazy-assed knowledge? Maybe I was just being wilfully naive. Like those women who married Mafia guys and their husbands kept bringing them home mink coats even though they claimed to work at the bowling alley.

The winter winds were arriving outside, sounding like children stationed under the puppet theatre and trying to make
thunder and lightning with pots and pans and rattling paper bags. He was making shadow puppets of wolves on the wall. They were just outside. That’s why we built the city: to keep out all the wolves.

I
T WOULD HAVE BEEN A HAPPY TIME EXCEPT THAT
I was always conscious of the fact that I had not spoken to Nicolas in three weeks. We had never spent twenty-four hours apart before our fight at the wedding.

I had just ditched him. I wanted to see him again, but how could I face him? A month in the life of a twenty-year-old is a very long time. You can become a completely different person during that time. You can grow so distant from a person that you can never quite catch up in your friendship. It was like falling behind in school.

If Nicolas was actually able to stay mad at me any longer, then it would change everything that I knew about the universe. Surely there had to be one constant thing about this world.

I brought it up to Raphaël before he went to work one night.

“Nicolas is always going to be Nicolas,” Raphaël said. “He’s probably got to go through a period of not being himself—just so that he can be sure that he really isn’t anybody else. Or he
wasn’t just himself by mistake. But then he’ll go back, you’ll see. And then we’ll have a shitstorm of Nicolas, don’t worry.”

For a second I was annoyed at Raphaël for not worrying along with me. I remembered how Nicolas had warned me that Raphaël was one of these lame-ass philosophizing types. And I thought, man oh man, my brother was right. Why didn’t I listen to him and refuse to have anything to do with this jerk? But then I sighed. Being mad at Raphaël wasn’t going to help this situation at all. None of it was his fault. I went back to worrying.

A few days later a twelve-year-old in a yellow and black striped sweater knocked on my door and said that Nicolas was waiting for me down on the corner. And then the boy buzzed away, off to smell some flowers.

Knowing how impatient Nicolas was, I ran around the house, scrambling for my peacoat and some shoes. I hurried down the stairs and onto the street. I started running but I was a little bit scared of how quickly my heart was beating, so I slowed down and walked.

I kept fixing my hair. As if I was on my way to a first date and was feeling insecure. I even stopped and looked at my reflection in the window of a car. I think I was wringing my hands as I walked. Trucks were bouncing along beside me on the street like they had thunderclouds in the back. What if Nicolas said he didn’t ever want to see me again? Whoever said that twins can read one another’s minds was wrong. I never had any idea what Nicolas was thinking.

Nicolas was standing on the corner, waiting for me. He put his hands over his eyes when he saw me coming toward him. He ran around and hid behind a skinny tree, all Inspector Clouseau–style. He picked up a piece of newspaper from the ground and then hurried to the bench and held it up in front of
his face with his legs crossed, reading it. I sat down next to him, and each time we made eye contact we blushed.

He was wearing a green ski jacket over a brown acrylic track suit. I think he wanted to prove that he looked good in anything. He dressed like a toddler that had snuck out the back door while his mother was preoccupied doing the laundry.

“Well, here we are,” he said finally.