The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (21 page)

“Fancy that.”

“Just the two of us, like old times.”

“Yup.”

“I never gave you a wedding present.”

“If you promise that you aren’t going to talk shit about my husband anymore, that would be the best wedding gift that you could give me. You know?”

“Oh, you should have told me. I could have saved $3.99.”

He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small blue music box. When I opened it, it began to play the tune “Il Était un Petit Navire”—that song about a young sailor who is about to be eaten by the other sailors because they’ve run out of food. Why had anyone ever invented songs? They made your heart all crazy.

I loved it. I’m not even sure why I started to cry. Maybe it was partly out of relief. I had imagined this meeting 360 different ways and I was just glad that I didn’t have to picture it anymore.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s the most wonderful thing that I’ve ever been given in my whole life.”

“Oh, don’t overdo it now! You sound like a numbskull. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. Don’t get so emotionally crazy, please. I never met anybody who cried the way you do.”

“I missed you.”

“Are we good? I don’t want there to ever be bad blood between us. You’re the only person who loves me.”

“Loulou loves you.”

“Loulou’s too busy worrying about his gastric problems to really love anybody. I’m a bum without you. I’m like a guy on a trapeze who’s hanging by his knees with nobody to catch. I mean that’s no kind of act, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I’m a bonehead without you. I’m a bungler. I’m a booger eater. A backwater bigot. A lonely pickled egg floating in a pickle jar. I feel like shit. I miss you, okay. You wanted to know if I would miss you. Well, I did. There you go. You’re a stronger man than me, Gunga Din. You win. You outdrew me.”

I laughed. It was funny because Raphaël had never said anything like that to me. I knew Raphaël loved me, but I sometimes got the feeling that if I left him, he would be perfectly all right about it pretty soon afterwards. I’d never met anybody that was as good at being alone as Raphaël. Nicolas would actually go nuts if I left him for good.

“I missed you too.”

“What a softie! Promise me that you won’t ever abandon me. Don’t move away or anything like that.”

“I would never do that.”

“He has to stay here as a condition of his parole, right?”

“Where would we go?”

“Somewhere where I could never find you again.”

“Okay, I promise.”

He looked content as he folded up the promise I’d given him and tucked it away in some deep, inner pocket.

“I need some normal clothes,” he said.

“I’ll say. You’re getting downright eccentric.”

“You want to come shopping with me now?”

“Oh, all right. I only have about five dollars though.”

“That’s great!”

Nicolas was in a particularly good mood. He called out random insults to people as they passed by. He stopped an Asian kid with a pocket protector and beige pants.

“Don’t ever change, man,” Nicolas said to him. “I love everything about that look. Seriously.”

There was a mural of the big bang outside the Salvation Army. Nicolas stood up on a bench to throw a beer can over his head into the garbage. His aim was really nice. It was lovely to see.

Nicolas was usually aiming a little bit too high. He always thought that he would be able to do things that he didn’t quite have the talent or ability for. He broke his nose once trying to ride a unicycle.

When we pushed open the door of the Salvation Army, so many bells rang that it sounded like the king had just died.

Nicolas went to the men’s section. He started trying to pile every suit jacket from the rack onto the crook of his arm. A fifteen-year-old store clerk gave him a funny look because he was making a mess.

“I’m going to a job interview on Monday.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

I wasn’t sure why he always had to claim that he was on his way to a job interview. It had probably become a nervous tic. The way some people had to laugh after everything they said.

“I had this friend named Maxim,” Nicolas said, raising and dropping his shoulders in a black jacket that looked too small. “He found out that he was one-eighth Native. So he goes on a
spiritual quest. Because that’s what all Natives do when they are eighteen. And then they rename themselves. So he does this. He roams through the wilderness outside of Boucherville. And then he comes back and his name is Daniel.”

“So?”

“So? Are you retarded? He’s supposed to have a name like Sleeps with the Fishes or Little Itchy Ass. Not Daniel.”

“Just stop. You’re being racist.”

“How the fuck am I being racist?”

He went into the changing room to try on a grey suit.

“Remember my friend Xavier?” he yelled from inside the stall. “He lost his job as a teacher because he was teaching the kids to play Russian roulette or something like that.”

“Yeah, something like that. Something like that … Do you have any idea what Russian roulette is?”

He came out of the changing room in the suit. He actually looked really handsome in it. I gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“Why do they call Russian roulette
Russian roulette?
Because Russians are bastards. There are these Russians who own a wallpaper store near the library and they shortchanged me. After that, Russians were dead to me.”

“Understandably so.”

I walked over to a long green chesterfield with upholstered, buttoned armrests. It looked like it could fit a family of eight people on it. It was made when the Catholic Church was still in power and everyone had up to ten children. They needed a gigantic couch so that they could all fit on it together. I sat down, waiting for Nicolas to get his regular clothes back on. A cat’s tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye.

Nicolas came out of the stall and walked over to a cart of fur hats and started trying them on, one after the other. I shook my head at each one. Every one of them gave him the effect of looking completely insane. Not that he would mind, but the police would stop him for sure if he was wearing one of those hats, using it as grounds to search his pockets. He held up a wire coat hanger with ties hanging from it.

“Remember Sébastien?” Nicolas asked. He couldn’t stop his nervous chattering. “Turns out his mother put Pepsi in his bottle when he was little. Now he has, like, jitters all the time. He has epilepsy. He’s suing PepsiCo. He’s going to be a millionaire.”

I asked the fifteen-year-old worker if he could turn on the television so we could make sure it worked. There was a rerun of
Chambres en ville
on television. Nicolas changed out of his suit and picked up a beat-up copy of
Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel
from a pile of paperbacks and sat, squished, next to me. We sat through two episodes, resting from the energy of having come to a store and found a new outfit. It was nice to sit on a couch. It was the closest we had been to being home together for a long time.

“Do you remember that time Loulou came to our parent-teacher interviews dressed in a tuxedo?”

I started to laugh. Our favourite thing was remembering stupid things that Loulou had done when we were children. There were memories that cracked us up every single time we told them to one another again. Like the time we got kicked out of the zoo because Loulou had brought along a plastic bag filled with steak bones and table scraps to feed to the lions. Or how we were once dilly-dallying on the way home from school, and Loulou called the police and told them that Nicolas had
been kidnapped. Loulou wanted to see if there was a way to put Nicolas’s face on a milk carton, just to teach him a lesson.

“Remember the time Loulou cut out the picture of Tony the Tiger from the cereal box so you could wear it as a mask on Halloween?” I asked.

We laughed. Nicolas had to put his hands on his stomach because he was laughing so hard. I had to look away from him to stop laughing. If we laughed too long, they would think that we were stoned and throw us out of the store.

“Remember how Loulou used to hold his hand up high in the air and get us to kick it? I’m not sure what he was training us for.”

We had been together so long these memories were as important to history as Stonehenge and the
Mona Lisa
.

He brought a suit with him to the cash register. I counted out my change for the five dollars it cost. I held up my one-volume encyclopedia. The woman shrugged and said it was a quarter.

Outside the store, a robin hopped by. It looked like a fat man with a red scarf tucked into his waistcoat. It looked like it knew what it was doing with its life.

“You have a court date, don’t you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re getting a suit.”

“Saskia and I are going to court about visitation rights and all that. I’m sick about it. I don’t even like to talk about it, it’s making me so fucking nervous.”

“It’ll be okay. It’ll go fine.”

There was a photograph of Nicolas sleeping on top of a bar in the tabloids the next week. It was quite extraordinary that Nicolas had managed to get himself in such an awkward situation. But Nicolas was given special privileges in bars around the neighbourhood. If anybody else was up on a table, you could
be sure that the owner would throw them the hell out. But if Nicolas was up on one, dancing drunkenly, it was good for business. People knew that they were hanging out in the right place at the right time.

Nicolas liked to make a spectacle when he was out. But he didn’t drink during the day. He was only going to AA as some sort of plea bargain that his lawyer had made for him after he was caught stealing a family-sized bag of Ringolos from a corner store at two in the morning.

But the tabloid saw the scene as a sign that Nicolas had begun to travel down some terrible road.

For a second, I thought, how bloody ridiculous. But then I felt an uneasy premonition in my belly. Maybe the media were the ones that were right. Perhaps they had been paying closer attention to Nicolas than I had.

I
DECIDED TO GO ALONG AS A CHARACTER WITNESS
for Nicolas on his court date. I put on a green dress with a fancy lace collar and brushed off all the cat hair from my long black coat. Saskia wouldn’t have a chance against us. She didn’t know how to be professionally adorable.

As we were walking to the courthouse, Nicolas and I even felt sort of cocky. We were going to be back on top of the world again. I felt happy that there was finally something that I was going to be able to do for Nicolas. It was going to be like old times. When we were together, no one could pick on us.

“You look great!” I said.

“So do you.”

“You look like one of those old-fashioned gentlemen from
Les Filles de Caleb
.”

“You look like you should be in Paris, seducing their president.”

Nicolas had a legal aid lawyer that he had spoken to on the phone. He met us outside the courtroom. He didn’t look as confident as we did, but I ignored that.

The judge wanted to know why Nicolas had no record of employment. Saskia’s lawyer pointed out that Nicolas didn’t even have a high school diploma. He brought up an arrest from the year before, for a petty theft that hadn’t seemed serious at the time.

Nicolas went up on the stand to defend himself. He was flustered and didn’t know what to say. He just kept shrugging and smiling, hoping that the judge would be converted to our belief that his life of petty crime was no big deal.

Nicolas suddenly seemed out of place. I saw him through everyone else’s eyes. He somehow looked more seedy in his suit than if he had just showed up in jeans and a sweater. He looked like a businessman who had just walked out of a strip club at three o’clock in the morning in a strange city and needed to find his way back to his hotel room. Why hadn’t we spent more time looking for a respectable outfit? We weren’t able to take anything seriously when we were together.

Saskia was dressed tidily in a burgundy suit and looked infinitely calm. She had a regular job as a receptionist now. She had gotten her shit together and we hadn’t.

Saskia’s lawyers brought a copy of the tabloid with the photo of Nicolas on top of the bar. To show that it was not just Saskia’s opinion that Nicolas was a fuck-up. It was actually newsworthy.

I went up on the stand to answer questions from the lawyers. I was sure to describe how Nicolas loved Pierrot and wanted to help raise and educate and set him on the proper path. I said that Nicolas was loving and funny. They all just stared at me, waiting for me to finish so that they could get
on with business. I looked around the courtroom. Nobody was falling in love with me.

The judge said he didn’t see how he could grant any visitation rights to Nicolas since he didn’t have a residence or a job. In addition, the judge told Nicolas he owed Saskia three thousand dollars in child support. This was an impossible amount of money. He sat on the bench outside the courthouse in his five-dollar suit and wept.

I
GOT THE JOB AT PLACE DES ARTS. THEY HIRED
me despite my terrible English. Étienne always said that we shouldn’t bother to learn the language of colonialism. Loulou was hopeless and couldn’t speak a word of it. I would answer the phone at the theatre and say something like: “There will be evening-time presentations down the line in the season that comes just after winter … with the blossoms in it?” But surprisingly, people didn’t let on that my incompetence bothered them.

I really liked the job. I was always busy and having to figure out something new. I would completely lose myself in the task at hand. I hadn’t known how great this could feel. Since I had grown up around so many unemployed people, there was never anyone to tell me how awesome work was.

In the evenings, when I left, the hallways were always still filled with girls from the corps de ballet. They sat on the floor with dour expressions on their little faces and their eye makeup smudged. Their skirts looked like they had toilet paper sticking
out of their tights, and their toes stuck out of holes in the feet of their stockings. Their spines poked out of their backs, like great lizards. There was a girl in a tutu smoking a cigarette by the fire exit. Her knees were all bandaged up, as if she was a porcelain doll that had been shoddily repaired by a child.