The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (39 page)

There he was in the cage like Iago, speaking like a beautiful, bitter bird. Iago pretended to be a model of virtue and propriety, but at heart he was downright rotten. Whereas Nicolas wanted to be evil and hard, but he was really so soft and sweet and broken.

I
WAS SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, WRITING
an essay for school, when the clock radio went off by accident. I had stopped listening to the radio and tried to avoid newspapers. It seemed like every day they had a different angle on us. Today there was a leading psychologist trying to explain what factors had led to Nicolas’s particular brand of insanity. He couldn’t get away with just being another idiot who robbed a bank.

Now the radio hosts were laughing their heads off. They couldn’t be talking about Nicolas. I didn’t know what was amusing them so much.

“No, but really, he gave a forty-seven-year-old woman an asthma attack.”

“It’s not the lion’s fault. He was just going for a stroll.”

“I don’t know how they’re going to fit him into one of those little cages at the SPCA.”

After this remark they laughed and laughed. They were so delighted with themselves that they couldn’t stop laughing. They were just going to laugh and laugh until the weather report.

I ran downstairs and across the street to the corner store and picked up a newspaper. It was on the front page, and the store owner was talking about it with a customer. In the middle of last night, a lion had crossed the Jacques Cartier Bridge onto the Island of Montréal. Early-morning drivers had spotted him as he walked down the highway. Drivers at that hour were always seeing hallucinations at the side of the road and didn’t know what to think. There was an aerial shot, taken from a helicopter, of the lion leaping over a car and heading to Chinatown.

The lion had strutted down Boulevard Saint-Laurent with his mane looking like it was slicked back. I could swear it was the same scrawny lion that I had seen in Val-des-Loups. Now he looked majestic walking down the street. Nobody could touch him. No one could tell him how to be. He was confident and calm. He took cool to a whole other level. When he yawned, his yawn was so enormous that all the little boys and all the little girls caught the yawn and went to bed.

It was time that there was a new
Roi de Boulevard Saint-Laurent
. He made everyone so happy. They were going to give him his own exhibition at le Zoo de Granby. One of the police officers who was the first on the scene affectionately named him René, because he said that the lion, with his thinning mane and enormous jowls, resembled the ex-premier of Québec René Lévesque.

There was something unsettling about that lion being here. I thought for a moment that I had better go check my bible. Because I was pretty sure that there was a verse in Revelations that said that a lion walking over the Jacques Cartier Bridge was a sure sign of the apocalypse. People all over the city were taking that lion for an omen. Some saw it as a sign that they should
stay away from the casino that week, some as a message that they shouldn’t get married. I was frightened. But I knew one thing for sure, looking at the photograph of the lion: Raphaël was coming back.

I
WOKE UP WITH A START A WEEK LATER
. I
ONLY
had a bra on. My belly was enormous. I was so tired that I couldn’t even remember anything. I couldn’t remember if I was a little kid in pyjama bottoms waking up from a nap. I couldn’t remember if I was an old lady. I couldn’t remember what point of my life I was at.

Raphaël was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. He was drinking a glass of iced tea. He had showered. His aftershave smelled like licorice. His hair was combed back and he was wearing a suit. He had a gold ring on his pinky finger with a sparrow on it. My eye went to it as if it was an announcement. He looked like he’d been up all night. This worried me. If he had been up all night thinking, there was no telling what kind of crazy thoughts he had come up with.

Raphaël closed his eyes for several seconds. He was gone to the world when he did that. Who knew how long he was away in his alternate universe? He could be spending years in Narnia. He might be involved in a terrible four-year battle. He looked
exhausted and world-weary when he opened his eyes again.

I thought he looked dead handsome.

I still wasn’t used to being awake. I felt as if someone had made me out of snow and I was going to melt soon, so what was the point? We had gone back to the way we were when we were little kids, where we couldn’t say anything to one another at all.

“I’ve decided to kill my father,” Raphaël said.

His gun was hanging from his left hand. He stood up and walked to the window and looked out. He seemed to be checking for something, but I couldn’t imagine what. I wasn’t sure if he meant that he was going to go kill his father right now. I somehow didn’t think so. Nobody ever did what they said they were going to do right after they said it. You could procrastinate for years.

He turned back around and came and sat on the end of the mattress. He gave me such a strange look. He looked at me with terrible love for a second. He put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.

I
WAS WEARING A BLACK SWEATER DRESS AND A
peacoat. The baby kept kicking. The baby kept crying out, “Goodbye, goodbye.” I kept opening my hand for Nicolas to take it as I walked down the street toward the funeral parlour. But there was just emptiness there. It was just an instinct that he should be showing up any minute to make me feel better. But he wasn’t.

I felt as if I could hardly walk. We always imagine the sidewalk to be so strong. But it is hardly true. It could give any second. Grief turned everything to liquid. Grief could deny the reality of all this. All the bricks were holding one another up. But any second, they might just give up hope. They might stop seeing the point and then they would all come crashing down. And the windows and signs and beds and all the nonsense that we fill our apartments with would end up lying on the street. As if we had all been evicted from our homes at once—if we’d been foolish enough to think that we’d ever had one at all.

Someone else had called the police. They had heard the shot, heard me calling out,
“Au secours!”
over and over again. Although I didn’t have any memory of calling out to anyone at all. It was hard to remember. Everything had a make-believe quality to it still. And I was skeptical that it had happened.

The words
CHAMPOUX ET FILS
were written on the glass of the front door with gold letters. The son was a seventy-five-year-old man. He did everything by himself. There was no one as organized as these old men who had been doing the same tasks for forty years. They knew how to look terribly sad but also completely in control.

The place hadn’t been redecorated since the sixties. There was something anachronistic about it. Even the hearse outside seemed old-fashioned. The driver wore a small blue sailor hat and a suit.

Some of the white tiles on the lobby floor were broken because so many people had walked across the lobby floor. Every day there were lines of people trudging up the stairs who were going through the exact same thing that I was going through.

I had already been here for three funerals. It made me feel a little bit comforted to know that I was at least some place that was familiar. Raphaël wasn’t the only person on earth that had ever died. My grandmother’s funeral had been here when I was five, but I could hardly remember it.

I could not make any sense of death. Even though death was just about the most ordinary thing that could happen to a person, it defied everything that I knew about the world. It was like anything could happen now. If King Kong had reached his hand through the window and snatched me up, I wouldn’t have kicked up a fuss in the slightest. I would just have let him wrap me up in his fist and looked out at all the sights around me.

Everyone in the neighbourhood was there because it had been on the news. They were all crowding in and squeezing up the staircase. They didn’t know Raphaël enough to really be devastated. In a meaningless world, they were desperate for a ritual. Everyone loves a sad little tune.

I had been trying to learn how to be alone. But there was a way of being alone that made you feel as if you didn’t exist at all. That was too terrible. All these people in their black suits were squeezing in around me. It seemed as if all the people on earth were gone and all that was left of them were their shadows.

The room where the coffin was had light blue curtains on the wall. There were two vases of lilies on either side of the closed coffin. There was a photograph of Raphaël that had been taken on our wedding day next to the casket. There was also a photo of him from school. Who knows where Véronique had found it, seeing as how he had tried to erase all evidence of his past.

A cold, clammy feeling of dread came over me. It was as if my insides were all rotten and black. Someone asked if they could take my coat and I whispered no.

I looked around for someone to comfort me. Loulou was sitting on a chair. He was shaking his head in disbelief the way that he had when I told him that I was marrying Raphaël. He was never going to be able to understand Raphaël. This was just the cherry on the cake. He couldn’t understand any of us as adults. He only really understood tiny babies who needed to have their diapers changed and their bottles put in their mouths.

Someone whispered to me that my father was here. Étienne was indeed standing in the doorway in a raggedy suit, holding a hat up to his heart. I had never actually seen him look so sorrowful. He was almost acting like it was his fault. He walked over
and put the tip of his finger on the flower that was pinned on my lapel. I couldn’t for the life of me remember how it got there.

Étienne was trying to say something. Maybe he actually was saying something but his words didn’t seem to be making it to my ears. His words were like badly constructed paper airplanes that just went straight to the floor instead of having any glide. He didn’t have the words to comfort me. Because he would have to have had a lifetime of comforting me in order to be able to comfort me now.

He didn’t have any favourite lullabies. He didn’t know how I felt about love.

For once, nobody cared that Étienne was in the room. Raphaël had stolen the show. It was a marvel. Death pulled the tablecloth out without upsetting any of the dishes that were on it. Everything was the same even though the world was completely altered.

I turned away from Étienne, still looking for someone. I wanted someone to say that it was okay that I hadn’t stayed in the country. I needed to be convinced that there wasn’t something that I could have done. I wanted to feel that I hadn’t betrayed Raphaël, that I hadn’t been the flakiest wife on the whole planet. Someone had to tell me that I had loved him properly.

I didn’t think that I could bear having no one to help me with this terrible confusion and sorrow. Everyone in Raphaël’s family was feeling their own dreadful emotions. It wasn’t for any of them to do anything but deal with their own horrific loss. It would be selfish of me to ask any of them to help me. But I had been desperate, since this happened, for someone to come and let me share my pain with them.

And how could I ask Raphaël to come out of his coffin and whisper to me that I was the most wonderful girl on earth? I
thought for a second that I must faint. That was the only way out of this.

Someone asked the people next to me to give him some room. I looked up and saw Misha squeezing through the rows of chairs to come to me. I hadn’t seen him in ages. I don’t know how he knew about the funeral. I never knew how it was that he was always able to follow what was going on with me. He just knew the way that a parent knew and would show up at your school with your lunch before you even realized that you had forgotten it. And I felt about Misha the way that a child feels about a night light when they are afraid of the dark. For some magical reason, its presence would make the existence of monsters impossible.

It was Misha who came and put his big, fat arms around me.

“You’ll be okay, my squishy, tiny sweetheart,” he murmured. “There was nothing that anybody could do for that boy. He was very, very lucky to have had you. Everybody, even the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, wanted to be married to you. He will always be thinking of you in heaven.”

This made me smile. I knew that he was an atheist. I knew that he was telling me that it wasn’t my fault. There are things that you need other generations to help you with. They knew the tricks of dealing with suffering that have to be given from one person to another. You can’t discover them on your own.

Misha had been to funerals before. Misha knew what to do. He knew what to say. He believed that there was a way out. In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was
joy
.

I put my head against his enormous heartbeat. Up close like that, it was like the rolling of drums. When you are waiting and waiting and waiting for a parade, you finally feel the drums first,
rumbling inside of you, and you know the wonderful spectacle is on its way. Before you can actually see the parade, you feel it inside your belly.

And I suddenly wasn’t in shock anymore. I was able to cry and cry and cry.

Sometimes I wondered why we were given all these amazing emotions. How come you got to feel happy while riding the metro with your friends? Why did you feel so awesome getting high? How come you were able to get that rush when someone’s dick went in you the first time? Why did you feel so frightened on a roller coaster? And then I realized that these emotions were given to you just so that you could experience the full impact of death.