Читать книгу Métis Beach - Claudine Bourbonnais - Страница 14

Thursday nights at the Métis Beach clubhouse!

They showed On the Waterfront, Buffalo Bill, Johnny Guitar, Moby Dick, and everything with Gary Cooper. Free entry. I was off to the movies with Jean and Paul, Françoise’s brothers. We were all terribly excited, with the sort of enthusiasm some hoped we’d have when it came time for confession. She’d be joining us later, once she was done in the kitchen at the Egan house, scrubbing pots and pans. Her hands were already calloused, and at her age!

We always sat in the last row, near the door, as if we weren’t entirely welcome among the youth of Métis Beach, though we knew we were supposed to be. After all, their parents — whom we worked for — kept telling us to participate in community activities. A way to contribute to our education, a social duty even, if not a type of charity. And so we’d go to the movies, filled with an equal measure of enthusiasm and apprehension. It wasn’t always easy to understand the plot of the movies, all shown in English. We’d have one eye on the screen and the other scanning the room, watching their reactions, trying not to embarrass ourselves — laughter, surprise, and fear we feigned with as much expertise as women feigned their pleasure, as I would realize with amazement years later when I watched When Harry Met Sally.

Thursday nights at the clubhouse! Cokes and chips bought at the small canteen with its aggressive neon lighting, enjoyed in the electrifying darkness of the room.

Gail would sit in the first row, flanked by Johnny Picoté Babcock, with his idiotic doe eyes, always ready to put his arm around her shoulders.

When she laughed, I roared; when she seemed affected by the plot, I put on a sad face; when she appeared to be scared, I prepared a reassuring smile for her.

She never turned her head in my direction.

I hadn’t seen Gail since that terrible night at her parents’ house when she’d taken me by the hand and dragged me into the garden, tears of rage in her eyes. She spoke of her father with anger and disgust, “It would have been better if you hadn’t been walking by that morning. He could have drowned, and I.…” I listened to her in silence, almost afraid. She had burning embers for eyes, promising a roaring fire to come, impossible to control. “I’m sorry, Romain. It was my idea, a stupid idea.” So Gail had been the one who insisted on having me over. That’s why her mother called, “He saved your life, Robert!” And her father had relented, “Well, fine. But if we need to suffer through a boring evening with a shy boy, let’s at least invite that old Barnewall.…” Gail spoke rapidly on that cool, moonless night. She was steaming — and not particularly coherent — as if she expected to be interrupted at any moment, “I’ll never depend on a man like my father. He’s so arrogant! And I’ll never live my mother’s ridiculous life! I’ll be a lawyer. With an office and important clients! I’ll be independent! You understand? Do you understand?” All the while, I had an expression of such helpless envy sketched on my face. There was no need for a fancy education at a private Protestant college in Westmount for me to know that a woman who wanted to be a lawyer would never fall for a boy like me.

We hadn’t spoken since that fateful dinner. As if nothing at all had happened that evening.

I was so timid, for God’s sake! I envied the boys of Métis Beach who approached her with assurance, like Art Tees, always monkeying around to impress her. He whistled and jeered during love scenes on the silver screen, or when two people kissed. The scenes never failed to embarrass us boys from the French Village — but just one of Art’s jokes, and we all breathed easier.

Every time, Françoise would join us some three quarters of the way through the movie, knocking down chairs in the dark with her fat behind as she tried to find a seat. Her brother Paul would give up his every time. And every time she smelled like grease and onions. And every time, as soon as the movie was over, she placed a rough hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Tell me what happened from the beginning.”

How I hated it! I couldn’t care less about her! I only had eyes for Gail. I tried to attract her attention but couldn’t do it. I was just too shy. I watched her joke around with the others at the canteen, a Coke in hand, and Johnny Picoté on her like a leech. If I was lucky, she might wave at me from afar, but generally she didn’t even look at me before leaving, probably thinking that Françoise and me.… Jesus!

Then came that evening in July 1962, the summer I turned seventeen. Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean and Natalie Wood was showing at the clubhouse. An event, a real one, and we all dressed accordingly. Leather jackets over white t-shirts, with greased hair for the boys, high-waisted pleated skirts, white socks, and cardigans for the girls. A film that most kids in Métis Beach had seen in Montreal already, twice or three times for some of them — once you’ve been there, you know you’ve been someplace — and they shivered with excitement, electricity in the air.

Gail arrived at the wheel of her mother’s Alfa Romeo with a friend of hers, Veronica McKay, whose parents owned the large Norman-style house to the east of the Egan property. They were laughing, elbowing each other in the ribs like partners in crime preparing their next heist. As if they knew something extraordinary was in the works. The clubhouse parking lot was filled with small sports cars, their motors purring; you came to the high Mass led by James Dean in your car, certainly not on foot.

My father had refused to lend me his Chevrolet Bel Air. Voices were raised at home, and I slammed the door as I left. I was heartbroken to see that the Coutus’ Rambler was gone, Jean and Paul had left already. They’d been luckier than I with their folks. All I could do was jump on my old CCM that had lost the lustre of its first summer, even if it meant getting there with rings of sweat under my arms. What humiliation.

I spent a long time in my room, anxiously contemplating my sparse wardrobe. A discouraging sight. My mother owned a clothing store, sure, but she didn’t sell jeans and leather jackets. They were for people raised in barns, and for thugs you read about in the newspaper, stories about robberies in Montreal or Quebec City.

I chose black pants and a white button-up shirt with short sleeves. The collar was heavy, stiff as cardboard, and chafed my neck. I gave up trying to do something with my too-short hair, and settled for slicking it back with a part down the middle.

The reflection in the mirror over my dresser was a sad sight: a little kid from another decade who’d aged too quickly. I looked like someone had been trying to shelter me from modernity at any cost. My uneducated parents couldn’t understand that the future belonged to the young.

Go out and have fun? Life isn’t fun and games, son! It’s made of duty and responsibilities.

Yet in that summer of 1962, I felt like a man, proud of my six-foot frame, a beard beginning to shade my cheeks, my body, better proportioned now, had begun to grow stronger from the hard hours at the sawmill. It was nothing like the previous summer, when the rest of my body had not yet caught up to my hands and feet, still growing, waking me in the night in painful spurts. I’d been in pain all summer, so much so I spent almost no time at all in Métis Beach, unless it was to honour my contracts. Once I went to the Egan house with my father, where we were supposed to repair the garage’s rotten roof. I could barely stand straight on my legs, and lacked any coordination at all, but I was bigger than my old man by a good head already — though that didn’t stop him from treating me like a child, “You’re useless, good for nothing!” I sought his affection all through my childhood without ever finding it — he was distant, icy, and when we found ourselves alone, he kept a sour look on his face at all times. His eyes, usually lively when he was with other people, became empty. The nail never properly hammered, the paint never applied well, the gutter not clean enough — always something to criticize me for. And if a few dead flies escaped my vigilance, he picked them up with his fat fingers and stuck them under my nose, “And what’s this? Are you blind?” That summer, I had lost my balance after stepping on a piece of rotten roof, and my foot had gone right through it. Instead of worrying about me, he began yelling, loud enough to attract Gail’s attention. She came over from the garden and stared at us for a moment, perplexed, and my pride had been so hurt that I avoided her for the rest of the summer.

But that summer of 1962, everything had changed. I was a man — I believed I was — and my English was getting much better thanks to two winters working for McArdle.

Inside the clubhouse, Jean and Paul were waiting for me, greased hair, satin jackets and collars popped, simultaneously embarrassed and proud of their get-up. I had a seat reserved next to them, as usual. Françoise freed herself earlier than usual, waved her hand at me when I walked in, all excited like a little fat girl in a candy store.

“Sorry, boys. I want to be closer to the screen tonight.”

Jean and Paul looked at me, offended, as I continued on my way and sat in the third row, only a few seats away from Gail and Veronica McKay, my eager eyes on Gail. A few times, she turned her head towards me, small movements, a question in her eye, as if she felt spied on. I smiled at her, and she frowned. Maybe she didn’t recognize me in the darkness. Or she was looking for someone else.

We were all distraught at Plato’s death, played brilliantly by Sal Mineo. At the end of the movie, Gail, Veronica, and the other girls were wiping their eyes with tissues, teasing each other. The boys, meanwhile, dreamt of being those rebels with tortured souls, modern heroes far more attractive than their fathers’ and uncles’ great men of the war.

Nicholas Ray’s work filled me with a powerful feeling of failure. I had lost my chance when I abandoned the seminary. Too late now, I couldn’t go on to study like the characters in the film, or the kids of Métis Beach who were already in university or would soon be.

On the dew-covered lawn in front of the clubhouse, some of us walked in a veil of our own thoughts. In the gravel parking lot, motors were being revved up, and car headlights cut our silhouettes out of the surrounding night. Gail chatted away with Veronica McKay, her head still on a swivel as if she was looking for someone who hadn’t come. She seemed nervous, overexcited. Art Tees came to offer her something, and she spoke to him brusquely. He turned back and walked to his bottle-green MGA, looking vexed. You could see it by the way he jiggled his keys around his finger. After such a night, and such a movie, a boy rejected by a girl could do nothing but feel humiliated.

And yet I was walking towards her, my heart about to beat through my chest, my knees wobbling. As I got to her, I spoke breathlessly, “How’s university?”

She seemed insulted, all of a sudden, as if I was making fun of her. “I see you haven’t heard the latest news.”

Next to her, Veronica was ignoring me with awe-inspiring expertise, “You’ll come and get me after? I’ll be over there, with Johnny.” She pointed towards a group of kids smoking around Mrs. Babcock’s Mercedes. She disappeared and Gail straightened her arms before crossing them over her breasts. She clearly was in no mood to continue the conversation. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jean and Paul’s Rambler, with Françoise in the passenger seat, staring at me with her cow eyes, boiling over with blame.

I went on, “You’re not at school anymore? Why?”

Falsely enthusiastic, she answered, “I’m engaged, didn’t you know?” I hesitated, and she laughed, indignant, full of rage. She cursed her parents for forcing marriage on her only a few weeks past her eighteenth birthday, in October, with the heir to Drysdale Insurance, a certain Donald Drysdale. Everything organized already. A large, expensive wedding at the Montreal Ritz-Carlton; everybody would be there — all the richest families in the country, a few cabinet ministers, and even Frank Sinatra himself, who had agreed, for an indecent sum of money, to sing Love and Marriage. I felt my heart tearing.

“Great.”

“Great?” she said, disgusted. “My life is going to end! Gail Egan will cease to exist! I’ll be my husband’s wife and my children’s mother, like all the rest of these interchangeable women.”

“What about being a lawyer?”

She shuddered. “They don’t give a shit! A respectable woman stays at home, takes care of dinner parties, children, and the help.”

“Don’t get married, then. Marriage and children, it’s all a trap. Simone de Beauvoir said it herself. Have you read her?”

Her eyes narrowed. Those eyes shining such a strange light that night. She barked a laugh, “Who?”

“Simone de Beauvoir. She’s a feminist.”

“A what?”

“A feminist.”

An insane laugh, wild, as if she were looking at a donkey that had learned how to add and subtract. Hurt, I was about to turn around and leave, when Veronica called out to her, “Gail! I’m here!” She was seated in the sporty Mercedes next to Johnny Picoté, who looked like a grotesque rockabilly caricature with his ridiculous hair. An oily banana. He was taking Veronica home, or so we understood from Veronica’s shouts.

“Come on,” Gail said.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Who else?”

And I followed her through the parking lot, my heart tripping over itself in excitement. She told me to get into her mother’s convertible Alfa Romeo, started the engine, and accelerated, going through the gears with precision and confidence, as if she had long years of experience. She wasn’t a girl anymore, she was a woman now, with a woman’s body — I could see her thighs under her skirt that had hiked up a little, by accident or design I couldn’t know, and her firm, full breasts under a pale pink cardigan. Burning tension between my legs, an overpowering desire to touch her. She drove at top speed, her brow furrowed, her ponytail with its ends whitened by sun bouncing on the back of her neck. I didn’t know where she was taking me, and didn’t dare ask. Gail Egan! In a car with Gail Egan! Oh, the faces Jean, Paul, and Françoise made when we passed them on the clubhouse’s small gravel road. A flash of childish vanity filled me, the ardent belief that my life was now better than anything I could have dreamed of. I was becoming one of them, one of the kids of Métis Beach. Yes, I, Romain Carrier.

Gail turned left onto Beach Street. We sped past Clifford Wiggs’ property, and I thought of those two swans found dead in the pond early in the summer, and wondered what Gail would think if she knew what I knew. “Bang, bang. On the first shot,” Louis had told me. With arrows. Some thought it could be wild animals, but a wild animal didn’t leave perfectly round holes, and so Louis received a fair share of suspicion. In the end, there wasn’t much proof.

“But why?” I asked, shocked.

He lowered his eyes, wiped his nose with dirty fingers. “They treat men like animals and animals like men. They killed my father, I kill their animals.”

“And what does Wiggs have to do with your father?”

“He’s English. All English are guilty. If they ask you where I was yesterday, I was at your place, okay?” And two days later, when Frank Brodie, Métis Beach’s private policeman, came by my place, I lied, not knowing I’d come to regret it.

We passed John Kinnear’s church, and Gail yelled in the humid air, a sort of primal scream, filled with despair, that made me shudder. Insane, I thought. She’s completely insane. The speedometer kept climbing, and the car burning into the night vibrated on the slick road.

“Do you know how my mother’s selling the marriage, as if it were the most natural thing in the world?” She pinched her nostrils and took Mrs. Egan’s shrill tone, the voice of dinner parties and forced compliments, “My girl, you’ll see, with time, you’ll come to appreciate him. What’s more, you’ll live a life of even greater luxury than your mother! Can you believe it? You’ll be able to buy all the dresses you want, and go and get them in Paris! Oh, my girl, it’s wonderful!”

The Alfa Romeo peeled off Beach Street and raced down Highway 132.

“I envy you, Romain. I know you think your world is small and stifling, but you can leave it if you want, and that would be the best thing for you. You can hope for better. I can’t.”

I said nothing. I didn’t believe her. After a few miles she took a sharp right, climbed Lighthouse Road, and drove to the point that plunged down towards the sea, where the Métis Beach lighthouse stood guard. Gail parked the car a little further down — the tide was high that night — and turned the headlights off. Behind us were the homes of the two lighthouse keepers who spelled each other off, day and night, to keep it running.

The din of the waves crashed against the rocks. The stars in the sky looked like a dance floor. Gail took my hand, and we walked along the beach, avoiding tidal pools. My heart beat so hard I felt its tremor to my shoes. Incoherent, breathless, Gail spoke rapidly in a mix of French and English. She spoke of Don Drysdale whom she would marry, the marriage she didn’t want to a young man of twenty-four she had no interest in. She talked about the cock he would put in her, it would absolutely revolt her, she knew — and she knew because she’d already done it, or almost, with a boy “as nice as you are,” the brother of a friend of hers. It happened in their house in Westmount, her parents weren’t there, and the help would remain silent as usual, for fear of being accused of lying and getting fired. “The children are the bosses too, you understand?” That evening, her friend said she’d done it with the other boy who was there. “All … all the way?” Gail asked. Yes, all the way, but not Gail, she was naked in the brother’s room, but hadn’t been attracted enough to the nice boy to “let him put his … you know.” She spoke without modesty, seemingly filled with despair, tears of rage in her eyes mixed with something wild, something insane. She told more stories, unfinished and shocking, that embarrassed me to the point I doubted I’d actually heard her right. I was trying to think of the right way to kiss her when she grabbed me by the nape of the neck, forced my face against hers, her burning breath like a panting dog, and kissed me urgently, with her tongue.

The next day we learned what had happened to Johnny Babcock and Veronica McKay. On the 132, at the intersection of MacNider road, a car turned left, and the driver didn’t see the Mercedes coming at full speed. The steering column pierced his chest, and Veronica’s neck was broken.

That night, Métis Beach lost its colour as if it had been drained of its blood. Devastated, the Babcocks and McKays returned to Montreal, followed by other families who claimed they simply couldn’t continue enjoying the summer, not after such a tragedy. That night, while the mutilated bodies of Johnny Picoté and Veronica were being extracted from the wreck, the golden youth of Métis Beach were fast asleep, dreaming of the tortured heroes of Rebel Without a Cause. One scene in particular was likely running through their minds, the one where the end of the universe is explained as the anxious young men and women gaze at the celestial vault of the planetarium: “Earth will not be missed … the problems of Man seem trivial and naive indeed.… And Man, existing alone, seems to be an episode of little consequence.…”

The funerals were held ten days later in Montreal. All Métis Beach was there for a whole week of July which, for us inhabitants of the place, seemed as empty as the end of September. A few families returned, but it wasn’t the same — tennis courts remained deserted, boats sat on the shore with their sails lowered like beached whales. Even Mrs. Tees’ garden party was more intimate and sober than usual that summer.

I prayed — in a manner of speaking — that Gail would return. She had lit a fire in me, struck a match, and left me to deal with the consequences alone! A constant, burning heat, a pit in my stomach, and my mother’s suspicious glances when she rifled through my stuff. Once she threw a copy of National Geographic in my face — given to me by Old Man Riddington — because of two pictures of African women with bare breasts, “That’s what you’re really interested in, eh? Don’t tell me it isn’t.”

I’d become a ticking time bomb. An incurable agitation filled me, a tumult between my thighs, not like the pitiful, terrifying erections of my time at the seminary, quickly extinguished by guilt.

My prayers were answered. Gail returned a few days later with her parents, more fragile than before, her eyes strange and absent. She never spoke of the accident, and when the tennis tournament organized by the clubhouse was cancelled, she said with a small, almost cheerful voice, “Johnny would have won anyway, he wins every year,” as if he were still alive and it was all a bad joke, Johnny and Veronica would be back any Thursday now to watch a movie — though those too had been cancelled.

Gail ignored me for days at a time, then, without warning, she came to the store, “Is Romain in?” She dragged me to the beach, pulling at me with an impatient hand, and kissed me passionately, not caring at all if she was seen.

Sometimes she asked me over to the clubhouse to drink a Coke. Other times, if there were friends around, she could ignore me entirely. I simply didn’t understand.

Then she would be waiting for me in front of her house on Beach Street until I passed by, returning on my CCM from old Riddington’s place where I mowed the lawn under a steely sun, and she threw herself on me, sniffing my collar like a dog, apparently excited by the odour of fermented sweat that clung to me. I told her, “No, Gail, I’m disgusting.” But she continued, even if she knew we were being watched. She would kiss me with the same ardour as the first time, in the pressing urgency of someone waiting for her execution.

“She’s a fragile girl,” Dana warned me, with that air that parents take when they’re worried about their children. “The accident really rattled her. More than all of us. And her father is mad. Robert Egan is a vicious man we should all be careful of. Don’t forget it.”

Many of the kids in Métis Beach stood up to their parents, so why not Gail? Why hadn’t she said no to this marriage?

“Some people prefer to suffer than to disappoint others,” Dana said. “Advocating for themselves is too painful — it means risking someone’s contempt.”

But Gail hated her parents; she wanted nothing to do with their acceptance. “Oh, Romain, it’s more complicated than that, especially for a woman. Believe me.”

One day, in one of her agitated moments, Gail decided we should have a picture of us. She told me, her eyes feverish with a sudden passion that I was careful not to encourage, “When I’m married and bored to death, I’ll just look at the picture that I’ll hide somewhere he’ll never find, and it’ll be like a little victory. A victory for independence. Do you understand?”

She said we should ask Françoise to take the picture, and I quickly cut in, “No, Gail. Not Françoise.…”

She looked at me with a teasing glimmer in her eye. “It’s funny that a boy like you wouldn’t have more nerve.…” She ran up the stairs as if she had good news to give and made her way to the kitchen where Françoise was preparing supper. Her parents were out for a round of golf, and wouldn’t return until late in the afternoon. A few minutes later, she returned, pulling a sullen and stubborn Françoise. Gail would later tell me, “You should have heard her when she said, ‘You know what your parents think of you and Romain,’ the disgust in her face when she said that!” But Gail insisted, and even shouted, “Just a picture, damn it! Just one!” Françoise threw her apron on the counter and followed Gail into the garden — all the while grumbling — where I was waiting for them, as taut as a bow. Her eyes! As if she were saying, This will cost you dearly, Romain Carrier! You can count on it. Gail placed a small camera in her hand, a flat Minolta. “What do you want me to do with that?” In an equally dry tone, Gail answered, “Certainly not pies.” I barked a laugh. Furious, Françoise pressed the button, probably imagining it was a trigger. “Happy now?” With a heavy pace, she returned to the house.

By then I was rather nervous, and didn’t like what I was seeing from Gail. But I let myself be pulled into the garage anyway, where we began kissing. “If Françoise knew,” Gail said, her voice triumphant, “she’d be green with envy.” She imitated Françoise, mocking her fat behind. I didn’t find it funny. “Don’t worry, Romain. Nothing can happen to us here. We’re in another world, another galaxy. We could spend our lives here, living off motor oil and paint. She laughed then, and kissed me, her hands in my pants, in the dark and humid garage, among the disorder and the diesel fumes. I was dizzy, my heart beating quickly. Suddenly, I heard gravel spitting from under the Bentley’s wheels, “My parents?” Gail wheezed. I put my hand over her mouth, “Hush!”

Through the small windowpane we saw them walk into the house before immediately coming out again, led by Françoise, one hand pointing towards the garage. “There.” The hate I felt for her at that moment.... Followed by panic. There was nowhere to go.

“Hide!” Gail said. She pushed me behind a pile of garden chairs. Walking heavily, Robert Egan came down the driveway and pulled open the door with his powerful hand.

“I know you’re there. Come out, now!” His face purple with rage, his eyes popping, he held a golf club in his hand. He grabbed his daughter’s arm and squeezed hard enough to force a small squeal out of her, before slapping her in the face. He turned towards me and raised his club in the air, threatening to smash it on my head. I backed up, terrified, making a barrier of whatever I could get my hands on, tools and cans of paint, finally banging my elbows and knees against Mrs. Egan’s Alfa Romeo.

Gail was shouting, “Don’t hurt him! He did nothing!” But Robert Egan wasn’t listening. He cornered me between a paint-splashed stepladder and the sharp propeller of a boat engine. “No, Dad! No! Please!” Around us, objects of all kind were raining to the ground.

“My girl will marry, by God! Leave her alone!” His club whipped through the air, scratching Mrs. Egan’s car, which I managed to slip around, catching my feet in some empty bottles. I stepped through the broken glass and managed to leave the garage and run off, like a rabbit chased by a fox.

By the time I got home, my father was waiting for me. He already knew. Robert Egan hadn’t lost any time. My father jumped at me like a frothing animal. And he hit. His hard fist in my stomach, leaving me panting. “What got into you? You want to bring shame on us, is that it? What do we look like now, you…!” He was about to hit me again when my mother screamed so loudly that my father pushed her against a wall.

Straightening, searching for breath, I said, “Don’t touch my mother, you dirty.…” but my voice was no more than an inaudible cry among the cacophony of tears and shouts. “You’re done for in Métis Beach! I’m going to cancel all your contracts. We don’t want to see you back there, understand? You’ll keep a low profile for the rest of the summer, and after that we’ll see what happens!” They couldn’t ask that of me, it was too cruel. What would I do?

“We’ll see wha..?” my voice tapered out. “We’ll see what?” My father straightened, as if I’d hit him.

“Shut up!” He was about to grab my collar with his calloused hands, but I pushed him off me with my shoulder and got back up, challenging him with my newfound six feet of strength.

“You want to throw me out, is that it?” My mother, hysterical, began throwing dishes to the ground.

I looked at her one last time, then turned and ran down the stairs into the street, and ran as far and as fast as I could.