Читать книгу Métis Beach - Claudine Bourbonnais - Страница 7

Gail would say, “Some people are born in the wrong country, like others are born with the wrong sex.”

Very early she’d put her finger on the source of my anguish. I was in the first category; she was in the second. Not that she would have liked to be a man, no, only that she wanted to have been born a few years later, when women were able to choose their lives — have a career or choose to be mothers, marry or not.

Words that were disarmingly sincere coming from the mouth of a young girl, spoken with a mix of lucidity and resignation, as only adults know how to do, when grave crises appear. But we were too young to be that lucid, we were only seventeen (I was four months younger than she), and miserable. It might have been the only two things that united us, really — besides the dream of living a life far from our parents — because in the end, we came from such different worlds.

You should have seen Métis Beach back then. Métis Beach and its satellite, our village, that the English called the French Village. A traveller passing through would forget it before the dust had time to settle in his wake. A series of modest wooden structures, covered in asbestos shingles. Tiny lawns dotted with sickly bushes, beaten down by the wind coming off the river that was so wide here it was called the sea. Rue Principale and its few shops. There was Mode pour toute la famille, my mother’s store, which we lived above; Quimper’s general store, which doubled as the post office; a bakery, Au Bon Pain Frais; and finally Leblond cobblers. The caisse populaire had its counter at Joe Rousseau’s place, a small white house at 58 Rue Principale, with no sign. (We used to say he’d hit it big, Joe Rousseau, since his rent, electricity, and heat were all paid by the government.) There was the “modern” church and presbytery, built in 1951. And Loiseau’s garage that held the limousines for all of the rich English from Métis Beach in the summer. Bentleys, Cadillacs, Lincoln Continental Mark IIs, and Chrysler Imperials. Black and shiny like seal skin, beautiful cars with gleaming chrome like in the movies, with the drivers in their dark suits, their caps raised on their foreheads when they were off-duty, having a drink at Jolly Rogers on Route 6, today called the 132, before returning to their tiny and badly ventilated rooms over Loiseau’s garage. They dressed sharply, but weren’t of the elegant class that stayed in the grand hotels of Métis Beach.

Métis Beach was to the west, at the very end of Rue Principale. Rue Principale turned into Beach Street — the same street, like an airplane that would bring you from a dull, gloomy country to another place, a shining paradise. You didn’t need a border or a gate to know you were moving into a foreign place. The hundred-year-old pines and spruce, the cedar rows, told you that much. Through them you could see verdant lawns decorated with massive rosebushes, and great summer homes all made of wood with tennis courts beside them. Lives of luxury, sports cars, and endless garden parties. Playing golf till sunset. In Métis Beach, tea time would end well before four o’clock, whisky was poured freely, sometimes as early as noon. We watched them with envy, all the way till Labour Day, when they left in the soft sunlight of early September, with the children and the maids. It would then be my father’s job, as well as the other men’s in the village, to take care of their homes, shutting off the electricity and the gas, purging water from the pipes, and covering up the windows with wooden boards for the winter to come.

Gail’s house, the Egan house, was my father’s responsibility.

Strangely, I can’t remember ever having envied their wealth. It was their freedom I envied, that arrogant freedom. Art and Geoff Tees were two of them, often seen at the wheel of their convertible MGAs (bottle green for Art, red for Geoff), the radio spitting out wild rock music. You could see them driving full speed on the 132, cigarette at their lips, beer bottle in their hands — they were barely sixteen for God’s sake! — accompanied by their girlfriends from Montreal who came to spend their summers in Métis Beach — it was said that they slept with them, in the same bed! The sort of behaviour you’d only see among the English. Among our Protestant neighbours. Where apparently they spoke freely of condoms and tampons, while in the French Village, we didn’t even know such things existed.

Their existence was an itch we’d have to scratch our whole lives until it bled. Unless we left.

The last time we saw each other was in December of 1986. Gail knew I was passing through New York. Her husband had an accountant’s meeting in Union City, New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson, and she’d come with him. She’d phoned me in L.A. I was surprised and thought it might be my friend John Kinnear in Métis Beach who’d given her my number, and perhaps John had even told her I’d be in New York that week. I can’t remember, but I’d been surprised, very surprised. “Romain, it would be nice, no? For lunch?” And I hesitated before answering. We had left each other on bad terms years before, and I still felt she’d stolen something from me. I had the feeling I’d been betrayed by her, that I’d been unable to help her — to save her. “Lunch?” I thought for a moment, yes, no … perhaps my friend Moïse might join us? It might be more pleasant. “Moïse?” Surprise in her voice, perhaps disappointment. “Yes, of course. I haven’t seen him in such a long time. It would be great.” And so we made plans for Zack’s, a deli on the Lower East Side. Moïse had gotten there a good half-hour late, covered in snow, breathless as if he’d run across Manhattan. We laughed, Moïse and I, but not Gail, she barely smiled. She was wearing a dress from another time, her eternal shawl draped across her shoulders as if in a perpetual state of hypothermia, throwing disgusted glances at the salamis that hung from the ceiling like stalactites. She sighed with irritation at the impassioned conversation Moïse and I began about the scandal of the hour, Irangate, which had sullied Reagan’s presidency. To distract herself, she began tearing the labels off our bottles of Beck’s.

“Are you okay, Gail? Everything’s good on your end?” She had little to tell us. Her home in Baie-D’Urfé, the animal rights organizations she was volunteering with. When it came time to order, she dug her heels in, “No vegetarian dishes?” In the end she had a tomato salad, barely ripe, their hearts still white, and mineral water. She pecked at her food, a hand gripping the shawl around her small breasts, throwing haughty looks at our plates full of pastrami.

“You keep going like this, boys, and you’ll be dead at fifty.”

What had I felt? Pity. Pity and a little anger. I was wondering why she’d come to see me. What was the point? After a taxi dropped all three of us at Rockefeller Center, we began walking towards the New York Times building where Moïse worked. A fine but abundant snow was falling over the city, its chaos now muted like a mountain in winter. Moïse was playing the fool, catching snowflakes on his tongue, and Gail walked ahead of us, head down, splitting the crowd like a ship racing for port after months of hard sailing. I escorted her to her hotel near Broadway. What could we say to each other? Between us, there was the weight of the separation for which she was ultimately responsible. She had behaved reprehensibly, egotistically. And we both feared our words would wake the monsters of our shared past. The events of summer 1962 had shattered our lives, marking us for the rest of our days, though it had affected Gail even more than me, I would come to discover.

She said, shame-faced, absorbed by the tip of her boot drawing strange shapes on the snowy sidewalk, “Well, see you next time.”

“See you next time.…”

I remember the small furtive pecks we gave each other on our frozen cheeks, then her hand buried in a large mitten pushing the woollen hat she wore down over her sad eyes. Forty-two years old, lost in a man’s coat, successive layers of shawls and scarfs, she looked like one of those students in Washington Square who found their clothes in an Army surplus store on Canal Street.

After that I wouldn’t see her again. It had been my choice, my decision. Turn the page for good.