Читать книгу Métis Beach - Claudine Bourbonnais - Страница 9

Two hours late, I dropped Ann at the studio in La Brea, an anonymous white stucco building between a Taco Bell and a small shopping centre. Before the demonstrators began marching in front of it — there were only five that morning — no one knew that inside a TV show was being filmed. There were no signs with the It’s All Comedy! logo, only doors and mirrored windows to discourage curious passersby. The Bunker would have been inviolable if only the idiots hadn’t set their minds to bothering us.

As expected, Dick was raging when we arrived. On the set, a few of the actors — Avril Page, Bill Doran, Kathleen Hart, and Trevor Wheeler — stood at the end of the set, in silence, coffees in hand, while cameramen and technicians busied themselves, pulling cables, adjusting the lighting for the umpteenth time. With an expansive, angry gesture, Dick encompassed them all. “You know how much these delays cost me? I’m not a fucking bank!”

Ann walked towards Dick, trying to calm him. Dick was short, brown, and as impulsive as a southern Italian; he was also practically bald, and his fingers were like sausages. Ann told him about Gail, and he grumbled a few ill-intentioned apologies (for Dick, it was always business first, before family drama and death) and told me, without looking at me, “The scene, you haven’t forgotten about it, right? We’re going to do as we said we would. Whether you’re there or not.” And Matt appeared, a New York Knicks cap on his head, a New Yorker with whom I shared a number of affinities. He was six feet at least, no more than an inch taller than me, with brown hair and a quick wit. From time to time we would be mistaken for brothers, though he was younger than me, and larger. The Knicks cap on his head wasn’t just for show; he wasn’t like those fat sedentary guys who spend their time drinking beer, never far from the ball cap of their favourite team. Matt had actually played basketball, and at a pretty decent level, with the Red Storm of St. John’s University, Queens. Each season he’d played with the team, they’d won four times as many games as they’d lost. He had Irish roots and the same Catholic education I did. And with this education came our shared aversion for what the church had tried to stuff down our throats — hell and all the nonsense on masturbation, the usual bullshit. So we felt the same pleasure in making In Gad, as if we were taking revenge on the era we were born in, thinking of the shy, inhibited boys we’d been, thankful at having lived through it without too much lasting damage. After all, many of our generation had never had an opportunity to break the shackles of their atavism, the chance to free themselves and laugh about the whole thing — laugh about the whole thing on TV.

Matt would take care of Trevor. I regretted not being able to settle the problem myself, even if I had total confidence in Matt. He had tact, he was a team player, like in his days with the Red Storm, and Ann would reinforce the message, “A small modification. No, not censorship, why would you even think that?” And Matt might toss out one of his theories about film direction, one that fitted with his former basketball career — intensity, look, and physical presence often more important than the text itself.

After all, I’d be gone for only a day or so.

I was about to kiss Ann and head for the exit when Dick caught me by the sleeve and said, as if uttering a threat, though his eyes were filled with compassion, “Don’t come back depressed, okay?”

Los Angeles International Airport. On a Monday morning. Filled with businessmen and tourists. A group of young nuns caught my eye, Latinas mostly, and I asked myself whether, in their congregation, they ever prayed that In Gad might be removed from the airwaves. One of them smiled at me, a mouth full of small white teeth, a kindly smile I tried to return. Why would such young women become nuns in 1995? The newspapers had written, in reference to In Gad, that in Hollywood, film and TV people had this idea that Christians were potentially dangerous citizens, fanatics — a misconception created out of a total misunderstanding of the values of a large portion of the population. All part of the culture wars. There might be some truth in that, though who was I to say? I made my way to the American Airlines counter, as usual. The girl there recognized me, “New York?”

“No, Montreal.”

She seemed caught off guard, though kept smiling. “First time there?”

“Yes,” I lied, to end the conversation.

A ticket to Chicago, then Montreal. Take-off in thirty minutes, no luggage.

Thirty-three thousand feet in the air, flying to another country, mine, I guess, a country I had fled in complicated circumstances in 1962. The question hit me suddenly: had I ever loved Gail Egan? I remember this one time in Métis Beach, after an afternoon spent at the Riddingtons’ home with my father, destroying a nest of carpenter ants and replacing a portion of the rotten railing that they had colonized. After, my old man had driven back home in our Chevrolet Bel Air, one hand out the window, letting me pedal back home on the brand new bicycle my mother had given me at the beginning of the summer, making me swear I’d take care of it “just like Dad does with his Chevrolet.” I was thirteen and finally tasting newfound freedom on my new bicycle, wandering about as I pleased in Métis Beach, carefully watching the properties with their cars in their large gravel driveways, hoping beyond hope to hear a shout from the other side of that border. Come on, Romain! Come play with us! A fool’s hope.

The young people of Métis Beach never saw us unless we were with our fathers, repairing something or other in their homes; for them, we were some sort of subspecies, perhaps even untouchables, Dalits. They couldn’t even imagine spending time with us.

At least that’s how I saw things. How I interpreted their cold indifference.

Flying along on my new red bicycle with white mud guards, I saw her walking along Beach Road, tennis racket in hand, looking lithe, self-aware, already conscious of her beauty, in short white shorts, far too short for the French Village, fine thighs, tanned, very tanned. I followed her at a distance, full of pride on my new racer, as proud as those vacationers from Métis Beach who paraded the beautiful cars they had received for their sixteenth birthday. My brand new CCM bicycle! None of those cheap brands that you found in low-cost bike shops, imported from Czechoslovakia, a Communist country as poor as its people, sad like the eyes of children condemned to ride around on terrible bicycles.

Unknown to her, I was riding behind her, zigzagging carefully so as not to put my feet on the ground, carving into my mind every detail of her, my head churning wild thoughts, guilty ones: her sculpted calves, firm thighs, the bulge there, just over the thigh, inside.…

“Gail, look who’s following you!”

Johnny Picoté Babcock. Came out of nowhere. His redhead face, splashed with rust. Gail had whipped around brusquely, forcing me to brake hard, and I almost flipped over my handlebars. Johnny Picoté burst out laughing, and went on aggressively, “What the hell are you doing, eh?” I mumbled something like, “Rien … Nothing.” And he walked towards my bicycle, a malicious grin on his lips, his fist closed around a rock he dragged across my mud guards, a scratch some four inches long that was like a knife in my side, a sharp pain that reached all the way to my heart. Gail said, “Leave him alone, he doesn’t speak English.” It wasn’t entirely true. I understood quite a few words, and could even speak a few of them, including some pretty complicated ones: lawn mower, rake, shovel, gutter. Spending so much time with the English, I ended up learning a few of their words. Red with shame and anger, I got back on my CCM and was about to go on my way, when Johnny Picoté Babcock planted himself in front of me. Like the bad guys in a Western, he gave me a long, hard stare, the sort that says, next time, you won’t get off so easy. I understood then that I would never be able to rival the boys of Métis Beach.

Sure, it was pretty early to be asking the flight attendant for a drink, but I did anyway, a screwdriver in a tiny plastic glass. From the seat next to me, a woman of forty, quite pretty and clearly in shape, threw me an amused grin, So early? Afraid of flying? I thought back to that time, long ago now, when Dick had tried his hand at political analysis, pitching the line that the Watergate scandal was not as bad as the media were trying to make it seem. I asked him, surprised, “You’ve never been to Washington? Or New York?” He avoided the question by mumbling something about Woody Allen, “Allen Stewart Konigsberg, that’s his real name, you knew that, didn’t you?” I hadn’t known it. “That shuts you up, right? Well, there’s no need to go to New York to know that.” In the end he admitted, defeated, that he had a phobia about air travel. “I envy depressed people. I hear when they take a plane, they don’t care whether it crashes or not.”

Dear Dick. The prototypical American who’d succeeded, comfortable in his own skin, and totally uncaring about the rest of the world, which he only half-assedly understood. He’d never been farther from California than Las Vegas, though that didn’t stop him from loudly proclaiming his opinions on the rest of the planet, and mocking my “Canadian origins.” This other time, we thought we’d seen Paul Anka at Spago, a fine dining place in West Hollywood, and I mentioned he was Canadian. He went off on a grotesque tirade, his words tumbling over one another in an almost incoherent mess thanks to the martinis he’d swallowed, “Ah, Canadians! Insipid and immature, just like their national symbols!”

I said, irritated, “You’re trying to insult me?”

“Insult you? It’s the truth, Canuck! What the hell! Beavers and mounted police about as dangerous as a horde of prepubescent girls? If you wanna be respected in the world, you’ve got to be feared! Give it up! Now, think about virile and ruthless animals like our eagle! Think about the chiselled chins on our sheriffs and our Marines! Come on, even your soldiers prefer to release doves into the wild than shoot clay pigeons!” His mouth full, his fork aimed at me, “Never forget — trying to be loved at any cost, goddamn it, that’s for wimps!” Then, wiping his chin with his napkin, “We should’ve given you political asylum when you came over, Roman, freaking political asylum.”

After a four-hour layover in Chicago and a two-hour flight, I reached Montreal in the middle of the evening, dead tired. Jack’s call early that morning, a lost day in flight and here I was in this deserted airport, scattered customs people with their sombre faces, and a certain unexplained tension, as if the world outside was on curfew. I saw the occasional traveller, looking tense, standing around television sets in the rest areas and restaurants, and couldn’t quite see what was fascinating them. Nothing had attracted my attention in Los Angeles or Chicago. The Braves had won the World Series two days earlier. Maybe Canadian football? Hockey? It seemed early in the season to be so interested. But perhaps people were bored to death in Montreal.

In the taxi on the way to the hospital, the radio so loud it gave me a headache, I realized to my great shame the extent to which I’d become so witlessly American. “Americans, ignorant?” Dick would say. “Why take the time to interest ourselves in what other people are doing, when their single burning ambition is to imitate us?”

At the Montreal General Hospital, crowds gathered around television screens. On every floor, rooms flickering with the bluish lights of screens, from which could be heard rousing music interspersed with cries of Yes! and No! sung like joyous refrains, filled with optimism. What a strange time Gail had chosen.

“I knew you’d come. Thank you.”

I pushed the door open, my heart beating with apprehension, the shock even greater than I anticipated, but before letting myself feel any of it, to postpone the terrible moment, my eyes turned to Jack, a man of fifty or so, his face lined by fatigue, shoulders slumped, salt and pepper hair. Facing the bed, a small television was on, but without sound, only images. Gail was either staring at some blank spot on the wall or sleeping, it was hard to say; she was extremely thin. I searched for signs of flesh beneath the sheets. To avoid crushing her, I passed my hand over the sheet before sitting down next to her.

“Romain...?”

I couldn’t speak. I was paralyzed. She continued, her face the colour of chalk, “Comment … tu es?”

How are you, comment tu es. Her broken French hadn’t changed.

“I should be asking you that question.”

She raised her shoulders, a hint of a smile that seemed to say, Oh, I’m done for, the question is barely worth asking, followed by another smile, this one courageous; she wouldn’t accept me pitying her. “You think this time is the right one, for you, Quebeckers?”

The Quebec referendum on sovereignty, live on television. She was about to die and was thinking about politics. I said, not knowing what to answer, “I don’t know, I hear it’s tight.”

“So, it was a good idea to vote by … how do you say it in French again?”

“Par anticipation,” Jack said.

“Right. That way, before dying, I might change the course of things. So that we stay together.”

Why did she insist on speaking to me in French in the state she was in? Even I was tongue-tied in French, words coming to me slowly.

My throat tightened. She coughed, a wheeze to break your heart. Jack came nearer to her, and wet her withered lips with a small moist sponge, before she fell into somnolence again, the effect of morphine, no doubt.

Seeing her so fragile, so close to the end, a wave of guilt overcame me, whose origins I couldn’t pinpoint. Guilty for what? For having been the one who burned the last bridge. Forgetting, here and now before such sadness, that there had been a reason for it, yes, a reason.

“Can you stay … just a little longer.…?” Slowly, she opened her eyes. “Do you know where I wish I could be now? Do you remember.…?”

Her unfocused eyes staring off in the distance, perhaps remembering her parents’ great wooden house, in Métis Beach, the happy childhood she had before she became a young woman to be married off. The unforgettable summers, from St. Jean Baptiste Day to Labour Day, long days in the sun and the tennis courts and the sea in small dinghies, wind in their sails. Campfires and roasted marshmallows, scary stories the kids told each other while the adults drank inside. The films shown on Thursday evenings at the clubhouse, classics with Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, James Dean, and Natalie Wood. Cokes sipped on the deck of Little Miami, the incredible view you had there when the sun set. The long drives on winding roads, hair in the wind, in one of the Tees boys’ sports car — though Gail had never had any affection for the “trouble-makers, deadheads, and daddy’s boys who thought they could do what they wanted.” Carefree days, a summer camp, where the young ones in Métis Beach had nothing to do but have fun, and ignore the responsibilities they would later acquire, when they became lawyers and businessmen, while we, in the French Village, would continue to work hard, bending passively to the whims of our parents, waiting without illusions for the monotonous life that was preordained.

Gail moved slowly, as Jack looked on. She lolled, almost as if nodding, and Jack helped her up in her bed, placing a pillow against her back. Shoulders bent, he left the room and returned immediately with a burly young man, reddish brown hair, my height. A nervous type, briefcase under his arm. Gail’s face brightened. Who was this man? A mastodon, really, at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He walked towards me and offered me a moist hand, as Gail introduced us in such a hushed voice we could barely understand, “Romain, this is Len Albiston … Len, Romain Carrier.…” Then Jack took over, and gave an embarrassed, hazy explanation — Len was a reporter, he worked for the Calgary Herald; he was in Montreal to cover the Quebec referendum.…

All well and good, but what was he doing in this hospital room? Why introduce him to me now?

Gail seemed to have read my thoughts. She spoke, her voice barely audible, “I know, Romain … It’s a strange moment.…” Len’s face reddened so suddenly that I began thinking unpleasant thoughts.

Suddenly tense, I said, “Gail?”’ Then turning towards Jack, “What does all this mean?”

Jack raised his shoulders, helpless. “Be patient. She’ll explain.”

After, I couldn’t remember how it was told to me. Gail had become animated all of a sudden, a sort of miracle, her eyes full of life, her voice energized. Len had stood in the corner of the room, shooting anxious glances at the television, raising the sound a little. He had an article to write for the next morning, and it was late, past ten, in strange and painful circumstances, but he was a professional, a conscientious journalist who was the pride of his … mother?

“My son, Romain. Our son. Summer of ’62.”

Len’s cheeks burned. This young man who seemed to have no connection to me, my son? My heart beating, I was too stunned to speak, too shaken to know whether I should even speak. Gail? What did you just say?

She gave Len a relieved look, and her face softened with a glow of serene resignation that the dying have when all of life’s files are finally closed. You see, Len. It’s done, it’s done.

What was I supposed to say to that? Wonderful! Or, Come here, my boy!

Embarrassed, Len looked at his watch, then went through his pockets and pulled his wallet out, from which appeared a card, his business card. He handed it to me, hands shaking. He had to leave and make his way to the Yes camp’s headquarters before the speeches, before the results. He went to Gail, took both her hands and kissed her on her forehead, the sort of kiss that people who love each other give. He seemed to know, somehow, that she wouldn’t be there anymore when he was done with his article. He was overflowing with emotion, tears in his eyes, the way he took Jack in his arms and, finally, the way he shook my hand, saying that he’d like to see me again, for lunch, maybe, but not now because he was so busy and he had to return to Calgary, but maybe in a few weeks. He’d come to L.A. if I wanted him to. And that was that. He took his raincoat, put his briefcase under his arm, and walked out.

I took my head in my hands. Why had she hidden this from me for all these years? Yes, why, Gail?

The strange vitality that had filled her was gone. Sudden pain contorted her face. Worried, Jack pressed a button that alerted a young nurse. Another dose of morphine, and the lines in Gail’s face were soothed.

On the television, talking heads babbled away. Then, shouts of joy from one side of the question — the game was over.

Through the window, day would come soon, autumn light would illuminate the city. Montreal, a battleground, its streets filled with election signs like so many abandoned flags.

A weary feeling overtook me — the love of my youth had died, and I was the father of a complete stranger.