Extreme Vinyl Café (12 page)

After all, is there anything more pleasant, or more reassuring, than an afternoon at Petit Lac Noir? Marie-Josée on the chaise longue, reading
Marie Claire
and sipping homemade lemonade; Jean-François trimming the front lawn. The lawn his great-grandfather planted and cared for— keeping it up is Jean-François’ pride and joy.

T
hat’s how they spent the last Saturday of this August. Most of it, anyway. Jean-François puttering in the shed, Marie-Josée reading magazines, although after lunch Marie-Josée did set Jean-François to work in the garden, a huge bed of wildflowers that stretches right across the front of the cottage.

“I want it looking its very best,” she said. “
Mais oui!
Remember who is coming.”

They were expecting guests. A younger couple whom they befriended years ago and hadn’t seen in … could it be that long.
Ce n’est pas possible
… a decade?

At five o’clock precisely, Jean-François came in, took off his gardening gloves and said, “
Eh ben
.”

Marie-Josée glanced at the clock over the kitchen door. It was time for his Saturday swim. Jean-François has a dip every Saturday at five—until the Saturday after Labour Day, when he folds his trunks and puts them away until St-Jean Baptiste.

She smiled at him and reached out and touched his face. The scars on his cheek were raised and a little inflamed.

It was hot. He had been working hard. She kissed him on the forehead and said, “
Je pense que je te joindrai
.”

T
he scars were one of the great lessons in Jean-François’ life. He got them in an altercation with a deranged cockatoo.

For the first ten years of his practice, he didn’t treat birds at his clinic. But after a protracted campaign waged by his receptionist, an impatient and flighty girl, he relented and agreed to treat the cockatoo, the first and last bird he ever admitted.

He had stayed late, as was his habit on a Tuesday night, Tuesday night being the night he does the books. So he was, as fate would have it, without backup when he went down to the basement to check the assorted dogs, cats, rodents and the solitary bird, which appeared to be going bald, losing feathers to some unknown malaise.

He was holding the cockatoo up to his face, and whispering to it in that ridiculous baby style that birds seem to encourage, thinking while he did that he might have been too inflexible about birds, that perhaps his receptionist had been right all along and he should consider apologizing, and wondering what he might possibly say to
her
, when the cockatoo abruptly
turned and said something to
him
that sounded disturbingly adult. Something you would never hear in a church.

And then the bird sank his beak into Jean-François’ cheek and wouldn’t let go. Or perhaps couldn’t.

Both Jean-François and the cockatoo panicked when they realized what had happened, and the two of them began flapping wildly, the bird shredding Jean-François’ cheek with his claws. Until Jean-François realized panic wasn’t going to get him anywhere, and he stumbled into the O.R., grabbed a needle that he had prepared for the next day’s surgery and plunged it into the bird’s back, anesthetizing it. Then he drove himself to Emergency at Hotel-Dieu with the drugged cockatoo dangling from his face like an earring.

This was over thirty years ago.

The intern who removed the bird still tells the story at dinner parties.

“I thought the guy was crazy,” he will begin. “He was barely coherent. He was screaming, ‘It’s going to wake up. It’s going to wake up.’

“I said, ‘That parrot isn’t going to wake up. That parrot is dead.’

“‘No. No,’ he said. ‘It’s just resting.’”

Over the years the doctor has embellished the story, of course.

“It was a huge parrot,” he says, holding his hands about two feet apart. “And it was dangling from his cheek. At first I thought it was jewellery. But it was a parrot.”

These days, in his version the bird does wake up halfway through the operation and there is a heroic struggle.

In fact
, the bird slept through it all. In fact, even after he had removed it, the intern still believed the bird was stuffed, or dead, and he had put it down on a shelf, and he was stitching up Jean-François when the bird did wake. The rest is more or less true the way he tells it—he and Jean-François trapped in the triage with this crazed and angry cockatoo dive-bombing them, the three of them crashing about, and the large nurse from the Gaspé who burst in and grabbed the cockatoo right out of the air, like it was nothing more than a fly and snapped its neck.

Jean-François’ wound got infected and healed poorly. And he learned his lesson. It wasn’t a new one. More a confirmation than a lesson, really. But there you have it. Plain as day. Change never led to any good. From then on he stuck to dogs and cats. He went to the cottage on the weekends, and to Old Orchard Beach in Maine every July.

The scars slowly faded with the years, and these days only announce themselves when Jean-François is tired or upset. He does his best to avoid both.

D
ave met Jean-François the summer after he and Morley were married. They met when Dave and Morley rented a cottage just down the road from the Cléments. That was the summer Dave and Morley had already spent what little vacation money they had on a trip to Holland. They had flown there for a weekend in February so Morley could fulfill one of her lifetime dreams and skate along the frozen canals.

Dave heard about it—the cottage down the road from the Cléments’ place—from an old friend in Montreal.

“You’d love it there,” he said. “No one will bother you, and it would be cheap.”

This was, as I said, a summer when cheap was important.

His friend called back a week later. “You can have it for free,” he said. “All you have to do is a few chores.”

“Cool,” said Dave.

T
hey left at the beginning of August, in Morley’s old orange and white Volkswagen van. The trip took almost ten hours. They went along old Highway 7, stopping every couple of hours—for coffee, for a swim; at a cheese factory outside of Perth; for cheeseburgers at a little stand in the middle of nowhere. They shared the driving, the way they shared just about everything in those days. They crossed the Ottawa River at Hawkesbury and from there rattled north onto Highway 329 and into the grey-blue Laurentians.

As they pulled in to Notre-Dame des Plaines, Van Morrison was cranked on the cassette deck, “Brown Eyed Girl,” and Dave was pounding the steering wheel in time to the music. Morley was squinting at a piece of paper.

“Okay,” she said, reaching out and turning the music down. “It says to make the following turns:
à gauche, à gauche, à droite
.”

Dave said, “Huh?”

Morley said, “That means left, left, right …
right
?”

“Right,” said Dave.

“Right,” said Morley. “But not right away.
Gauche, gauche
, then right.”

“Right,” said Dave.

“But first left, left,” said Morley.

“Then right … right?” said Dave.

“Right,” said Morley.

This went on for several minutes more than it should have, and they were feeling pretty goofy as they passed the gas station, and the general store, and the white church, and eventually pulled onto a dirt road with a bunch of cottages.

The road had two ruts down each side and a strip of grass down the middle. It was narrow enough that tree branches were brushing the side of the van. Dave slapped the steering wheel and cranked the music back up.

“This is going to be great,” he said.

They passed a few cottages and then saw the lake for the first time and a small, neat cottage with pale blue trim.

“Well, that was easy,” said Dave as he pulled in to the driveway.

Easy until they lifted the welcome mat and there was no key where the key was supposed to be. Morley stood there for a moment, looking around, and then she slid her hand under a planter on the step beside the mat. She smiled.
There
was the key.

The house was in much better shape than Dave had been led to believe. It was old, to be sure, but not rundown like his friend had warned. It was clean and neat and just about perfect.

“There’s a wood stove,” said Dave. “This is perfect.”

Dave’s friend had sent them a note explaining what they were expected to do in exchange for their free rent: take down the little wall between the kitchen and the living room and dig up the grass lawn so the owners could put in a garden.

“You think this is the wall they want down?” said Morley. She was pointing at the door between the kitchen and dining room.

Dave shrugged. They had a week. Time enough for work tomorrow.

“I’ll get the bags,” said Dave.

They found a bedroom and changed into their bathing suits. They headed across the lawn to the lake.

Morley said, “That’s where they want the garden, I guess.”

“Et voilà,” said Dave.

They stood at the end of the dock gazing out at the lake. Then Morley touched him on the back and dove without testing the water. She dove clean and straight and flat. When she came up, her long hair was floating behind her. It was the first time Dave had seen her in water. The first time they had swum together.

She turned and flicked her hair and looked back. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

Dave stuck his foot in the lake and yanked it out.

“It’s freezing,” he said.

T
uesday they slept until ten, had a big breakfast on the porch, went swimming, ate lunch on the dock, read on the dock and napped on the dock. Morley was reading Alice Munro for the first time in her life. Dave was reading
Rolling Stone
.

After supper they went for a walk further down the road. All the way to the end where a little stream flowed into the lake.

They talked about each cottage they passed; some in good repair, a few neglected; one with a sagging moss-covered roof, one a brand-new A-frame that seemed glaringly out of place.

“I like ours the best,” said Morley.

O
n Wednesday morning Morley made pancakes. They ate them on the porch. After they had cleaned up she said, “We should get to it.”

Taking down a wood wall in an unfinished cottage shouldn’t be too complicated. Dave began slowly and carefully, standing on a chair, gently prying the tongue-and-groove wallboards free with a hammer. By late afternoon, covered in sweat, his patience spent, he was stripped to the waist, ripping down the wall with a crowbar he had found in the woodshed.

While Dave attacked the wall, Morley was working on the garden.

“How big do you think they want it?” she asked.

Morley, still in her twenties, had never done any gardening in her life. She considered the lawn for a while and then marked out a rectangular bed that ran along the front of the house. She wasn’t surprised that they wanted the grass out. It was so incongruous: The cottage had a woodsy feel to it; the lawn was as manicured as a putting green, flat, spongy and soft. Morley used an axe to hack out large chunks of grass. Then she pried the sod loose and stacked it at the end of the driveway.

Morley was finished in a couple of hours. She put the axe down and went inside and made lunch.

They ate on the dock again. When they had cleaned up, Morley stared at her garden and decided it wasn’t big enough. She got the axe and ripped up another section of lawn. By supper, she had pulled up about a third of the grass.

“What do you think?” she said.

Dave thought she had made the garden way too big. He didn’t say that, however.

“Good,” he said. “It’s good. It looks great.”

Things were not looking great inside.

Halfway through the afternoon, Dave had uncovered a brick chimney. He had found a sledgehammer in the shed, and he had been going at the chimney for over two hours. It looked as if someone had lobbed a small explosive into the kitchen.

“This wasn’t the way it was described to me,” muttered Dave at eight on Friday morning.

They had been up since seven. For the second day running, Morley had set an alarm. They were leaving the next day. It was only eight and Dave was already sweating and covered in the brick dust which hung in the air of the cottage like smoke. But he was getting close. With any luck the chimney would be down by noon.

This
was the day they met Jean-François and Marie-Josée.

A
s Dave and Morley hammered away at the kitchen, Jean-François and Marie-Josée were driving back from their two weeks in Maine.

As usual they were coming directly to their cottage to spend the last two weeks of their vacation at the lake. As they rolled up the autoroute, and the blue Laurentian Mountains rose up in front of them, Jean-François was having the same conversation they have every year. Mostly with himself.

“Well, that was nice,” he said.

Marie-Josée nodded, unconvincingly.

“But,” he added, “it’s good to be home.”

As they crested the big hill and began their descent into Notre-Dame des Plaines, Marie-Josée was staring out the car window, feeling a little desperate. They were going to spend
the rest of the month at the lake, the exact same month she had lived through every year. She knew exactly how it was going to go.

On Monday mornings Jean-François would mow the lawn.

“The dandelions are terrible this year,” he would say.

On Tuesdays, they would drive into Saint-Sauveur for groceries. Wednesdays was laundry. Thursdays they would barbecue. On Fridays, take a bike ride along the old Loken Trail.

At 2:30 each afternoon, they would swim. At nine o’clock Jean-François would pour their final glass of wine. At eleven o’clock, lights out. It was like summer camp, except there wouldn’t be one solitary surprise. Not one unexpected moment.

I should get him a whistle, she thought.

“
Pardon?
” said Jean-François.

W
hen he turned the station wagon into their driveway, Marie-Josée blinked. She stared at the house and then at her husband.

Jean-François had gone completely slack-jawed.