My October (14 page)

There were no parking spots near the house on Laporte Street, so Luc had to circle the block to the other side of the park. The instant he was out of the car, he walked away. No explanation, no goodbye. He could feel Hannah's eyes on his back, but he didn't care. He was too angry to deal with her right now. Or with her lying son. As he walked, he became aware of something lumpy in his pocket. He reached in and pulled out a dollar-store key ring, a die made of silver-painted plastic attached to a flimsy chain with a single key on it. His new landlord—the fat man, Gagnon—had given it to him with the key. As Luc turned it over in his hand, he felt a rush. Hannah and Hugo were too far behind him to see it, and even if they had, they wouldn't have known what it was. It was small and secret, and that only added to the pleasure.

10

D
r. Mandelbaum's office was on Sainte-Catherine Street in lower Westmount. Hannah must have passed this building a hundred times and never noticed it. An art gallery occupied the first floor. Hannah and Hugo were standing in front of its shiny window, waiting for Luc, whom they hadn't seen since last Thursday's hearing at the school. Five days. They had spoken three times during this period over the phone. Each time, he was the one who made the call—from a pay phone, with an ocean-roar of traffic in the background.

The first call had come Friday morning, the day after the hearing. She had been up all night, waiting and wondering, and then, at ten thirty in the morning, just as she was about to go to bed, the telephone had rung. No explanation. No apology. She had been too distraught to demand either.

The second call had come Sunday night. Luc had learned from Serge Vien that Hugo would not be expelled. He was safe. The school, Luc informed her, would phone her officially with the verdict sometime Monday. The boy who had sold Hugo the
gun would be thrown out. It turned out this boy had been in trouble before. He, not Hugo, would pay for the crime.

The final call had come last night. Again filled with traffic sounds and again no indication of where Luc was or why he had left, though this time Hannah asked. She assumed he was bunking at the new office, but he would not tell her. He kept deflecting her with queries about the logistics of their meeting this morning, where the place was located and what time they were expected to show up. She decided not to insist. Explanations would have to wait.

A brass figurine looked at her from inside the gallery window. Barely a foot high, it was by far the most striking piece on display, much more beautiful than the acrylic painting or the geometric Plexiglas sculpture that also occupied the space. The figurine was female. Her breasts protruded generously beneath a garment that covered her from neck to toe. Her belly was a gentle hillock rising from the flat plains of her thighs. Was she pregnant? Hannah bent in for a closer look, pressing her nose against the glass. The moon-like face seemed to be glowing, full of secrets. Yes, thought Hannah. A young woman with child.

Hugo was leaning against the wall a few steps away, his eyes half shut. Earbuds connected his skull to the CD player in his hand. His face was expressionless. He could have been asleep.

Luc's disappearance didn't seem even to have registered with him. Hannah hadn't broached the subject yet. She didn't trust herself to. The thought of discussing Luc with him was, frankly, beyond her. And so she had turned to Mandelbaum—a specialist in teenage boys, a saviour of fractured families. That, at least, was his reputation. On the morning after Hugo's hearing, Hannah had telephoned his office. He had sounded fine over
the phone. Calm and reassuring, though not cheap. She had thought Hugo would be seen alone, but Mandelbaum dispelled that notion straightaway. Both parents were expected to attend the initial sessions.

Hannah had resisted, imagining Luc's reaction to this request, but Mandelbaum was firm. It was important, he said, for everyone to be on the same page. The metaphor had made her feel like crying. When Luc happened to call twenty minutes later to tell her he was alive, she explained what she had done. To her surprise, though he disliked psychologists in general and English-speaking ones in particular, he had agreed to attend.

Hugo pushed himself off the wall with one foot, squinting at something down the street. Hannah turned and followed his gaze. Her heart jumped. The blue Peugeot had pulled into a space half a block away. The door on the driver's side swung open and Luc stepped out.

He paused on the sidewalk, checking the address against a slip of paper in his hand. The sun was on him. He threw his shoulders back and stood up straight. He looked like an ad in a magazine—for cigarettes or high-end sportswear—the distillation of manhood in a sunlit image. Well-fed but not fleshy, intelligent, slightly bohemian. He looked happy, she thought with a pang. And startlingly young. The opposite, in other words, of her own sad and sleepless self.

It was strange seeing the man you loved at a distance, as if a few feet of concrete on a Montreal sidewalk could give you a perspective impossible to attain in the normal course of events. She wanted to run to him. She wanted to throw her arms around him, tell him how incredibly sorry she was, tell him that she missed him.

He walked up to her and kissed her on the mouth, another surprise. She must not weep, she told herself. Hugo was watching them. She could feel his gaze, although the minute she glanced his way, he looked down at the pavement. Luc tried to pat his arm in greeting, but Hugo stepped away from him and Luc ended up patting the air. The three of them stood like that for a moment, off-balance, silent. Then they trooped into the building in single file, like a cartoon family.

Just inside the front door was a steep staircase. Except for the dusty burgundy runner on the stairs, everything was white— the stairwell, the second-floor landing where they took off their shoes, and the small waiting room beyond it. The place reminded Hannah vaguely of her mother-in-law's apartment, except that into this spartan setting someone had introduced paintings, some abstract, others more figurative, all of them in bright, warm colours, set under glass in expensive frames.

Hannah found herself imagining what Luc must be thinking. His hard-earned royalties going to finance office art for a charlatan. A Westmount charlatan.

Mandelbaum himself came out to greet them, which relieved Hannah somewhat. No added cost of a receptionist. Tall and athletic in a plaid flannel shirt, he looked as if he were welcoming them into a backwoods cabin and not into a shrink's office in west-end Montreal. He was around the same age as Luc, and like Luc sported a beard, though his was more black than white. He had cut his hair short, about the same length as his facial hair, and you could see the thinning patches.

“Hi,” he said, sticking out his hand first to Hugo and then to Hannah and Luc. When Hannah addressed him as Dr. Mandelbaum, he gestured at her to stop.

“Call me Manny.”

Manny Mandelbaum? It was a joke, surely. She glanced at Luc but could not catch his eye.

When they went into his office, there was some confusion over where they were to sit. Mandelbaum had arranged four leather chairs in a circle, and somehow Luc had failed to note the brown cardigan draped over the one facing the door. He sat down in it, tense and serious, and Mandelbaum had to ask him in a polite voice to vacate it. Luc jumped up immediately, apologizing, but when he sat down in another chair he looked disconcerted and resentful.

Mandelbaum handed them each a pen and a clipboard to which a form had been attached. The form was simple enough, thought Hannah. Requests for four pieces of information with spaces below. He wanted her full name, her address, a phone number where she could be reached during the day, and her reason for visit.

Most of the page was allotted to the reason for visit. Hannah didn't need all that space. She wrote down a single word—
communication—
and passed the sheet back to Mandelbaum, who gave her an approving smile as he took it, as if she'd accomplished something. Luc was still writing. A dense, scrawled reason for visit. A crowd of words pouring out of him onto the page. At last his hand stopped.

“It's in French,” he said in English, handing over the paper. A rare concession, though Manny Mandelbaum couldn't know that. He rewarded Luc with a smile.

The only thing Hugo wrote was his name.

“Can't think of anything?” Manny Mandelbaum asked.

Hugo shrugged.

“That's okay,” he reassured him. “You don't have to write anything if you don't want to. Maybe it will come later.” He reached for Hugo's paper.

To Hannah's surprise, Hugo refused to give it up. He nodded at her, clutching the clipboard as if for protection. “I'm here,” he said gruffly, “because of her.”

Manny Mandelbaum didn't seem perturbed. “Because she asked you to come, you mean?”

Hugo shook his head. “Because she
told
me to.”

“That's fine,” said Mandelbaum. “It's a reason.” He mimed writing, indicating that Hugo should put it down. Which Hugo, frowning, did.

And then they began.

“First,” said Manny Mandelbaum, “I'd like to discuss the language issue.” He looked directly at Luc. “I'm American, born and raised in California, where I lived my whole life until I came here nine years ago to join the woman who is now my wife. There is a reason I am telling you this. My French is passable. I can converse with waiters and store clerks. But I learned the language late in life. What I'm saying is, my French isn't good enough for me to conduct a therapy session. I work in English.” He paused, looking at each of them in turn. “This may be a limitation that one or all of you are not comfortable with.”

“I'm okay with it,” said Hugo, surprising them all by being the first to speak.

Hannah nodded and said it was fine with her. They all looked at Luc.

Manny Mandelbaum pulled out Luc's sheet and checked his name. “How does that sit with you, Mr. Lévesque?”

Luc made a face. Not a happy face, but not outraged either.
Hannah wondered for a moment whether the use of the word
sit
had confused him. But he waved a hand impatiently.

“We're good to go, then?” asked Mandelbaum.

“Yes, yes, sure,” said Luc. He was still looking disgruntled, but Manny Mandelbaum either didn't register this or chose to take him at his word.

“I'd also like to tell you a little about my practice,” Mandelbaum continued. His voice was higher than Hannah would have predicted for such a big man, but it was calm and pleasant enough, and he enunciated clearly, which would be a help for Luc. “This is a safe space,” he said, indicating the room. “A space where you can say everything you need to say without fear of interruption or reprisal. My job here is to make sure it stays safe. I am not an expert any more than you are. I am not someone who can tell you what to do with your lives, what is wrong or right, or how to be. All I can do is listen. I'm good at that. I've had years and years of practice. And I can help you to listen too, to yourselves, and to each other.”

He had a choker around his neck, a rawhide string with three emerald-coloured ceramic beads. He resembled the boys Hannah had gone to high school with—Jewish boys, sons of dentists and lawyers, with a penchant for dressing like lumberjacks. That had been the style back in the seventies: lumberjacks wearing chokers. Mandelbaum had abundant chest hair, as Luc did. Tufts of it were poking through his open collar, the tips licking at the beads.

“Listening is just the first part of the equation,” said Mandelbaum. “The overall focus is communication.”

Hannah blinked.

Mandelbaum reached behind him and took a dog-eared paperback from his desk. He held it up.

On its cover, “Communication” was printed in white capital letters over a wash of dark colours from which a yellow flower emerged. Another word in pale cursive script was suspended above it.

“Nonviolent communication,” said Manny Mandelbaum. “Otherwise known as NVC.”

The layout was bad. Mismatched typefaces struggled for ascendancy against a busy background. The eye didn't know which way to look. The flower was distracting. The effect was kitschy, trite, off-putting. Luc shot her a look. He hated things like this: psychological fads and their accompanying how-to manuals. The books were cleverly marketed. They sold well and were rewarded with ever more space in bookstores. Literature was being crowded into dark corners, slowly suffocating at the hands of self-help.

“This approach was developed decades ago,” Mandelbaum explained, as if anticipating Luc's reaction. “A psychologist named Rosenberg came up with it in the sixties. He spent his childhood in a rough Detroit neighbourhood. He had an urgent, personal need to find peaceful alternatives to the violence he saw all around him. In the mid-eighties, he founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication.”

Luc cleared his throat. “There has been no violence in our family.” He paused. “None to speak of.”

Hugo chose that moment to look up. Hannah looked at the rug.

“I am sure you're a peaceful man, Mr. Lévesque,” Manny
Mandelbaum said, “but I am using the term
violence
in its broadest sense. I'm not just speaking about the physical kind.”

“He's lying anyway,” Hugo said quietly.

Luc's eyes hardened. “You're one to talk of lying,” he said to Hugo quickly in French. Then, keeping his eyes firmly on his son, as if he could silence him by the sheer power of his will, he addressed the therapist. “We are here today because of him,” he said, jerking his chin in Hugo's direction, “not me. I agreed to come here only because of your insistence, Dr. Mandelbaum. My wife has told you, I think, that he bought a gun and carried it inside his school?”

Hugo crossed his arms over his chest.

Once again, Manny Mandelbaum held up both hands. “Look, you are each going to get a chance to speak. I promise you. I just want to finish my introduction, so you know what you're in for. Is this okay with everyone?”