My October (33 page)

All week long, he'd been on edge, but tonight he'd toppled over into full-blown insomnia. It was the fault of that boy, that friend of Marie-Soleil's. What was his name? Arthur something. Saint-Cyr. That was it. The singer. Marie-Soleil called him a
genius. They'd gone to the Foufounes to hear him and his band, Les Enfants Terribles.

“He can recite practically all of Rimbaud by heart,” she'd said as they claimed the only remaining table in the centre of the room, within spitting distance of the stage. The lights shone directly on them, making Luc perspire. He was uneasy going out in public with Marie-Soleil, even to a big anonymous place like the Foufounes, with a crowd of people barely older than his son. All around him, he saw skinny boys with shaved heads and girls in sleeveless tops flaunting perfect flesh.

The show had been awful. Arthur Saint-Cyr did not have a voice. Or an ear. And he used a synthesizer, which Luc hated. His lyrics were plagiarized from Rimbaud, but cut up and rearranged so that what had once been poetically obscure was now meaningless.

To dull the pain, Luc had tossed down vodka shots. Three of them, in quick succession. Then things had unravelled. He'd argued with Saint-Cyr, who had come to sit with them between sets. That was why Luc was lying sleepless and alone on a Saturday night. Marie-Soleil had sided with her friend, and Luc had stalked off, his mouth dry and his head throbbing, while she stayed where she was.

He tossed the herbal capsules into his mouth and bent over the tap, slurping greedily. He couldn't handle liquor anymore. He'd never really been able to—it gave him headaches and disrupted his sleep—but these days he couldn't endure it. What had he been thinking, ordering vodka? He must have seemed pitiful.

The grout where the bathroom sink attached to the wall was black at the edges. It wasn't just dirt, he knew. Dirt doesn't grow
fur. He sniffed it and made a face. Why hadn't he noticed it before he signed the lease? It wasn't as though the fat man had hidden it. And even if he'd tried, the smell would have revealed the truth. So far, Luc had no runny nose or itchy eyes, but something so ugly had to be bad for him.

When he opened his eyes again, the sun was in his face. The clock showed 11:11. Below the time was the date: October 28, 2001. Luc sat up. It was the anniversary of his father's death.

His mouth tasted like ashes. He walked to the bathroom, where he urinated prodigiously and then drank from the tap, holding his breath to block out the stink from the awful black crack.

Thirty-five years ago today, Roland Lévesque had stuck the barrel of a Luger into his mouth. Every single autumn since then, Luc had relived it. It explained his mood. Even if he hadn't been conscious of it, some part of him had remembered. His limbs were still heavy from the herbal pills. He wished he could draw the curtains and sleep some more. But he had no curtains. And sleep wouldn't return now. He'd misbehaved last night, but that was the least of it. He'd caught a glimpse of himself as an outsider might see him—an aging philanderer pretending he had something in common with children.

He took a shower, and while the water trickled down— the pressure was woeful, another thing he'd neglected to check before signing with Gagnon—he realized what he must do.

IT WAS JUST PAST ONE
in the afternoon when he knocked on his mother's door. She didn't hear him immediately because she was out on the back porch, hanging laundry.

“This could be my last line of the season,” she said, nodding at the clothes waving in the breeze. “The forecast is for frost tonight.”

“You know what day it is?” he asked, rubbing his temples. He had a brutal headache.

Lyse nodded. “After I finish here, I'm going to the cemetery. Want to join me?”

He shook his head. After thirty-five years, she was still laying flowers at her husband's grave.
That
was love. He looked out over the rooftops, suddenly too sad for words. When he turned back, Lyse was scrutinizing him, a man's shirt bunched in her hands.

“Whose is that?” he asked.

She said Graeme White had been helping her fix something and had stained it. The shirt billowed in the wind, incongruously big among her dainty white things.

Luc had forgotten how calming his mother's presence could be. He'd barely seen her since he'd left Laporte Street, and he realized he'd missed her. After she finished with the laundry, they went back inside to warm up. She sat in her rocking chair, the one with white cushions in which she'd breast-fed him and later Rémi. For some reason, this thought affected him. Tears came into his eyes. She saw them.

“Is it your father?”

“Yes,” he said. And then, “No. It's me.”

She didn't say a word. She just sat, waiting for him to explain.

“The day Hugo was born, I swore to myself that I would never leave. Whatever happened, I'd stick by him. And now look. I'm almost fifty. The same age Dad was when he left.”

Lyse shook her head. “He didn't just leave.”

“When he died, then.”

“When he shot himself,” she said. “You are not remotely like him.”

“Yes I am,” he said quietly. “Only I used a girl instead of a gun.”

“A girl?”

He told his mother about Marie-Soleil and the place on Saint-Augustin Street. She listened in silence, her face still and sad.

“It's not what you think,” he said at last.

“Oh?” she said evenly. “And what do I think?”

“That it's a mid-life crisis, the tired old story of a man who can't face his own decline.”

Lyse studied him.

“It isn't, Maman. You don't know. You picked someone from your own culture, someone who could understand you, someone similar to you.”

Lyse took a breath and let it out slowly. “That's not true,” she said.

She leaned back in the rocking chair. “I owe you this,” she said quietly, and began to speak of Graeme White, the man who had been her friend and lover and soulmate for nearly thirtyseven years.

Luc stared at her. “Thirty-seven? That's not possible,” he said, more harshly than he'd intended. “That's longer than Dad's been dead.” His throat was hurting suddenly, his voice straining. “What are you saying? Did he know?”

His mother nodded.

Luc's stomach seemed to twist. “I don't believe it.”

Lyse began to cry.

Luc shook his head wearily. Admitting this had taken courage. He put a hand on his mother's shoulder. “Don't cry, Maman. It's okay.”

She shook her head. “No, it's not. You've been honest with me. I can at least return the favour. I tried to protect you and your brother, but you didn't need protection, Luc. Or maybe you did once, but not now. Not for years. It wasn't you I was protecting all this time. I was afraid you'd condemn me.”

And so she told him the story, the true story, of Roland Lévesque. It was a painful telling, with no hero at its heart, no redemption, nothing remotely uplifting in its outcome. Roland Lévesque had been a failure as a husband. He'd failed to be faithful. He'd failed to be sober. He'd failed to provide, and failed, in the end, even to remain alive.

Luc remembered the drinking. Certain nights, his father's friends had carried him home from the tavern. But that was normal, Luc had told himself. It was something men of that generation did. The tavern, like the Green Spot, had been a social club.

“He was an alcoholic,” Lyse said, as if answering his thoughts. “He had a problem, a serious one, and didn't have the strength to face it. He paid a high price. It cost him his marriage and his job.”

“That wasn't alcoholism,” Luc objected. His father had told him the story a hundred times. He'd fought for the workers. He'd defended their rights. That was why Imperial had gotten rid of him.

But Lyse was shaking her head. “He was caught drunk, Luc.

On the job. It could have been fatal, for him and for others. A fire broke out in a basement storeroom at the plant. The alarm went off and the firemen came, but no one was there to open up for them. They had to smash down the door. Your father was found asleep in the infirmary. They thought maybe he'd crawled in there overcome by smoke, but when they shook him, he woke up. There was a whisky bottle under the cot.”

“All right,” said Luc. “You can stop.”

But Lyse didn't stop. “The drinking got worse after he was fired. Once, he'd been a gentle man. He was funny and charming. Then he turned angry and got into arguments over nothing at all. I did what I could, paying the bills and such, shielding you boys from the worst of it. It went on for two awful years. By the end, we were barely talking. He wasn't home much, which was probably a blessing. One night,” she said, looking out the window at her clothesline, “your father asked me if I was seeing another man. Someone must have said something to him. Or maybe it was just intuition. I hadn't been planning to tell him, but he asked. And I told him the truth.”

She sat back in her chair, hugging her arms. “They found him that night at the Westmount lookout.”

“You didn't kill him,” he said, taking her in his arms. “If that's what you thought, you were wrong. Do you hear me?”

After a while, they went to her kitchen, the same kitchen in which he had sat as a boy, and put the ancient tin kettle on the stove for tea. From the shelf over the sink, she took down the stained teapot she'd used since his childhood, and the matching bowl from which he and Rémi had stolen sugar cubes to suck like candy.

His mother's words hadn't burdened him. On the contrary,
they'd buoyed him up. He had no idea if it would last, but he felt lighter than before. Lighter and yet paradoxically more solid.

He wanted to laugh. About what? The power of words, of stories told and untold? Luc took the steaming cup his mother handed him and breathed in the sweet, familiar aroma of tea.

28

N
ight was falling as Luc Lévesque walked into the Green Spot. It was Halloween, and the streets were full of children in costumes. There were a lot of skeletons this year. He'd passed two of them on his way here, cheap plastic outfits from the dollar store.

He opened the door to the restaurant. Strips of protective carpet had been laid down; the snow would come any day now. It would be light at first, like the dusting of sugar on a pastry, but by the end of December it would be knee-deep. He sighed. As a boy, he'd loved winter. Even the short, dark days of November hadn't bothered him, for they meant snow was on its way. And snow meant permission to stay indoors, reading and daydreaming.

He paused on the doormat to wipe his feet, nodding a hello at the man behind the cash, who still didn't recognize him. The man winked at Luc and smiled, as he had winked and smiled at every other customer who had preceded Luc that day. Nobody knew him here. The Green Spot customers were too busy making rent to bother with books.

He patted the pockets of his raincoat. He hadn't brought anything to read. Usually, he had a book tucked away. The last one he'd read was a French translation of
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe. Translation was betrayal, as Hannah was so fond of saying, but his English wasn't strong enough to read Achebe in the original. Achebe had been criticized for writing the novel in English—indicting colonialism in the colonizers' language. At least in Quebec, novelists wrote in French.

Luc had finished reading the book weeks ago and hadn't picked up anything since. Nor had he written a word. He was dry. Frighteningly so. And when was the last time he'd walked out of the house without a book? He patted the sides of his raincoat one last time, unable to accept his lapse, and made his way to the back of the restaurant.

He sat at his favourite booth. A cold rain was falling outside, and through the streaked window he saw people scurrying along Notre-Dame Street, ducking into doorways for cover, getting lost in the blur of water on glass. One of these ghostlike beings waved an arm. A pale face paused, shimmered briefly, then disappeared from view.

Vien. There was no mistaking that hair. The front door opened and Vien burst into the restaurant, scattering the small crowd waiting by the door. He stood alone on the mat shaking himself like a wet dog. Luc watched as he started to wriggle inside his trench coat. What was he doing? Scratching himself? No, he was reaching into a pocket to extract something. A file folder brimming with his students' papers. Poor bastard. He had brought his grading with him. Luc shook his head. The teacher's life—an unending river of red ink.

Vien walked toward him. “My man,” he said, with a wide
smile. He didn't seem at all perturbed about the rain or his own semi-drenched state. “Sorry I'm late. Have you been waiting long?”

Luc shook his head.

“My meeting ran longer than expected.” Vien peeled off his coat. Water had seeped through at the shoulders and streaked his shirt. “Damn Tremblay.” He'd spoken of this man before, a young teacher recently hired by Saint-Jean to teach history. “He wears a suit and tie every day to school. What's that about? And everything boils down to economics.” Vien threw up his hands. He had met the young man to set the Christmas exam, and they had ended up arguing about politics. “‘Independence is a failed dream bankrupting the province.' He actually said that. A man entrusted with the education of young minds. He doesn't even seem to regret it. ‘The dream is dead. It's a new century.' Such cynicism, and he isn't even thirty.”

Vien's palms were upturned, his arms stretched out. Jesus on the Mount, thought Luc. Or perhaps at the Last Supper. Only this Jesus had one eye pointing the wrong way.

“You're preaching to the converted,” Luc said.

Vien paused. “Sorry. But he really gets under my skin. And the worst thing is, the kids love him.” He removed his glasses for a wipe. “Go figure. A boy in a pinstripe suit.”