Most of these pastiches don’t work, I know that, but trying for them keeps me awake. I really think I caught a whiff of old Ernest for a moment there.
chapter two
Home for me is an apartment in the Annex, which I share with my partner, Carole, a translator who works mainly for the politicians in The Buildings.
Her work is easy, because the things English-speaking politicians want to say to their French-speaking constituents are very simple and have already been said. A cabinet minister who trusts Carole, and remembers that he has been applauded for one of her speeches before, will ask her for “the two founding nations” speech, adapted for a Noelville audience; a speech she can paste together from her files. Actually, most of the speeches she writes are about language in some way or other. One, entitled “Small Business is Big Business,” congratulates its French-speaking audience on being able to trade in any language they like, because this government, unlike the government in some other provinces (one, actually) does not demand that they favour one language over another. In Ontario, the speech says, both cultures are respected.
It’s pure bullshit, of course. The fact is, if you’re French, you have to learn English, but if you speak only English, you can manage just fine, even if you live in Noelville. There has never been a serious effort to foster bilingualism in this province, in the schools or anywhere else. Any premier who wants to put my money where his mouth is could simply require that a competency in French be a requirement for graduation from an Ontario high school. Carole says that if the Conservatives had ordered it done at the height of the separatist agitation, we would now be bilingual, and Ontario residents might be able to read the Montreal newspapers and get a real understanding of what being a French-Canadian is all about. It’s not something you’ll ever understand in translation, she says. But they didn’t, nor did the Liberals who followed them, or the socialist NDP who followed them.
Which is why Carole will always be able to find work. Carole, from long dealing with the people in The Buildings, doesn’t have a political twitch left in her nervous system (she no longer votes), and doesn’t mind what they ask her to write. She says she writes speeches that will “play”, never mind the content. Her favourite model is the Mark Antony “honourable men” speech. Her biggest success with this model was with the one she adapted for the Junior Minister of what was then called Extra-Urban Affairs (something about this title must have clanged in someone’s ear because the name changed several times before the civil servants finally settled on Non-Urban Areas, rejecting a suggestion by a wit in the Green Party of “Minister for Country Matters.”)
The speech Carole wrote, or rather assembled from stock, was built around the phrase, “I don’t know” (“Je ne sais pas”). She had noticed that no politician ever used the phrase in case it came out wrong in French, but the right man, she felt, could create rhetoric out of it. He could alert his audience by intoning it, moving through a series of nonsubstantive issues, after each one echoing “Je ne sais pas” followed by a significant pause. Then, finally, he would say what he didknow, bellowing out the positive, “Mais ceci je sais”(never mind the poor accent), or simply showing his fearlessness (“Je n’ai pas peur de vous,” etc ...).
Simple stuff and not original, but it gave Carole a new interest in her work. The Junior Minister used the speech for about three months, and only when he began to hear one or two of his colleagues pick it up, did he ask Carole to design a new one.
She was sitting up in bed, reading, when I got home, and I, slightly ignited by the touch of voyeurism I had experienced through the book dealer’s window, forwent my nightly last look at the television news, and joined her.
She held up the book “Four pages,” she said.
“Don’t you have a bookmark?”
“Four pages,” she repeated.
I sighed, but I wasn’t feeling thwarted enough to tear the book from her and fling it across the room, while ripping open the lacy bodice of her nightgown with the other hand. (Actually her preferred sleeping attire is a calico shift like a flour sack, which makes her look like an inmate of a madhouse in one of those French films set in the Middle Ages; and as for tearing it off her, it would take a qualified sail-maker to find the place to make a start.) But I didn’t fancy hanging about for four pages either, feeling myself, as I said, only minimally ignited. Instead, I turned to my copy of Boswell’s Johnson,my bedside reading for as long as I can remember, and soon we were breathing in unison, back to back, I asleep, she reading.
This is the place to note that Carole and I long ago agreed—perhaps it was why we set up house together— that neither of us would yearn silently, a seething mass of frustration, but speak up whenever and however desire manifested itself. She once mistakenly believed me to be yearning for the exotic and did her best to respond (we suit each other in most ways, after all, and we like living together very much) by trying to surprise me with the soles of her feet before she had smoothed them with an emery board, and another time, for the same reason (to give me a surprise), by sharpening her fingernails.
I found the effect in both cases more distracting than stimulating, so she quit experimenting and we concentrated on just holding back the dawn until we were both ready to greet it. So you won’t find in what follows any sexual gymnastics, and no fine writing on the subject, either; no detailed descriptions of love’s mansion, or any magnificent members bursting into the chamber of delight. None of that. We enjoy a private life crowned with warm endeavours, occasionally begun because of something Carole has read, but never continued to the point of plagiarism.
chapter three
The next morning, Carole kicked me out early.
Ours is a one-bedroom apartment on Howland, in a neighbourhood inhabited mainly by therapists of various kinds, and by freelance creative types—writers, actors, and stand-up comedians. The rent is low, but you have to park on the street and at night, coming back from a movie, it can take some time to find a space, and you get dinted more than you would in, say, Forest Hill. This is the main reason why people with car fetishes, the owners of Mercedes, for instance, and the four-wheel drive crowd, always move away once they’ve sold a couple of scripts.
As for me, the Toyota van I drive is dinted enough for me not to even notice if I get another scratch. Plus, I appreciate the district’s other amenities. To the south, on Bloor Street, we have probably the best strip of good, cheap restaurants in the core of the city, including Mel’s, a corned beef restaurant that is open all night and will sell you a half-sandwich if you’re not very hungry. And opposite Mel’s is Book City, one of the few independent bookstores left now that the chains have gobbled each other up. So we like it here.
As well as the single bedroom we have a bathroom so cramped because of the shower we’ve installed that you have to close the door to pee even when no one is home, and if you don’t lock it you are liable to be knocked off your aim if someone walks in suddenly. (Carole suggests I cultivate the practice of sitting down on all occasions, but that way I would fear being kneecapped until I got in the habit of locking the door.)
So we have one real bedroom, and another tiny room I call my office—an unwelcoming space with no natural light or feeling for which way is north. At night I don’t mind it so much, but I can’t work there during the day. Then there’s the living room, which has a window that looks out on to a brick wall three feet away, so it is usually dusk by noon. And finally, incongruously, there is the kitchen, a big room with a big table and two big windows, one on each side. This is my ideal workroom unless Carole is home and needs it, as she did that morning.
So I left a couple of hours early and drove over to Harbord, to the love nest. I was curious to see it in daylight, and, if possible, to get a look inside.
The building housed three stores on the ground floor: a dollar store selling junk, a video rental place, and a flower shop. The woman selling flowers told me the landlord lived upstairs; I walked round the building