“Don’t hang up!” the man had said on the telephone. “I’m Gail Egan’s husband.… It’s Gail.… She’s not well, not well at all.…”
A jump back in time, like stumbling off a cliff. A sudden shadow over my face had alerted Ann, “Something’s wrong?” She thought of the people we knew in L.A. Or perhaps my friend Moïse in New York. “Nothing serious, honey?” Gail Egan. Ann had heard of her, of course, and had seen those cards that Gail persisted in sending me on my birthday every year, without exception, on the dot like a reminder from a dentist’s office. And yet, any sort of relationship with her had ended long ago, too many terrible memories. Métis Beach, Gaspé, and now this — would this be another of these moments that brought everything back to the surface?
“Honey, tell me what’s going on.…”
I asked the man on the phone, “Something happened to Gail?”
“She’s in hospital.”
“What do you mean, she’s in the hospital?”
“She … she.…”
He swallowed a sob. Behind him, shards of rusty voices blared out of a speaker.
“Is Gail sick?”
“She doesn’t have much time left.…”
“What are you saying?”
“Gail ordered the doctors to keep her alive … until you got here.…”
“Until I got there?”
“It’s last minute, I know.…”
“I …”
I stopped talking, seized by an avalanche of confused thoughts. Gail dying? Followed by such anger that it surprised even me — why did she ask for me, now, after all these years? Now that things were finally going well for me. Couldn’t she keep from … from what, exactly?
“Listen, Jack.…” Then I heard myself stutter through a series of boring excuses. Yes, I understood his pain. No, I couldn’t leave Los Angeles, the shoot, a delicate situation, a controversial series.… The more I heard my justifications, the more ridiculous they sounded.
“It’s urgent!” Jack interrupted. He’d spoken loudly, with a seething anger that announced danger. “It’s a matter of hours. I know you’re far. I’m sorry.…” Then in a deep voice, irrevocable. “You’re her last wish.”
“I can’t, Jack.”
“Wait!” he shouted.
And I hung up, guilt like fresh skin.
3
Gail would say, “Some people are born in the wrong country, like others are born with the wrong sex.”
Very early she’d put her finger on the source of my anguish. I was in the first category; she was in the second. Not that she would have liked to be a man, no, only that she wanted to have been born a few years later, when women were able to choose their lives — have a career or choose to be mothers, marry or not.
Words that were disarmingly sincere coming from the mouth of a young girl, spoken with a mix of lucidity and resignation, as only adults know how to do, when grave crises appear. But we were too young to be that lucid, we were only seventeen (I was four months younger than she), and miserable. It might have been the only two things that united us, really — besides the dream of living a life far from our parents — because in the end, we came from such different worlds.
You should have seen Métis Beach back then. Métis Beach and its satellite, our village, that the English called the French Village. A traveller passing through would forget it before the dust had time to settle in his wake. A series of modest wooden structures, covered in asbestos shingles. Tiny lawns dotted with sickly bushes, beaten down by the wind coming off the river that was so wide here it was called the sea. Rue Principale and its few shops. There was Mode pour toute la famille, my mother’s store, which we lived above; Quimper’s general store, which doubled as the post office; a bakery, Au Bon Pain Frais; and finally Leblond cobblers. The caisse populaire had its counter at Joe Rousseau’s place, a small white house at 58 Rue Principale, with no sign. (We used to say he’d hit it big, Joe Rousseau, since his rent, electricity, and heat were all paid by the government.) There was the “modern” church and presbytery, built in 1951. And Loiseau’s garage that held the limousines for all of the rich English from Métis Beach in the summer. Bentleys, Cadillacs, Lincoln Continental Mark IIs, and Chrysler Imperials. Black and shiny like seal skin, beautiful cars with gleaming chrome like in the movies, with the drivers in their dark suits, their caps raised on their foreheads when they were off-duty, having a drink at Jolly Rogers on Route 6, today called the 132, before returning to their tiny and badly ventilated rooms over Loiseau’s garage. They dressed sharply, but weren’t of the elegant class that stayed in the grand hotels of Métis Beach.
Métis Beach was to the west, at the very end of Rue Principale. Rue Principale turned into Beach Street — the same street, like an airplane that would bring you from a dull, gloomy country to another place, a shining paradise. You didn’t need a border or a gate to know you were moving into a foreign place. The hundred-year-old pines and spruce, the cedar rows, told you that much. Through them you could see verdant lawns decorated with massive rosebushes, and great summer homes all made of wood with tennis courts beside them. Lives of luxury, sports cars, and endless garden parties. Playing golf till sunset. In Métis Beach, tea time would end well before four o’clock, whisky was poured freely, sometimes as early as noon. We watched them with envy, all the way till Labour Day, when they left in the soft sunlight of early September, with the children and the maids. It would then be my father’s job, as well as the other men’s in the village, to take care of their homes, shutting off the electricity and the gas, purging water from the pipes, and covering up the windows with wooden boards for the winter to come.
Gail’s house, the Egan house, was my father’s responsibility.
Strangely, I can’t remember ever having envied their wealth. It was their freedom I envied, that arrogant freedom. Art and Geoff Tees were two of them, often seen at the wheel of their convertible MGAs (bottle green for Art, red for Geoff), the radio spitting out wild rock music. You could see them driving full speed on the 132, cigarette at their lips, beer bottle in their hands — they were barely sixteen for God’s sake! — accompanied by their girlfriends from Montreal who came to spend their summers in Métis Beach — it was said that they slept with them, in the same bed! The sort of behaviour you’d only see among the English. Among our Protestant neighbours. Where apparently they spoke freely of condoms and tampons, while in the French Village, we didn’t even know such things existed.
Their existence was an itch we’d have to scratch our whole lives until it bled. Unless we left.
The last time we saw each other was in December of 1986. Gail knew I was passing through New York. Her husband had an accountant’s meeting in Union City, New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson, and she’d come with him. She’d phoned me in L.A. I was surprised and thought it might be my friend John Kinnear in Métis Beach who’d given her my number, and perhaps John had even told her I’d be in New York that week. I can’t remember, but I’d been surprised, very surprised. “Romain, it would be nice, no? For lunch?” And I hesitated before answering. We had left each other on bad terms years before, and I still felt she’d stolen something from me. I had the feeling I’d been betrayed by her, that I’d been unable to help her — to save her. “Lunch?” I thought for a moment, yes, no … perhaps my friend Moïse might join us? It might be more pleasant. “Moïse?” Surprise in her voice, perhaps disappointment. “Yes, of course. I haven’t seen him in such a long time. It would be great.” And so we made plans for Zack’s, a deli on the Lower East Side. Moïse