“No, Montreal.”
She seemed caught off guard, though kept smiling. “First time there?”
“Yes,” I lied, to end the conversation.
A ticket to Chicago, then Montreal. Take-off in thirty minutes, no luggage.
Thirty-three thousand feet in the air, flying to another country, mine, I guess, a country I had fled in complicated circumstances in 1962. The question hit me suddenly: had I ever loved Gail Egan? I remember this one time in Métis Beach, after an afternoon spent at the Riddingtons’ home with my father, destroying a nest of carpenter ants and replacing a portion of the rotten railing that they had colonized. After, my old man had driven back home in our Chevrolet Bel Air, one hand out the window, letting me pedal back home on the brand new bicycle my mother had given me at the beginning of the summer, making me swear I’d take care of it “just like Dad does with his Chevrolet.” I was thirteen and finally tasting newfound freedom on my new bicycle, wandering about as I pleased in Métis Beach, carefully watching the properties with their cars in their large gravel driveways, hoping beyond hope to hear a shout from the other side of that border. Come on, Romain! Come play with us! A fool’s hope.
The young people of Métis Beach never saw us unless we were with our fathers, repairing something or other in their homes; for them, we were some sort of subspecies, perhaps even untouchables, Dalits. They couldn’t even imagine spending time with us.
At least that’s how I saw things. How I interpreted their cold indifference.
Flying along on my new red bicycle with white mud guards, I saw her walking along Beach Road, tennis racket in hand, looking lithe, self-aware, already conscious of her beauty, in short white shorts, far too short for the French Village, fine thighs, tanned, very tanned. I followed her at a distance, full of pride on my new racer, as proud as those vacationers from Métis Beach who paraded the beautiful cars they had received for their sixteenth birthday. My brand new CCM bicycle! None of those cheap brands that you found in low-cost bike shops, imported from Czechoslovakia, a Communist country as poor as its people, sad like the eyes of children condemned to ride around on terrible bicycles.
Unknown to her, I was riding behind her, zigzagging carefully so as not to put my feet on the ground, carving into my mind every detail of her, my head churning wild thoughts, guilty ones: her sculpted calves, firm thighs, the bulge there, just over the thigh, inside.…
“Gail, look who’s following you!”
Johnny Picoté Babcock. Came out of nowhere. His redhead face, splashed with rust. Gail had whipped around brusquely, forcing me to brake hard, and I almost flipped over my handlebars. Johnny Picoté burst out laughing, and went on aggressively, “What the hell are you doing, eh?” I mumbled something like, “Rien … Nothing.” And he walked towards my bicycle, a malicious grin on his lips, his fist closed around a rock he dragged across my mud guards, a scratch some four inches long that was like a knife in my side, a sharp pain that reached all the way to my heart. Gail said, “Leave him alone, he doesn’t speak English.” It wasn’t entirely true. I understood quite a few words, and could even speak a few of them, including some pretty complicated ones: lawn mower, rake, shovel, gutter. Spending so much time with the English, I ended up learning a few of their words. Red with shame and anger, I got back on my CCM and was about to go on my way, when Johnny Picoté Babcock planted himself in front of me. Like the bad guys in a Western, he gave me a long, hard stare, the sort that says, next time, you won’t get off so easy. I understood then that I would never be able to rival the boys of Métis Beach.
Sure, it was pretty early to be asking the flight attendant for a drink, but I did anyway, a screwdriver in a tiny plastic glass. From the seat next to me, a woman of forty, quite pretty and clearly in shape, threw me an amused grin, So early? Afraid of flying? I thought back to that time, long ago now, when Dick had tried his hand at political analysis, pitching the line that the Watergate scandal was not as bad as the media were trying to make it seem. I asked him, surprised, “You’ve never been to Washington? Or New York?” He avoided the question by mumbling something about Woody Allen, “Allen Stewart Konigsberg, that’s his real name, you knew that, didn’t you?” I hadn’t known it. “That shuts you up, right? Well, there’s no need to go to New York to know that.” In the end he admitted, defeated, that he had a phobia about air travel. “I envy depressed people. I hear when they take a plane, they don’t care whether it crashes or not.”
Dear Dick. The prototypical American who’d succeeded, comfortable in his own skin, and totally uncaring about the rest of the world, which he only half-assedly understood. He’d never been farther from California than Las Vegas, though that didn’t stop him from loudly proclaiming his opinions on the rest of the planet, and mocking my “Canadian origins.” This other time, we thought we’d seen Paul Anka at Spago, a fine dining place in West Hollywood, and I mentioned he was Canadian. He went off on a grotesque tirade, his words tumbling over one another in an almost incoherent mess thanks to the martinis he’d swallowed, “Ah, Canadians! Insipid and immature, just like their national symbols!”
I said, irritated, “You’re trying to insult me?”
“Insult you? It’s the truth, Canuck! What the hell! Beavers and mounted police about as dangerous as a horde of prepubescent girls? If you wanna be respected in the world, you’ve got to be feared! Give it up! Now, think about virile and ruthless animals like our eagle! Think about the chiselled chins on our sheriffs and our Marines! Come on, even your soldiers prefer to release doves into the wild than shoot clay pigeons!” His mouth full, his fork aimed at me, “Never forget — trying to be loved at any cost, goddamn it, that’s for wimps!” Then, wiping his chin with his napkin, “We should’ve given you political asylum when you came over, Roman, freaking political asylum.”
After a four-hour layover in Chicago and a two-hour flight, I reached Montreal in the middle of the evening, dead tired. Jack’s call early that morning, a lost day in flight and here I was in this deserted airport, scattered customs people with their sombre faces, and a certain unexplained tension, as if the world outside was on curfew. I saw the occasional traveller, looking tense, standing around television sets in the rest areas and restaurants, and couldn’t quite see what was fascinating them. Nothing had attracted my attention in Los Angeles or Chicago. The Braves had won the World Series two days earlier. Maybe Canadian football? Hockey? It seemed early in the season to be so interested. But perhaps people were bored to death in Montreal.
In the taxi on the way to the hospital, the radio so loud it gave me a headache, I realized to my great shame the extent to which I’d become so witlessly American. “Americans, ignorant?” Dick would say. “Why take the time to interest ourselves in what other people are doing, when their single burning ambition is to imitate us?”
At the Montreal General Hospital, crowds gathered around television screens. On every floor, rooms flickering with the bluish lights of screens, from which could be heard rousing music interspersed with cries of Yes! and No! sung like joyous refrains, filled with optimism. What a strange time Gail had chosen.
“I knew you’d come. Thank you.”
I pushed the door open, my heart beating with apprehension, the shock even greater than I anticipated, but before letting myself feel any of it, to postpone the terrible moment, my eyes turned to Jack, a man of fifty or so, his face lined by fatigue, shoulders slumped, salt and pepper hair. Facing the bed, a small television was on, but without sound, only images. Gail was either staring at some blank spot on the wall or sleeping, it was hard to say; she was extremely thin. I searched for signs of flesh beneath the sheets. To avoid crushing her, I passed my hand over the sheet before sitting down next to her.
“Romain...?”