Hunting Houses Read online

  Hunting Houses

  Fanny Britt

  Translated by Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli

  Copyright © 2015 Le Cheval d’août

  English translation copyright © 2017 Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou

  First published as Les maisons in 2015 by Le Cheval d’août

  First published in English in 2017 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Britt, Fanny, 1977-

  [Maisons. English]

  Hunting houses / Fanny Britt ; Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli, translators.

  Translation of: Les maisons.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0238-1 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4870-0239-8 (epub).—

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0240-4 (Kindle)

  I. Ouriou, Susan, translator II. Morelli, Christelle, translator

  III. Title. IV. Title: Maisons. English.

  PS8603.R5877M3513 2017 C843’.6 C2016-906687-8

  C2016-907021-2

  Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program

  the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada

  through the Canada Book Fund. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities,

  for our translation activities.

  For Sam

  Houses are cluttered with wishes, the invisible furniture on which we keep bruising our shins.

  — Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

  His House

  I don’t yet know that I’m at his house. I should probably have guessed. Were they clues, the plate in the sink, the knife on the plate, the butter and jam smeared on the knife? Was it Francis’s hair tangled in the comb in the bathroom? Did he still use a straight razor to shave, were his jeans still ripped at the knees?

  Évelyne keeps the sewing kit in the laundry room cupboard. That I do see. I open the doors to the cupboards.

  “It’s just a formality, I hope that’s okay,” I explain to Évelyne, who is still nothing more to me than a woman my age, a bit younger or a bit older — at some point people become an indistinct mass, we feel the same age as women ten years younger or five years older and say, Who cares anyway, all the while thinking, Now that’s a lie if ever there was one.

  Évelyne gives a little laugh, sad and lingering. “Go ahead, open up all the cupboards, I have nothing to hide.”

  It’s true. Her laundry room is spotless. Her sewing kit fascinates me, an elephant-grey crushed wool case embroidered in red cross-stitch, a gorgeous little Scandinavian novelty, and I think, Évelyne is Danish. She’s a head taller than I am and her blond hair, straight and windswept as wheat, cascades down her black sweater.

  I ask her.

  She takes it as a compliment, of course, and says she’s from Shawinigan.

  I congratulate her on her house, which they’ll have no trouble selling. She covers her eyes with her hand, and I know what’s coming — I do this week in, week out. Guessing each client’s household drama has become second nature to me, and on our most cynical of days, we place bets back at the office.

  31 Des Groseilliers is a divorce. He cheated on her. She prefers the suburbs.

  7678 Drolet always saw herself spending her golden retirement years in Sutton with the money she’d make from the sale, but her son pushed her to remortgage three times. She hadn’t taken that eventuality into account.

  10821 Turnbull was told that Ahuntsic is nowhere near as hot a market as Saint-Lambert.

  Évelyne, at 794 Gouin East, woke up one morning to the man lying next to her blubbering. He told her he was suffocating, that he had to leave, he didn’t know why, it wasn’t her, but of course it was her, and anyway the children were older, old enough, eight is old enough, they’ll be all right and anyhow there was nothing for it, he was suffocating he was dying he had to leave.

  Usually, my colleagues and I laugh. Yet when Évelyne’s eyes misted over, I held out a tissue and had no desire to tell the others afterwards.

  “The place I’m moving to is smaller. An apartment. It’s nice though. I don’t think I could stand too much space.”

  “No, smaller’s easier. Not as much housework.”

  Dimwit. She’s not talking about housework and you know it.

  “Do you think it will sell?”

  Évelyne is crying in earnest now. I take her hand. I say yes, her house is fabulous. I myself would buy it if I could. It will make some other family happy, just as it did hers for so many years.

  My client nods; I can tell she finds the idea comforting — all my clients do. There’s some solace in thinking your house will live on outside you, like an extension of yourself, a promise renewed no matter the trials or failures, bestowing sudden meaning on sorrow. Personally, I have a hard time swallowing the whole idea because I have no desire to see others blossom where I wilted — but then I’m not that nice a person.

  Évelyne shows me the rest of the house, starting with two children’s bedrooms. In the first, a quilt in a delicate buttercup and peony pattern, cream-coloured, pink, pale green. A number of lively drawings on the walls, all signed SOLÈNE. In the other bedroom, blue and green stripes, dinosaur figurines, red-painted wood letters on the door: MATTÉO. Évelyne was astute enough to keep the walls white. It will be easier for visitors to project their own lives onto them — nothing worse than a pink bedroom covered in princess decals for undermining the morale of a mother with two sons who longs for the daughter she never had and hopes her new abode will offer the secret formula that will finally guarantee her the perfect family she’s aspired to since childhood. To that client, I’ll respond with all the solicitude I can muster, Who knows, this house could be a lucky charm, but when the client, in the throes of guilt at having diminished the worth of the children she does have, grabs hold of my arm, My boys are wonderful, I love them so much, anyhow, what counts is that they’re healthy, no? Do you have children? and I reply, Yes, three boys, for the space of a second, she’ll be caught between wanting to be me and relief that she’s not. Her coral lips stretch into the saddest smile ever smiled and she’ll murmur: Three boys. Quite something, isn’t it.

  I point out the lilac bush to Évelyne, the one we can see from the office window, say again that spring’s a good time to sell, that May’s colours will be phenomenal here. She laps up my realtor-speak obediently and with a slight lag time, as when you’ve had a bit too much to drink the night before. Or when you’ve been on a crying jag. By the window, her skin with its few near-black beauty spots takes on an almost milky tint. I find her painfully beautiful and think, Her husband must have been suffocating something fierce. Who walks out on a woman like her? I refrain from saying as much to Évelyne — I don’t want to see her tears flow again. I prom
ised the boys lasagna tonight, and there’s no flour left for the béchamel.

  It’s in the master bedroom that I find the most clues pointing to a breakup. The wood is light in tone and the sheets are white. One idea obsesses me: She’s Danish, and he walked out on her anyway. Red felt slippers are tucked neatly under the bed. Despite the order Évelyne likes to keep in her home, there is something concealed here, as in the sanitized crime scenes on TV police procedurals, where a constellation of blood stains is revealed under a black light. That’s what their room is like — bloody and impeccable.

  Along with the pile of books on the bedside table, I make out a magazine for do-it-yourselfers — it’s a special issue on building sheds. Also a Bob Dylan biography. Romain Gary’s Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid. A tidy pile. Later I’ll remember this and think, God, he hasn’t changed a bit, even down to his enduring fascination with difficult, talented men.

  On the other side of the bed, Évelyne’s side, a glass of water, a charger, a number of open magazines, their pages wavy from bathtub reading, a small bottle of Tylenol, a Playmobil figurine and crumpled tissues.

  Évelyne still sleeps here. Not him.

  She sweeps away the tissues, the Tylenol, the Playmobil figurine, with an apology, “Please Évelyne, no need to apologize,” and the sound of her name prompts Évelyne to collapse into my arms, sobbing. I can feel the Playmobil man’s little hand dig into my shoulder. The lasagna will have to do without the béchamel this time.

  “Whenever you think of the future, you never picture this moment. You see carefree travel, wide-open car windows, a positive pregnancy test, treehouses, fights followed by sessions of making up, your lover adding years to his age without growing old. You see all that’s pretty and smells good and gives you a rush and makes your blood run hot. You don’t see…this.”

  Évelyne speaks softly but in a purposeful rush, as though convinced that the telling of secrets can only last so long; shame could silence her any minute now, and once again she’ll have to shoulder her burden that grows heavier by the day, like a balled-up towel on the balcony that keeps absorbing rainwater.

  With her back turned to me, she packs coffee into the filter, foams some milk, then stops, not turning around.

  “I’ve made you coffee, but I’d rather have wine. How about you?”

  The feverishness that comes in times of crisis. Permission to do the unexpected. I notice that, despite it all, I envy her.

  “Bring on the wine!”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because I don’t want to drink alone.”

  “I’ll accept nothing less than a glass of wine and I refuse to drink alone.”

  Évelyne smiles and goes to pull an open bottle out of the fridge. She covers her left hand with her right, but too late — I can see it shaking. She had wine last night, nothing excessive, it helps, she doesn’t like to take sleeping pills. She sits down and we sip from our glasses, comfort at hand. There’s a crack in the plaster on the kitchen ceiling just above the door leading out to the backyard. Nothing to worry about. All the same, it should be looked after.

  “When we first moved in, I wondered — will one of us die here someday?”

  She apologizes for the morbid thought and half-laughs nervously. I should say, Don’t worry, I ask myself the same question every day. Will my life end here in this old car, its floor littered with candy wrappers and rotting apple cores? Will this ugly IKEA parking lot be my final destination?

  But Évelyne’s tears well up, and I don’t want to see them fall again or have her ask questions to change the topic and then have to answer her. I may have thought that I envy her, but actually, I don’t envy her at all.

  “You’re not morbid. Just the opposite. In real estate, we never talk enough about a house’s potential for fatalities.”

  Évelyne looks surprised.

  “That double gas range and its six burners are perfect for anyone bent on self-immolation.”

  She laughs, a fleeting melody. I’m on a roll.

  “That cedar veranda is ideal for triggering heart attacks.”

  She dries her tears. “My ex’ll like your sense of humour when he meets you.”

  “Does he like your sense of humour?”

  “Way back when, yes, I suppose he did.”

  “I’m sorry, Évelyne…It’s five thirty. My kids’ll be ready to sic social services on me.”

  By now, Évelyne radiates a calm sadness. We belong to a club, the club of women who don’t talk about love the way infant formula commercials do, and yet with each sentence, each fold of our exhausted eyelids, we speak of love and nothing else.

  An hour later, I still don’t know, after a bottle of white wine and an agreed-upon listing price and the posting of a for-sale sign, that it’s his house I’m leaving. All I know so far is that he has walked out on her and that Évelyne’s beauty didn’t save her; she’s in love and suffering. All so incredibly ordinary.

  At home, they’ve been waiting for me for a while. Oscar leaps into my arms and asks why I came home so awfully late. Boris shoves a complex Lego building into my face, recounting each and every stage that went into its creation. All I can hear of Philémon is his voice, a cavernous echo coming from the den where he and his freckles are busy soaking up the blue-tinged light of the computer screen. All three are here; they’ve survived their day in the city, the metro and school, the ham in their sandwiches, French dictation, smog, the mediocrity of their school. No one’s throwing up or crying, and I can smell tomato sauce; Jim has started dinner. When he sees me walk into the kitchen, he gives me a kiss, tastes the wine on my lips, and laughs, “Got another client drunk, did you?” He tells me the parents’ meeting at the school has been postponed, so we’re free to indulge in an eveningful of episodes of the Welsh crime show we like so much. There’s a magnetic pull to his shoulder; I rest my head. “It’s like a dream come true,” I say, and even though, deep in my heart rotting from easy living and death wishes, I know it’s a bit of a lie — how else can I explain the dizziness, the jelly legs, the roiling innards, it could be the wine, but the dizziness the jelly the roiling were all there this morning, it’s true this is a good life, a great life, like Évelyne’s before it collapsed, a landslide, so I say no more, stop at It’s like a dream come true, and Jim is happy, he taps my bottom, and now Oscar calls for me, and everything goes on as before.

  The bridge just has to fit into the trunk of the car. It consists of a hundred or so Popsicle sticks assembled with white glue and built by Philémon and two of his sidekicks in sixth grade for their final science fair project. It is of the utmost importance that nothing fall on the bridge and that it be delivered to the school without incident. Which I will do in an hour’s time, after a quick detour to the drugstore to find plastic bed pads because five-year-old Oscar hasn’t managed to go a whole week yet without wetting his bed, a problem neither Jim nor I want to draw attention to for fear of triggering an incurable social neurosis in our son or inspiring him to delve too far into the subject, which might lead him to discover that most psychopaths were bedwetters as kids and make him think that he, too, is a psychopath, which would be unfortunate since the fact is he simply has the smallest bladder on the continent and the greatest of thirsts just before bedtime. I’ll have to remember to hide the pads in a bag under the back seat. The other mothers from the science fair organizing committee mustn’t see them. Otherwise, they’d feel they had free rein to remind me — without any prompting whatsoever on my part — that their children were potty trained by the age of two and that they hope Oscar doesn’t have a more serious problem? I’d be forced either to smile with all my teeth (plus fillings) and tell a lie, It’s really only once in a while (it isn’t), or tear out their hair, its red highlights not fooling anyone, until they look like those forlorn dolls whose locks have been chopped off, their scalps full of holes like
the ones in their brains. I may not be that nice a person, but I want to do well by my sons, so I don’t forget to hide the mattress pads. I’ll have to drop by Évelyne’s as well for a set of her keys. People are already showing an interest and I’m delighted to think that a quick sale could go toward a new coat or a leather purse — that’s the point of the job, making money. When Jim comes home from work, he often asks me what I’ve done today and I wonder what done means, and what doing meant at another time in my life, and the only thing that comes to my lips is, I made money. For the most part, it’s an answer that satisfies me.

  I don’t know yet that I’m at his house, but it won’t be long now, just a few more minutes as I step out of the car, field a call on my cellphone. It’s Jim, telling me he’ll be late tonight, he’s playing badminton with his friend Marco, and I imagine him — as every other time he mentions badminton — racing across a waxed wooden floor, his runners squeaking, dressed like a private-school boy in an age-varied gang of similarly dressed men. Why it is that I envisage them in gym strips (burgundy shorts, grey T-shirts, vaguely medieval badges) I have no idea, but that’s the way it is. I hang up after confirming that I’ll pick up our youngest and that, yes, the bridge is sitting in the trunk of my car. I walk up the slate walkway (“superb modern landscaping”) to Évelyne’s house, and the heel of my shoe sinks into the wet earth between two slabs, of course, I would have to traipse through mud. Not that it makes much of a difference, with my hair scrunched into an untidy bun and the elastic of my bra holding by a thread. As I ring the doorbell, my only thoughts are of faint contempt for myself and for the flowery wrought iron doorbell, rustic and generic, I’ll have to suggest Évelyne replace that, she must know the importance of curb appeal, that doorbell is just tacky. The explosive contrast between the unfurling of my petty musings and the bottomless, secular silence that descends on me when the door opens is so marvelously tragic that I can’t even remember my own name.