Hunting Houses Page 7

  The phone keeps on ringing. I have to rummage through my purse, find it at the very bottom, answer.

  “Do you have a couple of minutes?”

  “I. Yes. How are you, Évelyne?”

  “Oh…”

  “Évelyne…”

  “I shouldn’t, we really don’t know each other.”

  “No, that’s true. That’s very true.”

  “But I’m going to say it anyway.”

  “Of course.”

  “I slept with someone in Toronto.”

  “…”

  “Do you think I’m shameless?”

  “…”

  “Tessa?”

  “You slept with someone in Toronto?”

  “A colleague. I thought he was good-looking, we’d bump into each other at seminars, but I never thought…We had sex all night!”

  “That’s. That’s marvellous, Évelyne.”

  “That’s not all.”

  “… No?”

  “No. He’s coming to Montreal at the end of the week. He wants us to get together.”

  “Oh. Is that all?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Was that all you wanted to say? Nothing else?”

  “I. No, why?”

  “Nothing. That’s perfect. He wants to see you again.”

  “Should I?”

  “You should do whatever you feel like doing.”

  “He kissed every last inch of me. He told me ten, maybe a hundred times, how fabulous I was. Then he was ready to start all over again twenty minutes later. The next morning too. He texted me all day long. Nothing too serious though. Jokes, code words. He said, ‘Any guy who lets you get away is crazy.’ What do you think I feel like doing?”

  “So then, do it. Do it. Who’s there to stop you?”

  “Nobody. Especially not Francis.”

  A blow, an absence. An attack of tachycardia. It’s normal for her to say his name.

  “No. You’re right.”

  “By the way, he told me you’d seen each other.”

  “What?”

  “Francis told me he was there at the house when you stopped by.”

  “That’s what he told you.”

  “Yes. He thought you looked qualified.”

  “Ha!”

  “What? Does that seem condescending? It is a bit condescending. Francis can be very paternalistic. Robert says that — Robert is my…I suppose he’s my lover, isn’t he? Robert says paternalism is the weapon of the weak.”

  “…”

  “I’ve talked about him too much. Not a good thing.”

  “No worries.”

  “Perhaps I should put a stop to it all. What if he gets bored? The humiliation. I couldn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “No, I meant yes, I understand. Not yes, you should put a stop to it.”

  “But am I right to be wary?”

  “Évelyne, about the house. I may have a problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Some infighting at the office. We’ve been asked to work as a team.”

  “What does that change?”

  “It means my team partner sees Ahuntsic as her territory. She wants to look after you.”

  “No!”

  No was right. Back at the office, Guylaine would be delighted to share a listing with me, but no one has forced my hand. Yet it’s the only thing I can think of right then to put some distance between me and Évelyne.

  “I don’t want someone else!”

  “I’m so sorry. She’ll be responsible for most of the showings. I promise that won’t change a thing for your house.”

  “I know. I’m being ridiculous. It’s just that I’d thought we might be friends.”

  When I was first with Jim, both of us smoked. He liked his morning cigarette over coffee in our apartment’s miniscule kitchen. The air grew thick with smoke; we had to open the door, its thousand shades of the same grey, cracked, crooked, with panes of glass so old they looked frosted. The sunlight that did manage to filter through set plumes of dust to dancing. I don’t know why the memory of all that dirt is dear to me, but it is. I always liked smoking at night better, when the only perceptible light came from the tip of the cigarette I’d just taken a drag from, lighting up then going dark like a torso rising and falling with each breath.

  After Philémon’s birth, we spaced out the sharing of cigarettes. Jim began to feel he couldn’t play his instrument as well as before, so he quit. I soon followed because with Boris’s then Oscar’s birth, the masquerade became laughable. Who is this old mother sitting cross-legged and smoking in her toy-strewn backyard? Not me. No longer me.

  But I never got out of the habit of heading out to the yard when the weather warmed up, once the boys went to bed. Tonight the temperature’s mild, and anyway, no one wants to shut themselves up like a mummy. There’s no way I can stay inside next to Jim in front of the TV set watching fictional people go through their traumas in order to remind us how lucky we are, Aren’t we lucky, honey? I don’t have a cigarette, but I did open a bottle of white wine; it’s Thursday, and I’ve brought my glass out with me.

  “The stars’ll be out.”

  Behind the wooden fence, my neighbour points at the sky. I forget that it’s not just birds and buds that come out in the springtime — neighbours do too.

  “Evening, Roland.”

  “There’s still too much light, but come eleven o’clock or midnight, they’ll be out.”

  “That’s what you say, but they can’t be seen in the city.”

  “With my telescope they can.”

  Roland puts his eye to the lens again, his back hunched over. Soon he’s groaning in discomfort, but he doesn’t change his position.

  “Would you like me to adjust the height?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your telescope. It’s too low for you, Roland.”

  “I like it this way.”

  “But it hurts, I can hear you.”

  “It’s perfect just the way it is. It’s at Rosa’s height.”

  Rosa, Roland’s wife, didn’t make it through the winter. She died on New Year’s Day, just after a visit from their grandson, Nathan, who’s enrolled in military college.

  No one thought she’d survive till spring. She huffed like a locomotive and her oxygen tank followed her everywhere. Roland would wheel her into the yard on clear summer evenings so she could admire the Big Dipper. Three packs of Player’s a day for forty-seven years, he proclaimed when she died, not without a certain amount of pride. His Rosa never bowed to anything.

  “The kids think I should sell. They say I’m sitting on a goldmine.”

  “You’d get six hundred thousand for it, maybe six-fifty.”

  “We paid forty-two thousand in 1974. Poor young people.”

  He shakes his head and rubs his neck, not too conspicuously, but still: he hurts all over and has ever since she’s been gone.

  When I close the sliding door to the kitchen on my way inside, the house is plunged into silence. The lightbulbs in the hood above the stove produce a weak pool of light. Everything is so familiar. The subway tile I still congratulate myself for choosing, despite the crumbling grout. The open shelves, a great idea stolen from six-year-old decorating magazines, shelves that actually turned out to be disastrous — pots, cake pans, sieves, lids, rolling pins idly gather dust (I quit sorting them into pretty colour-coded piles a long time ago). On the jatoba hardwood floor, bought on sale and laid by Jim one ambitious Sunday (the result is pleasing but the grooves are too loose, it will never qualify as a “professional” job), crumbs of bread, rice crackers, and parmesan forever accumulate no matter how often it’s swept. The empty sink shines. The walls, victims of my obsession with grey three years ago, have taken on th
e colour of a raincloud. I still like it. But the colour bleeds in places onto the white moulding that needs repainting. That’s when I’ll fill the holes left by the finishing nails, my finger dirty with latex.

  Those jobs are the kind I like, repetitive and satisfying, with guaranteed results.

  The dining room is cloaked in darkness. Its table is never totally uncluttered. Philémon’s science and geography quizzes lie waiting for our signature. He must have left them there once he’d finished his homework. I can’t find a pen; I’ll have to remember them tomorrow. I examine Philemon’s earnest but messy handwriting, his stellar grades, from day one. Boris is not as lucky, but his penmanship is divine.

  By late evening, the room looks austere, detached from the rest of the house. The built-in china cabinet, as old as the gypsum walls, still sports its porcelain handles. Jim has often suggested repainting its oak white to brighten the room, and I almost said yes. I’m usually not a purist for the natural look; it’s something I often say to clients, mouldings have been repainted since time immemorial, you shouldn’t let a house go for so little. Yet I never could get used to the idea in my own dining room.

  I sometimes sit here sewing on buttons, mending torn knees and eviscerated stuffies. We don’t have a hearth, but I play the Victorian anyway and find the shadows strangely companionable. This dark isn’t afraid of my own darkness.

  Oscar has abandoned his clothes on the bathroom floor. His pants and small socks, miniscule versions of a man’s clothes, lie scrunched on the mat. As usual, the pirate boat and goggles are left out. There is a cupboard for storing toys, and a laundry hamper in the corner by the washstand. But here life overflows more than in the other rooms. Not that I can talk. My creams and nail polishes, now thick and unuseable, bought in the lame hope of transforming my soul, the hairbrushes that, when purchased, promised to change my life, lie heaped on the counter. I simply drop the clothes in the hamper.

  From the very first day, the living room has been the heart of the home. Since our arrival, we’ve removed the columns characteristic of the 1920s building style, then the doors and a long stretch of wall just before Boris was born. We baptized that period “the epic renovation of 2006.” Once the living room was gutted, we dug the basement to welcome the hockey nets and Ping-Pong table a future of young boys held in store for us. “Guaranteed added value,” Sylvain often said at the office, thoroughly convinced that heaven was having an eight-foot ceiling and stainless steel appliances. As expected, our basement is strewn with abandoned knick-knacks, robots made of boxes covered in tinfoil, and every size of children’s clothing from zero to eleven crammed into more-or-less organized bins. Every time I head down with another load for the laundry, I wonder why I insist on keeping them all. Boris, sturdier than his big brother, wears almost the same size despite the two-year age difference. Oscar could use the big boys’ clothes, but by the time they reach him, they’re torn and stained and I reuse very few. No one will ever wear the clothes in the “zero to three” and “three to five” bins. Wouldn’t they be better off in the hands of some underprivileged children somewhere east of where I live, rather than here feeding the raging nostalgia that inhabits me? Maybe I’ll be able to give them away later. Once the storm has passed, and all the tough conversations and fighting are over, once Jim and I are left vanquished and empty, it will be easy to give away those bins of clothes. Bet your bottom dollar, I think all of a sudden as I turn off the basement light — the boys always forget — and then a song comes to me, the one little Annie sings in the ’70s musical comedy that Oscar watched again and again over the Christmas holiday. The sun’ll come out tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow / There’ll be sun. It’s not hard to leave, not when you have somewhere to go. We’re always leaving something or someone behind. How many clients have I seen agonizing over the decision to sell the house in which their children were born, only to jump eagerly at the first attractive offer? I’ve driven Jim to the airport so many times before a tour, watching the lightness in his step as he walked away from us, like that of a teen tasting freedom. Why wouldn’t I be able to walk away just as easily from everything I’ve known, everything that belongs to me and carries my trace?

  Aren’t I entitled to that sun tomorrow? If I called my brother to ask for his advice, he’d laugh, take a drag off his cigarette, and sing, It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. He’d be his usual non-judgemental hippy self. But I won’t be calling Étienne. Étienne died over fifteen years ago.

  2004

  Most surprising of all was how clearly I perceived sound. Only the baby’s squeals interrupted the gratifying silence in the apartment. When he slept, infinitely heavy in my arms despite his feather weight, I could hear the hum of the fridge intensify at the opposite end of the kitchen and the rustling of pages as my mother, seated in the living room, sat reading a Swedish thriller and waiting for my instructions: change the baby, take the baby, rock the baby, make the next meal. “Pretend I’m not here unless you need help.” She was on holiday — a lucky coincidence — when Philémon was born and had all the time in the world. She put herself at our disposal with no strings attached from the second Philémon emitted his first pint-sized giant cry, one July night, in a hospital in the east of the city. En route to the hospital, just before midnight, the radio announced Reggiani’s death. Jim took it as a good sign: his son, too, would be a musician. My mother begged, “Promise me you won’t call him Serge. Life brings enough hardships of its own without that.” I didn’t need to ask what she meant. For the past four years, our combined lives revolved around the same dark sun. Étienne died after a fall from a tall cliff one May morning in Scotland, during a trip with friends, a last hurrah together before scattering to their adult lives, one with a science education degree, another an industrial design degree, another, like Étienne, with a not-quite finished degree in cinema, “but nine credits are nothing, by Christmas I’ll have it.” His friends returned home horror stricken, carrying their missing companion’s backpack. They gave it to my parents as though it were a relic. It took over ten days to repatriate his body. An eternity.

  Étienne’s friends proved to be generous with us. My parents asked them to tell the story of the last days, his last hours, until his friends were blue in the face. They were always game and treated each time as if it was the first, embellishing their accounts here and there to flesh out the story, to do some good so that Étienne might live a little longer, even if only in the world of storytelling.

  “‘I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as Rowardennan in my life,’ were his words on our arrival. Our youth hostel was beautiful too, an old stone house, almost a manor, it even had a turret. I’ll show you the pictures once they’re developed. From our room, we could see Loch Lomond and a mountain in the distance. It was just so perfect, we decided to stay on. There was a group of Italian girls, they were really fun. Étienne had his eye on one of the four, Valeria, tall with curly hair. They spent all three evenings outside by the fire telling stories and drinking beer. The last night they stayed outdoors till morning. Étienne joined us for breakfast, wearing a smile as big as the moon. Valeria had given him her address, said we could visit her when we were in Italy. She’d fallen in love like that, in just one night. Not that I’m surprised. Étienne always had that effect on girls. It really bugged us. The next morning we started out for the West Highlands Way — I’d read good things in my guidebook about the Devil’s Staircase, a steep path but not all that dangerous if you stuck to it. We planned to go to Italy afterwards. We wanted to see Scotland, Ireland, London, Paris, Marseilles, Italy, Greece. Oh, Étienne wanted to go to the Cyclades too. In the end, all we saw was the Amsterdam airport, the Glasgow airport, Glasgow’s pubs, cars driving on the left between lochs, the Rowardennan village, then the devil’s mountain itself. Leaving the hospital, Fred was bawling like a calf, saying over and over, ‘If it had happened at the end of the trip instead, at least Étienne could
have known other countries too.’ But the thing is, Étienne was thrilled with things as they were. That’s what he said in Rowardennan, ‘I’ve never seen anything as beautiful in my life. We can die happy, guys.’ Then he laughed and opened another beer. It was just an off-the-cuff remark. But thinking back to that moment, it makes your blood run cold.”

  My parents listened to the bitter end of Christophe’s story, nodding, squeezing their eyes shut from time to time, interrupting him at the same spots again and again to ask the same questions. My mother: “Did you take a picture of Valeria? I’d like to see her.” My dad: “Was it Guinness he drank? He liked those dark beers, eh?” Paule and Yves, reunited in the same room, were only one of many surreal scenes I’d witness over the days following my brother’s death. The presence of my father, in a tracksuit, seated in Paule’s old overstuffed armchair where I’d seen her spend evenings reading and sewing, watching TV and talking on the phone, seemed both improbable and natural to me. This is what happens when death comes to call: the unknown becomes so brutally familiar that nothing shocks you anymore. There’s a period of détente — a horrific one, of course — in the gravity-free state that confers on the bereaved a kind of as yet untapped power.

  I surprised myself thinking several times a day, This would be something to tell Francis. Francis would laugh at this. Francis would be moved by my tears. I wanted to phone him; despite the eight months of silence between us I’d convinced myself that, Hey, if ever there was a good reason to call him, this is it. But his number had changed, and he wasn’t in the phone book. Between our breakup and Étienne’s death, a new century had begun, but nothing else had changed. Francis, too, had disappeared, and his absence, even in the fever of grief, only served as a reminder of that fact: he was all I could think of.

  On the morning of Étienne’s funeral, his friends worked hard to put together a quick collage of Christophe’s pictures that was displayed on an easel by the coffin in the funeral home. I thought they might have been too much. Even though my parents wanted to see the photos, it was not the best time to impose the last images of their son on them; it seemed indecent somehow, too in-your-face. Wasn’t this death inherently theirs? Were they not the legitimate heirs? Did they feel no jealousy toward the boy-men with their greasy hair (except at the funeral! What a sight, every head of usually grubby hair shining on this day, bathed in the sunlight coming through the church’s stained glass window, all the weeping young men whose resemblance to children had been revived by just one quick shampoo; I joked about it discreetly with Sophie during the reception buffet afterwards), hadn’t they stolen from them their last moments with Étienne? The man who had wanted this child, the woman who bore him and nursed him, the parents who watched him grow, had calmed his moods, mopped up his vomit, suffered through his homework and the apathy of adolescence, to then be deprived of their son’s last days of happiness, Never seen anything as beautiful in my life, only receiving from him, ten days before his death, a bungled goodbye, a quick hug at the Montreal airport surrounded by traffic officers reminding them to Please keep moving, you can’t park in the departure lane, this man and this woman should not have had to put up with shared farewells.