Hunting Houses Read online

  But no. Yves and Paule were delighted by the pictures, delighted to have Étienne’s friends there, touched, like them, by the footprints Étienne had left on the world. My parents preferred portioning out Étienne (with his friends, with the Italian girl, with the manager of the youth hostel, if it came to that) to owning him outright. In grief, they had lost the notion of ego itself; they were engulfed in pure love with none of the harshness of the living. It took me a long time, probably until Philémon’s birth, to grasp even fleetingly what love was made of. Unlike them, I spent those years lost in introspection, measuring the effect life had had on me — Étienne’s glaring absence, only rivalled by that of Francis, then mitigated by Jim’s arrival and Philémon’s birth. Four long years in the painful vortex of the most absolute egotism. Still. I would have liked to believe that, with Philémon’s entry into the world in 2004, I was healed of my hypervigilance, of the pathetic passion for navel-gazing — for a while, I did believe that was the case. I lost the obsessiveness, of course, Philémon’s life becoming infinitely more important to me, more essential than my own, which was an immense relief. But I had only to see my mother with the baby, her lighthearted repetition of gestures, the wonderful eclipse of expectations (He exists, I saw him arrive, what a privilege, Tessa), to understand how far from detachment I really was. I was nothing but love and torment.

  Our apartment took up the north half of the second floor of a five-suite building in the heart of Saint-Denis traffic, on the Plateau where all my friends lived and that still had a student-worker-bourgeois feel. It resembled the apartments we hung out in: faded moulding repainted twenty times, thin maple slats of flooring warped by time and the clay soil, rooms in a row, and so much space given over to hallways. Before Philémon, I’d never noticed the hallways before. But over the first few weeks of his life, I spent so many hours walking ours that I came to know them like the moles on my arms. Here, an inactive phone jack. There, the original wall light fixtures to which I’d added tiny department store shades that I adorned with ribbon embroidered with orange beads in a stab at decorating, a stab at accomplishing something other than eating and sleeping over the long weeks during which I had nothing to do but wait on Philémon. Farther down were Jim’s boxes of vinyl, hundreds of records that, one day, would have their own cabinet. He planned to build one as soon as we had enough money for good wood. Meanwhile, the records lived in green milk crates and took up half the hallway leading to the bathroom. I knew the boxes’ contours by heart and never bumped into a single one.

  With Philémon, every night was the same in a different way. His first cry jerked me out of the light damp sleep that had become my norm, and I’d sit on the edge of the bed, waiting to get to my feet. At first, Jim followed me to the baby’s Moses basket, brought me glasses of water and the remote control and stayed near at hand as I nursed. Soon enough, I stopped waking him up. What was the point? Philémon and I had our routine.

  I scooped the baby out of his basket, stood feeling his weight on my shoulder, then carried him into the living room. I could have stayed in bed to nurse him. Should have, if the brochures — all sweetness and light — given to us as we left the hospital were to be believed. But I liked the living room better. There, Philémon and I could go about our vital business: nursing, in his case, and watching reruns of home reno shows in mine. In the blessed silence, no interference. No guilt either. No criticism aimed at me for not doing something more important. No one to dare hint, through seemingly innocent questions, that having a baby was no career choice. When are you going back to university? They have daycares, you know. No, in the space we inhabited, there were only two people in perfect harmony and the scent of breast milk.

  I was nothing but love and torment. And had been ever since Étienne’s death. Maybe even ever since Francis left. Or maybe forever.

  At first, I thought suffering would make me a better singer. Hadn’t I chosen Lamento d’Arianna to audition for my bachelor’s in music? Lasciatemi morire, that I caterwauled with feeling. And it worked; I was accepted into the program. Now that I knew despair up close, I would become Monteverdi’s most sensitive interpreter since Anne Sofie von Otter. But I hadn’t factored in the stage fright I suffered every time I performed during my third year, either as part of the chorus or as a soloist, whether the repertory was just a Christmas carol for sick kids or the Purcell aria that would decide my final mark.

  “Dido’s Lament” in Dido and Aeneas reigned supreme as something I’d longed to sing ever since I began studying music. It presented no major technical challenges but required a stunning, faultless, fully mastered interpretation. My voice professor, an adorable bottle blonde, hadn’t discouraged me from my choice. Grief would pay.

  Of course, that’s not the way Lucille put it; she was tactful. “Our sorrow can become our strength, Tessa.”

  Except when it breaks you.

  Except when you hyperventilate and spend nights on the Internet waiting for pages to load with their terrifying explanations for the symptoms you’re suffering from. And when the answers glue you to the couch, your hand on the remote, sorrow pushes you to gorge on American soap operas for months on end. Your sorrow has you smoking like a chimney and ruining your voice. It cripples you with cowardice and terror. And when I say you, I hope you understand me.

  I only ever sang “Dido’s Lament” in rehearsal.

  “The good thing,” Sophie said philosophically when I told her I was leaving the music faculty three months before earning my degree, “is you’ll never be the girl who failed. You’ll always be the bum who dropped out of university. It’s better to be the dumper than the dumpee, everyone knows that.”

  I spent years dazzled by the series of coincidences that led to my meeting Francis. One June day in 1999, a few weeks after I’d received my acceptance letter from the Université de Montréal, Sophie convinced me to come along for a two-day work stint on an eco-friendly building project. We were to lend a hand to a team of architecture grads from the University of Ottawa. It gave her an excuse to see Sean, a student she’d started dating not long before; for me, it would be an opportunity to get away and quit practising five hours a day. You’ve been accepted, dummy! Sophie, about to start in communications at UQAM, deemed that a life well-lived was a creator’s best possible raw material.

  My dad loaned us his car; I liked to drive. Sophie had found a room where we could crash (in an apartment Sean shared with a biochemistry student from Kitchener) and brought along enough CDs to take us all the way to Chicago. At the age of twenty, already deeply nostalgic, we’d been playing the same songs over and over for too long. An excessive indulgence in our favourites — Bob Dylan, Portishead, the Beatles, especially The White Album, The White Album till it was worn thin, the Police, Leonard Cohen, Carole King at Carnegie Hall, the soundtrack to Time of the Gypsies — was nothing short of a way of life.

  Smoking with the windows down (my dad wouldn’t mind, his new girlfriend Ghislaine was a smoker too), belting out renditions of “Rocky Raccoon” and “Famous Blue Raincoat,” describing our plans for the future: me fleeing to Ireland because I adored the rain; the two of us escaping to Louisiana so that Sophie could track down the mysterious uncle her mother had always talked about who, according to legend, trafficked in crocodile skins (“Then I’ll write an article on him and win a Pulitzer,” raved Sophie); me singing an operatic version of the great TV hits of our childhood, Rémi, Candy, Tom Sawyer, Care Bears, and selling thousands of records; the two of us setting up a table on the roof of Sophie’s building and, for my twenty-first birthday, inviting twenty-one people over for dinner; learning to sew, whip up cocktails, ski, make French braids.

  Upon arriving in Ottawa, it quickly became clear that my “bedroom” was nothing more than a small couch in Sean’s kitchen between the water heater and the sunroom. Aaron, the biochemist from Kitchener, a tall boy whose scrawniness was only matched by his pallor, offered — with little enthusiasm a
nd not the slightest desire — to share his bed with me. I gave a nervous laugh, said I adored kitchen couches and that, at any rate, I’d be up and about before anyone else.

  Sean was easygoing, amused, his hands travelling continually between his pants pockets and the wavy hair that he twirled around his finger as he spoke. He knew his charm but adored Sophie, so I abstained from commenting on the size of his ego. I let him laugh at his own jokes because they were funny and because he looked like an eight-year-old. Sean was one of those people who can bring together thirty others on a Saturday in June to scrape off paint, remove nails from planks, and fill holes in metal panels. Sophie could have done better, but she could have had worse; she already had had worse. Sean would do for now.

  As soon as I arrived onsite, I was assigned to the snack station with three other girls. A simple task, almost absurdly so. Who couldn’t help themselves to lemonade or put milk in their coffee? I kept busy sorting bags of chips by flavour. Shortly before eleven, a cry rang out to my right; a student had just jammed a rusty nail into his hand. He kept hollering — overreacting, in my view — and saying he hadn’t had a tetanus shot. A girl took him to the university’s nursing office, leaving the de-nailing station vacant. Bored by my conversation with the snack bar girls, I told Sean I’d take over.

  My job consisted of sorting through the planks of wood and making sure that every last nail had been removed before they were reused for the house’s interior finish. Once the boards had been cleaned, I delivered them to the sanders, who removed the last traces of dirt and paint flakes using rotary sanders like the one my dad had for his odd jobs: small and far from efficient. A lot of work was underway without much progress being made. Three Franco-Ontarian guys boasted about their ineptitude without a trace of pride. “I should be done by Canada Day.” They laughed and guzzled Sprite. They offered me some, I took a sip, amused and a bit less shy. None of the boys interested me, and none were interested in me. Everything casual and not unpleasant.

  “Okay, guys. Frank’s coming with his big sander.”

  One of the three, Kevin, gave his fingers a snap and smiled at me, “Guess we can’t be slackers forever.”

  Like them, I turned to see the Frank in question. He wore an ordinary T-shirt, an ugly thing depicting the effigy for the university’s civil engineering faculty — a mauve maggot or was it a lightning bolt? At any rate, the thing cried “Eureka!” in a speech bubble and wore a hat reading Class of 1994. His outfit was rounded out with a pair of shorts, the same shorts everyone had on that summer, including me: beige workman’s shorts with eighteen specialized pockets, the kind favoured by archeologists or BBC cameramen. He had thick hair; I remember thinking, It almost looks like horsehair, there must be some pretty funny pictures of him as a kid, and a faraway gaze — could it come from how deeply set his eyes were in their sockets? Around his neck he wore ugly mirrored sunglasses attached to a nylon cord, the beginnings of a sunburn shone on each ear, and his solid calves were impressive. He must bike or ski or both. The man (at least thirty) with his ugly glasses, horse’s hair, and sports physique laid down his sander, smiled, and held out his hand, “Hi, I’m Francis.” How to explain my shortness of breath, the Franco-Ontarians fading away, evaporating into thin air so that nothing remained in my field of vision but him and his face, my body shedding its organs, leaving nothing but a draught, an empty space, flat open country? And the only thought that crossed my mind as I stood facing this man in his hideous T-shirt — was that a coffee stain at the neck? — his forehead beaded with sweat, was, I will never love anyone the way I love you.

  So basically, a series of coincidences. Sophie met Sean one March evening at the Mad Hatter where we went only when our McGill friends took us there, and even then, only after a lot of convincing. Sean wanted to celebrate his master’s in a big way by building an eco-friendly house (actually, I found out that it was Aaron of Kitchener’s idea; how could I not be fascinated by the fact that even Aaron of Kitchener had had a role in bringing Francis and me together?). Francis, a lecturer at the time and so their professor, turned up at the worksite. He saw me. It happened.

  From the moment I agreed to be part of Sean’s project, my encounter with Francis became a likelihood. He could have shown up at the snack bar when I was working there, or attended the end-of-project party the following night; he did, in fact. That’s the night we made out like teenagers.

  After borrowing Sean’s old 1992 Saab — his mother’s, actually — we drove into town on the pretext that the store of vodka was getting low. An hour later, with the bottle of vodka sitting on the back seat, the tangle of our bodies lay in the front between the gear shift and the tape recorder sputtering Cowboy Junkies. We had already reached that stage the day after we met. The day before, we’d shaken hands in front of the sander, traded polite jokes around a beer and had an exchange I deemed prophetic. Francis liked Leonard Cohen as much as I did. At my lowest point after our breakup, Sophie kept saying, “Who doesn’t like Leonard Cohen, Tessa? Seriously, who?” But with him, I had the distinct feeling that there was a difference; this was for real. Had he known right away too? Did he show up at the wrap-up party because he knew he’d find me there? Would he have gone anyway? And if he hadn’t spoken to me that first day, would he have even noticed me? Were the two of us simply destined to meet, or was it more like we were condemned to meet?

  When Philémon was four days old, we said to ourselves, Time for a walk. It seemed the thing to do after two days in hospital and two days spent staring at the baby in his basket on the coffee table in the living room, asking ourselves, What is this thing that’s neither a cat nor an idea? So Jim valiantly carried the brand-spanking-new stroller down the stairs out onto the sidewalk, then returned for the car seat — a saleswoman with a lemon-sucking smile had informed us that the seat in our stroller was too wide with too many gaps; the bucket seat, according to her, complied with prevailing regulations and was far safer. Jim set the car seat in the stroller using the “indispensable” plastic adapter we’d paid so dearly for, then helped me carry the baby downstairs, holding my elbow as though I were some old lady at risk of breaking a bone or two. We swaddled Philémon in all kinds of blankets, despite the summer heat, making sure to pack the baby carrier, the diaper bag, and a change of clothes as well. Our exotic destination, the drugstore, was a dozen blocks away.

  The walls of our neighbourhood were made of brick and concrete and streaked with urine, and the potholed streets we ventured down, riddled with puddles dirtied by passing cars, stank of garbage cans. Where did this assault on our senses come from? Had the source always been there? It suddenly seemed indecent to deliver such a small, easily broken being into this world.

  The drugstore cashier spoke too loudly. On the sidewalk, passersby tripped over the stroller; three of them just about fell on Philémon. The SUVs’ exhaust pipes were right at his level. And why was the sun beating down on us? Where were the tall noble trees to arch over us and provide protection as we passed?

  I had spent the last few years convincing myself that the universe was an inhospitable place, but never had I felt it so brutally as that July afternoon when Philémon, Jim, and I covered the ten blocks between our apartment and the neighbourhood drugstore. What had I been thinking to impose the suffering of this existence on another being? What had gotten into me?

  I passed through Ottawa again with my father, three months after meeting Francis, on the way to my grandparents’ cottage in Wakefield. The joyless city that is Ottawa suddenly seemed to come alive, enhanced by our romance, bathed in the golden light of my recollection of those days.

  We had bought wine on King Edward Avenue. We walked along the banks of the canal to sober up from our first night together. From the phone booth in a corner of the ByWard Market, I called Sophie to tell her everything. I couldn’t wait to be back at Sean’s apartment and, over the phone, I did a good job conveying how lost, drunk, breathless, sated, and hooked a lover
I was.

  “I get what you see in him. People say he’s a genius.”

  “Who says that? Does Sean know him well?”

  “Not that well. He says he’s a lit prof in an engineer’s body.”

  “That’s exactly it! A rotten description though.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you think I’m nuts?”

  “I think it’s the first time I’ve seen you respond so strongly to a human being who isn’t a fictional character in a nineteenth-century novel.”