You should have seen the look on my three roommates’ faces the next day around noon when Gilbert emerged from my room! And his when he got a look at them!

I hadn’t told my friends that I had company – I assumed that when they came home at daybreak after their night’s work we’d finished making love and they’d thought I was alone – and when they got up I’d fixed them the kind of late breakfast they like: copious and greasy. As for Gilbert, I hadn’t had time to explain my arrangements with three drag queens from the Main who’d been my work-mates, in a whorehouse, for more than a year and with whom I’d been sharing the huge apartment for even longer.

Nicole, Jean and Mae were waxing ecstatic over my perfectly cooked bacon and my scrambled eggs with cheese when the door to my room – the first on the left after the kitchen – opened on the stark-naked Gilbert who was trying to untangle his mop of blonde hair with my hairbrush. A priceless picture: my three friends gawking while Gilbert froze on the threshold, arms raised and blushing like a little boy. He didn’t even think to cover himself. He stood there in the noonday sun as nature made him. He was more than handsome, he was glorious.

And all he could say was, “I thought I heard voices … I figured it was the radio …”

Then he closed the door to put his clothes on.

The silence that followed was eloquent. It was my turn to hear them thinking and what I could read in their minds made me want to howl with laughter. Needless to say, they were astonished, but went on buttering their toast as if everything was as usual. They were goggle-eyed though, and I knew they were trying to think of something not too compromising to say: after all, I had the right to get it on with whoever I wanted, but they mustn’t look surprised at what a dish he was so they wouldn’t insult me.

And as I should have expected, the silence didn’t last, curiosity winning out over discretion, which I must admit is not a characteristic of drag queens.

Jean-le-Décollé dropped his knife onto his plate.

“My God!” he said in English. “I’m in love!”

Mae East patted my leg under the table.

“I don’t know where you found it, dear, but make sure you don’t lose that one! And when you’re finished, hand him over to Auntie! Name your price! And more! The sky’s the limit!”

Nicole Odeon, hilarious, had placed both hands over her heart.

“I’m not hungry anymore. I have to take off ten pounds! Or twenty!”

I replied, teasing, “More important, you have to take off a good foot and a half!”

We laughed, we howled, we clapped our hands, Nicole even threw herself against my bedroom door as if she wanted to smash it open, like in an old Italian neorealist melodrama, and eggs got cold while cup after cup of coffee was poured.

Fifteen minutes or so later, as Gilbert hadn’t come out of the bedroom, I started to feel guilty about leaving him alone and I asked my three friends to excuse me while I went to see what was going on. Was he in the bathroom, had he showered, was he waiting for me to get him and make the introductions?

Mae East chewed on a limp slice of toast.

“If he didn’t know we were there he must’ve had a shock, poor thing! We don’t look like creatures of the night at breakfast, we look like we’ve escaped from a battlefield! Noon, the drag queen’s Waterloo!”

Then, stopping and pointing to the two others, “Theirs, anyway. I’m gorgeous always!”

Nicole ran her hands through her blonde hair which needed a dye-job. Badly.

“If you aren’t back in half an hour, Céline, I’ll put out the fire with a kettle of cold water!”

I pushed open my bedroom door, laughing but a bit worried all the same.

Gilbert, fully dressed, was sitting on the bed and pretending to read La Débâcle, one of the final volumes of the Rougon-Macquart, which I’m finding rough going because descriptions of battles aren’t my favourite reading

“Aren’t you coming out for breakfast with us, Gilbert?”

He looked up from the book and what I could see in his incredibly blue eyes I didn’t like.

“What are those weird things anyway?”

Just what I’d been afraid of.

So I sighed and sat down on the rumpled sheets beside him to explain.

He listened attentively, nodding now and then to let me know that he was following. He started a few times because he’d heard a lot about the Boudoir during Expo but had never set foot inside, his opinion being that a brothel featuring transvestites was grotesque. He had no idea that he was going to find out that I’d been its official hostess. He’d hit on a waitress at the Sélect and found himself with a former hostess in a brothel. I could understand his surprise, but I also sensed that his reluctance was due to something else, that his use of the term weird things earlier had come from something deeper than surprise, and for a while I was afraid I was with one of those intolerant, unbearable males, who always fear their virility is being questioned and are suspicious of anything that doesn’t follow the unwavering line of what they want the world to be: irremediably straight.

Was he suspicious of transvestites? This longhaired beatnik, this guitar-strumming, pot-smoking gypsy?

He tried to reassure me, swore that he wasn’t intolerant, explained that he’d been taken aback and it would take him a while to get used to my entourage, and I’m sorry to say that I was relieved because he was talking about the future, not worrying over problems that his prejudices towards my roommates might create. His brow was furrowed in worry while he spoke to me. I concentrated on the fact that he wanted to see me again, that I hadn’t been a one-night stand, I ignored the rest – my concerns, my questions, his obvious discomfort – to persuade myself that all would be well, and I took his hand to lead him to the kitchen. He followed close behind as if he were walking to the gallows.

Everyone was polite, we shared a good laugh, Gilbert ate a hearty breakfast, yet something was missing around the table over the next half-hour. I couldn’t put my finger on it, it was hard to pin down. I may have been the only one who had that impression, but it seemed to me that this whole display of cheerfulness was forced, self-conscious, stilted, that some indefinable discomfort hung over the breakfast. The jokes my three friends cracked weren’t too dirty and they didn’t simper and flounce as much as I would have expected, subtlety not being their strong point; after what they’d said about Gilbert a little earlier, I’d have expected them to eye him hungrily and, kidding around, make barely disguised advances or come out with the cracks drag queens specialize in. And Gilbert responded to the winks and the limp innuendoes with laughter that sounded hollow, with shrugs that he seemed unable to control and tried to disguise with hilarity.

I saw Jean-le-Décollé frown several times, which worried me. Did he think that Gilbert wasn’t right for me? Did he foresee problems, crises, tears on account of the huge physical difference and for other reasons that I couldn’t see? Jean is an excellent judge of character, he was quick to discern people’s good points, their flaws, possibilities and shortcomings; that was how he’d become a kind of chief or in any case an important and respected advisor to the drag queens of the Main. Did he foresee in this handsome specimen I’d spent the night with some flaws that were invisible to me? Was he reconsidering his I’m in love? And, with the other two sensing it, was Gilbert’s rating dropping in the kitchen of the apartment on Place Jacques-Cartier for some mysterious reason? I felt like getting up in mid-conversation to scream and pound my fist on the table and say, “Do you think I could have twenty-four hours of happiness without having to question everything?”

For a few hours I’d let myself go, done thrilling things that had transported me, and now I was back where I’d been the day before, worried and tense.

His coffee finished, Gilbert asked if he could take a shower and, to my amazement, no one offered to accompany him.

We heard him singing the same song Louise had sung the night before, about airlines and propellers. But no one around the table said a word, which was absolutely abnormal, and I started to panic. I got up from the table and went to make a fresh pot of coffee, set it on the burner, and turned to my three friends.

“Okay, I want to know what’s going on.”

Jean-le-Décollé sipped some cold coffee.

“Come and sit down, Céline.”

Mae East got up to fill the butter dish.

“Something happened when you went back to your room with Gilbert …”

Nicole Odeon put her hair in a pink elastic to make a ponytail.

“Jean-le-Décollé recognized him first.”

Frowning, I looked at Jean-le-Décollé.

“Do you know him?”

He heaved a long sigh as if he didn’t want to say what would come next. I felt my heart skip a beat and sink into my stomach. Okay, I was about to get some more bad news, better prepare myself. But what came out of Jean-le-Décollé’s mouth was simply one more mystery that left me no further ahead.

“Yes, we know him. You don't, you haven’t been around the Main long enough. Gilbert is the son of Madame Veuve.”