The great night arrived then, my chicken with olives and lemon had been simmering in its juice for hours – my grandmother Poulin’s secret: a 200-degree oven all afternoon – the air in the apartment was filled with rosemary and the scents of the south of France and five nervous people were waiting for the arrival of three guests who didn’t know that they were going to meet.

We had invited them at half-hour intervals. First, the two Gretas, so there’d be time to get the younger one drunk, then – Surprise! Surprise! – Gilbert himself, innocent victim of his girlfriend’s machinations.

The night before, we’d made love as we never had before. Did I want to be forgiven in advance if my plan didn’t work? Whatever it was, this time I was more expert, more excited, and Gilbert didn’t resist, he let himself go and his pleasure was mixed with amazement. I was a veritable tornado, all at once my caresses, involved and professional, turned out to be so skillful, so complicated that they were new to me, I was everywhere at once, I moved with no transition from succubus to incubus, I nourished myself with the squeals like a piglet’s and the gasping of the man-object Gilbert had become in my hands, and thanks to him I’d been acquiring experience and it was all to my teacher’s advantage. Our lovemaking, repeated several times, was rewarded by our feasting on a huge bowl of cereal, puffy with humidity because the box hadn’t been closed properly, followed by a session of tickling that took us both to the verge of hysteria.

Greta-la-Jeune made things easier for us by turning up already tipsy. Her drinking problems were already making tongues wag when the Boudoir closed and her inevitable return to the street in recent months had been a disaster. I saw her every now and then, she came to the restaurant for an order of fries or a fish and chips when she was able to escape the vigilance of Greta-la-Vieille, who kept a nearly maniacal eye on both their weights and every time, her obvious, gradual, unavoidable decline broke my heart.

(The two younger “girls" of Fine Dumas had been the most affected when her establishment closed the year before: Greta-la-Jeune who, despite the care and the angelic patience of Greta-la-Vieille, was sinking into alcohol and junk food to numb her despair, and Babalu, already depressive and fragile, who was foundering without resistance into a kind of permanent, debilitating neurasthenia. She paced her strip of sidewalk, nose to the ground, hands in her pockets, absent from everything and barely present to her clients. Threats by Maurice’s henchmen, though numerous and explicit, had no effect: of our own Brigitte Bardot, with her freshness, her mischievous little face and her astounding naïveté, all that was left was the pitiful little scarf knotted under her chin which hadn’t fooled anyone for ages, and she was becoming the laughing stock of the Main. But Babalu still brought in enough money so that everyone left her alone and Maurice’s emissaries were content to laugh in her face when they went to collect their due.

Greta-la-Jeune was getting fat before our eyes, steeped in alcohol, pickled, though it didn’t interfere with her work because certain wealthy clients were keen about her ample pink flesh, while Babalu melted like an anorexic teenager and neither one, we feared, could be rehabilitated.)

I don’t think I need to add that Greta-la-Vieille was not in a very good mood when they arrived … She kept glaring at her companion. In any other circumstances, those looks would have nailed Greta-la-Jeune on the spot, but this time they just seemed to amuse her because she mocked them openly. I felt that our plan for her would be easy, we just had to give her a little more to drink, she probably wouldn’t even realize what was going on; it wouldn’t work with Greta-la-Vieille though, she was bristling and preoccupied by the appalling condition of her friend, who might refuse to fall into the trap I was setting. And would hate me for it till the end of my days, I was positive, and I began to curse myself for being too lenient.

My four partners in crime already saw the situation as desperate, I could sense it, and I was the only one in the big parlour with its garish colours who showed a little sparkle and a bit of joie de vivre, even if it was fake. Shattered, my three roommates were standing like fence-posts, drinks glued to their hands and, for once, silent. While the Duchess kept looking at the front door until even Greta-la-Vieille exclaimed, between two offensive remarks intended for the other Greta, “What’s up, Duchess, looking for a prospect? You can’t take your eyes off the door! Are we here for your engagement announcement? Did your Mexican Peter come here to join you?”

Greta-la-Jeune raised her glass and bleated idiotically, “I’ll drink to that!”

Exasperated, Greta-la-Vieille said, shrugging, “You don’t have to tell us! You’d drink to anything!”

And poor Greta-la-Jeune had to fan the flames by coming back immediately with, “Sure, especially to your funeral!”

It took all our diplomatic skills – which we weren’t renowned for – and the Duchess’s comic expertise to restore some life, if not peace, to the room. Greta-la-Vieille, draped in her wounded pride, wanted to leave right away before the other Greta did something irreparably stupid, Greta-la-Jeune collapsed heavily onto the forties-era sofa and kept threatening to vomit in the lap of her protectress, while my three roommates were content to shift the bowls of chips and other nibblies on the big coffee table while looking daggers at me. As for me, I was starting to pray that Gilbert wouldn’t show up. Our attempts at reconciliation were going unheeded, our attempts at conversation were dead ends, when the Duchess, suddenly inspired, had the brilliant idea of putting on Mae East’s old turntable Greta-la-Jeune’s favourite piece of music, Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” and launched into her own personal version of the jitterbug which was so silly that it always made us laugh. But I think it was not so much her clowning that restored the good mood to the room as the grotesqueness of the situation: regardless of what you have to say about them, drag queens have a sense of the ridiculous as sharp as a knife, and seeing the big whale of a Duchess flinging herself around like a lunatic on the fake and threadbare Persian carpet to save a young evening that was beyond a shadow of a doubt doomed to failure was enough to tickle their sense of humour. Towards the middle of the piece, everyone but Greta-la-Jeune, who was still slouched on the rough, worn velour of the sofa, was dancing, arms flailing and voices blaring. There was something desperate and hysterical about this forced dance being performed by six individuals who quite obviously had no desire to, but felt obliged to, follow her as they tried to redeem a situation that was already lost.

And it was just as the Duchess was threatening to move the needle back to the beginning of the piece that the doorbell rang.

Five persons stood motionless in the parlour, turned to stone, while a sixth, under the reproachful gaze of the seventh and last, began to shout while brandishing a bottle of Beefeater, “Duchess! Duchess! Your prospect!”

I wanted to be anywhere else, at the other end of the world, on another planet, in a different, forever inaccessible solar system. Or at the Sélect, serving hamburger platters to faceless nobodies.

But Greta-la-Vieille, while ignoring him, saved the day by grabbing Greta-la-Jeune bodily and saying to her, “Whoever it is, he mustn’t see you like this, you’re a disgrace! Come on, we’ll go to the bathroom and try to make you look human … As human as possible …”

I went to answer the door.

Gilbert was greeted by silence as heavy as a wet winter overcoat. You’d have said that someone had cut the sound so as to study just the body language of the people in the parlour. Jean-le-Décollé, Mae East and Nicole Odeon, with a coldness that was strange in them, merely nodded when he came in, while the Duchess, who only knew him by reputation, inspected him like some vulgar piece of goods, from head to toe, from toe to head, stopping, but barely, on the parts that seemed to interest her, appearing more stunned than seduced. I could have killed them! They could have pushed themselves a little, helped me out, at least put an end to the stupid silence that had us all in knots! I knew that they didn’t hold him in high esteem, but all the same a little decorum wouldn’t have hurt anybody! I heard myself asking, hesitantly, if anyone wanted a drink. Someone, probably Gilbert, asked for a beer. The others turned down my offer, pointing to the drinks they’d just refreshed before they launched into the mad dance prompted by the Glenn Miller music.

Gilbert seem to be having one of his good days. No sign of nervousness on his face, no sign of depression either. There was always that, but with him you never knew … All day long I’d tried to convince myself that he would react well to the surprise I’d arranged, but now that he was there, even in good shape, and no one seemed willing to help me, I wasn’t sure of anything and I felt like cancelling, like getting rid of Gilbert before Greta-la-Vieille left the bathroom, and hiding under my warmest blankets, intending to stay there till autumn.

While I was serving his drink – before the guests arrived I’d put a few beers in a champagne bucket because I knew it was practically the only thing Gilbert drank – we heard noise from the back of the apartment – slamming doors, loud, furious voices, a broken glass – and I thought I made out a few words: disgrace, goddamn drunk, never again … My three roommates gawked and didn’t try to cover the racket. The Duchess actually seemed to be enjoying it. Gilbert asked me if there were any other guests when I’d assured him there would only be six of us. The Duchess of course couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Yes, your surprise!”

Gilbert half-rose, frowning.

“Surprise? What surprise?”

The disappointed look he gave me then was already tinged with blame.

“Do I smell a trap, Céline?”

I stayed silent, with my glass raised and a guilty smile on my lips.

“Tell me right now, Céline, or I’m getting the hell out …”

I didn’t need to answer, Greta-la-Vieille was emerging from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

“If she isn’t asleep in ten minutes I’ll knock her out myself!”

Silence is a rare commodity among drag queens and when Greta-la-Vieille realized that no mischievous retort or ironic remark was coming in response to what she’d just said, she felt right away that something was wrong and she leaned against the old record-player, bringing her hand to her heart.

“For God’s sake, girls, did Marlon Brando die while I was in the loo?”

No one laughed. Or seemed to have heard her. It was as if the parlour had been poured into a plastic mold the way animals are at the new taxidermists who don’t bother empting their victims before mounting them on a metal stand, but plunge them into blocks of transparent acrylic, carefully cut and perfectly symmetrical, that you can exhibit anywhere in the house, claiming they’re works of art and not ordinary animals stuffed in a more up-to-date way. One of these days, who knows, some filthy rich lunatic might buy our fossilized parlour – with the title Five Drag Queens and a Midget Cruise a Beatnik, a relic of the decadence that characterized the second half of the twentieth century.

The stillness that had settled into the parlour on the arrival of Greta-la-Vieille was all the more surprising because usually it was buzzing with pointless activity since its inhabitants were as wary of peace and quiet as of the bubonic plague.

So the only movement in the paralyzed room came when Gilbert turned to see who’d just come in. Had he recognized her voice? Then, during the quarter of a second that it took for him to turn his head, the world as I’d known it collapsed. The floor opened up beneath my feet, a gaping hole that revealed the bowels of the Earth, and the seething of Hell was hollowed out where a moment earlier a fake Persian carpet had been, the parlour and everything in it slid into it unbearably slowly and I thought to myself that if that was where my life was leading me, to this resounding flop – I no longer had any doubt about it – then it was my own fault because I’d been the sole instigator and it really wasn’t worth bothering to live.

They didn’t even take a thousandth of a second to recognize one another.

And the shock was terrible.

You see it in the movies sometimes, people reunited suddenly, by chance, and depending on whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy, you laugh or cry because you’ve been manipulated by the filmmaker, the actors, the background music that does its share as well; but in real life, at home on the Place Jacques-Cartier, in your own parlour, in the company of friends who aren’t acting and with no background music to guide your reaction, you stand there, stupefied, you feel superfluous, a voyeur, guilty, you want to disappear into oblivion and never come back, especially if you’re behind this event and no one knows where it will lead – to horrible tragedy or boundless joy. And it all takes place on the smoking ruins of the world as you’ve known it.

I say that the shock was terrible, but I guessed that more than I saw it.

Because they didn’t move. They both turned white and wide-eyed, incalculably powerful energy exploded between them, lighting up the parlour and its occupants like a camera flash, but they didn’t move.

And if I hadn’t stepped in I think they’d still be there, dumbfounded, speechless, until someone came to take them home. After a fairly long moment, and seeing that nothing was going to happen unless I did something, I found the courage to put my hands on his shoulders. He didn’t make a move to free himself, he didn’t push my hands away, and I thought to myself that maybe all was not lost after all.

I turned towards the other four witnesses, still glued to their seats, and gestured to them to leave us alone. I was afraid that the Duchess, with her absolute lack of subtlety, would make some stupid crack, pointless and uncalled-for, but for once she seemed to understand the gravity of the situation and she merely exited the parlour like a great actress after a successful scene.

Alone with me now, Greta-la-Vieille and Gilbert did not make a single move towards one another, did not exchange a word. They only looked at one another for long minutes, transfixed, mesmerized, and they cried. In silence. Scalding tears ran down their faces, sobs shook their bodies, they were bent double when pain, or happiness, or both, was too powerful, they blew their noses noisily and cleared their throats to stifle the cries that wanted to get out. They couldn’t take their eyes off one another but they couldn’t speak either. They drank each other in with their eyes but couldn’t express in words what they were feeling.

Greta-la-Vieille had stayed leaning against the old record-player and gesturing broadly. She could have been a French singer from the 1930s, about to open her repertoire of songs about sailors’ girls, about shop girls abandoned by the man who’d seduced them, who have been rendered mute by emotion. As for Gilbert, he was bent over as if he wanted to leap out of his armchair and run into his adoptive mother’s arms, but something, modesty, shame, shyness, kept him from doing so and he sat there, overcome by a sluggishness against which he was helpless, that immobilized him. And like her, he was crying. In silence. They looked at one another and all they could do was cry. As if they’d felt a need to drain themselves of excess emotion before starting again from square one. Or leave one another forever without exchanging a single word.

As for me, I hoped I’d be forgotten. But I suspected that they weren’t even aware of my presence anyway, that I did not exist, that nothing mattered to them but the other person’s appearance in their life after a separation of so many years. But why didn’t they get up, why didn’t they embrace, even if it meant hurling insults or blows afterwards if they felt the need, why this immobility when it seemed to me there should have been wild cries, hysterical music, riotous and uninhibited dancing, the Duchess’s impersonations or the snappy retorts of Jean-le-Décollé to celebrate it? To celebrate what exactly? It couldn’t be called a reunion, reunions weren’t those endless sobs, those gulps of pain, those silent looks; reunions were shouts of joy, slapping thighs, impossible promises – and they were celebrations! Would they be content with a long, silent scene before they turned their backs again once and for all? Without a reconciliation? Without even a curse? Had I brought them together so that nothing would happen? Deep down, I knew very well that millions of things were happening, were being expressed, shouted, at the heart of this silence – confessions, declarations of which I’d been merely the project manager without the right to test them and that until the very end my job would be to play the thankless role of silent witness and accomplice.

Then, from two exchanges I heard, brief but filled with meaning, I realized when the silly shyness finally dropped away and the flood of words gushed out, that the atmosphere would lend itself more to murmured confidences, to confessions exchanged sotto voce, than to outpourings and bursts of laughter. I had been naïve enough to organize a party when a simple, informal meeting would have done, idiot that I was, and I found that I was in the way, unwanted in my own overly complicated scenario.

After blowing their noses and dabbing at their eyes, from all appearances exhausted by the inarticulate violence of what had just gone on between them, Gilbert looked at Greta-la-Vieille and told her in a husky voice I’d never heard before, “All those years, I was spying on you …”

With the faintest and the saddest smile I’d ever seen, she answered him, “I knew.”

And during the long, intertwining account they both gave of the past fifteen years, I imagined the evening’s other four guests relegated to the kitchen, useless and knowing it, ears pricked for any bits of conversation, cursing because they’d left their drinks in the parlour and were condemned for the rest of the evening to tea, Seven-Up and Pepsi.