I HURRIED HOME. I WANTED TO SEE NICOLAS SO that I could tell him about the janitors singing Étienne’s song. I was feeling lousy about it, but he would laugh it off.
It was only about a twenty-minute walk back to our building, across the street from an old theatre that now sold electronics. The building was falling apart but the wooden doors were still painted gold every year. Sticking out above the door was a neon sign that wasn’t ever lit up and said CHOW MEIN. There used to be a Chinese restaurant in one of the apartments. Pigeons sat on the sign, crammed together like a group of teenagers making trouble on a bench. The noise they made sounded like a marble rolling across the floor all day, every day.
A girl with messy blond hair was standing in the lobby. She had on a white raincoat and sneakers. She gave me a sad look. I knew she was hoping to run into my twin brother. She reminded me of the Little Mermaid, right before she was going to have to throw herself back in the water because the prince had rejected her. Lonely, crazy girls always thought that Nicolas was going to save their lives. He gave off that impression. Lord knows why. He had probably already slept with this girl, but I knew he wouldn’t have any interest in her now. I smiled and ran past her up the one step and down the hall.
Our apartment was on the ground floor and it was small. There was yellow wallpaper with canaries in the hallways. There were old-fashioned lamps on every surface. There were second-hand paintings all over the walls. There were a lot of sailboats. There was a painting of Jesus rolling his eyes up at the sky in every room.
Nicolas and I had been raised by our grandparents since we were babies. Our mother had left us on their doorstep, so to speak. Our grandmother had died when we were five, so actually we’d more or less been raised by our grandfather. His mother regretted naming him Léonard only five minutes after she did so, and no one had ever called him by his real name. Everyone just called him Loulou.
Loulou was in the kitchen wearing an old suit jacket over an undershirt. He had fixed a hole in the sleeve of the jacket with a staple gun. He wasn’t wearing any pants. His undershirt was tucked into his boxer shorts, which were covered with little golden paisleys. They looked like goldfish that were all dressed up for church. He was always crapping his pants, so he stopped wearing them at home. It just made life easier. He crapped his pants every time he smoked a cigarette.
Loulou’s nose was big, a family trait, but then what old man didn’t have a huge nose. His ears were enormous too. He had blue eyes and his eyebrows were wild. It was impossible to know anymore what he had looked like when he was young.
He had a pair of dentures, but they were too big for him and made him have to grin ludicrously when he was wearing them. Loulou once told me that it was perfectly acceptable to slap a man in the face for being forward when he was young. That’s why men of his generation lost all their teeth, because the roots were weak from having been slapped all the time.
“Bonjour, Loulou!” I said.
“Where have you been?”
“Out slaying dragons.”
“There were still dragons when I was little. They were a sickly bunch. They would hang around garbage cans in the alleys behind Chinese restaurants. They would smoke cigars so that they could have smoke coming out of their mouths.”
“I know, you told me.”
“I’m glad they went extinct. Fucking ruined the Middle Ages for everybody. Oh, they didn’t like it when the shoe was on the other foot.”
“I’m starving.”
Loulou started making dinner. He never let anyone else cook. He had a dishrag tossed over his shoulder with roses on it. He had an oven mitt that was shaped like Babar the elephant. The spaghetti fell onto the floor like a burst of applause when a famous person makes a surprise cameo on a television show.
“Oh my fucking God. What the fuck just happened here? Am I losing my mind or is there spaghetti over the floor? I’ve gone senile. I can’t fucking stand it.”
As I brought a broom, Loulou put on a new record that he had found in the garbage. He played it at full volume and it was hard to make conversation. I had to scream bloody murder for him to pass me the salt. Loulou was drinking milk out of a plastic measuring cup. He always thought that Nicolas and I and everyone else our age had AIDS. He wouldn’t let us use the same cups as him.
“Did you know that you can get into the zoo for free if you’re on welfare? Why aren’t I on welfare? Sign me up.”
“You are on welfare.”
For a long time, Loulou had collected scrap metal for a living. He still stopped to lift up a refrigerator with his bare hands every now and then to show people that he could. He carried around a briefcase filled with spark plugs and telephone wires and a wrench that weighed five or ten pounds.
But he was getting old and was always having tiny heart attacks while lifting things into the back of his truck. He would get faint after pushing a stove up onto the flatbed of his truck and fall over. People would call 911 because they would find him lying in their garbage heap staring up in the air. He had the look of a bewildered little kid on his face when he came to. His rescuers were always moved by the expression of absolute innocence that he had on his face at those moments. When he would tell Nicolas and me about these episodes, we would laugh so hard, we couldn’t speak. We would even burst out laughing in bed in the dark when we thought about it. A few days ago, he’d found a fridge in the garbage. He put it on a little red wagon and pulled it down the street. He had to stop in order to have a heart attack. Nicolas lay on the kitchen floor screaming with laughter when I told him. Mortality didn’t mean anything to us because we were so young. We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine.
A cat crawled in the window. There was a catnip tree in a yard in the alley behind the building. Every time I looked out my window, there were cats in the tree. They often jumped onto the balcony and into my room. It was hard to have a memory without at least one cat in it.
Later that night Loulou got drunk and went into the living room to watch television. There were stains on the gold cushions of the couch. I spent about five minutes trying to get a channel. Loulou had made an antenna out of five coat hangers that sometimes picked up a channel from New York.
“Sit down already. That’s as good as you’re going to get it.”
I threw myself down next to him on the couch. He put his arms out in front of him, as if we were in a small boat that might capsize. I guess I figured it was my duty as a granddaughter to sit next to Loulou and listen to his nonsense. In Québec, people took care of their parents and not the other way round.
The news was on and they were talking about how there was going to be another referendum within the year. Québec would again vote on whether or not to separate from Canada.
“Oh my goodness,” said Loulou. “All this again. Your father was nuts about separating. Oh my goodness. He was at all the marches. Do you remember that?”
“How could I forget, he dragged Nicolas and me to all the rallies.”
“That’s right. You guys used to wave those flags around. Nicolas would really get into it. Man, what a little guy. He was yelling for a free Québec, wasn’t he?”
“You voted Oui too.”
“What do I know? When Jean Lesage came into power he took all the electricity companies away from the Anglos and the Americans. Then my heat bill came down. I’ll always remember that the Anglos made me freeze to death. Oh, and everyone in this building was voting Oui. I just wanted to make everyone happy. Who did you vote for?”
“I was seven years old.”
“Of course. Did you sign up to finish school?”
“I signed up without Nicolas.”
“You were better in school than he was. He was always antagonizing the teachers. It’s good to do something by yourself. I used to beat you to stop you from sleeping together in the same bed, but you still did. You ate out of the same plates. You wore the same clothes. You said the same things at the same time. You took baths together. It was disgusting.”
I slammed my glass on the table.
“Laisse-moi tranquille avec ça.”
Loulou was right about Nicolas never fitting in at school, though. He was diagnosed by the teachers as having every learning disability they could think of. They assigned a different one to him each year. He broke his leg playing musical chairs in Grade Three. He acted like it was the only chance he was ever going to get to win anything.
Nicolas used to say that he dropped out because the teacher had made him use the word incandescent in a sentence. He said that it was emotional abuse. But we just stopped going when he was sixteen because he hated it so much and was failing every class.
I was able to sit still in class and did okay on my report cards, but I left with him anyways. After that, we were educated by second-hand paperback books and madmen on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Anyways, even though we were high school dropouts, people still treated us like precocious geniuses just because we’d been on television.
We had so much fun together during those years. We stayed out all night. We were always drinking. Even when we were teenagers, we would sit in our bedroom and drink until we cried. We would hug our stuffed animals like lovers and pass out in our clothes, with one leg out of our pants and the other leg in.