I HAD TO MEET SASKIA AND PICK UP PIERROT. I was the go-between for Nicolas and Saskia. They would lash out at one another for days after meeting. I didn’t like being in this position. She was the only person in the whole world who would dare to trash-talk Nicolas around me. She knew I had to sit and listen to it in order to get an afternoon with Pierrot.
They were in the park. White round petals were all over the ground as if the polka dots had fallen off a woman’s dress. Saskia hadn’t even put enough clothes on Pierrot really. He was wearing an undershirt with characters from the children’s show Passe-Partout and jeans with butterflies on the knees and flip-flops. Saskia was wearing a T-shirt that had rows of moustaches on it and jean shorts. Her hair was gelled back so tightly that it seemed painted on. Her ponytail was made into ringlets that looked like telephone cords. She and Pierrot were eating chocolate ice cream cones.
“I don’t know if Nicolas is the one. I ask myself that over and over again. I want all sorts of things. My mother didn’t give me anything. I’m not talking about she didn’t buy me cars or a fancy gold suit. She didn’t give me any manners. She never told me to stay in school. She never told me not to have sex. Look at me now.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
“What do you see in that ugly Russian guy Misha? How could you suck his dick? I could understand if he was a millionaire and you do it for lots and lots of money. But he has nothing. His skin is bad, too.”
Pierrot was kicking his legs back and forth, not really listening to us.
“I’m not seeing Misha anymore,” I said. “But you know, he wrote poetry all the time. You could get him a pencil and a piece of paper and a blindfold and he would write you a poem. You could give him any subject.”
“Even my mother never dated a guy that ugly.”
“He played the French horn and I like music.”
“I want to marry a millionaire. I want to take some fertility drugs so that I can have triplets with a millionaire.”
“Nicolas will never be a millionaire.”
Saskia glared at me. No matter what she said about Nicolas, she had apparently not quite given up on her illusion that he could make her filthy rich somehow.
Nicolas had only had a couple of serious girlfriends. The first was a girl named Maude, but she wanted everyone to call her Jessica. She always had these wonderfully perverted stories. She had a best friend who had had sex with a German shepherd. She had big black eyes, giant pouty lips and a faint dark moustache. Her head was too big for her skinny body. She wore boy’s undershirts with no bra. She drank beer and wore a navy blue pea jacket from a vintage store and cut her hair short and tucked it behind her ears. I thought she looked a bit like Mick Jagger and I had never seen anyone so beautiful.
Then Nicolas met Saskia. We’d both known Saskia in high school. She had just immigrated from Czechoslovakia with her mother. Saskia wore a red acrylic sweater with patterns of white chess pieces on it to school every day. She always tied her scarf around her waist instead of her neck. Saskia’s face always reminded me of a boiled egg because it was so round and pale. It was a very Eastern European–looking face. If you found this look attractive, then she was drop-dead gorgeous. If you didn’t, then she wasn’t.
Nicolas and I ran into her at the swimming pool one day. She had on a white bikini and we noticed at the same time that she had huge breasts and was a bona fide fox. It was a shame, I remembered thinking. I thought that if she had stayed in Czechoslovakia, she might have been a movie star. She would have married a high-ranking Communist. Instead she ended up in Montréal with a bath towel wrapped around her waist, making out with Nicolas up against a chain-link fence until the lifeguard blew the whistle at them.
She sounded like a man when she sang. The first time I heard her singing along to the radio when she was over one day, I didn’t like it, but it grew on me. We liked the way Saskia sang Michael Jackson songs. Her accent made any rock and roll song that she sang seem like a strange ditty about the war. As if she was on the back of a truck with a goose on her lap and a machine gun hidden in a basket with loaves of bread. She worked as a checkout girl and housewives were terrified by her accent.
Nicolas for some reason—maybe because she was the only girl who wasn’t wildly in love with him—was mad about Saskia. He got Saskia to go out with him by promising that he could get her a record deal through his dad’s contacts. She was an ambitious, clueless lunatic. They had broken up twelve times and got back together before she got pregnant. They named their son Pierrot because of how he looked in a little black cotton hat that someone had given them as a present.
Pierrot was a typical kid of a single parent. He always seemed frazzled. He acted like he had just stepped off a school bus and realized that he’d left his lunch box on it.
As I sat next to her, Saskia started doing her makeup on the bench. She drew black Cleopatra lines around her eyes. Pierrot looked straight ahead sadly. They had fallen out of love with Nicolas, but I never could.
“Do you have my money? Jesus Christ.”
I gave her every cent that Nicolas and I had, which unfortunately came to seventy-three dollars. He owed her about two thousand. I then asked her if she could actually give me back three dollars.
“You guys are pathetic.”
“I know. I know. But Nicolas really wants to see Pierrot. It’s driving him crazy.”
“I’m going to take Nicolas to court for the back payments. Will you tell him this?”
“Yes, of course. Of course.”
“Life, it is not a joke.”
After I handed over the money, Saskia let me take Pierrot off to see Nicolas. To make the afternoon special, Nicolas let Pierrot ride the mechanical deer that rocked back and forth outside the supermarket. Every time the deer gave any sign of letting up, Nicolas would drop in another quarter until all his change was gone. Pierrot ended up nauseated and sitting on the curb with his head between his legs.
He’d slipped into one of his quagmires and there was nothing we could do to pull him out. He sat on the bench between us as we tried to cheer him up.
“Would you like me to tell you a story about a lion who loses all his mane?” I asked Pierrot.
“It is a book to help children cope with Papa losing his hair?” Nicolas said gloomily.
“Don’t you remember that storybook?” I asked.
“I’d rather kill myself than go bald.”
“You’d look good with a toupée.”
“Would you, Pierrot, would you like to hear the story about a lion?”
“No, I don’t like lions. They scare me.” Pierrot shook his whole little body to show his disgust even with the idea of lions.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nicolas yelled. “We’re not in Africa. When are you going to meet up with a lion?”
“I saw them at the zoo. They were eating bloody meat.”
“Well, that is fucking disgusting, granted.”
“Do you want to hear a story about a wee mouse who hangs around with Benjamin Franklin and discovers electricity?”
“I remember that movie. Le Journal de Montréal gave it one star.”
“Pierrot, sweetheart, would you like to hear the story of a car named Herbie that could talk?”
“Don’t even get me started on Herbie. He couldn’t talk. He honked his horn. My friend has a horn that beeps when he doesn’t push it. I don’t see anyone making a movie about his car.”
“I’m just saying, you can only go so far, psychologically speaking, when you’re dealing with a car.”
“How about the story of Benji? Tell him a story about Benji saving the day.”
“Stop polluting his head with that American shit. Benji never fucking saved the day. What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t he prevent the Russians from developing the atom bomb first?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Benji saves the day. That’s the point.”
“Tell him the adventures of Snap, Crackle and Pop. Tell him how they saved the day. Making some noise in a bowl of cereal.”
“Don’t be stupid. What about the three little kittens who lose their mittens?”
“Sounds riveting. I’m surprised they haven’t turned that into an opera. What happens to them after they lose their mittens?”
“Their mother gets upset.”
“Oh fuck, Nouschka, you had to go and mention his mother. We’re trying to get off that subject.” Nicolas glared at me. Sure enough, Pierrot sat with a huge frown on his face and tears streaming down his cheeks. He always wanted to go back to his mother’s house, where everything was done in the way he liked it. I could tell that Nicolas felt utterly rejected by his son.
I held Pierrot’s hand as I walked him home. He kept looking in the opposite direction, as if he had no idea that anyone was holding his hand. He ran into his apartment without even saying goodbye. Sweet Pierrot Tremblay, the saddest boy in all the world, was not buying what we were selling. We still lived at home, in a tiny kingdom that we had spent years building. But it was so poorly defended that these days a four-year-old could take it down with a wooden sword.