THEY SAY IN QUéBEC THAT IF YOU ARE CONCEIVED on a night when your parents are drinking, then you are going to be melancholic your whole life. If your parents conceived you the first time they ever had sex, then you will be lucky your whole life, and everyone you meet will fall madly in love with you. Nicolas and I found ourselves in this universe on an otherwise unmemorable night in Val-des-Loups.
Étienne left Montréal for the first time in 1973, to tour rural Québec. He despised it and was bored to death.
He was stuck in a motel room one night after a show. There was a movie playing on the television set. After ten o’clock, they played movies that were made in Québec. You would think that ninety-nine percent of the population were heroin addicts if you watched these movies. The vedettes wore winter coats the whole time and yelled at each other. These movies were so realistic that your own life kind of seemed fake and glamorous in comparison. If the movie had been better, he might have stayed in his hotel room that night.
Someone had given the drummer an address to a party. They decided to go check it out. Ordinarily Étienne would never have gone to a house party, but there was nothing else to do in these terrible, tiny small towns.
The party was in a white clapboard house. There was a field behind it without animals. There was a row of little undershirts on the clothesline. One was covered in strawberries, another with horses, and one had the teeniest bow at the neck. Étienne felt turned on by all the naked undershirts. They walked into the house without knocking.
The heavy metal was loud. You could do that in Val-des-Loups because there was nobody around for miles and miles and miles.
Almost the first person that Étienne noticed was a girl in a turtleneck sweater that looked like it would swallow her any minute. She had a plastic ring on her finger from a gumball machine. She was drinking a beer for the first time. She was fourteen years old. She may or may not have been beautiful.
She wore her black bangs down over her eyes. Étienne generally hated shy girls. They looked down at the ground when they talked to him. They were deathly boring because they were too afraid to say anything.
But then again, sometimes shy girls kissed you just so that they wouldn’t have to talk. They hoped that they were pretty enough to get away with not speaking. Some shy girls were too afraid to say no. Even though you’d just met, they were terrified that you wouldn’t like them. Once they let you feel their tits, they weren’t sure what to do. They thought that maybe they weren’t in the right to say no.
Étienne knew he could get this girl to sleep with him.
Étienne asked the girl if she wanted to go into a little bedroom at the back of the house to talk to him. She knew exactly who he was. The whole party did. Everyone was looking at him and pretending not to. She followed him to the bedroom. There was a forest on the wallpaper in the bedroom. The polyester bedspread was purple with gold roses. Ugly. They over-decorated their houses in small towns. Ugly.
Étienne liked young girls. They believed in his persona completely. What did he need with women who could see right through him? Lily Sainte-Marie looked like she was still afraid of the dark and spent her pocket change on candy. She looked like she still had to memorize the spelling of words at night.
She had little hands. She shrugged even though there was no reason to shrug. She just figured that she had to do something with her body. So she sat there shrugging and shrugging. He started taking off all her silly clothes. Her clothes didn’t match and every piece was a hand-me-down. Ugly.
She didn’t even really move during the actual act. She kept her eyes closed really tight and her mouth squeezed shut. She looked like she was holding her breath, as if she had just jumped off a diving board and her body was shooting straight down into the water.
She loosened up after losing her virginity. She was so excited sitting on the side of the bed that she wasn’t even getting dressed. And she looked so young, like a kid that was expecting her mother to dress her. She climbed onto his lap while he was trying to tie his shoelaces.
She wanted to know if he would call her. She told him that if her father answered the telephone, then he should just hang up immediately. Lily Sainte-Marie told him that her father would kill him if he found out that she had had sex. She said that her father was strict and wouldn’t even let her go to school dances. She wanted to know if she could come to visit him in Montréal.
She whispered that she loved him.
Étienne suddenly didn’t know why he hadn’t worn a condom. She had trapped him. She had caught him. He knew. He knew. He knew she was pregnant. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.
He didn’t want to throw down an anchor in this strange small town in the middle of nowhere. Where their symphony orchestra was a sixty-five-year-old man named Benoit, who could play Peter and the Wolf on his clarinet.
Domestic life took down people quicker than the bubonic plague. Étienne had struggled his whole life not to be a member of any class. A man without children doesn’t belong to any class. He is a free man.
Étienne wanted to walk right back to Montréal. He climbed out the window and went back to the motel. He hoped to never see her again.
Anyways, all of this sounded better as a song. Our whole lives, from our conception onward, had been a romantic take on a narcissist’s asshole behaviour. Our lives were a fiction. I had swallowed it all. I had believed it more than anyone.