NICOLAS AND I WERE IN THE BACKYARD DRINKING coffee and reading the newspaper on the evening of our twentieth birthday, trying to enjoy the last bit of sunlight. The tiny courtyard didn’t get that much light because other buildings surrounded it. Loulou was always telling us how lucky we were to have a yard. When we were younger we would sit out there on small chairs, drinking Coca-Cola out of teacups. There were empty coffee tins with spindly roses in them. There were jars with bean sprouts.
There was a pigeon coop out there that Étienne had built when he was a little kid. He had spent all his time as a kid, even in the winter, hanging out with the birds. It was beautiful. It was built out of old window frames. Some of them had glass panes in them. Some of them had wire screens.
The building was still surrounded by the pigeons and seagulls and sparrows that Étienne had invited. There was something magical about that. They were still looking for Étienne, his dwindling audience.
Loulou came out wearing a paper crown from a doughnut box. He was sad when we didn’t laugh. He missed having babies in the house.
“You twos were just so, so damn cute whens yous were little wee things. You looked almost as cute as your father. Now that was a beautiful baby! Lord oh lord! That baby was striking. Bus drivers would stop their buses and come right out on the street to look at him. Women would go insane. I was afraid he’d get stolen in the supermarket by crazy women.”
“Oh fuck,” said Nicolas. “Could you speak plainly or not at all?”
Loulou figured that since Étienne had been so successful, there was no way that anyone in our family was going to be successful again for the next hundred years. So there was no point bothering with us or encouraging us to do much.
We didn’t really get to be the babies. Étienne was the one who was marvelled over. He was the one who threw tantrums and who had erratic behaviour. He was the sensitive one who needed to be complimented all the time. Everything he did was evidence of his genius.
“Look, old man,” Nicolas said. “Today happens to be my and Nouschka’s twentieth birthday. Which is a monumental occasion. This is not Let’s Get All Fucking Gaga About Étienne Tremblay Day, like every other day. Okay? And that goes for you too, Nouschka.”
“What did I do?” I asked. “I’m just sitting here.”
Nicolas watched me as I read the paper. He kept staring at me, not moving an inch. I was acting as if I had no idea whatsoever that Étienne came by on our birthday. We could almost count on our hands the times that Étienne had come by since he had got out of prison. But he never, ever missed our birthdays. Nicolas hated how excited I would get to see him.
Étienne was as famous for his fall as he was for his songs. There were articles in all the magazines about how Étienne was living in a rooming house on Rue Saint-Dominique and had lunch each day at la Mission in Vieux Montréal. Nobody could believe how broke he was. It was almost miraculous.
He didn’t even try to hide or blend in. He dyed his hair black in his sink. He continued to dress like he had gone home with the bridesmaid at a wedding and was walking home in the morning in his fancy clothes from the night before. Étienne’s top hat had sailed above everyone else’s head along Boulevard Saint-Laurent for years. It made everyone else seem dowdy and ordinary.
God knows why I got worked up when Étienne visited. I always anticipated something that never happened. He got drunk and he gave us the crappiest gifts on the planet. When we were twelve, he gave us both a second-hand porcelain doll. The doll’s hair was messy, which had given me the strange impression that it had been sleeping in bed with Étienne.
When the doorbell rang we all went back inside. I answered it, cool as a cucumber. I opened the door and there he was. My heart skipped a beat. It couldn’t help it! Sometimes Étienne looked magically youthful. He looked eighteen when he was forty. He was wearing a navy blue sweater vest with red diamonds on it, and he was carrying a beige cat that he had brought as a gift for Nicolas and me. The cat looked like a sweater that had dried on a coat hanger and was now stretched beyond all recognition. I don’t know why, but it seemed like he had stolen the cat from someone’s yard.
“A cat?” Nicolas said. “You brought us a cat?”
“This is no ordinary cat, my darling children. This was once Cleopatra herself. She demanded to be overly pampered when she was alive, and now as punishment she is forced to spend the rest of her days as a disdained and yet adored creature. Who wouldn’t mind spending their life as a cat? Why, at my age I have a veritable envy of their flexible spine. Never mind the use of books of philosophy, never mind Marcus Aurelius or Kierkegaard. This creature is able to meditate on the wonders of the universe with a simple piece of string.”
His bearing undermined his verbal pyrotechnics. He seemed incredibly nervous and was acting as if we were going to mistreat him. He shied away from my glances.
When Étienne sat down at the kitchen table, he didn’t even seem to be able to deal with the chair. It kept tipping over to the side as if it was trying to throw Étienne right off onto the ground. He was holding a glass of water that was trembling like crazy. It was a glass with Tintin on it that we’d got for free at a hamburger joint. I had never known this glass to have any dignity before, but it clearly didn’t want to be held by Étienne. It shivered like a dog that was being taken to the pound.
Étienne reached into the bag that he was carrying and pulled out a large can of beer. He looked embarrassed that he was doing this. He looked in my eyes sheepishly as he raised it to his lips. The beer changed his entire demeanour immediately. After he downed the beer in a few big swallows, he started getting talkative. He looked around the room.
He was the only person I ever knew who had a twinkle in his eye. Or at least he acted as if he had a twinkle in his eye. Or at least I imagined that he had a twinkle in his eye. I found it charming, whether it existed or not.
We were having an early dinner. Loulou had made his special spaghetti sauce. He put a salad bowl with tiny hot dogs in the middle of the table. When we were younger, Nicolas and I used to leap on those like wild animals, but we were all feeling a tad reserved that evening. During dinner Étienne started reminiscing about our childhood as if he’d always been around.
“Nico, remember you flashed that girl in Apartment 7 and her mother called the cops on you. Remember how you tried drinking a raw egg because you saw Rocky do it and you threw up on the carpet. You were so bad at spelling. The teacher said that she had never met anyone in her career that was as bad at spelling as you.”
Nicolas and I looked at each other, insulted. Where did he get these memories? His memory was a shelf in a junk shop with things that should have been thrown out. Like plastic roses or old tins of crackers. We thought we had tossed these memories away, but he had gone through our garbage like a ragpicker in order to find them and here they were again. I wished that Étienne would go back to being vacuous and entertaining.
When he saw this wasn’t winning us over, Étienne tried to make us feel sorry for him. He paused as he inhaled his cigarette in the way that only a Québécois can inhale a cigarette.
“I’m beat up. I’m physically and mentally exhausted.” He exhaled loudly for effect. The cigarette smoke hung over his head like the little cloud that hangs over Eeyore. “I just feel like digging my own grave, lying in it, letting it fill up with rainwater and drowning myself. I don’t have any money. When I’m at a bar, people expect me to buy them a drink, but I don’t even have money for that. I like to have my cup of soup at Dunkin’ Donuts and that’s all.”
I reached over to put my hand on his shoulder to comfort him, but Nicolas interceded and gently pushed my hand away.
“What the hell are you on about, old man?” Nicolas said. “You want to borrow some money? We’re all fucking broke. The whole city’s broke.”
“Did you know that I performed in France once? They couldn’t pay me to go back.”
“Well, those days are over, aren’t they?” Nicolas said.
Nicolas wasn’t giving me a chance to respond to anything our father said. Étienne was quiet and looked awkward for a moment. Then he raised up his can of beer into the air.
“My beautiful, beautiful children. Today is the luckiest of days, isn’t it? Today I had two children instead of one. Nineteen years ago today.”
“We’re twenty years old,” Nicolas said. “Twenty!”
“Of course, I’m just feeling flustered today because I’m full of ideas. I’m excited. I get inaccurate when I’m excited.”
“What are you excited about?” Nicolas asked. He narrowed his gaze, suddenly suspicious.
“There’s a very tasteful reporter named Hugo who wants to do a segment on us all. He’s doing a special on all the old rowdy gang. Where they are now.”
“What the hell?” said Nicolas. “Who in the hell is Hugo? You know how I feel about Hugos.”
“You don’t even know where this conversation is going, my boy. Hugo has some interesting ideas. I’ve been looking for a venue to express some of the ideas that I’ve been developing. I think it would be a good vehicle for me to launch my album. It’ll be a concept album. Part song, part memoir. Between my songs I’m going to read bits of my life story. This documentary will be broadcast nationally. I want to have a scene of myself standing on the bridge in Parc La Fontaine, reciting the lyrics to ‘Pamplemousse vert.’ It will be lovely, no?”
“Putrid would more likely be the word I was looking for,” Nicolas said. “What do you need us for?”
“He’s pitched the whole family. You’re not going to leave your own father high and dry, are you? I thought that they could just film us doing something normal. We can be shown eating sandwiches. You two can be roller-skating in the park. You’ll look so cute, n’est-ce pas? We can take a paddleboat around the pond with the swans in it.”
What a lovely portrait he was painting for a seven-year-old Nicolas and Nouschka. He hadn’t been clueless. Some parents didn’t know how the hell to act, but Étienne had just proven that he knew exactly how a happy family would spend an afternoon. We had never actually done anything like that together.
Nicolas looked over at me and saw the stricken look that I must have had on my face. He motioned to me quickly that he was going to take care of this. As he stood up, Nicolas’s chair fell over behind him. Étienne stood up at the same time. They looked so much alike. Étienne’s skin was darker and his black hair was thinning, but other than that, the resemblance was uncanny.
“Are you out of your mind!” Nicolas said. “And why are you bringing this up on our birthday? This is supposed to be a private celebration, not a business meeting.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do certain things for you, Nico. I’ve never been sure what it was that you wanted from me.”
“Advice! Why don’t you give us advice! Why don’t you take an interest and try to guide us once in a while. You know? Guide us through these troubled times.”
“I can do that. Let me give it a shot.”
Étienne looked like giving us advice was completely out of his depth. I think he would have preferred something a little more concise—like picking up our laundry or mailing some letters for us. But he decided to go before he revealed by virtue of his sitting there that he had no guidance whatsoever at the tip of his tongue.
“So no documentary then?” Étienne said as he was getting his coat.
“I don’t think you realize it,” Nicolas said, “but I dream of slicing the throats of these types of idiots. I would relish stabbing them in their hearts with a salad fork.”
“My dear boy, you have always had a startling inclination toward hyperbole. It’s truly remarkable. It would even be remarked upon in the courts of Louis XIV.”
“Why don’t you ask Noëlle if she wants to be in the documentary?”
“Who?” Étienne said.
Étienne looked to me for help. I was always the one who was able to talk Nicolas into performing when we were kids. I decided to take Nicolas’s side. Étienne didn’t even know who Nicolas was talking about when he mentioned our mother. I didn’t want to pretend that we were a loving and close-knit family. There was something horrific about it. It shone a light on something I wanted kept in the dark.
“Nouschka, fais-moi un sourire.”
“No,” I said quietly.
“Fine then. I will ask them to leave. For all I know, they might be recording this unpleasantness right now.”
We were suddenly confused. There was a jarring inconsistency between what Étienne was saying and reality. He was talking about the documentary film crew as if they were here in the room, when clearly they were not. Nicolas grasped the situation before I did and said, “Where are they?”
“They’re out in the hallway.”
Nicolas went and threw open the door, and sure enough, there was the documentary crew. They were standing with their equipment, crammed together in the hallway. They weren’t even really ashamed.
“Should we leave?” Hugo asked.
Étienne was immediately in character. He would know how to salvage this moment. He probably felt protected now that the camera was on—the only thing that truly adored him and never let him down. Everyone in the crew positioned themselves quickly and started taping.
“Well, my darlings,” Étienne said, turning to bid us adieu, “who can believe that another birthday is here? Celebrate your youth, my darlings. Blow out your candles and make sure that you wish for immortality.”
The cat slipped out the door after Étienne.
Nicolas slammed the door behind them. But we could still hear them as they departed.
Étienne began to sing an old song about an elephant that gets a peanut stuck up its nose. I hadn’t thought about that song in a long time. I always assumed the song had a deeper meaning, although I had no idea what it could be. Now as an adult, I still didn’t know. How could you not love someone who came up with songs like that? That was the trouble with people with talent. That was the reason that they got away with murder.
“I am done with that man,” Nicolas said for the millionth time in his life.
I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Yes, he was here again trying to use us. It somehow never prevented me from enjoying the show. I never took Étienne seriously or got outraged at him. Nicolas was the only person who made me livid, and he could do that pretty easily these days.
Later that night I found an undershirt with anchors on it stuck between the mattress and the wall. The tag said LACOSTE. It was obviously Adam’s. I inhaled the shirt deeply. It still smelled like him. I went into the bathroom with it. I took off all my clothes except my underwear and put the undershirt on. I stood in front of the mirror and watched myself put on some lipstick.
“I’m finished with you,” I told myself as I puckered my lips. “I’ve lost all respect for you. Look, we had a good run. I just think that it was a mistake.”
I put a towel on the floor and lay down on it. We could never masturbate in our own bed because the other one was there. I imagined that Adam was going down on me. I imagined Hugo was filming me through the window, encouraging me to come. God knows who we became when we masturbated. It was like our desire was a spirit that possessed us and took over.
Nicolas started banging on the door. I couldn’t even find a place in this apartment to have a sexual fantasy without Nicolas barging in. I stood up and put my dress back on over the undershirt and flushed the toilet.
I flung open the door.
“Niaiseux!” I yelled, with my hands flying open toward his face, like a startled dove.
“Osti de conne!” he yelled back.
I moved to my right to get around him, but he moved to his left. And then when I went to my left, he went to his right. And so on and so on. There was no way that we could imagine how either of us could ever possibly find our way out of that apartment. We were just going to spend the rest of our lives running away from each other and bumping into each other. The tiny apartment was a labyrinth and Nicolas was the Minotaur in every closet and every room.