I WAS GETTING DRESSED FOR OUR DATE. I’D TOLD Raphaël that I would meet him on the corner, but he said he’d knock on my door. Why he thought he had to come and knock on my door was beyond me. Our family had always considered manners to be sort of on the phony side.
It made me nervous, because Nicolas had been insulting Raphaël ever since I went off with him at the fair.
Nicolas came in the room. He took off his sweater and lay down to rest in his undershirt. He had had that same undershirt with Papa Smurf on it since he was ten years old. He lay there with his boots still on. He lit up a cigarette and watched me while I buttoned up the back of my dress.
One of our own cats walked into the room at that second, to see what was happening. It was Johann, a black cat with perpetual bed-head. He looked like a splotch of ink that was appearing through a pocket in a shirt. Nicolas looked at the cat for a second as if he was going to pick a fight with it, and then he turned back to me.
“Man, what a low-life,” Nicolas said. “I mean low class. You might try and meet somebody who has a real job.”
“You don’t work at all.”
“He has to punch a clock or he goes back to jail. Wow! He’s a Fortune 500 man. A most eligible bachelor.”
“You might like him if you got to know him.”
“Frankly, I can’t stand the motherfucker. I mean, who does he think he is walking around like that. I’ll tolerate that kind of shit from those exiled Vietnam vets but nobody else. Did you know that the U.S. government cheaped out and gave the vets Edgar Cayce and I’m OK—You’re OK books on tape instead of proper psychiatric treatment?”
“Where did you hear about this?” I asked.
“A library card is no cure for mental illness, that’s for sure. When vets come back, they should not have library privileges. If I have to stand in the line for the bus and have a Vietnam vet behind me talking about Tolstoy, I’m just going to go move to the Northwest Territories. It’s why I don’t take public transportation.”
“Why would you, when you can drive in style on your bicycle?”
“How do you know Raphaël hasn’t been lobotomized? People with lobotomies don’t know they’ve been lobotomized.”
“So what if he has?”
“I should have known! You’ll go with anybody!”
I tied a ribbon in my hair and wagged my head back and forth in the mirror to see if it would stay on.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Really, in all honesty, he’s a dick. I told you in Grade One and I’m telling you now.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Nicolas would develop irrational hatred for people when he was a little boy and he would not let it go. It was very important for Nicolas to always be infuriated by someone. It allowed him to externalize some of the hatred that he felt toward himself.
“Why do I feel like your relationship with Raphaël is just to spite me?”
I stopped, startled. There was some strange truth in what he said, but I didn’t want to explore it. Nicolas seemed to think that my relationship with Raphaël was a punishment for his having lied about Adam and dragged me to see Lily with no preparation. He couldn’t believe that it didn’t have anything to do with him. I also had a hard time believing that this relationship had nothing to do with Nicolas.
Everyone had always given Nicolas and me a hard time about sleeping in the same bed together and changing around each other. There was never anything about it that gave me a feeling of indecency or self-consciousness. But the idea that Nicolas had orchestrated my sex life creeped me out. Maybe it was about time that I wanted privacy. Even though Le Journal de Montréal, La Presse and Le Devoir had all described us as precocious, Nicolas and I were late bloomers, emotionally speaking.
The doorbell rang. Nicolas sprang up out of bed and ran down the hall to the front door. The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn’t accept it. I ran after him, but it was too late, Nicolas had swung open the door and was leaning out of it. Raphaël was standing there, expressionless, in sunglasses.
“Yes, can I help you?” Nicolas asked. “Are you here to convert us to Jehovah’s Witnesses? You guys should put a little more something something into those magazines. Like maybe you should have a comics page. And some horoscopes. I’m just saying, if you’re looking to attract more converts. Or have a telethon. Everyone loves a good telethon.”
“Funny.”
“Whatcha guys gonna do tonight? Drink some Kool-Aid with Jim Jones?”
“I’m here for Nouschka. Tell her I’m here.”
“Were you here last night? On no, that was another guy.”
“What’s with you? Still sticking up fourteen-year-olds in the metro?”
“I’m going to let that go. But let the record state that I resent it.”
I pushed Nicolas out of the way. He seemed resigned to being shoved aside. I trotted down the steps next to Raphaël. I liked the way Raphaël was dressed all in black except for a pair of brown running shoes with red laces. I don’t think I’d ever seen him in the same pair of footwear twice. He put his arm around me as soon as we were outside.
Suddenly we heard Nicolas call out, “I’m looking right at you!”
We looked up and he was on the roof. It was sort of startling that he’d gotten up there so fast.
“Just because my sister’s stupid enough to date you, it doesn’t mean anything. I’m going to come and kill you one of these days.”
“You talk pretty tough for an asshole all the way up on a rooftop,” Raphaël called back.
“Just because you’re fucking Nouschka doesn’t mean you’re fucking me.”
“Doesn’t he care what the neighbours think?” Raphaël asked me, actually looking shocked.
“They’ve heard everything,” I said.
“He’s disrespecting you, you know.”
“I don’t know how you can like me if you hate Nicolas. We’re like the same person.”
“No, you’re not.”
“We were having conversations before we were even born.”
“You guys aren’t alike at all. You’re opposites.”
“How so?”
“You love everybody and he hates everybody. Sometimes I don’t even know which is worse, because I feel like both of you might want to show a little bit of decorum and equilibrium.”
We spent the evening in a motel. I threw my peacoat on over my underwear and went out onto the street and stuck my thumb out as if I was a hitchhiker. The minuscule twinkles were all over the sidewalk, reflecting moonlight. Raphaël got into his car and drove around the block. He was going to pretend to pick me up and then drive me to the outskirts of the city and rape me, or something like that.
A police car came around the block before Raphaël’s car. The police officer got out and started asking all sorts of questions. He wanted to arrest me. The officer assumed that I was a prostitute because I had no clothes on under my pea jacket. Raphaël got out of his car and managed to convince the officer that we were just perverts. The police officer told us to keep it to the bedroom.
We went to a tiny underground restaurant that had mirrors on all the walls. It was one of those end-of-the-world Chinese restaurants. If you were a respectable citizen, you would never even notice that it was there. There were small bowls of water with rhododendrons floating in them on the tables. None of the menus had the right prices. They had the prices from 1975 on them.
I looked over at Raphaël. He had a pack of cigarettes in each of his pockets. It was a bring-your-own-wine joint. Raphaël unscrewed the lid and took a long drink right from the bottle.
“Disgusting!” he yelled.
We ate salt and pepper squid with chopsticks. The place was filled with actual prostitutes. One girl, who looked twelve, was wearing a fur hat and a T-shirt. She was so stoned that she couldn’t tell whether she was hot or cold.
There was another girl with a turtleneck sweater and tiny shiny pants. She had ordered a plate of dumplings but couldn’t eat them. She was biting her fingernails and looking out the window. She had a terrible cough, the way that pretty fifteen-year-olds who smoked in the wintertime and had sex with grown-up men did. The bottom of her face was all red around her mouth as if someone had been kissing her violently. A pimp was with her. He looked about eighteen years old. He had on a black sweater and sweatpants and poofy light blue sneakers.
There were horses on one of the girls’ T-shirts. If you put your ear up against her chest, you could hear them galloping. It was here on Rue Sainte-Catherine that the most beautiful kisses in the world were grown.
Raphaël had stopped taking his medication. He told me that the drugs screwed up his perception of time. One particular Wednesday had lasted for a year. And once, three days went by in five minutes. He said he was looking out a window and saw a rose bloom and wilt right in front of him. And the drugs messed with his erections.
We both had this strange intensity when we were making love. As if we hadn’t quite figured out what it was for. As if we pinned too much of our hopes and dreams on it. I was thinking that sex could cure all sorts of things. But the girls here knew exactly what sex was worth. They knew that sex cost forty dollars and could be bartered down. If you took one of the girls up to a hotel room, and she drank a glass of water while sitting on the ledge of the bathroom sink in yellow polyester underwear, did it look much different than true love?
I wanted to tell Raphaël about my mother. I thought it was that time of the relationship where I could bring up serious things instead of just flirt and have sex. And I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. In his own way, he could be quite brilliant at summing things up.
“Do you know that Nicolas and I met our mother for the first time last month?”
“Really? How the hell did that go?”
“She didn’t even want us there. There was this look on her face like we could destroy her life. We were, like, the worst things that had ever happened to her. She would have opened up her pocketbook and given us all the money in it, just to get rid of us. She looked like we were going to blackmail her.”
“That’s got to make you feel low-grade lousy all the time.”
“It sort of makes me feel like I’m kind of creepy? Do you know that feeling that I’m talking about? It’s hard sometimes to put it into words.”
“You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual to how to be likable,” Raphaël said, “but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.”
I wouldn’t have used those metaphors exactly, but he had actually sort of captured that icky feeling. That’s what it felt like when the little tank that contained your self-esteem was running on empty and you needed to somehow fill it up.
And that was what all the girls sitting in this restaurant were also feeling. They were very, very pretty, but they felt so ugly. They looked into their bathroom mirrors in the middle of the night because they had to pee for the twelfth time because of a bladder infection, and they saw ghouls and hideous things.
I didn’t know what sort of memories had driven Raphaël to such insights. I was about to ask, but he had already stood up and swung his jacket on in a way that somehow implied that the subject was closed. He had no intention of delving into his own psyche that night.
“But you don’t have to worry about how the rest of the world sees you. You just have to think about how it is that I think about you.”