LOULOU ALWAYS GOT DRESSED UP WHEN HE WENT to visit our grandmother’s grave. He had put on his fedora and his navy blue suit. He was wearing a giant gold watch that never told time properly. He had taken his weekly shower and didn’t have his usual vague odour of cat piss and dead things. Instead, he smelled like the breath of someone who was sucking on a hard candy.
It was September. It was already getting chilly. I kept waiting for the right moment to tell Loulou that I was getting married. I felt like I had to confess something bad that I had done, as if I had been expelled from school.
We had to walk over the park on the mountain in order to get to the cemetery. The police went around on horses. There were old men who had their pants pulled up inexplicably high and had plastic bags filled with apples hanging from their wrists. Young people were sunbathing in the cold. Little children were gathered around the brass statue of a lion. They stroked the lion’s mane and blew into its nostrils. They begged it to awaken from its terrible frozen spell and come home with them.
Loulou was having more trouble walking than ever. He would stop, hunched over, and look all around him as if he was taking in the magnificent view, as opposed to being tired.
“Clouds don’t look like much anymore. When I was a kid, you could look up and see adorable white goats running around. It was lovely. You see anything up there?”
“There’s a naked woman taking a bath.”
“You’re a pervert, Nouschka. You and your brother.”
There was a man on a unicycle balancing a hat on his nose. After the 1980 referendum, everyone with prospects left the city. Everyone here now was a direct descendant of a daydreamer. A disproportionate amount of people in the city were planning careers in the circus. We passed by the giant pond.
“There used to be puppet shows in this park all the time when I was a kid. Of course, there was a Punch and Judy show. There was also a Lush and Trudy show.”
“A what?”
“Lush and Trudy. It was about a puppet who drank too much and cheated on his wife.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, it was very popular. There was a puppet named Putz, who wore a trench coat and exposed himself.”
“What did they have at the big amphitheatre?”
“Oh! All sorts of things. There was a magician who was able to swallow birds and then crap them out of his ass, still alive!”
“That’s disgusting!” I laughed.
“Oh no!” he said. “Look, swans!”
I’d heard his stories about swans for years. Loulou said that once when he was little, he passed by a pond on a rainy day, and a swan fell madly in love with his umbrella. Loulou said the swan decided that it wanted to marry the umbrella and keep it as his wife. The swan chased him all the way home.
I thought about the swans that were in the pond when Raphaël asked me to marry him. If things went badly, would I have a horror of swans, I wondered.
I looked over at Loulou. He was also lost in thought as he looked at the birds. The shape of his fedora was ruined, like he’d worn it in the rain. His brown tie was flying and twisting in the wind like a seal performing tricks. I suddenly realized, for the first time, how sad he was. He had never recovered from our grandmother’s death. I felt sorry for him and didn’t want to tell him about the wedding. He’d been upset enough for one lifetime.
He bent over to talk to babies in their strollers. “Have you tried Rogaine for your hair loss?” “Lost all your teeth? So have I!” “Come on, get out of there. It’s my turn!” “I hope you’re not drinking and driving.”
Then he would look up at the mothers and laugh his head off. It was impossible for me to know what people thought about him.
“I went and bought a stationary bicycle. I rode it all day and I got nowhere.”
He had to tell jokes to everyone. He was lonely. He wanted to get in all his talking for the day. He wanted complete strangers to love him. He was the last vaudevillian star in the world. It’s harder to be funny when you’re older. You’ve lost touch with the zeitgeist, to put it mildly.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.
“Oh, what? What the fuck now? Jesus Christ. Here we go. Let me get off my fucking feet before you tell me.”
“Raphaël and I are getting married.”
Loulou looked like he was going to have a heart attack. He opened his mouth and shut it before he was finally able to compose a sentence.
“I hear people say that you’re good-looking,” he said. “Why can’t you date a doctor or a lawyer?”
“It’s too late for that. Besides, Raphaël’s smart.”
“You’re just like one of those girls who gets kidnapped and falls in love with their kidnappers.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“And I think that he is slightly retarded, if I may speak freely,” Loulou continued. “You were such a cute baby. Why did you settle for the first guy who asked you?”
“I love him.”
“He’d better take a trip to the Wizard of Oz for a brain. On second thought, he should go there with a grocery list. He should ask for a backbone while he’s there. And the ability to get a job.”
“Oh stop. He can do anything when he wants to. Look how far he went with figure skating.”
He was quiet again for a bit. He raised his shoulders and then dropped them, as if he was giving in to an argument.
“I think that if there was a weather report on his mental state, I would say eighty-five percent chance of crazy. He’s a ticking time bomb. Is that fucker skating again a possibility?”
“No. He’ll never skate again.”
“He’s too proud for the Ice Capades, eh?” Loulou shook his head.
We walked into the graveyard. If I had come on any other day, I would have stopped to read the tombstones. Here lies Joachim Renault, who drank three beers then went to play hockey on the lake that was not quite frozen. Here lies Xavier Therrier, who never got over his wife having left him and just didn’t have the strength to fight his fever. Luc Dionne, who was loved by all his family, died trying to rescue the family cat from a tree.
“I don’t know,” Loulou said. “Did I raise you properly? Did I not tell you two little assholes that you could be astronauts? Isn’t that the philosophy? Tell your kids they can be dentists when they can’t even pass third-grade math.”
“Not really. You were obsessed with Étienne.”
“You said such cute things on that radio show. I thought for sure you’d grow up and be a politician or something like that. You read all those pretty poems.”
“I’m finishing school. I’m going to be a professional something or other. I want to maybe be a journalist, a political commentator, a writer. Something like that.”
“You’re sensible. Except when boys come around. Then you’re fucking nuts.”
I stood there second-guessing my decision to marry Raphaël, as I had done a million times that week. Maybe I was afraid to ever just be alone. Perhaps I needed to have a man in my life as a cowardly backup plan.
“What about that rich little Jew you were going with. Why not marry him? Don’t tell me. He turned out to be gay, am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“I’m old, but I still know what is what, don’t I?”
He looked around to see if anyone had heard his joke, but everyone there was lying six feet under the ground.
Loulou let it go at that. A proper parent would have been able to end it all there. Loulou could never get angry or lay down the law with Nicolas and me. He just stopped seeing us when we became adolescents. How could I avoid getting married young? This way I could start a brand new family, where everyone would notice me.