EVEN THOUGH I TRIED TO TALK TO RAPHAËL, HE grew more distant. He poured himself a glass of whiskey when he came home in the evening. He took off his clothes whenever he was drunk. After two drinks he’d be standing in the apartment wearing only an undershirt and underwear. There was a halo over his head when he drank. You could see him warming up and start to glow.
He stopped eating dinner. He cooked himself up some magic mushroom tea one night. He drank it out of a mug with the comic-book hero Lucky Luke on it. He sat on the other side of the kitchen table, winking at me.
I noticed that he never reacted to a single thing on the TV. And he always had totally random expressions on his face. He once looked like he was in terrible pain. I asked him what he was thinking and he said that he was trying to figure out where he had put his keys.
I woke up and Raphaël had his gun in his hand, pointed at me.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I kicked him in the stomach with my bare foot. I picked up a tiny teacup that was on the bedside table and flung it at his head. Then I stood up in front of him and slapped him as hard as I could. He reached out and whacked me across the face. What a smack!
We stood staring at each other, as if we were waiting for something to happen. It was as if we were both trying to wake ourselves up from this awful dream—this strange dream where we were married.
I started to laugh my head off because nothing happened. This was reality. This was my world. I was stuck, married, in a tiny apartment. We were uneducated. We had no prospects. We were a typical sixties Québécois couple living in the nineties. We had thrown our futures away. We would be doing the same thing fifty years from now. The difference was that we would be uglier. We would argue with each other on Friday nights.
He looked at me some days like I was a hostage that no one was paying the ransom for. Marriage was disgusting, wasn’t it?
Later that night I lay in bed studying for history class. Love is cursed in Montréal. Samuel de Champlain’s wife cursed it. She was twelve years old when she had to marry Champlain. She was repulsed. She wanted to go right back to Paris, where she could drink chocolat chaud and fall in love with boys named Bruno. They told her in France to just go limp and then she would have a darling baby to play with. Every time he went near her, she screamed at the top of her lungs.
Champlain’s beard was shaved into the shape of a heart and his sleeves were the puffiest that money could buy. He knelt down at her bedside in his flea collar and wept and felt alive. Her rejection was like a drug. He had never seen a pale little face like hers. It was just like the hole that you cut out of the ice to go fishing.
He liked making her angry. There was nothing so beautiful as that girl thrashing about and pouting her round little mouth, which was like a drop of red wax sealing an envelope. She ran into the woods one night, wearing only her petticoats, which looked like frost on glass windows. The mud coughed violently beneath her feet, like an old man clearing his throat. Her little fists were clenched and her little knees knocked together. She pulled out her hair and shook her locks.
She started spitting out horrible, wee, adorable, unthinkable curses. She hoped that the Iroquois would kill Champlain. She hoped that every other married person was just as unhappy as she was. You could still hear her curses on very cold days. When the wind was like paper airplanes being thrown at your head. When the wind was like walking through plates of glass.