NICOLAS WAS OUTSIDE THE MÉTROPOLIS. HE was scalping tickets to music shows. He always did that on Friday nights.
The thousands of light bulbs on the marquee were flickering on and off. Whenever a light in our kitchen would blow out, Loulou would tell us to take a ladder and go and get one of the bulbs from the Métropolis sign. It was a staple in his stand-up routine. He looked sort of picturesque under the marquee, looking off into space with a stern expression, his hair swept back. That’s why all the girls in high school had always been in love with him. He sort of looked like a tortured gangster from a sixties film noir. The crowd had all gone inside to see Les Colocs, and if he had any tickets left, they weren’t worth anything anymore.
“What’s the news?” he said when he saw me walking up.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Ohhhh, why?” Nicolas yelled, throwing his arms up in the air. “We’re supposed to be trying to put this family out of its misery. We’re sluts, we have ADD and we’re separatists. We shouldn’t be procreating.”
He was grinning though. We both started to laugh for no reason, or perhaps at the fact that we were inflicting more Tremblays onto this world.
“I thought that wearing spandex all the time was supposed to render a man infertile,” Nicolas said. “Just please don’t let the little fucker figure skate. You know I hate that shit.”
“I’m going to buy him one of those all-white outfits. The ones with fringes under the arms.”
“You wouldn’t! Think of all the poor kids in China who are in sweatshops being forced to make sequins for those outfits.”
We started cracking up. He was sort of happy that I was in the same boat as him. It was like when he had dropped out of school and I had done the same. He usually did stupid things first—like smoking and drinking and having sex—and then he felt all weird and guilty about them until I did the same. Then they just seemed normal. He always liked when I followed him down. If you think that that is an awful quality, well you are probably right, but you can’t have a very high opinion of love.
“You must be hungry,” he said. “I was hungry all the time when Saskia was pregnant. Also, I had morning sickness, because I vomited when she told me.”
“What else can you tell me about being pregnant?”
“You’ll want an ice cream sundae.”
We went around the corner to a café that served sundaes year round. It was a tiny, cozy place that we’d liked since we were kids. The walls were painted pink and there were paintings of blue skies with clouds. There were plants in the petite jars on the shelves; their roots were swimming around in the water, like some nineteenth-century etching. The chalkboard had a dozen different names for ice cream and specialty coffee; the bottom halves of the words were all smudged.
He took a wad of cash that he had made that evening out of his pocket. There were an awful lot of red two-dollar bills padding out that roll. He peeled a couple off the top and handed them to the waitress.
“Two sundaes.”
The waitress had an afro, the back of which was white with chalk powder from leaning on the menu board. She put scoops of vanilla ice cream into the bowls and then poured hot caramel onto them. The sauce melted the ice cream immediately. We waited for a moment to see whether or not the hot caramel might have the power to melt away all of winter.
“When I get the three grand together,” Nicolas said, “I’ll be able to see Pierrot and we can let the kids play together.”
I wasn’t going to try and argue that getting three thousand dollars didn’t necessarily mean he would see Pierrot again. We were just going to sort of celebrate the possibility of being good parents. Getting pregnant while we were young and unprepared meant we were old school. I had written a paper on family life in Québec before the Quiet Revolution in the sixties. During La Grande Noirceur, when the Catholic Church controlled the province, Québec was famous for its birth rate. Girls everywhere got pregnant too young. You would see them skipping rope with their pregnant bellies. You would see them in the children’s section of the library, using their huge bellies to prop up their books. There were seven or eight carriages parked outside every store. The sound of all the rattles shaking at once could drive you mad. Every house smelled like pissy and shitty diapers. You had to wear rubber boots because of all the porridge spilled on the floor.
There were babies in baskets in all the doorways. Once, a woman came home with a baby wrapped in newspaper, sure that it was a little piece of ham that she had bought. Babies were always crying. Mothers could do nothing to make them hush, because all the lullabies were written in English.
As we looked out the window, Étienne and the camera crew passed by. He had cut out a heart from a piece of red construction paper and safety-pinned it to the lapel of his jacket. I don’t know what he was trying to say. He was getting experimental.
Étienne was holding up his hand as if to claim that he was the one who had come up with the idea of having snow this year. And maybe it was. Maybe Étienne hadn’t just invented Nicolas and me, but maybe he had created the whole world.
I guess, since he was my father, it would make sense for me to go out there and say hello and tell him that I was pregnant. He had other things on his mind right now though. Clearly. To go up and talk to him would be like interrupting a performer in the middle of a play. How lovely to be in a production of your life instead of being in your life itself.