I WENT TO LOOK FOR RAPHAËL AT THE POLISH Social Club a few days later. He hadn’t come home the night before. There was a woman singing on the stage. She strummed a ukulele and pouted her lips abruptly as she said each word, as if she was spitting out sunflower seeds. It was a style of French singing where you spoke the words really emphatically, as if you were lecturing a child.
A cat was in the corner, yawning. It looked like an insomniac in striped pyjamas.
Raphaël was drunk. He was sitting with a blond girl on his lap. I walked over, took a drink off their table and threw it on her. Everyone was startled and started to laugh, even the girl, who shook the beer off her hair like a wet dog that had just come in from the rain. I had thought that we were happy again. It had been the loveliest thing on the planet. That was the last time we were happy in the city.
After that night Raphaël would check his horoscope in the mornings as if he was checking his stocks. He bought six different newspapers and had a Spanish man help him translate the horoscope from a paper from Mexico City.
He started laughing at odd times. There was something a little terrifying about people who laughed at a joke too long or at jokes that weren’t funny.
“Are you going to work?” I asked him as he was leaving the apartment one night.
“No. I’m all washed up. I’ve got a Grade Eight education. The only work for me is robbing jewellery stores. And my heart’s just not in it.”
“Weren’t you going to go back to school, for nursing?”
“There’s a reason for you to go to school. You write all those clever essays in your notebooks. You know how to do something like that. It is very hard for a person to go to school once they have rejected the linearity of time. It presupposes that we are moving forward through time and that a gradual accumulation of facts is necessary. Some of us are going backwards through time. As such. We are unlearning loads of information.”
He walked out the door. He frustrated me the way that Nicolas did. They didn’t act as if they would ever be twenty-five. They didn’t have any sort of long-term plan. They were just trying to get through the day. They were often involved in plans that weren’t actually plans. Complicated plans that left them exactly in the same place that they started out. They put on all sorts of costumes and affectations, but they couldn’t get away from the idea of who they were as children. Nicolas was Peter Pan. Raphaël was Captain Hook. But it was the same old story being told by a slightly different character.
It would be okay—we could make it—if we both did something small every day to make sure that we were getting our lives together. I wanted to have some fun in life too. I didn’t want to have to do all of the work while he got to go mad. I didn’t like to be like the ant, all industrious and worried, while Raphaël went around being a grasshopper, all wild and upset and singing at the moon. I felt terribly selfish thinking this way, but I couldn’t go down with Raphaël. I had to have my own trials and tribulations. Jesus, I was twenty years old!
I walked into the kitchen one night. Raphaël was naked and running a magnet from the fridge door that was in the shape of a pina colada all over his body. He wanted to see if he could detect any magnetism. I glanced at the workout sheet he’d put on the fridge. He had been up late the night before and had apparently done three thousand sit-ups. He told me that he thought that some scientists had put a transistor in him when he was a little kid so that they could monitor the effects of child abuse. He said they were writing a book about him. He was going to ask at the hospital if he could have his whole body X-rayed so that they could find the receiver and remove it.
Try as I might, I could no longer make sense of Raphaël’s behaviour. In retrospect, I should have done something. But he had been to the doctors and that hadn’t worked. His family was useless. What other options did I have? There was a cult around the corner, where a twenty-seven-year-old who wore a pair of pants without a belt lectured about macrobiotics. There was a hypnotist above the legal clinic who wiped away all your problems for sixty-five dollars. There was a tarot card reader on the first floor of our building. None of them seemed like viable solutions.
Instead I hid some extra money from my paycheque in a tin with roses on it under the bed. I didn’t want to admit to myself why I was hiding it. I was hiding it in case I left Raphaël. I had started to do it since I found out that I was pregnant, just in case. But, actually, I knew that he was going to fall apart. I looked around the room guiltily when I was done. No one was there.