RAPHAËL SAID THAT HE WANTED TO GO OUT AND have some fun with his gorgeous pregnant wife. He watched me getting ready. He was drinking Scotch out of a glass. I put on my red dress and was leaning over the bureau to look in the mirror while putting lipstick on. He was wearing a shirt that was the colour of robins’ eggs. The sole was hanging off the bottom of his shoe. It looked like an alligator with its jaw hanging open.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?” I asked.
A skinny girl in a wife-beater T-shirt in Saint-Henri appeared in the mirror. Her stepmother was yelling at her in the background.
“I don’t know why you even spend one second fixing yourself up,” Raphaël said. “You look fantastic all the time. I am going to draw you eight hundred hearts on a piece of paper. And I’m going to mail it to you. And you’re going to open the mailbox and the hearts are going to fly right out of it like hornets coming out of a hornets’ nest.”
“That’s sort of beautiful, baby,” I said. It was actually something that my Cyrano might have said.
I put the lipstick down and turned around with a flourish to indicate that I was ready to go. I was willing to forget everything. If there was one thing that I knew how to do, it was to live in the moment and have a kick-ass time.
“Look at you! I have to take you out into the world. I have to let other people look at you because it’s only fair. You’re so pretty it’s breaking my heart just to look at you. I think that I can see your aura. Glowing out of you.”
“What colour is it?”
“The colour of daffodils, I think, except pink.”
We went dancing at the Armenian Confederation Ballroom. He sat on a chair as I danced the sweetest, tightest lap dance in the history of mankind.
We probably looked like the most romantic couple on earth, like we were having the best time that any two people could possibly have. Really, we were going someplace where the music was loud, loud, loud, so that we didn’t have to hear the anxious mutterings of our psyches. And if we partied and went out dancing and made love often, didn’t it mean we were okay?
When we got home, Raphaël told me not to turn on the lights yet. I stood in the dark as he ran to the window and opened the blinds. He told me that he was certain we’d been followed. I told him that he was imagining things and flicked on the light switches. But for once he actually turned out to be right. Even a crazy clock is right twice a day.
A week later I saw a photograph of me dancing against Raphaël at the ballroom on the corner of the cover of a tabloid. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I opened up the magazine, and inside there was a blown-up photograph of Raphaël as a little kid wearing a silver spandex tuxedo and matching top hat. He had a gold medal hanging around his neck. His father was standing next to him, looking like the proudest man in the world. As I stared at it, I realized that it was one of the pictures that Raphaël had thrown away. In fact, the entire page was covered with photos that Raphaël had crammed in the bin that day on our way home from Véronique’s house. Someone had gone into the garbage and taken out his secret history. I never thought they would go that far.
According to the writer, Raphaël was a tortured genius. He had gone mad doing pirouettes. They found some doctor to say that training children to be professional athletes was a form of child abuse. Supposedly, figure skating was one of the few professions that could lead you to catatonic despair. Space travel was another one. Maybe now that he was with Nouschka Tremblay, he would get his life back on track and he would join the exhibition circuit. I wondered if there was a possibility that Raphaël wouldn’t see this magazine.
A patient in the hospital ended up showing it to Raphaël. He said he couldn’t understand why Raphaël was working as an orderly if he was in a magazine. He brought it home and tore it up in front of me as he carried on frantically.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life standing in front of this garbage can, tearing myself up. I’m going to climb into the garbage truck myself and just get the fuck out of here. Just be taken and not worry about this shit anymore. Who do they think they are? I’m going to eat my fucking fists.”
Sometimes it was hard to figure out who the press was going to be smitten with. Raphaël didn’t fit into the ordinary, day-to-day life of the city, but he fit into the mysterious world of the tabloids beautifully.
You could have a graduate class on him at Université de Montréal. The prerequisites would have to be Russian Realism, The Death of the American Dream, The Bad Guy in Henry James, French Postwar Existentialism, and Seventies Independent Cinema. You could write your thesis on a man like him. The story wasn’t going to go away in a day. It was going to be drawn out, like a love triangle on a soap opera.
He chased a photographer down the street. He took off his jacket, threw it onto the photographer’s head and then knocked him to the ground. He yelled at everyone who had stopped to view the spectacle that he had every intention of breaking their fucking necks. He walked home in just his undershirt. Everybody got out of the way. He stopped at a store to buy a carton of milk. When he was looking through his pockets for change, the guy at the store told Raphaël to just take it.
He gave great quotes to interviewers who called him up at work, telling them that they were parasites and the like. That’s exactly what the tabloids wanted to hear. They liked their heroes to play hard to get. And to be honest, I thought that having a concrete enemy was doing Raphaël some good. He could stop waiting for demons to come out of the woodwork.
There was a photograph of Raphaël smoking a joint in the park. He was incredibly worried that his probation officer was going to see the photograph and have him thrown in jail or committed again. Which was actually a legitimate fear, I suppose. I wonder if it’s more comforting to a schizophrenic to have legitimate fears or imaginary ones.
He got into a scrape in the hospital elevator with a man who came in right after him with a camera in his hand. It turned out that the man was there to photograph his newborn baby. The hospital suggested that he take a leave of absence. Raphaël walked into the apartment wearing his scrubs, looking distraught.