AS WE WALKED BACK TO THE CAR, I TURNED AND waved to the bikers.
“I want you to ask yourself a serious question,” I said, once we were out of earshot. “I want you to ask yourself whether you think that what Québec needs is another biker?”
“I’m not a biker. I’m just visiting a few of my business associates.”
“Do you know what business associates do? They wear suits and have briefcases, and you meet them in boardrooms and you give presentations. They don’t walk around in black tank tops and have designated tables at strip clubs. They don’t start their meeting by bragging about their oral sex skills.”
“How would you feel about changing our names?”
“I don’t like that. What are you going to change them to?”
“I always feel fantastic with a new name. It’s like a brand-new suit. I feel like a new man. How about Marguerite? Arnaud Marguerite.”
“I don’t think I’m one hundred percent in love with that stupid name, to be honest.”
“You’re not being open-minded.”
“I think I’ve been reasonably open-minded enough for one day. I’m out here in Saint-Maurice-Fucked-Ma-Blonde, looking at lions!”
“If we stay out here for a year, then we will maybe make fifty thousand dollars breeding this guy, and then we can go back to the city and get back on our feet. We can buy a lot of fancy things.”
“Now we’re going to breed the dog?”
“Sure, why not? He’s a champion.”
“A champion how?”
“Would you like a brand-new fur coat?”
“No.”
“What about leopard-skin seat covers for the car?”
“What about gold teeth? We should get matching gold teeth.”
“Be serious, Nouschka. We can have our own house.”
That’s the problem with marrying young, isn’t it? It’s almost like one of you has to sacrifice your dream for the other. It was true that Raphaël’s dream was a little bit more lucrative at the moment. But it was just money that was going to run out and then leave us off exactly where we were before. If I had a degree, it would lead me to all sorts of promising futures. But here I was in the woods, a thousand miles from school.
We climbed in the car with Champion the German shepherd. The dog was clearly ecstatic that we were taking it home with us. It kept toppling around in the back seat as we drove off. It finally squeezed its head behind Raphaël’s seat and stuck its head out the window.
We stopped outside a grocery store. There were about a million signs on the front of the store window. The prices were written in big fluorescent numbers on white pieces of paper. There was a sign that was making a big, big deal about the price of milk. Raphaël went inside.
The dog kept looking anxiously out the window to see if Raphaël had come out of the store yet. Perhaps it thought that Raphaël might sneak out a back exit and run away from us all. The dog was trying to suppress a whine. I could tell that it was almost painful for it not to cry out. I wondered who had fallen in love with Raphaël quicker: me or the dog.
I watched the people walking out. They all looked Québécois. No one out here understood a word of English. Knowing how to speak English was a Montréal thing. There was a man with a handlebar moustache. Everything else about him was ordinary—everything except that moustache.
A woman with a brown trench coat that almost went down to the ground came out of the store. She was smoking a cigarette. Her children were all following behind her, each carrying a plastic bag with the word Merci written on it in blue. They walked in a row behind her, like a row of pretty little ducks.
“Look at that woman,” I said out loud. “She doesn’t even know when to stop. Soon she’ll need a school bus just to take her kids to school.”
I could spend the rest of my life in this car, waiting for Raphaël to come out of the grocery store. There would be three kids crammed into the back seat, wearing different T-shirts and reading comic books and praying that their father would bring them out a bag of Cheetos. Their running shoes would kick the back of my seat, like a heartbeat.
The dog did a circle of joy when he saw Raphaël come out of the store, pushing a cart with a huge bag of dog food and other groceries in it. He loaded everything into the trunk of the car.
“I always sort of saw myself as some sort of intellectual,” I said as I watched Raphaël through the car window. “But here I am, pregnant, in the middle of nowhere, waiting for my biker boyfriend to come out of a grocery store.”
As Raphaël got in the car, he handed me a plastic bottle of spruce beer. There was a lumberjack on the label with a tiny red toque on his head. We Québécois were always drinking spruce beer. Every time I drank it, I thought that this time I might like it, and every time I drank it, I liked it even less. I almost gagged after having a sip. I’d never felt as contrary as I did that day.
“I should have just stayed stranded on the island with Nicolas. I should have. We would have been happy with the pelicans and the swans. I should have just married the walrus. What was so wrong? Things were less complicated. All that Nicolas and I ever did was bitch about our lives. But maybe it wasn’t so bad. Because everything off the island is worse.”
“Are you talking to your mother?” Raphaël asked. “You talk to her all the time. Ever since I started seeing you, you were always talking to your mother. Maybe every time that you talk to her, she’s probably somewhere—wherever she is—answering your questions. Did you ever think about that?”
I looked at Raphaël. Sometimes mad people could say such wonderfully astute things. They could wrap their minds around lovely possibilities that the rest of us couldn’t.
“Let’s not fight,” Raphaël said with kindness. “Let’s just see where this adventure takes us, shall we?”
“How long are we going to be out here?”
“I just can’t be on the island right now. You know that we had a difficult history. They’re all sorts of ways for places to be bugged, you know. I saw a documentary on the Cold War. Since Communism fell, they sold all their equipment cheap. There are warehouses full of wiretaps and headphones.”
But then, of course, they ruined it by saying something like that.
He was wearing a giant gold watch. It didn’t seem to tell the right time, but he didn’t seem to mind. Maybe his broken watch told the right time in a parallel universe. He clicked on the ignition. Someone screamed out from the radio. The dog put its paws on the back of the seats and leaned its head forward between us like a little kid that was excited about wherever we were going.