A History of Forgetting (2 page)

‘Denis is behind the couch and won't come out.'

‘Leave him there,' said Yvette. ‘He'll forget all about it.'

‘He's bleeding.'

‘Eh?'

‘We had a little punch-up. You know us.'

‘You pig.'

‘Why do you assume it's my fault?'

‘Because Denis' not responsible. Is he hurt bad?'

‘A nosebleed. Can you come over?'

‘What? Now?' She snorted. ‘The house is full up. Did you try distracting him?'

He sighed very loudly, in case Yvette didn't hear him over the unlistened-to child who had begun needling in the background. Somebody wouldn't let him play with something. Over and over he repeated it at a higher and higher pitch. His complaint was in English and the female hubbub he was trying to penetrate was French.

‘Malcolm? Just a sec.' She cupped the receiver and snapped at the child whose siren of indignation finally gained him the attention he'd been seeking. He was interrogated briefly, then Yvette was scolded by some female relative. ‘I'm trying to have a conversation here,
câlisse,'
she retorted.
‘Câlisse,
I can't hear myself think.'

‘Sorry, Yvette,' said Malcolm. ‘I shouldn't have called.'

‘You know what? I'm gonna come just to get away from this.'

‘I appreciate it,' he said.

‘Yeah, yeah. It's not a Christmas present. You know holidays are time and a half.'

‘Of course.'

Back in the living room, he called to Denis still behind the couch. ‘Come out, darling. Yvette is on her way.'

No reply. Denis was sobbing like a child.

They rarely fought and if they did, forgiveness was not usually hoarded, but graciously bestowed. In the bathroom, Malcolm rinsed the taste of nails out of his mouth. Carefully, he drew back his inflating upper lip to inspect the soft inside of his mouth cut by his teeth. So this was what love comes to. It comes to blows, he thought.

He couldn't bear to return to the living room, so stayed at the table finishing Denis' coffee as he listened numbly to his weeping. His hands shook as he lifted the bowl. It stung to drink. It stung. This was perhaps the worst thing that had ever happened between them.

Thankfully, Yvette was on her way, Yvette their caregiver, their saviour. When the agency had first sent her, their only employee who spoke fluent French, Yvette, a
Québécoise
, took one look around, jaw locked, eyes narrowing, sussing out the situation.

Straight out, Malcolm told her, ‘You won't have to bathe him.'

‘Ugh!' she said. ‘I suppose you do.'

‘You also won't have to cook. Denis does.'

Her eyebrows arched; the promise of less work was tempting. What clinched it though, was Denis himself shambling into the living room on cue. He saw Yvette planted there on the couch and he slew her with that smile of his, the left corner of his mouth lifting a second before the right, making him seem perpetually guileless and bemused—which he was. Another of the extraordinary things about Denis was that he appeared to be exactly what he was.

Yvette's clenched jaw softened. ‘Oh,' she said. Malcolm knew the look, knew the breathy sigh; he'd seen and heard it a thousand times. She was already in love with Denis standing there twinkling in his unmatched socks.

‘I don't usually like the French,' she said, but since then
Denis had risen quickly through her ranks. Most days Malcolm came home and found him brushing out her hair, Yvette sitting
there, complacent and slit-eyed as a cat. Caregiver and charge
never met or parted without a profuse exchange of kisses.
Denis probably got more kisses out of her than did Mr. Yvette.

In twenty minutes she was buzzing to get into the apartment—never just once, three impatient blasts, as if in a code they'd previously established.

‘We got my gang with us again this year,' she told him at the apartment door. ‘The three sisters, the hubbies, all the kids, my dad. They come out for the skiing, eh? Continuous fucking fighting. I'm glad to get away for an hour.'

‘Thank you again,' Malcom said.

She heaved her heavy shoulders, dismissing his appreciation, and in the mirror patted her hair. It was an adjectiveless brown, crisp from overperming, swept back with girlish barrettes on both sides of her broad face. ‘So what did you do to him?'

‘He became agitated when I told him it was Christmas. I mean, don't we all? I woke up this morning and very nearly vomited.'

She frowned, which was half her repertoire of facial expres
sions; she also puckered when she smoked. As for smiling,
Malcolm had never seen her at it. He suspected she didn't have a molar in her head because every time she opened her mouth
to slang at Denis, he glimpsed a deep black hole.

She started down the hall, Malcolm following her caboose in tight cotton legging. He stood in the doorway while Yvette went over to the couch. ‘Denis!' she bellowed, as if the problem was his hearing. To him, she spoke her twangy French. ‘What's going on?' When he didn't reply, she knelt on the couch and reached over the back. ‘Come on. Up you get.'

It pained Malcolm to see Denis obey her and pull himself to his knees. To see the blood smeared on his face.

‘There's a good boy. Up we go. Jesus Christ, what happened to you? It looks like someone hit you.'

‘M'a frappé?'
Denis laughed and shook his head—an absurd suggestion. When he made a move to kiss her cheek, she put out her hand in a policeman's halt.

‘Let's wash your face first, eh?'

She led him out of the room, passing Malcolm in the doorway. ‘Who would do that to you, Denis? You're such a dear.'

Denis told Malcolm,
‘Yvette est arrivée!'

‘Yes, I see that.'

‘Shame, shame, shame,' she hissed in English. ‘I'd like to clobber you back. How would you like that?'

Sheepishly, he followed to the bathroom where Yvette left Denis while she went to get a clean cloth from the linen cupboard. Denis, standing in front of the basin, staring in the mirror, was clearly alarmed by what he saw: the blood clotting in one nostril, blood sticky on his lips and chin. He reached out and lightly touched the mirror, looked at his fingers, shook his head.

‘Denis, I'm sorry.'

Denis didn't seem to hear. He pulled a hand towel off the rack, wet it, then did the oddest thing. Instead of wiping his face, he began cleaning his reflection, scrubbing, scrubbing, then blinking at himself, perplexed.

 

 

 

2

 

Malcolm brought Denis to Vancouver because it was where he
had been born and raised, but when they arrived he found a city
so changed as to seem an entirely different place. They might as
well have gone to Quebec City or Montreal, he realized; by then it
was too late. While the Hotel Vancouver still stood downtown,
along with a few old churches squatting in the skyscrapers'
shadows, the wrecking ball had demolished so many familiar buildings. Gone was one of his favourites, the Art Deco medical arts building where h
e
'
d used to get his teeth filled. They'd resurrected the granite nurses that had adorned the original
façade, but these once-grand symbols, Nurse Health and Nurse Hygiene, only looked butch and out of place on their updated
pediments. Even the house h
e
'
d grown up in had disappeared, the whole block razed, and in its place there was a pink stucco condominium complex streaked with mildew. He marvelled that they had not blasted away the mountains, too.

None of this he really minded, though. He preferred that everything be new. When they lived in Paris he used to stop every afternoon at the same café on the way home with the groceries. Once, early in his first year, he came by in the evening and left his coins as usual on the table. The next day the waiter told him that the prices increased after six. Malcolm said that he hadn't known, that he would make up the difference now, but the waiter waved off the debt. ‘Yesterday was yesterday. Today is today.' This struck him then, as now, as a sensible philosophy.

At certain moments, though, everything did seem as before. When Malcolm stepped across the threshold of the
apartment, he could have been stepping into their place in the Marais. The layout was not quite right and neither were the neighbours or the view, but all their furniture was there—it had nearly bankrupted them to bring it over—and the Persian carpet and the paintings, everything in exactly the same arrangement. Except that the ceiling was lower, the kitchen matched; he had been very particular about the kitchen when choosing the apartment. Disassembling the old one, he'd made careful notes in order to put it back together here.

Back in Paris Malcolm would not, when he got home from work, find Yvette smoking at their dining-room table and reading an American tabloid. That was different. But Denis
still came to greet him with his only English sentence:
‘Are you
angry?'

He meant, ‘Are you hungry?' the “H,” beguilingly dropped.

‘Très fâché,'
Malcolm answered, smiling.

Malcolm, who, as always, left that morning with Denis' list, had returned with a bulging net shopping bag. Denis took it and began unloading the packages on the counter. Into a clear glass bowl he emptied the mushrooms from the paper bag.

‘Are they all right?'

Denis sniffed at one and shrugged. ‘They'll have to do.' Nothing Malcolm bought for Denis passed inspection. Ever. There had been a time when this annoyed Malcolm no end. They had
had their share of quarrels over an imperceptibly browning
fennel bulb, a leek supposedly too packed with grit. Malcolm,
rebelling, had even gone so far as to suggest that Denis do the shopping himself, a threat he regretted making, seeing Denis
turn away, hurt. It is these little rituals that prolong love, Malcolm knew now, but it had taken him a long time to learn.

The list read one Spanish onion and twenty pearl onions.

‘
Un, deux, trois, quatre
. . .' Denis expertly shucked their paper skins as he counted.

‘There are twenty,' Malcolm assured him.
‘Il y en a vingt.'

‘Vingt-et-un,'
Denis continued,
‘vingt-deux, vingt-trois .
. .'

‘Now you've confused him,' Yvette said from the table. She turned a page in the tabloid.

‘Don't you have another client?' asked Malcolm, the Queen
of Tact.

‘I do. It's the old judge. At bath time, he always asks to suck my tit.'

Malcolm mock recoiled, ‘That would never happen here.'

‘No, Denis is a gentleman.' Still she remained parked at the table, propping herself up on a plump elbow as she interfered.

‘May I help?' Malcolm asked Denis.

Denis looked up, the one silver lock flopping in his eyes, and waved Malcolm off politely. He never accepted the first offer. Malcolm would have to ask several times. He'd have to beg and then Denis would give him a menial task to do incorrectly, insult his work and drive him from the kitchen.

‘Please.'

‘Non, non.'

The task he granted Malcolm at last, just as Yvette stubbed out her cigarette and lumbered over, was to open the brown paper package on the counter.

‘Ah, your cheque,' Malcolm finally realizing why she was hanging about. ‘It's on the desk.'

He went to get it and, when he returned, he found Denis chopping up a carrot while Yvette tested the weight of the package, squeezing it curiously. She opened the paper wrapping to have a peek. A blue-black coil, a whiskered neck. Eyes. She dropped it on the counter and jumped back. ‘
Câlisse!'

Denis was at her side in an instant, wielding the knife. With equal parts comedy and chivalry, he decapitated the thing, the force of the cut sending the head rolling off the counter and onto the floor where it looked up expressionlessly from beside its executioner's slipper.

‘Merde,'
he muttered, bending to scoop the head up on the side of the knife.

Yvette elbowed Malcolm out of the way. He followed her to the door. ‘What was that?' she hissed.

‘An eel. It's a delicacy, Yvette. You should come for dinner some night.'

She snatched the cheque out of his hand.
‘Câlisse.'
Then, as he helped her with her coat, she told him, ‘I almost forgot. A mirror in the bedroom. Broken. I closed the door so he
wouldn't step in the glass. I don't clean, right?'

‘Of course not.' He pressed his fingers to his eyes. ‘Why
does he do that?'