A Very Bold Leap (34 page)

“How are you, my dear fellow?”

“Very, very well,” said Charles, flattered by the journalist’s enthusiasm and trying to look the part of a successful writer.

“And the writing?”

After a second’s hesitation, the young man replied that he was working on something, but he was just in the early stages; there was still a lot of time and effort ahead, because this time it was something big, something ambitious.

Délicieux looked impressed. He nodded his head so vigorously that droplets of rainwater flew from his chubby chin like fireworks celebrating Charles’s announcement.

“It doesn’t pay to be idle, Charles! Life is all about patience, especially for artists!”

Then, with a friendly gesture, he took Charles’s arm. “I wanted to tell you how terribly sorry I am to have sent you to that bloody fool Pigeon. What a disaster! He completely ruined the publication of your novel, which, by the way, I still find extremely remarkable!”

Unfortunately he’d forgotten the name of it, and had to ask Charles to refresh his memory.

“
The Quiet Rip-Off
,” Charles said, somewhat reluctantly.

No doubt to make up for his gaffe, Délicieux asked Charles to join him for a coffee at La Brioche Lyonnaise, which was a few doors away. Charles accepted immediately, happy enough to be diverted from his morose and tormenting thoughts, and within minutes was sitting at a table with a cappuccino sprinkled with cinnamon, listening to the journalist’s lurid and detailed accounts of the latest rumours circulating in the artistic community.

After his mildly appreciated performance in
Nights in the Tailless Chicken Hotel
, Donald Laumont, crippled by debts accrued by his passion for gambling, had been forced to sell his beautiful cottage in Morin Heights, and his wife still hadn’t forgiven him for it; in fact, they were sleeping in separate bedrooms, an arrangement she may one day come to deeply regret. Even with the success of her latest album, Lola Malo was going around with a long face because of her obsession with the idea of having a baby — which she could not seem able to do despite all her best efforts as well as those of her husband and no doubt several lovers. On top of that, she was embroiled in a pitched battle with her mother-in-law over a swimming pool that was installed in the wrong place. The producer Martin Majot had eaten up all the profits he’d made from
The Idol
on his latest film,
Love on Skis
, which was a total flop, showing to empty houses for the past month and garnering howls of derision from all fronts; the film was a disaster because both his mistresses had left him at the same time, presumably without having consulted with one another beforehand.

Unfortunately, only a tiny proportion of this juicy material was publishable; despite all the rhetoric, freedom of speech was still a limited concept in this country. You could write anything you wanted to, as long as you didn’t say anything. Ah, so many checks and balances are strewn in the path of a journalist. Délicieux himself had been in a cold sweat for weeks, ever since
Artist’s Life
, the magazine he’d been working for for seventeen years, had just been bought by Québécor, and you know what they say about a new broom:
Pierre Péladeau, the new chief, had declared that “you can’t make good paper out of dead wood.” Half the editorial staff had been let go, but Délicieux and two or three others had officially been recognized as pillars of the establishment. All the same, he’d only temporarily dodged the bullet, because no matter what they say, talent has never outshone stupidity, especially bureaucratic stupidity.

The journalist ordered two more cappuccinos and finally got around to asking after his companion. Charles, knowing his tale would find a good ear, launched into a long and detailed account of his recent religious adventures, which amused the journalist so much that he asked Charles if he might write an article about them.

“After all,” he said keenly, “those sermons were a kind of public performance.”

He took out his notebook and asked Charles a few pointed questions, promising that if his story ever did get published, he would take all the necessary precautions.

Then Charles was struck by an inspiration. After reducing his friend to tears of laughter by exploiting all the resources of his mind and his imagination, he blushed and asked him if, by any chance, there would be a job for him at the magazine. He’d do anything, he said: empty chamber pots, interview deaf-mutes, type up other people’s stories on the balcony in winter. He’d wanted all his life to make his living with his pen!

Suddenly quiet, his face screwed up in perplexity, Délicieux scratched the end of his nose. “Hmm,” he said, “it’s not that I doubt your ability, Charles… It’s just that this isn’t the best time to try to get a friend on the payroll. Believe me, the new boss is still trying to prove that he really is the boss; he sticks his nose into everything — how many pencils we go through, how many paper clips we use! We practically have to fill out a request form to go to the bathroom. In any case, leave it with me for a couple of weeks. I’ll see what I can do … Holy smokes! Eleven o’clock! I’ve got to run, my boy.”

He got up and Charles caught a whiff of his eau de cologne through the spaces between his pink shirt buttons.

Okay, run off, you perfumed prig
, Charles said to himself, holding back a bitter smile.
If you ever want to clear a room, all you have to do is ask for a favour. Suddenly, pfffft! You’ll be alone in a second!

But Délicieux held out his hand and gave Charles a smile that would melt glaciers at the South Pole.

“You know what, Charles?” he said. “I’d be as pleased as punch to have you as a colleague. Imagine the fun we’d have, days and nights together, eh?”

Charles continued on to the Canada Manpower Centre, where they made him fill out a questionnaire that went almost all the way back to when he got his first baby teeth. Then he was interviewed by a clerk who asked him all the questions he’d just answered on the questionnaire, as well as a few others. After that, the woman filled out several other forms, each a different colour, and put them into a file folder and wrote Charles’s name on the tab. Then she gave Charles a warm, maternal look and kindly advised him to go back to school. Without a degree, she said, he was condemning himself to the life of an alley cat.

It was nearly one o’clock by the time Charles left the centre. Although he loved restaurants, circumstances were forcing him to make economies, and so he decided to go home to eat lunch in his apartment, despite the fact that he was famished. He didn’t even allow himself to buy a chocolate bar. “When I’m a journalist,” he told himself, “I’ll eat lunch in restaurants every day, and dinner, too, if I want! Everything will be part of my life when I’m working.”

He was still adding a few touches to his future life when he arrived at his apartment. Whistling, his head filled with golden images, he pushed open the door to the foyer, then stopped in mid-whistle and let out a long snort of air through his nose, his usual reaction to an unpleasant surprise.

Steve was sitting on the steps leading up to his apartment, hands crossed on his knees, waiting.

“Well,” Charles murmured after a few seconds, “it looks like this is my day for confrontations … What, have you all formed a group or what?”

Steve stood up awkwardly, his nose twitching comically, and would have held out his hand to his former friend but thought better of it.

“Hello, Charles. How are you doing?”

“So, let me get this straight,” Charles said, ignoring the question. “Céline got nowhere this morning, and so she sent you to see if you could do any better, is that it?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I haven’t seen Céline for weeks.”

The seriousness of his voice quashed Charles’s anger, and he almost regretted his harsh welcome.

“She didn’t want to see me again,” Steve added. “Which wasn’t that hard: it’s easy to end something that never got started in the first place.”

“Listen,” Charles said, his impatience returned full force, “I’m starving to death, and anyway I don’t want to talk standing here in the foyer.”

“Let me buy you lunch,” Steve said quickly. “Anywhere you like.”

“You will not buy me lunch. You will never buy me anything ever again.”

They exchanged a few more words, and then Charles decided to go to the cafeteria in the Saint-Luc hospital, where he could eat for next to nothing. He told Steve he could come along if he felt like it.

Soon they were ensconced in the corner of a large, noisy room, where they could have both had nervous breakdowns without attracting much attention. While Steve watched silently, looking quite pitiful, Charles gobbled down a plate of veal cutlets, apple sauce (reconstituted), and overcooked carrots, wiped up his plate with a slice of bread, took a sip of very bad coffee, and then leaned back in his chair.

“Okay, so what do you want to tell me? Choose your words carefully, I’m not having a good day.”

“I… What the hell, I don’t know where to start… While I was waiting for you in your building, I had all these smart things to say running through my head, but now that you’re right here in front of me, everything’s all mixed up.”

“Don’t count on any help from me,” Charles said sourly.

“Look, first I have to tell you what happened. I —”

“Céline already took care of that.”

“Do you mind if I speak? If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, we might as well call it quits right now and go our separate ways, and forget the whole damn thing.”

“Good idea,” Charles said, standing up.

Steve grabbed his arm. “No, please, hear me out. I’ve been wanting to get this off my chest for weeks now. There’ve been nights when I couldn’t sleep. You know me, Charles, I’m not a monster, am I? We’ve known each other since grade school, you’re my best friend …”

“I
was
your best friend,” Charles corrected, his voice tight. “When you want to keep someone as a friend, you don’t sleep with his girlfriend.”

“I know, I know, I’m getting to that. That night I called Fernand’s house to see if they’d heard from you, and Céline answered the phone. She seemed completely shattered, Charles, completely, you should have heard her! She sounded so wretched I couldn’t not ask her what was wrong. She burst into tears and told me everything, and if you don’t mind my saying so, Charles, I’ve got to say I was pretty much thrown on my ass.”

“It’s not your ass that concerns me,” Charles said, laughing harshly.

“I felt so… so sorry for her, poor thing,” Steve said, ignoring the joke, “that I offered to go with her. She was going to your apartment to get her things.”

“I know, I know, like I said, she already told me all this.”

“She couldn’t have told you how
I
felt, goddamn it!” Steve practically yelled. “Sorry, I’m a bit on edge myself, I hardly know what I’m saying …”

He heaved a deep sigh and looked around the room to see if anyone had overheard his outburst. Then he sighed again and went back to his story.

“So, I was helping her pack up her stuff in the bedroom when, just like that, I was holding her in my arms: she could hardly stand up, and her eyes were running like a couple of faucets. Then she stopped and looked up at me with this weird expression on her face, like she was thinking about something else, you know? Then she said, ‘It’s not fair, Steve. For three days now, maybe longer than that, he’s been screwing some bimbo in La Tuque while I’ve been moping around here waiting for him. I want to get even, Steve.’ Stupid me, I said, ‘How?’ And she said, ‘I want to sleep with you. In his bed. I want you to do this for me, Steve. It can’t be that hard, can it?’ And she started undoing my belt.”

He stopped to take a deep breath, trying to get control of his emotions.

“Charles, it’d been months since I’d been with anyone … Yeah, I’d jerked off a few times, but you and I both know that doesn’t help much … I just cracked. Yes, I cracked… Don’t look at me like that, come on… Me and my dick don’t always see eye to eye, you know what I mean? Well, my dick made the decision without consulting me, I swear to God… We’d barely finished when you walked in the door, and I’ve got to say, I’ve had better sex in my life. Her too, I suppose. There. That’s the whole story… Except for one last thing: if there were any way I could go back and do the whole thing over again, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t, Charles. But of course there’s no way…”

He hung his head in consternation.

Charles looked at him, and the same feeling that, a few hours earlier, had almost moved him to forgiveness stirred within him again. But, just like before, his arms wouldn’t budge. A treacherous voice whispered in his ear that only a cuckold would pardon such an offence as they had committed; his honour demanded the total destruction of all bonds that had united him with Céline as well as with Steve. Once faith has been severed, the voice told him, it can never be resurrected. If you have a wound in your hand, you have to cauterize it without mercy, or you risk losing the whole arm.