Last Night in Montreal (11 page)

21.

“Dad,” Michaela said once, standing at the foot of the stairs while he worked at the dining room table, “can I run away and join the circus?”

Christopher looked up, blinking. He had hardly been home since the page had been torn from the oldest Bible; he couldn’t look at his wife without thinking about it, without wondering how she could sabotage him so completely, and so had taken to avoiding her altogether. Michaela looked different somehow, and then he realized that she’d gotten a haircut since the last time he’d really looked at her.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“One
A.M.
”

“Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can I join the circus?”

“You can’t join the circus,” he replied, annoyed by the question but still grateful to be forced into conversation with her, remembering when he looked at her face that her latest school picture was still in a desk drawer at work. “We’ve discussed this, remember? A few weeks ago, when you sprained your ankle? The answer’s no.”

“That was six months ago.”

“Six months,” he said, and shook his head.

She was looking at him blankly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “the answer’s still no.”

“But why not?”

“You
know
why not. We already
left
the circus.”

When he said it aloud, he felt curiously bereft; he didn’t come home very often at all after that, even at night. When her parents didn’t come home Michaela sat in the living room, watching television alone late at night. One evening a commercial she didn’t like came on, and she threw a coffee mug at the screen. The screen cracked with a satisfying pop of light and went dark, and the mug rolled broken under the sofa. After that when she turned on the television the screen lit up but was blue and blank and had a jagged crackling dark line down the center. Days began to go by when she saw neither of them; she came and went in a house filled with large spaces and shadows, did her laundry sometimes in the evenings in the quiet basement, did her homework in her room at night. She pushed a shopping cart through the wide bright aisles of a grocery store a few blocks away, filling it up with microwave dinners and toaster waffles in a dozen flavors, and spent a great deal of time arranging these in the freezer. She wouldn’t have said that she was particularly unhappy; she valued her privacy, and the house was more peaceful without them. She rarely saw her father except in passing; coming out of the upstairs bedroom with a shirt over his arm, going through a box of his files in the dining room. Her mother was prone to coming home at unexpected times— the middle of the afternoon, three
A.M.
, eight in the morning. She had very little to say, right up until the evening when Michaela came home and found her father sitting alone in the dining room with a half-eaten layer cake. The icing was pink.

“You missed the party,” her father said. He was leaning as far back as his chair would go without falling over, looking at his hands clasped on the table. He didn’t look up at her.

“My birthday isn’t for another week,” Michaela said. “I’m still fourteen.”

“It was a going-away party. Your mother left.”

“Left where? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “She didn’t tell me. She just brought home a cake and said she was leaving.”

“Did she say when she’d be back?”

“Well, that’s just it, pumpkin,” he said. “She was a little noncommittal on the subject of whether she was coming back again.”

“Did she say why?”

“Apparently I work too much.”

Michaela went up to her room then, and closed the door. She didn’t go to school the next day, or the day after that. It was much easier to drop out of school than she would have expected, but after a week her father got a phone call from the principal’s office and made her go back. A few days later he left a note on her bedside table (
Gone to U.S. on business, back in a couple weeks, keep going to school, will wire grocery money to your checking account, call Peter if you need anything)
and disappeared. She was used to his business trips, which generally lasted three weeks; this time, however, she didn’t see him again for a year. When she told Eli this, some years later, he understood that she thought of the quiet dissolution of her family as having been more or less Lilia’s fault. Lilia had, after all, written her name in a Bible, and she did run out barefoot into the snow.

“You can see why I hate her,” Michaela said.

Part Three

22.

In a hotel room four or five stories above Boulevard Rene Levesque, in the harbor city of Montreal, Eli was trying to find a phone number. Michaela wasn’t answering her phone, and he wanted to reach Club Electrolite. He had called directory assistance three or four times, and although the operators themselves seemed flawlessly bilingual, some glitch in the system was causing the phone number to be given repeatedly in French, which was not a language he understood; all the languages he knew were dead or on life support. “Please hold for the number,” a sequence of operators had told him brightly, followed by a mechanical click, and then the same robotic
cinq, une, quatre, trois, cinq, deux,
etc. “Listen,” he was saying to the third or fourth operator, “I need this number in Eng—” but the French robot was already speaking, and he slammed down the receiver in disgust. His collection of obscure aboriginal languages had never seemed more useless. He was reluctant to call the hotel switchboard, because he thought the number he was looking for might belong to a strip club. He stood for a few minutes in the middle of the floor, disconsolate in the winter sunlight, and then moved to the window to look down at the anonymous street. He had arrived from New York City by train the night before. He held no Canadian currency. He didn’t speak the language.

He had arrived without luggage, the postcard and the envelope folded together in his jacket pocket with his toothbrush and his map. After thirteen hours of travel the train pulled into a shadowy underworld of tracks and cement platforms, three hours behind schedule, and stopped with a monumental hissing of brakes. He got out of the train and stood for a few minutes on the dim platform, at a loss. He’d had a prolonged disagreement with an imperfectly preserved Amtrak Café Car sandwich earlier in the day, and he still felt a little ill. Travelers moved past him, speaking French. He thought about just staying down here, on the level of trains and shadows, and then somehow sneaking onto the next train bound for New York City and arriving back in Brooklyn sometime tomorrow and just forgetting the whole thing, but decided he’d never forgive himself.

He took a deep breath and started in the direction of the escalators. Across the concrete twilight of the platform, the stairwells held a greenish, somewhat aquatic light. He stepped onto an escalator and traveled upward under exposed fluorescent lights into the cavernous grey of Station Bonaventure. He stood near the top of the escalator for a few minutes, not quite nauseated anymore, but—and this was almost equally uncomfortable—acutely aware of his lack of luggage. He put his hands in his pockets, in the absence of a luggage handle to hold on to, and this was when he realized that he’d left his cell phone on his desk in New York. He swore under his breath and began walking toward the nearest pay-phone sign.

This station was imposing, although he didn’t find it beautiful. Blue-and-white frescoes high up on the walls depicted heroic scenes involving swords and canoes. The words of an anthem he’d never heard were rendered in two languages, large enough to be read from below, but there was no other English. The insanity of the journey came over him like a chill. He wanted to go home. He was already wishing he hadn’t followed her here. At the pay phone he pulled the envelope from Michaela out of his pocket and dialed the number written on the inside of the flap. It was apparently a cellphone number: there was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings. It rang four or five times before an indifferent-sounding message clicked on: “This is Michaela. Leave a message.”

He cleared his throat before the tone. “Michaela,” he said, speaking too loudly, “this is Eli Jacobs. I’m in Montreal. I’m coming to the club tomorrow. I’ll . . . I’ll do what you said, with the white flag and everything, I just . . . I . . . I hope she’s there. I hope she’s there.” He meant to sound stern but sounded nervous. He hung up fast, flustered, and stood for a moment in the phone booth with his eyes closed. Nothing he had known in Brooklyn seemed applicable here.

He forced himself to leave the station, walking out into the cold evening air. The street outside was all but deserted, urban in a way that reminded him of medium-sized cities everywhere; windswept plazas, hard angles of glass and concrete. Across the street, a low anonymous glass tower reflected lights and the sky. A few cars passed, boxy and random, and it took him a few minutes to recognize them as taxicabs. They weren’t yellow. There was, in fact, nothing identifiable about them at all; this was a random remnant fleet, grey Toyota Tercels and old blue Valiants, boxy red Fords with failing mufflers and squarish minivans with rust around the fenders, all with some variation on a taxi sign bolted to the roof. One or two slowed in front of him; he didn’t get in. He found their randomness unsettling. He thought about calling Geneviève for advice and decided against it.

A couple was approaching through the pools of amber streetlight, passing in and out of shadow and light. The man was telling a complicated story with elaborate hand gestures. The girl let out a high-pitched silvery laugh.

“Excusez-moi,”
said Eli awkwardly as they drew near. They paused, receptive and looking at him, smiling. He thought for a second, but his high school French would go no further. “I’m looking for a hotel,” he said, conceding linguistic surrender. “Somewhere near here? Could you recommend anything?”

But he’d failed the password test: the air between them turned suddenly to ice. The girl’s smile hardened into a sneer. The man said something, but the only words Eli understood were
anglais
and
américain.
Whatever he said made the girl laugh again, but in a different, harder way, and they left him standing and walked onward. The man was resuming his story as they passed out of hearing range; the girl was laughing her original, silvery laugh.
“Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to live in a city with a doomed language?”
Geneviève had asked him once, some days or weeks ago in what may have been another lifetime. He stared down at the glittering sidewalk, blinking and at a loss, while the barely recognizable taxicabs kept passing like clockwork in front of him, over and over again like a looped reel with minor variations (Ford, Toyota, Toyota, Chevrolet) and it occurred to him that Thomas was right, that coming here had been a colossal mistake and also that he was somehow too far in already to back away from this place.

When he turned back toward the train station there was in fact a hotel attached to it: Le Hotel Reine Elizabeth towered just behind him. The fact of its existence somehow made him hate the walking couple even more; he could still see them in the distance, arm in arm. The lobby coincided with some uninformed ideas he had about what grand hotels might have looked like in Russia, circa 1960 or so: red carpets, gold-and-crystal chandeliers, businessmen in double-breasted suits, older women with sculpted hair and small handbags waiting stoically on ornate sofas here and there among the pillars. The room was warm with cigar smoke and conversation. He couldn’t understand a single word.

In the morning he spent a long time in the shower. When he got out he dug in his jacket pocket for the folded envelope and dialed Michaela’s number again. It went immediately to voice mail. He hung up without speaking and went down to the front desk to ask for directions. The lobby was much less pleasant in daylight. The concierge tactfully steered him away from Club Electrolite but recommended a number of fine restaurants and a jazz club nearby. A bellboy, apparently concluding that he was yet another American tourist here for the sex, pulled him aside and said he thought Club Electrolite was near the corner of Ste.-Catherine and Rue McGill but remarked that as far as he knew it was primarily a dance club with some go-go dancers, and that if Eli wanted to see some, ahem,
danseuses nues
perhaps (irritating wink here), he needn’t walk that far; he could, the bellboy said helpfully, simply make his way to Rue Ste.-Catherine, where apparently there were two or three strip clubs on any given block from here to the city limits. In both directions.

“No, I’m looking for a girl,” Eli said.

“Of course,” said the bellboy.

“No, a specific girl. I’m looking for a specific girl.”

“Aren’t we all?” said the bellboy. “Listen, go to Club Electrolite if you want, but you go a couple blocks east on St. Catherine Street around nightfall, you’ll see all the girls money can buy. But don’t go too far east or they all turn into transvestites by the time you get to Rue de la Visitation.”

Eli thanked him and set out for the address on the postcard. It was just past noon, but the sky was heavy and dark. It had begun to snow, and the sidewalk was slippery. He walked slowly, not particularly eager to arrive at his destination, and he’d walked a half block past the club before he realized his mistake and doubled back to find it.

Club Electrolite was a narrow four-story building of the same dirty grey stone as the buildings around it. A narrow alley ran along one side. A neon sign flashed the outline of a naked angel above the door, but all the windows were dark. He stood on the sidewalk, pulled at the door again, and for a moment wanted to fall to his knees: a sign on the door, miraculously bilingual, advised him that the club had switched recently to winter hours and would be open only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights until May.

That was the third Monday afternoon in December. He wandered back down the street to a warm café, at a loss now, and sat alone for some time with the remains of his thoughts.

IN THE LAST LIGHT
of afternoon a few days later Eli took a walk to the river. Thirteen hours by train to the south New York City was etched in the brilliance of autumn, but here winter was well under way. It had snowed twice already in the days since he’d arrived, and the temperature seemed to be dropping by the hour. A white electric cross burned at night high up on the hill above the city; Eli, looking out from the window of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, thought that it was one of the loneliest visions he’d ever seen. He walked for entire afternoons through the frozen streets looking for Lilia, standing in places that he thought might attract her, sitting in coffee shops where he thought she might linger, reading the English-language press for clues on the city he found himself in, trying not to speak English in public except when ordering coffee. The businesses closed early here, but he found two coffee shops about a mile apart that stayed open all night, admitting freezing drafts every time the door opened. He thought of them as beacons in the night ocean and moved between them on alternate nights. Cold air seeped through the windows of every room.

He had read somewhere that there was a cruise ship docked at the port. He wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it, but it seemed like something Lilia might take pictures of, and on the fourth day he thought that walking there and then walking back to the hotel might take up a few hours, and he was desperate to distract himself; Club Electrolite was theoretically opening again that night, and he hadn’t decided what he was going to say when he saw her. He was walking slowly through the old city, moving south toward the harbor, when a movement high above him in an alleyway caught his eye: a girl was standing on the railing of a fire escape. She was balanced perfectly two stories above the cobblestones, one hand steadying her on the ladder above. For a confused moment he took her for a suicide, but at the instant he was about to call out to her, he saw the rope. It had been strung tight from building to building, tied expertly across the vertiginous span between fire escapes. He would have taken it for a makeshift clothesline, except for the girl. He saw the way she had aligned her thin body with the rope, the ballet slippers on her feet and the ferocity of her obvious intent, and he understood what she was going to do. He drifted a few steps into the alleyway and sank close against a brick wall, looking up.

He wanted to call out, perhaps to stop her, but it was too late; it occurred to him that any sudden noise or movement might be fatally distracting. The timing of his arrival on the scene was impeccable. As he stood below, cold sweat on his forehead, she casually removed her hand from the ladder. Eli closed his eyes for a second and then looked back at the street; a man passed on the other side, looking at his reflection in a long blank office-building window, and he thought to call out to him with the best high school French he knew—
Help me, aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît, please—
but what could another man do at this moment besides distract her into a lethal fall? She was well beyond anyone’s reach. He forced himself to look at her.

She took one careful, expert step out onto the tightrope. He closed his eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable: the loss of balance, unbearable teetering, nightmare wingless descent. Surely no one survived this. A rope with no safety net and cobblestones beneath; he could already see the conspiracy unfolding between the rope and the cobblestones and the siren call of gravity, blood pooling outward from the shattered white epicenter of her skull. His hands were clenched fists in his pockets. He wanted to scream.
But no one,
Zed had scrawled once in a letter from Africa several years ago,
should have to die without a witness.
Eli opened his eyes.

She took a second impeccable slow-motion step, and then another. Her face was unreadable and utterly calm. This nightmare, this conspiracy of terrible details: for the first time he began to notice what she looked like, beyond the obvious horror of watching her last moments on earth. It was hard to see her clearly from this angle, in this light, but she was wearing a red dress, and her hair was platinum-white: she shone like a signal in the high shadows above. An apparition, wingless angel, and the poetry of her balance: she moved so slowly. This was a terrible, nerve-shattering meditation she practiced. He couldn’t breathe.

In his mind’s eye he watched her falling and falling and falling in front of him, but she kept moving forward over the rope. One deliberate step after another and she was halfway across already, two-thirds of the way, unceasing, and then she reached out and grasped the fire-escape ladder across the alley from where she’d started, safe and balanced on the opposite railing. She hopped down to the fire-escape landing and then stood there looking down, almost directly above him. Safe.