The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (12 page)

He was stuck in a motel room one night after a show. There was a movie playing on the television set. After ten o’clock, they played movies that were made in Québec. You would think that ninety-nine percent of the population were heroin addicts if you watched these movies. The
vedettes
wore winter coats the whole time and yelled at each other. These movies were so realistic that your own life kind of seemed fake and glamorous in comparison. If the movie had been better, he might have stayed in his hotel room that night.

Someone had given the drummer an address to a party. They decided to go check it out. Ordinarily Étienne would never have gone to a house party, but there was nothing else to do in these terrible, tiny small towns.

The party was in a white clapboard house. There was a field behind it without animals. There was a row of little undershirts on the clothesline. One was covered in strawberries, another with horses, and one had the teeniest bow at the neck. Étienne felt turned on by all the naked undershirts. They walked into the house without knocking.

The heavy metal was loud. You could do that in Val-des-Loups because there was nobody around for miles and miles and miles.

Almost the first person that Étienne noticed was a girl in a turtleneck sweater that looked like it would swallow her any minute. She had a plastic ring on her finger from a gumball machine. She was drinking a beer for the first time. She was fourteen years old. She may or may not have been beautiful.

She wore her black bangs down over her eyes. Étienne generally hated shy girls. They looked down at the ground when they talked to him. They were deathly boring because they were too afraid to say anything.

But then again, sometimes shy girls kissed you just so that they wouldn’t have to talk. They hoped that they were pretty enough to get away with not speaking. Some shy girls were too afraid to say no. Even though you’d just met, they were terrified that you wouldn’t like them. Once they let you feel their tits, they weren’t sure what to do. They thought that maybe they weren’t in the right to say no.

Étienne knew he could get this girl to sleep with him.

Étienne asked the girl if she wanted to go into a little bedroom at the back of the house to talk to him. She knew exactly
who he was. The whole party did. Everyone was looking at him and pretending not to. She followed him to the bedroom. There was a forest on the wallpaper in the bedroom. The polyester bedspread was purple with gold roses. Ugly. They over-decorated their houses in small towns. Ugly.

Étienne liked young girls. They believed in his persona completely. What did he need with women who could see right through him? Lily Sainte-Marie looked like she was still afraid of the dark and spent her pocket change on candy. She looked like she still had to memorize the spelling of words at night.

She had little hands. She shrugged even though there was no reason to shrug. She just figured that she had to do something with her body. So she sat there shrugging and shrugging. He started taking off all her silly clothes. Her clothes didn’t match and every piece was a hand-me-down. Ugly.

She didn’t even really move during the actual act. She kept her eyes closed really tight and her mouth squeezed shut. She looked like she was holding her breath, as if she had just jumped off a diving board and her body was shooting straight down into the water.

She loosened up after losing her virginity. She was so excited sitting on the side of the bed that she wasn’t even getting dressed. And she looked so young, like a kid that was expecting her mother to dress her. She climbed onto his lap while he was trying to tie his shoelaces.

She wanted to know if he would call her. She told him that if her father answered the telephone, then he should just hang up immediately. Lily Sainte-Marie told him that her father would kill him if he found out that she had had sex. She said that her father was strict and wouldn’t even let her go to school dances. She wanted to know if she could come to visit him in Montréal.

She whispered that she loved him.

Étienne suddenly didn’t know why he hadn’t worn a condom. She had trapped him. She had caught him. He knew. He knew. He knew she was pregnant. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.

He didn’t want to throw down an anchor in this strange small town in the middle of nowhere. Where their symphony orchestra was a sixty-five-year-old man named Benoit, who could play
Peter and the Wolf
on his clarinet.

Domestic life took down people quicker than the bubonic plague. Étienne had struggled his whole life not to be a member of any class. A man without children doesn’t belong to any class. He is a free man.

Étienne wanted to walk right back to Montréal. He climbed out the window and went back to the motel. He hoped to never see her again.

Anyways, all of this sounded better as a song. Our whole lives, from our conception onward, had been a romantic take on a narcissist’s asshole behaviour. Our lives were a fiction. I had swallowed it all. I had believed it more than anyone.

I
T WAS GHASTLY
. H
ORRIBLE
. T
HE WORDS THEMSELVES
were meaningless; I was just saying the requisite number of them so that I could get to the end of the conversation. And when I somehow got to the end of the conversation, then Adam would be out of my life. He knew that too, so after everything was said, he still kept talking nonsense rather than leave.

“I was raised by the mother of Little Nicolas and Little Nouschka. It’s amazing in a way. I don’t think that it’s creepy at all. On the contrary, it means that we were fated together.”

“Give it time,” I said. “When it occurs to you just how weird this is, you’ll never want to touch me again, that’s for sure.”

Nicolas came in and was eating an apple. Adam was packing in slow motion. He acted as if his sweater was made of cement as he dragged it off the floor and put it in his suitcase. He flung it in violently.

“This isn’t fair. I’ve done nothing but worship the ground that you walk on. That’s where I went wrong. I should have been mean to you. I should have just yawned when you were
talking. That’s what the ladies like. Do you know how many girls are out there, lining up to go out with me? There will be riots on the streets.”

I looked over at Nicolas, who rolled his eyes to register his disbelief that there would be any riots.

“I’m the one who leaves girls. They aren’t the ones who leave me. You think you can do better than me. You can’t. God damn you, I’m special.”

At this, Nicolas got up and walked out again, embarrassed for Adam, I suppose. Luckily Loulou had the television on. He was incapable of hearing anything while the television was on. A marching band could pass right outside the window and he would miss it entirely.

Maybe the saddest thing about Adam leaving was that I wasn’t going to miss him. How did I know for sure this wasn’t love? Feeling oddly pissed off at someone for reasons that you couldn’t put your finger on was surely somebody’s definition of love.

But no sooner than I started feeling sorry for him, I would think about what had happened and then find that I was enraged. I had never been envious of Adam. I had loved his magical stories from the faraway kingdom of Being Rich. I had never wanted his grand houses or private school education. But this was too much. He could not have our mother’s love because that was something that rightfully belonged to us. That wasn’t something that you could buy!

He was pulling out paperback philosophy books from under the bed. He had located odd little spots in the cluttered room where he could find his own space for his things.

“Will you give me five and a half seconds, Nouschka? Can we sit down for a cup of coffee? I know this is really fucking
weird. In a way. But in another way, it’s not that completely crazy.”

He didn’t really sound convinced of his own words. He was trying to get his head around the news himself.

“It isn’t actually a reason for us to break up.”

“I think it’s enough of a reason actually. I don’t want to think about you, or Lily Sainte-Marie. Noëlle, whatever her name is. I don’t even want to think about Nicolas right now.”

“You can’t get away from him. You’re two parts of a whole.”

I suddenly wanted to murder him for saying it. I was glad again that I was throwing him out.

“Why would you say that? We’re not the same person, you know.”

“But now Nicolas isn’t going to hang out with me either.”

“What, are you breaking up with Nicolas or are you breaking up with me?”

“You’re both breaking up with
me
. You’re both rejecting me.”

His coddled upbringing had ironically made him susceptible to the ragged glamour that surrounded us. I needed someone who could see through all that. He didn’t realize that it was preventing us from doing anything with our lives. Adam would never be able to get me away from Nicolas.

Nicolas shook hands with Adam at the door. Nicolas too just wanted him to go. His escapade involving Adam had come to fruition and was over. More importantly, we just needed to be alone. After Adam left, Nicolas stood there, not saying anything.

“Why are you so calm?” I asked.

“Honestly, Nouschka, I think that I’m in shock.”

I looked at him. He probably was. After he had broken his arm when he was five, he kept walking around in a circle, telling everyone to relax and stay calm.

“She asked us to go away,” he said. “She asked us not to ruin her life.”

He looked to me for sympathy, but instead I was outraged.

“I can’t even be under the same roof as you tonight. I’m going out.”

“Oh, where are you going? Don’t leave me here all by myself. Come on, Nouschka. Can’t you punish me in some other way? I don’t want to be alone tonight. It’ll drive me crazy. Look, we can have a long, warm tête-à-tête about this whole fucking thing tomorrow.”

I climbed out the window. He reached for my foot, but I was already running off down the street.

Our mother had come and seen the city with its 1001 flavours of everything and had decided to leave us here. I walked through the street. All the neon signs were flirting with me. They said things like
PARADISE! THéâTRE éROTIQUE! L’AMOUR! XXX! DANSEUSES NUES!

I went down a tiny alleyway. There were floral curtains on the windows of the cheap hotels, behind which prostitutes were pretending to moan in ecstasy. There were faded murals of old advertisements from the thirties on the walls for detergents and colas that didn’t exist anymore. There were bits of red brick all over the ground because the buildings were falling apart. I
stopped and looked at some graffiti on the wall that I had written with a can of spray paint when I was thirteen:
NICOLAS AND NOUSCHKA WERE HERE WITH THE RATS AND THE FLOWERS
.

I remembered writing that. It was so exciting. Nicolas had showed it to all the other kids in the neighbourhood because he thought it was so great.

I decided to go and see Misha. I hadn’t seen him in months. I hadn’t even called. Because I was young and pretty, he was able to forgive me for so many things, but maybe this time I had pushed my luck.

I just wanted him to tuck me up in his big, fat arms and sing me some sort of idiotic Russian lullaby and chastise me for not eating well. He would yell at me for sleeping around. He was the only person who did. He would unbutton my sweater and then put all the right buttons in their corresponding holes. He once bought a bobby pin with a cloth flower on it and pinned it in my hair. He was the closest thing that I had to a mother and I wanted him to take care of me right then.

I went into the Ukrainian restaurant. Misha often ate there. We’d order plates and plates of food and it would still only come to three dollars. There were photographs of Russian performers on the wall. The women used more hairspray than anyone else in the world. They were covered in sequins, which made them look like glittering skylines at night.

Sure enough, Misha was eating at a table at the back of the restaurant. The top buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a Star of David around his neck. When he saw me, he wiped his mouth with a handkerchief that was on his lap. I sat down on
the chair across from him. He grabbed the leg of my chair and pulled me over to him. He gave me a big kiss on the mouth. I sat on his side of the table with my head on his shoulder.

The waitress came by to refill his cup of coffee. She stood there, giving me a dirty look. She thought that I wasn’t any good. She thought that I was a gold digger, which I was, except I wasn’t there for money. I was there because I knew that Misha had an abundance of love that he had saved up. He had stored it away under his mattress because he’d had no one to spend it on.

She started a conversation with him in Russian out of spite, I guess. I didn’t really care. Then she glared at me and turned and walked away.

“That waitress thinks that I sleep with you for money.”

“I wish that you would let me give you money; it would turn me on. I could pretend that I called an agency and they sent you over.”

“But doesn’t that insult you? Why would she think that? I think you are devastatingly sexy. Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know why on earth you do, but apparently you do.”

I started telling Misha the story about how Nicolas dragged me to meet our mother, and the waitress went up to the wooden sound system that was on a shelf on the wall and turned the music louder. Then she gave me a quick glance backwards as if to say, “Take that. He won’t hear you begging for money.” The stereo was playing a Russian singer. He sounded angry. He sounded as if he was marching up a flight of stairs.

I didn’t mind though. I liked yelling above the music. It meant that there was a point to raising your voice. It was like turning up a burner under a pot on the stove so that all the food could start cooking. My emotions were getting all heated and then turning into something wonderful.

“Do you know that song that my dad sings about my mother, well about Lily Sainte-Marie?” I yelled.