The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (30 page)

A patient in the hospital ended up showing it to Raphaël. He said he couldn’t understand why Raphaël was working as an orderly if he was in a magazine. He brought it home and tore it up in front of me as he carried on frantically.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life standing in front of this garbage can, tearing myself up. I’m going to climb into the garbage truck myself and just get the fuck out of here. Just be taken and not worry about this shit anymore. Who do they think they are? I’m going to eat my fucking fists.”

Sometimes it was hard to figure out who the press was going to be smitten with. Raphaël didn’t fit into the ordinary, day-to-day life of the city, but he fit into the mysterious world of the tabloids beautifully.

You could have a graduate class on him at Université de Montréal. The prerequisites would have to be Russian Realism, The Death of the American Dream, The Bad Guy in Henry James, French Postwar Existentialism, and Seventies Independent Cinema. You could write your thesis on a man like him. The story wasn’t going to go away in a day. It was going to be drawn out, like a love triangle on a soap opera.

He chased a photographer down the street. He took off his jacket, threw it onto the photographer’s head and then knocked him to the ground. He yelled at everyone who had stopped to view the spectacle that he had every intention of breaking their fucking necks. He walked home in just his undershirt. Everybody got out of the way. He stopped at a store to buy a carton of milk. When he was looking through his pockets for change, the guy at the store told Raphaël to just take it.

He gave great quotes to interviewers who called him up at work, telling them that they were parasites and the like. That’s exactly what the tabloids wanted to hear. They liked their heroes to play hard to get. And to be honest, I thought that having a concrete enemy was doing Raphaël some good. He could stop waiting for demons to come out of the woodwork.

There was a photograph of Raphaël smoking a joint in the park. He was incredibly worried that his probation officer was going to see the photograph and have him thrown in jail or committed again. Which was actually a legitimate fear, I suppose. I wonder if it’s more comforting to a schizophrenic to have legitimate fears or imaginary ones.

He got into a scrape in the hospital elevator with a man who came in right after him with a camera in his hand. It turned out that the man was there to photograph his newborn
baby. The hospital suggested that he take a leave of absence. Raphaël walked into the apartment wearing his scrubs, looking distraught.

I
T WAS WARM OUT
. T
HE TATTOO OF A ROSE ON
Raphaël’s arm had grown new leaves and buds and completely surrounded his bicep. My stomach had finally grown big enough that people on the street were able to tell that I was pregnant. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

At work my boss kept laughing and telling me not to lick the envelopes because it would cause my baby to have birth defects. And then she yelled at me for carrying boxes of programs into the office. She said that she would never forgive herself if I had a miscarriage. Finally she told me to take some leave and promised to give me my job back whenever I wanted to come back to work. I was at home during the day with Raphaël.

“We’re going to the country,” Raphaël said. “We’ll be safer there.”

“No, we’re not.”

I didn’t even look up from my math textbook. I hadn’t left the island of Montréal since I was seven years old and visited Étienne in prison. There was just tundra and nothingness out
there. I did not want to go into the wilderness, where you were all alone under the stars with nothing to distract you from your thoughts. If you lived a certain way downtown you could get away without having one of your own thoughts for weeks.

“We have to leave tonight,” Raphaël said. “I don’t want to be taken away and be incapacitated. They’ll fill me up with drugs so that I can’t even tie my own shoes. I’ll never be able to support my family.”

I had no intention of leaving the city and living in the boonies. I was outraged. I had put up with all his craziness all winter and I had to draw the line somewhere.

“Well it’s been nice being married to you, baby,” I said. “But I guess we’ll have to get a divorce.”

His face got red, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he launched into action, throwing stuff randomly into a suitcase. He mostly seemed to have packed underwear, an alarm clock and a copy of the novel
Comment faire l’amour avec un négre sans se fatiguer
.

“Goodbye!” he yelled.

He walked out the door. I sat there listening, but I didn’t even hear the sound of his boots going down the stairs. I knew he was standing outside in the hallway, waiting for me to run after him. Finally, he flung the door back open.

“We’ve got to get out of here now. Stop being a crazy, irrational bitch. Please! I’ve fucking had enough of this. You’ve got five minutes to put your things together.”

“I’m not putting any of my things together.”

“Fine, you don’t need any of it. It’s all cheap, crazy crap anyways.”

“Who do you think you are? Talking to me like this. Do you think I’m going to just sit here and be insulted by a washed-up figure skating schizophrenic? You are sorely mistaken.”

“They’ll all survive without you, you know. Your family.”

I burst into tears. I felt horribly homesick. I wished that I had never left home and that Nicolas and I still lived together in the same bed.

“I feel guilty and terrible,” I said.

“You want to believe that everything and everybody will go to hell when you’re gone. It’s all about your ego.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go. Just let me pack a few things.”

I took off the dress that I was wearing and tossed it out the window. I threw my shoes out the window. The coats went down to the ground like descending birds of prey. A homeless man stopped, put on one of my hats and walked off. There were understudies everywhere getting ready to play my part if I left.

I dropped the drawer filled with utensils out the window in order to make a point. It woke up the whole building. I threw the plates. The little glass and ceramic people lay without their heads on the street. Some of them frowned sadly and closed their eyes and whispered their last words. I took Raphaël’s ten-speed bicycle and pushed it out the door. It rode itself down the stairs miraculously. It was as impressive as when Kermit the Frog rode a bicycle in that movie.

Raphaël walked out the door and headed down the stairs with our suitcases. I followed him down in my undershirt and underwear. I’m sure I looked ridiculous; everyone could see my protruding belly. I followed him out onto the street. People leaned out the window to watch, but they didn’t seem to worry very much—or think that they should come down and help us.

I lay down in the street in front of the car. I knew people did that kind of thing—but I didn’t know that I was one of those people. I was so afraid and confused that I almost wanted to let Raphaël run the show, but he was completely crazy.

An older woman wearing an orange housecoat came out of the building. Her white hair was held up in senseless directions with bobby pins. She started walking toward us with her cane.

“Yes, Madame,” Raphaël said fiercely. “Can I help you? Can I help you? This isn’t a show. If it was a show, I would charge admission and you couldn’t afford it. So go back and watch
La Petite Vie
.”

“I’m going to miss
La Petite Vie!
” I said from the ground. “I hate you. I used to be a beauty queen.”

“Here we go. Here we go.”

I was suddenly terrified about Nicolas not being able to find me. I thought that if I could just stop anywhere to leave a message for Nicolas, it would be okay. It was just impossibly awful for me to leave the city without telling him. I had promised him earlier in the year that I would never go.

“I just want to go to the pharmacy. I have to go get some Aspirin.”

I knew that my excuse wasn’t believable though. Raphaël called me out on it right away.

“Are you crazy? You don’t get headaches. You just want to have a chance to call Nicolas.”

“You’re always making me choose between you.”

“Our relationship always suffers when you start obsessing about him. You can’t be a wife. We have to have our very own little family. I get to be number one just for once.”

“I always make you number one.”

“Not really, Nouschka, my darling. Not really. You pretended that you chose to be with me at the wedding. And maybe you were, for just that night, but you’ve been slowly, bit by bit, trying to get back to Nicolas. But time moves forward and not
back. And don’t you realize that all the successes in time travel are so that we can move forward?”

I sat looking at Raphaël, trying to grasp the gist of what he just said.

“If we were to go back in time, it would be disastrous to civilization. There would still be dinosaurs running around. And there would be no Beethoven or Sigmund Freud. All of our encyclopedias would be obsolete because they would be encyclopedias of the unknown.”

I shook my head at him in an uncomprehending way.

“You got married to me,” he said, putting his hands gently on my shoulders. “You can’t go back to the way things were before. Have some respect for the present.”

He was right. He was completely mad and even he could see that I couldn’t go running back to Nicolas.

A scrap-metal truck passed by. They were building spaceships out of fences and grocery carts. They wanted to be the first Québécois to plant a fleur-de-lys on the moon.

“Do you still love me?” I asked.

He paused and sighed. “
Voyons donc
, Nouschka.”

We left the city in the night. Nicolas and Loulou and Étienne were all on the island, having no idea that I was leaving. I felt in my purse. I had brought along the tin that was filled with money.

W
E DROVE DOWN THE HIGHWAY, PAST ROWS OF
farmhouses that looked like a line of lunch boxes on a bench at the back of the class. The radio was playing a late-night show. The DJ’s bosses were asleep. Otherwise, surely, he would be fired for playing music that was so profoundly sad. The notes from the piano were like raindrops falling on the lake.

We drove past the exits to towns named after saints. There was Sainte-Julie, who was conceived one Christmas night when her father swore he’d put a condom on. There was Saint-Jacob, who woke up after a night of heavy drinking to find that a tattoo of the Virgin Mary had miraculously appeared on his arm. And Saint-Martin, who got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, and when he turned on the faucet, beer came out.

Nicolas and I were conceived in a small town like this. But I was tired of believing the Lily Sainte-Marie creation story. It made no sense to me. It was easier to believe that a cow was licking maple syrup off a stone for an hour until the stone began to cry and stretched out its little arms in the air. Or to believe
that a wolf gave birth to Nicolas and me under the rotten floorboards of one of the rotten houses in Val-des-Loups.

The house was down a path in the woods. The headlights illuminated the woods, like a spotlight that shines on the stage before the circus begins.

It belonged to one of the Bleeding Sparrows. I expected it to be a dump. On the contrary, the house was made out of wood and was painted white and was really pretty. The rent was only three hundred dollars, because there was no work in the area. I had never been in a house that size. There was a green Indian carpet with salmon pink flowers. There was a couch with deer all over it, and framed needlepoints of deer on the wall. There were actual deer out in the forest. You could hear them making the sound of pulling off their boots.

The mattress let out a cry when I flopped onto it. Raphaël was burning sage and waving it all over the room to get the evil spirits out as I fell asleep.

Raphaël threw his clothes into the garbage bin behind the house. Why he did this, I have no idea. Maybe he thought they had bad karma. In a pair of jean shorts, he drove to the local dump and filled a paper bag with clothes. Someone had thrown out an entire wardrobe from the seventies. The collars on all the shirts were too long and the buttons on the jackets were gigantic. Raphaël came into the kitchen wearing a pair of bell-bottoms and a polyester undershirt with a red and brown tweed pattern on it. He was wearing a pair of flip-flops on his enormous feet. None of the shoes at the dump were big enough for him.

I liked his style. It was like we had gone back in time to before we were born. Raphaël had proven his thesis that you could indeed move backwards in time as well as forward.

“I need some sort of outdoor work,” Raphaël said.

“You don’t even know what that means.”

That evening, Raphaël asked me to pass him his red jacket as he pointed to a black one on the back of a chair. I passed him the jacket and he seemed happy with it. I guess he didn’t subscribe to the idea that words belonged exclusively to their definitions. That, or he was reading a different dictionary than the rest of us.

“I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he said.

“I’m going with you.”

“Suit yourself. But I’d rather you not interfere with my transactions.”

I had on a skirt and a turtleneck that was too big. My hands kept getting lost in the sleeves. I grabbed my boots and put them on.

“Are you going to be a drug dealer?”

“No. The guy who owns this house is doing two years in Kingston Penitentiary for that sort of thing. That’s why we get to stay here for so cheap.”

“It’s so lonely though.”

“I’m going to get a guard dog to help with that.”

Part of Raphaël’s probation conditions was that he wasn’t allowed to have a dog. It was worse than all the drugs. That he was getting a dog was a clear sign that he was going down the same old path he’d gone down before.