Appropriate Place Read online

  For her, so sure of herself, this is an appropriate place. A honeycomb cell where Gabrielle can finally experience the “after.” She sips her drink. She contemplates putting on music, the posthumous Nocturne by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, played by Midori at Carnegie Hall, one of the few discoveries made through her membership, now expired, in the Columbia Record Club. But if she did that, at the beginning of this evening that’s so bare, in her mind’s eye she would see the slender image of a foreign woman straining over her strings, and the crowd at the concert. And there would be noise.

  The ice cubes dissolve, the water dulls the accents of orange and liquorice, the caned chair back scrapes the shoulders of Gabrielle Perron, who thought that she was capable of existing amid silence.

  She has nothing to think about. Nothing. A very beautiful spider, pitch black, clings to the railing, apparently without a web. Five more hours till midnight. She really should have some ivy on the eastern exposure and, in the flower boxes, red geraniums. She has always been able to think about something, but never about meaningless things like Jean-Charles’s knee or the oozing brains of a calico cat. She gets up to open a tin of white asparagus and the new bottle of cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oil, uncork the Sauternes, light the broiler. She’ll see tomorrow. The salmon steak — it’s perfectly normal in this heat, which is definitely outrageous — tastes slightly off. It’s just as well that there were no choux à la crème, they’d have gone bad.

  Two

  A MONTH LATER, Pierre has brought the place under his control. He has transported gallons of paint, bought brushes and rollers, piled and protected the furniture in the middle of the living room. His dexterity is remarkable in a boy his age, who’s not supposed to know how to work. He has respected Gabrielle’s silence on the days when she was listing her entire library on computer, he even helped her modify the program to add cross-references.

  Outside, there’s a drought. The river will become a prairie, Gabrielle predicts, when they meet on the balcony at noon, where he has helped her put up an awning. She prepares lentil salad, cold pasta with clams, roasted peppers, sugared raspberries. He joins her in drinking light sangria. They had very little to say to each another until the day when he began to show an interest in her paintings.

  First, in the retriever portrayed by Anne Ashton between two rosebushes, a dog indifferent to the hunt, posing on the tips of his long, arched legs, a print for the boudoir of a marquise. It wasn’t modern art, he was surprised to note, claiming that he’d spotted some everywhere else in the apartment and that he preferred a beige and silent Gaucher, so brilliantly closed around its interior folds that it takes away your appetite for images. “What he’s done is give a colour to a bad mood,” said Pierre in the tone of a budding connoisseur, already a touch snide. Anne Ashton’s dog provided an opportunity to put him in his place, to explain to him that Gaucher’s terrible break with the living could be found just as well in the rendering of an animal from another century, whose artificially arched posture in a fake warren questioned any wish to paint reality, world without end, then and now. And had he not noticed the insect on a rose petal that didn’t correspond to any known species? It would take a great deal of subtlety to grasp the new directions of art, the deceptive return to the anecdotal that seemed attractive, sometimes witty, but that always carried with it an impression of death.

  He had to struggle to listen, no doubt because of his lack of vocabulary, and afterwards he avoided expressing an opinion on the works prematurely. Instead, he let his opinions fall as questions until he finally approached the most intimidating, the series of paintings in the corridor, near-frescoes that seemed to be formless beings intertwined, hairless and with heavy stomachs, neither men nor women, breasts wounded, sex gashed, lashing under a pale sky shot through with thorns. “Still, you could think that the painter used velvet brushes,” he ventured to say. Gabrielle taught him that this expert, amorous series was the work of a young woman. Laurence Cardinal’s line, shot through like the mind of a medium, had more to say about the gentleness and the cruelty of lovers than she would ever learn, though artists’ loves are supremely tormented.

  Pierre had become obsessed with these uninhibited canvases that seemed to move as he walked past them. And Gabrielle had been caught up in the game of educating him, to the point of mentioning without embarrassment the desire smouldering under the ashen grey of the faces, the shudder that flowed beneath the light brown of the thighs, the orgasm that cut the red, colour of blood and of sex, of the flesh — all that linked by a furious charcoal that had streaked the scenes as if they were the last ones.

  “You can’t know,” she’d begun without thinking, in the middle of a leaden Friday. And now, because it was the logical next step, he wanted to know. As if he were inquiring about another painting, he had asked her to make love. Because the time had come, he said, and because girls his age paid no attention to him. Anyway, it was reciprocal, he preferred the company of older women, like his mother’s friend who had taken him in for the summer and was now all wrapped up in her lover’s recent death.

  Gabrielle had given in without a fuss, perhaps a competitive spirit still inhabited her, she’d be a contrast with the weeping widow. Besides, she’d felt an urge for that particular game, belly and legs abruptly hot, it would be good on the floor, on rough sheets smelling of camphor already stained with ivory white, he could spill himself onto them without embarrassment because she’d throw them out afterwards, she had planned it.

  Gabrielle brought their plates inside, turned off the air conditioner, joined Pierre in the shower to be at the beginning no more than a shadow, matte and brown, against his, pale and musky. It would be best to hide from him the creases under her breasts, at her knees, at the place where shoulder meets arm. She’d have hidden them even from a man of fifty, she wasn’t one of those women who enjoys bites — the light is one. She rubbed him slowly, then soothed him while she guided his hand towards other creases, those that stay beautiful, that open and flow with her particular milk in the lavender-scented foam and the fingers of an overexcited boy. She pressed her sex at length against his thigh because later, in the living room, it would be too quick. He lay down awkwardly in fact, didn’t know how to caress her in the open air, she’d teach him in the days to come. She guided him into her, and his slight movement before he collapsed created a flash in her belly, made her flow again, so wet. She was surprised and still hungry, she mustn’t.

  Madeleine would have recommended buying a vibrator instead. After wearing out a good many overly young lovers, she had something against them all — youngsters who interfere with your life for months, who insult the rules of spelling in their love notes that take the form of praise of older women, and then one morning, with their bare eyes, look you up and down with contempt, leaving you more withered than you are. And that’s without counting the sense of incest, which makes you come with guilt. But Gabrielle would say nothing to Madeleine, this one was going to be brief. It would be over when the painting was, and the apartment wasn’t all that big.

  Around three o’clock, after Pierre had left, she poured herself some ice water and savoured her new life, resign-ing herself to her recent folly. This child whom she’d teach about sex, everything she had sought and so rarely found, would be a mere rite of passage. He had the eyes of autumn, of a wolf, maybe, as in Peter and the Wolf, do you remember, Gabrielle, Prokofiev and the night?

  Oh yes, she remembered, the first of the wolves.

  There is winter and a girl of sixteen, neither very pretty nor very tall, and she’s spending the weekend at her friend Guylain
e’s. They are studying piano, but they consider the lessons old-fashioned and prefer gatherings where you mix with boys and with ideas about resistance. That day, in Guylaine’s enormous bedroom — she has rich parents and a house in the suburbs with a driveway so long that they need a snowblower — they are drawing up the bylaws of their student association, copying them from a model being used at the university, everything from obligatory dues to rules of meetings, from election regulations to the disciplinary committee. They have hopes of retaining the key elements when the time comes to adopt them. The nuns are leaving the veil one by one, only the last holdouts are still at the college, the chaplain preaches a secular moral code and the nuns don’t dare to stop him from discussing democracy with girls who are, even so, not as rebellious as Marie-Claire Blais, whose novels are beginning to win praise.

  Guylaine’s mother has a maid who makes beds and does dishes, to Gabrielle her friend is a princess. Guylaine though is modest enough to serve her. For it’s Gabrielle who knows everything, why to found associations, with whom to correspond to register for the national congress, how to start the fundraising by inviting a chansonnier, the shyest of them, the one who sings about the sea without grumbling, he won’t cost too much. Gabrielle intends to dress all in black to meet his agent, she dares to laugh at the lace that fills her friend’s bedroom, that trims the dressing table and the windows and the canopy bed. Guylaine doesn’t defend herself well, except for the Icart prints, they’re worth a lot of money, her father chose them, he’s a connoisseur of everything. The father is a pharmacist, that’s the only thing that is clear in Gabrielle’s eyes, he doesn’t say much, is lost in thought behind his cigarettes and his books, an avant-garde Christian, says his daughter. Gabrielle sees him as a kind of hermit, resigned to his women — wife, daughter, maid — in another life he’d have been a saint, he sighs constantly and goes to the art galleries by himself on Saturdays, where he unearths old works. He says that art is now deteriorating, and his daughter repeats it.

  Gabrielle doubts that, because the new art appeals to her, but Guylaine’s father is the sole authority she dares not take issue with, she’d be afraid of losing her friend, who is so gentle and who listens to everything with fervour. She envies her that father whose silence is so laden with thoughts, while her own father doesn’t have a single one. He extricates himself from his eternal bus, the number 50, only to stumble through a moronic account of his day, then start again on the morrow. His schedule, the inspector, worn brakes, road maintenance, lost old ladies, bawling children, insolent students. He doesn’t wonder if the world is deteriorating, he’s not in it, his eyes shine only when he talks about an imminent move to Montréal-Nord where Italian builders are finally putting up houses a person can afford. Gabrielle will loathe Montréal-Nord.

  On this Saturday night, as on all the others, the pharmacist goes down to the basement, an entresol fixed up according to his canons. They aren’t his ancestors although they give that impression — the two portraits of anonymous dignitaries of Nouvelle-France that flank a rough antique buffet. By Jean-Baptiste Roy-Audy, according to the bronze plate on the jigsawed frame, a man in black with a collar so high he could have been a priest, and a woman in rusty green, her hair pulled back so tightly she must be the mother of priests. A rosary drips from her fingers, she prays eternally for the salvation of colonial souls. The buffet in fact has something of the sacristy about it, even the blue-fringed lamp was made from a ceremonial candlestick; antique dealers don’t have to empty the churches, they’re doing it themselves, for next to nothing. In the pharmacist’s den the armchairs are wingbacks, he calls them voltaires but neither Guylaine nor Gabrielle is familiar with that name, the writer is not to be found in the convent library. As for the pharmacist’s, it has rows of Les semaines sociales du Canada, bound by year, in the company of everything by Claudel, Péguy, Mauriac. But he considers them too young and too girlish to enter there, they have to play the piano while he reads Bernanos, Les grands cimetières sous la lune.

  Which is what they are doing one Saturday before dinner, puzzling out a piece for four hands, grinding away at a rather out-of-tune Heintzman. Then Guylaine goes upstairs to look for her mother while Gabrielle plays from memory the piano version of Peter and the Wolf, whose phrasing, while childish, flows gravely towards the man reading. Long afterwards, she will ask herself if this moment hadn’t been the first instance of the false innocence she’ll learn to master, if by accentuating the melancholic effect of the wolf’s notes she hadn’t wanted to trouble the dry individual at her side. Why had she turned towards him before launching into the twittering of the bird unless it was to test the line she’d just held out? In a moment he’d been all over her, clinging to her back, hairy arms grasping her shoulders, hand seeking the buds of her breasts under the angora sweater, boring into her body to nestle it in his chest. She remembered the acid smell of his green-striped woollen necktie as much as the tongue that had scraped her neck, and the seconds to free herself and run away.

  She should have cried out, but instead she had climbed the stairs, getting back her aplomb, she’d gone into the kitchen quite naturally, offering to help. She should have had her heart in her throat instead of feeling a shiver of pride at the person she’d become in this bourgeois house. That at least was the image of the moment she had finally settled on: that of a young girl who had been able to dominate at the first assault the droppings that ooze from Pharisees in heat. There had been so many others in what would be her profession that the pharmacist had been a useful preliminary exercise.

  She was forgetting that, all the same, she had steered clear of Guylaine for days and that later she had constantly avoided the calm gaze of the father who seemed to have no reason to feel guilty. “Maybe he was just being affectionate, friendly,” suggested Madeleine, who preferred the least awkward interpretations for anything having to do with sex. Maybe.

  She had never breathed a word to Guylaine, who every now and then remained her friend. Guylaine had a beautiful soul. She’d enrolled in nursing science because her father pictured her in a lab coat, following in his tradition, but also because she had an image of herself relieving all forms of suffering, she dreamed of holding the hands of children with cancer and incontinent old people, in the same way that Gabrielle was waiting impatiently to enrol in sociology courses given by Guy Rocher, whose vocabulary was sprinkled through the communiqués from the Presse étudiante nationale. Social classes meant her at the bottom with Guylaine above, and equalization was in the wind, it was inevitable. It had seemed certain to her late one summer, next to the pool in the garden that suburbanites were beginning to take better care of, when Guylaine had confirmed that she was engaged to a nice accountant who’d been hovering for two years and who had just inherited, prematurely, a chain of book and stationery stores. Guylaine was well aware that boredom lay in wait after too many of her Fernand’s embraces, she was not so dumb and she’d already sampled the body of this future golfer obsessed with performance. The books he sold did not include those Gabrielle was engrossed in and which she no longer even bothered to tell her friend about. Anyway, she’d moved on from Rocher to Bourdieu, whose more indignant jargon gave her an appetite for action. Guylaine would have been alarmed.

  To get a glimpse of the future, she had only needed to catch the hint of concern in the eyes of her friend, who was going to get married and was well aware that she was choosing the wrong path, nearly apologizing. “It will be simple, in the country, the church will be a formality, my dress is ecru and short, the caterer will be waiting at the chalet in Saint-Sauveur, there’ll be a little
dancing, in October it will be too chilly to have the party outdoors. It will be perfectly ordinary, nothing fancy, you can come on your own if you want.” Of course she would go on her own, to watch the assurance of the rich quietly fade away, to waltz out of step with the pharmacist whose fingers are stiff now, and delight in the lovely autumn blaze that would envelop her friend. If she were pregnant, which seems to be the case, the wedding would be even more agreeable. Gabrielle, who had just obtained her master’s degree and was about to become a research assistant in the Université de Montréal sociology department, in other words a marker of student papers, would make allowances for tradition, last refuge of the higher classes. And the fact remained that she believed she truly liked Guylaine, plump and brunette, who had not been born to white niggers of America, but was that her fault?

  Bone cancer carried Guylaine away in a matter of weeks nine years later. Another wolf perhaps, the beast that had eaten away at her soul since the birth of the twins, a boy and a girl without grace, dull-witted since their first cry. Guylaine removed herself from the road where they were growing up the wrong way, she refused all chemicals, and Gabrielle blames herself for having been kind enough to understand her, and thus to have tolerated her apathy. “But bone cancer is always fast,” she tells herself, to shake off the shadow that could let remorse seep in.

  She samples from the basket the season’s last strawberries, the hulls come away between her teeth, warm, smearing lips and fingers, one of those sensual pleasures that should have been enough to keep Guylaine attached to life.