three hundred dollars.
“No way, Françoise, I can’t accept.”
“No, I’m telling you, no! It’s a gift!”
A gift? With that tone? I didn’t insist, thanked her, and left.
13
“After all these years, we should celebrate a little, no?”
She had so much lipstick on, her mouth was like a caricature. Françoise opened the door to her small house on Rue Principale, decorated somewhat garishly — golden picture frames, heavy wall-coverings, and massive furniture — proud to show me the table she had set for us, a large block of foie gras in the middle of the table; she’d been keeping it for just such an occasion. “It isn’t every day you get a visitor from so far away.” Her tone was exuberant, playful, a troubling contrast with her behaviour a few hours earlier at the store. The wine glass she held in her hand could have contributed to her strangely euphoric attitude. At the sight of five place settings on the table, I froze.
“You expecting others?” I had been hoping we might speak just the two of us.
She gave me a small shrill laugh and shook her head as if it wasn’t what we’d agreed on. I was irritated — it wouldn’t be possible to have a conversation now that her brothers were coming — who else but Jean and Paul could have been invited? And, of course, the doorbell rang.
Jean and Paul. Barely fifty, but they looked like old men. Paul more than Jean, with his sallow cheeks and waxy skin. Jean was a bit plumper, with the hard belly of a pregnant woman. His hair, however, was greyer, almost white. He held out a firm hand, without warmth, giving me a bitter look, while Paul skimmed the wall and foundered into the living room, avoiding my handshake. Years ago I disappointed their sister’s inordinate expectations, and the brothers still held a grudge.
“Come!” Françoise pulled me into the living room. A tray of oysters lay on the coffee table. Her husband Jérôme had picked them up at the grocery store and managed to shuck them in record time. “Without even hurting yourself, right honey?” Jérôme, a delicate man with an embarrassed smile, acquiesced with the same timid nod he’d given me when I arrived and Françoise had said boisterously, scanning me from head to toe, “Look, it’s the coat I was talking about, it suits him well, doesn’t it?
In the living room, on the burgundy velvet couch, Jean and Paul waited in silence as Jérôme worked the minibar, making them a drink. I had hazy memories of Jérôme, the timid eldest son of Roger Quimper, the owner of the general store. Back then, he had the smooth, fearful face of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old youth, so quiet you sometimes forgot he existed. “Jérôme? He was with us that night? Are you sure?” That was Jean speaking from behind the wheel of his father’s Rambler, one night in Little Miami, as if suddenly waking from a dream, “Hey! Jérôme!” And Jean turned to ask him before noticing he wasn’t in the back seat stuck between Françoise and the door, his usual spot. Even Françoise hadn’t noticed. How we’d laughed that night! Jérôme? Left behind in the bathroom!
Well, so be it. Françoise had decided on this poor, thin boy, his back bent, head retreating into his shoulders, always glancing at you sideways even when you stood right in front of him, as if he suspected you of something. He looked like his father, who inspected us from behind the store’s counter when he’d see us jostling one another in his store, without a dime in our pockets and a strong temptation to grab something.
Jérôme had taken over the family business in 1977 and had recently brought it into “the modern era,” Françoise explained, pride in her voice. “With a nice Metro sign, just like in those ads on TV.”
She was a businesswoman, Françoise was. My mother’s store and a grocery store, not too bad at all.
A rum and Coke for Jean, a beer for me, a glass of white for Françoise, scotch for Jérôme. “And you, Paul, your usual hooch?”
Paul laughed nervously, revealing bad teeth. Jérôme handed him a room-temperature ginger ale in a pint glass, with three maraschino cherries on a toothpick. Paul said, as if apologizing to me, “I quit drinking years ago. No choice. It was that or die.”
“Cirrhosis,” Jean clarified.
I learned that Paul hadn’t worked in years, was living off welfare, and not doing much with his days. As for Jean, with his two children gone from the house, he lived with his wife in Mont-Joli and worked as a civil servant in a local government office, but not for very much longer.
“Retirement at fifty-three. Not bad, eh?”
“And what are you going to do?”
His face lit up, “Nothing! Isn’t that great?”
I shivered and Jean noticed it, sure enough. An awkward silence that, after a few moments, Françoise tried to talk her way out of, talking about everything and nothing, pushing oyster after oyster on us. “Come, eat more! We have to eat them all! Have you tried this sauce? You should taste it! It’s Jérôme’s favourite. There’s ketchup in it!” Without much appetite, we downed the oysters, except for Paul. “My liver, I can’t,” he repeated, holding his stomach every time.
Perked up by a second rum and Coke, Jean began talking about the village and its inhabitants, those who’d died, those who’d left for the old folks’ home, the English of Métis Beach who’d panicked at the idea of a second referendum, though not as much as in 1980. It had been traumatizing nonetheless, there was no doubt about it, especially after Parizeau’s words — money and the ethnic vote — that wouldn’t help, you could be sure about that. Harry Fluke was thinking of selling everything and moving to Ontario.
“Well, better this ending than another,” Françoise rejoiced. “This way, it’s the status quo.”
Jean and Paul’s jaws clamped shut, but both kept their disagreement to themselves, happy enough to let their sister steer the conversation. Squirming in her seat, Françoise told me how the English population was getting older and older, and their children were no longer interested in spending their summers here. “They think it’s too cold. And they’ve got houses elsewhere. In Florida, the Caribbean, the South of France.” Some had even sold their properties to French people. “Who would have believed it? There’s less inequality than before. The English aren’t as rich, and we’re a little bit more so. It isn’t what it used to be, and we’re better off for it.”
This time Jean and Paul rallied to their sister’s opinion and said in unison, almost comically, “Yeah, good for us.”
Then the eternal and predictable questions about my job in Hollywood. Françoise seemed excited by the fact that I had worked with Aaron Spelling on Fantasy Island. She said, “Oh! Tell me everything!” like a little girl about to get a surprise. “What’s the dwarf like? You know, what’s his name again?”
“Tattoo.”
“Tattoo, right! He seems nice.”
“He died.”
“Tattoo?”
“The actor. Hervé Villechaize.”
“Oh? They do say dwarves don’t live very long.”
“He killed himself, two years ago.”
My answer
