Dick. The prototypical American who’d succeeded, comfortable in his own skin, and totally uncaring about the rest of the world, which he only half-assedly understood. He’d never been farther from California than Las Vegas, though that didn’t stop him from loudly proclaiming his opinions on the rest of the planet, and mocking my “Canadian origins.” This other time, we thought we’d seen Paul Anka at Spago, a fine dining place in West Hollywood, and I mentioned he was Canadian. He went off on a grotesque tirade, his words tumbling over one another in an almost incoherent mess thanks to the martinis he’d swallowed, “Ah, Canadians! Insipid and immature, just like their national symbols!”
I said, irritated, “You’re trying to insult me?”
“Insult you? It’s the truth, Canuck! What the hell! Beavers and mounted police about as dangerous as a horde of prepubescent girls? If you wanna be respected in the world, you’ve got to be feared! Give it up! Now, think about virile and ruthless animals like our eagle! Think about the chiselled chins on our sheriffs and our Marines! Come on, even your soldiers prefer to release doves into the wild than shoot clay pigeons!” His mouth full, his fork aimed at me, “Never forget — trying to be loved at any cost, goddamn it, that’s for wimps!” Then, wiping his chin with his napkin, “We should’ve given you political asylum when you came over, Roman, freaking political asylum.”
After a four-hour layover in Chicago and a two-hour flight, I reached Montreal in the middle of the evening, dead tired. Jack’s call early that morning, a lost day in flight and here I was in this deserted airport, scattered customs people with their sombre faces, and a certain unexplained tension, as if the world outside was on curfew. I saw the occasional traveller, looking tense, standing around television sets in the rest areas and restaurants, and couldn’t quite see what was fascinating them. Nothing had attracted my attention in Los Angeles or Chicago. The Braves had won the World Series two days earlier. Maybe Canadian football? Hockey? It seemed early in the season to be so interested. But perhaps people were bored to death in Montreal.
In the taxi on the way to the hospital, the radio so loud it gave me a headache, I realized to my great shame the extent to which I’d become so witlessly American. “Americans, ignorant?” Dick would say. “Why take the time to interest ourselves in what other people are doing, when their single burning ambition is to imitate us?”
At the Montreal General Hospital, crowds gathered around television screens. On every floor, rooms flickering with the bluish lights of screens, from which could be heard rousing music interspersed with cries of Yes! and No! sung like joyous refrains, filled with optimism. What a strange time Gail had chosen.
“I knew you’d come. Thank you.”
I pushed the door open, my heart beating with apprehension, the shock even greater than I anticipated, but before letting myself feel any of it, to postpone the terrible moment, my eyes turned to Jack, a man of fifty or so, his face lined by fatigue, shoulders slumped, salt and pepper hair. Facing the bed, a small television was on, but without sound, only images. Gail was either staring at some blank spot on the wall or sleeping, it was hard to say; she was extremely thin. I searched for signs of flesh beneath the sheets. To avoid crushing her, I passed my hand over the sheet before sitting down next to her.
“Romain...?”
I couldn’t speak. I was paralyzed. She continued, her face the colour of chalk, “Comment … tu es?”
How are you, comment tu es. Her broken French hadn’t changed.
“I should be asking you that question.”
She raised her shoulders, a hint of a smile that seemed to say, Oh, I’m done for, the question is barely worth asking, followed by another smile, this one courageous; she wouldn’t accept me pitying her. “You think this time is the right one, for you, Quebeckers?”
The Quebec referendum on sovereignty, live on television. She was about to die and was thinking about politics. I said, not knowing what to answer, “I don’t know, I hear it’s tight.”
“So, it was a good idea to vote by … how do you say it in French again?”
“Par anticipation,” Jack said.
“Right. That way, before dying, I might change the course of things. So that we stay together.”
Why did she insist on speaking to me in French in the state she was in? Even I was tongue-tied in French, words coming to me slowly.
My throat tightened. She coughed, a wheeze to break your heart. Jack came nearer to her, and wet her withered lips with a small moist sponge, before she fell into somnolence again, the effect of morphine, no doubt.
Seeing her so fragile, so close to the end, a wave of guilt overcame me, whose origins I couldn’t pinpoint. Guilty for what? For having been the one who burned the last bridge. Forgetting, here and now before such sadness, that there had been a reason for it, yes, a reason.
“Can you stay … just a little longer.…?” Slowly, she opened her eyes. “Do you know where I wish I could be now? Do you remember.…?”
Her unfocused eyes staring off in the distance, perhaps remembering her parents’ great wooden house, in Métis Beach, the happy childhood she had before she became a young woman to be married off. The unforgettable summers, from St. Jean Baptiste Day to Labour Day, long days in the sun and the tennis courts and the sea in small dinghies, wind in their sails. Campfires and roasted marshmallows, scary stories the kids told each other while the adults drank inside. The films shown on Thursday evenings at the clubhouse, classics with Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, James Dean, and Natalie Wood. Cokes sipped on the deck of Little Miami, the incredible view you had there when the sun set. The long drives on winding roads, hair in the wind, in one of the Tees boys’ sports car — though Gail had never had any affection for the “trouble-makers, deadheads, and daddy’s boys who thought they could do what they wanted.” Carefree days, a summer camp, where the young ones in Métis Beach had nothing to do but have fun, and ignore the responsibilities they would later acquire, when they became lawyers and businessmen, while we, in the French Village, would continue to work hard, bending passively to the whims of our parents, waiting without illusions for the monotonous life that was preordained.
Gail moved slowly, as Jack looked on. She lolled, almost as if nodding, and Jack helped her up in her bed, placing a pillow against her back. Shoulders bent, he left the room and returned immediately with a burly young man, reddish brown hair, my height. A nervous type, briefcase under his arm. Gail’s face brightened. Who was this man? A mastodon, really, at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He walked towards me and offered me a moist hand, as Gail introduced us in such a hushed voice we could barely understand, “Romain, this is Len Albiston … Len, Romain Carrier.…” Then Jack took over, and gave an embarrassed, hazy explanation — Len was a reporter, he worked for the Calgary Herald; he was in Montreal to cover the Quebec referendum.…
All well and good, but what was he doing in this hospital room? Why introduce him to me now?
Gail seemed to have read my thoughts. She spoke, her voice barely audible, “I know, Romain … It’s a strange moment.…” Len’s face reddened so suddenly that I began thinking unpleasant thoughts.
Suddenly tense, I said, “Gail?”’ Then turning towards Jack, “What does all this mean?”
Jack raised his shoulders, helpless. “Be patient. She’ll explain.”
After, I couldn’t remember how it was told to me. Gail had become animated all of a sudden, a sort of miracle, her eyes full of life, her
