Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (26 page)

Before long we were on the highway that followed old native trails through the great mountain forests of the Laurentians. The only sign of human presence in this primeval landscape was a shorn strip, forged for skiers, slicing down one of the hills. Patrick had to explain what it was.

“Looks sinister,” Rosie said.

Patrick chuckled. “Yeah, who knows what those ski runs could be up to.”

Marcel, the man who’d been taking care of Vera’s cottage all these years, ran a gas station and convenience store at the turnoff from the highway. He was sitting on a stool behind the counter of his store, his eyes fixed on a portable television. I was afraid that when he rose from the stool, the ribbons of yellow flypaper hanging from the low ceiling would stick to his hair, but he deftly avoided them as he jumped up and came towards us.

He was white-haired and slim, and wore denim overalls; I wondered how he felt about the appropriation of his ordinary work clothes by urban youth. He knew who we were and had been expecting us, but a proprietary wariness made him grumpy. “You have to turn on the water,” he warned us.

Patrick assured him, in impressively fluent French, that we’d be fine.

Marcel reverted to French too. He offered us a good price on firewood and said he’d bring it over later if we liked.

“Parfait,” Patrick said. I’d never seen him make this sort of effort—he was trying to be affable, and it really was a struggle.

Rosie had wandered over to a long, narrow warehouse with a flat roof and corrugated metal siding, just behind the store. The words
Marché aux Puces
had been painted in fire engine red on the siding. I thought at first that the wavy letters were meant to be decorative, then I saw that the lettering was merely following the furrowed metal.

“I’ve never been to a flea market,” Rosie said. We tried to peek through the windows, but they were dark and dusty, and all we could see was a reflection of ourselves looking in. “Pouvoir regarder?” she asked Marcel, struggling to remember one or two of the hundreds of French classes that had led, apparently, to not very much.

“Fermé.”

“Quand … ouvre?”

Marcel took pity on her and switched to English. “That’s the affair of my brother-in-law. Ask to him.”

While Patrick filled up, I strolled into the miniature store. Four bruised pears, a rusty iceberg lettuce, Kraft cheese slices, chocolate bars, a few tins of soup and baked beans, all looking as if they’d been salvaged from a train wreck. With the ten-dollar bill my mother gave me I bought as much as I could.

As we drove away, Patrick shook his head. “Imagine living in the same small town all your life. The same people day in, day out. How can you not go mad?”

“I’d like it,” Rosie said. “I’d like knowing everyone around me. You could see their lives change.”

“Yes. The new tires on their car. The postcard from their grandchild in Seattle.”

“‘There is a place in London town,’” Rosie sang. “‘ My railroad boy goes and sits down. He takes a strange girl on his knee. And he tells to her what he won’t tell me.’”

. . .

“Man,” Patrick said as we pulled into the unpaved driveway.

I’d expected a simple wood cabin, but Vera Moore’s cottage, like her city house, was made of weathered limestone. The prominent pitched roof covered the walls like an orange-pink lid, and its two dormer windows glinted with hooded eyes in the sun. The screened-in porch seemed to have been added on as a concession to summer living.

The area immediately surrounding the house had been cleared, and a patchy lawn sloped downward from the back porch to the lake. The clearing extended on both sides to the edges of a spruce and white birch forest. The slender birch trees were wrapped in brown and white and black-tipped veils of bark. They cast a siren’s spell on me, and I walked over, tugged at the curled end of a papery strip. Parchment for a pillow-book.

“I can’t believe this place is still here,” Patrick said. He was leaning against the hood of his car as if he hadn’t yet decided whether to stay. “I was sure it would be a hollow, burnt-out shell.”

“But your mother told us it was in good condition,” I reminded him.

“She’s easy to dupe.”

Rosie had strayed meanwhile to the back lawn. “Look at the lake!” she called out. “Our own private beach—there’s even a dock! I could stay here forever.”

But Patrick ran his hand through his hair and groaned.

“Headache coming on?” I asked.

“No. It’s the country. Too much nature.” He drew a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “I don’t like the country.”

“Now you tell us,” I said. “Were you here a lot as a kid?”

“Oh yes, oh yes, we came every summer. God, what a nightmare.”

“Why?”

“No one wanted to be here, but my mother thought it would be good for us. She forced us to go swimming and sailing and canoeing … I don’t like canoes,” he added emphatically.

“Did she enjoy it at least?”

“No. We were all miserable. I was miserable because I hate water, which tends to be cold, and nature, which tends to be unpleasant. My mother was miserable because she’s allergic to just about everything that grows here. And my father was miserable because he was always miserable.”

“Your father was here?”

“Yeah, it was before he left.”

“What about Anthony?”

“Tony? I don’t know. It was hard to know what was going on in his mind. He went into town a lot, hung out at the local pool joint.”

I tried to picture Patrick in a bathing suit. On my bedroom wall I had a print of Piero della Francesca’s
Baptism of Christ
, which I’d found in a library discard. It was a glorious scene: the River Jordan in a Tuscan landscape, three seductive angels quietly watching as John and Christ succumb to erotic holiness, a convert stripping in the background. The bearded Christ looks atypically casual as the transparent water encircles his white ankles, while the convert, pulling off his shirt, is caught in mid act, his head lost inside the fabric, his body lovely with readiness. I could see Patrick, white and naked, transplanted into this scene, but unlike Christ he was alone: everyone had left, and he stood unbaptized in the shallow water, exposed and chilly. Stoically he would endure the vertiginous sports, the shame, the mosquitoes.

“Poor Patrick,” Rosie said. “We don’t have to stay here. We can go to an inn or a hotel if you like. It’s just as much fun.”

“No, no. It’s all in the past.” He threw his half-finished cigarette on the ground and crushed it with his shoe.

“It won’t be horrible this time round,” Rosie promised. “It’ll be fun. Can we go down to the water?”

“Sure.”

I followed Rosie to the beach. If we squinted, we could make out three or four other clearings along the shoreline, but they were at
the other end of the lake, and the houses were either hidden by shrubs or too small to be visible.

Tentatively I stepped onto the wobbly wharf and inhaled deeply, the way we do when we want to inhale a view. The shaded forest fringed the water like a tufted Afro, and the sky above it was a silk canopy of palest blue.

“I wouldn’t walk on the dock,” Patrick called out from above. “It needs fixing.”

“It’s fine!” I called back.

“I really wouldn’t walk on that,” he repeated, coming down to the beach. “I’ll fix it tomorrow. I’ll get some wood in town.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, stepping off. For a moment the three of us stood there, as still and silent as the lake.

“I feel like the first person on earth,” Rosie said.

“Or the last,” Patrick remarked. “I’m going inside.”

Dr. Moore’s cottage was a naked manifestation of her quest for family intimacy. Indoors, the layout was all open plan: kitchen, dining area, a study corner with a desk, sofas and a rocking chair around a granite fireplace. A picture-window ran the length of the back wall, and sunshine poured in, landing like a stage-light on the braided rugs and knotted floorboards. Everything was scrubbed clean. Dr. Moore must have instructed Marcel to prepare the house for us, and afraid of losing his cushy caretaker’s job, he—or more likely his wife—had even washed the curtains.

“Far out!” Rosie said.

“How far out?” Patrick gibed annoyingly.

“Are the bedrooms upstairs?” I asked. A disquieting sensation had come over me. I felt we were trespassing on Dr. Moore’s house, on her defenceless generosity. Her dreams of family vacations had fallen flat, leaving only this empty house, heavy with her lonely failure. It made you want to tread carefully, as at any burial ground.

“Yeah. I’ll bring in the sheets and things.”

We fetched the linen and carried it up the creaky stairs to the attic floor. The four bedrooms radiated symmetrically from a
spacious vestibule. The vestibule was beautifully furnished with antique chests and bureaus, but the bedrooms themselves were small and poky, with steeply slanting ceilings and minimal floor space, as if to discourage reclusive tendencies.

“Who gets which room?” I asked.

Clutching a folded sheet to her chest, Rosie whirled around, her head thrown back, and for an odd second she reminded me of Sandy Dennis in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—
vulnerable, fragile, and slightly mad. “Anything’s fine with me,” she said, and my vision readjusted itself. “They’re all perfect.”

Patrick seemed to have fallen into a semi-stupor. I tapped him on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind the one with the brass bed. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, sure. That was my dad’s room.” The word
dad
surprised me, and I wondered whether Patrick was being drawn against his will into the house’s—or his own—shunned past.

“You’ve deserted me!” Rosie called out from the room opposite mine. “Well, don’t forget to write.”

I sat on the edge of the big brass bed and stroked the polished casting; I had a fleeting urge to kiss it. A country smell clung to the wallpaper, a soporific brew of mushrooms and spruce and wet earth. I lay down, shut my eyes, and like the man in the song, I sank into a dream.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that we realized we’d forgotten all about food. I spilled Marcel’s derelict groceries on the table, and we stared at the grey lettuce, the bruised pears. Rosie and I had eaten the chocolate bars in the car.

“There should be a restaurant not too far from here,” Patrick said.

“We can’t go to a restaurant every time we’re hungry,” I said. “We have to stock up.”

We decided to go to the nearest town to pick up groceries. As Patrick drove up the main street he said, “Man, this brings back memories. I’m not sure I’m up to it.” His voice was stripped of its usual glib wrappings. “My father liked this place. He said it had a Byronic soul, whatever the fuck that means. Byronic,” he repeated, shaking his head, but not derisively—sadly, if anything.

“You miss him,” Rosie said.

“Yeah, I guess,” he admitted, and I think we both wanted to reach out and embrace him, but of course we didn’t.

The town’s centre consisted of two streets lined with unassuming, well-maintained establishments: a few somnolent stores, a tall white church, a plant nursery, gravel parking lots, the supermarket, a pizzeria, a restaurant-bar, and a two-storey brick building with plaques that identified its inhabitants as notary, veterinarian, and, intriguingly,
Directeur de conscience
.

As we rolled into the supermarket parking lot, a small gang of teenagers who were hanging out next to a brick wall turned to gaze at us. Most of them were smoking cigarettes—out of profound boredom, it seemed to me.

Like trusting disciples, they approached us. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, decked out in leather wristbands, fringed vests, bangles, and bandanas. There was a fragile edge to their adopted style; they were pleased with themselves, but they also wanted others to be pleased with them.

A thin-faced, buck-toothed girl smiled at us. She had her arm around the waist of a handsome boy, his midriff smooth and tanned between hip-hugging jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Patrick said, “Salut,” and the boy touched the hood of the Mercedes as if it were holy. He began asking questions in French. I caught only a few words:
cylindres, suspension, vitesse
.

He was the leader—not because he was the handsomest but because of his courage. His eyes held a twinkling secret, his body was alert, reliable. And now his friends were goading him in
French to ask for a ride. He took up the challenge, swung his long hair as a pledge.

“Sure.” Patrick tossed him the keys and the three of us headed for the supermarket. The morning rain had left muddy pools of water on the uneven ground, and Patrick stepped straight into the puddles as he walked.

“Patrick, you’re getting your shoes soaking wet!” I said, steering him away from the water.

He peered down absently. “I didn’t notice.”

“What do you notice?” I asked.

“As little as possible.”

The floor of the three-aisle supermarket was made of grey barn-wood and there were tinselly Christmas streamers hanging in loops from the ceiling beams. We filled our cart with apples and bananas, breakfast cereal, milk, juice, peanut butter, canned vegetables, pies in cardboard boxes, bread, cheese, eggs, soda crackers.

At the checkout counter, Rosie pulled a few magazines and comic books from the rack. She wanted to pay for them, but Patrick wouldn’t let her. “I owe your father hundreds of dollars,” he said.

The car came inching into the parking lot as we emerged from the store with our groceries. The entire gang had managed to squeeze in, and they shouted and waved at us through the open windows.

“Far fucking out,” the guy with the bare midriff said in English, as he handed back the keys. “I’m Jean-Pierre, and this is Yves, Manon, Jules, Petit Oiseau, my cousin Glenn from Toronto, and my girlfriend, Jojo.”

Patrick invited them to visit any time they liked and gave them directions to the cottage.

“Peace, man,” Jean-Pierre said, and the others echoed, “Peace, man. Peace.”

In the evening, Marcel came by with logs for the fireplace. It took Patrick a while to get a good fire going; he scrunched up
sheets of newspaper, then went scavenging for small sticks. Finally, the flames caught, but Patrick couldn’t find the fire-screen and tiny sparks flew out into the room. Rosie was afraid of the sparks and hid behind the sofa. When the fire settled down, she began strumming on her guitar, trying out chords for “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I found a pack of cards and Patrick taught us a new version of Hearts, harder and meaner than the one we knew. We played late into the night.