We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  ALSO BY JOANNE PROULX

  Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Joanne Proulx

  Excerpt from OPEN SECRETS: STORIES by Alice Munro, copyright © 1994 by Alice Munro. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

  Excerpt from THE DIARY OF ANAÏS NIN Volume Three: 1939–1944. Copyright © 1969 by Anaïs Nin and renewed 1997 by Rupert Pole and Gunther Stuhlmann. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permision of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Proulx, Joanne, author

  We all love the beautiful girls / Joanne Proulx.

  ISBN 9780735232884 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780735232891 (electronic)

  I. Title.

  PS8631.R6815W4 2017   C813′.6   C2016-907174-X

  Cover and interior design: Jennifer Griffiths

  Cover image: Ian Ross Pettigrew/Getty Images

  v4.1

  a

  For my kids: Simon, Sophia,

  Elise. Cody, Brady, Behn.

  Into a fragile world pour your

  strength and goodness.

  In memory of my friend

  Renate Mohr, master of life

  and impermanence.

  And always, forever, Martin.

  None of that. Not allowed. Be good.

  ALICE MUNRO, “Vandals”

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Joanne Proulx

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  January

  February

  March

  June

  July

  August

  September

  November

  December: (epilogue)

  Acknowledgments

  I love her. Everything. The way she smells. Tastes. Feels. Jesus. The way she feels.

  The first time. It was an early-morning thing. I was coming out of the bathroom. Jess was in the hall. We were both still half-asleep. I don’t know why she was sleeping over—she wasn’t babysitting, we were way past that, I can’t remember, it wasn’t that unusual, she’s always been at our place a lot. She put her hands on my shoulders and backed me into the bathroom, kicked closed the door. The whole thing lasted about fifteen seconds.

  You took advantage of my morning wood, I say, later, months later, when I’ve regained my ability to speak.

  Lucky boy, she says.

  Lucky boy.

  We’re lying in my bed this time, a map of the world pinned to the wall above us, a million other places we could exist. I’m rubbing the lace on her bra, trying to take things slow, so she knows that I can. The lace is scratchy against my thumb.

  Doesn’t this bug you? I ask.

  Not really. You get used to it.

  I kiss her, there, beneath the lace, so now it’s scratching my cheek.

  She puts her hand on my belt buckle, gives a little tug, and I can’t help it, I moan just thinking about what’s next.

  Your parents would be mad if they knew, Jess says. They expect more from me.

  More than this?

  She laughs. Her lips are gorgeous. Her teeth white and perfect. Perfect. She undoes the top button of my fly. And Eric, she says. He’d be very mad.

  My jaw tightens, back teeth clenched. Yeah, I say. Whatever.

  She undoes another button. And whatever you do, you can’t tell Eli. Because he’d tell Eric. For sure.

  I know, I say. I’m not stupid. I know Eli.

  Jess lifts her head off the pillow, opens my mouth with hers, slips her tongue inside, long black hair sweeping my face, the smell of summer in winter.

  I like it with you, she says. She works the last button loose and slides her hand inside my jeans. With you I don’t have to be a porn star. With you, I can just be myself.

  Her hand. Jesus, I love her hand.

  Mia and Frankie are well into an impromptu photo shoot when Frankie asks her if Michael, her husband of nineteen years, is the first guy she really loved. Mia tells the girl no. Without lowering her camera, she tells her how the first boy had been trembling when he whispered he loved her on the stone bridge that crossed Black Bear Creek.

  “Actually?” Frankie says. “Trembling?”

  “Like a leaf in a storm. We were young. Fifteen.” He’d walked her home for weeks before he worked up the nerve to hold her hand.

  Mia rotates the ring on her lens, snaps the girl sharply into focus. A beauty. A lioness. Broad shoulders, amber eyes, beautiful lips, crazy, springy hair—the deepest shade of red. Behind her a wall of old north-facing windows, winter creeping in around the puttied edges.

  What Mia doesn’t tell Frankie about the night on the bridge is how that first I love you collapsed her life before into a trinket. How one beat back her heart had been a quiet thing, hung in her chest like an un-struck gong. Instead, she dips her camera so she and the girl are eye to eye. “Hot chocolate?” she says. “A cup of coffee?”

  “Nah.” Frankie flips her phone over on the settee. “I’m good.” The blue rectangle shines bright on the purple velvet, the fabric dark as a bruise in the low northern light that floods the front of the studio and lets Mia shoot without a flash.

  Frankie puffs a stray curl away from her face. Over the last couple of years she’s grown out her hair and found some magic product to tame it. Today, her curls lie long and loose, only a hint of wild, and there’s a new gleam at her nostril—the nose ring she hasn’t told her parents about. It’s the reason she came to the studio, to show Mia first and build up the courage to go home. Mia’s already reassured her that the new piercing looks good—and it does—and sure, her parents might be upset, but they’ll get used to it. Although honestly, Mia’s not certain they will.

  “So.” Frankie glances up from her phone. “What happened with the trembler?”

  Mia tells her how she loved the boy back, so unguardedly, so completely, so willingly, and the tragedy of him being a fundamentalist Christian who didn’t believe in premarital sex. How intense it all was, the two of them falling deeper and deeper into a frustrating fumble of love.

  “God,” Frankie says, “that sounds horrible.”

  “It was.” Mia is surprised by the camera’s tremor. She presses the body more firmly against her brow; old-fashioned, she knows, but she rarely uses the screen. “After three years,” she says, “all I wanted to do was, well, you know, fuck.”

  “Mia!”

&nbs
p; It is their best moment together, and Mia has caught it, the girl leaning so joyously toward her, laughing, her body draped over her knees, the ring in her nose a gold glint in the soft grey of the studio windows.

  And then, after she’s sitting straight again, she asks so shyly, “Well, did you?”

  “No,” Mia says. “We broke up. He was pure when he left me. Both of us pure and broken-hearted and terribly, terribly horny.”

  “That’s a sad story.” Frankie’s shoulders lift as she laughs.

  “The saddest part,” Mia says, “was afterwards we could not find a way to be friends.”

  Frankie stares off out the window at the sternness of a Canadian winter. In her hand, her phone tumbles, darkened screen flipping to dusty-pink case.

  “How about you?” Mia asks. “You met anyone special?”

  The girl casts a long stare into the camera. Light framing light, she lets Mia in, the shutter clicks, a flicker of black, and Frankie snaps back bright at the centre. She brushes her nose, and her auburn mane quivers. “No,” she says. “Not really.”

  Michael unfolds the scrap of paper he’s drawn from the bowl. “Frankie,” he reads, and she flashes him a peace sign. Sitting on the floor of her family’s slope-side chalet, leaning up against one of the old leather couches, her cheeks are red from being outside all day. Like everyone else she’s in her après-ski wear: woolly socks, long johns and a baggy sweatshirt, Mont Orford embossed across the front. Michael sees no sign of the nose ring Mia mentioned, which probably means Frankie lost that fight.

  “I hope you’ve learned to draw,” she says.

  “No, I hope you’ve learned to draw,” Michael teases back. They’ve always been easy together. On the chairlift that morning, bobbing in the air thirty feet above a slope of glittery white, their skis brushing the tips of snowy evergreens, she’d asked him to just, blah, be quiet for a bit. A few seconds later, with her face tipped to the sun, she said it felt like she was communing with God.

  Finn picks his mom’s name from the bowl, leaving Frankie’s parents, Helen and Peter, as the third team, which isn’t ideal. Peter can’t draw to save his life, and board games make Helen cranky, especially when she’s paired up with her husband. Regardless, everyone’s pretty mellow as they settle in around the table and set up the board, well fed on spaghetti and meatballs—Helen’s recipe, always wonderful—and muscle-tired after a good day on the hill: bright blue sky and decent snow and a fairly mild minus ten, which is about as good as it gets in the Eastern Townships in January.

  The teams select their markers. Michael and Frankie get stuck with a stray chess piece, a knight. The game’s old, the little hourglass also missing, so Finn pulls out his iPhone to use as a timer.

  Peter places a red marker on the board. “Think we’re going to get the management contract for the Soho?”

  “Yeah,” Michael says. “I think we’re good.”

  “Premium condo building. We’ll make big money.”

  Mia rolls her eyes. “Can you please not talk business tonight?”

  “Fine with me,” Michael says, and picks up the die. “Who starts?”

  “We have to get off P.” Frankie has the rule card in her hand. “Person slash place slash animal.”

  Helen holds up a bottle. “More wine?” Mia raises her glass.

  “Can I have some?”

  “You’re seventeen, Francine,” Helen says. “The drinking age is nineteen.”

  Finn glances up from his phone. “Eighteen in Quebec. And we’re in Quebec.”

  Helen sets down the bottle, doing her best to look stern, which isn’t easy for her. “Then next year you both can have a glass.”

  “You and me”—Finn high-fives Frankie across the table—“rockin’ the clubs in Orford.”

  Peter jimmies the first card from the box. “Are we starting here or what?”

  —

  “HOW DID you get tinsel out of that?” Michael plucks the paper from Mia’s hand. “He drew three squiggly lines.”

  “Are you two cheating?” Peter leans over, trying to see what Finn’s drawn.

  “Definitely cheating,” Frankie says.

  “We don’t need to cheat. We’re just good.”

  “Yes we are,” Mia says, in her most pleasantly obnoxious game-player voice.

  “I swear you two can read each other’s minds.” Michael looks at the paper again, those three anything lines, feeling unsure, disconcerted.

  —

  “NO ACTIONS!”

  “Come on, it’s right there.” Michael cocks a thumb over his shoulder, at the chairlift behind him, framed by the picture window. “Does it say no pointing? Where does it say no pointing?”

  “It’s Pictionary.” Finn picks up the lid and shows it to his dad. “The Game of Quick Draw. First Edition.”

  “I’m fine with pointing,” Frankie says. “I mean, it’s hanging right behind his head. It seems almost wrong not to use it.”

  “I like your thinking, partner.” Michael gives her a wink. “Someone should get you a glass of wine. Maybe a nose ring while they’re at it.”

  “Would you stop,” Helen says. “Michael, you are a s-h-i-t disturber.”

  He reaches across the table and squeezes her hand. “You know the kids can spell now, right, Helen?”

  “Just move your stupid piece, you cheater,” she says, finally letting herself laugh.

  —

  “HOW IS THAT a giraffe?” Helen stares at Peter’s drawing in disbelief. “It looks like a horse. Oh my gosh, we’re never getting off the first square.”

  Peter elongates a line, stretching his stick horse’s neck. “There. Now it’s a giraffe.”

  Helen tuts. “My kindergarten students draw better than that.”

  “Yeah? Well, they’re not on your team tonight, are they?”

  “Everyone knows giraffes have long necks, don’t they? I mean, isn’t that what defines them? Their long necks?”

  —

  “FRANKIE, YOUR HAIR. I can’t see what you’re drawing. Skirt. Dancer. Skirt?”

  She stabs at the paper with her pencil and gives Michael an exasperated look.

  “What? Dress? Oh, oh”—he snaps his fingers, his eyebrows lift—“tutu.”

  “Yes!” Frankie whinnies as she moves her marker onto the same square as Finn and Mia’s and rubs it saucily against their playing piece.

  “Are you hitting on our little blue thing?” Finn asks.

  Frankie whinnies again and rears up her little plastic horse.

  —

  “WE’RE THINKING ABOUT going to Whistler for Family Day weekend.” Helen drops the game pieces into the tray. “You guys interested?”

  Michael and Mia exchange a glance. They definitely do not have the funds for a trip like that.

  “Whistler!” Finn says. “We should so do it.”

  “We’ve never gone together,” Frankie says. “It’ll be sweet.”

  “Isn’t it kind of expensive,” Mia says, “to fly across the country for only a couple of days?”

  Peter looks up from folding the board. “We’re just tossing the idea around. We haven’t decided anything.”

  Helen’s jaw drops. “I thought I was supposed to book the tickets.”

  Peter slots the board into the box. “Finn, can you hand me the lid? We were just going to talk about it, Helen.”

  She shakes her head. “I thought we already had.”

  “So, what?” Frankie says. “We’re not going, then?”

  —

  “LOOK.”

  Finn’s first to notice the snow falling outside, so dense the night sky has lightened to grey and the evergreens bordering the runs have disappeared in the flurry along with the looping string of chairlifts. Michael slips his arm around Mia’s waist and tucks her into his side. She smells good, a fine blend of wood smoke, red wine and fresh air. For many reasons, he’s happy that they have their own room at the chalet tonight, that Finn and Frankie have moved out of the bunk beds and
onto the living room couches where they can watch old movies on late-night TV.

  Helen frowns out at the storm. “We’ll need more food if we get snowed in.”

  “We’re not getting snowed in,” Peter says. “We have work on Monday.”

  Frankie bumps her shoulder into Finn’s. “Powder in the east.”

  “Who needs Whistler?” he says. “We can be happy right here.”

  Friday night, there’s a knock at the door. Michael and Mia, stretched out on the floor in front of the fire trading sections of last Sunday’s Times, a half bottle of shiraz standing on the carpet between them, both groan.

  “You expecting anyone?”

  Mia shakes her head.

  “Probably someone collecting for something,” Michael says. “They always come on Fridays, when they know we’re at our weakest.”

  “Charity people—heartless bastards.”

  “You went out for Heart and Stroke.”

  “Don’t remind me. Most of the neighbours were so unhappy to see me, cap in hand. God, and Randolph. The millionaire on the corner—”

  “With the Aston Martin.”

  “—dropping change into my hand. Nickels, dimes, the occasional quarter.” Mia shivers. “I’ve been wishing a heart attack upon him ever since. Or a stroke. Either would be fine.” She leans a little closer and lowers her voice, as if there’s a chance whoever’s on the front porch might overhear her. “He doesn’t deserve the tree on his lawn.” An enormous maple, at least two hundred years old, Mia’s always been crazy about it. Even Michael, not a huge tree connoisseur, is impressed by its size, the fact it grew so large in the city.

  They lie still, listening for the dull thud of boots on snow-packed porch stairs to release them back to their papers. Instead, there’s another knock, this time louder, more insistent.

  “Shit,” Michael says. “You get it.”

  “No, you.”

  “No, you.”

  “I’ll blow you if you get it.”

  “Deal.” Michael slaps Mia’s ass as he rolls up off of the carpet. He knows that after another couple glasses of wine, they’ll probably both fall asleep in front of the fire. Still, he likes the sexual banter, likes the fact that after nearly two decades of marriage Mia still says the words and, from time to time, graces him with the deed.