“Dull as dishwater, non, our day-to-day? But that’s the life they accuse me of setting on the Xerox machine to put on stage as Amélie. Only it wasn’t our life up there. Nothing like.” His eyes retracted from the past to refocus on his dinner companion. “Have you seen the play, Ève? I never asked you.”
“I’ve only read it.”
“So you know what was in there. Amélie and I, we didn’t have any of the knock-down-drag-outs that I stuck into the script, there was none of the muck, the other women. None of that twisted crap. It all came from up here.” He smacked his forehead with too much force as if to rebuke his brain for its hypercreativity.
“Then I don’t get it. Why didn’t she defend you against all those false accusations at the time? Why didn’t she just come out and say that it wasn’t your marriage up there on stage? Do the stand by your man bit.” Evie tried humming a few tone-deaf bars to lighten the tone.
“Until Amélie, we had a quiet life, a private life. You can picture that can’t you? You’ve seen how I live. Well, I grant you it was a little livelier when it was the two of us, but private still. Cozy. Intime. But then, wham, there she was, under siege, from one day to the next. All that attention, the publicity. And it was ugly a lot of it, let me tell you. Well, I suppose you don’t need me to tell you, do you? That’s how we got here, isn’t it? It turned out to be too much for her to handle. It ate away at her that the same shopkeepers she’d always done business with so pleasantly up and down the street looked at her in a new way, a smirking, wet t-shirt way. At least that’s how she felt. And she’d tell me she could feel the neighbour ladies giving her the fisheye. So she found her own way of dealing with it. She sealed herself up in the house. Stopped going to the dépanneur, the grocery store, the dry cleaner. Stopped answering the phone. Stopped looking for work. Turned herself into a hermit. And it was me she blamed for putting her in that situation. She figured I should have anticipated all the fallout, and I suppose I should have. The way she saw it I betrayed her, set her up for as much humiliation as if the play really had replicated our marriage. I failed in my husbandly duty to protect her. That’s why she never spoke out, never denied anything, never defended me, wouldn’t lift a bloody finger to set the record straight, let people go off and think what they damn well pleased. She was out of it all.”
“But by doing that wasn’t she punishing herself too?”
“I didn’t say it was rational.”
“What were you thinking, naming the play after her?”
“I’ve told you, she was happy I named it after her at the time.”
“Was that before or after she’d seen it?”
“Okay. It was before. You could say I misled her on that point.” Jean-Gabriel pushed past his peccadillo to bring himself up to the present. “So, to finish off this topic once and for all, I did get my comeuppance in the end. I wonder if it gave her any satisfaction? Maybe she never even noticed, dropped me from her radar. Why not? Anyway, the thing is, after Amélie I never was able to write anything half as good ever again. I’m telling you, it was like she put a hex on me. A permanent choke. And, the cherry on the cake, the whole scandale sealed my reputation, as you well know. Some writers who’ve been around the block end up in the role of emeritus public intellectuals. They get to sit on all the TV couches and spout. Not me. I end up being an emeritus public asshole.”
Evie resented that punk kid Amélie for stomping on Jean-Gabriel’s future with her petulant silence. What did she think she was doing standing in the way of literature, blackening Jean-Gabriel’s character in the eyes of the world with her finger paints? Evie couldn’t help but wonder why he’d ever picked her out of the crowd, a schoolgirl who’d hardly gotten her feet wet in life. Wouldn’t he have logically sought out someone more mature, someone more cerebral, more liberal-artsy? More like herself in fact. Clearly this Amélie babe had other redeeming qualities. Men.
“Needless to say we went our separate ways after that. Or she went her separate way. And there you have it. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. With minor editorial revisions, a comma here and there. Now when you finally become a famous author, ma petite Ève, and I have faith that you will, watch that you don’t make my same mistakes.”
“I think we’re safe there. No one so far has shown the least interest in publishing anything of mine outside of the obituary pages.”
“Have patience. You never know in what direction your creative juices will lead you.”
Moshe came in via the rear service entrance, the same door through which the pig carcasses reported for duty, just beside the walk-in fridges. Even though the resto had an open plan, the owners had calculated, rightly Moshe felt, that it could backfire to showcase absolutely every last aspect of the food prep to their diners. Maybe the restaurateurs didn’t slaughter their pigs on-site, but they did do their own butchery, lopping off heads, tails, and trotters to the chefs’ exacting specifications. Their tools were hardcore. After a good afternoon’s work, the back room looked like a field hospital at the Somme. It didn’t necessarily translate that an unrepentant carnivore wanted to stand ringside at the abattoir while the shochet did his business. Sometimes it made good sense to keep the children in the dark about affairs beyond their ken. So the owners partitioned off the sawdust-strewn carvery, allowing the staff to wield its cleavers in camera.
Bread delivery was outside Moshe’s normal realm of responsibilities, but when the bakery’s driver called in sick, it was always the apprentice who was expected to pick up the slack. Otherwise, what was the point of maintaining a food chain? Moshe unloaded the van and stashed his leggy loaves in the rough wicker umbrella baskets awaiting them under the salad station.
“Hé Mosh,” called out one of the chefs from the kitchen, “Marcellin dogging it again?”
“Would you catch me behind the wheel of that heap for any other reason?”
“Come over here a minute. I’ll give you something to try that will make your trip worthwhile.” Moshe joined his friend behind the stove and observed as he tipped his pan toward the gas burner to set its contents alight. The two stared into the flames in culinary communion. When the blaze subsided, Moshe spooned up some of the sauce and let it rove over the topography of his tongue. His taste buds spent a few happy moments disentangling the elusive flavours, but the rest of his body didn’t share their joy for long.
Moshe glanced out over the bar that separated the kitchen from the dining room. This was his kind of place, casual and convivial. As Marcellin’s surrogate he’d had occasion to drop off breads at all manner of restaurants, but the eateries with a gentle hubbub like this were his favourites. He scanned the tables, every one full, and deservedly so. Clearly all the clients were relaxed and enjoying their night out, coddled in an atmosphere of expert service and earthy good food. His gaze happened to rest on one particular table where a couple was clinking champagne glasses. Who orders bubbly unless there’s an event to celebrate, and he wondered what Evie and Jean-Gabriel could be feting, for indeed on second look he recognized the clinkers as his neighbours. His imagination wasn’t cutting him any breaks as it ran trailers of the various possibilities on the plasma screen behind his eyes. Now it decided to pull out all the stops? Thanks for nothing.
The baker stood planted like a maypole in the centre of the action while the restaurant’s employees danced around him. He drew attention to himself by virtue of his erectness and immobility. A beetle posture was the kitchen norm, hunched over sink or stove or tray, and stasis was a hanging offence. Inukshuk Moshe cast such a wide shadow over the premises that the diners couldn’t help but wonder who went overboard on the dimmer, and their heads turned en masse toward command central behind the bar. It was too late for Moshe to slip back out the service door un-noticed. Jean-Gabriel was already hailing him to stop by their table.
“Moshe, mon ami, small world. I didn’t know you moonlighted here.”
; His assumption was only natural, but it forced Moshe to admit that he was on truck-driver duty, endless status rungs beneath his regular occupational role. On Anti-Shabbos nights when Moshe arrived challah laden, his friends teased him for his bakerly perfectionism, but they revered his profession, that he knew. Though they never said it in so many words, translation of silences came easy to him in that affable crowd. To them he was heroic, coaxing great loaves out of the ovens with his asbestos hands. He was the creative genius in their midst, at least until Jean-Gabriel crashed the party and usurped top spot. But tonight Moshe had shlepper written all over him. He was still dressed in the same baker’s whites he’d put on at four in the morning. The sweat crescents that his armpits normally held captive had decided to make a break for it and go free-range, scampering all the way down his torso. He probably shouldn’t have even entered the bistro’s dining area. However porcine the restaurant’s theme, perfuming the joint with his odour of sty was carrying things too far. The owner would no doubt call over to the bakery to have him dressed down for it tomorrow.
“Join us for dinner, Moshe. I can have them set another place.”
“Yes do Mosh, it would be fun.” Evie seconded her table companion. “You could give us your insider opinion of everything. It would be great to eat at a restaurant with a trained foodie, almost like sharing a meal with Julia Child or James Beard.”
Moshe couldn’t delight in the compliment her comparisons were surely meant to relay. Instead, they left him feeling gelded. Jean-Gabriel lifted his arm to signal the waiter for an additional chair, but Moshe reached over and yanked it down with unexpected force, as if it were attached to a Vegas slot.
“No, no, I can’t. Really. I have more deliveries to make.”
“Can’t you come by after?” Evie asked. “We’ll be here for a while. They haven’t served our main dishes yet. There’s plenty of time.”
“Thanks, but I have to get the van back.”
“You can’t even make it by dessert?” Evie urged him. “I peeked at the menu. They’re serving tarte Tatin tonight. I know how much you love it. Come share some with us.”
“Moshe, it would be our pleasure to have you stop by later. Even if it’s just for a digestif.”
Moshe ran his hands through what would have been his hair if he hadn’t razored it down to the nub to muddy the borders between field and fallow. Would they never release him? In his current state, a complete fumigation and upgrade to civvies would take him hours and he’d still never measure up to Jean-Gabriel’s sartorial standards. The guy lived an unadorned life according to Evie’s recounting, but he seemed not to stint where his closet was concerned. No, better to go home and lick his wounds. He tried weakly, as he withdrew, to recoup a point or two.
“Be sure to try the pain aux olives,” he said. “I made it myself.” But later that night, when he replayed the encounter under his shower spray, his forehead pressed against the cooling tiles, he regretted his parting line that made him sound like a kindergartner proud of his lumpy clay ashtray. Why hadn’t he just kept his mouth shut?
Chapter 7
“THEY WANT TO AUCTION ME OFF.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Jean-Gabriel was opening the day’s mail at his kitchen table while Evie superintended the pasta sauce for their dinner. He waved the letter he’d just read in front of her. “I’ve been asked to be a prize at a charity auction. This is what my life has come to. I’m now the turkey.”
“What’s the cause?”
He looked back down at the invitation. “Sauvez le Cinéma Cinq. You at least have to love it for the sibilance.”
“It isn’t very moderne as a concept, is it?” Evie asked him. “A meat market?”
“I don’t think they expect you to get up on the podium and flex your pecs, but I could be wrong. It says here that the high bidders win a private evening with their preferred author or performer at some future date. It’s all meant to sound uplifting. The winners get to feel like a patron of the arts, an honourary member of the Medici family for one night. All the proceeds go to bringing the Cinéma V back to its former glory. They’ll need a bundle to renovate that pile of rubble.”
“Will you do it?”
Jean-Gabriel set down his reading glasses. “I have to admit a part of me is tempted. Having women bid against each other for a tête-à-tête with me, it’s a hard thing for a man to resist. Does wonders for your ego. But it’s too risky. I’m seventy years old and I’d probably be competing against a slate of young bucks. I could end up being humiliated. It’s safer to pass.”
“Oh, come on. They’d be bidding on you as if you were a long-lost Picasso.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so.”
“You’re my biggest booster.”
“Always glad to provide a service. I will just ask you, though, why you assume it will be only women bidding on you?”
“Call me old-fashioned.”
Evie’s fingers tweezered the invitation out of the garbage. She ironed out the crimps with her hand and passed it back to him. “Are you sure you won’t take part? Wouldn’t you want to pitch in to revive one of the city’s venerable old movie houses? Dress up all fancy? Be fawned over? What’s not to like?”
“Okay mademoiselle. Since you’re so insistent. Here’s the proposition. It says here I can bring a guest. I’ll go if you’ll agree to come along with me. It’s right up your alley anyway. Haven’t you crowned yourself greatest movie fan in the world, or am I mistaken?”
Jean-Gabriel never missed an opportunity to ask for Evie’s company on his various outings around town. Outings was her word. What was she supposed to call them? Dates? Anyone who kept his medications in a plastic pill-minder like the one on Jean-Gabriel’s bathroom counter was over the age bar for dating. And he had other disqualifications besides. He used an extra long, no-bend-at-the-waist shoe horn. Guys who used shoe horns period were too old to date. Weren’t they? Evie knew she was being unfair to oldsters or whatever the PC term was. The youth-impaired? But she was in uncharted territory. Until lately, the only individuals d’un certain âge she’d ever hung out with on a regular basis were her grandparents. When they leaned heavily against her and hooked arms, smelling of closed windows and Depends, it was so she could prop them up. But when Jean-Gabriel slipped his arm through hers while they strolled through Jean-Talon Market, it wasn’t for support. He’d never seemed unsteady on his pins before.
Evie couldn’t prevent her famously open mind from doing a bit of self-protective grey bashing. It hammered her with all the geriatric stereotypes. It saw tufts of wiry hair growing out of noses and ears everywhere it looked. And whenever Evie went to a restaurant with Jean-Gabriel, it invariably pulled a fast one on the ice floating in the water glass, replacing it with a partial plate. Evie knew where her brain was going with all this but it should have had more confidence in her. Maybe Jean-Gabriel saw their outings as try-outs for some future expanded role for Evie, but she wasn’t auditioning to be his leading lady. In this pairing, at least for the time being, she was perfectly content to play Tonto.
“We watched the Cinéma V burn down,” Evie told him. “From Girouard Park across the street. The whole neighbourhood was there. People were sobbing. My parents could hardly bear to look. That’s where they went on their first date.”
“At least the façade survived intact. That was a stroke of luck. I can’t think of any other building in town as quirky looking as that one.”
“I know. What would you call that style? Early King Tut? I love the way the stone’s all carved up like a sarcophagus. And those twin 3-D pharaohs up top? When we used to go by it on the way to school every day all the kids kinked their arms sideways Egyptian style. A school bus ritual. If you didn’t join in you’d end up having bad luck.”
“You’d be haunted by a mummy?”
“I think it was more
on the order of having your lunch money snitched.”
“You’ll come with me then?” he asked her.
“Why not? I owe the place that much I guess.”
“So am I presentable?” They paused in the hotel lobby before entering the packed ballroom. Evie evened out the loops in Jean-Gabriel’s bow tie and brushed a trace of imaginary lint off his tux. “There, now you’re perfect.”
“You look perfect too. But then you always do. That dress. It sizzles. Red suits you.”
“Save all that smooth talk for the high bidder. Don’t squander it on me.”
“You’re a very difficult girl to compliment. Has anyone ever told you that? Are you so resistant with everyone or are you just like that with me?”
“Psychoanalyze me some other time. We have to go in. We’re late.”
Evie and Jean-Gabriel tacked themselves onto the end of the reception line where the paddles were being distributed in advance of the auction. The one Evie was allotted was stamped with number 455. She’d never brandish it, that she knew, but she accepted it all the same. Starting bids were set at five hundred dollars, with hundred dollar increments for subsequent bids.
Evie cased the joint. The other guests milling about were abundantly, drippingly, unremittingly jewelled, as if they’d taken their accessorizing cues from the chandeliers. She couldn’t ascertain if their bangles were twenty-four carat or ersatz; she was hardly in a position to bite down on them and check for toothmarks, but she had the distinct impression that she was the only one in the room who didn’t have that kind of cash to throw around.
“Anybody tempt you?” Jean-Gabriel caught her scanning the catalogue she’d received along with her paddle. Guests all over the hall were studying it like the racing form. In fact, there were a few names on the list that called out to her but she didn’t fess up.
Evie, the Baby and the Wife Page 8