My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  His mother’s words hadn’t burdened him. On the contrary, they’d buoyed him up. He had no idea if it would last, but he felt lighter than before. Lighter and yet paradoxically more solid.

  He wanted to laugh. About what? The power of words, of stories told and untold? Luc took the steaming cup his mother handed him and breathed in the sweet, familiar aroma of tea.

  28

  N ight was falling as Luc Lévesque walked into the Green Spot. It was Halloween, and the streets were full of children in costumes. There were a lot of skeletons this year. He’d passed two of them on his way here, cheap plastic outfits from the dollar store.

  He opened the door to the restaurant. Strips of protective carpet had been laid down; the snow would come any day now. It would be light at first, like the dusting of sugar on a pastry, but by the end of December it would be knee-deep. He sighed. As a boy, he’d loved winter. Even the short, dark days of November hadn’t bothered him, for they meant snow was on its way. And snow meant permission to stay indoors, reading and daydreaming.

  He paused on the doormat to wipe his feet, nodding a hello at the man behind the cash, who still didn’t recognize him. The man winked at Luc and smiled, as he had winked and smiled at every other customer who had preceded Luc that day. Nobody knew him here. The Green Spot customers were too busy making rent to bother with books.

  He patted the pockets of his raincoat. He hadn’t brought anything to read. Usually, he had a book tucked away. The last one he’d read was a French translation of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Translation was betrayal, as Hannah was so fond of saying, but his English wasn’t strong enough to read Achebe in the original. Achebe had been criticized for writing the novel in English—indicting colonialism in the colonizers’ language. At least in Quebec, novelists wrote in French.

  Luc had finished reading the book weeks ago and hadn’t picked up anything since. Nor had he written a word. He was dry. Frighteningly so. And when was the last time he’d walked out of the house without a book? He patted the sides of his raincoat one last time, unable to accept his lapse, and made his way to the back of the restaurant.

  He sat at his favourite booth. A cold rain was falling outside, and through the streaked window he saw people scurrying along Notre-Dame Street, ducking into doorways for cover, getting lost in the blur of water on glass. One of these ghostlike beings waved an arm. A pale face paused, shimmered briefly, then disappeared from view.

  Vien. There was no mistaking that hair. The front door opened and Vien burst into the restaurant, scattering the small crowd waiting by the door. He stood alone on the mat shaking himself like a wet dog. Luc watched as he started to wriggle inside his trench coat. What was he doing? Scratching himself? No, he was reaching into a pocket to extract something. A file folder brimming with his students’ papers. Poor bastard. He had brought his grading with him. Luc shook his head. The teacher’s life—an unending river of red ink.

  Vien walked toward him. “My man,” he said, with a wide smile. He didn’t seem at all perturbed about the rain or his own semi-drenched state. “Sorry I’m late. Have you been waiting long?”

  Luc shook his head.

  “My meeting ran longer than expected.” Vien peeled off his coat. Water had seeped through at the shoulders and streaked his shirt. “Damn Tremblay.” He’d spoken of this man before, a young teacher recently hired by Saint-Jean to teach history. “He wears a suit and tie every day to school. What’s that about? And everything boils down to economics.” Vien threw up his hands. He had met the young man to set the Christmas exam, and they had ended up arguing about politics. “‘Independence is a failed dream bankrupting the province.’ He actually said that. A man entrusted with the education of young minds. He doesn’t even seem to regret it. ‘The dream is dead. It’s a new century.’ Such cynicism, and he isn’t even thirty.”

  Vien’s palms were upturned, his arms stretched out. Jesus on the Mount, thought Luc. Or perhaps at the Last Supper. Only this Jesus had one eye pointing the wrong way.

  “You’re preaching to the converted,” Luc said.

  Vien paused. “Sorry. But he really gets under my skin. And the worst thing is, the kids love him.” He removed his glasses for a wipe. “Go figure. A boy in a pinstripe suit.”

  Vien slid onto the bench across from him. Their knees touched and they both swivelled, like magnets pushing off each other.

  “We’re getting old.”

  Vien put his glasses back on and frowned. “What a thing to say.”

  Luc shrugged and pointed to the white hairs on his chin, then at Vien’s grey stubble. “The body does not lie.”

  “It’s not our hair that counts.” Vien thumped his chest with a fist. “It’s this.”

  Luc had to laugh. Good old Vien. He patted the teacher’s hand. “They’ll never take us alive, Vien.”

  Vien pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “You okay, Luc?”

  “Could be better.” Luc looked down and tapped the file Vien had laid on the table. “You planning to mark these while we eat?”

  “No,” said Vien, “I brought them in case you were late. But why would you be late? You live around the corner.”

  Luc made a face. “Not for long. I just came from a rental on Rose de Lima. One bedroom. Guess how much they want?”

  “You’re moving?” Vien asked, taken aback.

  Luc nodded.

  “But you just did that.”

  Luc shrugged and signalled to the waitress. The service was slow today.

  “The place didn’t work out?” Vien persisted. “I thought you were so pleased with it.”

  “It overlooks the tracks, Serge. You saw it. Ever tried sleeping beside railway tracks? Let alone working. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Well, I do,” said Vien. “A writer in that house? It’s too perfect for words. Gabrielle Roy’s probably chuckling in her grave.”

  Luc folded his arms. “Let her chuckle. She’s resting in peace. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since I signed the lease.”

  Vien grinned a little too suggestively. Luc decided to ignore it.

  “It’s a great setting for a novel, Vien,” he allowed, “but not for a life. Really not. Trust me.”

  “How’s your literary agent?”

  Luc didn’t look up. He was flipping his knife back and forth on the paper placemat. The names of the businesses printed on it started to swim.

  “You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?”

  Luc stopped flipping.

  Vien’s eyebrows rose, forming a quaint gable above his face. “You can’t do this to me, Luc. You two looked amazing together.”

  The waitress chose that moment to appear with two glasses of water. Luc picked up a glass tentatively, then put it down again. Ice in November. His teeth ached just to think of it. This waitress was older than the one with the salon tan who’d served them last time. She seemed to be missing a few teeth and consequently smiled less. Luc did not need to consult the menu. He knew exactly what he wanted.

  “Un hamburger, all-dress,” he said, in his best franglais. As the grim-mouthed waitress scribbled his order, he added a side of onion rings. For old times’ sake.

  Vien ordered the house salad.

  “That’s all you’re having?” It was the first time Luc had seen anyone, let alone Serge Vien, order something green in this place.

  Vien patted the bulge at his waist. “Trying to slim down.”

  After the waitress left, Vien asked again about Marie-Soleil, but Luc made it plain that he didn’t want to talk about it. So Vien switched the conversation to himself. He had met someone, he confided. She was Ukrainian, and her name was Anya. He smiled as he pronounced it, a Ukrainian version of Hannah. Her last name had twelve letters and was unpronounceable. He spelled it. K-u-s-z-n-i-r-e-c-k-y-j.

  Anya’s daughter Kateryna was in one of his classes. On the first day of the fall semester, he’d simply called her Katy K. He had met his share of diff
icult names over the years. Katy K’s was too difficult even to attempt.

  She was scoring perfect grades in the sciences and in math, but barely passing Vien’s history course. It was a question of language. She’d been in Canada for only two years. She was fluent in Ukrainian, obviously, and Russian, but had only just begun to learn French.

  “Her mother came to my office. It was the morning after the Lanctôt reading, actually.”

  When the short blonde with the electric-blue eyes knocked on his office door that day, it had seemed like fate. “I’d been with you the night before,” Vien admitted shyly. “You seemed so happy with your new place and your new friend.” The following day, he had driven out to Katy’s apartment in the east end to offer his tutoring services. The next week, after the tutorial, Katy’s mother invited him to stay for dinner as a token of thanks for all the help he’d been giving her daughter.

  “The rest is history,” said Vien with a wink. “She’s divorced. A doctor by training, working as a nurse at Saint-Luc Hospital while they figure out the professional equivalencies. It’s awful how we treat people like her. She’s got qualifications coming out of her ears, and her French is quite decent.”

  Luc looked up, surprised.

  “She’s also an amazing cook,” he said, flushing with something that looked like pride. He was becoming a connoisseur of Ukrainian cuisine. He sat back on the bench and they both surveyed the room, inhaling the familiar odours of coffee kept too long on the burner and reheated grease. “I should bring her to the Green Spot, don’t you think? Give her a taste of Quebec?”

  “It might scare her off.”

  Vien gave him a look. “She’s pretty strong. And besides, she told me she wants to learn more about my homeland.”

  Luc smiled. He had rarely seen his old friend so animated.

  “Maybe I’ll wait until spring, though,” Vien said. “Saint-Henri looks better then.” He paused and scratched his chin. “By the way, I’ve been thinking of moving back to town. My place in Longueuil is on the market. They’re turning all those old factories in Pointe-Saint-Charles into condos. Maybe I could find something along the canal. That would be a change. I could walk to work. Think of it,” he said, “no more bridges to cross.”

  “Or burn.”

  Vien honked.

  They fell silent. The unsmiling waitress set down their food and walked away. Vien watched Luc from across the table. His wayward eye had watched Luc during two of the most painful episodes of his life. When it counted, Vien had been there. In the years immediately following the death of Luc’s father, and now, as his marriage was collapsing, Serge Vien, his very own Sancho Panza, was right beside him.

  Ghosts were hovering over them. He had sat in this booth with his father forty years ago; and after that with Vien, two lonely boys finding solace in each other’s company. Those moments at the Green Spot were part of him, and now this moment was part of him too. This moment, when Vien had talked about the birth of love and Luc had spoken of its death.

  “Is this being fifty?”

  Vien blinked.

  “Seriously,” said Luc. “I turned my life inside out, and for what? I still can’t tell you. Don’t think you’re any better, my friend. You did exactly the same thing with Suzanne.”

  “Not exactly,” said Vien, with some irritation. “I was fortyeight at the time. And Suzanne turned my life inside out, not the other way round.”

  “Even so,” said Luc. “Mid-life. It’s like being a teenager, don’t you think? Disorder. Distress. Maybe worse than being a teenager. My father killed himself at fifty.”

  Vien gazed steadily at him. Luc knew he wouldn’t turn away. Vien understood despair. He had lived through the dissolution of a marriage. He too must have faced the terrible thought I will die alone.

  “I think I understand my father a little better now,” said Luc.

  Vien nodded.

  Luc rubbed his tired eyes. “I got it wrong, you see, in my novels. Really, fundamentally, wrong.”

  He told Vien about the conversation with Lyse.

  “But it’s fiction, right?” said Vien amiably. “Who cares if you missed the mark? The whole point is to confabulate.” He was eating one of Luc’s deep-fried rings, picking the batter off delicately with his teeth the way they used to do as kids, until all that was left was the pearly, translucent string of onion inside.

  To confabulate. Yes. But then, what were the layers of truth Luc had thought he was peeling back with such care and precision?

  “How could you have known?” Vien went on, wiping grease from his fingers. “She kept it from you. And no one ever really knows his father.”

  Luc nodded. Vien had recently told him the story of his own father’s death. He had received a phone call a decade ago from a government office in Maine informing him that he, Serge Vien, was the sole beneficiary under his father’s last will and testament, even though he hadn’t spoken to his old man since his fourteenth birthday.

  Vien was probably right. Fathers were by their very nature impenetrable. Luc was flipping cutlery again, a coffee spoon this time. He missed a catch, and the spoon clattered off his saucer onto the floor before he could save it. He understood very little about Roland Lévesque. He never had, but at least he now knew just how little. The old stories had been partial truths, or simply wrong. Everything that had ever happened to him had to be revised, each memory of his childhood revisited, his father recast in a harsh new light. But even this was grossly inadequate. It was impossible to sum him up. It was impossible to sum anyone up. Luc couldn’t even figure out the movements of his own pathetic heart. “What an asshole I’ve been,” he said. “But what’s done is done, I guess. Calling myself names isn’t going to help. The real question is what to do.”

  “Go back to Hannah?” Vien offered. “She’s a good woman.”

  Luc shook his head.

  “Did you even try?”

  Luc said nothing.

  “You know they’re back,” said Vien, glancing at his watch. “Hugo’s looking great, don’t you think? Toronto did him a world of good.”

  Luc sat very still. They were back. He let the fact sink in. And of course Hugo would have seen his homeroom teacher. But he could have managed a call. At the very least, Hannah could have. Then he remembered. There was no telephone at Saint-Augustin Street. The only way to contact him was to knock on his door. It wasn’t as if he’d made it easy for them.

  “So, he hasn’t let you in on what he’s been up to?” Vien said. He was trying to cheer Luc up, trying to engage him. He didn’t realize he was turning a knife in Luc’s side with every word. Luc opened his mouth to say something, then appeared to change his mind.

  “But I shouldn’t be the one telling you this. I confess, I organized a little surprise for you both today.” He narrowed his eyes as he looked at the front of the restaurant, where a small cluster of people were sheltering from the rain.

  Hugo was there, looking small and wet. He was wearing his school uniform, and his old black knapsack was slung over his shoulders. Vien stood up and waved. Hugo spotted him and took a step forward, his face uplifted, happy. But then his smile faltered and he stopped short.

  Vien called out his name, but Hugo had already turned. Clutching the straps of his knapsack to steady his load, he bolted for the door.

  Luc scrambled to his feet. He raced up the aisle past the customers in their booths, past the waitresses, past the guy behind the counter, no longer winking as he ran by. The bell jangled as the door slammed behind him.

  Rain bit into Luc’s skin. As he followed Hugo around the corner to Greene Avenue, out of the shelter of the restaurant, an icy wind hit him square in the chest. The adrenalin burst was already receding and he’d started to pant. Hugo was as quick as a hare. The distance between them was widening. He had to catch up, had to tell his son that he was sorry, profoundly sorry, for everything he’d done. He had to let Hugo know that there was no reason anymore to run away.

  Luc h
ad always thought of Hugo as unathletic, a lounger without speed or endurance, yet here he was, easily outstripping his old man. The schoolbag bounced unrelentingly on his back. Running with it must hurt like hell.

  He chased his son past the community garden at the end of the block, its plots bare, waiting for winter. The pavement glistened, slick with rain. Water was streaming down Luc’s face. A little farther on, a bike path intersected the street. When Hugo reached it, he turned west into a grove of trees. His dark jacket, made darker still by the wet, melted into the gathering shadows. For a moment, Luc panicked at losing sight of him, but then he too arrived at the bike path. His lungs were burning now; his burger-laden stomach was heaving. His son was receding into a distant speck.

  Luc’s chest felt strange. For some moments, his breastbone had been tingling. He’d ignored it in the rush to catch up, but now there was pain, acute pain, ripping through his chest. He looked down, expecting to see … what? A hole? And through the hole a poor, aging heart? He touched his leather vest and the frayed denim shirt underneath, which strained just a little these days across his chest and belly. His feet stopped their desperate sprint.

  “Hugo …”

  It came out weakly. His son would never hear it. Hugo kept right on pounding, hard and steady.

  Luc bent over, gasping for breath. Rain dripped down his face, turning salty and warm as it mingled with his sweat. He dropped to his knees on the bike path and bent forward, slowly, slowly, until his forehead was in a puddle on the asphalt. He had no idea how long he knelt there in the water. Time was irrelevant in the battle to inhale.

  At some point, a pair of sneakers appeared at the puddle’s edge—red Converse runners just like his own, only a couple of sizes smaller, with dirty, frayed laces. Rain had darkened the canvas. Drops bounced off the rubber toes, which shone. Luc’s heart leapt at the sight. The rest of him didn’t move, however, remaining bent in this odd but comforting posture. His lungs were functional again, thank God, emptying and filling as if breathing were the most ordinary thing in the world.