It was his turn to laugh. Quite foolishly, he said, “Even if I didn’t want to, I’d have to make you pay up.”
“Well,” she said with a small frown, “I should hope so.”
They dozed for a while, then she talked to him about her work, which obliged her to travel constantly. She spoke of long evenings spent in hotel rooms and bed-and-breakfasts. She lived a very quiet life, detested bars full of fat pickup artists whose hands were on your thigh after two minutes of conversation. Her locums often took her back to the same areas, and over the years she had made a few friends and acquaintances here and there, which provided her with some distraction, but too often boredom reared its ugly head; she fought it off as best she could with books and television. But despite all the inconveniences, she liked her peripatetic life. It gave her a sense of freedom.
“Now tell me about you,” she said, pressing her lips against his.
Charles was less forthcoming about his past, but he did tell her a bit about his childhood, about the circumstances under which he’d been adopted, about Lucie and Fernand and the job they’d given him at the hardware store. And he told her that he’d dabbled in writing, and eight months ago had even published a novel.
“Really?” she said, impressed. “A real novel? I’d love to read it. What’s it called?”
“It was a very bad novel,” was all he replied. “I burned all the copies. I might write another some day.”
“All the copies?” she repeated in astonishment. “But that’s terrible!”
“Even the manuscript.”
“You’ll live to regret that.”
They made love again.
“When can we see each other again?” he asked her as he was leaving.
“Tomorrow morning, if you can come early. I have to go up to Malartic for two weeks. Can you be here?”
“If both my legs were broken I would drag myself here,” he said with a wide smile.
Charles had been barking for sixty-three days. He had become so good at it, he could have given elocution lessons to dogs. The job, however, was beginning to get him down. The magic of those solitary nights was wearing thin, as was the thrill of catching canine-owning miscreants. He felt that the day was not far off when he would tire of this bizarre life in which he slept while the rest of the world worked, and worked when everyone else was asleep. He missed his friends, and in the past few weeks his friends seemed to have drifted away from him. And Céline, whom he was seeing much less often than usual, missed him more and more, and he could foresee the day when she, too, would let him go.
He saw his stunning pharmacist twice more after that unforgettable day when he’d knocked on her door to deliver her notice of offence. She came back from Malartic and left almost immediately for Moncton, New Brunswick. She called him a few times when she was depressed, a mood that came over her more often, she confessed during one call, since she had met him. One night she tried to persuade him to call in sick and join her for a weekend, and for a moment he was tempted. But he declined when he thought of Céline, and Aglaé, wisely, didn’t push it. Charles had made it clear to her since their first encounter that he had a girlfriend.
“I’d be surprised if you didn’t,” she’d said to him, with a somewhat sad smile. “I’ll bet you’re madly in love with her, too. Oh, well, I’ll just have to take what I can get, and count myself lucky to have you at all.”
“No luckier than I am,” Charles had replied, smothering her with kisses.
To his amazement, his infidelity caused him no great, stinging remorse, and that, oddly enough, bothered him. Did he not still love Céline? He was fairly certain that he did. Why, then, did the thought of how he was behaving towards her not cause him some degree of shame? His misconduct hardly bothered him at all, evoked little more in him than a desire to laugh out loud. Worst of all, he had absolutely no desire to stop; no woman had ever given him so much pleasure before. Did all men, as they got older, become such egotistical and unscrupulous womanizers, liars living double lives, hopeless swordsmen ever in search of a piece of skirt with which to comfort themselves? Can a man ever really love a woman, truly and deeply?
One afternoon in March, he posed these questions to Parfait Michaud. The notary had asked him to help remove some storm windows whose frames had rotted, and replace them with new ones. They worked for about an hour, buffeted by a damp, icy wind, with the tips of their fingers tingling painfully, their eyes tearing up, their cheeks stinging with cold, and both of them bitterly cursing the winter and its attendant discomforts. When Charles, frozen stiff, carried the last of the old windows to the garbage, Amélie came out into the yard to see how the work was progressing. She was wrapped in a thick purple coat and had a cap stuck on her head. To her husband’s great surprise, she seemed satisfied with their work. She turned to Charles, who was shivering beside her, and gave him a warm embrace.
“You poor lamb,” she said, “come inside and get warm. I’ve made a pot of cranberry spiced tea.”
Charles and Parfait went into the kitchen and conscientiously drank the steaming tea and ate warm, sweet-smelling pecan muffins. Afterwards the notary invited Charles into his office for a somewhat more invigorating pick-me-up.
After draining his second snifter of cognac, Charles felt an irresistible need to pour out his feelings; the Courvoisier was coursing through his veins, pushing the winter a thousand kilometres away, and his soul had become a kind of ripe fruit, cooked by the sun, ready to burst open to let its warm pulp run out. The notary, whose instinct for the most delicate disclosures had been finely tuned by his profession, had a vague idea of the subject his young friend wanted to broach, and gave him an opening by asking after Céline.
“She’s fine,” Charles answered, although with a slight tremor in his voice.
“And the two of you are … that’s all going well, too?”
“Ye-es, as well as can be expected.”
“Well, obviously. As everyone knows, absolute perfection is not to be found in this world.”
“True enough,” Charles replied. “And you might say that the older you get, the more imperfect the world seems to become. And the more imperfect I become, too.”
“You aren’t the first person to make that observation, my dear Charles. Many others have discovered the same thing.”
“I’ll be okay as long as I don’t live to be a hundred!”
“Something like that. At some point,” Michaud sighed, “we make our peace with ourselves and simply turn our thoughts to other things.”
Charles leaned abruptly forward, his face bright red.
“Tell me, Monsieur Michaud, there’s one thing that’s had me stumped for quite a while now.”
“Charles, how many times have I asked you to call me by my first name, even if it doesn’t suit me all that well? Okay, sorry for interrupting. What is it that’s been bothering you? You have my full attention.”
“It’s me, Parfait. I’m what’s bothering me.”
Charles told him in great detail about his encounters with the pharmacist, sharing with him his own astonishment, not to say alarm, at the ease with which he was able to reconcile his sublime rolls in the hay with Aglaé with his deep and abiding love for Céline. Wasn’t such a thing unnatural?
Parfait Michaud reached for the decanter of cognac and recharged both their glasses.
“An interesting question, my friend. I’ll have to wax philosophical about it, or at least try to. Yes, it is unnatural, because true love must be sufficient unto itself. The problem is that most men are like you, including myself.”
“That I know,” Charles sniggered.
The notary shrugged his shoulders and went on.
“I’ve been kicking around this planet for fifty-eight years now. I’ve had plenty of time to think about this famous and infamous question of love. My thinking hasn’t got me very far, but I have nevertheless come to certain conclusions. It seems to me, my dear young man, that there are three ages of love. There is first
the Ardent Age, in which all one’s desires are fulfilled and so it’s easy and natural to be faithful to a single partner; one isn’t even aware of an alternative. That’s when lovers believe their bonds are eternal. It’s a charming time. Then comes the Tender Age, when the attachment we feel for the other is still there, still deep, but it no longer conceals its limitations or smooths over its rough patches. One begins to appreciate that the shared life can sometimes be an uphill battle, calling for nerves of steel and a great deal of self-denial. It’s understandable that, at this stage, many people take to looking around for that wild magic they no longer find at home.”
“That’s not my case!” Charles protested.
“And then comes the Ice Age,” continued the notary, apparently without having heard, “when you go on living with the other more out of habit and convenience than because of any emotional attachment. Almost all couples reach this age — those, that is, who haven’t already split up. Amélie and I have certainly reached it, as you have no doubt gathered. A tiny minority manage to remain stuck in the Tender Age. Those who pretend to remain forever in the Ardent Age should be given stiff fines. You ask me where I think you are in your own life? Well, only you can say, Charles. Certainly the three ages I’ve just described to you are gross generalizations, a blueprint, if you will, that won’t apply to all couples. They are just the fruit of my modest reflections, the musings of an amateur in such matters, nothing more. You may be in a kind of transition phase at the moment, or outside the blueprint altogether, in some age that I haven’t seen yet, I don’t know.”
“I’m certain that I love Céline, and that she loves me,” Charles said, his fists trembling, his eyes aflame. “And we love making love, I assure you.”
“Ah, well, of that I have no doubt,” Michaud replied, laughing.
“It’s just this bloody Aglaé, I can’t get her out of my mind. Ah, the whole thing is driving me crazy!”
“If I have any advice to give you, Charles, it’s this: don’t you and Céline get married too hastily. Let life ripen you up a bit first — it’ll show you a whole range of things about yourselves that will surprise the hell out of both of you. It’s all very well to have moral scruples — they’ve been drilled into you since the day you were born. But eventually you’ll come to realize that they’re really nothing more than trinkets that people hang on themselves when it’s convenient, when they want to look respectable, and which they take off the moment a situation no longer calls for them. Oh, God, listen to me! I’m a corrupter of youth! It must be the cognac talking. Will you have another drop?”
Charles left the notary’s house not much wiser than when he’d entered it. All he’d learned was that he was a man like any other, and that he couldn’t stop himself from seeing the pharmacist again. In fact, he saw her a few days later.
It was because of her — and a certain pill taken by a city employee — that he lost his job and got another under the most unfavourable circumstances imaginable.
A month earlier, Roger Laprotte, a.k.a. Dopey, had undergone a spectacular psychological metamorphosis in a matter of two weeks. A doctor had prescribed for him a new type of antidepressant that had been praised in all the medical journals. Laprotte underwent a series of treatments designed to level him off at a dosage of forty milligrams per day. One of the benefits of the new regimen became manifest almost immediately. The psychological slumps that had transformed the poor man into a heap of inert matter, and that had earned him the sarcastic pity of everyone around him, started coming farther and farther apart, and eventually disappeared altogether. But that wasn’t the end of the changes that took place.
He also became charged with immeasurable energy. He arrived at the office at the crack of dawn every day and stayed until well past quitting time; he went through work like a forest fire through a stand of conifers. His co-workers, at first astonished, then admiring, became gradually almost alarmed, and speculated at great length as to the source of these extraordinary changes; some thought he was doing cocaine, although he didn’t have that high-energy stare, or the acid expression, or the nervous gestures often seen in coke addicts. In fact, he emanated a smiling, monumental sense of calm. A kind of tranquil jubilation existed within him, a joy that apparently had nothing to do with anything around him. Was he overdosing? Were these unexpected side effects? Laprotte’s very soul seemed to have been transformed into a solid block of polished granite, impermeable, indestructible. He had become, in one body, more of an inspector than all the other inspectors in the world combined.
It was at this juncture that the director retired. Naturally, Laprotte replaced him. Within weeks the Taxation Service was renowned throughout Verdun for its energy and efficiency. The new director kept an eye on everything, knew everything, ran everything. Favouritism disappeared; lax interpretations of the rules became as outmoded as kerosene lamps and silent movies. City councillors and even the mayor tried to put some restraints on this newfound ardour, but they failed miserably. They could be seen leaving the new director’s office red-faced with shame, annihilated by his inarguable logic and rigorous asceticism. It was obvious to them that the man needed to be ousted and replaced. But to do that, a pretext had to be found.
Whenever Laprotte and Charles ran into each other, the former inspector continued to show his old amiability, but now it was more like jovial Jupiter greeting a poor, club-footed shepherd.
“So, Charles, my boy, six more dogs this week than last? Excellent! Let’s do even better next week, shall we?”
“Yes, Mr. Laprotte.”
The disaster happened on Friday the 27th of March 1987. As he did every Friday, Charles was out delivering his notices of fines to the city’s tax evaders. The previous evening, Aglaé had informed him that she would be in Montreal that day, waiting to hear about a new locum, and that she would very much like to see him. Charles had explained to her that it would be complicated, because that night he had to go to a birthday party for Blonblon, one of his friends.
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, however, overcome by desire, he decided to take a break and drop in on the pharmacist. Twenty minutes later the Taxation Service received an urgent call for Charles that required his immediate attention. The office tried to reach him on his pager, but the apparatus was attached to his belt and his pants were lying in a heap on the living-room floor, while their owner was twenty feet away engaged in an activity that rendered him oblivious to any and all outside interruptions.
Half an hour went by. After four or five attempts, the Taxation Service operator expressed surprise at Charles’s silence, loudly enough that Roger Laprotte, who happened to be passing her desk at that moment, overheard her. He asked her what the problem was. The incident seemed to him to be odd enough to require clarification. Within minutes, five municipal employees were patrolling the streets of Verdun, looking for Charles Thibodeau’s little Honda. At three thirty-two, they came across it parked on rue Desmarchais. The director, when informed of the fact, became thoughtful. He paced back and forth in his office, chewing a stick of cinnamon gum and trying to think of a way to follow up on this lead (after all, they couldn’t go knocking on every door up and down the street!) until a casual remark Charles had made a few days earlier came back to him. Laprotte had the registry of fines brought to him, flipped through a few pages, and emitted a strangled cry of exultation. An instant later he was in his car, hastening to rue Desmarchais.
Charles, meanwhile, was stretched out on top of Aglaé, slowly descending from seventh to sixth heaven, and taking subtle and particular delight in each stage of the journey. When they heard the doorbell ring, neither of them moved.
“It’s probably the super, wanting the rent,” Aglaé sighed after the third ring. “If he thinks there’s no one home he might come in. I’d better go tell him to come back later.”
She donned her housecoat and straightened her hair. Whoever was at the door was tapping on it now with what sounded like a coin, and the small, dry sound brough
t a series of bizarre and frightening images to her mind: the pecking of small, insane birds attacking the building; the horrible ticking of a time bomb; the clicking finger bones of the undead, surging en masse from their graves to haunt the memories of their living counterparts …
“Who is it?” Aglaé called through the door.
“It’s Roger Laprotte, madame, the director of the Taxation Service. I would like to speak to one of my employees, Charles Thibodeau. No, no, madame, save your breath. I know he’s here. His car is parked in front of the building and I know of your relationship with him. With your permission, I will wait on the landing. Tell him I’m in no hurry.”
Horrified, the pharmacist returned to Charles and told him what Laprotte had said. After a moment’s consideration, Charles told her to let him in. “Tell him to wait in the kitchen while I get dressed. I don’t like confrontations on landings. And for heaven’s sake, stop crying. That won’t help anything.”
“Good afternoon, my friend,” said Laprotte, when Charles came down the corridor buttoning his shirt. “Thanks for not keeping me cooling my heels. You know how much work I have to get done in a day. I am very sorry to find you here when you should be on your beat making sure our citizens obey the law. As you are aware, your probation period isn’t supposed to end for another three months. Well, sir, it just ended. I’m letting you go, as of today. I’m very sorry, I assure you — you were one of my best employees. But what can I do? Your behaviour leaves me no choice. If I let you off this time, I’d have to turn a blind eye to everyone in the department, and my authority there wouldn’t be worth a pinch of coon-shit.”
Charles looked at him for a moment, attempted a smile, but managed nothing more than a wry grimace.
“Yes, you’re right,” he said with stoic calm. “I’ve been playing with fire, and it serves me right if I get burned.”
“I’m glad you see the situation so clearly.”
“But it’s all my fault, Mr. Laprotte,” sobbed Aglaé. “He didn’t want to come here. I talked him into it.”
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