He spoke to no one about his bizarre experience for fear of being teased. The sensation had lasted only a few seconds, but its effect was much longer-lasting; although still a young man, Charles had admitted into his anguished consciousness the notion that time presses relentlessly on, and that it was necessary to extract as much happiness as possible from each fleeting minute, and the feeling never left him. To waste time suddenly seemed to him a monstrous crime.
Consequently, when Stéphanie mentioned during a conversation a few days later that the father of a friend of hers edited a small weekly newspaper in a part of Montreal called Villeray, Charles swallowed his pride, admitted to her that the job in the magazine that he’d been waiting for didn’t seem to be in any hurry to materialize, and asked her to put him in touch with her friend.
That same day he went to visit the friend, Charlotte, who immediately telephoned her father at his office.
Victor Vanier adored his only daughter; she could have got him to swallow spoons for her, or slither across the room under the rug. What he also liked, and with almost the same passion, was to have competent employees with the lowest possible salaries. He spoke briefly to Charles on the phone, then told him to be at the Villeray Siren the next morning at eight o’clock. The week before, one of his journalists had managed to wrest a pay increase from him, the second in fourteen years, and Vanier had taken it like a heart attack. For the sake of his own health, he had decided to fire the bastard, and now here was this Charles fellow who seemed to have come along to restore his equilibrium.
The next day Charles showed up at the Villeray Siren with a copy of The Quiet Rip-Off under his arm, which he showed to the businessman. Vanier flipped through a few pages, enough to see that the style was more than passable and that there were no glaring errors in the French, which pleased him enormously, since the majority of the pen-pushers he’d hired till then had given the impression that they hadn’t made it past primary school. He sensed a windfall. A long conversation with Charles convinced him that the young man was clever, resourceful, and ambitious; with careful handling, he could be a godsend. He would have to shape him, but that didn’t seem difficult since the lad was obviously eager to learn the ropes. Because of his inexperience, he could only offer Charles a job for two days a week, at forty dollars a day. The quickness with which Charles accepted the position made Vanier like him all the more.
Charles would begin work in two days’; time. Happy as a clam, he went straight to the sporting goods store to announce that he was quitting, news that was not taken well, as he might have expected. But the feeling of inadequacy he’d been having when hanging out with Stéphanie and her brother began to dissipate. And since it never rains but it pours, that same day Bernard Délicieux called Charles to announce triumphantly that he had finally managed to get him a position at Artist’s Life. The charming seventy-year-old woman who for twenty-two years had been bravely writing the bleeding-hearts column had fallen down some stairs and fractured her wrist, and so would be unable to work for several months. When he’d heard of the accident, Délicieux had gone straight to the editor and remarked, à propos of nothing, that, not to say anything against the excellent old dear, the column had become a tad moribund over the years, and that this might be a good opportunity to give it a bit of a youthful kick, and he happened to know of a young man who would be brilliant at it, and he was only twenty-two years old!
The editor had laughed in his face, but then (oh, the mysteries of the human brain!) the next second had thought it was a good idea. Although there had been a long period of mistrust between the two men, the editor had slowly found himself appreciating Délicieux more and more, and had even taken to asking him for advice once in a while. Charles could come in to show him some samples of his work anytime.
“So what would I have to do?” Charles asked, perplexed.
“You edit questions sent in to the magazine, and you write the replies to them. In other words, you make up the questions and then you answer them. Nothing to it. I could do it in my sleep. Okay, I can tell you’re still confused. Come down to the office now and I’ll show you how it’s done. In half an hour I’ll make you an eminent psychologist. It’ll be a good chance for me to introduce you to the boss. Just be yourself, and be confident. You have to give the impression that you could take on work that’s a thousand times harder than this.”
Sitting in the journalist’s office, Charles listened nervously but with full attention as Délicieux explained his duties.
“People,” Délicieux said, “especially women, love to read the bleeding-hearts column, but whether out of laziness or for fear of being recognized, I don’t know which, they are very reluctant to express themselves on paper. And so, from time to time, the flow of letters slackens a bit, and when that happens you have to put your shoulder to the wheel and come up with some real doozies. It can be a lot of fun.” Délicieux himself had written the lovelorn column for a women’s magazine a few years before and he’d enjoyed the heck out of it. “But there are rules to follow, and if you step outside them, all hell will break loose.” There were, he said, five basic rules:
Use common sense.
Employ a mixture of cruelty and compassion in order to appeal to the masochist and the wimp in all of us.
Take your letters to the very edge of vulgarity, but never cross the line: as long as it doesn’t go too far, a juicy little detail sucks the readers in — and on that point, the grand old dame who used to write the column had been coming up short for the past few years. However, out-and-out obscenity will completely turn off your female readership.
Keep your answers practical, concrete, and down to earth. And avoid like the plague anything that reeks of philosophy or any other useless, smoke-and-mirror nonsense.
Be concise. Long letters or responses make readers turn the page. Besides, you don’t have much space for the column.
Charles would be writing as Maryse: the column had always been called “Letters to Maryse,” and there was no way that would change.
“So, are you okay with that?” Délicieux asked, standing up; he had to leave to conduct an interview. “Tomorrow I want you to bring me in two questions and two replies, and we’ll go over them together.”
“Tomorrow?” Charles said, fearfully.
“Hey, have a bit of faith in yourself, Charlie my boy. With all the talent I know you’ve got, you could do this with your hands tied behind your back. And just think, a week from now you’ll be consoling every forlorn lover in Quebec — at fifty bucks a column!”
Charles hurried from the office and went into the nearest newsstand to buy every magazine he could find with a bleeding-hearts column, and settled down to study his new craft. Halfway through the night, his downstairs neighbour could still hear Charles’s typewriter clacking away; the poor man got up, made himself a cup of herbal tea, then, gripped by a sudden wave of anger, started pounding on his ceiling with a broom handle. Charles gave a start, then heaved a sigh of resignation and carried on working with a pen. The next morning, closing in on eleven o’clock, he brought Délicieux the following:
Dear Maryse,
I’m fifty-one years old, a civil servant with the City of Montreal, and I live with my mother who is old and not very well. I make a good living and I don’t drink, although I smoke occasionally I always thought that I was destined to live alone, I mean without a wife or children, and I thought I was okay with that. But about two months ago I met a neighbour at the dry cleaner’s and I could tell that she was interested in me and I must say I felt the same about her. Dorothy is forty-four, divorced (from an alcoholic) with no children, is great-looking and in good health. We have already begun to talk about getting married. She has told me quite frankly that she would be happy living with me but under no circumstances would she want my mother living with us. She says that my mother would interfere with our intimacy, and in the end would break up our marriage. What do you think?
Alonzo
Dear Alonzo
,
I think your friend is right. Talk to your mother; explain to her the possible consequences of her presence in your new household. You’ve already devoted a huge part of your life to her, and I congratulate you on that. It’s a rare mother who gets such eloquent proof of her son’s love! She will surely understand your predicament and readily agree to move into a seniors’; residence, especially since so many of them nowadays provide a caring and comfortable environment.
Maryse
Dear Maryse,
My husband and I have been married for fifteen years. I’m thirty-nine and he’s forty-one. At first we were passionately in love and very happy together. Unfortunately, for the past five years my husband has seemed uninterested in me in a sexual way. At first I thought he was having physical problems, and in fact that’s what he told me was wrong. But recently I’ve awakened twice in the night and found him masturbating in bed. He isn’t having physical problems: he’s rejecting me. Is he seeing another woman? Maybe. I have no real reason to think so, and I haven’t had the courage to ask him. What should I do?
A Married Widow
Dear Married Widow,
You’ve already answered your own question, for the most part. Your husband is in perfect health and his sexuality is functioning normally You’re surprised by his lack of passion towards you. Might that not be because of a certain coldness on your part? A lack of interest in his problems? Or because you’ve gradually allowed dull routine to infiltrate your sexual relationship? Sit down and have a frank discussion with him about your worries, and admit to him your shortcomings. He’ll admit his, if he has any. Your relationship will soon perk up, if I may put it like that.
Maryse
The journalist looked up, smiling radiantly.
“Bravo, Charles! I knew you had it in you! Everything’s perfect, except for one small thing: I’m talking about the last bit in your response to the Married Widow, where you say, ‘if I may put it like that.’ Never, and I mean never, make jokes in a bleeding-hearts column. Bleeding-hearts columns have to be as serious and straight-laced as a letter from the Pope. If not, your readers will think you’re making fun of them — of course you are, but they must never know that, Charles. And that’s the end of our collaboration! Let’s go have a drink to celebrate the great career that lies ahead of you!”
Victor Vanier, the founding editor of the Villeray Siren, was a man of great resourcefulness who enjoyed a high reputation in his part of the city as well as in certain sectors of neighbouring parts. He was justly known as one who enjoyed high living and was very partial to the pleasures of the table. Nothing made him salivate like a huge slice of tourtière swimming in grease and buried under a mound of glistening Heinz ketchup. The name of his newspaper always inspired in him a deep pride, and he considered his editorship of it the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him.
With remarkable agility, Vanier played on the two meanings of the word “siren,” giving it deep, semantic richness by planting, in the top right corner of the front page, a drawing of a beautiful, well-endowed mermaid holding in her right hand the bold device that had stopped the hand of many a newspaper thief with the journal’s motto:
Charm and Vigilance
That being said, however, the pages of the Siren were filled for the most part with tepid articles of purely local interest; simple, practical pieces culled from the Keystone wire service; and advertisements for brassieres, used-car ads, and notices of supermarket sales.
Charles worked at the Siren on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The paper was printed Wednesday night and distributed on Thursday. He quickly learned how to lay out pages on a tabloid grid — four pages to a folio sheet — by first placing the ads in their proper spots and then filling the gaps between them with articles either expanded or cut to fit the available space. When desperate, he filled small holes with a “Thought du Jour” or a “Your Weekly Smile” or one of a sheaf of poems supplied by two local poets whose struggles with the Muse were, it seemed, regularly successful.
With time he learned how to toss off short pieces inspired by events of the week, to track down gossip and make it sound like news, to conduct telephone interviews with local community leaders (who usually proved to be indefatigably talkative), to feign deep interest in the most mundane and insipid topics, which sometimes put interviewees sufficiently at ease that they might say something interesting.
Victor Vanier, meanwhile, would make the rounds of the local businesses selling advertising space, an essential task in a weekly publication like the Siren, which was distributed free of charge. Advertising was its sole source of income. When he wasn’t out visiting clients, he was on the telephone, using all his charm on his regular customers. His assistant in this work was Francine, a dry, slight, ageless woman of a sensitive character, a total chatterbox who also functioned as the weekly’s receptionist and secretary.
When the ad spaces were filled, Victor Vanier sat himself down before his computer and composed his weekly editorial, in which he generously shared the wisdom he had accumulated over his twenty-seven-year career.
Vanier vigorously encouraged sports, and was therefore fiercely opposed to video arcades, which he viewed as dens of iniquity for the young. He was tolerant about smoking, so long as it was done in moderation, and he hated anything that resembled progressive thinking. His two political idols were the Leader of the Opposition in Ottawa, a loudmouth who, for reasons unknown, had been nicknamed Flabotte, and Anatole Flingon, his favourite commentator, a political science professor at McGill University who was much in demand as a speaker at certain types of conferences, and was famous for his corrosive style and his tendency to take cut-and-dried positions on complicated issues. Both Flabotte and Flingon were ferocious opponents of Quebec separatists, who for the past twenty years had been disturbing the country’s peace with their dark plots and continual recriminations.
Charles loved his work. It was almost like being a writer. Despite the admittedly narrow influence of his activities, he sometimes had the feeling that he was making a small difference in his community. When he banged out a short piece that wasn’t too badly put together, that here and there showed a bit of spunk or a nice turn of phrase, and then saw it reproduced seventeen thousand times — the usual print run for the Villeray Siren — a flutter of pride brought a smile of satisfaction to his lips, and he told himself that it was, after all, only a start. “They ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
On nights when the paper went to press he would often work well into the wee hours of the morning and end up sleeping in the office, since the metro would have stopped running and taxis were too expensive. Vanier had set up a camp cot in one of the storage rooms, and allowed Charles to use it whenever necessary.
“When Pierre Péladeau founded the Rosemont Journal, he would often sleep in the office,” Vanier told Charles, knowing it would kindle his zeal and flatter his self-esteem. “People who want to get ahead in life don’t sit around staring at a clock, do they, my boy? No. This is the only one way to get to the point where people are going to greet you with respect!”
Vanier himself would stretch out on the cot nights when one crisis seemed to follow another. But more often he used it when in need of a short nap after a long liquid lunch with a client.
Within a month of starting work at the journal, Charles had gained the complete confidence of his employer and even the occasional friendly nod from Francine, who had seen so many journalists come and go (since Victor Vanier paid so little, the paper was like a revolving door) that she had developed a stony indifference to her fleeting workmates.
On Thursdays and Fridays, when he was free of the Siren, Charles put on his bleeding-heart hat. Writing this column gave him even more pleasure than working at the newspaper, since he could indulge his imagination to its fullest and have the fruit of his labours appreciated by a much wider audience than that reached by Monsieur Vanier’s weekly; Artist’s Life, one of the flagships of the Québécor fleet of magazines, re
ached a market of more than a hundred thousand readers.
And these readers lost no time in appreciating Charles’s efforts. Three weeks after his first column appeared, the number of letters he received had doubled, and his boss had intimated the possibility of his receiving a raise in pay. He took his new responsibilities seriously, and began reading popular books on psychology, despite being ragged about it by Délicieux.
“It’s just that I don’t want to cause anybody any problems,” Charles explained to the newsman. “How would you feel if you found out that by giving someone some bad advice you had led them to commit suicide, or murder, or to get a divorce?”
“I’d feel totally fine about it,” Délicieux replied, “because during my long career I’m sure I must have caused all of those things many times. There are so many idiots out there who are incapable of reading two lines without getting confused that my articles must surely have provoked some damage.”
Charles shrugged and stuck to his humanitarian principles.
A month later, as a result of the “Letters to Maryse” column’s growing popularity, slightly more space was given to it in the magazine. When she learned of this development, the former columnist felt the rug being pulled out from under her and called the editor. The latter told her in effect that perhaps the time had come for her to redirect her many talents, but that the magazine would of course continue to value her services, if that was what she wished. What did she think, for example, of crossword puzzles?
The grand dame refused outright, and without ever having laid eyes on Charles, began nursing a smouldering hatred for him. Over the next few weeks, the editor received several letters from various sources criticizing Charles’s judgment and his use of vulgar language. The editor contented himself with a smile, and whenever he passed Charles in the office would pat him on the back or address him by his first name, an honour he very rarely accorded to his employees.
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