Document 1

by François Blais

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. You won’t go on a trip to Pennsylvania or anywhere else, and you won’t do anything else either. How could I say such a thing? Jude or you on your own would be a millstone for anyone, but together you’re like two millstones joined together, get it? I’m not saying that to be mean, and I’ve got nothing against Jude, but at some point you have to realize that—”

  “Yeah, fine, you’ve already told me your millstone story, I know all that, but if I’ve understood you right, you’re agreeing to help us because you’re sure you’ll never have to do it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I’ll accept your yes. We’re what today—July 24? The money should arrive in about a month. Two weeks after that, we’ll split and leave you the dog on our way past. I’ll take you at your word.”

  “What money?”

  “The money from the Arts Council for the book we’re writing. I’ve told you about it, but you must not have been listening.”

  “You won’t write any book.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “If you want.”

  “If you’re sure that we won’t write a book, will you agree to let us call it Justine Has a Huge Ass or Justine Has Stinky Feet?”

  “Sure. I can’t wait for my signed copy of Justine Has a Huge Ass!”

  “Well…I think we’d be happy to just call one chapter that. But we’re going to do it, and you’re going to get your signed copy.”

  “Cool.”

  “I’ll call you a couple of days before I bring Steve round.”

  “Steve?”

  “The dog.”

  “Right. Perfect.”

  Ò...28...Ò

  The Day of Big Surprises

  Steve quickly adapted to his new life as a pet dog. The idea of being taken care of, of seeing food fall from the sky at regular intervals, hasn’t damaged his self-esteem in the slightest. He’s accepted it as his due. A real welfare bum at heart. He even staged a mini-hunger strike one day when we gave him chicken-and-vegetable Orijen instead of beef. (But we stood firm and he cracked after fifteen minutes.) He looks a little less bony now that he’s put on a bit of weight, but, let’s be honest, he’s never going to win any beauty competitions. On the other hand, he’s as clever as a little monkey. He goes to find his leash when I say it’s time to go out; when I put a treat on his nose, he waits for my signal before snapping it up; he’s learning to play dead, but he’s not there yet. If we lived in a big city, we could get up a routine and put on a show in tourist areas. We’d get rich. Even though I’m the one who teaches him all his tricks, even though I’m the one who spoils him the most (I always let him finish my plate and I give him the remains of my drumsticks), I must confess he has a marked preference for Jude. He loves me a lot, for sure, but if there was a fire and he could save only one of us, I’m under no illusions. Jude is truly the Eighth Wonder of the World. All he has to do is open his mouth and Steve starts thumping his tail on the floor.

  Once, a couple of years back, Jude’s mother took in a little stray cat who, once settled, refused to ever set foot outside again. (Tempest, her name was, and she too would never have won a ribbon at any cat show.) She seemed to be afraid the door would shut for good behind her if by some misfortune she ever crossed the threshold. Her former owners must have kicked her out, so we could never get her to risk it again. To begin with, I was afraid of things going the same way with Steve, that his weeks (months?) of living wild might have put him off the outdoors and that he might become a couch potato. But no, he loves going out; if it was up to him, he’d spend eight hours a day outside. His favourite walk is the following: we take Third as far as Grand-Mère Shoes (yes, I know it’s not been Grand-Mère Shoes for ages, but we oldies stay attached to the old names: the shop across from Matteau’s place is still Claire Corsetry to me; The Source is still Bonbon Thérèse, etc., and it will be that way until I die); anyway, we get as far as Grand-Mère Shoes and then head into the woods by the hill that goes up to the Maurice XM snowmobile club. There, a network of paths takes us to the other side of the hill, onto Eighteenth Avenue (you might think there wouldn’t be two streets with the same name in a single municipality, but there are indeed two Eighteenth Avenues in Grand-Mère, this one and the one in the Domaine. We turn onto Chemin des Cormiers, walk along Beau-Rivage, and come back by Chemin des Marronniers. We rejoin civilization, so to speak, by Eighth Avenue South, the official name of the Grand-Nord hill. We could do this loop in three hours, but we always spend ages in the forest, where Steve likes to chase animals both real and imaginary.

  Usually we go for a second walk after dinner, but not such a long one. We make do with going to Rivière Park, for example, where I sit on a bench while Steve enjoys sniffing other dogs’ behinds, or yapping at the ducks from the bank. Most of the time, Jude skips his turn for the evening walk. So I was alone with the dog last Monday evening when Seb came up to me. “I called your place. Jude said I’d probably find you here,” he said, sitting down next to me. His turning up like this worried me slightly. It was so not his way to impose. We’d seen each other a few times in recent months, to have coffee or just to stroll along Sixth, and each time he’d gone to the trouble of phoning in advance. “Uh, Tess…it’s Sébastien… Um…I was just wondering if you’d like to have coffee with me this afternoon. I mean, only if you want to, if you’ve got nothing else on. But…um…no big deal.” So his turning up like that, without warning and without seeming bothered by his daring, made me suspect that he had something important to tell me, but, since I’m not optimistic by nature, I didn’t imagine for a single second that it might be good news. Instead, I was imagining catastrophic scenarios, like him falling to his knees and presenting me with a jewellery box while giving me a speech about uniting our destinies. “Jude told me you’d gone out to walk the dog. I guessed from that that you had a dog.”

  “Very good, Holmes.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “The white one with spots over there.”

  “It doesn’t look like a dog.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “It’s a total skeleton! Don’t you feed it?”

  “You’ll never believe it, but he’s tripled in size since we’ve had him.”

  “Incredible! What’s his name?”

  “Steve.”

  “It suits him.”

  “…”

  “Apart from that…um…how’s the book coming along?”

  “Not bad. If we get back from the States in November as planned, I should manage to finish over the winter, edit in the spring, and send it off in time for the autumn season.”

  “Good plan. And if you sell the film rights—which will definitely happen—the film will come out two years from now.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And who do you see playing you?”

  “Audrey Tautou, who else? Don’t you think I look like her?”

  “Uh…not particularly.”

  “Seriously! Our eyes and hair are the same colour!”

  “Well, in that case I look like Brad Pitt.”

  “Two peas in a pod.”

  “…”

  “Uh…when you got here I had the impression you had something to say. Maybe I was wrong…”

  “Oh! Yes, I was forgetting…”

  “What?”

  “Actually, it’s not really something to tell you. More like something to give you.”

  “What did you want to give me?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Just $12,000. Less what you owe me for your hideous car, but still a tidy sum.”

  It wasn’t a complicated sentence, but my brain couldn’t decode it right away. I am so used to things fizzling out, nothing ever working out well, that my brain circuits controlling reactions to success have long been deactivated. I r
epeated his last reply dozens of times, trying to understand it, reviewing every possible interpretation. It must have taken me a good two minutes before I came to the conclusion that the literal interpretation was probably the right one. While this mental labour was going on, Sébastien took a piece of paper out of his bag and held it out to me. It was a cheque for $12,000, made out to him, from the Canada Council for the Arts.

  “You’re kidding me…”

  “If I could make such convincing fake cheques, you’d never catch me eating at Subway.”

  “It worked…”

  “I’d say so.”

  “We asked for money and they gave it to us… It’s crazy.”

  After I’d gathered myself together, Seb and I arranged to meet the next day at the National Bank, so we could convert this scrap of paper into real money and settle our accounts. For now, I apologized for leaving him so abruptly, but I had to run to tell Jude the news. I called Steve and put his leash on. I was getting ready to leave when Seb called me back.

  “Uh…Tess…”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you know he’s a bitch?”

  “Hey? What?”

  “Steve. He’s a she.”

  “Well, I never!”

  “Look.”

  “Wow. It’s true!”

  “This is one big day of surprises!”

  Ò...29...Ò

  Celebrations

  Thinking it would be childish to hold anything back, I launched everything at Jude as soon as I set foot in the apartment. “Steve is a girl and we’ve got the cash!”

  He had the same reaction I did. He stopped what he was doing (the washing up, as it happens) and went to sit in the living room, where he was silent for some time, a perplexed wrinkle striped across his forehead. Then he got up and went to crouch by the dog, who was lapping water from his bowl. “Fuck! You’re right! What’s the female equivalent of Steve? Sandra? Linda?”

  “She’s still going to be called Steve, she’s used to it. You can’t change a dog’s name, it might upset them. Caesar said so. And anyway, Steve is fine for a girl: the singer in Fleetwood Mac was called Stevie Nicks.”

  “Stevie. Not Steve.”

  “Well, yeah. But I get the feeling you’re not focusing on the most important part of my sentence.”

  “We’ve got the cash.”

  “Yes, we’ve got the cash.”

  “We sent them an envelope full of bullshit and in return they give us a cheque for twelve thousand bucks. The neighbour was right: and people wonder why the country’s in such a mess… What now?”

  “I’m meeting Seb at noon tomorrow: he’ll cash the cheque, take his part, and give us the rest. After that, we can start getting ready, pay to renew your licence, buy suitcases and some clothes, etc. But I suggest we begin by celebrating.”

  “Definitely. But we should still go easy on the celebrating. Remember we’re on a tight budget.”

  “Yes, we’ll celebrate sensibly. A nice meal in a real restaurant, that sort of thing, just to mark the event.”

  The next day, at the appointed time, I met Sébastien outside the National Bank. You often hear it said (especially by poor people) that money can’t buy love. Nothing is more wrong. That’s all it does buy. People become very affectionate toward you when you spend a lot in their shops or carry out big transactions in their banks. The lady at the counter was kind to the point of obsequiousness while Sébastien was explaining our situation (“I’d like to deposit this cheque into my account and then transfer $6,000 into this young lady’s account”), nodding her head and looking at him the way the apostles must have looked at Jesus during his transfiguration. Once the transaction was completed, I rushed to the cash machine to do a balance inquiry. “Available Funds: $6,234.89.” I know that doesn’t mean much to you, reader—just one single paycheque of yours looks like that—but for me it was an absolute fortune. I went back to Sébastien on the pavement. As we were about to leave, I asked him to wait for me and went into the bank once more to do another balance inquiry. My balance was still up at $6,234.89. This time, I printed it out to show Jude.

  Just before we parted ways, at the corner of Eighth, Sébastien said to me, “Um…Tess, I don’t want to get involved in things that don’t concern me…”

  “Oh, don’t be shy.”

  “You said that you and Jude were planning to save to increase your cash. Something tells me you haven’t done that…”

  “You’re right, it didn’t work out. We’re going to trim our expenses instead.”

  “All the same, $6,000 is hardly a fortune. You know, I wouldn’t mind lending you a bit more money. With even just a thousand bucks extra, things would be a bit less tight…”

  “Listen, Sébastien, I might be wrong (in which case you can call me an idiot), but…um…I get the impression that you’re only offering because you’re afraid you’ll never hear from me again now that we’re all square.”

  “What are you talking about? First, we’re not all square: you are eternally in my debt for letting you use my name with these institutions.”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Oh.”

  “But if I understand you correctly, all those times you agreed to have coffee with me were just to spare the feelings of the guy you owed money to.”

  “Oh, come on! Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything.”

  “Okay, but the offer still stands: a thousand dollars, which you could pay me back in several small instalments when it suits you.”

  “Well, it would certainly be less tight with an extra thousand bucks. So let’s go for it. Once again I don’t know how to thank you…”

  “I could make some suggestions, but you wouldn’t want to hear them.”

  “You’re so crude!”

  We returned to the bank. He went in and came out again a few minutes later waving a wad of bills. There was five hundred in hundred-dollar bills, the rest in smaller bills. I stuffed it into the back pocket of my jeans (a month’s salary, a hundred hours standing behind containers of cold meat and vegetables wearing an ugly uniform), thanked Sébastien again, and went back home.

  I said earlier I’d rather die than be indebted to the neighbour, but I’ve had to dilute this slightly: we didn’t have anyone else handy to look after Steve while we were out celebrating. Since we were only leaving for a few hours, we could just have left her with enough water and food, but she doesn’t like being left alone. The one time we tried it, she protested by committing several acts of vandalism (emptying the garbage in Jude’s bedroom, disembowelling a cushion, assaulting a tissue, etc.). We got the message. Anyway, we won’t be all that indebted to the neighbour: all he has to do is physically be there, which is his speciality. And we’re leaving him a fridge full of beer. He’ll get drunk playing Xbox and watching smutty videos, and he’ll never even notice that he’s not in his own house.

  At first we thought about reserving a table at Toqué or Laurie Raphaël, or one of those fancy city restaurants, but in keeping with our policy of celebrating sensibly we made do with Le Guéridon in Trois-Rivières. And since we were passing through the regional capital, we decided to combine the useful with the pleasant and take a trip to Les Rivières Mall to make a few purchases for our journey. Some clothes, for starters. Jude wanted nothing to do with buying clothes, but I pointed out that Pennsylvania was a long way away from his mother’s washing machine, and that he wouldn’t make it very far with his two pairs of jeans, his four moth-eaten T-shirts, his ancient running shoes that cost ten bucks, and the wool sweater he was wearing in his Grade 12 class photo. In any case, he probably wasn’t going to be allowed into a top restaurant like Le Guéridon decked out like that. He groused a bit but gave in. I didn’t waste this chance: he came out of the mall dressed like a little gentleman. I found him two pairs of shoes at J
ack & Jones: a beautiful Santoni pair in leather, and some Nike high-tops. I handed over my debit card without even looking at the total, but just from seeing the love in the sales assistant’s eyes I could tell that Jude would be the only person on welfare in the province wearing Santonis. It’s pretty simple: you have to pay for quality. Then we got him some pricey underwear from Underwhere? (to encourage businesses who have a stupid play on words as their trading name) and we found the rest in West Coast. As for me, I found happiness in Garage and Jacob Connexion. After that, we went to Bentley and acquired two Skyway sports bags and two Samsonite wheelie suitcases. That would have to do.

  We knocked back a few pints at Nord-Ouest, at the corner of Notre-Dame and Forges, and at dusk we ambled over to Le Guéridon. Jude was already wearing his new clothes and his fancy Santoni shoes; as far as I was concerned, I didn’t think I needed to change; I was presentable enough in my old clothes. Except then I spilled some Hoegaarden on them, and you can hardly turn up to any restaurant except Stratos Pizza smelling of beer. So we passed by the car, where I picked out an outfit, and then looped back to Rue du Fleuve, thinking we might spot a deserted corner where I could change. I speedily carried out the operation behind the water treatment plant.

  “Good, now let’s take your old clothes back to the car and go and eat,” Jude said.

  I said no, we’d wasted enough time already and I was starving to death now, so I ran to chuck everything in the river. Good riddance! After all, I’d had that T-shirt for three or four years, the jeans too; you can hardly say I hadn’t made good use of them.

  Mr. Fisher reckons the general public is pretty much indifferent to the beauty of words, that most of all they just want to be told a story. I’m not ashamed to admit it: my tastes align pretty well with those of the general public. Words for the sake of it—not really my cup of tea. But I always make an exception for restaurant menus. I, who would prefer to get down on all fours to scrub the floor rather than open a book of poetry, would go to a restaurant just to savour the descriptions of the meals. I can’t resist showing you a few examples (taken from Le Guéridon’s website, if you want to read the whole thing):