Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  She was tired of waiting. She could feel him swallowing like a fish out of water. She reached for her clip-on earrings, dropped them in her lap. Her ears were sore from the earphones she wore all day, saying may I help you sir, may I help you madam. And now the pinch of these fake pearls on her lobes.

  Roger picked up the earrings. She said oh, for the grazing gesture that shot feeling into her legs. He looked at her and shook the earrings like a pair of dice.

  “Odette,” he said.

  “Oui,” she said.

  “Odette, tu es tellement belle.”

  “Merci.” She couldn’t get used to the effect she had, even though she expected it now, and when she didn’t get compliments she would rush to the ladies’ washroom and find consolation in the mirror. In the last few years, she’d lost the gawkiness in her limbs, she’d filled out in what her mother called all the right places, and she’d lightened her hair, bit by bit, with peroxide at first and then with a bleaching compound she got at the drugstore, and that made her blue eyes really stand out.

  Her father, Béribée, called Roger un flatteur. Un maudit de nouveau riche. Which Roger was. Smelling of Brylcreem, looking spoiled around the edges. Roger called himself too sensitive. “Ma mère a toujours dit,” he always said when he’d drunk too much, “que j’étais trop sensible.”

  Odette didn’t think a man could be too sensitive. But sometimes she wanted Roger to look through her, the way actors looked through actresses in the movies before they kissed.

  The giving in her knees subsided. She looked at the view. She said, “C’est beau.” He looked right through her. “Ouais, c’est beau, mais c’est pas New York.”

  She was quiet after that. If only he could bring himself to pop the question.

  WHAT IF SHE SAID yes to him, what would happen? And what if she said no?

  She always thought she was going to miss something, whatever decision she made. It drove her father crazy. When they played cards and she couldn’t make up her mind about what to set down, he said, if you were a horse, Odette, you’d never get out of the starting gate. And then he shook his hand in the air, cracking his finger bones like a whip, shouting: Go, woman! Go! The more he pushed her, the more confused she became, and then she’d play anything, and go off into a trance, watching the flowers on the worn Oriental carpet in the dining room where they played.

  The wind blew in lilac from the yards below, and rustled the pale leaves of poplars above them. It was like a shiver, this wind, as it danced over their soft, young faces in the dark car. Odette’s hair rose from the back of her neck. Roger leaned forward, took her chin in his hand. “Je t’aime, Odette, si tu savais comme je t’aime.” She jumped out of her skin to hear it, repeated it to herself, but couldn’t say it back to him for fear of raising expectations she had no intention of meeting just yet. If she said je t’aime too soon, he would end up pushing himself against her like he did that time at the swimming party at Pierre Leduc’s place in Sainte-Adèle. And she felt dread in her belly, remembering how the sand on his thighs had pressed against her legs, how everybody had laughed at them later on.

  He said, “Viens,” and got out of the car and walked around to open the door for her.

  They leaned together on the stone parapet. She imagined the currents of the St. Lawrence flowing under the bridges. He put his arm around her shoulders. The lights twinkled in the warm air, the wind blew her pleated collar over her mouth. “Dis oui, Odette.” She started to shake, felt choked by the desperate way he held her. She couldn’t say yes. She couldn’t not say yes. She closed her eyes, lost the feeling in her legs, her knees almost buckled under her. When she opened her eyes, she felt herself falling into a net of lights, falling and choking with a non from a long time ago. She smiled as best she could and, feeling tiny and apart from herself, said oui.

  A mosquito had landed on her neck. Odette crushed it absent-mindedly, smearing her neck with her own blood.

  LE FUTUR WAS GOING to be glorieux, everybody said so. Everybody said les années cinquantes vont apporter la prospérité au Québec. Everybody being Roger’s father, Eugène Beaulieu, and Roger himself, who thought the war had solved all human misery. “It’s a new world, baby,” he said to Odette. “Maintenant l’argent va tomber du ciel.”

  The shame of being conquered, a shame handed down, swallowed, spit out with the stringy guilt of Catholicism, that shame was going to disappear, dissolve in the bright lights of machines never before imagined. The past, everybody allowed, had been a torture for le peuple canadien, who had been stretched on the slow rack devised by the English, sinews contorted by inferiority, tongues burned to conform. But that was over now. The future was going to be glorious. The future was being invented by physicists and engineers who had recently conceived of the atomic bomb. It was a future that would dwarf all human concerns, that would find its apotheosis with Expo 67, where the sun blazed on the treeless site, where slides dissolved to the sound of cymbals and xylophones in disposable pavilions.

  Roger was always telling Odette that they were going to be part of this brave new world. They were going to be special. That’s what Roger said all the time, “On n’est pas comme les autres.” He was proving it by wanting to marry the half of Odette that was Irish. Irish, English, there was no difference, he was marrying the blood he’d been bred to hate. He saw himself as brave, as new, as willing to take huge leaps. He was not really French-Canadian on this account. No child of Duplessis, he, no descendant of tight-fisted, narrow-minded habitants.

  Roger’s grandfather had made a fortune by selling his land, and then other people’s land, in what they now called Montréal-Nord, but that didn’t count as habitant. That farmland was now sprouting duplexes and triplexes. The Beaulieu family had gone from habitant to rentier in two generations, and Roger hated any mention of his origins. He could never let anything be, was forever asserting his identity as an Outremont playboy. “Baby, ça ça fait habitant,” he’d say to Odette about anything that looked old, used, worn, real. And she laughed, very citified, very Montréalaise, hiding her surprise at the bitterness behind the words.

  Over time she got to know that the bitterness was directed at his father. Over time she got to hear the stories of how Roger’s father loved to talk about manure over dinner, after ringing for the maid with his foot on the buzzer underneath his chair. He did it to get to his wife, and to annoy Roger, to rattle what he called les grands sensibles. As the family sat down to chicken en cocotte, he talked about the honest smell of fumier, or about the blood flowing from the bodies of butchered pigs, and les beaux boudins you could make out of that. Eugène Beaulieu called his farm talk la réalité. Roger didn’t want to have anything to do with la réalité.

  At twenty-five, he had no idea what he wanted; he swam in a warm sea of possibilities, tried not to crash on the narrow rocky shore of his father’s plans. His mother, Louisa, read the poetry of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Musset, and quoted dripping alexandrines as if she were eating chocolates. She took the train to New York every two months to seek the services of a Freudian analyst, and between those visits took to her bed in fits of what was called neurasthénie. For as long as Roger could remember, his father had hammered everything his mother thought or felt into tiny boxes he called les folies de Louisa.

  Roger didn’t want much. He wanted to have du fun. “Pourquoi pas,” he said, all the time. He wanted to party with his generation of rich French-Canadian youth who affected American slang, who said ben swell, hunky-dory, no flies on you, who danced to swing music, who swooned over Frank Sinatra. Sometimes he thought he wanted to play the drums for big bands. He imagined pounding out the feeling of loss that never left him into the bodies of dancers filling up the big ballrooms of English hotels. But that would never have been allowed; Eugène’s son, playing the drums, mon Dieu Seigneur, c’est pas possible.

  He wanted to take Odette to parties, to skating parties, and costume p
arties and carnaval parties, and watch her face when his friends said, “Y est donc l’fun, Roger, y a donc de la personnalité.” He had lots of personality, that’s what he had. He could make people laugh, had a way of telling stories that told a bigger story. He had no idea where the stories came from. They just came out of him, and when he drank they came even more easily; he could give himself up then, to all the words and ideas and fantasies that welled up inside him. He liked not knowing where things were going to end up, he liked how words opened up into other words, into puns and innuendoes and pictures that made his friends laugh.

  “Arrête, Roger, j’en peux pus,” they said, heaving, tears in their eyes.

  Being a party boy, walking the tightrope of what other people thought of him, that was his true métier. But now that he wanted to marry Odette, his father was going to give him a flower shop to run. And so he was going to do that, too. Be liked, be loved, and run a flower shop. Until other possibilities galloped in and kicked dust on la réalité.

  WHEN SHE FINALLY SAID je t’aime on the grass that stained her pale skirt green, it was to slow him down. They had walked around the stone parapet and down the little path that led to a sweet-smelling grassy slope. He had spread his jacket on the ground. And now she was going numb from the heavy breathing in her ears.

  She didn’t want to lose him, but she didn’t want to do this either.

  A clump of grass dug into her shoulder blade. She tried to ignore it, tried to chart her body through the effect it had on Roger. He was sighing and moaning. He was so heavy on top of her she could hardly breathe. Her whole body wanted to heave and shake him off, buck and send him flying.

  She opened her eyes, lost herself in the night sky full of stars.

  When he hiked up her skirt, and she felt his hands on the skin between the top of her nylons and her underwear, his whole body went stiff and then collapsed in choking sobs. “Odette,” he moaned. “T’aurais pas dû faire ça.” What? She hadn’t done anything, just imagined the soft skin of her thighs, felt the beginning of something warm between her legs. That was all. And now she was ashamed.

  He stood up and tucked his shirt into his pants, rummaging around in there, so that she had to close her eyes. She didn’t want to see his face. Sometimes, looking up from a kiss, she was shocked by his features. So dark. Black hair, black eyebrows, brown eyes with furry eyelashes, so defined for a man.

  “A quoi tu penses, là, Odette?”

  “A rien. Je pense à rien. As-tu mes boucles d’oreilles?”

  “Sont dans ma poche, pitou.”

  He sat down again, adjusted his jacket around her shoulders. She said merci. He said de rien. Traffic sounds rose up from below, a squirrel clawed its way up a blue spruce. Roger lit a Sweet Caporal and inhaled deeply.

  “Tu m’aimes, hein baby, tu m’aimes?”

  She wanted to cry. She took his hand and put it on her cheek. He stroked her face, then reached into his breast pocket for the silver flask he always carried with him. His hand grazed her breast on the way out. “Pardon,” he said. “Un p’tit drink?”

  “Oui. Non.”

  “Oui ou non?” And he took a long swig. She watched his Adam’s apple go up and down, and suddenly fell in love with his neck, the soft skin there, the skin without stubble.

  “Oui,” she said. If she was going to be kissing him some more, she’d better taste the same as him.

  “A nos fiançailles, Odette,” he said. “On va avoir du fun, ma belle Odette. Tu vas voir, ben du fun.”

  She brought the flask up to her lips. He said ready, set, go. Before she knew what she’d done, she’d gulped down the rest of the brandy.

  “Woa, woa, pitou, pas si vite,” he said.

  She coughed. She felt warm as toast. She laughed and liked her laugh. It was like a great ringing of bells. She couldn’t stop laughing, seeing the disappointed look on his face because there was no brandy left for him now. “Tu devrais te voir la face,” she said.

  “Tu fais ton Irlandaise, hein Odette?”

  “J’avais soif, Roger,” she said. She pulled at a tall piece of grass and bit into the soft succulence of the stem.

  IRLANDAISE. WHAT A JOKE. Every year, on St. Patrick’s Day, Odette’s mother bought pots of shamrocks wrapped in green aluminum paper. Ceramic leprechauns sat on spotted toadstools. That was all, and her uncles sang old songs that made their bloodshot eyes water. Keening for something over the water. What? What in heaven’s name were they going on about? Odette had no idea. That whole side of the family, the Irish side, wiped tears from their eyes all the time, from laughing or crying. It didn’t seem to make much difference in the way they looked.

  They liked the French because the French hated the English as much as they did, and because the French were good Catholics. Not one of them had ever learned a word of French, though. The English took our food, that’s what Odette’s mother said when they talked about Ireland.

  The English took our food. As a child Odette always saw her brother Eddie’s face when her mother said that. He got the second helpings, and the thirds, Eddie did, because he was the only boy. Nothing. Nothing to eat, she said, blue eyes fierce, twisting her apron as if it had all happened yesterday.

  Odette couldn’t give two cents about the past. They weren’t hungry now, so what was the big deal? It was a way of liking to be sad. Her mother liked to be sad. That Irish sadness had seeped into her feeling of exile as a child, when her mother had left her at her grandparents’ house for two whole years. She must have been five or six at the time. Her mother left her there and went back to Halifax. She didn’t even say goodbye. Granny Mattie had stood in the steamy bathroom while Odette took a bath in the biggest tub she’d ever seen, and said, “Your mother’s gone now. She took the train back to Halifax. You’re going to stay with us awhile.”

  In her grandparents’ house on Rachel Avenue, Odette cried herself to sleep, face pressed to the glazed pillowcases sad Granny Mattie had starched. Granny Mattie yelled stop crying, stop crying, so that Odette half-cried, a twisted feeling in her belly, corkscrewed on the bed.

  She was left there, and her sisters stayed behind in Halifax. No one ever said why.

  She couldn’t start caring about that.

  What she cared about were the big faces on the movie screen of the Loews Theatre, what you could do with your pale eyebrows, what you could put in your brassiere for the perfect silhouette under tight sweaters. Odette knew how to put things together so they shimmered, how to bring people’s eyes in her wake. It was a gift, like divining. She was possessed by it. She knew how to create the Look. The Look could make you as big as a screen face in other people’s eyes, so big that people shrank, thinking they were the only ones with butterflies where their stomachs should be, with chips where their shoulder pads should be.

  She daydreamed her way through her cours commercial at the Reine Marie convent. In classrooms smelling of chalk, she dreamed about Alan Ladd and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. She modelled her kisses on their lips, lips bigger than her body. Watching those movies, transfixed in the dark, feeling the ridged velours of the seat under her hands, she wanted to melt into light.

  She wanted to be a movie star or a nun. She didn’t want anything in between.

  “Maybe I should be a nun,” she said to her mother one time. Her father, who’d been listening, said, “Odette, you’d be a nun with two pairs of slippers under your bed.” She didn’t know what he’d meant until later when she was doing the dishes. She blushed then, looking down into the soapy foam of the dishwater.

  THEY WERE SO QUIET now sipping brandy on the slope of the Mont-Royal. She was feeling the brandy. “Embrasse-moi, Roger. Embrasse-moi,” she said.

  He kissed her. He tasted of vanilla and sugarcane, sweet as Christmas pudding.

  STILL IN HER BATHROBE two hours before her wedding, Odette wanted to finish her toast and tea before her fat
her got going on something he’d seen in La Presse. The world was being divided in two. Les Rouges and everybody else. The headline in today’s La Presse, which Odette’s father was holding out with disdain, was “Le Communisme Menace L’Asie Toute Entière.” Anything to do with le communisme was bound to remind Béribée of his brother Jean, who, Béribée said, was one of Duplessis’s white-collar goons. All that meant was that Jean made his legal living hunting and prosecuting reds.

  “He always was a squealer,” Béribée said about Jean. “Now he gets paid for it.”

  Not today, Odette wanted to say. Please, not on my wedding day. Dear God, do not let what is in La Presse travel through my father’s face like an invading army starting with a twitch around the mouth and ending with a throbbing vein at the temple.

  She wiped the corners of her mouth with her fingers and pushed the crusts of her toast to the side of her plate. Béribée sat at the head of the dining-room table; the rest of them ate in silence, clustered like refugees at the other end.

  Odette’s sisters, Kathleen and Doris, were already made up, looking dusty and waxy-lipped in the white, milky light of the dining room. Snow had fallen all night, piled high on the window-sills and flat roofs of the houses on Sainte Famille Street.

  Calculating now, Odette figured that Kathleen and Doris had already used the bathroom, her father had his own sink in his room, Eddie was shaving. The bathroom, when she would get to it, would be steamy and uncomfortable, the door flimsy against the collective will of the house, because they would all want to get in again and again, that was for sure. You could never get any peace in there.

  “Are you excited?” Kathleen said. “I’d be excited.” There was red lipstick all around the rim of her coffee cup.

  “Mum?” Odette said. “Mum?”

  Special, she wanted to say. Special day. My special day. Could you get rid of them?