The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

  The rain cleared. Blue skies arched over the bluffs. Loggers’ dust churned white in la forêt. Freighters, barges, the moored pleasure boats, bobbed in calm shadows. Our twilights were touched with indigo. Mallards flew over the reeds in V-formation.

  Etienne Bastide applied to join les buveurs. He was blond with a rosy complexion and blue eyes. We led him up the bluffs, blindfolded him, forced him to drink three pints of Lamont’s Ale, twirled him around, and ripped off the blindfold. In this way he saw the falseness of St Croix. We asked his story.

  ‘One day, last summer, I stole a chicken and my father’s rowboat,’ Etienne said, staring at his interlocked pink fingers. ‘I rowed to the Galtieau Cement Works. By the time I came around Ojibway Flats I could see all of St Croix, brown houses with white stains like rooster shit. The chicken jumped from between my legs and drowned.

  ‘A submarine surfaced. The captain came out of the hatch, a bearded man with pearl buttons. I got in, and we submerged. There was almost no light, only a dim red electric bulb in the ceiling. Shrimp eggs trailed up past the porthole. I could hardly breathe. Red mist came out of drains in the ceiling.

  ‘In dark chambers naked men were covered in clay. By their sides were brass canisters which contained their names. They ate dirt from pewter plates and dust from lead goblets. I was frightened by the loose flabs of skin that folded down their chests. A mariner caught me watching and cuffed me behind the ears. I fought hard but he strapped a coffin on me.

  ‘“Are we being taken to Nipigon?” I asked, “to work the fishing boats?”

  ‘He didn’t answer.

  ‘“Are we being taken across Lake Erie,” I asked, “to pick hops?”

  ‘He didn’t answer.

  ‘“Are we going to Sudbury to work the steel mills?” I asked.

  ‘“YOU’RE GOING TO DETROIT TO BE MALE PROSTITUTES!” he screamed.

  ‘The dead men turned away, ashamed. Suddenly there were depth charges. The submarine tilted, drifted, and then the propellers chewed grit. Stokers, completely naked in the heat, sweating by the red furnaces, were swept away in explosions of water. Religious icons bobbed around our feet. I escaped through a hatch, swam up and floated to St Croix.’

  We blinked at Etienne Bastide. Nobody knew what to say. Etienne also looked embarrassed.

  ‘Do I hallucinate?’ he finally asked. ‘I haven’t even told Father Przybilski!’

  I jumped up and pounded my fist on the table.

  ‘Etienne Bastide is admitted,’ I said, ‘because he told us fiction as though it was truth!’

  Etienne Bastide performed magic.

  I visited him on LeClerc. Drawings of the St Lawrence Seaway hung on the stairwell. He had a beautiful sister named Katherine and the first time I saw her she came from the bathroom in a white terrycloth robe. She had eyes black as midnight.

  ‘So,’ she said, smiling strangely. ‘Etienne’s little friend.’

  Etienne took me to his bedroom. The bedroom was wallpapered with designs of cowboys, his butterfly collection was on his dresser. He had a collection of blue clowns. He made two of them bounce on the bed, fast, then slow, turning slow somersaults, sparkling, rainbows.

  He put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I can make them do anything,’ he told me.

  There was an invasion of pond snails that autumn. Etienne and I collected them on the breakwater. The snails had a layered sac and genital ducts, blue mouths that led to the alimentary canal, which M. d’Aube called invagination. These shelled worms clogged the wharves, leaving slick trails.

  ‘Garde!’ Etienne said, pointing. ‘They ejaculate into the air!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is a compulsion.’

  ‘Such a compulsion.’

  Etienne nudged me.

  ‘You, too,’ he whispered. ‘Soon. Very soon. Oh, soon.’

  Etienne got a job at the Fleur de France bakery. He patted buns in a white cubicle behind blue ovens. He wore a white apron with a blue ribbon. I watched him pull the dough.

  ‘This is the levain de chef,’ Etienne said. ‘This is the levain de première.’

  Etienne adjusted his white paper cap. At that time he was not yet taller than I. His cheeks were flushed from the oven heat. His blue eyes, small and wet, watched me.

  ‘Save me a tarte,’ I said.

  ‘For you. Here.’

  Etienne gave me an almond tarte. It was hot and full. I bit into it. It was like biting into life itself.

  ‘Jean,’ he said, wiping my chin. ‘You eat like a pig.’

  ‘Could I have another?’

  ‘Jean,’ he said. ‘Divine Jean-Michel of Canada.’

  The nights were getting cold. I sat on the red divan, reading Gasoline Alley. My father came home, crossed the kitchen in giant steps and slapped me.

  ‘How dare you be happy,’ he hissed, ‘when others suffer!’

  I went to the boiler room of St Bonaventure. I threw a wire over the heating duct, tied it around my neck, and jumped into the coal-bin. Electricity exploded in my brain. It was Etienne Bastide. He was at the door. He had turned on the light. ‘Jean – ’ he blurted. ‘I love you – ’

  * * *

  Father Przybilski slapped me in his office.

  ‘On est bête, c’est pour longtemps,’ he said. ‘Stupidity is for a long time.’

  Father Przybilski twirled his sharp pencil. He didn’t know what to do with me. The tall windows were filled with blue skies, tiny horsefeather clouds, wisps of cold. He adjusted his glasses.

  ‘You like Etienne Bastide?’ he asked.

  ‘He is nice.’

  ‘In fact, you are quite fond of him.’

  ‘He is very nice.’

  ‘You love him?’

  ‘He is extremely nice.’

  ‘Do you think he will love a suicide?’

  ‘I don’t want to be Catholic.’

  ‘Well, it’s too late now, Jean-Michel!’

  I had to shovel coal after school for a week. Etienne watched from the chute hatch, his blue shirt neatly starched.

  Etienne bombarded me with gifts: a glass paperweight of St Croix, a Sauk headdress, slippers, drawings of Katherine on blue paper with charcoal. I sucked his minted vapour drops. Etienne brought fudge. We ate sweets during the darkening days, Etienne and I.

  We sat together in religion class.

  ‘Luther was born in 1483 of Catholic parents,’ Father Ybert lectured. ‘He was instructed in the Roman Catholic faith and entered the order of the Eremites of St Augustine. He learned much but he became proud. He quarrelled with the monks. They refused him the office of prior so he left the monastery and became addicted to lascivious music. He went to brothels. He joined the nun Katherine von Bora in a God-robbing marriage.

  ‘Luther perverted the true Gospel. He spread heresies. He split with Calvin and Melanchthon and died of the cholic in a drunken stupor in 1546. His corpse was carried from Eisleben to Wittenberg by an airborne devil.’

  Etienne squeezed my hand.

  ‘Luther was a doctor of Godlessness, a professor of villainy, an apostate, a God-hating fornicator, and author of the Augsburg Confession. There are one thousand Lutherans in St Croix and they have all read the Augsburg Confession!’

  Etienne was sweating.

  I visited Uncle Bobo.

  He worked in the fisheries for M. d’Aube, a low concrete building with dangling lights. Bobo had Reynaud’s disease. His fingers were dead. He banged them on M. d’Aube’s desk and soaked them in hot water but he felt nothing. Bobo’s smock was smeared with fish eggs. He showed me the lampreys.

  ‘They suck and suck,’ Bobo told me. ‘When they are through, they drop off.’

  M. d’Aube hooked a lamprey and pried its mouth open. Circular teeth in double rows gleamed under the violet light. The urogenital canal flickered. Bobo took the eel in both hands to the laboratory desk. M. d’Aube smashed its head with a ballpeen hammer.

  ‘There are men like this, too,’ M. d’Aube warn
ed.

  ‘I am careful, Monsieur d’Aube,’ I said.

  ‘I must be blunt, Michel. You are not careful.’

  He slit the eel’s belly and dug out the egg sac with a gloved forefinger. He unwound the long intestine. He squeezed it down until white fluids oozed into his glass bowl.

  ‘You think you walk a broad road,’ he said. ‘I tell you, it becomes thin as a razor.’

  M. d’Aube poured the lamprey entrails into a pink solution. He washed his hands three times. He put a hand on my shoulder and offered me a Player’s.

  ‘Tiens.’

  ‘Merci.’

  Outside, red leaves lay wet and bright in the spray of the trout tanks.

  ‘With respect, Michel,’ he repeated, very softly, looking up at the blue sky. ‘You are not careful.’

  The September fête began.

  St Croix’s stores suddenly filled with religious emblems, icons and corn-husk memorabilia. Brass chandeliers, bijoux of amber, hung in our doorways. Basques hung lakeshore moss. Germans roared in Gustave’s Tavern. Suddenly a Roman candle appeared on the bluffs, visible from the middle of Lake Superior.

  A Ferris wheel, five generators, a mystery house, and goldfish games rolled on to Swallowfield Meadows. Rockets went up at midnight. Romanians juggled knives. Catholic tents sold rosaries, coral crucifixes, folding leather prayer cards. Father Ybert heard confession under a white awning. My father patrolled la forêt. With a flashlight he found couples and doused them with a bucket of water.

  ‘Fas attention, monsieur!’ he warned. ‘You’ll get stuck!’

  Ignace was Catholic Boy Bishop. He paraded the fairgrounds in a satin gown, reciting Latin, casting water with a pussy willow. He was nervous and had practised for hours at home in the afternoon.

  ‘Saint Ignace!’ Danny Auban shouted.

  ‘No,’ Ignace said modestly. ‘I am but the Boy Bishop.’

  By night the buveurs gathered around orange sparks flying high, a bonfire that burned horse manure. Black rivers of air twisted up to the stars. There was no Canadian flag then so we made our own, and flew it higher than the Polish double-headed and the German imperial eagle. Protestants burned an effigy of Pius so we crossed Isle of May Street and threw firecrackers at their punch parties.

  Mormons sold manna-cakes of walnuts and honey. Jehovah’s Witnesses fried Kingdom fritters. Austrian sausages sizzled. Yugoslavs carved a spitted beef. Smoke of kebabs rose into the moonlight and Poles hosed beer from barrels into glass mugs. We ate apples, foie gras, onions frying in butter. We Europeans threw up all over la forêt.

  Etienne and I got drunk. Malt ales, lagers, rum, gin and whisky sloshed in cups on planks suspended between barrels at the Belgian tent. Etienne and I got really drunk. In the lights of HM Prison Swallowfield’s black gothic gates, polka bands played. Flatulence rose like perfume, spiralling through the shafts of floodlights. One smelled sex in the cold wet grass. Couples danced on platforms. Etienne and I got piss drunk.

  We danced under blue pennants, Etienne and I, and ended up in the white birches.

  ‘Jean,’ he said unsteadily.

  ‘Quoi?’

  ‘Well?’

  Moonbeams twisted down the resinous oaks between the birches. Etienne trembled. I trembled a bit, too.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  I looked around. It was dark as a cow’s belly. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. We stumbled a few steps over rotted logs and groped toward the heat of each other’s face.

  ‘There’s no one around,’ he whispered.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘No one at all.’

  I touched his chest.

  ‘Etienne!’ I said. ‘You’re going to have a heart attack!’

  I leaned, he leaned. We missed. Suddenly he grabbed my face in both hands and jammed his lips into mine. I tasted new, red wine. He backed away. The moon came out. His blue eyes widened as though he had just learned something.

  ‘I didn’t hurt you, Jean?’

  ‘You bit me.’

  ‘Yes. I think I did. Here’s my handkerchief.’

  My arms felt so heavy I could hardly lift them.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then let me, Jean.’

  Etienne dabbed my lip. We walked back through the bracken to the dancing crowds. Faces of St Croix sweated. We were sweating, too.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Etienne whispered.

  He walked into the crowd. I joined him later at the kielbasa counter. Everything was as it had been. And if it wasn’t, whose business was it?

  In the morning, there was frost.

  I sang:

  ‘De Bretagne sur l’eau

  L’enfant arrive trop tôt

  Son nom fut Jean-Michel

  Un petit cochon-o

  ‘Ah tra la la

  Et la la la.

  ‘From Brittany over the water

  Came a baby much too soon

  His name was Jean-Michel

  A little pig-o.

  ‘Ah tra la la

  And la la la.’

  It was dark on LeClerc Street. Sweat ran down our windows. My father sucked noodles and dumped red cayenne powder on to his potatoes. He gripped his fork convulsively, his skull visible under his red hair. The shrimp and noodles, bread and cayenne, came toward his mouth and he stared at them coming until he was cross-eyed. Our father was obsessed. With what was he obsessed? With Gregors Illuskvi, the Ukrainian guard who reported him for abusing Barrault.

  Ignace smirked as he sucked his fingers. I smelled darkness like Swallowfield’s drains.

  ‘Etienne Bastide called for you,’ Ignace said.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Etienne Bastide.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘While you were out.’

  ‘Are you friendly with the Bastide?’ my father asked.

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘Jean est amoureuse!’ Ignace hooted, using the feminine.

  My father stopped chewing and stared at me, and his cheeks bulged with cayenne potatoes.

  ‘Do you touch?’ he asked.

  ‘We do not touch.’

  ‘The higher climbs the monkey, the redder is its bottom,’ my mother giggled.

  My mother put her delicate hand over her mouth. She raised a knowing eyebrow.

  ‘La p’tite Jean est amoureuse,’ she said, again in the feminine.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I am in a bad mood.’

  Ignace lay on his bed in his white underpants, the only thing visible sometimes on those dark nights.

  ‘Jean,’ he said. ‘I am afraid.’

  ‘Of what are you afraid?’

  ‘Of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  He turned over. Ignace had two navels. It embarrassed him. The pillow was pale. It blended with his shoulders.

  ‘You and Etienne.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Some day you will die, Jean. Then what?’

  ‘I’m dead.’

  Ignace believed in Satan. Bodiless, Satan grew trumpets for hair and French horns for shoulders. He lived in a walnut coffin fifteen feet long in la forêt and from the coffin a profane hurdy-gurdy shook the trees so down came the autumn leaves, regrets of the damned.

  Ignace sang. I accompanied him on a concertina.

  ‘Il fut, part un triste sort,

  Blessé d’une main cruelle

  On croit, puisqu’il en est mort

  Que la plate était mortelle.’

  Ignace’s voice was maudlin.

  ‘He was by a sad fate

  Wounded by a cruel hand

  And is known to be dead

  For the wound was mortal.’

  ‘The wound was mortal,’ I reprised.

  ‘Il mourut le vendredi

  Le dernier jour de son âge;

  S’il fat mort le samedi

  Il eut vécu d’avantage.’

  ‘He died on Friday

  The last day of his life

  If he had died
on Saturday

  It would have been better.’

  ‘It would have been better,’ I reprised.

  Then Ignace lay still, one forearm over his eyes, imagining his death, drowned in Georgian Bay.

  ‘Am I lovely?’ he asked after a while.

  ‘You are white as a shroud.’

  ‘Men are not lovely. But I believe in man, Jean. I believe man is capable of anything.’

  ‘Under certain circumstances.’

  Ignace became sad.

  ‘Is it possible to speak with you spiritually?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lies, intrigues, slanders.’

  ‘So? I find it difficult to be sincere.’

  ‘Frankly, you are impossible.’

  Etienne and I walked by the black canal. We went under the trestle bridge by Galtieau’s yard. Branches and dead leaves floated by. A naphtha fire burned red behind the dry cleaner’s. Etienne coughed, a long stringy filament. When I looked I saw that filaments hung from telephone wires all over town.

  ‘Perhaps we shall go too far,’ Etienne said. ‘Our involvement.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘I fear some things, Jean.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some things in particular.’

  He spat green.

  ‘Are you spitting because of me?’ I asked.

  ‘Against trouble, in general.’

  My feelings for Etienne changed. It blew up one night at the Shell station where Paul Hartmann worked. The fluorescent lights sent a cold, flickering light over the buveurs who drank and played cards. It was grotesque. Our flesh looked decayed.

  ‘Play, Jean,’ Etienne said.

  ‘I’m playing.’

  ‘With whom?’

  The card-playing stopped. All we heard was Paul’s radio. I dropped my cards.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘One hears – ’ Etienne said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are still in love with Antoinette Hartmann.’

  ‘One hears,’ I said. ‘One hears. ONE HEARS. St Croix is full of ONE HEARS and never ONE KNOWS!’

  I stood up. So did Etienne. The two chairs tumbled backwards on to the concrete. Paul Hartmann pulled us down to our chairs.

  ‘Buveurs,’ he said gently. ‘Please. We are buveurs.’

  Etienne and I shook hands. But if I had had a shotgun I would have blown his head off.