My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Vien laughed, nodding as if impressed. If he felt guilty about his intrusion into Luc’s working day, it didn’t show. “I love your books,” he said. “I’ve read every one of them. It’s amazing.”

  “What’s amazing?”

  “That you did it.”

  “Wrote books?”

  “Not just books. Tanneur tanné, La mort d’un rêveur. You’re the voice of Quebec, Luc. That’s what they call you. The voice of a generation. Our generation. Les boomers. And I grew up with you. I knew you way back when.”

  “You did,” said Luc, smiling magnanimously. This type of talk used to make him want to run. Now, he just let it wash over him. Water off a duck’s back. He had a talent, that was all. He could tell a story. But he still woke up at four A.M. worrying about money and the health of his prostate gland. His hair, formerly thick and black, was still going grey. The muscles of his stomach were still thinning and turning incrementally into fat. It wasn’t as though writing saved him from anything. At one time, he’d thought it might.

  This had changed when Hugo was born, so tiny and dark, so utterly foreign, that Luc had actually felt a shiver of revulsion. It shamed him now to remember. The birth of his son had shown him how little control he had, not merely over extraneous things, but over intimate ones as well. Writing, he’d once thought, sharpened the sensibilities. It rearranged the interior world, making space for empathy and love.

  As he watched Hugo emerge from between Hannah’s legs, covered in blood and wax, he hadn’t felt anything even approaching love. After the doctor had cut the cord and the nurses had cleaned him, after Hannah had taken him in her arms and held him, crooning, against her breasts, Luc was offered the chance to hold him too. Hugo had looked up at him with enormous, worried eyes. His brow was mottled yellow and pink, the skin wrinkled like an old man’s. He had resembled in that moment the poster of Franz Kafka hanging above Hannah’s desk: saucer-eyed and Semitic. Not a trace of the Lévesque bloodline to be seen.

  Vien’s chatter brought Luc back to the present. He was describing the details of his life: the house in Longueuil on the South Shore; the daily drive over the crumbling Champlain Bridge; the wife who had walked out a year ago. He still lived in the bungalow by the river they had owned together.

  “You’re lucky to have this,” Vien said, motioning at the room with both hands. “Not the office,” he clarified, following Luc’s eyes. “I mean Hugo. Your wife. A family.”

  Luc didn’t answer. Vien had always been a sentimentalist. Playing father to a fourteen-year-old son and husband to a woman you’d lived with for over twenty years wasn’t unadulterated bliss, not that he was about to go into it.

  “Well,” said Vien, as the silence grew uncomfortable.

  They walked to the door.

  “He’s a good kid,” said Vien.

  Again, Luc said nothing.

  “Boys go insane at that age.”

  Luc shrugged and shook Vien’s hand, which felt surprisingly spongy. Too many years at a desk marking papers. He watched him walk to his car, a Toyota with a rusting hole above the rear wheel. Vien’s back was slightly bowed, his step small. At fourteen, he used to bound down the stairs, taking them two at a time, kicking at the chestnuts that littered the front walk. Life had done its work. Vien was freighted now, slow. He walked by the chestnuts without even seeing them. Luc tucked in his chin, threw back his shoulders, and pulled himself to his full height. He hoped to God he didn’t look like that from behind.

  Vien’s horn tooted twice as he drove off, back to the Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Where he worked, teaching Hugo. It was hard to fathom.

  A memory came floating to the surface, a cellular memory of the scratchy ill-fitting uniform Luc had been forced to wear for five years. Luc had not liked high school. He’d had reasons, not all of them related to Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste itself. The face of his old principal, Monsieur Hervé, rose up in front of him. A fierce, pockmarked man. Or was the fierceness, like Vien’s lazy eye, like the honking laugh, just a distraction from the good man underneath?

  Luc put away his notes. Too bad it was Monday—a short day might set the tone for the whole week. Where was Hannah, anyway? It had been four days, but it felt longer. If she’d been here, he would have been spared all this. Or maybe not spared, not utterly. He would have wanted to see Serge Vien again, even though it made him sad. Those soft fleshy hands. He took one of his own hands in the other and squeezed. He could still feel his bones.

  His wife should be here. This was her responsibility: Hugo, school, health. Especially health. She would have reacted strongly. Dragged Luc into a long, unnecessary discussion about the risks Hugo had just taken, with her father skulking in the shadows behind every word. Maybe it was best she was away.

  Nothing bad had happened, after all. Hugo was his usual sullen self. He seemed fine. It had been a stupid, juvenile prank, that was all. Luc put on his outdoor shoes. He wouldn’t get angry at his son, even if the boy had cost him a day of work. He opened the front door and stepped outside into the blazing sun. As he climbed toward the second floor, where Lyse lived, the rays felt good on his shoulders, and he chastised himself for his indoor life. It was like summer. He should get out more. Just above him was the flat that Vien had once known so intimately. Vien had practically lived with Luc’s family during his unhappy years as a boarder at the school. Lyse had procured a letter from Madame Vien allowing him to have dinner with the Lévesques on weeknights. And most weekends too, Vien would be there, sleeping on an inflatable mattress beside Luc’s bed.

  At the second-floor landing there were two doors, one to Lyse’s place, one to Luc’s own home on the top floor. He opened the latter and took the indoor staircase two stairs at a time.

  Hugo’s scuffed shoes lay upended on different steps. Luc collected them, placing them neatly next to one another, removed his own shoes, and arranged them likewise. You have to stay calm, he told himself. And be firm. He turned his head sharply to the right and then to the left. Sometimes he could get it; there would be a satisfying little pop right up at the top, where the vertebrae connected with the skull. The axis vertebra. Wasn’t that the name for it? No pop today. He tried again. Nothing. He opened his front door and stepped into a din of gunfire.

  “Hugo?” he called out. He stood for several seconds, listening. No answer. Only the guns.

  The place smelled of garbage. He had forgotten to put it out on Friday in the rush to get Hugo out of bed and ready for school. The truck would come again tomorrow, a fact that Luc had written in his agenda in bold red print. That was what turning fifty was about: writing things down in red ink.

  Hugo’s door was shut. A green copper cobra fanned its oxidized hood at the level of Luc’s hand. Rémi had bought this ancient ornamental door handle in India and given it to Hugo for Christmas. Luc knocked and the guns fell silent. There was some rustling. Luc reached for the snake’s head and pushed.

  The computer was dark. There was a house rule: Hugo wasn’t allowed to be at his computer until evening, and then only after his homework was completed. He was on his bed, scratching the plastic cover off The Guinness Book of World Records with his thumbnail. His school uniform—an updated version of the navy shirt and pants Luc himself had once worn—lay crumpled on the floor. He was wearing jeans now, his boxers exposed at the waist. Luc picked his son’s school pants up and folded them.

  “So you made yourself faint.”

  Hugo’s eyes remained fixed on the book. His right earlobe was puffy and red. That had been their last fight. Hugo had visited a piercing studio on a dare with two of his friends. Hannah had been annoyingly calm about the whole thing. The school had not been so accepting; the stud had to go. Hugo had gotten rid of it, but, predictably, the hole was now infected.

  “Your ear’s red,” Luc said.

  The boy lifted his hand to touch it but still refused to look at him. His hair was shaved so close that Luc could see the bony ridges under his scalp. Pinhead pimples dotted
his forehead.

  “Hugo.” Luc turned his head away sharply, then turned it back. The crick still would not release.

  The boy didn’t move.

  Luc grabbed the book. “Look at me!”

  Hugo looked up, focusing over Luc’s right shoulder.

  Luc inhaled and lunged.

  His son’s bones felt like the bones of a bird in his hands. The boy struggled weakly. This was easy; easy and satisfying. Why was his heart beating so hard? He bunched the loose fabric of Hugo’s shirt in his fists and forced him down on the bed. He felt, rather than summoned, the grin on his face—an instinctive grin, a baring of teeth. What was happening? His mouth and hands seemed to have disconnected from his reason. He’d never let loose like this before. Never dreamed it was possible. Hugo went limp. There were tears in his eyes.

  Luc released him. A mistake, it turned out, because instantly Hugo scrambled to his feet.

  “Prick!” he yelled in English. “Dirty prick motherfucker!” He was crying now in earnest, but the words were still clear. Luc watched in stunned silence as he screamed them, again and again, hateful, foreign things that moved through Luc’s ribs and lodged, painfully, dully, in the centre of his chest.

  2

  Luc was staring at his screen again. Today was no better than yesterday, though so far it had been quiet. He had plugged in his phone—he couldn’t in good conscience do otherwise—but thankfully there had been no calls. He had slept poorly and woken up sweating, with a vague memory of bad dreams. Hugo had risen late, of course, his surliness magnified by the fight. Too late to eat breakfast if he wanted to catch the bus for school. And he’d left on the kitchen table the lunch Luc had taken guilty pains to prepare—a ham sandwich, miniature carrots, the last of the chocolate chip cookies, an apple.

  Hannah had a mantra. “Ne prends rien au plan personnel.”

  Luc pictured her shaking her head, accusing him with her big, unhappy eyes. He stretched in his chair. His eyes stung and his head kept sagging against his chest. He should probably take a nap. Instead, he leaned forward, forcing himself back to chapter five.

  His narrator was looking for a home. It was a literal search, like Rose-Anna’s quest for an apartment in Bonheur d’occasion.

  How he loved that book. People said he wrote well, but he had never come close to Bonheur. Had Gabrielle Roy known how good it was? Could you ever know that about your own novel, or did you have to take other people’s word for it?

  His narrator felt like a stranger to his half-Irish wife and their mongrel son. He believed his wife was unfaithful. She was distracted, absent, all but oblivious of their son’s recent downward spiral. There was no tender talk between them anymore, no talk at all, really, except recrimination. Life in the four-and-a-half on Lacasse Street had become close to unbearable. Art imitating life. Luc’s hero was now an avid reader of the classifieds; he watched for rental signs as he worked the streets of Saint-Henri, retracing his route after his fares got out if he spotted anything promising. It had begun innocently, an idle pastime. But it soon turned into a conscious search. He jotted down numbers, knocked on people’s doors, took note of every chance. A real home, a place where a man could lay his head in peace: was that too much to ask? Buildings were being bought up by developers all over Saint-Henri. Luc planned to introduce a character inspired by Rémi, a contractor who purchased cheap properties in the southwestern section of the city, fixed them up in a hurry, and flipped them at exorbitant prices. Rémi had renovated this triplex, which their family had owned since 1950. The market value was now twenty-five times what it had been the year it was bought.

  Good places were hard to find. Students and artists had discovered Saint-Henri decades ago and displaced the truly poor, but now even they were being forced out by the speculators. Rents were many times what Luc’s protagonist could afford.

  Luc was searching for a place too.

  He enjoyed walking the streets, especially after dark. He had always liked looking through the windows of other people’s houses. It was astonishing how few of them had blinds or, if they did have them, how few were pulled down. He had watched a girl dance topless in front of her mirror, so thrilled by her own gaze that she failed to notice his. He had heard couples shouting insults at each other, wives screaming. At least Hannah wasn’t a screamer. That he could not have endured. He’d seen plenty of other things on his walks. Love scenes, for instance, trysts in the alleys, men embracing men. But mostly he’d seen people alone, skin tinged with the blue flicker of a multitude of luminescent screens. Because of Hugo, he hadn’t been out on his nocturnal rambles in a while. He wanted Hannah to come back. The clock was ticking. Rémi had said December, and that didn’t leave much time.

  Until Rémi moved out, Luc had worked upstairs. One of the bedrooms had always been set aside as his office. Hannah claimed not to need one. She was fine in the pantry, she said, and he didn’t press the issue. Then Rémi met Catherine and moved to the Plateau. And Luc’s life went from good to perfect. For three glorious years, Luc had paid Rémi rent and enjoyed complete peace and comfort in the bottom flat.

  But now Rémi and Catherine were splitting up. Rémi was returning to Laporte Street and Luc had exactly two months to find a new refuge.

  The telephone rang. “Luc?” The voice was young, melodious. “I thought I’d get the answering machine.”

  “Well,” he said, “you got the man. Sorry.” Only he wasn’t sorry at all. The voice belonged to Marie-Soleil. He was alert now, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling pleasantly.

  “I thought you unplugged in the mornings.”

  He looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. “Actually,” he said, “I’m done for the day.”

  “I didn’t mean to disturb.”

  “You’re not.”

  But she was—if disturb was the word for it. He could picture her lips, which were the colour of plums. Luc’s agent, Frédéric Axe, had hired her as a personal assistant two years ago. She accompanied him to literary functions, travelled with him to book fairs in Paris and Frankfurt, sleeping, Luc hoped, in a separate hotel room. Frédéric had told Luc with a straight face that he was teaching her about foreign rights.

  Luc had left it at that. But recently there had been a shift. Whenever Luc visited the office, Marie-Soleil came out of her cubicle to greet him. She had taken to kissing him familiarly on both cheeks and laughing at his witticisms. And now she was calling him in the middle of the morning at his desk.

  “My good luck,” Marie-Soleil said, and laughed. She laughed often. “Yours too. I have news.”

  He heard something in her voice, something erotic. Or was it just youth, amplified by the excitement in his own body?

  “I’ve found the perfect place.”

  Five minutes later he had hung up the telephone, changed out of his long underwear, and was walking down Laporte Street in the direction of the canal. His teeth were brushed. He had checked his beard for breakfast crumbs. He regretted the grey in it. Beards for men, hands for women: the infallible indicators of age. Marie-Soleil was not yet twenty-five.

  The day was bright, surely an auspicious sign. Yet he mustn’t raise his hopes too high. Mustn’t make a symbol of the weather.

  This wasn’t a scene from a novel. At Saint-Jacques Street, he turned right and walked west to du Couvent, then south. Not a long walk. Saint-Henri was surprisingly small. Its streets intersected and bifurcated in strange, not altogether logical, ways, often punctuated by parks and squares, but the actual geographical area was not large. Luc quickened his pace. It was good to be walking.

  Only people who didn’t know him well envied Luc Lévesque. He led a largely interior life, bent over a keyboard, his peculiar form of monasticism that didn’t preclude the right—the obligation, even, since as an artist he felt compelled to explore every stage of a man’s life—to procreate as well as to create. But solitude suited him. He was a slow maker of sentences. He compared himself (never out loud) to Flaubert. A hesitater, a chro
nic victim of second and third and fourteenth thoughts, a perfectionist who, unlike Flaubert, never came near perfection. He often worked through dinner and into the night. He and Hannah could spend a whole day within a few steps of each other and not exchange a word.

  He walked past the Cinéma Cartier on grimy Notre-Dame Street. It was no longer a cinema; Dawson College owned the building now. In Bonheur d’occasion, Jean Lévesque had brought Florentine Lacasse here on their first date. Two doors away, looking every bit as rundown and forlorn as it must have looked in the forties, when Gabrielle Roy was walking these streets, was the Deux Records bar, where Florentine’s father, Azarius, had made beer-fuelled speeches about the war. This stretch of Notre-Dame held little charm. Even in sunshine, it remained grey and shabby, with a few shrubs or bits of grass to enliven it.

  Luc reached Saint-Augustin Street. The discount store with the diner at the back where Florentine Lacasse had served meals—les 15 Cennes—crowned the north end of the street where it intersected with Notre-Dame. Les 15 Cennes was a dollar store now. Plus ça change …

  Luc didn’t like this area. Sometimes, he went to Distribution Alimentaire Aubut for cheese—the parmesan was good—but in general the southern half of Saint-Henri depressed him. Most of the factories had been turned into pricey lofts, which made him angry. It was only recently, after Frédéric Axe moved his office into the district, that Luc had started visiting with any regularity.

  Marie-Soleil had instructed him to meet her at the last building before the railway crossing. He knew the house, of course. It sat a few steps from the tracks, a wooden structure tapering at one end like a boat’s hull, “twisted, as if to brace itself against life’s shocks.” A brilliant phrase, which Luc surprised himself by remembering whole. Gabrielle Roy had compared the house to a sailing vessel, a clumsy one, cleaving waves of industrial dust and debris.

  It certainly was a singular sight, squatting there precariously. A perfect place for surly, ambitious young Jean Lévesque, the character Gabrielle Roy had created to inhabit it. Perfect, now, sixty years later, for another Lévesque. Marie-Soleil was right.