Last Days of Montreal

by John Brooke

  “I don’t know why you do this to me, Ma.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  “I’m your son.”

  Pa says, “I can’t listen to this.”

  “But I love you, Pa.”

  Ma says, “Have some food.” She spreads her arms. There’s soup, there’s dumplings…

  Miko smiles at all the food. “Later.”

  “You won’t want it later.”

  “I still love you, Ma. I don’t blame you.”

  “You’re a grown man. You do what you want with your life.”

  “Yeah,” agrees Miko, and sighs. The kitchen is his favourite place in the world. Smell of coffee, sausage and peppers, chicken boiling…whatever’s happening, Miko loves it. He loves Ma and Pa.

  Pa says, “Why don’t you get yourself back in the clinic?”

  “Nah. They’re bad people, Pa. They don’t know me like you and Ma do.”

  “Your Ma and me, we’re getting old.”

  “You got everything I need, Pa.”

  “We want to retire…maybe go back to the old country.”

  Whenever he hears this line, Miko says, “Gerry and Stan will kill me.”

  Ma always says, “Gerry and Stan are sensible men. They got no obligation to take care of you.”

  Miko enjoys getting them both talking. He says, “Yeah, but if you give them the business.”

  “I don’t give them anything,” says Ma. “They buy it.”

  Miko looks into her eyes. “Put me in the deal.”

  “You’re not a horse, Miko.”

  Pa gets up from the table, coffee and tv Guide in hand. “The girls will put you in the clinic,” he says. “They have their own lives.”

  “Cunts.”

  Ma smacks the table. “Stop!”

  “Ah, Ma…” And Miko smiles. Because Ma isn’t really mad. She loves him. And Pa’s face is beautiful…beautiful like in a story. “This is all I can do. It’s not like it’s a complicated thing.”

  Pa says, “A man has to take care of himself, Miko.”

  “I love you, Pa. You’re a beautiful man.”

  Pa says it again: “I can’t listen to this.” He goes back to watch the news.

  “You make your father sad, Miko.”

  “I’m his son.”

  “He never had this kind of problem. All the years we’ve had the business, your father was always a sensible man.”

  “I’m going to be an old junkie, Ma.”

  “I’ll be dead.” She takes her board to the sink and runs some water.

  “It’s so simple.”

  “You want to know how much you cost us, Miko?”

  “No, Ma, I don’t want to know that kind of thing.”

  “I can tell you right down to the last dollar.” She cleans her knife…goes to the fridge for beets.

  Miko watches her chopping. He asks, “You know how much the guy who owns Disneyland makes?”

  “He works for his money.” Chopping, chopping, chopping…

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s got too much for any one man. It makes me mad. I bet Stan could figure a way to do that guy.”

  Ma stops to get something out of her nose. She asks, “Why do you do this to me?”

  “Why do you do this to me, Ma?”

  “I’m your mother…for God’s sake, Miko!”

  “You’re my mother…you should know what it feels like.”

  “Have something to eat.” She slides the beets off the board into the Presto.

  “Later, Ma…later.”

  Ma heads back to the fridge. “You should eat.”

  “What about the guy who killed those kids in Scotland?”

  “He’s a monster.”

  “Worse than the one who killed those women here in Montreal?”

  “Stop it, Miko.”

  Miko turns in his chair to tell her, “I just want to talk to you.”

  “Go talk to your father.”

  “He won’t talk to me. You’re the only one I have to talk to.”

  Ma comes back to the table with the pastry she did this morning. She lays it down and cleans her board again. She gets out her bowl. She goes to her spice rack and comes back with nutmeg and cinnamon. She goes to the cupboard and gets out the maraschino cherries, the raisins, almond paste and walnuts and pistachios. Some Quick…always a spoonful or two. Her oil. The honey. The Frigolet liqueur from the bottom shelf, to hide behind the honey. Then back to the fridge for the orange juice and butter, the powdered espresso and the eggs… She unwraps the butter and pulls out her knife and asks him, “What will you do when I’m gone?”

  It jolts him. She always surprises him, just when he’s into her rhythm and the warm magic of it all. “Don’t talk like that, Ma.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  He nods “yes” to that and asks her: “Just one more? I’m your son.”

  “Why can’t you act like it? This is what I ask.”

  “But I am,” says Miko. “I act just like you made me.”

  The bell rings. Two Haitians come in. They wear stupid hats and talk their French so you can’t catch a word. Doing business with those guys always makes Ma agitated, and Miko too — so the good part goes quicker than it’s meant to. By the time they’re gone, Miko’s heart is turning grey again.

  Ma gets back up, reties her apron… Miko loses his train of thought.

  Later in the park, the afternoon sun breaks through and touches him, a quiet finger, reminding him that he’s in for some pain, a good three hours’ worth. Miko asks, Who the hell am I to deserve this?

  His body whispers that he is Miko, the drug dealer’s son.

  Recognition brings the echoes of the words from her kitchen.

  Miko sits there and lets it play out again…until the dogs begin to come.

  The Finer Points of Apples

  “Mmm! you smell like apples.” Bruce was nuzzling her hair, pushing his knee against her thigh.

  “Le vinaigre de cidre,” said Geneviève. “The apple man sells it.”

  “Cider vinegar?”

  “C’est bon pour le…how do you say it?…itching.”

  “Smells good.” Then Bruce asked, “Are we going to make love tonight?”

  “Pense pas.”

  “Ah.”

  “You would like that?”

  “I could.”

  “Pas moi. Trop fatiguée.” Geneviève rolled over.

  “Maybe the apple guy has something for that too.”

  “Peut-être…bonne nuit.”

  In fact, the apple guy did.

  Gaston Le Gac had long fingers that knew how to reach deep into her different openings to places Bruce had never been, or scratch her breast at le moment juste, or slap her bottom with a calculated measure of playful malice which could make her insides flow. Or baking the apple: He would disengage completely — maybe softly kiss — while pressing an apple against her. She would ply herself upon its smoothness. It was birth in reverse, the head of the child she had never made. No, she had no regrets on that score. Far too late for that. Rather, it was the sense of being removed, of falling into a space between herself and the life around her. Pure imagination. The erotic far side of procreation. The apple, after all, is forever. Gaston brought Geneviève fresh sex and immortality.

  And it was conversation — of the kind Bruce, four years into their liaison, had never quite caught onto. Oh, his French was fairly competent at this point; but what could an English Canadian ever really know of a French traveller’s soul? Of her blood-borne feelings?

  They had determined that Gaston had arrived from Quimper via Paris the very week she had walked off her flight from Toulouse. That was twenty-three years ago. Now here at long last was the inevitable meeting with a fellow countryman, the kind she’d vaguely imagined as she’d set out, footloose, excited…then nibbled at from behind loneliness for the first two years at wine and cheese things at l’Alliance or brunches at friends of friends, then forgotten for a time when she’d met her f
irst stranger at a fern bar in Vancouver, and then encountered again from a different kind of distance as the trail had wound, in ever more diffuse circles, back here to Montreal.

  Where there are lots of us.

  Yes, but all reattached, she thought. To them.

  Twenty-three years, and it was this scruffy Breton, coming up from Frelighsburg to sell his apples at le Marché Jean Talon.

  His wife’s apples, to be more exact. Well, her father’s, really. But almost hers and so Gaston’s. Geneviève had heard that part too. It meant this could be only une aventure. A fling? An affair? Something on the side? Positioning it in English was something she would leave for the time being. Just une aventure, thought Geneviève, without a sense of any wrong. Because we have the passion and the practicality, and these are meant to be separate. The ability to keep each in its place is in our blood. It’s what they know us by, our calling card.

  Gaston’s wife was a sturdy Québécoise. Micheline. She worked the stall the occasional day, but there was no threat. Too far from her. Like with Bruce. She wouldn’t know. Never in a million years. And there were three children, who also helped out on weekends, and perhaps the eldest girl sensed something as she observed her papa chatting with this regular customer, this Française; Geneviève had met her eyes, shaken hands and smiled. But that girl was only half French and she couldn’t truly know the things that linked Gaston and Geneviève. No, they were safe.

  It was a question of breathing the same way. Or the finer points of apples. They could talk for hours if they had to, right there in the middle of the market. The locals’ eyes would glaze over and they’d get on with other things. It was a kind of natural protection, especially here in Montreal.

  They were settling on Empire. The acidy element made the sweet more precious, the pulp required real teeth, had character. But Gaston was still loath to dismiss the McIntosh.

  “This is your basic apple,” he said. “Sure, some will call it bland, flaccid. Myself, I say it’s soft, welcoming. This apple is fundamentally sweet. Sweetness is a quality where degrees begin in the ineffable and descend from there. A child will eat six of these McIntosh before she realizes she is ill. None of them can match that. We are talking fruit, remember, something the Lord created and the Devil put to use.”

  “It is like our vin de pays,” countered Geneviève; “solid, and there for anyone. But low. No, there are no two ways about it — the McIntosh is low. If you want to know quality, you have to move up.”

  “True. Absolutely true.”

  “Now the Cortland,” she ventured, “is almost a McIntosh. That soft taste, as you characterize it…and almost Empire as well. Cortland’s pulp is a force to be reckoned with. And it lacks the sour bite. Yes, I would almost say Cortland is the best of both worlds.”

  “But are we here to deal in almosts?” queried Gaston.

  “No…no,” sighed Geneviève, smoothing her palm along his hairy back, “we’ve come too far for that.”

  “If you want to challenge Empire you must side with Spartan. You must go past the threshold of stringency. Spartan compels the mouth to draw in upon itself. Not pleasant to my taste — but vital!”

  “But if we must explore those areas — ” Geneviève was at a point in her life where she did not like to speak of dryness. “ — we must surely say Lobo is king.”

  “King of dryness, yes, no argument there. But it is flat. Lobo is soft but in all its negative connotations. Sweetness, character — there is nothing there!…much like those waxy things they send us from the west. Delicious. Now there’s a marketing triumph for you…No, Lobo is entirely too easy. If McIntosh is for a baby, Lobo’s for a sauce and not much else.” He rolled over, sipped on her nipple. “It’s my biggest seller, though. I have to love Lobo regardless of what I know is true.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Geneviève, fingers in his stringy hair — jet black and so familiar.

  “Do you?”

  “Oui,” she mused, suddenly weighed down by subtlety, “some things are made to test us.”

  That morning she had tried to give Bruce a reason why fini could not be used to express his feeling of exhaustion after a fourth piece of toasted baguette, smothered, as usual, with peach jam from her mother’s village in the Midi, a half-hour north of Sète:

  “Yes, to say you are finished — as in through eating, which anyone would be…” Bruce never flinched at her jabs. “And yes, if eating four pieces of toast like that will serve to break your reputation into crumbs. Your social standing, or your business credibility: these both could be fini…Mais, tu ne peux pas le dire pour le moral. Jamais.”

  “I don’t mean to use it for my morale,” said Bruce. “I feel fine. Wonderful! I’m just wiped out from eating four pieces of toast and two bowls of your beautiful coffee. J’suis fini. As in fatigué.”

  “You can’t.”

  “You can in English…whew! I’m finished!”

  “Faux amis.”

  “Why?”

  “C’est le moral.”

  “No, c’est le physique.”

  “No, Bruce…non.”

  “Think you’re wrong this time, Gen.”

  So she’d got the dictionary and it took an hour.

  She should have been accustomed to it by that point, but no, it was still surprising how much time they spent working with words. The mechanics. They were a shield against the gap. And why deny it? Not a bridge; one cannot bridge a gap that will always, like sweetness, be ineffable. Just a shield. One more way to work around the gap so a bond could form. And it was not only with Bruce…with the English. It happened with all the Quebecois she knew as well. Gaston had said “and how!” (tu parles!) to that, referring to the three children he had engendered, but who lived here, in this slightly less-than state of culture.

  Geneviève did not need to explain or argue language with Gaston. Of like generation and both with a Bacc A…philo or literature; not much real use like the B which was the economic sciences, and from a system that was now obsolete; but it meant they could speak the way one was meant to.

  So they did, and were free to delve straight into each other.

  Which is not to say that Geneviève and Gaston went gouging through the body to devour the soul. Not at all. A passion of sorts, yes, some days (self-respect demanded some); savagery, no. They were both too old for such behaviour. They both had things worth guarding.

  She had Christmas in English now. Bruce’s blue-rinsed mother refused to consider chestnuts in the stuffing. His too-polite father really did believe in the English queen. But Geneviève had found the beginnings of a new family over in the western reaches of crumbling Montreal. Sure, she fought it — the bond that could never be perfect. She was fighting it in this thing with Gaston. Or was wavering the better word? Lâcher pied? Her instincts, fears, something had latched on to these people even while her mind continued to dissect their ways. Because Bruce had helped her shift up, at long last, into a more civilized way of living. He sent his daughter to college, and he kept his son supplied with music and those ridiculous clothes; yet he still contributed enough to allow Geneviève’s one-woman translation operation to be enjoyable now. No more panic if the calls did not come. Since leaving his disaster in Westmount and moving in, Bruce’s presence had allowed her to work with a view of the poplars in the lane and the Italian neighbours in their gardens, then, if she felt like it, leave it in the afternoon. Bruce; and their home together: the practical side… She would take her bicycle and pedal to the market, ten minutes away, for bread that was improving, sausage she had learned to like, real cheeses from France, good fish from the Greek, decent tomatoes in September. And apples.

  Les Pommes Le Gac. You had to pass it. It was dead centre, where the two closed-in aisles met in winter, the nexus of the expanded open-air arrangement that came with summer. There were eight varieties of apple, six of which came from Le Gac’s own orchards. They also offered apple butter, jelly, juice and cider, pies, a syrup, a taffy in th
e winter, and the cider vinegar — with herbs, or straight. Geneviève had a large jar of wine vinegar in her cupboard and replenished it with the dregs from every bottle opened in her home. So she had never tried this product. But she was a regular. She had been stopping at the stall for several years with no real thought for the proprietor with the Breton name. Bruce took an apple in his briefcase every day.

  It was September when it started. It had been hot, Montreal humidity lingering, but pleasant by then, and even cherished, with only three, maybe five more weeks till the seasons changed. She and Bruce had gone for their three weeks in Maman’s house, then come home to spend August in the backyard. A cousin — Yves, on her father’s side from Nantes — and his family had stopped over for a couple of days on their drive through Quebec. Visitors always liked the market, so she’d brought them along. Yves and Gaston traded pleasantries in their Breton dialect, everyone was delighted…they came away with a complimentary bottle of the cider vinegar. Four weeks later Geneviève approached with a postcard from her cousin, to be forwarded to Monsieur Le Gac, and a bottle of the chewy southern wine she always brought back from Maman’s village.

  “You must drink it with me,” said Gaston.

  Yes, she thought, chatting on about Chirac and his atomic bombs in Polynesia, perhaps I must.

  It was not difficult. He kept a three-and-a-half opposite the police station on St. Dominique, hardly a minute away. Cheaply made. In need of a good fumigating. She watched officers tucking in their shirts as they got out of their patrol cars and slammed the doors.

  “Handy,” offered Geneviève.

  “Practical,” corrected Gaston, “otherwise I’d never sleep.”

  So it was September. But they did not rush into it.

  They kissed on Referendum Day. A cold day, the bitterness of Quebec winter just arriving. It had been a joke actually, to show their own small solidarity. Yet it was also, they both knew, a recognition of its inevitability — the thing that was going to happen. But they did not consummate it until January, with Christmas and family well out of the picture, the day after Mitterrand died.

  Not difficult at all. There was the grotesque cold since New Year’s, historically unusual amounts of snow, a strike by the City workers which meant it stayed there, and of course the politics. Apple buyers were sparse and sombre. Gaston wore two sweaters and a Montreal Canadiens toque, making him look more of a nul than Bruce’s son. Not difficult… But neither was it passion that first carried them through: