The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

  ‘You are really stupid, Jean,’ Ignace said. ‘Maudit niaiseux. To have run away again.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘If you were killed–

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You’d have gone straight to hell.’

  News of Dienbienphu filtered into St Croix. The disaster took hold. The British secretly smirked. We tried to make plans but we were under a mauvais esprit. Aggravated by paralysis, my father attended the city council. He demanded that fleas on the wharf be eradicated.

  ‘But, cher monsieur,’ said the city manager, ‘we were discussing the street tax.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Now you know the French viewpoint.’

  I became depressed. I spoke to St Bonaventure’s nurse. I told her I wanted to commit suicide. I told her I had no belief in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. I said there was no afterlife, no heaven or hell. She sent me to Father Vigneau who beat me with a mop.

  I had to wear a conical cap and blue fingerpaint on my nose. I wore a sign: ‘I am a dumb pig. I wear this because I am corrupted. I am bad. This is a lesson to be learned. Stupid. Bad boy. Look. Laugh.’

  I walked home. Strangely, my house began to drift. I ran down LeClerc but my house arched into the sky. I ran after, screaming, until I tripped. Something dragged me backward down Emilia Street by the heels and threw me against a warehouse door.

  We took Ignace to Doctor Lacomb. I looked at Doctor Lacomb’s collection of pipettes, awls, and stethoscopes in the foyer. I peeked into the inner room. Ignace lay on a high leather bed. The nurse swabbed his lower abdomen and gave him an injection. Dr Lacomb came in, washed his hands, and put on sheer rubber gloves. The nurse gave Ignace a second injection and his lips stopped fluttering.

  Dr Lacomb made an incision across Ignace’s belly, reached down, and fumbled.

  ‘Damn it. Where are they?’ he muttered.

  After a while he found something, gave a jerk. He sutured the wound with a white nylon thread, the nurse swabbed the wound with brown liquid and Dr Lacomb took a drink of water. Dr Lacomb came into the lobby. My mother looked up from her magazine.

  ‘He will breed like a pig,’ Dr Lacomb said.

  ‘Ignace is going to be a Jesuit,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Well. At least he’ll be normal.’

  The nurse wheeled Ignace into a waiting chamber with a poster of Lake Van in Turkey. We went inside. The sun from the window came through his transparent red ears, over his white hair.

  ‘How beautiful is sodium pentathol,’ he mumbled, and fell asleep.

  We drove Ignace home. As we drove up the driveway I saw the Dybs.

  ‘Ignace got his balls!’ I yelled.

  We took him inside. He slept most of the afternoon, then came down for supper. My father bought champagne and toasted him.

  ‘To Ignace Verhaeren,’ he said. ‘For on this day he achieved his testicles.’

  * * *

  My mother became nervous. She sliced her thumb at Kelly’s and bled on the vegetables. She had a crying fit and had to sit on a folding chair by the brown curtains.

  That October the patients complained of waiting for breakfast. Three elderly women said they lined naked to get their baths, and one fell and broke her hip. Residents were required to pay tips for afternoon tea. Then Amélie Ybert showed her bottom in contempt of the staff and they shoved puréed rutabaga in her ears. An elderly virgin, Natalie Mons, complained of the rude method of her bathing, and the orderly in shame burned his hands.

  These were the rumours of Kelly’s Nursing Home.

  Our mother took the waters of St Lazare.

  I carried her suitcase to the trunk-line station. It was midnight. A Polish soldier walked back and forth in the green rain, looking down the tracks into the darkness. She kissed my forehead.

  ‘Don’t torment Ignace,’ she said.

  ‘Who, me?’

  She took the train past the bleaching factory, across Ontario to the Laurentian Mountains. St Lazare was near Quebec. She was shown her room, which had a bowl and basin, crucifix, folded white towels. In the morning she went to mass and then changed for the bathing pools. The smell of chlorine was kept away by pot-pourris of rose leaves. Arthritics stood with their heads like wine bottles in alignment devices. Steam rose, obscuring Quebec. Nuns served distilled water.

  She toured Quebec. She visited Dufferin Terrace. She visited the Hotel Frontenac. From the promenade she watched the St Lawrence surge around the island of Orleans. Lower Quebec was hung with lavender. She went to the Archbishop’s Palace. It was closed. She left a bouquet of nasturtiums on the Plains of Abraham. She went to the panorama of Saint Anne de Beaupré and stayed three hours. She attended mass in Notre Dame des Victoires and heard the echoes of pilgrims. She knocked at the Ursuline convent. It was also closed.

  On the way back she visited her old convent, Our Lady of Trois Pointes, on a bluff over the St Lawrence. Stone angels looked down with rain-ruined faces. She went to the administration.

  ‘I am Yvonne Krems,’ she said. ‘I was noviced at this convent.’

  ‘And you subsequently married?’

  ‘I wish to re-enter.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘I am unhappy. I work hard in a stupid town. My husband is cruel and my children are fools.’

  ‘In every marriage there is regret.’

  ‘You were my Mother Superior.’

  ‘In every life, sadness.’

  ‘I AM DYING.’

  ‘You are not a sheet, Yvonne Krems, that can be sewn whole again.’

  She went to the garden grotto. Partly screened by black iron bars and trailing moss, an impossibly old nun scrubbed rocks. My mother kissed her hem through the bars.

  ‘O, there are children to be fed!’ she cried. ‘Things for them to do! And life is ugly!’

  ‘Such was your decision.’

  She went to the dining hall. Novices sat at long benches, one hand with the soup spoon, the other in the lap, under pewter candlesticks. She knelt in the chapel. Red and blue light from the stained glass fell on her black hair.

  ‘Jesu,’ she whispered. ‘I have lost everything.’

  Our mother came home and dreamed of peonies growing from industrial waste. Each peony was a relative. The wind as it blew sang a lullaby from the cold Brittany shores.

  ‘Savez-vous planter les choux

  A la mode, à la mode

  Savez-vous planter les choux

  A la mode de chez nous?’

  ‘Can you plant cabbages

  In the way, in the way

  Can you plant cabbages

  In the way we do?’

  And each peony grew until the tendrils tangled, and they fell under a black sun into the ash and scattered seeds.

  ‘On les plante avec le doigt

  A la mode, à la mode

  On les plante avec le doigt

  A la mode de chez nous.’

  ‘Plant them with the finger

  In the way, in the way

  Plant them with the finger

  In the way we do.’

  She woke with a start. I cooled her face with a cloth.

  ‘Jean – I saw our dead – ’

  ‘So many Verhaerens,’ I said. ‘These Flemish names.’

  ‘So many Kremses.’

  I combed the little curls over her ears. Her little hands covered mine.

  ‘All crazy,’ she said.

  After work, before anybody came home, her hair in a paisley kerchief, her housecoat with its little balls and strings of dust, my mother sat in her red easy chair, sipped strong French coffee, and listened to Coffee with Bruce. One day as it rained she stood at the window looking out at the bare trees of LeClerc.

  ‘How I wish we could eat and fly, eat and fly,’ she whispered, ‘like the blue-headed geese and die.’

  I found a dead dog in the Petit Croix. I pulled it with a pole but it floated away and sank.

  * * *

  I went up the stairs of the Bon Ga
rçon.

  Amber lamps lit a dirty Venus. Tattered pink carpets led past an armoire. Moose heads, racoon heads, muskrat heads, depending on the woman, stuck out over doors. On the doors were stencilled names. I heard groans. The further I climbed the longer the corridor grew. I crawled on my hands and knees under a low ceiling until I came to Agnes Moosefield.

  ‘Jean-Michel,’ Agnes said, ‘your father is not here.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Ah?’

  I dug into my pockets and held out four crumpled Canadian dollars. I went in and closed the door. On her wall was a picture of a woman bathing in a wooden tub with a man. An Indian headdress was nailed to a bedpost. I saw her health certificate over the dresser, and a bowl of almonds.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

  ‘I will ride you like an alligator.’

  ‘Let me wash you.’

  She shuffled to the basin in pink slippers. She came forward and unzipped me.

  ‘Look at you!’

  ‘Is that me?’

  I was hit with vertigo. I turned and slammed into the bedpost.

  ‘Oh-’

  ‘I’ll get some paper towels,’ she said.

  Suddenly there was a movement at the door. Somebody had been spying. I hobbled to the door, holding my trousers. I ripped open the door and saw my father running away, giggling.

  ‘Did you enjoy that?’ I yelled. ‘Did you!’

  Roger Vaucaire, a reform-school boy, caught narcosis. He came to St Bonaventure but couldn’t concentrate. I saw Roger come down La Poudre Road. Roger wore a plaid green flannel shirt and black boots. Decayed wet stubble glistened in the dark fields. He thought he was alone. He danced down La Poudre Road. He jumped, twirled, slapped his boots and danced.

  ‘Roger!’ I called.

  We smoked Chesterfields on a bench on the bluffs. Wheat freighters passed our harbour, going to Rutherford. Below the roofs were black with black wet wires. Rabbits lurched through the mud by our feet. Roger made finger pulls of invisible triggers. Suddenly Roger got narcosis again. He dropped his Chesterfield and leaned against my chest, delirious.

  ‘I will make you, pretty baby,’ he said, fingering my shirt. ‘I will put my finger in your eye.’

  ‘Poor Roger.’

  ‘I will look babies in your eyes,’ he said. ‘I will pick silly corns out of your toes.’

  ‘Poor Roger Vaucaire.’

  ‘I will tear your door off its hinges.’

  I had a strange dream that night: Roger Vaucaire in gossamer wings with a wand, stepping through gauze curtains.

  Roger lived in a trailer by the quarry, an area we called the Arrondissement des Pauvres. His grandfather had emphysema. His sister Amy had a hole in her heart. Roger showed me his comic books and model railroad, moss islands with tunnels trimmed in stone, pine trees of lacquered needles. Roger had an extraordinary talent, the purpose of it as yet unknown. He had a black tumour above his right knee and rested his leg on a green footstool. I eased on his black slippers.

  It grew dark. He turned on the light. Lamps he had painted with moose in wild rice lakes glowed. Tin angels revolved in heat. Gold foil twirled at the darkening windows.

  ‘Roger – ‘I said. ‘You are an artist!’

  Modestly, he waved his hand. He showed me his grandfather’s bayonet, dented and rusted, and a piece of shrapnel. Roger collected anarchist posters. Rain started falling. The birches were whipsawing in la forêt. A big storm, something really big, bigger than with Antoinette, was coming. I learned later it was a hurricane – a freak. Roger’s trailer wall divided the cold light outside from the warmth inside. I forgot St Croix.

  Roger gave me a glass of crème de menthe.

  ‘You are a master artist, Roger!’ I said.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. Suddenly my hand flamed. I laughed.

  ‘You are king of artists, Roger!’

  Roger turned on the radio. The Alouettes were losing. He turned it off. We drank more crème de menthe.

  ‘Y fait tellement noir, tout d’un coup,’ he said. ‘It’s so dark, all of a sudden.’

  ‘Night falls fast now.’

  The storm beat against the quarry. We watched, drunk, through Roger’s window.

  ‘J’avais jamais rien vu de si beau,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.’

  ‘Dieu que cé beau. God, it’s beautiful.’

  He drunkenly touched my face. A cry came through the rain. He pulled back his hand.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought – somebody – yelled – ’

  Roger opened the window. Rain spattered on to his scarred forehead.

  ‘Pitounes,’ he said, leaning out. ‘Whores. In the Bon Garçon.’

  ‘So far away?’

  ‘Women cry out to excite the men.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘They cry out until they shake.’

  There was a fly on the cold sill. Roger twirled a black thread into a ball and the fly mated with it.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘The whole world. Ficky-fick.’

  Roger showed me a contraband register of prostitutes. In it were pictures, names, addresses, specialities, sketches, criminal records and health certificates. He closed the book. We drank more crème de menthe.

  ‘One dives deep, Jean.’

  ‘In women?’

  ‘Astonishing what women do with men.’

  ‘What do they do, Roger?’

  ‘They move their bellies in the agony of love. Jean, I have made women moan. They sweat on their bed, hair plastered to a pale forehead.’

  ‘They sweat?’

  ‘I tell her it is only a momentary disgust. She is intrigued. I enter her, slowly. Her eyes open wide: she has learned something. I ride her like a cowboy. She loses herself. She jerks at her crisis like a perch on the pier.’

  ‘What technique!’

  ‘Shut up. Listen. In a cheap tenement, the mother of one of our friends, even one whom you know, twists like a hanged man as I stroke her inside. Like a diesel stoker, up and down, until she loses all dignity in desire.’

  ‘A master technician!’

  ‘I am Ed Gien!’

  Roger was sweating. He had reddish-brown hair on his upper lip. Now it was beaded with sweat. Hurricane Hazel swept the north shore, but we only heard about it later. We were inside a numbed cave. Roger poured even more crème de menthe.

  ‘These Catholic women,’ he confided, ‘crack like almonds. They burn in fields of fire. They scream like scorched pigs. That is how they are. That is how they always will be.’

  ‘Oh, my.’

  ‘Don’t you find it so?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve never had a woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you buttered the bread on both sides.’

  Milky gobs spurted into St Croix. It happened this way. Milkweed floated in clouds over the prison. A hydrant burst and sprayed water up the bluffs. Silky, milky gobs rotated down our streets, hung from telephone wires, dripped on cars. I saw Roger at the greengrocer. We turned away, blushing.

  One night I sleep-walked out on to the roof. Roger caught me from the oak tree.

  ‘You silly goose,’ he said.

  * * *

  I walked down LeClerc and outside Etienne Bastide’s house I watched Katherine dress. It must have been for a party, because she put a brooch on a full green dress. The lights in her room were warm and yellow. Her art project, a collage of leaves, stood beside her mirror. Suddenly a squirrel ran across the roof. She looked out and I backed away.

  A heart beat on the sidewalk.

  ‘Jean – watch what you’re doing,’ it said.

  I slipped it into my coat, and carried it home.

  Roger and I visited the museum of suicide.

  It was in Heron Bay. We walked up the wooden steps and went into what had been a ropemakers’ hall. Black cloth outlined the exhibits, mou
nted on enormous wooden spools. The first exhibit was Frantisek ‘Frankie’ Bremml. In a glass tank a doll sat in a steam boiler. Roger pressed a red button. Steam came out of a valve. Frankie turned black.

  The second exhibit was Artur Dornbach. Dornbach lay in an aquarium with a papier-mâché rock around his neck. Roger pressed the red button. Inky water oozed into the tank. The third was Henry Silver Adams, whose doll sat in front of a painted barn. Roger pressed the red button. Adams tumbled into a tub of fertilizer.

  The fourth exhibit was Ken Renquist. Renquist stood on the corner of Llewelyn Street and Georgetown in a miniaturized Heron Bay. Roger pressed a red button. Renquist’s doll, red hair flying, fell under the wheels of a red bus. There was a diorama of Wolf Hazard. Wolf lay in a lacquered garden of real squash, hollyhocks, rosemary and marigold. Aspirin bottles Uttered the shadows. Roger pressed the red button. Wolf’s torso fell apart.

  In the foyer were news photographs of Emily Lanke, George Lipp and Gilles Scott, who burned himself in a bathtub of naphtha. Roger and I had cream tea, cakes in the buffet. We watched the shadows in the harbour.

  ‘If only people died immediately,’ he said.

  ‘Carried straight from their mother’s knees.’

  ‘To la cimetière.’

  ‘And were not,’ I said.

  ‘No. Never even were. To be not.’

  ‘Not even to have been.’

  The buveurs debated suicide.

  ‘Dark rushes on the mind,’ Herman Pic said.

  ‘One does not even see dark,’ Lawrence Otto objected.

  ‘Not even dark,’ Paul Hartmann agreed.

  ‘Just that last little – flicker – ‘Danny Auban said. ‘ – perhaps bitterness – and – ’

  ‘Nothing,’ Herman said.

  ‘Ploof,’ I said.

  The buveurs passed a motion:

  Ploof.

  Many have said I was influenced by Etienne Bastide. Some say my obsession with Antoinette Hartmann was the turning point. In truth, all I ever was, all I ever could be, everything, I owe to Roger Vaucaire.

  I became addicted to crème de menthe. I was irritable without it and couldn’t sleep. Roger and I mixed crème de menthe and coffee, vodka and sloe gin. We called it The Pope’s Demitasse. By sheer accident I found Roger one day lying on the railroad tracks. He punched me in the face.