LaPointe sighs and scratches his hairline. She appears to be in her early twenties, younger than LaPointe’s daydream children. It’s late and he’s tired, and this girl is nothing to him. A skinny kid with a gamine face spoiled by that silly-looking black eye, and anything but attractive in the oversized man’s cardigan that is her only protection against the wind. The backs of her hands are mottled with cold and purple in the fluorescent streetlight.
Not attractive, probably dumb; a loser. But what if she turned up as a rape statistic in the Morning Report?
“All right,” he says. “Come on.” Even as he says it, he regrets it. The last thing he needs is a scruffy kid cluttering up his apartment.
She makes a movement as though to rise, then she looks at him sideways. He is an old man to her, and she knows all about old men. “I don’t do anything… special,” she warns him matter-of-factly.
He feels a sudden flash of anger. She’s younger than his daughters, for Christ’s sake! “Are you coming?” he asks impatiently.
There is only a brief pause before she shrugs with protective indifference, rises, and takes up her shopping bag. They walk side by side toward the gate. At first he thinks she is stiff with the cold and with sitting all huddled up. Then he realizes that she has a limp; one leg is shorter than the other, and the shopping bag scrapes against her knee as she walks.
He opens his apartment door and reaches around to turn on the red-and-green overhead lamp, then he steps aside and she precedes him into the small living room. Because the putty has rotted out of the big bow windows, they rattle in the wind, and the apartment is colder than the hallway.
As soon as he closes the door, he feels awkward. The room seems cramped, too small for two people. Without taking off his overcoat, he bends down and lights the gas in the fireplace. He squats there, holding down the lever until the limp blue flames begin to make the porcelain nipples glow orange.
Oddly, she is more at ease than he. She crosses to the window and looks down at the park bench where she was sitting a few minutes ago. She rubs her upper arms, but she prefers not to join him near the fire. She doesn’t want to seem to need anything that’s his.
With a grunt, LaPointe stands up from the gas fire. “There. It’ll be warm soon. You want some coffee?”
She turns down the corners of her mouth and shrugs.
“Does that mean you want coffee, or not?”
“It means I don’t give a shit one way or the other. If you want to give me coffee, I’ll drink it. If not…” Again she shrugs and squeeks a little air through tight lips.
He can’t help smiling to himself. She thinks she’s so goddamned tough. And that shrug of hers is so downriver.
The French Canadian’s vocabulary of shrugs is infinite in nuance and paraverbal articulation. He can shrug by lifting his shoulders, or by depressing them. He shrugs by glancing aside, or by squinting. By turning over his hands, or simply lifting his thumbs. By sliding his lower lip forward, or by tucking down the corners of his mouth. By closing his eyes, or by spreading his face. By splaying his fingers; by pushing his tongue against his teeth; by tightening his neck muscles; by raising one eyebrow, or both; by widening his eyes; by cocking his head. And by all combinations and permutations of these. Each shrug means a different thing; each combination means more than two different things at the same time. But in all the shrugs, his fundamental attitude toward the role of fate and the feebleness of Man is revealed.
LaPointe smiles at her tough little shrug, a smile of recognition. While he is in the kitchen putting the kettle on, she moves over to the mantel, pretending to be interested in the photographs arranged in standing frames. In this way she can soak up warmth from the gas fire without appearing to need or want it. As soon as he returns, she steps away as nonchalantly as possible.
“Who’s that?” she asks, indicating the photographs.
“My wife.”
Her swollen eye almost closes as she squints at him in disbelief. The woman in the photos must be twenty-five or thirty years younger than this guy. And you only have to look around this dump to know no woman lives here. But if he wants to pretend he has a wife, it’s no skin off her ass.
He realizes the room is still cold, and he feels awkward to be wearing a big warm overcoat while she has nothing but that oversized cardigan. He tugs off the coat and drops it over a chair. It occurs to him to give her his bathrobe, so he goes into the bedroom to find it, then he steps into the bathroom and starts running hot water in the deep tub with its claw feet. He notices how messy the bathroom is. He is swishing dried whiskers out of the basin when he realizes that the coffee water must have dripped through by now, so he starts back, forgetting the robe and having to go back for it.
Christ, it’s complicated having a guest in your house! Who needs it?
“Here,” he says grumpily. “Put this on.” She regards the old wool robe with caution, then she shrugs and slips it on. Enveloped in it, she looks even smaller and thinner than before, and clownlike, with that frizzy dustmop of a hairstyle that the kids wear these days. A clown with a black eye. A child-whore with a street vocabulary in which foutre and fourrer do most of the work of faire, and with everything she owns in a shopping bag.
LaPointe is in the kitchen, pouring out the coffee and adding a little water from the kettle because it is strong and she is only a kid, when he hears her laugh. It’s a vigorous laugh, lasting only six or eight notes, then stopping abruptly, still on the ascent, like the cry of a gamebird hit on the rise.
When he steps into the living room, carrying her cup, she is standing before the mirror that hangs on the back of the door; her face is neutral and bland; there is no trace of the laugh in her eyes. He asks, “What is it? What’s wrong? Is it the robe?”
“No.” She accepts the coffee. “It’s my eye. It’s the first time I’ve seen it.”
“You find it funny, your eye?”
“Why not?” She brings her cup over to the sofa and sits, her short leg tucked up under her buttock. She has a habit of sitting that way. She finds it comfortable. It has nothing to do with her limp. Not really.
He sits in his overstuffed chair opposite as she sips the hot coffee, looking into the cup as a child does. That laugh of hers, so total and so brief, has made him feel more comfortable with her. Most girls would have expressed horror or self-pity to see their faces marred. “Who hit you?” he asks.
She shrugs and blows a puff of air in a typically Canadian gesture of indifference. “A man.”
“Why?”
“He promised me I could spend the night, but afterward he changed his mind.”
“And you raised hell?”
“Sure. Wouldn’t you?”
He leans his head back and smiles. “It’s a little hard to imagine being in the situation.”
She stops in mid-sip and sets the cup down, looking at him levelly. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Why’d you say it then?”
“Forget it. You’re from out of town, aren’t you?”
She is suddenly wary. “How’d you know that?”
“You have a downriver accent. I was born in Trois Rivières myself.”
“So?” She picks up her cup again and sips, watching him closely, wondering if he’s trying to get something for nothing with all this friendly talk.
He makes a sudden movement forward, remembering the bath he is running.
Her cup rattles as she jerks back and lifts an arm to protect herself.
Then he realizes the tub won’t be half full yet. Water runs slowly through the old pipes. He sits back in his chair. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t startle me! I’m not afraid of you!” She is angry to have cowered so automatically after her swaggering talk.