By contrast, the guards keep their shoulders unnaturally square and their chests boldly out. LaPointe assumes that once the hippies have driven away, the guards will relax and round their shoulders against the wind. He smiles to himself.
Before mounting the wooden stairs, LaPointe looks up at the windows of his apartment. No lights. She must still be out shopping.
The static cold of the apartment is more chilling than the wind, so he immediately lights the gas heater, then sets water to boil, thinking to have a nice hot cup of coffee waiting for her when she comes back.
The water comes to a boil, and she has still not returned. He empties the kettle, refills it, and replaces it on the gas ring. As though putting on the water is a kind of sympathetic magic that will bring her home to the coffee.
It doesn’t work.
He sits in his armchair and looks across the deserted park, drab in the winter overcast. Perhaps she’s left for good. Why shouldn’t she? She owes him nothing. Maybe she has met somebody… a young man who knows how to dance. That would be best, really. After all, she can’t go on living with him indefinitely. In fact, he doesn’t want her to. Not really. She’d be a pain in the neck. Then too, someday soon…
Without thinking, he slips his hand up to his chest, as he has come to do by habit each time he thinks of his aneurism… that stretched balloon. He feels the regular heartbeat. Normal. Nothing odd in it. Yes, he decides. It would be best if she’s found somebody else to live with. It would be ghastly for her to wake up some morning and find him beside her, dead. Maybe cold to the touch.
Or what if he were to have an attack while they were making love?
Good, then. That’s just fine. She has found a young man on the street. Somebody kind. It’s better that way.
He grunts out of the chair and goes into the kitchen to take off the kettle before the water boils away. He will enjoy a quiet, peaceful night. He will take off his shoes, put on his robe, and sit by the window, listening to the hiss of the gas fire and reading one of his Zola novels for the third or fourth time. He never tires of reading around and around his battered set of Zola. Years ago, he bought the imitation-leather books from an old man who ran a secondhand bookstore, a narrow slot of a shop created by roofing over an alley between two buildings on the Main. The old man never did much business, and buying the books was a way of helping him out without embarrassing him.
For several years the books sat unread on the top of his bedroom chest. Then one evening, for lack of something to do, he opened one and scanned it over. Within a year he had read them all. It wasn’t until the first time through that he realized there was a sort of order to some of them: heroines of one book were the daughters of heroines of another, and so on. Thereafter he always read them in order. His favorite novel is L’Assommoir, in which he was able to predict, in his first reading, the inevitable descent of the characters from hope to alcoholism to death. The books feel good in his hand, and have a friendly smell. It is the 1906 Edition Populaire Illustrée des Oeuvres Complètes de Entile Zola, with drawings of substantial heroines, their round arms uplifted in supplication and round eyes raised to heaven, the line of dialogue beneath never lacking in exclamation points. Such men as appear in the plates stand back, amongst the dripping shadows, and look mercilessly down on the fallen heroines. The men are not individuals; they are part of the environment of poverty, despair, and exploitation to which futile hope gives edge.
The novels are populated by people who, if they spoke in Joual dialect and knew about modern things, could be living on the Main. It seems to LaPointe that you have to know the street, to have known the parents of the young chippies back when they were young lovers, in order to enjoy or even understand Zola.
Yes, he’ll put on his robe and read for a while. Then he’ll go to bed. He is looking for his robe when he notices in the corner of the bedroom Marie-Louise’s shopping bag with its burden of odds and ends.
She will be back after all. The shopping bag is a hostage. He returns to the living room feeling less tired. She will surely be back within half an hour.
She is not. Evening imperceptibly deepens the sky to dusty slate as details down in the park retire into gloom. The novel is still on his lap, but it is too dark to read. The gas fire hisses, its orange-nippled ceramic elements an insubstantial glow, the room’s only light. Twice, when cars stop outside, he rises to look down from the window. And once he starts up with the realization that the kettle must be burning. Then he remembers that he took it off long ago.
The air becomes hot and thick with the oxygen-robbing gas heater, which he knows he should turn down, but he is too tired and heavy to feel like moving.
As always, his daydreams stray to his wife… and his girls. It is late evening in their home in Laval. Lucille is doing dishes in the kitchen fixed up with modern appliances he has seen in store windows on the Main. Logs are burning in the fireplace, and he is fussing with them more than they need, because he enjoys poking at wood fires. He goes up to the girls’ room—they are young again, and they are disobeying orders to get right to sleep. He finds them jumping on the bed, their long flannel nightgowns billowing out and entangling them when they land in a heap. He kisses them good night and teases them by scrubbing his whiskery cheek against their powdery ones. They complain and struggle and laugh. Lucille calls up that it is late and the girls need their sleep. He answers that they are already asleep, and the girls put their hands over their mouths to suppress giggles. He tucks them in with a final kiss, and they want a story and he says no, and they want the light left on and he says no, and they want a glass of water and he says no, and he turns out the light and leaves them and goes back down the stairs—he must get around to fixing the one that squeaks. He knows every detail of the house, the layout of the rooms, the wallpaper, the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe that record the growth of the girls. But he never pictures a bedroom for Lucille and him. After all, Lucille is dead. No… gone. To the house in Laval. He wakes with a sweaty throat and a wet mouth, and with a confused feeling that something is going on. Then he hears the sound of a key in the lock. The door opens with a slant of pale yellow light from the naked hall bulb, and Marie-Louise enters.
“My God, it’s hot in here! What are you doing, sitting in the dark?”
As he gropes out of sleepiness, she finds the switch and turns on the lights. She is loaded down with parcels, which she dumps on the sofa, then holds her hands out to the gas fire. “Boy, it’s cold tonight. Well? What do you think of it? Cute, eh?” She turns around to model an ankle-length cloth coat of burnt orange. “It was on sale. Well?”
She walks a couple of steps and does a comic little turn, parodying the models she has seen on television. She doesn’t bother to conceal her limp, and LaPointe notices it as though for the first time. The detail had dropped from his mind. “It’s… ah… fine,” he says dopily. “Very nice.” He wonders what time it is.