CUT to Milo and Yolande walking on Saint Helen’s Island together.
“Why are you always so passive, Milo?”
“I tought you loved me.”
“Yeah, I love you, but. . I mean, a person’s gotta know what they want. I say let’s get married, you say fine, and then you don’t do anything about it!”
“Well. . what is dere to be done? Is it as complicated as all dat? I don’t know, I never married anybody before.”
“Neither did I, you idiot, but we should throw a party, send out invitations to our families, I know that much. .”
“. .”
“Okay, okay, I know you never met your parents. . But you must have been raised by somebody, Milo. You didn’t grow up with wolves in the forest!”
“Dat woulda been nice.”
“Come on. . You said you had a wonderful grandfather.”
“He’s dead.”
“And. . don’t you have a whole houseful of aunts and uncles and cousins up in Mauricie?”
“Dere’s nobody left.”
“You want us to get married just like that, in city hall?”
“Dat’s fine wit me.”
“Okay, well. .”
Close-up of Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. We read the end of the text: united in wedlock on this day. . Signed: Milo Noirlac. He hands the pen to Yolaine. . CUT.
OVER THE NEXT half minute or so: flashes from the next few years as Milo and Yolaine begin the life of a fairly happy, rather successful, moderately artistic Québécois couple of the late 1970s.
Milo running up the short flight of steps onstage to be congratulated at an awards ceremony, Yolande clapping from the audience. . The same situation the other way around. . Milo making wild love with Paul Schwarz on their first scoping-out trip to Rio. . Yolaine memorizing lines in the living room, with Milo cuing her. . Milo chain-smoking as he writes at the kitchen table in the middle of the night. . Yolande coming home at three A.M. and the two of them making love amidst his papers on the table. . Yolaine jealous because Paul Schwarz is on the phone and she suspects there might be something between them. . Milo in a black hole, in bed, his head turned to the wall, Yolande hovering at his side and worrying about him just as Roxanne used to. . Yolaine and Milo vacationing on the Côte d’Azur after the Cannes International Film Festival. . Sitting side by side on the beach. . Making love in the sand after nightfall, when everyone has gone home. .
A conversation over dinner that night. Yolande smiles at him as they raise their glasses in a toast.
“What shall we drink to?”
“To us, my beauty!”
“Yeah, but to us what?”
“To us, I dunno. . Do we have to add someting?”
They sip their drinks.
“That’s just the question, Milo.”
“What?”
“Yeah, should we add something or shouldn’t we? I mean. . should I stop taking the pill or shouldn’t I?”
“Ah!”
“You said it. Ah.”
“I don’t know. . D’you want a kid?”
“I don’t know. But it’s time I did, with my thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you! Do you want a kid?”
“I don’t know.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Hmm.”
“We’re pretty weird, aren’t we?”
“You tink so?”
“Okay, well, we can think about it awhile longer.”
“Let’s do dat.”
“Yeah, right, we’re not in that much of a hurry, eh? We can give it some more thought.”
“Right.”
(Remember how warmly I encouraged you to have a baby with Yolande, Milo darling? I quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet to you: You had a father: let your son say so. . I wanted you to live forever! But in Quebec in those days, too many adults had been unwanted, illegitimate, orphaned, lost, or abandoned children. . Now that people could avoid having kids, no one seemed to know quite how they felt about parenthood.)
EXTERIOR, SAINT DENIS STREET — NIGHT. Paul Schwarz is in Montreal to work with Milo on Science and Sorcery, their project about AIDS in Brazil. Sauntering into a bar together, the first thing they see is Yolaine’s back, with the arm of a male stranger draped ostentatiously around it. Not missing a beat, Milo steers Paul over to a corner table and goes on talking about how to do smooth camera work in the steep, unevenly cobbled streets of the favelas.
When she gets up to leave a few minutes later, the strange man’s arm still possessively glued to her body, Yolande catches sight of her husband and freezes in her tracks. The man releases her, but Milo smiles and looks away.
She slips her arm back through the man’s arm and they go out the door together.
CUT to Milo working at the kitchen table the next morning, cigarette in hand. When Yolaine comes home, he pours her a cup of coffee and brings it to her with a kiss. She clatteringly drops the cup into the sink.
“I just don’t get it, Milo! I don’t come home all night and you don’t give a damn!”
“. .”
“You see me with another man, I don’t come home all night and that’s fine with you!”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Listen, it’s just not normal to be that unjealous! I’m jealous, and I find it only normal to be jealous!”
“So we each tink we’re normal. Dat’s normal. .”
“For God’s sake, Milo! You’re just too passive! You have no will of your own! I’ve been telling you so for years! It is impossible to know what you really want, because you don’t want to tell me! I want to make love, you say fine; I want to marry you, you say fine; the great Paul Schwarz wants to make a film with you, you say fine; and what if he wants to sleep with you? Do you say fine then, too? Maybe you do! I spend the night in the arms of another man and you say fine. Are you missing a cog or what, Milo? You should get help!”
Before answering, Milo stubs out his cigarette, carefully washes and dries his coffee cup, and puts it away in the cupboard.
“You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you. People can’t belong to each oder. They can’t even know each oder. . Dey don’t even know demselves! I don’t feel de need to know everyting you do. I trust you. Everybody does what dey need to do, don’t dey?”
“But if I leave you, Milo?”
“Well. . if you leave me, you leave me. You won’t be dere, so you won’t have to tell me, I’ll see it all by myself.”
“Jesus, I don’t believe it. You’re incredible!”
CUT to the two of them in bed, writhing in each other’s arms. But Yolaine’s mind is elsewhere. .
Then comes a depressing scene most of us have probably lived through at least once: on a rainy, desperately gray November afternoon, surrounded by boxes and suitcases, the couple divvies up their kitchen utensils. . record collection. . library books. . all the possessions they’ve accumulated in five years of marriage.
CUT to Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. Close-up on the end of the text: divorce by mutual consent. As no children issued from this union, no legal dispositions need be made on the subject. Signed: Milo Noirlac. He hands the pen to Yolande.
(And then, Astuto. . It was just a few weeks after your divorce, wasn’t it, that. .)
One evening, in his new and much smaller apartment out in the Mile End section of Montreal, Milo is completely engrossed in the Science and Sorcery screenplay. . so when the phone rings (jump, shout, What?), he picks up the receiver angrily. Listens. We hear a man’s voice but can’t make out the words. After a few seconds, Milo sits down again.