“I’m not particularly hungry; are you?”
“Hm-m! I could eat a horse! And look what a beautiful day it is!”
The glitter of the park stings his eyes. But yes, it is a beautiful day. Perhaps a walk in the cold air would help.
With few places open on a Sunday morning, they take breakfast in one of the variété shops common to this quartier, although slowly disappearing with the invasion of large cut-rate establishments. Such shops sell oddments and orts: candy, bagels, teddy bears, Chap Stick, ginger ale, jigsaw puzzles, aspirin, newspapers, cigarettes, contraceptives, kites, everything but what you need at any given moment. Its window is piled with dusty, fly-specked articles that are never sold and never rearranged. In the jumble, knitted snow caps and suntan lotion rest side by side, one or the other always out of season, except in spring, when they both are.
The proprietor moves a stack of newspapers to the floor to make room for them at the short, cracked marble counter. He has a reputation in the district for being a “type,” and he works at maintaining it. Although his counter service is usually limited to stale, thick coffee in the winter and soft drinks in summer, he can accommodate light orders, if he happens to have cheese or eggs in the refrigerator of his living space behind the shop. They ask for eggs, toast, and coffee, which the proprietor fixes up on his stove in the back room, all the while singing to himself and maintaining an animated conversation in English, his voice raised, from the other room.
“Is it sunny enough for you, Lieutenant? But I’d bet you a million bucks it won’t last. If it don’t snow tonight, then tomorrow will be the same as yesterday—shitbrindle clouds and no sun.” He sticks his head out through the curtain. “Sorry, lady.” He disappears back and calls, “Hey, do you want these sunny side up?
Hey, you remember that one, Lieutenant? Oh-oh! I broke one. How about having them scrambled? They’re better for you that way, anyway. Egg whites ain’t good for your heart. I read that somewhere.
You’ve got to remember that one, Lieutenant. Bing Crosby.” He comes from the back room, carefully balancing two plates, which he sets down on the cracked counter. “There you go! Two orders of scrambled. Enjoy. Yeah, Bing Crosby sang that in one of his films. I think he was a priest. Say, do you remember Bobby Breen, Lieutenant?
That was a great movie. He sang that sitting on a hay wagon. You know, that ain’t easy, singing while you’re on a hay wagon. Yeah, Bobby Breen and Shirley Temple. Wonder whatever became of Shirley Temple. They don’t make movies like that any more. All this violence shit. Sorry, lady. Hey! You don’t have any forks! No wonder you ain’t eating. Here! Geez! I’d forget my ass if it wasn’t tied on. Sorry, lady. Here’s your coffee. Hey, did you read this morning about that guy getting stabbed in an alley just off the Main? How about that? It’s getting so you can’t take a walk around the block anymore without getting stabbed by some son of a bitch. Sorry, lady. Things ain’t what they used to be. Right, Lieutenant? And the prices these days!
Don’t you believe it! What can you get free these days? Advice. Cancer maybe. It’s a miracle a man can stay in business with the prices. Everybody out to fuck his neighbor… oh, lady, I am sorry! Geez, I’m really sorry.”
As they walk slowly along a gravel path through the park, her hand in the crook of his arm, she asks, “What was that mec jabbering about?”
“Oh, nothing. It never occurred to him that you don’t speak English.”
The crisp air has cleared LaPointe’s headache away, and the little food has settled his stomach. The thin wintery sunshine warms the back of his coat pleasantly, but he can feel a sudden ten– or fifteen-degree drop in temperature when he steps into a shadow. The touch of this sun, dazzling but insubstantial, reminds him of whiter mornings on his grandparents’ farm, the soil of which was so rocky and poor that the family joke said the only things that grew there were potholes, which one could split into quarters and sell to the big farmers to be driven into the ground as post holes. All the LaPointes, aunts, cousins, in-laws, came to the farm for Christmas. And there were a lot of LaPointes, because they were Catholic and part Indian, and you can’t lock the door of a teepee. The children slept three or four to a bed, and sometimes the smaller ones were put across the bottom to fit more in. Claude LaPointe and his cousins fought and played games and pinched under the covers, but if anyone cried out with joy or pain, then the parents would stop their pinochle games downstairs and shout up that someone was going to get his ass smacked if he didn’t cut it out and go to sleep! And all the kids held their breath and tried not to laugh, and they all sputtered out at once. One of the cousins thought it was funny to spit into the air through a gap in his teeth, and when the others hid under the blankets, he would fart.
On Christmas morning they were allowed into the parlor, musty-smelling but very clean because it was kept closed, except for Sundays, or when the priest visited, or when someone had died and was laid out in a casket supported on two saw horses hidden under a big white silk sheet rented from the undertaker.
The parlor was open, too, for Christmas. Kids opening presents on the floor. Christmas tree weeping needles onto a sheet. A pallid winter sun coming in the window, its beam capturing floating motes of dust.
The smell of mustiness in the parlor… and the heavy, sickening smell of flowers. And Grandpapa. Grandpapa…
Whenever a random image or sound on the Main triggers his memory in such a way as to carry him back to his grandfather, he always pulls himself back from the brink, away from dangerous memories. Of all the family, he had loved Grandpapa most… needed him most. But he had not been able to kiss him goodbye. He had not even been able to cry.
“…still mad?”
“What?” LaPointe asks, surfacing from reverie. They have rounded the park and are approaching the gate across from his apartment.
“Are you still mad?” Marie-Louise asks again. “You haven’t said a word.”
“No,” he laughs. “I’m not mad. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. About being a kid. About my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather! Tabernouche!”
That is a coincidence. He hasn’t heard anyone but himself use that old-fashioned expletive since the death of his mother. “You think I’m too old to have grandparents?”
“Everyone has grandparents. But, my God, they must have been dead for ages.”
“Yes. For ages. You know something? I wasn’t mad at you this morning. I was sick.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
She considers this for a while. “That’s funny.”
“I suppose so.”
“Hey, what do you want to do? Let’s go somewhere, do something. Okay?”
“I don’t really feel like going anywhere.”
“Oh? What do you usually do on Sundays?”
“When I’m not working, I sit around in the apartment. Read. Listen to music on the radio. Cook supper for myself. Does that sound dull?”
She shrugs and hums a descending note that means: yes, sort of. Then she squeezes his arm. “I know why you’re leading me back to the apartment. You didn’t get enough last night, did you?”