When the song ends he walks up to Jocelyn, leans over the table, extends his hand and she takes it. Madeleine watches from her chair, remembering Lisa in the pup tent, confessing her love for Mike.
She feels old, and world-weary too. The booze, the circumstances, her span of fifteen years all gang up on the moment to contain it. It means something. As though it were part of a story. Why is she thinking about Lisa Ridelle tonight? Where is Lisa now? She was hilarious. Or was it that she laughed a lot? Who was the funny one, me or Lisa? Auriel was; Madeleine feels a surge of warmth and longs to see Auriel again. That was only six years ago. It feels ancient.
She checks a beer bottle for butts, then takes a long pull.
The band is playing “Love Me Tender.” Jocelyn and Mike lean into one another, swaying slowly. Madeleine bums a cigarette from a young woman with a beehive and cleavage. Leaning forward for a light, she gets a close-up of pencilled brows, liquid eyeliner, and a whiff of lily-of-the-valley perfume.
“Thanks,” says Madeleine.
“Garde les allumettes,” says the girl and winks.
They have nothing in common.
They strike up a conversation in both languages, switching back and forth without noticing. Madeleine has never been drunk before and her French has improved mightily. They talk about the young woman’s fiancé, who is off cutting wood in Nouveau-Brunswick. She tells Madeleine she’d be pretty if she’d just do one or two things — offers to take her to the bathroom and do her makeup. Madeleine follows her.
The ladies’ room is a pukey pink and reeks almost as much as a gents’. The Québécoise opens her patent-leather clutch and goes to work on Madeleine’s face with a brush and several tubes.
“Que t’es belle, ma p’tite, tu me fais penser à ma petite soeur.”
“Oh yeah? How old’s your little sister?”
“Ben, chérie, she died, elle est morte.”
“Shit,” says Madeleine. “C’était quoi son nom?” and immediately regrets asking because she knows what the young woman is going to say—
“Her name was Claire.”
“Shit,” says Madeleine. “What happened to her, what the fuck happened to her?”
Madeleine never swears — she never drinks, either, or wears makeup or hangs around with tarty French girls who’ve probably never heard of Simone de Beauvoir.
The young woman answers, “She got sick, honey. The meningitis, she just goes like that,” and snaps her fingers. “Pauvre petite,” she adds. “Oh you are sad, baby.” Cupping Madeleine’s cheek with her hand. “Pleure pas.”
“I’m not crying,” answers Madeleine, lifting her chin for a topcoat of clear gloss applied by the girl’s middle finger.
Madeleine feels the graze of a nail along her lip, then the French girl kisses her on the mouth — taste of chemical cherry, cigarette juice, and so soft, a wet pillow—“Don’t be sad, eh?” she says to Madeleine, stroking her hair, and kisses her again.
Madeleine kisses her back, melting into her mouth. The Québécoise slides her hand down Madeleine’s hip, around behind, and pulls her close.
“You want to come home with me, baby? C’est quoi ton nom?”
“I can’t,” says Madeleine, ducking out of the bathroom.
Back at the table, Mike and Jocelyn are resting. Jocelyn is flushed, laughing. Mike takes a haul of his beer, allows it to trickle down his neck and pats it on like aftershave, singing, “‘There’s something about an Aqua Vulva man.’”
Jocelyn turns and sees Madeleine. “Oh my God.”
Mike takes one look at her and fumbles in his pocket for his hanky. “You look like a two-dollar whore.” He wets the hanky with his tongue the way Dad used to. “I let you out of my sight for one second—”
He goes to dab at her face, but Madeleine escapes to the bar and checks herself out in the mirror—sacrebleu. Mike appears over her shoulder and laughs. She looks like a raccoon and her mouth is all smeary. She grabs his hanky, douses it in beer and wipes the lipstick off. The crotch of her jeans has gone smeary too, but thank goodness that’s invisible, thank goodness girls don’t get public hard-ons.
Madeleine sees the young woman in the mirror — she has returned to her table and is necking with a big guy with a dirty blond braid down his back. Madeleine thinks of the waiter back at Le Hibou. I should do it with him. Why not? Someone’s got to be the first. At least he doesn’t go to her school, and she won’t have to let him be her boyfriend.
At three-thirty A.M. Mike requests a song from the band. Little Richard and the Big Bopper give way to a French Canadian folk song. The singer laments, close in to the mike, “Un Canadien errant, banni de son pays….” Madeleine cringes — this is so corny. Any second now, a separatist is going to jump up and throw them out of here. “Parcourait en pleurant, des pays étrangérs….” A simple tune, like the best folk songs the world over — I have lost my home, I long for my home, my home exists now only in memory.
Maman always sang the original, “un Acadien.” But Mike will soon be un Canadien errant. Vietnam — it doesn’t get more errant than that. And where are he and Madeleine from, anyhow? Say goodbye to the house, kids….
Mike puts his arms around Madeleine and slow-dances with her. His hair is wet with sweat, the back of his neck pink. He drops his head to his sister’s shoulder. She laces her fingers together between his shoulder blades — he does have shoulder blades in there somewhere, beneath the muscle, soft and hard all at once, my big brother. He still smells nice even through the Hai Karate, the beer, the bourbon and sweat. He smells fresh — the freshness of hide ’n’ seek at night in summer, the smell of grass stains, of swimming in the lake, and sun-baked sand dunes, their sleeping bags side by side — where have those times gone? Qui peut dire où vont les fleurs?
Madeleine is drunk for the first time in her life. She strokes the back of her brother’s brush cut — stupid idiot, Michel, why do you have to go away? Why do you want to hurt anyone? I know that’s not why you’re going, why are you going? His buzzed hair is soft, a thick and delicate carpet. They will not know you are different from the others, Mike. They will not know you are kind. She bites the inside of her mouth but it does no good, she is drunk, her famous ability to go neutral has dissolved, mascara traces clown tears down her cheeks. Sarge, I’m hit.
Mike raises his head, beams into her face — kisses her on the cheek. “Stunned one,” he says, and holds out his arm to Jocelyn to join them. The three of them sway in place, arms around one another, to the rest of the song.
They travel across the bridge back to Ottawa in the pockmarked Nova. Madeleine drives — she is the least drunk, and in no danger of losing her licence, because she doesn’t have one. She turns along the river and follows the curving parkway past the prime minister’s residence, past the governor general’s and through Rockcliffe Park. Jocelyn’s parents are divorced, she lives with her dad, she has no curfew — paradise. Madeleine pulls up in front of her house among the embassies.
“Pretty ritzy,” says Mike. “I’ll see you to the door.”
He and Jocelyn stand under the porch light, kissing. Madeleine is shocked. Jocelyn reaches behind, opens the front door and slides in, Mike slides in after her.
Madeleine waits. She rests her head against the steering wheel, because she gets the spins when she leans back against the headrest. She falls asleep and Miss Lang, the Brown Owl, arrives in her wedding gown and Brownie beret. She smiles slyly and says, “Of course you know what hibou means in English?”