Mansaré took the ‘green’ bag in his free hand.
‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked.
The phlegmatic man made, for the benefit of all and sundry, an ambivalent gesture conveying both ‘The Service will take care of it’ and ‘Could we please get a move on?’
‘Let me assure you,’ he said, ‘something’s in the works. You won’t be left twiddling your thumbs long.’
The grey sedan, after reassuming its position in the flow of traffic, took a few aberrant detours, perhaps not strictly necessary since no one was following them, but then there was never any harm in taking such precautions, if for no other reason than to entrench the habit, keep the pencils sharp. So they went for a spin around the Embassy District, wasted entire minutes at three poorly synchronized red lights, slipped under a railway bridge, and drove past a row of more or less abandoned factories before finally making their way back into a downtown draped in fog, past a slow procession of street lamps and galleries, halting in front of the forest of skyscrapers that Fabrice Mansaré was coming to know well. He’d been living there awhile. Night had fallen. Against a backdrop of darkness, hazy halos of light were visible through the car window.
‘You can leave me here,’ he suggested.
‘No,’ said the phlegmatic man, ‘I insist. We prefer door-to-door delivery.’
At one point in the meal, people believed they heard a muffled detonation, surely from outside somewhere, but not one word was uttered on the subject, and the festivities were not interrupted. Faya wondered what had possessed Simone to invite her wet-blanket drawing teacher friend with the repellent habit of incessantly rubbing his wrists, though she was cheered by the presence of The Bear, who was taking all the man’s sadsackery for the team. Simone herself, sitting across from Faya, seemed somehow absent, though the party was in her honour, in a sense, but no, she was off somewhere, forgetful of her barely touched dragon bowl, half-listening to Faya’s relentless monologue. It was the kind of day when nothing stuck, connections failed to take, one cast around and tried to fathom the vagaries of life in a vain search for some means to tie the disparate strands into a knot.
The quartet sat in silence around a table for two in a packed vegan restaurant. The Bear, crammed into an unaccommodating corner, had to regularly shift to make way for employees haughtily noting orders on white pads, or carrying soups, salads, and chapati in outstretched, disapproving arms, or tardily dispensing condescending bills. They were lucky to have been seated so quickly: a lineup was now forming in front of the restaurant.
Faya had chosen this uncomfortable eatery – Simone would have opted for the pizzeria now familiar to us, which would have suited Pierre-Luc much better as well. But Faya was determined to cross the street the moment their late supper was finished to a dive-bar-slashintimate-music-venue called Au Carouge, where already, behind his mixing board, the sound tech was marking levels with a felt pen on the masking tape covering his knobs. The barroom was still empty. The musicians stood waiting for their audience to deign to appear.
On the evening’s bill was a group called Poupée Sincère that, Faya had heard, was debuting a new singer freshly arrived in town who had offered her services at the very moment when her predecessor decided, to her bandmates’ disappointment, to move to the country and study agronomy. This frontwoman, a stunning blonde of towering stature, had quickly learned the band’s list of songs, which were now, thanks to her whisper-like voice, getting a whole new lease on life. She showed up on time for every practice but slipped away right after, spending very little time with the group who, while not holding it against her per se, did have to wonder what sort of future was augured by this aloofness, which in the right light could look almost like contempt. Her sisters in song had chosen to treat their new bandleader like a creature parachuted from another planet.
Pierre-Luc had gone with the flow, from restaurant to bar. He’d paid his cover and offered his still-sore wrist to the doorwoman who had summarily stamped it. He was still regretting not having waited for Sarah-Jeanne Loubier at the gallery, and thus failing to keep what he considered a promise, though in point of fact no promise had been made, and he brooded over his student’s (hypothetical) disappointment when she arrived to find him gone – that is, if she eventually made it to the gallery, the devil in Pierre-Luc’s ear replied; but she swore she would, the angel countered; and so on and so forth it went as the ancient foes bickered away above Pierre-Luc’s head.
The room had filled up. The party settled in at the aluminum bar. Pierre-Luc turned his attention to the generations of silkscreened prints for shows long past on the walls. He liked the faux-tin ceiling.
It didn’t take long for Faya and Simone to start bickering over what seemed to Pierre-Luc like a trifle. Perched on an uncomfortable bar stool, The Bear was persisting in his relentless attempts to engage him in conversation; Pierre-Luc, resolved to drown his stabbing pain in alcohol, threw in what he could. He felt strangely at home in this place he was getting to know, and had no problem being half a generation older than the rest of the crowd, as he threw back his g&t and told himself taking a cab home wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The first set started, performed by a young man who was also manifestly a shy man, since he was all but hidden behind his collection of laptops and equipment, his absence compensated for by the faded colours of a Super 8 film projected onto his great wall of gear. White waves of sound emerged from the speakers, mostly in the deeper bass frequencies, and in the centre of it all there was a hesitant interplay of rhythms that Pierre-Luc tried to piece together over his neighbours’ yammering and cash registers clanking whenever someone bought a drink. Pierre-Luc had always wanted to like musique concrète. He’d never quite managed to wrap his head around any of the recordings he’d tried to listen to, but the style seemed to come into its own here, in situ, with the added layers of the visuals and the cacophony of chatter that seemed not to undermine but rather to uplift the composition. Pierre-Luc was so absorbed in the music he barely noticed Faya and Simone digging in their heels. The only reprieve in their flow of invective came when they chose instead to seethe awhile.
The set ended, and Pierre-Luc filled the intermission with a trip to the bathroom. Around the urinal the white tile was decorated with political slogans and promotional stickers. He took a drawnout piss and felt like a new man.
Upon his return he found no sign of Simone, just Faya, who turned her back on him. At first he thought Simone had gone to relieve herself as well, but he soon saw that her handbag had also vanished, along with her coat and other accoutrements.
The Bear had disappeared as well, but his things were still there. Most mysterious, thought Pierre-Luc, shrugging his shoulders and turning toward the barkeep, who was simultaneously swamped and in no earthly hurry. Next to Pierre-Luc stood a woman of tremendous height in a black leather jacket whose long blond hair was topped with a backward beige cap. The woman, who seemed to be in the same limbo as Pierre-Luc, waiting for a bartender to notice her, inexplicably turned toward him and flashed a coruscating smile.
Many an author of the male persuasion has waxed lyrical on the staggering power exerted, often unwittingly, by tall blond women, as if this hypothetical society could be viewed as a homogeneous species, entitling us to objectify each member to our ends – a stance that, by the by, would make every individual tall blond woman an iconic paradox, wielding ultimate power over the very desires of men they ever remain accessory to. And yet there simply was something formidably luminous about the woman who that evening graced Pierre-Luc with her smile, an ineffable splendour that partook of the extreme confidence certain people feel in every one of their movements, a purchase she seemed to have over all creation.
‘Good crowd,’ she ventured in the direction of Pierre-Luc, who would never have dreamed to expect as much.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ answered Pierre-Luc. ‘It’s my first time here. Is it always like this?’
‘It’s my first time too.’
‘I’m Pierre-Luc.’
‘Célestine,’ replied the woman, who had finally caught the bartender’s eye. ‘A big glass of water. The kind with bite.’
‘And