Nancy Huston - Black Dance

“Tank you, sir,” she says. “What you celebratin’?”

“The Virgin Mary just went hydroelectric!” Neil proclaims in a loud voice, raising his glass to all and sundry.

“Somebody turn her on?” Awinita asks.

Neil shouts with laughter. At sixty, having chosen, like Yeats, to spend the final years of his life as a Mad Old Man, he no longer cares what people think of him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our dear premier, Maurice Duplessis, made a big speech today (I’m sure you all heard it on CBC) to inaugurate a new hydroelectric installation at Beauharnois. Isn’t that fantastic? Come on, sing along with Duplessis, everyone, and raise your glasses to Hydro-Québec!!”

“You got a problem with Duplessis, Irishman?” says one of the tipsier customers, lurching up to Neil.

“Not at all, except that he also made a big speech out at Notre-Dame-du-Cap the other day (I’m sure you all heard it on CBC) officially dedicating our Belle Province de Québec to the Virgin Mary. Everyone who was anyone was there! Le clergé, les grands journaux, tout le monde . And he made sure we found out that just a stone’s throw upriver, at Le Paradis des Sports hotel on Lac des Piles, his old pal Georges Cossette would be allowed to sell liquor without a license. . except during Sunday Mass, of course, ha-ha-ha!”

“I know dat place,” murmurs Awinita. “Not far from Grand-Mère, right? I got a friend who work up dere.”

“That’s right. Everybody hear that? The young lady has friends who work at Le Paradis des Sports. I’m certain they’re on excellent terms with Georges Cossette, Maurice Duplessis, and other gentlemen of the same circles. And I’m certain that with a little extra persuasion, they will also be on good terms with the American jazzmen who come to play in that prestigious establishment. Isn’t that fantastic?”

“Fuck off, you bloody Mick!” the drunken customer blares. “Go home and screw those druids of yours if you’re not happy here! Duplessis is a good man!”

“He’s a man of my bleedin’ age!” roars Neil, his green eyes ablaze, his salt-and-pepper beard abristle. “And having lived in the province of Quebec for thirty-three years now, I have the right to say what I think of Maurice Duplessis, for the luva Christ! I think Maurice Duplessis is one arsehole of an opportunist, who sings the praises of the Good Virgin when he needs to wangle votes from the populace, and of Hydro-Québec when he needs to attract investment from the Brits! That’s what I think! It’s a free country!”

“Free, my ass,” says Awinita.

But no one hears her because Neil and the drunken customer have come to blows and the others are shouting and taking sides and Irwin is busy shooing the whole testosterone-drenched free-for-all out of the bar and onto the sidewalk, and this scene will hopefully give our spectators some badly needed comic relief.

CUT to a Friday morning scene in the kitchen with Liz.

“It just doesn’t tally, Nita.”

“. .”

“Who do you think you’re fooling? Irwin’s at the bar every night, he keeps track of the number of guys each girl goes up with. His count for you this week is twenty-nine, yours is seventeen, so I wanna know what happened to the other twelve. What happened to the other twelve, Nita? You keep this up, sweetheart, and you’re out of here. Now tell me the truth. Where’s your money going?”

“Just. .”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Nita. You supporting a boyfriend, a habit, or both?”

Awinita doesn’t avert her gaze. Her face is impassive.

“Been doin’ a bit o’ H.”

Liz’s expression alters.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. That’s a lousy idea, sweetheart. Poppers are one thing, okay. Long as you don’t overdo it, they help get you through your working night. But H. . Nah, I’ve lost too many girls to H, honey. . I don’t want you on that shit. It’s death, man. How long you been shootin’ up?”

“Not long.”

“Okay, listen. I’ll give you one chance, not two. I’ll pay for you to get cleaned up. As I’ve told you before, this is not a charity operation; I’m doin’ it as a favor to myself. I’ve invested good money in you, and I don’t wanna lose my investment. That clear?”

CUT to a room in a private medical clinic. Awinita, trembling and trickling sweat, stands at a window that gives onto a white wall. We grip the windowsill, then our stomach. .

The camera, which is our gaze, explores the room, watches objects writhe with a furtive life of their own, receives reality as sheer horror. The window is light, then dark, then light, then dark. Awinita’s withdrawal lasts twenty-nine days and twenty-nine nights. .

(Sound track: to be dealt with later. Yeah, Milo, I agree — it should be rough but not redundant, not jejunely illustrative of the pain your mother is enduring. Maybe just slip an MP3 into the vortex of a garbage incinerator — something like that?)

Calmer now, we are lying on the bed, on top of the bedspread, staring up at the ceiling.

A jack-in-the-box suddenly springs out of a colored block and starts bouncing gaily around. The floor of the room is dotted with other blocks, no doubt containing other jack-in-the-boxes. It runs slam-bang into a closed door, topples backward in a somersault, and finds itself right-side up again, joyous and unscathed. Just then the door opens and the Bad Giant appears. He raises his huge, hairy foot and brings it down on the jack-in-the-box, crushing it. . but the spring is strong and it bounces up again, knocking the Bad Giant flat on his back.

Awinita sits up in bed and rings for the nurse.

“I’m clean,” she tells her.

• • • • •

2. —What c’n I get ya?

3. —Can I take your order?

4. — What? . . A chin?

5. —Well, with those words you’d be better at the tailor’s than in a coffee shop. Wanna coffee?

Delinquent, bandit, bad boy. In the early twentieth century, the malandro was an individual whose way of life was based entirely on improvisation.

Milo, 1967–70

UPON RETURNING TO the farm after Oscar’s death, Milo goes into a black hole and stays there. Weeks, months maybe — he loses track of time. Goes through chores and homework, robotlike. No one can reach him.

Neil is worried— Won’t you come up and read with me, Milo? — no, he will not, not yet. He needs to swathe his being in protective robes of silence and shadow, plunge into somber splendor, the closets of his early childhood, the blackout screen at the end of TV movies, and also, when summer finally rolls around again, the deepest, darkest water at the center of Lac des Piles. .

(I’m seeing more and more clearly that what you love when you love somebody are that person’s loves. Loving you, Milo, means loving your love for Oscar. Neil. Lac des Piles. .)

On the far side of the lake is an Anne of Green Gables sort of house — Milo has swum across to it several times. A cushy green-and-white summer cottage with a glassed-in porch, property of a wealthy gay movie producer by the name of Sherman Dyson. As wealthy gay movie producers were an exotic species in rural Quebec back in the mid-1960s (and who could have guessed that you yourself would one day fall in love with just such a creature?), every aspect of Dyson’s identity was an inexhaustible source of gossip in the area. His wealth aroused people’s envy, his homosexuality their sarcasm, his profession their reverence. . and no one knew what to make of the fact that, the previous spring, he’d gotten married. The bride was rumored to be a good deal younger than he, and a model, and a looker, so it may not be far-fetched to suggest that Milo’s powerful crawl- and breast-strokes across Lac des Piles, that summer after Oscar’s death, took him with perhaps unwonted frequency in the direction of this particular summer cottage.