Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

“I’m not going to split in two, if that’s what’s troubling you. You can stop staring at me.”

The administrators squirm uncomfortably in their office chairs.

“I insist,” she adds, surprised by her own firmness.

There are bursts of laughter here and there, a few knowing glances cross the room. They expected this. This is why they are here. They came to see her lose it.

“I’m aware how small your world is, how much you need the monsters and miracles of others. But I am neither one nor the other. You all know how to read, so I leave you in good company. You can make do without me.”

With the dazed board members looking on, Madeleine tosses the thick report onto the table, where it lands like a slumbering body, and then slams the door behind her. Once again she finds herself at the foot of the lighthouse and leans her back against it facing the sea spray. She inhales the infinite and the multitude of the ocean that is numberless — neither one, nor two, nor a hundred — a plural, incalculable world before which she wants to kneel down. In the distance, she sees Yun, both feet planted on the deck of a sailboat as slender as a spear, with a cabin strangely similar to a Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

As she is leaving, the watchman hobbles up to her. She ferrets in her bag looking for her keys. He lays his hand on her wrist to interrupt her frantic searching. He has never touched her this way.

“I have a present for you.”

Poking around in his jacket pocket, he retrieves a stone whose blue and white colours are combined in a sort of mineral swirl.

“I picked it up on the beach a long time ago. I knew it had come from far away, from another world, and that it was there for someone. So I’ve kept it at the bottom of my pocket. It’s yours. This stone is you.”

“Do you find me so very cold?”

Monsieur le gardien smiles.

“I didn’t say it was your heart. I said it was you. You’re not alone, Madeleine. Remember that.”

Madeleine’s fingers gently caress the pebble’s coolness as the watchman walks away with that slow gait of his filled with certainties. “For him,” Madeleine mutters, “the whole world is strange and twisted. He expects nothing else.” She takes the stone out of her pocket and presses it to her lips.

Paul’s second pillow always has too many smells. In every fold of the pillowcase she finds a different aroma. Roses. Lavender. Some tobacco. It all makes her want to sneeze but, instead, she lets out a sigh.

“Are you bored?” Paul asks, stroking her temple.

“You make my head spin.”

He gets up to part the curtains and let in the setting sun; then he goes out and comes back with two bottles of beer all beaded with drops of July. The first swallow awakens Madeleine’s languid nerves, and she sits up, putting distance between her nose and the pillow.

“You know, I have no trouble believing there are two women inside you. You’re as fickle as the wind, Madeleine Sicotte.”

“I have no trouble believing it either, you know. The problem is that I think I’ve always listened to the same one. The other has been muzzled.”

“What did she want?”

Madeleine shrugs. “Beer,” she is thinking. “A cigarette.”

“Something darker, I guess. Or grander.”

A fly starts tapping stubbornly on the window, and Paul abruptly swings around, hoping to discover a bee. Disappointed, he turns back to Madeleine.

“Why don’t you come live with me here?” he blurts out.

Madeleine twists the sheet around her forefinger. The cloth is riddled with holes from hot cigarette ashes.

“Because you fuck anything that walks,” she tells him.

“What? That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is true. You even fuck my neighbours. I saw Violette Godin’s locket on your night table a few weeks ago.”

“Who can blame him?” she adds in her mind. Paul is the village’s only decent bachelor. He is a good lover and a good cook. Madeleine has always put up with her lover’s unfaithfulness without saying a word. But today she can’t understand what has kept her from being forthright for so long.

“We all know it; none of us has any illusions about you. That’s why no one wants to be your wife, Paul. You’ll never have one if you try to have them all.”

Lying there naked, Paul is unable to meet her gaze, and he keeps stroking the rabbit’s foot that goes with him everywhere. Madeleine finds him handsome and is sorry to have shamed him yet at the same time she feels a huge weight has been lifted from her shoulders.

“You smell nice,” she whispers as she kisses his ear.

“You know,” he says as he draws away, “if you came to live with me, there wouldn’t be any others. From then on, you’d be the only one. You’re the one who belongs here. Anyway, you can’t go on forever alone in that big house taking in one traveller after another. Especially once your son sails away on that boat.”

Stepping toward her pile of clothes, Madeleine stops short.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think I heard someone say that he and his girlfriend plan to leave on a boat after his operation. That would be the right time for you to move here and settle in.”

Madeleine dresses quickly.

“I will not settle in with you — that’s out of the question! I don’t want to settle anywhere.”

“It’s because of Micha? It’s been years, Madeleine!”

“Be quiet! You don’t know a thing about it!”

A few minutes later she is tearing along the dirt road toward the highway. Paul is still standing in his bedroom in his underwear with a stony look on his face. Madeleine hits the brakes to let a hare go by. Then starts away again.

“What’s this business about a cruise?!”

She is shouting at the top of her lungs. A scream that she held in when she found the house full of her son’s childhood friends and while she waited for them to leave, for Joanna to go out to do some shopping, for Yun to take a shower, and finally for Édouard to be alone in a room with no way out. Like someone who has just been struck in the stomach by a cannonball, he recoils.

“Uh, well, me and Yun have hunted up a cheap boat. We’ll have to patch it up a little after I get my kidney… We’d like to see if it’s possible to follow the route of Marquette and Jolliet: sail up the Saint Lawrence and then…”

“Are you insane?” Madeleine cuts in. “After the operation, you’ll need to recuperate and wait several weeks in case your body rejects the transplant.”

“I know, but after my convalescence I’ll be on my way again. That’s what I’ve always done.”

“Well, enough is enough! I’ve had it!”

Édouard holds himself stiffly with his fists clenched behind his back.

“You almost die, you land up here and then as soon as you’re able to take a few steps you shove off? Is that how it’s always going to work? You come back to sleep and eat and then you bolt?”

“What more do you want? I’m an adult. I don’t live here anymore.”

“What I want? I want a son who comes to visit his mother, that’s what I want. Not another vagrant who stops here just long enough to get his strength back so he can disappear the very next day.”

“But that’s what I do. I come to see you — what else?”

“Bullshit! We’ve barely had a real conversation since you arrived. And that was only because you’re ill and they thought I wasn’t your mother. As a rule, we say a word or two about the weather and that’s all. But here you are waiting for a transplant and here I am with two people inside me, and it’s as if nothing has changed! You spend your days glued to your girlfriend — don’t get me wrong, I adore her — but you use her like a shield. Then afterwards you work things out so you can take off at the first opportunity, even though you’ll still be in poor health and courting death at any moment in the middle of the Mississippi or Lake Ontario, without any help, without me.”