16 15 Dec 90   So much for New Year’s resolutions. But it has been good with Bob for 5 months now. In fact, so good that I have not felt like writing in you, my journal, until I had the sense that this is not merely a summer-and-autumn fling. But winter is here, and it’s still good. We will take a little break from each other during the next month, now that Daniel is here. I am not ready to have them meet. And Bob will go to France for 3 weeks with his parents. He has a history of course. Never married, but came close a couple of times. He is relieved that I am not interested in marriage. Jokes about la jeune veuve jolie et riche, d'un œil pleure et de l'autre fait fête. Which is not far from the truth. Perhaps I am not so jeune, but as long as Bob thinks so… Of course he knows my age. And does it make a difference that Bob is 14 years younger than George? Frankly, my journal, it does. Not so much physically; George is in pretty good shape (“for a doctor,” he says). But take music, for example. George is stuck in the music of his youth and the band at his birthday parties played nothing but covers of 60s bands. Don’t get me wrong, my journal, I love that music too, but to Betty it’s foreign; she’s all new wave. Daniel’s taste in music is more idiosyncratic. He likes folk and jazz and opera, and seems indifferent to rock. But I don’t really know. Bob, on the other hand, appreciates youthful music. He likes Sonic Youth and Michael Jackson and Mylène Farmer and Madonna, and last month he took me to a concert by Céline Dion. It makes me feel younger too. It brings back my days with Jean-Marc, when he took me to hear Robert Charlebois, just returned from the scandal in Paris. But he likes classical music and opera too. Last month we saw Les Contes d’Hoffmann at Opéra de Montréal. It was much more comical than the Met version on television a couple of years ago. (It was D who made me appreciate the comical side of opera when we saw Don Giovanni together.) The mechanical doll Olympia was a very funny and cute young Québécoise named Hélène Fortin. I had a friend in Rimouski named Hélène Fortin. I have had another dream about Jean-Marc. And again I woke up frightened. But why? I could not recall anything frightening in the dream itself. What is it then? The circumstances of J-M’s death? But it has been 20 years! At the time there was no HIV in the Western world. And if there had been, and… Surely I would know it by now. Twenty years, almost to the day, since I met Miki. Time for a visit to the Baron de Hirsch. And then a trip to Lachine. It still sounds funny, saying it in French: un trip à la Chine. The big surprise: Bob is circumcised, quite unusual for a French Canadian male. (I recently found out at a conference that Québec and Newfoundland are the provinces with the fewest circumcised males.) It took me a while to ask him why. It turns out that his mother is Jewish, therefore technically he is too. She is from Marseille of Algerian family (the one that he visited in July) and she met his father in Paris: it was where she was studying and he was working in the BNC branch, where they were married and where Bob was born. And circumcised. So my new lover is French Canadian and Jewish. Le meilleur des mondes possibles, n’est-ce pas, mon journal? G did not call until September, a few weeks after he got back, and I told him right away. “There is someone else,” I said simply. But then he surprised me. “Maybe that’s for the better,” he said, and then he paused like waiting for me to ask why, but I was silent, so he said that it’s because his daughter Amy has a crush on Daniel, has had it for two years, since she was in Grade 9. And it would be too awkward for us if anything ever came of that. Daniel and Amy! It sounds ridiculous. But then I am not sure that I know my own son any more. Since Betty and I now speak French again he has been trying to speak French with us but is having a hard time and lapses into English. Sometimes he makes mistakes that he says are due to confusion with Spanish. One thing he told us is that he has a girlfriend. He calls her Cici but her name is Cynthia. She is Port Puerto Rican, is one year ahead of him and is studying psychology. I asked him if he spoke Spanish with her. He just laughed and said no. I don’t know if it can be said that he is serious about her, but when we went to Mont-Tremblant he did not flirt. He has been hinting that he wants to have a real talk with me, grownup to grownup. Une vraie conversation, comme deux adultes. I am not sure if that means that he wants me to tell him things about myself or to tell me things about himself, or perhaps both. I assume that he knows about Bob because Betty of course knows (she was the one who set us up, so to speak, by making me sit next to him) and she probably has told Daniel. Or maybe not; I am not sure that they had time for a private talk, since D was busy seeing friends and B was busy with Gérard.   The hero’s journey Daniel’s first discovery on returning to his hometown was that the household that was now constituted by his mother and his sister had returned to francophonie. Both of them now spoke exclusively in French, not only with each other but also to him. And he found that his French had grown rusty through disuse and through contamination with his recently acquired Spanish; he caught himself using some subjunctives and some prepositions incorrectly. Betty, who was now in Grade 11, had decided that she would leave North Am after that school year and, like a good born-again Québécoise, enroll in a French CEGEP. When he asked her if Gérard had something to do with her decision she answered, shyly but matter-of-factly, “Tu parles!” Daniel wondered if she, like their father, had found the love of her life before she was sixteen. He had not seen his mother since returning from Germany, and he felt the time to be ripe for a serious mother-and-son talk, now four years overdue, about his father. He would bring it up a few days before leaving for New York. Meanwhile he saw Fela, who welcomed his account of his journey, and got together with some old friends, including Harvey, Leslie, Roxane and Megan. Harvey and Leslie were now a couple. They had gone into the second year of CEGEP after finishing Grade 12 at North Am, and were now regular first-year students (U1) at McGill. Both were studying political science, though for Leslie it was her major concentration while Harvey would begin law the next year. Harvey still played soccer and Leslie, who had slimmed down and was now quite pretty, still played violin and smoked. Roxane, on winter vacation from UBC, told him outright that she had now fully come out as a lesbian, confirming the gossip Betty had brought home two years earlier. Megan had a new boyfriend that she was, for the first time in Daniel’s experience, not ready to cheat on. He found that he didn’t care, and even felt somewhat relieved. Sex with Megan would have been like restarting an old routine. He was looking forward to seeing Cici again, feeling a tinge of anxiety over the possibility that the relationship might not resume, even though she had said, “See you in a month!” For while their decidedly non-melodramatic farewell was of the kind that left them free to pursue other liaisons, the expectation – faint at first, then growing in strength – of seeing her again had a liberating effect on him that was of the opposite kind: he felt himself freed, for the first time in two years, from the driving need for such pursuits. Cici had a knack for making every date feel like an ab initio seduction. She was the first woman in Daniel’s experience to wear, even as the weather grew cold, blatantly sexy clothes (including underwear) for going out; it was something she had been practicing since her quinceañera. Her wardrobe seemed limitless, since she never wore exactly the same outfit twice. Curiosity about what she would wear on their next date became a part of Daniel’s excitement, and the feeling stayed with him during the winter vacation. The women that he saw at Mont-Tremblant, in their tight ski (and even tighter après-ski) outfits, left him indifferent.   In his spare time in Montreal Daniel managed to finish reading the dozen articles that made up the “Anglo-Saxon Journey (with some Spanish and French)” series. The articles combined sketches of personalities, ranging from Oswald Mosley to Marilyn Monroe and including Jean Lesage, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, with discussions of movements such as neo-fascism, Quebec nationalism and civil rights, and descriptions of the situation of social groups like Jews of Montreal and the Latinos of the United States. Eyewitness reporting (mediated by television) on events as they happened made the writing especially vivid. It was just the kind of journalism that Daniel would want to do. He would not do any more reading of In meiner Zeit till his return to New York, he decided, and so he would make the return journey overnight, as before, but the Winterreise on the bus no longer appealed to him, and he chose the overnight train instead. The Montrealer’s service had been suspended for two years, but since its resumption, a year and a half earlier, its operation had acquired a good reputation. He made a sleeping-car reservation for the Friday before Martin Luther King Day. On the eve of his departure there was dire news from the Middle East. A coalition of thirty-four governments, led by the United States and including Canada, invaded Iraq with air strikes, and Iraqi missiles – which the media called “Scud” – were launched against Israel. It was just the kind of counterattack that Michael Wilner had predicted, more than two decades before, in The Long Seventh Day. The father’s presence now loomed large on the son’s mind. After dinner, when Betty was out with Gérard, Daniel approached his mother, who was reading a book on the living-room sofa. “You know, maman,” he sad as he sat down beside her, “it’s been four years since I went to New York to talk with Brigitte.” “I know.” She didn’t look up from her book. “And I’ve never told you what she told me about papa.” “That’s right. You haven’t.” She raised her head slightly but did not look at him. “Not to mention other stuff she told me in her letters, and in Germany last summer, or the stuff that Nili told me.” He chose not to tell her at this time about getting to know his father through his writings. “That’s right.” She was now almost facing him. “Haven’t you wanted to know?” At last she looked him squarely in the eye. “As a matter of fact, no, I haven’t.” “Why? He was your husband!” “In a manner of speaking. I mean… yes, we were legally married, and we had children, and he left us his money. But we were together just a few times, never for more than a month, and when we were together he never talked to me about his life when he was away from me. I knew about the stuff that he wrote about, of course – that’s how we met. At the very beginning I asked him some personal questions, and he gave me some very vague answers. He said that he had been married to a movie star – he made it sound like a joke – and he was divorcing her. When we were filling out the marriage papers is when I found out that he was born in Poland. Then he introduced me to Fela and told me that she could fill me in on his background, which she did, to some extent. But the feeling that I always got from him was that when we were together he just wanted to be in the present, and he made me feel the same.” “Was I an accident?” Mireille smiled broadly. “No, darling. I knew that I would never really have him, and I thought that this way I could keep a part of him.” “Did he know that?” “Just as we were saying good-bye he said to me, ‘if you get pregnant let me know,’ and he left me a card with his phone number in Hamburg. I wasn’t sure if I would call him, but he was back here in February to celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday, and by then I knew, so I told him. I certainly didn’t expect him to come back and marry me. I didn’t actually want to get married – I was all prepared to be a single mother – but he insisted.” “How about Betty?” “The same, more or less. I had a… a strange premonition that I might not see him again, and I wanted another piece of him. And I never did see him again.” “But you saw his body, didn’t you?” “No. I didn’t want to. His dead body meant nothing to me. I let Fela and her relatives take care of it, especially since a Jewish burial was involved.” Confusing thoughts began to swirl in Daniel’s head. “What if it wasn’t really his body?” “What do you mean?” The question startled Mireille. “Who else’s would it be?” “He had enemies in Israel. Brigitte and Nili both told me. The Mossad played some dirty tricks on him. They might have sent a wrong body. He might be rotting in a prison…” “Don’t be ridiculous.” “Couldn’t he be disinterred for a DNA test? I know they didn’t have them back in the seventies, but now…” “They’re still not very reliable, and I’ve never heard of one being used on a cadaver, let alone one that by now is probably just a skeleton.” “I learned in biology class that they’ve extracted DNA from skeletons that were hundreds of years old.” “But not to identify them individually!” “No, but probably in a few years…” “Are you serious?” The cloud of macabre thoughts began to dissipate. “I don’t know, maman. I’m going to have to think about this some more. But thanks for the talk. I needed it.” “Me too, darling. I’ve been waiting for you to bring it up, like the grownup that you are now.” He was thinking of saying But I’ve been a grownup for over a year now when his thoughts were disrupted by the sounds of Betty and Gérard bidding each other good-night outside the house. The sounds were marked with pauses, probably occupied by kissing. After Gérard, who had just acquired a car, drove off, Betty walked into the house and called out, “Bonsoir, tout le monde.” It was at that moment that Daniel became aware that, in the course of his long conversation with his mother, she had not said a single word in French.   The Montrealer arrived at Penn Station only forty minutes late, and Daniel called Cici as soon as he was in his apartment. Their reunion that evening, at the Cuban-Chinese restaurant, was pleasantly natural and no more fraught with melodrama than their farewell; it was as though they had been apart for a few days and not a month. And so the pattern was set for their subsequent separations and reunions. The absence of melodrama, as in their intervening dating life, was something that Cici appreciated after her previous entanglement, which she described as being like a soap opera. What she actually said, on that first date in January when they were catching each other up on their respective lives, was that her relationship with her former novio Tony had been pura telenovela. She now felt comfortable enough to throw in occasional Spanish expressions in talking with Daniel. He could readily understand how a man like Tony would be crazy about Cici. He could imagine how, once he was ready to fall in love, it might easily be with someone like her. When she told her that, she laughed. “You’re young!” she said. “I’m young too, but you’re younger! Hell, I’m a cradle robber! Carajo with that love stuff! Let’s just have fun!” She laughed again, and Daniel thought that her laughter had a bitter undertone. He had intended to tell her about his momentous talk with his mother, but decided to postpone the telling till the next date. At his apartment, as she was pulling off his undershirt, on seeing his torso she remarked, “What happened to your pancita?” “My what?” “You know, panza, like Sancho Panza, your little… paunch.” “You mean my beer belly? I haven’t had that since Thanksgiving! I started losing it as soon I started playing soccer!” “Oh… I guess you were losing it gradually, so I didn’t notice, but now that I haven’t seen you for a month, I see that it’s gone. I miss it!” “You do? I worked hard to get rid of it!” “But it was cute! I liked feeling it against mine!” Cici did, in fact, have a delightfully rounded belly that was the epitome of young womanhood and that she didn’t mind displaying when the weather was warm enough. “But now that mine’s flat again it’ll feel even better, you’ll see,” he said as he took her in his arms. They both had things to attend to during the rest of the holiday weekend, and then classes began. They made a date for the following Saturday afternoon.   On that freezing-cold, cloudy afternoon, Cynthia Carmona, or Cici (she was never Cici Carmona), was not yet the famous Dr. Cynthia C. Bloom (Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Florida State University) who dispenses bilingual advice on Spanish-language television and appears on English-language networks as an expert on the psychology of Hispanic Americans. (During her clinical training she had a romance with her supervisor, married him briefly, and kept his surname as her professional name after the divorce.) She was a junior at Columbia and she was in the warm apartment of her sophomore boyfriend, Daniel Wilner; when she counseled him, she did so in English. For despite her gradually more frequent use of Spanish expressions she insisted, until the end, on speaking only English with him, and if his Spanish did improve during his time with her, it was no thanks, or hardly any thanks, to her. What Cici did introduce him to was the vast and rich world – a world in which she was well versed – of popular and folk songs in Spanish, from Latin America and Spain alike. That introduction gave him a reason to resume his guitar playing. He learned to accompany her singing in a wonderful variety of rhythms, and eventually became fluent enough to sing duets with her. That afternoon they listened, first, to a broadcast of Un Ballo in Maschera, with Pavarotti in fine voice. Hearing Pavarotti reminded him of Berlin; remembering Berlin reminded him of Inge; and remembering Inge made him horny. Cici, as usual, was ready. She was Daniel’s first girlfriend who referred to the sex act as making love. He was used to hearing and saying faire l’amour when speaking French; it was what his mother had used when she first talked to him about sex. But the English version had always struck him as awkward, like so many other word-for-word translations from French: ‘Fat Tuesday’ for Mardi gras; ‘lost wax’ for cire perdue; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for Les parapluies de Cherbourg (instead of Cherbourg Umbrellas – it was, after all, the name of a store); and, most ludicrously, The Four Hundred Blows for Les quatre cents coups. But with Cici, making love became a natural part of his vocabulary. Afterwards she played for him a cassette album of songs by Pablo Milanés that she had just brought back with her from Puerto Rico (smuggled over from Cuba, she told him). Milanés had a lovely, warm singing voice, and was often accompanied by one or two female backup singers. The music was quite rhythmic and energetic, even danceable, though quite different from the salsa that was played at the dance joints to which Cici took him. Though Daniel was reading the lyrics along, he had trouble following their meaning – the phrasing often seemed convoluted – except in one song, A caminar, which was a duet with one of the women, and contained two easily understood verses that were repeated several times, alternately by the two singers: No me pidas cambiar lo que en principio, Admirabas en mí sin serte extraño. Don’t ask me to change what, in the beginning, you admired in me without it being foreign to you. Yo no quiero cambiar lo que tú fuiste, Lo que eres y serás al enfrentarme. I don’t want to change what you were, what you are and what you will be when you face me. At the end the two verses were combined contrapuntally by the two singers. It would be fun, Daniel thought, to learn the song and some time in future sing it as a duet with Cici. She seemed to know most of the songs by heart, since she sang along with the recording. (The last song, Salida, was – according to the liner notes – not by Milanés but someone named Eduardo Ramos, who was listed as the album’s producer and the band’s leader and bassist.) When she sang the line Dale salida a tus sentimientos she looked at Daniel pointedly. “It means ‘Get your feelings out,’” she said during an instrumental break. The song ended with the word Salida, which Daniel took as a signal to start talking. He told her about the profound conversation he had had with his mother and mentioned in passing his idea, which he now found bizarre, of exhuming the body in Michael Wilner’s grave for possible DNA fingerprinting. “Hold on,” Cici said. “That could be significant.” “What do you mean?” “Well, you know, the search for the father is, like, an archetype, not exactly a Jungian one, but one that’s often a part of the hero’s journey.” “Did you learn about this in your class?” “Not only, but yes.” “Tell me more.” “Take, for example, Odysseus’ son, what’s his name…” “Telemachus.” “That’s right. When he’s a kid he’s told that his father is dead, but when he grows up he no longer accepts it, so he begins the search. Of course he ‘s got the help of the goddess Athena, while you…” “I’ve got the help of the goddess Cynthia! She’s the same as Artemis, you know.” “Hey, you really know mythology! But what I meant was that you’ve got DNA.” “Are you serious?” He shocked himself by asking Cici the same question that his mother had put to him. “You know, my mother said that those test aren’t reliable yet, and especially not on cadavers.” “Yet. That means it’ll take time. Of course the journey takes time.” “But exhumation isn’t so simple!” “The journey isn’t supposed to be simple, Daniel. Many obstacles must be overcome.” A thought suddenly struck him. “I’ve told you about my father’s friend Nili, and her daughter who was my biology TA – she’s getting a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She’s the one who told us that scientists in England have gotten DNA from old skeletons. I’m sure she’s more up to date about this than my mother. I could go ask her.” “The first step on your journey!”   In the evening, after a Thai dinner, they went to see Cyrano de Bergerac, with Gérard Depardieu. On the way back to his apartment Daniel mentioned that a former girlfriend of his was named Roxane. “We’re still friends,” he added. “Just friends?” Cici asked with a laugh. “She’s lesbian now. I think I was her only guy.” “So, was it so good that she never found your equal, or so bad that it turned her off men? Which is it?” “I don’t know… Hey, stop messing with my mind!” He took off one of his gloves and tried to mock-slap her with it, but she ducked, and the glove glanced off her wool hat. “Am I too young for you?” She took his ungloved hand and squeezed it affectionately. “You’re a wise old soul, Daniel Wilner, in a… young body.” And she sang: “Yo no quiero cambiar lo que tú fuiste, lo que eres y serás al enfrentarme.” At that moment Daniel, though he was not sure what being in love felt like, believed that he might be getting close to it. He was counting on Cici to save him from the precipice. And she did. “Actually,” she said, “what I was going to say was a wise old soul in a stupid young body.” “Stupid? Me? Why?” “Not you. Your body. Because it hasn’t got that nice pancita. All there is that stupid dick.” “My dick is stupid?” He suddenly lowered his voice as they reached the front door of his building, which he unlocked with a code. But the lobby was empty. “Sure,” Cici said, her voice also subdued. “All dicks are stupid. They just want one thing. That’s why when someone is called a dick, or a prick, it’s because he’s stupid.” “Have you known a lot of dicks?” Daniel asked, ambiguously, as they began to climb the stairs, with the click of the high heels of her boots reminding him of claves. “I mean, besides Tony’s,” he added. “Are you kidding?” She laughed. “He wasn’t even my first! And once I knew that I didn’t love him I cheated on him right and left.” “Not with me, though.” “No. By the time I met you it was practically over, and I wanted a fresh start.” The apartment was very warm, and they quickly removed their outer garments and hung them on the coatrack. “Wasn’t he jealous?” Daniel asked. “That’s the funny thing.” Cici sat on the sofa and started pulling her boots off. “He was possessive – he was always saying that he was the only one for me – but he was too stuck on himself to even suspect that I might be cheating. After a while I didn’t even try to hide it.” In her stocking feet, she was now in a half-lotus position on the sofa. “I was hoping that he would catch me and then drop me. But he didn’t, and I finally told him. And of course that was the end for him.” “And the beginning for me,” Daniel said while unbuttoning his shirt. “For us,” she corrected him as she stretched her legs and began slowly to unzip her dress, her body swaying to the humming song of the zipper, percussively accentuated by the quiet snap made by the unhooking of the brassiere. A line from an old song, sung by Yves Montand on one of Mireille’s LPs, came into his mind: La fermeture éclair a glissé sur tes reins… And then another line (the lyrics, he was quite sure, were by Jacques Prévert): la pointe de ton sein a tracé une nouvelle ligne de chance dans le creux de ma main… He moved behind her and let each of her nipples trace new lines of fortune in the hollow of his hand.