Nat in New York

You need America, on the side. you’ll only have that if you’re not American, and even then, America is everywhere. What is America anyway? A country confusing itself for a continent, named after an Italian who never even lived there? Many questions, but, of course, more answers than questions. That’s what Aunt Hélène would say.

When I ask what America is, people ought to know I’m asking as an actor from Montreal. Not an American, not even a Canadian, but a Québécoise. And not just any Québécoise. I have a forked tongue: English and French. I have an accent in both languages. Everyone asks me where I’m from. My snakelike sense of belonging crawls in the garden of nations. When they find out, people think I put the accent on, but that’s really how I speak. It also makes me good at my job, because every time I speak, I have to choose how to speak, how to change. My brain switches faces in the middle of sentences.

When I take the Manhattan-bound A-train in the morning, when I sink into the earth to rise again each morning, I read “the most beautiful pages of French poetry”: Les Plus Belles Pages de la Poésie Française, an anthology Hélène gave me. They didn’t have us read a lot of classics in high school. I asked her once, my teacher: why don’t we read any Balzac? She’d say: Natalie, you really think they’d read that guy if I assigned him? I suppose we wouldn’t have. But do you really change at the contact of something you already know?

Then again, no matter how many times I do it, it doesn’t get easier. I know, because I change so often, how hard it is to change. My mind is clothed in the web of language it’s run into and run to. Words stick to you. They stick to everything. I know what it feels like to talk with your aunt, then struggle to pull your mind out of your web of French for a friend who doesn’t share in it. I know what it means to want to cover a whole room, to want to fill a place with French—every cobweb corner, every leaf and petal, book, handle and button in it—because you know people will understand you, or because you know they won’t.

At the Expat, Neal—he’s half American—asked me to give him an example of a Queb expression, for old times’ sake. I gave it to him in François Legault’s voice: s’enfarger dans les fleurs du tapis. Rolling the r’s and all. And when he was done choking on that desperately dry martini, he asked me what it meant. He’d heard carpet, he’d heard flower—in the something. But the verb he had trouble with. S’en… what? In the fleurs of the tapis? S’enfarger. Oh, s’enfarger. What does that mean? He said.

And I had trouble explaining, really. Stumbling? Stumbling, sure, if you can stumble not just yourself but also someone else, then it means stumbling. Stumbling in the carpet’s flowers? Neal sipped his martini again. So, they’re scared of carpets, he said, and then he managed a joke that was both racist and Quebec-bashing at the same time. It was just about that moment I decided not only not to see him ever again, but not to see anyone else so long as I was in New York, so disgusted I was with this world and its inhabitants, and because my Aunt Hélène is ninety-five and living alone, and I miss her.

She never married, because she always lived with her friend Lise, who died two years ago. Both of them worked for the American Embassy in Ottawa. As soon as they retired, they devoted their lives to community service and golf. They took care of us in the ice storm when our parents needed a break. Hélène’s dad, my great-grandfather, was a local politician. A rouge. A Liberal, which was as red and as left as you got back then without risking jail, or getting beat up or shot at. Her mother, the daughter of a notary, was a pious school principal. One time, when the priest came over complaining the sixth kid wasn’t on its way, that she was stopping God’s plan for the family, she told Hélène: don’t believe everything they tell you. So Hélène doubted. Doubted all her life, and smoked and drank, but only in what she called medicinal quantities, and only at parties. And when the party was over, it was over, and it was work, all over again, until the next. She even typed her brother’s thesis on Fridays. That man couldn’t even do his laundry himself. Bet she drank a shit ton on those Fridays. I say goodbye to Neal on that thought, leave the bar, take a train out of Harlem, to wherever.

On my way out of the subway, I walk into a church. Not for long. I only ever feel religious when I’m sad. It’s a plain old church. Brown brick. No one’s in it except that guy. I think he’s called a Sexton. It’s a Catholic church. No, it’s Episcopalian. I’m not sure. I see a painted heaven close over me in a fury of cheap doves. Like the legions of pigeons outside. Here it’s quiet as incense. I guess Hélène isn’t the only one in doubt. It used to be that all of our people pretended to believe. As soon as they were told they didn’t need to anymore, they didn’t. God, the director, was gone on vacation. Hélène hated that. But she still had her crucifix. I asked her why, once. She said: I doubted when they said he existed. I doubted still when they changed their minds.

Even Jesus doubted, didn’t he? Cold in Gethsemane, abandoned by his friends. I walk to the high altar, like to an off-Broadway stage. I didn’t manage to land that gig. How many plays is Neal doing? How many plays did Neal and I do before we broke up? I can’t even remember. We did Godot once in Toronto. I was Pozzo. He was Vladimir. A match made in limbo. After the first production, we went to see Ollie play at the Cloak. We came in so late most of the regulars were already beering for a good six hours. There was William Wallace, high as fuck on God’s dandruff. There was Tony Hawk, talking about how he sliced his Guinness hand with a paper cutter up north. There was that ginger guy and his friend with the suspenders. I think that’s when Neal first told the gang he was moving to Brooklyn. I’d already made up my mind to come meet him if I ever got bored. I met him now. I am bored, Hélène.

They make a big deal of unshakable faith, here and everywhere faith is a thing. Maybe it’s they who don’t get it, not us. The shaking of it. I won’t stay in this church much longer. It’s so cold here I forgot it was summer, Hélène. That last night this past summer, when we were in Paris, on rue Dunois, in the treizième, you told me to go find Lise some flowers before I left. Lise was losing her memory, watching her illness slowly undo the braid of her life. She held the strands in her hands not knowing what to do with them. Flowers were better than framed photos, you said, because you didn’t need memory to appreciate them. Lise would look at a picture of herself with you at Père Lachaise and not remember where you were. She would look out at our golden panorama of Paris, see Notre-Dame shoot its stone arrow into the sun, into a sky blue as death, and not remember she was in Paris. Flowers would be the perfect gift, you said. They’d mean I love you, just in the way they opened under her nose. And soon they would die, leaving her with nothing to forget.

You, Hélène, you never forgot anything. You kept each item in the house just where it was when she died. Years later, the mold, the trails of dust, the spiderwebs arcing between them. The mind as it holds onto things. Defacing all things. I forgot to get those flowers, Hélène. I was out in Montmartre, forgetting, like I am now. Down in the subway now again, looking away from everyone, as though everyone had your face. Seven generations you saw pass by like that. I might be a generation of one. All my friends in Toronto are getting married. I don’t know what their problem is. I catch my flight tomorrow. There’s a million wars going on and the earth’s falling apart. It has been, since you were a kid. And fuck you, fuck you Jerusalem, fuck you Moscow and fuck you, too, Rome and Istanbul, fuck you, too, New York, Toronto, Montreal. Somehow, in spite of them, we’re all still here. Neal is still here. I’m still here. All of them and their people, still here.

I’m out of a job, I don’t want children. I pissed in Morningside Heights. Someone was murdered there last year. I threw up under a bridge and a man in a beanie, who looked like a bit like a pigeon, laughed at me. Hélène, when I got tired of all that sorrow, I opened the book I had with me: Les Plus Belles Esties de Pages de la Poésie Française. Your buddies dedicated it: À Hélène, dite la Déesse. Hélène you brought their walls down at your retirement party, besieged their Chanson de Roland asses at a table full of wine and flowers. All career long you drove a rose of decency around their hearts. You loved those cigar-smoking, beige-pants, Kanuk-Subaru-fishing-trip old fuckers, and you were loved in return. Where are they now, that garland of friends, that crown of thorns?

Who has ever wanted anything more than independence? Not this kind, not their kind. Not even my kind. The one in the details. Yours. I don’t need a nation, an empire, a republic. I don’t need a people, a family, a God, to belong. I only want your doubt looking them in the face, asking that one question, the one you asked me. The one Neal asked me and I refused to answer. The one to ask the Lord in his doubtful flowers at the borders of Hell:

When will I see you again?

Photo graciously provided by Sean Witzke from Unsplash.