Men Without Pants

Our band was rehearsing Iggy Pop's "I Just Wanna Be Your Dog" in my basement when Tommy, one of our guitarists, said to Steve, the other guitarist and lead singer, "Dude, you gotta sing like you really wanna be her dog!"

"What's wrong with the way I'm singing?" Steve asked, defensive.

"You don't sound like you really mean it," Tommy replied. "You lack conviction..."

Steve looked at Tommy, confused.

Mike, our bass player, interrupted our rehearsal to say to me, "Okay, Tony, what's the name of the band?"

I did a drum roll and hit the crash symbol. Then I shrugged and said, "I don't know, how about Men Without Pants?"

"Okay," Mike replied. "Men Without Pants it is."

Steve and Tommy, the lead guitarist agreed. Men Without Pants we were.

We changed our name a lot because we had trouble getting return gigs. It wasn't like we sucked; the bars sometimes didn't want us back because people couldn't relate to us. So we often played under a different name at the same place and hoped that people would like us better the second time around.

Mike, Steve and Tommy figured out that I was the best at coming up with new names, so that became my department. I came up with names like Dikes on Bikes, Life Sucks and Radio Nazi. The first was from a lesbian motorcycle gang that I had heard of in San Francisco, where my aunt lived. (No, she's not a lesbian, just a former hippy from the sixties — a free spirit.) The second was from you know what— we've all had them days. The third was a term I had for people who crank up the radio so loud while driving by that you can almost see the car shake. But I don't know how I came up with names like Purple Roses or Pushing Up Daisies, except that they had flowers in them.

I got Men Without Pants from a band in Montreal during the eighties called Men Without Hats; they had a song called "Safety Dance" that appeared on MTV for a while. I started from the head and worked my way down— that's how the thought process works sometimes. We got the gig under Men Without Pants.

We weren't terrible musicians. It's just that we weren't really good enough to be esoteric like King Crimson or early Pink Floyd, when Syd Barrett was their guitarist. Back in the eighties, people in the Windsor and Detroit areas were either into speed metal or punk, and we were neither. We were like late-sixties or early-seventies retro. Steve, our lead singer, neither screamed like the heavy metal singers trying to imitate Robert Plant, nor sang like he had a speech impediment like Johnny Rotten. We used a lot of distortion and feedback, like early Black Sabbath. If we had gone to Seattle, we could have easily been a grunge-punk band like Sonic Youth. Or a garage band, if we started out during the first decade of the millennium, when bands concluded that they didn't need bass players. Bass players can be such assholes, you know.

Tommy was the leader of the band, at least on stage. He could play with anybody; he had perfect pitch. He knew instantly which instrument was out of tune and never used a strobe tuner, which guitarists all seem to rely on nowadays. He was into alternative tunings too, like open-G and open-D, which only the Seattle bands were using at the time. When he was in the standard E tuning, he sometimes tuned each string down three semitones so that his guitar was tuned down to C-sharp — which Seattle bands also did. The rest of us shrugged at first, but then Steve and Mike followed suit.

I learned from Tommy that drummers also tuned their instruments, when he said to me one time, "Your snare's out of tune."

I'm like, "Okay, how do you tune a snare drum?"

He hit the A-string with his pick and said, "Try that."

So I tuned to his A-string, and I've been tuning my drums ever since. It made me a better drummer. I tune to the A of a Jamaican steel drum now.

Mike, our bass player, was the best musician. He played piano, cello and guitar, as well as electric and stand-up bass. He later got a doctorate in musicology and ended up teaching at university in upstate New York, or some place like that. We had trouble keeping bass players, because a good bass player can always find a better gig whenever there's any trouble in the band. In the end, we lost him too.

Since Steve got the previous gig there, we sent Mike, afraid that the bar owner might recognize Steve and not give us the gig. I sometimes hustled the gig too, because I could never convince anybody I'm famous. If I change my hairstyle, my wife won't even know me — I'm that anonymous.

We never sent Tommy because he was strange— we were sure the owner would recognize him right away. With his curly blond hair and wire-framed glasses, he was instantly recognizable. He looked like the lead singer of Mott the Hoople at one time. All he needed was the sunglasses and the top hat.

We really rehearsed for this gig, thinking this could be a new start for us. All full of enthusiasm, Tommy said, "Hey, let's practise every day! We would sound a lot better if we practised every day."

We knew he was right, but he typically got geeked up for gigs. The problem was: Mike was going to school full time while Steve and I were working full time. Steve was a janitor at the Ford Plant in Ford City, while I ran a lathe in Wyandotte, Michigan; I also had a wife and a two-year-old daughter. Steve was still trying to save his marriage, before his wife ran off with some other guy to the reservation on Walpole Island; she was part Ojibway. So we didn't practise as much as we should have; we only practised two or three days a week, about nine or ten times before the gig. The gig was about three weeks after we booked it.

Tommy didn't have a steady job, and he was smoking a lot of pot. His mother was apparently willing to let him sit up in his bedroom all day and practise. She was either a saint or as loony as him— maybe both.

What happened during one of our rehearsals was a sign that Tommy's head wasn't in the same place as the rest of the band artistically. He tuned his guitar to some funky tuning of his own invention and made it sound like a sitar; he had recently heard some music by Ravi Shankar that his mother had. His parents were both right in the middle of all the craziness during the sixties, only his father apparently never came back; his parents were divorced around the time he was born, 1968, I think it was. His father was living in California or Florida. His mother was still a free spirit.

Tommy played melodic lines on the high strings and used the lower strings as a drone, very Eastern; it sounded like he was playing two guitars. Since Indian and Middle Eastern music is based on a system of microtones rather than the twelve-tone system of seven natural notes and five flats and sharps, he probably wouldn't have sounded authentic to somebody from India or the Middle East. But to us, the flowing lines from his guitar sounded exotic, Middle Eastern. We all had a passing acquaintance with Middle Eastern music, having heard it from the open windows of passing cars driven by Arabs and Pakistanis down Wyandot Street in Windsor, where all the Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants are, if nothing else.

The problem was that nobody knew where he was coming from. Mike was able keep up with him because Tommy played diminished and harmonic minor scales over a two-chord vamp, but Steve never knew when to come in. We jammed as a trio— Tommy, Mike and me — with Steve looking on like a spectator. I felt later that that some congas would have been better than the Pearl drum set that I was playing, but I could keep up. It was a tabla rhythm, nothing elaborate — something like: one-and-uh-two-and-uh-three-and-uh-four-and. It was just that the stress fell on the second and third beats instead of either one and three or two and four. I never thought I was getting it right.

We stopped after about ten minutes. Tommy smiled like he had just discovered a new dimension besides those of time and space. He said to Steve, "Well, what do you think?"

Steve expressed an enthusiasm that I was sure he didn't feel: "Hey, that was real good!"

"Well, see if you can come up with some lyrics," Tommy replied.

But Steve never came up with any lyrics, and we never played that song again. Since we had recorded it on my four-track, I later added some bongos. Tommy dubbed an acoustic guitar tuned the same way as his electric and used it as a drone, never stopping his strings with his left hand on the neck. He explained to me that that was how the tambura, a stringed instrument of northern India, was played: without stopping the strings. His mother had hiked through Europe and the Middle East to India with him on her back; she had seen live Indian music performed numerous times in India.

As the time for our gig approached, Tommy starting acting more and more strange. He missed a couple of rehearsals and Mike delivered an ultimatum to me and Steve : "If he misses anymore, I'm out!"

Steve was better at massaging the egos of other musicians than anybody I have ever known. We're still friends, me and Steve, though we don't play in bands together anymore. He was a kind, decent person— a real prince of a guy. He once found a replacement band after we had to cancel on short notice— something he wasn't legally obligated to do. We were unable to play the night of the gig because we had lost a lead singer and bass payer just before the gig, but he didn't want to leave the bar without a band.

He was a sheep in wolf's clothing in a cutthroat business. Since he was our manager, we might have lost some musicians because they thought he wasn't cutthroat enough. We often played for as little as three-hundred and fifty a night when we could have possibly made five-hundred or more. We played in some real dives where the acoustics were shitty and the patrons were rowdy. We never played in a real redneck bar, but we once had somebody come up to us and say, "You boys mind playin' some country?"

We knew that Mike was serious about quitting the band, so Steve and I went to talk to Tommy. We drove to Tommy's house across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. When I found out that Tommy lived in Windsor, I said, "Hey, I didn't know he was Canadian!"

Steve replied, "If people know you're from Canada, you're not really Canadian."

He had a point. I'm from Hawkesbury, Ontario, but not a lot of people know about it.

First, we stopped at a Harvey's near the Ambassador Bride, where Steve had some poutine for the first time. Then we drove to Steve's place. He lived near the corner of Riverside Drive and Joseph Janisse Street, a three-bedroom red brick Canadian bungalow with a loft from the early twenties on the south side of the street. The place look immaculate from the outside, like his mother had nothing better to do but do the gardening all day, weather permitting.

We rang the doorbell. A few minutes later, the door was answered by a wraith-like middle-aged woman in a long, tie-dyed cotton skirt and a woollen shawl around her shoulders. Her gun-metal grey hair was down to the small of her back in a pony tail. She looked like a grandma, but she smiled very pleasantly and said, "He's upstairs!"

When we arrived at the top of the stairs, where Tommy's bedroom was, Steve knocked on his bedroom door. We heard a muffled voice say, "Go away!"

"I think he's depressed," Steve said to me confidentially.

I rolled my eyes and I was like, "Great — a head case!"

Steve knocked on the door again and said, "Tommy, we need to talk."

Tommy told us to come in; he was still in bed. His bedroom wasn't super messy, but it was getting there. It was small, with just a cheap dresser made of particle board, a bed, and a coffee table with a roach clip in the ashtray. In a few weeks, we would have had trouble finding him under all of that stuff on the floor, if he let all of his clothes and everything else pile up. There were clothes all over the floor.

"We have to talk," Steve repeated.

Tommy rolled over on his stomach and buried his head under his pillow. "Life sucks," he cursed.

"We already played under that name, remember?" Steve joked.

Then he said, in all seriousness, "We're about to lose another bass player."

Then he looked at me and added, "Tony said he wants to quit the band too. If you don't get it together, we're not going to have a band, Tom."

Tommy pulled the pillow off his head, rolled over on his back, and stared at us, his expression betraying nothing. His ratty, shoulder-length brown hair and almost peach-fuzz beard gave him the look of a hermit who had spent some time in a cave. The truth was that he sometimes holed himself in his bedroom for days at a time, having to work himself into a frenzy just to pick up his guitar. Music was work for him as well as play. If he wasn't rehearsing or playing gigs, he was like a workingman who had just been laid off; his life was without purpose.

For Tommy, music was a reason to get up in the morning, which typically started about two o'clock in the afternoon for him. He had no other ambition in life but to be a performing musician. Extended vacations are not good for you, even if you can afford not to work. An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and idle hands his tools. Unfortunately, we thought we could already hear the devil hammering away in the workshop that he had set up in Tommy's mind.

"We play our gig next week," Steve reminded him. "I want to get two or three more rehearsals in before we play. Are you going to be at the rehearsal Thursday, or are we going to have to find somebody else?"

Tommy looked at him for a moment, then replied, almost croaking like a frog: "I'll be there."

Tommy was true to his word; he didn't miss another rehearsal before the gig. However, we found out later that he had a drug problem that was far more serious than any of us had realized. His drug of choice was acid— mushrooms, purple microdot or mescaline. He liked Ecstasy too, though I don't think he ever took it during a gig.

He later confessed that he had done acid over a thousand times since junior high, and that he used to time his trips before a gig or a rehearsal. He would start tripping a day or two before a gig or rehearsal and play while on the tail end of the trip. He sometimes played brilliantly, but sometimes he didn't. Tommy was seldom obviously stoned, since his drug of choice wasn't the normal one for drug users. We didn't make the connection right away; we thought he was just flakey.

Steve only stayed with him as long as he did because when Tommy played well, few guitarists could touch him. It was just that when he didn't play well— when he sucked— bars didn't want us back and musicians quit our band.

Since Tommy didn't have a car, Steve and Mike left it to me to make sure that he got to the gig on the night we were supposed to play. I picked him up at his mother's house, and he was ready. I took that as a good sign. Tommy had two guitars with him rather than one. The black guitar case with the bumper stickers all over it protected his beloved white Stratocaster from the elements, but I had never seen the brown case before. It was all beat up, like it had been abused by a troop of mountain gorillas in the Congo.

Interested, I laughed and I asked, imitating a red neck, "Where did you get the guns, John?"

That was from an old song by The Guess Who, and he knew it. He smiled with a crazy gleam in his eye and said, "I picked it up a pawn shop. It's just a Fender Mustang, nothing expensive. I just wanted a different sound."

From the look in his eye, you could tell that something was up. Something told me I had better hold onto my you-know-whats because, tonight we were going to be in for a wild ride.

We were scheduled to go on at ten-thirty and play until two o'clock, when the bar closed. The bar that we were playing was somewhere on Holbrook Street in Hamtramck (that's "ham-tram-ick", not "ham-tramk"). It was better than a dive, but not the classiest place that we had ever played. At this point, however, we were happy to be playing anywhere. We set up and ran our sound check.

The gig started off well. After the first song, we had no major problems with the sound, though we had no soundman of our own running the board; somebody from the house was running it.

We played a mix of originals and cover tunes. Tommy did a credible job of singing Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady," playing the solo with his teeth. He had worked on it hard during rehearsal so that it would sound like he knew what he was doing on stage. There isn't a lot that's left to chance in the music business, you know.

After a twenty-minute break, we came out for the second set. Tommy sang another Hendrix tune, "Manic Depression," on which he also did a credible. Mike on bass and Steve on guitar played the signature riff an octave apart while Tommy took the solo. Tommy threw everything into his solo, like he did with all of his solos, but he only got a tepid response from the audience. That happens sometimes. No matter what you do, the audience will not respond.

Until the third set, the most memorable event of the evening was Mike getting telephone numbers from three different women. Mike used to stand up on stage, looking cool and unruffled; women like that aura of confidence, you know. Since we never had a front man, a lead singer, for any length of time in our band, the bass player usually got the most chicks.

I was like Ringo, who was more or less the Beatles' "special effect," because of his big nose. Since I was already married, I had found out that one woman was more than enough for me to handle anyway. Steve felt the same way, though his wife obviously was handling more than one man. But that's another pair of sleeves, Steve's marital problems.

The women mostly ignored Tommy, possibly because he looked barely twenty-one and he had a ragged peach-fuzz beard. As well, he looked crazy in a goofy sort of way— not like Charles Manson. Only there's a fine line between goofy and Charles Manson, I guess.

Teenage boys may like to see guitarists jump around and play the high notes up past the twelfth fret, but it doesn't seem to impress the women. If it did, Tommy would have got the most chicks hands down.

The third set began much like the previous two sets, uneventfully. Then Tommy put his beloved Strat on his guitar stand for the last song of the set and put the strap of his new Fender Mustang around his neck and shoulder. The song that were about to play was Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner."

Tommy dedicated it to the service men and women sent to protect the people of Iraq and Afghanistan from Osama Bin Ladin. There was plenty of "rockets' red glare" and "bombs bursting in air" in Tommy's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" that night; he was able to replicate Hendrix's whirling dive bombs and thunderous explosions, no problem.

Then, for the last explosion, he threw up his guitar, stepped back, and watched it crash to the stage. The guitar landed bottom end down and then rolled over to one side. I was afraid that he might throw it into my drums, so I stepped to side, a voice screaming in my head, "Oh no, not my beloved Pearl drum set!"

Instruments have souls, you know, but Tommy had no intention of smashing an expensive drum set, no more than he would have demolished a top-of-the line guitar like a Strat. Instead, he grabbed his Mustang by the neck and brought it down to the floor hard a couple of times like a firefighter chopping a burning piece of furniture.

Then, after the neck broke off, he grabbed a plastic bottle of some lighter fluid, knelt before the helpless guitar's prostrate body, and poured some of the fluid all over it— a big mistake. Every light in the house came on as a couple of guys built like trees grabbed him by the arms and violently jerked him up to his feet.

He had the look of a drunk about to be tossed out of a bar for reasons that he didn't understand. Tommy didn't understand that he was playing inside a bar with a sprinkler system rather than an outdoor venue like the 1967 Monterrey Pops Festival, where Jimi Hendrix gained rock and roll immortality by setting fire to his guitar.

Hamtramck has a fire code, you know — as well as all the other cities in the Detroit area.

We were all thinking, "This can't be happening!" But it was. The owner threatened us with prosecution, but we got off with a warning. He kicked us out and told us not to come back. We hauled off our equipment to the jeers of some of the patrons. I vividly remember one guy gleefully shouting, "You guys suck!"

I will never forget it if I live to be a hundred years old; it felt like being spat upon and then shat upon.

After we finished packing, we all wanted to kill Tommy— even Steve. Humiliated, Mike quit the band on the spot. After a couple of days to think about it, I did the same. Men Without Pants wasn't fun for me anymore; it was not worth quitting my day job.

Steve still plays in bands while Mike is teaching music somewhere in the US where the unemployment rate isn't as high as it is in Michigan. Steve told me later that Tommy was arrested for possession of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana at the border by US customs, but we don't know what happened after that; he joined the world of missing persons, more or less.

Hey, it's only rock and roll, right? If you can make a good living at it, like the Rolling Stones, fine. If not, it can be an expensive, even dangerous, hobby.

Men Without Pants disappeared into hyperspace like a computer file when somebody hits "delete" rather than "save." It may be better to burn out than to fade away, but we faded away.

Hostile Environments

You are a nurse at a hospital in the United States who crosses the border between the United States and Canada every day. The traffic at the border has got worse and worse, because of the events of September 11, 2001, that black Tuesday. So you have to get up early in the mornings. There are so many cars, so many trucks each morning, everybody has to show three pieces of identification. They will have to show a passport. Always, there are those who are searched by customs, taking more time.

You live in Ontario with your husband and your baby, who's only one year old. Tall, with dark skin, brown frizzy hair, brown eyes, you are very pretty, in your twenties, with a Tutsian beauty, but with a haunted look. Several members of your family have been massacred by the Hutus in Rwanda. You lack confidence in yourself, it seems, maybe because you were born in a little village in Rwanda, not a large city in the United States where you work, I don't know. What have you experienced during the massacres of the Tutsis by the Hutus? I don't know, me, being unable to comprehend the horror. I visualize the angry crowds, drunk on blood and alcohol. I see the repeated machete blows and hear the cries of the victims, but you don't talk about it. I can't comprehend the horror, neither the hate of the murderers nor the inaction of the world.

At work, you take the elevator to the nurses station on your floor, greeting the other nurses there. You are pleasant to them, they are pleasant to you in return, but the others don't like you very much: they think you are conceited, not very sociable. You prefer to be alone, it seems, so they don't talk with you much. Then you find on the counter a pretty bouquet of flowers with a little note attached. You smile, thinking at first that the bouquet is from your husband. But you read the note without recognizing the writing: it's an anonymous love letter. As you see it, nothing will come of it, you, being married and the mother of a child. But you read the note again: "My sweet Angela, I'm really attracted to you. If you are as nice as you are beautiful, maybe we can be more than just friends..."

From the feminine writing, you understand right away that the flowers are from another woman. You know very well that there are certain women at the hospital who prefer the society of other women. But this is something new: no woman has ever written a love letter to you before, though you have received them from boys at school, when you were young. You smile, shaking your head in an attempt to appear nonchalant: maybe it's only a joke, you, being new at the hospital. Maybe the other nurses are amusing themselves at your expense. This is your first position as a registered nurse since the nurses college. You work in the United States, new to the profession, unable to find a position in Canada, perhaps, because of budget cuts for health care there. Many Canadian nurses work in the United States, you know. It's possible that you will need more experience before working in Canada, I don't know.

You read the love letter one time more before you throw it in the waste basket. That woman, the anonymous one, she's never going to be any importance, you think.

*****


At home in the kitchen you talk about it with your husband. He smiles and says: "Hey, I have some competition. I'll have to treat you right..."

He holds you in his arms, you kiss in the middle of the kitchen. You laugh as well and put you head on his shoulder. Then you frown and look up at him: "It isn't funny, Alain. She thinks she loves me..."

"Her identity is unknown, right?"

"Yeah, that's right...

"Then don't worry about it. Until she reveals herself, it's no big thing. It's just a crush, she'll get over it."

You laugh to yourselves, then you kiss. He cooks supper while you feed the baby. Then everybody sits down for supper.

*****

You receive a second love letter, also anonymous. The author writes that she thinks about you all the time. She writes: "I see you every day in the cafeteria. I'm waiting for you, my love..."

You roll your eyes. But, out of curiosity, perhaps, you sit in the cafeteria to eat lunch. A little while later, a black woman sits at a table some tables across from you. You see each other, and the black woman smiles at you. The woman is perhaps thirty years old, with dimples on the cheeks of her round face. She is of medium height, with brown skin, light, like your skin, with brown hair cut close to the scalp. She isn't very pretty, but ordinary in appearance. Her body is round, with large breasts, thighs and hips. She has a belly. You are perhaps disappointed in the lack of beauty in this woman, if she is the one, but you like her smile. Her smile is pleasant, serene: you like her smile, despite yourself.

So you decide to ignore her and begin to eat lunch, but when you raise your eyes, you notice her looking at you still; the woman smiles again. You're ill at ease, but you try to smile at her out of politeness and begin to eat lunch again. Then the black woman stands up, takes her tray, and returns to work. From behind, this woman has a slow and sexy walk, but that bothers you too. You wait for the woman to leave the cafeteria before doing the same.

*****

Some days later, you receive a basket of fruit with another love letter attached that reads: "Remember me and eat!"

You can't believe it! You think: "This is really bizarre!"

Just then, the black woman that you had seen in the cafeteria arrives at your station. You can't discern the reason for her visit, but she sees you and and introduces herself: "My name's Sophie, how are you doing?"

Her manner is relaxed, very assured. She smiles broadly while showing white and perfect teeth. Her voice is calm, a musical contralto; you like her voice. She seems to be friendly, but you don't trust her. But you smile back at her with a forced smile, almost a grimace: you introduce yourself too. "Ah, your accent," she exclaims. "You're French-Canadian, aren't you? There are several nurses from Canada here..."

Then her eyes, which are almost black, focus on the basket of fruit.

"Ah," she exclaims, "somebody has given you a basket of fruit!

Before she leaves, she looks at you one more time and says: "Bon appétit!"

In anger, you throw the basket in the waste basket after she has gone.

*****

The next day, at lunch in the cafeteria, you hear somebody address you. It's Sophie. You look at her and see her standing in front you, holding a tray as she smiles at you. She asks pleasantly: "Is it okay if I sit with you?"

You're really ill at ease, but you reply: "Not at all, please sit down!"

She sits at your table across from you, you talk. She listens to you very attentively while you talk, smiling mysteriously. It seems that she's checking you out. You try to avoid all eye contact, but she has a beautiful, mysterious smile as she talks about herself. You learn that she has a son, that she sings in a church choir. She says: "I love to sing, I have sung my whole life! I feel closer to God. Black people have always loved the church. They know how to praise God..."

She has a certain charm. You are attracted to her despite yourself, or maybe because of yourself; you like her. Then you notice that she's wearing a plastic necklace with the small letters: "wwjd." Of course, you know very well what those letters mean: "What would Jesus do." She believes that Jesus would serve others, like you. That's the reason why she's a nurse, like you.

You tell her: "My son's going to go a Catholic school when he's older, but he's just a baby now. The provincial government pays for Catholic instruction. He's going to go to a French school; there are many French schools in my province. My husband was born in France, in Grenoble. We met in France, but he followed me back to Canada to propose marriage. After six months, we got married. That was three years ago..."

But she replies: "That's interesting. My son's going to go to a religious school too..."

This is really strange, like she hasn't been listening what you were saying. So you decide to avoid her in the future. You decide to no longer eat in the cafeteria.

*****

It's early in the afternoon. You drive to a café downtown near the hospital for lunch. Through the window of the café, you can see two women walking arm in arm down the street, a blonde and a brunette who are talking, really laughing. They are between twenty-five and thirty, these women. The tall one, the blonde, has fair features: long and blond hair, blue eyes, rectangular face, and a straight and thin nose. She's very pretty, her cheeks pink, since it's winter. She's wearing a long light brown coat and a white woolen tuque on her head. Her friend, the brunette, the small one, has dark features, wearing a black down coat down to her waist and a black tuque on her head. She has a round body, a round face. She has olive-coloured skin and black hair, not very long. Her nose is curved, like that of an eagle, like she's Mediterranean, Italian or Lebanese. She isn't very pretty, the brunette; the blonde is the more attractive of the two.

At one time, maybe you wouldn't have thought of them as lovers, but just friends. If you thought of them at all. While on vacation in Europe with your best friend, Denise, you often saw two women in the streets, strolling together arm in arm: it was no big thing. It was to avoid being jostled in crowds, they say, for protection against men who would throw them to the sidewalk and steal their handbags. Eventually, you and Denise did the same, so that nobody would jostle you. You have walked arm in arm with Denise in Toronto too, Denise and you. The experience wasn't dreadful, arm in arm with her. Of course, you didn't think that others in the street would think of you as saphiennes, not at all! But now...

As you see the two women walking along the street together, as you think of Sophie, you wonder about them. You ask yourself now if the others in the street in Toronto weren't wondering about Denise and you. Or maybe they were making assumptions. But the blonde and brunette pay no attention to the others in the street: the others, they have to step aside to avoid colliding with them.

*****


You have a dream at night where you are walking with your friend Denise while window shopping along the Champs-Elysées in Paris. You and Denise laugh as you point at the beautiful merchandise in the windows. Then someone shouts something cruel: "You dikes!"

Denise quickly turns around and shouts at them: "Go fuck yourself!"

But you are more sensitive than Denise: these words hurt you very much, and you start to cry...

*****

You receive a basket loaded with toiletry articles: little scented soaps, a bottle of shampoo, a bottle of creme rinse. The author writes: "Ah, my sweet Angela! Let us take a bath together! I will wash your back, you will was mine. I like a woman who is all woman. It's your voice, your accent like brown sugar, like your skin, like your eyes. I have so sugar to give too..."

You throw the basket in the waste basket while cursing. The other nurses on your floor stare at you, astonished.

*****


You sit a table in the café downtown, next to the window. You see the two women strolling arm in arm across the street from across. Nobody walks like that, except these women. You stare at the women. They show no open affection, except in walking arm in arm; they don't even look at each other. You look for signs that they are lovers, but they show no signs : no kissing, no flirting, nothing. They are only walking arm in arm. When they approach a corner, the one looks to the right, the other to the left. Then they cross the street together, still arm in arm. Then they're gone. Maybe it's something that two women in a large city in the United States, full of crime, ought to do : maybe they should walk arm in arm for the protection against men.

*****


In another dream, you are walking alone along a city street. You feel really out of place. There are lots of cars, lots of people — the place is really on the move. There are couples that talk, couples that laugh while walking down the street, but you are threatened. Then the two women collide with you while they come out of a café. The women profusely apologize when they see what they have done. Then they laugh at your expense when they see the confused look on your face. You feel really out of place...

*****

You lie down naked on your side in front of your husband, your back to him as you settle into his arms. Your husband touches your left shoulder with his hand and plants a little kiss on the shoulder while caressing the left side of your body. He gets drunk on your long Nubian body, stretched out in front of him like Eve. He gently kisses the nape of your long and elegant neck. But you tense up your body and start to cry. "Hey, what's wrong?" he asks, almost whispering.

He holds you closer to him. "What's wrong, eh?"

You would like to tell him everything, but you can't: there's so much to tell. He cuddles you while you sob. Then you tell him: "Please fuck me, I'm suffering..."

You surrender yourself completely to him. That evening, you really have the demon; you will have the demon every night of the week. The pleasure is very intense, but almost painful as well. You have the need to forget for a while, but what good is it? It's impossible to forget about it, you always remember it later.

*****

You show your husband the last love letter. He asks as he reads it: "The others, where are they?"

"There aren't any others," you reply. "I threw them away."

"At least you saved this one," he says, frowning. "You will need proof, documentation."

You nod.

"You have to show it to somebody."

You nod again.

"You have to show it to somebody," he repeats, believing that you don't understand.

You nod, but you don't understand. You don't understand anything.

*****

You receive another love letter, the fifth, the sixth, an entire series of love letters. However, a nurse has seen who has been leaving them. This nurse is a black woman, like Sophie. Almost everybody at the hospital is black, including you.

You ask: "Do you know who she is?"

The nurse replies: Oh, sure, I know her! I don't know her name, but she works on the eighth floor, in radiology.

Then the nurse adds: "I've seen her before, but this is the first time I've ever seen her leave anything."

You ask the nurse if she would please describe the nurse who has left the love letter. The nurse describes the person. Sophie fits the description perfectly. You thank the nurse.

You're really angry, but you're resolved too. You take the elevator to the floor where Sophie works, but someone tells you that Sophie has already left for the day. So you take a pencil and some paper to write a brief message, telling Sophie to meet you at a certain café downtown.

*****

At home, you tell husband what has happened at the hospital. Angrily, he asks: "How come you haven't talked with somebody about it? With an administrator, for example?"

You shrug your shoulders with resignation and reply: "What's the administrator going to do?"

"Nothing, if you don't tell him about it."

You get angry and reply: "I'm fed up, Alain, really fed up!"

"Then you ought to talk with the administrator of the hospital."

You shout: "No, it's my business. I'm going to talk about it with her myself. I'm going to show her the love letter. I'm going to tell her to leave me alone!"

You have a crazy look in your eyes. Your husband is afraid that you're going to do something stupid. He thinks that you're very naïve, he thinks that you're too trusting. So he tells you: "Look here, it could be dangerous."

He puts his hands on your arms and says calmly: "I'm afraid for your safety, okay? Maybe she's mentally ill. We don't know, nobody knows. So I'm going with you."

You calm down and reply with assurance: "It's okay, Alain. I'm going to meet her in public. What is she going to do?"

You shrug your shoulders and repeat: "What is she going to do?"

"Anything," he replies. "She could do anything. So I'm going with you."

You touch him gently on the arm and say: "Don't worry! I'll be careful, okay?"

Then you add: "Besides, you have to work tomorrow — we need the money. So don't worry, it's okay."

He's doubtful about the whole thing, but he shrugs his shoulders and says: "Okay, but be careful, eh?"

You nod: "Okay then..."

*****

After a white night, you drive to work the next morning as if in a trance, like an automaton, without concentrating on the road. You almost run over a mutt about to cross the road, but you stop the car just in time. At the moment you cross the border, you get very anxious, with the hospital only five minutes from the border. When you enter the building, you repeat to yourself several times the words that you want to say.

You don't have to think about so much at work, so you forget about it for a while. Your work relieves the tension, the anxiety, somewhat. There's even a case of cardiac arrest, where you discharge your duties in a professional manner. You forget about it, before you take your first break of the day.

At the nurses station on your floor, you see the head nurse on your floor, a black woman like Sophie. The director reads the love letter and says, bored: "You'll have to show it to the head nurse on her floor. I can't do anything about the matter..."

You nod, but you don't trust a head nurse who could be a black woman like Sophie, like the head nurse on your floor. You understand that this sentiment is unreasonable, even racist — you, from Africa, a Tutsi from Rwanda. But you're afraid that the people at the hospital will take sides with Sophie : the employees at the hospital are mostly dark like her, many of them black, like the Hutus of Rwanda, the scene of the genocide against the Tutsis, where you were born.

Are you not right? Not completely. At first, many of them might side with Sophie, that's true, but the more reasonable of them will change their minds when the facts become known — reasonable people are always ready to change their minds. Besides, they might think that Sophie is strange like you do.

Then lunch times arrive. You're going to face your tormentor, if Sophie is going to come to the café. You drive to the café downtown, pay the parking attendant, and enter the café. You sit by the door to wait for Sophie, who hasn't arrived yet. Sophie comes about ten minutes later. When she sees you, she smiles and says, very gregarious: "Hi, Angela, how's it going!"

"Bad," you reply angrily. "I'm doing badly."

As you throw the last love letter on the table, you say quietly:

"I've had enough, Sophie, I've had enough! I don't love you, I will never love you — okay? I love my husband and my son. I'm happily married. I don't want to receive any more love letters, flowers, baskets of fruit or soap, okay? I've had enough!"


Sophie smiles at you and says: "Oh, I would take such good care of you, sugar! I would give you a life of peaches and creme..."

You stand up abruptly with your hand bag to leave the café. Standing face to face, you stare each other. Then Sophie smiles at you before she gives a big kiss on the mouth. Furious, you grimace, then you slap her hard in the face. Then you walk fast towards the door. But Sophie calls to you in a hard voice, in a cold voice. You stop despite yourself, despite the sensation of danger, to turn around and face your enemy. You could die, but you don't care: you would rather die in this café than work in a hostile environment at the hospital.

There it is, the discharge of the pistol as you turn around, before the bullet tears into your chest. That's the last thing you remember before you fall to the floor unconscious: the discharge of the pistol.

*****

You work at a different hospital from this one. It's to facilitate the police investigations that those who are shot are sent to this hospital. You have had surgery to remove the bullet, which missed your heart by a few millimetres. If the pistol had been larger, like a 38 Special or a Colt 45, you probably would not have survived, since the assassin was less then ten metres away from you. However, the pistol was a 22 Derringer, almost the smallest pistol on the market. Probably, the police will want to ask a few questions about the crime of which you are the victim.

You wake up at the hospital with you family around you: your husband, your parents and your baby. You smile weakly in an attempt to reassure your family. They tell you what has happened, so that you will understand better, but you are still disoriented. After you cuddle the baby for a little bit, your parents take the baby out of the room so that your husband can talk with you for a while. "She's dead," your husband says. "She shot herself."

You say nothing, you only turn away your head. Your husband says with emotion: "I should have gone with you! I really regret that I didn't go with you!"

You turn your head to him and say without emotion: "It's not your fault, Alain. It's likely that she would have shot you too..."

He holds your hand and says: "I love you, Angela."

You look at him and reply as you rub his hand: "I love you too."

Then you say: "I would like to sleep, eh?"

You fall asleep with your husband sitting in a chair next to the bed, falling asleep too. While you sleep, you have a dream about Sophie making love with you. You kiss each other, murmur words of love. What pleasure! You are at the point of ecstasy, until you sit up in bed and shout angrily: "Go away! I love my husband!"

Then you wake up. You husband is still sleeping in the chair next to the bed. Finally, you ask for a sedative from the night nurse, unable to go back to sleep.


*****


During the following day, the police come to ask some questions. The police officers make their apologies before the ask them, then they leave afterwards. Then the administrator of the hospital where you work come to visit too. She's a black women, from the South of the United States, sincere, full of sympathy as she speaks in the gentle accent of her native region. But you discern an ulterior motive to her visit.

The administrator asks questions to understand better the unfortunate events that have happened, she says. You answer them as well as you are able. The woman says to you: "I'm really sorry, ma'am, but it isn't our fault. We didn't know because you didn't make a complaint."

You turn your head away: "It's my fault..."

"No," the administrator protests. "It isn't your fault either. She was mentally ill, ma'am."

There's a long silence. Then you say with sudden hostility: "In answer to your question..."

The administrator has a confused look. After some moments, she asks: "What question, ma'am? I don't understand..."

"The real question: if there was anything between us...

"Pardon me, ma'am?"

You look at the administrator with defiance and shout: "No, we have never been lovers — never!

Then you weep bitterly, you feel violated by the whole thing. The administrator tries to comfort you, but it's difficult. You calm down eventually, the administrator leaves, having expressed the deepest regrets. You thank her. Then a nurse comes to give you a sedative.

*****

You return home some days later to recover from the wound. You will need a psychiatrist. Each day, you will sit in a rocking chair, holding your son. It's therapeutic for you. You like to watch your son take his first steps across the living room floor to get a toy. Your son rides his rocking horse from time to time. You like to watch the cat sleeping in front of the window in the winter sun, eyes closed, the curtains open. It's therapeutic for you. You feel safe and sound in the living room, behind these four walls with the curtains open or closed to the world. But you have to go back to work eventually, you think. You aren't looking forward to going back to work, but you back to work. It has to be done.

* * * * *

The first day at work, you are never completely at ease. You think that the other nurses aren't at ease either. At times, you think that the others are talking about you behind your back, you feel the eyes of the others checking you out while you walk down the hall. Maybe it's only your fantasy, but nobody greets you warmly, it seems; they are merely polite. So you feel all alone, without friends. You ask yourself if they aren't asking the question: "Was there something between them?"

And: "Is she a lesbian?"

*****

It's the beginning of spring, it's sunny outside. It's perfect outside, the people, joyous. Many people are wearing neither coats nor their tuques. So you go to the café downtown, where there are tables outside. The temperature is about fifteen degrees, so you sit outside.

Then you see the blonde and the brunette, very animated as they talk, as they laugh, arm in arm, walking down the street. It must be that they, always walking together like that, like the society of each other. Maybe they make a good match...

They approach the corner. The blonde looks to the left, the brunette, to the right. The moment that the traffic clears, they almost detach themselves, the blonde, to the left, the brunette, to the right. They stop to sort it out, they argue a little. The brunette is the dominant one, it seems. The blonde shrugs her shoulders, the two women link arms again, and they march to the right, laughing, where the brunette wanted to go. Then they are gone, out of sight. They are always arm in arm, these women.

You think of Sophie now with sympathy, with the feeling of culpability, since Sophie is dead. You wish now that you hadn't got angry like that, because she had nobody, it seems, unlike those women, unlike you. Maybe they call these feelings "survivor's guilt," I don't know.

Then you remember being shot in the café where you are seated. You tremble, about to have an anxiety attack: you are afraid of a nervous breakdown. You would like to call your husband with your cell phone so that he might drive across the border and bring you back home. However, your husband is far away in Canada, where he works, where both of you live with your son.

An old woman, a black woman, notices your turmoil. She touches you gently on the arm and asks: "Are you all right, my child?"

You nod your head and reply: "Thank you very much, ma'am. I'll be fine..."

The woman stays with you until she's sure that you are well, then you leave the café, never to return.

You don't want to work at this hospital anymore, it's a hostile environment. After lunch, you give the hospital a two weeks notice of leaving. It's evident that you aren't ready to return to work now. So you quit the hospital after two weeks. Maybe you will never work at a hospital again. You would rather sit in a rocking chair while you cuddle your son, while he's still a baby. It's what mothers want to do: they want to be with their children.

*****

The house is a harem, somewhere to protect the woman against the eyes of a hostile environment, the world. You can disappear into each other, there, where there are curtains to block out the sun and the moon. In the evenings, your husband and you make love in melding your mouths and your bodies into each other. You, your body is soft, pliant, when it yields to him. Him, the muscles of his arms are taut, like elastic about to break. You want to disappear into each other, you feel yourselves disappearing, perilously close to an abyss, vertiginous, as if ready to fall until you hit the bottom and break into millions of pieces. You disappear into each other more and more while not wanting ever to come back. But you come back. Him, he holds you in his arms afterwards, your back to him. He's still drunk on you, on your body: on your smell, on your taste, on the sound of your breath, on the beating of your heart against his hand. When he buries his face in your hair, he's happy, you are happy too. Together you sigh with contentment, you cuddle.

But you can never disappear completely: there is always the hostile environment, the world. You can never forget her completely, because she wanted you so much.

Sea of Tranquility

Maria da Conceição is a Brazilian woman who is twenty-six years old. She has a degree in finance from a university in Brazil, but she wanted to emigrate to Canada. However, she didn't know anybody there. As well, she neither spoke English nor French well enough to have the qualifications necessary to stay in the country permanently, according to the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship. So she decides to immigrate illegally, staying after the expiration of her visitor's visa. She finds a job in a clothing factory, "under the table," without paying any social insurance. At the factory, another female worker, a Chinese woman, advises her: "You should marry a Canadian citizen right away. Otherwise, you'll be deported if they catch you."

Worried, Maria asks: "What do I do? I don't know anybody."

The Chinese woman replies as she shrugs her shoulders: "Maybe I can ask someone. But don't tell anybody, eh?"

Maria doesn't say anything, dreading deportation all the while. Then she forgets about it. A few weeks later, however, the Chinese woman tells Maria over lunch in a whisper: "It looks like I found somebody."

However, the woman won't divulge any details: she has to talk about it with someone else, "another party." The Chinese woman arranges through this "other party" a meeting with a man who's willing to sponsor her. The man, whose name is Gilles, meets her at a restaurant to negotiate the terms. They hit it off, they like each other — they even laugh. Gilles seems nice, but he only wants to sponsor her at the price of thirty thousand dollars, deducted each week from her check over the next six or seven years. She can't believe it — that's a lot of change! But Gilles smiles at her and says: "Don't worry, my dear: I'll take good care of you. That's a guarantee..."

Reluctantly, Maria agrees. So they move in together into his little apartments in the Plateau, a low-rent district of Montreal at the time, before the yuppies started to take over. Then he goes with her to the office of the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship to formally sponsor her. It's official: Maria da Conceição is now a permanent resident of Canada, as long as Gilles agrees to sponsor her over the next six years, as well as her son, if he ever comes to Canada. She doesn't have to live with him, he says. However, it's better this way, so that the people in the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship will think that he's able to support her. If Gilles can't support her, it's grounds for expulsion for her and imprisonment for him, if there's any false pretext. As they understand it, the whole process would start all over again, if she had to find another sponsor. It's very complicated: an honest mistake could mean deportation for her, or even imprisonment for him. However, the neighbours think that they're a couple, which is part of the plan.

However, they aren't really a couple: she doesn't want to sleep with him, but in her own bedroom. She has a flag of Brazil tacked to the wall, with a green background, a yellow diamond in the centre, and a globe with the stars of the southern sky. Across the globe, like a sash across a soldier's chest, is Brazil's national motto: "O ordem e o progresso." Order and Progress.

Gilles is over forty, never married, no children, tall and thin with stooped shoulders. He's unemployed because of a back injury in an industrial accident: a shelf of automobile chassis fell on top of him at work, several tons — he was almost killed. He's living on monthly disability cheques now. It's doubtful that he'll ever work again. Life is therefore bitter for him sometimes. Because of a chronic backache, he's really suffering. In order to sleep, he has to take a lot painkillers. Even with the painkillers, he can't always sleep. Maria feels sorry for him. He doesn't want to complain about it, but you can hear him groaning at night sometimes.

During their daily meetings, they often feel uncomfortable together, ill at ease. Gilles is short with her, their conversations, without intimacy. Like most couples, they talk about the bills for the hydro, the gas and the telephone, but they're strangers to each other. There are long silences between them, silences that are unbearable at times. Maria is open in personality, gregarious but emotional: she cries easily, whereas Gilles is charming but less open than her. But she tries to show him some consideration, because of his back. For example, she massages his back for him whenever he asks. As well, she buys what he likes to eat when she does the grocery shopping without him asking. Gilles, he isn't a bad devil, showing some appreciation sometimes: "You're a good woman," he says ironically. "You could be a good wife to someone..."

However, Gilles is a devil: difficult, unbearable at times, hateful. For example, he complains about the apartments not being sufficiently clean, of the dishes in the sink. Maria works six days a week at times, but Gilles — who's unemployed — expects her to do the housework as well: cook and clean, do the laundry. Maybe it's only the demon of middle age: he wants a woman from time to time — sometimes, any woman. Because she doesn't love him, maybe that's the reason why he feels himself starting to hate her. But maybe he doesn't understand that love is compassion towards strangers, as well as the sexual desire for another person. But in the end, he doesn't like living with someone who doesn't love him, who doesn't want his love. So he and Maria argue sometimes, usually because of some little thing. Since she works all day, sometimes twelve hours a day, she's tired at the end of the day. It isn't fair, she thinks. Finally, they get into an argument argue about it. She yells out loud: "I'm human, not an animal!"

Then she starts to cry. Gilles is silent, realizing that he has hurt her. She's very tired: she needs sleep more than anything else. So he says in a low voice, with some shame: "I'm really sorry, Maria, I was wrong, okay? But I can't do some things anymore..."

He holds her in her arms and lets her cry. She has more respect him more after that incident, because he has apologized. But Gilles' back gets worse and worse: the pain is no longer bearable. He can't sleep at night, and he needs a cane; he's barely able to walk without it. When she comes back home from work, she can hear him moaning painfully in his bedroom. Sometimes, she can hear him crying. It's evident that the painkillers are no longer effective. In the end, Gilles cries in agony, after many nights without sleep: "I want to die, I can't take it anymore!"

Maria replies softly as she cries for herself as well as him: "You'll have to kill me too, Gilles: I need a husband. I'm the one who's facing deportation..."

Then she holds him tenderly in her arms in an attempt to console him. The next morning, she takes a day off to go with him to the doctor, without him having to ask. It has to be done, she thinks: he's in bad shape. As well, there are people who think that he's her husband. We don't exist all alone in a vacuum, you know: we worry about what other people think, openly, if not subconsciously.

The doctor tells them that he needs surgery, because of pressure to the sciatic nerve. But the doctor warns: "I can't give you a guarantee. The surgery might not work..."

But Gilles chooses the surgery anyway, no longer able to bear the pain. The rehabilitation is difficult, the physical therapy, arduous. At times, he wants to give up the rehabilitation because of the pain and stay in bed for good. He's depressed, but she tries to encourage him: "Don't give up, Gilles," she says, "don't give up..."

She telephones furtively from her cell phone at work every day when she has a break, so that she doesn't lose her job — they don't allow cell phones there. She takes care of him at home after work, out of compassion, because he needs her. As well, she needs him too, that's true, but she doesn't like to see anybody suffer — anybody.

After a few months, he can walk to the park with the aid of a cane. After a few more months, he can walk without the cane. When it's possible, the weather permitting, when she doesn't have to work, she goes to Mount-Royal Park during the weekend. She learns that there's tender side of him: he likes children, he likes to watch them play in the park in all their innocence. If they're allowed to listen by their parents, he even reads books to them from the library at times. He also does magic tricks, him, the amateur magician. He's a different person then: happy, no longer angry; he's not such a bad devil then. He always returns from the park in a better mood, on his plate, though the rehabilitation is difficult, if not painful. But he tells her one day: "Life is good, Maria, despite everything..."

Maria merely nods her head. Without him saying anything, she realizes that he wants children.

With obvious pride, Gilles shows her the city of Montreal. From their balcony, they can see all the neighbours and gossip with them. Whenever they move to new apartments, usually around the first of July, their friends and neighbours always help them. The Metro, with the souterraine and its underground stores, is new and clean, so they ride the Metro to various parts of the city: to Old Montreal, to the centre-ville. They stroll up and down St. Denis Street, with its fine old buildings, and St. Catherine Street, with its many stores. The stroll up and down St. Lawrence Street with its night clubs and ladies of the night. When one of them greets Gilles, he talks with her without embarrassment as he introduces her to Maria: he knew her in the past, from Catholic school, he says, but Maria feels herself getting jealous. They see such futuristic monstrosities as the Biodome and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome across from the Old Port: "Look at that building there," Maria exclaims, pointing to the geodesic dome. "It looks like a moon that is just landed!"

"That's right," Gilles replies in agreement. "It looks like the moon..."

In the winter, Maria sees the snow for the first time: it's a lot of fun. The earth is beautiful when it first snows. The branches of the bare trees are still covered with a thin coat of fresh snow, not a dry and light powdery snow thrown up in circular gusts by a violent wind. But there's a lot of snow in Montreal in the winter. However, Gilles feels sufficiently recovered from the surgery to go ice skating. "You must be crazy," Maria exclaims, doubtful. "You're going to re-injure your back!"

"It's cool," Gilles replies. "Me, I was born on skates."

That Sunday, Gilles persuades Maria to ice skating with him. In Mount-Royal Park, they lace up their skates, then they skate between the tall maples and tall oaks; it's a lot of fun. Gilles never falls down on the hard ice, not once, whereas Maria falls several times. But the second time, then the third time they go skating, Maria knows her stuff: she learns to skate before the end of the winter, when they have to hang up their skates, like everybody else in Montreal. He who hates the winter in Montreal, in the province of Quebec, ought to live somewhere where it doesn't snow, like Florida.

Maria da Conceição is mysterious to him, an enigma. Maybe she isn't beautiful in the classic sense, like a star in Hollywood, but she has a certain charm. She's nice, pretty in the face: she has her own beauty. With medium dark skin, frizzy hair, medium brown, down to her shoulders, and eyes almost black, she's of uncertain ethnicity — exotic even. Well in the flesh, with large breasts, she will probably get bigger when she gets older, he knows, when she has had children, but she's pleasant to the eye now as well as in personality: he likes her shoulders and hips, her entire bone structure. When he sits with her at the table on the balcony of their apartments, with her all alone in a reverie, he asks himself what she's thinking, what poverty, what personal troubles in life she has experienced. But her beautiful dark brown eyes are opaque: they reveal nothing about her past life. He would like to ask what she's thinking, but maybe she can't articulate very well what she's thinking. Maybe she lacks the fluency in either French or English to articulate what she's thinking. Or maybe she's only shy. He doesn't know, but he doesn't want to be too curious.

So he sits down at the table next to her without saying anything. He's about to touch her hand when she sees a sparrow, crowned with white feathers on its head, with brown and black stripes, landing in front of the sliding door on the balcony. She whispers, all excited: "That's a tico-tico! You always see them in Brazil..."

"There's lots of sparrows here," he replies. "They don't usually migrate in the winter like other birds, but stay the whole year. They like the city, the sparrows. But that one there, it's very rare, like teeth on a chicken. You don't usually see them here anymore. Or at least I don't see them..."

On weekends, she makes telephone calls to Brazil. She doesn't offer any information, it's none of his business. So Gilles decides to mind his own business: he doesn't say anything while supposing that she's talking with family members. But he wonders about these telephone calls. Then she cries after she hangs up the telephone, after she has been shouting. He asks gently: "What's wrong, eh?"

But she shakes her head: she's unable to talk about it. But she lets him hold her in his arms while she cries. He understands, he thinks: it's an argument with someone close to her — a boyfriend in Brazil, perhaps. He's a little jealous.

In July, some months later, Gilles and Maria go to the Jazz Festival. St. Catherine Street in the centre-ville is partially blocked. There's music everywhere: in the clubs, in the parks, in the middle of St. Catherine Street that's closed to traffic. There are so many people there, like everybody is at the festival. The place is jumping — they even see people in seventeenth century costumes rented from Joseph Ponton's. Maria da Conceição can really dance the samba. With her brown body well in the flesh, as she wears a short green light dress, the colour of the flag of Brazil, she's very sexy. Her movements are graceful, hot. He's really attracted to her that night; he wants her. They spend several nights together like that during the Jazz Festival, talking, drinking beers, laughing their asses off. Then one night, at a table under the terrace of a restaurant over dinner, they make eyes, play footsie and kiss. As they return to their apartments, he kisses her hard on the mouth, full of desire for the woman who's practically his wife without really being his woman. A little confused, not really knowing for sure what the rules are, he asks the question somewhat timidly: "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?"

She shrugs her shoulders, smiles at him and says: "We're almost married, Gilles..."

They sleep together that night in Maria's bedroom, under the flag of Brazil on the wall at the head of the bed, the one with the globe of the southern stars in the middle of a yellow diamond, with a background the colour of her dress, light green, with the Portuguese words: "O ordem et o progresso." Order and progress. She's gentle with him that night, since he's still recovering from the surgery.

The next morning, Gilles wakes up and sees Maria sitting naked on the bed while she holds a photo on her knees. It's a photo of a child, a little one, around three years old. He asks: "Is that your son, the little one there?"

She nods her head. "His name is José," she replies. "I really really miss him..."

Gilles extends his arm and caresses hers with his hand: "That's too bad about your son," he says. "When I return to work, he can come live with us, okay?"

Maria turns around and looks at him and asks: "Are you being straight with me?"

"Yeah, I'm going to return to work. That's the plan."

Maria responds by giving him a kiss on the lips and a hug. They sleep together many nights, many weeks, many months. Maybe Maria will leave him in the end, after she has obtained Canadian citizenship. Maybe, because they argue from time to time. However, Gilles thinks that he has a debt to pay: she has taken care of him, before the surgery, and after the surgery as well. As well, she works full time, under the table, and pays most the bills while he receives disability cheques from the government to pay the rent. So he wants to help her bring her son to Canada, if it's possible. Maria, she has a debt as well: he has been letting her live with him so that she can obtain Canadian citizenship. But Gilles has a reason to recover now, a reason to live: he wants to help Maria bring her son to Canada. It's a marriage of convenience, but more complicated now. Then it's official: they get married at the palace of justice, because they love each other. However, she's still only a permanent resident, not a citizen.

After six months, maybe a year, it seems that Maria has morning sickness. So he asks the question: "Are you pregnant?"

She replies while vomiting in the toilet: "I think so..."

At the doctor's, it's confirmed: she's pregnant. Gilles is with the angels, then he's a little bit worried. He asks: "What about your job: are you going to lose it, you, being pregnant now?

"Don't know..."

"What about the factory?" he asks. "Is it very loud?"

"The looms are really very loud," she admits.

He's worried about her health, and he's afraid that the noise from the machines will make the unborn baby deaf, so she quits her job and becomes a maid for a family in Rosevere. It's a job, but she has to quit that one too after the mistress learns that she's pregnant. What do they do? Together, they look for a solution: she can sew clothes at their place and sell them at clothing outlets, if she only had the cloth, if she only had a sewing machine! So they buy the sewing machine, then she sews the clothes while he gets the cloth and delivers the clothes to the stores. So that she can sew more clothes faster, Gilles helps her with her work. It isn't easy to sew as well as her, she, ever the good seamstress, Gilles, always awkward. But they have to do it: she has been supporting them with her ability with a needle and thread, with the sewing machine. So they work together early in the morning and late at night to the whirring of the sewing machine. Physically, the work isn't too difficult for the mother-to-be, but she has need of more and more rest towards the end of the third and last trimester. However, it's illegal for her to work, because she isn't a citizen, and she hasn't been able to get a work visa.

Late in the evening, someone knocks very loud at the door, angrily. Afraid that something is wrong, Gilles opens the door a little. It's a man, dark like Maria, with a boy around five years old with him. The man is polite at first, speaking English haltingly, but the man stinks of alcohol on his breath. Then the man gets really angry when he hears Maria ask Gilles what's wrong. When he sees Maria, very pregnant, he threatens both Gilles and Maria with violence. Maria and the man argue loudly in Portuguese while Gilles tries to protect her from harm, the boy still standing in the hall, very frightened. Then there's an angry exchange of words between Maria and the man. Completely forgetting Gilles' presence, forgetting, apparently, that Maria is pregnant, the man tries to strike Maria. Gilles can't believe it! He punches him in the face in an attempt to protect his wife, despite his back pain. With the men fighting in the hall, Maria calls the police. Then she has sharp pain to the stomach as she falls to the floor. She has been so angry, so afraid, that she's about to have a baby now.

Really in a panic, the man flees, abandoning the little boy, who still remains standing in the hall. Gilles telephones the ambulance after he invites the boy inside. He is in pain, because of his back. The police come, then the ambulance. The police later arrest the man. Maria, she tries to talk with her son in the ambulance, but it's almost impossible: she's about to have the baby. The contractions are closer and closer together, the cervix, more and more dilated.

At the hospital, with Maria about to give birth to a son, Gilles and José sit with her in the triage room, then in the delivery room, the whole time. Gilles and José can't talk to each other very much, since José only speaks Portuguese, but Gilles does magic tricks for him, pulling a coin from his ear, for example. For a few months, until he has learned a few words in French, José can only communicate verbally with his mother. However, Gilles and the boy hit if off: they play tic-tac-toe and card games in the obstetric ward as well. At the hospital, after having given birth to the baby, Maria relates the whole story:

"José's father was supposed to follow me to Canada, that's the reason why I had been sending money by post. We were going to get married, but we argued a lot, then we broke up. He was accusing me of being unfaithful, but he was paranoid — he got drunk a lot. Of course, I denied his accusations, several times, but he threatened to prevent me from seeing my son, though José was living with my relatives: that was the reason why I was crying that one time. When he appeared at our home at midnight, I was speechless like you: I didn't think that he would follow me to Canada. I'm sorry, Gilles, really sorry! Please forgive me, it's all my fault!"

She offers him her hand. Gilles takes it and asks: "Do you want to live with me for always?"

She replies, very tired: "Of course. We're married, Gilles..."

She doesn't leave him, but there's an investigation some months later by the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship after the incident with José's father. Maria's former boyfriend has claimed that they are married, so Maria and Gilles have to prove that their own marriage is legal, not just a marriage of convenience. This is really serious: in Canada, bigamy is illegal, grounds for deportation, so Maria must convince the official that she's not a bigamist. Even more serious, Maria's former boyfriend also claims that she has been working in Canada illegally. So they will need an immigration attorney, so that Maria and José can sort this mess out.

At the interview before the official from the Minister of Immigration, everybody has to be present: Maria, Gilles, José, and the newborn, Mario, who's about six months old. Maria's former boyfriend is also present. But at the interview, the official asks: "Do you love each other, sir and madam?"

Gilles protests: "She has taken care of me: I have a chronic back pain, you know. Me, I was trying to protect her when that guy was trying to beat her. What better proof of love is there?"

Maria replies by showing the official the baby on her knees: "This is our son: Gilles is the father."

The immigration official seems satisfied that they love each other. However, Maria's former boyfriend has given some very damning testimony against her. Logically, it would be impossible for Gilles to support both her and a baby on his disability cheques alone. However Maria never admits that she has been working, despite a grilling from her boyfriend's attorney. "What do you do for food, for clothing?" the hostile attorney asks.

Fortunately, Maria can tell her: "We get them from a church," she replies, shrugging her shoulders. "They give us food every month..."

Then Maria gives the name of the church. But there's another matter: the immigration official wants to question José, because the boy might want to return to Brazil with his father, he doesn't know. He has to consider the little one, though the final decision isn't the boy's. But he isn't a bad devil, he thinks of himself: he wants to do right by them. Afraid, perhaps, that it might not be his day, he asks José with sympathy in his voice: "Would you rather live with your mother and her husband here in Canada, or with your father in Brazil? Remember, my friend: your parents live very far away from each other. It's possible that you might never see your mother or your father again..."

But the boy doesn't understand the immigration official: he's only able to speak Portuguese and a little bit of French. Maria's lawyer protests when the official won't let Maria interpret for her son, but the official ignores his protests. So the official looks for someone who can speak Portuguese. Maria starts to cry, afraid of losing her son again. The official finds the interpreter, a woman born in the Azores, who admits that she didn't understand everything that the boy has said, since she isn't from Brazil. But she concludes: "He would rather live with his mother. He says that's afraid of his father..."

Then the boy says in French: "Gilles is my friend. He's nice to me."

Then the immigration official asks Maria: "Has Mr. Ribeiro ever beaten you, madame?"

Maria glares angrily at her former boyfriend, who glares back at her defiantly, then says coldy: "Yes, several times..."

Her attorney shows the official a copy of the police report, stating that her boyfriend had assaulted her the night that he was arrested. Then he says in a dry monotone: "I would like to request that Mrs. Meloche and her son, José, be granted political asylum, on the grounds that their lives could be in danger if they were deported to Brazil, as Francisco de Assis Ribeiro is clearly a violent and dangerous man. After all, he assaulted a woman who was eight months pregnant at the time. He has even confessed..."

The whole thing takes a long time to resolve: it isn't until six months later that the Ministry of Immigration informs Maria et José that they can stay in Canada with Gilles as political refugees. Eventually, Maria da Conceição becomes a Canadian citizen, as well as a nurse, though she works in the United States now. She has since given birth to another child, a daughter named Sonia, their third child, since Gilles has accepted José as his own son. Gilles returns to work with the permission of the doctor. Though he can't do everything that he could before he was injured, he works in the tool crib, checking in tools. But he has remembered his promise to Maria and José: to treat them right, no matter what, like she has treated him right during his long convalescence from the surgery on his back.

Of course, all is not milk and honey even in the land of milk and honey, even if they love each other. The Sea of Tranquility is a dried-up lake on the surface of the moon, not the true state of marriage. But their marital problems are another pair of sleeves.

The Siren Whisper

Caroline and Julie are lifelong friends, married with children and over forty, with parallel careers: they are both nurses. The one, Caroline, is blond, tall and thin. The other, Julie, is a brunette, of medium height, full-figured. They are very different from each other in personality: Caroline is sociable; Julie, shy. But they have always had a quiet, unspoken desire for each other.

One day, Julie learns that she has ovarian cancer: she might die. Julie talks about it with Caroline, they hold each other and cry. Then Julie reminds Caroline of a vow that they had made as teenagers a long time ago: "When we are over thirty, if we are both single or widows, I will lie down with you under the stars. I swear by the aurora borealis..."

Since they live in a small town somewhere between Montreal and Quebec, there are lots of aurora borealises. They laugh in each other's arms, it was all a joke, it was all for laughs. But they have always wanted to make love under the stars, under the aurora borealis. They could have had a Boston Marriage, you know, if not for the desire to get married with a man and have children. You have to do these things right, you know.

Then Julie says, all serious: "Come on, let's make love, Caroline! It's possible that I'm going to die...

When Caroline is a little hesitant, Julie pleads: "Please make love with me! It's you that I love!"

Then Caroline murmurs: "If I only had a cock..."

Julie, still in her arms, looks up with her sweet brown eyes and replies: "Two women can always send each other too, my dear..."

So they kiss, and that begins the love between two women, who are lifelong friends. They spend a romantic weekend at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, telling their husbands that they have to work. They have a night on the town, eating and drinking wine at one of the finest restaurants, dancing close together at certain bars. They wander up and down the small streets of the Basse-Ville, up and down the halls of the museums, arm in arm. They ride a carriage pulled by a percheron horse. They even sit together in a dark movie theatre and hold hands as they watch a movie. They make eyes, they flirt and caress each other. They devour each other with their eyes and their mouths. When they kiss, on the lips or on the fingers, it's magic. Every day, after they come back from Quebec, they leave each other text messages on their cell phones: "I love you." And: "I want you."

After making love at the Chateau Frontenac, they cuddle contentedly and sigh, but it's only a brief affair of the heart. Julie deteriorates rapidly, because the cancer has spread: Caroline can only cuddle her. So little by little, Julie dies at home in bed, surrounded by family and friends. The moment that she dies, Caroline cuddles her body in bed, her three children do too. Caroline kisses her tenderly on the lips, with tears in her eyes: "I love only you," she whispers.

A coroner comes to take away the body. That night, in the little kitchen, Julie's husband, Jim, weeps piteously at the table as he gets drunk with Caroline.

"I loved her," the big man sobs pathetically.

"Tell me about," Caroline replies, smiling sadly as she touches his hand lightly. "I loved her too..."

They talk about it, late into the night and early in the morning. Then all of a sudden, Caroline stands up and begins an impromptu striptease. Little by little, like a stripper, she strips naked as she walks back and forth across the floor of the little kitchen, a blonde panther. Jim can't believe it!

During the striptease, Caroline says to Jim, all seductive, ever the tease: "We were lovers, her and me, but that was a long time ago..."

Jim has the taste for her as he watches her walk across the floor while doing her striptease. After Caroline has removed each article of clothing, they devour each other with their mouths and feel each other up against the closed door to the basement. He fucks her hard against the door, but he withdraws his penis before he comes. Frenzied, she falls to her knees and gives him a blow job until he ejaculates in her face, in her hair, and in her open mouth. This is lust, not love, but she cries: "Fuck me in the ass, hard!"

So he sodomizes her with her arms extended, her torso spread over the kitchen table, until he comes, until she takes her foot as well. The sex is rough, but the physical pain of the sex with Jim is not worse than the psychic pain of losing a dear friend to cancer for Caroline. Both the pain and the ecstasy are unbearable for her. She feels herself torn into pieces but content. Stretched out on top of the table still, with her arms extended, Caroline smiles while panting: "Thank you..."

She showers and gets dressed, then she goes home. At home, early in the morning, she asks her husband, Richard, to hold her. "Julie's dead," she tells her husband as she cries.

"That's too bad," Richard replies, with sympathy in his voice. "That's too bad..."

They cuddle for a while, but he gets drunk on her body like Jim. She's very tired, but they make love in a slow and conventional way until he comes, without her coming, but she doesn't care: she only wants to sleep. She knows that her husband loves her, she loves him too. They have two children together, a boy and a girl. But she doesn't want her husband anymore: it's Julie that she wants. However, Caroline cannot yet accept that Julie is dead.

For a few months, maybe six months, Caroline is in mourning. She's depressed. For no apparent reason, she suddenly cries from time to time. So she sees a psychiatrist, who prescribes some medication. Richard is aware of her sorrow, without being aware that Caroline and Julie were lovers. He doesn't know that Caroline was unfaithful with Jim either. She doesn't want to have sex with him, but he thinks it's the medication to fight the depression. So they look for the correct medication with the psychiatrist.

Then there's a new nurse at the hospital where Caroline works. This nurse is mysterious, possessing something indefinable without really being pretty or beautiful. She's young, probably in her twenties, tall and thin like Caroline, but dark. She has a Creole beauty, tropical, with skin the colour of cinnamon, and long and frizzy hair the colour of the earth. Her laughing eyes are like the night, almost black. According to her name tag, her name is Bergenoute, an usual name. She has a certain allure, Bergenoute, like the Loralei. In her fantasies, she sees Bergenoute, spread out like the Eve before her on the rocks of an island in a strait under the stormy skies, whispering seductively: "Come!"

At work, during a break for dinner, Caroline sees Bergenoute again in the cafeteria, all alone at a table. Very shy at first, the normally sociable Caroline approaches her cautiously. She's afraid that she's too old for her Dulcinea, since she's in her forties while Bergenoute is probably in her twenties. However, when she sees Caroline standing in front of her, Bergenoute smiles and says hello. They introduce themselves, then Bergenoute asks Caroline to sit down; Caroline sits down across from her. They talk, they laugh. Bergenoute is very talkative, her manner, free and easy. She's twenty-eight years old, born in Haiti, but a Creole, of several races. But Caroline thinks that Bergenoute is checking her out too: it's the way she looks at her longer than it's appropriate to look at a stranger. It's the way she touches her on the hand casually, little touches that linger more and more. But Caroline doesn't care: she already has a crush on her. Bergenoute is magnificent to look at, very exotic, like a rare bird in the jungle, the quetzal, for example. So they make eyes at each other and touch knees under the table. Then Bergenoute offers while staring at Caroline: "I had a friend, but she isn't my friend anymore..."

Although Caroline is married, she replies: "I had a friend too, but she died of cancer..."

"That's too bad, my love," Bergenoute says softly, as she touches her on the hand again. "That's terrible..."

Before they go back to work, while still gazing at each other, Bergenoute smiles at her and lightly rubs the back of her hand with her index finger: "You're a lot of fun, Caroline, I like you. If you can hear the siren whisper like I do, call me some time..."

They stand up and hug each other before they leave each other. They kiss each other twice on the cheeks, but Bergenoute touches her ear lobe lightly with the tip of her tongue. Then she leaves a business card with her telephone number. So does Caroline.

"Call me sometime," Bergenoute repeats seductively.

That night, Caroline makes love with her husband. The sex is fantastic, dreadfully so. She takes her foot over and over again before she comes in a great climax. But it isn't her husband that she wants: she hears the same siren whisper, crying out loud like the siren of an ambulance.

She has the taste for another woman: Bergenoute.