L’Horloge

Jessie meant to listen for those three notes, the three notes that seem to come from deep within the subway tunnel, doon doon doon, an ascending major triad like three quarters of a barbershop quartet. But she missed them and heard only the announcement that they had reached the end of the line, the terminal station, and thank you for voyaging with the STM. She pulled out her phone and checked Ed’s address again.

Jessie’s uncle Ed was dating a woman named Amelia, whom he met in the care facility where he lived. Ed was just a few years older than Jessie’s mother, but he had had a stroke in his early sixties, as men in their family tended to. He could walk only at a slow shuffle and couldn’t use one arm at all, so he’d moved into the facility three years ago. He’d been dating Amelia for the last two.

The home was in Laval, and it had taken Jessie longer than she’d intended to finally get around to visiting. She’d meant to as soon as she moved to the city, but the semester was so busy, she was teaching for the first time, she had her wily and erratic supervisor to deal with, her seminars were long, she was trying to maintain her relationship with David back home, there was that thing with Shaun she had to make a decision about, and the metro ride was so long and her weekends so brief, that it was almost ten months after she moved to Montreal when she finally stepped onto the platform at Montmorency and caught a cab from there to the home, which was called L’Horloge. Jessie had tried to pronounce it three times before just giving the cab driver the address.

The building was the tallest thing in Laval, it seemed. It had a clock tower—our very own Big Ben, the cab driver said. Jessie laughed, but the cabbie just frowned into the rearview mirror and she realized he might have been in earnest. “It’s very tall,” she said. “Imposing, even.” The cabbie ignored this, talking in what she guessed was Arabic into his radio.

Inside L’Horloge she took off her sunglasses and looked around for signs to the cafeteria. The lobby was full of old people with puffed white hair—popcorn heads, her mother would say—listening to tinny Irish music at incredible volume. She squirted some foamy hand sanitizer from a dispenser and turned down a hallway.

“The building was the tallest thing in Laval, it seemed. It had a clock tower—our very own Big Ben, the cab driver said.”

From her mother’s description she pictured Amelia as a tough, not very bright woman who was more like a nurse than a lover. She imagined her as significantly younger than Ed, with many children from a previous relationship. One of those tiny manipulative women who laugh aggressively at the wrong things and would somehow, without directly saying it, make Jessie feel bad about her education and childlessness, as if Jessie had done it on purpose to put on airs. Who would use a phrase like “put on airs.”

When Jessie arrived at the cafeteria, though, what she found was a regular-sized older woman with an expression that went from pleased to anxious to pleased again very quickly. Ed was sitting next to her.

“Ed!” Jessie shouted, louder than she meant to. There was something about old people that did this to her. As she approached Ed made to get up from his chair but Jessie waved him down.

“Welcome to the hor-log!” he said, falling back into the seat.

“It’s great to see you,” she said to him. He was extremely dirty. The sling that held his bad arm was stained, and there was a white paste in the corners of his mouth. His curly hair was pulled away from his face and held with what looked like a little girl’s barrette. He wore a t-shirt with a cartoon on it of what appeared to be a chubby naked man with a crew cut and an erection. She turned her attention to Amelia, whose neck and hair were covered by a dark blue hijab. Below that she wore a pink sweatsuit, as though she’d just stepped out of an eighties aerobics class. “It’s really nice to meet you,” Jessie said, reaching for Amelia’s hand, just as Ed said their names—Amelia, Jessie, Jessie, Amelia—and then she wasn’t sure if she should shake hands with Amelia, if that was forbidden, so halfway there she altered course and her hand landed on Amelia’s shoulder and gave it a couple pats.

“Oh,” said Amelia, “yes!” She nodded, smiling, and then frowned and sat back in her chair.

“Have you eaten yet?” Ed asked her. “I hope so. The food here is terrible.”

“Yeah, I had a sandwich on the way.”

“Oh,” said Amelia, “yes.” She paused, seeming to think very hard, and then said “Well. Well. That’s.” She nodded at Jessie. “Oh. Well. Uh-huh.” Jessie smiled and waited.

“Amelia knows all about good eating,” Ed said. “She was a chef at a French restaurant. I mean a real French restaurant, in France, not some Québécois travesty that thinks margarine is the height of class. As in, this place had a Michelin star. What was it called again, Meals?”

“Ah,” said Amelia. “Ah. That. Well. That.”

“Right, L’Étoile du nord. François Mitterrand ate there in the eighties.”

“Oh yes,” Jessie said. “Of course.” She was already fabricating the visit into a story she’d tell David over the phone, and possibly also Shaun, over coffee or (be honest) more likely gin and tonics. You won’t believe my uncle, she’d say.

What about him? they’d ask.

Well, what?

Ed had moved to Montreal in the seventies to be an individual, as Jessie’s mother put it. He was a Marxist, then a Maoist, then for a while he was into Kabbalah. In another family he might have been a black sheep but in Jessie’s he was light grey at best. People sometimes referred to him as a “confirmed bachelor,” which Jessie learned in her twenties was code for gay, but in Ed’s case it just seemed to be descriptive. He had a lot of girlfriends, whom Jessie heard about only after they had broken Ed’s heart. “A scourge,” her mother called each of them, later. In any case Ed had made a life for himself. He spoke French, his friends were mostly separatists and he himself voted oui in ’80 and ’95. These politics were a bit of a family scandal and there were many fights during his visits back to Edmonton, which became rare and rarer. During one memorable bout Jessie’s grandfather had shouted “If the péquistes had their way we’d all be packed onto trains!”

“People sometimes referred to him as a ‘confirmed bachelor,’ which Jessie learned in her twenties was code for gay ... ”

Ed called him hysterical and reactionary and stormed off to smoke Gitanes in the backyard. He came back the next Passover, then for his father’s funeral. His mother said, I suppose the next time we’ll see you will be at mine. It turned out to be true. Ed hadn’t been back since.

When Jessie told her parents she had an offer from Concordia for grad school her mother had said, So, you can keep an eye on Ed. It sounded offhand, which was how Jessie had taken it.

“This seems like a nice place,” she offered. “Do you like it here?”

Ed shrugged. “It is what it is. At least I have Amelia. The staff call us Money and the Ethnic Vote. We’re everything that’s wrong with the place!” He laughed and smacked the table with his good hand. Amelia let out a wide-mouthed guffaw. Her molars were large and stained brown in the middle.

“Though that’s not really accurate,” Ed said, sobering. “If I were one of those rich Westmount Jews I’d live in a mansion with a round-the-clock roster of help-staff. But I’m a regular middle-class Jew. It’s this or a long walk on a cold night with a bottle of tequila.”

“It seems decent enough,” Jessie said. “The clock is nice.”

“Ah yes,” said Ed. “A reminder of mortality and encroaching death. Very subtle.”

On another glance at Ed’s shirt she saw that the naked character wasn’t a man but in fact a butch woman with a placid expression; her hand was somehow tucked behind and through her legs to become a stand-in penis.

“So what do you think of Montreal?” Ed asked.

“I love it,” Jessie said. “It’s very European.”

The only time Jessie had seen Europe was four days she spent sick with food poisoning in Glastonbury. She’d lain in the tent moaning while David interviewed musicians for his blog. Now, sometimes when she woke in the five a.m. dark, her body seeking a warmth that wasn’t there, she’d think of that timeless time in the tent, sweating to the sound of faraway drum jams and wondering who she was, if she was anyone at all. Yes, it was very European.

“That’s what people say,” Ed said. “Me, I think yeah, if you mean Eastern Europe. Everyone at war all the time, divided into little cliques. Roads look like they were bombed out. Mobs and corrupt politicians running the show.”

“But there’s so much history here,” she said. “Everything is steeped in it. I love the layers of existence. I love how there are places where the pavement has worn away and you can see the cobblestones underneath. It’s magical.”

Amelia nodded vigorously. “When,” she said. “It’s. Well. I always loved.”

“Well, you would say that,” Ed said. “She’s just glad they’re not trying to deport her,” he explained to Jessie. “What about your classes, you like them?”

“Yeah, school’s great. My supervisor is this really amazing scholar, she’s doing cutting-edge work in visual culture. She’s really interested in garbage as a site of capital accumulation.” Jessie realized how pompous she sounded as she said this. Like a preface.

“Sounds fascinating.” She checked his face for sarcasm. There didn’t seem to be any, but it was hard to tell. She told Ed and Amelia more about her prof’s work, avoiding talking about her own research. It wasn’t that she didn’t think they’d understand but that even thinking about her own work exhausted her to the point of nausea.

Jessie had brought her travel backgammon set from home—Ed was a fiend in his youth—but he seemed underwhelmed by it and suggested instead she find a Scrabble board in the rec room. “It’s more fun for three people,” he said. Three became four when Marie, another resident with pure white hair in a bun slid in next to Jessie and began reciting Jessie’s letters like she was taking an eye test. “Hay. Hay. Pee. Arr. Haytch. Eye. Dee.” Ed invited her to play, in spite of the fact that they were already well into the game. “I don’t mind!” Marie said. “I don’t care about winning, I just like the company!” But rules are rules, thought Jessie. Yet there was nothing she could do.

Amelia played JENNY for 34 points.

“No proper nouns,” Jessie said.

“A jenny,” Ed said, “is a female ass.” Which Jessie knew. But didn’t expect other people to.

“A female ass?” Marie said. “What kind of word is this?” Marie had a girlish soprano voice with a creak in it like a kitchen cabinet door. Her eyebrows made up for in length what they lacked in density. She widened her eyes comically at Jessie, as though they were co-conspirators in some intrigue. This was the sort of interaction Jessie feared at parties—that some well-meaning doltish person would glom onto her and prevent her from meeting real people, people she could talk to. Here Marie seemed relatively harmless, a problem that would resolve itself naturally, with time.

“A donkey,” Ed said.

“Why don’t you just say donkey then?” Marie said. Ed ignored her and added ING to QUAIL. “Thirty-six,” he said. “Read ’em and weep.”

When Jessie’s turn came she stared at her letters. She moved an H back and forth a few times, trying different combinations. She could spell JIHAD for a cool 46 points, hitting both the triple letter and double word score. She moved the H again.

“While we’re young,” Ed said.

“Yeah yeah.” Finally she added two tiles to Amelia’s J.

“JAM,” said Ed. “A big twenty-four for Jessie,” He added it to the scoresheet. “You know, you were almost a Jenny,” he said.

“Really?”

“Your dad was pushing for Jennifer. He thought it was a good girl’s name. He thought Jessica sounded cheap.”

“Huh. I never knew that.” Jessie realized she was hungry for this—for family lore, for stories of her parents before they split up, as actual people.

“How’s David?” Ed asked.

“Fine,” Jessie said, quickly. “It’s hard, being away. But we manage.”

“I’m sure you do,” Ed said without looking at her. He coughed and shuffled his tiles.

“And how’s Christine?” she said.

Christine was Ed’s semi-estranged daughter, technically Jessie’s cousin; she was the product of a brief affair with a Québécoise, some kind of activist he met shortly after moving. Jessie had only met her once, at their grandmother’s funeral. She was a few years older than Jessie but seemed of a different generation completely. Her hair was in sausage curls and she wore a loose black tunic and a small silver crucifix. She had big serious-looking eyes and a wry mouth and smooth olive skin. She looked like a European refugee from the 1940s, like the picture of Anne Frank on the back of the book Jessie was reading for school. Her English was polite and limited.

“Do you ’ave fire, she had asked Jessie. What? Jessie said. Fire? Like a fireplace?”

After the burial she and Jessie sat in a pile of leaves on the boulevard while adults milled around with plates of devilled eggs and smoked salmon bagels and sliced cucumber. It was early October, one of those startlingly warm fall days. Do you ’ave fire, she had asked Jessie. What? Jessie said. Fire? Like a fireplace? Christine rolled her eyes. Fire, she said, mimicking flicking a lighter. Jessie was still puzzling over the gesture when Christine pulled out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one in her mouth. Jessie must have looked shocked because Christine had laughed at her. They’re not real, they’re just candy, she said. See? She bit the end off and chewed deliberately, a pantomime of eating.

“Oof, Christine,” Ed said. “Christine wants nothing to do with me.”

“That’s rough,” she said.

“Never,” said Amelia. “Not even.”

“I know,” Ed said, “but it’s not her fault. Her mother hates me,” he explained. “She’s poisoned the girl’s mind.”

“What a shame,” Marie said.

“Does she live in Montreal?” Jessie asked. For some reason this notion hadn’t occurred to her until just now. She had a cousin, a Québécoise cousin. Ed stared fixedly at something behind Jessie’s head and fluffed at his beard. “Yes, as far as I know. She’s doing geography at U de M.”

Marie let out a laugh. “Such a family of intellectuals!” she said.

“I call her every now and then, but it’s like talking to a duck. Ouais. Ouais. Ouais.” Ed quacked out a series of flat yeses and shook his head. “Pointless.”

Jessie added her I to Ed’s Q.

“Oh dear, I’m afraid that’s not a word,” Marie said.

“It is,” said Jessie. Marie gave her such a look of angry accusation that Jessie laughed, a nervous defense. She looked at Ed for backup. “You know it, right? From Chinese medicine? The life force?” Ed shrugged. “It sounds familiar. But I can’t be one hundred percent sure,” he said. “Do you want to challenge it?”

“Yes,” said Marie. “I challenge your kwee.”

“Chee,” said Amelia.

“Another country heard from,” said Marie.

“That’s right, it’s pronounced chee,” Jessie said. She nodded at Amelia, who smiled in a way that seemed encouraging rather than encouraged, as though Jessie were the one needing help. A dictionary had to be located, and Marie insisted Jessie accompany her to the library. As soon as they were in the hallway, Marie stopped short and turned to Jessie, grabbing her elbow. “You need to do something,” she hissed into her face.

Jessie looked around. Someone far down the hall was pushing a cleaning cart. “About what?” she said.

“You know, I’m not an idiot,” Marie said. “I see what she’s doing.” Her face had become red and puckered, the lines of her forehead pointing down and her chin pointing up.

“What is she doing?”

“Playing him. Putting on that act. Faking. You know.”

“No, I don’t.” Jessie wasn’t sure what Marie meant—faking what? Dementia? A stroke? Love? Religion?—but her conviction was so strong that it didn’t seem to matter.

“Well then you’re as dumb as he is.” Marie dropped her elbow and marched back into the cafeteria. Jessie followed, the skin on her elbow cold from where Marie had grabbed her, an odd excitement in her gut. “Well I’ll be jiggered!” Marie announced, her voice trilling like a robin’s. “It’s a word! Chee! Chee! Chee! Twenty-two points for the lady!”

Ed suggested they go up to Amelia’s room to relax. “I’d invite you to my room but she has the view,” he said. Jessie expected to push Ed’s wheelchair but Amelia rose from the table with startling fluidity and began to push it toward the elevators. Jessie had to grab her jacket and almost sprint down the hall after them.

Amelia’s room was on the twelfth floor. The view was of Laval: strip malls and parking lots and beyond that, the river, which looked like a silver line. And beyond that the city. The city where right now a man was wondering where she was, when she’d be getting back. Then she thought of David and felt both defensive and grateful. He was the one who had suggested the arrangement.

There was a desk with a creaky chair that Jessie sat in, and Ed pulled Amelia onto his lap and she laughed, very loud, and then said “You aren’t.”

“I am,” said Ed.

“Well,” she said.

The room was full of books and abstract wall hangings that looked like stills from 1980s video art, blurry and jagged shapes and pastel colours. There were framed photographs of a younger Amelia, hair uncovered and wearing a starched white apron, with people Jessie didn’t recognize but who Ed said were very important in France. On the desk were several vials of blood and one of what might have been urine.

After a few minutes Amelia got up and went into the next room. “She’s tired,” Ed explained. “You took a lot out of her.” Jessie chuckled but Ed didn’t, which made her think he was serious. They heard bedsprings squeal, and then, very shortly thereafter, light and delicate snores, as though from a kitten.

“Is she—”

“Muslim?” Ed said. He passed his good hand through his hair, dislodging the barrette. “Of some sort. She’s had a tough life. She’s French-Algerian, they’ve taken more shit than you or I could imagine. She doesn’t like to talk about it that much. “

Jessie wondered what she did like to talk about, but instead she said, “That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

“Oh?”

“I was going to say, is she older than you?”

“You know, she’s a feminist,” he said. “I bet you can’t imagine that, a Muslim feminist.”

“I can,” Jessie said. “Of course I can.” Ed ignored her. “They’re trying to paint them as victims of their own ignorance,” he said. “They want to outlaw the veil. They want to make her illegal.”

“Only for public servants,” Jessie said. She had no love for the Charter herself but the issue was moot. “Anyway,” she continued, “the Charter was overturned.”

Ed took off his glasses and held them at arm’s length, squinting. “For now,” he said. “But there’s something here that doesn’t want us. And it’s the same thing that’s been there since Champlain, that old rat fucker, landed at the parking lot of the Dollarama. Or wherever the hell he washed up.” He was becoming agitated, red-faced and sweating.

“Give it back to the Mohawks, that’s what I say,” he continued. “Let them sort it out. Me, I’m done. I’m ready to retire. I’ve been fucked over too many times. I’m all in. That’s it that’s all.” There were beads of sweat on his lip, and he reached out with his trembling good hand. He closed his eyes and puffed air in and out his mouth. Was he having another stroke?

“Uncle Ed?” Jessie said. “Are you okay?”

“Shit. Heartburn. Pass me that—” He pointed to a bottle of Tums on a bookshelf. Jessie opened it and shook one out into his hand. He chewed, and seemed almost immediately to relax.

“Sorry,” he said. “I get het up about this stuff. Bad for my health.” His tongue was white with dissolved Tums.

Jessie’s knees were beginning to throb from sitting for so long. She imagined herself running on the path that led up the mountain, dust flying from her sneakers.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You know, Marie said something weird to me. Out in the hallway.”

“Marie? She’s a batshit crazy,” Ed said. His voice sounded weird and throaty. “What did she say?”

“Something about Amelia.”

“What about her?”

“That she was. I don’t know. Not for real.”

“Like how? Like imaginary? Like a figment of my imagination?” Ed made a loop-de-loop signal by his temple and stuck out his pasty tongue. Jessie suddenly wished she had never come. What was she hoping to get out of this? Some insight into her family, and therefore herself? Family was a fiction, and the past was past. She felt damp in her armpits and under her breasts. What time was it? She wanted to look at her phone but was afraid of seeming rude.

“She thinks Amelia doesn’t care about you, that she’s in it for some other reason. Some ignoble reason.”

“Is there any other kind?” Ed sighed. “I feel sorry for Marie,” he said. “She’s not right in the head. A lot of the people here—” He looked at the ceiling, where an improbable chandelier dripped cut-glass tears. “I’m sixty-six,” he said. “Do you know how young that is? I was born after the war. Just after the war. Does that make such a big difference? Yes, I think it might. And yet. And yet.” He seemed on the verge of some grand pronouncement but then he stopped talking and stared out the window. From the next room they could hear Amelia’s almost musical snoring.

Ed could have been a true iconoclast, a rugged individual carrying circumstance like a heavy backpack. Or maybe he was just cultivating weirdness, one of those people who eat apple cores or wear their watches on the inside of the wrist. That was possible.

Later Shaun would say, yeah, but you mean like Muslim Muslim?

Before she left Ed had given her Christine’s number and told Jessie to call her. “I know you haven’t seen her in a while,” he said, “but she’s family, and that counts for something. You’ll understand more when you’re older.” This was comically ironic coming from Ed, who had shed his family like Salome losing her veils—tantalizingly slowly, and for good.

He’d dictated Christine’s number from memory and she had entered it in her phone. It was a 514 number, which Jessie understood to communicate some degree of authenticity. Her own number was a 438: new, and possibly suspect.

“Were you visiting someone?” a woman in the elevator said. She looked like a nurse or homecare worker, in loose green pants and a soft-looking yellow shirt that hung from her large breasts. Her name tag read Lolita, which Jessie thought was something she’d tell Shaun about later.

“Edward Schmidt,” she said. “He’s my uncle.” They spoke facing the doors, as convention dictated.

“Oh, you’re Ed’s niece,” the woman said. “I’ve heard about you. The journalist.” It was sort of true, so Jessie nodded. “I publish here and there,” she said.

“Good for you. Aren’t Ed and Amelia dear? They’re inseparable. We call them Meals and Wheels.”

“I thought you called them—”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I misunderstood.” The doors opened and they walked out into the lobby. The Irish music was still playing, as though no time had passed.

Age, it seemed, made some people more rigid, while others shrugged off their lifelong preoccupations like a damp overcoat. As she waited for the bus she looked up at L’Horloge and tried to guess which window was Ed’s. He’d given her cab fare but she thought she’d save it for a nice dinner.

She’d periodically come across Christine’s phone number in her contacts list, and would daydream about calling her. A stylish, angular woman who smoked Gitanes. Or something else: a knit poncho, dreadlocks, a red square pinned to her chest.

“It was a 514 number, which Jessie understood to communicate some degree of authenticity. Her own number was a 438: new, and possibly suspect.”

They’d meet at the cafe on Faillon. The brioche is out of this world, Jessie would say. They’d talk about their shared grandparents and messed-up family dynamics. Tabernac, Christine would say. That’s it that’s all.

By the time a year had passed she’d already begun the move to Toronto, where they handed you a blazer and a wad of cash at the city limits. That’s what they said, anyway, her friends who had already left, fellow grad students on the up and up: we miss the lifestyle, but a job’s a job. I have to admit, one friend confided in hushed and slightly guilty tones, it’s nice to be able to charm people in English again.

Jessie had to load a U-haul, pick David up at the airport, send off a wad of CVs, head down the 401 in a seemingly endless chain of dark blue Subarus. Finally she got a new phone and posted on Facebook: New phone! Send me yr numbers pls and thx! She’d start over, clean and fresh.