Winner: Man and His World
I spent two years in law school, 1965 and 1966. Both years, there was a boy named Étienne in the class.
I spent two years in law school, 1965 and 1966. Both years, there was a boy named Étienne in the class. He was fresh-faced and France-French and we all found him interesting, with his delicate accent and his European manners. He would arrive to morning classes with a baguette, bought fresh on his way in. To him, fresh bread was a daily essential, and the morning was when it was freshest. The first few bites would already be ripped off and consumed from his five-minute walk, bakery to campus. He’d offer everyone a piece as class began, though none of us accepted. To us this was eccentric, but to him, we were just as crazy, eating 60¢ pre-made sandwiches from the lunch cart.
That year, I frequented a bar called Cléopatra, probably weekly. Montreal’s gay village hadn’t yet materialized. We had a few bars in a few different neighbourhoods, and Cléopatra was the most English-friendly. At other bars, when I spoke to men in English, they responded in French unapologetically. If I couldn’t keep up, they held their pointer fingers up and went Oh, like they had just thought of something that needed addressing. Then they turned and found others to chat with in their own tongue. Sometimes I toughed it out in the French bars anyways, for instance if the crowd at Cléopatra was getting samey-samey. At a French bar called La Guillotine, I would play a private game: I’d see how long I could nod and smile and facially express my way through an all-French conversation. Once or twice, it worked, and I was taken home. Mostly, though, I stuck to Cléopatra. And one evening, in the last few weeks of first year, I saw Étienne there. I saw him from across the bar, registered why I recognized him, and felt the blood in my face heat up. He was from school, I couldn’t be seen by him there. I fled and found a vantage point from which to give him a look more discretely. He wore a red tank top, tight and bright. He was acting shifty and uncomfortable, looking everywhere, his arms crossed tight. Was it his first time there? Had he not realized what kind of bar this was, and now he felt obligated to stay? He was looking in every direction but mine, and it hit me that he was doing exactly what I was doing, avoiding acknowledgement. He had seen me before I had seen him, that must have been it. We were being ridiculous. It was like the States and the Soviets: our peril was mutually assured. I went to him and said “Aha!” all friendly. We laughed and embraced. A gimlet is gin and lime juice, and a bit of sweet syrup, shaken and poured over ice. That year, I had gotten it in my head that a gimlet was the most sophisticated drink you could order at a bar. Maybe it had been ordered by one of the women of Peyton Place, or one of the other soaps I watched with my landlady. I ordered one gimlet for me and one for Étienne, and we found a couch. I was a little flirty: I put my arm on the back of the couch, and when he made me laugh, I grabbed his shoulder and squeezed. Each time I grabbed him like that, he would freeze or change his posture, a bit wound-up. I asked if it was his first time at Cléopatra and he said yes. I asked if it was his first time at any bar like this. “In Montreal, oui,” he said, “but there is such a bar in Reims. Back in school, I biked there from the farm. One hour on bike. One or two times seulement. I didn’t like.” I asked what had taken him so long to come to “such a bar” here in Canada, as he had lived in Montreal for almost a year by then. He sat, thinking to himself and unresponsive. He was perhaps pretending not to understand the question, or not to have heard it under the music. I let it pass and asked a different question. I asked if he had really grown up on a farm.For a moment, for some reason, I thought perhaps he was answering my first question after all, in a deeply-considered way, the question I thought he had pretended not to process.He said yes, livestock and all. Mostly sheep. His family hunted too. He envied his sister, who never had to go on expeditions. He talked about being le chien, the dog. That’s the person who walks ahead of the rest, stomping and sometimes barking, to rustle the birds from the grasses. He hated it, but what he hated more was shooting the animals, and when you’re on an expedition the only person who isn’t given a gun is the dog. So, he was the dog. In France, dogs don’t go woof or arf, they go whou-whou. Walking through that field, going whou-whou, gave Étienne an ice-cold feeling, even if it was summer. “Plus jamais,” he said. Never again. For a moment, for some reason, I thought perhaps he was answering my first question after all, in a deeply-considered way, the question I thought he had pretended not to process. “Isn’t hunting dangerous?” I asked. “Oh yes,” he said. “It killed my uncle. Oui! It killed him. I am very tiny but my family is huge. Big men full of hair, then me. My uncle was shot. I was this big,” he said and held his hand flat two feet from the ground. “Another man did it: accident. The casket came, it was too small for my big uncle. Too small, but we cannot return it. My grandfather says, Enlevons les pieds. So he uses the saw to cut off the feet au revoir.” Horrified, I asked what they did with them. “We placed them at his sides,” he said impatiently, like it was the obvious answer. Then we both broke into a long laughter. Our drinks were finished. I was out of money but I had lots of booze at home and I said so. We sat on my bed with our whiskeys. In the room I was renting, it was the only thing to sit on, aside from the floor. But it didn’t feel loaded with potential, the way beds did when I sat on them drinking with other men. It felt like just a place to sit. We made tiny cursory moves on each other: I grabbed his feet and placed them in my lap, he pushed my shaggy hair out of my face and behind my ear. But I was more interested in friendship, and I think he was as well. That would have been the more unusual outcome of a night like that, and the more valuable outcome too. We never kissed, we never took our tank tops off, and he didn’t spend the night. Before he left, we heard the couple upstairs fighting. They fought often, day or night. I asked Étienne to tell me what they were fighting about. Instead of doing this, he asked me why I never tried to learn French. “Law school is tough enough,” I said authoritatively. Étienne nodded in solidarity, though I suspected that my struggle was not relatable to him. Our professors often said, if you think it’s hard now, you don’t stand a chance for later.
Sure enough, I failed the end-of-year exam, and they kicked me out of the school. Cléopatra took me on behind the bar, where I made gimlets, as well as Manhattans and old-fashioneds and more. It didn’t take long to earn back the money I had poured into school. Bar work suited me. I was happier than I had been as a student. Étienne came often when my shift began, bringing two baguette-bread sandwiches in wax paper, always two different kinds. On my break, we’d each eat half of each sandwich. One evening, I came to the bar ahead of my shift, and there were no customers at all. Usually there were at least a few from 4 p.m. on. My boss said cops had gone to La Guillotine two nights previous. Most men left immediately at the sight of them, but the bar staff were asked a few questions, about what kind of clientele they kept. Word had spread, people were spooked. My boss was worried about business. He said I didn’t have to stay that night, and that I should check in with him the next day about my shifts for the rest of the week. Étienne came with his sandwiches. Instead of eating at the bar, we took them back to my place. I was really worried about my job. It paid well and I knew I’d have a hard time finding a similar set-up. Étienne tolerated my anxiousness. We drank my booze, we talked about France. He let me ask question after question about life there, but if I asked too much about him—why he cut out of his little French town called Bazancourt, what he missed particularly about it—he got cagey. Near the end of the night, he was visibly blitzed, falling asleep as he spoke. He was audibly blitzed as well: he spoke rough, like the French equivalent of a hick. He asked what I pictured when I pictured his home’s farm. “Red,” I said. “Big doors, wood fence, I guess.” “J’ai pensé ainsi,” he said, laughing. I thought so. Then he asked if I’d like to find out for myself what it looked like. He hadn’t been home the previous Christmas and he was planning to visit for this one. He said he didn’t want to go without a friend. We could stay with his family, all I had to pay for was my flights. I said yes, I got excited. The next day we went to the travel agent, and one month after that, we flew to northern France together.
We landed in Reims, where we spent a couple nights. There were things Étienne wanted to show me there. We saw the pretty cathedral and the equally-pretty basilica, and on one of the afternoons, we ran into a friend of Étienne’s, a young man named Denis who worked at the salon. I thought salon could mean many things, and I was too timid in the moment to ask what it meant in this instance. Denis joined us on our walk through town for a while, without really asking to. While Denis was with us, Étienne ignored me completely. I smiled politely as we walked. A few times Denis mentioned Étienne’s escape—“ton évasion”— an escape from their hometown of Bazancourt, to the far away land of Montreal. He too said nothing to me, and didn’t even give me a look. They spoke only in French together and Étienne was offering no translations. We went to a hairdressing studio, full of women with their heads in heaters. They waved to Denis, this was the salon he worked at. It was a hair salon, the same word as in English after all. Then he went into the salon, apparently to start work for the day, and Étienne and I continued our walk. As our train took us to Bazancourt on the third day, snow began to fall. Étienne’s mother gave me an enormous hug at the train station. My French was already very poor, but when she spoke, I couldn’t understand a single syllable, so thick and bizarre was her accent. His father, a tall and scrawny man, said maybe two words at the station and during the whole half-hour drive. But when he did speak, I found his accent impenetrably thick as well. When we arrived at the farm, it was nothing like I had imagined. It was a tiny country house built with green and brown bricks. There were no fences that you could see, but there were sheep all around. One stood by the door when we arrived, and Étienne’s mother said to her, “Vite, Marie, vite!” The sheep trotted off. “She adores attention,” Étienne’s mother told me. I asked if there were fences. Étienne said there were, but they were far enough that you couldn’t see them. All I could see in the field around us was a soft floor of snow.
While she rambled, Étienne’s sister stayed at the table, sometimes piping in to tell her mother to leave me alone. And his father was in the kitchen, plucking feathers off a stinking headless duck.The living room, dining room and kitchen were really all one room. His younger sister was at the dining table, reading magazines. When I recognized Catherine Deneuve’s picture in an article, Étienne’s sister cooed with approval. We discussed The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Unlike her parents, she spoke English, though her accent was rough. I understood quickly that Étienne worked very hard to make his accent sound Parisian and proper. His family spoke the way he did when he was drunk. Using Étienne as a translator, his mother asked me all about Canada when we sat down. She wanted to hear about the fall colours, the rivers and lakes people skate on, other things Étienne barely had the energy or willingness to translate. When he gave up and went to his room to unpack, his mother kept asking questions. While she rambled, Étienne’s sister stayed at the table, sometimes piping in to tell her mother to leave me alone. And his father was in the kitchen, plucking feathers off a stinking headless duck. When I headed upstairs, gesticulating that I was tired, I saw that the bedrooms were just bit bigger than the beds they contained. Étienne’s room felt especially small because he had a table, with a record player, a huge set of headphones and a pile of records. The foot of my sleeping bag had to go beneath the player’s table, between its legs. The records were sleeveless, and the labels in their middles had all been peeled off. Where the labels had been, Étienne had etched letters and numbers: JG1, JG2, PC, NS. “Judy Garland,” he said. “Judy again. Patsy Cline. You see. This was my system.” And he shrugged, as if to say, every teenager has his eccentricities. I suggested we throw one on, and he said maybe after a good night’s sleep. Which felt like a brush-off. In the morning we were served enormous breakfasts. I didn’t know what everything was, for instance the pile of bacon-like meat. I ate everything quickly before I could tell the taste. Two old girlfriends of Étienne’s came by and greeted him with hugs and kisses. They too spoke almost no English, and together the four of us visited their old high school. It didn’t bother any teachers when we interrupted classes so that Étienne could tell them how school in Canada was going. Nobody asked who I was. Étienne, the two girls and I sat in an empty music room, surrounded by unstrung cellos, and ate sandwiches that his mother had packed for us all in wax paper. We came home and Étienne went to visit other friends, this time with his mother and without me. I sat in his family room, trying to read one of his sister’s magazines, word by word. I used a Bescherelle that they had lying around. His father was in the kitchen, now preparing a stew, with meat from the duck, fat from the meat, and gravy and beans. Maybe a half hour into our mutual silence, Étienne’s father spoke to me, asking about l’exposition. I didn’t understand at first, but soon put it together that he was asking about Expo ’67, a world fair that was set to begin the following summer in Montreal. Using my dictionary with the difficult words, I told him about how they had taken the dirt from the subway excavations, and poured it into the Saint Lawrence river for a year, until there was an island there. Then they built more: all kinds of pavilions, to represent nations from across the world. Sometimes he nodded, he knew a bit about the event already, possibly from Étienne. I told him, slowly and somehow, that I was surprised he knew so much. At this he smirked and fetched something from the kitchen cabinet: a cigar box full of postcards and pamphlets. There were illustrations of the Eiffel Tower, and various other buildings. I put together that this was paraphernalia from a previous world fair that had taken place in Paris. “Allez-vous?” I asked. He shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “She. Wife.” I mentioned that I had a job lined up for the Expo: I was going to be a bartender in the Man the Provider Pavilion. I had been practicing all kinds of cocktails in anticipation of the gig. The city had provided a list of drinks to master, on a laminated orange card. At this, the quiet and reserved man displayed some mirth. His wife and Étienne came home, he spoke to them excitedly. “Oh!” replied his mother, and then they both spoke a bit angrily to Étienne, who laughed. “They want to know why I did not tell them you are working for Expo.” “Everyone is!” I said, because it was true, almost everyone I knew at Cléopatra and beyond had lined up some kind of gig for the event, hosting or tour-guiding, serving or bartending. His mother grabbed my arm and shook me, she was so excited. It was like I was a celebrity. She grabbed the postcards and told me the stories behind them. She spoke as slowly as she could, and Étienne provided some translation now. It was 1937, she was just a little girl. This was the Swiss pavilion, the Polish pavilion. “C’était le pavillon où j’ai mangé de l’ananas pour la première fois,” she said to Étienne, for him to tell me. “She ate here for the first time l’ananas. I don’t know this word,” said Étienne. “La-na-na?” I asked. And both of his parents laughed at my pronunciation, and the ridiculousness of the word: La-na-na, they both said, laughing with each other and with me. With difficulty, they mimed and described the food, but I only wound up more confused. “It’s yellow and green,” Étienne put in. “It has skin like the lizard. It has hair at the top.”
Through her son, she described the first bite. The little yellow cube contained so much more water than she thought was possible. She thought it was a kind of magic trick, not something natural.In reaction to this, I made a face his parents found hilarious. His mother was clutching her sides and showing most of her grey teeth. Eventually we figured out that the word was pineapple. At the world fair in Paris, long ago, Étienne’s mother ate a pineapple for the first time. Through her son, she described the first bite. The little yellow cube contained so much more water than she thought was possible. She thought it was a kind of magic trick, not something natural. She remembered the moment exactly. Then Étienne excused himself from translating duties and told me that he and I were going out. When we got in the car, I told him I loved how excited his mother got about things. “She’s always bossing you around, Étienne-Étienne-Étienne. So cute.” “You say it wrong,” he said, starkly unamused. “My name. Every time. Did you know this?” I suddenly understood we were in very different moods. Was he laughing about the pineapple, how the rest of us were? I hadn’t been looking his way much. “I know how to say your name,” I said. I repeated his name, and he went tsk-tsk. He said it slowly, I listened, I parroted him: “Étienne.” “Not close,” he said. “Don’t try.” He started the car and pulled out of the driveway. I asked if we were going to the bar of his childhood, the men’s bar in town. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, mortified by the idea. Instead he took me to the one bar that was near Bazancourt. When we got there, it wasn’t dark yet, but everyone was drunk. And everyone knew Étienne. The music was loud, the accents were difficult, and mostly I stood at the bar smoking cigarettes. “Joyeux Noël,” said someone when I provided a light. I hadn’t realized until then that it was Christmas eve. Early the next morning, all the booze and cigarettes hit my system. I woke up with a crushing stomach ache, before anyone else was up. The bathroom was in the very middle of the upper floor, and the crack between the door and the floor was thick enough to fit a hand through. Sitting on the toilet, I could hear everyone breathing and rustling in their beds, and it made me too self-conscious to go. When I emerged from the bathroom, I was informed that we were going to church. We walked, first through a field, then through a patch of trees. Some sheep joined our walk at their leisure, others stood in our way almost flirtatiously. In the trees there was a grave. Étienne’s sister laid down a thistle she had plucked on the walk. We all stopped and stood silently in front of the grave. “Oncle,” said Étienne. I pointed at my feet, silently asking if this was that uncle. Étienne nodded. After the patch of trees we reached the fabled fence, and a ladder stile which we crossed one by one. You could see the church from the stile. There was a graveyard next to it, and I made a mental note to ask Étienne why his uncle was buried in the woods instead of the graveyard, though it slipped out of my mind over the course of the sermon, which was exactly as comprehensible as the long Latin-language sermons of my childhood. Midway through, I nodded off. After that we took a long walk home along the country road. When we arrived I learned what his father had been working on this whole time in the kitchen: the Christmas dinner, which we ate in the early afternoon. The stew was called cassoulet. We also had cheese, bread, roasted apples, snails from a can, and a pie that I was pretty sure was rhubarb. We drank good wine out of the good crystal. My stomach still ached, but I ate and ate like a guest aiming to please. It felt to me like we had been eating for hours. Then it was dark—we really had been eating for that long. Eating and talking and laughing. By now Étienne’s father was addressing me directly. He turned me into his private addressee, telling me about childhood friends and trips he had taken outside of France. I didn’t just nod along, I talked too. He asked me a bit about life in Montreal, and I would try to respond, though I had no idea how to conjugate verbs and was trapped in the present tense. He asked about bartending. He would tell me a meal, and I would tell him what cocktail was best to have after. Some cocktails, he asked about the ingredients, and with Étienne’s help I told him. But when he asked what went in a kir, I had to admit that I didn’t know. At this, he slapped my shoulder and said to us all, “Bien tôt.” Then he left the house. Everyone looked my way to see why he had gone, but I couldn’t exactly answer. I went upstairs to try to use the bathroom discretely. Étienne, his mother and his sister could be heard clearing up the dishes downstairs. It was like I was in the same room, they were so audible. Étienne and his mother were having a conversation. I heard my name a few times. “Est-il votre ami?” “Bien sûr, maman.” “Pas plus?” “Pas plus, maman.” Then Étienne provided reasoning of some kind that I could not decipher, reasoning why he and I were friends but not more. Unable to control my bowels, I defecated and made a humiliating plop sound. “Oh!!!” shouted all three of them downstairs, and then they started applauding for me. I couldn’t help but laugh, the worst had happened and it wasn’t so bad. I felt comfortable with this family, I was happy to be spending Christmas where I was spending it. When I came down they clapped again and, red-faced, I did a bow. Étienne’s father came through the door with a bottle of shiny red liqueur. “Crème de cassis,” he said. Then he and Étienne’s mother bickered a little: she had just refilled the glasses with red wine. The bickering concluded, Étienne caught me up. “We will finish the wine that has poured, then you will make us a new drink.” I nodded obediently, I wanted the party to keep going forever. A bit of booze helped Étienne’s father loosen up, but now he’d had a lot of it, and had become too drunk to speak English much at all. He insisted that Étienne sit between us and translate. He said I’d learn many drinks during my stay there in France. I could take them back and impress everyone on the manmade island, including the beautiful girls. At this I smirked. I smirked at Étienne’s mother, and at Étienne. His father spoke more, and Étienne didn’t translate right away, not until his father insisted, prodding him in the arm.
... and then I made gestures that said: different, understand, I’m different, I’m sure you understand.“He wants to know if you have any girlfriend,” translated Étienne. “Don’t say.” “Why not?” I asked. Étienne had just been speaking with his mother about me, and I didn’t see the issue. “Don’t,” Étienne said. In that very brief moment, I disliked Étienne for taking it upon himself to become more than a translation device. He wasn’t meant to editorialize or to opine: it was not his role here. It felt right to supersede him. “Pas des femmes,” I said. “Je suis—” and then I made gestures that said: different, understand, I’m different, I’m sure you understand. Once my meaning registered on Étienne’s father’s face, he became as silent as he was on my first day there. It was like he had left the room and left his body behind. Étienne’s mother filled the silence with her chatter. Étienne translated like an automaton, monotone, offering no more of his own commentary. His mother got out the cigar box and talked about the world fair a little. She asked me questions, through Étienne, about the different pavilions at the Montreal Expo. I shared the names of the ones I remembered: Air Canada, Africa Place, Man the Provider, Man the Explorer. Then there was a piercing crashing sound. The crystal glass in Étienne’s father’s hand had shattered. He had squeezed it and it shattered. His hand was full of blood. His mother went and got a cloth. He just sat, clutching the cloth, staring at it, instead of looking at any of us. We were all silent a moment. Then his mother picked the conversation back up. After our glasses were empty I made kirs for everyone. Étienne’s father went upstairs, I didn’t make him one. Étienne talked me through the drink recipe. As I shook the jar in which I had poured the wine and bitters and ice, Étienne’s mother came and spoke to me under the sound of the clinking. “Tu as trop parlé,” she said, a little friendly and a little instructive. When she went to sit at the couch, I asked Étienne what trop meant. “Too much,” he said blankly. “You talk too much.” We all drank our kirs in different places, Étienne’s mother upstairs, his sister at the kitchen table with her magazines, and Étienne and I by the radio, listening to crooners. Then we went to his room to sleep, my feet tucked beneath the record player. The morning after, I told Étienne I wanted to explore more of France. “Bien sûr,” he said. We went down and I said my goodbyes, and everyone acted like this had been the plan the whole time, for me to leave the day after Christmas. In the car, Étienne and I were silent. I spent the train ride back to Reims shitting in the bathroom stall. I did the math: it was cheaper to kill time in Reims until the flight that had already been booked than it was to rebook. There was a cheap enough hostel, and food was inexpensive in the cafes. It was the fuzzy week between Christmas and New Years Eve, when places open and close at unusual hours; waiters seemed listless to me. After a few days, I thought it would be nice to find that bar that Étienne had mentioned. I could meet some interesting people. Maybe someone to stay with, and I could save some bread that way. But I didn’t know who to ask about the bar. Wandering on my second or third afternoon, I walked by Denis’s hair salon. Maybe he would know where to go, I figured. I asked the woman at the counter for a haircut from the male stylist. He came and greeted me, and sat me down. My face didn’t register for him. In my terrible French, I tried to tell him how we knew each other—“Étienne,” I said, pronouncing it as carefully as I could. He shrugged, confused. Ignoring my use of English, he asked quick and difficult questions about how I wanted my hair done. Then I said slowly: “Je suis un ami d’Étienne.” Even this didn’t do it. He threw the cloth across my chest, irritated. I found it hard to believe. Already, to him, the other day’s walk had been shared between two men.
