Free A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche Page A

said, I was too much like my father. It was partly true, but it was hard for my mother to hear, unfair of me to place such a heavy burden on her shoulders. To tell a wife that your life is ruined because you’re too much like her husband. How stupid could I have been? She said, “You’re exaggerating,” and then all I heard was the empty buzz of the phone line. She’d hung up on me.
    “Yes,” I say. “Like Dad, Bernard, I’m overdoing it as usual…”
    I indulge myself a bit. I like yanking Bernard’s chain once in a while, making him face up to the stupendous absurdity of this life he is so awkwardly attempting to transcribe into equations. I’m old, Bernard, and part of being old is overdoing a few things, just as it is part of being young. Too much ice cream when you’re a child, too much wine sixty years later. What should we do, forbid children to eat ice cream and doting old men to drink wine? Bernard blusters. Lise takes his side, blustering along with him. As far as they’re concerned I’m being irresponsible. If I want to waste my life it’s my business, but it’s too bad for poor Isabelle, who in a few years will find herself wiping wine and grease and gravy off my chin. They don’t say that, exactly, but it’s understood. My mother refuses to be drawn into the discussion.
    “What do you think of the election campaign?” she asks.
    IN 1956, my father was selling cars. We hadn’t climbed a single rung up the social ladder, but we were no longer drinking powdered milk. We had roast beef on Sundays, and my father wore a suit and tie to work every weekday. On Saturdays, however, when he did the shopping, he dressed like a slob. People don’t really change. The living-room furniture was new. It was more comfortable than the old furniture, but we weren’t allowed to sit on it except when we had company. On the walls were reproductions of great works of art I’d never seen before but that matched the colour of the fabric on the sofa and the wall-to-wall carpet. We had a television.
    Except on Saturdays, when he dragged his noisy sandals down the supermarket aisles, we were a respectable family. I went to college, my mother wore pretty hats on Sunday, the flowers and shrubs my father had planted around the house were the envy of all the neighbours, who contented themselves with keeping their lawns green and nicely trimmed. He knew all that, knew he was envied, that he was accumulating points as if he were in a game, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it. He revelled in his victories and advances, the apple tree that burst into generous bloom every spring, the client who couldn’t afford a car but bought one anyway. He would call our anglophone neighbour over to show him how well his fertilizer was working. The neighbour, a timid man but an environmentalist before it became fashionable, would agree. We all bore witness to his successes, although we didn’t really understand them. He triumphed. At the time I was getting 100 per cent in all my subjects at school; my mother crowed ecstatically but my father never said a word. I was his son, how could I come anywhere but first in class? My only merit, it seemed, was in being his son.
    “ANYWAY, YOU’VE always looked down your nose at Dad and the family. The minute you became known as an actor… So we can do without your lectures, thank you very much…”
    “I’m not lecturing, Bernard, I’m telling you how I feel.”
    Isabelle presses my arm again. In these circumstances she is smarter and more sensitive than I am. I’m a bit like an American. I charge into the fray and worry about the damage later. Isabelle is more African—she hears only what she needs to hear. In contemplating a lake, she knows that the pebble disturbs only the surface of the water, not the lake itself. It sinks without trace into the bottom mud, which is the lake’s memory. And she’s right. I should be more like Mother, who asks again what we all think of the election