The Visit

The telephone rang, as usual, at the wrong time. Claude was shaving and I was still in the shower, so I said “let it go to the answering machine” and we would pick up the message later. I was in a hurry, we had slept late just the day I had to be at work by 8:30, and the phone call would have to wait until that night.

On my way to work I called my assistant on her cell phone so that perhaps she could pick up a cappuccino and croissant for me on her way up. That morning it looked like the people in the metro all had lost their cat, or something. Perhaps they had listened to bad news on the radio while Claude and I were having our happy moments. Perhaps new terrorists had found a new way to scare the good people in the U.S. and we were experiencing sympathetic fright. Or more likely our team had lost its game of whatever the current sport was. I had no time for this and remained in my social isolation bubble to rehearse my staff meeting agenda: the next two weeks were going to be busy, and that felt good. I was also going to have lunch with the boss at his favorite restaurant, which was definitely a good sign too. My cell phone vibrated and popped the bubble. It was Claude.

“Who were you thinking of?” he said, as if I hadn’t seen his name displayed on the phone.

“A bunch of cotton spreadsheets,” I responded, realizing I needed that coffee.

“Your mother called and said to call her back as soon as you can.”

“Not a funeral, I hope. I really can’t do a funeral right now.”

“She didn’t have her funeral voice on, it was more of her usual I’m-scared-of-answering-machines voice,” he said as if she was his mother.

“Okay. Big kiss.”

“Smooch. Have fun with your big meeting.”

I called my mother after the meeting. Our parish priest was on his way to Montreal and the Canadian West, she said, and she had told him that I would put him up for a couple of days. That and he was bringing motherly homemade jams with him. Everything was all right here, except that maybe we were going to have a guest from my village. I live in the village, a fact that was going to be my main preoccupation for the next two days.

“Okay,” I said, politely. Mothers can hardly be contradicted when they are in their seventies. But “okay” meant that my past was going to meet my present tomorrow. My past does not know much about my present, and we like to keep it that way. My mother knew that I shared an apartment with Claude, but I had neglected to tell her that he had become more than a good friend. I could not find words that were simple enough to explain what had happened to me since I had left home.

“I could go stay at Robert’s for a couple of days,” said Claude that night, trying to be accommodating I suppose. No way, there was no way I would let that happen, to feed the lamb directly into the wolf’s mouth.

“Thanks, honey, but I think I can handle it and show my real life to him, if you’re OK with that. I think the time has come to let this happen.” We hugged. Claude is not only my lover, he is my best friend. His family accepted me heartwarmingly and somehow this priest is part of mine. In such a small village as mine, everybody is part of the family. In any village, it is not easy to be different.

We agreed that Father Vaillancourt could sleep on the sofa bed in the living room and we would sleep in our bedroom as usual. We did not know what to think, we laughed at the idea of a man of the cloth being in our house of sin. But we also thought that this would be fine. The Father had known me since I was born, and had known my parents since they were all children.

The morning after I waited at the top of the stairs at the Central Station where the passengers emerged from their journey into the night. The little man had lost a lot of his hair, but I wished at that moment that I would look as good when I turned seventy. Perhaps it was the air of the sea, the fewer worries, or the long walks on the beach that kept him so well preserved. I repressed the thought that it could have anything to do with celibacy. Here was this man from my past, dressed in the fashion of the past if there was any, standing in front of me with a grin that reminded me of the ceremonious return of the fishing boats overfilled with cod. Here were the long walks in the fields, the smell of freshly picked strawberries, the endless return of the waves crashing on the sand. He was here, and my modern life looked smaller than he looked to me.

“Hello, Padre.”

“Son, how are you? It is so good to see you!” he said, shaking my hand vigorously.

Yes, he calls me “son” almost out of his religious habit but also because he saw me grow up, we shared countless dinners and gatherings where he and my father were like brothers. They shared fishing stories and a little caribou once in a while, never bringing up the subject of his profession in the conversation. At my father’s funeral, he cried more than us, he who had presided over the births and deaths of the village for half a century.

He looked at the very high ceiling of the station, at the lights and the signs all around him, like a child looking at a Christmas tree for the first time. We agreed we would walk to my place, and I warned him about traffic signals and watching for cars with busy city dwellers in them. As we surfaced to the street, at the end of two escalators, he almost fell on his back looking at the surrounding skyscrapers. I was reliving my own arrival here, but this time I already knew all the answers. It was too early in the morning for him to notice the change of climate on Ste-Catherine street, from serious shopping to serious art to not-so-serious sex and to definitely not the usual sex.

After leaving his suitcase at my apartment I asked him if I could let him be a tourist for a few hours in the old town while I would go to my office. We set an appointment back at 5:30 on Place Jacques-Cartier. I didn’t know what to think, where to take him from there. Claude, what a sweetie, was busy cooking a five-course gourmet dinner with wine. The Father and I walked as he recounted his discoveries of the day. There was a church in the old town dedicated to the mariners, and he had gone to meet the priest there. Apparently, the mariners no longer came, but the church had not lost its mission as a shelter. He remembered the day a big ship had run aground in the storm near our village and how the sailors had taken refuge in our houses and in the church.

We stepped in the apartment that the scent of dinner called home.

“Padre, this is Claude. Claude, this is Father Vaillancourt,” I announced, omitting any allusion to who Claude was.

“You can call me Henri, Claude” the Father said. I did not know what to say about that. I could not get myself to calling him by his first name, but Claude who had no history with him felt right at home. Not a single time during the fabulous dinner did it occur to me that we had just broken generational and ideological barriers. Shattered to smithereens. There were my six miniature rainbow teddy bears aligned on the window sill, and there was a figure from the past, from my village, a figure of fatherly authority that said to me “Thou shall not…” in my worst dreams before I moved here. There was our bedroom, which I was sharing with a man, a man the Father was talking to as if they had know each other since they were kids. A fabulous dinner had happened. I emptied my glass and gathered the empty plates to make space for Claude’s crème brûlée, the world’s best because he makes it with that old iron. We topped that with a dessert wine and talked until our heads went numb and didn’t know what to think next.

“Would you believe,” I said to Claude when we were in bed, “that we passed by St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine and the Padre looked right in the eyes of the hookers and said ‘bonjour’ with a smile?” We laughed our hearts out and hoped not to make any noise. This had been one of our best evenings as a couple, and we teased each other about becoming the traditional and gentle kind of couple who entertain guests who marvel at our exploits. We made love like there was no tomorrow, but quietly.

“Let’s call Mom, Padre,” I said in the morning, giving him his coffee. I dialed the number on the phone and gave it to him. “Angéla?” he said, “yes, it’s me, I’m at Jacques’ place and it’s beautiful out here.” Moving to the bathroom to become unable to get the phone, I wondered how it was that this old man could be so young at heart. I was grateful that he was taking care of my mother while I was living my free life. His sacrifice was in my name.

That afternoon at the Central Station, I insisted on buying him some food for his train ride. He was going a long way, and I was almost jealous of his adventure to the west. I put money in his shirt pocket.

“Your mom asked me to talk to you,” he said, “but I know you don’t need anybody’s advice.” He laughed. “Of course, you know she worries that you’re not married.” We laughed, perhaps for different reasons. “She loves you and she thinks in the old-fashioned way, and I told her on the phone this morning that you are doing fine. You are doing fine, my boy.” He hugged me with a hug like I had never had before, one in which the past, the present, and the future meet and don’t want to go back where they belong. The conductor called us but we did not hear him until he shouted at us. The Father took his bag and went down the stairs, but after a few steps he looked back to see if I was still up there. Then he said:

“Bye, son. Hey, can you do me a favor? Can you send me one of these rainbow flags they have in your village? I think it would look swell on my church!”

A nod, a last wave. I couldn’t laugh. I did not even laugh in my mind. We were just about to embark on a voyage of understanding, a voyage in which we were just the men we were.

December 3, 2002