McMahon sent a girl named Lily to seduce Pierrot. He would have been sleeping with her himself if his rage for Rose hadn’t rendered him impotent.
Lily was the opposite of Rose. She was pale. She had blond hair that she wore in a great bun heaped on her head. The bun always looked so messy, just on the verge of collapsing. It never did. Her green eyes were the color of marbles that any boy would go crazy trying to win. But she squinted. She’d had trouble with her eyesight when she was little but didn’t get glasses. Now her face was sort of permanently squinted up. She had the look of a Persian cat sitting in the sun.
Her legs were so long she made any dress she had on seem indecent. She always seemed naked. Businessmen paid ludicrous sums to have sex with her. They only slept with her because the price was so high. They could be sure that no poor man was able to afford her. They would be sticking their penises only where the best penises had gone.
Pierrot was on his way home from the hardware store. His pocket was filled with screws for a pulley mechanism being built to hoist up a two-hundred-pound clown into the air. Lily took Pierrot’s arm as he passed by. “Please, come upstairs with me. I need some help. Quick, it’s an emergency.” She scrunched up her face a little—like a rabbit sensing danger—and tried to convey her distress.
Pierrot followed her. It made him nervous. He was generally very nervous when women called on him to help them. They usually asked him for something he couldn’t provide. He hoped she didn’t want him to lift anything heavy, or to fight off some terrible brute she had become involved with. Pierrot wasn’t good at that sort of thing.
To his surprise, she sat down on the edge of the bed in her room and spread her legs. On the mattress next to her was a tea tray with cups and a vase with wilty-looking mauve flowers in it. Poised on the corner of the tray were a spoon and a syringe atop a tiny bit of newspaper with last week’s headlines.
“Will you shoot this dope into my thigh? I can’t have anyone see marks on my arms.”
He was so surprised. He was in the room with heroin itself. It was as though heroin had taken on the form of a girl. He found the heroin was much more seductive than the beautiful woman. He hadn’t expected to confront it like this. Imagine answering the door and finding your ex-lover standing there, saying she had changed her mind and wanted to come back. How could you resist? What would it hurt to spend a moment more in the room and help this girl out? He liked the ritual of cooking dope. It made him feel important, like someone with an actual profession—a doctor, say. He took a stocking of hers from off the bedpost and tied it around her thigh. The instant he injected her, Pierrot felt high by proxy. They were curiously upside down. The bed was on the ceiling. The rug too was on the ceiling. The table, with its teacups and lamp, wasn’t crashing to the ground. Clever girl! What a way to decorate a home. She looked at him with her eyes closed and laughed.
Then abruptly Pierrot came to his senses and the room righted itself. He had to get out at once or he would succumb to the drug and live on ceilings, floating over life like a ghost, for the rest of his life.
When he flung open the door, a man stood there with a camera. It was the detective with the checkered hat, the one he couldn’t afford. Pierrot nodded to him, but the detective pretended not to notice and moved on.
? ? ?
HE ENCOUNTERED another odd woman a few weeks later when he stopped to look in a bakery window. Montrealers gathered around bakery windows as if the cupcakes on display made a sort of comic opera. You would look at them like you were looking at a Hollywood musical but it was even more marvelous, as it was right there at your fingertips. How could any Hollywood starlet compare to a vanilla cupcake topped with red candies in the shape of tiny stars?
In the window, he saw the reflection of a woman coming up behind him. It was as if she were a submerged body rising up in the water. She wore a man’s black wool coat and had on a sailor’s cap. She came up next to Pierrot and whispered into his ear.
“Tu me reconnais?”
“What’s your name?”
“I like to change my name every week. Once my name was Marguerite, but all I did when my name was Marguerite was get into trouble. I was such a bad girl when my name was Marguerite that I changed it to Natalie.”
Pierrot looked at the girl, his mouth hanging open, not sure what to say.
“We can call ourselves Lucille and Ludovic. We can do whatever we want. And then change our names to something else.”
“My name is Pierrot. I’m quite happy being called that.”
“T’aimes fumer? Do you like to smoke?”
“I like it more than anything.”