The Main

“I hope you didn’t have anything big on tonight,” she says.

“Nothing very big. A pinochle game I had to postpone, that’s all.”

“Hey, wow, Lieutenant.” She makes two clicking sounds at the side of her cheek. “Pinochle! You really know how to get it on.” She lifts her glass. “Salut?”

“Salut.”

She finishes half her drink and sets it down on the bar. “That word ‘salut’ reminds me of a proof we recently had that our aural-oral system of language learning is not without its flaws. We had an Arab student here —a nephew of one of those oil pirates—and he was being preened to take over the world, or learn to surrender in six languages, or whatever the fuck they do. Dumb as a stick! But they were giving him all sorts of special tutoring at McGill—I think his uncle bribed them by buying an atomic laboratory for them, or half of South America, or something like that… I mean, he was really stupid. He was so dumb he’d have difficulty making the faculty of a polytechnic in Britain, or getting his Ph.D. in journalism in the States… That line would get a laugh in an academic crowd.”

“Would it?”

“You’re not much of an audience, LaPointe. And now I don’t even remember what that story was supposed to illustrate.”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe you’re just playing for time.”

“Yes, maybe. How about another drink?”

“I still have this one.”

“I think I’ll have another.” She brings it around the bar and sits beside him. “I had the weirdest experience just now. I was crossing the park, and there was someone there, in the shadows.”

“Someone you know?”

“That’s just it. I had the feeling I knew him, but… I can’t explain it I didn’t see him, really. Just sort of a shadow. But I had this eerie feeling that he wanted to talk to me.”

“But he didn’t?”

“No.”

“Then what frightened you?”

She laughs. “Nothing. I was just scared. I warned you it was a weird experience. Am I babbling, or is it my imagination?”

“It’s not your imagination. This afternoon you said you knew me. Tell me about that.”

As she speaks, she deals with her glass, not with him. “Oh, I was just a kid. You never really noticed me. But for years, you’ve been… important in my life.” She puffs out a little laugh of self-derision. “Now that sounds heavy, doesn’t it? I don’t mean you’ve been important in the sense that I think of you often, because I don’t. But I think of you at… serious times. It must be embarrassing to have a stranger tell you that she has a rather special vision of you. Is it?”

He lifts his glass and tips his head. “Yes.”

“You think I’m drunk?”

He balances his thumb against his little finger. “A little.”

“Drunk and disorderly,” she says in a distant tone. “I charge you, young woman, with being drunk, and with having a disorderly life—a disorderly mind.”

“I doubt that. I think you have a very orderly mind. A very clever one.”

“Clever? Yes. Neatly arranged? Yes. But disorderly nevertheless. The front shelves of my mind are all neatly stacked and efficiently arranged. But back in the stacks there is a stew of disorder, chaos, and do you know what else?”

“No. What?”

“Just a pinch of self-pity.”

They both laugh.

“Now how about another drink?” She goes around the bar to refill her glass.

“No, thanks… all right. Yes. And tell me, with that self-pity you talk about, is there some hate?”

“Tons and tons, Lieutenant. But…” She points at him quickly, as though she just caught him slipping a card from his sleeve. “But not enough to kill.” She laughs drily. “You know something, sir? I have a feeling we may spend a lot of this night talking about two different things.”

“Not all of it.”

“A threat?”

He shrugs. “So, tons and tons of hate. Do you hate me for not remembering you?”

“N-n-no. No, I don’t blame or hate you. You were a central figure, a star actor on the Mam. I had an aisle seat near the back. I spent my time staring at the one actor, so naturally I remember him. You—if you ever bothered to look out at the audience—wouldn’t see them as individuals. No, not hate. Take two parts disappointment, mix in one part resentment, one part dented vanity, dilute with years of indifference, and that’s what I feel. Not hate.”

“You said your mother was a hooker on the street. What was her name?”

She laughs without anything being funny. “Her name was Dery.”

LaPointe’s memory rolls and brings up an image of twenty years ago. Yo-Yo Dery, a kind of whore you don’t see around anymore. Loud, life-embracing, fun to be with, she would sometimes go with factory workers who didn’t have much money, and for free, if they were good mecs and she liked them. Carefree and mischievous, she earned a reputation as a clown and a hellcat when, right in the middle of the dance floor of a crowded cabaret (the place where the Happy Hour Whisky a Go-Go now is), she settled a dispute with another hooker who claimed that Yo-Yo’s red hair was dyed. She lifted her skirt, dropped her drawers, and proved that her red hair was natural.

“You remember her, don’t you,” Mlle. Montjean says, seeing his eye read the past.

“Yes. I remember her.”

“But not me?”

Yes, come to think of it. Yo-Yo had a daughter. He talked to her once or twice in Yo-Yo’s flat. After Lucille’s death, when the need to make love got annoying, he went with street girls occasionally, always paying his way, although as a cop he could have got it free. Yo-Yo and he made love three or four times over the years. Yes, that’s right. Yo-Yo had a little girl. A shy little girl.

Then he recalls how Yo-Yo died. She killed herself. She sent the kid to stay with a neighbor, and she killed herself. It astonished everybody on the Main. Yo-Yo Dery? The one who’s always laughing? No! The one who proved she was a redhead? Suicide? But why?

LaPointe made the break-in. Rags stuffed in the crack under the door. He had to shatter a window with a beer bottle. Yo-Yo had slipped sideways onto the kitchen floor, her cheek resting on the bristles of a broom. There were cards laid out on the table. She had turned on the gas, and started playing solitaire.

Funny how details come back. There was a black queen on a black king. She had been cheating.

But what became of the kid? Vaguely, he recalls something about a neighbor keeping the girl until the social workers came around.

“Do you remember why they called her Yo-Yo?” Mlle. Montjean asks, almost dreamily.

He remembers. Like a Yo-Yo, up and down, up and down.

Mlle. Montjean turns the stem of her tulip glass, revolving it between her thumb and finger. “She was good to me, you know that? Presents. Clothes. We went to the park every Sunday when it wasn’t too cold. She really tried to be good to me.”

“That would be like her.”

“Oh, sure. The good-hearted whore. A real Robert Service type. In a way, I always knew what she did for a living, even when I was four or five. That is… there were always men around the flat, and they left money. What I didn’t know at that age was that it wasn’t the same in everyone else’s house. But when I was old enough to go to school, the other kids straightened me out soon enough. They used to chant at me: ‘Redhead, Redhead’—I can still hear those two singsong notes, like a French ambulance. I didn’t understand why they chanted that, and why they giggled. My hair has always been brown. You see. I didn’t know about Yo-Yo’s epic proof in the dance hall. But all the other kids did.”