Jonathan made out the queenly form of Madame Latulipe, the proprietress, standing behind the desk in a mauve turban and cake makeup. She had tilted her head back in order to quiz him and she was playing to her all-male audience.
“Jacques Beauregard,” he replied.
“Comment, chéri?”
He had to repeat it above the din: “Beauregard,” he called, unused to raising his voice. But somehow the name came easier to him than Linden.
“Pas d’bagage?”
“Pas de bagage.”
“Alors, bon soir et amusez-vous bien, m’sieu,” Madame Latulipe yelled back at him as she handed him his key. It occurred to Jonathan that she had mistaken him for a member of the surveyors’ party, but he saw no need to enlighten her.
“Allez-vous manger avec nous à soir, M’sieu Beauregard?” she called, waking to his good looks as he started up the stairs.
Jonathan thought not, thank you, madame. Time he got some sleep.
“But one cannot sleep on an empty stomach, M’sieu Beauregard!” Madame Latulipe protested flirtatiously, once more for the benefit of her raucous guests. “One must have energy to sleep if one is a man! N’est-ce pas, mes gars?”
Pausing at the half-landing, Jonathan bravely joined the laughter but insisted nonetheless that he must sleep.
“Bien, tant pis d’abord!” cried Madame Latulipe.
Neither his unscheduled arrival nor his unkempt appearance disturbed her. Unkempt is reassuring in Espérance, and to Madame Latulipe, the town’s self-elected cultural arbiter, a sign of spirituality. He was farouche, but farouche in her book meant noble, and she had detected Art in his face. He was a sauvage distingué, her favorite kind of man. By his accent she had arbitrarily ruled him French. Or perhaps Belgian. She was not an expert, she took her holidays in Florida. All she knew was, when he spoke French she could understand him, but when she spoke back at him he looked as insecure as all Frenchmen looked when they heard what Madame Latulipe was convinced was the true, the uncorrupted version of their tongue.
Nevertheless on the strength of these impulsive observations, Madame Latulipe made a pardonable error. She placed Jonathan, not on one of the floors convenient for receiving lady guests, but in her grenier, in one of four pretty attic rooms that she like to hold in reserve for her fellow bohemians. And she gave no thought to the fact—but then why should she?—that her daughter, Yvonne, had made her temporary refuge two doors down.
For four days Jonathan remained in the hotel without attracting more than his share of Madame Latulipe’s consuming interest in her male guests.
“But you have deserted your group!” she cried at him, in mock alarm, when he appeared next morning late and alone for breakfast. “You are not a surveyor anymore? You have resigned? You wish to become a poet perhaps? In Espérance we write many poems.”
Seeing him return in the evening, she asked him whether he had composed an elegy today, or painted a masterpiece. She suggested he take dinner, but he again declined.
“You have eaten somewhere else, m’sieu?” she demanded in mock accusation.
He smiled and shook his head.
“Tant pis d’abord,” she said, which was her habitual reply to almost everything.
Otherwise he was room 306 to her, no trouble. It was not until Thursday, when he asked her for a job, that she subjected him to closer scrutiny. “What kind of job, mon gars?” she inquired. “You wish to sing for us in the disco perhaps? You play the violin?”
But she was already on the alert. She caught his glance and renewed her impression of a man separate from the many. Perhaps too separate. She examined his shirt and decided it was the one he had been wearing when he arrived. Another prospector has gambled his last dollar, she thought. At least we haven’t been paying for his meals.
“Any job,” he replied.
“But there are many jobs in Espérance, Jacques,” Madame Latulipe objected.
“I’ve tried them,” said Jonathan, looking back on three days of Gallic shrugs or worse. “I tried the restaurants, the hotels, the boatyard and the lake marinas. I tried four mines, two logging companies, the cement works, two gas stations and the paper mill. They didn’t like me either.”
“But why not? You are very beautiful, very sensitive. Why do they not like you, Jacques?”
“They want papers. My social insurance number. Proof of Canadian citizenship. Proof I’m a landed immigrant.”
“And you don’t have these? None? You are too aesthetic?”
“My passport’s with the immigration authorities in Ottawa. It’s being processed. They wouldn’t believe me. I’m Swiss,” he added, as if that explained their incredulity.
But by then Madame Latulipe had pushed the button for her husband.
André Latulipe had been born not Latulipe but Kviatkovski. It was only when his wife inherited the hotel from her father that he had consented to change his name to hers for the sake of perpetuating a branch of the Espérance nobility. He was a first-generation immigrant with a cherub’s face and a broad, blank forehead and a mane of premature white hair. He was small and stocky and as fidgety as men become at fifty when they have worked themselves nearly to death and start to wonder why. As a child, Andrzej Kviatkovski had been hidden in cellars and smuggled over snowy mountain passes at dead of night. He had been held and questioned and released. He knew what it was to stand in front of uniforms and pray. He glanced at Jonathan’s room bill and was impressed, as his wife had been, that it comprised no extra charges. A swindler would have used the telephone, signed tabs at the bar and in the restaurant. A swindler would have done a midnight flit. The Latulipes had had a few swindlers in their day, and that was what they did.
The bill still in his hand, Latulipe looked Jonathan slowly up and down, much as his wife had done before him, but with insight at his wanderer’s brown boots, scuffed but mysteriously clean; at his hands, small and workmanlike, held respectfully to his sides; at his trim stance and harrowed features and the spark of desperation in the eyes. And Monsieur Latulipe was moved to kinship by the sight of a man fighting for a toehold in a better world.
“What can you do?” he asked.
“Cook,” said Jonathan. He had joined the family. And Yvonne.
She knew him immediately: yes. It was as if, through the agency of her appalling mother, signals that might have taken months to exchange were transmitted and received in a second.
“This is Jacques, our very latest secret,” said Madame Latulipe, not bothering to knock but flinging open an attic bedroom door not ten yards along the passage from his own.
And you are Yvonne, he thought, with a mysterious shedding of shame.
A desk stood at the center of the floor. A wooden reading lamp lit one side of her face. She was typing, and when she knew it was her mother she continued typing to the end, so that Jonathan had to endure the tension of looking at a mop of untidy fair hair until she chose to lift her head. A single bed was shoved along the wall. Stacked baskets of laundered bed sheets took up the remaining space. There was order, but there were no keepsakes and no photographs. Just a sponge bag by the hand-basin, and on the bed a lion with a zipper down its tummy for her nightdress. For a sickening moment it reminded Jonathan of Sophie’s slaughtered Pekingese. I killed the dog too, he thought.
“Yvonne is our family genius, n’est-ce pas, ma chère? She has studied art, she has studied philosophy, she has read every book that was ever printed in the world. N’est-ce pa ma chèrie? Now she is pretending to be our housekeeper, she is living like a nun, and in two months she will be married to Thomas.”
“And she types,” said Jonathan, God alone knew why.
A letter slowly disgorged itself from the printer. Yvonne was looking at him, and he saw the left side of her face in naked detail: the straight, untamed eye, her father’s Slavic brow and uncompromising jaw, the silk-fine hairs on the cheekbone, and the side of her strong neck as it descended into her shirt. She was wearing her key chain like a nec
klace, and as she straightened herself the keys settled with a clink between her breasts.
She stood up, tall and at first glance mannish. They shook hands, it was her idea. He felt no hesitation. Why should he, Beauregard, new to Espérance and life? Her palm was firm and dry. She was wearing jeans, and again it was her left side that he noticed by the light of the desk lamp: the tight denim creases that stretched from the crotch across her left thigh. After that it was the formal precision of her touch.
You’re a retired wildcat, he decided, as she calmly returned his glance. You took early lovers. You rode pillion on Harley-Davidsons while you were high on pot or worse. Now at twenty-something you’ve reached a plateau, known otherwise as compromise. You’re too sophisticated for the provinces but too provincial for the city. You’re engaged to marry someone boring, and you’re struggling to make him more. You are Jed but on a downward slope. You are Jed with Sophie’s gravitas.
She dressed him, with her mother looking on.
The staff uniforms were hung in a walk-in airing cupboard on the half-landing one flight down. Yvonne led the way, and by the time she opened the cupboard door he knew that for all her outdoor manners, she had a woman’s walk—neither the swagger of a tomboy nor the watch-me roll of a teenager, but the straight-hipped authority of a grown and sexual woman.
“For the kitchen, Jacques wears white and only white, and laundered every day, Yvonne. Never the same clothes from one day to the next, Jacques; it is a rule of my house, as everybody knows. At the Babette, one is passionately conscious of hygiene. Tant pis d’abord.”
While her mother chattered, Yvonne held first the white jacket against him, then the elastic-topped white trousers. Then she ordered him to go into room 34 and try them on. Her brusqueness, perhaps for the benefit of her mother, had an edge of sarcasm. When he came back, her mother insisted that the sleeves were long, which they were not, but Yvonne shrugged and took them up with pins, her hands brushing indifferently against Jonathan’s and the warmth of her body mingling with his own.
“You are comfortable?” she asked him as if she didn’t give a damn.
“Jacques is always comfortable. He has inner resources, n’est-ce pas, Jacques?”
Madame Latulipe wished to know about his extramural preferences. Did Jacques like to dance? Jonathan replied that he was prepared for anything but not perhaps quite yet. Did he sing, play an instrument, act, paint? All these pastimes and more were available in Espérance, Madame Latulipe assured him. Perhaps he would like to meet some girls? It would be normal, said Madame Latulipe: many Canadian girls would be interested to hear of life in Switzerland. Courteously prevaricating, Jonathan heard himself say something mad in his excitement:
“Well, I wouldn’t get far in these, would I?” he exclaimed, so loudly that he nearly broke out laughing, while he continued to hold out his white sleeves to Yvonne. “The police would pick me up at the first crossroads, looking like this, wouldn’t they?”
Madame Latulipe let out a peal of the wild laughter that is the signature tune of humorless people. But Yvonne was studying Jonathan with a bold curiosity, eyes on eyes. Was it tactic or was it my infernal calculation? Jonathan wondered afterwards. Or was it suicidal indiscretion that in the first few moments of our meeting I told her I was on the run?
The success of their new employee quickly delighted the elder Latulipes. They warmed to him with each new skill that he revealed. In return, Jonathan the more-than-good soldier gave them his every waking hour. There had been a time in his life when he would have sold his soul to escape the kitchens for the elegance of a manager’s black jacket. No longer. Breakfast began at six for the men coming back from night shift. Jonathan was waiting for them. An order of twelve-ounce sirloin steak, two eggs and frites was nothing out of the way. Spurning the sacks of frozen chips and ill-smelling catering oil favored by his patroness, he used fresh potatoes, which he peeled and parboiled, then fried in a blend of sunflower and peanut oils, only the best quality would do. He got a stockpot going, installed a herb chest, made casseroles, pot roasts and dumplings. He found an abandoned set of steel knives and sharpened them to perfection—no one else must touch them. He revived the old range that Madame Latulipe had variously ruled insanitary, dangerous, ugly or too priceless to be used. When he added salt, he did it in the true chef’s way, hand raised high above his head, raining it down from a height. His bible was a tattered copy of his beloved Le Repertoire de la Cuisine, which to his delight he had stumbled upon in a local junkshop.
All this Madame Latulipe observed in him at first with an adoring, not to say obsessive, admiration. She ordered new uniforms for him, new hats, and for two pins she would have ordered him canary waistcoats, lacquered boots and cross-garters. She bought him costly pots and double boilers, which he did his best to use. And when she discovered that he employed a common laborer’s blowtorch to glaze the sugar surface of his crème brûlée, she was so impressed by the blending of the artistic with the mundane that she insisted on marching her bohemian ladies into the kitchen for a demonstration.
“He is so refined, our Jacques, tu ne crois pas, Mimi, ma chère? He is reserved, he is handsome, he is skillful, and when he wishes he is extremely dominating. There! We old ladies may say such things. When we see a fine man, we do nor have to blush like little girls. Tant pis d’abord, Hélène?”
But the same reticence that she so admired in Jonathan also drove her to distraction. If she did not own him, who did? At first she decided he was writing a novel, but a reconnaissance of the papers on his desk yielded nothing but draft letters of complaint to the Swiss Embassy in Ottawa, which the close observer, anticipating her interest, had composed for her discovery.
“You are in love, Jacques?”
“Not that I am aware, madame.”
“You are unhappy? You are lonely?”
“I am blissfully content.”
“But to be content is not enough! You must abandon yourself. You must risk everything every day. You must be ecstatic.”
Jonathan said his ecstasy was his work.
When lunch was over, Jonathan could have taken the afternoon off, but more often he went down to the basement to help hump crates of empties into the yard while Monsieur Latulipe checked takings: for God help the waiter or bar girl who smuggled in a private bottle to sell at disco prices.
Three evenings a week Jonathan cooked family dinner. They ate it early round the kitchen table, while Madame Latulipe made intellectual conversation.
“You are from Basel, Jacques?”
“Not far from Basel, madame.”
“From Geneva?”
“Yes, nearer to Geneva.”
“Geneva is the capital of Switzerland, Yvonne.”
Yvonne did not raise her head.
“You are happy today, Yvonne? You have spoken to Thomas? You must speak to him every day. When one is engaged to be married, it is normal.”
And at around eleven, when the disco hotted up, Jonathan was once more there to lend a hand. The shows before eleven were mere displays of nudity, but after eleven the acts became more animated and the girls gave up putting on their clothes between turns, except for a tinselly apron for their cash and maybe a gown they didn’t bother to fasten. When they opened their legs for you for an extra five dollars—a personal service performed at your table, on a stool that the house provided for the purpose—the effect was of a furry burrow belonging to some artificially illuminated night animal.
“You like our floor show, Jacques? You find it cultural? It stimulates you a little, even you?”
“It’s very effective, madame.”
“I am glad. We should not deny our feelings.”
Fights were seldom and had the sporadic quality of skirmishes between puppies. Only the worst of them ended in expulsion. A chair would shriek, a girl would skip back, there was the smack of a fist or the strict silence of two men wrestling. Then out of nowhere André Latulipe was between them like a little Atlas, holding them apa
rt until the company settled again. The first time this happened, Jonathan left him to handle matters in his own way. But when an oversized drunk started to take a swing at Latulipe, Jonathan locked the man’s spare arm behind him and led him to the fresh air.
“Where did you learn that stuff?” Latulipe asked as they were clearing bottles.
“In the army.”
“The Swiss have an army?”
“It’s obligatory for everyone.”
One Sunday night the old Catholic curé came, wearing a soiled dog collar and a patched frock. The girls stopped dancing and Yvonne ate lemon pie with him, which the curé insisted on paying for out of a trapper’s purse bound with a thong. Jonathan watched them from the shadows.
Another night a mountain of a man appeared, with cropped white hair and a cuddly corduroy jacket with leather elbows. A jolly wife in a fur coat waddled at his side. One of Latulipe’s Ukrainian waiters gave him a table by the floor; he ordered champagne and two plates of smoked salmon and watched the show with fatherly indulgence. But when Latulipe looked round for Jonathan, to warn him that the superintendent would not expect a bill, Jonathan had vanished.
“You got something against police?”
“Until my passport comes back, yes.”
“How come you knew he was police?”
Jonathan smiled disarmingly but offered no reply that Latulipe could afterwards remember.
“We should warn him,” Madame Latulipe said for the fiftieth time as she lay sleeplessly in bed. “She is provoking him deliberately. She is up to her old tricks.”
“But they never speak. They never look at each other,” her husband protested, putting down his book.
“And you don’t know why? Two criminals like them?”
“She’s engaged to Thomas, and she will marry Thomas,” said Latulipe. “Since when was no crime a crime?” he added gamely.
“You are speaking like a barbarian, as usual. A barbarian is a person without intuition. Have you told him he mustn’t sleep with the disco girls?”