My parents were not angry with me, quite the opposite. Mother gave me a large plate of roast beef with mashed potatoes. Since it was a weeknight, I was expecting some Jell-O for dessert, but no, she had saved some of the maple-syrup pie for me.
That flavour of maple syrup made me think of Sophie and Elizabeth; Sophie who had cooked that delicious sugar-shack-style luncheon, Elizabeth who had furnished the priests and the departed bishop—and I—with the real, eagerly-awaited luncheon.
I took a mental note to myself, not to forget to pour maple syrup on Elizabeth or Sophie and do some licking; doing this on Louise would be nice too.
Was I ever going to see her again? There was the question—Officer Donald, the old fuzz; there was the rub and obstacle.
That old fuzz had robbed me of my first socially acceptable girlfriend, a girl I could have confidently brought home with me, a girl I could go to the malt shop with.
Suzanne, my dear sister, covered my cheeks with kisses, smearing them with her rouge as she was quite beside herself with joy; she was the loving sister, complete with tears. I never realized she was that fond of me.
The alluring shapes of her breasts caught my eyes as she stooped down to hug me as I sat and ate.
“I thought you were never coming back! Oh, Gaston! I’m so happy to have you back!”
“Calm down, sweet sister! I’m happy to be home too,” I replied, allowing myself to tenderly caress Suzanne’s dainty hand, which my impure mind swiftly began to visualize around my cock as I used the silver dessert fork to cut a small bite of that wonderful pie.
I tried to chase these impure thoughts, but they always came back like a legion of stubborn demons.
I avoided my sister’s gaze and looked down at my half-eaten piece of pie while Mother warmed up my cup of coffee, but then my gaze was attracted and drifted to her stockinged lower legs and the Italian-leather heeled shoes encasing her dainty feet.
Suzanne was the only one whose presence made me a bit ill-at-ease, mostly because her figure sometimes flashed in my fantasies while I was banging Elizabeth or Sophie.
I complimented my mother on her fine cooking in an attempt to take my mind elsewhere than on my sister’s boobs and her other immoral charms.
Father called the police to tell them I was home, safe and sound.
He repeated what I told him, that I simply took a bus and got away because I wanted to see Montreal; I was at the Oratoire Saint-Joseph and listened to the Quattuor de Lorraine, and I simply took a room by myself. I also had him tell them that Officer Donald Gauthier had seen me on Avenue Cartier holding hands with a Louise, a girl who lived on the same street as him.
“Yes, he met her on the bus. Officer Gauthier drove her home. … Yes, Sergeant. Yes, all’s well. Uh, my son would like to know what the family name of that girl is and where he can find her, if you know it by any chance. For some reason, Officer Gauthier was pressed for time and my son didn’t… All right, yes. I’ll tell him that.”
My father hung up the phone and said that Officer Gauthier was off-duty and would phone us tomorrow.
I was very much confused, but I felt it was perhaps a good idea to make the Sergeant aware that Officer Gauthier drove Louise home. That Sergeant was a superior and it could be that the old fuzz was known for having been hovering around her for some time. It could be a good way to hit back at him. He clearly struck me as the type to take advantage of others using his position of authority.
With all that had occurred in that wood past Côte Gilmour, Louise’s family name had escaped my mind, although the old fuzz had said it aloud, more than once, while he was so disgustingly taking advantage of her.
The bastard! If it weren’t for him, I would have a bona fide girlfriend, I mean a proper girlfriend I could have openly dated and call my steady date. I had pleasured her on the bus—and she obviously loved it.
Louise had a natural, simple way of being pretty and natural; she had something deeply comforting that made me want her. Elizabeth was a living, walking dream of glamorous perfection. Sophie was a country girl. Louise was a town-bred chick, and I was a town-grown lad.
When we shared that vanilla milkshake, there was such genuine closeness between us as I had never felt with Elizabeth or Sophie. We bonded when our foreheads were resting against each other while sipping that delicious malted milk and deeply lost in each other’s gaze.
The seafoam turquoise of her eyes would always remain with me. I hoped it was not going to become the evermore distant dream of a lost paradise.
A paradise lost thanks to Officer Donald Gauthier.
There he stood in front of me in my mind’s eye, a vile old man with piggish satisfaction while Louise knelt at his feet with my defunct trench coat draped over her shoulders; her mouth was filled with his dick while her beautiful head bobbed back and forth in a vulgar dance of submission.
When he erupted in grunting victory, the old fuzz shot and splattered his milkshake all over her spotless face and he looked at me with a wicked smile and a glare in his eyes that said, “She’s mine!”
I hoped that making his superiors aware that he had some dealings with her would make a difference. Perhaps my heart was still too naive.
A knock on my bedroom door interrupted the thread of my thoughts. Father?!
He carefully closed the door after making sure Mother wasn’t anywhere nearby. Then, he sat on my bed, staring at me like a little boy looking at Santa Claus and his bag of toys. To say I had never seen him like this was a gross understatement.
There he was, a dignified-looking businessman in his navy-blue suit, thinning hair, yet still retaining some of his youthful features, looking at his son with wild anticipation…
“How was that bonnie lass, son? Your uncle Henri said she was the loveliest and most glamorous lass he had ever seen in his life! How is she? Did you drive somewhere together and spend the night at the motel? Don’t worry son, it will be our secret.”
I felt I could trust Father, so I told him part of what we did together, omitting the gang-fuck at the church, omitting Sophie and certainly omitting Elizabeth’s name and where she was now.
“Ha ha… I’m proud of you, son! Come to my study and we’ll drink a scotch together,” he finally said, patting me on the shoulder.
Then, I broke down and started to cry on his shoulder, thinking of Louise. I felt I was never going to see her again, and it was so unfair!
“Come, come, son! Pull yourself together and snap out of it! You’ll meet other girls… don’t make a big mishmash out of it, son. Your life is just beginning. You have youth; it’s like having the sun inside you! Do you know what men my age would give to be your age again?”
“Then, that must be why Donald fucked Louise and took her virginity.”
My father was ghastly pale and looked at me as if I were Abraham Lincoln who came back from the dead. I then realized what I said; I was thinking aloud.
“What did you just say?! Did I hear correctly? A police officer took advantage of a virgin lass?! This is serious. Very serious indeed!”
“Father, don’t say anything. Policemen can give trouble to honest people like us.”
“Well, I hope that pig calls you when the Sergeant tells him about… What was her name?”
“Louise. I met her on the bus. She’s the reason I was crying. Oh, she’s such a lovely girl. If you saw her, you would adore her!”
Then, I started to cry again and this time, my father grew impatient.
“Snap out of it, son! You’re a man now, and men don’t cry like lasses! Now, let’s have that scotch together. And please, do tell me more about her.”
***
Later that week, Uncle Henri invited us for his usual spaghetti dinner on Friday night. He insisted that I came. He said his daughter wanted to ask me some questions about her Latin lessons, which I knew was a bullshit story to get my arse over there.
Of course, Uncle Henri said nothing about me and my mysterious mistress as long as he was sitting at the dinner table in the immediate vicinity of his wife, a fine housewife whose prettiness suddenly revealed itself to me as a shock.
She wore her dark hair in the Italian style, which truly suited her well, and I told her so when we met in the entry hall. She smiled with surprise and pride in her eyes.
I loved the way her dark curls were tousled instead of tight; her short hair was shaggy, but sculpted, with spit curls that framed her pale face and delicate neckline. I was already picturing myself as a neck-kissing lover in the act of unbuttoning the top of her royal-blue dress and disregarding the dignified morality of her pearl necklace.
My compliment was a sincere one and I think she felt it. I later overheard her talking about me with my mother, her stepsister, as she said, “My! My! My! Your little Gaston is now a young man; what a mighty fine chap he’s becoming!”
“Calm down, Solange! He’s still but a lad and he’s your nephew…”
“Oh, yeah, a lad; broad-shouldered and six feet tall, with strong arms a girl can confidently lean herself into. Yes, like you said, a lad!”
My experience with Elizabeth had opened the doors to a new world. All of a sudden, grown women like my aunt were beautiful to me. No woman seemed to be off-limits to me, except my sister and my mother.
Guillaume and Jean-Pierre, my two young brothers, were constantly fidgeting with utensils at the table or stepping off their chair to go play with the family dog, a Shetland shepherd. This restlessness wasn’t that surprising since they were only four and six years old.
They heard my well-known voice as I helped my mother and reminded them about the wonderful rolled cake and fresh whipped cream that was in store for them if they behaved.
As I spoke, I imagined I was licking that whipped cream off Solange’s breasts. From the cute bulges that were delightfully apparent at the front of her dress, I understood I would genuinely enjoy such an adventure; perhaps Solange would too.
She was presently giving me that same kind of girl-in-candy-store look that I now knew well from Elizabeth. I felt amazed and a bit terrified by how quickly I became such a veteran at observing women.
Uncle Henri and Aunt Solange had three daughters, two of whom were under ten—Béatrice and Laure. Alice was turning fourteen in August, and she had reached that in-between age when you’re too old for this, or else you’re too young for that.
She was quickly growing into a teenage version of her dark-haired mother, except she wore her dark hair longer and styled it in an age-appropriate ponytail. Alice sat at my right and kept pestering me with questions while I ate my spaghetti.
Alice wanted to pull me in her bedroom so we could listen to her jazz records together, but after the dinner was concluded, Uncle Henri made sure I was included in their men-only-brandy-and-cigar club rendez-vous in his study, which was lined with books and fitted with a small bar.
Uncle Henri closed the door, and there I stood, a highly valued guest between my uncle and my father. I had valuable information and this was power.
With a thick Cuban cigar sticking out of his overweight face, my maternal uncle would have looked remarkably like that middle-aged man in the Monopoly board game if he had worn a tuxedo and a stovepipe hat, but he was presently without his homburg hat and wearing a simple bowler shirt with two broad bands of vertical white that brightened that otherwise black shirt with short sleeves.
He looked at me like a kid in wild anticipation on Christmas Eve, his eyes wide open and a bit of sweat shining on his balding head, which perhaps predicted what I was going to look like twenty-eight years down the road.
“Pour yourself a drink, Gaston, and let’s talk!”
He called me Gaston instead of sonny, promoting me to full-man status. This went a bit to my head and I got a bit carried away. The brandy made me cough; my young palate wasn’t used to such strong liquor.
Perhaps my place was still alongside my cousin Alice, listening to records and playing Monopoly with her and her two young sisters while my little brothers played with “cat’s eyes” beads or pretended to be desperados with toy guns. Life was rushing me straight into adult territory; my awakening sexual self loved it, but the boy inside me wanted to slow down a bit. At the end of the day, I was still an in-between teen.
In that all-man study, Father and Uncle both drank my words, while forgetting to sip their brandy.
They sat in dazzled silence and listened to my road-and-motel tale, all of it complete in its glorious details, and their jaws dropped as I did my best to describe what Elizabeth looked and felt like naked; I didn’t forget about the scent of her hair and the fascinating blackness of that wavy hair you blissfully get lost into when you just grunt and hammer her like a beast until that wonderful explosion where words lose their meaning.
I still remained level-headed enough to leave her true name out, calling her Elsie like we did in the presbytery, but my tale nonetheless made it understood that she drove me toward Three Rivers and Montreal.
When Father asked me where we stayed after that, I remembered that they were both strongly religious and decided, very boldly, to tell them about the gang-bang in the presbytery. My goal was to shock them and escape that interrogation where I was led into too many revelations about my glamorous girlfriend. Brandy was starting to cloud my judgement too.
“We stayed in a presbytery as honoured guests,” I continued, looking at the bewilderment making a sudden appearance on their faces. “The priest and his deacon both enjoyed her as well, and a bishop was there too. Oh, you should have seen the expression on His Excellency’s face as he dropped his load on her breasts; it was…”
I stopped speaking. The horror on their face told me that they were shocked indeed; much more than I had foreseen. If I had told them I just took a knife and killed two toddlers just for fun, they wouldn’t have looked at me any differently.
“The bishop… Did you say you were near Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, sonny?”
“Well, uh, I guess so, Uncle…”
“You shouldn’t speak about the dead like that, sonny. Shame on you! That bishop died of a heart attack this very week! This… woman, this witch… that Jezebel you were with, she could just as well have pointed a revolver at his head and pulled the trigger. She killed him! Such a saintly man…”
“Son! You’re lying! I hope, really hope that you’re just a dirty little liar, because if that tall tale is true, then you’re on your way to become a depraved young hooligan! Tomorrow, I’ll call the police again and tell them you’re ready to come downtown and make a statement, unless you tell us right now that you’re sorry to make such tall tales!”
I blurted out an apology, acting like I was really sorry while hiding my joy. I knew my father was now going to angrily send me away.
“All right, son! Take your coat and hat and go home! I forbid you to go out for the next three weeks! You have much work to do to make up for the days you missed in college, so go get started! No but, no arguing! You are grounded!”
Stepping out of Uncle Henri’s austere study was like being released from jail. Until I was past the oak door, I did my utmost to act and look mortified. I was very much relieved to be done with this uncomfortable interrogation about Elizabeth.
“Gaston… At last! Let’s go to my room and listen to the Ravens and the Orioles!” my cousin said with such a girly enthusiasm as only a thirteen-year-old lass can display, but I was firm in my resolve.
“Some other time, Alice. My father just put me under detention because of something I’ve done with a… Anyway, I need to catch up with my homework. Good-bye, Alice!”
I gently gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek and ignored her questions as she insisted to know what exactly it was that I had done to get punished.
I took my leave from Aunt Solange. As we stood alone in the kitchen, I gave her a quick kiss on the lips while lovingly stroking her Italian-style hair.
Her expression of astonished pleasure alone made my trip to their house worthwhile. She was quite a lovely woman and a very fine hostess too. Fucking her would be fun, and if she got pregnant at thirty-six years old, everybody would assume it would be thanks to Uncle Henri and his cigar.
After kissing my mother goodnight, I let the chill evening breeze caress my apple cheeks while buttoning up my green-and-cream varsity jacket, happy to look exactly my age. I was going to act like it too.
My uncle’s large house on Avenue Monk looked quite solemn and massive in nightly shadows, with its front alley guarded by a pair of tall, venerable pines that were no less than two centuries old, meaning they were already there when the Battle of Québec was fought in 1759 between General Wolfe and Marquis de Montcalm, who probably…
