Desire/Fear

Before Louise had gotten married, Pierre used to eat lunch during his lunch break. Now he eschewed the sandwich his wife packed for him daily to ice skate underground. He felt awkward in the office’s kitchen, eating turkey and tomatoes, while Louise ignored him and instead spoke to Reginé about their respective adoring husbands. Before that day, he had been Louise’s confidante. She would whisper stories of her childhood spent in rural Saskatchewan to him. The world she described in these stories sounded like the equivalent of purgatory. Louise had journeyed to Quebec at eighteen lacking any knowledge of the French language or of her new city. On a whim she had decided she might want to be a secretary. All of her words fell straight into Pierre’s ears. And as they fell, he had to constantly remind himself of the sandwich sitting in front of him. The tomatoes had often soaked through the bread, making it moist and soggy by lunchtime. Food was easy to ignore, with Louise around.

Louise’s whisperings soon led to a man named Gerald. Gerald was a chef at a “fine Italian restaurant” downtown. Pierre ate his sandwich and imagined how many of the dishes Gerald made almost certainly contained tomatoes, and how they were guaranteed to be more appetizing than his sandwich. Through Louise’s lips, Gerald was perfect. And he was far younger, far smoother, far less filled with the baggage of one still-existent marriage. Pierre tried to turn the conversation away from Gerald whenever possible, even resorting to national politics as a more suitable topic. As an avowed conservative, Pierre knew Louise disagreed with everything he said, but even an hour-long debate about parliament was preferable to Gerald and his veal parmesan.

And then there was their engagement, and their wedding. The entire office had been invited. Pierre had left after he realized that he had been so intently watching Louise that he had completely missed the priest’s saying: “speak now or forever hold your peace,” and had gone home to his thoroughly confused wife, who had of course expected him to be gone far longer. Her bridge group was still seated in the living room eating peanuts.

Since then, Pierre had felt steadily more ignored by Louise. I know what I wanted you to be, he thought to her. But if you only did consider me a friend then why aren’t you treating me the same way now? This thought filled him with equal parts hope and depression.

Pierre made another loop of the rink, then realized what time it was. 12:50. He skated to the edge of the ice and stepped off, unlacing his skates. She told me she used to ice skate on the edge of someplace called Emma Lake,he thought. She had to be careful of ice fishermen. He imagined her face in his brain. How strange it was that sometimes the people he cared for the most were the ones whose faces he could not recall. It used to be that way with his wife, he would try to think of her while away on business trips and could recall her only as she was posed in their wedding photograph, not as she was in real life. It was easier to bring her face into his mind now. But he didn’t even have a photograph to recall during his thoughts of Louise.

He picked up his skates, walked over to the brick wall, and touched it, imagining the escalator which would lead him to his office building across the street. Three seconds later he was at the foot of it. Riding up he imagined how he could burst into Louise’s cubicle and demand that she listen to him as he professed his love for her. It was a pleasant image to keep in his head.