She and Jeanne hadn’t seen Sébastien because they’d spent the weekend with some radical lesbian friends in the Eastern Townships, whom they didn’t get along with all that well, but saw now and then for old time’s sake. They’d come back late Sunday night, depressed as they always were after these trips they forced on themselves two or three times a year. At first, a few years earlier, they’d been amused at the total rejection of men which their friends advocated, the stones they threw at the mail carrier, the way they ­shouted at the police officers who dared to turn up during a particularly noisy drinking bout, the excessive attempts to feminize their speech which led to horrors like “hersterectomy” and “goddessdamn” and made Mélène threaten more than once to bring along a male friend, a phallus in motherland, their exclusion of tomcats, their attempt to chase away everything that was masculine out of pure, ­simple hatred of the male, but finally, once that fad had degenerated into something that resembled madness, my friends had been turned off completely and had grown more and more remote from the group of women who were cutting themselves off from the world, closing themselves inside a ghetto from which there was no escape, choosing a deliberate, distressing intellectual and physical poverty. Mélène had known some of these women when they were much younger, she’d been fond of them and tolerated ­seeing them “throw themselves away” as she put it, on unforgivably childish concerns instead of tackling real issues. She hadn’t had time to tell me about her weekend; I’d taken her by storm the minute I arrived at her place, at lunch time.

For once I ate what she served me without really noticing. My beloved junk food was the farthest thing from my mind and she took advantage of the situation to feed me ­“naturally.”

She gave me a second helping of a thick soup which ­tasted a little too green and which scratched my throat.

“Why don’t you talk to Mathieu about it instead of me?”

Idiot woman! The reason seemed obvious enough to me!

I blew on my soup.

“It’s too delicate . . . for now. He adores his son, which is normal . . . All I hope is that I’ll be able to adore the kid too . . . But I doubt it. And I’m scared. Our relationship’s too complicated, Mélène, it never seems simple except when the two of us are alone!”

At that moment she’s the one who thought I was being silly. And with reason. I wished I could be like her women-friends in the Eastern Townships and shut myself away in a ghetto, but with Mathieu. No more CEGEP for me, no more child for him. Elementary—and unthinkable. I pushed away the bowl of green soup.