“I’ll try and talk to him. But it won’t be easy because I’m not sure he wants to talk about it either.”

“Want me to talk to him?”

That was exactly what I’d come for, I knew it now. Why didn’t I realize it before?

Mathieu

Mathieu

The waiting room was filled with young men sporting the latest look, smelling strongly and expensively of whatever scent was currently in, elaborately laid-back, a little too well-dressed for the early morning hour and, above all, alert to everything that was going on around the desk of Francine Beaupré, the secretary, who controlled the situation like the caller at a bingo game. Actually, the secretary of a casting agency is a very important person: people smile at her as they probably never would in real life, they pay court to her, even screaming queens compliment her on her clothes, her hairdo, her nail polish, her lipstick, her makeup; they bring her little presents (very small, of course, they don’t want to seem to be buying favours), they tremble when the intercom sounds on her ultramodern grey smoked glass desk, they give her a hopeful glance as they enter the studio and, depending on how it goes, a look of triumph or defeat when they emerge.

Francine Beaupré had no power whatever over the final selection of candidates for commercials or movies, but it was she who phoned them, it was she who had the fullest knowledge of the agency’s catalogue of photos and CVs, who often “recommended” one name over another to her bosses, depending on her mood—and on whether the ­bearer of the name was “nice” or not . . . So she had to be handled with kid gloves, cultivated like some rare plant, but casually, so no one could say: so-and-so buys the agency ­secretaries. All this took place then amid a sort of false ­bonhomie, as if nothing that was going on in the office had any importance, although every candidate present was prepared to wipe out all the others for a part in a soap opera, or in a commercial for soft-drinks or—since they paid so well—beer.

And if you landed something of course you had to “thank” her. Which meant that Francine Beaupré went out a lot. She was often seen on the arm of some very handsome young man, always different, always deferential, at the premières of eagerly awaited plays or the opening nights of French singers who’d come here to try and revive a career that was fading at home, she turned up at rock concerts and even at the Opéra de Montréal, which she hated, while ­adoring the sophisticated—and, even more, the rich and influential—audience. At these premières she did the same things she did at the office: flattering the right people in the right way, but so cool that it all seemed invisible.