Short story: "The Frenchman's Notebook"

 

The Frenchman’s Notebook

 

It put Leo Kubochev on the spot. He didn`t want to offend either one; but if he had his choice, he would rather have coffee with Jimmy Mitchell.

And he did find himself avoiding Mike`s Mart where Gaston Gauthier went for his long morning coffee break, and just as long afternoon coffee break, the only place in St. Jude that didn`t seem to mind his loud presence, and that was only because Mike`s Mart wasn`t a coffee shop; it was a convenience store with a soup and submarine sandwich bistro.

But it was inevitable that he would have to confront “the Frenchman,” as all the coffee regulars in town referred to him, and he did one afternoon while walking downtown.

Leo was going to the post office. Gaston was sitting in his shiny red Toyota (which always looked like it had just come out of the showroom) parked on Front Street in front of the drug store, waiting to pick up his wife who got off work at five-thirty.

As Leo approached Gaston`s car, he recognized him, steeled himself, and waved hello, hoping that would be enough; but it wasn`t. Gaston stretched over, opened the passenger door window, and waited for Leo to bend over and talk with him.

“Long time no see,” the Frenchman said, in his usual loud and embarrassing voice. “Are you working now? Is that how come you been avoiding me?”

“No, I’m not working yet. But I’ve got some good prospects.”

“Yeah?” Gaston said, feigning excitement. “Where?”

“Oh, here and there,” Leo said. Actually, he didn’t have any job prospects. He said that to everyone who asked. “I’ve put my name back in at the mill.”

“No way!” the Frenchman exclaimed. “They won’t hire you at the mill. You’re too old! You’re wasting your time. I put thirty-seven years in that place, and I know for sure how they think. Come on, Leo; where’s your brains? I thought you were smarter than that!”

And he wondered why people stopped having coffee with him…

 

Born into a family of twelve children, Gaston Gauthier moved to St. Jude from “la belle province” when he was twenty-one and worked in the bush camps for two years, hating every minute of it, before getting on at the paper mill in the nearby town of Rock Point where he worked loading magazines in the Groundwood until they shut that department down, which forced Gaston to take an early retirement because he hated being in the labor pool where he was shunted from one job to another, depending upon where they needed him.

He lived in the company bunk house at Rock Point for the first ten years of his employment until he met his wife Casandra, and when they got married they rented for five years the main floor apartment of the house that used to be the old hospital building of the Ontario Hydro community that my neighbors Bob and Carol had moved to St. Jude when Ontario Hydro closed down the Pine Falls town site; but the new house that Gaston and Casandra purchased wasn’t a regular house, it was a pre-fabricated factory home that was moved onto its location in two parts by a tractor trailer.

When Gaston called me to do some work on his place, it didn’t surprise me to see that his house, as tight as it was in its design—one narrow hallway going half way down the center of the forty-eight-foot unit—was kept completely spotless, everything in its place and not a smudge on the coffee tables, counter top, or windows.

And that’s also how Gaston looked, as though he was going to Sunday Mass every day of the week. He always wore dress pants and neatly pressed shirts. He never wore jeans except for work where he loaded eight-foot logs into the magazine pockets in the cement floor rigged with elevator lifts that dropped the logs down where they would be ground into pulp by the huge grinding stones and then sent by conveyer to the digesters to be cooked, a hard, solitary job which they called “loading magazines” and which was eliminated when the company started buying wood chips instead of logs. But Gaston never went to work in jeans; he had a locker at work, and he changed his clothes before and after every shift.

Gaston took his time showering after work, because he commuted in his own car from St. Jude to the paper mill in Rock Point. He used to belong to a car pool (three, actually), but all the men soon tired of him and found some excuse to exclude him from their pool.

He always shaved after his shower, and combed his neatly trimmed hair; and every day, for reasons one could easily guess given his nature, he kept a record of the weather and other details in his shirt pocket. In fact, this became a standing joke in the mill. “Watch out he doesn’t write you up in his notebook,” the men would say, and laugh.

The two-by-four feet ceiling tiles in the small kitchen ceiling had sagged over the years, and Gaston wanted to know if they could be screwed back up and painted.

I didn’t know. Carpentry wasn’t my trade, and I didn’t want to get involved in something that I knew could easily come back to bite me; but he insisted that it would be alright, because he had asked two other “professionals” about it.

“See,” he said, standing on a chair (after first placing a newspaper on it) and pushing a tile up so that it went to its original flat position. “If you put a screw here it will stay, and then you can paint it.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself, Gaston? It’s not a big job,” I said.

“I want a professional. Me, I’m just a mill worker. You can do that, eh? It’s not a big job. I ask two or three other guys to come, but they never show up. How much you charge for this job? Not very much, eh?”

“I charge by the hour.”

“How much you charge an hour?”

“Twenty dollars.”

“How long it gonna take you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I even want to do it. I don’t know if the screws won’t bust through the tiles. The sag pressure might force the screws to break through—”

“Then put lots of screws!” he jumped in, in his extra loud voice to convey absolute confidence, which in reality only made him look more of the insecure buffoon that everyone in town took him to be.

“Why don’t you put the screws in and leave them for a few days and then I can come back and tape them and paint the ceiling for you,” I said.

“You think they gonna show?”

“Probably. That’s not drywall up there. I won’t be able to get a smooth finish because the tiles have a rough texture. The best thing you can do is texture the whole ceiling, like we did your living room—”

I had textured his living room ceiling four years earlier when he had the tiles replaced with drywall, but word got back to me that I had “gouged” him and I didn’t want to work for him again; but he kept calling and leaving messages on my answering machine.

I never liked the man from the day I met him. He was a rude little martinet who everyone in town knew kept his wife in her place (their only child ran away from home when she turned sixteen), but he couldn’t have the same kind of control over others, and that fostered a personality much too strange for the good people of St. Jude to suffer. But for the sake of my business, I had to be professional; so, I answered his message in person.

“How much you charge me for texture?” he asked.

“My texture rate is still the same, one dollar per square foot; but I’d have to do prep work first, so that would be extra.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I have to prepare the ceiling first. If you screw the tiles back into place, I’ll have to tape them so the heads won’t show, and then I have to tape all the seams as well; and then I’ll have to prime the whole ceiling before I texture it.”

“How much you charge me for the whole job?”

“Do you want me to screw in the tiles too?”

“Yeah. You do the whole job.”

“Are you sure you want me to give you a price?”

“I don’t like my ceiling! It look like hell! I have to fix it! I can’t look at it no more!”

“Why don`t you replace the tiles with drywall like you did the living room?”

“I ask, but no one want to do the job for me. Give me a price for texture.”

“Okay,” I said, and worked out a price for the entire job. “But I won’t be able to do it for you for a month. I’ve got other jobs ahead of you.”

He studied my estimate, then looked at me with his suspicious little eyes and was about to say something but relented; but he relented relenting, and said, “How about you give me a deal. I pay you big money to do my living room. You should give me a good deal for my kitchen. What you say?”

“I have to make a living too, Gaston. That’s my price, take it or leave it,” I said, and turned to leave. Just as I was about to open the door, I added, “If you can get someone else to do the job, please go ahead. You have my blessing.”

Unsure of what I meant, he just stared at me. Gaston wasn’t the most perceptive person in town. “Okay, I think about it,” he said, and that night he called, and the following month I did the job, taking extra caution to avoid Murphy’s Law which always seemed to manifest for people like Gaston; but once again, word got back to me that I had gauged him.

This time I was told by Leo Kubochev, whom I hired occasionally to work for me whenever I got a bigger job, and he told Leo that I had “stuck” it to him really good…

 

Jimmy Mitchel was just the opposite of the Frenchman. Where Gaston was meticulous in his appearance, Jimmy always looked rumpled; but it didn’t seem to matter to him. In fact, it suited his easy-going nature. And unlike the Frenchman, who craved to be noticed (another reason he spoke so loudly), Jimmy’s ego didn’t need that kind of attention; he was perfectly content to fade into the background.

A down-to-earth, easy-going “down-homer” (he hailed from Cape Breton), Jimmy also worked at the Domcan Paper Mill in Rock Point, a truck driver and loader operator before retiring at sixty-five. He was married with three children, two boys and a girl, all grown up and living in different parts of the country; but his wife one day packed up and left him for the man she had been having an affair with most of their married life.

It broke Jimmy’s heart, but he didn’t blame his wife for leaving him. He still loved her. One day, while having coffee and a plain old-fashioned donut with Leo at Robbins Donuts in the city where they had gone up just for a drive, in Jimmy’s Mercury, he said to Leo, with a mixture of melancholy and amusement in his quiet, soft-spoken voice, “Today’s my thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. I think I should celebrate, don’t you?”

Leo smiled. Jimmy had been divorced twelve years, and not once did he show an interest in other women, though some women in St. Jude showed an interest in him.

Jimmy’s charm was his innocence. It was also his flaw. But that didn’t seem to bother him. Somehow, he had managed to survive all of life’s blows that his innocence invited; and at his age, he wasn’t about to change. That’s why he stopped talking to the Frenchman; the very core of his being had been impugned by the man’s impudence.

 

I had also done some work for Jimmy. Not for Jimmy Mitchell himself, but for the fly-by-night contractor that Jimmy had contracted to renovate his washroom.

Pro-Renos was from Winnipeg. They were canvassing all the towns in the North Shore of Ontario. I had heard of them from some of my customers, and what I heard wasn’t all that favorable; but when they asked me to do some drywall taping and painting, I accepted. Work was scarce that summer.

Lorne, the salesman for Pro-Renos, approached me. He was as unctuous as salesmen can be. So slick was he, that he talked a friend of mine (whom I considered to be one of the most frugal people I had ever met) into a renovation that her carpenter son-in-law could have done for one half the price and still made a salary and profit; but I played dumb.

“What are your rates?” Lorne asked me.

“Twenty dollars an hour,” I replied.

“Do you have a GST number?”

“Yes.”

“What if I paid you cash?”

“Sorry. I have to charge GST,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, too clever to push the point. “When can you start?”

“Whenever. I don’t have much going on right now.”

“Good,” he said, and we drove over to Jimmy Mitchell’s house to show me what had to be taped and painted.

Jimmy was still working at the paper mill at the time. That’s why he did the renovation job. He didn’t want to be saddled with that expense when he retired, so Lorne easily talked him into it; an eight-thousand-dollar job that I calculated could have been done for half that price by a local tradesman; but I didn’t tell Jimmy that.

I did however suggest that he get another estimate for the siding job on his house that he was going to give to Pro-Renos the following spring. “Get Terry McAllen, or Art Simpson; I’m sure they’ll give you a much better price.”

“I didn’t know there was anyone around here who could do that kind of work,” Jimmy said. “If I had known, I would’ve gotten another price for my washroom. What do you think? Do you think I paid too much?”

“It seems a bit much to me. Whatever you do, Jimmy; don’t let Lorne talk you into the siding job until you get another price. Ask Terry or Art. See what they say first, okay?”

“Okay,” Jimmy said, and he did get two other quotes; but when he told the Frenchman what Terry McAllen had charged him to do his siding, Gaston, in his extra loud voice said: What’ the matter with you? You crazy? You coulda got that job for half the price!”

Jimmy did not react. In his usual quiet voice, he said, “I got two other prices, and they were both higher. I think Terry gave me a good price. And he did a good job.”

“No way! That’s too much money! I think he stuck it to you real good! I know these guys. They’re all crooks!”

Jimmy didn’t say anything. There was no point talking to Gaston. He finished his coffee and went home and watched racing on TV. Jimmy loved car racing. He used to race stock cars when he was younger. He had trophies and pictures of his ten years of racing, but his wife took all the photo albums with her when she left. Then Jimmy made himself some dinner; shake-and-bake pork chops, boiled potatoes, and carrots; and he had his usual beer.

Jimmy was overweight and had high cholesterol. His doctor put him on medication for his cholesterol, and he was told to watch his diet and to exercise; so, he started walking every day. He began to enjoy his walks, doing up to four and five kilometers some days; but he had trouble controlling his diet. “I just can’t seem to lose any weight,” he said one day in the coffee shop. He was sitting with Gaston, Mike, and Bunny, who were all retired. “I cut back on my eating, and I walk every day,” Jimmy said, “but I’m still the same weight.”

“That’s simple,” the Frenchman said. “You eat too much!”

“I guess so,” Jimmy replied, in his easy-going manner.

“It’s not how much you eat, Jimmy,” Bunny said; “it’s what you eat. That’s what my wife tells me anyway. She should know. She belongs to Weight-Watchers.”

“What’s the difference what you eat? You eat too much, you get fat. That’s the trooth, eh?”  Gaston said, expecting everyone to agree with his irrefutable logic. And it didn’t matter what they talked about, the Frenchman had to put his peculiar spin on things, which always got to one or the other of the coffee regulars eventually.

But it was more than that. Gaston interrupted conversations. “out-louding everyone,” as Leo Kubochev put it; and he was rude, and insensitive.

One time, a couple of weeks after Jimmy retired, he was sitting with Gaston in Mike’s Mart. They didn’t know each other that well, so they talked about themselves, their family and so on; and Gaston said, “Oh, yeah; that was your son that had that bad car accident a few years ago! I remember now! The other boy got all crippled up!”

Jimmy didn’t want to remember. It was his car that his son was driving, and with all the trauma and hassle with the insurance company, he wanted to put it all behind him; but Gaston, seeing the crippled boy’s brother sitting in another booth, called out, “Hey Billy! Where’s your brother now?”

Taken by surprise, Billy Preston didn’t know what the Frenchman was after. “Which one?” he asked, with some embarrassment.

“The cripple,” Gaston called back.

Jimmy wanted to crawl into a hole and hide. His back was turned to Billy, so he couldn’t see him; but he felt the heat of Billy’s red face burn into his back.

“He’s in the city,” Billy said, reluctantly.

          “Oh, I didn’t know that,” Gaston replied. “You know that car he got smashed up in? That was Jimmy’s car! That was his car,” he said, pointing to Jimmy. “Yeah, that was his car. Did you know that?”

Billy lowered his head. Of course, he knew; but he didn’t want to talk about it, especially not across the room with that loud Frenchman, and Jimmy felt no less humiliated than the crippled boy’s brother.

But Jimmy was patient with Gaston. He wasn’t much of a coffee shop goer until he retired, but once he found himself with all that time on his hands, he didn’t know what to do with himself, so he began going out for coffee just to get out of the house and be with other people. And he enjoyed talking with other retirees.

But it was bound to happen. Jimmy didn’t feel like making lunch one day, so he dropped into Mike’s Mart for a soup and submarine sandwich. Gaston, who had dropped his wife off at work at Harvey’s Pharmacy, was still sitting in a booth by himself nursing his second cup of coffee and staring out the window. Jimmy ordered his lunch and joined him.

One thing led to another, and before long they were talking about hub caps. Jimmy tried to explain to Gaston that the hub caps of his Mercury Century weren’t like other hub caps; they were only six or eight inches in diameter, and not the full size.

“No way!” Gaston said. “All hub caps are the same size! What’s the matter with you? You know that!”

Jimmy, who had taken off the back right tire of his car the day before to check for a rattle that he thought was coming from the shocks, knew what he was talking about; but he couldn’t get through to the Frenchman that his hub caps were smaller than other hub caps. “They’re only this size,” he said, forming a small circle with his hands. “I know. It’s my car. I just took off my tire yesterday—”

“Bullshit! They don’t make hub caps that small! I know that for sure!”

“I’m telling you, Gaston; I know the size of my hub caps. They’re only this big.”

“No way! I think you bullshit me!”

“You don’t believe me?”

“No way!”

“Are you calling me a liar?” Jimmy asked, incredulously.

“For sure!” Gaston said, in his extra loud voice.

Jimmy didn’t know what to say. He had never been called a liar to his face before, and the very thought of being called a liar—especially about something that he knew was a definite fact—so affected him that he began to shake all over.

“What’s the matter with you?” Gaston asked.

Jimmy couldn’t speak. He just stared at Gaston, studying him as though he were seeing him for the very first time; but again, Gaston said, “What’s the matter with you, you sick?”

Jimmy winced, and then his whole face contorted as though he had just seen something so utterly repulsive that he had to get away as quickly as possible.

He put his hands firmly on the table and forced himself up, and looking down at the Frenchman he said, “I’m not talking to you anymore.” And he didn’t. He left and never sat with the Frenchman again. That was two years ago.

At first Jimmy used to avoid going to Mike’s Mart whenever he saw the Frenchman through the big plate windows sitting in one of the booths; but then he said to himself, “Why should I deny myself because of him? If I want a submarine sandwich and a bowl of soup, I’m going to have them,” and he went in and sat in another booth.

This happened at least once a week, and every time it happened, someone they both knew would walk in and invariably sit with Jimmy; but the Frenchman could not figure out why. It was beyond his comprehension. But he always took out his notebook after each incident, and made a little note…

 

Leo Kubochev, who walked downtown to the post office every day, had to walk by Mike’s Mart, and he would often see Jimmy sitting by himself in one booth and Gaston alone in another, but he never went in because he didn’t want to choose between them. But Gaston confronted him again one day. “So how come you avoid me?”

“I’m not avoiding you,” Leo said, lying.

“Then how come you don’t have coffee with me no more?”

“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t been around,” Leo said, embarrassed.

“I see you walking downtown every day. What’s the matter with you? You think I’m stupid?” Gaston replied, giving Leo his fixed stare whenever he meant business.

“Look, I have to go,” Leo said, not wanting to get into a discussion. “I have to get a money order before they close. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay. See you later,” Gaston said, trying to sound casual; but Leo didn’t like being put on the spot like that, and he decided that he, like all the others, had to make a choice.

He hated to do it, but he didn’t want to sacrifice his freedom in town just because he didn’t want to sit with Gaston. But he did sacrifice his freedom, because he couldn’t offend the Frenchman “He can’t help himself,” he rationalized. “That’s just the way he is.”

One day, however, while walking back home from the post office he looked into Mike’s Mart and saw Jimmy and Gaston sitting alone in separate booths, and something gave way: he was simply tired of the Frenchman having that kind of power over him.

He walked in boldly and said hello to Gaston, and then he got a soup and coffee and sat with Jimmy. Gaston made a note in his notebook and never talked to Leo again. In fact, there were many people in town Gaston had stopped talking to; but no one cared.

 

——