Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette

phone booth?” The few drinkers already at tables were watching television, the beery smell created a gentle warmth in the dimness, it was so simple, she discovered. She asked for Corrine, her room number, she could take the stairs on the left that led directly to the room. But would she recognize her? Or laugh? Or greet her briefly, indifferently, then send her away.
    â€œCorrine? She isn’t here any more. They left weeks ago.” The boy was curious. He looked at Marie and he didn’t go back to his glasses.

Thirteen
    A CCORDING TO THE BOY, THEY HAD taken an apartment in town. He didn’t know where. Their life at the hotel had become unbearable. Pietro rarely left his room, they couldn’t even clean it, now and then, he’d fly into a rage, pound the wall at the slightest sound. He never went downstairs except to force Corrine to go up, in the middle of the night. “He’s psychotic, you know.”
    The boy, the owner’s son, was at the age to be studying social sciences. He mentioned it because they were both incongruous here, he in his almost clerical garb, she in her well-cut coat, and also because he wanted to keep her here for a moment. She could have claimed to be Corrine’s cousin or a childhood friend. Say that they’d lost track of each other, that she had conducted a lengthy search before coming here. Talk with him about living in some hovel when luck has passed you by, and the country, vast as it is, is basically so small for human beings and has so little to offer the poor.
    But she invented nothing in a story that boiled down to so little. She had met Corrine last summer, Pietro had been sick, they’d talked just like that, in a park, and with marriage, moving, travelling, going back to school, they’d got out of touch. She’d come to catch up, now that winter was here to stay, and she’d been able to find the time. It would soon be Christmas. Had she not left an address? “No,” he said, “but I can ask.”
    He walked her to the door. Under his eyes he had a peculiar square ridge, it stood out very clearly on his pale face, exposed by his close-cropped hair. He repeated his promise to look. She promised to come back. Soon.
    It was a Monday, and he behaved as if he’d been expecting her. He took her coat, seated her at the bar, offered her a beer which she refused because of the smell and because of Ervant later, offered her a coffee which she barely touched because of the faded cup. He didn’t know exactly where Corrine lived now, but she was working in the little grocery store at the corner of Rhéaume. Marie said nothing, wanted not to believe him, but he had his theories. About women who aren’t as strong as they seem, who dominate the weak, a common characteristic in a nation that is itself subservient. People raised their heads only to find out when to lower them under blackmail. Running a grocery store had always been a job for immigrants, who served there before going on to be served, and you could be an immigrant in your own country. For someone Corrine’s age, though, it was the end of the road. At forty she would wear flowered dresses and an apron, and then Pietro would be able to sneer at her as well as tyrannize her.
    He tried to make her shed the image of Corrine the survivor, the thistle. He gestured with his hands and brushed against her, but it was with words that he tried to get her on his side. There was no need to spar with her, she’d have been easy to take. Now that she had crossed the threshold it would have been good to go up to a room with him, spread a clean sheet, let herself be penetrated while she breathed in the musk of damp walls and of the long neck of this tense young man. There was a sensation of warmth in her groin, but he was looking at her like a girl you take to the movies and then to the Paris Café, a girl to be slept with only by candlelight and to music by Schumann, many