Beaumont & Me
If you ever meet Beaumont Truchon — and you might — tell him he’s not alone.
He’ll feel out of place and like a part of him is missing, he’ll tell you all that if you ask him, but he’ll say that’s not the concern just now. He’ll look around with eyes that are always busy, even as you speak to him. They are searching for the woman he loves. Sometimes, he’ll go quiet, listening for a voice he knows although he’s never heard it.
He’ll know exactly what this woman looks like, give you a detailed description, and he’ll feel like she’s so close, so damn close… like she’s almost here.
But he’s never met her.
I don’t think it happens very often that a man is given three existences at once, but it happened to Beaumont. There were three of him, and now there are two.
I don’t mean three guys with the same name, I mean one guy three times.
The first Beaumont I met, the one you might someday encounter, was always engulfed in a feeling that was almost sadness but not quite. He was certainly lost, but he had a purpose and who is lost when they have that? He was looking for Mathilda Melody, a woman who loves him for everything that makes him him. She has very beautiful red hair that use wind well, and a smile that is easy to relate to yet holds many secrets. She is generous and forgiving and, most importantly: she exists. He didn’t make her up. He’s not crazy.
He knows she’s near him, always, but he can’t find her. He can’t find that happiness that seems so close, such a vital part of who he is.
The reason I say you might meet him is that he travels the world looking for her, hoping at some point he’ll turn his head quickly enough to catch a glance of her profile or a flash of her bright red hair amongst a crowded street. Beaumont Truchon is taking a lifelong walk with someone he’s never actually seen or spoken to, who always seems nearby and only ever just out of reach.
I met him years ago in a town with a name so subtle I never caught it. He was sitting in a diner, writing something long and full of answers and questions on the surface of his corner table, while sipping on an orange juice. My curiosity lead me to ask him if I could take the seat in front of him. He said yes and, since I was so full of questions, he agreed to relieve me of some.
If I put all the answers I got from him together, it sounds something like this:
“I’m writing a letter to a woman I’ve never met. She is near here, I think, so she might maybe stumble onto this sometime soon. I love her very much. If she feels the way I’ve been feeling for so long, then she’ll understand, she’ll know where to look for me. I’ve been looking for her perhaps ten, fifteen years? Sometimes I’m afraid maybe she’s a ghost, or an angel, because I feel her, she feels near me. All the time. Well, most of the time. She’s around here somewhere, and she loves me. I know this. I’d like to meet her. Just once, at least.”
I didn’t read what was on the table, but I spoke to Beaumont that whole afternoon, and he told me many things. He told me about love. Told me there was no way to play it, this was the trick. It is not an instrument. You can’t be in love the way you want to. He said love was like a straight line running parallel to your life, and your life was another much less stable line that sometimes runs into love’s, and that all you could really do is hope the two lines would cross paths and, when they did, stay entangled for as long as possible. He said that was why some people stopped loving for no apparent reason, couples break up and one of the party is left standing and feeling their love while the other doesn’t anymore. It happens. He said he had been on that line for a very long time, that he was right on top of it. He couldn’t, even knowing what she looked like, find the woman with whom he shared this affection. He said his head was filled with half-memories, too vague to be concrete but present nonetheless. And then he said nothing more (but it was a lot).
Our conversation ended, or faded with an increasingly noticeable absence of words, and after a few brief moments, he took his leave. He was on a train an hour later, his head stuck out the window, feeling wind on his face, apparently favouring fresh air to the smell of the inside of trains.
There was a smile on his face, but it was hiding.
A year later I met Beaumont a second time. I was living in Baltimore with a girl I’ve since lost touch with — how’s life been treating you, sweet Laura? —and met him at a party we had been invited to by friends of friends. When I saw him across the room, among the crowd, he looked radiant and full of life, and living it hungrily. I went to him cheerful and happy to see him happy… but he didn’t know me.
He had never met me at all. And he was sixteen years deep into a fulfilling marriage. With a redhead. A very real one. And sometimes, often, you’d catch her smiling a smile you could easily relate to yet held many secrets.
He had lived in Baltimore all his life, had no brothers or family (except for his loving wife, of course), and had certainly never travelled the world looking for his love, whom he had met right here something like, what, was it twenty years already? We spoke, and the way he spoke of love was like no one ever had. So convincingly, not tragic and randomly like the other Beaumont. No, his take on love was about beauty, about happiness and letting it roam free inside you. Letting it lead you. It was something you made with your heart and kept alive with kindness and understanding. It wasn’t a line your life might or might not randomly encounter, it was a promise.
His eyes were so constantly convinced, so sure and willing and very fine, they made his face glow. This here was a happy man. He said that I shouldn’t worry about it, that love was something in me, like all my other feelings, and that since all my other feelings came out when triggered right, this one would too, though only at the right time. When I asked him how he felt about staying in the same city all his life, he said that he didn’t mind at all, because he saw the world in his dreams. Daydreams and nightdreams transported him to different continents, to different locals where he saw himself writing romantic things everywhere. On little notebooks and on train station walls and on tables in diners… He didn’t expand on that and I didn’t ask him to.
I liked him a lot.
He introduced me to Mathilda Melody, I introduced them to my Laura, and the night supplied the four of us with drinks and fine times. We spoke (though mainly they) about their happiness and the different ways in which they felt it. I have many fond memories of this Beaumont and the enlightening night I spent with him and his dear wife. It went by significantly faster than any other night I had lived, and at five AM Laura and I took our leave, both of us in awe at how happy and perfect this couple was.
The entire night, I did not once speak a word of the other Beaumont, I chose instead to keep the details of that first encounter with his other him to myself.
I spent a long time thinking about the two Beaumonts after that. I thought about how similar they were — despite living in such different circumstances — and about how their feelings were exactly the same, but the context in which they felt them were so different that they couldn’t possibly be understood the same way. The first Beaumont had no one to aim his feelings at, there was only one Mathilda Melody, and she was with another him. All he had were echos of memories which fed his need, though only partially, only just so, and gave him hope, a hope that he believed in just enough to continue his pursuit. There would be no end to his quest. But it was a beautiful quest, so full of truths and worth. Nothing more romantic than to think of him with an image of Mathilda in his mind, in Africa, or China, or England or France, wherever he was now, always looking for her, not necessarily unhappy, armed with a noble reason to keep going, this blind but righteous fate only ever just out of reach.
Sometimes, I wished that he would just forget about her or that he would find out the truth. Only sometimes, though. Again, he had never struck me as unhappy, moving through the world toward something so tangible and gorgeous.
A few years later, while in Montreal, I read in the obituary section of the newspaper that a Beaumont Truchon had passed away, so I decided to show up and pay my respects. I remember feeling that I owed him this much, that he had done me a favour that one afternoon in the diner, his hands quietly folded over what he had written on the table, explaining to me his fable, which I had never forgotten and had enriched me in ways which are difficult to articulate.
When I got to the wake, everybody had already left for the day. I was standing alone at one end of the quiet room. There was Beaumont, at the other end, lying very still in an open casket.
I walked slowly toward him until I could see his body. I was not looking at it, though.
I was looking at his ghost.
Here was another Beaumont, half-transparent, shining, sitting up in the casket, right through himself, facing me, his legs dangling through the wood.
This Beaumont was also still, but not as convincingly, he was not still like a corpse but instead like a thinking man. Composed, too, not sad or panicky which would only be natural, considering the fact that he was dead.
The first thing he said was, “I can’t believe it.”
I decided he was talking to me, not to his own corpse, and asked him what exactly he was referring to. He looked up, considered me for a moment, and then he smiled and said that he knew now, about the three of him. It was completely surreal and not necessarily possible, he said, but damn, it explained so much about his whole life, about how he felt.
I was confused. I asked him where his travels had taken him lately, even though what I really wanted to know was how he had died. Don’t lie, that’s what you want to know, too. He looked at me again, and he smiled again, saying that I had it wrong, that he wasn’t the travelling Beaumont, but a third one, that he had never left this city. He said we had never met.
He knew who I was, though, and he had had a few dreams about me, dreams that today he finally understood. He remembered — though only faintly — talking to me about love, explaining it to me in different ways. He said that he had lived in Montreal all his life, waiting for Mathilda Melody to show up, the woman he loved, the woman he felt so close to.
Sometimes he interrupted himself and smiled wistfully, shaking his head, before continuing. He had been very depressed, often filled with despair, lacking the insights of the second Beaumont and the initiatives of the first. He had so long wondered why Mathilda felt so close, so real. His entire life. It became almost unbearable to have her feel so near and yet always out of reach.
He spent every day in his mind — where she was nearest to him — not talking or sharing or engaging with anyone else, and last week he’d crossed an intersection without looking, lost in a romantic thought and busy mining it for all its warmth, all its tenderness, when a car had hit him and put an end to his life.
He explained that the way he saw it — when his heart still beat and blood still coloured his cheeks — there was no point in being too mobile, going to look for the mysterious red-headed woman who wore her smile like an invitation, since there was a risk he would only get farther from this feeling telling him she was here, so close. He couldn’t risk it. He couldn’t risk losing this eerie, tender proximity, like the second before a hug, the moment before a kiss.
But not now, not anymore, now he knew. He knew that somewhere a version of him was travelling the globe, fuelled by romantic hopes which nourished his heart, and, more importantly, he knew that somewhere else entirely another him was married to Mathilda, happy, and making her happy. Mathilda. That was her name…
The look on his face was filled with such relief.
He would sometimes turn and stare at his other face, the dead one, an expression of absentmindedness still lingering on it, still showing even through the makeup someone he didn’t know had generously applied all over his skin. And he would smile again, wistfully but informed, with new-found wisdom.
I asked if he regretted being dead. He said, “I’m still here, aren’t I?” and I replied that that was true, but he couldn’t be with anyone anymore. That’s all I could think about. He thought about this, and said there were more dead people than living ones, so really he felt optimistic about maybe meeting someone, not Melody, but some other person, a ghost he might get along with. There was a weight gone from his shoulders now that he could finally allow himself to move on from the promise of Melody, seeing as the promise had been fulfilled long ago.
I left the funeral parlour sometime later, my hands in my pockets and my mind buzzing with thoughts. I was thinking about what had led me to Montreal, to Baltimore, to everywhere else where I’d been. I was thinking about what the Beaumont Truchons had taught me, and about what I was feeling at the moment, about the people who had been in and out of my life, about what was in store for me, about how I liked it, the way a pretty lady might look at me sometimes — like she saw something in me. About how I liked to look at people on the street, in diners, at parties, and why.
How we’re all searching.
I felt normal, not crazy or lost.
Thank you for reading this story! If you enjoyed it, consider clapping, highlighting, and/or leaving a kind comment. Also, I have written a novel titled The Last Flight Of The Starleap, which might interest you.
