"We have a room in the basement with a big bed but no windows." Weston whispered that to me and then told Bob he'd call back. We wouldn't be spending too much time in the room anyway, but his voice was extremely rude and so we called around some more with no luck. Bob & Mariko's it was. We grabbed a Dr. Pepper, tossed our bags in the car, and drove northwest into the setting sun. Literally. At one point Weston was wearing 3 pairs of sunglasses. Two hours later, we rolled up to the shady Park Slope-esque Rue Laval, and I saw a 70-year-old old man in a plaid shirt and a fedora sitting on the steps chatting with neighbors. Bob.
His voice was jarring at first, but he immediately morphed into a grandfather figure to me, his words slow and soothing, explaining that we should park on the other side of the road, that we're in the heart of dinner time, that they'll get you if you don't. His words all blended slowly together as he unlocked the bottom apartment door, asking if we got here alright, if the traffic was bad, and here's the corner where everyone looks at their computers, and breakfast is served between 9 and 10:15 and we have plenty of space and you have to stand on the bed to turn on the air conditioner and Mariko or myself will help get you all organized in the morning. He says he's like a Jewish grandmother (he sure sounded like one), he likes people, been doing this for 30 years. "Get yourselves a nice bottle of wine around the corner," he said, "they let you bring it into restaurants because of the province's ridiculous taxes on alcohol." He didn't dote or linger, just gave us the keys and told us to go have fun. After browsing the bookshelves in a corner nook of the basement, I was convinced that Bob and Mariko were lovers of the same sex, but you should never judge a book by his bookshelves, apparently.
The next morning, the creek and groan of the floorboards above our heads told us that it was time to make our way upstairs for breakfast. We were greeted at the top of the stairs by a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Mariko, a short, thin, John Lennon-bespectacled Japanese woman, which explained the bamboo and sumo theme in our guest room. I was way off. We were way off from the get go. Bob was hovering at the end of the breakfast table, a bit of jam dangling from his shaggy moustasche, getting everyone organized for the day - and invited us up to their apartment on the third floor to sign a few papers. After croissants, coffee, and a hard boiled egg, we climbed the winding stairs to Bob and Mariko's lair.
I was afraid it would smell like old people. I was afraid they would be smokers, or hoarders. But yet again I was wrong about Bob and Mariko. Their hardwood floors were clean and shined, their furniture sparse and practical. Bob had a typewriter balancing precariously on a pile of pillows in the bay window seat, along with the 1980's black and white television on mute. Their cat, Schwartz, slept quietly in a red sleigh on the floor. We sat on the couch and Bob told Weston where the market is, and what part of Mount Royal park there would be a drum concert. "There are a lot of alternative people there, you could go there to get a good contact high." His thick New York accent still didn't make sense to me in this posh French Canadian neighborhood, so we asked him how he got here. "I came on vacation 30 years ago and never left." I couldn't help but glance over at Mariko, smiling in the chair in the corner, pretending to read.
It goes without saying that if we had stayed anywhere else our experience in beautiful and strange Montreal would have been vastly different. We still would have tried on leather coats and cowboy boots at the vintage store down Rue St. Laurent, we would have bicycled too far past the old Olympic Stadium, and gotten caught int he rain on our way home. We would have still stumbled upon oddities like people in a vacant lot carving stones and people in wheelchairs watching children play in the park and drunk men stumbling into and out of fountains in the moonlight. But Bob and Mariko made the trip unexpectedly and extremely comfortable.
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