Les Tricolores Of My Heart

As any reader of Pride and Prejudice will have seen coming, Ellie and Bigsley just broke up because Bigsley is moving to New York City for a while for work, and ended things. Needless to say, she is devastated. It's sad, but not as sad as it will be when the same thing happens to Olivia. It is coming really soon, and I'm concerned that I am actually going too slow with this. I need to pick up the pace of the plot, eh?

I am currently at 27,023 words. I'm 1,000 behind where I want to be, so I guess that I will just have to write 3,000 tomorrow. I blame it on Harold Potter, and how FUCKING AMAZING the last movie of the series is. WOW.

Here's a little back story on Ellie. Enjoy:

Ellie didn’t think that it was for her, the whole “not getting out of bed and singing along to “You Oughta Know” until her lungs hurt almost as much as her eyes did” thing. She thought that she had had a broken heart, and like she dealt with every obstacle that got in her way, she had taken it with grace and an English stiff upper lip.

Back in the old days, when Ellie had been a McGill student in Montreal, she thought that she had fallen in love. I say “thought,” because at the time she might have characterized it as such, but now she would have never described it that way. It was with a Montreal West Island native named Maxim Charbonneau, a twenty-three year-old chemistry grad student who she often ran into in the Otto Maas Chemistry building. Maxim loved three things in life: materials chemistry, the Montreal Canadiens Hockey Club, and… well, the Montreal Canadiens. He loved them so much that he loved them for two; and when he and Ellie would walk down to le Centre Bell to cheer on their beloved Habitants, he had to love them for two, because Ellie sure wasn’t pulling her weight. There were several other things that he liked, including poetry (particularly sports-themed poems), Montreal smoked meat sandwiches from Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, his intramural hockey team called “Tabernac Dans Les Patins,” and the natural and home-grown Canadian super group, Nickelback. When he saw Ellie for the first time, talking with her film studies professor in the hall outside of Maxim’s office after her class, he figured that he had room for her on the short list of things that he really liked. He would knock off Nickelback, if necessary. He wondered if he had ever seen anyone as beautiful as her, and quickly concluded that he had not. He also had no idea what she was talking about, so he concluded that she had to be smart. She was so beautiful and smart, he was falling for her already. But what she good enough to crack into the top three of his loves? He didn’t think that he could kick out either of the Canadiens, but maybe, if she was really special, he could add a fourth.

He knew that she would often be in his hallway, so he made a point to stay in his office more than usual. This had the distinct disadvantage of forcing him to interact with undergraduates, which he really didn’t like, but it gave him the advantage of hearing her voice and seeing her several times per week. He was soon able to strike up a conversation with her when she was waiting in the hall for a friend. They talked several times, and before he knew it, he had invited her to see the Canadiens take on the New York Rangers. He was nervous for his likes to meet his loves, kind of in the way that someone might be nervous to introduce their new girlfriend to their parents. What if she complained the whole time? What if red and blue made her look ugly? Maybe it was an ambitious first date—and entirely unconventional, on top of that—but he figured that if they couldn’t get along (and by they, I mean Ellie and the Canadiens), then maybe it wasn’t meant to be. They were always going to be together (and by they, I mean Maxim and the Canadiens), but maybe they could still have a chance (they, of course, being Ellie and Maxim).

Perhaps she didn’t love the Habs as much as he did, but other than that glaring personality defect, he had concluded that she was alright. She had read so many books and articles that always had something interesting to say. Perhaps she didn’t cheer and hoot as loudly as he did (or at all) when Georges Laraque got into yet another fight with Sean Avery, who was being a douchebag as usual. But she seemed caring and sweet, so perhaps he could overlook her lack of enthusiasm for on the ice thugishness. Her voice was just so lovely that he could have listened to her talk all day (as long as a game wasn’t on). This could work, he thought.

Olivia knew all of this because Maxim had told Ellie everything. They became quite close over her last year in school, and she had spent a great deal of time in his tiny apartment on rue Milton. They breakfasted at Place Milton with all of the other students, they went on dates to Amelio’s Pizza, and she was in the stands as Tabernac Dans Les Patins cruised to a second consecutive intramural B-division championship. He wrote her some nice poetry, which she still had in a shoebox under her bed in London. Her favourite, “Les Tricolores Of My Heart,” had compared her hair to the beautiful flowing locks of Alexei Kovalev—who for the love of Gary Bettman shouldn’t have been allowed to cover his glorious hair with a helmet— and it had made her swoon. He had also described their partnership as “as fruitful as the goal-scoring partnership of Andrei and Sergei Kostitsyn. Although their relationship was “just beginning to bloom, like the skills of rookie goalie Carey Price,” he looked forward to “a promising future, and many awards.” This was sort of where the poem derailed; she wasn’t aware of any awards that were given out for being in a good relationship, and she suspected that he was mostly just talking about Carey Price there.

Between you and me, Maxim had even briefly thought that Ellie might be the future mother of his children (who would most certainly be named Maurice Richard Charbonneau and Guy Lafleur Charbonneau—he wasn’t exactly sure what he would have done with girls) and they could have season’s tickets to the Bell Center and wear matching jerseys. Ellie’s mother Fran was particularly perceptive, and when Ellie had brought Maxim home to Toronto for Easter that year, she had been sure that Maxim was going to “make her an offer.”

Of course, things hadn’t exactly worked out that way. Maxim had received an offer of admission to pursue his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he was entirely unable to turn it down. That same week, Ellie had been accepted as an intern for Darcy Publishing in London, which eventually turned into her full-time job at Globetrotting Gurlz. They had sat down one night on Ellie’s bed to tell each other their news. Perhaps if only one of them was leaving, it might have worked out; they could have stayed together and made it work long-distance for a while, then perhaps one of them could have relocated. But no, that wasn’t the case. It was over, and neither of them was romantic enough to deny it to each other or themselves.

Ellie moved to London, and for about two months, she felt sad and lonely. How much of that was because of Maxim, and how much was the fact that she had left everything and everyone that she knew to move there was anybody’s guess. Her mind would try to wander to her favourite memories, like the first time they said “I love you,” the many afternoons that they spent reading on Lower Field under the hot sun, and the many, many times that they had shared an unbelievably large pitcher of Alexander Keith’s lager at Station des Sports while watching the Habs lose in the playoffs—again. If she had allowed herself, she might have reminisced about his Canadiens boxers, or the way that he would always listen to her problems and do everything that he could to help her.

But she didn’t think about those things; not with any regularity, at least. Her mental discipline was almost unparalleled, and with a little focus, she could stop herself from remembering those things. If she had to think about him at all, she would only let herself think of the bad things, like how many goddamn Canadiens games she had to watch in order to spend time with him, or how he knew everything there was to know about chemistry but very little about the real world. She missed him, yes, but only the self-imposed so-called “appropriate” amount.