by Nelly Arcan
WHEN YOU SAW me that night at Nova, I already had a jump on you because you knew who I was, you knew me by reputation. You knew I’d been a whore, you knew I’d written a book that had sold, and for that reason you thought I had ambitions. The first time you saw me, it was on Christiane Charrette’s show, I was the featured guest. Catherine Millet was sitting next to me and behind me on a screen, naked photos of her streamed past. From your living room, you saw that thing that was hard to get along with and that kept people at a distance and was striking in the context of a TV show where I should have been filled with enthusiasm at the prospect of confessing to the multitudes; you saw my attitude, reticence that should have been gratitude, consent, and cooperation. You thought I was a snob, that I was running the show, rejecting questions with an exasperated look, a woman like me would never get interested in a man like you; I’d had recognition in France and you hadn’t published anything yet, for you I was a woman in charge. Seen from your living room, I was a conqueror, and you even forgot Nadine while the show was on.
Knowing me before you knew me led you down the wrong path. The first time you saw me on TV, you didn’t realize the camera makes people seem bigger by letting them saturate the screen, you didn’t realize they become the centre of the world and the object of everyone’s gaze, like the stars at the end of your father’s telescope; your father had a passion for the cosmos and every night he would disappear into his little observatory on the roof of your building to contemplate the stars. He was trying to grasp the final moment of their explosion, leaving you alone with your toys and your need to impress him. You didn’t realize that on a TV screen, a person is much bigger than her real size and that her blue eyes look bluer, illuminated by the spotlights on the set, her skin takes on the golden glow of success, my god what I would have given to keep that image in your mind, my god I wished we’d never met at Nova on Saint-Dominique Street. One day my grandfather told me there was a strict relation between love and distance, he told me that the day after man was created, God retreated very far into the sky.
WHEN I MET YOU, I met your three ex-girlfriends at the same time, Nadine, Annie, and Annick. I also got to know the masses of Internet girls stored in your computer and who had names that indicated their category, the Schoolgirls, the College Girls and the Girls Next Door, the Wild Girlfriends and the ones who wore boots and never failed to knock you off your chair as you sat in front of the screen, them in their Fuck Me Boots. With you, I discovered that there were very few Women on the Internet.
Today I know there were always too many people between us, I know that my having been a whore made you presuppose a number of things, for example that I would accept anything once I got used to it. You imagined you were my client, and that I would accede to all your twisted demands. On the subject of the imbalance between males and females, I had several theories that made you laugh. I said that equality between men and women could have existed if God had allowed ovulation to be triggered by orgasm and not by an autonomous system that paid no attention to the rise of pleasure or the urgent need for release or even mood swings that could have stopped the liberation of the ovum. I added that if women could discharge their fertility like men, men would lose their erections and the issue of women ejaculating would absorb their complete attention, they would spend hours on end talking about it on the phone with their buddies, they would hit the boutiques trying to look sexy. I said that the bipolarity that underpins the universe through its arrangement of atoms and that turns the North Pole into the South every x millions of years should have given men women’s natures. If my grandfather had heard me, he would have spun in his grave, my grandfather didn’t believe in the evolution of the human race, only its disappearance.
UNTIL I CAME ALONG, you had only dark-haired women. Before I wasn’t sure but now I know that the blond colour I applied every month to my chestnut hair played a part in your love that didn’t know what to do with itself after only eight months and so returned to the women of your memories. I say that because your ex-girlfriends had things in common like dark hair and names that followed each other in girlish sonority between N and E, Nadine, Annie, and Annick. In my life I had to answer to at least ten names but you knew me as Nelly, it’s crazy how this repetition led to the ultimate name of Nannie, the woman among all women, a true mother with breasts to drink from and arms to sleep in from the time your world came into being, why wouldn’t the key to your cock be found in the smallest fold of a letter and why wouldn’t a colour like brown be the answer to all your questions? I wondered whether behind the names of the men I loved a hidden name stood, a patriarch’s name, perhaps, a name made for mine that would defy my father’s choices and take me to the end of my worst nightmares, the name of the great love for whom I would give my life the way we say it when we want to make children understand that love carries a high price. I never found anything and maybe it’s better that way, to see your destiny in other people’s names can bully you into living. In the shape I’m in, I’d rather my aunt’s tarot cards kept their mouths shut.
AT NOVA, I KEPT my real name for close friends and used Nelly for everyone else. I came to you on the trail of names from your past. The mystery of your love remains unsolved because I wasn’t dark and my hair colour wasn’t part of your plans. Everyone thought I was imagining things because there are blonds they call bombshells and dark-haired girls who are plain ugly, but everyone forgets that a woman’s beauty is of no use if she doesn’t correspond to a man’s tastes and that a blond, even a pretty one, is worth nothing to a man who needs the warmth popularly attributed to dark-haired women. If I hadn’t decided to kill myself once I finish writing to you, I could experiment and transform myself into a raven-haired beauty to see if you would call me back to your side, but why let you discover my true colour underneath the dye once my hair grows out. Anyway, I’m sick of those seduction ploys born in laboratories, most of the time they turn against me.
Maybe you’ll tell me that those dark-haired girls don’t deserve so much of my attention because at Bily Kun where we went every Friday, you looked at the blonds as much as the others and even more because their pale skin was like a beacon in the dark atmosphere of the bar. You told me one Friday that blonds stood still while dark ones bounced all over the place; you told me it was because blonds didn’t need to move to be noticed whereas dark-haired ones had to jockey for position to be seen by men. Thanks to the very light blonds, you said that Friday as you put your giant’s hand on my head, your hand greater than God’s that could strike without hurting me, the bar looked like a starry night. That could have been a compliment, a real one, the kind that help children understand how lofty love is, if you hadn’t said next that your hatred of the Big and Little Dipper and camping trips where everyone talks about their personal philosophy of the cosmos came from your father’s love of astronomy.
Your father gazed heavenward in search of novas that, in a symphony of colours, set free the gases they contained or, better still, supernovas that had violently exploded under atomic pressure and were so enormous he could observe them with the naked eye; what your father liked about stars was the spectacular result of their death. Often I reminded you that the name of his beloved stars was also the name of the after-hours place where we met and that fact pained you, it seemed to you that the significant events of your life should not, even in a metaphorical way, be linked to a spatial dimension or calculated in light-years. Every time the opportunity presented itself, and even when it didn’t, you would say that the universe was lost in the excess of its own dimensions and it was useless to think of its geography. You said that in hopes of retrieving your father from his distraction, you lost all interest for everything distant and concerned yourself with what was close. I often wondered if the Internet girls you liked to jerk off to were part of the distance, or whether they were close.
WHEN WE SPLIT up for good, the day I understood I would need to die by my own hand and not be crushed by your overwhelming strength, we
agreed that Bily Kun would be yours, since you went there long before I did, and that I’d take Laïka, since you hated the place. That evening we divided up the bars of Montreal to keep from crossing paths, especially since Freddy, a few days earlier when he was talking about couples that break up, said that forbidding your ex to go to certain parts of the city was a way of planning to meet him.
Today, Bily Kun is not for me, and neither is the after-hours place run by Orion, the DJ you liked but refused to hang out with, maybe because Nadine’s many old lovers went there, but mostly because the vocabulary surrounding it reminded you of your father. To torment you, your father never missed a chance to bring to the supper table the cosmic phenomena named in function of their shape, the myriad nebulae like the Helix, the Eagle, the Egg, the Hourglass, and the Cat’s Eye. Your father never missed an opportunity to enlighten you and your mother about the stellar winds that blew stars off course and the blue stars whose heat was far greater than what the red and yellow ones emitted.
Every year, in the enormous loft on Saint-Dominique Street, Orion organized four big after-hours nights corresponding to the first day of every season: the Blue Giant on the first day of spring, Nova on the summer equinox, Black Hole on the first day of autumn, and Big Bang on the winter solstice. Then there was Pulsar on New Year’s Eve when the crowd of partygoers, whipped to a frenzy by speed, would attract the interest of the police who were afraid the floor would come crashing down on the neighbours below. Since Orion began, we never missed those nights, the best ones on the Montreal techno scene; it’s funny to think that during the last three years, at least ten different times, we were both in the same place and never crossed paths. During those three years, in the dark loft you never noticed my doll-like features, and through the noise of the techno music, your voice never reached my ears. On the first day of spring this year, I didn’t go to the Blue Giant and on the first day of summer that will fall on the date of my personal deadline, I won’t go to Nova. I don’t want to go to a party that will blunt the pain of seeing you with someone else, I don’t want to keep my eye on you all night long just to find out you’re not looking at me. Everyone knows that when a couple separates it infects the places the two of them used to go, which according to the individual case can spread to places frequented by rivals with their contempt. I had plenty of rivals with you, starting with Nadine who was in every place before me, even the least desirable, Nadine whom everyone knew and called La Nadine, Nadine who was everywhere and whom everyone waited for at every party, Nadine who had the gift of pulling in everyone’s love though not loving in return, Nadine who cheated on you, who left you and to whom you might have gone back.
Everyone knows that a nobody like me is afraid of her own shadow, they understand I might turn every dark-haired man in Montreal into you and your giant steps opening a pathway through the crowd of pedestrians who have no choice but to step off the sidewalk to let your imposing mass go by, protecting their faces from the gusts of wind kicked up by your footsteps. Everyone agrees that this woman has an obligation to avoid you for fear of feeling her overwhelming smallness which is why she sticks to four streets in the Latin Quarter and even then.
Our story had other settings than bars. Not far from Bily Kun is the Mountain where we never went, though we often talked about it.
On sunny Sundays, on Mount Royal the tam-tam drummers gather, and the dancers too whom we both hated, you because the smell of patchouli and the bare torsos of the men next to the Park Avenue traffic made you sick, and me because I couldn’t stand the packs of dogs driven wild by other dogs, or the over-hip attitudes of their masters toward material things. One weekday night, we convinced each other that the angel of Mount Royal, who had been soaring into flight for years now from the tips of his toes toward some unknown destination in the sky, was going to come crashing down on the musicians’ heads; we wondered how we ever arrived at such a conclusion. We predicted the angel would topple from its pedestal after a lightning strike and its fall would be accompanied by a clatter of rusty iron, the sound old freighters make when they dock. We often called down misfortune on other people, and said prayers, better to hate them.
From time to time Nadine would go strolling in the summer sun on Mount Royal, I know that because Josée told me she saw her two or three times. Maybe it happened there, behind the trees planted in a checkerboard pattern, when she displayed the full extent of her ability to jerk you off with her hands bigger than mine and that wrapped around your cock to its very tip. With you, every event had to reach its logical conclusion, which is why a girl you kissed at the SAT ended up sucking you off behind a speaker and she went all the way too, to the very back of her throat where your cock strained to find the full measure of its length and there found its release.
YOU WERE VERY fond of your cock and you photographed it often. It was your declaration of victory, a form of conquest, the American flag unfurled on the Moon; when you were a boy you must have been the head of your class. I invented all sorts of descriptions that made you laugh, I whispered into your ear Cock pillar of our love Cock treasure hidden beneath the sheets, your cock that few women appreciated for its true value you used to say to me, your cock that you questioned sometimes because you didn’t know where to situate it on the scale of cocks of the world among the races from greatest to smallest, Blacks, Arabs, Whites, and Asians. You thought it was a shame that porn stars couldn’t serve as proper references since they were chosen according to their disproportion and you lamented the fact that your friends might be lying about theirs; you admitted there was no way to establish once and for all whether or not yours was big, but you thought my pussy was tight and for your cock that was a good sign.
You told me at the SAT, she gave you a blow job out of the blue, the girl you didn’t know but who wanted to get to know you whatever it took, the way so many others wanted, even if knowing you meant a single time behind the speaker. You told me how she felt for your zipper under the blue neon lights, how she swallowed it all without spitting any out even if you didn’t ask her for anything. You told me it was the perfect duration from beginning to end so as not to be noticed by Annie who was your date with her black hair that you stroked in the darkness of the bar.
It’s unlikely that before Creation God foresaw that scenes glimpsed through other people’s stories would always last longest and contain too many details; I wonder whether — since I am afraid of hidden things and how I might find you there — the trees are still growing on Mount Royal. I resent how the configuration of the stars remains unchanged despite the random movement of women through the lives of men, I also resent how the sun shines carelessly upon the world, paying no attention to the neighbour girls who might be sunning themselves beneath your window, your dark-haired neighbour girls who wiggle their asses and throw their hands over their heads and cry out in shrill voices as they squirt cold water on each other. I resent the girls from your part of the Plateau who use every possible teenage trick in the repertory of the unexpected to give you a hard-on.
At the beginning of our story, we got along perfectly; with you, I was careful to be open, I made sure you wouldn’t bang up against my person. With you, I did things I had done only with my clients. Together we did what lovers don’t usually do, when it comes to sex there are things you do with strangers and things you do with familiars. I did those things with you because I knew you would be the last one to touch me. Maybe I wanted to go to the very extreme like you did, and explore what was left of my virginity by scraping at its walls, I must have done that to give you a reason to leave me, as well as displaying my tolerance to getting worked over. They say that to get a man attached to them, women have to show some resistance.
At the beginning when you fucked me, your eyes locked on mine and you gripped my throat with one hand so I could feel your strength as you faced the decision at hand; you knew how to cause pain without causing too much and keep me at the edge of injury. Five times, you spat on me without averting your e
yes, three times in my mouth and twice on my cheeks. That kind of thing is always retained in its exact number and science has still not understood why, no doubt because it’s so disturbing that nothing else can be said about it. If my aunt had seen your spit in her tarot cards, she probably would have said nothing to keep from venturing into inexplicable facts that arise from the gift of foretelling the future.
You might say it wasn’t so important, other men had spat on me and I spat on them for money. You could say that spitting is not so different from biting or squirting sperm on some other part of my body. You could tell me that my past as a whore had shown me the worst men have to offer, everything done outside of love in the brutality of organs that have nothing in common and the troubling sounds that issue unexpectedly. I am trying to understand our story because between us love came to dwell in a place it had no business being. No doubt I saw love in your spit and that, for you, loving meant loving the mark you left on the other person.
I LOVED YOU the first time I saw you at Nova even if I felt that all there was between us was differences, even if you told Adam about a kind of plastic surgery that was all the rage in California because it gave women pussies as tight as what little girls have. I answered at great length, I told you it wasn’t worth having a little girl’s pussy since genuine little girls were already ruling the world with bodies in tune with their pubis, hairless, narrow, and open to all since they had no preferences, let alone the millions of Asian girls who could win the tight-pussy contest hands down. I also said that if love came down to nothing more than women tightening around men, women could be spared the trouble of having sexual parts since their asses could be used for that purpose, giving men the feeling of bigness and the impression of defeating resistance. You answered by saying that one day children would have no room to be born, prisoners of the tightness love demanded; that evening we traded clever comments good-naturedly, we had the gift of repartee. That evening I had no defense against love and its ability to take root in darkness. . . If only I had known, like they say, but I did know and that didn’t help.
