by Nelly Arcan
I remember a card from my aunt’s deck called Strength, it showed a woman holding a lion’s jaws open with her hands. The way I recall it, the card never appeared in her readings, I remember once my aunt tried to draw something out of the cards face down in front of her, she decided to proceed by deduction, analyzing the ones that weren’t there. She noticed the absence of Strength in the deck of twenty-two, according to her, many uncertainties surrounded me, but above all I was not a lion-tamer. That card controls situations through audacity and technique, it’s the card of dexterity when the world falls apart around you, it prevents excess, it’s a kind of muzzle.
In her tarot, you would have been the Pope or the Emperor, you would have been clothed in the frigid blue colour of fleur-de-lys. Or you would have been the Tower, I often came upon that card and finally stopped being afraid of it. In the world of my aunt’s readings, it was called the “Maison-Dieu,” and that house wasn’t a place of worship but a weapon pointed at humanity, a grenade or a volcano. It represented divine wrath striking wildly upon the heads of people below, on it you can see a tower crumbling and its stones flying into the air. My aunt said it always announced an inexplicable and overwhelming catastrophe come from above and ending its flight on Earth, it was an act of God. She never imagined the Tower could be a man I loved; for her, love shone in the sky, it was an airborne, ascending feeling that, in the worst cases, could unexpectedly dissolve, leaving unpleasant odours and a feeling of nausea. In her passion for the future, she forgot the moist hole that lets in no light, the place she grew before her birth.
When I think about it today, the time I spent in the cottage continued for me, I probably never left the place.
FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK, you kept your arms around me, on the way back to Montreal you wanted me to lay my head on your lap as you drove. That position reminded me of the film where there’s a driver driven mad by his passenger who is sucking him off, in the end he dies in a crash, no doubt after having seen his life flash by from his first birthday cake with candles on top to the present moment when he takes his hands off the wheel, reaching a violent orgasm and flying into the ditch for good. They say that God allows men to measure the worth of their lives before they die through a series of pregnant memories, and that restores their proper place in the universe, and shows them that the essential chapters of their existence can be contained in a fraction of a second. They may come to understand the failure of their lives and in some cases their eternal burning in the fires of hell will seem less unfair, that’s what my grandfather told me. After our brief encounter, you and I could have ended in a final shared memory by dying on the highway. During the trip I thought of what would become of me in a head-on crash, I wondered if the car wouldn’t just swallow me up as I lay at your feet with the pedals. I wondered if the car and I, now indissociable, would form a single mass, if in the closed casket at the funeral home, my body would be shaped like twisted metal. Later, I considered the trip as a missed opportunity.
On the way back I thought you were going to ask me to suck you off but the request never came. From time to time you put your finger into my mouth, maybe that was a compromise. For three solid hours on Highway 10, you talked about your father and his penchant for the stars, you surprised me when you said he never took an interest in any other woman but his wife, you couldn’t believe it. That you couldn’t believe in his fidelity should have sounded alarm bells, that meant you thought all men were the same, and that scattering themselves was the heart of their nature. At the time I thought the opposite, that you could be faithful to me, I didn’t know that the Atlantic Ocean that had separated you from your father for the last five years hadn’t lessened your desire to torment him by becoming his inverted image. Every time you talked about him, you did exactly what he did, in one motion distance gaped open before you, you stared into nothingness as if the revelation of stellar space could lift you off this earth where you stood, you lost sight of everything, you climbed down from your greatness. Today I wonder if your father hadn’t met God somewhere between the stars. I say that because my grandfather used to claim that seeing God blinded you to everything else, it was like witnessing a solar eclipse without protective glasses, it left black holes in your eyes, he said it created blind spots at every angle.
FOR THE FIRST few weeks of our story, I scared you because I had a whore’s past and a book behind me. When they saw me walk into the room, your friends all agreed. They compared me to Nadine: another bitch, they said. Between us lay the gap of my experience and success. Your friends believed in my superiority, having been a whore gave me a man advantage over you. Later I understood what your friends meant, they knew you inside out, they knew you wouldn’t pay attention to a woman unless she had the reputation of giving herself freely to members of your circle and even right in front of you. That’s why at the beginning your dreams showed I belonged in the category of sluts, from the heights of that category I could drop you or, worse, humiliate you the way Nadine had by kissing guys at Bily Kun as you watched or by casually mentioning that her old boyfriends, once they’d known her, could never get attached to another woman. Nadine had a way of elbowing aside the women men had in their past or even in their future, I wonder if my aunt met her in the readings she did for her female customers. By branding the life of more than five hundred men, Nadine branded the life of ten times more women, all the men I know in Montreal have had direct or indirect relations with her. One Friday night at Bily Kun I kissed your friend Mister Dad but you didn’t see a thing, your eyes were somewhere else, probably looking at some blond who acted as the landmark to help you find the bathroom where lines of coke awaited you. I tried to be a slut, but my timing was off.
AT MY GRANDFATHER’S cottage you read my reviews because you wanted to take charge of my grant application to the Quebec Arts Council. It was hard work and I would have to pay you, you figured you deserved ten percent of the grant. When I finally got it, you weren’t in my life any more. I found out through Freddy that you were still waiting for a cheque to show up in the mail. When I realized you had talked to him about my grant, I was so upset I couldn’t touch the money, maybe my deprivation would make our story live on in my bank account. From that point on, I held the money hostage.
I needed to convince the Quebec Arts Council jury to invest in me, I needed to provide proof of a possible future in Europe and in that area you had some useful knowledge as a French journalist, you knew the exact order with which I should present the reviews, from the greatest to the smallest. On the scale of prestige, you knew that Le Monde des Livres counted more than Libération even if as a leftist your heart leaned toward that paper. The thirteenth review came from Le Journal where you published most of your articles. We wondered whether we should include it, since in our financial situation, superstition concerning the evil influence of the number thirteen was a factor.
At the time, you must have noticed the problem I had connecting to the future; it’s always made me inefficient when it comes to business. You couldn’t believe I had no idea what happened to the hundreds of thousands of dollars I made from my years of whoring; in this carelessness not directed at other people, you saw a kind of self-destruction, it was also an extreme form of cynicism toward capitalism, it was sabotage, a way of devaluing the system. That week, you told me that if you’d known me when I was a whore, you would have found a way to invest the money and taken a percentage for yourself, you said that whores who were escorts should get themselves an agent. When such a great amount of wealth has to be laundered, the notion of a pimp should be reconsidered, business whores like other kinds need someone to protect them against themselves. In your opinion, whores’ self-destruction takes place at every level of their being. By throwing their money out the window, I answered, whores get rid of their clients.
Reading my reviews, maybe you saw me as an authority figure, I say that because the day you worked on them, you didn’t fuck me in your usual way, you were very gentle. There was supplicatio
n in your caress, you even insisted on licking my pussy even though you knew I hated that so much I’d earned a special note on the net from unsatisfied clients who loved me to suck them, but deplored the absence of reciprocity. Some of them wrote on chat forums We can’t go down on her, but they did say that to compensate for the ban, incomprehensible when everyone knows from reading fashion magazines that cunnilingus is the surest way to make a woman come, I sometimes agreed to kiss them on the mouth. For you, licking pussy was an act without any sexual goal, it was an offering, a consecration, and consecrations didn’t get you off; in any case you couldn’t understand why a client would want to do that to a whore and either did I, I never understood. I told you that when I asked, some of them pointed out that they weren’t paying me to do what they could do with their wives, by that they meant they would do everything to me they weren’t doing to them. The sharing of sexual practices between wives and whores created confusion about the things you did with me; often my clients preferred to talk to me instead of doing anything else.
The day you organized my reviews and clippings at the cottage, you came to me several times and read out the articles from different papers in France and Quebec. Each time I asked you to stop and each time you kept reading until I grabbed the paper from your hand, you couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to hear what people had written about me, and you couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to watch myself on TV since everyone else would have gladly done that, you couldn’t understand that some people find it impossible to look at themselves full face without first preparing for the event with all kinds of precautions, without controlling other people’s opinions and their own body squirming in the bad lighting. You couldn’t understand that when you read my reviews, I jumped on you and screamed that my whole life I’d had to protect myself against other people and the upsetting things they said that sent me escaping into books written by dead authors, most of them, and dead for a long time, the things living ones said that were repeated by the newspapers were the worst because they gave concrete facts and appealed to the crowd you were part of. You didn’t understand that the author of a book called Whore could be afraid of words to the point that shame made her cover her ears.
That day at the cottage, you were surprised at first, you smiled at my refusal to hear what other people said. You didn’t know that the reviews confounded my aunt’s tarot cards that were faithful to their silence each time and that my fate as a dead woman now seemed to be in doubt, you didn’t understand that these reviews put me on the map whereas I was meant to remain invisible, the whole business contradicted my destiny. If you had known, there would have been no love between us, you would have kept your distance. At the cottage I must have seemed cute, because in your surprise you didn’t say hysteric but timid, my reaction displayed excess modesty that went so far it wiped away the material proof of my success, it was a way of reinforcing my artistic integrity. The problem with madness is that it has many arrows in its quiver, it has smokescreens for people of sound mind, madness knows how to bare itself only once it’s too late, it can disguise itself as normalcy or even seduction, it can make death look like Lolita.
ONCE YOU TOLD me you wanted to publish as fast as possible and be the first one to talk about porn sites in a novel, you figured that innovation would make your name. You thought writing meant shedding light on current events and gaining exclusivity. Your trade deformed your writing. You didn’t like me telling you that the latest high-tech possibilities that reproduced work as pixels showed no new reality, nothing but the world’s oldest profession, as they say, speaking of that ancient impulse to seek release by aping conquest. You thought human nature should evolve, you thought that since we had pornography on the Internet, and could find everything and more, unheard of things we could access in a second from all across the planet, no one had any reason to jerk off with his own mental images that were too pale and without depth, you thought the Internet made the imagination obsolete.
You wanted to publish as fast as possible and be part of that category of young authors, to be a young author, you had to publish before the age of twenty-eight. After twenty-five, you were mature and to be known for maturity was as common as dust. It was better to be known in the extravagance of youth, the more flagrant your youth, the better your chances of being on the front page of the entertainment weeklies. As a journalist you knew how other journalists adore newcomers and especially the youngest among them, these newcomers are well advised to get to know journalists personally, you had set the table by becoming friendly with the literary columnists from Ici, Voir, La Presse, and Le Journal. I should have thought about that sooner, you told me, my naivety often came across as impudence, the mistakes I made while figuring out how much I owed the public were often criticized. You said that the media wasn’t a field to be explored but a stage where you couldn’t perform unless you were perfectly prepared; you said that my inexperience made some people ridicule me, if I’d had an agent, things would have been different. In your opinion the media was like prostitution, journalists were like clients who like the taste of fresh meat, when they find a new toy they pass it around and share it among themselves.
WHEN WE CAME back from the Eastern Townships, we entered our Bily Kun phase, which was our drug period too. We loved each other in the exaltation of getting high and the end-of-evening crash.
Coke gave us a lot of things to say. When we did coke, we never fought, all friction eased, sometimes I even talked as much as you did. Other times our words went further than what was permissible and we didn’t realize what we’d meant until the next day. At Bily Kun, on a Friday evening, you told me you liked to take pictures of your cock, and urged on by dopamine and its mirage of a final truth that might be shared, I said that was perfectly normal; I told you how one of my old clients also suffered from an excess of self-love, he had to keep an eye on his cock when he was fucking, with whores he could understand it, but with other women, his girlfriends, it was harder to explain. Coke was part of our lives before we met, you were chatty by nature and with your friends it didn’t show, but since I didn’t usually talk much, your friends thought I’d turned into a real chatterbox. When they saw me during the week, they must have suspected something, my silence must have tipped them off, I don’t know if they made the connection to coke. We never broached the subject with them at Bily Kun, drugs weren’t like sex, they were much more personal.
I went to extremes with you at Bily Kun and other places too, at the SAT or the after-hours places on Saint-Dominique like the Black Hole in the fall or the Big Bang in winter when Bily Kun closed its doors at three am. I was in love and I wanted you to be happy, sometimes I would give you what was left in my bag just to hear you talk some more. Our frequent trips between the toilet and the bar where we drank our beer must have worried your friends who didn’t do drugs. The tradition is for friends to wish their friends well and wishing them well can mean intervening with advice about their downfall, it can mean hitting the brakes for them. But you were a big boy and you discouraged anyone getting involved.
Among your friends was JP whom you knew since you’d been in Quebec and whom you liked very much because you both had the same ideas about women, you thought they could get off only with Bad Guys and Hard to Get types, women liked to make their lives miserable. I noticed there was a little of JP in your French accent; people often mixed you up, they thought you were brothers and women didn’t know which of you to choose. You spent so much time together, you began to look alike even if you weren’t the same size, and like all Plateau inhabitants, you were cynical about political parties and you hated people from the suburbs. When you got excited in a conversation, you had a way of slapping the person you were talking to on the shoulder, and when you did that with me, I shrunk away, I didn’t want to be your pal.
MAYBE COKE MADE our story last longer. We both needed someone to help us through the early morning panic that would hit us at your place because you had high-speed Intern
et. To finish off the night, we would surf the net, once we found comments about my book written by former clients; later, we couldn’t retrieve them, maybe they were stored somewhere inaccessible, even for an expert hand. The trouble with my apartment was the tall windows that faced south, and that let in the light of the rising sun, that light exposed us as we performed our little routine and it used our vulnerability to portray us as we were. You said the dawn light was too cruel, it flashed on the jumpy nerves beneath our faces and disfigured us and illuminated the way we crawled across the floor in search of a line of coke to put up our noses, you said the light made us look more derelict than we were.
Sometimes the end of the night was terrible, and the darkness of the room at your place didn’t help. We cursed ourselves, we promised to behave in the future but right now, just a little more coke, your dealer delivered anywhere on the Plateau until six in the morning. A prisoner of our little bags, licking the bottom as we kept an eye on each other, we feared the downward rollercoaster into the world of parasites, we were contemptible creatures and the walls of your room looked upon us in desolation. Each time we said it would be the last, and each time we remembered the last time we said it would be the last. The proof of our weakness was there to contemplate, we gave up and did more coke.
WE QUICKLY GOT used to our ugliness on those Saturday dawns but the pleasure of being together went undiminished, we knew that happiness awaited us when we awoke Saturday afternoon, on the far side of the down. Friday night’s desolation was redeemed the next afternoon in the summer heat and the repeated fucking that spat the poison from our systems. You sweated out the filth of the previous night through your cock, love disinfected us, and by Sunday we had forgotten everything.
