Hysteric

by Nelly Arcan

  In front of your screen that week, I had a thought for those married couples who have lost all desire for each other and seek consolation by cycling through website after website in the comfort of their homes. At no time in front of your screen did I think of the two of us. I preferred my computer to yours, since with mine the images would appear, very slowly and by small increments from top to bottom, like a striptease, while your high-speed system threw everything in our faces all at once. The pictures overwhelmed us, we needed a few seconds to stare at the screen before we could assemble the pieces of female nudity and make a whole from the parts. Sometimes we’d see floating body parts that didn’t seem to belong to any of the girls and we tried to reconstruct the missing protagonist; that took some imagination.

  SITTING SIDE BY SIDE, we saw a lot of pictures. During my initiation, I could barely look at myself in the mirror, my own reflection shocked me, compared to Jasmine I was too old, the age of the first wrinkles and the first grey hair. I almost left you but winter was coming, the holidays were around the corner and faced with the perspective of crossing into the milestone year of my death alone, there was no point making a move.

  I especially remember little Jasmine, the Girl Next Door you loved more than the others, she was like a younger sister, maybe because the name of the site you’d taken her from, Little Sisters, suggested it. She wore a long brown wig that cast a halo of ambiguity over her seventeen-year-old self since it made her look older, which in turn highlighted her youth. We both saw something touching in her, if she hadn’t been a model she could have sold matches, or been Cinderella labouring in her rags. She stood in front of a brick background that made the composition look like a damp, cold dungeon. There were hundreds of pictures of her, dressed or in her underwear or entirely naked, always wearing a naughty look. When I gazed at her I bit my tongue to awaken another sensation besides wretchedness; if you’d been a client, you would have paid me for her. Most of the pictures were botched and all looked the same, I imagined that the photographer’s hard cock had panicked and pushed Jasmine out of the frame, or maybe he simply didn’t give a shit if art lied about the truth, art that concealed instead of revealing. You taught me to follow the proper order of the thumbnails to reproduce the steps of her undressing with all her hesitations; by moving through the pictures from right to left, we recreated something real. It wasn’t composition or beauty but proximity that mattered; we had to feel as if we’d taken the pictures ourselves and made them look, to some extent, like family photos.

  I could see Jasmine’s face in some pictures and that bothered me. Faces were unnecessary for our purpose, I thought, and I preferred it when they simply weren’t there; catching a model’s eye, even in a picture, made me feel I was being watched back and that ruined any chance of finding pleasure. It was the opposite in your case. You needed a face for identification, but I never understood what sort of identification it was; for you, girls had to be identifiable in case you met them on the street or, better yet, if they turned out to be your neighbours. In the pictures where Jasmine was naked, she wore a serious look and you said that the moment of contemplation before moving onto the act had to be solemn, for you being naked meant being ready, and being ready meant an end to all joking. I knew you had a hard-on, but for the first time that meant failure for me, it meant rejection.

  After looking at the photos, we turned to her videos and watched her take her small breasts out of her red bra then push her white panties to the side and stick a finger in her pussy as she opened her mouth. Jasmine respected the demands of the marketplace to the letter. You pulled my pants down and pushed my panties to the side and took me from behind. I didn’t know what to do so I played the part of the little girl, I lowered my eyes and cried because pleasing you seemed impossible and I felt nothing but pain because you were fucking someone else and I couldn’t do anything about it. In an ultimate act of retreat I turned my pussy over to Jasmine, I gave up and stopped moving. In my self-effacement I lost all memory of what a woman does with a man, four million years of mutual knowledge of the sexes, and suddenly I didn’t know how to move or moan and the room turned numb. I left my body and my body took over, my dry pussy tightened around your cock as if trying to expel it, it went into the kind of convulsions that rack the stomach when it wants to spew something out that doesn’t suit it, but you pressed yourself deeper into me, you enjoyed my body’s resistance that gave you more pleasure.

  On the screen there were too many important details you were seeing and I was missing. I wondered whether you were looking at Jasmine’s ass or mine, I doubted the usefulness of my contribution to your romance, I was only a conduit to the screen, I doubted the reality of my own flesh against yours. A dog barked in La Fontaine Park and I thought dogs work hard to be loved by their masters, I thought of the young Czech woman you spilled beer on trying to get her to dance at the SAT, I thought of my sagging skin as I neared thirty, that skin you had fastened yourself to. I thought of many things far from your eyes that were focused on Jasmine on a loop with her panties pushed to one side.

  A glass of water fell and as I tried to pick it up I hit my eye against the side of your desk. You came at the same time and I stayed on my knees, watching the puddle expand under your desk, I noticed a garbage can there overflowing with Kleenexes that couldn’t have been used for a cold since you never got sick. You helped me up by my armpits. You were surprised when you saw my face twisted by tears, you sat me on your bed and held me in your arms. While you were fucking me you didn’t notice I was crying, you probably thought the new experience of integrating pornography into our lovemaking was responsible for the strange sounds I made. I told you it was nothing and that we shouldn’t give up, I would end up believing in your love with such strength that no other woman could drive me out of your heart.

  I don’t know whether, during his lifetime, my grandfather wondered about the similarity between the sound of tears and pleasure, but if he had, I’m sure he would have thought that God was twisted to impose that ambiguity on mankind. He must have thought God was laughing in his beard, alone on the heights of his kingdom, he was jerking off over people’s confusion.

  That week, you showed me many things, but your initiation didn’t teach me pleasure, only the subtleties of your facial expressions I would need to decipher when you fucked me. As you lay on top of me, you didn’t consider I would be confronting the multitude of Internet girls, scornful under your closed eyelids, nor did you think that every time we saw each other, I wouldn’t see myself in your eyes, only other women’s pussies. The night you left me, you told me that among your female friends and ex-girlfriends there wasn’t one who complained about your habit, among all the women you had known I was the only one who made a big deal about it. I asked you whether any of them had been a prostitute for five years and you didn’t answer; you thought I went too far trying to make a point.

  I wonder if you’ve seen Jasmine’s most recent pictures. Yesterday new ones popped up and she isn’t wearing a wig. She looked exactly like a girl her age. Every time I see her, I think of us, how awkward I was in front of her digital perfection and what dogs think when they wag their tails. I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror for weeks. I wonder if I’ve gotten older.

  THE DAY AFTER you left I tried to find you and I opened a lot of doors. I started visiting Cinéma L’Amour on the corner of Saint-Lawrence Boulevard and Duluth Street. Freddy told me about the place where men come to jerk off in an old movie theatre while watching real couples fucking on a small stage lit by red light. He was curious and had gone there a few times. After eight years of marriage and not a single infidelity, he confided, he’d recovered a sense of innocence and at his age innocence burdened him; after eight years of being faithful, he felt like an old maid. For several weeks, until I found out I was pregnant, I went there thinking the place might be an improvement over your computer screen, a first step toward reaching out to others. I thought I’d discover human warmth there, but forgot tha
t the warmth I was thinking of can’t be found in total anonymity.

  I think I just wanted the trap to close around me. By then, my decision was made, I’d decided to reject any chance of finding some saving grace as I’d done in the past, I wouldn’t give myself another second chance . . . I was at death’s door and had the right to let go and die wherever it pleased me. When I told Freddy I intended to go to Cinéma L’Amour, he warned me against the place, he told me all I’d find were old men with one purpose in mind, fucking curious little girls like me. He probably said that to protect me, since being raped in a place like that removes any possibility of bringing the perpetrator to justice, in any case in the past public opinion had rarely been on the victim’s side. Freddy saw sex in legal terms, he got married at City Hall before a Justice of the Peace. I told him I was used to old farts and sometimes even missed the sensation of their breath on the potential for pussy that I represented for them. I told him I was going there to test my blond feminine charm, who knows, maybe since I quit whoring I’d lost the essential qualities that made me part of the magnetic field where great seducers meet desirable women. After having been touched, licked, and taken every which way, perhaps I gave off nothing more than the acrid odour of scorched earth.

  Always chivalrous, Freddy offered to accompany me, but once we got there we agreed that having the other person around might be an obstacle to jerking off. We split up at the entrance and gave each other an hour before we met up again at the exit, in an alleyway lined with garbage cans from the nearby stores; alleys are made to accommodate the guilty, alleys are a parallel world where the light of day never enters, they are my grandfather’s hell on earth. At Cinéma L’Amour, no one uses the main door that opens onto Saint Lawrence Boulevard; imagine the loss of face if someone they know goes by. Women get in free, like in every other place where there’s public sex. It has been universally proven that women are money-makers in businesses geared to men since they attract them, and women generally have lesser needs. They ask only that their openings be filled, they offer their hands and let themselves be taken, apparently women are accommodating in these sorts of places, the thing that strikes you about reading The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is accommodation. It has also been proven that people who are sick the way I am see themselves as guinea pigs, not looking to heal, but refusing to be passive in their destruction; it’s a matter of dignity.

  The first time, two dozen men were jerking off in the darkness to three couples operating a calculated rotation of three different positions, her on top, her on the bottom, and him behind. The sounds the couples made were broadcast throughout the room, they were amplified by microphones, and so were the jerk-off sounds in the shadows. I wondered why the lights were so dim in the theatre and remembered that my former clients all had a job and most of the time a family. I remembered that the offer of sex in society meant seeing everything without being seen, it meant paying to remain anonymous. Jasmine would never see you through your computer screen. Jasmine would never know what went on around her, the break-ups and reconciliations, not to mention the hysterics’ investigations into what gives the men they love a hard-on.

  The first time I left quickly because I suddenly understood that Jasmine might be on your computer screen as men were jerking off around me; the revelation of searching for you in the wrong place affected me too much to enjoy the couples, and knowing you were elsewhere made me want to find you. In the alley I didn’t wait for Freddy. I took my car and drove to your apartment, the blinds were drawn in your bedroom window, my hands were shaking so hard on the wheel I almost lost control. It was the last time I came anywhere near your place. When I got home, I called Freddy. He was worried, he’d been looking for me everywhere.

  I returned a dozen times and let myself be surrounded by the sounds love makes when it withdraws into itself, and that reminded me of the sound of every other man, including you. Those warm spaces were like mothers’ bellies where low- or high-pitched gurgles and even the subtlest murmur become a way to explore the world, to me the eyes aren’t the windows of the soul, the voice is. My grandfather always said that since the beginning of time many men have heard God but no one has seen him. The first few times I didn’t want to get myself off in that room, I would only do it once I got home. I tried to find my place in that darkness without making any sound so my feminine condition wouldn’t be noticed but it was to no avail, I thought too much about you and how you weren’t there, I wondered where you were and then your computer screen came to mind, I imagined cruel scenes where you got a hard-on for another woman, I imagined that made you smile.

  When I went to Cinéma L’Amour, I dressed in loose clothing like women over forty do, I wore the very large sports outfits you left at my house to hide my breasts that on the Internet were judged much too big for amateurs of small tits, and too small for lovers of big ones. I wore your black baseball cap with the bill in front, your high-collared black sports jacket that went all the way down to my knees and your white-striped black pants whose bottom half I’d cut off, I wore them as low as possible on my hips to leave room for my imaginary cock. Maybe my efforts to look like a man only made me more of a woman in the same way Jasmine’s seventeen-year-old radiance shone through her wig, but beneath my cross-dressing I’m sure anyone could have seen that I wanted to be left alone because, usually, no one bothered me. After all it’s likely that in places like that men are more interested in other men, with their hands surreptitiously working, they close their eyes better to hear the others around them as they pretend to be attentive to the action on the small stage.

  My favourite times were when the Cinéma was most crowded, Fridays between six and eight PM, the intensity of the sound numbed me and I forgot the danger of being heard and sometimes even forgot you. Two or three times I managed to come after a good deal of effort but each time sadness overtook me in its strongest embrace and it would last for days, maybe because something inside me had functioned without either you or I having anything to do with it. It isn’t easy to admit that life goes on but not by choice, it’s those unstoppable organic forces, life draws its own path outside human will, outside the injustices perpetrated on the weakest like those poor children dressed as soldiers to replace other soldiers in a country where all the men are dead. It isn’t easy to face the fact that life uses the hungry and the sick to keep itself going in the form of sacks of wheat dropped from planes, it uses laboratory-made hybrid cows and antidepressants that force movement onto tired minds. This is life born in the mists of time, eventually it conquers all, it will flow forth from the worst atrocities and impose its strength once more, and repeat the errors of the past, I don’t want any part of it. . . To think we celebrate the courage of survivors when it’s just life dragging them behind!

  When I kept my eyes closed long enough, sperm would drip down my cheeks without warning and other times I opened my eyes to see a cock straining toward my mouth. The men who approached me did so in silence while sound was the only thing I expected from them. Every time a man came near, the thread of my reverie would be broken and I couldn’t find pleasure listening to the men around me, so I would leave. I left that place the way you leave an after-hours club at dawn, with the light of day falling cruelly on the hours of darkness written on your face, in an attitude of shame behind the sunglasses and the urgent need to be somewhere you might belong. I returned home, and with blinds drawn, I would run through the numbers on the call display to see if yours was among them; while I was gone you might have wanted to talk to me, you could have felt, from afar, that I was falling. I should have realized that searching for you in the moans of other men brought your absence that much nearer. I should have decided that it was unacceptable that behind other people underground passages might open that would lead to still others, and that we might create a network of sewers through which people would stumble among the obscene noises that accompany men satisfying themselves. After a few weeks at Cinéma L’Amour, nausea overcame me when I closed
my eyes, and I understood I might be pregnant. The sounds in that place changed, they became different from yours, I thought your sounds must have evolved from the contact with other women, your sounds and theirs reflected each other in an echo chamber that made them complementary and unique. After a few weeks I fell asleep in that place as soon as I closed my eyes, at that point in my life I couldn’t do anything right. Not long after, a drugstore test showed I was pregnant and things changed for a while, my death wasn’t a sure thing any more. But the day after my abortion, my decision became irrevocable again and I began writing you this letter.

  During my Cinéma L’Amour period, Freddy stood by me, his friendship had no end. Before I met you, he and I used to picnic in La Fontaine Park every weekend, one day we probably opened a bottle of wine right under your bedroom window. At the theatre, Freddy always stayed nearby, but far enough so I wouldn’t hear him. He was probably better at jerking off than I was, but I never knew for sure. He had the same expression when he left as when he entered, his hands were the same, they didn’t bear the impression of his cock. There was no mix of shame and satisfaction on his face and his eyes hadn’t widened by what he’d seen. Freddy never said anything about the visits and never mentioned the effect that those distant women bathed in red light had on him. Nothing was said about his motivation for being there, but I knew he had his reasons for escorting me, and leaving the place only when I did. He would always walk in front of me when we entered, he was trying to cover me. He must have loved me the way you love fledglings fallen from the nest. He wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be raped, he told me not to drink anything since there were drugs made for rape, he said it was a drug like any other that made strangers look like saviours, Freddy wanted to help those who wanted to hurt themselves.