by Nelly Arcan
With you, he tackled the issue of degenerating matter within which electrons unhooked themselves from their atoms and moved about in random fashion, proving that the great cosmic clock was malfunctioning and the universe was spinning toward decomposition. He spoke to you about the possibility of an uncontrollable multiplication of black holes, those points of darkness whose rotation, much too rapid, sucked in space and time, and within which the universe as a whole might be absorbed. Another end was possible and it was the most terrible to consider because it would be achieved in a sadness and solitude untenable for the human mind: the heat death of the universe. As stars moved away from each other with increasing outward speed, their movement caused an expansion that would push the already unattainable limits of the universe further out. Lacking proximity, the stars would suffer a slow progressive cooling that would stall the motion that drives them. The fire of the universe would be extinguished once and for all, and it would have no other choice than to turn into dust.
TALKING TO ME at Nova about your dream brought you a little closer to it. You had reasons for wanting to love me; with me, love wasn’t a state of fact but a project. Since that night, living apart from you has been impossible because I saw myself in your memory, I existed as a personality in your mind, for the first time since I don’t know how long, I believed in myself.
Your idea was to love me with great passion to demonstrate the difference between love and brotherly concern, you wanted to be the man of my life but not immediately; after the test of social recognition, we had to go through the test of fucking, a woman who’s been fucked two thousand times might have a pussy that’s too wide and that would call attention to her partner’s half-hard cock. When I think of all the men I sucked off for money, when I think of those pictures of me on the web that made men spill their seed and my contribution to the worst in them, entertaining the hypnotized masses imagining that women are begging for them, when I think of your porn novel and the hundreds of hours you spent jerking off with your left hand, coming in perfect unison with the soft childish whine issuing from the Girl Next Door’s open mouth, when I think of that night when you knew those things about me and I knew what I knew about you and we loved each other anyway, I can’t help thinking that love is tactless.
The trap was set. That night our conversation set the tone. All that was missing was the bedroom test, and there our conversation continued without words.
Often in bed you’d tie me up and take me by surprise to satisfy your scenario of a woman being forced, sometimes you’d hit me but not too hard, often pleasure drew me out of my body. Later I started asking for it and you stopped wanting to. You loved me like a fool. The pleasure of being hit had little to do with actual sensation, it was the opposite, it was pleasure born of numbness, the absence of contact, it was a screen that protected me from your strength; in bed like elsewhere, you put me in a state of shock. At first you loved me for my pliancy, later you tired of me because of my pliancy.
SIX MONTHS AFTER Nova you were fucking me out of fatigue, saving time by not having to tell me your heart wasn’t in it and that it was over. You did it to avoid having to explain things to someone who refused to listen, fucking was your way of cutting the argument short and not having to go on endlessly, it was a means of escape as you lay on top of me. Six months later fucking me was an exertion, like a boxer whose adversary is putting off the inevitable knockout.
You fucked me to get rid of that thing that slept in your bed, having to move around my weight so you could come irritated you, and when it would happen, when finally friction triumphed over your mind split between my presence and the porno pictures from your memory, lines of pain crossed your forehead and your eyes closed, they showed just how much concentration you’d needed. When you’ve been a whore, you recognize the signs, even the most discreet ones, men’s faces speak to us constantly without them realizing it, we can smile in the most abject moments, we know that in the good times we can act as if nothing ever happened; with whores, what you see is never what you get.
YOUR STRENGTH CRUSHED me and I’ve been trying to find a name for it ever since. From up close, it turned into something like my own corruption, I could hear it every morning in the way you cleared your throat that always woke up Martine, I could hear it in your footsteps going down the hallway on top of your neighbours’ heads, in your way of asserting that I loved you, and saying you loved me without waiting for an answer, or interrupting your friends at Bily Kun because, suddenly, you remembered what you’d wanted to say. I could see it in the way you never stepped in when a man in a bar started flirting with me, it meant giving me the right to be seduced. Your strength was to not react, hold off till the end of the scene, reply with a lag then move onto something else, or be captivated by a book when I was crying in the next room. Your strength was in writing twenty drafts of your novel and believing in each one a little more each time, it was making me laugh and fighting my sabotage, it was in thinking it might just work between us and hoping to solve the issue of my hysteria in a calm fashion.
Your strength meant letting your life go its noisy way and letting others carry the weight of their lives. Your ex, Annie, called it carelessness, there was indifference in it too, I know because I read that letter twenty times, the one she wrote you the day after Nova when she’d been a witness to our meeting, you stuck it on the cork board behind your computer with a tack. I read her letter every time I was alone in your room and couldn’t bear thinking which woman you might be with. Every time I read her words, I read my own. Her letter hardly said anything at all, a few lines about her humiliation made worse because you’d never wanted her, her humiliation was empty and unacknowledged, an accident that had to be dealt with in solitude. Today I know that in a final surge of generosity Annie tried to conceal, as did we, what occurred outside Nova, in the first light of dawn when you and I left side by side for my place. In her letter she spoke of her raw humiliation but also your monstrous kindness whose source she could never identify, your brutal kindness that confused her because it put her necessarily in the wrong, it preceded the equally brutal return of your assertive strength that sent her home in the middle of the night for no good reason. Annie wrote her letter the way I’m writing today, her letter meant that loving you would necessarily end in wreckage.
My grandfather used to say that because love was immoderate, men betrayed God and held him responsible for everything, they asked his forgiveness then turned around and accused him, they made him suffer through the extremes of adoration and vociferation.
YOU TALKED A LOT, the morning when we woke your voice was deep and gravelly, in the evening it was higher pitched. During the night when you dreamed, you talked, sometimes you’d blurt out strange things like “matronbry” and “whissped.” Once I heard you say that “the ‘sput’ lost her hand,” and I thought you were talking about me.
Women were your favourite subject; you maintained their mystery by trying to understand them.
You made fun of my friend Josée who used okcupid.com, a dating website, to find her lovers; supposedly, hundreds of thousands of people were able to fuck thanks to the site. Josée’s file number was 1115053 and her pseudonym was butterfly173; on her profile she had a picture of herself looking sideways at the camera as she ran her hand through her hair. Underneath she described herself: she was five feet nine, a redhead with no freckles and blue eyes, a solid 34C bust supported by long legs. She had an insatiable sexual appetite, or so she claimed, and was a part-time instructor at the Université de Montréal, she loved movies and good wine, travelling and the great outdoors. In exchange for her youth and beauty, she demanded that men deal with her dog Rocky that went everywhere she did. In one day, she might receive more than a hundred messages and didn’t have time to answer them all, she ended up neglecting her studies in business management.
Some nights when we were bored, we’d read the profiles on okcupid.com. We chose our favourites the way we would have chosen a whore. In the
profiles, the quality most sought after in the opposite sex was determination. People looked for partners, as they say in the business world, who knew what they wanted, they dismissed out of hand anyone who might be neurotic or hadn’t solved their issues. Most looked for non-smokers, and with mental health came physical shape; I often wondered what we’d end up with had we tried.
Some network members would meet in a café before moving on to a bar and then a round of fucking the same night just to get it over with, since people didn’t want to make the effort for no good reason. On the first date, when you came face to face with a real person freed from their digital photo, you might end up packing it in and heading for the door, why throw good time after bad since you knew it would never work. Whores call that getting turned down. When whores get turned down, it’s always a tragedy, they have their pride and money doesn’t change that; for them, okcupid.com and sites like it supply free revenge, both sides can lose face and that’s a form of justice.
When you met someone you had the right to hesitate and feel around the edges, take a moment to consider the other person before making a decision; these days, evaluation is part of the seduction. One day, a client of mine had to pay me for nothing because he decided to hang around and his hour ran out. When he left, I wondered whether watching me waiting for him as he decided to fuck me or not wasn’t his way of getting off.
Josée was never a prostitute and that’s why she believed in probabilities. She’s probably right, in the end, believing in probabilities is a great way to find your way when you don’t believe in God. Josée found happiness on her fortieth date. At the beginning of her quest for love, she set a limit of one hundred encounters.
One day you confided that you once had a profile on okcupid.com, but unlike Josée you did it out of cynicism, to make a mockery of it, it was part of your research for an eventual series of articles on the sexual mores of men and women who use the Internet.
YOU WERE ALWAYS talking about women, at Bily Kun on Friday nights for example with your friend JP and the guy we called Mister Dad because he was fifteen years older than everyone else and came from New York.
All around us people were writing and trying to publish; there are so many books on the market, writing has become an epidemic. Mister Dad wanted to publish a book that wasn’t like mine, he said, his book told a story that was based on action and had a beginning and an end, in the middle was a plot and suspense, it was a book for men. We always spoke English with Mister Dad, not out of submission but impatience, when he spoke French he took too long and his rhythm didn’t fit with our cocaine-flavoured perception of time that pushed every sentence out of our mouths head over heels, speaking his language was a form of selfish compassion. Speaking English made me boring, it turned me into a chick. In English I could only speak in trademarks, Florida, Sex and the City and who was fucking who in Hollywood; the great existential questions stayed out of reach, often they couldn’t get past the barrier of the fourth word and they hung there, suspended in the idea state, I made all sorts of gestures to compensate for what I couldn’t say. When I talked to Mister Dad, I always stopped halfway to let him continue my thoughts in his language. I wanted him to speak English because as soon as he tried French, we became a ridiculous duo of gesticulations and jumping up and down in front of each other; to get it over with, I’d say You know and he’d say I know, and we understood each other.
All the time we were together, he tried to understand what you saw in me, he thought I was superficial, you told me that yourself. One night at Bily Kun something really strange happened and I could never explain it, Mister Dad and I kissed on the mouth right in front of you and you didn’t see a thing. While I was kissing him I looked straight at you, you were looking off in the distance and talking to JP. That night we kissed a number of times, ten at least, you were close by but your mind was elsewhere. Everyone knew us at the bar, everyone respected you, everyone looked at us then at you. That night at Bily Kun, there were long periods of silence buried by techno music, people established consensus with their eyes and waited, making no moves, they were awaiting orders from the King of Bily before deciding, everyone was coming to their own conclusions, they thought it was over between us. JP saw Mister Dad and me and didn’t understand; he left without saying goodbye. The next day he called you and made a big deal about it, JP had scruples that kept him from fucking women he didn’t love and it made him aggressive when he saw other people acting like exhibitionists, he’d head for the door because women were acting like whores, it really pissed him off. When you learned what happened, you blamed my behaviour on coke.
Later I found out Mister Dad kissed me because he’d always wanted to. He could feel it was almost over between us and he didn’t want to miss his chance, even though he thought I was a dumb bimbo, he liked my sexy California body.
ONCE I TOLD you about the pictures of me that appeared on the web eight years ago, they were among the first pornographic images in the history of the Internet, probably I wanted to punish you, but you were delighted by the news. The pictures intrigued you because you wanted to find out if knowing me would affect your pleasure when you looked at them, after all, jerking off to someone you know in the disenchantment of everyday life could be akin to incest. Maybe the experience would help you discover a new dimension and at the moment of release, the emptiness might not be as deep, maybe with a picture of a woman who actually cared about you, you wouldn’t feel so swindled. Every client who fucks a whore feels cheated after he comes, and a lot of them try to get their money back.
I was young in the photos, not much more than twenty, and that attracted you too. Maybe, since then, I’ve become another woman, maybe I didn’t look like myself any more, eight years is a long time for a woman, especially in her twenties. You had your theories: you said that women in their twenties go through the ass test, it can grow fat all of a sudden, in their thirties it’s the skin test, it can change texture, skin can grow age rings like old trees, and women don’t recover. When a woman turns thirty, she suddenly has too much skin, it continues to grow and slowly comes untethered from her body that can’t keep pace. You said my ass had stayed young despite my being twenty-nine but my skin had started to change, not much but a little all the same, it had begun accumulating on my stomach for no particular reason, it was the same with your cat Oreo. When it comes to female cats and women, the skin provides for kicking babies fighting for living space.
For the first several weeks of our love you searched for the pictures in vain, you rummaged through the archives. You had ways of breaking down paywalls without knowing the passwords and that took you hours; looking for my pictures with such single-mindedness might have been a seduction strategy. You looked through every picture in the Barely Legal archives where, supposedly, only girls under twenty are recruited and made into children with all the trappings, teddy bears and single beds. Barely Legal was a legal detour to the Lolita site, but you knew that since you’d visited it a number of times for your research, you’d had to explore the landscape to gain concrete knowledge to inspire your romantic exudations. For you, red-haired girls in braids who were just beginning to bloom were a fetish like leather boots, though between the two you preferred boots. They conveyed the urgency of getting fucked in an alley, boots meant not taking time to find a bed, they also represented the authority of strong women. You claimed to be attracted to women, not girls, your mother was a missionary, she worked at rehabilitating problem kids, she volunteered, she was tough. I told you that the older you got, the younger your tastes became. I wonder if you’ll remember me when you’re fifty.
You never found my pictures, and that saddened you. As a consolation, let me tell you about the photo shoot, I’ll give you one of the last pieces of my past I haven’t turned over.
My hair was braided and tied with white ribbons for the shoot. They made me wear a little blue and white checked summer dress called a sundress, but the size of my breasts sabotaged the whole get-up. They t
ried to emphasize my slender legs and little feet that are so small they’ve fascinated every man I’ve met. For my breasts I joked and said I should wear a bib that might partly cover them and they thought that was a good idea, it had never occurred to them, they’d buy one for the next recruit who had tits. “They” were three men. The first took pictures like a real photographer while the second shot Polaroids to test the lighting, the third organized the composition and the themes of the set; like you, he was at least six feet tall, he saw the scene from on high, he was the idea man.
To go with the bib, they got the idea I should eat jam right out of the jar with my fingers. During the shoot I had to do that, and I had to play with a teddy bear that had been dug out of the back of some closet, my father had given it to me for my birthday, I remember it stank of humidity. The lighting had to be natural to reflect the natural goodness of children who usually know nothing about colour matching and the notion of profile; the lighting had to suggest sunny afternoons when young girls are left alone to nap in their bedrooms where only their dolls may enter. The atmosphere had to conjure up playgrounds off the beaten path; as they stepped into the universe of childhood, users had to be sure they wouldn’t get caught.
They explained what the pictures were meant to suggest. They made it clear I shouldn’t give the impression I knew anything about sex, even though I was absolutely wild for it. I needed to act within the limits of what little girls would know about the topic, I had to look sideways but still remain shy and slip one of my braids into my mouth, not to imitate sucking a cock but to learn how my hair tasted. I had to depict the naivety involved in discovering the world for the first time through my senses, I also had to get naked to satisfy the curiosity of Internet users, my first objective was to display my body and show them where the hurt was so they could toy with it, the other goal was an invitation to help me learn something new. In other scenes, the ones that delivered the paydirt, I had to compare what I had with another little girl and let her play doctor. Everyone knows that little girls play doctor during naptime, the excitement makes them wet themselves, and only jealous women would complain about such innocent discoveries. Everyone knows that little girls have pussies that need a gentle touch and ask for nothing in return, at that age more than any other, pleasure comes without shame and yearns only to take form.
