Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Charles was staring at Julie’s bicep as she solicited it with her hand, as if to measure its strength, attracting the attention of a few women around them, mineral-water prattlers. Charles didn’t understand anything about themes that emanated from people or the baroque character or the results of the process. Baroque meant nothing except, maybe, objects and flaws. Baroque like gargoyles, demons, monsters, oddities and bad-taste baroque like gothic, adolescents wearing black over white skin, weighty and dramatic, haunting the Plateau Mont-Royal.

  “Baroque?”

  “Yes, baroque.”

  Charles was waiting for details that didn’t come. His attention had moved to Julie’s breasts that were filling him with a pressing desire to touch them. Nothing of what he heard pleased him but something in Julie’s body, her firmness no doubt, attracted him. He wanted to possess, to make her his, and for that he couldn’t get flustered and lose his edge.

  “I’ve been a photographer for six years,” he declared by way of an answer, folding his hands over his knees, an interview posture.

  “Before, I was an assistant. I liked it, but it was hard at first. Montreal isn’t very big, and there are a lot of photographers. Most models go elsewhere to get paid more. I work for Elle Québec, Loulou, Summum, rarely for Vogue or Vanity Fair. I shoot for fashion magazines, but I do events too . . . and overseas contracts . . .”

  Charles continued dealing out information about himself, scattered every which way, slowly realizing he had very little to say. He was sorry, all the more so because he was having difficulty not dropping his eyes to Julie’s breasts. But she was barely listening to him, knowing she would break down and drink, and knowing as well that to be interesting, Charles would first need to make a list of things that wouldn’t be useful for them. She wished they could skip this fastidious part of character.

  “Do you like your loft?” she asked to stop his prattling. “What do you see from your window? I’ll bet it’s the brick wall on the other side, right?”

  As she spoke she watched the pack of cigarettes that peeked out of Charles’ shirt pocket, feeling in the pit of her stomach the twinge that always preceded the times she drank, the malaise before the dissolution, the resistance of her body before the joy of falling apart. In a single quick movement she grabbed the pack, opened it, and pulled out a cigarette before looking up at Charles, waiting for him to offer a light.

  “I’m not sure yet, it’s pretty busy.”

  Concentrating on her cigarette, the first in six months, Julie hadn’t heard him.

  “What? Not sure about what?”

  “The loft.”

  “Yes, of course, sorry.”

  “And there isn’t a brick wall in front of my window. There’s nothing special out the window, actually.”

  “You lived with Rose before you moved here? How long have you been together?”

  “Four or five years, something like that. We didn’t live together before, only next to each other, practically on the same street. In Little Italy.”

  “It’s not bad there. Calmer. There’s so much noise here.”

  Then, as silence fell, Julie noticed the desire in Charles’ eyes for the first time, a desire like a light he shone on her, then a child behind the cedar hedge screamed in surprise and began to bawl with that end-of-the-world intensity Julie hated so much. For her, intensity was a serious mistake, inconsiderate when you considered other people’s existence, and besides, the end of the world should be welcomed with the feeling of a mission accomplished, and not revolt and resistance.

  “We should drink a little before we talk,” she suggested through a mouthful of cigarette smoke.

  “Anyway, my work and my life aren’t exactly exhilarating,” Charles admitted, unhappy at being so uninspired, and feeling he wasn’t a very interesting subject.

  Julie was expecting just that sort of reply; she wasn’t of his opinion.

  “Exhilarating doesn’t interest me. I work with unease and guilt.”

  Charles disliked both unease and guilt. They didn’t become him, and he couldn’t understand how they could constitute a starting point for a project.

  “We should have a bottle of white wine,” she decided. “It’s time for an aperitif. Do you like wine? Unless you want sangria?”

  In the hours that followed, they drank three bottles of chardonnay. After a few glasses, it all disappeared, the documentary project, fashion, photo shoots. They relaxed and Julie was able to get what she wanted from Charles in little bits and pieces, and in the drunkenness that filled her, she began to listen to him, alcohol excited and lulled her at the same time, soon she entered that phase of general reconciliation in which every person with whom she’d ever crossed paths in her life was absolved, washed of all sins, when the greatest moments of disaster and the deepest depths of abjection took on a personal meaning bigger than her and that she had to accept.

  Emboldened by Julie’s body leaning toward him, encouraged by the questions she asked, Charles ended up giving in and talking about the butcher shop that Pierre Nadeau—his father—had owned, providing details he had promised himself never to express out of fear of unearthing everything, bringing to the present abominations best left in the past. The hesitation and distance that characterized him earlier suddenly gave way to uncontrollable outpouring. His fear of the taboo was suspended as his story took shape and as Julie, who didn’t hear the children behind the hedge anymore, perceiving nothing but the extraordinary quality of his story, let her stupefaction show.

  Of his childhood Charles retained only terrible and anxiety-ridden memories of large pieces of hanging flesh, his father’s and his animals’, a small room inside the shop filled with cold and the smell of death where his father would lock him in each time he had panic attacks and demanded to see his mother and sister who’d left to live in another city when he was twelve. He told Julie about his vision of pieces of meat splayed, dismembered, stacked together, the feeling that the essence of his life would stick to this flesh, and that he too would be cut into pieces and hung and, who knows, forced to forever remember this life where he and the carcasses formed a single body.

  His sister Marie-Claude followed his mother Diane out of the city and he, Charles, had been forced to stay with his father in the house with its adjoining shop. It was better that way, his mother thought, to develop his identity, and grow up with the right gender, officially given at birth.

  Pierre Nadeau not only had the brutal manners of a butcher, but a few defects in his soul he could blame on his own father, cracks through which insanity entered, real insanity, the kind that produces chattering voices that open onto invisible planes populated by beasts. Charles had a lot to say about his father who’d nearly driven him crazy: his explosive nature that erupted after Diane and Marie-Claude’s departure, his state growing worse and more intense, which led to the loss of his butcher shop after a few years, before he ended up in the psychiatric hospital where he was to this day. His attacks, his descents toward hell, the uncontrolled slide had disturbed Charles and forced him into his father’s darkness, where he witnessed his world in nightmarish snippets: the telepathy, the deathly dangers, murderous and mutant female assassins, informers from beyond the grave, signs of planetary catastrophes, conspiracies against him fomented in high places, within the Government, in the spheres of Supreme Power.

  The sheer size and strength of Pierre Nadeau let him rule over the house, his son who was his only audience, where his insanity was law. Many afternoons, when Charles came back from high school, he had to help his father close up the shop, wrap pieces of meat, label them, and sometimes lug the large sides of meat that had been delivered by truck into the shop. Once the chores were done, father and son began the night’s routine, at the end of which the son, more often than not, would finish his day in the cold room. The routine was a kind of ceremony. Charles wasn’t hungry enough to eat the dishes prepared by his father. He would have given anything to finish off the plate of meat an
d potatoes but he couldn’t, the meat was too close to him, from the family shop, meat made of the same bloody matter as he was, as red and painful as his own body, and the more upset his father became, the less Charles could face his plate, his father’s elliptical speeches, his leaps of logic between subjects that had no link to what was in their plates, the treachery of women, the Amazons who had an eye above their pussies, or so said the father as he raged through the house with no regard for his son. He, the father, whom all wanted to hurt, needed to protect himself from the Amazons, sworn enemies of men, protect himself from them but also everyone and everything else, the G-Men especially, in cahoots with the Amazons and their superhuman sight, the third eye in their pussies that saw everything coming, especially him.

  The father combined the most fantastic elements, thinking he could find truth in his constructed system, and understand better than anyone the planetary threats against humanity. He lost himself in his stories instead. Every time, Charles would moan and cry, unable to stay in one place, unable to feel comfortable anywhere, not even in his room from which he could hear his father’s carrying on. Then his father reacted, finally Charles existed, he had to push his son aside, his existence was howling too loudly. He dragged him to the cold room, an old walk-in refrigerator that couldn’t be opened from the inside. His son disappeared into it, partly so he wouldn’t need to suffer his presence in his unfolding insanity, partly to protect him from it, for at times, when light broke through, he would see Charles’ anxiety as he witnessed the insanity he wanted to cure. Almost always he would go and release him an hour later, two at most, but sometimes he’d forget him entirely and wake up in the middle of the night, remembering he’d forgotten. He would run to the cold room, sorry, sorry, and pull his shivering son out, still moaning, and envelope him in his rough tenderness, hugging him too hard, crying over him, choking him, sorry, sorry, tenderness that was, for Charles, worse than the hours of detention.

  During his isolation in the cold and dark of the cold room, another war began, the one he had to fight, not against his father but against the thoughts that tumbled through his mind. The slabs of meat he couldn’t see appeared in photographic detail, they were a presence in the room. Then there were noises, the kind that a footstep in a puddle makes. He heard the sounds of moving viscosity that reached for him in mortal embrace. Charles would try and disappear and breathe as little as possible, to escape the attentions of the butchery.

  This nightmare lasted more than a year, then Diane took him back and brought him to live with her and his sister in Magog, not far from Montreal. If his mother had made her move even a month later, it would have been too late, Charles believed, he would have gone mad, he would have fallen in with his father and his beliefs, his Amazons and global treachery. He would have done that out of a desire to survive, the way the spirit adapts to what’s intolerable, faced with the shattering of expectations, the days of ruin with their infernal logic to which only his father held the key.

  Charles couldn’t stop talking, and as he told his story to Julie, she asked questions and offered opinions, she served him up a small masterpiece of interpretation: she told him why he’d become a photographer and why he didn’t desire his models, why he loved the smooth unity of women’s bodies in photographs, their integrity guaranteed by the images themselves, the glossy paper that turned their bodies hermetic, inalterable, without odour and by the same process without sexual energy, sublime but neutered. All that, Julie continued, because his father was a butcher. That explanation could have been perceived as a ghastly shortcut but it captivated Charles who was reliving his childhood with this woman he barely knew as his guide, she was revealing the essence of his life like a fortune teller, with two draws of her cards, the butcher who splays open, the photographer who seals tight.

  By the third bottle of Chardonnay, Charles’ story began to wither, it took a comic turn as Julie, still rehashing her theories about his career as a photographer, compulsively touching his shoulder, feeling her need for a man, a powerful appetite that hardened her nipples, a sign of health. Every five minutes they clinked their glasses together, cheers, to your health, making jokes about the World Cup fans they called “Free Radicals.”

  They were breaking open a fourth bottle of Chardonnay when Rose appeared, when they finally noticed she was standing next to them, unmoving, pale, almost blending into the row of cedars behind her, the same colour as her safari dress. She was standing bolt upright by their table, looking at neither one nor the other but at a hazy spot somewhere between them, the two of them who’d forgotten her, Charles more than Julie. She looked like a statue but for the uncontained distress of her features, and she forced the reality of the outside world onto Julie, like an accident between her life lived in a vacuum and the great obstacle of other existences, those other people who loved with all their hearts and imposed their suffering on her like a return to her past. Rose had been on the patio for the last hour, they’d later learn, watching them from the next table, drinking the same Chardonnay, as if to be part of them.

  She’d heard the last hour of Charles’ confession as he slowly drew closer to Julie, touching her elbow as she held onto his shoulder. Rose’s world fell apart a second time on this same patio as she realized that Charles never broached the subject with her, despite the many attempts to learn more about his father. He’d never spoken of the cold room, he always claimed Pierre’s insanity had been caused by depression due to overwork. He even alleged they’d gotten along well, and that he was sorry he had to go live with Diane and Marie-Claude.

  “Hey! Rose! How are you?”

  Julie was aware of the embarrassment of the situation, but she was having too good a time to give into it. She raised her arm in an attempted wave.

  “I’ve got the same dress,” she yelled, “only beige! Come and sit down!”

  As she scanned the patio for a chair, Julie noticed that people were looking at her with that superior air in which she saw herself debased; she had felt that look before.

  Still standing, unmoving, Rose could neither return Julie’s wave nor leave. She had never felt so bad in her life, she was being forgotten by people and made to forget herself. She didn’t care about keeping up appearances, so sharp was the dagger at her throat. On that day, as she was being harried from the world where the world itself was an image both crude and distant, she felt for the first time how close love could be to hate.

  Charles was ashamed of Rose’s intrusion, it forced him to confront another shame, worse than the first, of having dug so deeply into his past, into what was least respectable, under Julie’s spell, her magnetism had made him reckless, more so than the wine, even though he wasn’t used to drinking, at least not in such quantities and so early in the day. He got up, dizzy and upset, to take leave of Julie, kissing her on both cheeks, peck-peck, avoiding the subject of the full bottle he was leaving with her, and making no allusions to a future meeting.

  Julie was drunk. She was beginning to dissolve. Her happiness had crumbled. It was too early to go to bed, too late to stop. She went home with the bottle of Chardonnay, got a glass of water, and swallowed two Xanax in front of the television set to make sure she wouldn’t drink any further. Her body would be swallowed by a sleep that would prevent any more damage, sleep would accomplish what she couldn’t do: she would stop drinking. She woke up eight hours later on the couch, in the middle of the night, in front of the snowy TV screen, the memory of leaving Plan B completely gone. As she stood in the warm water of the shower, at least she knew she hadn’t done anything stupid. She hated her cowardice that always left her on the edge of some great fall, it pushed her into nothingness that wouldn’t spit her out until it took a bite out of her, keeping a piece for itself. As she always did, she put an X on her calendar for the date of her relapse, the first in six months, and cleansed herself the following days at the gym, sweating, more than necessary, in the sauna.

  IT WAS STILL EARLY. The sun was beginning to rise over the ea
stern edge of the city, sending its rust-coloured rays through Julie’s window. Not that bad after all, she told herself that morning, recalling her relapse, she’d seen worse. As she lay on her couch, she thought of Charles, whom she believed she loved. She remembered his look on the patio that had lost the indifference of their first meeting, a look that took each part of her in, piece by piece. Alcohol had kept her from feeling the effects but now, on the couch, she felt them returning, the heat, the filling of her being that hardened her nipples, flowed into her pussy suddenly alive again, like a corpse rising from the grave.

  She was afraid her emotions wouldn’t last. Other men caused the same reaction over the years and none had lasted. Men encountered her hardness, her coldness, her frigid reactions to their attempts to get close to her that appeared early on, after a few days together, at most a week or two. Life had a special way of rigging every game, and she had her own tendency to get out of sync, the way she had of never having the right emotion for the situation. Never had Julie felt so loved by men as when she could no longer return their love.

  Her family, those close to her, her colleagues, and even André the Giant Casanova, her only friend who never spoke to her in the language of love, claimed that her fear of being abandoned as she abandoned herself kept her from loving them. At one time or another, everyone had served her up the fashion magazine psychology about how people who loved no one were simply more sensitive than others, Homeric lovers changed into stone by adversity, people with hearts so great they became parsimonious with their affections. People are making things up when they think fear keeps me from loving, Julie said to herself, the fear of abandonment as if I could give a shit about their abandonment, everyone is in love with the idea but actually it’s a material incapacity; my circuits are fried, the very flesh in which love takes root has been damaged.

  Wounded flesh hides to heal. Julie lived in a downy décor, flowery, a cocoon that always embarrassed men who dared enter, so comfy everything was, all cushions and comforters, so subdued was her environment, filled with green plants where three Siamese cats slept at all times, the atmosphere discouraged movement. The setting was designed to reflect and contemplate on the past, a retreat against the grain of the world, its impetus towards efficiency and results. In Julie’s loft there was very little effort, few results, but many rewards, those you enjoy sitting or lying down. She lived in a single large room where she could keep an eye on the pots on the range, lying on the bed, and her immobility, sometimes troubled by her cats that always moved in a pack, as by groupthink, was visible everywhere, in radius of three to ten metres.