Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  The bathroom was immense, as big as the bedroom, which wasn’t a room but a loft space that two chests of drawers, a lamp, a few plants, a desk and the brown leather couch circumscribed. The bathtub was deep and wide, it faced a white tile wall on which large moving glass panes let Julie watch television while her body was immersed in bubbles.

  Two days after the events at Plan B, she and Charles bumped into each other on Mount Royal Avenue. Charles smiled when he saw her as they moved toward each other on the same side of the street. He smiled as if she’d always been part of his life, as if he’d been expecting her at this very moment, as he was walking out of a supermarket. The way he was smiling wiped away the shame of his confession, as well as any shame at having been caught by Rose. They stopped walking to talk, both affected by that reserve that follows great declarations and epic gestures. They talked about how they might see each other in the future without being disturbed. The bar called Les Folies, not far from Plan B, seemed ideal since neither of them had ever been there, and since Rose would look for them in places they knew and patronized, like the Assommoir, the Baraka, and Bily Kun.

  Julie had a sort of intellectual compassion for Rose. She knew she’d been for Steve the way Rose was now, a bitch sniffing for a trail, fearing recognition, a self-absorbed being you had to spare and get used to. Like Rose, she had seen another woman’s filth demolish her life. She believed those stories are destined to repeat themselves, travelling from one existence to another, and that each woman was, by her nature, another woman’s bitch. She wanted to enjoy being the strongest—especially since she’d suffered from being crushed before—to feel the ongoing triumph of her victory close to her heart, hold that happiness up and compare its longevity with the sadness that held her every morning when she woke. But of course suffering was in league with time, there was nothing fleeting about it, it was the backdrop on which fleeting pleasure was exhibited like a fit of the giggles, lightning, and fireflies.

  On her bed, Chafouin, one of her cats, lifted a somnolent lid over his blue eye and moved a few steps to the left before stretching and lying back down in his own purring, identical to what he was. He settled in the same position through a seemingly useless effort, but which was necessary for him to renew his happiness at falling asleep, feeling night cover over his conscience again, a downy sleep in which downy dreams were dreamed, without conflict. Often Julie wondered if her cats had noticed the changes she’d undergone in the past few years, if they understood she had copied their way of being, a series of curled up positions, sleepy batting of her eyes not truly knowing desire, content to simply be, to prepare the ground to welcome her. Sometimes her newfound downy nature began to sicken her, and exert the same pressure the outside world did. Her immobility would fill with hostility and threats, insults shouted at her in the name of life that was happening someplace else, without her. Comfort began awakening a need to leave that same comfort, and the pleasure principle of letting go would become dangerous ground, a Pandora’s box. In those moments, she would remember why she was dead. She was dead from an excess of will, perseverance becoming all, she was dead in her determination as life commanded her to give up, and withdraw herself from the world. She was dead from her refusal to suck it up.

  When comfort forced her out of herself and she thought of death, she would be like her cats, she would move a little, settle down further, sit in her green armchair and read her newspapers, her books, coming up with ideas for writing, most of which would never take shape.

  She was feeling the beginning of discomfort when the phone rang.

  “Hi, it’s Rose, your neighbour.”

  A voice behind Rose’s, Charles’ voice, speaking to someone who wasn’t Rose, touched Julie. It added to his smile the last time they saw each other.

  “Yes? Everything’s all right?”

  “I was wondering if you were free to talk. Among neighbours, you know. I’ve got an idea for a documentary.”

  Rose’s voice was slightly slurred by alcohol, she had that drawl Julie immediately recognized.

  “Wait . . . like now? I’m not sure . . .”

  “It won’t take long,” Rose cut her off. “I’ve got a scoop for you.”

  IV

  * * *

  A FAMILY OUTING

  THE TWO WOMEN were facing each other on the roof. They were seated at a wooden picnic table painted bright orange, so orange it reached toward the blue sky with not a cloud in sight. Rose brought a bucket of ice with her, a bottle of white wine, and two large wine glasses. It was the same Chardonnay from Plan B, to Julie’s despair who felt the desire to drink come over her. Julie had no defence against alcohol that had once again become—in no time at all, or in the time it took her to pass Charles in the street and talk with him—a force of attraction drawing her in, dark with sudden gaiety, induced relief at a steep price. The bottle brought everything back to her, it was a crystal ball that predicted the steps that led to her fall, the unravelling of this new wound she knew too well, in the heart of a blue afternoon.

  Curiously, the railing hadn’t been repaired, and disembowelled, it offered a death threat, a promise of destruction to those who stepped too close. Five metres from the table, it opened its maw wide, blackened by lightning. It was almost beautiful in this world obsessed with rules, Julie thought, this northern life mortified by risk, modernity that never missed an opportunity to illustrate potentially dangerous scenarios, always with a certain relish, by the lack of real dangers in its environment. Rose was watching Julie with a sad smile on her face, behind pink sunglasses as garish as the orange of the table and the blue of the sky, where a cloud had appeared, out of nowhere.

  Despite the fever beginning to take hold of her, she noticed and studied Rose’s lips that had been touched up: slightly swollen, perfectly defined, with expertise, covered with natural beige lipstick, a fleshy mouth, a sweet almond.

  “Who did your lips? They’re amazing.”

  Rose put the bottle in the ice bucket and looked up at Julie, involuntarily tightening her lips, suddenly she wanted to hide them.

  “I know a lot of surgeons in Montreal,” Julie added, looking over the rest of Rose’s body, as if to get the latest news.

  Rose was shocked. No one had ever called her out on her lips that she got touched up twice a year, no one had ever thrown it into her face, even in the fashion industry where plastic surgery was routine, with the operations that made it what it was. Going to the surgeon was like getting an abortion, the parts put in or taken out were your own and didn’t concern anyone else, a personal choice over your own body that you could make completely freely, without justification or negotiation. The results were made to be seen, but that didn’t mean they could be discussed, her lips that could be seen by all didn’t mean you could talk about them, it didn’t mean that her lips—that she hoped would be remarkable—weren’t her intimate property, like a toothbrush or a tampon at the bottom of her handbag.

  “My lips, yes . . . I go to Gagnon, Dr. Marc Gagnon.”

  “I noticed your breasts too, they’re really well done too. A bit too high maybe? Though not really, they’ll droop with age.”

  Rose was embarrassed, surprised at what she was hearing and annoyed at losing control of the conversation even before it started. She perceived Julie’s head-on impudence dished out as if it were nothing at all as a means of seduction she herself didn’t possess, and Julie, who wasn’t at all embarrassed by Rose’s embarrassment, waited for the rest as she observed her glass held high, at the tip of her fingers, transparency filled with loving liquor against the backdrop of a blue sky, thinking about the cigarette she didn’t have, whose taste would have gone so well with the wine.

  “There’s something people don’t see and that I see,” Rose began. “It concerns unhappiness in love. It has nothing to do with the so-called incompatible psychologies of men and women.”

  “It’s the foundering of morality, and religion, and authority that transcends
the duration of the original infatuation, no? The disappearance of all values that might supplant sexual desire?”

  Rose wasn’t expecting that sort of reply, and she wasn’t sure she understood what it meant. She turned the wine in her glass, describing small staccato circles until a few drops flew out and spattered the table. Despite herself Julie felt the waste, the loss of joy.

  “No, no, that’s not it . . . nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with religion or the disappearance of . . . whatever. Even less with men’s feelings that are never as intense. Nor feminism. It’s a lot simpler, it’s statistical. An aberration, but you can’t do anything about it. Not yet. Not today, and not tomorrow.”

  Julie was in line for a bad time, she understood now. Rose didn’t want to talk about subjects for a documentary, but about her and Charles. She wanted to talk about her own situation and their little hobbling triangle through the intermediary of some global vision about the misery of love whose single cause everyone had been searching for since the beginning of time, as if unhappiness wasn’t the foundation of love itself.

  The sun began to burn the two women like a punishment. In the blue sky a group of white clouds had formed out of nothing, out of itself, begetting made possible by its own potential.

  As Rose refilled her glass, Julie inspected her handbag for the cigarette she knew she didn’t have. Handbags are often searched by women, she noticed, like a magical and prolific object that produced lost or inexistent objects: money, credit cards, cigarettes, and medication that appeared out of a void that neighboured reality where all the lost things in the world waited, building up in numbers until a few were transmuted into women’s handbags, inside their little zippered pockets.

  She was searching through her bag when Rose took out an unopened pack of cigarettes, its plastic wrapping untouched, Benson & Hedges Ultra Light King Size, Julie’s brand when she was a serious smoker. With that, Rose destabilized Julie, who suddenly understood that Rose had begun to know her in her tastes and habits, she knew how to read her actions, she pre-empted her desires, she saw her when she thought she was alone, when she felt for the edges of her being in her private place. Where had she gotten this information? Probably on the Plan B patio when Rose was listening to her and Charles.

  It wasn’t Rose spying on her life that troubled Julie the most. The golden pack of cigarettes shining on the orange table brought back the memory of a horrible night at the Assommoir when she offered a flower to a young woman, a blond, whom Steve was seeing after he’d left her. Having drunk too much, Julie had a revelation. She must immediately execute a symbolic gesture of submission and honour, follow an animal code that all gregarious individuals obey to know their place in the world, she had to act to respect the changing hierarchy of the strong and the weak, the great and the small, to follow the rituals of group survival. It was clear to her that night at the Assommoir that she had to change her impotence into an active role, and find a way to keep her chin up, but she had only humiliated herself further. The bitch of a woman she had secretly nicknamed Girly was embarrassed, Steve even more so; they already felt pity for her because the flower represented even worse initiatives she might undertake, she might fall even lower. A flower or a pack of cigarettes as a way to remain relevant, the proof of her existence in other people’s lives, but also a break with common language, the final stage of all communication between victors and vanquished.

  After that night at the Assommoir, Steve understood he shouldn’t encourage Julie by speaking to her, he even stopped acknowledging her when he saw her out of fear of unleashing a new parade with new antics. His final retreat from mutual recognition, the consensus of a shared past, had been Steve’s last demonstration of love for Julie. He didn’t want to let her sully herself, Julie decided, didn’t want his memory of her dragging through the mud before him, he who had once known her so proud.

  As Rose kept her own counsel, Julie told herself that compassion—which only appears when we see ourselves in someone else—was based on egoism; the greater the pain at seeing yourself in another person, the greater the compassion; the greatest part of compassion was the deep-set horror in yourself that you saw surface in someone else, knowing you could be next. Only in the awareness that you’d stooped as low as the person before you, at least once in your life, could peace be achieved; peace corresponded to the moments of camaraderie in the mutual recognition of humiliation.

  Rose remained silent as she watched Julie unwrap the pack of cigarettes with exasperating slowness. Finally, she spoke.

  “Love is more difficult for women because they’re more numerous then men. Leftover women create tension in other women by wanting to carve out a spot with a man. By being too numerous, they jostle for position to be in a relationship. Jostling for position becomes their destiny in love. It’s as simple as that.”

  Julie heard Rose but said nothing, contemplating her own nightmare that evening at the Assommoir through the pack she had finally managed to open, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. As she smoked, she watched bouquets of white clouds forming here and there with worrisome swiftness in the sky over greater Montreal, the North American capital of global warming.

  “In Quebec, there are one million women too many, more or less. The population is fluid, it moves from place to place, we shift and it’s hard to get a clear view of the crowd. We don’t notice it. We don’t think about it. We never see it as a problem that affects society as a whole. This million or so extra women create pressure on men, their heads spin with so many women. They don’t complain about it, of course. But not knowing where to turn makes them dizzy.”

  Rose showed no sign of inebriation as Julie slowly felt the alcohol rise in her. Rose watched the broken guardrail a moment, as if to slough off the weight of all those extra women by pushing them off the roof.

  “Men aren’t polygamous by nature but they get that way to respond to the pressure women put on them. Contrary to what people think, men are far more in demand than women. There are far more single women than men.”

  “Impossible,” Julie interrupted. “If there were a million more women in Quebec than men, we’d hear about it. Am I right?”

  “Why would we hear about it? Neither men nor women see a problem. Men come out on top, they can choose from a wide range of women. Men don’t speak out against favourable conditions. That’s just instinct.”

  As she spoke, Rose took the bottle of Chardonnay out of the ice bucket and replaced it, automatically, without even looking at it.

  “Women can’t draw the link between this reality and the problems in their love life. The fact that they’re single more often than not, that they’re always being dropped for someone else, women or other men. It’s discrimination if you talk about it! It’s sexist if you present it as a social problem! Saying it is dangerous in our world. Because of past domination, because of History.”

  “Okay, okay,” Julie said, filling up her glass with what was left of the wine. “Presented like that, it’s a big problem. But I can’t understand why this disproportion doesn’t get more attention. These days everyone’s on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.”

  “What’s strange is that people think the opposite is true, that on Earth there are only men. Just because it’s the case on television, in the news, in politics, everywhere. All your history books, war in the Middle East, in the Arab countries, in Africa, everyone we hear and see, they’re all men. Global history is saturated with men. Women are invisible except in ads and videos. Or on the Internet, where they’re overflowing.”

  “Okay, I follow you, but what you’re saying is outrageous. In China and India, there are mass killings of girls by way of abortion and murder. You do know that, right?”

  “Yes. In countries like China and India there are millions of women missing. One hundred million in all. Because of large-scale foeticides and infanticides. But the massacre of girls makes people think that there are not enough women elsewhere in the world.
It’s the opposite.”

  Rose was beginning to grab Julie’s attention; she was beautiful in her enthusiasm, not a rigid, frozen beauty but something alive, she was turning into a real person, glowing and baroque, the kind Julie liked. And there was some truth in what she was saying, Julie thought, a truth announced with pompousness, a way of revealing the underlying drama by dishonestly exaggerating the distribution of gender, which Julie liked, it reminded her of Charles’ father’s Amazons with their pussy-eyes.

  “Okay, let’s say you’re right, but what are you referring to? A study? Something on TV?”

  “In Quebec and everywhere else in the West, the population is 52% women. Anyone can verify that. Those are un official statistics. Of seven million people in Quebec, that adds up to 280,000 women too many. It doesn’t seem like much but there’s something else that makes all the difference. Fifteen percent of men are gay, at least. I say at least because I’m an optimist. So maybe more. Some studies show that up to 20% are gay. But let’s be optimistic: 15% of men are gay, meaning 504,000 gays in Quebec. If you subtract those men who aren’t interested in women from the total, there are only 2,856,000 men who love women and want to form relationships with them. So 784,000 men are missing. Which makes 784,000 women too many. Almost a million.”