Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  “It might be a good idea to take her back,” he continued, taking Julie’s hand in his. She took it back just as fast, hiding it under the table, a loser. Charles noted her move but decided not to make anything of it. He hated these complications between men and women, things that just weren’t worth it, stupidities like interior design, some colour that didn’t quite fit.

  “It might be a good idea. It might not be. I want to give her a chance. Stylists like her don’t come around every day.”

  “Women like her don’t come around every day,” Julie echoed, to give ominous meaning to his words.

  They had nothing more to say to each other. Charles left and Julie could hear alcohol’s siren’s voice. She stared at her computer screen, unable to read anything on it. What she’d written meant nothing to her now. She knew she wouldn’t be able to work anymore that day.

  From then on, Julie felt like she was being gnawed on by rats. She began drinking again, from time to time at first, once or twice a week, then every day, only in the evenings, then in the afternoon. She hid to drink. That was useless since drinking is always visible, it’s not something that can be hidden in a relationship.

  Behind her apparent jealousy, another monster was lurking, far worse. Julie was worried about Charles, and that worry was something she’d never known before with men, it was related to the fetishistic pleasure he took, a pleasure she believed she could understand and share. Now she saw that her understanding of it was only ideational, answers filled with nothing more than ideas. She now knew that trying to accede to his desires could only destroy her, and though she was convinced she would destroy herself, she would continue to accept, continue to try.

  For that pleasure of his, she found a word that destroyed him every time she uttered it: slaughterer.

  IT WAS WINTER and it was cold. A cold as intense as the burning of summer. Cold like a row of teeth where the white smoke of the city’s chimneys that followed the wind’s direction seemed itself to be made of ice, about to freeze over and shatter. Montreal was at its deadest, some restaurants didn’t make the effort to open, others offered passersby empty interiors where an idle waiter lazily lingered.

  Julie was at Plan B with Charles and Bertrand, the latter still in a sour mood, despite the time that had passed. He couldn’t accept that Julie was in a relationship with Charles, he could have tolerated it if they were just fucking, but a real story, with daily life and shared projects—that he couldn’t swallow. Bertrand was in a dark mood out of allegiance to Rose, but also out of resentment, since he’d never understood why she’d chosen Charles over him, he’d never been able to cut through her coldness or generate even the slightest emotion in her. Julie only had eyes for Charles, and she removed everyone from her world with no qualms through the exclusivity she awarded him with, sickening him, it seemed too animal, unacceptable, the way she’d obliterated everything that didn’t relate to Charles.

  “Does Bertrand know about the slaughterer?” she asked Charles earlier that day.

  “Stop it with that word! I don’t want to get into it. Not with you.”

  “Not with me? With who then? Does Bertrand know about it, yes or no?”

  “No, and he never will.”

  “Rose kept the secret for you all this time?”

  She looked at Charles the way he’d never been looked at before, as if she were seeing him for the first time, as if she truly saw him as he was, a twisted man, to say the least.

  “She never talked about it with you? Impossible. One day Bertrand will find out, and he’ll judge you! And Rose will find out what you’re made of too one day, and she’ll judge you as well!”

  But that night at Plan B she was quiet, she had no wish to exit her prostration that protected her from the others. Bertrand and Charles were discussing something that didn’t interest her, she was drinking with great application, praying for the pain to stop or at least not worsen. She was dipping her finger in her glass, drawing rings on the table when a young blond woman came up to her, attracting her attention by touching her shoulder with a hand even finer than Rose’s or hers, “a paw” as they said where she came from. Julie recognized her immediately; she had never been able to forget her. She had a name for that enemy emerging from her past, from the depths of time: Girly. Steve had left her for this one, she had debased herself before her. The blond was smiling at her as if they were friends, as if she’d be searching for an opportunity to speak to her.

  “I know who you are. I’m Steve Grondin’s ex. Like you, I was hurt.”

  “Sorry? You’re what?”

  Julie had understood, of course, but she felt disgusted by the idea of building a bond around shared grief, sisterhood at the bottom of the barrel, that would have made Steve into an object of worship, a miserable god, true enough, but a god nonetheless.

  “I’m Steve’s ex. I dated him after you. It was hard for me too.”

  “Yeah, right. You think it’s over? You think your love affairs will have better endings now?”

  The blond woman retreated a step, raising her hand to push aside a strand of hair that had fallen over her eye, smoothing the end between her fingers the way injured cats lick their fur. She was hurt, and in her malaise, the way she felt ridiculed in front of witnesses, Julie saw herself as she had been, years ago, flower in hand, she pictured herself sent packing, dismissed at the Assommoir bar. Right, that’s it, humiliate yourself, burn yourself on my surface, smash your face against my fist, Julie challenged Girly in her mind, Julie was already looking elsewhere, straight ahead, drinking her drink, ignoring Girly, cancelling her out, and Girly, looking for something else to say and finding nothing, departed empty-handed from Julie’s blind spot. For all the world she wouldn’t have given her a sign of compassion, she left without a word and without understanding what had happened, she probably thought she was offering a flower, in her own way, to Julie. Two minutes later, Julie spotted her in the doorway, wearing a long black coat, going out the door, outside. Girly had left the building, and Julie’s glass was empty.

  That night, she didn’t give it any more thought, but the next day the scene caught up with her, forcing a thousand thoughts into her already crowded head, a den of lions she could no longer tame, opening their maws in every direction. Again she felt imprisoned in the great wheel that dominated her, stronger than the relationship she had with Charles, a movement that echoed the disorder in the skies and the drift of continents, a movement that could accelerate, causing a colossal shift in the ocean currents. Julie came to a conclusion: to survive, it was better not to look for happiness but avoid suffering, off the wheel. You had to find cover.

  VII

  * * *

  LIFE WITHOUT CHARLES

  OUTSIDE THERE WASN’T even any snow. The temperature was far above seasonal levels, change was ineluctable, every media outlet predicted it as experts in suits and ties commented on the progressive ruin of the land that was breaking apart through every means known to nature, all at once: earthquakes, cyclones, typhoons, and a tsunami, the melting of Polar ice adrift, port cities and fertile land drowned in salt water.

  In high places, predictions were falling on deaf ears, including in the White House. Soon, in the northern portion of North America, the seasons would disappear and become the same, they would soon turn into an endless magma of greyness and humidity, heat and sun out of orbit, off its trajectory and, who knows, heading on a collision course with Earth. Greenland would fall into the Atlantic Ocean, making hundreds of millions of people flee for higher ground. Autumn and winter would be characterized by mud and wind, beating rain and mental depression, spring and summer by climate-controlled shopping malls, electrical storms, weather alerts, and the agglutination of children in public pools, all pissing in the rancid water.

  Like Julie O’Brien, Rose Dubois was personally affected by the weather, she’d adopted this trait of Julie’s to impress Charles, in thought only because he wasn’t there to see her and take pleasure in it. She couldn’
t please Charles anymore but she could imagine that one day she could please him, she’d do it by appropriating, one by one, all of Julie’s features, in body and mind. She was wrong about what Julie was and what Charles wanted, but she couldn’t know that, couldn’t know what he wanted because he himself was lost, he knew nothing now, because only God, who didn’t exist as One Who Intervenes, as a Professor in man’s questioning, could have told him.

  Outside, women were beginning to undress and show their beauty, the only beauty that remained despite the planetary imbalance, a beauty that grew through the studied and generalized practice of striptease.

  Day was falling in early April, Rose was sitting in a pastry shop on Colonial Avenue, the Baguette Dorée, which was also a bakery and a café all in one, right in front of the building where she no longer lived but where she still had a few cardboard boxes, sitting safely as a pretext to return. Five or six excuses, she calculated that very day, but still she couldn’t return five or six times, taking one box during each visit to bring it back to the surgeon’s house. Her rigmarole was obvious but acceptable, yet as time passed it would become too obvious and unbearable for Charles, and annoying him was the last thing she wanted. To get close to him and get him back, she had to play the game of frivolity, the comedy of healing, pride proclaimed through eyes held high and an affable manner. In her case, an affable manner was a challenge because there was not much that could penetrate Ativan, an anxiolytic Dr. Gagnon prescribed her, and that spread over her life like a layer of down, a soothing medicine that nipped in the bud expressions of happiness or suffering, as Botox had before it.

  Rose had a storehouse of visits that had to be carefully managed. She wanted to put off the time when there would be no more reasons to go see Charles, with or without an appointment, as an ex-girlfriend who has a right to take what is hers. She was sitting in front of a café au lait and a Portuguese pastry, ovos moles that she tore into little bits instead of eating. She’d become thinner but was still pretty, she still had her good skin that shone beneath her well-fitting clothes and the high-heel boots she was wearing were even higher than the ones she used to wear a year ago.

  From the bakery she was keeping watch on the large windows of Julie’s loft, on the third floor, where the drapes were pulled. With a bit of patience, Rose could catch shadows here and there, traces of Julie and Charles in profile, dancing on the ceiling. Then she let herself slip into a trance, looking for a sign that might be aimed at her, that might be for her, hurt at not being that second shadow next to Charles and grateful for the disguise these shadows represented, distancing her from them, covering up what they were doing, making the nature of their activities indefinable, or at least ambiguous. The bakery customers who liked her threw sideways glances in her direction, but they thought she was a lunatic, with the look of hysteria they couldn’t understand because they did like her prettiness. That she was desperate was unthinkable to them. For men and women alike, women’s beauty was incompatible with failure, hysteria, and pain. It was inconceivable that beautiful women might die young or kill themselves, simply because they were beautiful; it was intolerable that they might destroy themselves, that beauty might be damaged by the beautiful woman herself, that this beauty might not be a natural resource, a public good protected by the laws of men. In this widely shared perspective, only ordinary or ugly women could fail, kill themselves or be murdered, they had a right to despair because their degradation was comprehensible, a consequence of the banality of their appearance, or their ugliness, which came down to the same thing: anything that departed from beauty, in women, even a little, fell into a no man’s land.

  Rose was absent-mindedly watching the windows of Julie’s loft which were now dark, though the drapes had been drawn from the inside unbeknownst to her, indicating that someone had been there a while, lying low in obscurity. But nothing was happening, she had to be patient, maybe another café au lait, tearing another pastry apart with her fingers.

  Outside, dirt and wet. What was left of the snow couldn’t be called snow since its nature had long separated from that white fluffy material, volatile and cottony that covered her country for centuries, giving it its reputation, the source of its folklore; now, through metamorphosis snow had become a black crust mixed in with mud. Montreal the Sow was dirtier than ever and her cleaners, the blue-collar workers, were once again on strike. They were using grime as a pressure tactic against Montrealers who would have to accede to their demands for higher wages. Society’s well-being was held hostage by garbage men who stuck the citizens’ clean noses in their own shit, and the city looked like a garbage dump even worse than New York, Rose thought that day, though she’d never been to New York.

  As she was numbly considering the bottom of her coffee cup, a light flashed on at Julie O’Brien’s place. Rose was electrified, for her it was like a curtain rising, an entanglement revealed, the beginning of a play. A shadow appeared, then moved over the ceiling and paced a moment, disappeared, reappeared and disappeared again, at regular intervals. A second shadow approached the first, this one calmer, indolent, as if bored with the other’s fever, its nervous fidgeting. Rose felt a disagreement between the two shadows, and pleasure burned inside her, she was witnessing the couple’s first argument projected on the ceiling like two shadow puppets, a tearful woman and a man accused. Then the light went out the way it first came on, without warning.

  Barely a minute later, the couple appeared in the street, Julie in front and Charles behind. Julie was crying and walking quickly, like a woman who wants to flee as she waits to be held back, forcing her man to play a part, the guy who doesn’t want her to go. She was walking toward the café where Rose sat, a danger for Rose, she had to jump up and turn around and hide from Julie, while trying to keep an eye on her as she walked by. Julie stopped in front of Baguette Dorée’s storefront, where Charles caught up with her. The bakery employees looked on incredulously as Rose hid behind a shelf stacked with fresh bread, but the show was worth the price of admission. Yes, that was Julie’s shadow that had paced the ceiling, growing ever more irritated with Charles’ stoic nature, Rose recognized her Charles, still breathtakingly beautiful, even if he needed a haircut.

  Rose had seen the couple once walking in the street, side by side, and she’d seen Charles and Julie walking separately, though neither had seen her, she instinctively knew how to act with self-effacement, she slipped to the other side of the street, slowed her pace, sat down on a bench, took a detour, using a shop for cover. Seeing them individually or together devastated her every time, but on this afternoon, a fault line opened up in the way the couple presented itself to the world: Charles had remained unchanged while Julie seemed damaged, smaller in every part of her body, a Russian doll emerging from her big sister, set next to her, a diminutive double, on the mantelpiece.

  Julie had lost weight, but more than her body was involved, her face spoke, she wore no makeup, deep circles sagged under her eyes and her white skin was blemished, reddened in spots.

  Charles was trying to get her to hold still by grabbing her arm, but Julie was fighting him, at first energetically, then more slowly, finally she yielded by putting her arms around his neck, though her left arm seemed unable to straighten out completely. Rose could see something Julie couldn’t: Charles’ bored look, a look eloquent with disappointment, which Rose knew all too well. Then the couple separated after they kissed, blandly, with no heat. Charles went toward Saint Lawrence Boulevard, hands in his pockets, a spiteful expression on his face, while Julie moved off toward their building with the slowness of souls in purgatory.

  Rose left her shelter behind the bread rack and sat back down at the table that gave onto Colonial Avenue. A smile on her lips, she began anew to tear up her ovos moles and drink small sips of her second café au lait, still piping hot. Then, turning to face the street, she found herself looking directly at Julie who was standing stock-still and straight in front of the window, staring at her, her face hard and wet tears sti
ll on her cheeks, her expression in pain but still haughty so that nothing could impress, terrible because it was indestructible underneath the veneer of humiliation. The shock of seeing Julie in the window was so great that Rose dropped her cup with a noise that again attracted the attention of the staff: the two women facing each other, staring like children raised by wolves at their reflection in a mirror. Julie had caught Rose red-handed. She knew Rose wasn’t there by chance, she’d been coming there for a while, she’d become a regular there, it was a scheme to spy on her and Charles. She turned on her heels and walked toward her loft like a mechanical approximation of a woman, while Rose, who had failed to hide through sheer idiotic satisfaction, began getting her things together to leave, still in shock, unsteady on her high-heeled boots. She would never be able to return to the bakery but that didn’t matter. As the light slowly ebbed over the starry mantle of the sky, she’d gotten her money’s worth, and it would keep her for a while.

  THE RESTAURANT CALLED Chez L’épicier in Old Montreal was Marc Gagnon’s favourite, with its choices of surprising dishes like a strawberry dessert topped with calamari mousse. According to Marc, nothing could exceed the delight of eating there accompanied by a beautiful young woman like Rose, who’d suddenly come into his life, in the middle of the night, just at the right time, though he’d been thinking of her for a while.

  He had just separated from his wife with whom he had no children, and had stopped touching long ago.

  At a table at the back of the restaurant, near the majestic staircase covered in red carpet that led to the toilets, five women were speaking very loudly, celebrating someone’s birthday. They were all between forty and fifty, they were talking, eating, drinking, laughing, winking, and glancing around, but no dice.