Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  At the sight of the tricolour elastic waistband of Winslow’s underwear, a good three inches of which were visible over the top of his pants, a surge of slightly acidic nausea rose in me, fuelled by all those petty vexations that slowly eat away at your insides, and I thought, without explicitly formulating the words, that Bob Winslow was a dangerous man, a loser who’d been driven crazy by isolation, a degenerate fired up by the insalubrious desire to imitate his neighbour and thus prevent himself from losing his selfhood due to his own lack of personality. He was feeble-minded, a person who thought that getting a dog was enough to prove to me that the two of us were alike and that my relationship with Jeff was nothing special; that what made me different could be eliminated by a simple mirror trick.

  Bob Winslow’s strategy, or what I considered to be his strategy, was not remotely original. It was based on the exceedingly banal principle on which the society I’d tried to leave was also founded: the abolition of identity through the multiplication of the self and the creation of new multiples, with the aid of which identity will try in vain to reconstruct itself. I hated this slavish mentality and had the feeling, as I contemplated Bill’s face, that I’d been catapulted into the pastel suburbs of Edward Scissorhands or Pleasantville, or any such nightmare where you only have to peep over the ineluctable hedge to observe your charming wife, your elegant house, your gleaming car, your adorable children in your neighbour’s yard—or worse still, to see yourself, all smiles, busy mowing the lawn or trimming the inevitable hedge. The horror. The idea, as I stood in front of the mirror, that one day I might come face to face with Winslow revived my nausea, which was immediately followed by shivers set off by the cold man inside me nibbling away at my resentments.

  “Nice doggy, good puppy,” I nevertheless babbled like an idiot, crouching down next to Bill, who was busy prancing around me under Jeff’s jealous gaze. Jeff likes everyone except other dogs — or at least not dogs trying to seduce me. To show Bill I was his owner — and who was master — Jeff gave a snarl that lifted his lip on the left side and revealed his yellow teeth, then growled a little. Bill seemed to understand what Jeff was telling him, because immediately he lay down at Jeff’s feet and wagged his tail. Well, at least one of us knew how to get some respect, proof that in a half-empty glass there is always a little liquid, or that the dynamics of any duo is invariably determined by which is the one ready to bite and which is the one who’ll let himself be torn to shreds — by the biter and the bitten.

  As we waited, Winslow looked at Bill with the loving gaze of someone who’s just discovered the meaning of life, which made me feel a certain respect for him. I’ve always thought any man who loves dogs can’t be entirely bad or entirely stupid, but I wasn’t going to give in to this brief surge of sympathy. Although I might feel a modicum of respect for men fond of dogs, I vastly prefer ones who only like dogs and leave you in peace. This wasn’t the case with Winslow, who took advantage of my moment of weakness to announce that he’d not only come to introduce me to his dog, but also to invite me over for dinner — to officially welcome me to Mirror Lake and celebrate Bill’s arrival into our little community. Those were his exact words, “our little community.” What a jerk.

  It was now or never, were I to explain that I didn’t like communities, small or large, new or old, anterior or posterior, and that the best way to welcome me was to ignore me, so I said as much, but he didn’t get it. There are some people, and Winslow was one of them, who are so convinced that harmony among men — and particularly good neighbourly relations, complicity between spouses, the collusion of minds, and other such baloney — is going to save the world that they don’t listen when you point out such concord isn’t born of promiscuity or overpopulation. So Winslow turned a deaf ear. He’d sensed that, due to some perfectly ordinary embarrassment or awkwardness, I’d not accept his invitation, so he’d made us a little something to eat and brought it with him. Without even allowing me the chance to protest, or to claim I wasn’t hungry — that I was anorexic, that I was on a strict fennel-based diet, that I had multiple allergies and was Howard Hughes’s grandson — he ran over to the car he’d parked at the top of the driveway to my cottage (so that was how he’d got here, the schemer) and returned with a basket like Little Red Riding Hood’s, two bottles of bubbly, and a box decorated with a tightly curled ribbon he must have unearthed from an old box of Christmas decorations.

  “For you,” he said, blushing, as he handed me the box.

  The sneaky old bastard had thought of everything, right down to the most trivial, microscopic details, which was why it had taken him three days to turn up again. I had no choice but to invite him onto the porch, where I unwrapped the gift while he took a tablecloth out of the basket, laid it on an old wooden table that actually seemed to be waiting for it, and started serving dinner. The gift was a book, The Maine Attraction, a novel by one Victor Morgan, whom I didn’t know from Adam; Winslow enthusiastically recommending it to me partly because, he said, the characters were very realistic, though mostly because the story took place in a little village not far from Mirror Lake. I had no idea how he’d guessed I liked reading, so I asked him.

  “Intuition,” he said, adding that he was like a woman in that respect. It was the anima side of his personality, and his intuition never failed him. He then appraised me, with that disagreeable little smile on his face, and I noticed his eyes were the same blue as mine, either faded blue or periwinkle blue, depending on the light and what we’d consumed the night before.

  But I didn’t have time to dwell on the resemblance, because he’d handed me a glass of sparkling wine, raised his own, and said, “Live long and prosper, buddy,” then clinked his against mine — which was full and spilled. To hide my irritation, I ground my teeth, and therefore smiled, and talked to him about my reading, which brought us to a place where men can get along. If I hadn’t felt about Bob Winslow the way any normal person would about someone suffocating them, I might go so far as to say we had a pleasant evening, sitting on the porch and discussing Victor Morgan, David Goodis, and Stephen King, whose shadow hovered over the Maine forests. But when Winslow referenced Irish, William Irish he said, and Woolrich, Cornell Woolrich of course, I was at my wits’ end and tried to come up with the right word to define the frankly unspeakable irritation flooding over me.

  Winslow had just articulated the double name of an author holding a place in my own personal pantheon, with whom I had a singular relationship. Nobody I knew had ever read Irish, and here was this ape taking ownership of William and Cornell as if they’d been to bed together. The corollary of my annoyance was that the more we talked, the more I discovered how much this jerk and I had in common. If Winslow had detested the company of his peers, I’d have been fine with us being alike, especially as I would never have found out at all, except by chance, but apparently this was one of the few traits we did not share.

  Winslow must have noticed, as I was compiling a list of our similarities, that I was doing my best to contain myself because, whether out of sympathy or simply to imitate me, he started grimacing, reflecting back a parody of myself and Kermit the Frog, curing my dyspepsia immediately. Not exactly delighted to learn that my face reminded others of Kermit, whom I didn’t like, I turned away and sank inside myself — deep inside myself, far from the annoying surface of things — letting Winslow badmouth Waltz into Darkness, Irish’s masterpiece, during which time Catherine Deneuve, who’d rendered the mermaid of the novel immortal for Truffaut’s camera, appeared on the screen between Winslow and me, pursued by a crazy-in-love Jean-Paul Belmondo. When Deneuve disappeared — after a period of time hard to measure for a man enthralled by beauty — Winslow launched into a shot-by-shot analysis of The Bride Wore Black, and I let Jeanne Moreau and her black veils invade the screen. After the third or fourth victim’s blood squirted me in the eye, I changed the channel and became, instead, interested in the butterflies burning their wings on the dusty bulb shining i
nside the lantern. Winslow must have turned it on as I was kissing Catherine Deneuve while Belmondo’s back was turned, because it was now pitch-black out.

  I like that expression, pitch-black, almost as much as black as the devil’s lair, except that it’s more realistic, because if we are to believe what we’ve been told, the devil’s home is red with a touch of fiery yellow. A blast of heat came to my face as I thought about people who don’t love their neighbours as themselves being good candidates for Lucifer’s team, subsequently realizing that I risked spending eternity in a disco setting. What with this perspective frightening me as much as the prospect of waking up in the same bed as Winslow, I assuaged the fear with the first argument that came to mind: since I actually hated my neighbour as much as myself, I’d be able to plead my case when angels from heaven and hell grabbed me and started fighting over which side I would go to.

  The matter settled, I looked at Jeff and Bill tussling over the butterfly corpses littering the porch. Bill was clumsy and didn’t really know what to do, so he was watching Jeff and trying to copy him. A bit of hairy wing was stuck to the side of his jaw, making him look kind of stupid, but he didn’t seem to care any more than he seemed to feel the slightest hint of compassion for the little creatures trying to shorten their already brief lives.

  I wondered how dogs feel about death — not their own or their masters’, but the deaths of butterflies, squirrels, field mice. Hard to say . . . With the two-part aim of satisfying my curiosity and silencing Winslow’s voice, I focused on Jeff’s large head, on his round eyes, tried to place myself there, behind those eyes staring at the butterflies. At first, I saw tiny, crazy, useless, meaningless things flapping about the light amid the crackling noises of the flame, whirling in the cool evening air, and then falling, insignificantly, at my feet. I watched a moth that had taken refuge under Winslow’s chair, and since the sight made me feel neither hot nor cold, I concluded dogs feel nothing about the death of creatures not like them. This was perhaps also true for one or other of the pariahs of Morgan’s The Maine Attraction — seven of them, all on death row, who a nice fictional licence permits us to see gathered around the table for what will be their final meal, or that’s what Winslow was telling me right then, having finally decided to leave Irish in peace.

  I listened to him distractedly, my consciousness still half inside Jeff’s big head, but nevertheless the information filtered through the other half in my attempt to find out if the seven death-row inmates of Holburn prison were like dogs and Winslow’s universe truly overlapped with mine, but I was too tired and hadn’t actually learned anything interesting about the novel nor the select affinities that might bring Winslow and I together, except for the fact that Morgan, the novel’s author, hadn’t published anything afterwards and, in 1951, the year I was born, had vanished into thin air.

  After his exegesis, I pulled myself out of my torpor and saw that Winslow was serious and thoughtful. Reading the book had clearly made a big impression on him, so much so that all traces of his easygoing smile had disappeared. It occurred to me that at least reading could do one good thing: it could sometimes make us seem less stupid. I also noted that Winslow was a difficult character to pin down, rough around the edges on the one hand, and fit for decent company on the other, like a big branch whittled and sanded on one side only. While I was trying to come up with a way to properly express Winslow’s elusive side, Wittgenstein came to mind again and I remembered that he’d written something about the inexpressible. “If it can’t be expressed, it can’t be said,” or something like that. So I allotted Winslow to the category of the inexpressible, and poured the last of the second bottle of sparkling wine into his glass, a gesture briefly enlivening his expression before it immediately reverted to that of an idiot.

  And that’s how the evening ended. Winslow put his glass down, picked up his Little Red Riding Hood basket, tablecloth, dirty dishes, and then got into his car with Bill, two shadows big and small that the night quickly swallowed up as they emitted a “See you soon, racoon.” But the mountains didn’t take up the call, as mountains only answer to shouts, and because Winslow, at the end of that night, was looking peaky. And, as everyone knows, folk with peaky complexions don’t shout. They mumble, murmur, and talk only to themselves. Actually, I intuited the words see you soon more than I heard them, enough that I was not at all certain of the perhaps enigmatic words spoken by the image of Winslow that the dark, like a ruminant, masticated and then gulped down.

  The most basic courtesy demanded, after Bob Winslow kindly inviting me to my place for dinner, that I do the same in return; that like Little Red Riding Hood, I gather together a few galettes, a small jar of butter, and other food in a basket, jump into my rowboat and hurl myself into the wolf’s mouth. But courtesy was an alien concept to me. I’d come to Mirror Lake to be alone and not to have to worry about the propriety that burdens all men bereft of the liberty of isolating themselves deep in the woods and who, instead, must pretend to love their neighbours.

  So I opted for silence and rudeness, sure that Bob Winslow, however tenacious his desire to erect a bridge between the two sides of Mirror Lake, would end up figuring me out. I ambled around in my supreme innocence for two days, until he rowed across the lake a second time in his old green rowboat, this time to invite me to share the harvest of his miraculous fishing trip. “Twenty trout in half an hour, Robert. Never saw that in this fucking lake,” he couldn’t stop repeating, making the word fucking ring out because Bob Winslow, along with most of his compatriots, peppered his speech with fuck and fucking almost like breathing, a punctuation that emphasized the intensity of his emotions, fucking life, fucking shit, fucking sun, which he followed by telling me I was the one who’d brought him luck, fucking luck, Robert, so that it was only fair I share the trout with him. I told him he was wrong, that a man like me brought poisse, a word his rudimentary French led him to interpret as fish, fucking fish, and it took me a while to get it into his head that misfortune dogged my heels.

  “Ill fortune dogs my footsteps, Bob,” I said, adding that if my presence at the lake were having any influence at all on the local habitat, it was to bring bad luck to the fish rather than good luck to Bob.

  Then I tried to explain to him that I wanted — “like a rat, Bob” — to be alone with Jeff. And in his great perspicacity, having again anticipated my reaction, he produced a few trout fillets from the wicker basket lying in the bottom of his boat and advised me to roll them in flour before frying them. Then he set off again, slowly rowing toward the other bank with his head down, perhaps mulling over old, stubborn miseries as he did so. Bill, meanwhile, was sitting in the back of the boat and looking at Jeff with his round eyes, smiling the way dogs do, with that meek expression containing all the innocence of the world. Then I felt strangely uncomfortable at the sight of this man who seemed unaffected by the contingency of existence, and wondered if perhaps his innate good humour was simply a charade to prevent his collapse. But I let my discomfort ebb away, called Jeff, and went inside to fry Winslow’s fucking fish.

  At eight o’clock, wanting to enjoy the sunset, I went out onto the porch with Jeff and my plate of steaming trout, at the same time as Bill and Bob Winslow, the two of them silently sitting opposite us on the far side of the lake and watching us as they ate. At least, I felt as if they were watching us, though it’s hard to see what someone’s eyes are looking at from a distance. Still, I was almost certain Winslow had waited for me to go outside and then copied me. I had no idea what he was hoping to achieve by acting this way, or why he’d decided to start such a game with me, because it’s similarly tricky to read a person’s thoughts from that distance, but the fact that he’d hit his target killed my appetite. I spat out the mouthful I was chewing off the porch and smack onto the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, which would have jumped had it been a pebble, but which remained stoic, as rocks comfortably are. The rock had nothing at all to do with the story, but subconscio
usly I blamed it for me having let my guard down with regard to Winslow and the deplorable situation that had resulted. Since the subconscious, which doesn’t understand itself, is slower to forgive, mine decided that all this was the rock’s fault. Now that I had someone to reproach for my unhappiness, I should have felt better, but didn’t, so I gave the rest of my plate to Jeff and slammed the door as I went back inside, this to make the rock think a bit and so that Winslow would understand I hadn’t fallen for his little trick.

  I brooded all the next day and, on the stroke of six, loaded Jeff into my rowboat and set a course for the south bank and Bob Winslow, determined to let him know that I no longer wanted to see him, hear him, or breathe the same air as him: that he was giving me hives and made me want to retch; that I hated fish, Red Riding Hood, brotherly relations, Victor Morgan and his band of murderers, and that I had absolutely no desire to read his vapid plot twists. In short, I was determined — but I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. Before I’d even opened my mouth, Winslow bombarded me with an incoherent stream of words, going on about the miraculous fishing trip and fawningly giving me two or three pats on the back as if there was nothing wrong, as if he’d not seen me cursing as I spat his trout out on the rock that had become my scape-goat. And before I even had time to realize what was transpiring, I was sitting opposite Bob Winslow eating a trout stew made from the previous day’s leftovers, his periwinkle gaze assessing me, it seemed, with a hint of the superciliousness that distinguishes winners. I hated him all the more, which was getting to be quite a lot, but nonetheless I ate my stew, washing it down with a local brew and listening to him pontificate about line fishing and the silent cries the fish make as the hook rips through them.