Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Actually, Winslow didn’t explicitly mention their cries, I just imagined them while he went on about the flies he made out of feathers collected from the woods or at the lake’s edge, and how a fish wriggled at the end of the line when you pulled it out of the cold water. I was listening half attentively when I saw a fish — just like the one swimming in my bowl in chunks — take shape at the perimeter of my vision, gills open in the suffocating air. Then I heard a cry, a plaintive muffled call for help, along with what sounded like a whistle emanating from its bulging eyes that the mountains, not knowing how to whistle, did not echo. To be frank, this death whistle shook me. I’d never been especially moved by the sight of a trout but deduced that my indifference arose out of the fact that fish make no sounds audible to our feeble ears. If fish were able to speak like other animals, the barbaric activity that is hook fishing would surely have put off a few of its disciples. But the silent suffering of fish, condemned to wiggle at the end of a line without audible protest, suits everyone, because a mind at peace associates the lack of a scream with an absence of pain, thus relieving what serves them as a conscience. After these ruminations I had trouble finishing my meal, which ended up in Jeff’s belly once more, though I did have another beer, and then another, which made the boat pitch around when, finally, I managed to extricate myself from the swing on Winslow’s porch, announcing that all good things must come to an end and it was time for me to go home.

  That is actually pretty much what, like an idiot, I said to Bob Winslow and his sparkling eyes: “Every good thing must come to an end.” Then I took to the lake and rowed to the cadence of my beery evening with a sad song on my lips. They will live on love and no more sorrow, the mountains echoed, because in drinking Bob Winslow’s beer I had effectively sealed what is sometimes called a friendship. And I have to admit that once the wind got up, the conversation had taken a more intimate turn. As the chimes jangled softly from their corner of the porch, Winslow had talked to me about his childhood in the Adirondacks, insisting that he could never live far from the mountains. And then he told me what had brought him to Maine.

  “I wanted to stop hurting,” offered Winslow as his justification for buying a cottage on Mirror Lake. “I wanted to chase away the pain.” He recalled the day he’d decided to leave his boondocks village and to do so without looking back. “It was spring, the end of April,” he continued as the chimes tinkled, though nothing about his story suggested that season. Given the sky he was describing, you might have guessed October or November, just before the first snow. Outside, he recounted, still-leafless trees were bending under the force of a wind whipping up the embattled hair on Bob Winslow’s forehead. He’d found himself on a deserted road, a few miles away from his home village, which formed a part of the collection of nostalgic snapshots he described for me as the sun set over Mirror Lake. He’d stopped his car at the bottom of a steep path that opened onto a wide, ill-defined piece of land — a garbage dump, actually — where dense smoke rose up from the ashy detritus. A man he’d always thought of as his brother was coming his way along a gravel road, alone and silent, and approaching a heap of filth on which a few crows were hopping about, indifferent to the violence of the wind, indifferent to the squawking birds and stinking odour that, fortunately, the cold of this peculiarly autumnal April tempered somewhat.

  “In the depths of the fog,” Bob Winslow muttered at this point in the tale, “I had perceived the lonesomeness of that man, my brother, as deep as the deep waters of Mirror Lake,” his eyes misty as he pointed his crooked index finger toward Mirror Lake’s abyssal centre and considered the notion of an unfathomable distance separating us from the beings we love. An image from the day before of Winslow moving further away on the lake, a big gloomy carcass pondering his sorrows, flashed furtively across my mind. I followed it for a few seconds before swiping it away with the back of my hand, because I had no intention of letting myself emote about something that might as easily have been a mirage, and returned to Winslow. His voice was caught up in the hallucinatory music of the chimes, as he recounted how he’d watched the smoke gradually obscure the shoulders and head of the lone man, how he’d seen the solitary figure slowly disappear at the end of the bleak road, before convincing himself that this was how people we love disappear: they take a path we can’t follow. “They take a narrow path, too narrow for two men, so we stay helplessly at the trail head, forced to watched their silhouettes diminish and disappear as the distance and fog gnaw away at them. We know that anything we do or say is futile. And then we’re made aware of our own isolation, of our own fucking solitude, Robert.”

  Which was when Bob Winslow swallowed noisily, his shoulders bowed under the weight of the fog. For the first time since I’d met him, I felt something for the man, by which I mean something positive, this despite my efforts not to be moved by the parasite, lowering my gaze so he wouldn’t notice the emotion I attributed to the several bottles of Gritty McDuff’s I’d knocked back — and so I couldn’t see him either. Then his story stopped there, with the image of a man whose death he couldn’t envision without also imagining the collapse of the world.

  A brief silence followed, during which Winslow’s lonely friend hovered over us, and I wondered yet again who Winslow was, this man who moved seamlessly from vulgarity to tenderness, from seriousness to truisms. “Your new neighbour,” answered a gentle voice, one endeavouring to put me on guard against any undue sympathy. Something told me that this voice was wise, so I said goodbye to Bill and Bob Winslow and climbed back into my boat with Jeff, though not without reflecting on the fact that this evening I was the one appearing to be a person on the run, a blurry shape moving away in the night, my boat furrowing a path through the black water too narrow for two men, and then I started singing Raymond Lévesque’s “Quand les hommes vivront d’amour,” hoping the thought of men living on love would dispel the image from my mind and prevent Winslow from associating me with this man, his brother.

  Once home I felt dirty, icky, coated with the viscous sentimentality Winslow’s confidences had layered on my skin. I took a lengthy shower to try to clean off the glue clogging up my pores. Next, I opened Morgan’s novel, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for reading. I flipped through it distractedly and did what happens to me when that part of my brain dedicated to reading is looking at the page but my eyes are not following, so that I read the same page, five, six, or even ten times over, as the rest of my brain abandons itself to a slumber penetrated now and again by a word, sentence, or picture conjured by the text.

  Perhaps it was down to the Gritty McDuff’s, but the novel’s first lines made me feel pretty nauseous, so I returned to the bathroom to splash my face with cold water and told Jeff I was going to sleep, which made him feel relieved as he doesn’t like seeing me in such a state. I lay down on my bed, he snuggled up to my side, I adjusted my side to the curve of his back, and then sank into an agitated sleep that hurtled me into the middle of a dream in which the real Humpty Dumpty, that bad egg, was out of sheer stupidity falling off his wall, appearing again, then tumbling off it again, a large crack running from his forehead to what could be described as his missing penis, all the while displaying the vapid smile that made me want to strangle him, to crush him by wrapping my arms around his big idiotic stomach. But my disgust at the idea of being bogged down in the sticky yellow substance that would spurt out of his stomach prevented me, which he knew, the imbecile, so that he carried on his little game, staring at me with his idiotic eyes, and was not in the least affected by the string of curses I was hurling at him: stupid fool, fucking bloody fool, bastard, moron, tête de noeud, twit, twit, maudit twit! Then a fish suddenly went by in the cardboard sky sketched behind Humpty Dumpty’s wall, emitting a silent cry, immediately followed, if you can put it like that, by a fish travelling in the other direction, unless it was actually the same fish which had decided to do a U-turn off camera — I would never know and didn’t care. And then the dream
abruptly stopped there, without a word of explanation.

  When I heard birdsong, I wasn’t at all unhappy that the sun was rising. I opened my eyes, got out of bed, albeit unenthusiastically and went to look out at Mirror Lake, that might have been the most beautiful place in the world after Capri and Niagara Falls but for the little green boat right in the middle of it, from which a man wearing a green cap was casting a line, oblivious to the distressing silence of the fish. I took the simple option and went back to bed.

  For the next three or four weeks I cooked up all sorts of plans to get rid of Winslow. I thought again about strangulation, fell back on poisoning, and leaned toward asphyxiation once more. I even thought about making a hole in his boat, hoping he wouldn’t know how to swim, or setting fire to his cottage, maybe employing a hired assassin, but didn’t put any of these plans into action as I didn’t want Bill to be orphaned. I ate Winslow’s fish, spitting it back out onto the four-hundred-million-year-old rock any time a talking fish went by, prancing in front of the mountains, and let Winslow become embedded in the landscape as if I had a choice in the matter. Trying to make the most of Mirror Lake, I endeavoured, like any animal focused on survival, to establish a certain routine. After a while I even managed to smile again, which was enormously pleasing to Jeff, who was starting to worry. I was sure my life in Maine would unfold like this — between Winslow, Bill, and Jeff — but was forgetting that there are six billion of us on the planet, and just how real the risk is that one or other of these six billion degenerates might leave his house one morning, deciding on a path leading right to Mirror Lake and bringing with him everyone else who has it in their head that I deserve no peace or quiet.

  I’d chosen Lolita because of Nabokov’s novel and Juliette Lewis’s performance in the remake of Cape Fear, where she plays one of the most authentic Lolitas created in cinema or literature since Nabokov’s. I hardly expected Juliette Lewis to turn up, but was secretly hoping the girl would have the same full lips and, if I paid the asking price, that I’d be able to convince her to reproduce the actress’s demonically sensual pout. Since bringing a girl out to the already overpopulated Mirror Lake was out of the question — the casting agent, so called, would no doubt have refused anyway — I came to an arrangement with the agency’s impresario, as he styled himself, and set up a meeting with the girl in question at a motel in the nearest village.

  From the moment of my arrival at Mirror Lake, I’d limited my forays out to a few quick stops at the state liquor store and the Mirror Food Market, but the fervid dreams that had for some time been waking me in the middle of the night, alternating with the nightmares in which Humpty Dumpty conspired to drive me crazy, were a fair indication to me that I’d not attained that degree of asceticism necessary for me to forget my needs. So I decided to act, particularly as I was terrified the two categories of dream might mix. If ever that happened, I could well find myself doing stupid things to Humpty Dumpty and subsequently be fit for the asylum. I should add, here, that contrary to what you might think, the temptations at Mirror Lake were numerous, particularly in my bedroom closet, where I had stumbled upon enough girls to destabilize even the most ordinarily constituted men.

  Out of masochism, magnanimity, or plain stupidity, one of my predecessors had left an impressive collection of magazines ranging from Real Smart and Paris Sex-Appeal to Playboy and Penthouse, along with Duke, Rex, Jem, Chicks and Chuckles, Girlie Gags, and other monthlies in which the spread of scantily clad flesh constantly tested my determination to abstain from all contact with the opposite sex. For me, such contact had only led to tortured relationships in which, invariably, I would be admonished and at the same time it would be demanded of me to be a man, specimen of a species whose essence I’d never quite succeeded in capturing.

  When I discovered the magazines, that part of me I wrongly or rightly associate with man’s intrinsic nature experienced a sudden surge of vitality, and I spent several evenings leafing through the matte or glossy pages asking myself how the devil women were so beautiful. That’s when the torrid dreams started, despite my quickly subscribing to a pact with my conscience that allowed me my solitary pleasures with the magazine, this doing no harm to either of the protagonists involved, what with their having consented to their respective positions freely, but that wasn’t enough. The morning I woke up with a sore wrist I dismissed any scruples, grabbed the telephone, and came to an arrangement with the impresario, even though I have a horror of motels and would need to embark on an unanticipated journey into the world of men for the sake of a woman’s touch.

  I asked for room 11, that number having brought me luck in the past, and went there to wait for Lolita with a bottle of bourbon. Drink would help me forget that Lolita’s real name could easily be Conchita or Marie-Chantal, or that I was about to pay for a woman’s scorn in order for her to let me access a part of her body where dozens of others before me had cried out before getting dressed again. The notion of deriving pleasure from a body some lamentable destiny had dedicated to communal usage pushed me to drink more, all this as the reflection of a drunkard was distorted in the mirror of the plywood dresser.

  From the evidence, Lolita had never read Nabokov and must have been persuaded to choose the name because of its slightly vulgar exoticism. When, finally, she arrived — a few minutes late, one drink too many in her, the figure she cut resembling Anita Ekberg’s more than it did the delicate Juliette Lewis’s — I was relieved, not only because she distracted me from my reflection, the alcohol metamorphosing it in the dusty mirror, but also as the image her body conveyed had none of the frailty my fantasies would have defiled. As she asked me to wash the part of my body that had led me to this motel, I secretly thanked her and then I downed another glass, this time to try to forget that I was hard despite or because of the shame — and too, to forget that the room was already rank, even before I’d touched her, with the smell of cold cum.

  It was quick, as it has to be. You don’t linger in the dispassionate arms of a woman who wants nothing more than to be done with you. Nonetheless, after folding up my money and slipping it into a minuscule fake-leopard-skin purse matching her underwear, which were bigger than the purse, Lolita leaned toward me, offering me a view of that voluptuous valley of death into which men have been blindly hurling themselves for centuries, insensitive to the dangers archetypal memories should guard us against. Then she did what all women do when confronted with sad men: she kissed me on the forehead, slid a hand through my hair, and attempted what, in my distress, I really wanted to interpret as a smile. This tender gesture, which perhaps had no other purpose than to show me I wasn’t as bad as all that, still managed to tarnish the image I had of myself, which was already in pretty bad shape. I’d left the world I came from so that I would no longer have to see what men did to beauty, how their vulgarity diminished it, and now the maternal instinct of a whore, even as it proved to me the inalterable gentleness of a woman’s touch, had emphasized my own ugliness.

  Had Lolita not made me feel so tender, I’d have hightailed it out of there. Instead, I murmured that I’d like to see her again, feel her hand caress me again. Since I’d been fascinated by her curves from the start, these having the same hypnotic power as Anita Ekberg’s, I added without further ado that I would call her Anita from now on. She must have thought Anita the name of the woman who’d gotten me into such a state, because she accepted immediately, again with that hint of a smile striking me like a blade right in my chest, right where I thought myself invulnerable.

  When I returned to Mirror Lake, Bob Winslow was waiting for me, Jeff was waiting for me, Bill was waiting for me. They were all wearing the same fearful, reproachful look that was on my mother’s face when I came back from my first school dance. I was propelled forty years back in time, to a period of my life when the only thing I knew about the female sex was that they bled every month and that this bleeding could turn sin into drama. I must have started a good two weeks before, tr
ying to convince my mother to let me go to the dance that night, promising to mow the lawn all the way through to December if necessary, to be in by ten o’clock every night, and to keep my hands where I was supposed to when I was dancing with young girls — which meant on their shoulders, whatever the dance and whatever mockery I risked in consequence — all this a lot to pay for the privilege of seeing Rosie, Rose Bolduc, outside of school hours and to be able to admire her in the wrinkled cotton dress revealing her knees, which I was sure would be as white and soft as boiled eggs. But it was a price I was willing to pay.

  So I was present that evening and behaved as my mother wished, partly because I knew breaking my promises would weigh on my conscience, though mostly because Rose Bolduc, the only girl worth starting a life of lies for, had eyes exclusively for one Gilles Gauthier, an imbecile whose sole positive feature was his James Dean mane of hair, though the majority of the girls hadn’t even heard of James Dean and to this day I still wonder what they all saw in Gilles. Basically, I was a model of good behaviour. I lightly brushed fat Ginette Rousseau’s neck, accidentally, as we danced an imitation of a waltz to a Fernand Gignac song, though we’d all have rather let it all hang out to an Elvis or Beach Boys hit. The musical selection was the task of the school principal but we tried to get what we could out of the school snoozefests, as we would call the school dances from then on. Julien Lapierre had heard the word in some movie, I think: “What a snorefest.” Without Julien Lapierre and his movie, the dances would simply have been “boring school dances,” an expression with way less character and no chance of being passed down through history.