Ginette Rousseau woke me up by putting her big chubby hand on my cheek. “Robert, you’ll freeze to death,” she whispered, as if it were a big secret.
In the languor of my dream I mistook her for Rosie and embraced her, which only added to the poor girl’s confusion concerning my feelings for her, despite my pushing her sharply away as soon as I realized the lips gently descending from heaven and touching mine were not actually Rosie’s.
“Robert Moreau, you are seriously high,” she said a bit more loudly, brushing off the snow clinging to her wool coat. Words over which, in time and space, the ones Anita had spoken superimposed themselves. “You look completely stoned, Bob,” she said, which was true, because for a few moments I’d been enjoying the quasi-magical power of reminiscence, though I’d just come back down to earth and right into the shit Anita pointed out to me. “And you have shit on your shoes.”
“I know, I step in shit on purpose, I like it,” I answered, wiping my Doc Martens on the green grass and then resuming our trip to the car.
“You got a ticket,” she added, cocking her big sunglasses at the little scrap of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. “It’s not your day.”
It really wasn’t. At least, it wasn’t anymore, because it had been a few hours earlier, when I was drinking my coffee in the pink flamingo mist. I wanted to point out everything had been fine until she showed up, but stopped myself because it wouldn’t have been kind, for one thing, and for another I didn’t want to be the cause of fresh tears. I kept quiet and drove her home, where I waited for her to pack her bags so that I could take her to my cottage until we came up with a solution.
Anita lived in a one-bedroom place that could well have been attractive were it not for the innumerable fake-leopard-skin cushions strewn across the floor and the furniture, and I wondered what kind of cult made Anita so devoted to this animal rendered kitsch as soon as it is removed from its native savannah. Later — that is, the next day — I learned she’d been so since childhood, after a trip to the zoo with her father. Around the middle of their excursion, he went to buy her a cone of cotton candy and they both sat down on a bench in front of the leopard cage, where he told her incredible stories set in Africa, in which two baby leopards called Bambi and Bamboo had starring roles. Then her father foolishly promised her that one day they’d go see Bambi and Bamboo, who lived somewhere in Mozambique, and she’d believed him. And she believed him still, even though her father had moved on to new pastures and tossed her over his shoulder ages ago.
“It was the most beautiful day of my life, that brief hour in front of the leopards’ stinky cage,” she admitted before pursing her lips, biting them, and bursting into tears. Which made me really hate her father, along with all the other parents who put such ideas in children’s heads, convincing them the world is beautiful, that carnivorous animals have names like Bambi, clowns are called Adolf, and sharks are called Snoopy. This sort of foolishness inevitably leads to Anitas living in fantasy worlds, waiting for father who’ll never come home again and burying themselves in cushions so they don’t start screaming. Obviously I was wrong, Anita’s case was special, and I shouldn’t have resented her father for sparking her dreams in a zoo stinking of urine, but because he’d made her dream at all, for once in her fucking life, and because she idolized him.
Right then, as Anita was packing her bags, I was not yet cognizant of this story and thought the leopard print some kind of fetish, what with the matching underwear too, and I really didn’t want to be involved. I simply asked if she could wear something else, take off her hanged-man pants and leave them on the bed, or, better still, pop them in the garbage chute. But I didn’t say anything about the underwear, I’d already learned my lesson on that front, and this thing she had for spotted fabrics was obviously serious. I also asked if maybe she had some cream in the fridge for my Pink Flamingo Sperm, which I quickly described to her, and we set off again, closing the door on the dozens of Bambis and Bamboos sleeping in her bedroom and to whom I’d not had the honour of being introduced.
Ten minutes later, after a detour to the grocery store, we were driving to Mirror Lake but not whistling, Anita because she had no reason to be filled with joy, and me because I’d just opened up a corridor between the rest of the world and Mirror Lake, and because I was creating fresh ties with people I’d hoped to leave behind in my efforts not to have to endure the suffering caused merely by encountering another two-legged creature. Only Jeff was whistling, ears blowing in the wind as usual and his nose sniffing the mingling scents of the Maine forests — of hare urine, fox feces, and spruce tips, which were telling him stories whose meaning I, or any other man, would never understand. And it was better that way, not just for dogs but for all animals. Then, just as we were doing a U-turn, Anita said, “It’s not John, it’s Jack.”
“What’s not John?” I muttered distractedly.
“You think it’s John but it’s Jack,” she went on, and since I knew no Johns other than the dead man, the drowned man, John Doe, naturally my thoughts turned to him and the possibility that Anita, contrary to all expectations, had caught wind of his identity.
“WHAT’s not John,” I said again, less distractedly, emphasizing the interrogative nature of my words, and experiencing a mounting anxiety that nearly transformed my U-turn into a Greek omega: Ω.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she shouted, clutching the dashboard, “John or Jack, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same fucking end result.”
“It’s absolutely not the same,” I yelled in turn, amazed to discover such nihilism in Anita, though I ought to have suspected it, given her profession. “The man is dead, Anita! The least he deserves is to be rescued from anonymity, even if we can’t rescue him from the lake,” I said in English, which made her not shout but scream, and I needed to stop the car because I’d already sent Jeff flying into the door twice and Anita was close to getting another black eye. I didn’t care about me. All I wanted was for the truth to show its big pale face and for Anita not to throw up in my car, given that the truth always makes people want to vomit.
So I brought the car to a stop with a big squeal of tires that was a testament to my exasperation and, in a silence only broken by the chirping of grasshoppers, although you could have heard a fly if a fly had been passing, I repeated, “The man is dead, Anita.”
She fiercely denied it, calling me a murderer, and then the whole thing devolved into a yelling match, which Jeff then waded into. I had to kick all of them out, the truth included, so that Anita would listen and understand I’d not killed anybody yet, neither John nor Jack. Then she threatened to start crying again, if only to make me listen in turn, so I would realize that she wasn’t talking about the drowned man or even about the missing guy, but her boyfriend John, and Jack, her pimp. Basically, it was Jack who’d hit her, not John, did I understand?
I absorbed this piece of news with a long, very long, silence, because in my mind John Doe had just drowned again. Then I said, “The fucking bastard,” an insult Anita thought was directed at Jack the pimp, and which she brushed away with another limp movement of her left hand. “It’s not John, it’s Jack,” she repeated as I was loading everyone back into the car. And then I left truth in the ditch, because it would know how to find us again, and drove off.
When we arrived at the cottage, I sent Anita to bed, because I was tired and I was expecting Winslow to show up. Given that everything else was going badly, it was obvious the halfwit was going to appear and, sure enough, half an hour later he left his cottage and got into his boat with Bill. If we’d been in a movie, we’d hear the same background music playing in my head each time I saw Winslow heading for the north shore — the chords accompanying the shark’s arrival in Spielberg’s famous movie, to be specific — but we weren’t in a movie, we weren’t in anything, we were in life, where the predictable spooling of scenes doesn’t trigger a soundtrack. So, to make up for the defici
encies of real life, I started humming the famous refrain, DA-dum DA-dum, and then the DA-dum became a sort of cosmic mantra and I lost touch with reality. I was propelled into an astral voyage smelling of patchouli, while Winslow’s boat turned into an enormous shark fin, around which formed a vaporous, reddish cloud, before the stroke of a paddle made the whole scene disappear and brought me back to earth.
A few minutes later, Jaws arrived on the bank asking me what was wrong.
“Everything,” I replied. “The whole nauseating predictability of life,” I said, and then I told him to whisper, because someone whose identity he didn’t need to know was sleeping inside, after which I tiptoed back into the cottage to make us a couple of Pink Flamingo Sperms, which we drank while admiring the sunset, despite the mixture with which we were trying to quench our thirst being frankly disgusting. Still, after the third glass we began to forget the taste and started seeing life through rose-coloured glasses, which was no small thing. I picked Piaf’s song back up where I’d dropped it that morning, a sign that the links in a chain always end up being attached, and that a smile in the morning no friend to distress. And then, since Winslow didn’t know the words of the song very well, but was being joyously transported amid the flotsam of the sunset, he invented a game in which we had to list everything pink in life, from babies’ skin to women’s vulvas, and then anything with rose or pink in the name, from Rrose Sélavy to Rose Ouellette, a.k.a. La Poune, whom I felt obliged to describe to Winslow and did this so effectively that he fell in love with her on the spot. The gradual effect of our whimsical game was for us to discover that pink was everywhere in the universe, starting right at the bottom with coral reefs, climbing up dunes of fine sand, then moving into the trees and sky, from where it went back down again into the depths of the oceans.
“Fuck, Robert, we’re surrounded by pink,” Winslow said, somewhat prosaically, even though it was blue and green which actually dominated at Mirror Lake. But we didn’t care, we were in a Rose Period just like Picasso’s, and we drew delicate lines of magenta, fuchsia, raspberry, on everything we could. I even told Winslow about Rosie Bolduc, and he promptly fell in love with her too, which didn’t bother me, because clearly he was having a tender moment and swooning at the slightest reference to feminine graces. Pink Flamingo Sperm might have tasted disgusting, but it had advantages, and we were just discussing Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther when Anita appeared.
“Pardon me, gentlemen,” we heard her say, “but I must get ready for my scene. Tell Mr. DeMille I’ll be on the set at once,” and we turned around to see a larger-than-life Anita coming down the porch steps draped in the quilt that usually lay on my bed. It wasn’t exactly the ideal staircase for Gloria Swanson’s final scene in Sunset Boulevard, but Anita was credible in the role of a fallen and utterly lost star, what with her big, wide eyes, her long bare arms and commanding voice, gravelly from all the shit she took in every day: slaps, alcohol, and other junk hardly as smooth and creamy as our Pink Flamingo Sperm.
This was a wonderful present Anita was giving me, because I’d told her how much that scene moved me, the one where Gloria Swanson totally loses her marbles. Out of all the movie scenes I remember, out of all the ones that make you swallow noisily as your eyes, confronted with the tragic beauty of madness, fill with tears, this is one of the most upsetting. Swanson inhabits the role with such talent you really believe what you’re seeing is true; you think she must have lost her mind during filming and hidden in a corner of the stairwell where the camera flashes of newspaper gossip pages bore down on her collapse in real time, so they could serve their readers bloody images of the dark side of fame and fortune. In truth, I’ve always thought gossip rags have more or less the same function as priests, their job being to keep the little people down and have them believe greed leads to death, as if poor people all die saints.
All this to say that Anita’s performance was credible in the semi-darkness, what with the shadows roughly drawn on her face by the forty-watt bulb hanging at the top of the stairs. I told Winslow to shut up and, putting myself in Erich von Stroheim’s shoes, went to film Anita Gloria in all her splendour. I shone the beam of my pocket flashlight on her, which only made her face more tragic, and shouted “Cameras! Action!” Anita gratified me with a wild-eyed look, lifted her chin, and pronounced in her smoothest voice, “Okay, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” I shoved the flashlight between my teeth and, holding my hands in the shape of a viewfinder, moved slowly toward her as Franz Waxman’s music enveloped Anita’s face and she became, through the magic of cinema, Gloria Salome, Anita Salome, and finally Salome Salome, her big octopus arms dancing and driving corrupt Herod Antipas crazy.
We did three retakes without any kind of plan, so much were we in our characters. When we were done, Winslow didn’t know whether he should cry or clap, and Bill and Jeff hesitated between barking and howling, before, in an enthusiastic show of admiration, they were doing all four — crying, barking, howling, clapping, as Anita and I savoured the brief fruits of our glory and fell into one another’s arms like two exhausted ageing stars.
“Bob Winslow, Anita Swanson,” I said, by way of introduction, realizing that I didn’t know Anita’s last name. Then we continued our evening around a campfire, Anita and I wrapped up in my multipurpose quilt. Winslow, curious to know who this Anita was who’d fallen from the munificent sky, was for his part bombarding us with questions about how we got together, and discreetly avoiding any mention of Anita’s mauve and green eye, about which she informed him anyway. It wasn’t Robert or John, it was Jack, she said, which then demanded some further explication I chose not to be involved in.
We made a nice trio, we did, gathered in the warmth of our muted voices under an August sky parading the history of the universe in our faces with its displays of white dwarfs, red giants, the Milky Way, and other galaxies. We seemed to be part of a symbiosis in which you could hazard our well-being from the tranquility of our expressions. As for the dogs, they were resting peacefully at our feet, not even bothered by the crackling of the fire over which we toasted bread rolls that our memories would assign, in time, to the category of unsurpassable things, along with our mothers’ cakes and pies — sugar pie for me, apple pie for Winslow, and sweet potato pie for Anita.
I was closer to my kind than I’d ever been before, and this intimacy simultaneously intoxicated and terrified me. I was well aware that the company of men — and women — would bring me no good in the long term, and, as I have repeated so often, this was why I had fled them. And now the place to which I’d fled had become a meeting place for lost souls eager to forget all pain — past, present, and future — by gorging on bread rolls and beer, Pink Flamingo Sperm having been excluded from the evening’s cocktail menu. I wasn’t about to wreck the moment. No, I wasn’t going to tell them that life was shit, they knew that already, and life, whatever that is, would soon do that for me. I behaved instead as if the planet wasn’t hurtling toward catastrophe; as if Winslow, Anita, Bill, and Jeff were not going to die. I ate my toasted buns and we carried on the game we’d named Pink Lady — in Anita’s honour, and to keep it related to cocktails. But I did suggest we abandon pink in favour of yellow, since Winslow and I had pretty much done pink.
“Fire!” Anita exclaimed first, stirring the glowing embers.
“Blazes,” Winslow said next, putting the word in the plural to include the dozens of little flames dancing in front of our eyes.
“Stars,” I added, so as not to break the thread we were weaving that stretched from the glowing centre of the earth to the cold light of the stars. We remained as we were until the early hours, until, apotheosis of a Pink Lady in yellow, the sun appeared from behind the mountains, inspiring Winslow and Bill to get into their boat, delicate silhouettes against the yellow aureole of the sunrise — yellow, the colour of madness! — and glide over the water toward sleep.
Anita and I sat by the dying fire, waiting for
Bill and Bob to reach dry land safely. There’s no way we would have allowed any mishap and its resulting misery to alter the perfection of the yellow dawn. Then we waved at the two ghostly figures, who faded away with a noise of wood scraping over sand, and, the obvious culmination of our companionable night, went inside to make love, this time without greenbacks or a tiny imitation-leopard-skin bag, after which Anita introduced me to Bambi and Bamboo, two furry leopards whose scruffy little heads were poking out of the top of her travel bag. That’s when she told me the zoo story, and then about the collection of Bambis and Bamboos in her bedroom, insisting that there were only four genuine Bambis and Bamboos in the entire world, the two who were waiting for her and her father in the Mozambique brush, and the ones her father, the bastard, bought her on that starry day in July 1980, and which she took everywhere with her like relics of lost innocence.
Just as she finished her tale, rain started falling gently on the metal roof, accompanying the wan sadness of a child turned lady of the night, and in a sudden burst of affection she grabbed my semi-hard cock. Then I closed my eyes, listened to the rain, and thought of those lines by E. E. Cummings, “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” I thought about Cummings’s rain’s small hands as I savoured the delicate touch of Anita’s fingers on my cock — though her hands weren’t particularly small — convinced I finally understood how this image came to Cummings and how people write unforgettable lines. A little later, after a sleep interrupted by dreams, Anita took me once again, but the rain had stopped, the spell was broken, and I wondered where the idea of taking someone came from, conflating the totality of a being with a chunk of erect flesh. A deep self-loathing made me grab Anita’s hands, the rain’s hands, and force them to move faster. I wanted to put an end to the lies; I wanted the only truth worth sustaining between two people connected by alcohol and sex to burst out in my orgasmic cry. But I didn’t come. Three times in as many hours is beyond the capability of a man who’s still drunk, of a drunk man my age with a slightly enfeebled prostate.
Mirror Lake Page 9
