Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  “So, what are we going to do now?” I asked Winslow, who jumped to his feet like a gallant knight and declared that we would go find her and rescue her from macho Robbins’s clutches.

  “Are you crazy?” I said, also leaping to my feet. “Are you crazy, Winslow?” (After which I admonished myself: Stop repeating yourself!) “Robbins is a cop, we’re not. Robbins has a gun, we don’t. Robbins is crazy, really crazy, I’m not. And, last but not least, Robbins has Ray-Bans and we don’t!”

  I think I was a disappointment to him, because he’d thought me braver than that and more in love.

  “You already have all the symptoms,” he said, trying to convince me I was in love, but what led him to whine the most were Robbins’s Ray-Bans. “How exactly do they give him an advantage over us?” So I was obliged to explain at length how it was that Robbins’s Ray-Bans rendered him invulnerable. Had this twit never noticed that Ray-Bans made Robbins impossible to pin down, as impossible to pin down as a nest of snakes, protecting him from predators and serving the dual function of camouflage and armour? “He’s kind of like Marcel,” I added, and since Winslow had no idea who Marcel was I gave him a quick tutorial on the plays of Michel Tremblay and the character of Marcel, who was invisible to everyone if he put his black glasses on. To prove the point, I asked Winslow if he knew what colour Robbins’s eyes were. No, Winslow didn’t know the colour of Robbins’s eyes, nobody did, not even Anita, because — and I was so sure of it I’d have put my hand in the fire and sworn as much — that woodlouse even fucked with his sunglasses on. “So you see, that’s what gives him an advantage over us, Winslow.”

  To which the latter replied, “We just need to buy ourselves some Ray-Bans too.”

  I gave up, told Winslow to let it drop and went outside with Jeff, followed by Bill, for a walk by the lake.

  It was another magnificent August day, just the way I like them, with that slight sensation of heaviness that makes you feel summer’s fullness right in the pit of your stomach, and again I wondered why we couldn’t just be happy with that, why we always need something else when nothing can equal the beauty of an August sky, the beauty of a storm, the beauty of a star, of a squall, of a moose crossing a lake, a dog running after another dog, a maple tree turning red, a monarch fluttering from flowers to branches. Because we’re fools, I repeated to myself again; it’s the universal answer, because happiness resides in coming to terms with our stillness. And as happiness brazenly strode past, I turned up the bottoms of my pant legs, sat down on the dock, and soaked my feet in the cold water, remembering the time Anita and I had splashed around in the filthy pool at our motel.

  She and I had already shared memories and places that belonged to us, like ordinary couples, and a little pain stabbed my heart at the thought that we’d probably not see each other again, that our story was one of those stories with no resolution because they stem from the abnormality of the two protagonists. Sure, I’d always tried to stay off the beaten track, had never wanted to blend into the crowd — wearing red when black was in fashion, eating meat when an entire generation was grazing on alfalfa, smoking when the tobacco police started attacking smokers to ease suv drivers’ consciences. But now I was forced to concede that a modicum of normality wouldn’t hurt, to admit that it is easier to climb up facing forwards rather than backwards, and to walk back down again looking backwards rather than forwards, especially when you fall in love, in other words, on your head.

  That’s it, I’ve said it, my concession surely the effect of the magnificent August day. I wasn’t in love, I was sticking to my story, but despite my eloquent words I was beginning to fall in love, and silently I thanked Anita for her magnanimity, which was breaking my fall right in the middle. I didn’t want to fall in love, didn’t want to be part of a couple, which would have been the fatal consequence had Anita not come up with the benevolent idea of protecting me. From now on, I would take no more risks, there would only be Jeff and me, the moose and me, the lake and me, the four-hundred-million-year-old rock and me, though I would leave a little space for Winslow, because trying to dispatch Winslow was like trying to get rid of a wart or stop a rabbit from procreating. To mark my resolve with a symbolic gesture, I took Anita’s letter out of my pocket and ripped it into a thousand pieces — approximately — and sent them dancing out over the lake, where they fell softly, like a gentle blue rain, in no hurry at all. Some of the drops, no doubt eager to keep feeling the August sun, stayed on the surface, where the letters they contained — Ti for Tim, ov for love, miss for I’ll miss you — gradually faded. And then Tim and love and missing sank morosely into the waters of Mirror Lake, waters nothing can resist; a shadow came over me, a friend’s shadow, a hand clasped my shoulder, a friend’s hand, and Winslow lowered his enormous carcass down next to mine, said “hmm-hmm,” and offered me the bag of balsamic vinegar Humpty Dumpty chips he was holding.

  In a CinemaScope movie the scene could have been touching. Initially, the camera would have framed two men sitting side by side on a wooden dock in a gorgeous setting that some would have identified as Quebec, others Vermont, and would have captured, in the background, a big yellow dog and a medium-sized yellow dog (Bill had grown) chasing each other, and then, a little further away, in the shade of a tree, a cottage that all lovers of solitude would envy. “Peter,” some girl in the back row of the movie theatre would whisper to the guy next to her stuffing himself with popcorn, “that’s the kind of cottage I want,” without suspecting, poor thing, that the deed of sale would include clauses written in microscopic letters. Then the camera would slowly pan back to the centre of the lake as it moved gently upwards, a movement requiring a crane to be installed in Mirror Lake’s unfathomable depths, and the setting sun would skim the two men’s balding pates, light up the two dogs’ silky coats, and draw starry reflections in the cottage windows. And all the viewers, especially the girl in the last row, her eyes brimming with genuinely felt tears, would have thought about the happiness that arises naturally from a combination of elements as mundane as a lake, two dogs, a cluster of spruce trees, sunshine, and, finally, friendship, visible in the silent harmony of the two men.

  But the viewer would not have known that the first man’s silence came from the fact that he was petrified, and the second man’s because he had nothing to say. What the viewer would not have seen, the close-up not long enough, was the pallor of the first man, and what the viewer would not have heard, what with the sound of Barbra Streisand singing “People” — “People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world” — taking over the movie theatre in full Dolby Surround, was the first man asking the other in a strangled voice, “Where did you find those fucking potato chips, Bob?” and the other one answering, “In your fucking camp, Bob!”

  But we weren’t in a movie, just in a fucking nightmare, I summarily decided, reintegrating the word into my vocabulary, even as Winslow ostentatiously held up the bag of chips in exactly the spot on which the camera’s lens would have focused had there been one, a bit of product placement as you’d find in the barely disguised advertisements designed to bring a little money into the coffers of a movie production, art ready to sleep with the devil so it won’t be reduced to the silence to which it will be limited by the devil anyway.

  “Impossible,” I said. “I don’t eat them.”

  But Winslow insisted, saying that they’d been lying on the low table in the living room and it must have been Anita who left them there. Maybe they were a gift, the asshole suggested in a semi-skeptical, semi-romantic tone. And suddenly I saw Jones innocently appear, emerging from around the corner of the cottage and holding another of the blue and yellow chip bags out in front of him, Robbins’s sly grin preventing me from grabbing the bag Jones was waggling in front of my face, undigested crumbs sticking to his disgusting tongue. The conspiracy jumped out at me in all its nakedness, because it was obvious there had been a conspiracy, a collusion, a scheme, and that t
hey were all in league against me — Robbins, Anita, Jones, even that cretin Winslow — to make Humpty Dumpty travel from my night terrors into my nightmarish life. How had they known? I was clueless. How had news of my obsession reached their ears? I’d suspected it might happen, I’d always talked in my sleep, which more than once put me into rather awkward situations with people ordering me to explain the fantasies my subconscious could no longer recall. As if I were responsible for the salacious shouts one part of me — a part that had never bothered to address me directly — let out!

  Anyway, clearly I’d been the victim of an enormous machination in which Anita played the lead and me the silly goose, the Good Samaritan rescuing the woman in distress who just happens to be wandering along the path he’s taking with a black eye. What a deception! Anita didn’t have a black eye any more than I had a third one, which is why she needed to spend hours in the bathroom dolling herself up, putting on makeup, spraying herself with Shania, not to hide her shameful eye, no sirree, but to dress it perfectly! And come to think about it, I had noticed that it didn’t look quite right, that it didn’t have the natural look of a true black eye, but was a little too plaintive for my taste, a bit too lachrymose, not like a genuine black eye that looks at you with hostility and contempt, as if it would jump right out and mash up your own ugly mug if you so much as dared to say the words eye, pain, peroxide, or soft green. Treacherous was the only possible adjective to express the underlying nature of the woman suddenly apparent to me. The lowlife had sucked me right in, I’d been stupid enough to think she was in love, and had even sensed something in myself that was on its way to becoming a feeling, I who . . .

  I thought I’d been sorting all this out inside my head, but apparently I’d been yelling everything out loud for a while, because Winslow grabbed my arm and said, “Whoa, Bobby, stop, that’s enough, you stop,” holding out an almost-overflowing glass of the whiskey that had appeared during the brief ellipsis in time that had eluded me. I must have seemed pretty crazy. The two dogs were watching me from a respectful distance, wondering what was going on, especially Bill, who wasn’t used to hanging out with me in day-to-day life and seemed to be feeling sorry for Jeff.

  “Jeff’s a happy dog,” I said to Winslow, because I’d had enough of everyone being on my back, and I took the opportunity to tell him he could drop his posturing, I knew full well he’d participated in fomenting the whole scheme against me, and I wasn’t going to drink his poisonous whiskey. He told me I was out of my mind, of course. “You’re completely crazy, Robert,” he said, and other things in the same vein. I could work him over and end up getting a confession out of him, no question, I would just need to resort to torture.

  “How do you know about Humpty Dumpty?” I asked, trying to remain calm and reflecting on how tone of voice often conveys the precise opposite of what you’re feeling. But the only answer he gave me was an innocent look — innocent in the sense of “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but also maudit innocent, that semantic pearl in the repertoire of Quebec insults, inferring blessedness, beatitude, and not the state of being “not guilty.” So, in order that my tone of voice aspiring to be calm continued to be so, I reformulated the question and took a sip of the whiskey, and because this whiskey, just like any other self-respecting whiskey, was well and truly a poison, and, one swallow leading to another, the first glass would be the trigger of what would become the second-most memorable bender in the history of Mirror Lake.

  Let me tell you the whole story. After an hour of intense — that’s to say macho, tough, inquisitorial — interrogation, I hadn’t managed to drag a thing out of Winslow, still claiming he didn’t understand an iota of my crazy story and becoming aggressive. So I went to fill my glass and bring him one, along with the bottle, which would allow us to avoid unnecessary comings and goings and might soften Winslow. Now it was his turn to be watched from a respectful distance by the dogs, who weren’t very pleased to see that the day, which could have been beautiful — which actually was beautiful, if you removed Winslow and me from the scene — was getting worse. After the first glass, Winslow did indeed seem a bit better, this reassuring the dogs, and I took advantage of the lapse to start up the interrogation again, but, as I myself was at the end of a second glass, my questions were a bit fuzzy. My vagueness allowed Winslow to bring the conversation around to what seemed to him to be the central and neglected element of the day: Anita’s hasty departure. The suddenness of her departure intrigued him, though I suggested it made perfect sense given the logic of the conspiracy, crafted to have you believe the suddenness of her flight had meaning. In fact, it had no purpose other than to draw attention away from the departure itself and focus it instead on questions concerning the origin, nature, finality, and the why of the hastiness that so unexpectedly changed the course of events.

  “Are you following me, Winslow?” I asked, after apprising him of my theory of their treachery. No, he was not following me, said his big innocent eyes — innocent, that is, in the conventional sense. When, with the insistence of someone who’s drunk a little too much, I tried to refine my explanation, Winslow steered our arguments in the direction his obstinacy was heading, Winslow himself along for the ride, saying I was too stubborn to concede that I was displaying all the symptoms of a fella trying to extricate himself from love’s snares — those were his actual words, “love’s snares” — whereas, he said, he was courageous enough to admit that he would miss Anita. For a few sweet but also bitter seconds, I saw again the tiny blue scraps of Anita’s traitorous letter floating on the equally blue surface of Mirror Lake, and especially the fragment on which the verb to miss was dissolving, conjugated in the future, which really is the only tense that suits when a person is preparing to suffer, though it was missing the will pointing to the future, which left miss, a.k.a. young girl. I’ll miss you, miss . . . It didn’t take much for Anita’s image to superimpose itself on the little blue scraps where her left hand, wearing a ring with a cabochon, had drifted, and for the tune of “La dame en bleu,” performed with forceful tremolos by one Michel Louvain endeavouring to eternally imprint himself on doleful memories, to cancel out Mireille Mathieu’s attempts to sing louder than Vicky Leandros in the process.

  Evidently it is no longer possible to have tender thoughts without the ambient kitsch of the late twentieth century sticking to the skin like an old piece of gum to the sole of a shoe, I whined. To snap out of my lament, I begged Winslow to talk to me about blue, any blue at all and the beauty of it, needing to be reconciled with this colour aspiring to nothing more than regaining its original purity. This led us to play the Pink Lady game but this time with the colour blue, saving her from the terrible end of the dame en bleu by imagining her seated in bushes overflowing with blueberries, little bluebirds perched on her shoulders, or, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, swallows, neither Winslow nor I able to remember which of the two was depicted like this, with birds braiding her long, silky hair. Then Winslow declared it wasn’t either of them, but the Holy Virgin, which I declared impossible — I pronounced it ampossybeul — because the Holy Virgin didn’t have hair loose but wore a veil, a big veil made of stars that lifted our eyes to the heavens. The Virgin Mary did not appear, we weren’t drunk enough for that, but a minute star, just one, did appear in the early evening sky — it felt like the night would be a chilly one — suggesting that we’d been the victims of another ellipsis in time, this one not worrying us. We might not have been drunk enough to start having visions, but we were sufficiently smashed not to be anxious about a few short hours disappearing, insignificant in the light of the eternity unfolding above our heads.

  No, we carried on with our game, changed it up a bit, because of the French word for chilly, which I’d told Winslow was frisquette, which made him laugh, just like all words ending in -ette. Like the Arquette sisters, Patricia and Rosanna, he said. He could never see their name in film credits without smiling, but before I let him carry on I wante
d to know how he knew they were sisters, something I’d always wondered about. He didn’t know, he said, it just seemed obvious to him that with a name like that, which he pronounced Arkwett, the simpleton, they had to be sisters. Okay. Then we started listing off all the movies they’d been in, only to realize with amazement that Rosanna was part of the cast of Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu, and that in fact life was an endless series of astonishments, a web of inexplicable interactions in which each atom inscribed itself in the logic of the Big Everything. The only connection we could establish between Patricia and blue, apart from it being the colour of her eyes, was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which Patricia didn’t have a role, sure, but that doesn’t matter because she did act in another movie of his, Lost Highway, of which Winslow hadn’t understood a thing but must have had some blue in it. I did not dare admit that I had failed to grasp all the movie’s subtleties either, I can be really annoying on the subject, so we put Lost Highway to one side and focused on Blue Velvet and Isabella Rossellini, especially the scene where she yells as she disrobes beneath the stars. Alcohol was screwing with our memories, neither of us able to remember what the title referred to. “Maybe Isabella’s dress was made of blue velvet,” I suggested, but Winslow told me I was confusing everything, that not hers but the Holy Virgin’s robe was made of blue velvet, night blue, sky blue, night-sky blue, and together we raised our eyes to the starry heavens where we nearly did see Mary, having finished the bottle of whiskey and seizing on that as a reason to go back into the cottage. To which Winslow added, with a guffaw, that it was starting to get “friskwette.” Friskwette, fucking French people!