I hadn’t wanted it, and yet I liked the waves Mia was stirring in me. I felt like talking to Louis about her, but I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t well. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of Julien, or Louis, or Mia. But I refused to slip back after all the headway I’d made since B. It wasn’t fair. To change the subject, I talked about how that young woman appeared to me—the first, the only—during my shift at work the night before. Distracted, Louis listened to me while watching the people around us. He studied a cute brunette in front of us who was standing up to adjust her skirt, before finally noticing I was waiting to have his attention to continue.
“And what was special about her, this girl?”
“She was walking alone in a dark alleyway at two in the morning, Louis. She was walking toward the river.”
“Maybe she was going to meet someone.”
“There’s nothing at the end of those vacant lots. An overgrown hill and some water, that’s it. You can’t even sit on the riverbank.
He nodded his head, slowly, playing with his thumbnail. Then he took charge again.
“Come on, let’s go back. Please.”
My eyes lost in the sky, I felt Louis’s insistence weighing on me. I liked it better when we didn’t talk. Now he was forcing me out of my hypnotic blue.
“We’ll see.”
He didn’t answer. I think I fell asleep for a little while, stretched out like that in my silence.
Four
The blue sky gradually darkened, fading toward mauve. It was simply a meeting between girls, a night out among friends. I dressed carefully, wanting to give the impression that my body was more seamless than it really was, and left quickly, hoping Julien hadn’t noticed I was wearing my favourite shirt.
Everything was coming undone inside me as I walked. The heat drew flashes of lightning over the top of the buildings. Mia was waiting for me at the corner of the street near the bar where we were supposed to meet, with her waves of auburn hair, her hips, her small belly, her breasts. I got a little closer to her with each step, hyperconscious of my body. My legs, my skinny arms. My fragile ankles, already ravaged by mosquitos, and my heels defeated by blisters. The fold of skin made by my high-waisted shorts, which were too tight. My damp hair, messed up by the humidity. I could feel everything, down to my burgeoning cellulite and the beauty marks scattered across the nape of my neck, all of which had become used to trembling beneath Julien’s hands. Mia smiled at me from far away, and I felt myself losing control. Arriving in front of her, I stopped. We kissed each other on the cheeks.
“I’m thirsty,” Mia said, in a voice deeper than I remembered.
She moved aside to let me by. I opened the door to the bar. It was my first time there. It was early for this type of place, in the middle of the week. The young server smiled at us, then invited us to sit wherever we liked. I sunk into an oversized chair that swallowed me up almost entirely.
We ordered some beer. My palms were clammy. The server moved away, her hair tied back in a ponytail that danced against her back. She didn’t suspect anything; no one saw anything. They’d just washed the floors and tables, and the place smelled like detergent, which irritated me. The other odours were lost. Feeling like something was missing, I realized I was seeking the scent of Mia’s perfume, which had reached me through the humidity that had saturated the air of the tavern and made it unbreathable. But tonight, it was hidden.
I wasn’t able to relax, afraid the conversation between us would never get going. For a minute, I became lost in the details of Mia’s many rings. Her eyebrow was split by a thin scar. I hadn’t noticed that feature the first time, or else I’d forgotten it. Funny how she was eluding me, a small, moving flame that transformed in my fantasies and was transforming right in front of me. Her jewellery was reflecting the neon pink lighting covering the top of the wall all around the room. Our pints arrived and we toasted, my hands trembling. I was drinking a red ale and she a blonde, which made us laugh. Mia’s face revealed signs of her age. She was a few years older than me but younger than Julien, I was almost certain. I found her ravishing. An old rock ballad was playing too loudly, and we weren’t able to stop ourselves from humming along. The low lighting made it seem like it was late at night. I started talking to her about the bar where we’d met—if a beginning was to be found somewhere, it was there. We discovered it the summer we were fifteen.
“We?” Mia asked.
“Louis and me. My best friend.”
I had the urge to correct myself: my only friend. But I continued. It was the only establishment that would let us enter and drink without checking our IDs. We used to like going there after class, and then we’d take the train back to the suburbs, drunk. The old lady who used to work there would pretend not to know that we were still kids, even if everything in our attitude and youthful features screamed it. We had started going to that bar compulsively, several times a week, and were among its regulars. A few years later, when the old bartender left, an acquaintance our age who also used to hang out at the tavern took her place. Mia laughed.
“So the old woman was replaced by that young, cute guy from the other night?” she asked.
“Exactly. We never found out what happened to her, come to think of it.”
We shrugged our shoulders. I smiled, recalling that period.
“So anyway, here’s my own grimy bar,” Mia said. “I live really close to here.”
This place was trendier, despite the décor and a particularly kitsch drink list that hadn’t changed with the passing times.
“And you?” I finally asked, because I wanted to know everything.
Mia was self-employed, and her work as an agent consisted of facilitating connections between young, emerging artists and art collectors. She would give them advice, help them establish contacts, and sometimes find them a place to exhibit. It barely paid the bills, but she liked it. She admitted she had no artistic ambition herself, and didn’t know how to do anything with her own hands. But she knew how to recognize who would succeed, anticipate the trends, spot real talent. I was dumbfounded. I’d studied for a long time only to find myself working in a call centre where people complained the app on their smartphone wasn’t working properly. I’d become used to the place, I explained to her. I would look out the window, my mind free. The customers would call in the middle of the night to moan, and I hated them. It was only while telling Mia this that I really became aware of it. They were never thinking of me.
Our conversation, punctuated by short silences and reserved smiles, eventually became more spontaneous. She was speaking to me with big eyes that were green and calm, eyes that were widening to make room for me.
On the web, I could examine the bodies of hundreds of naked women, bodies folding in improbable ways for love. Supple, they let themselves be filled with pleasure, but also with a certain amount of darkness. I had always found them beautiful, nothing more. Their bodies allowed me to place myself within the paradigm of nudity, of femininity. Then I would forget them. Girls passed through my life even faster than men. Sometimes I sympathized with some of them. I liked to laugh in their company, talk with them at the dinners I was invited to, but none of these relationships succeeded. I never knew how to act with them, how to climb over the wall that kept us from one another. Mia, though, wasn’t putting up any resistance to who I was. I felt I could join her on the other side of the wall.
We drank another beer. My cheeks became rosy, like Mia’s. Heat circulating within me, I was calm and happy. I hadn’t noticed the bar filling up.
In an effort to melt away the drunkenness, I decided to walk home. I was full of energy, used to a nocturnal life. The streets were swarming with young people like me—they looked light, that night. Something had liberated them from their youth. They were carrying six-packs of beer, holding the plastic rings with two fingers and walking toward an apartment or park where others were waiting. I recognized their clothes, bought in the same thrift stores as mine. They smelled like cigarettes, perfume
, and mint gum, and I thought that things weren’t so bad, finally. That things could settle down. Return to normal. With each step, I passed more people who were excited and thirsty. They would smile at me before throwing their cigarettes on the sidewalk and pushing through the wire mesh-covered doors of the neighbourhood corner stores decorated with neon signs and faded beer ads. Each step was carrying me toward home. I was hoping Julien would know how to catch up to me after this night.
Inside, the air was gruelling. I had to get us out of this hell. The apartment was in perfect order: the uncluttered counter was glistening under the light of the moon, round and soft. On the fridge, my love had attached a note saying that tiredness had defeated him and he hadn’t been able to wait up for me. I found him in bed. He couldn’t have been sleeping for long. Neither drunk nor sober, I wanted to continue to play and laugh. I got undressed. The soundless noise of my clothes falling to the floor seemed like something both sexy and sad. I had a furious desire for Julien to look at me, even more than the desire to feel him inside me. I needed him to be hungry for my body. I climbed on top of him to try to tempt him out of sleep. He turned over in protest.
As I got up, I smelled a vague odour of something rotten in the air, despite the fact that Julien had cleaned, meticulous as always. I inspected the room, looking for a leftover piece of forgotten food or dirty dishes, but nothing. I leaned down to look under the furniture, lighting up the ground with my phone. Nothing there either.
I sat on the sofa and turned on the TV. Television at night is the most depressing thing. They replay the daytime news and the kind of old films you’ve seen a thousand times. The walls of the living room took on the colours of a sequence of images that could kill—out of boredom or with their great violence. A blonde with a tragic destiny was slipping through the alleyways of Chicago to escape a creature. She stopped running to adjust the belt of her dress. A repeat of my crime scene analysis show was playing on another channel. I already knew who the victim and the guilty party were. I muted the sound and read a few pages of a magazine that belonged to Julien, the most recent issue of the New Yorker, without taking in a word. At midnight, the date of June 1st displayed on the DVD player.
When I raised my head, the six o’clock news was playing again. A face was taking up the whole screen. We looked each other in the eyes. A young woman had been reported missing. She’d been expected on Monday night, but never came home. The muted lips of the newscaster were busying themselves now with describing her: height, weight, hair colour. Two photos followed one after the other. In the first, the girl was holding a bouquet clutched against her graduation gown. The second portrait was visibly more recent. She wasn’t smiling. Her skin was glistening as though she was also suffering through a heat wave. The humidity had plastered tufts of brown hair to her forehead.
*
The next day, Julien came home from work early and convinced me to go out. He said my night schedule was responsible for my cowardice and depression. He would have liked me to apply as manager of the day shift after my first six months at the centre, but I’d never been able to bring myself to do it.
The feeling of suffocation I felt in the apartment followed me outside. At the corner of the street, I was already swimming in it, and my denim shorts were rubbing against the skin of my thighs. I’d kept my USA T-shirt on out of negligence. A city employee was watering the flowers in the square at the corner of our street, the water evaporating immediately into the air, making a cloud that caught the sun. People passing looked blurry to me. Waiting for the green light, they were swaying on their legs, sweating like meat tied up in the window of a butcher shop. Julien pulled me against him to kiss me on the temple. I responded to his kiss with a vague smile, prisoner of my thoughts. He no doubt believed he could calm the agitation he felt in me but couldn’t locate. But of course he didn’t succeed.
We had decided to go buy something for the condo. There must be some piece of furniture or accessory we were missing, Julien insisted. The department store air conditioning made me shiver. The music, the items on sale, and the breasts of the mannequins without heads quickly distracted me. I’d drank too much coffee. A thin, very made up girl approached us. Her hand held out toward us, she offered me a perfume sample. I put it in my pocket, preoccupied. I hadn’t noticed Julien walk away. He already knew which aisle to aim for. My head empty, I stared at a display of home accessories for a long time, under the brutal lighting that made the skin of my inert arms look pale. A saleswoman asked if I needed help.
“Everything’s fine, thanks.”
I continued to wander.
Coming across my reflection in a mirror in the cosmetics department, I saw my mascara from the night before, which hadn’t been washed off properly and was now smudged and black under my eyes. My blonde hair was dull and my cheeks were still red with heat. I was forgetting to take care of myself. The white fabric of my T-shirt had thinned to the point of revealing the two dark spots of my nipples. It was at that moment that Florence appeared, at the end of the centre aisle. I sighed. She was always there, somewhere, not liking me. She had kept her tinted glasses on inside, and like each time I saw her, I told myself it was what I should have done too. Shopping bags from different boutiques balanced at her elbow. Her eyes finally met mine, and she slowed her pace reluctantly. No longer able to avoid each other, we said hello.
“What are you shopping for?” she asked, looking me over.
“Oh, I don’t really know. I was looking for something for our apartment, for Julien and me.”
I wanted to point to Julien, but he was nowhere to be seen. My hand fell back to my side. I ran my fingers over the lipstick displays. They shone, multiplying under the play of light like Mia’s jewellery and imprinting themselves on the inside of my eyelids. Florence followed the trajectory of my hand, looking sceptical. Then Julien emerged out of an aisle and came toward us, smiling. He put his palm on my shoulder blade.
“Julien, this is Florence. Florence, Julien.”
“Hi,” they said at the same time.
What was Florence thinking, when she saw him? Was she comparing Julien physically to the bartender, to know which of us had made out better? Her expression was partially concealed by her glasses. Despite everything, I thought I could recognize myself in her features, but Julien didn’t notice anything.
“Well, then, good luck,” Florence said, before leaving.
I could have told her so many things about my boy-friend. I could have talked about his recent promotion at the advertising agency, where he had the coveted position of team manager. I was living in his big condo, where I had more space than it was possible to fill at my disposal. Florence’s platform heels clicked behind me, and I was annoyed by my own apathy.
I asked myself whether the bartender was infatuated with me because I looked like her. Perhaps we were interchangeable. I had pitied that girl, because of what she didn’t know but guessed about her lover. And I knew that after that infamous night at the bar, she’d pitied me too.
We went home, silent within the excruciating heat.
One night the previous summer, Louis’s ex Marion had persuaded us to go out with her. I was living at Louis’s at the time. The situation was supposed to be temporary, but I was taking advantage of his hospitality. For more than a month, my stuff had been laying around on the living room floor, surrounding the couch where I was letting time pass by. During the day, I would feign sleep to please Marion, who would say she was happy I could rest. She would smile with insistence. She obviously wished I would talk more, that I would confide in her or collapse in her arms. But I didn’t know her and didn’t desire that proximity. She would touch my shoulder when we were passing each other in the apartment. She didn’t take her eyes off me, like I was a child playing at the bank of a ravine.
She took us to a bar Louis and I judged much too snobby. The truth was we were intimidated by the place, but we hid it by ridiculing the long wooden tables, the chrome stools, the ivy covering t
he entire wall of the patio. Marion was nevertheless set on the spot. She’d reserved one of the long tables for her group of university friends.
“We don’t see each other often, but when we do see each other, we take it seriously,” she told us while miming the gesture of downing a drink.
Anticipating our night out, I’d put on makeup in the bathroom and opted for a short, flared skirt and a velvet wrap sweater, adding a delicate necklace with a pearl hanging at the end and matching earrings. The black outfit with my hair pulled up into a bun gave me a severe look. I put on some perfume. Once the mascara was applied to my lashes, my eyes looked much bigger. The bruise around my eye had completely disappeared. Maybe I was too well dressed. Or rather, after arriving there, I would realize I hadn’t done enough. It had been days since I’d changed out of my pyjamas.
Once there, Marion flung herself into the arms of her pretty friends. Louis and I had taken a table for two set back from theirs. The music was too loud for my taste. Not only was I dressed well enough for the spot, but I found myself strangely in harmony with it. If you put aside the fact that most of the girls preferred to wear more lively colours, I was blending in with the masses. I ordered a sangria, which arrived in a large glass with a skewer of cherries and orange slices around the rim.
A man caught my attention. He had noticed me too. He was a few tables away from us, with a group in work clothes. Young professionals, but to hear them talk and laugh casually, it was evident that their daytime obligations were far behind them. A serious girl sitting near him fixed her eyes on me from time to time. Her salmon-coloured dress and long brown hair seemed enviable to me, and yet no one spoke to her. She looked to be on the verge of sleep, calm. They made a striking couple. Wholesome people are made to go together—people who were sick remained prisoners of one another. I knew nothing of this man, except that she was completely cocooned by him. He was seductive. His body was a harmonious surface on which I could have laid down and caught my breath. I had tried to hide this feeling from Louis, all while expressing it without words to Julien, sitting over there, still a stranger to my life and me to his. But Louis had not been fooled, and he discreetly indicated the man.
Aphelia Page 3