by Devon Code
The bikers ordered bottles of and steak dinners. When Madeleine had served their drinks, she returned to find Jean-Marc scrambling to prepare the orders, eyeing the men warily through the service window. The bikers ate and drank heartily, requesting more beer, and then whiskey, saying very little to one another. At first when they would order another round, Madeleine would bring them fresh glasses, but eventually she brought the bottle to the table and filled the glasses held in the outstretched hands. The bikers spoke quietly amongst themselves, the alcohol seeming to have no effect upon them. When for the third time she filled the whiskey glass in front of the man with the teardrop tattoos, he told her to leave the bottle on the table. When she ignored his request the man placed his hand upon her upper arm, grasping the bare skin firmly. She could feel the warmth of his palm and the callouses on his fingers. At any other time she would have done whatever was necessary to free herself, but in this instance she felt it would not be prudent to resist. She expected the man to repeat his demand or else reach toward the bottle, but instead he held her without speaking, and with his free hand he impaled a morsel of steak on the tines of his fork, brought it to his mouth and slowly chewed. She looked at the tattoos on his face and saw that the third teardrop tattoo was not a tear at all, but the thorax of a spider. Madeleine looked to see if Jean-Marc was watching, but she couldn’t see the service window from where she stood. The other men said nothing, indifferent to her predicament. Then the man who gripped her arm said, “One thousand dollars,” and all of the other men at the table raised a hand in the air. The man at the foot of the table said “two thousand,” and the hands remained in the air without exception. She could feel their appraising gazes upon her, and she looked back at them, expecting them to smirk, as if they were playing a game, but their expressions remained impassive. After some deliberation the man with the spider tattoo called out “five thousand” and two of the men lowered their hands. The sums increased gradually in sequence and when the sum of twenty thousand was reached, only the hand of the goateed man at the foot of the table remained in the air and the matter was thus decided.
The man who gripped her arm asked if anyone wanted coffee, and several of the men voiced their assent, and he asked if they still had room for pie, and there were several nods, and he released her arm so that she might fill their order. She forced herself to walk back to the kitchen slowly, only to discover that Jean-Marc had left, although his shift had not yet ended. She considered doing the same or else calling the police, both of which might cost her her job. Instead she took a pill from a vial in her pocket and swallowed it with a swig of whiskey from the bottle still held in her hand. She put on a pot of coffee and warmed up a cherry pie. She went back into the dining room and began to clear the men’s table and told the man with the spider tattoo that dessert was on its way. The man didn’t answer, for he was immersed in a conversation that sounded serious, although Madeleine could not tell what it was about, for they seemed to speak in code. When the men continued to ignore her, she raised her voice and said, “Do you still want that pie?” and the man at the head of the table nodded, without looking at her. She brought it to them with plates and forks and cups and the pot of coffee.
The men divided up the pie themselves and the goateed man at the foot of the table poured the coffee and the cups were passed around. She went to the cash to add up their tab and brought the bill to the man at the head of the table. Then she went back to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher, the room filled with its noise so that she did not hear the revving of the motorcycle’s engines. When she went back out to the dining room she found it empty, the bikers having paid their bill in cash and left a fifty-dollar tip. She didn’t feel fear or anything at all until she returned to her apartment that night. She locked the door, drew the blinds, climbed beneath the covers of her bed and lay there in the dark, feeling as if she were not safely home but in some other place entirely, a place inhabited by men to whom she was nothing more than a sum determined by a whim. She wondered whether she’d really been auctioned off as it seemed she had, whether in the mind of the man at the foot of the table and in the minds of his companions, she now belonged to him. She also wondered what would have happened if she’d fled as Jean-Marc had done, if she’d gained their respect by holding her ground so that they’d decided to spare her, or else if the whole auction had been a pantomime, a performance in which their power over her was so implicit that it need not be exercised to its full extent. Before she fell asleep, she took the fifty-dollar bill from the pocket of her uniform and examined it in the light of her bedside lamp, as if it were proof of something she could otherwise not believe. She suddenly felt very sad that her father had died while she was young and still in need of his love, although she knew that she was older now, a young woman capable of looking after herself, that she’d proven this to herself that night, and that the one hardship she had endured had no bearing on the other.
When she awoke the next morning, she was exhausted. In spite of this, she began to paint and found she did so without the self-consciousness she’d felt for so many months. From then on she would rise as soon as she awoke in the morning and would paint for at least an hour. In the winter months it was still dark when she rose, and rather than turn on the lights, she would paint in the dark, the forms upon the canvas revealing themselves as the morning sunlight slowly filled her flat. She found herself turning away from representation and toward abstraction, and she became more pleased with her work as a result.
Though she broke things off with Jean-Marc, she continued to work at the restaurant for another six months and the bikers did not return during that time. Then one afternoon Jean-Marc came by her apartment to pick up the possessions he’d left behind. When he saw her new work he was effusive in his praise. Though she could tell his praise was genuine, she did not let her pleasure show, responding instead by accusing him of being a pervert and a coward for having abandoned her the night that the bikers had come to the steakhouse. Jean-Marc did not defend himself, agreeing that this was an accurate assessment of the lesser aspects of his character. In the months that followed they managed somehow to maintain a friendship and Madeleine saw more of him, in fact, since he’d become involved with Mathild, whom she admired, thinking her to be a gifted poet.
When Madeleine finished her story, James, lying beside her on her bed, said he’d like to see the steakhouse where she’d worked, proposing that they go there for breakfast. Madeleine replied that there were much better meals served at closer restaurants, that there was no reason for her ever to return to the steakhouse. And then, in order to end the conversation, she began to make love to him. Once he was inside her, she inserted her hand into his rectum more forcefully than she ever had before, her fingers curving as they penetrated deeply, as if he she was searching for something inside of him. It occurred to him that whatever it was she endeavoured to grasp in her small hand was no longer there, that it had been expelled some time before they’d met. He screamed when he climaxed, surprising her as much as it did him, sounding as it did like the scream of a child frightened by a shadow in a darkened room, and she reciprocated, screaming back at him, the two of them screaming in unison.
When she withdrew her hand and he rolled off her and she rose and went to the bathroom, he lay there thinking about her story. He was disappointed by her reluctance to take him to the steakhouse, for in his mind had grown a hope that a visit to the restaurant might bestow upon him something of the certitude that Madeleine had found there, or he hoped at least he might come away from the steakhouse with an understanding of the merits of Madeleine’s paintings, for though he’d spent hours examining the multitude of canvases stacked against the walls, searching for something that moved or intrigued him in some way, they elicited no response from him whatsoever, expressed nothing of the fear and hope of the story she’d told about how she’d come to paint them, nothing of the dignity in the expressions of the dodo men and women in the paintings they
’d seen together on the day they’d met. When he looked upon her paintings, he felt nothing but an absence of feeling. Sometimes they would examine her work together and he would ask questions about the choices she’d made, or compare one of her compositions with another, as much in a genuine effort to understand as to suggest interest. If she had any inclination as to how he felt, she did not let on, and James decided that her confidence in her work was such that their relationship did not depend on his understanding of it. Nevertheless, the vacuity that overcame him when he contemplated her canvases made him uneasy. The more he looked at them, the more their emptiness intensified, so that he’d begun to feel as if Madeleine herself was something of a mirage, as if there had to be something unsubstantial about someone so prolific in the production of such work. She’d come to make him feel uncomfortable, or else her presence made him aware of something within himself that was cause for great unease. He decided that he must break things off before they went any further, and that this news would best be delivered on neutral ground rather than in her apartment. But when he awoke the morning of the ninth day and suggested once more that they go out for breakfast, Madeleine looked up from her easel and said that she was painting.
She continued to paint throughout the day and into the evening, until Mathild and Jean-Marc appeared at the door, seemingly unannounced, though it became apparent that Madeleine had expected them all along. She uncorked the bottle of wine they’d brought and the three of them discussed mutual friends and acquaintances with whom James was unfamiliar, James and Jean-Marc sitting on kitchen chairs while Madeleine and Mathild sat cross-legged on the mattress. As he listened to them James studied Jean-Marc’s beard, which had amounted to little more than stubble when they’d first met but had since grown into the most striking of his features, its fulsomeness rivalling James’s own.
Then Jean-Marc drew their attention to the green canvas Madeleine had been working on when they’d arrived, the merits of which James thought to be particularly obscure. When Jean-Marc asked James for his opinion, James closed one eye and squinted at the painting with the other, remarking that upon a preliminary viewing the canvas called to mind a rainforest canopy as seen from the point of view of a bleary-eyed bush pilot, and that upon subsequent viewings the same canvas conjured in the mind the leaf of a spider plant as observed mid-photosynthesis through the lens of an electron microscope, but that finally both of these were inadequate attempts to describe what could only be comprehended by gazing upon the sumptuousness of the image itself. Jean-Marc nodded and sipped his wine, seemingly satisfied with James’s appraisal, while Madeleine and Mathild looked on, watching him intently, saying nothing, as James considered that neither Jean-Marc nor Mathild seemed surprised to find him there in Madeleine’s apartment wearing the very same denim trousers he’d worn the night he’d first met them, along with a loose-fitting peasant blouse of Madeleine’s. Rather than make him feel at ease, their lack of surprise at finding him cohabitating with Madeleine made him feel strangely uncomfortable, as if he were pretending to be someone he was not while they abetted this illusion. Jean-Marc asked him if anything had come of the résumé poem he’d recited at the gallery, and James said that no, nothing had come of it, unwilling to admit that he’d not returned home since that night.
“I’m sure it’s only a matter of time,” said Jean-Marc, and then he asked him if he’d be willing to share with them another of his poems.
“Not likely,” said Madeleine. Then James, as if to prove her wrong, spontaneously recited the opening canto of “The Maundering Harlequins.” He shut his eyes after the first stanza, for he found that his audience was listening with an attentiveness to which he was unaccustomed, and this unnerved him. When he opened them again, he saw that Madeleine and Mathild were still looking at him, as if they had been watching him uninterruptedly, the two of them mesmerized by the movement of his lips or else the sounds that accompanied them, while Jean-Marc looked away, in the direction of the window half-concealed by Madeleine’s impenetrable canvas, this wayward gaze meaning nothing, thought James, for Jean-Marc might have been listening just as intently as the other two, his brooding expression indicating that the poem had caused him to think of something or someone he would rather not think about—an infant, perhaps, that Jean-Marc feared or despised—as much as it might indicate his distaste for the poem or its recitation, while the looks on the faces of Madeleine and Mathild were easier to gauge, betraying as they did a mixture of revulsion and awe, James wishing that he might augment the former while dispelling the latter, suspecting that many of the English nuances of the poem were lost on them and so elucidating his intentions just as he he’d done in the letter he’d written to me. When he’d finished, he did his best to address the questions posed to him in turn by Mathild and Madeleine and even by Jean-Marc, which were insightful, questions that James himself would not necessarily have thought to ask had their positions been reversed. Mathild finally asked him to recite the work again and he complied.
“That’s quite a poem,” Jean-Marc said when he’d finished. Then Jean-Marc proposed a toast, employing a vernacular expression with which James was unfamiliar, though he raised his glass nonetheless. Mathild announced that it had grown late, and soon she and Jean-Marc embraced both Madeleine and James and left them there alone.
“You were full of surprises tonight,” Madeleine said to James. Her tone communicated her hurt that the presence of their guests had managed to draw out something inaccessible in all the time they’d spent alone, and James decided it was time for him to leave.
“Where are you going?” she asked, as he collected his leather jacket and Warren’s mandola. He said that he needed some air. He began to feel the first pangs of guilt as soon as he passed through the hall and down the stairs, but this was not enough to turn him back. He started down the street, uncertain as to his direction, when the April air became laced with a fetid familiar odour, a scent he unmistakably associated with a beginning, or else, an ending. Then a shadowy form approached and rubbed itself against his shins with great enthusiasm so that he felt compelled to pick it up, realizing as he did so that his fate was somehow bound up with the mangy tabby he held in his arms, the cat content to be held, James reluctant to put it down and walk away. His possession of the cat, he realized, made returning to Madeleine’s apartment an impossibility, for he was now certain that this was the cat that licked his hand on the first morning he had awoken in her bed, a cat whose presence was not welcome in her home. When a cab approached, he hailed it and gave the driver his address.
“What’s his name?” the driver asked. James surprised himself when he answered that the cat’s name was Señor Mosca, the pseudonymous name of the author of the Peruvian novella, which was the first suitable name that came to mind. When his telephone rang early the next morning he expected it to be Madeleine. It was not until a man’s voice greeted him that he remembered he hadn’t left his number or address with her. The man on the phone then introduced himself as an assistant manager of the Auberge St. Eglise and asked James to confirm several facts about himself, facts with a loose basis in reality that James remembered communicating in his résumé. When the assistant manager requested that James report to the hotel to begin his training later that same morning, James did not hesitate to accept, nor did he protest, when, as he first stood before the assistant manager, he was informed that he’d have to shave his beard and cut his hair. The assistant manager did not mention how he’d come into possession of James’s résumé and James did not ask, resigning himself to his lowly position in the hierarchy of the Auberge St. Eglise for a period of several months, conforming to the hotel’s every regulation save the management’s insistence on polyester pants.
James paused to take a bite of his eggs, which had no doubt grown cold, the waitress having cleared my empty plate away some time before.
“When was the last time you saw Madeleine?” I asked, and James said he hadn’t seen her since t
he night he’d walked out of her apartment, though he thought of her often and continued to feel guilty about the way he’d left. Several weeks after he’d started working at the Auberge St. Eglise, he found himself passing the Indian restaurant where he’d first met her and her friends. He decided to go in and order a meal. The food was flavourful and inexpensive, and he eventually came to make a habit of eating there when his schedule would allow. He found something comforting about the restaurant, which was small and dark. In the windows at the front were tables low to the ground, separated from the rest of the dining area by curtains. Patrons would remove their shoes before sitting cross-legged at these tables, and though James always considered sitting there, he thought it better suited to couples or small groups, and so would sit instead at one of the regular tables toward the back. A tall, turbaned man with a grey beard would take his order and serve his meal with a bottle of Indian beer. The man was at once formal and familiar with him in a way that suggested he knew things about James it was impossible for him to know. The kitchen was located behind a curtain at the back of the restaurant, and James assumed that the man’s wife worked there, preparing the food her husband would serve to the customers. The restaurant’s walls were decorated with ornately patterned textiles, and sitar music played softly. James became accustomed to the sameness of his meals there and nothing out of the ordinary happened until a Friday evening in early June.