Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  At the Nautilus, Charles looked at Julie the way he looked at everyone else, one look, two, perhaps a third, because of his work as a photographer, he focused more, he was a master of composition too outside his studio, but also because Julie was the kind of woman he liked, medium height, curves rounded and full. But that wasn’t all, she had more charm than most in the way she’d suddenly stop in the middle of her tracks to look out the window, her head in the clouds, far away, outside. But there were so many women in Montreal Charles found attractive, a fact that played against them. Maybe it even played against him as well, since he had slowly developed a resistance to his own tastes. Then Julie walked to him just like that, as if nothing in the world was simpler, maybe she had come looking for the weights he was holding and that she needed, the thirty-pound dumbbells. Could they share them? Okay for alternating, weights changing hands and hands touching out of simple necessity, an agreement that set Julie’s attention on Charles whom she had never seen. Could he show her some exercises? Which muscles did they work?

  Rose watched them with her stylist’s eye, by reflex she observed Charles the photographer who so often came close to so many bodies. Patiently she held back, discreet, bent over her own weights that couldn’t measure up to Julie’s as with so many things, she would have the occasion to tell herself later. She left them for a time to their teamwork to concentrate on her own exercises, then she continued watching them, still at some distance, from a different angle.

  Other meetings had occurred at the gym over the next few weeks, in the same manner, with first names exchanged and more glances in each other’s direction, more words, verbal thrusts from Julie who had awakened entirely, though not entirely present for Charles.

  These were mere details, but Rose the stylist noted them all. To be a stylist, she declared, was to see the details in women that separate them from the background, the absolute sex bombs, the ones who have character, the stars, and all the others while you’re at it. Being a stylist means that when you walk down the street you look at every woman in isolation, to put her in focus for a photo.

  The second time Rose saw Julie was in line at Meu Meu on Saint-Denis, still under an acid aggressive sun, filled with water, weighing upon the passersby adventurous enough to go outside, the weight lay upon everything that moved or slept with difficulty, like dogs. Julie was in front of them, a dazzling platinum blond, baby blond, defined shoulders above a thin waist, blue tank top and a jean skirt, looking over the list of ice cream flavours, or gelato flavours as Rose sometimes said to sound European. Charles watched Julie who was still to his taste, and did no more because he didn’t know whether the shared weights and advice dispensed and the names exchanged were enough to say hello. Julie was looking at the large tubs of ice cream, and Charles watched Julie since she was still to his taste, but mostly to expedite the greeting, and fulfill his duty to be polite. He stared at the nape of her neck where a few errant strands of hair fell, waiting to greet her when Julie turned toward them, looking into each other’s eyes, in torment, unsure of which flavour to go for or fighting the temptation of calories she wouldn’t touch, then quickly leaving empty-handed without even greeting Charles or recognizing him. Rose wished that things could be left at that, but two other events took place, the least spectacular of which happened on the patio at Plan B.

  The place was jammed with women and peppered with a few men, smokers most of them since a recently passed law prevented people from smoking inside public places, including bars. The sun, the crushing humidity, the sky ballooned with enormous clouds that barely let any air through, and only thick wet air, difficult to breathe, making you inhale with your mouth open like a dog lying in the shade, in the dirt. Rose checked out the women there and spotted Julie in the corner, she’d seen her at the Nautilus and in line at Meu Meu, she’d seen her dozens of times in the neighbourhood, and now she was sitting with Bertrand, her friend and Charles’ too. Life is grotesque, she thought among them there in the outdoor café, sensing the dagger’s approaching thrust.

  Rose realized that Julie had always been alone when she’d seen her, everywhere she was alone, her friend Bertrand made her see Julie’s solitude, though it was obvious, this was Bertrand she’d had in her bed before Charles, the man whom Charles pushed out of her life. Of all the men in Montreal, she told herself—even if there weren’t that many—Bertrand would be the one to break her solitude, and make Julie a gregarious being like everyone else.

  That day the couple was sitting in a way that kept Charles from seeing them, which gave Rose a respite, at least for a time. She would have to take the initiative, and stop the situation with her silence in hopes that nothing would happen, or force Julie’s hand by way of an introduction, and maybe nothing would come of it. Bertrand sitting with Julie might bring Julie into Charles’ vision by simple association; through Bertrand, Charles and Julie might find common ground, a place to meet.

  Rose was about to force the meeting when Julie got up and took her hand bag, then shook Bertrand’s hand and left without seeing them. A few minutes later Bertrand came up to them and sat at their table without mentioning Julie. Rose’s torment, the dagger, the blade she used to amputate herself, kept pressing against her throat. She said nothing as the men spoke among themselves, leaving her outside the triangle. Concentrating on Charles’ words as he regaled Bertrand with his upcoming collaboration with Elle Québec and another hypothetical shoot for a photo reportage in Africa. Vaguely following a conversation dampened by the heat concerning the space between fashion and human misery, forcing herself to remain ironic about the arrogance of imposing a stylist on AIDS victims in Africa for the hypothetical photos that Doctors without Borders was clamouring for. Rose realized in silence that she could not push Julie away from the outside, and in her desire to exorcise the dagger, she asked, “Who were you sitting with, just now?”

  Rose’s voice, caught in her throat, hobbled by her enemy, was so strange that Charles thought the question had come from another table. Bertrand opened his eyes wide, his two hands reached for his head in an indication of foolish forgetfulness and at the same time he brought Julie back to the patio at Plan B. Bertrand didn’t answer Rose, but Charles.

  “Julie O’Brien, the scriptwriter. Do you remember Children for Adults Only? The way parents reacted? Five or six years ago? They wanted it banned from the theatres. She’s the one who wrote it.”

  Charles searched through his memory, barely functional in the heat and sun. He recalled something or other, but couldn’t be sure because he hadn’t seen many films in the past few years, and almost nothing from Quebec.

  “I told her about you and your staff,” Bertrand continued, motioning with his chin toward Rose. “She wants to write about fashion and photographers. With some sort of angle on nude bodies, or nudity as a disguise, how it hides women or something. The Julie O’Brien point of view is what I’m trying to say, hunting for vice.”

  Charles turned to Rose, trying to see whether Julie the scriptwriter was the same Julie from Nautilus, the same Julie who stood at the borders of their lives. Rose discovered that Julie was well known, she had written a movie that she’d liked, and she learned that Charles had been presented to her as a potential topic for a documentary in which she, Rose, Charles’ excrescence, the shadow of his eye, the slave who organized, brightened, and showcased other women’s beauty before exiting the frame where no one could see her, she, Rose, might have a role as a member of the staff. Then for the first time, Julie issued from Charles’ lips.

  “Blond, like very blond hair? Short? Green eyes? Like very, very green eyes?”

  Bertrand’s hands went up to chest level, and his hands made it known that Julie had much more than her eyes or her hair to make an impression.

  “Yes,” he added, dropping Julie’s breasts that he’d mimed with his hands. “Single, talented, a bright future.”

  Four women stood up at the table next to them, making them move away from the hefted handbags and thighs cli
mbing over them to pass. Among the women was Pauline, a makeup artist Rose knew from having worked with her early in her career as an intern. Rose didn’t return her smile. She wasn’t there for Pauline—the conversation between Charles and Bertrand that didn’t concern her, where she didn’t belong, pulled her in. Rose didn’t know what ritual to perform to parry Julie’s dagger, she didn’t have the tools yet to neutralize this growing threat that occupied the entire sidewalk café, as large as the world, nailing Rose to the spot, forcing her deeper into her nothingness, a threat that would not disappear or leave at the end of the day like a fashion model after a shoot. Charles leaned back in his chair, master of the conversation.

  “I know her. I’ve talked to her a lot at the gym. She asks me for advice. We’ve talked about this and that but, strangely, never about work. How did you meet?”

  Bertrand was already looking elsewhere, there was so much to see at the café that was as good as Julie, more beautiful than her, so many women that beat her hands down, he told himself, his mind filled with burning images.

  “I went up to her in the street an hour ago and asked her to go for a drink,” he replied, his eyes wandering to bare legs under the neighbouring table where two women sat. “The sort of thing that never works, usually.”

  “And she said yes, just like that?”

  Charles was offended, as if his own past rejections should be compensated by Bertrand being rejected too. Bertrand reacted with a vague gesture, as if to refuse all credit.

  “After I insisted, yes. I see her all the time in the neighbourhood. She looks cold from a distance. And she stays cold when she’s sitting with you. And she doesn’t drink, is what she told me.”

  Then Bertrand stopped talking for a moment to stifle a yawn.

  “She used to drink, but now she only partakes of mineral water and grenadine. A real lady.”

  A long silence fell, like the end of a conversation. Bertrand glanced idly at his watch, Charles’ head was in the clouds, Rose was waiting for the other shoe to drop, she felt it coming the way you smell a storm brewing. A child yelled from the other side of the cedar hedge that delineated the café as the sun hovered a few feet from their heads.

  “Oh, I almost forgot!” he suddenly said, like a runner catching his second wind. “She left me her phone number. Thanks to you, Charles.”

  He placed a small piece of paper with Julie’s number on it on the table, a bit of Julie set between them like a trophy or a gift. A tithe for Charles the photographer who could pick it up and place it in his pocket if he so desired, this small piece of paper marked with another woman that Bertrand finally picked up again, oh, thank you, God, Rose prayed, thank you for discarding the fragment of that bitch that Bertrand, thank God, slipped back into his shirt pocket, a flowery Hawaiian shirt, showing off. They went on discussing her coldness, what might be its origin, then the changes she’d undergone, referred to by Bertrand who’d been tracking her from a distance for years. Weight loss brought on by drugs, the way she had of avoiding eye contact, drinking too much by herself in the far corner of a bar, her reputation for being a slut, an impression of mental filth, an aura of foulness and ruin reflected in her eyes and skin, then a slow resurrection of her body, her blondness growing even blonder, her head held high showing signs of health, a firmer stature, anchored, a sense of propriety in public, the recovered dignity of a woman who’d gone bad. A woman killed by love, Rose would later learn, who had found a way to walk again, to breathe.

  Something in the world collapsed for Rose that day in the patio at Plan B. The beginning of the end of her reign; soon new royalty would merge to take her place as she fell. Rose found herself in the uncomfortable posture of her own fall, shambling, dragging, out of Charles’ life, a fall that would give her time enough to see what was coming, unhurried, but inevitable. Rose knew that without the need for distance, she knew it somewhere inside herself, as is sometimes said, her little finger, her antennae, her sixth sense, all to service her failure.

  Two weeks after the events at Plan B, the couple’s move struck her like an oracle’s prophecy. Rose and Charles moved in right in front of Julie’s door, in her building, on Colonial Avenue. You can’t even begin to understand, Rose would complain to whoever might listen, once the damage is done, once the facts are established, you can’t even begin to understand how life possesses me, toys with me, Rose in Rosine and then Rose in Julie, the neighbour across the way. Rose was absorbed a second time by a woman she didn’t want and from whom she couldn’t escape, except if she moved again, and immediately. Julie was closing in on her life, materially, inescapably, inexorably, as her neighbour. Rose could do nothing about it, she’d often explain her misfortune from the inside, through the substance that made her who she was, some gene pummelled into her by her mother that she now had to carry, that threw her to the wolves, strong enough to keep attracting new wolves to the door, a gene like a magnet that attracted defeat from afar, or pulled her out of her orbit into a crash course.

  Rose didn’t know right away that she had moved into Julie’s building. The day that followed the move, she saw her walking down the hallway, wearing shorts and high heels, a manicured hand jingling her keys. Julie looked at Rose without seeing her. Her presence could only mean that she was after Charles, she was coming for him, Bertrand had called her and she’d then called Charles in a logical progression, to meet her subject, her way of writing. On the other hand, there was the fact that Charles wasn’t there. He had gone to the studio for the day where he did his work.

  It took Rose a while before she understood that Julie was living in the apartment across from hers, on the border of her home filled with cardboard boxes left unopened since work continued.

  But she had to leave. After she saw Julie in the hallway, she needed to go buy men’s clothing since it was a male model, a popular singer, guitar-player, and songwriter Charles was shooting that day. Rose didn’t dress men very well since she had never learned to study them. She had this theory that men weren’t erection material for women, instead men’s bodies were like magnifying glasses that they ran across women’s skin to observe its grain, and then, and only then, came women’s erections, under the gaze of that magnifying glass in which they contemplated themselves.

  She only had a few hours left to find a buckskin jacket that would reveal the man’s chest, jeans, leather boots, leather belts with a steel buckle, sunglasses, and bracelets, and cowboy hats that would shade the eyes and give the shoot the feeling of a duel. Downtown, there were any number of shops side by side where she was known, she could walk in searching for whatever new accessory might highlight the youth and coolness of a pop singer who played the guitar. Rose picked the clothes at random, organizing the colours with no regard to the usual rules of fashion, a lapse that was not like her. She didn’t even take the time to chase after the parking ticket the wind had blown off her windshield, and on Saint Catherine West she ran a red light on her way to the studio and narrowly missed a pedestrian.

  The shoot was scheduled for Charles’ studio, but Rose stayed in the building where she’d seen Julie, trying to link her being there to an explanation she couldn’t find. The singer she was supposed to work on made her think of Charles, whom she had to forget, and Charles whom she had to listen to but not look at made her think of Julie who, in her mind’s eye, kept walking down the hallway of what should have been their sanctuary. She kept seeing Julie on a loop, emerging from the elevator and moving forward, always with a different outfit, like a fashion show, haute couture on high heels, jingling her keys like castanets from a manicured hand, poised, cold, regal.

  The singer was kind to her but didn’t particularly like the clothes she had picked out. Just because he played guitar didn’t mean he had to dress like a cowboy. Just because he was popular and everyone liked him didn’t mean he had to play the whore in this travesty. Despite everything, Rose came off not too badly, she figured, in the studio, protected, safe from Julie who might have been—who could t
ell, she worried—haunting the hallways of her building with her confident, cadenced, clicking gait.

  Normally, photo shoots weren’t danger zones. The models who paraded past Charles weren’t the same as Julie. Their simpering airs were paid for and even if, in their world where they had to be picked out of a crowd, the keys to their advancement often lay with photographers. Charles resisted them, at least at this point in his career.

  The hard part about dealing with models wasn’t seeing Charles photograph them, but getting used to the suffocating feeling their beauty caused. Models were oppressive, unanimously and unilaterally, except when they grouped together and tallied up their complexes, when they banded together to attack the strongest, the most beautiful, comparing, and find themselves wanting.

  Being a stylist meant finding a way not to feel bad about yourself when you faced the way other people were superior. Being a stylist meant working for their superior side, your job was to add beauty onto the foundations of their beauty that hurt you. Rose wasn’t tall, and that made it impossible for her to even consider measuring up to them, since transcendence was nothing, and a magnanimous soul bullshit. Her small size summed up her role. With the models high on their heels, her eyes were on a level with their breasts, finely formed and girlish.

  It hadn’t always been so easy. One day Charles was late, and she started fitting clothes on a teenager to get a head start. The girl would go into the changing room and come out with a different outfit on her back. Rose watched as she forgot about the little room and undressed in front of Charles who had finally shown up, in the middle of the studio, refusing Rose’s offer of a blanket that she held up like a makeshift screen. The girl took her clothes off and put on another outfit as Rose the stylist assisted her, forced to ignore the situation, retreating behind her body as she undressed at a slow pace that revealed everything, with the casualness of a woman who never missed an opportunity. Rose found a name for this sort of woman, this way of being, a name meant to hurt: bitch. Bitch to signify the split, moving from being a passive audience to a judge, answering with her own dagger and entering the battle. Bitch to keep her integrity in her distance from this foreign race. A race of young bitches, she liked to imagine, playing off the tension they created, dreaming of leaving the Montreal kennel to go and bitch in a larger universe of bitches, like Milan.