by Nelly Arcan
For Rose to know those statistics by heart impressed Julie, who understood nothing about numbers because they didn’t follow any aesthetic logic and did nothing more than force the mind to consider a specific catastrophic reality. The outrageous numbers and statistics and percentages made her head spin when she tried to face the reality Rose was trying to describe, though she succeeded only in making it threatening and vague. Julie was lost. The only thing she understood was that Rose was preparing some possibility that would probably become real.
She knew that there were more women than men in the West, and in Africa it was truer, since they represented 60% of the population according to what she’d heard on the television. She also had the impression that homosexuality was growing among men, and had noticed that the more women in any given society walked around in states of undress, the more they flaunted their bodies, the more men turned from them to desire each other. The more women offered themselves, the more men refused what was being offered—freely and easily, what’s more. But to that extent? Could the epidemic of short relationships, breakups, and divorces be linked to a numerical disadvantage between men and women, made more extreme by male homosexuality?
“What about lesbians?”
“There aren’t enough. Less than 1% of women are gay.”
“Lesbians are as numerous as gays. We think there are less of them because they’re not as visible. They don’t display themselves as much, or go out as much, or talk as much. That’s what they say. That’s what I’ve heard. It’s what everyone says.”
Suddenly offended, Rose jumped to her feet, onto her high heels, jostling the table and her wine glass that tipped over in a small puddle and a tinkling of glass. She stood out against the changing sky that reminded Julie of the one that had spat down lightning that struck the guardrail.
“There aren’t as many because there aren’t as many! I don’t care what everyone says!”
Rose’s entire face and body were caught up in torment. It turned her words into a staccato stutter. Everything about her required attention and submission, listening to her wasn’t a choice but the price to pay to be in her presence.
“There are way, way less,” she continued, sitting down without righting her glass that Julie kept staring at.
“That’s just the way it is. You can’t compare male and female homosexuality. Think about it. You meet gays every day in the street, in the shops, at the hairdresser’s, on television, every day, every day! I’m sure you know some, you’ve known plenty in your life, dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds. At the gay pride parades, only gay men! In the gay neighbourhoods, only gay men! Just look! Look and see for yourself!”
Rose pointed her index finger at the sky as if the parades and gay neighbourhoods she was talking about were to be found there, with their excesses of flesh and colour, their sequined, sparkled wriggling, their floats covered with cocks and muscles. But there were only cottony white and grey clouds that seemed to rush down toward the roof, filling the air with humidity that stuck to the flesh like leprosy.
“Okay, Rose, I admit it, it’s obvious, irrefutable. These days we’re so obsessed with gender equality that we stick it where it doesn’t belong. We think of equality as symmetry, which is foolish.”
Rose wasn’t listening to Julie, Rose wasn’t even speaking to her, Rose was trying to settle the score far beyond Julie. She was declaring her opposition to the world at large, her refusal of the established order of things.
“Do you know a lot of lesbians? Do you have any among your friends? Have you ever had one in your life? Real lesbians, not the ones that make out with their drunk friends in bars to show off and be sexy. Not the ones that think they’re bisexual because they messed around, or wanted to mess around with another woman. Or the ones that are bored enough to sleep with other women without coming or getting wet just so they can talk about it afterwards. To impress their friends. For the pleasure of saying it, you understand?”
In the distance, a rumbling of thunder was heard, a single growl, confusion in the sky that didn’t know which leg to stand on, it was dropping into its lower keys like a piano. No one could tell which direction the sky would take.
“Since when do women show off less than men? Or talk less than them? That’s all women do! Talk about themselves and reveal themselves, their interior, their emotions. Women and their sentimental truths! Women and their need to say everything! Bitches! Whores!”
With these words Julie woke up for real, this was getting serious. Rose had stopped beating around the bush, she’d touched the heart of the subject: scheming. Rose had rarely talked so much in her life, and all of sudden she realized she should stop there. She confessed more than she should have, just as Charles had done a few days earlier. She gushed on the roof in front of Julie—whom Charles liked so much, she could no longer ignore it—the deepest, most painful part of herself, she showed the irregular cloth from which her life was cut. But at least she’d done it, she consoled herself, without speaking of her father to Julie, that man she had loved with such passion, the likes of which only children are capable of. That father had disappointed her, and she had him in the back of her mind as she was speaking.
Julie said nothing for fear of arousing Rose further, for her anger seemed to be diminishing. Then Rose sat back at the table, crossed her legs, and placed a hand on her hip. She pulled the bottle of wine out of the bucket for the second time, and seeing it was empty, violently dropped it back in. Julie, Rose’s audience, drew a line between the threatening sky and her ferocity, and she hoped only for a return to a calmer climate. She lit another cigarette.
“There isn’t a single reason why women would be bashful about coming out of the closet,” Rose continued.
“There’s no reason, at least today, in our society, to hide it if they were. They don’t hide because the truth is that they aren’t!”
“No, Rose, no reason at all.”
Rose stood up again. Getting her second wind, she began pacing around the table.
“There are so few of them that it’s an injustice to all women! If only they had an alternative to being lesbian! But no, they belong only to men and to men only!”
Rose went on punishing the roof with her heels, a prisoner of her speech, unable to find the exit. She couldn’t stop and she couldn’t continue. She served up her pain at being in the world without relief, in its reality forged of flaws, of existences unbidden in the same sandbox, on the same territory, condemned to remove themselves from life or, worse, share it. That pain had been contained in darkness for the longest time, years of fermenting in explanations of misery, years of resistance, of stubborn acceptance of gangrened excuses that now burst in the light of day.
“It’s the tension between women! That’s the problem! The tension of having to fight like a bitch to keep a man!”
Rose sat back down and looked Julie in the eye to make her presence felt, there, before her. Tension was a problem, Julie thought, Rose was right. Tension like a dynamic of pain and the movement toward succour, tension that she had tried to reduce, prevent it from re-entering her sleepy life in any way possible, tension like a starter’s pistol for pain, a signal to move and raise your fists and fight, give into panic that tried only to reduce its source, and get back to the level, slow plane of quietude, Nirvana where life was unmoving, flattened out, like death. Tension at the origin of life was also life that had to be tamed.
Rose looked into Julie’s eyes and said, “Charles is mine.”
Charles . . . let her keep Charles, Julie thought, happy to feel that Rose, by finally naming him, had reached the end of herself. Julie took a violet felt-tip pen and a piece of paper out of her handbag, and wrote something. She handed the paper to Rose.
“Send me the data, numbers, and statistics comparing the birth of boys and girls. Births according to gender, as well as homosexuality. To this email. I want to study them. What you’re telling me seems incredible. But for now we’re out of wine.”
/> The sky was covered with drifting clouds. An ambulance wailed down Saint Joseph Boulevard, going west. Rose smiled, appeased, her mouth like a sweet balm that shone.
“Want to go to Plan B?”
TAWNY FUR, INTERMIXED with beige and brown, Chafouin, Julie’s largest and laziest cat, was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes burnt by excess, the next day around noon. He was sleeping next to her in a ball, entombed in his six kilos, his nose on his back legs bent back toward him in that classic pose of every cat in the world, bastard or not. Feeling Julie move, he opened his eyes, then closed them with a sigh. For him, nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, his world had stayed the same, life continued its course, without past or future, a dog’s life, without the beatings.
For a few seconds after she woke, Julie remembered nothing of the previous night and it was far better that way. Memory had its reasons for forgetting things that concerned well-being and self-esteem, forgetting was a gift from heaven that locked up the filth and threw away the key.
There was no clarity in her mind, only pain and dryness that obscured her vision. Knowing she was in her own house was the only thing that counted, being at home and not naked, at least not entirely. She was lying on her stomach on top of her undisturbed bed, her feet on the pillow. Her jeans were where they should be, attached at her waist by a large black leather belt, but her T-shirt was pushed over her breasts. Then as sure as the sun rises in the morning to throw its light over all Creation, the night’s memories began to return.
“Oh, no! Shit! Shit shit shit!”
The events, convivial at first, had gone too far. As usual, as usual, she repeated, raising herself on her elbows and scanning her loft to make sure everything was still in place, that the material stability of her life in its incarnations of furniture and electronics, its proliferation of green plants and walls covered in pictures and paintings, hadn’t gone anywhere, hadn’t—as she had—forgotten themselves by letting loose in every direction at once. Julie didn’t worry too much about herself, protected by so many nights far worse, passed out in the arms of strangers, or waking up outside the city in a puddle of urine.
She had to get up. Lifting herself on her elbows, she immediately located her white satin bra on the wooden floor, the one she’d been wearing last night, except that the straps had been undone. A bit farther off, her gold leather handbag was on its side, spitting out makeup, coins, balled up Kleenex, and business cards she’d picked up in the course of the evening. Then, near the mess of her handbag, she recognized a belt, it too made of black leather: Charles’ belt.
“Goddamn shit. He forgot it.”
Other memories returned, linked to the belt left on the floor and her t-shirt raised over her breasts which she pulled back down, muttering, the action was immediately followed by a searing pain in her head where static crackled, probably the noise of the circuits in her brain trying to rediscover lost pathways. Julie got out of the bed and stumbled toward the shower, to avoid letting images parade by that might have been exciting if her mind hadn’t been clouded by a headache, if she hadn’t been so hungover, if the images hadn’t included Rose as a witness. She shrieked in rage as she accidentally turned on the cold water. Her three cats leaped to their feet in unison, their ears turning in her direction, eager not to miss anything of the fury that reached them from the shower.
At Plan B, Rose and Julie had continued drinking white wine, the same Chardonnay neither of them would drink after Charles’ death, neither would be able to see a bottle of it on the liquor store shelf without recoiling.
Seated on the always jam-packed patio, Julie was amazed to gaze upon—for the first time—the world described by Rose twenty minutes earlier on the roof of the building: of the thirty-nine customers seated outside, twenty-eight were women, and of the sixty or so inside the bar, according to Rose’s and Julie’s approximate count that kept getting disrupted by the comings and goings of customers who gawked at them, forty were women. Julie had always thought of masculine presence as domination through physical force and numbers, domination through the colossal buildup which men were capable of in time of war and popular uprisings, for Julie who never lacked men to hold her in their arms, it was hard to believe. Julie was seeing for the first time what had been there all along, she’d been troubled enough to approach groups of women over the evening and ask them whether they had noticed this reality, whether they were bothered by it, worried or revolted. Most of them, like Julie, were looking and seeing for the first time. Most didn’t know what to think, they believed it was just coincidence, a random occurrence that had brought more women than usual together, at the same time they recognized having sensed this reality in some dim fashion without wanting to notice or reflect on it. Julie was amazed to realize, in her thirty-third year, that she’d never noticed the distribution of the sexes in the places she patronized and that she’d never, ever considered the repercussions of this mathematical distribution on the hardships of love, and the cliché of women waiting for men gone off hunting, outside, elsewhere.
“It’s always like that,” Rose told her, gloating at how the fact rattled her. “I’ve been noticing it for so many years that I can’t unsee it. In all Montreal, the Plateau is the neighbourhood where the concentration of women is the highest. But you should see what it’s like in Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean. The statistics aren’t entirely clear, but according to the darkest predictions, there are seven women for every man.”
“Really? I thought that was a myth.”
“It’s true. Completely true. I don’t know why or how. In any case, the worst places are restaurants, in Montreal and elsewhere. Women go out in packs in restaurants, it’s striking. The worst was at Bu, a tapas place. I checked the place a couple of times. Only women, forty-three of them. And one man. Only one!”
And since they mentioned the tapas at Bu, the two women agreed they should eat something if they wanted to continue drinking. They swallowed down all sorts of pâtés on toast, black olives and shrimp mousse, nuts and goat cheese and more bread, leaving out the wine just long enough to get their strength back. They spoke of other things, the sweltering summer in their country of snow, the World Cup that they both couldn’t be bothered with except that it assembled men in great packs, their common experience of aesthetic obsession that Julie had long considered a sort of Western burqa. The aesthetic fixation, Julie submitted, covered the body with a veil of constraints spun with extraordinary expenditures of time and money, hopes and disillusions vanquished by new products and techniques, operations and touch-ups that cloaked the body in superimposed layers, until the body was eclipsed. It was a veil both transparent and dishonest that denied the physical truth it claimed it was revealing, in the place of real skin it inserted skin without faults, hermetic, inalterable, a cage.
“They’re Vulva-Women,” she repeated, an expression of the moment that made them laugh. “Vulva-Women are entirely covered with their own pussies, they disappear behind them.”
Rose didn’t always understand Julie, and Julie, who kept complimenting Rose for everything and nothing and even her silence, who took her hands in hers and sung her praises thick with inebriation, revealed her recent past by telling the story of her disappointments in love, her collapse that, she had to admit, wasn’t entirely over since she was still drinking, because she’d never be the same with alcohol or men, because she rediscovered the desire to live without really finding life. Then Bertrand appeared on the patio, he sat down and began drinking with them, he tried his luck with Julie and then with Rose, his manoeuvres were rejected by both women, teasing accomplices.
The rest of the evening was lost in a haze dominated by a few images separated from the pack, but that were themselves ambiguous. Julie saw herself simultaneously in two different bars, the Assommoir and the Tap Room, without knowing which came first. She saw herself in a disorder of time and space, a collision of images, taking Rose by the hand and walking with her, kissing Rose on the mouth in front of a d
umbstruck Bertrand. Then she saw Charles arriving and Rose moving away from her, she saw herself looking for cocaine, finding some, not having enough money to pay for it, then finding some way anyway, moving toward the washroom with first Rose then Charles, but much later, kissing Charles on the mouth, in the toilet, lifting her t-shirt at her house, feeling Charles’ hands on her breasts, without knowing if it was at the bar or at home, feeling his mouth, trying to touch his cock in his jeans, his belt undone. She saw her cats on the bed disturbed by the mechanical animation of pleasure, the mess of caresses indistinguishable from previous nights with other men. She recalled Rose appearing next to the bed, mirror image of her safari-dress appearance in front of Plan B’s cedar hedge, a terrible apparition that slowly came into view, where they had been seen far more than they saw.
Julie pictured herself walking through the streets with the troupe though realizing Rose was standing alone, not looking at anyone, because of Charles being all over her, Julie, who couldn’t stop talking. She remembered Rose disappearing with Bertrand once they had gotten back to the building on Colonial Avenue, and Charles staying with her to talk and talk, drink more and snort a little, for an uncertain length of time that seemed both very long and very short.
There were all sorts of things she couldn’t remember and that worried her, like the sexual contact that left her with a feeling of coldness and strangeness, bodies thrashing against each other short-circuited by everything that was poisoning her blood. Curiously, Charles’ cock didn’t make an appearance, maybe because Charles hadn’t let Julie touch it, or because he couldn’t get hard. She had no memory of when Charles and Rose left her loft, or his reaction when they’d been caught by Rose, nor could she remember how Rose reacted.
She forgot how she’d managed to pay for the cocaine and in what quantity, but she retained an image in which she was licking the bottom of a plastic baggie. She saw Rose and recalled the two of them dragging each other through the Tap Room, hand in hand, to contemplate the miracle of a majority of men in the crowd, a late night influx that had thrilled them and led them to produce a lesbian comedy of deep kisses on the mouth, but she couldn’t remember the path they’d taken to the bar. She remembered the late-night appearance of a producer she had worked with in the past and had forgotten why he told her he never wanted to work with her again, or why she’d kept a bunch of his business cards.