Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Julie got out of the shower, covered herself with a clean towel, pulled the drapes, and settled back into bed, under the covers. Her body was filled with a deep shame, shame at her actions but also at everyone else in the world who acted the way she had. She was ashamed of herself, and of this world where everything was allowed, where permissiveness turned life into infection, and clouded it with stink. Shame of her adolescence that continued into adulthood, the prime of her life where she should have been somewhere else entirely, in discipline and work, the will to choose a path and direction, accomplishment and a quest for recognition, progress with a mind turned toward marking History, the need to leave a mark on the world. She of this self-indulgence that was growing in her, senescence like an insouciant giant, an ungainly beast unaware of the damage left by its passing. Ashamed too was she of her generation’s veneration of pleasure that made everything possible and acceptable as long as it was light and frivolous, as long as it was birthed in the heart and came from the gut, as long as it could be turned into a joke around the table during a dinner party with friends. Ashamed of the alcohol that rotted her, that transformed her into something else, a cow, a sow, a savage state where she snorted and displayed herself like a bitch in heat. She was ashamed of her vulgarity in which the vulgarity of the times was reflected, she was ashamed of all the moments when she simply felt no shame. Prone in her bed, she concluded that shame always came too late, always the next day, and never came when it should have, when it was needed, when it should hurry to be felt to prevent the worst, but it didn’t intervene, at least not in time. Then she figured that the times she acted like a sow were the only ones when she was part of the world. Shame was separation, and acting like a sow was union, public defecation.

  Under the covers, as always Julie contemplated the ceiling, and felt her desire for Charles intact. She felt it in her fear of having disappointed him, or driven him away with her prattling, her cocaine-induced enthusiasm, synaptic joy, her extravagant mannerisms and declarations about the world, her shamelessness that opened her up like a door. Her desire was intact because she wanted to see Charles and make sure, despite everything, that he still found her beautiful.

  Men, she had come to see, remain brothers before the vulgarity of men, but are nauseated when women act the same way, women shouldn’t drink beer straight from the bottle according to her father, shouldn’t curse, women had to be discreet to a fault, especially when it came to their mouths. It was a matter of habit and time, Julie thought, you had to give the world time to adapt so that the equality of men and women in filth came naturally to everyone’s senses like a state of nature.

  Julie knew her mind wouldn’t stop, it was a stranger to both exhaustion and pity, but she fell back to sleep anyway, with images of Charles.

  She woke up eight hours later, Chafouin’s nose tickling her neck.

  V

  * * *

  THE WAR EFFORT

  ROSE DUBOIS WAS sitting in a waiting room on Beaubien Street, with ads running on a television set high in the top corner of the room, like a professor at a lectern. Bitchiness had been part of her life for several days now, since she caught Charles and Julie together on Plan B’s patio, and it seemed to want to make a definite place for itself in her life. The feeling said it all, it was an established state of being. Her universe was caught up in bitchiness, all Plateau Mont-Royal and her work even more so, including this waiting roomed filled with female customers flipping through fashion magazines waiting for their wrinkles to be needled away, consulting promotional leaflets for Botox, Restylane, Dermadeep, Artecoll, and other new products whose many advantages Rose hadn’t discovered yet.

  Like the other women, she was waiting in this room decorated in lush complementary tones of green and yellow, filled with everything that existed in the name of well-being, value added, extra self-confidence provided by injection, the gifts you gave yourself, for yourself and no one else, you could read that in the ads, one of which trumpeted the slogan For me, me, me. Plastic surgery is somehow centripetal, autarkic, Rose told herself, as she waited like the other women for the same thing they were waiting for, sitting in the antechamber of every wound required in the name of beauty, pain migrating toward the marvellous like so many caterpillars, after gestation, guaranteed to turn into colourful butterflies, yet that still needed a new boost every six months to keep their colour and stay aflutter.

  Rose managed to find a replacement at work and Charles understood why, he respected her reasons, and even offered to give her a week off work—a first in their work relationship. He was kind to her because he loved the swelling that hardened her lips when she emerged from the surgeon’s clinic, kind with her lips that he nibbled on carefully in the days following her operation, his hand running back and forth over his cock until he came on her lips, then spread his sperm over them with the tip of his cock like in a porn movie. Kind in his uncontrollable excitement and stubborn erection, or so thought Rose who considered his offer of a week off as a way of pushing her aside, of laying her off, of wanting her to get used to being independent and saving her from sensing him drawing away from her. That he cared for her as he put distance between them made her suffer that much more and she couldn’t comprehend why, maybe because his niceties only dragged out her pain, prolonged the torture, washed the guilty party of his sins. She had contradictory thoughts: nothing had happened yet between Charles and Julie because everything was still ambiguous, but everything would happen because of that ambiguity, that much more powerful because it floated above them instead of consuming itself and breaking apart, that hesitation was enough for her to establish the truth, a truth of the heart. Rose felt she should leave to avoid humiliation, at the same time she needed to stay and resist, and experience humiliation to the end, turn it back on them, humiliate herself to piss them off, make a splash, keep the malaise alive, stick around like a bad apple in their projects and maybe just destroy them. Stay in the picture not to see, but to make them see her.

  Rose looked at the women who were waiting along with her, women of all ages with their eyes on the pages of magazines made for them, bursting with products designed for their needs. Only women, once again. Then a man on the road to becoming something other than a man, the by-product of a man mutating into a woman, walked into the waiting room, eyes slightly closed by the swelling that was healing, with fading bruises, yellow and violet, on his cheeks. He was wearing a medical mask over his mouth indicating that something had happened at that level that shouldn’t be seen. The man, who wore prosthetic breasts, had square shoulders that didn’t fit in with what he wanted to be, poor guy, not to mention that he was too tall, with strong features impossible to erase, his hips too narrow under the skirt that ended above his knees, that revealed his legs that were too muscled, and his calves that were too big, those two parts could not—at least not yet—be reduced to something more refined and slender.

  Rose wondered whether he still had a cock and couldn’t help but think, one more too many. Then she corrected herself and thought again: too bad for this middle-of-the-fencer, I feel sorry for him for wanting to be a woman, knowing that’s impossible, neither men nor women, and homosexuals even less, no matter their gender, will want this synthetic creature that has lost or soon will lose its gender, but that will retain the indicators of it for the rest of his life on the remains of his body, despite all his life’s work.

  Then she thought of Isabelle, a svelte model of Italian origin, a woman who’d become her good friend for a while, a few years back. The image of Isabelle arose to refute her thoughts, without dissuading her from her beliefs. When it came to her theories, Rose had an obstinate streak, what couldn’t be hammered out grossly and before the eyes of all didn’t count, for her truth had no nuances and was always ironclad, it didn’t float into the people’s minds, it didn’t illuminate but was a blow to the head, the nature of truth was crushing.

  Isabelle had told her the details of her life in Madrid where she went from time t
o time to model, but mostly to whore, as she had done in Montreal, London, and Paris. Her stories were always worth your while. In the flesh market, she had rubbed shoulders with transsexuals who—to Rose’s real surprise for she didn’t want to believe it—got paid more than real women, even the youngest who were most in demand all over the globe. Transsexuals whose transformation had been a success, and who all looked like one another because they’d been recast by the same Madrid surgeons, all of them with the same eyebrows, high and oblique, that made them look as though they were forever casting a downward glance on you, their mouths like an ampulla, a pussy right in their faces, enormous breasts, double D, E, F. Well, Isabelle maintained, they made a fortune with clients who weren’t homosexuals, men who were able to get it up not only for their joke toward which their cocks had turned, but who preferred the hybrid gender to the real one. Isabelle described the ambiguous results of some of the transformations she’d seen: folds of flesh made from the testicles themselves, folds that looked like a dick, and balls, she said, describing the results with the rounded palm of her hand, results that looked like attempts at pussies that had neither the proportion, colour, and even less the texture of the real thing. Transsexuals had mitigated genitals, Isabelle would say ironically, when she was in a good mood. Of the infinite varieties of pussy in the world and their idiosyncrasies, a transsexual’s cock folded back into itself shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same category. The dry, arid hole that often wasn’t more than fifteen centimetres couldn’t come close to a real hole, yet men would get hard and pay top dollar to fuck it.

  That just goes to show how nature is unnecessary when it comes to erections, Rose thought as she listened to Isabelle, who’d gotten hitched to some British photographer, or so she’d heard not long ago. Every year Isabelle would send her an electronic birthday card that danced and played dreary music over and over again, on a loop.

  Rose couldn’t stop looking at the transsexual, she stared at him with merciless curiosity, so intense it was odious. She was still looking at him when Dr. Gagnon appeared in the waiting room, the only man in the troop of appellants, to motion Rose to follow him into his office. He was used to seeing Rose on a regular basis and was starting to feel a certain warmth toward her. He had noticed that the younger his patients were, the more often they came to visit him, maybe because they’d heard their mothers endlessly repeat that it was better to be safe than sorry. Getting a leg up on old age, he understood, yielded more than the bandages that sought to hide it.

  Dr. Gagnon was a handsome forty-five-year-old with a big smile who preferred Rose over his other patients for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He was touched by her fragile nature, she was so small you could do what you wanted to her. That thought was a source of pleasure for him, he imagined grabbing her and pulling her to his side with violent kisses, or throwing her out the window, against the wall, until she begged and pleaded. Dr. Gagnon couldn’t decide which of these brutal scenarios he preferred.

  Rose sat across from him, in his position behind the solid, serious doctor’s desk.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while, Rose. All’s well with you?”

  Dr. Gagnon knew she could read his thoughts on his face, so he turned to the reports of her recent visits, remembering with some embarrassment that in the past few months, she’d been coming much too often, he had seen her only three weeks ago to freeze the muscles of her forehead and the skin around her eyes with Botox.

  “Things are okay here,” she answered, pointing at her forehead with her index finger. “I showed up out of the blue because I wanted a little more . . . for my mouth . . . to highlight it, to showcase it, you know?”

  “Of course, yes, of course . . . come a little closer,” he asked, opening his hands and making Rose get up and bend over his desk.

  Dr. Gagnon examined her lips with his both thumbs. They were to his liking on every level, and they made him want to fill them with himself. But the perfect lips she showed him were perceived, by the typical woman she was, not as a feature she should derive pleasure from, but as material that could be moulded indefinitely and pushed endlessly toward improvement.

  “I guess we could aim for a bit more volume on the upper and lower, by injecting in the middle, in small doses, to thicken them. A single syringe, I wouldn’t recommend more than that.”

  “I want my lips to pop,” she insisted, sitting back down and lifting one hand in front of her mouth, as if to shield them from him.

  “They’ll pop, they’ll pop. But always harmoniously.”

  “I trust you to use gentle aggression, Doctor.”

  Her reply had Dr. Gagnon laughing, but his laughter was much too high-pitched and enthusiastic, it was heard throughout the clinic, and his bored assistants rolled their eyes toward the ceiling. Then his laughter dropped off suddenly, leaving them both embarrassed and facing each other. Rose knew that her surgeon had a weakness for her, she used that to her advantage, but this was the first time she felt like letting him near her, to bring him closer to what was happening to her, the emptiness she saw opening before her.

  “I think my boyfriend is going to leave me. For a woman in our building,” she burst out, mortified by the tears welling up in her eyes.

  Usually, and with someone else, Dr. Gagnon would have side-stepped the confession with a polite smile and a courteous attitude that left no doubt he wasn’t there to discuss his patients’ private lives. Too many women confessed far too easily in his office, believing there was necessarily an intimate relationship between doctor and patient because he would open them up, turn them inside out and restyle them. But this was Rose, and what he heard were dulcet tones indeed: this was the first time she shared something intimate with him.

  “He’s crazy to even think about it,” the doctor declared.

  “We just moved in together. And we work together. It’s the other woman . . . ”

  Rose was about to burst into tears and fall apart in her surgeon’s office, she tried to stave off her broken-hearted bitch howl by turning and staring at the wall full of diplomas that she couldn’t read, then moving onto black and white portraits of women from the Roaring Twenties, pictures she noticed for the first time. Portraits of glowing ivory faces with liquid eyes, undulating, wavy hair that broke the light like a prism, beautiful silent children whose entire vocabulary was contained in the batting of eyelashes.

  “You know that cosmetic surgery can’t be used to keep a man. Even if people are led to believe otherwise, it has no effect on lost love. Many women have tried and failed.”

  “On my man it’ll work,” Rose replied immediately, in a tone of complete self-assurance. “But I understand what you mean. The other woman, the neighbour, she’s my type that way. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was your patient too.”

  Rose didn’t know where she was going with Julie, but she couldn’t help talking about her, or thinking about her. Having come into her life through Charles, Julie had become unavoidable, inseparable from her own destiny. But did she have to carry her everywhere, even to the surgeon’s office, where the shape of her body would be decided?

  Dr. Gagnon wanted to continue the conversation, but time was flying, he had to move. He asked Rose to lie down on the operating table as usual, and injected a dose of morphine in her arm as usual, bringing her to the edge of sleep, where in general, life is good, even for the miserable and the diseased. Silence fell throughout the clinic, Rose lay almost asleep before him, he could take the time to examine every inch of her without embarrassment, she was more desirable than ever, Rose the sleeping beauty who needed a mouth to kiss. He took out a syringe, but before he injected her, he took her hand and bent over her, brushing her ear with his lips.

  “You’ll always be welcome here if you need consolation. Even from the pain given to you by the man you love.”

  From deep within the peace that ran through her veins, Rose smiled, not knowing whether her smiled really existed or if it was onl
y an intention, the thought of a smile. With the touching ungainliness of very shy people, Dr. Gagnon bent over further and kissed her on the lips before operating on them. He was extremely careful with the procedure, not injecting the whole syringe, to give her what she wanted without destroying what she had.

  When Rose felt strong enough to get to her feet and walk out of the clinic without needing to lean on the walls, she emerged from the small recovery room reserved for minor procedures, her mouth covered with a mask, and made her way to reception. Behind her counter a secretary had told her, with a voice better suited for a morgue, her mouth upturned in a haughty sneer, that this time she didn’t have to pay.

  IN THE TAXI she couldn’t stop herself from touching her lips with the tip of her fingers, the swelling of her lips continued, she thought of Charles and his strange desire for this swelling wound. Her surgeon had kissed her on the operating table. He broke the barrier between them in her moment of voluntary submission, as she waited for him to produce what would get Charles excited, as she was trapped, open to his touch. She was aware of it and didn’t know what to think. In any case, it was the least of her worries.

  An idea was slowly dawning on her, her surgeon was a doctor who might, if she worked on him well enough, operate on her for free the way he had done in the past a few times, and give her, who knows, some money since he had piles of it, not to mention that he might be able to prescribe her all sorts of things difficult to get your hands on, like pain medication and anxiolytics that propel you into deep sleep with no questions asked, pills that heal people whose souls are sick, where putrefaction grows.