Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Between her and Charles there had never been any great discussions about life. They were both secretive and not very curious about other people, their curiosity wasn’t expressed through words but in their sight, well developed by their profession. She sensed Charles more than she understood him, through intuitions she couldn’t express in words, she sniffed him out, reacting to his changing moods like a domestic animal, dogs and cats that panic and hide under furniture, whining when they feel a storm coming, or purr and wag their tails. She’d known certain things her whole life, but was only gaining awareness of them now, just as they were about to slip from her grasp.

  Rose knew Charles had loved the women in his life serenely, including her, he’d always taken his time, approaching them indirectly or letting them come to him, attentive and patient. She also knew that Charles had never known the all-consuming power of passion, he had always declined the animal aspect of love where you lose yourself like a beast, releasing your instincts on the other person, giving yourself wholly to the chosen one who devours you.

  No man in the world loved women more than Charles, she knew this from having lived and worked with him for years, but there were barriers in his love he couldn’t overcome, emotions that remained inaccessible, like the torment and pain of jealousy and the violence of possession. He had never seen his world fade into nothing from the physical absence of someone he loved, nor had he lost all interest in anything his lover didn’t care for. Rose knew he loved her with that trusting, solid, patient love old couples have.

  But beyond what she knew of Charles, Rose believed that Julie O’Brien would be an exception, Rose was beginning to feel the spark of passion in him, something he’d never known. Recently he’d been distracted, clumsy, confused. For the past few weeks she’d felt him ready to follow Julie anywhere at the slightest sign, ready to commit any folly. She saw in Julie the ideal being that she wasn’t and that she should have been, with Charles, of course, but also with other men who all sought the Ideal Female, a model etched into their gender since the beginning of time and which they grasped after, a template in their DNA that they followed with their erections, in unison.

  But when it came to Charles, Rose still had an advantage that Julie didn’t, and it had to do with his cock. He had tastes and preferences that horrified him and that he never spoke off, especially not to Rose who consented in silence. He never spoke of his desires like the good, considerate boy he was. His preferences were the opposite of consideration and sensitivity, they were the very opposite of nature itself, if nature could even be mentioned in that area. His appetite was contrary to all reproductive logic, he believed, and to everything that made him a human being, everything he wanted and wished for himself and others. But don’t all appetites lead to the destruction of everything that gets you to open your mouth? Wasn’t hunger the negation of food? Isn’t nature in large part directed against itself to control its terrible expansion through mechanisms of reabsorption? Sometimes Charles figured that perversion saved men by preventing reproduction through diverting their sperm onto sterile objects that didn’t produce ovum, like cadavers, shit, and feet.

  But Charles still suffered from a burning desire and a swollen cock for women with breast implants and for bodies that had other bodies in them that didn’t belong to them, for swelling lips inflated with fill, lips you could feel with your fingers, your lips, your cock. He felt the same for the scars left like signs of entering, a call to fever, for implants, injected substances, hardening, wounds, injuries of beauty beaten into the body that generated in him such excitement that it had taken him time—weeks—to hold back and keep from shooting his wad as soon as he touched her naked body, he preferred her breasts to her pussy, her lips to her ass. He penetrated her here and there just to please her, and only for the first year of their relationship. Then he’d stopped entirely, understanding that Rose herself had decided to take on the role of pure fetish: made for sex without sex, Charles taking her silence as the confirmation that she really didn’t need the kind of penetration that has been universally practiced since the dawn of man.

  But that passion, because that’s what it was, was the only one he had ever experienced, and it had nothing to do with love, Rose knew. The moment when he was lost to pleasure was short and had a predetermined and abrupt end that left him disconcerted and nauseous, and Rose felt the same, she would look at Charles when fever took him, when he switched without warning from being gentle and caring to abandoning his whole self to a part of her body that couldn’t make her come unless she touched herself.

  His was a precise performance that almost never varied, he imposed it on her to control and handle her, wanting the rest of her to disappear or at least keep quiet. During his fever, Charles would ignore Rose and manipulate only one part of her, a nipple, for example, the very summit of a certain suspect hardness created by implants, the proof of human intervention, dictated by human desire, a refusal to be only this much, only an “A” on a scale that went much higher, firmness the result of an effort toward something better, a higher state, according to the point of view.

  Rose saw Charles for the first time at a photo shoot. Three famous models were there to advertise some new techno club. They had to pose like pussy gone mad for lesbian desire, two of them kissing while the third put her hand in the hollow between her thighs, and her mouth on the second one’s breasts.

  At the time Rose was a stylist’s assistant and Charles an assistant photographer. She was small compared to everyone, and she had a talent for getting out of people’s way, moving aside when they had agency, a hidden presence that knows its position in the scale of things: in the periphery. But in her debasement that day, she demonstrated some solidity, pride even, a sort of robustness made possible because she wasn’t suffering, she was refusing the humiliation of the three models and their tantrums and whims, who were taking advantage of the group effect there in the studio to complain about their hair, makeup, and clothes.

  Rose caught Charles watching her several times. Each time he reacted with a smile in lieu of an excuse, a timid mouth that seemed to say I can’t do anything about it. Charles absent-mindedly followed the proceedings, moving between the makeup station and the set where the models were waiting, inspecting the photo equipment, the lights, flashes, spots, and silks, the XXX grills, giraffes, and umbrellas, the two assistants quiet as they watched the three women who looked like a litter of kittens covered in pink fabric that Rose and the official stylist had to set up, fold by fold—to make it seem as though it had been tossed there in the heat of passion, in organized negligence.

  Once the shoot was over, they found themselves walking side by side in the street. Rose, who was always ready to serve, offered to drive Charles home. As they drove, they spoke very little but Rose felt, with her two small hands gripping the wheel, Charles looking her over from head to toe. Despite his effort to see her body as a whole, he couldn’t take his eyes off of the swelling of her lips like a small internal haemorrhage, an obstinate, stubborn mouth, the flesh turned up prettily that made him want to pinch her and arouse pain. He was searching for words to invite her up to his place for a drink, but the closer they came to his house the more the idea began to lose its meaning. Anyway, getting women to fuck him wasn’t his thing. Once they were in front of his house, he’d already forgotten her name. He got out of the car and said goodbye, taking with him the picture of her mouth that called out for offence, violation.

  Two years went by before they saw each other again, two years during which Charles had become an efficient and well-liked photographer, and she a stylist, sometimes helped by assistants, but mostly working by herself with Laurent, her favourite hairdresser and makeup artist. She liked him a lot because working with him was, as she said, like working with silk.

  One day Charles hired Rose without giving it much thought, without knowing who she was, following the recommendation of a colleague who’d left to pursue a career overseas. He had completely forgotten her. But
when she showed up in the studio with a man he thought was her boyfriend, he recognized her immediately. She hadn’t changed a bit, she was small and delectable, with new curves under her t-shirt, sculpted without exaggeration, just enough to be desired. He’d made the right decision, he figured, and he felt a warm feeling for his photographer friend, and Bertrand, the boyfriend, only made her more desirable. There was no need to hurry, he told himself. He had to remain cautious and bide his time, let their interaction find its hierarchy, and the dynamic between them develop, a routine, approach her gently before inflicting the hurt.

  Nothing in his life had been easier than taking Rose. No woman, among those he’d loved, had made his courtship so simple. Early on Rose understood that Charles was the leader with women, the one who placed limits, who structured unions through his control, his emotional strategy, through his reasonable practices of love. He led not by desire but tepidness, taking the moderate role, choosing to dam the torrent that emanated from women. The little animal that Rose was who loved with all of her heart often felt constrained, as if forced to move around in a wheelchair, but she didn’t have the strength to leave it. In this story she had to conform, agree to his limits and renounce the love she expected from him, out of love for him.

  After two years of living together, Charles’ love hadn’t moved an inch, still lukewarm, with no outpourings, a constant, a simple emotion that avoided disagreements and guaranteed the peace. Rose could acclimatize herself to this stable sort of love, the kind you find among cousins of the same family, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that his desire for her had slowly fallen into slumber, after hitting a peak never since reached. His desire had lessened like every other desire in the world, by the simple fact of always having to see the same thing, the same scenery, for Charles the same small body, lips and tits that, over the years, had sagged a little, drooped, become flexible, like the norm, like nature—if by nature we mean what fades into the background, what doesn’t break the continuity of shapes, colours, and tastes that have already been experienced, and anticipated, in this life.

  Rose sometimes worried about this but hadn’t begrudged him the change, since she herself did not have much desire for sex, an activity that was always portrayed as such a big thing, but that she could experience only from the outside, an actor playing a part. Even during Charles’ greatest devotions, she always felt like she had no ability to arouse. For her, all erections were enshrouded in doubt, like an imposture, they couldn’t really be meant for her, they had to have some secret quest for something she didn’t possess.

  Charles returned to his bachelor habits. She knew that after he worked on selecting and retouching photographs in his studio, he spent time on the Internet looking for those body parts that took his breath away, and forced him to gasp for air. She knew he was looking for parts of women he could drag his cursor over and enlarge, then bring his tongue to the screen as if to graze on the fetishistic morsels that made him lose his mind.

  He didn’t have to look for long. Thousands of websites, most of them sadomasochistic, were a real gold mine. The breasts and lips had almost always been operated on, alluding to human intervention, showing signs of mistreatment, voluntary bruising. When Rose was alone in the studio, she’d go through Charles’ computer to find the images that often came in the form of short video clips he’d saved, always similar, like sisters. These segments of bodies troubled her by their strangeness and reminded her sometimes of the medical dictionary in her parents’ house that had so impressed her as a child, a large red and white book her father liked to flip through.

  To Rose’s eyes, the images differed from the dictionary pictures only by their gaudy underwear, leather, latex, wigs, and makeup that showcased the particular body part. Lips came without a face, breasts without arms, asses without legs. A lot of images didn’t represent sexually charged regions, but only bruises, blue on white skin, fragility exposing its true colours, scars, uneven parts not attached to pleasure.

  But she knew nothing of how Charles quickly grew bored with his own weaknesses. She didn’t know that the images he collected had a short lifespan that varied little from one picture to the next, their effect never felt beyond these first few days, she certainly didn’t know he always felt sullied by jacking off and that his desire would return, a harassment, always the same. She had no idea that he hated the way the images, so irresistible at first, quickly became obsolete, he disliked the hunt for new ones, a pursuit renewed by his desire that didn’t subside, though it would surely diminish with age but, for now, it made him track down his nourishment any way he could.

  Once Charles had freed himself from his demons, the images packed on his screen were perceived in a different light, they took on another dimension, the invitation was transformed into an eviction: the nearly identical shapes, the parts of women he chose for their discordance, left him with an after-taste of shit, the feeling that all these pieces of meat would come alive, as they did when he was young, and demand justice from him. He realized that the butchery hadn’t left him—far from it—it had just opened a new shop in the bodies of the women who got him hard. Sometimes horror would overtake him as he gazed at these headless women, detached, wounded, soulless, then he returned home to seek shelter in Rose’s arms, consolation in her servitude as in a blanket, a comforter wrapped around his day, his shame.

  ROSE WAS ON COLONIAL AVENUE, not far from her building. The scenery had begun reflecting her life again, the mass of passersby dominated by women. Rose had taken her surgical mask off and placed it in her handbag, raised the collar of the blouse she’d chosen for just that purpose since it covered her mouth, then she paid the driver and exited the cab.

  The entrance to her building and the hallways were deserted, but the door to Julie’s loft was ajar as if she was expecting someone, or hadn’t closed it properly or, worse still, she wanted to be seen by her neighbours. This was exactly what Rose thought as she felt the dagger graze her neck again. Turning her key carefully to avoid the humiliation of being discovered hiding her mouth with her blouse, Rose overheard Julie speaking to someone, on the phone she guessed, a few words concerning the charms of a man she was extolling, a cascade of words criss-crossed with laughter, the flirtatious emotional connection before love emerged.

  Before the mirror framed in Mexican pine, hanging in the entrance, Rose pulled her collar down, revealing her outsized lips like two pieces of meat that would drive Charles wild, at least for a couple of ejaculations.

  She lay down on the bed, her veins still rushing with morphine; she wanted nothing more than to be there, lying on her back under the covers. She wanted to sink into the softness injected into her, the softest she’d ever felt, thank you, Dr. Gagnon, for upping the dose, she thought as she held a wet cloth filled with ice cubes to the swelling. Charles called to say that the shoot with an actress, a woman first seen in a movie where she played an exotic dancer, would go on late into the night, but knowing that Julie O’Brien couldn’t possibly be with him, she didn’t care.

  It wasn’t up to her to discover the truth of Charles’ past, but she was bothered by how slow she was to get things through her mind, as her mother Rosine had told her over and over again, a woman who’d strung together one pregnancy after another, desperate to squeeze something else out of her womb besides girls.

  Rosine was a loving mother, but truly miserable. She’d eventually set her heart on Rose after abandoning her for a year, maybe as a way of redeeming her mistake. She made Rose into a double of herself, showing her the path to fashion by teaching her to sew, the rudiments of the profession. Rose was close to her mother through her name but also her body. Like her mother, she was shaped like a pear, short and with no chest, narrow shoulders and large hips, a pear she managed to hide by sheer force of will, but that required no more than a moment of laziness to re-emerge, ripen, boil to the surface, she knew that to counter her natural shape she needed to stay vigilant by regimenting her food, then turning to surgery and exerci
se, avoiding pregnancy. Such was the advice offered in a convoluted way by fashion magazines on page after page but always between the lines. Rosine infiltrated her name and her genes, a mirror aimed at her, a graft that pulled her down.

  Rose didn’t want to be slow to get things through her mind, she hadn’t seen her father’s homosexuality, though he’d gotten his wife pregnant, his erections moved in an opposite direction from his mother, but had stayed long enough in her mother’s pussy to spread his seed and reach her eggs. She loved her father endlessly, he couldn’t be different from other men because he was the Norm, his tastes and manners, his reflections and ideas about the world, were magnified in Rose’s eyes and took on the size of the universe, he could do no wrong and no harm, beyond reproach like every father in the world in their little girls’ heart.

  Her father’s name was Renald Dubois and he came from Arvida, a small town that later would become Jonquières, not far from Chicoutimi where his father and grandfather were born. Beyond his grandfather he didn’t know, he’d lost track of his ancestors, something he didn’t care about. What mattered to him was never to reproduce there, to go as far as possible from the aluminum smelters where the men of his family had sacrificed their lives in heavy labour, all back and no brains, they’d laid down their lives in acid emissions, toxic dust in the air and the water, then died from a skewer of cancers: of the lungs and of the bladder, with intestinal diseases to boot.

  For Rose, Renald Dubois had been the greatest, the strongest of fathers, far more than for her sisters, for whom only her mother was important. Her sisters had remained close as they got older, still more or less living as a family, without Rose who couldn’t handle the oppression of her clan. Her only link to her family was the time spent during the holidays, and even then, she hadn’t seen anyone in over two years, not even her mother.