Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Charles

  The note reassured her. She immediately wrote to tell him he was welcome at her place. There was a secret way up: take the elevator down to the entrance then climb back up to the third floor via the fire escape that led to her back door which she would leave open. He could come to her place without being seen and he could go back the way he came.

  Her sixty minutes of cardio were done. The Star left the stage the moment Julie took her earphones off. Without music the pleasure of being a star lost much of its intensity, the performance was cancelled and Julie fell back to earth, into a reality where she wasn’t sure she actually was anyone at all.

  She continued her workout as she had a hundred times before, concentrating on her back and biceps that day. She would lie on her back, a bar in her hands extended over her head, sometimes on all fours, a weight in one hand, sometimes sitting at different angles, a weight in each hand. She concentrated on the movements that warmed her body and made her cry out softly, groans that brought sex to mind, sex that had disappeared from her life but might, with Charles, who knows, be given new life.

  Often her cries of pain attracted men’s attention, they themselves were grunting, but louder, so many ephemeral trophies of athletic success, cries that proved they had pushed themselves to their limit, given their all. Sometimes the sounds were like what Julie imagined orgies would be for blind people: moving bodies occupying a given space, hitting each other, seeking pleasure that involuntarily expressed itself with breath, from the nose and mouth, leaks from inside out like secrets impossible to keep. When she closed her eyes, the whole room became an orgy of solitudes busy in front of the mirrored walls, not touching each other, looking at each other but pretending not to, through the mirrors, their grunts intertwined, a thick mixture of sound droppings, smells and sweat, quick glances out of the corners of eyes, sometimes mutual, given and received in the mirrors that multiplied bodies in their orgy.

  Julie lived in gyms the way she lived at home; she exercised the way she put on her slippers; she worked her muscles the way she watched television. She couldn’t live without this way of moving, sweating, filling a part of every day with mechanical effort that didn’t require thought. She couldn’t live without this burning in her flesh that enveloped her, calmed her, real inner peace for hours that consisted of a straight line of emotions, armour against negative thoughts. A stable warmth without flare-ups or cool-offs, and when she found herself away from the gym for too long, she could feel herself slipping through her own fingers, falling into approximation, her ideas would begin to lose shape and come together in a single mass and Julie would get that feeling of leaking out of herself, like a snowman in the rain, shredded by the wind. She knew the price to pay for rebuilding herself with mistreatment when she was broken, and the price was restrictive; she couldn’t risk losing what had made her a statue, made her stone.

  At thirty-three, Julie couldn’t travel anymore or seek new adventures with a pack on her back, destination of new worlds and cultures; the unpredictable was not a possibility for her. She could not, except rarely, sleep in a bed that wasn’t hers, skip a meal or change her diet that suited her training. Her youth was done. She’d mistreated herself so much that she couldn’t take pleasure from being somewhere foreign, unless she had the means to recreate what she’d left behind, a way of controlling her work schedule, her meals, her food, and her sleep, unless she could be anywhere in the world the way she was at home.

  She recently refused the opportunity to shoot a movie in Europe, hating herself for it, a film where she would have interviewed collectors of World War II detritus. She was supposed to interview and write a script based on the stories of these collectors who were also diggers in the earth, who searched for all sorts of objects, pieces of planes, weapons, ammunition, and other materials of war, not to mention human remains, then exhibited them in museums that people would pay to visit, museums these collectors set up in their own houses in the German, Belgian, Polish, and French countryside. In the detritus they sometimes found skulls, femurs, and thoraxes with shreds of clothes on them. Most of these collectors were nutty, which should have made the project interesting, given her the desire to move forward with it, but she’d refused, unable to imagine working blindly in the far-flung countryside, away from big cities, and worse, the work would have put her into contact with the remains of existences long gone; she’d have to spend time with dead things that had been pieces of another dead thing; a plane, a tank or, worse, a human body. It wasn’t the theme itself that terrified her but the way she would have to encounter it, through dispersion and dissipation—who knows whether after a few weeks there’d be any difference between her and the unearthed remains, who could tell whether, in the end, she’d get comfortable in these cemeteries, and begin to rot for good.

  Nautilus was full of men. Julie pushed herself hard, she was exhausted but couldn’t stop. Like a lot of people she believed in going beyond her limits, reaching perfection through abuse. To respond to her recent excesses and go as far in her workout as she had in the bars, she added extra weight for each exercise, overestimating her strength and endurance. While executing the “Arnold Press,” a complex movement invented by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, her left arm, the weaker of the two, couldn’t sustain the extra pressure, and at the fifth repetition her wrist bent backward.

  A sharp and blinding pain exploded in her muscle, a stab, a white thunderbolt in her shoulder but also in her head, the lightning made her howl in the middle of the busy herd. The intense pain forced her eyes shut as if her vision, usually turned outward, had retreated to attend to the pain that bent her in two, made her fall on her knees, holding her left elbow with all the strength of her right hand and bringing her head as close as possible to her shoulder, her eyes still shut, concentrating on the only thing that mattered: the fire that rose from her injury.

  She left the gym in an ambulance and in absolute confusion, whisked off to the Hôtel-Dieu emergency room where she got a dose of morphine, quickly followed by another after the doctor realized the first was having little effect, something Julie proved by her constant groaning and by the fact that she was turned into herself, absent to the world. She was sent home, her shoulder and left arm in a sling after an X-ray showed that despite the shock, there was no dislocation.

  They didn’t tell her how long she’d have to stay away from exercise, though her recovery would be a matter of months, not weeks. It was a catastrophe she could scarcely measure, anaesthetized as she was. Her future was compromised but morphine prevented her from reacting and understanding she had to give up movement and become a statue. On the contrary, she saw the end of exercise through the enjoyment of the clean drug she was on, unadulterated, from the medicine chest, and she happily read the prescription for Empracet that she received, pills that would keep her warm, and never to be mixed with alcohol.

  At home, she found a second note from Charles under her door, an answer to hers.

  Julie,

  Tonight, 7:00, at your place. Can’t wait. Leave your door open. Leave a message downstairs if you can’t.

  Charles

  IT WAS TOO LATE, almost midnight and Julie, her shoulder in a sling, couldn’t figure out what to do. She wanted to sleep right now, but also wanted to take time to write to Charles with her good hand. He must have found a locked door closed and been unhappy not to find a message explaining what had happened, but he couldn’t wait and that’s what counted, oh God, let his excitement last, let him be patient, she hoped, make sure my shoulder doesn’t come between us, like Rose. Before going to bed she wrote a note and set it downstairs behind the newspaper rack, the story of her accident and the emergency room that offered, in closing, her sincere apologies followed with a heartfelt kiss. They could see each other tomorrow night at her place if he could be there, she swore.

  THE MONTHS THAT followed were troubling and filled with pleasure, at least that’s how Julie O’Brien would remember it. The strangest part was that
once their story began, she didn’t have much to say about it, maybe because the joys of love can’t be understood through words that never reflect true emotion, unless they’re kept close to the heart, words can’t come close to describing them, in the end, words serve only to give yourself a second chance to love lost things.

  Charles Nadeau’s love rebuilt Julie’s capacity to love. She’d been exhumed and brought back to life. Love at first sight, she’d thought for a time, blind, mutual love, steamy love that rises in a wave from her guts to her face, joining the weather, the sun’s daggers on her fair, russet skin, so poorly adapted to climate change, a movement toward the spread of the desert across the globe, and the demonization of good weather. Love had broken the weight of the world that oppressed her and forced her into her loft, filled with cushions, sleepy cats, and drawn blinds.

  She wouldn’t find much to say about this love, except that her life felt lighter. Something of the aridity of the world had lessened, relaxed, become less tense, the world had stopped fighting against itself, a strange and surprising magic that softened its surface, as if love could straighten the order of things, giving them logic, filling them with necessity. For a while she could say that God had hidden his plan well and that the Devil could crawl back to Hell. The universe was forgiven, it had been right to give birth and make the chaos in her heart flourish. The universe had a key that Julie finally held in her hand: life came from death only to meet love, before returning to death, this is what she understood. It was as simple as that, there was no reason to make it complicated.

  The summer of love continued in its fullness, then turned to autumn that would soon arrive, a magnificent season with the return of a more reasonable sun, less biting, a sun that invested, as time passed, an orbit further from Earth, giving more room for autumn to advance, and proclaim itself the most beautiful period of the year, still warm but not hot, with drier air flowing more freely. Filled with affection and new understanding, she contemplated the thousands parading down Saint Denis Street protesting Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon to dismantle Hezbollah, and the Lebanese, with this invasion, were thrown back into their past, into the horrors of the civil war and the scars it left behind. The scars were palpable beneath the reconstruction, in the modern architecture. What had been bombed was bombed again, rubble lay underneath the solid surface of Lebanon, roads and buildings ready to crumble again, and fall apart with the smallest shake, so that the loss of life, of children and friends, could begin again and again, counting the dead, the impossible grief of armed vengeance, mourning, without end, in the hatred of your neighbour, the ultimate goal of your life.

  People around the world had risen in protest, among them Jews, following the path of the march, sticking out from the others in their fur hats and long black coats to their feet in the blazing sun. A human tide had walked for hours on Saint Denis Street as Julie smiled upon them because she was in love, she would have taken anybody’s side under any pretext because she thought she was in love, she wanted to be with them, out in the world, and not by herself, in her shelter, because she thought she was in love. Love had brought her back to the world, where everything had its place.

  She wasn’t working out anymore and that didn’t bother her, another miracle of love. She’d been afraid her body would disintegrate but it didn’t happen, and wouldn’t as long as she could walk and even run, as long as her shoulder remained in place, fixed and stable in its sling. The wars of the world and the rainstorms over Montreal could do all they wanted, as long as she could be with Charles in some café over lunch and at night at her place, with or without alcohol.

  Love had blinded her for a time to Charles’ warped tastes, his tics and obsessions that didn’t bother her, at least not at first, probably because she couldn’t see how deep they were. Months passed before this crease in the bed, that she called all sorts of names, eventually pulled them apart by creating a tribunal for Charles that would shower him with accusations, and weigh him down with judgements.

  In the evening they would more often than not be at her place, whether Rose was in the apartment on the other side of the hall or not. Julie knew very little about Rose since she’d separated from Charles, two or three things, such as her finding refuge in the home of a man whose identity remained secret. That’s all Julie wanted to know: let Rose not be alone, let her be well-protected, but far away from them. She wished her well but she wished it to happen elsewhere, she wanted her happy life to reach her from a great distance, like a postcard dropped in her mailbox, from some beach down South, written by a cousin whose name she’d forgotten.

  Charles had irregular hours, and he could arrive at any time between six and 9:00 PM. He walked into her house without knocking and on tiptoe, always a little late, as if it was nothing, surprising her sometimes as she was waiting in the middle of the living room, cigarette in hand, with a strong desire for alcohol, on sale everywhere, so many opportunities to come back to earth, to return to sleep.

  Every time he walked into her loft, he would greet her the same way. “Hey, there, backy-back!”

  He gave her that nickname the night of the now-famous bacchanal, an “anal night,” she had called it, her attempt to say it would join the annals of history. All night he’d called her “backy-back,” two words joined by a hyphen, exotic and playful. The first night it bothered her, but once she was in love, she welcomed with open arms the dose of affection contained in the name he’d given her, as silly as it was.

  When Charles had come in this way on one of their first nights together, she didn’t smile, unhappy about his lateness, as slight as it was.

  “I thought you weren’t coming. I was about to go out,” she’d lied.

  “Sorry, I did my best,” he answered, offering up a liquor store bag with two bottles of white wine.

  More of that damned Chardonnay, Julie thought, for once she couldn’t care less about the bottles and the oblivion they promised. She maintained her sullen silence, unable to hide the girlish pout of someone waiting for an apology. Her grumpy air softened Charles.

  “Lately, I’ve been working with actresses and singers with no experience. It takes longer, plus I have to train a new stylist. It’s hard working with a new girl. It takes time to create the chemistry, and communicate without always having to talk. It isn’t as fluid as before. But it doesn’t matter, that’s just the way it is.”

  Charles was attracted by Julie’s shoulder in its sling revealed by her transparent blouse, and he touched her, softly at first, laying his hand on her, then more firmly, gripping and releasing, gripping again, like a cat pawing the ground where he intends to sleep, preparing his territory.

  “Hey! Careful!” Julie exclaimed as Charles’ eyes began to glaze over. “It’s still fresh!”

  Charles released his grip, though he left his hand on her shoulder, a hand as wide as a racket, long, eager fingers, the way she liked them.

  “I’ve been thinking of you all day,” he confessed, taking his hand away as if he were sorry to. “It’s hard to think of one woman when you’re trying to photograph another. I could barely get the focus. I don’t have to go back until tomorrow afternoon, so we can go crazy tonight, if you like.”

  “We’ll have to go crazy in my little loft,” Julie said, reaching for the bag to show she accepted his gift, his presence, his words, his paw on her.

  They moved into the living room, sat down, and began talking, drinking wine in small mouthfuls, going back to Charles and his past again, his father’s butcher shop, but also other things, a conversation made of small sounds that served to narrow the distance between two people interested in each other, to unite them, chit-chat as the pretext to breathing in the other person’s scent.

  And love, miracle of miracles, removed alcohol’s malevolent power. Its call had stopped torturing Julie, or not as much as before. She wouldn’t lose herself entirely, and she knew why. It was Charles. Charles as a resting place, a safety net. She wouldn
’t fall into shamelessness with him a second time, she wouldn’t let her vulgarity sully everything, especially since she was on medication and the softness of her loft didn’t inspire excess, it was like a lullaby, a feather bed, an endless candlelight evening, a hearth fire burning for hours on end that flowed without discord.

  While talking about nothing in particular, Julie realized, for the first time, that Charles was beautiful, despite the fact that he was often around. Men’s beauty, she noticed, didn’t come at you head-on, you had to discover it slowly, over time, like a soul, or a temperament. It was different from women’s beauty, not made of artifice and constant efforts on the surface, but of flesh, the product of a father and mother in their depth, it could be groomed but was not a product of grooming, it had nothing to do with the beauty of women, aggressive, jumping out at you, made of successive applications of layers on the skin that compelled your attention like a fire alarm. This beauty that existed without special measures was durable, it didn’t age ungracefully like women. The different illumination of the sexes, Julie observed, was the worst injustice because it made the path of women infinitely more brutal and difficult, they who lived in a constant stream of light like an interrogation, a search, an examination that covered them from head to toe, turned them into asses, complete pussies.

  But all that would change, Julie predicted, she was attentive to the transformations of the era, everyone would end up equal, and just as brutal. Men’s bodies, even homosexuals, would begin to feminize and be forced to follow the imperatives of beauty, the requirements, the commandments, men would have to own the same products as women but masked with different colours, red, brown, green, deep blue, grey, and black. The difference between men and women would be reduced to the wrapping of their respective beauty products, and who knows, maybe men’s cocks would stop getting hard to imitate women and turn toward their own image, captivated by the mirror, revealed and hidden by the illusionist’s vicious burqa, the disguise whose cost is so dear.