by Nelly Arcan
Charles was much more beautiful than Steve, though they shared a number of features, their similarity bothered Julie because it pointed to a continuity in her tastes. Charles was tall with blue eyes, salt and pepper hair, his eyebrows were very close together and they gave him a permanent look of concentration and intelligence, he had giant hands that manipulated her in bed and put her in her place, an attitude of immobility and attention, they directed her toward his favourite angles, the porn shots that innumerable men of his generation preferred, but she also took pleasure in them since she had a body for porn, she had a pornographic essence . . . like so many other women. Charles and Julie were of their time, they loved their neighbours with the means they had.
As well as his shining, lush hair, Charles had a full and sensual mouth, a mouth that Rose and Julie would have killed to have, the kind they were trying to draw on their faces with injection after injection. Charles looked like an angel, a Saint Francis of Assisi, he was so beautiful that he disturbed those who looked at him too closely, and once his beauty was seen, no one could miss it. That was what Julie believed that night, never thinking his beauty would destroy them by provoking her jealousy, or the beauty of his models, but the sex that lay behind it.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her that night as she was admiring his beauty.
After the collapse of moral and religious institutions, after the historical destruction of the notions of duty, sacrifice, self-abnegation—in short, established order—only beauty was left to join two beings, and money too, of course, that tends to accumulate around beautiful people. Socially, love was no longer the opposite of prostitution, and prostitution that sells people, selected the most beautiful, that was the Darwinian logic, the return to primitive behaviour, trophies for baboons. Despite love’s mutation toward the most savage discrimination, Julie believed that love made fools of people, its voluptuous stultifying was a constant through the ages, and it gave the world its lightness.
That night she kept remembering Marilyn Monroe who, one sad day, had written or said these beautiful words: “When you love someone you give them the power to kill you.” In any couple, there is always a killer and someone killable, the killer always kills despite himself, without wanting to and without pleasure. In a relationship the killable person always more or less gives herself up to the slaughter, often doing the job herself, and what the killable person can’t stand is not to be killed, but to not inspire in the killer the desire to kill. So you have to bring the murder about yourself, thinking about the killer, the criminal who is absent from the scene of the crime.
But for now Charles liked her as much as she liked him, she was the Star on their private stage where they were enough for each other, far from the audience.
“What’s that?” Charles asked, pointing at a large plant on a small Indian cabinet, with a single yellow fruit.
“A lemon. I’ve had this tree for almost a year, and it’s produced just one lemon.”
“Is that normal?”
“No idea. The tree didn’t come with an instruction manual.”
They contemplated the lemon for a while, for some time, as if they expected to see it fall, right there, at any moment, suddenly ill at ease in their silence at the centre of which hung a lemon without inspiring any thought in particular, a silence that announced a separation, or perhaps the opposite, their bodies coming together.
“When it falls, I’ll let you know. We can make a fish dish with it, or cocktails,” she breathed into Charles neck.
Invited by her breath, Charles kissed her impatiently, getting straight to the point, first nibbling at her lips, then lifting her shirt, opening it wide to see the sling around her painful shoulder that excited him so much, likely because Julie was suffering, moving his hands against her breasts, kneading them roughly, pinching her stiff nipples through the fabric of her bra. Then he climbed on top of her and freed her breasts from her bra, they were hard from the prosthesis, he pulled his jeans down and took out his cock. The way Charles acted reminded Julie of the forgotten movements of their last encounter, they were exactly the same, this repetition, she understood, is what gave shape to what had happened that night, to what had existed without being understood. Julie was a captive of Charles’ determination, she felt an insistent and unexpected warmth between her legs, with one hand she grabbed Charles’ cock and he came immediately, two thick squirts of semen aimed at her breasts landed on her chin, then ran down her neck.
That was it, it was over, it had lasted less than a minute and Julie was incredulous of how quickly his semen had spurted onto her, she was even more surprised by the heat she was feeling below, in her open casket, a bothersome sting that wouldn’t quit, a need, like a fledgling opening its beak toward its mother’s mouth.
Julie guided his hand toward her wet pussy, for that operation she had to take her panties off, get up and change position, with her above and him below. Charles began to stroke her but the time it took for that touch to reach her was too long. The heat had diminished, and though Charles tried to awaken it, the fire had gone out, maybe because he tried so hard, the red embers turned grey, all that remained was a feeling of cold annoyance as he obstinately worked on her. He had lost his erection, and there was no sense to it.
But Charles wasn’t done yet. They fucked four times that night, on the couch and even on the floor, if you can call fucking the act of coming on her breasts and shoulder. Julie managed to come twice by touching herself, her two first times in years, another miracle, a resurrection in her existence where sex had become no more than a word, a concept, a zone hidden under the snow, the North Pole. Here was proof of her successful reintegration back to life, the dead matter of her body could still offer her that pleasure.
They ended up falling asleep together in Julie’s big bed where her three Siamese cats joined them, and they woke up early the next morning and realized that the chemistry, the electric love, was still there. For the months that followed, they spent all their time together.
JULIE WAS IN a café, sitting at a table she had chosen years before, imposing her choice on the customers, settling down in such an everyday fashion that no one would have thought of disputing her right to that table. Always the same table in front of the large window that looked onto Saint Denis Street, at the Java U.
The café was small and not very busy, neither deserted nor packed, its advantage was that it was right next to her house. The café had become an extension of her living room, a house with changing décor, always a background to what she was writing on her computer, a white Macintosh that looked like a toy, a piece of candy. The decor included passersby and regular customers who also had their assigned table and whom she didn’t talk to or barely, just to say a brief hello, barely lifting her head, the minimal movement that recognition required.
Java U had become her café by the simple fact that she frequented the place and had eased into it, she had been accepted as an obstinate regular, someone who tipped well and paid her bill. Her assiduity guaranteed the respect of the staff who kept the table for her with a small cardboard reservation sign until eleven, after which, if she hadn’t yet arrived, they took the sign away with no hard feelings, preferring, however, when she called if her plans took her elsewhere on a given day. She even managed to get them to lower the volume of the music when she judged it too loud, or to change the music altogether when the same awful tune came on, most often techno that, she told them, was music strictly made for nights of dancing and drugs, and not for a morning of writing, not for the concentration that work required. She believed the music could change the taste of the coffee, giving it a hurried, upset flavour.
Julie was facing her laptop screen and typing willy-nilly ideas and impressions, early thoughts on her scenario. She was trying to structure it around Charles’ personal story, but Rose’s too, her ideas about her work, including her apocalyptic vision of female demography. She decided to include Rose in the script, this young woman who had magnific
ently disappeared from her relationship, a woman who’d abdicated without a fight, almost too good to be true. She had a plan in mind but hadn’t yet mentioned it to Charles, as if she didn’t want to put Rose back in the picture, at least not yet.
Julie believed that, with time, Rose would reveal herself to be like Justine in Marquis de Sade’s Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue, still standing a virgin after the worst depravation. She believed that, by the time the script dragged through the procedural chain that led to actual filming, Rose would have gotten back on her feet and might laugh off everything that happened with the help of time and distance. She figured that Rose might still be in a relationship with her mystery man who saved her on that shipwrecked night and who, according to the little Charles knew, was rich.
“He has a lot of money.” That was the only information Rose disclosed about her man, all she said to Charles when they spoke to each other over the phone or face to face, in her former loft when she sometimes came to grab a few boxes. She threw the other man’s money in Charles’ face like a reproach or a confession, as if money was the only thing this man possessed, as if this other man could only have value in something Charles didn’t possess, or not very much of, because he couldn’t give it to her in droves. Neither Charles nor Julie knew at the time that through this other man’s talent, his skills as surgeon, Rose was plotting to win back Charles, or just destroy him.
Outside, winter was plastering its intense cold over the frozen city, held in sway, a cold that made everything crack under the ice, the roads that, come springtime, would expose thousands of potholes, deep holes that would damage thousands of cars. In the café the music was too loud, it made the place feel like a bar, it was so loud its presence became physical, it entered the body at chest level and turned them into beat boxes, but Julie didn’t hear it, the bass was pushed to the limit but didn’t make her resonate, the way the sun and the heat didn’t lacerate her, or the cold burn her, the traffic noise had stopped oppressing her when she was stuck in a traffic jam.
A homeless man came into the café and was immediately shooed out by an employee, a cup of coffee was knocked over and fell to the floor, shattering. A surprised shriek from a customer who’d scalded herself penetrated the underlying noise of the music and flowed into it, the woman’s shriek now part of the beat as if the music had been waiting for it to move forward, combining it into its rhythm. But Julie heard nothing of this noise, she was in love and her love was beginning to feel like a terrible blanket, love was beginning to bare its teeth and change into a snare, her love that only until recently had been an opening, a new way to see the world.
She was entirely concentrated on her script; she had become too close to it. She was working with impressions, visions in which people’s souls materialized. In her memory she kept the image of Rose on the roof of the building, her head against the sky-blue background, anger growing inside her.
According to Rose, at birth there were 52% girls and 48% boys, while in reality, according to Quebec statistics she’d consulted on the Internet, it was the opposite. World-wide, there were 105 boys born for 100 girls, and Quebec was no exception: in 2001, 37,033 boys were born for 34,709 girls, and in 2003, 37,127 boys for 35,066 girls. That same year in Quebec, there were 190,048 boys aged 0 to 4 years for 179,590 girls. If women were more numerous than men on Earth, it was because mortality rates were higher for men at all ages, and if women were more numerous than men in Montreal, in particular in trendy neighbourhoods, it wasn’t because they were born in greater numbers, but because they moved there in greater numbers. It was as simple as that. That was the difference Rose was talking about, and instead of being happy about this truth, she preferred to lie to stay within her kin, even outside her native Saguenay.
As for her calculations about homosexuals, they were unverifiable, since the definition of homosexuality itself was subjective, contrary to biological gender, which was clear: boy or girl, blue or pink, cock or pussy. On the Internet, the statistics weren’t clear and left too much room for interpretations that could never be official. The rates varied between 8% and 20% of the population and, obeying society’s obsession with equality, they forced society as a whole to be answerable to egalitarian values, and so the statistics made no distinction between the sexes, implicitly creating an equivalence of homosexuality rates between men and women.
But no matter. Rose’s understanding of the world was out of sync with reality, forged from childhood trauma; the distance between truth and interpretation was what interested Julie more than the numbers themselves. Truth was no friend to numbers, it came from elsewhere, from the suffering of not being indispensable to the world, for example, what was the place from which all interpretations of the world emerged.
She was thinking these thoughts when Charles walked into the café and sat down, without being noticed, preferring to itemize her with a smile, taking his time.
“Hey, backy-back, I was looking for you. But I can’t stay long.”
Julie lifted her eyes to Charles in his white shirt with fine black lines, a Diesel. He looked like a photograph, with his face placed square in the middle. The café music had emerged at the same time he had, oppressive, noise pollution so early in the morning. Yet Charles had simply given birth to what was already there, on the cusp of her senses. Her world had been reduced to this, a certain light Charles cast around him in a circumference defined by his shadow that changed depending on the time of day, and he was always the centre of it.
“It’s a coincidence. I need to talk to you.”
She stood up to kiss him, pressing her lips against Charles’ mouth and keeping them there a long time, looking for a touch of electricity, a shock.
“Rose needs to be a part of this documentary project. She might want to say what she thinks. That’s just her style, right, to want to admire herself on the screen?”
As she spoke, something shimmered in Charles’ eyes. With no apparent reason, like a reflex, he opened Julie’s date book at a random page, something he never did, discovering two pages covered with his own first name written at every angle and in different colours: Charles in red, Charles in blue, Charles in pink, green, grey, black. Like a little girl, he thought, not without embarrassment, like a schoolgirl in puppy love, who wastes her time daydreaming and colouring.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he replied, looking at her date book, seeing his name written everywhere, in every corner, on every page meeting the intensity of Julie’s love. Sometimes, he deplored, love leads to prostration.
“Rose is raving mad. She was howling from the rooftops, understand? There’s something from her past in her inventions about women. I’m sure it comes from her family. It must have been something in her childhood.”
Julie abruptly stopped talking, she realized how stupid what she said sounded, and realized too that she had raised her voice, attracting the attention of a number of customers, they raised their eyes and looked, then immediately returned to their laptops, most of them Macintoshes, their small white apple bitten into in the middle.
“Presented that way, I know it doesn’t make for a compelling story. Every adult had a childhood in which something happened. But her story and her stylist’s point of view on the world of fashion could really be interesting for the documentary. She pushes her ideas to the limit to get people worried about her condition. That’s the impression she gave. It’s like parents who are pedophile in their feelings, who refuse to see that the greatest gift they can give their children is to leave them room to grow.”
Charles looked at Julie wearily. For the first time what she was giving off seemed suspect, malicious, a lack of heart, a hidden flaw. She was merciless in the way she attacked others. Unlike him, in her work she was a shredder, a vampire.
“Her desire for the world to be a certain way dismisses the reality of the world,” she continued, softening her tone to almost a murmur, her body straining toward Charles across the table.
“If I und
erstand correctly, you want to ridicule her in front of everyone? Make a sideshow out of her? You want us to be case studies?”
Stung by the word “us,” Julie looked at Charles. With a single remark, he’d gone back to being a couple with Rose, right in front of her, and against her. It wasn’t the first time she’d understood that he wasn’t entirely hers, but it was the first time he showed his claws for another woman, ready to leave the embrace they’d been living in for months, and stare her down, take her on directly.
“No, that’s not it, you don’t understand. I don’t want to ridicule her. I don’t want to make you two into case studies, as you said. I want to show where you’re from, your families. Have your worlds revealed, your universe. Show how your careers choices have to do with where you’re from.”
“Showing, revealing. Why don’t you use yourself as a subject, so we can have a good laugh?”
Charles pushed her datebook away from him across the table, the way you push aside a dish you don’t want anymore, to get away from its smell.
“Some things don’t need your light cast on them, Julie. You can’t do whatever you want with other people. Rose isn’t crazy, and she isn’t howling mad either. She’s one of the strongest women I’ve met.”
“Of course I can’t do whatever I want with you. That’s a given, you don’t even need to say it. Who do you think I am? What’s the matter with you? What’s this business about the strongest woman?”
“I just saw Rose, just now,” he told her, staring with unfocused eyes at a point in the window of Java U, where people walked past.
“She came to the studio on a whim this morning. She wants to start working with me again. She says she’s ready, she’s come to terms with living without me.”
Charles finally turned his gaze back to Julie again, who didn’t feel like talking anymore.