Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  But Rose wasn’t thinking about the life around her. She was still considering the scene she’d witnessed two weeks earlier, which had finally convinced her to quit Ativan, slowly, under Marc’s supervision, since he was well aware that her dependence on the anxiolytic was keeping her close to him, it made her dependent on his prescription pad. He was a bridge, he knew, between Rose and what she wanted, and what Rose wanted was to fight for Charles with Marc’s help, take advantage of Julie’s weakness to do battle with her and send her sprawling to the mat.

  The night she had called him and gone to his place, Marc welcomed her kindly, she didn’t even need to explain why. He was happy to learn that her man had left her for another woman, and that he didn’t love Rose anymore. Marc’s ability to leave her in her silences that could last hours at a time, without forcing himself into them, without worrying, was a true gift to Rose, who more than anything needed to be alone with someone.

  “Do you know what’s happening in Vietnam right now?” she asked him over dinner, cutting a vegetable in her plate, some sort of strange red carrot she’d never seen and whose name was unknown, a cross between two roots.

  “A revolution? A coup?”

  “No. Well, maybe. That’s not what I mean.”

  Rose reached for the bottle of wine, a Cahors, but Marc anticipated her desire and pre-empted her with a clean move, a surgeon’s hand, in all circumstances.

  “It’s due to economic growth, the newspapers say,” she continued, watching her glass being filled.

  “Overnight, women have turned to plastic surgery in droves. It’s become massive in such a short time. Men set themselves up as surgeons, and beauty salons open unauthorized clinics in their backrooms. Drop-in clinics, of course. Women are disfigured, or wake up with two different eyelids. But no matter, they go ahead, without thinking. They want to be operated on as quickly as possible. They turn down anaesthetics to save time. To go faster, to get back to work.”

  Marc Gagnon didn’t like talking about work outside of his office, even indirectly, especially if he was eating, and more so if he was eating something he had difficulty identifying with certainty. He would have to get Rose to understand this at some point, but each thing in its own time, nothing needed to be hurried, the night was still young.

  “Asians in general lack self-criticism,” he answered after a time. “Always top speed, eyes closed. People like that scare me. They’ll submit to Order, no matter if Order keeps changing its face. They’re all about accomplishment, movement without reflection. I’ve heard that humanities, like psychology or philosophy, don’t exist over there.”

  “These women are operated on at top speed,” she continued, not taking the trouble to listen to him. “Some of them catch infections because there’s no sterilization of instruments. Getting operated on or putting on lipstick, it’s all the same. Getting sewn up is the same as getting made-up.”

  Sewing, she’d said. Sewing is like patching. Marc Gagnon hated when she used that word around him, since he’d done everything she’d wanted for years, he had been many things but certainly not a seamstress, or a tailor, his talent had nothing to do with stitches and the patching of wounds. Another thing he would have to tell her, very soon, in time.

  “I’m starting to believe the Western world is sick,” she continued. “I think the East is clearly demonstrating that.”

  “It’s true that Western women are getting operated on at a faster clip. Though it certainly isn’t as fast or as all-encompassing as Asians.”

  “I’m sure that every day in the West, women are disfigured. By their own eagerness. Through their exaggeration.”

  “No doubt. Surgeons have to be vigilant, they have a code of ethics. Some of the women who come in for plastic surgery have pretty wild ideas.”

  “You’ve probably operated on them, right?”

  “It’s happened, sure. Two weeks ago, there was a case. I operated on a young woman who, in my opinion, was a prostitute or worked in porno. Her demands are always pretty extravagant.”

  Marc stopped talking, and fell to stabbing at small pieces of fennel with his fork.

  “Really? What sort of demands?” Rose insisted.

  “We’re eating. Talking about it might spoil your appetite.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Well, I started by performing vaginoplasty to tighten her vaginal walls.”

  The women at the far table burst out laughing, and Marc stopped and looked around to make sure no one was listening. Then he continued his explanations.

  “It’s a laser operation that makes the inside of the vagina more narrow through cauterization. The procedure is becoming more widespread. But that’s not all. She wanted me to operate on her inner labia so that they would be absorbed by the outer. Like the vagina of a little girl.”

  The waiter who had come up and heard “the vagina of a little girl” issue from Marc Gagnon’s mouth froze, with one arm extended toward the wine bottle he hadn’t touched. Not knowing whether to serve them or question them, he decided to take out a small brush and clean the table, pushing crumbs into one hand, then hurrying away.

  “You can see why I don’t like talking about surgery in public.”

  “Who cares? Please, tell me more.”

  “Before the operation, she got her pubic hair removed by laser. The depilation is definitive and provides maximum visibility of her genitals. Personally, I think that’s going too far,” he continued. “At the same time, there is no risk of disfigurement. It’s not her face. The face is public, and genitals are private.”

  Then time stopped, and the restaurant disappeared. Just then, at Chez L‘Épicier in Old Montreal, Rose was certain that her story, the one she was sharing with Julie and Charles no matter how physically distant they were from her, had been predetermined, governed by a force superior to hers, superior to Marc as well, whom she didn’t really consider except insofar as his past had made him a plastic surgeon. As she listened to Marc’s story of the woman with the labia cut and then tightened, the inner lips swallowed by the outer, drawn tight and concealed from prying eyes, Rose was struck by a revelation, a solution for the life she’d always led, the possibility of acquiring the right pussy, of the right shape, a priceless treasure, key to all men’s desire. Just then she knew she would be able, through Marc, to get a key, the key, the ultimate lure that would force Charles back to her, the lure she had been missing and that he might be dreaming of, in secret, filled with shame.

  Rose felt she was floating above herself. A great wind had risen in her mind, blowing every which way and, outside of that, her ideas buffeted about were slowly organizing themselves like migratory birds, ideas that had become a direction, and nothing else mattered. As astounding as the lightning strike on the roof last summer, this operation would be her way of getting Charles back, even if it was only to extract his sperm, even it was only for that, to receive his cock, to get fucked.

  Rose was staring at Marc, unseeing; she saw something else. Her own pussy, made to measure.

  “No,” Marc said emphatically.

  He had stopped eating, and placed his knife and fork next to his plate.

  “The answer is no.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, I won’t agree to operate on you. Not there.”

  Marc had guessed her intentions, anticipated her desire, as he’d done earlier in the evening with the wine. Rose had no desire to play the naïve role, and besides, she was far away, far from the restaurant and Marc, imagining her new pussy, tight and girlish, with no hair, a pussy evolving through the healing process, a perfect one, a lovely bite, a mouthful.

  “Well, someone else will, then,” she decided, staring straight at him, seeing him weaken for the first time.

  They finished their meal in silence. To reassure Marc, who felt he was losing his grip on her, and make him forget her cold determination that showed how she was using him, Rose took his hand in hers and held it a long time, saying the words that were neede
d for forgiveness.

  In the weeks that followed, Rose did not mention the operation. She knew Marc would operate on her when the time came; he would because he loved her, she knew that he would go against his own will for her, he would pursue the madness that wasn’t yet his, but would soon be.

  ROSE WAS WALKING down Saint Lawrence Boulevard, earphones on her ears, another habit she’d gotten from Julie, not even listening to the music eating away at her eardrums, and that the sea of passersby could hear in a five-metre radius, they turned in her direction to identify the source of the noise, squealing metal produced by an endless electric guitar solo from an old ZZ Top hit, “Sharp Dressed Man.”

  A few weeks earlier she went by Charles’ studio, and surprised him with a visit. He was at his computer, retouching photos, and he had welcomed her with a smile and even a little nervousness, like a sign of regret, a slight shiver, since here was a person who had disappeared and suddenly returned, and been missed in the interim. She offered to start working for him again as a stylist. She was over him, she lied, she accepted he was with Julie as long as Julie would stay away from the studio, at least for now. She hadn’t worked in months but had taken time off to think, and understand things, to learn about life. Their team shouldn’t end with their love affair, that would be a waste.

  She hid nothing from him. She was still living with a man and would stay with him until she got back on her feet, he had to understand that much. Hadn’t he thrown her out in the middle of the night and humiliated her? Had he thought so little of her when he deprived her of her relationship, her loft, and her job? What had she done to deserve such betrayal? Charles told her he regretted that it had ended the way it did, through an ugly act that she didn’t deserve. He didn’t understand how it happened either, looking back. He couldn’t remember what had come over him, and he’d been thinking about it a lot.

  At one point Charles left the studio to grab his lunch that the Meat Market, a popular local restaurant, made for him. Rose used the opportunity to go through Charles’ computer, since she knew it by heart. Very quickly, she found what she was looking for: the porn sites he had visited the day before, each one proof that Julie wasn’t the Woman, she didn’t have it All, she didn’t own the ultimate Pussy. The images were still the same, mysterious in their selection, fear-inducing for those who weren’t like Charles, or in love with Charles. Charles hadn’t changed. In the parade of women through his life he remained unaltered, his body aged like everyone else, but his being was frozen in time, he remained a small child.

  A child’s sex for a child. That’s what she wanted for herself, that’s what she was about to acquire, then offer him. The operation was to take place in early May in a clinic where Marc didn’t usually operate. His team knew he was with Rose, and the idea certainly didn’t appeal to his staff. Having a relationship with a female patient stunk of perversion as it was, and if word about his next procedure with her was to spread, the Canadian Society of Plastic Surgeons might be alerted, and he might be reprimanded and considered a moral degenerate.

  She walked swiftly toward Salon Furisme, her new hairdresser, and the place where a number of Montreal’s stars got their hair done and where she was forever changing her look with Marc’s money, too often, it was another one of her compulsions, cutting her hair shorter and shorter. As she walked, she thought about how she might get Charles to see her Pussy and get Julie into the picture as well, making her see the desire in his eyes and the electricity that would burn there, but also the instant when Charles would spring from deep inside himself and let the beast loose, the way he’d done in front of her, Rose, at Julie’s loft that fateful night. Rose wondered whether she should physically push Julie to the scene of the unveiling of the Pussy, the way statues of famous men are presented at a ceremony, or whether it was enough for Julie to just see a picture of it, or better, a video.

  As she walked down Saint Lawrence Boulevard, an image sprung unbidden from her memory. She saw herself as a child in a wooden shed with two little neighbours, boys, their pants around their ankles, and she looking at the boys’ organs as they looked at hers. The image was clear, distinct, banal. Very quickly another image followed: she and her four sisters in the bathtub, packed in like sardines, her little brother, it seemed, was in her arms—he was no more than a babe-in-arms who might drown. Rose thought of the image of six children naked in the bathtub, the family taking their bath, the group dominated by the sex of the babe-in-arms with the little girls holding him like a trophy, as if they had given birth to him themselves. Another image followed, this one long forgotten and producing its anxiety, an image of suffering: her mother Rosine crying, naked as well, in the bathroom but not in the tub, sitting on the toilet seat, a hazy image of Rosine naked and crying, sitting on the toilet, stronger still, the unfocused vision of her body in tatters, her breasts damaged by feeding, her mother crying, moaning, repeating Rose’s cursed name, Rosine repeating Rose, Rose, my little Rose, and Rose not knowing what to do with this overflowing of tears and flesh, she didn’t know why her mother was crying so hard and so loud. Rose took the pain upon herself with its mysterious cause, the sadness she might have been responsible for, she couldn’t remember clearly. Another image travelled through time to her: she was a little girl being pulled down the aisle of an airplane away from the bathroom, her underwear was around her ankles and her mother Rosine was pulling her, “Mom, Mom, stop,” but Rosine paid no attention, maybe because she knew nothing about underwear around her knees, maybe because she considered that demanding to have your underwear on was a childish whimsy when you were like Rose, a hairless child in a plane, in the middle of the sky, too young for modesty.

  Rose put up no resistance to the images rushing through her; she let the flow continue. Hundreds of images passed through her, interlocking, falling one into the other, some instantaneous, like pictures of her as a teenager spending hours in front of the mirror, hours and hours spent scrutinizing every inch of her face and body, trying on different clothes and applying makeup, weighing herself, doing her hair and waxing herself, dressing and making up her sisters who, as they got older, moved away one after the other, leaving the clan of females and cleaving to males, going toward them like escape routes. The everyday images of her mother sitting in the living room in front of the TV after Renald Dubois, her father, left, memories of her past friendships followed, friends and roommates in various apartments and at various parties, in bars and restaurants, images of Kathleen, a childhood friend who showed her breasts in public and had the entire high school at her feet, next came the photo shoots, hundreds of models’ bodies one on top of the other, like a painting of the fall from grace into the depths of hell, a collection of shoots and magazines, pornographic images as well that Charles collected on the Internet, pictures of Charles in bed with her, Charles and Julie in bed, witnessed and imagined, images from TV, her and Marc Gagnon in bed, his strange body that wasn’t like Charles’, ending in the vaginoplasty she’d seen the day before, in a Polaroid that Marc kept in a folder.

  Rose had walked past Furisme without realizing it, she was going too fast, blinded, as if the surface of the world around her that offered so much had lost its physical shape, its colour.

  All images had a common theme. Sex. Sex was central to her life and life in general, it was the thread that held all lives together. It was wrong to say that you were born from a pussy because you never left it. It was wrong to say that everything in life comes back to sex because it was never far enough from sex to return to it, life never went anywhere else, life was a prisoner of sex from beginning to end, even the lives of children. Sex was the only place life lived, from the cradle on.

  The revelation depressed her so much she stopped walking and sat down on a bench. She wouldn’t go to the salon to get her hair cut. She wouldn’t get a new colour either, and she wouldn’t go to the gym. She wished she could have decided not to sacrifice herself on the operating table, but that was impossible. Her decision was irrevoc
able and it wasn’t even hers, a force bigger than her had decided, and it had swallowed her up.

  VIII

  * * *

  NATURE’S REVENGE

  JULIE O’BRIEN WAS running on the treadmill at the overcrowded Nautilus. Members had to keep an eye on the equipment like vultures, they crowded around the machines and determined who would go next, in civilized fashion they organized the pecking order of benches, bars, and weights. Everyone had to alternate, it was the law of the land in times of overcrowding which came, every year, with spring, when the entire city was trying to get back into shape, the season of short shorts and hormones, when you showed off your body.

  Her head ached but Julie ran anyway, trying unsuccessfully to imagine herself on stage with fans all around her, calling out her name, her Star’s name. In her relationship with Charles, she’d lost even this pitiful means of auto-congratulation that so often softened the blow of existence.

  Her shoulder wasn’t in a sling anymore but she still couldn’t work her muscles with free weights, that caused too much pain, but no matter, time was short and she was running, earphones on, listening to Madonna’s “Jump,” trying to find that state of grace again, that calm assurance she had before Charles came and tore down everything in her life. She was running to recapture what she’d lost.

  There were mirrors everywhere in the white neon lighting, an abrasive, pitiless light. She was emaciated with dark circles under her eyes, her gauntness gave her a tragic air. You couldn’t really say that her gauntness made her uglier, but it took away her sexual aura, her lioness attitude. Now you could see her without noticing her, and she didn’t notice anyone either, she’d lost sight of herself, her face was secluded from the world. Her hair had grown out and her roots showed strawberry blond, visible in what was left of her platinum colour, so much that they looked brown. In the street, men had stopped turning around to look at her, or less than before, she was melting into Montreal and its crowds who had to step around the lampposts that lit up gutted streets, potholes more like craters that revealed the sewers, open maws that contributed to the ruin of the city.