Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Rose was first to arrive. Without making any noise, she surprised Julie who was lost in her thoughts like the first time they’d spoken to each other, one year before on the same roof, during the World Cup.

  “How are you?” Rose said crisply, a coldness Julie decided not to attend to, to save herself the effort.

  Julie had to raise her hand to shield her eyes from the sun that blinded her and hid Rose who, in this violent light, looked like an apparition. Rose moved closer, out of the sun’s glare. The first thing Julie noticed was Rose’s hair, as short as her own, or almost, a square cut that stopped at the chin, framing her face that seemed even younger, even more like a little girl than before. She was wearing a tight-fitting turquoise dress, platform shoes that showed her small feet with French-manicured nails, shoes that let her look Julie in the eyes since she was wearing flip-flops, her fuck-me shoes were stored next to the champagne, with the skimpy outfits just in case, and two bathing suits. Rose had paid for professional makeup, the real thing, her eyes were highlighted with deep, greyish-blue shadow, smoky eyes, but it had been done with good taste and skill, her eyebrows were darkened and raised with a pencil, her eyes seemingly wider, though that was an effect of Botox.

  Over the past year, Rose had become more beautiful, but it was beauty from determined effort that spoke volumes about the time and money she’d invested. She had the vulva-body of the Madrid transsexuals, everything about her summoned up erections, her pussy covered her from head to toe like a leather skin. More than ever she was the perfect subject for a documentary, and Julie was glad about that.

  “You look good. I can tell you’re not wanting for money.”

  Julie immediately regretted her ironic tone. She was being rude and didn’t know why. But at least rudeness was a kind of communication.

  “I’ve had fortune in my misfortune, like they say,” Rose answered in the same tone.

  The blue sky, omnipresent and immense, was unmoving, like a still life. It would be perfect for the shoot, Rose calculated. She knew from experience that the sun, if she could use it, would serve her, as long as she could manipulate the shade created by the parasols and the array of spots and light boxes that Charles would bring, since she knew him by heart. But in the end, nothing else mattered more than when she felt so good, when she would return to Charles’ eyes and stamp out Julie.

  “I’ve started working with Charles again, but only on a contract basis.”

  “Really? Going back to school?”

  Rose laughed a small bitter laugh, Julie eluded her again for some obscure reason, maybe she was jealous of this solid woman before her who remained strong despite failure, who hadn’t been destroyed.

  “Let’s just say I’m reorienting my career. I’m changing things up. That’s what a breakup will do for you. You get a new haircut, you do things you’d never have done before.”

  “You force him to stay, even if he’s already gone.”

  “Things that go in the direction of the things loved by the one who left,” she continued, ignoring Julie’s last comment that she hadn’t understood in any case.

  “Things like what’s going to happen today.”

  Silence fell between them as usual, as it always did when they weren’t drunk, silence during which Rose moved toward the tables and the green umbrellas to look over at the guardrail, making no comment about the furniture.

  “The situation is a little unreal,” Julie admitted. “But it’s completely spontaneous, and we can stop at any time.”

  Spontaneous? Not really, Rose told herself.

  “It’s unreal, but we’re all unreal these days,” Julie added, raising her voice so Rose could hear her as she walked among the tables.

  “It’s true. We live in an unreal world.”

  Rose walked around the deck slowly, stopping here and there, a doll looking into the distance that seemed not like a horizon but some cardboard background. She lifted her chin toward the world around her so the world might see her perched on her platform shoes, her back arched, running a hand through her hair.

  Rose rifled through the sandwiches and bottles, and picked up Julie’s black patent leather shoes, the kind you wore for an audience when dancing around a pole, and in the other hand she had a bottle of champagne. She straightened herself and held out her hands to Julie, a smile playing on her lips, a fake smile, drawing a parallel between the shoes and the champagne. With one easy movement she tossed the shoes back in the corner.

  “Is the champagne for drinking now?” she said, pointing at the bottle. “May I?”

  Julie felt a pinch in her stomach; an answer to Rose’s question. She checked her watch, the torment readable on her face. Noon, and Charles still hadn’t arrived.

  “Do what you want. It’s a bit early for me, though. Don’t you think?”

  Rose looked for the champagne glasses, found them, and set them out on a table. A minute later the cork flew with a pop and hit the inside of an umbrella, and Julie felt it had popped in her stomach, she tensed, trying to digest and expel it.

  “I’ve got your girly cigarettes, Benson & Hedges Ultra Light King Size.”

  Julie looked at her glass overflowing with bubbles. Oh, well, she told herself, see you tomorrow. The two women clinked their glasses, cheers, and they drank to the shoot about to happen, cheers, and the future while they were at it, cheers.

  “I have to tell you something before we can’t talk about it,” Julie began, placing her glass on the table. “Charles is in a state and he’s trying to hide it. Since I’m tied to the way he is now, it’s best if you offer your help and make the next move.”

  “What’s happening? What sort of state?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, massaging her stomach to calm the pinch of anxiety. “He seems distressed. That’s the least you could say.”

  “Charles and I didn’t talk about those things, the past and all the traumas. We never talked about our families and what they’d done. Everything was always good between us. I never saw him feel bad two days in a row.”

  The two women were sitting across from each other, looking at one another without judgment for once. Julie lifted her glass toward the sky whose blue faded into the golden colour of champagne. The bubbles were rapidly climbing, demonic, as they fizzed, when you brought your glass to your ear, they made a pshhh sound, like a snake’s forked tongue about to attack.

  “It’s something to do with his sexuality. Well, to do with his tastes, that you know about.”

  Partially hidden by the large sunglasses she’d set on her nose, Rose’s face froze.

  “What?”

  “His thing stopped working.”

  It was the first time the two women mentioned his unusual sexuality. Rose lowered her eyes, she was thinking of the pictures she’d sent him two days earlier and that he certainly had seen.

  “Stopped working? What do you mean?”

  “Like a machine giving up. I think that when it stopped, something in his head broke too. That’s all I know.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Two days ago. He was at his lowest.”

  Rose put an acrylic nail in her mouth, her thumbnail, and began chewing on it, staring at her glass. Her Pussy, well-behaved until then, awoke and began sending all sorts of sensations from within. It knows we’re talking about it, she thought, the way a beast knows its master’s intentions.

  “He told me about some pornographic pictures that were sent to him by someone who knows him. He thought it was me. But I figure that since you’re familiar with his . . . universe . . . his repertoire . . .”

  Julie wanted to continue, but the door to the roof opened and Charles appeared, carrying three aluminum boxes by their handles.

  Rose moved to take one.

  “Two boxes left downstairs, at my place.”

  “You need help?”

  “No, I’ll be fine. But you can start taking the equipment out.”

  He
looks better than the other day, Julie thought. He looks strange, Rose lamented, unable to think of anything else but what she’d done, the pictures she’d sent, and what Julie had just said.

  From out of the boxes, Rose took out a camera, a Nikon F5, lenses, filters, a tripod, a few lights, and umbrellas, and set them near a table where she would assemble it all, in the shade. She busied herself to hide from Julie, who was observing her, already in her role of scriptwriter, analyzing her subject, feeling that Rose was overwhelmed by the situation.

  Then Olivier Blanchette showed up with his camera, followed by Charles who didn’t know he was coming, and who didn’t like having a cameraman.

  THE SHOOT WAS about to start. Olivier was ready to film the scene. Julie had prepared the shoot, to Rose’s disappointment, who imagined herself like a model in a photograph, made-up, sexy, varnished, and not like a sideshow, self-alienated, a hysteric behind bars. Her conviction, she reminded herself, must be her only commandment. She just had to think of the hidden reason for why she was on the roof, without which she would have never played this game, and her enthusiasm returned. It would be foolish to miss out on an opportunity she’d been dreaming of for so long, the way she’d destroy them both with the weapon between her legs. But life, as always, would not go according to her predictions, cunning bitch that she was.

  The theme of the shoot demanded that the women be photographed without posing, captured by surprise, drinking champagne, eating, moving around, talking among themselves or on the phone, while ensuring that the plastic aspect of their bodies was in focus. That’s where Charles’ talent entered. He would have to shine his light on the well-planned aspect of their natural look, and not improve them too much with his storehouse of effects, his spots that lit and embellished, his filters that hid the irregularities of their skin—or so ran Julie’s theory—she was talking too much, explaining too much, blathering on, which enraged Rose, but she had to keep quiet since she was part of the project, it was her plan, she’d consented to it after all, her vision of women buried under their pussies like quicksand. Rose like Rosine again, despite her Pussy that, in one hour or two, maybe three, would jump out like a jack-in-the-box.

  Charles didn’t say much, the project wasn’t very complex except for the cameraman, but he learned to ignore Olivier after a while. He was calm, and completely in the moment, surprising when he considered that two days had passed since the events in his studio—where he hadn’t returned since, fearing that the experience might return. He understood what Julie was trying to do, having listened to her many times on the subject, thankfully the sun’s glare on their bodies hid them in a halo of light that kept him from sensing his vile clairvoyance, his third eye that dug graves. The wind, the noise around him, the movement of both women playing their parts as if nothing was happening at all—Julie perfectly embodying the role while Rose had difficulty not posing—prevented them from puking themselves up on his lens. Their environment made them airtight, the sky, the sun, and the air locked them into their bodies, set down a protective filter between him and them.

  Both women were eating, mostly Julie who wanted to put off the time when she wouldn’t be able to stop drinking. Sometimes she put on one of her bathing suits, only to realize that her body no longer had anything special; time had rounded her belly that had never had the chance to bear life, the skin of her ass was striped with small stretch marks and had loosened a little, despite her efforts, not to mention the scars left by the razor blades, small fine lines, white or pink, that covered her breasts and the inside of her thighs, lines like scratches that would fade with time, but which, for now, couldn’t pass unseen. So be it, Julie thought, another preoccupation that she would have to forget about like a sentence passed, left to age in peace, as her memories already had. Rose missed nothing of the changes in Julie’s body, and found herself magnificent by comparison. She prided herself at being younger even if it was only by three years, she congratulated herself at finally being one of the winners, one of those women who make men fall on their knees, who see every door in their path open, letting them walk toward new doors that will also soon open, in a perpetual parade where obstacles disappear by themselves, one after the other.

  The shoot was taking place in a calm atmosphere; an outside observer would have been bored. Olivier kept a safe distance, zooming in sometimes on Charles, sometimes on Julie, but most often on Rose, who was showing off. It was hotter than forecast. In the blue sky the sun had grown larger, swollen with itself, satisfied, bringing with it water vapour that appeared on the horizon, small white stringy clouds like cotton candy, Julie imagined, sensitive to the emerging effects of alcohol that brightened her, made her childish.

  “Julie! Don’t you have more champagne at your place? I thought I heard you say that.”

  “Yes, but be careful, the sun hits hard when you drink. No need to rush, anyway.”

  Julie the drunk dispensed hygienic advice that, for once, she was able to follow, probably because she’d promised herself, once the shoot was done, once the pictures had been reviewed and filed away, to really let go, and drink to the dregs, until she lost herself, the way she wanted. Especially since André would be joining them soon, in a couple of hours at most, with some “wake-up,” the euphemism he had found for cocaine, that white vixen who would give her a second wind.

  Still in her platform shoes, Rose was playing her new character; she’s changed, Charles and Julie both observed without consulting each other, exchanging conspiratorial looks when Rose went too far and became almost comical, with her serious, almost solemn air. She’d taken off the top of her dress and pulled it down over her belly button that she’d pierced and fitted with a small white diamond. She was covering her body with cream, not to protect herself from the sun, but for the cream effect, using it to caress herself in front of Charles. Not only was he not amused, but he waited for her to stop to photograph the moment when she lost patience, a game that angered her.

  “You’re a terrible model,” he said.

  Nothing could have annoyed her more, and because he resisted her attempts to attract him, she would later remember, she took the fatal decision to publicly humiliate him, forcing him into a corner.

  “Look who’s talking! You don’t think I don’t know what you usually ask of your models?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. Being a good model means following directions, and the direction here is to be photographed outside of a pose. You’re annoyed, and that’s what’s interesting, we need to exploit it.”

  “I accept more than you think. And annoyance can’t be exploited, the way you say. If you do exploit it, then it’s still a game, it’s still a pose.”

  Rose got up and grabbed a bottle of champagne that Julie had just set in the ice bucket. Too hurried to open it, she hadn’t taken the time to tear off the gold paper that covered the neck, and hadn’t been able to pop the cork. As she tried to open the bottle that wouldn’t comply, she hurt her thumb and broke a nail.

  “Fuck! Fuck!”

  For the first time that day, Charles actually enjoyed looking at her. He seized the moment and started shooting away, moving in closer on her.

  “Stop! Shit, stop!”

  “You’re too serious, Rose. Have some fun,” he said, aiming his camera at her until he got too close and she ripped it from his hands, the way a child takes another child’s toy away from him, not to play with it, but simply to take it away.

  “You’re not funny. Why are you doing this to me? No woman wants to lose control over her image, so no woman can play this game of yours. How can you not know this? You, the great photographer, the bitch-maker.”

  Charles couldn’t believe it. Rose had never talked to him that way, with those words. Lose control. Bitch-maker. With her words, he remembered the porn pictures he’d received, pussy sent from an unknown email address. The pictures jostled inside him; he still had that anxiety of meat, of sequestration and his father’s insanity. But the anxiety vanished becaus
e he’d just realized a truth: all of it, everything that had occurred and would occur, everything that life had been so far with its suit of trials, had been indispensable. Rose had illuminated him. His life was part of a project bigger than he was, a necessary project in which he played a central role. The project was that of the Will.

  It’s her, he’d understood. Will has placed her on my path.

  He saw the pussy on his screen at the same time he saw himself in Pierre’s house, his father’s house, sitting in front of a plate heaped with meat and potatoes that made him nauseous as Pierre told him the story of the female creatures that have an eye inside their pussy. All of it, the pussy pictures that he now attributed to Rose, his clairvoyance that saw under the skin, and his father’s story about the Amazons’ pussy-eye, was beginning to take form in his mind, revealing its narrative logic. Ideas were emerging from obscurity to appear in the light of day and be confirmed as revelation, sent to him through signs that carried an important message, signs from another world, that of the dead, of lost souls. His father could be attempting to speak to him.

  Rose noticed Charles’ disturbed look. She calmed down and gave him back his camera.

  “Julie told me you weren’t doing so well. You can talk to me if you want. She said she’d caused you harm.”

  “You women. Always talking.”

  He put away his camera in a box, then sat in the shadow cast by one of the umbrellas. He lit a cigarette to relax, but the buzzing that had filled his head in the studio a few days earlier awoke in him again, gaining in intensity with each passing second, becoming liquid frenzy, as if he were standing near a roiling sea. Soon Charles could hear the crashing waves, his mind was being pulled this way and that by great swells of water that threw themselves at the cliff’s bottom where they broke, white explosions covering steel grey, a repeating percussion of wave, break, wave, break, the cliffs shuddering. He could see Rose and Julie through the din of water splitting against the rocks, he observed them without being part of what they were, or in the place where they were; they existed on a plane where he no longer belonged.