Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  To cut to the chase, Winslow had seen Tim Robbins making his way over to see me, and had deduced he’d be on his way to his place next — in fact, he was already there, which I could see for myself just by going over to my window, through which I could see Winslow’s cottage disappearing in a great cloud of dust — and Winslow wanted to know if Ray-Bans’s visit had anything to do with Anita.

  “Yes,” I said, as on edge as Winslow was. “Keep your mouth shut, you’ve never seen her, you’ve never seen a woman your entire fucking life,” I went on, and then I hung up and gave him time to arrange his face and to wipe away the excitement-induced sweat no doubt dripping down his forehead. As for how he’d got hold of my number, we’d sort that out later.

  We’d had a lucky escape, and as I sat down in my chair to watch the scene on the other side of the lake unfolding, I thought of the old ad for a phone or telegraph company heralding the advantages of the technology by comparing it to smoke signals. The memory was so distant I couldn’t figure out if I’d seen the ad in a movie, in a magazine, on TV, or just made it up. Given that it was so well conceived, and told the truth, I decided I must have made it up. Without a phone I’d have been done for, it would be my spit-roasted carcass that Tim Robbins would be using to make smoke signals, and I spared a thought for Alexander Graham Bell, who’d just saved my life. I might have spared a thought for God, whom I’d mixed up in the whole imbroglio by sending a sincere prayer up to him just a few moments before, but it’s well known that agnostics like me forget about God as soon as they don’t need him anymore. If I had believed in God, I might have been afraid that he would take revenge, which he sometimes does. But as I didn’t really believe in him, and my relationship with him was on a purely as-needed basis, I chose the option which suited me best, stating that if he existed, then in his merciful goodness he would remember the sincerity of my prayer and gloss over my ingratitude. During this time, Winslow was on the far side of the lake and swearing to a skeptical Robbins that he’d never seen a woman in his life, and Jones was chewing slices of salted Humpty Dumpty as he did the tour of Winslow’s cottage before walking over to Robbins to tell him he hadn’t found anything, which was to be expected as there was nothing to be found on that side of the lake. Then both of them got back into Robbins’s 4×4 in the cloak of a silence that promised they’d be back.

  Winslow started to guffaw in a silly, uncontrollable manner — nerves — and I was able to breathe again at last, which gave me a moment to consider just how pleasant the day might have been had I been alone and not sucked into a time-hole into which all the lost souls of the region had also been sucked. I shouted to Anita that I was going on a reconnaissance trip and advised her to stay put until I was back, then I called Jeff, who was sulking in the corner, his big head pressing heavily on the floor, because I hadn’t yet made any space for him that day.

  “Come on, Jeff,” I said cheerfully, “we’re going out,” magic words instantly erasing the sadness from his big wet eyes and starting up the emotional mechanism that regulated his wagging tail, its metronomic beating displaying to me another time, the meaning of pure joy.

  It was exactly the kind of August day I like, dominated by the yellow grass shimmering around the lake; a calm day, not the slightest hint of wind, and the clouds in the sky doubled in Mirror Lake, its still waters moving only when water striders skimmed over them or a trout rose to the surface with a lazy plop to catch a narcissistic fly daring to hang out on the surface. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, full of this beauty that had put an end to my pain the day I convinced myself that trying to understand it was useless, that you just had to take life as it was without trying to understand its mysteries at all. When I opened my eyes again, I saw a moose, an old buck with fraying fur, coming out of the wood a mere fifty feet away from us. I grabbed Jeff’s collar — which meant don’t move, don’t bark, don’t even think about growling — and we watched the moose gulp back some water, then enter the lake and, spirit proud, set off swimming toward the east bank, the bank of the rising sun. The moose and the setting were in perfect harmony, and neither Winslow nor Anita nor I had a right to appear in it, because the scene belonged to the moose, to coyotes, to foxes — to all the animals on whose territory we encroach, too foolish to stop reproducing and contributing as we do to the demographic curve’s exponential rise, too stupid even to be able to conceive of saving all this beauty.

  By the time the moose had reached the other bank, my cheeks were wet and my lips salty and my eyes brimming with some of the beautiful clean water I held in diminishing reserve. I watched as the moose briefly turned around and looked at me and Jeff to let us know he’d spotted us long before we’d spotted him, and that sometimes a man, a dog, and a moose together in the same scene can be beautiful — a moment of perfect silence on a clear August day, the yellow grass dozing. Set before this ancestral wisdom, of which I would never have even a tiny fraction, I snivelled some more. The moose disappeared into the pines and I mumbled a prayer, another one, so that no one would shoot this animal when hunting season came around and the smell of gunpowder and blood spread surreptitiously across Maine from east to west.

  After this heart-rendingly bucolic scene, I wanted for nothing, though I would have liked Anita to leave, and for Winslow’s cottage to disappear along with Winslow, so that all that was left at the perimeter of the lake was Jeff and me, a dog and his man sitting in the dusty summer light watching the deer quietly passing through. This desire being too simple for the people involved to help me achieve, I kicked out into the void, let go of Jeff’s collar, causing him to bark like a lunatic and run from left to right with the crazily frenetic movements you sometimes see in happy dogs. And that’s what I wanted too, to be happy, as if the word could have meaning in a man’s mouth, and for people to leave me in peace free to watch moose, build animals out of sand or maybe a castle to shelter in, with a moat and a drawbridge, just like in novels, just like the one my old toes were building now and the water was seeping into. I could fill it with crocodiles, sharks, and other wild animals to repel invaders — one promptly turning up in the shape of Anita, unable to let me be in my castle for two fucking minutes. No doubt she wanted to be princess of my castle, and were I to give her three days in the dungeon they’d hear her screaming at the other end of Maine and Tim Robbins would come to rescue her, destroying my brattice, my merlons, my arrow slits, and my bartizan with his clod’s 4×4.

  “Watch out,” I warned as she came closer, “there’s a crocodile about to eat your big toe.” And just as I was saying so, Céline Dion, still looking like a big toe, appeared in the dungeon singing “My Heart Will Go On” as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet sank with the Titanic and James Cameron proclaimed “I’m the king of the world!” and the world in question caved in like a sandcastle on the borders of a lake that didn’t give a damn about keeping promises. “I asked you to stay hidden,” I said in reproach without averting my eyes from the collapsed world, and she said she was fed up, that it was too nice to be shut inside, too nice to be alone, disingenuously emphasizing the word alone. I agreed with her first assertion, but not the last, which was too final for my liking, like a finale with violins, when two heroes are reunited forever, together forever, never again alone. At the very idea, a big shiver ran through my body, from the occipital to the astragalus, although right then it didn’t occur to me that the French for “astragalus” is astragale. Had I thought of it, Albertine Sarrazin’s novel of the same name would definitely have come to mind and I’d have been delighted, but that didn’t happen, I didn’t think of astragale any more than I thought of occipital. Philosophically, I told myself that solitude is something that needs to be earned the hard way, that to obtain it you need to accept the stormy upheavals of the flesh, to which I added: “But what . . . but seriously, what am I going to do with Anita?”

  A big cloud passed over at that moment. The lake darkened, and I turned the page of a novel I would reall
y have liked to read, not even thinking of asking Anita if she had a cousin, an uncle, or a brother called Jack.

  The night after Robbins’s third visit, I had an HD dream, just as I’d expected — HD standing for Humpty Dumpty but also for hard drugs, high definition, and high density. I woke up in a terrible state, in the middle of a scene where Humpty Dumpty, who had taken on the double appearance of an egg and a potato, was both on top of and at the foot of his wall. When the banging on the door made its way into my dream, unless that was what started the dream in the first place, the Humpty Dumpty at the bottom — and with whom I identified, I hadn’t crammed Freud for nothing — was hitting the wall with hammer blows, while the Humpty Dumpty on top of it was waving his little potato arms in all directions and shrieking insults like boar, oaf, lout, the numbskull. Unmoved, I continued to linger by the wall, the collapse of which would only provide me a semi-release — a supervised release, you could say, since you can’t escape your nemeses any more than you can yourself.

  In brief, my impatience went unrewarded, because I was pulled out of this dream by an insistent banging coming from the next room, where somebody was obviously trying to break down the door. I immediately thought of Tim Robbins, who must have discovered that Anita was staying with me and had come to kill us both, and then of Anita, who evidently had raced to hide as soon as she heard the angry bang-bang, because she was nowhere to be found, and neither were Bambi, Bamboo, her stiletto heels, bags, anti-wrinkle sunscreen, or her Shania perfume, named after Shania Twain, “Shania by Stetson,” which was going to haunt me one day — the perfume, that is, not the singer. Anita must have hidden in the closet, I couldn’t see any other way out. I pulled on a pair of pants and yelled that there was no fire and, before opening the door to the bedroom, I whispered in the direction of the closet that I’d take care of everything. Then I went out, donning the appearance of an angry guy not the tiniest bit intimidated, but all for nothing as it was the moron Winslow attacking my door.

  “Baptême, Winslow, where are your manners?” I shouted as I opened the door, which wasn’t even locked, a detail I pointed out to him as I pulled up a chair for him to perch his fat ass on since it was clear he had no immediate plans to leave, and asked him to wait a couple of minutes before he revealed whatever catastrophe he’d come to announce, because it was clear to me that another earthquake was about to disturb the serenity of Mirror Lake’s environs. So he sat at the kitchen table while I made coffee and filled Jeff’s bowl with kibble. Jeff hadn’t even barked when Winslow started beating the door down. The dog was getting soft, I’d have to have a word with him — explain to him that enemies weren’t always strangers and that, Winslow or no Winslow, we had a right to privacy. It wouldn’t be easy. Jeff liked everybody. Except that ugly Robbins, although Jeff hadn’t barked at him the day before either, I was realizing now as I looked back on it. There was a hole in my story there, unless Jeff had some kind of issue with his vocal cords.

  To reassure myself about his health, I did something that always makes him go absolutely beside himself: I rolled up on the floor in a ball and sighed, which immediately started him barking, as well as Bill, who was with Winslow and always repeated everything Jeff said. Winslow leapt to his feet to tell me I shouldn’t take it so hard. “It’s not a disaster,” he said, “Robert, you’ll find another one.”

  Another what, I had no clue. What I did know, or what I’d guessed, was that some new disaster had occurred despite Winslow’s denials, and once more I told him to keep quiet until I’d finished my first coffee. “You shut your mouth till I drink this coffee, Bob, is that clear?”

  The problem was that Winslow was unfailingly obedient, so he sat in silence watching me drink my coffee with his big blue eyes, something I hate as much as waking up to find a pair of big black eyes staring at me from the pillow next to mine, but I didn’t give in and drank my coffee right down to the last drop. I listened to the flies buzzing around the table, to the sounds of Jeff’s tongue darting around trying to catch the flies, and to the sounds of Bill’s tongue as he caught and ate them, adding ambient noise to the slightly uncomfortable atmosphere of the room. To dissipate the discomfort, I poured myself another coffee, offered Winslow one to keep him busy, gave the dogs water to help the flies down and then said “Go for it,” words that had the effect of trumpets sounding the kill on a fox hunt, because Winslow immediately launched into a breathtaking tale of which I barely understood a thing, but in which Anita’s name appeared a little too often.

  After a third coffee, I finally understood Winslow thought he’d seen Anita in town a few hours earlier, and with Robbins, who wasn’t looking happy at all. This made Winslow nervous for Anita’s other eye.

  “It wasn’t John, it was Jack,” I said, to calm him down, adding that in any case he must have been mistaken because Anita was in the bedroom closet. “Don’t panic, Bob, you hallucinated,” I said, “Anita is in the closet,” which alarmed him in a different way.

  “Since when do we shut women in closets, dammit?” said Winslow. “We’re not in the Middle Ages here!” I pointed out that there were no closets in the Middle Ages and went to find Anita, whose turn it now was to provide some explanations.

  As I went into the bedroom I shouted to Anita that she could come out, that there was no danger, that it was just fearless Winslow come to warn me that he’d seen her in town. When I received no reply, I shouted a little louder, “You can come out, Anita, it’s just Winslow.”

  Faced with the imperturbable silence of the closet, I went crazy, remembering all those stories of asphyxiated children found among the smelly shoes, all the horror stories our mothers told to stop us from hiding in the dark where sins abounded, and I yanked the door to the closet open only to find that Anita wasn’t in it. Nor was she among the shoes: the closet was empty of Anitas, there was no Anita behind the curtains, nor under the bed, nor in the drawers, nor in the enormous cedar chest smelling of mothballs, as if the cedar actually needed naphthalene to repel the creepy-crawlies. I’ve never understood the stubbornness of people who use both cedar and naphthalene — behaviour as bizarre to me as criminals choosing to finish guys off with a bullet when they’ve already stabbed them twenty times. I’d seen that in a movie, you see everything in movies, and in books too — but the problem was there was no Anita anywhere. Afraid that she might have disappeared or been abducted, I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed Winslow by his checked shirt and asked him to kindly tell me the story again.

  I ought to have been happy the whole Anita business had been settled, but in my irritation I wasn’t happy at all and didn’t notice the small perfumed note Winslow was holding in his right hand. When, after he’d threatened to be as mute as a fish (and here I didn’t mention the silent cries of fish), I finally let him go, he brandished the Shania-scented missive under my nose and, jolted by the familiar, invigorating scent, I recovered at least a little of my composure.

  “Where did you find that, Winslow?” I asked him suspiciously.

  “On top of Victor Morgan’s book,” he answered — the book sitting meanwhile on the low table in the corner of the living room, eyeing me up. Discovering that Anita had chosen this place among thousands to leave me a message was just too much, because maybe there was a subtext here relating to the links between her and a certain Jack Picard, which I would spend days trying to figure out without ever receiving confirmation that I’d hit the bull’s eye. At the time, I was thinking about giving the cursed book back to Winslow, but I changed my mind as there were still a few things about Picard I wanted to check out, as well as a potential message to decode. So I sat down at the kitchen table under Winslow’s avid gaze. His big blue eyes, dripping with the slimy lust of creatures feeding off the misfortunes and defeats of others, were once again about to witness a scene that I’d rather have happened in private. Delicately, I unfolded the small scrap of blue paper while the blaring voice of Vicky Leandros, whom I’d always confused with M
ireille Mathieu, permeated the cottage and told me that “Bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu.” I made no effort to push her away, it would have been pointless, and instead let Anita’s heartbreakingly naive words mingle with the song.

  Essentially, Anita was telling me she’d left me for my own protection. She’d thought long and hard, and come to the conclusion that for as long as Robbins was alive, she’d be a danger to me, so she preferred to move on. If that’s not love, then what is? I thought, leaving Winslow to stew in his curiosity as I did so. For a minute I thought about killing Robbins and proving my love to Anita in turn, but the impulse wasn’t genuine and would have left me in a pretty fix, because I wasn’t in love, even if I was presenting some of the symptoms associated with that state, though these were atypical and had resulted simply from contact with the infected person. It might appear that love is contagious, especially when the other person is insistent, but it’s not. The seeming contagion is no more than a form of tenderness, sympathy, or compassion due to the exquisite suffering of the person who’s fallen head over heels for you. I was familiar with the phenomenon, because most of the time I am the person who is head over heels, and here I was still uncertain which of the two roles I preferred. The knowledge that someone catches a glimpse of you in their soup bowl and sees you appear on every street corner, or that you are the sole and vapid topic of conversation of someone you otherwise respect, isn’t always gratifying, especially when you’re made to feel, at least in part, responsible.

  All things considered, it made sense to give up on the idea of an assassination. And because Winslow was increasingly annoyed, I told him he was right, that Anita had hit the road. “She’s gone,” I said, amazed I didn’t feel like partying as a consequence. I tucked the piece of blue paper into my back pocket, which would then reek of Shania, the thought only half pleasing to me because, to be honest, I hated that perfume. But I owed it to Anita.