Leper Tango (8 page)

“The water.”

“You see it too, Franck, don't you. It is the water. It is the reason we are together.”

The loft lived up to the advance billing. A luxury 3000 square foot loft, balconies on ever y side, and a solarium overlooking the port on the St. Lawrence. The owner was an Egyptian. We learned later he was skipping town on a tax evasion charge. His wife was Brazilian. She had big, siliconed tits and perfectly tanned legs, which emerged from her tight thousand dollar dresses and made her look like a star member of a Rio cabaret revue. Judging by her clothes and the furniture in the place, and the date of the Egyptian's plane tickets, the tax authority's chances of recovery were not high.

I signed the lease, and handed over twelve post-dated cheques. By the time the Egyptian and I had finished our third beer, the day was coming to a close, and the moving men were being directed by Sheba back and forth in front of us with a king-size brass-rail bed. She eventually settled on dead centre of the loft. The rear wall was systematically lined with antique mirrors, brass lamps and other paraphernalia I had purchased cut-rate from the Egyptian. Within the day, we had gone from hell to heaven again.

The Brazilian woman's name was Zeta. She and Sheba spoke in different accents, but it was the same language. They were both experts in setting up or taking down camp very quickly, and wherever they were they knew they were born to lead the march towards the next great consumer frontier. The Eg yptian, now that his cheques were safe in his pocket, was waxing philosophy. “I knew the fates would intervene. I could not leave this place with just anyone. I have my reputation and my businesses here, of course. Maybe, someday, I will even come back and live here in Canada. But, you know, the taxes are far too high. This, you people must learn to change. Until you do this, you can never become a truly great nation.”

Later, I realized that he had left no forwarding number, so I had no way of helping the police and the revenue service when they arrived the next day looking for him.

The loft became our own little temple of sex and pain. The light coming through the windows of the solarium and the balconies were illusory, as there was only one exit to the loft, a thick door with a double deadbolt on it. The bed, a brass four-poster, quickly became the centrepiece of our existence. Right after the noon meal, I fell into the habit of strapping her arms to the top posts, fucking her from behind as her legs wriggled back and forth like two eels, then leaving her chained to the four-poster while I checked things out at the office. Upon my return, she would be crazy as a rabid dog, and only three or four hours of sex would get her as near to normal as someone like her could get. Then, after protracted discussions, she would insist I repeat the process on the following day. All that to say, in her own way, she enjoyed it.

It was a cold winter morning, but the loft was tropical. She was stretched out beneath the sunroof, wearing a mud-coloured bodysuit. Her eyes were half-closed, the evil temporarily assuaged, yielding to the languid pleasures of our day-to-day life, such as it was. I still had money, and while I continued to use it up, things remained at a manageable level. She hadn't moved for awhile, outside of casually leafing through a local cultural newspaper, which filled the front pages with rants against sexual abuse and the back pages with S & M personals.

I was standing at the bar counter which divided the kitchen area from the rest of the loft. A notebook, what appeared to be a journal, was open. A series of handwritten entries in log form:

L
EPER
T
ANGO
83

I think it was the first time that I had considered up front that she was a whore. A whore fucks men or fucks them around for a living, so she needs a log book for that. So, she was a whore. I looked up. She was watching me.

“Do you know, Franck, there is a wine in the
arrièrepays
region where I grew up.”

“Which
arrière pays
would that be?”

“It is called Biturica vine, I think, a wine first sown by the Plantagenets in the twelfth century. It endures cold, storms, rain. It lasts forever.”

“I don't see the connection.”

“The connection? I'll give you one if you have to have one, Franck. I am five hundred years old, but I cannot endure the cold.”

“Don't sweat it. Montreal is hydro-electric heaven.

We'll heat up the loft and buy a cactus.”

She continued thumbing through the personals for a minute or two.

“I want to take you back, Franck. My country, it is built on the remains of a volcano. White clays, rusted volcanic tufa, chalky limestone. It is like me, Franck.

Stratified.”

“I'll think about it.”

“There is nothing to think about, Franck. Look at this ad. Single mother of two, enjoys bowling, looking for honest lover. Bowling. Honest lover. There is your America for you.”

“This isn't America.”

“It's worse, Franck. You are a watered down version.

And colder. Franck, you told me the other day that you want to be anonymous. This is your chance. You can live like a Sultan, basking beneath the olive trees, drinking wine, and making love to me. What more could you want? You just have to trust me.”

Our lives may have appeared unconventional, but I recall thinking at the time, that I was just getting started, that it was time for the two of us to somehow leave our mark. In our own little way. Obviously, really good sex involved some element of nihilism, and why not continue the dance back in the old country? But, I hadn't answered the question quickly enough, as her monologue had moved onto another tangent.

“
C'est vrai
. It's true, Franck. I can be a little psychotic sometimes. But, be reasonable, Franck.”

It was a reasonable statement, one you would expect from a rational actor, and I might even have conceded the point, if she weren't turning up all four heaters on the gas stove, as a little dramatic backdrop. She held two brochette skewers over the flames, watching me as the tips turned charry black, and then red-hot.

“Sometimes I think you are going to completely miss what I am about, Franck.”

I watched her, thinking, the threat of imminent violence slows the rhythms down, pushes us into an atavistic headspace which has always been there, but is left temporarily dormant until we bring it back into life.

“You can really be
nul
, at times, Franck.
Moins que rien. Un plouck. Niais
.”

One of her gifts was being able to articulate each word distinctly, yet leave it hanging, coagulating like a thick mortar. I watched her some more. She rotated the skewers as she edged towards me. I was aware of her hands, which only slowed to a halt when she was preparing something a little more explosive. I could thank her for my improved peripheral vision. Sheba had charted the next minutes of the day, and designated them as Dantian. I looked behind her, at a poster which had appeared on the wall of the kitchen. It was t wo-tone, emerald green and steel-grey, in the Soviet realism style. The poster was a 1923 public warning against syphilis. It showed a man in the pose of Rodin's
Thinker
, being punctured by an augur boring a hole through his belly. The head on the poster read:

PAILLE DANS L'ACIER

DE LA MACHINE HUMAINE

ABAT L'HOMME LE PLUS FORT

Don't expose yourself to this contagion, said the advice beneath the caption. And beneath the poster itself, I noticed something else for the first time. A series of books on sorcery and incantations. Whatever. Her voice interrupted my survey.

“Your past is over, Franck. Are you ready for the future, Franck?”

Suddenly, she broke into a smile, turned off the stove heats, and let the skewers drop out of her hands onto the undulated portion of the aluminium sink. She walked over to me, dropped to her knees, placed her hands on my thighs, stroked them soothingly.

“Franck, I don't want to hurt you. I've had enough of that. So, don't make me. There are times, Franck, when I love you too much to let you live. But, you evoke something within me. I don't know what it is. Goodbye, Franck.”

She stood up and threw her arms around me. I'd already forgotten the previous five minutes. I wanted her too badly.

I was awakened later in the night by the sound of glass breaking and the smell of smoke. I called out for Sheba, but there was no sign of her. I next heard the sound of a loudspeaker, ordering residents out of the building. By the time I hit the street, a high winter gale had created a funnel effect, the flames had blazed out of control, and were well on their way to taking out four neighbouring buildings. The loft survived, but a family next door didn't. Half a dozen firemen had to be treated for smoke inhalation. Police investigators' antennae were tuned to insurance fraud. They were sure it was arson, but the origin or the motives behind it were never determined.

VII

After she left Montreal, I found myself at loose ends again. The loft was empty except for a few pieces of furniture and the mirrors that lined the walls. After a few days, the phone rang. It was Axelle. I invited her over. Axelle had curly thick black hair. She was small-chested, and her ass was rubenesque. Still, there was something about her that made her sexy. It wasn't so much a physical thing, although she did have pouty lips and dreamy eyes. And the eyes conveyed that she just might, even though it wasn`t in her interest at all, she just might throw everything away for a really good afternoon, that is if you were worth it. In other words, she had weaknesses and, being a good urban Montreal girl, she didn't worry too much about exposing them. For her, a man was not attractive unless he was married. This type of character flaw was what bound us together. We each had our compartments of perversity.

After she had had a drink, I asked her if she would try on some of the lingerie Sheba had left behind. No, Franck, I can`t do that. Why can`t you do that? I can't do
that
, Franck, because you don't attract me. At least not right now. What is it in me that repulses you, Axelle? It`s not so much repulsion, and her way of answering made me temporarily happy that I was at least in the cit y, where people shamelessly tell you things about themselves and about you, because it's all part of a bigger game, and the game is to keep the essential out of the other's grasp, even if it means mounting an imposture so elaborate that it makes you look like a criminal, or worse.

Franck, no matter how deep you go into your own speleological expeditions of the psyche, there seems something salvageable about you. I see, I responded, realizing that this automatically excluded me as a candidate of any kind for Axelle, who demanded either to destroy or to be destroyed in order to feel she was even halfway alive. Do you think, I asked, this will always be the case. Not necessarily, Franck, she answered, I see signs that you may eventually move up to
priorité 4
.

A xelle left shortly after, leaving me alone with a wardrobe filled with women's lingerie, $80,000 worth of mirrors no one wanted to buy and some time on my hands. I stepped out onto
rue Notre Dame
, and walked towards the Main. It was still early evening. Across the street, fifty metres up, was the Sulpician monastery. A bum was standing just outside the entrance. He was hiding his crutch and sneaking around the corner to have a cigarette.

I turned left and walked past the
Palais de Justice
, at the bottom of the Main. Not eighteen months previous, I had been practicing law, or more precisely cajoling, threatening, sucking up to judges, and bluffing my way into my own version of justice, which meant out-of-court settlement at any price. And now, I had as much in common with my ex-colleagues as a vice-deacon from the Kazakhstan Orthodox Church. I walked down the hill and glanced to the other side. The Montreal Mission for the Homeless. I still hadn't been reduced to that, but now I felt it was no longer outside the realm of possibilities. It could happen. Anything could happen.

Another f ift y metres and I was in Chinatown. I stepped into Fong's Saigon Success and ordered a bowl of soup. Across the street, the first few transvestites were setting up for the evening. The bark of the Québecois accent, the cacaphonic Cantonese threaded with Ho Chi Minh city insults and salty pork soup were more nourishing to me than anything the Louvre could offer. This was one of the few places in the world where I could feel right at home. I felt I was on my way somewhere, choosing a path of my own making.

Two buildings further up was the Cleopatra, a night club where boys could be girls, and more than likely were. I would occasionally drop in for a drink towards the end of the night. The Cleopatra was a natural stopoff for me because it was filled with freaks. To me, freaks weren't unhappy people, or unbalanced people. Not when you found them in their own element. Sodomites and pansies could gather unashamedly in the Cleo and wallow in each other's company. Quite a number of conventional looking men were regulars as well. They would ask the girls to dance, and everyone knew that every one of those girls had a cock under her dress, but she was acting like a woman, more than any woman could. The women in these men's lives, i.e. the ones being abandoned for the she-male tramps waltzing around Cleopatra's, preferred parody to actual sex and seduction. It was just a question of taste. One person likes watching members of his own sex create a caricature of what a woman might once have been. Another prefers soap operas and supermarket schlock about rampant incest and sexual abuse in the workplace.

The seasonal posture for the standard replicant woman was ridicule and mockery. So, at least that year, the average magazine-reading female did not consider herself up to scratch unless she engaged in mocker y, preferably of any pretentions a male might have to a life. Like with everything, there was cost-benefit. The mockery saved her from all risks, including the risk of being loved by her man and the risk of being subjugated and taken the way only a woman can really enjoy. The john's stance, and basically Cleo patrons were all johns of one sort or another, was evasion. The only risk for the john was getting caught, and the odds were against it. Basically, the equation was simple. Each of them wanted to get fucked on his own terms.

These were the types of thoughts that came to me, partly because, in Sheba's absence, my mind shifted back to the general from the particular, and partly because it was Tuesday night, and I was on my way to watch Lola's striptease act, which usually brought a crowd of outsiders, college kids in gangs, stags, outsiders who wouldn't be caught dead in the place alone. Lola's attraction lay in her breasts, apparently the biggest in the world, 105 cm. Each of them weighed in at three kilos. Everything in her had been pumped up with silicone and hormones.

I first met Lola at four in the morning just after her weekly performance in a diner called Le Caféteria. She was seated alone in a neighbouring booth, contemplating her mammaries, looked up and caught my eye.

“How long can they stay up?”

“Hard to say. Not forever. Inflation always precedes a depression.”

“It's not just the tits, honey. Once I got them done, I had the cheekbones,
les pommettes
, the mouth, mini-lift for the eyes. I even had my eyebrows tattooed. Then I started everything all over again. They removed the
arc de cupidon
, rolled back the mucous membranes right up to the nose, and pumped the lips full of silicone. Look at me. I'm a surgery addict. I love going under the knife.” Her mouth was a perfect replica of a vagina. She pushed her lips out into what was more a pulsation than a pout. It throbbed automatically, and it lacked conviction. Like a cat's rectum. Her breasts protruded across the table insolently parking on my placemat. World War I vintage zeppelins landing at the Paris Air Show.

“I am basically a woman transvestite. I have succeeded in creating a completely artificial woman. Barbie to the extreme. You know, I would like to have even bigger breasts. But, not even the black market abortionists will come near me anymore. Look at me. I am a complete freak.”

Obviously, she was a freak. What was less obvious was her daily consumption of neuroleptics, anxiolytics, and enough sleeping pills to keep a small druggist in the black on an ongoing basis. When you are in your early twenties, you can still do these things and look all right.

“I can't sleep on my stomach anymore. I have to wear a bra twenty-four hours per day.”

As I recalled my meeting with her, I had arrived inside Cleopatra's and ordered a couple of vodka shooters.

The pre-act, a stand-up cross-dressing comedian, a throwback to the Rocky Horror Picture Show days, had just pranced onto the stage. The crowd burst into applause. It was superior to television, but the audience didn't require cue cards to applaud.

The androg ynous mummy on stage risked being stoned to death just walking down the street during daytime hours, but in Cleopatra's, temple of freaks, she was adulated. The patrons loved her for having the guts to turn herself inside out. Inside the Cleo, thick with artificial Marilyn Monroe clones waltzing, or allowing johns to light their cigarettes, or powdering their recently shaved chins, we were all bound by the same sacred truth to which we clung with the desperation of the fervent believers. Engraved in our talmudic tablets was the knowledge that the really sick ones were out walking the streets, wearing off-the-rack ready to wear, paying their taxes, holding down the day jobs.

While enjoying an after dinner Scotch with Bourque one evening, I asked what it was in me that had pushed my first wife to hire a hit-man to take me out. More of a by-the-way conversation item than anything. We conversed from inside a solarium hatched onto the rear of his twelve-bedroom mansion, which overlooked a glacial lake from its perch up in the Laurentian mountains. It was a pretty spectacular winter panorama, interrupted only by the occasional cameo appearance of his fourth wife who drifted in and out wordlessly during proceedings, clad only in a powder-blue babydoll lingerie, and laced to the eyeballs with Librium. But Bourque scarcely noticed her, and was directing his full attention to a tale I was recounting of my own first marriage, which had been
conventional to the extreme
.

“An interesting phrase. Tell me, Franck, about the day you left her.”

Bourque often said I intrigued him, but it was more the fact that he was so far beyond the pale himself that he could only draw enjoyment from other purveyors of the bizarre.

“Actually, I have no recollection why I married her in the first place. No memory of things like love or for that matter, even a long term plan.” Bourque sipped his Glenfiddich, eying me, a smile curving around his beak of a nose.

“But, you were living with this person, Robinson. You were building a life! Surely ...”

“Correct. For a time.”

“Even went so far as to have a family.”

“We had three children, I believe. Two boys and a girl, as I recall. For a time, I even participated in their upbringing.”

“Such as it was.”

“Such as it was. One evening, I glanced at her from across our living room, one of those sunken mezzanines that looks like it was retrieved from a John Cassavetes film. She was eating tapioca from a bowl she claimed had been designed by Alvar Aalto, with an undersized burgundy coloured spoon. She was a tapioca fanatic, not above consuming up to six bowls during any given evening, but somehow she never gained weight. On the other hand, her complexion was growing prunish.”

“Prunish
to the extreme
, so to speak.”

“She was very big on mud masks and sun lamps. On the complexion issue, pretty hard to determine
causa
causans
.”

I imagined Bourque to be a mutated offspring of a Frenchwoman raped by an oversized bird. I was at least half right. He nodded sympathetically.

“Causation is one of the thornier aspects of the law.

That's why I stick to product liability, wherever possible.

Res ipsa loquitur and Hedley Byrne principle.”

“As she reached the bottom of her bowl, she had a habit of tapping and scraping her spoon against the walls of
that
bowl in a rhy thmic, absent-minded manner, which pushed her into a reverie. That particular day, I watched her repeat her ritual, mentally preparing myself for the question which always followed ...” I stopped, wondering whether I actually had been married, or whether I hadn't imagined the whole saga. “
Do you love me still, Franck?
It could have been her spin, but the phrase struck me as grammatically flawed and highly ambivalent. I considered how quick ly its weak sentimenta lit y would mutate into simmering hatred once I left her. So, it was probably the tapioca that did it. In retrospect.”

Whatever kind of bird Bourque was, it was in danger of extinction. Pterodactyl? Albatross?

“
Mon cher Franck
, I don't give a whit about your motives. Just give me the facts — chronologically.”

“There aren't any facts. I just up and left her.”

“You up and left her!”

A grin found its way onto his dung yard fowl of a head. He shouted the phrase in mock outrage, as I had recounted the story a number of times.

“You can't just up and leave your wife, Robinson!”

“It was early in the morning. I told her I would make breakfast.
Do you love me still, Franck?
Never more than today, honey. I couldn't overplay my hand. Wait here, I said, this morning, I have a surprise for you.
What kind

of surprise, Franck
, she gurgled in her usual tapioca tones.

Just promise you'll wait for me here. Then, I descended the stair well, took the keys from the kitchen table, walked out the door, and drove away.”

“How did she react?”

“I have no idea. My lawyer took care of matters.”

“Did she not even tr y to approach you, track you down?”

“You, obviously, have never met my lawyer.”

“Franck, I will tell you why other men detest you.

You do what they all long to do, but lack the courage to execute.” “That's not my problem.”

“ You lack moral f ibre, Franck. You are what we French call a
lâche
. A
faux-jeton
. I confess that there are times when I admire you. But, I cannot think that it will end well for you.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Does it end well for anybody?”

The next time I was in Cleopatra's, I ran into Lola's husband, a transvestite with a heroin addiction who performed shows at the Love Affair, a booze can located in the rear of the Beijing restaurant. I sat down with him in the centre stalls, which had been purchased from a diner. He was skinny, had one of those long rectangular heads that look okay on camera and inhuman on the street. His hair was done upwards in a small pony-tail, like a medieval Samurai warrior, except he was an end of the mil lenium she-ma le stripper married to the woman with the biggest tits on the planet.