Involuntary Bliss Page 8

  “Then what do you call him?” James asked, propping himself up on one arm, which caused the nausea to overwhelm him, as the woman told him that she didn’t call him anything, that he was a nameless stray who came in uninvited through the open window and eventually would leave. James positioned his head over the dustbin next to the bed and saw, in the moment before he began to retch, at the bottom of the bin lay several spent condoms already splattered with bile. When he’d finished, the woman approached him, holding a mug in one hand and cradling something in the palm of the other. He noticed the smears of paint on her forearm and minute splatters, like green freckles, upon her left breast and the smoothness of her abdomen. When he saw her face, with its solemn expression, her name returned to him. Before he could speak it, she put her fingers in his mouth. They tasted of paint as she placed something small beneath his tongue and held the mug to his lips, compelling him to swallow a quantity of warm ginger ale. His last thought before he fell asleep again was of all the résumés he’d given out the day before, and how he should go home in case someone tried to call about a job.

  For the next ten days, whenever it occurred to James that it might be time for him to leave, Madeleine would take off her clothes or slip another pill beneath his tongue, or she would lie on the bed and take one of the books from the pile on the floor and begin to read, and he would feel compelled to do the same, or else he would be hungry and they would prepare a meal, or else he would strum chords on Warren’s mandola, endeavouring with little success to compose new lyrics in the French language, until, one by one, all but the last of the strings snapped, as if the instrument was ill-suited to its new environs, so that he was forced to abandon it in favour of conversation or else silence, the apartment peculiarly without a stereo. On the third day she asked him to recite some of his poems, and he said that they were all in English, a language that seemed increasingly foreign to him. So as to change the topic he asked why she never went outside. She explained that she didn’t have to, but when he woke up the following morning, she was gone.

  He found a note explaining that she had an appointment and would be back soon. James considered using the opportunity to leave, if not to return indefinitely to his own flat then simply to remind himself what it was like to be in the outside world, but he felt a reluctance to do so, for he did not have a key and would have to leave the door to the apartment open if he wished to return. He had no idea what kind of neighbourhood Madeleine lived in, whether it was the kind of neighbourhood where one could leave the door to one’s apartment unlocked while one went to the or else just strolled around the block. From the noises he sometimes heard emanating from the street below, he had suspicions that it was not that kind of neighbourhood but a different, more sinister kind. When Madeleine eventually returned later that afternoon, she was laden with groceries and sodden with rain, which made him reluctant to leave.

  The experience of those ten days in Madeleine’s apartment, said James, as we sat together in the diner on that Sunday morning, was like being an invalid undergoing a luxurious convalescence from a debilitating illness, although after he recovered from the night of the reading he felt fine, in fact, was more content than he had been for quite some time, at least for the first few days, as if he’d managed to internalize something of the sense of well-being emanating from the smiling dodo men and dodo women he’d encountered in the gallery, images which he’d recalled sometime after his hangover had abated and which remained constant in his mind’s eye. Whenever he woke in the morning, he would find Madeleine standing before a canvas or an easel. He would watch her work, trying his utmost to discern some governing principle behind her actions, eventually coming to the conclusion that in her painting she did not rely on premeditation. He was fascinated by her conviction, her unwavering confidence, as if each stroke of her brush was ordained by an obscure order of which only she could conceive. He tried to think how he might describe her paintings to someone who had not seen them, and it occurred to him that Madeleine painted landscapes in which the vanishing point, the , constituted the totality of the canvas, that her entire body of work was in the act of disappearing from view, slipping over the horizon at the very moment of its creation.

  Whenever she finished painting for the day they would make love, and on the first of these occasions, he was startled when she inserted a fingertip into his rectum. On each subsequent occasion, she would insert the finger further, then multiple fingers, curving them as they were inserted, these progressively ambitious acts of penetration becoming a ritualized facet of their lovemaking, contributing, much to his surprise, to their mutual experience of climax, after which they would read. He read a great deal during that time, though he read randomly and sporadically, never finishing a book, choosing a different paperback every day, either a section of a novel or half a suite of poems, or a work of criticism about an artist’s oeuvre with which he was unfamiliar, or a philosophical work about concepts he did not understand. All of Madeleine’s books were in French and when he came across a word he didn’t recognize, he would ask her what it meant and she would tell him without lifting her eyes from the page. It was as if his requests in no way impinged upon her own reading, or else as if she were not reading at all but simply staring intently in a simulacrum of reading while her mind was occupied with something entirely unrelated to the words on the page, an idea for a new painting perhaps, an innovative combination of brushstrokes, a juxtaposition of shades of green she had yet to try, for when they would prepare dinner together and James would sometimes speak of what he’d read that day, Madeleine seldom, if ever, spoke of what she had herself been reading, though countless other topics were broached, their conversations often continuing until morning.

  When, one evening, James asked Madeleine how she’d become a painter, she said that it had only happened recently. In high school, she explained, she’d decided to be a television news journalist, a career chosen in part because of childhood memories of watching the evening news with her father, who’d been a gentle and kind but taciturn man, with no artistic inclination. While her mother prepared dinner, Madeleine explained, her father would sit in his armchair in the living room and watch the evening news, and she would be permitted to sit in his lap. They would watch the news together attentively and without comment, although sometimes her father would grunt, which could signify either approval or disapproval. Occasionally, when a reporter prefaced a particular kind of news story, her father would tell her to close her eyes and cover her ears. Often he would put his own hands over hers, so that the tips of her fingers would touch the side of his hand as its weight gently pressed her head against his chest. She loved these times, when she could not see or hear but could only imagine the images and sounds from which she was being protected. Much of the time she didn’t understand what was happening in the news, but she knew from a young age that her father considered it to be important, something to be observed dutifully and taken seriously, even if he would seldom discuss what he saw, certainly not at the dinner table, where they were much more likely to discuss what Madeleine and her sister had learned that day in school.

  Then, some years after she’d grown too old to sit in his lap, her father was killed in a car accident at the age of forty-two. On the night of the accident she’d sat outside of the operating room with her mother and her sister, the three of them waiting to learn whether her father would live or die. There was a television in the waiting room and she watched the evening news as a reporter stood at the scene of the accident and described what had happened. The reporter held an open umbrella over her head, shielding herself from the rain that fell that afternoon. Madeleine listened for her father’s name, but it was never mentioned, the victim of the accident remaining unidentified. The reporter appeared very grave when she looked into the camera and signed off. It seemed to Madeleine as if she was speaking directly to her, and she understood at that moment that her father would not survive.

  When she eventually
returned to school, she found herself unable to focus and her grades suffered as a result. Where she had excelled before, she was barely able to get by. She lost interest in everything she’d once enjoyed and began to sleep for longer and longer periods of time. Her sister and mother were alarmed and secretly surprised at the depth of Madeleine’s grief, for she and her father had never seemed particularly close. When her few close friends grew tired of feeling sorry for her, she didn’t mind because she wanted to be alone. Her grief increased as time went by and the memory of her father grew more distant, so that it was replaced by a void, a sense of loss that could not be repaired. As the months dragged on and the anniversary of her father’s death approached, she found herself unable to sleep, the deep exhaustion that had overwhelmed her in the months since the accident finally giving way to insomnia.

  One evening after her mother and her sister had gone to bed, she sat alone in the living room in the armchair where her father always used to sit, watching the late-night news. She watched a report about a catastrophe in a remote part of the world she knew nothing about. It occurred to her at that instant that the attentiveness of the reporters was an attempt to honour the lives of those who had died, however unremarkable those lives might have been, that reporting on a senseless tragedy with some semblance of objectivity was a way of making that tragedy less meaningless than it would be if it remained unknown, even if the unnamed victims existed in the viewer’s mind as little more than a body count, a pinpoint on a map, an image of smoking rubble. She decided then that she would pursue a career as a journalist. With this idea came a sense of peace she’d not felt since before her father’s death. She turned off the television and began to envision a future for herself she never could have imagined before, as she gradually gave in to an elated exhaustion.

  She did not wake until the morning, still seated in her father’s chair, determined to work toward her goal. Though she’d always been articulate, she was also shy, and she knew that a career as a television journalist would not be an easy one for her to pursue. Her mother and sister felt great relief at the change that had come over her so suddenly, and they encouraged her and shared in her sense of accomplishment, when upon her high school graduation, she was accepted by a prestigious journalism program. In her second year of study, she began a series of television news assignments. When she looked into the lens of the camera, she imagined she was speaking directly to her father, that no matter how mundane the story, the subject matter was of great interest to him, and that he was watching and listening very closely, trusting in her to convey the story with that admixture of impartiality and compassion that makes for compelling television news. At first this allowed her to overcome her shyness, and she impressed her classmates and her instructors with her confidence and poise. But as her second semester of study went by, and then the third, her father’s death grew increasingly distant, a thing of the past, something preserved in a shadowy region of her memory she was increasingly uncomfortable visiting. Each time she stood in front of the camera, it became harder for her to imagine him as the man he had once been. She could no longer envision him listening to her every word, but saw only the camera staring back at her, its lens a dark cyclopean eye the gaze of which took in all the composure she could convey and gave her nothing in return. Each time she faced the camera, she confronted an unbearable vastness containing innumerable images of discord and loss, and she came to understand the camera as somehow complicit in her father’s death.

  In the months before she was to graduate, she dreaded her broadcast assignments to the extent that she could not sleep the night before, and when it came time to tape, she would move her lips, mouthing the scripts she’d prepared but unable to sound out the words, or else she would shake uncontrollably and tears would stream down her cheeks. Alarmed at the change that had come over her, her instructors and classmates offered encouragement and advice, but she found herself unwilling to take any action that might help overcome her paralysis. Instead she left the university and returned to her mother’s home, slipping back into the despair she’d first experienced in the months following her father’s death.

  A year passed with little change and at her mother’s urging, she began to see a psychiatrist who prescribed her antidepressants and listened to her speak at length about everything that had happened and how this made her feel. The psychiatrist would ask questions and when Madeleine answered, the psychiatrist would say almost nothing in reply. For several months, when Madeleine felt as though she’d said everything there was to say, the psychiatrist would still say nothing, letting the silence hang between them until Madeleine felt compelled to continue speaking. At these times she said things that surprised her, confided emotions she’d never known she harboured. She would leave the psychiatrist’s office feeling raw and exposed, though her depression did not subside.

  Then one day in mid-January, after several months of therapy, she went to her appointment and from across the street she saw that the window of her psychiatrist’s office was covered with plywood. She approached and tried the door, which would not open, though she could hear noises coming from inside. Venetian blinds were drawn over the glass door, although they were askew, as if someone inside the office had bumped against them. When she peered between the blinds, she saw her psychiatrist on her hands and knees, gathering papers that were strewn about the floor. Everything inside appeared upset and overturned, desks, chairs, cabinets, a spider plant upended from its pot, its leaves and soil ground into the carpet. She wondered who’d left the office in such a state and what was written on the documents that lay exposed and trampled underfoot. Then her psychiatrist caught her eye and said, “The office is closed today,” raising her voice to be heard through the door. When Madeleine made no sign of moving, her psychiatrist, still on her knees, holding several sheets of paper in her hand, looked through the blinds more closely. “Just a minute,” she said and opened the door and stepped out.

  “I can’t meet with you today,” she said, hugging her arms to her chest. Madeleine saw that her eyes were rimmed with red as if she’d not slept the night before, and her hair, which was always tied back, now hung messily around her shoulders and in her face. This caused Madeleine to imagine that her psychiatrist had been caught inside the office when the violence had occurred and had been thrown about like the furniture and the papers strewn across the room.

  “Things will be back to normal by next week. Call me if you need to talk before then,” her psychiatrist said, before she went inside and shut the door. When Madeleine returned the following week, she found everything restored to the way it had been. The glass in the window had been replaced, as had the spider plant, the new plant so similar to the old that Madeleine wanted to examine its leaves to see if they were real, but her psychiatrist was waiting for her at the door. Madeleine noticed that she’d cut her hair, which caused her to look more severe. Rather than ask her to describe her week, her psychiatrist said they’d made considerable progress in the months since they’d begun their sessions together.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said, and Madeleine could not think of what she’d done to elicit this pride. She remembered how her psychiatrist had looked the week before and realized she had problems of her own. Madeleine surprised both of them then when she announced her interest in enrolling in drawing classes. This was not something she’d ever considered doing before, but it seemed to make sense to her, arising as it did out of nowhere, as a way of moving beyond the stasis in which she’d been trapped for some time. Her psychiatrist seemed pleased with the idea and Madeleine followed through, enrolling in an introductory art course. She was surprised by how much she enjoyed the classes, and as weeks went by, and then months, her mood lifted somewhat, although she grew increasingly disheartened by the lifeless quality of the drawings and the paintings she produced. In spite of her misgivings, at her psychiatrist’s urging she submitted a portfolio of her work along with a proposal for a government artist’s
grant. She decided that it was impossible to create anything worthwhile while on antidepressants, and also that her mother’s concern—which had not abated since Madeleine had returned home—was stifling, and so she decided to move out on her own. She found a job as a waitress in a steakhouse and after saving enough for a deposit, she moved to the bachelor apartment on the south shore, where she now lived. Its ceilings were high and it got a good amount of light, while the interior of the steakhouse where she worked was very dark, even in the afternoons, the decor consisting of smoke-stained stucco and exposed wood beams, curtains drawn over the windows even during daylight hours so as to obscure the world outside. Most of the patrons were men who dined alone. The steakhouse was open late and she preferred to work on weeknights when business was slow and she’d be responsible for covering the dining room on her own.

  In the early afternoons before her shift began she would draw and paint, though she was no more pleased with her work than before. Although she’d stopped taking her antidepressants, she continued to meet with her psychiatrist so that she could get her prescription filled. She would give the medication to Jean-Marc, who was employed as a cook at the steakhouse, and in exchange Jean-Marc would provide her with a variety of other pills that helped to break up the monotony of the hours she would spend alone. Eventually the two of them began spending time together after their shifts, and then sleeping together, Madeleine grateful for the companionship.

  Then in mid-April, on an evening when the manager had left early, she heard the rumble of idling motorcycles coming from the parking lot, and one by one the engines were silenced and a group of bikers entered the restaurant. There were six of them in total, all of them stocky with shaved heads or close-cropped hair. A man with a goatee, the largest of the six, approached her as she carried a tray of dishes toward the kitchen and said that they wished to sit together, gesturing toward the back of the restaurant, where one of the few remaining customers was eating alone. Madeleine told him that if they would wait a moment, she would see that they were seated. When she emerged from the kitchen she saw that the bikers had positioned themselves at the back of the restaurant, the customer who’d been seated there having left a twenty-dollar bill lying next to his half-finished meal. A short man with a shaved head and three tears tattooed beneath his right eye sat at the head of the table facing the entrance of the restaurant, and the man with the goatee sat with his back turned to the front door.