A Perfect Disharmony

Sébastien Brebel, Jesse Anderson

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781628972634
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A middle-aged couple takes in a prurient young woman picked up from the side of the road; a single mother struggles against the hostile feelings she harbors towards her precocious son; a man has alternative fantasies of domination and submission involving a fellow commuter; a hotel room is booked by an elderly woman in search of a place to end her life. In the fourteen stories that make up A Perfect Disharmony, Sébastien Brebel explores the experiences of isolated women and sexually obsessed men while weaving together digression, daydreams, and an accumulation of detail to create a wholly unique approach to the short story form.

Intimacy

THE PHOTO’S QUALITY is wanting, the lighting in which you pose is raw and unflattering. I don’t know who took it, I found it by accident in one of those ancient iron boxes where you kept all kinds of useless things that you just had to hold on to, driven by an attachment as naïve as it was superstitious to a past you weren’t particularly fond of. At first glance, it’s a rather banal, maybe even botched, photo of you in a neon-lit bathroom, and each time I see it, I experience a sharp pain that’s impossible to locate. It’s clearly you, although I’ve never seen the expression you’re making, and I experience an unhealthy attraction looking at you like this, framed under the dirty, yellow light at the end of the evening. The photo’s here, beneath my eyes, and the preciseness with which it represents you and everything that it divulges about the situation in which you found yourself at that exact moment overwhelm me with the force of a meteoric revelation. The photo reveals everything, but it’s your face that stands out more than anything else, your beautiful face, illuminated by intensity and showing the exhaustion felt by someone naked and desperate, your eyes half-closed against the strong light, reflected violently by the bathroom tiles, being projected by the camera. The photo reveals everything, and although it’s somewhat blurry, as if the photographer was trembling at the moment he took it, it distorts no detail of your exposed body. The legs, the stomach, the breasts, the hand holding the nearly finished cigarette and the face turned toward the ceiling, everything is captured with an agonizing exactitude. These young girl’s legs that I so often kissed, this stomach, these breasts and knees and every other detail shown off by your nakedness, I examine them all with an obsessive acuity. Did the photographer ask you to raise yourself up a little out of the bathwater to expose your cute, little breasts, wet and shiny from the water, the nipples hard and brown? Was he likewise trying to satisfy his lustful curiosity by asking you to lift your ass up in order to bring your wet pussy to the surface of the water? There’s no doubt that the photographer was a man; a lover, a boyfriend, a fleeting stranger fished out of a nightclub, I’ll never know, and truth be told, I don’t care to know. He was there, this man, focusing on your body from behind the lens of his camera, and you gave in to his instructions with a tender passivity and a perfect understanding of what was necessary to make the photo a success, unless it was in fact you who suggested, for reasons unknown to me, this late-night photo shoot in the miniature bathroom saturated with steam and cigarette smoke, perhaps because he’d demonstrated remarkable talent while making love to you and you’d experienced afterward, along with a profound and idiotic appreciation, a determination to prove to yourself that it was worth the struggle to go on living and to immortalize this moment in which you felt so close to bliss. Did you have even the slightest idea of how beautiful you were in that moment? Were you high, were you in love? Perhaps you were both at the same time, and the two sensations had become inseparable in your mind, bonded together in a way I’ll never be capable of understanding. One thing is certain, you show the particular exhaustion that only sex can bring about, that benign exhaustion that lasts and lasts and refuses to fade until the first signs of morning. The light hurts your eyes, and it looks as if you were sleeping, but nothing could be further from the truth. You’re twenty-seven years old, you’re not happy, and you give in with a feverish indulgence to every new experience that comes your way, and your face, in this moment of uncertainty, reveals a strange mixture of unreality, disorientation, and fear, your face reveals an absolute and morbid acquiescence, directed calmly at yourself toward the interior area in which lurks your despair, an acquiescence not derived from resignation or passivity but from an understanding, finally received, finally attained, of why you’re there. The photo is blurry and seems botched, but it wouldn’t be so perfect and so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contradiction
• The Picture Window
• The Connection
• Metamorphosis
• Antonia
• Melancholy
• Reservation
• Off-Season
• Delay
• Infiltration
• Quarantine
• Cohabitation
• Sunday Afternoon
• Intimacy