The following Chapter One excerpt is from the novel Monster by Jowita Bydlowska.
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It’s late in May, the orange 7 p.m. sun descending slowly behind the buildings just visible from the tall windows of the bookstore. The air smells metallic, of city and dried blood, silver-grey fumes from cars, lights and noise but also spring, a moist animal muzzle rooting, the creature part of me picking up on it, stirring in its sleep.
You stand out in the lineup – especially here, amongst the neurotic-thin men who like books – with your wide athlete’s body, a tight T-shirt, your inky beard, a black square bag hitting your hip as you step out to talk to the person in front of you, some nerdish girl (nerdish girls are probably exotic to you, you can corrupt them easier). This place is full of them; later I’ll try to recall the girls you talked to, once I noticed you. There was a girl with glasses in a pale pink dress, who fretted and flirted, and one with wispy hair who was soft and pretty, pretty like a sheep, her big animal eyes never leaving your face.
I smile, look behind her, lock eyes with your camera lens.
The store’s ceilings are high, European-city high, wall-to-wall shelves with books with their colourful spines, some pulled out and displayed half-open, a few with their full faces vying for everyone’s attention. I don’t know if they’ve done any studies of how much time it takes for a book to command attention. I look at my own debutante, its purple cover and the letters in the title font arranged from fat to skinny, the wrong approach considering what the book is not about. Today is her birthday so everyone is picking her up, carrying her, caressing her anticipation-shivering vertebrae but after tonight, who knows if they’ll bother with her?
There’s a big table with a plate of sweaty cheese cubes and grapes and cheap champagne, and plastic glasses. On my smaller table I have a flute with not so cheap champagne. Voytek’s hoots and laughter come from all sides of the large room as he runs around entertaining our four-year-old. He is the one who brought the not-cheap champagne and opened it in the bathroom in the back of the bookstore – Psst hey, hey, he said and pulled me with him. His alligator eyes. Inside the bathroom, Voytek barked not to look at him so I didn’t, I supported myself against the sink and looked at the word PROUST! printed on the cover of a book stack and listened to the sounds behind me, the clink of the buckle of his pants, squeak of shoes, the jarringly fussy whisper of my crinoline underskirt being lifted. (I’m wearing a See By Chloé silver A-line dress, the colour of the cars outside, a cascade of skirts like waves, with a cinched waist and corset-like top. I have never read Proust.)
I giggled and my husband asked in an offended tone if I did not enjoy myself.
Of course I do, I said and kissed his mouth, tasting grapes and cheese, and a crypt.
Fine, he said, grunted repeatedly, came, pulled up his pants, and produced the champagne as if that was my reward for lying to him.
I didn’t not enjoy myself. But I was distracted, our daughter was in the storage-slash-employee room, sitting with one of the young women who worked at the store. As we straightened ourselves out, I thought about how the young woman recognized my husband, judging by how she stared at him when we first walked, in and how quickly she volunteered with Ruby when Voytek said something about having to talk to me in private; she knew what he was hinting at, I was irritated with her for conspiring.
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But Ruby was behaving, so I couldn’t be too mad. The young woman must’ve told her to be quiet, must’ve distracted her with a book with pictures of corpses, or surgeries, so she could eavesdrop on my husband grunting like a stag as I stared at PROUST! while all that was going on.
Afterwards, Voytek thrust the bottle at the girl and said, Can you hide this somewhere?
She nodded, her eyes reptilian like his, flashing above her face mask. She was wearing a bowtie and a man’s suit. It was a look. Rejecting femininity. Opposite of me in my giant skirts, my thighs still wet. I felt my face get hot, I was blushing and no one was even looking at me. Ruby wrapped herself around my legs, sniffing me, her face in my skirts.
Actually, you should have a splash, where are my manners? Voytek said and the girl laughed and said she was working and my husband said, It’s just one glass, it’s a special occasion. Right?
And I said, Please. Have a glass.
What’s the occasion? said the girl as if she didn’t know about the book launch, in the store where she worked and where she had volunteered to watch the child of the author who was having this book launch, the author married to Voytek Tak – the Voytek Tak whose books the girl’s father had probably read in their original form, before translation, and felt angry about, having been his unpublished contemporary. I saw the girl as a child, sneaking into her parents’ bedroom to read all the forbidden books – corpses, surgeries, but especially the one that launched Voytek into a bad-boy-lit orbit, made him a phenom in his time. Many years ago. There was a lot of sex in the book and people wrote about that, about how it was too explicit and unnecessarily vulgar. But also fresh, edgy.
You stand out in the lineup – especially here, amongst the neurotic-thin men who like books – with your wide athlete’s body, a tight T-shirt, your inky beard, a black square bag hitting your hip as you step out to talk to the person in front of you, some nerdish girl (nerdish girls are probably exotic to you, you can corrupt them easier).
Voytek still has sway. A look passed between him and the girl – that kind of a look. Maybe it was more pronounced because the bottom of her face was covered. Either way, if they could, of course, they would, if only because of the girl’s father’s imaginary rivalry, or they would because she heard him grunting, maybe pictured it all, his exertions, in the bathroom, and she’d want to make him grunt like that herself, or they would because he poured her a glass of champagne, as if she were an adult, on par, or they would f–k because people f–k. I watched her watching him while they clinked their glasses; it was as if I wasn’t even there. Then again, I’ve been told I have a tendency to be paranoid and imagine things.
I’ll take care of her, Voytek said, meaning Ruby.
I love kids, said the girl and Voytek laughed, I don’t. Go, go, he pecked me on the cheek and smacked my bum.
What is everybody doing in there? said my best friend, Lisa, who surprised me right outside the storage door, black nails like talons wrapping around my upper arm, her face all overdrawn eyebrows and caterpillar lashes, no mask, her red lips like a scratch. Her hair looked freshly blown out.
What are you doing here? I said.
Waiting for you! Anyway, this is John! Lisa cooed and pushed a small human male at me, his arm shooting out as if activated by a button. I shook his hand. I thought of a slang one of my husband’s students introduced me to: NPC, a non-player character.
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John wants to write a book, Lisa said. It’s about his grandfather’s immigrant journey as a mill worker and then starting a factory. But that’s only a disguise because it’s really a self-help about becoming a successful businessman. We should have lunch next week to discuss, she stared at me, a hint of a smile luring in the corner of her mouth, and I understood. There would be no lunch next week, there was no book – there was maybe some half-baked idea – but John was not an NPC, not tonight; tonight John was the most important player, at least for however many hours he paid Lisa for.
We want to enjoy the celebratory mood a little longer, I am buzzed from the champagne and from being famous. All I can think of is your face – you’re not a story yet, you’re already an altar, my future daily devotional.
Yes, lunch, of course. Absolutely. I have to go, excuse me, I said and let Lisa kiss me on both cheeks.
And then it was time for me to go and stand at the little podium and nod during the introduction and shake my head in fake annoyance as my editor told cute anecdotes about being forced to work with me and my generous use of the word “f–k” and how he had to take it out but also how he had to “put some f–ks back in,” which made people laugh quite genuinely, and then I said things about being forced to work with him (some chuckles, clearing of throats), and then I made a joke about health magazine covers insisting on all of us women having to “get our body back” as if our body ran away somewhere where in reality all it did was have a child, or had to commute to a boring office job (genuine laughs), and then I thanked everyone, including people like Brett Fraser from marketing, whom I didn’t know at all – I memorized names on the way – and I said something about feeling true in my body and the long windy road, but feeling true, yes, that’s the word, true, true, I had healed, and there was more applause and then one more joke about the cheese not being a diet cheese and then it was time to sit at my smaller table, and then there you were in the lineup.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, but I need to give our story some kind of a beginning. Those are the frames leading up to the moment I meet you, notice you talking to whoever it is you are talking to, that camera bag hitting your hip. In my memory, I can smell you from where I stand, your minty cologne mingling with the outside, the cars and the spring and the setting sun. I stare, hypnotized, as someone says something about being true to her body, many women say that, true-to-their-bodies women say they are true, and my husband hoots, and Ruby squeaks, and then our old babysitter with her own daughter appears and says, Show Yoveeta what you got there!
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Her daughter opens her palms and there it is, a dying butterfly. The girl sets out to explain about butterflies in a determined, mechanical voice.
I smile, look behind her, lock eyes with your camera lens. The daughter doesn’t budge, she’s a big girl, she has to finish her speech, eggs, pupa, chrysalis, caterpillar. Le-pi-dopterist. The females of some gypsy moth have no wings, all they can do to move is crawl, she finishes. Her mask is dangling off her ear, it’s stained yellow on the inside.
Her mother apologizes and I say good-naturedly that it’s fine, it’s no problem. This encourages her, Oh, oh! Tell Yoveeta that you rode a Leviathan!
I rode a Leviathan, the girl sighs.
I picture the girl atop a giant serpent. I say, What?
It’s the biggest rollercoaster in Canada. It’s very scary, the girl says in the same monotone. Her mother’s open face smiles and I smile back into it. North Americans feel proud of the most bewildering achievements – riding roller coasters or being able to eat twenty hot dogs in one setting.
That’s amazing, I say.
I look down at the girl’s hands. The butterfly is dead.
(You will say later, pillow-to-pillow, how I struck you as elegant, gracious, putting up with that situation at my own book launch.
I never told you that I fired the babysitter a week later. I liked that she made the effort to pronounce my name right but that wasn’t enough. She was even more of a pushover than I am, I didn’t like seeing her being bossed by her little girl. I worried my own daughter was going to pick up on this kind of behaviour, become a little b–ch, halt lineups with her needs, her own butterflies. It was bad enough she had me for a mother.)
I rewind the evening, try to see if there’s anything to stamp you out but no.
I sign both copies of the babysitter’s book, write something sweet and personal, possibly even, “With love” but nothing you would get extra money for once I’m up on eBay, dead and marginally more valuable. I’m not witty like my husband who writes about birds and the seasons and each moment’s significance and hope and dust and death. He knows lines, poems. He studies things like poems, he has a degree. In Poland, they are talking about setting an official plaque outside of his birth home, and he’s not even dead. But he has written about communism, and he is an import Polaks could all be proud of, he has won awards. His signed books are already on eBay.
The babysitter’s daughter closes her hands, rubs them together.
I get up and excuse myself. In the bathroom I splash my face with some cold water, pinch my cheeks, stumble over the pile of screaming PROUST!s, straighten them, take a few deep breaths, come out, do it all over again, smile and touch hands and try and fail to listen, and say thank you. I am not meant to be out and in public for this long; over the years I’ve shrunk my world – or rather I’ve grown inwards, depending on how you look at it. I’ve become somewhat unsure of reality, not convinced that this isn’t all a spectacle put on for me. Right now, I want to go home where I talk to the walls about my hopes, more specifically where I go to dream about freedom. I don’t have a clear concept of it, I just want to one day not be hungry for anything or anyone.
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My husband appears briefly at my table with a new glass, and he tells me I’m doing great, I’m a star, and then the girl in the pale pink dress, and then you, finally you, finally you are here. I have to look up, and neither of us smiles, we know, we already know, and the air feels different, like there’s more of something, extra gravity, objects with greater charge create stronger electric fields. I raise the glass and take a little sip, my eyes on you the whole time.
We talk with our eyes for six champagne seconds, the light outside the windows now heavier, more decadent, more golden; a small swath of your hair turns deep-fire red when you tilt your head, my head tilting with yours in a perfect mirroring gesture. You rub your beard self-consciously; it’s a new beard, a test beard, and after tonight, I will never see you with a full beard again.
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You talk. You are charming, confident, loose, that camera bag banging against your hip, the fire in your hair turning black, deepest dark. You apologize for taking the picture of me (you don’t have to, everyone else is doing it, this is what this is for). You say you are new at your job, now that you’re here, you claim to not have had the foresight that it would be a dumb idea to try to interview me during this time, during my own launch. You laugh as if we are both in on a joke. I laugh when you ask if you could, actually – could you? you say, Oh lawd, please, m’am, I’mma get fired, I need this, it’s my big break.
You make a face, bat your lashes, fold your hands in a prayer.
(Later you’ll write that you don’t care about books like that, self-help, memoir, and you don’t have a girlfriend anyway to give a book like that to. That’s how you let me know you don’t have a girlfriend. And that you don’t give a shit about the book I wrote.
It’s your lack of subtlety I like. Your lack of apology.
I roll my eyes and say, It’ll have to be another time.
Another time? Perfect. That works, I’ll email you, I’m sorry and thank you, thank you, you say and you leave, the air relaxes, fills with other smells of other people. I don’t relax, but I keep talking, signing more books, more of everything, more of it a blur, blur of Lisa hugging me too long and too tightly to the disapproving looks of Covid-conscious strangers. The light outside goes, is gone, the metallic greys of cars gathers, intensifies, the red light of stop, Don’t Walk. Then it’s over, the girl from the storage room rustles by, maskless, she throws a line, a little smile, my husband is a fish, a hook, he sinks. I wonder if they’d exchanged numbers. I am tired, I am talking to someone or maybe I am not talking any more, my body is wet and hot underneath all the waves of See by Chloé.
I stay with your ghost for the rest of the evening as I walk with my husband in the warm May night.
Voytek and I walk home as Ruby falls asleep in the stroller. We want to enjoy the celebratory mood a little longer, I am buzzed from the champagne and from being famous. All I can think of is your face – you’re not a story yet, you’re already an altar, my future daily devotional.
I rewind the evening, try to see if there’s anything to stamp you out but no. At the launch, all women told me about their bodies, stories of triumph, sacred but wasted (on me); the women said I helped, or that was the gist of what they all said. I was indebted to all of them holding my book close to their chests, their furtive glances and nervous smiles, their spelling out names of sisters, cousins, friends who they were buying their second copies for. There were moments where I felt like getting up and screaming, I wanted to make a scene like people do on reality TV, flip the table upside-down, kick the shelves. A few women held my hands in theirs, too many hands cupping mine – when did people replace handshakes and elbow-bumping with this gesture? Or was it because we were freshly out of another lockdown and were overwhelmed with the permission of intimacy? Seeing so many mouths all at once was shocking. Each time a mask would unhook, there it was, that confessional duckbill, their eyes flitting, and I’d feel my stomach constrict. It wasn’t quite my stomach either but the thing that lay dormant in that area where all of my hunger would start. Now that I was here, with my book, I was accountable to the world for not letting it out; I told the world I was in charge and not the other way around. But I seemed incapable of paying attention to all of that for too long, my book and my success and my stomach.
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I forget most people from that evening, no one else’s face is sharp, in focus. I retain no guilt about that, not remembering the women, and myself, and our pain or victory, I remind myself that I’m not indebted to anyone after all – it was Voytek who told me people feel intimate with authors, especially with memoirists; they think they have learned your secrets and now you owe it to them to learn theirs. You don’t.
I stay with your ghost for the rest of the evening as I walk with my husband in the warm May night. At one point he asks if we should share some French fries and pulls me toward a shouty, comic-sans food truck with a big clown logo painted on the side. A headache comes on instantly as the smells hit my nostrils, grease and cleaning products. There is a woman in the back of the food truck scrubbing something, she looks at me briefly, the bags under her eyes are deep, bruised.
Just small, I say in a small voice to my husband who knows what he’s doing. I hold his eyes and he nods.
The logo clown passes me the fries and wishes me a good night. My hand is shaking as I jam three clammy strips into my mouth, contemplating their warmth and softness, the simple – and therefore perfect – saltiness, the kick of the vinegar. I’m flooded with sensation, the masticated deathly chunks travelling down my throat, my own internal Leviathan. I have no words for what I know yet but before bed, in the bathroom, my head bent over the toilet, throwing up the fries, my terrible form of prayer, I have a vision. I don’t know if I should blame you, my husband or my body. But I do have a vision, in the paradox of slowing down while I speed up I become many things at once, an open shell, a pearl swelling, shuddering rib cage, something more visceral even, a white deer carcass, steam, a pomegranate geode of pulsing guts. I feel excavated. I have another vision: of your closeness, your physicality, how it will be unbashful, demanding of my yielding. Skin against skin, hard of muscle and warmth. Your c–k that I will ask to invade me, that I want to be a rock to climb over, a crystal to impale myself on, the tip of you stirring ribbons of red and pink inside me, the wetness between us in my breath, and the milky bitterness of you on my thighs, our sweaty hair, my smell briny and sweet and warm like blood, you taking, claiming, my desire pooling underneath and all around me in my nakedness, shame and shamelessness sliding against you, to keep you and push you away but keep you again, as I devour everything and for once, I don’t want to, or understand how to, purge and I am content, filled, whole.
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Excerpted from Monster by Jowita Bydlowska. Copyright 2024 Anvil Press. Reprinted with permission from Jowita Bydlowska. Toronto, Ont., Canada. All rights reserved.
Jowita Bydlowska is the author of Possessed, the best-selling memoir Drunk Mom, and the best-selling novel Guy. She’s also a prolific short-story writer, journalist and a professor at the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, and came to Canada as a teenager. She lives in Toronto with her son and their chihuahua.