by Steve Toltz
I closed the paper, more clueless than before. From the next room I could hear the television; it sounded like Dad was testing the volume to see how high it could go. I went in. He was watching a late-night soft porn series about a female detective who solves crimes by showing her clean-shaven legs. He wasn’t looking at the screen, though; he was staring into the tiny oval mouth of a can of beer. I sat next to him, and we didn’t talk for a while. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked.
“Thanks, Dad,” Dad said.
I sat there trying to think of something sarcastic to say in retort, but when you put two sarcastic comments side by side, they just sound nasty. I went back into the labyrinth and to the Inferno in my bed.
“Where’s the milk?” she asked as I crawled in beside her.
“It had lumps in it,” I said, thinking of Dad and the lumps within. Anouk and Eddie were right- he had slipped back into a depressed state. Why this time? Why was he grieving over this rock star he’d never heard of? Was he going to start mourning every death on the planet Earth? Could there be a more time-consuming hobby?
In the morning when I woke up, the Inferno was gone. That was new. We had obviously fallen to a new low- in the old days we would’ve shaken each other out of a diabetic coma to announce our departure. Now she sneaked out, probably to avoid the question “What are you doing later?” My hut had never felt so empty. I buried my head in my pillow and shouted, “She’s falling out of love with me!”
To distract myself from this sour-smelling reality, I picked up the newspaper and browsed through it, cringing. I’ve always hated our newspapers, mostly for their insulting geography. For example, on page 18 your eyes fall on the story of a terrible earthquake in some place like Peru with an insult hidden between the lines; twenty thousand human beings buried under broken rubble, then buried again, this time under seventeen pages of local blabber. I thought: Who prints this gum disease?
Then I heard a voice. “Knock knock,” the voice said.
That put me instantly on edge. I shouted back. “Don’t stand at the door and say ‘Knock knock’! If I had a doorbell, would you stand there saying, ‘Brrrring’?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Anouk asked, entering.
“Nothing.”
“You can tell me.”
Should I confide in her? I knew Anouk was having troubles in her own love life. She was in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always breaking up with people I never knew she’d even been seeing. If anyone had an eye for the beginning of the end, it would be Anouk. But I decided against asking for her advice. Some people sense when you’re drowning, and when they step forward to get a clear view, they can’t help putting their foot on your head.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I want to talk to you about your dad’s depression.”
“I’m not really in the mood.”
“I know how to fill his emptiness. His notebooks!”
“I’ve snooped enough in his notebooks to last a lifetime! His writings are the stains of dripping juices from all the tangled meat in his head. I won’t do it!”
“You don’t have to. I already did.”
“You did?”
Anouk pulled one of Dad’s little black notebooks from her pocket and waved it in the air as if it were a winning lottery ticket. The sight of the notebook produced in me the same effect as the sight of my father’s face: an overwhelming weariness.
“OK,” Anouk said, “listen to this. Are you sitting down?”
“You’re looking right at me, Anouk!”
“OK! OK! Jesus, you’re in a bad mood.”
She cleared her throat and read: “ ‘In life, everyone’s doing exactly what they’re supposed to. I mean, look closely when you meet an accountant- he looks exactly like an accountant! Never did there exist an accountant who looked like he should have been a fireman, a clerk in a clothing store who looked like a judge, or a vet who looked like he belonged behind the counter at McDonald’s. One time at a party I met this guy and I said, “So then, what do you do for a crust?” and he said loudly, so everyone could hear, “I’m a tree surgeon,” just like that, and I took a step back and gave him the once-over and I’ll be damned if he didn’t fit the image precisely- he looked like a tree surgeon, even though I’d never met one before. This is what I’m saying- absolutely everyone is as they should be, and this is also the problem. You never find a media mogul with the soul of an artist or a multibillionaire with the raving, fiery compassion of a social worker. But what if you could whisper in a billionaire’s ear and reach the raving, fiery compassion that’s lying dormant and unused, where empathy is stored, and you could whisper in his ear and fuel that empathy until it catches alight, and then you douse that empathy with ideas until it’s transformed into action. I mean, excite him. Really excite him. That’s what I’ve been dreaming about. To be the man who excites rich and powerful men with his ideas. That’s what I want- to be the man who whispers thrilling ideas into an enormous golden ear.’ ”
Anouk closed the notebook and looked at me as though expecting a standing ovation. Was this what she was excited about? His megalomania was old news to me. I’d learned the same when I’d helped him out of the asylum. Of course, it was just a lucky break that time- taking the contents of those insane notebooks literally and using them on its owner was a very hazardous business- as we were about to find out.
“So what?” I said.
“So what?”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t get it?”
“Stop repeating everything I say.”
“It’s the answer, Jasper.”
“It is? I’ve forgotten the question.”
“How to fill your dad’s emptiness. It’s simple. We go out and find one.”
“Find what?”
“A golden ear,” she said, smiling.
VII
That night, on my way over to Anouk’s house, I thought about her plan. The golden ear she had decided on belonged to the head of Reynold Hobbs, who, in case you live in a cave that doesn’t get cable television, was the richest man in Australia. He owned newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, movie studios, and television stations that recorded sporting events that he broadcast through his cable networks. He owned football clubs, nightclubs, hotel chains, restaurants, a fleet of taxis, and a chain of record companies that produced music that he sold in his music stores. He owned resorts, politicians, apartment buildings, mansions, racehorses, and a yacht the size of the Pacific island of Nauru. Half the time Reynold lived in New York, but he was so secretive, you never knew which half. He was the rare sort of celebrity who didn’t have to worry about the paparazzi because he owned them. I tell you, Reynold Hobbs could take a shit off the Harbor Bridge and you’d never see a picture of it in the paper.
I don’t know how long Anouk had been planning this unpromising mission, but she showed me an article that said Reynold and his son, Oscar, were going to be in the Sydney casino that night to celebrate their purchase of it. Her plan was for us to go to the casino and try to convince Reynold Hobbs, Australia ’s richest man, to meet with Dad, Australia ’s poorest.
At this time Anouk was back living with her parents in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in a nice cul-de-sac with a nice park next door and lots of children playing in the street and neighbors chatting over fences and big front lawns and big backyards and swings and a nice comfortable family car in every driveway and dogs who knew where to shit and where not to shit and in nice symmetrical piles too, like a Boy Scout’s campfire. It was the kind of middle-class exterior people love to peel back the layers of, looking for worms- and the worms are there, sure. Where aren’t there worms? And yes, Anouk’s family had a worm. They had a big worm. A worm that wouldn’t go away. It was Anouk. She was the worm.
He
r father was working in the garden when I turned up. He was a healthy man in his fifties, so healthy that the sight of him always made me resolve to do fifty push-ups every morning. Muscles bulging, he was bent over the flower bed ripping up weeds, and even his workman’s crack was taut and glowing rosily underneath strong, virile tufts of bum hair.
“Hey, Jasper, what are you all dressed up for?”
“Anouk and I are going to the casino.”
“What the hell for?”
“To break the bank.”
He chuckled. “You can’t beat those corrupt bastards. They’ve got it rigged.”
“There aren’t many corrupt bastards you can beat.”
“Too true.”
Anouk’s mother, a beautiful woman with streaks of gray through her thick black hair, came out with a glass of water that she might have intended for her husband but that she gave to me.
“Here you go. Hey, am I shrinking or are you still growing?”
“I think I’m still growing.”
“Well, don’t stop now!”
“I won’t.”
I liked Anouk’s family. They didn’t make a great effort to make you feel welcome, they just looked at you as though you’d always been there. They were honest and earnest and enthusiastic and cheerful and hardworking and never had a bad word to say about anyone. They were the kind of people it’s impossible not to like, and often I’ve felt like marching them up and down the street, daring people not to like them.
“Where’s Anouk?”
“In her room. Go on in.”
I walked through the nice cool house, up the stairs, and into Anouk’s bedroom. Anouk always returned here after unsuccessful outings into the world- usually after jobs or relationships went bust. They kept it for her. It was strange to see her here in her family home, and in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old girl. Let’s be clear- Anouk was now thirty-two, and each time she moved out, she swore she’d never return, but things always had a way of going sour for her, and she was never able to resist going back for a while, to take a breather.
I had been to several of Anouk’s apartments, and she was always in the middle of throwing out a man who’d disgusted her, or washing the sheets because a man she’d been sleeping with had been with someone else, or waiting by the phone for a man to ring, or not answering the phone because a man was ringing. I remember one who refused to leave; he’d tried to invoke squatter’s rights in her bedroom. In the end she got rid of him by throwing his mobile phone out the window, and he followed closely behind it.
When I went in, Anouk was in her walk-in closet getting changed.
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
I snooped around. There was a photograph beside her bed of a man with a square head and dark sunglasses and the kind of sideburns that killed Elvis.
“Who’s this horror show?”
“He’s history. Throw him in the bin for me, will you?”
I had considerable satisfaction tossing his photograph in the bin.
“What happened with this one?”
“I’ll tell you what happened. I have no luck. My relationships always fall into one of two categories: either I’m in love with him and he’s not in love with me, or he’s in love with me and he’s shorter than my grandmother.”
Poor Anouk. She couldn’t stand being eternally single and she couldn’t stand that she couldn’t stand it. Love was tantalizingly absent from her life, and she was trying her best not to conclude that she was three-eighths through an eighty-year losing streak. She was humiliated to have joined the legions of single women obsessed with trying not to obsess about their singular obsession. But she couldn’t help obsessing. She was now in her thirties and single. But it wasn’t a question of the biological clock. It was a question of the other ticking clock-the clock, the Big Clock. And while she was always looking deep into herself for answers, just as the sages advise, what she came up with wasn’t one single reason, and it wasn’t as if she were stuck in a vicious circle, but rather in a pattern of several conjoined vicious circles. In one, she always singled out the wrong type- either “bourgeois yuppie bastards” or just “bastards,” or, more often than not, a “man-child.” In fact, for a while she seemed to be meeting only men-children in various guises. She also had a habit of being the other woman and not the woman. She was the kind that men like to sleep with but not have a relationship with. She was one of the boys, not one of the girls. And I don’t know the psychology behind it, but anecdotal evidence proves it: she wanted it too much. But because no one seems sure how it works, you just have to go about trying to beat this mysterious force by pretending not to want what you really want.
Anouk stepped out of her closet looking spectacular. She was wearing a diaphanous green dress with a floral print and a black slip underneath. It looked like she had bought it two sizes too small on purpose; it showed every curve of her body. They were hairpin curves. My God, she was voluptuous, and if you had the right kind of imagination you couldn’t think of anything other than sleeping with her, if only to get her off your mind. I admit I’d enjoyed masturbatory fantasies about her from the age of fourteen onward, ever since she had tired of her phase as shaven-headed, Doc Martens-wearing, pierced angry girl. The green eyes were still shining, but over the years she had grown her black hair out so it was long and flowing. She removed her piercings and went from stick-thin to spongy and now sauntered around like a promiscuous cloud in a tight dress. Even though I was there to help combat my father’s depression and encroaching suicide, I couldn’t help but think: Maybe it’s high time Anouk and I slept together. Should I try to seduce her? Can you seduce someone who’s seen you go through puberty?
“Maybe you should give relationships a break for a little while,” I said.
“I don’t want to be celibate, though. I like sex. I’ve slept with a lot of men and I want to keep sleeping with them. I tell you, whoever talks about the carnality of human beings and excludes women should come by my place one night and see me at it.”
“I’m not saying you should be celibate. You could find a lover, like they have in France.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea. But where do I find a no-strings-attached lover?”
“Well- and don’t say no straightaway- what about me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re like a son to me.”
“No, I’m not. We’re more like distant cousins secretly checking each other out.”
“I’ve never checked you out.”
“You should think about it.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
“I think she’s falling out of love with me. You see, I need a confidence boost, and I think if we became lovers, that would do it.”
“Jasper, I don’t want to.”
“Is that any reason?”
“Yes.”
“Haven’t you ever slept with someone as a gesture of goodwill?”
“Of course.”
“Or out of pity?”
“More often than not.”
“Well, I don’t mind if it’s a charity fuck.”
“Can we drop the subject?”
“I never knew you were so selfish and ungiving. Didn’t you volunteer one year with the Salvation Army?”
“Collecting money door to door, not screwing the down and out.”
We were at an impasse. Well, I was at an impasse.
“Come on, stupid,” she said, and with Anouk leading the charge, we made our way to the Sydney casino.
***
Let’s not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade. At blackjack tables and sitting in front of poker machines were tense and desperate men and women looking like droids, who didn’t seem to be gambling for pleasure. As I watched them, I remembered the casino was famous for having its patrons lock their
children in their cars while they gambled. I had read a news story about it, and I hoped all these sad, desperate people rolled the windows down a little while they put their rent money in the pockets of the state government, which rakes in huge profits and then puts half a percent of it back into the community for counseling services for gamblers.
“There they are,” Anouk said.
She pointed to a crowd of paparazzi, businessmen, and politicians. Obviously Reynold Hobbs, a seventy-year-old man with square wire-framed glasses and a perfectly round, bald, Charlie Brown head, had taken some advice that it might be good for his public image if he tried to pass himself off as an “ordinary guy just like you,” which was why he was hunched over the $10-minimum blackjack table. The way his shoulders were slumped, it seemed as if he’d lost his posture in the last hand. Anouk and I walked up a little closer. He might be Australia ’s richest man, but it didn’t look like he had got there by gambling.
His son, Oscar Hobbs, was a few meters away, trying his luck at a poker machine, holding himself upright as only a celebrity can- a man that can be photographed at any moment, that is, a man not picking his nose or shifting his genitals. I quickly gave myself a stern warning: Don’t compare your life to his! You haven’t a chance! I looked around the room for a comparison I could live with. There. I saw him: old guy, not many teeth, not much hair, boil on his neck, nose like a conch shell; he would be my anchor. Otherwise I’d be in trouble. There was no way I could stand comparison to Oscar Hobbs, because it was a matter of public record that with women he was the luckiest son of a bitch alive. From my furtive readings of tabloid magazines I had seen his string of girlfriends- a long, beautiful, enviable string. If you saw some of the honeys he’d been intimate with, you’d eat your own arm up to the elbow. Fuck. I can’t even stand to think about it. He wasn’t a social-butterfly kind of heir apparent; you’d never see him at art openings or A-list bars or movie premieres. Oh sure, every now and then you’d see the corner of his chin in the social pages of the Sunday papers, but even from the way the chin was looking out at you, you’d just know he’d been caught unawares, like a thief surprised by a security camera in a bank. But the women! After seeing photos of them, I’d go back into my bedroom and tear at my pillow savagely. More than once I tore it to shreds, literally to shreds, and it is very hard to actually tear a pillow.