Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  This I knew. One night Stella had pretended to talk in her sleep in order to confess to Aldo that she was in love with another man. “Aldo, Aldo, I’ve met someone,” she murmured. She had hoped, he supposed, that he would feel as though she had left herself ajar and he could peek in when her mind was turned. She murmured, “Slept with him.” And, “Leaving you.”

  At Luna Park Aldo ceremoniously forgave her, but it was irrelevant. Stella dropped the bombshell about her upcoming nuptials to Craig. This hit him hard. They stood like two mutes; he felt like a removed tumor that was trying to graft itself back on. He yelled into her eyes and nose—fuck you, you fucking fuck—and stormed off and wound up between the pavilion wall and the back of the Rotor, a narrow corridor that smelled of popcorn and urinary tract infections, where he stood sobbing, for just a couple of minutes, he said, when two lean, muscular teenagers, one in oversized sunglasses, or maybe safety goggles, put him in a headlock and escorted him at knifepoint to an ATM where they forced him to withdraw, in their words, “the maximum daily amount.”

  I laughed at the cold precision of that term. “What then?”

  Stepping up to the bank machine, Aldo whispered to himself not to forget his PIN, and promptly forgot his PIN. The teenagers’ eyelids twitched erratically and their pupils were dilated; their brownish teeth and broken skin suggested methamphetamines, Aldo noted, and they looked to be no strangers to violence, nor to fault-finding parents, low grades, truancy, nil self-esteem, and a dissociative loss of control, and Aldo thought about how stabbing was extremely high on his list of fears—to be slashed, while dangerous to muscle, would be bearable, a wound he imagined to be hot and biting yet survivable—but stabbing! That conjured up fatal thrust wounds and vascular organ damage and unimaginably nightmarish punctured-lung/asphyxiation scenarios, even less pleasant than a bullet in the stomach. (“How many movie villains have told me how long it takes to die from a gut wound?” he asked me.) “Put in your fucking PIN,” the shorter teenager shouted, and in reaction to his mind’s utter blankness Aldo was now wearing a smile that may have been misconstrued as sardonic or mocking. There was a tense silence, and other than stare into the unappeasable drug-fucked faces of youth and say he had a low tolerance for foreign metals, what else could he do? (“Besides, I think sluggishly on my feet,” Aldo admitted.) At this point, he recalled, the teenager raised his knife hand in a tight arc and brought it down at a diagonal rush, and Aldo thought: Slashed it is! with actual relief as he went down on his knees and felt weirdly vindicated that he had accurately deduced the (hot, biting) sensation before falling face-first onto the hard concrete, which, on his cheek, was sun-warmed and gravelly. A thirteen-year-old couple who had to take out retainers to kiss spotted him and called for help, and he was tended to by the skeleton staff of Luna Park’s First Aid Station, interviewed by security personnel, and driven to the police station where he was offered instant coffee and seated opposite a sketch artist, a uniformed man so rigid and stony, Aldo said, he looked like “he would have to be loved intravenously.”

  “That would be Constable Weir,” I said.

  It was then, Aldo continued, that it occurred to him, possibly out of an overwhelming sense of the futility of the exercise, or the simple unlikelihood of justice, how amusing it might be to describe his own face.

  “You did what?”

  There followed an intense marathon as Aldo recalled his precise features, based on photographs and countless hours staring unhappily into mirrors, and described himself with narcissistic intensity and an almost hallucinatory level of concentrated precision (lightly copper complexion, slightly acned with multiple crosswise scars; clenched, rounded jaw; chestnut-brown hair thinning to a single vertical dagger; narrow facial shape with high forehead and horizontal wrinkles; bushy eyebrows and blue deep-set eyes with small irises; off-white teeth, medium-sized chiseled nose with pronounced nasal wings; low cheekbones; large earlobes; downturned lips, with tendency to lower-lip pout and a pouching of the skin below the lip corners, etc.). Constable Weir drew and Aldo examined and corrected and Constable Weir—despite the silently dawning realization of the farce—adjusted and redrew and grew weary of their collaboration but on the whole was patient, exact, determined not to fail him. After two and three-quarter industrious hours and now with barely restrained fury, Constable Weir printed and slid the image across the desk. Aldo looked at it impassively; he felt like the exact sum of his parts, no more, no less.

  Is this him? Constable Weir asked.

  Yes, Aldo said. That’s the bastard.

  • • •

  An hour later we were in the Hollywood Hotel on Foster Street, talking about violent horror movies, the housing market, and our sex obsessions—torture porn, real estate porn, and porn porn—before Aldo began to ask me questions about Tess and our marital state; he was doing his amateur psychologist bit that he’d first developed to soften potential investors. I’d seen it a bazillion times. Using tactics gained from years of compulsively reading psychology, and wielding concepts that I’m not entirely certain he had a complete or even rudimentary grasp of, he would lean into someone’s face and gently tug with his hypnotic, sibilant voice; he screwed up his eyes as if trying to see them through the fog of their complicated insecurities, which makes a person, I’ve noticed, strain to be clearer. Then he would lean back as if to give the subject space to knock down their own fortifications. He was pretty good at conferring the illusion of long-term friendship on a stranger, the way his gaze fixed on their pupils with such intensity. He even did this with me; I couldn’t help feeling flattered by both his focus and what his focus illuminated: the subtle complexity of my own psyche.

  “This isn’t the life I planned for myself, but maybe that’s what I like about it,” I lied. But something about Aldo’s single follow-up question, asked in a steady, uninflected voice (“How does Tess feel about your inability to complete a single work of writing?”), had me tearily confessing how her body used to be a standing invitation but now she had stopped allowing me to touch her breasts, which basically made them like fake pockets on a designer jacket, and how sometimes when she looked at me I felt I was being frowned upon by a tribe of elders, and how this marriage had become a bad trip I was going to have to ride out if I wanted to continue living with my daughter.

  The problem perhaps was that Tess had undergone an unexpected blossoming of mind and spirit; the failed actress, ex-bartending punk, and occasional shoplifter that I married had now earned a social science degree and found a job with the office of the Public Guardian—essentially as a substitute decision-maker for people deemed to have insufficient cognitive capacity to make their own. All her clients had some kind of disability—acquired brain injury, drug- or alcohol-related memory impairment, intellectual dysfunction—and she made daily decisions about where they were to live, shifting dementia patients out of squalor into aged-care facilities, even deciding what medical treatment they should receive, most recently giving consent to an amputation for a retired bus driver who had refused it. Her passion for social work grew in direct proportion to my ambivalence for policing. In her presence I felt my deficiencies throb. Especially in the wake of that last, disastrous novel, my fizzled writing career was the elephant in every room of the house. Sure, I still had promise, but less of it, and more dribbled away each year. It seemed obvious that I should be doing the heavy lifting of Sonja rearing while Tess was allowed to flourish at her career, but I hadn’t given in to her on that issue, and now we fought all the time, about whose parents were better grandparents to Sonja, about how best to discipline this fierce little wind of a girl, about who deserved the night out when babysitters were scarce, about anything. Tess was gnawing at the ties that bound us, and in terms of love, I felt like I was campaigning for my re-election, on the verge of being voted out by my single constituent, voted out of her heart by her head.

  Aldo sipped his beer without taking his eyes off me. The lurking bartender took our empties and replaced them wit
h fresh ones. I explained, almost sobbing now, that at first when I left for work, Tess would say, in a trembling voice, “Don’t get shot,” but as the years went by, that phrase had become imbued with its opposite meaning.

  Aldo swished beer around his mouth before swallowing. He said, “Remembering the past is like watching a Hollywood movie, in that you never see the characters go to the toilet.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He tore his coaster into little paper crumbs—and trotted out a few trenchant observations, “You’re a frustrated artist in search of a consoling diagnosis, and it’s interesting that the debilitating perfectionism that has torpedoed your professional writing career is completely absent in your relationship, which you expect to work entirely without your effort, as if a relationship has not only its own intelligence but its own will to live. Guess what, Liam? It doesn’t.” He then said that a person who won’t abide reminiscence is someone who hates the present, and he also thought it was interesting I hadn’t mentioned my fear that Tess had already found someone else (he was spot on—I suspected she had grown unreasonably close to the coworker in the fawn Windbreaker who dropped her home one time); he told me, in a tone I found uncharacteristically condescending, that “what you experience as emotional pain is only your reaction to the circumstance and you therefore bear a degree of responsibility for it.” When I asked, “Has that comment ever actually helped anyone?” it was not clear by his shrug that it had.

  Aldo, I could see, was in crisis mode himself; he was devastated by the shocking news of the wedding, and it was at long last dawning on him that he and Stella would never get back together, yet because his love had not diminished in any form, and was so thoroughly deflected by its intended recipient, it was in danger of growing into a kind of hate and he’d have no choice but to dissociate from his own heart, because loving her less “wasn’t even a fucking option. And if you say, ‘Don’t worry you’ll meet someone else,’ ” he warned quickly, “I’ll fucking punch you in the throat.” I said nothing. Slumped on our stools, taking in the beer-armpit-scented air, we were mutually inconsolable about our love situations. We were friends who now had one extra thing in common: We were both at the end of our rope. How did we get there so quickly? We’d not yet hit middle age. Why did we get such short ropes? Maybe fixating on our unachievable goals (Aldo’s businesses, my writing) had somehow made us bystanders in our own love lives. Were we like hunter-gatherers returning to the cave each night empty-handed? Is that why our womenfolk had sought out better offers? While we were weeping about our unreturned love, the doors swung open and two young women in tight T-shirts and short shorts walked in flanking a breathtaking redhead, and though we both straightened our postures and endeavored to exude virility, it didn’t lessen our losses. Aldo turned to me, and when he mimed a face contorted in lust he managed to pretty accurately express the oppressive helplessness of it; the last thing he wanted in this depressing moment was to be sexually aroused—it was a genuine nuisance.

  The crowd thinned and the pub closed and we stood outside as a three-a.m. wind nearly took our heads off, like some curfew-enforcing act of God. Beside us, a handful of stragglers were trying to hail taxis that had just ended their shifts, the drivers refusing passengers who didn’t live on their own exact street.

  “OK then, I guess I’ll see you later,” Aldo said.

  “OK then,” I said.

  We loved each other but good-byes were stubbornly awkward; I never really understood why; perhaps they were an expression of the disappointment of something left unsaid. No matter how open and honest we were, no matter how much we unburdened ourselves and admitted shameful secrets never before uttered aloud, we couldn’t seem to depart fully satisfied with the transaction. We stood another long moment. I thought about Aldo’s chronic fear of being alone. A frail half smile sat weirdly in his otherwise frowning face. He looked like he could break into laughter or tears.

  “Do you remember when Stella couldn’t go a full sixty seconds without touching me in some way?”

  “It was annoying.”

  “She loved my smell.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  The wind abated and we shivered in the cold night’s stillness, as Aldo launched into an unwelcome rambling monologue, which it was much too late in the evening for, about how Stella’s kisses had felt one minute like she was violently cauterizing a wound, and the next like a feather-light brush of the lips that drove him crazy, and how she’d never once belittled him, except of course with her own merits and abilities, and now he had this horrible feeling that something bad was going to happen to him and he wouldn’t be able to even get her on the phone. And did he mention that she was going to have a Buddhist wedding, though neither she nor Craig were strictly Buddhists? I smiled silently but it wasn’t my real smile and he knew it.

  “Anyway,” he said, with a tinge of self-disgust, “I’m off!” We gave each other a sad hug and an extra squeeze as our mutual expression of regret. Aldo’s keys jingled in his pocket, but I knew he never drunk-drove because of his fear of committing vehicular manslaughter. He set off at a dawdle and when he disappeared around the corner, leaving me in the empty street, I was struck with an overwhelming dread. Truth was, ever since high school, Stella had been the magnet that drew Aldo back to earth after he flew off onto dangerous tangents. In my case, when I’m feeling murderous and unhinged, it’s anchoring to come home and see Tess and Sonja in a standoff or a cuddlefest or painting the toenails of our claw-footed bathtub. Aldo was going home every night as if he was a contaminated sample, to an apartment empty but for ferocious silences and his own potbellied shadow, with no one to refill the liquid soap dispenser or quiet his alarmist tendencies or take minutes or second motions or bounce ideas off or egg him on or talk him down—and until he was ready for bed he would often sit in his Poäng birch-veneer Ikea armchair for hours, feeling like an unaccompanied minor on a long-haul flight.

  IV

  Six months after that, my phone rang just as a young shoplifter, in an attempt to extricate himself from my handcuffs, had gotten in a tangle in my backseat while a proliferation of nosy citizens had risen in a unified spasm and were circling me with their phone cameras and mortal hatred. It was Stella on the line, her voice dripping with the old dislike, as if she were gazing ruefully at a photograph of me as she spoke. Aldo had assaulted her at the wedding, she said, before drinking himself into a coma.

  I was speechless. It was entirely plausible that Aldo might try drinking himself to death at her ceremony simply to cast a black omen over her marriage, but would he have physically assaulted her? True, Aldo was already a well-known parasite and failure, had declared multiple bankruptcies, and was the kind of man you might come across sharing cigarettes in an alleyway with a masturbating hobo, but he certainly wasn’t violent.

  “Craig thinks I should take out an AVO,” she said, as if Aldo were one of those acid-throwing jealous exes who seek to disfigure what they cannot have.

  “You really think that’s necessary?” I asked.

  “Listen to me very carefully, Liam,” she said, in a flat, unfocused voice—I suspected she was browsing the internet while talking to me—“You’re his friend. You deal with him,” and hung up. So what could I do but ride grudgingly to the rescue once more? I opened the car door and liberated the shoplifter from the handcuffs and took a stance that gave the crowd just the slightest hint of imminent arrests. In return, they gave me mock salutes and heil Hitlers. It was infuriating, but I couldn’t give them the finger if I didn’t want to see it on YouTube.

  In the hospital room, Aldo lay flat on his back in perfect stillness, sheets firmly tucked to his chin as if the person who’d made the bed was unaware he was still in it. He looked full of oversized fears, like a ship in a bottle, in that you wondered how he squeezed them all in there. The room was suffused with a buttery light. Leaning against the window alcove, transfixed by his phone, was a short, middle-aged man with a boyish
face, and on his head the answer to the age-old question of what happens to curly hair when it thins.

  “This isn’t it,” Aldo said with fragility, as if the words were on a string he could pull back into his mouth at will.

  “Good to hear,” I said.

  He meant this wasn’t the thing he wouldn’t recover from, the dividing, before-and-after event that transforms lives. I weathered the uncomfortable angle required to embrace him and noticed he was insufficiently bandaged around the neck, so that the edges of nasty lacerations were visible.

  “I fell on a fork,” he said.

  “Cake fork nicked his jugular,” the small man in the corner said, laughing, without looking up. “There was a lot of blood, which didn’t make the wedding cake any more appetizing.”

  “Who has a carrot cake for their wedding anyway?” Aldo asked.

  The image of blood-soaked carrot cake floated before my eyes. “Give me the highlights.”

  Aldo made a grunting show of sitting upright. “The special day,” he said. “Let me tell you. Her celebrant looked tolerant. Too tolerant. In fact, he exuded an exasperating degree of tolerance, as if, in addition to Buddhist and Hindu weddings, he performed KKK and Taliban weddings.” The man in the corner guffawed. Aldo described the whole event: rooftop ceremony amid a shitload of tropical plants, him wedged between burly female cousins as the passive-aggressive groom and kite-strung bride lit candles and incense at the foot of a shrine to Buddha and shat something out of their mouths about the fastidious discharging of marital responsibilities. A couple of incoherent blessings later, Craig got up to say that he was compelled by the inadequacy of language to understate his feelings, then Stella’s uncle Howard made a speech that began as a nod to his hero L. Ron Hubbard but ended as a single long perverse sentence that made obscure references to a camping trip that had as its denouement an exploding toilet, while Aldo got progressively shitfaced and kissed an aunt with a face like aged pork, and at some point made an uninvited wedding toast.