by Steve Toltz
I can’t believe Leila’s gone. She was so full of life.
Never short on gratitude. Thank you, Aldo, she’d say, for ruining Christmas, thank you for ruining my birthday, thank you for ruining a perfectly nice Sunday lunch.
She had a great sense of humor.
Whenever there was thunder, she’d look at the sky and say, “Great minds think alike.”
She adored you.
As a mother who wanted photogenic children adores a moderately handsome son.
You were always embarrassed by her.
On public transport she spoke like loudspeakers! I remember when I was a child and she asked me to sing a little number for dinner guests, then turned to them and said I had a voice like the castrato Farinelli. And God, the nose she had for magazines hidden under mattresses. In those pre-internet days, her intuition had compass-needle accuracy, always pointing due porn.
I remember her being a very together lady.
That was a front, for visitors. In truth, she hardwired me for panic attacks, by example. Regarding suffering, she really set the tone.
You mean her death? Was it bad?
That depends. Are impacted bowels bad? Where do you come down on septicemia and gangrene?
Jesus Christ.
She had to grapple with her complex reactions to the realization of her worst fears, poor thing. The triumph of having predicted the worst-case scenario vs. the horror of experiencing it. She had her fucking legs amputated, Liam.
Oh Jesus! Where did she die?
Hospice. With a violent lemon odor and obligatory death cat. That final visit the nurse said to me, “The body knows how to die, let the body do its thing,” which I thought made sense, and when I went in she was lying peacefully, dying on her left side. She always had the outward appearance of indifference, which I suspect is the real secret to longevity. That or a genuine desire to die. I made a timid effort to wake her. How was I going to talk to her about the gangrene? She opened her eyes. I said, “What have you got there, soldier—trenchfoot?” She turned her head, not because she couldn’t look me in the eye, but so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye.
Considerate. Did you say everything you wanted to say?
What could I say? What could I ask? What did I want to know about her, anyway? Why exactly she and I seemed to be more afraid than other people? It was always difficult to talk casually to her because her anxiety prevented it, her judgmental heart prevented it, and now her pain prevented it. “Aldo. We’re the last ones left,” she said, looking genuinely heartbroken. “So what?” I said. “The very idea almost makes me want to murder us both on the spot.” She managed a laugh—she knew I was merely parodying my old heartlessness. “Besides, I always suspected you were secretly pleased to have outlived your family. In fact,” I said, “I’m the only thing standing in the way of a complete sweep, and we both know it.” She waved her hand at me. Every family has a private language. Ours was mainly gestural. Questions bubbled up, mainly about Veronica, but I couldn’t articulate them. The next twenty hours were atrocious. Leila never stopped talking about how she never got to do that European tour of death camps; she’d hallucinate old friends; I moved her from lying to sitting to lying. Even the morphine drip seemed insufficient to diminish her agony. In the end, she died when I was out getting drive-thru McDonald’s. I missed the moment, but you know who didn’t? That fucking white-haired priest, remember him, Liam?
Father Charlie?
He also showed up uninvited and unscheduled at her mostly secular funeral service, and spoke about the waves of bad luck that had broken against her. Henry’s death. Veronica’s death. And the final insult of losing her house due to her son’s financial misdeeds. Then the old cunt read a psalm, called her “a deep believer now resting in heaven.” That shit me. I took to the lectern to rebut. Thanked him for so deftly explaining how she had been confiscated by God into his kingdom, where I imagined her talking all throughout orientation and lurking creepily around the apostles’ dressing rooms. I said, “We are here today to honor a woman who once took up a whole two-seater couch but will soon fit in an overhead compartment on any domestic commercial flight. Leila Benjamin, a voice-over actress who after my father’s death never lost her unbecoming face of perpetual sorrow, and basically spent the rest of her life leaning on God and searching for codependents and working on her résumé and striking up curious friendships with predators of the cloth—an especially qualified congregant, having lost a husband and child, she had the smell of Job on her, poor dear.”
It would have been better to watch you without sound.
“Some of you think I killed her with my demoralizing business snafus. Rest assured, I will avenge her death by dying myself one day, maybe sooner than you think.” Blah blah blah. Then I said something about how she never stopped moisturizing her hands and loved salad bars and kept Kleenex in a shoulder holster and had a hug Veronica and I used to call “the third rail,” and how when she was fifty-five she went out and bought black dye for her hair. I asked her why and she said, I think I’m going prematurely gray. Premature, at fifty-five! She was a woman in denial. Then I improvised the poem I promised myself I would write as a tribute to her love of poetry.
I remember. Leila read poems to you after every dinner.
And before every bedtime right into late adolescence! Though it was more Veronica’s thing; she was the poet of the family. Leila always force-fed us French and Spanish poets. Apollinaire. Valéry. Reverdy. Breton. Cernuda. Lorca. Éluard. Jiménez. Hernández.
Let’s hear yours.
“Mother. My mother. A monument that stood / for seventy-two winters before sliding / into the sea. Her face reflected / in her three-sided bathroom mirror, like a Bacon / triptych. She disapproved by stealth. Mouthed / her silences. Captained a family that went / down. Could fashion a crown of thorns out of any / topic. Attentive grudge holder. Bestial temper. Own worst / frenemy. Shut-ins who live in glass houses / shouldn’t.” That was it.
Shouldn’t what?
Live in glass houses. Clearly, I didn’t know what the fuck I was saying!
Do you want to take a minute?
I have something in my eye.
They’re called tears, Aldo.
Liam, it’s just me now.
You still have a ton of relatives, don’t you?
No.
On your father’s side.
Fuck those cunts.
So you’re an orphan. Welcome to the club. You’re almost forty.
No parents, no brothers or sisters, no children. Imagine, to never be able to have another incestuous thought!
Aldo, you realize you could easily fall into homelessness? You’ve the three magical ingredients: mental problems, terrible financial debt, and zero support network. Add alcohol to this mix and you might vanish in the blink of an eye. Well, I want you to know you still have me. Remember what Aristotle said? Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Yes, but that was in an epoch when all other goods meant a clay pot and some terra-cotta roof tiles.
Let’s get back to the reason you’re here.
Did I mention who I saw, as I was up there on the podium, in the back row sandwiched between manicurists of the deceased?
Stella was there?
And so pregnant, standing in a way that was sexy but I knew was bad for her hip. On catching her sympathetic look my heart went out to myself in the worst way. I thought: If only we could fuck shyly again! I hurried through my eulogy and practically trampled the secondhand coffin to make it over to her. She seemed to be aging at half-speed and was a tumult of familiar odors—jasmine and freshly spilled vanilla milk shake and wax bendy straws. “I’m so sorry; I loved your mother. Let’s go outside and I’ll watch you have a cigarette in memoriam,” she said, reminiscing on Leila’s two-pack-a-day habit, and about how an hour after her last cigarette she would burp up smoke trapped in her lungs. We went outside where the traffic moved in fits and start
s as if grazing on the dull surface of the road, and as my mind stumbled over thoughts, Stella placed her hand on my shoulder. It is tiresome to find even compassion erotic. I said, “I guess I should wish you luck for your caesar.” Now we plunged into the vast unspoken reservoir of old pain. The number of people we were mourning doubled, and to prevent the descent of another curtain of awkward silence, she suddenly snapped, “What the fuck happened at the Railway Hotel? My uncle said you just stopped turning up.”
She was annoyed at you.
She was annoyed at my having squandered the opportunity she’d laid out for me. Like most people, Stella wanted lavish praise for tiny gestures of ordinary kindness, just as she expected to be rewarded daily for possessing common sense. I thought: She’d accept a kiss if I forced her, then wipe it off on the way home, so what would be the point? As if reading my mind, she gave me a look of pained uncertainty and I told her Leila was to be buried between Henry and Veronica, a little family reunion in a space I’d gotten her at Waverley Cemetery. It was her favorite. “Waverley’s everyone’s favorite,” Stella said, which is true. It’s a hell of a cemetery. With nothing left for us to say to each other, she swiveled on her heels and waddled away.
So this was the last time you saw Stella before you tried to kill her baby?
I can’t believe you just said that to me.
Aldo, we need to get there. How did you know she was having a caesarean?
I assumed that no doctor, in light of her past history, would allow a let’s-just-see-what-happens birth plan. I called a certified pediatric emergency nurse I knew, who had friends at the Royal Hospital for Women, who found out on the sly that Stella had a C-section booked for April twentieth.
Why was it so important for you to see the child that is not yours?
Because I love her. Because the world is round. Because of the wonderful things she does. Because, because, because, because, because.
Because?
If she loses this second child then perhaps having lost the first was her fate and not mine.
So on the morning of April twentieth you—
Wait up. Where’s the fire? A person can’t take his own life without tying up loose ends, can he? My original intention was to take revenge, make amends, confront ghosts, and settle scores, but I couldn’t be bothered with all that so I focused on one thing: apologies. I wanted to say sorry. So for a whole week I entered the houses of old friends and associates and colleagues and acquaintances in tears and left in tears and admittedly didn’t utter a comprehensible word in between.
I’m glad I didn’t answer the door.
My farewell was always “see you later.” To say “see you soon” felt like I was sentencing that person to death.
What did you apologize for?
Everything, everything.
What everything?
Everything! I said sorry for ruining your experience of high school; sorry for threatening to fuck you with a monkey’s thighbone; sorry for pretending not to see that rainbow that time; sorry for making fun of your grandfather’s war record; sorry for asking if your new girlfriend had bird-headed dwarfism; sorry for saying you died in childbirth; sorry for boring you into the arms of death with Stella-related issues; sorry for saying “I’ve a thought,” then waiting for you to ask me what it was; sorry for not getting to know your children; sorry for summarizing your problems back to you with a smirk; sorry for telling everybody your mantra; sorry for purposefully speaking slowly to prolong the conversation because I was afraid to go home alone; sorry for feigning nonjudgment when I was judging you like crazy; sorry that I accepted your compliment about being a good listener when I was leveraging the severity of your many gag-inducing deficits to persuade you to partake in my schemes; sorry for abusing my knowledge of your weaknesses and habits and sad interpersonal relationships to get you to lend me money; sorry for making informal psychological assessments in brief psychodynamic therapy sessions you weren’t aware of having; sorry for looking into your bereaved or incest-surviving or recovering-alcoholic or histrionically emoting or chronically fatigued or prescription-medication-abusing faces and comprehending you for my own ends; sorry for using you instead of helping you understand your true value, for not pointing out you were sixes stalking eights, or sevens who were once eights while your partners had ascended to nines; sorry I never really helped all you uneducated adults who somehow managed to partner up, procreate, and sustain full work lives with no apparent native language whatsoever and who for the most part test nothing you say against reality and boast that “what you see is what you get,” mistaking it for a positive trait; sorry for stifling raucous laughter and sending you back to your abused families with your firm belief in your own virtue and human goodness intact; I’m sorry for my fluency in bullshit; I’m sorry for you well-thumbed open books who have no idea whatsoever that you’ve had acute depression for thirty years; I’m sorry for flattering you even when it was not in your long-term interest; I’m sorry for allowing myself to be treated like a human security blanket, for forcing confessions through the sinister use of awkward silences, for purposefully not shedding light on your perceptual biases that even blind Freddy could see, for using your personality disorders to my advantage; I’m sorry for sitting back and letting you demonize yourself while I reaped your gratitude and ministered to your agonized souls with a prospectus or bank account number.
How did that go down?
My most resonating indiscretions had all been financial. I came offering love and asking forgiveness, but in the end they just wanted their money back.
So then it was April twentieth and you went to the hosp—
NOT YET. First I had to write the perfect good-bye to pin to my body and take to the final curtain. I remember the night of the nineteenth sitting at the window in my shitty apartment like a fixed idea, thinking how what I could have been I never was, and what I used to be I wasn’t really anyway. It was dark outside; there was only a small and puny moon, just an overblown star really, that gave no light to speak of. I could just make out the silent trees moving in the night and the empty kindergarten below, which had gotten me arrested one summer morning for standing naked in my own kitchen. I opened the sliding doors and stepped onto the balcony. At one end of the street a young man was breaking into a car. At the other, a kid throwing a brick through a phone booth. What an unfriendly society, I thought, even our criminals—
Are too antisocial to form gangs.
Are we finishing each other’s confessions now?
Is that what this is? A confession?
The moon looked mean now, full of cold rage. I went back inside and opened the fridge and stared at the food rotting in shopping bags before returning to the desk, to the note. Dear World, I wrote, I am not one of those people whose greatest fear in life is being chased down a long corridor by their unrealized potential; rather, mine is of an intruder breaking into the apartment while I am in the shower.
That’s the dumbest suicide note I ever heard.
No shit. I was way off point. I tried again and wrote, To all of you who stand poised halfway up the so-called back stairs to liberty but cannot move up nor retreat, I dedicate this suicide note, which, if you are reading it, means I have been murdered—if I have any self-respect—by my own hand.
Pretentious.
Agreed. I couldn’t get it right. The neighbors above were doing their nightly dragging of furniture across the floor while twisting a cat’s ears, or something like that, making noises so sudden and random you couldn’t brace yourself against them, but so regular you anticipated them at all the wrong moments. I switched off all the lights, turned off the clocks, the TV, the stereo, unplugged the microwave and the fridge—anything with an electric hum or a blinking red light. Still, true darkness and total silence were impossible to achieve. The sound of moaning came through the walls. I rubbed my bruised chin that still ached from the previous week when I’d discovered firsthand the perils of asking the neighbors to keep their po
rn down. I wrote, There’s nothing I would do again the same, and if given the opportunity, I would decline the opportunity.
Not great.
But not terrible.
So THEN you went to the hospital and—
Not quite. Before my final breath, there was one essential task I had to attend to.
Jesus Christ. What was that?
Liam, I don’t know about you, but I am just plain furious that I never ever grew out of the adolescent male mind-set. You know, that if your only tool is a penis, every problem looks like a vagina.
Desire that feels like starvation, I know.
And even when getting it, I was fed up by the act itself: irritated by the unfalsifiable nature of women’s orgasms, sick of the logistical nightmare of craving personal space during intercourse, frustrated at needing fellatio to be silent but too timid to ask the girl to keep the sucking noises down.
So you went out to get lucky?
The Bat & Ball & Chain.
Where’s that?
Near Central. It’s just your standard carcass of an old hotel. A dozen poker machines, a squalid chamber of doorless toilets, an undersized pool table beside a dance floor, dozens of small tables and chairs filled by men watching women watching men watching television. Normally I go an hour before closing, as prey. Timing is crucial: too early and the predators still have plenty of time to find someone better-looking than you; too late, they aren’t in the mood anymore. I drank the first beer quickly, contemplating the unusual paradox. How do you sell yourself when you’re the salesman and the product?