by Steve Toltz
Don’t be so sure.
True. I’m always misjudging circumstances. Like the time I went for a job interview and the manager asked what would I say is my greatest asset and I answered: I can sleep anywhere!
Aldo.
Yes, Mimi?
Let’s meet.
VIII
Your Honor, it was three in the morning when we met outside the often violent Coogee Bay Hotel. The night was cold and the moon thin and transparent, just barely in the sky. I spotted her moving as if she hoped to kill something underneath her heel with every step, wearing jeans tight enough to stop circulation, and that, I gruesomely thought, would need to be cut off in an emergency. I felt like a gravedigger resting on his spade.
—Hi, she said.
—There’s nothing worse than lonely people who find each other and fail to connect, but no pressure.
With the salty wind like shadows of ghosts advancing from the sea, and the palms swaying, I took her in: The deceased was leggy and nearly as nearly beautiful as I remembered, with high, pushed-up breasts, her signature wild hair, and cannibal eyes glowing in the dark. We seemed overawed by each other and were both suffering the embarrassment of mutual attraction. Our faces were close together now, lips almost touching, but we had not yet kissed. A group of skinny men ran along the beach, the echo of their conspiratorial voices drawing us even closer together. Mimi wrapped her arms around my neck and I tasted cigarettes in her hair; we stood, cheeks together, almost-kissing in the unbroken silence for uncountable minutes. I tell you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is eerie and unbelievably erotic almost-kissing a stranger in the dark.
—What are you thinking about? the deceased asked.
—Our retirement years, how it might be lovely to pool our superannuation, move to Byron Bay, and then die within twenty-four hours of each other—one from heart failure, the other from grief.
What’s that? OK, Mr. Impatient, I’ll get to the point. And why shouldn’t I? The point is fantastic.
Rain may or may not have been falling. The deceased pressed her body heavily against mine and I could feel her silken lashes against my cheek and our faces did what faces do before we hurried back to her place to begin—as you’re so fond of saying—a sexual relationship. Is that concise enough for you? May I at least describe her residence, or would the prosecutor like the jury to have no sense of place or setting?
IX
Along a dull stretch of highway, Your Honor, north through hills and scrubland, off a desolate coastal road that winds along the cliff’s edge, there’s a narrow lane, and at the end of the lane, obscured by wild garden, stands a house hidden in the shadow of an enormous camphor tree. I stepped out of Mimi’s van into the wet morning; the earth was soft and everything shiftless and breezy. I followed the deceased through the front door of this ramshackle house into a large open room with ocean views, filled with pandemonium: There was a lanky man with shriveled arms furiously turning over couch cushions while a girl in overalls said, “Warm, warmer, now cold, colder.” A Japanese girl drawing a guy with white dreadlocks cutting his toenails; bodies strewn on mildewed furniture, heads in laps, resting on groins, the shape of multiple carcasses twisting in a single hammock; carpets stained with paint and cigarette ash; candles melted down onto wine-stained tablecloths; guitars strewn on the Ping-Pong table; street signs and broken chairs, dried paint tubes, stiff unwashed brushes, and a piano on which you knew that some son of a bitch would soon be playing “Chopsticks” or “Piano Man.” The atmosphere was vaguely thoughtless and erotic. It smelled of cats and kebabs and turpentine. I tripped over a ukulele. A laughing woman was giving a haircut to a dog with stitches in his coat, while sugared-up children ran wild around them, eating paint that most certainly contained lead. I asked, What the hell is this place? A squat? A commune? Mimi said, It’s an artists’ residency. The Hobbs Foundation. One of seventy now across Australia. Here we have mainly painters and sculptors, a couple of poets.
The children were running in circles and throwing shriveled apples from a still life.
—Is there an actual parent around here? I asked.
—Plenty of societies, like the Spartans, got by just fine raising children as a society.
—Sure, I replied tersely, if you count their decline and eventual extinction as “getting on fine.”
Each room was crammed tight with easels and canvases and paints, and smelled of human sweat. I had the impression I couldn’t brush against a curtain without contracting hepatitis C. I heard dogs barking, but that turned out to be on the stereo.
Sidebar, Your Honor: What do I know about art? I was never an artist myself, even though as a child I knew that to ask someone why they were in a bad mood when they weren’t in a bad mood would put them in a bad mood—sometimes I did that just to change the energy in a room. And then, when I was older, it was a reliable pleasure to tell a newly formed couple they looked like brother and sister, and watch the spark of sexual chemistry flare out. Of course I knew the basic archetypes: bald vigorous Spaniard type vs. tormented Dutch ear-slicing type; the rejectionphobes vs. the rejection fetishists; those who put anything they daub or scribble up for sale vs. perfectionists who warm themselves on painting bonfires. Otherwise, it was Mr. Morrell who’d taught me everything I knew to this point about art as a profession: The best artists are disillusioned by eight thirty in the morning; the only perfection possible is to never begin; without context, a high-priced and much-feted conceptual masterpiece turns back into the embalmed shark or garbage pail that it is; artistic genius is often linked with insanity only because free time is the key factor in exacerbating mental illness; most artists are easily offended, save empathy for their work, but parcel it out sparingly in their lives; they cultivate animosity toward their audience and vehement contempt for their patrons. In short, as Mr. Morrell elucidated, they are a beloved, magnificent, obstinate race of snake oil salesmen. Now that I think about it, Mr. Morrell is the reason why I’m suspicious and even fearful of artists as a species, so when Mimi made brief introductions—Everyone, this is Aldo. Aldo, this is everyone—I braced myself. Good thing I did. Hi, they said. I’m Frank Rubinstein. I’m Nick Whiticker. I’m Eve Fairbanks. I’m Dan Wethercot.
—Why is everyone telling me their full names? I asked Mimi.
—They want to see if you’ve heard of them.
The onslaught continued: I’m Maria Hamilton. I’m Tristan Conrad. I’m Louise Bozowic. I nodded with a rigid smile and eyed the males in the group. Who had fucked Mimi? Who wanted to? Who would after I left? Was the coward who plastered pornographic posters huddled among them? Now I wonder, was there a murderer among these artists? Shall we add them all, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to the list of possible suspects?
Mimi led me into her bedroom; it was like the inside of a shantytown. We kissed again, and the deceased unbuttoned my shirt and registered shock at the sight of my scarred torso.
—What the hell happened to you?
—Oh, this and that.
She ran her fingers over the faded scars, the scratches that had never healed, and the stretchy burns where I had failed to incinerate.
—Seriously, what did you do, fuck a cat-o’-nine-tails?
—Is this going to be a problem?
She undressed, and there they were—her famous nipples, her famous birthmark! She nimbly unbuckled my belt but fumbled with the buttons on my fly. I think she was used to zippers. Members of the press, going to bed with a new woman is like having to learn a whole new operating system on the first day of work with the boss breathing down your neck. You can quote me on that.
All morning we talked, about my fears of immortality, about her sad upbringing—what an interesting woman! The deceased, I learned, was born into the type of family who wore headphones at the dinner table, who lived in navy-blue jogging pants, who never had a golden age. Her alcoholic mother had four children by three different fathers; hers was a gambler who’d blow inconceivable sums on horses and onli
ne casinos. She had a bipolar brother and a sister who got hooked on dirty methamphetamines, an ice monster who became something to scare the children with. Mimi’s childhood was played out in poker-machine enclaves, racetrack bars, and heroin-injecting rooms. They lived in Randwick, almost directly across from the Prince of Wales Hospital (the proximity of which encouraged them to fall apart: more than once Mimi would plop her mother in a shopping cart they kept in the yard and wheel her over to emergency to get her stomach pumped). They took lunch in the hospital cafeteria, and got takeout coffee from the machine at reception. On birthdays they bought flowers from the hospital gift shop, and regularly purchased toiletries from the hospital pharmacy. The soundtrack of her childhood was an ambulance siren. God took unprovoked swings at them too. They dealt with high blood pressure, pacemakers, epilepsy, type 2 diabetes, and borderline personality disorders. There were accidents, brain injuries, bad-luck diseases; a severely autistic cousin lived with them for several years. And Mimi had to take care of them all. Clean. Shop. Wash. Dress. Cook. Feed. Toilet. Iron. Shave. Bathe. Change bandages. Run all over town. Lie to cops. Take orders from doctors. Appease social workers. Calm autistic cousin. Restrain bipolar brother. Sit through cold-turkey vigils with sister. Endure mother’s night terrors. Negotiate with father over finances. Tolerate her name called in impatient or solicitous voices. Hide booze. Hide smokes. Hide weed. Check oxygen tank. Lie to debt collectors. Manage welfare payments. Yell at doctor. Distribute antipsychotic medications. Accompany brother to court. Drag father home from racetrack. Drag brother out of pub brawls. Honor father’s forged checks. Pick up body of collapsed mother. Retrieve stolen items from pawnshop. Perjure herself in court. Physically lift uncle. Administer intravenous medication. Fill exhaustive shopping lists. Weather age-inappropriate cleansing of opposite-gender genitalia. Endure her name being called in choked voices. In frustrated voices. In vehement, theatrical voices. Withstand sister’s aggravated assaults. Mourn mother both alive and dead. Her family didn’t mind inconveniencing her—this was the arrangement. Life as permanent errand! That explained, she said, her ability to draw a chair close to a bed without making a noise, apply a bandage in the dark, disinfect a wound, administer a morphine drip, spot a precancerous lesion. Just as I had learned amateur psychology, she had learned amateur nursing. Where I had read the APA Dictionary of Clinical Psychology and the Handbook of Psychological Assessment, she had read the Fundamentals of Nursing and the Nursing Diagnosis Handbook. She knew how to take blood pressure. How to collect a urine sample from an unwilling donor. Dispense medication to an indisposed mouth. Maintain a patent airway during a seizure. Palpate firmly the upper right quadrant of the abdomen below the costovertebral angle.
OK, Your Honor. Etcetera. Happy?
The point being, near midday, after having fucked and talked for six straight hours we had still not slept. The sun was shining directly through her windows, so brightly we had to put on sunglasses.
—How do you feel? she asked.
—Like I’ve been shot out of a cannon into the side of a mountain.
Mimi asked me to rub suntan lotion on her back, and that was erotic enough to get us going again until sunset. When I made a move to go, her hand clutched my arm.
—Stay, she whispered.
What else could I do, Your Honor? I stayed.
X
Two glorious months! Two months of sweaty siestas on creaky daybeds, waking up to the sound of thunderstorms, of dreaming about sleeping beside the very woman I was sleeping beside. Two months without praying for the opposite of clemency, without worrying about my incalculable, inescapable tomorrows, without thinking: My kingdom for a terminus!
Sure, bailiffs, we had our petty domestic differences: The deceased liked all the windows open and I liked them closed; she put every food product in the pantry whereas I prefer the entire kitchen to be one giant refrigerator. Sure, I discovered that compliments went down badly. A comment on her beautiful eyes, for instance, revealed to her a deafening silence on the subject of her nose. And she often worked into conversation the phrase I don’t suffer fools gladly whereas I don’t generally suffer gladly the fools who say that. One thing she could not tolerate was lying in bed and not sleeping. She wanted to fall asleep at an insane speed; anything longer than instantaneous was an unacceptable torment. She took sleeping pills I’d never heard of—Lunesta, Trazodone, Ativan, Sonata, Rozerem—she combined, she alternated, but she always took something, and didn’t like it being pointed out. She was impatient, highly sensitive to criticism, intropunitive, self-critical, and had epigastric complaints she never took anything for. One particularly instructive day, she went out to the pharmacy specifically to purchase a scar-healing cream that she ministered to each of my disfigurements, perhaps to exert early control over me. Certainly her facial flushing and sweaty palms when she applied the cream was curious. I should also mention she was not just caring, but intuitive; she knew what to do if I was stricken by a headache or a fake headache or a panic attack or the fear of a panic attack.
Mornings she would attempt, despite my protestations, to tell me her dream, and she didn’t like to be looked at either; any type of gaze—human eyes, animal eyes, camera lenses—seemed to rile her DNA, which was ironic because Mimi was a starer herself and the type of person who thought it acceptable to photograph the homeless as long as it was in black and white. She had sharp hip bones and an inexhaustible amount to say on the considerable deficiencies of Sydney men, as if they were a universal experience from which one could derive universal truths, and seemed to have an endless array of past boyfriends and lovers whom she’d reminisce about postcoitally. Her interpersonal issues were unclear. With a core group of artists, she had a hot–cold relationship that was both snuggly and standoffish. I might as well do the Crown the service of naming the chief suspects.
I allege the abstract painter, Frank Rubinstein! I allege the pointillist, Nick Whiticker! I allege the sculptor, Dan Wethercot!
It was from these people, incidentally, that I learned what it really means to be an artist. Their lives made a deep impression on me, and not only because a failed entrepreneur is a loser whereas a failed artist is always an artist no matter what. Their self-esteem is high! With their paint-splattered shirts and flabby guts and joints stuck to their lower lips, they walk around like captains of industry. They smoke like they have inoperable cancers. They keep their studios like teenagers’ bedrooms, their bedrooms like crime scenes, their sinks like toxic hazards, and their kitchen walls, after cooking, like Jackson Pollocks. They gossip and offend each other and are easily offended and all their facades are in perfect working order—they have decided exactly who they are going to pretend to be and never look back. They fuck like one-man shows. They hammer, screw, nail-gun, saw, ravage canvases and each other. They drag in furniture that has been tossed onto the streets—broken-legged chairs multiply in the night. They are a frugal, crusty, sweary lot, who spurn corporate monoculture and seek corporate sponsorship. They trudge past you without a nod or smile, and swing between rivalries and factions, wondering aloud how to be controversial. Their developmental delays seem to have done their careers nothing but good. Their brains are all pleasure centers with no circumference. Pygmalionism is rife. The currency is flattery. They tell each other’s anecdotes in the first person. They spread marijuana butter on toast and brew their own beer and act twenty-two, regardless of chronological age. They work hard and they self-aggrandize hard. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, why wouldn’t you be an artist? The sleep-ins are mandatory, the work days are orgies of creative playtime, the conversations stimulating, the sexual revolutions permanent. Every night, mirthless poets and arrogant painters couple on the balcony under a moon that burns coldly in the dark sky. Every night parties bound along until the wee hours of the predawn. Nobody who does next to nothing with their lives, I learned, goes to bed before three.
It took a long time for the deceased to show me her art. One night we were in
bed, the sun had just set and a large communion wafer of a moon was already wailing on the burnished horizon. Mimi pulled out a black folder from under the bed and hesitantly presented it to me. Photographs of a man’s face before and after she slapped it; a vaguely comic series of people in trees; darkrooms and old cameras; nibbled foodstuffs in display cases; charred dolls on barbecue hot plates; winged insects drowned in toothpaste; closeups of elderly throats; miscellaneous hands and paws; blurry cityscapes; an erect penis in soft focus; an anus smoking a pipe; a vagina on a bed of lettuce. There were hundreds, all stylistically different. She had never made a single dollar out of them, supplementing her income with unskilled minimum-wage jobs, just as I had done in between disappointing business ventures and begging. In fact, as it turned out, we could track how, over the past two decades, we’d been practically chasing each other around the sewer end of the job market. (The year Mimi was telemarketing, I was washing dishes; when I was telemarketing, she was cleaning toilets, etc.) Now she was determined to make photography her profession by building her portfolio. The problem was this: she thought these photos were casualties of her intentions, unsalvageable shit that felt utterly unrepresentative of her.
—I start each new series with fresh hope, and I’m always disappointed, she said with disgust. Every approach I try, the results always let me down. What I think I see through the lens has no bearing on the printed image. What I try to capture I don’t, and sometimes it’s like I don’t have a single optical nerve connected to my brain!
As she was talking I realized: Oh, she’s leading up to something. Behind her eyes there was unmistakably an ulterior motive to this speech; her pace was slowing, and when it got down to a certain speed I knew she would ask me the question she was leading up to. Her deviousness was adorable.
—I’m not blocked, I’m gridlocked. I have been since this last series, she said, pointing to several photographs of nudes draped over water pipes.