by Steve Toltz
—I need to talk to you.
—That’s somewhat anachronistic, no? Oh well, I suppose you’d best come on in then.
Stepping inside, I was immediately hit by the low energy and ramshackle seediness of the place: sticky tape over the light switches, stained carpets, mismatched lampshades, and so many kitty litters you could taste the toxoplasmosis. Stuck up on the walls were not-good drawings, dire paintings and wonky sculptures that I realized were artworks dedicated to him by students. I told him I’d found Mimi Underwood.
—Did you indeed? Is photography still her passion?
When we were deciding who should do the hands-on blackmailing, Mimi had frozen up and shouted, I can’t go! I don’t ever want to see Angus again.
Morrell motioned for me to take a seat. I was thinking of the way she said his name, Angus, when I removed an aggravated ginger cat and lowered myself into a brown leather easy chair; it groaned under my weight. I smiled toothily, belligerently, godlessly. Nothing felt right.
—What about that girl of yours, that singer?
—I can’t believe you remember her. She didn’t even go to our school.
—She sang a song for you, didn’t she? In protest. A song of love. I do remember that, of course. Wait. The girl she’d taken ketamine / And fingered Aldo Benjamin. Priceless!
—We’re divorced.
—Sorry. But. Well done also. You know what I mean. A middle-aged divorcé is radically less creepy than a middle-aged bachelor. God, I remember how deeply in love she was with you. What was her name?
—Stella.
—Stella. That’s right. In one’s youth, females fall in love with you for no reason whatsoever. It never happens again. After adolescence, they are scrupulous in needing reasons. Often, let’s be honest, financial.
—Speaking of which, we need money.
—You and Stella?
—Me and Mimi.
—You and Mimi? How do you mean? You’re a we?
—She won’t tell anyone that you had sex with her when she was a minor, if you pay up.
He took a sharp, emphatic breath. Sweat stained his shirt under the arms and across his chest.
—But Aldo, he said sadly.
I felt like an explorer in a new land coughing in the faces of the indigenous population. I was doing something irreparable to him. I could see it in his eyes. It was all happening in front of me. I tried an appeasing grin and his eyes widened, as if afraid to miss anything. He was practically throbbing like an engine in his reclining armchair.
—Just ten thousand a month. For six months. Or sixty thousand all at once. Whichever is more convenient. And you won’t hear from us again.
I slowly rose to my feet. The cat scarcely looked at me.
—How much did you say you want?
I sat and repeated the whole thing. Morrell picked an ice cube out of his glass and threw it—it hit me on the cheek. The second bounced off my chin.
—Down they forgot as up they grew.
—What was that?
—E. E. Cummings, he said, and threw another ice cube, this one landing in my eye. I decided to sit it out and remained in the chair as he pelted ice cubes at my face and head.
—Do you remember the day we met? he asked.
—Was it in class?
—I think it was about the middle of the year. I was smoking a cigarette outside the staff room when I heard the sound of coughing and turned to see you standing there. It must have been your first day after transferring from another school, because you were in a different uniform. You asked me if I would put out my cigarette. Of course, I could have simply refused or moved away, I was outside after all, and a bloody teacher besides. Nevertheless, I wearily extinguished it under my shoe and tossed the butt in the bin. You thanked me for putting it out, but not a moment later fetched a packet of cigarettes from your own pocket and lit one up yourself! I remember gazing at you in bewilderment before you turned to me and said, Sorry, sir, I just don’t like your brand.
I slid the paper across the table.
—Here are the bank account details. Just a simple transfer.
—Later I could see the funny side of it. At the time, though, as you sauntered across the yard, I asked the biology teacher, Who’s that prick? I see you met our new student, she said. He’s going to cause some trouble, and by that she meant that you were so striking, she could almost hear the popping of hymens.
I got to my feet and an ice cube hit me in the chest. A nebulous cloud of guilt swept over me.
—I’ll let myself out, I said, and as I stepped onto the front porch, the door slammed behind me, marking another blow to the prospect of ever liking or respecting myself again.
XIX
In the hammock, the ropes straining under our combined weight, laptop between us, we refreshed my bank account page every few minutes, hoping for the electronic transfer of funds. Clouds skipped by and the cold winter sun failed to warm our bones as we listened to the waves, listened for a siren, and refreshed the page again. By late afternoon the money was still not in the account. It started to rain and we moved inside. The storms were a gift; they broke across the sky. I camouflaged my body with hers. All I ever wanted was a succubus to possess me, I thought afterward, as we lay on our backs gazing at each other in the mirrored ceiling.
Mimi was in the shower when her mobile phone rang on the bedside table. I answered it.
—Who’s this? a voice asked. Hello? Hello?
At first I feared it was the police but then laughed at myself—the police don’t ordinarily call and arrest you over the phone. In any case, that hello was emanating whiffs of restrained jealousy. Holy hell: This was him. Elliot Grass.
I tried to conjure the face of this panicky acrobat, this unlucky poet, and imagined him in a corridor, a long line of irate inmates scowling impatiently behind him.
—You afraid to talk to me, you piece of shit?
—Not at all.
He grunted, as if the sound of my voice had sullied his ear. I stubbed out my cigarette in a seashell. An engulfing silence followed.
—I thought I was unlucky, I said. I’ve driven drunk without headlights, on acid, in the rain during a sneezing fit, and I’ve never killed anyone.
—Mimi told me some very interesting things about you, Aldo Benjamin. You are quite the unfortunate human being.
—You’re pretty unfortunate yourself.
—You sound like a real loser.
—Is it my imagination or are higher security prisons generally more hygienic than lower security prisons?
—Maybe I’ll send someone over there to look in on you.
—I’ll put the kettle on.
—You’ve got a smart mouth.
—Go smoke your own mustache.
—How’d you know about that?
I hung up and mentally changed my diagnosis from narcissistic personality disorder to antisocial personality disorder. Mimi was still in the bathroom. When the phone rang again, I picked it up on the first ring.
—Don’t hang up, please. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be aggressive. I just want to talk to you for a minute. That OK? You seem like a smart guy. Can you talk a minute?
—What do you want?
—She answering her mail? She lets it build up.
I said that I would look into it. His breathing grew easier.
—Is she taking her medication? The red pills.
I said I thought so. I’d seen her take pills but I hadn’t noted the color.
—And how are her feet? She gets dry and cracked heels. She has to put a special cream on.
Now I wasn’t sure. Had I noticed anything ghastly about her feet? As far as I could tell, they were perfect specimens of female feet.
—And another thing. She looked a little thin last time she visited. She eating all right?
—She’s eating fine.
—And what about sex? She having orgasms? She doesn’t get them from penetration, you know. You gotta stimulate the clitoris.
I hung up again and turned her phone to silent. I went out onto the balcony where a bunch of drunk Hamlets were soliloquizing simultaneously. I downed a couple of beers, then returned to the bedroom where the deceased was half-awake, sprawled across the bed in a patch of moonlight.
—Mimi, I said, lying down beside her. Can I kiss you?
—We’re done asking permission. We can move on to a state of implied consent. I don’t even really care if you fuck me while I’m asleep. Let’s just use each other up, OK? Until there’s nothing left.
—Jesus, Mimi, I said, though the idea of tramping about in her soft hollows without her timing me was pretty appealing, so we went at it. We had been going four or five minutes when Mimi’s body slackened and harsh sounds came out of her, like a throat clearing itself over a loudspeaker. Worse, when I tried to kiss her, her mouth was off limits. Why? Was she mad? No. She was asleep!
—Hey, I said, shaking her. Why do you have to take sleeping pills every night?
—I wasn’t asleep. I was listening to every word you were saying.
—I wasn’t talking. I was making love to you.
—You told me that already.
We self-medicated our way through the following week, with much sleep-fucking and quiet lamenting and a near-constant gazing out to sea.
On the morning of the eighth day, ten thousand dollars was in my bank account, transferred from one A. Morrell. The blackmail was an unqualified success! Morrell was going to pay up, month after month. Mimi was a beautiful wreck with a grateful smile. Like seasoned criminals toasting the heist, we went out to celebrate the imminent cock-blocking of Elliot’s assailants. Over after-lunch foot massages in comfy leather recliners I noticed she was basking in the radiated calm of her own relieved heart; Mimi was helping Elliot and I was helping Mimi and all was well in the world. It was only when we arrived back at the residence that the heaviness returned, weightier than ever.
—We have a new artist staying with us, Adrian Oldenburg said. Come say hi.
Yes, bailiffs, you guessed it. Standing there, in the corner of the room, was Mr. Morrell, smiling without using his mouth. Mimi let out a small cry of distress.
—Hello, you two. I think we may have met, he cackled.
Every muscle in my face and body tightened and I stood rooted to the spot; I thought of The Fussy Corpse, and how it was to be dissatisfied with every conceivable outcome, and paralyzed by that dissatisfaction, to do nothing while the storm of indecision and impotence raged inside you.
XX
—That’s it! Good-bye Zetland High! Forever! They gave me a touching farewell, I wish you had been there. Forty-two years on the job. It was a bit emotional. Well, of course it was. I was like a stepfather to those sexting rascals. Now I’ve done it! All my life I’ve been saying to students: Esse quam videri. To be and not to seem. And I never took my own advice! But this time, when the dark allure of the paintbrush beckoned, at long last I heeded its call!
He was like a bereaved man in the first stage of grief—hysteria. Cheerfully bounding from one side of the room to the other, he was almost delirious while giving me strange, complicated looks, as if I were a disinherited son who’d come to borrow his car.
—I just booked a space at this lovely artists’ residence. I’m giving myself six months, which I believe should be plenty of time to prepare.
He grabbed me and Mimi by the hands, greeting us like his liberators.
—What month’s a good time for an exhibition? What if it rains? You know the people of Sydney won’t step outside their homes if they’re in danger of being struck by a raindrop. In any case, it should be a medium-sized space. Perfect for twelve or fourteen works. Not too many. Scarcity is value.
Mimi had gone pale. It wasn’t difficult to understand what had happened. We’d given him the transformative experience needed to spur his liberation, to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a painter.
—Yes, I want to do something like that, he said, looking at one of Maria Hamilton’s collages.
He might have been a former teacher-cum-blackmailee who had turned the tables on his tormentors, but he was also a struggling artist anxiously preparing his first solo exhibition. And he was totally exhilarated, pacing and weaving through the room, touching every fixture.
—This place is wonderful! So bohemian! Aldo! Mimi! You should come down and see my rooms! I’ve already had significant interest from several galleries—well, former students now running galleries.
Oh God, I thought. Is there anything more dangerous than a time-poor unappreciated man with a whiff of glory? Mimi and I must have both looked pretty silly, with our stillness and gaping jaws. Was he really going to live here? With his woolen vest and sinusitis? I found it difficult to orient myself all of a sudden. I looked out the glass doors at the steel-gray sky. A thick gust of wind sent the weather vane spinning. Beside me, in the face of Morrell’s uncoiled mayhem, Mimi had grown cold, her breathing unnatural, labored. He picked up a paint-splattered red bandanna from the floor and tied it around his head; he smiled vigorously at everyone, as if granting them permission to continue about their life choices. He pointed to Frank Rubinstein’s semi-abstract painting of a slice of toast.
—We need to believe that you mastered a technique and decided not to use it, not that you never had it.
He bounced from one artwork to another, almost stumbling over canvases to pick them up, holding etchings to the light, gesturing at photographs, scrutinizing sculptures. He examined Lynne Bishop’s pastel drawings of rotund babies.
—Either aim your dream at the higher end of within reason, or isolate the greatest achievement of a second-rate peer and strive for that.
I thought: Being a teacher really permeates one’s being; a fireman isn’t a fireman at dinner, whereas a teacher is a teacher at a molecular level. Still, I detected the tone of stored-up resentment from witnessing generation after generation of artists celebrated younger and younger.
Morrell was gazing at a bronze sculpture of a giant hand.
—I like this one. I feel positively menaced by it. But why are you trying so hard to be contemporary? You are alive in the present. It doesn’t matter what you do. You are contemporary.
He praised and castigated in the same breath; he knew how to humiliate and excite.
—This one. No, I am not seduced.
That’s right. I am not seduced was Morrell’s most repeated line. It had a catchphrase quality to it and we loved to hear him say it.
—I can’t believe I ever gave these up, he said, lighting another cigarette. Now he stood at the glass doors on tiptoes, as if trying to make out the semi-naked women who were no more than blurs on flat sand.
—What do you think about this self-portrait? Louise Bozowic asked, holding up a square acrylic painting.
—Either learn to paint hair or learn to paint hats.
Louise wrote that down. The swiftness with which the artists took to Morrell was crazy. They lined up to show him their woodcuts and slide projects and reverse-glass paintings and graph-paper sketches. Maybe it was their sensitivity to criticism and their greater sensitivity to praise that made them feel so flattered; he critiqued in one breath and asked their advice on his upcoming show in the next; he was both mentor and student. He linked arms with whomever he was talking to. Forty years of never being able to touch the people he taught; now he touched everybody, while seemingly determined to expel those four decades of acquired wisdom in a single night.
—Stop trying to stop being derivative.
—Don’t let your palette tell you what to do.
—If you can’t be great, be vague. If they don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, they can’t see that you haven’t succeeded in achieving it.
Morrell shouted across the room at me.
—Hey, I sold my home! You’ve been there, Benjamin, it was no sort of place at all. That pathetic container I lived in for thirty-six years, that I bought for sixty-five thousand in 1977
, I sold for one point three million. Bam! Just like that! My neighbor had wanted me to sell for years so he could extend his hideous compound!
Morrell’s energized, meth-like high had no foreseeable comedown.
—Aldo, Mimi whispered, what are we going to do? She wasn’t crying, but her voice was full of tears. Morrell bounded over and leaned between us.
—Don’t look so frightened, girl. I will still pay your ten thousand a month.
—In return for what? I asked.
—Don’t mumble, Benjamin.
I learned from Dee Franklin that he had rented two of the interconnecting rooms down below, that he’d come in with a handful of cash and bargained Casey Huntington for the biggest space in the residency, adjacent to the other biggest space in the residency in which he intended to stretch his 2-meter x 2-meter canvases.
—This way, girl.
I whipped my head around to see Morrell coaxing Mimi downstairs for a private tour of his new paintbrushes. I made a move to follow, but Mimi shot me a sharp look that made me feel like I had confessed to a crime too late, after an innocent man had already been executed.
XXI
Through a crack in the door, I could see Morrell on his knees undoing Mimi’s shoelaces and talking about the “impersonal yet melancholy” photographs in The Fussy Corpse. I went back to Mimi’s bedroom and tried to draw a permanent veil over my heart. Morrell had made the whole residence feel like a sleazy motel, and she was acquiescing in some kind of trance, as if he was pressing on an old injury from which she’d never recovered, or more likely, yes, instead of our silence—our initial offer—her actual body was now the goods demanded by Morrell in exchange for his ten thousand a month. Blackmailed by the blackmailee! Talk about a backfire! I threw a pillow across the room and gazed out the window. The moon looked wan and weak from not having lately been worshipped.
Around midnight her phone vibrated on the nightstand.
—I’m not in the mood tonight, I said.
—What are we going to do about her old high school teacher?
—How do you know about that?