Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Jesus Christ! Just be silent for one minute!”

When I sense someone is about to hurt me emotionally, it’s very difficult to resist the temptation to act like a five-year-old. Right then, for example, it was everything I could do to stop myself counting down the sixty seconds out loud.

“I think we need a break,” she said.

“A break meaning a lengthy pause, or a break meaning a severing?”

“I think we need to stop seeing each other.”

“Has this got something to do with my father?”

“Your father?”

“I saw you talking to him this morning after you left the hut. What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“He didn’t say nothing. The man has never said nothing in his life. Besides, you were talking to him for, like, ten minutes. Did he say something against me?”

“No- nothing. Honest.”

“Then what’s this about? Is it because I drank your tears?”

“Jasper- I’m still in love with Brian.”

I didn’t say anything. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to work that out. Or a rocket scientist. Or an Einstein. Then I thought: I don’t think brain surgeons, rocket scientists, or even Einstein are that brilliant when it comes to charting the map of human emotions. And why always brain surgeons, rocket scientists, and Einstein anyway? Why not architects or criminal lawyers? And why not, instead of Einstein, Darwin or Heinrich Böll?

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“You’re in love with your ex-boyfriend. I don’t have to be Heinrich Böll to work that out.”

“Who?”

I shook my head, stood up, and walked out of the pub. I heard her calling my name, but I didn’t turn around.

Outside, I broke into tears. What a hassle! Now I’d have to become rich and successful just so she could regret dumping me. That’s another thing to do in this short, busy life. Christ. They’re adding up.

I couldn’t believe the relationship was over. And the sex! That fortuitous conjunction of our bodies, finished! I supposed it was better this way. I really never wanted anyone to shout at me, “I gave you the best years of my life!” This way, the best years of her life were still ahead of her.

And why? Maybe she was pissed off that I had drunk her tears and was in love with her ex-boyfriend, but I knew Dad had said something that had pushed her over the edge. What had he said? What the fuck had he said? That’s it, I thought. I don’t care what he does- he can write a handbook of crime, put in a suggestion box, set a town on fire, smash up a nightclub, be interned in a mental hospital, build a labyrinth, but he absolutely cannot touch one hair on the head of my love life.

He was a stinky concentrated form of pandemonium and I would no longer let him ruin my life. If the Inferno could break up with me, I could break up with him. I don’t care what anybody says, you absolutely can break up with family.

I went home planning to gather up all the particles of energy I could muster and release them right in his fucking face!

I marched straight into his house. The lights were off. I unlocked the door and sneaked in. I heard a strange sound from his bedroom. He must be crying again. But it didn’t sound like mere crying. It sounded like sobbing. Well, so what? I hardened myself against the lure of sympathy. I went and opened the door, and what I saw was so shocking, I didn’t have the common decency to close the door. Dad was in bed with Anouk.

“Get out!” he screamed.

I just couldn’t get my head around it. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Jasper, get the fuck out of here!” Dad yelled again.

I know I should have, but my feet seemed to be as dumbfounded as my head. “What a joke!”

“Why is this a joke?” Dad asked.

“What’s she getting out of it?”

“Jasper, leave us alone!” Anouk shouted.

I stepped back out of the room and slammed the door. This was really insulting. Anouk hadn’t wanted to sleep with me and yet she had jumped into bed with my father. And ewww- with my condoms! And what was she doing with Dad when Oscar Hobbs had been trying to get into her bed? Was some pitiful soap opera going on? Dad was a man who had spent the majority of his life absent from human relationships, who finally embarked on one with his only confidant, merely to find himself as the dullest point of a love triangle where, if logic prevailed, he would lose her.

Well, this was no longer my problem.

The next morning I woke early. I decided the practical thing would be to find a room in a share house with junkies, something cheap and affordable so I wouldn’t drain my meager savings just on shelter. I answered a bunch of ads in the newspaper. There weren’t many that didn’t specifically ask for, in capital letters, a FEMALE. It seemed to be common knowledge that men hadn’t made the right kind of evolutionary leap, the one that allowed them to tidy up after themselves. The apartments and houses that did permit males to exist there weren’t so bad, but they all had people living in them. Of course I knew this beforehand, but it wasn’t until I was face-to-face with the other humans that I realized I needed to be alone. We were expected to be civil to each other, not just once in a while, but every day. And what if I wanted to sit in my underwear and stare out the kitchen window for six hours? No, the solitude of living in a hut in the center of a labyrinth had ruined me for cohabitation.

In the end I decided on a studio apartment and took the first one I saw. One room and a bathroom and a partition between the main area and the little kitchen, which ran alongside a wall. It was nothing to get excited about. There was not one feature of it about which you could say, “But look at this! It has a ____________________!” It had nothing. It was just a room. I signed the lease, paid the rent and the security deposit, and took the keys. I went inside and sat in the empty room on the floor and smoked one cigarette after another. I rented a van and drove home to my hut and threw all my possessions worth keeping into it.

Then I went up to the house. Dad was standing in the kitchen wearing his dressing gown that still had the price tag on. He was whistling atonally while cooking pasta.

“Where’s Anouk?” I asked.

“Not sure.”

Maybe with Oscar Hobbs, I thought.

The pasta sauce was spluttering, and in another pan he seemed to be overboiling vegetables so as to bleed every last nuance of flavor out of them. He gazed at me with a rare look of affection and said, “I understand you were a bit shocked. We should’ve told you. But anyway, you know now. Hey- maybe the four of us can go out sometime?”

“The four of who?”

“Anouk and me and you and your plaything.”

“Dad, I’m leaving.”

“I didn’t mean tonight.”

“No. I’m leaving leaving.”

“Leaving leaving? You mean…leaving?”

“I’ve found an apartment in the city. A studio.”

“You already found a place?”

“Yeah- put down a security deposit and the first two weeks’ rent.”

There was a shiver running through him, a shiver I could see.

“And you’re moving out when?”

“Now.”

“Right now?”

“I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“What about your stuff?”

“I hired a van. I packed everything I need.”

Dad stretched his limbs strangely, and in a dull, artificial voice he said, “You’re not giving me much say in the matter.”

“I suppose not.”

“What about your hut?”

“I’m not taking it with me.”

“No, I mean…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he meant. Dad started breathing heavily through his nostrils. He was trying not to look wretched. I was trying not to feel guilty. I knew that by losing me he was losing the only person who understood him. But I was guilty for other reasons too; I wondered what was going to happen to his mind. And how could I leave him with that face? That sad and lonely and terrified face?