Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Then it hit me. She’s not famous! She’s my son’s girlfriend!

Well, so what? Why should I care? This wasn’t very big on the tragedy scale. It was just a teen drama, the type you might see on a nightly soap opera. But by being an eyewitness, I had become a character in the cheap melodrama; I had to play out my part to the end, to the dénouement. How irritating! I just wanted to peacefully self-immolate. And now I had to “get involved.”

I dropped the matches and the petrol in disgust and went home, enormously relieved that an excuse for staying alive had dropped in my lap.

When I arrived home, Anouk was in her studio, stretched out on the daybed she’d made for herself, propped up on a mountain of pillows. I could always count on Anouk for good conversation. We each had our favorite topics, our default topics. Mine was the gnawing fear of dropping so low in my own estimation that I would no longer acknowledge myself in mirrors, but would pass on by, pretending I hadn’t seen me. For Anouk it was always a new horror story from the chronicles of modern relationship hell. She often had me in stitches recounting recent love affairs, and I felt a strange pity for those men, even though they were the ones who left her. She was always creating complications for herself- putting the wrong people together, sleeping with her girlfriends’ ex-boyfriends, sleeping with her ex-boyfriend’s friends, always just on the line of fair play, teetering on the line, sometimes falling.

“What do you think of this girl Jasper’s seeing?” I asked.

“She’s beautiful.”

“Is that the best we can say about her?”

“I’ve hardly had two words with her. Jasper keeps her hidden from us.”

“That’s natural. I embarrass him,” I said.

“What’s natural about that?”

“I embarrass myself.”

“Why are you interested?”

“I saw her today- with another man.”

Anouk sat up and looked at me with bright eyes. Sometimes I think the human animal doesn’t really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t.”

“I think I have to, don’t I? I can’t sit back and watch my son be made a fool of by someone other than me.”

“I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t talk to him. Talk to her. Tell her you saw her. Tell her she has to tell him or you will.”

“I don’t know.”

“Telling him yourself will be disastrous. If nothing else, he won’t believe it. He’ll think you’re jealous and competing with him.”

“Do you think fathers and sons compete for sex?”

“Yes, though not in the Oedipal way. Just in the ordinary way.”

Anouk brought her knees up and rested her chin on them and stared at me as if debating whether to tell me I had something stuck between my teeth.

“I’ve had enough of relationships,” she said. “I want to take some time out. I think I’ve become a serial monogamist. It’s embarrassing. What I’d really like is a lover.”

“Yes, I think that would suit you.”

“A friendly fuck with someone I know.”

“Good idea. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“Not sure. Maybe someone like you.”

She really said this. And I really didn’t get it. Slow, slow, slow. “Someone like me,” I mused. “Do you know anyone like me?”

“One person.”

“Like me? I wouldn’t want to meet him.” Jasper? It couldn’t be Jasper, could it? “Who do you know like me?”

“You!”

“I’ll admit there’s a similarity,” I said slowly, starting to get the hint. It was coming to me now, as if through a dense cloud. I sat forward in my chair. “You don’t mean…”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“No, really?”

That’s how it began between Anouk and me.

It became a regular thing. Lying in bed with this young, beautiful woman, I felt a pathetic, adolescent form of pride- this is me kissing this neck! These breasts! These are my worn-out hands groping their way along the length of this sublime body! This liaison really saved me. I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.

When you sleep with a friend, the trickiest part is getting started. You can’t just jump into fucking without kissing, and kissing is very intimate. If you kiss in the wrong way, it sends the wrong message. But we had to kiss, to get the engines warm, so to speak. We never kissed after sex, obviously. What would be the point? You don’t warm the engine after you’ve reached your destination, do you? But then we started doing it anyway. I was confused. I thought a friendly fuck was supposed to be passionate and revitalizing. I was all ready for that. Sex as fun- sinful but harmless, like chocolate ice cream for breakfast. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was tender and loving, and afterward we lay in each other’s arms, and sometimes we even caressed each other. I didn’t know what to make of it. Neither of us knew what to say, and it was to fill an awkward silence that I confided to Anouk my big secret, that I was finally actually dying.

She took it worse than I had imagined. In fact, she almost took it even worse than I did. “No!” she screamed, then launched feverishly into a catalogue of alternative therapies: acupuncture, strange-sounding herbs, some terrifying cure called soul-flossing, meditation and the curative potency of positive thinking. But you can’t positive-think your death away; you might as well try thinking “Tomorrow the sun will rise in the west. In the west. In the west.” It doesn’t do any good. Nature has laws which she’s maniacal about enforcing.

“Look, Anouk. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting death,” I said.

She asked me all the details. I gave them to her, as I knew them. She felt so sorry for me, I wept.

Then we made love in a frenzy of desire that was downright violent. We were fucking death.

“Have you told Jasper?” she asked afterward.

“About us?”

“No- about you.”

I shook my head feeling shamefully elated, because I was enjoying a fantasy in which he would be sorry for despising me. He would break down and weep, half torn open by remorse. This thought perked me up a bit. Someone else’s soul-destroying guilt can be a reason for living.

After this initial discussion, we didn’t talk about my upcoming death much, although I could tell it was on her mind by the way she would try to convince me to donate my cancerous organs to researchers. Then one frosty night, while warming our hands on the afterglow of ferocious sex, she asked, “What are you going to do for the rest of your life?”

It was a good question; now that the rest of my life wasn’t the few billion years I had assumed it would be, what was I going to do? For the first time in my life, I was at a real loss. A total loss. I couldn’t even read anymore. What was the point of deepening my understanding of the universe and the shitheads in it when I would no longer be around to snarl at my findings? I already felt my nonexistence with bitterness. There was so much I wanted to do. I thought of all the things I could’ve been. As I said them to Anouk, each sounded as ludicrous as the next: a mountaineer, a writer of historical romances, an inventor credited with a great discovery, like Alexander Graham Bell, who pioneered phone sex.

“Anything else?”

“There’s one thing.”

“What?”

“I always thought I would make a really good Rasputin character.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I dug through my notebooks and showed her an idea I’d had about influencing rich and powerful men with my ideas, whispering spectacular ideas into an enormous golden ear. She latched on to this with a lunatic’s energy. She seemed to think that if I achieved just one of my dreams, I would go to the grave feeling satisfied. Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? True satisfaction can’t exist as long as there’s one itch left to scratch. And I don’t care who you are, there’s always an itch.