Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Then one empty night Jasper burst into my room with the unlikely news that Oscar and Reynold Hobbs were here to see me. Apparently Anouk had brought home two of the most powerful men on earth. An intense hatred for Anouk surged up in me. What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don’t you realize he doesn’t want it? His real wish is not to die.

I went out and saw them. Reynold, imperious and resolute; he even blinked with authority. And his son, the heir apparent, Oscar- sharp and serious, with aesthetically jarring good looks, he was the perfect product of the modern dynasty (in modern dynasties every second generation breeds with supermodels to ensure that the bloodline has high cheekbones). I felt an intense hatred for those two men too, so secure in their destiny. I had finally come around to believing in my death, but I couldn’t fathom theirs. They seemed impervious to everything.

Reynold looked at me, sizing me up. I was two sizes too small.

And why were they in my house? To listen to my ideas. How had Anouk pulled that off? It was remarkable. It was the most anyone had ever done for me. I dug out some old notebooks and read a couple of asinine ideas I’d had over the years. It’s not important what they were, only that they fell flat. As I read, the two men looked to have faces made of a sturdy wood. There was really nothing human about them.

After hearing me out, Reynold violently lit a cigar and I thought: What is it with wealthy men and cigars? Are they thinking that lung cancer is for the plebs while tongue cancer puts them in a higher echelon? Then Reynold mentioned to me the real reason they were here. Not to listen to my ideas after all, but to get my input on a television miniseries they were hoping to make on, what else, the Terry Dean story.

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say anything.

Reynold brushed one hand down his thigh and suddenly the son said, “Now we’ll be off!”

What teamwork! What superconsciousness!

Then they left.

I went out into the labyrinth, furious at my dead brother, begging the cosmos to allow me to travel back in time just for five minutes, long enough to spit in his eye. I mean, how tireless a ghost was he? He had turned my past into a vast open wound, unhealed and unhealable. Infected and infectious.

It was cold out. I waded through the night as through a river. My disappointment was not so surprising; of course a part of me wanted to succeed. You can’t be a failure all your life, can you? Actually, you can. That was the problem right there.

“Marty!”

Anouk. She was running toward me. The sight of her was a great relief. I was no longer angry at her for fanning the flame of my brother’s ghost. I had Anouk. I had ferocious passion on my résumé. Our lovemaking was so exciting you’d think we were committing adultery.

“I’m sorry. I thought they might really be interested.”

“They just wanted Terry. They always do.”

Anouk put her arms around me. I felt desire moving through the rooms of my body, a bright sun casting its light on the shadows of my cancer, and I grew fresh and young and Anouk could feel this was happening because she hugged me tighter and nestled her face in my neck and left it there for what seemed like a long time.

We heard footsteps somewhere in the bush. I pushed her away.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s Jasper.”

“So?”

“So don’t you think we should keep this between us?”

Anouk studied my face for a long time. “Why?”

Somehow I knew he’d take it badly. I was terrified that his hysterics might prejudice Anouk against me, might turn her off the whole idea. She might conclude that sleeping with me wasn’t worth the trouble. That’s why a couple of days later I went about the bizarre, unenviable chore of interfering in my son’s love life. A part of me knew that no matter what I did, no matter how honorable or dishonorable my intentions were, it would inevitably backfire. Well, so what? It’s not like I’d be breaking up the world’s most rock-solid couple. Isn’t their incompatibility evident by the mere fact that she has risen to the moral challenge of acquiring a lover and he hasn’t? I’m rationalizing, of course. The truth was, I preferred his storming furiously out of my life to the prospect of Anouk slipping out of my arms.

I couldn’t call the girlfriend up, and there was no way of asking Jasper for her phone number without his taking out a restraining order against me, so one morning I woke early and staked out his hut, waiting for her to leave, and when she did I trailed her. The frequency of their relations, if not the seriousness, I was able to ascertain by the adroit way she navigated through the labyrinth. I walked behind her, watching her curvaceous body swing this way and that. As I followed her, I wondered how you go about addressing someone’s treachery. I decided you just come out with it.

“Hey, you!” I said.

She turned quickly and gave me the kind of smile that can really castrate a man. “Hello, Mr. Dean.”

“Don’t give me that. I have something to say to you.”

She looked at me with all the sweet, innocent patience in the world. I launched right into it. “I saw you the other day.”

“Where?”

“Kissing someone I didn’t father.”

She let out an uncertain gulp of air and lowered her eyes. “Mr. Dean,” she said, but that’s all she said.

“So what have you got to say for yourself? Are you going to tell Jasper, or am I?”

“There’s no reason to tell Jasper. The thing is, we used to go out together, and I’ve had a hard time forgetting about him, and I thought…well, it doesn’t matter what I thought, but he doesn’t want me. And I don’t want him anymore. And I do love Jasper. I just…Please don’t tell him. I’ll break up with him, but I won’t tell him.”

“I don’t want you to break up with him. I don’t care if you’re my son’s girlfriend or not. But if you are, you can’t cheat on him. And if you do, you have to tell him. Look- let me tell you a story. One time I was in love with my brother’s girlfriend. Her name was Caroline Potts. Hang on, maybe I’d better start at the beginning. People always want to know what Terry Dean was like as a child. They expect tales of kiddie violence and corruption in the heart of an infant. They imagine a miniature criminal crawling around the playpen perpetrating acts of immorality in between feedings. Ridiculous! Was Hitler goose-stepping all the way to his mother’s breast?”

“Mr. Dean, I have to go.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” I said, and as she walked away, I couldn’t work out for the life of me what we had cleared up, if anything.

Later that night Jasper walked in on Anouk and me in bed. He flipped out. I don’t know why it caused him such profound embarrassment- maybe the Oedipal project is most effective in broken families such as ours; the son’s desire to kill the father and fuck the mother is less repulsive an idea if it is the mother-substitute the boy desires to sleep with. As if to confirm my revolting theory, Jasper acted very hurt and even furious. I suppose at some point in life we give in to a senseless outburst that serves to rob us of all credibility, and this was Jasper’s. There was no logical reason why he should oppose this occasional physical and sweaty union of Anouk’s and mine, and he knew it too, but the next thing he came and told me was that he was moving out. We stood in silence for a minute. It was a large minute, not long but wide and cavernous.

I smiled. I felt the weight of my smile. It was exceedingly heavy.

His exit threatened to last a century but was over surprisingly quickly. After he said, “I’ll phone you,” I listened to the furious song of his footsteps retreating and I wanted to call him back and guilt-trip him into staying in contact with me.