Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

My mother and I had painted the same face, that same ghoulish face! What did it mean? Had I seen these paintings in my youth? No. The journal said she had given up painting after my birth, and since Dad and I left Paris just after her death, I definitely hadn’t seen them. So Astrid had seen a face and painted that face. And I had seen the same face and also painted it. I examined the paintings again. With sharp edges and horizontal lines broken up to make its geometrically off-putting head, done in a vile green and thick, wavy lines of black and red and brown, it wasn’t a passive face she’d painted, it was face as function- the function being to scare you.

I turned away from the paintings and tried to work it out. It was totally reasonable to assume that (a) my mother was haunted by the face in the same manner I was or (b) my mother hadn’t seen it floating in the clouds but had actually known the person it belonged to.

Pacing the warehouse, I forced my way through the junk and came across an old broken cabinet. In the bottom drawer I found half a packet of Marlboros and a lighter in the shape of a woman’s torso. I lit a cigarette but was too preoccupied to inhale. I stood there in that place totally immobilized by thought until the cigarette burned my fingers.

My eyes sprang open. I hadn’t realized they’d been closed. An idea had been inserted into my brain. But what an idea! What an idea! Why didn’t I think of it straightaway? I circled the room shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God,” like a contestant on a game show. I examined the paintings again. This had never happened to me- a lightning-bolt moment! It was incredible! “Why assume I’m turning into my father,” I shouted, “when there’s an equal chance I’m turning into my mother?” I stomped my feet to shake up the whole building. The thought was absolutely liberating. What had I been worried about all this time? And even if I was turning into my father, it wouldn’t ever have been the whole of me but only a section or a subsection- maybe a quarter of me would turn into him, another quarter into my mother, one eighth into Terry, or into the face, or into all the other me’s I hadn’t met yet. The existence of these paintings suggested a scope to my being I had not previously imagined. I think you can appreciate my indescribable joy. The period when my father threatened to dominate my personality- the Occupation- was a mirage. It had never been just me and him. I was a goddamn paradise of personalities! I sat down on a couch and closed my eyes and pictured myself. I couldn’t see anything clearly. Wonderful! That’s how it should be! I am a blurry image constantly trying to come into focus, and just when, for an instant, I have myself in perfect clarity, I appear as a figure in my own background, fuzzy as hair on a peach.

I suddenly knew what it meant. My mission was clear: fly to Europe and find my mother’s family. The face was the starting point. This was the first clue. Find the face, I thought, and I’ll find my mother’s family.

In a daze, I grabbed as many of the canvases as I could handle and called a taxi and took them home. I stared at them all night. I felt a mixture of feelings so conflicting in nature I was threatened with being torn apart by them: a deep grief for the loss of my mother, a snug feeling of comfort that we were close in mind, spirit, and psychosis, an abhorrence of and revulsion for the face, a pride that I’d uncovered a secret, and a furious frustration that I didn’t understand the secret I’d uncovered.

Around midnight, the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it. The journalists wouldn’t leave me alone. The phone stopped ringing and I heaved a sigh of relief. My sigh was short-lived. A minute later the phone started up again. This was going to go on all night. I picked it up.

“Mr. Dean?” a male voice said.

I supposed I’d better get used to that. “Listen,” I said, “I’m not giving interviews, quotes, comments, or sound bites, so why don’t you go hound a gang-raping footballer.”

“I’m not a journalist.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I was wondering if we could meet.”

“And I was wondering who you are.”

“I can’t say. Your phone is probably bugged.”

“Why would my phone be bugged?” I asked, looking suspiciously at the phone. I couldn’t tell whether it was bugged or not.

“Could you be outside Central Railway Station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”

“If the phone’s bugged, won’t whoever is listening be there too?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I’m not. I thought you might be.”

“So will you be there?”

“All right, then. I’ll be there.”

He hung up. I stared at the phone awhile, hoping it might start speaking on its own, explaining to me all the things I didn’t understand. It didn’t.

At nine o’clock the next morning I was at Central Station, waiting for God knows who. I sat on a bench and observed the people who hurried into the station to catch the trains and the people who hurried out of the station to get away from the trains. They seemed to be the same people.

A car honked its horn. I turned to see a black Mercedes with tinted windows. The driver was leaning out of his window, beckoning me with his finger. I didn’t recognize him. When I didn’t move, he stopped with his finger and started beckoning me with his whole hand. I went over. Even standing right up against the car, I couldn’t see who was in the backseat.

“Mr. Dean, would you get in the back, please?”

“Why should I?”

“Jasper! Get in!” a voice called out from the back. I smiled instantly, which felt strange because I hadn’t smiled for a long time. I opened the back door and dived in, and as the car moved off, Anouk and I hugged for ten minutes without speaking and without letting go.

When we pulled away, we stared at each other with our mouths half open. There was simply too much to say to know how to go about saying it. Anouk didn’t look like a rich widow. She was wearing a silk sari of deep red and had shaved her head again. Her enormous green eyes peered crazily out of her skull like symbols of an ancient catastrophe. Her face looked both old and young, foreign and familiar.

“You must think I’ve become paranoid with all this mystery stuff,” she said. “But it’s awful, Jasper. Everyone wants me to put on a brave face, but I don’t have one of those. I only have a distraught face. After Oscar and now your father it’s the only one I’ve got left.”

I sat trying to think of a way to start speaking. I squeezed her hand instead.

“I own it all, Jasper. I don’t know how this happened. I’m the richest woman in Australia.”

“The richest woman in the world,” the driver said.

“Stop listening!”

“Sorry, Anouk.”

“I won’t let anyone call me Mrs. Hobbs. Well, that’s another story. But isn’t it funny that I’m so rich?” It was more than funny. It was more than ironic too. I hadn’t forgotten how we’d met- she’d been running a key along Dad’s sports car because she outright hated the rich. “But you’re so thin!” she exclaimed. “What’s happened to you? I’ve only heard bits and pieces.”

I asked the driver to stop and he pulled the car over in a dead-end alley. Anouk and I climbed out, and standing in the alleyway next to a sleeping drunk clutching a broken television set, I told her everything about Eddie and Terry and the democratic cooperative and Thailand and poison and the murdering mob and Caroline and the people-smugglers. By the time I got to the boat trip she was biting her lower lip, and at my description of Dad’s death she sucked it into her mouth. For the rest of the story she kept her eyes closed and left a sad, bittersweet smile on her face. I didn’t mention my mother’s paintings, because I needed to keep something just for myself.