Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Maybe it was her arctic, belittling tone of voice, but he’d just stare sullenly into his coffee as she unveiled her latest damning report from the front lines. Her most unsettling and damaging form of reproach, though, was when she critiqued Dad’s criticism; that sent him reeling. You see, he’d spent nearly his whole life honing his contempt for others and had nearly perfected his “guilty” verdict on the world when Anouk came in and leveled it. “You know what your problem is?” she’d say (that’s how she always began). “You hate yourself and so you hate others. It’s just sour grapes. You’re too busy reading and thinking about big things. You don’t care about the little things in your own life, and that means you’re contemptuous of anyone who does. You’ve never struggled like they have, because you’ve never cared like they do. You don’t really know what people go through.” Often as she dished it out Dad would be strangely quiet, and he rarely rose to his own defense.

“You know what your problem is?” she asked after Dad told her his life story one afternoon. “You’re rehashing your old thoughts. Do you realize that? You’re quoting yourself, your only friend is a sleazy sycophant”- Eddie-“who agrees with everything you say, and you never air your ideas in a forum where they might be challenged, you just say them to yourself and then congratulate yourself when you agree with what you said.”

She went on and on like this, and over the following months, as I squeezed uncomfortably into adolescence and my relationship with Dad weakened daily, as if it had osteoporosis, Anouk didn’t just pour acid all over his ideas, hopes, and self-esteem, she took aim at me too. She was the one who told me I was only good-looking enough to attract about 22 percent of the female population. I thought that was a dismal figure, really abominable. It wasn’t until I was able to spot the loneliness in the faces of men that I realized that being attractive to 22 percent of women is a whopping success story. There are legions of ugly, wretchedly lonely, hopelessly inept sociopaths out there who fall in the 0-2 percent category- armies of them- and every one would kill for my 22 percent.

Oh, and she also berated me for neglecting the second batch of fish.

You see, Dad’s bank balance was swelling again, and undaunted by the previous episode of fish homicide (suicide?), he bought three more fish, this time simple goldfish, as if he thought that the ownership of fish went through degrees of difficulty depending on the species and the previous disaster had been caused by the fact that he had bought me fish that were simply too hard for my level. To him, goldfish were fish with training wheels: immortal, impossible to kill.

He was wrong. In the end I disposed of those fish quite easily too, though this time from underfeeding. They starved to death. But we argued right up to and including the day Dad died on the issue of whose fault it was. I went away for a week to stay at my friend Charlie’s house, and I swear to God, as I was leaving the apartment I said to Dad, “Don’t forget to feed the fish.” Dad remembers it very differently, and in his version, when leaving the apartment I had actually said, “OK, bye.” Whatever the case, sometime during my weeklong absence the fish came down with a bad case of starvation and, unlike humans in the same fix, did not think to resort to cannibalism. They just let themselves waste away.

Anouk took Dad’s side on this one, and I noticed that the only time Dad enjoyed the benefits of a ceasefire was when he could team up with Anouk against me. I have to admit, their relationship perplexed me. They were an improbable pairing, as if a rabbi and a man who raised pit bulls were marooned together on a desert island; incompatible strangers thrown together during a time of crisis, only Dad and Anouk’s was a nameless crisis without beginning or end.

A year into her employment with us, Dad received an unexpected phone call.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Jesus Christ, no. Absolutely not. Not if you raped and tortured me. How much is a lot? Well, all right, then. Yes, yes, I said yes, didn’t I? When do I start?”

It was good news! An American film production company had heard of the Terry Dean story and wanted to make it into a Hollywood blockbuster. They wanted Dad’s help to make sure they got it right, even though they were setting it in America as the story of a dead baseball player who comes back from hell to take revenge on his teammates who battered him to death.

So it seemed Dad could make good money off his memories, but why now? There had already been a couple of wildly inaccurate Australian movies based on the story, and Dad had refused to cooperate with any of them. Why this surrender, this sudden willingness to exploit his private dead? It was another in an alarming series of abrupt about-faces, allowing a writer to come with a nice check in exchange for picking the scabs off Dad’s brain to see what was underneath. Anouk, with her uncanny gift for identifying the worm in the apple, said, “You know what your problem is? You’re living in your brother’s shadow,” and when the twenty-three-year-old gum-chewing writer bounded cheerily into the apartment the following week, he only had to say, “So, tell me what Terry Dean was like as a child,” for Dad to grab him by the shirtsleeves and throw him exuberantly out the door with his laptop after him. One court appearance later, his new “job” cost him $4,000 and some unwanted press. “You know what your problem is?” Anouk said that night. “You’re a fanatic, but you’re fanatical about everything. Don’t you see? You’re spreading your fanaticism too thin.”

But you want to know what our real problem was? You can’t drift blissfully along in a blind haze when someone’s standing beside you shouting: That’s lust! That’s pride! That’s sloth! That’s habit! That’s pessimism! That’s jealousy! That’s sour grapes! Anouk was stuffing up our deeply entrenched custom of scraping and wheezing our way unenthusiastically around our claustrophobic apartment. The only way we knew how to get ahead was to plod toward our paltry desires and pant loudly to get attention. And the endlessly optimistic Anouk wanted to turn creatures like us into superbeings! She desired us to be considerate, helpful, conscientious, moral, strong, compassionate, loving, selfless, and brave, and she never let up, until gradually we fell into the regrettable habit of watching what we did and what we said.

After months of her boring us and boring into us, we no longer used plastic bags, and rarely ate anything that bled; we signed petitions, joined fruitless protests, inhaled incense, bent ourselves into difficult yoga positions- all worthy ascents up the mountain of self-improvement. But there were crap changes too, deep plummets into the gorge. Because of Anouk, we lived in fear of ourselves. Whoever first equated self-knowledge with change has no respect for human weakness and should be found and bitten to death. I’ll tell you why: Anouk highlighted our problems but didn’t have the resources or the know-how to help us fix them. We certainly didn’t know. So thanks to Anouk, not only were we stuck with the slippery menagerie of problems we already had, we were now imbued with an appalling awareness of them. This, of course, led to new problems.

There was something really wrong with my father. He was crying; he was in his bedroom, crying. I could hear him sobbing through the walls. I could hear him pacing back and forth over the same small space. Why was he crying? I’d never heard him cry before; I thought he couldn’t. Now it was every night after work and every morning before work. I took it as a bad omen. I felt that he was crying prophetically- not for what had happened but for what was about to take place.