Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“You should think about it.”

“What about your girlfriend?”

“I think she’s falling out of love with me. You see, I need a confidence boost, and I think if we became lovers, that would do it.”

“Jasper, I don’t want to.”

“Is that any reason?”

“Yes.”

“Haven’t you ever slept with someone as a gesture of goodwill?”

“Of course.”

“Or out of pity?”

“More often than not.”

“Well, I don’t mind if it’s a charity fuck.”

“Can we drop the subject?”

“I never knew you were so selfish and ungiving. Didn’t you volunteer one year with the Salvation Army?”

“Collecting money door to door, not screwing the down and out.”

We were at an impasse. Well, I was at an impasse.

“Come on, stupid,” she said, and with Anouk leading the charge, we made our way to the Sydney casino.

Let’s not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade. At blackjack tables and sitting in front of poker machines were tense and desperate men and women looking like droids, who didn’t seem to be gambling for pleasure. As I watched them, I remembered the casino was famous for having its patrons lock their children in their cars while they gambled. I had read a news story about it, and I hoped all these sad, desperate people rolled the windows down a little while they put their rent money in the pockets of the state government, which rakes in huge profits and then puts half a percent of it back into the community for counseling services for gamblers.

“There they are,” Anouk said.

She pointed to a crowd of paparazzi, businessmen, and politicians. Obviously Reynold Hobbs, a seventy-year-old man with square wire-framed glasses and a perfectly round, bald, Charlie Brown head, had taken some advice that it might be good for his public image if he tried to pass himself off as an “ordinary guy just like you,” which was why he was hunched over the $10-minimum blackjack table. The way his shoulders were slumped, it seemed as if he’d lost his posture in the last hand. Anouk and I walked up a little closer. He might be Australia ’s richest man, but it didn’t look like he had got there by gambling.

His son, Oscar Hobbs, was a few meters away, trying his luck at a poker machine, holding himself upright as only a celebrity can- a man that can be photographed at any moment, that is, a man not picking his nose or shifting his genitals. I quickly gave myself a stern warning: Don’t compare your life to his! You haven’t a chance! I looked around the room for a comparison I could live with. There. I saw him: old guy, not many teeth, not much hair, boil on his neck, nose like a conch shell; he would be my anchor. Otherwise I’d be in trouble. There was no way I could stand comparison to Oscar Hobbs, because it was a matter of public record that with women he was the luckiest son of a bitch alive. From my furtive readings of tabloid magazines I had seen his string of girlfriends- a long, beautiful, enviable string. If you saw some of the honeys he’d been intimate with, you’d eat your own arm up to the elbow. Fuck. I can’t even stand to think about it. He wasn’t a social-butterfly kind of heir apparent; you’d never see him at art openings or A-list bars or movie premieres. Oh sure, every now and then you’d see the corner of his chin in the social pages of the Sunday papers, but even from the way the chin was looking out at you, you’d just know he’d been caught unawares, like a thief surprised by a security camera in a bank. But the women! After seeing photos of them, I’d go back into my bedroom and tear at my pillow savagely. More than once I tore it to shreds, literally to shreds, and it is very hard to actually tear a pillow.

“So how do you want to tackle this?” I asked Anouk.

“We should attack on two fronts. One of us takes the father, the other one the son.”

“This is never going to work.”

“You want to try Reynold or Oscar?”

“Neither, but I suppose I’ll try Reynold. I want to ask him something anyway.”

“OK. But what should I say to the son? What kind of opening do you think will work?”

“I don’t know. Pretend you met before.”

“He’ll think I’m trying to pick him up.”

“Then insult him.”

“Insult him?”

“Dissect him the way you always do. Tell him what’s wrong with his soul.”

“How do I know what’s wrong with his soul?”

“Make it up. Tell him his soul’s got one of those stains on it that smudges when you try to wipe it clean.”

“No, that’s no good.”

“All right. Then tell him he’s so rich he’s cut off from reality. That’ll get him going. Rich people hate that.”

“But he is so rich he’s cut off from reality.”

“Anouk, believe it or not, financial hardship is not actually the one official reality.”

“Let’s not argue. Let’s just get going on this.”

“OK. Good luck.”

I went over to the table where Reynold Hobbs was hunched, but there were no empty seats. I stood around, breathing on the players’ necks. A security guard eyed me suspiciously, and with good cause too. I was acting suspicious, muttering to myself, “What the hell am I going to say to this media giant? How can I convince him to see my father? As an act of charity? Reynold Hobbs is a famous philanthropist, sure, but his is the kind of charity you phone in.”

A reporter sitting next to Reynold finished an interview, stood up, and shook his hand. I took the opportunity and squeezed in beside him. Reynold smiled cordially at me, but I immediately sensed his discomfort. Some people are just no good talking to anyone under twenty years old, and the closer you are to zero, the greater their discomfort. He turned away from me and became instantly engrossed in a conversation with his lawyer about the average point size of small print in a legal contract. Reynold wanted to put in some clause in Times New Roman but drag it down to four points. His lawyer was debating the ethics of the proposed move, and argued that any print needs to be no smaller than seven points to be “all aboveboard.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hobbs?” I said.

He turned slowly, as if to say “Everything I breathe on turns to gold, so I’m doing you a big favor just facing in your direction,” and when his eyes reached me, they did so with an infinite stillness that told me in no uncertain terms that despite our proximity, he was inaccessible.

“What is it?”

“You own some of our newspapers, don’t you?”

“And?”

“Well, I thought power was supposed to corrupt, Mr. Hobbs. But what you do isn’t corrupt- selling diarrhea isn’t corrupt, it’s just a baffling waste of power. With all the influence you exert, with the infinite choices you have up your sleeve, you could print anything, and yet you choose to print armpit sweat. Why?”

Reynold didn’t know what to say. I looked over to see how Anouk was doing. She seemed to be faring better than I was. Oscar had an embarrassed look on his face. I wondered what she was saying.

Reynold was still ignoring me. I said, “OK, you want to sell papers. I get it. You sell fresh phlegm because the public has an indefatigable taste for fresh phlegm. But can’t you make your papers a little bit liberating? What about sticking in a quarter page of Tibetan wisdom between the rehashed headlines and the daily horrorscopes? Would it kill sales?”

The security officer’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“It’s OK,” Reynold said, without taking his eyes off me.