Steve Toltz - Quicksand

OK, Your Honour. Et cetera. Happy?

The point being, near midday, after having fucked and talked for six straight hours we had still not slept. The sun was shining directly through her windows, so brightly we had to put on sunglasses.

— How do you feel? she asked.

— Like I’ve been shot out of a cannon into the side of a mountain.

Mimi asked me to rub suntan lotion on her back, and that was erotic enough to get us going again until sunset. When I made a move to go, her hand clutched my arm.

— Stay, she whispered.

What else could I do, Your Honour? I stayed.

X

Two glorious months! Two months of sweaty siestas on creaky daybeds, waking up to the sound of thunderstorms, of dreaming about sleeping beside the very woman I was sleeping beside. Two months without praying for the opposite of clemency, without worrying about my incalculable, inescapable tomorrows, without thinking: My kingdom for a terminus!

Sure, bailiffs, we had our petty domestic differences: the deceased liked all the windows open and I liked them closed; she put every food product in the pantry whereas I prefer the entire kitchen to be one giant refrigerator. Sure, I discovered that compliments went down badly. A comment on her beautiful eyes, for instance, revealed to her a deafening silence on the subject of her nose. And she often worked into conversation the phrase I don’t suffer fools gladly whereas I don’t generally suffer gladly the fools who say that. One thing she could not tolerate was lying in bed and not sleeping. She wanted to fall asleep at an insane speed; anything longer than instantaneous was an unacceptable torment. She took sleeping pills I’d never heard of — Lunesta, Trazodone, Ativan, Sonata, Rozerem — she combined, she alternated, but she always took something, and didn’t like it being pointed out. She was impatient, highly sensitive to criticism, intropunitive, self-critical, and had epigastric complaints she never took anything for. One particularly instructive day, she went out to the pharmacy specifically to purchase a scar-healing cream that she ministered to each of my disfigurements, perhaps to exert early control over me. Certainly her facial flushing and sweaty palms when she applied the cream was curious. I should also mention she was not just caring, but intuitive; she knew what to do if I was stricken by a headache or a fake headache or a panic attack or the fear of a panic attack.

Mornings she would attempt, despite my protestations, to tell me her dream, and she didn’t like to be looked at either; any type of gaze — human eyes, animal eyes, camera lenses — seemed to rile her DNA, which was ironic because Mimi was a starer herself and the type of person who thought it acceptable to photograph the homeless as long as it was in black and white. She had sharp hipbones and an inexhaustible amount to say on the considerable deficiencies of Sydney men, as if they were a universal experience from which one could derive universal truths, and seemed to have an endless array of past boyfriends and lovers whom she’d reminisce about post-coitally. Her interpersonal issues were unclear. With a core group of artists, she had a hot — cold relationship that was both snuggly and standoffish. I might as well do the Crown the service of naming the chief suspects.

I allege the abstract painter, Frank Rubinstein! I allege the pointillist, Nick Whiticker! I allege the sculptor, Dan Wethercot!

It was from these people, incidentally, that I learned what it really means to be an artist. Their lives made a deep impression on me, and not only because a failed entrepreneur is a loser whereas a failed artist is always an artist no matter what . Their self-esteem is high! With their paint-splattered shirts and flabby guts and joints stuck to their lower lips, they walk around like captains of industry. They smoke like they have inoperable cancers. They keep their studios like teenagers’ bedrooms, their bedrooms like crime scenes, their sinks like toxic hazards, and their kitchen walls, after cooking, like Jackson Pollocks. They gossip and offend each other and are easily offended and all their façades are in perfect working order — they have decided exactly who they are going to pretend to be and never look back. They fuck like one-man shows. They hammer, screw, nail-gun, saw, ravage canvases and each other. They drag in furniture that has been tossed onto the streets — broken-legged chairs multiply in the night. They are a frugal, crusty, sweary lot, who spurn corporate monoculture and seek corporate sponsorship. They trudge past you without a nod or smile, and swing between rivalries and factions, wondering aloud how to be controversial. Their developmental delays seem to have done their careers nothing but good. Their brains are all pleasure centres with no circumference. Pygmalionism is rife. The currency is flattery. They tell each other’s anecdotes in the first person. They spread marijuana butter on toast and brew their own beer and act twenty-two, regardless of chronological age. They work hard and they self-aggrandise hard. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, why wouldn’t you be an artist? The sleep-ins are mandatory, the work days are orgies of creative playtime, the conversations stimulating, the sexual revolutions permanent. Every night, mirthless poets and arrogant painters couple on the balcony under a moon that burns coldly in the dark sky. Every night parties bound along until the wee hours of the pre-dawn. Nobody who does next to nothing with their lives, I learned, goes to bed before three.

It took a long time for the deceased to show me her art. One night we were in bed, the sun had just set and a large communion wafer of a moon was already wailing on the burnished horizon. Mimi pulled out a black folder from under the bed and hesitantly presented it to me. Photographs of a man’s face before and after she slapped it; a vaguely comic series of people in trees; darkrooms and old cameras; nibbled foodstuffs in display cases; charred dolls on barbeque hotplates; winged insects drowned in toothpaste; closeups of elderly throats; miscellaneous hands and paws; blurry cityscapes; an erect penis in soft focus; an anus smoking a pipe; a vagina on a bed of lettuce. There were hundreds, all stylistically different. She had never made a single dollar out of them, supplementing her income with unskilled minimum-wage jobs, just as I had done in between disappointing business ventures and begging. In fact, as it turned out, we could track how, over the past two decades, we’d been practically chasing each other around the sewer end of the job market. (The year Mimi was telemarketing, I was washing dishes; when I was telemarketing, she was cleaning toilets, etc.) Now she was determined to make photography her profession by building her portfolio. The problem was this: she thought these photos were casualties of her intentions, unsalvageable shit that felt utterly unrepresentative of her.

— I start each new series with fresh hope, and I’m always disappointed, she said with disgust. Every approach I try, the results always let me down. What I think I see through the lens has no bearing on the printed image. What I try to capture I don’t, and sometimes it’s like I don’t have a single optical nerve connected to my brain!

As she was talking I realised: Oh, she’s leading up to something. Behind her eyes there was unmistakably an ulterior motive to this speech; her pace was slowing, and when it got down to a certain speed I knew she would ask me the question she was leading up to. Her deviousness was adorable.

— I’m not blocked, I’m gridlocked. I have been since this last series, she said, pointing to several photographs of nudes draped over water pipes.

A thousand possible subjects and none quite right. Mimi peered at me with sly eyes. She said her photos didn’t feel unique, inspired, organic or revelatory in any way; rather they felt parodic, vulgar, flat, self-conscious, trite. Clearly more preoccupied with what she was about to say than what she was saying, it was at that moment she dragged her finger languorously across my thigh, climbed on top of me and pressed her sharp hipbones against mine.