Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘So you’ll never fucking guess who’s getting remarried,’ Aldo said.

‘You’re kidding.’ This was bad news, the worst. ‘To who?’

‘Something called Craig, one of those sub-lawyer thingies.’

‘You mean like a legal secretary?’

‘A paralegal something-or-other, yeah, one of those law careers where you’re kitty litter for other lawyers.’

‘Remarried! What’s he like?’

‘I don’t know much. I only met him once. He’s lived in Italy and so went on and on about how lateness is culturally superior to being on time.’

‘What a cock.’

He pinched the cigarette butt so tight it became a flat wedge he had to suck hard on to get any smoke through. The air grew heavy with the smell of impending thunderstorms and Aldo told me how the week before, he’d followed them to Bronte, down to the beach where he saw Craig take his shirt off to reveal swimmer’s abs lodged in a soldier’s torso, and how Aldo had stood there behind some family’s beach umbrella feeling a slow liquidation of his emotional assets. He let out a dry, glum laugh, bent down to pick up a fifty-cent coin and winced; I could see through the open shirt that his torso was wrapped in white gauze.

‘And guess what else? She’s asked me to be part of the wedding.’

‘No she didn’t.’

‘She still considers me her best friend.’

‘Ex-husbands aren’t best friends!’

‘No shit.’

We slid into the car. Aldo shifted the sideview mirror to steer clear of his reflection. We moved off into the three-lane highway and were quickly embroiled in heavy traffic.

‘Part of the wedding,’ I said. ‘As what?’

‘An usher.’

‘An usher?’

‘That’s how I said it. An usher? An usher? So I tear the tickets in half and with a flashlight show the patrons to their seats? Something like that, Stella said laughing, thinking that my being lighthearted was proof of her good decision. But I begged her to reconsider. I mean, first of all, I almost choked when she told me the wedding is on a rooftop. I said, It’s outside ? Her whole life she’s dreamed of getting married the traditional way that we never did, with the dress and the cake and the whole extended family, and then she goes and organises an outside wedding? I mean, thirty-six years in the planning and it can’t rain ?’

He was breathing heavily and staring into the copper light that glinted off the skyscrapers from the setting sun.

‘If I’m to be entirely honest,’ I said, just to stir the pot, ‘I never understood what you saw in her.’

Aldo snapped to attention. ‘For one, she’s naturally beautiful. I don’t know if you realise this, but the whole time we were together, she never once wore makeup.’

‘That’s like describing me by saying, He doesn’t wear a hat. So fucking what?’

‘So shut up and put on the siren.’

‘Grow up.’

A long stretch of gridlocked traffic, and I had to actively resist the homicidal urge to plough through it or open the door as motorcycles weaved past. As usual, civilians who pulled up beside me looked straight ahead with fixed postures, or slouched down in order to hide their texting; or rolled up their windows gradually, or all of a sudden, to contain the smell of pot. Ten minutes later, we’d only moved two blocks. Aldo eased back into the seat and put his bare feet on the dashboard. I knocked them off.

If you wait long enough in life, your jealousies will eventually make no sense. Stella’s devotion to Aldo had always nested a special envy in my heart. She adored him, beyond all bearable limits. She wrote songs about him, for Christ’s sake, songs that she performed in public spaces in front of strangers. In that era, I had a few times made the tactical error of going out as a foursome; they behaved as if their love took place at a cellular level and whatever Tess and I had going on seemed— was —paltry in comparison. And now — poof! — that love was gone.

‘How’s your novel?’ he asked.

‘I’m taking a hiatus.’

‘You shouldn’t let failure go to your head. ’

‘You don’t understand. When I write about a character, it’s like getting a tattoo of them on my arm, and when it doesn’t work out I carry the failure of the relationship around with me forever, like some celebrity —’

‘Loser.’

‘The man just arrested for wasting police time is not calling me a loser.’

‘That’s not how it went down.’

‘What happened?’

As we stuttered along in the peak-hour nightmare, Aldo told me the whole story.

Earlier in the day, he’d convinced Stella to return to Luna Park with him in the hope of rekindling their romance, a dud idea that misfired almost as soon as they got through the turnstiles. He had blurted out the whole spiel about them giving it one more shot. ‘She said, Face it, Aldo, the marriage was a failure. I said, The relationship isn’t a failure merely because one of us didn’t die, and despite it being the gold standard for our whole stupid civilisation, my death or your death is actually a ghoulish barometer for marital success. Then we talked about the state of our union in those final months. She said it was rusted, leprous, and there was no wind left to harness. She said, A love drawn taut snaps eventually. She said, Maybe our youths ended at different times, did you ever think of that? I said, Let’s lay all our cards on the table, and I proceeded to tell her that somewhere affairs were had, by me, just two minor indiscretions that any competent marriage counsellor would have recommended to couples staring down a commitment that stretches interminably into the future. Get it out of your system, I imagined the marriage counsellor advising.’

‘The imagined marriage counsellor?’

‘Hey, my conscience is clean: I change it every week.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

Aldo laughed loudly then bit his lip as if he’d revealed something he had set out to conceal. ‘Anyway, I told her how deeply and permanently and profoundly hurt I was by the way she left me.’

This I knew. One night Stella had pretended to talk in her sleep in order to confess to Aldo that she was in love with another man. ‘Aldo, Aldo, I’ve met someone,’ she murmured. She had hoped, he supposed, that he would feel as though she had left herself ajar and he could peek in when her mind was turned. She murmured, ‘Slept with him.’ And, ‘Leaving you.’

At Luna Park Aldo ceremoniously forgave her, but it was irrelevant. Stella dropped the bombshell about her upcoming nuptials to Craig. This hit him hard. They stood like two mutes; he felt like a removed tumour that was trying to graft itself back on. He yelled into her eyes and nose — Fuck you, you fucking fuck — and stormed off and wound up between the pavilion wall and the back of the Rotor, a narrow corridor that smelled of popcorn and urinary tract infections, where he stood sobbing, for just a couple of minutes, he said, when two lean, muscular teenagers, one in oversized sunglasses, or maybe safety goggles, put him in a headlock and escorted him at knifepoint to an ATM where they forced him to withdraw, in their words, ‘the maximum daily amount’.

I laughed at the cold precision of that term. ‘What then?’

Stepping up to the bank machine, Aldo whispered to himself not to forget his PIN, and promptly forgot his PIN. The teenagers’ eyelids twitched erratically and their pupils were dilated; their brownish teeth and broken skin suggested methamphetamines, Aldo noted, and they looked to be no strangers to violence, nor to fault-finding parents, low grades, truancy, nil self-esteem, and a dissociative loss of control, and Aldo thought about how stabbing was extremely high on his list of fears — to be slashed, while dangerous to muscle, would be bearable, a wound he imagined to be hot and biting yet survivable — but stabbing ! That conjured up fatal thrust wounds and vascular organ damage and unimaginably nightmarish punctured-lung/asphyxiation scenarios, even less pleasant than a bullet in the stomach. (‘How many movie villains have told me how long it takes to die from a gut wound?’ he asked me.) ‘Put in your fucking PIN,’ the shorter teenager shouted, and in reaction to his mind’s utter blankness Aldo was now wearing a smile that may have been misconstrued as sardonic or mocking. There was a tense silence, and other than stare into the unappeasable drug-fucked faces of youth and say he had a low tolerance for foreign metals, what else could he do? (‘Besides, I think sluggishly on my feet,’ Aldo admitted.) At this point, he recalled, the teenager raised his knife hand in a tight arc and brought it down at a diagonal rush, and Aldo thought: Slashed it is! with actual relief as he went down on his knees and felt weirdly vindicated that he had accurately deduced the (hot, biting) sensation before falling face first onto the hard concrete, which, on his cheek, was sun-warmed and gravelly. A thirteen-year-old couple who had to take out dental plates to kiss spotted him and called for help, and he was tended to by the skeleton staff of Luna Park’s first aid station, interviewed by security personnel, and driven to the police station where he was offered instant coffee and seated opposite a sketch artist, a uniformed man so rigid and stony, Aldo said, he looked like he would have to be loved intravenously.