Small Claims

by Andrew Kaufman

  “What about the mess?”

  I said nothing. I ushered my daughter back to our car. My son still didn’t look up as I strapped Jenny into her car seat beside him. I lowered all four windows and drove to the ski hill. The kids had their lesson. It was only on the way home, as I saw the gas station from the other side of the 401, that I realized the key to the bathroom was still in my pocket.

  With waiters hovering nearby, wanting us to leave so they could reset the table, Julie waited for my answer, but I couldn’t tell her the story of Jenny puking. Given the fragile state of our intimacies, the justifiable doubt she has in the nature of my character, it would be too easy for her to misinterpret the story as just another rant about how I carry the heavy burden of dealing with our children. Or, even worse, she could have easily taken the side of the kid behind the counter, reprimanded me for leaving the poor clerk with such a mess, for setting such a bad example for our children, a perspective that would only have started another fight.

  But even more threatening to me, more intimidating than her neutral stare, provoking more anxiety than the idea of getting a lawyer and putting the house up for sale, the real reason I didn’t present the story of Jenny’s puke and the trip to the gas-station bathroom was that the telling would have made me vulnerable. And I have lost the ability to be vulnerable around my wife, which seems, to me at least, to be the entire point of being married to someone.

  “What is it that you want?” I said instead.

  “That’s it? That’s your answer?”

  “Do you even know?”

  “I want someone who makes their own decisions,” she responded, quickly. “I want someone who can stand on their own. I’ve already got children. I don’t need you to be one. I want…I want a man of action.”

  It’s was her final phrase, so cliché, so black and white, so Bogart and Bacall, that froze me, that made me unable to reply. It cast its severe and damning power over me because I knew it was true. I didn’t admit this, either. I just shrugged. I put on my coat and so did she and we walked out of the restaurant single file, both of us with our hands thrust firmly and deeply into our pockets.

  Doug’s hands stay silently at his side, moving only when he needs to flips a page. His statement continues, rambling, for seventeen more minutes, twelve of which are spent presenting his original arguments in various uninspired and repetitious ways. Finally, he concludes.

  “Okay,” Justice Royal sighs. “Would you like to call your first witness?”

  “That’s all I’ve prepared.”

  “All right.” Justice Royal turns his attention to Anthony, counsel for the plaintiff. “Would you like to cross?”

  “Yup.” Anthony bounces out of his chair and stands at attention. He stretches his arms over his head, commits a small bow toward Justice Royal, and then takes a single piece of paper from a manila folder. He sets the paper in the middle of the table and places his pointer finger underneath the first printed line of text.

  “You acknowledge that you had an agreement with Perpetual?”

  “Um…”

  “Do you?”

  “It was unsigned.”

  “Do you acknowledge the existence of this agreement?”

  “I do.”

  And it goes from there. Anthony works down his list of questions, rhetorically swinging from branch to branch, point to point, emotionless, egoless, a perfect extension of the faceless corporation he represents. Doug’s not used to being challenged and his dislike for Anthony makes him appear defensive. Or maybe he just is defensive. Whatever the cause, the effect isn’t flattering. During his opening statement, Doug was bewilderingly incompetent to an almost lovable degree—now he’s coming off as evasive and elitist. Even though I’ve grown to hate Doug in a very short time, and I’m fully aware that I’m projecting each and every aspect of myself that I currently dislike onto him—my wishy-washiness, my inept earning of money, my inability to keep track of dates, my failure to appreciate my wife—I find myself feeling sorry for the guy. This is the degree to which Doug’s getting pummelled.

  “Would the building permits we requested have increased or decreased your property value?”

  “That would require an assessment.”

  “Okay. Would the renovations to your house have increased the value of your home?”

  “Perhaps?”

  “Substantially?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And property taxes are based on a home’s value. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then it’s safe to say that the building permits we requested would have increased your property value?”

  “That is a possibility.”

  “Did you resist getting the building permits in order for the city to remain unaware of the increase in your property’s value?”

  “No. I did not. Absolutely not.”

  Anthony turns the piece of paper over. There is only one question written on the other side. Helen looks up from her note-taking and glances at her husband. The look she gives him is not filled with love. The courtroom is quiet. For a moment I think that Anthony won’t ask any more questions, that he’s happy with how much shit he’s already kicked out of Doug. But this is not the case. Anthony has one more question. If anything in life is guaranteed, it’s that there will always be one more question, and it’s the one that’ll bring you down.

  “Did you get the building permits?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Have you gone ahead with these renovations?” For the first time Anthony’s voice is not neutral but strong, filled with suspicion and contempt. Doug’s pause is long. The radiators come on with a metallic tick loud enough to drown out the hum of the electric clock.

  “The necessary building permits were acquired,” Doug says.

  “How many?”

  “Several.”

  “Of the seven building permits Perpetual asked you to acquire, how many did you eventually acquire?”

  “I’m not sure of the exact number.”

  “I have the documentation right here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Seven. You applied for and received seven building permits. Does that seem right to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. No further questions.”

  Anthony nods, clicks his pen, sits down. He’s trying very hard not to smile, which is the only act of charity I will ever see him perform.

  Doug looks at his wife. Helen stares, intensely, at something invisible and very far away. Doug leaves the witness stand. He sits beside her. When he leans toward her, she leans away.

  “Are you done, then?” Justice Royal asks.

  “Yes. I think we are,” Helen says.

  03. Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others: Part one

  Another possible source of my anger and frustration, something to explain why my optimism is no longer strong enough to sustain belief in the limited eighteen-month warranty for the Quizz #2-17 Performa Vacuum, why everything tastes bland and flavourless, and why nothing excites me, is that my fourth novel, the one that was supposed to reinvigorate my flagging literary career, is terrible. It’s simply bad. I’m not exaggerating or being my own worst critic. As a work of fiction, the book undeniably fails to come together. I have published three novels and certainly there have been sections within these published pages that I feel failed to express my talents fully, swaths of twenty to thirty consecutive pages that were certainly not written from the top of my game—but never have I felt this way about an entire book.

  This is the first time I’ve deemed an entire manuscript unpublishable. I know, without doubt, that the defects and deficiencies of this novel cannot be redeemed by vigorous editing, a reimagining of plot, or a deeper understanding of the characters’ needs and desires. This is not just a novel that needs work: this is a novel that doesn’t work. It’s just fucking bad. I know this in my heart to be true, and that has never happened to me before.


  That being said, there are some really good moments in it. I think it starts off well. This is the opening paragraph…

  I’m not going to say exactly what I was running from. It was the same thing you are. Different numbers in the same equation, that’s all: x (chases) y = y (runs). Maybe you don’t even realize you have an x. You should find that very frightening, because it means your x is so big and terrifying you can’t even find the nerve to look over your shoulder. So steel your courage and search your heart and ask yourself what your x is.

  Is it the lover you’ve fallen out of love with, but can’t seem to leave? The best friend you abandoned in their moment of need? Perhaps it’s just the undeniable knowledge that grabs you by the throat late at night and shakes you awake, screams silently in your head how somewhere along the line you made the wrong decision and now the life you’re living is a complete and utter lie.

  We all have an x. So it doesn’t matter what my x was, even though mine caused me to stand on the gravel shoulder of the southbound lanes of the Don Valley Parkway trying to hitch a ride to anywhere else.

  Not bad, eh? The novel goes completely to shit very shortly, two or three pages after that. The book is weird, but the weirdness is forced, not allegorical or metaphorical or fabulist, but just weird for weird’s sake. The story follows Simon, a man in his late twenties who was born with green skin, webbed hands, and webbed feet. Doesn’t that sound marketable? In a literary landscape ruled by realism, where no book with a fantastical premise has even been shortlisted for a major award—and don’t give me that shit about Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, because that’s simply the exception that proves the rule—I have no fucking idea why I thought, why I was so stubbornly and absolutely convinced, that a character who’s little more than a giant talking frog would resonate with readers.

  But that’s not the worst of it. The book quickly turns into a surrealistic coming-of-age story, a narrative format and arc that work together in much the same way that bicycle tires and glass do. The plot, such as it is, follows Simon, the talking frog, who was raised by his human mother and who never met his father, as he sets off to find himself and, hopefully, others like him. I think it was an attempt to stand out, to gain recognition through originality rather than artistic merit, the literary equivalent of a gimmick. This ultimately led to the creation a sort of semantic new wave band, turning me into a CanLit version of A Flock of Seagulls or Men Without Hats, but without all the sales and cool haircuts.

  Two years ago, when I started Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others, I thought it was going to be my breakthrough. But the novel’s simply unreadable and, even worse, boring. It’s not just me who thinks this. My best friend Zach, who’s been the first reader for all of my books, thinks it stinks.

  I wish I had the strength to burn it. I am so aware of how bad this book is that I can even see the rare passages, the three successful paragraphs tucked amongst twenty pages of shit, where it’s not. I think the third chapter ends well. Our green-skinned Kerouac starts hitchhiking, but near the end of his third day he still hasn’t made it out of Ontario. Of course, his failure is the result of him having green skin, although this is never explicitly stated in the text. Why? Because I believed it would be more literary not to do so, as if being obscure was a narrative virtue.

  It’s afternoon when a car pulls over for him. Simon runs up to the tinted passenger window and it lowers: there is a green-skinned man behind the wheel. Can you believe it? Same webbed hands, hairless head, the whole bit. The other giant talking frog, the one driving a fucking Buick Electra, offers Simon a ride. For hours they drive north in silence. Once again, I choose to leave the character’s motivation for this silence “open.” Simon remains in the passenger seat, heading east on the Trans-Canada Highway when…

  The driver suddenly took the first exit we passed. It was 7:15 in the evening and the sun was three inches from the horizon, spilling bottles of orange and yellow paint. There was a high ridge of hills to our right, but he didn’t drive toward them. We passed a gas station and he pulled in, drove around to the back, and parked the car pointing at a brick wall, the front bumper less than six inches from it.

  Apprehension and fear filled me—here I was sitting in a stranger’s car, nobody knew where I was, and I didn’t even know this man’s name. I had put my trust in him simply because his skin was green. As these undeniable realities struck me, I turned my whole body, picked up my knapsack with my left hand, and found the door handle with my right.

  “Go if you have to,” he said. Both of his hands returned to the steering wheel and he stared out the front windshield at the brick wall. “But it might be worth it just to sit here, quietly, for the next several minutes before you do. All I’m asking you to do is sit here and watch the sun set.”

  There was something about his voice, calm but serious, that made me pause. Although I kept my hand on the door handle and my knapsack on my lap, I stayed in the passenger seat. I stared ahead, thought I’d give it a try, matched my breathing with his. I did everything just like he was doing. I just didn’t get it. Once he’d mentioned the sunset, I’d assumed he would restart the car, find a different location, at the very least reverse so that he wasn’t parked directly behind the back wall of a gas station. When I looked through the front windshield, all I saw, all it was possible to see, was a brick wall. “I can’t even see the sun,” I said.

  “Who said you had to see the sun to watch it set?”

  I stared ahead, unblinkingly, and after three or four minutes I began to see how the light changed, and the colours with it. I watched the red brick turn to rust, and then to an almost-brown before it became a dark, dark red. I saw the dashboard turn purplish-blue and then to coal. My own skin turned more shades of green than I had ever seen before. Every second that passed brought out a new colour to my skin, each one so rich, so deep, it seemed like it should have had its own name, not just be considered a shade of something else.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “There ya go.” He breathed out a breath I hadn’t noticed he’d been holding. “You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be just fine. My name is Ást.”

  “Simon.”

  We shook hands, our mutual webbing making this awkward in a most endearing way. Ást turned on the headlights, started the engine, backed away from the wall, and returned to the highway.

  I think that one of the reasons Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others is such a total and ultimate disaster is that it was written from a place of wishful thinking, a novel that wasn’t a story I needed to tell, but a collection of pages with words on them sequenced to impress. Even this scene, which is honestly one of the best in the book, is a minor observation, something that could have been distilled to a throwaway comment by a minor character. It would actually have been stronger, created a greater impact on the reader, if it had been presented within the narrative as a minor turn, something that allowed the reader to discover a small piece of wisdom on their own terms, instead of me shoving it in their face like some oversized phallus in a bit of poorly lit pornography. As it is, the only comfort I can take from Forgive Us Our Eccentricities As We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others is that, as failures go, it is a spectacular one.

  This is small comfort and does little to quell my fears that I’ve lost it, that I will never write another piece of worthwhile prose in my life, that the very thing that used to make me feel safe and secure has been taken from me, like a beloved stuffed animal pulled from the arms of a toddler in a well-meaning but unwise effort to prepare him for the first day of school.

  04. The Lipstick Couple

  “Where’s your evidehhhhhhnce?”

  The plaintiff’s attorney, Conrad, joyfully lingers on the final syllable, filling the room with a long, guttural roll. His grey hair is pulled into a tight, tiny ponytail. His glasses are half frames, which he constantly looks over, and the diamond in his ear sits near the bottom of a fles
hy, unattached lobe. I do not like him. He’s a blowhard, a show-off, the kind of man buoyed through the construction of elitism, who sustains an artificially elevated sense of self-worth by pretending to love jazz and sending back perfectly cooked steaks in restaurants.

  “We need to see the evidehhhhhhnce!”

  “It’s my word against his. My word against his!” The defendant, Tony, is a big guy wearing a fine black suit and a wrinkled white shirt. A narrow band of untanned skin is visible on the ring finger of his left hand. Tony waves in the general direction of the plaintiff. He’s been on the stand for thirty minutes and responded to at least that many questions. His voice has become high and thin over the course of this cross-examination. The problem is that all of Tony’s answers, each and every one of them, lack specifics. He has placed words in such a sequence that they resemble answers, but ultimately lack the spine of empirical evidence. Tony’s dancing around something, most likely the truth, and the effort of this performance is tuckering him out. He rests his forearms on the wooden railing of the witness box, curving his torso and hunching his shoulders until his body takes the shape of a question mark.

  “No forms? No emails? No records of recommendaaations?”

  “I’m not going to waste the court’s time with boxes of paper.” Tony raises his hands, then lets gravity take them downward until they slap against the railing. That he’s come to court without any evidence seems to be a point of pride. As his exasperation increases, the gestures Tony uses to illustrate it, this repeated raising and lowering of his arms, the twisting of his torso to look over his shoulder and give Justice Smith a look of Can you believe he just asked that, have caused him to become dishevelled. The second and third buttons of his shirt have come undone. There is a roll of untucked shirt at his equator. But none of these things makes Tony look as defeated as the sorrowful expression, one that asks for both pity and complicity, which he repeatedly directs toward Sam, the plaintiff.