by Steve Toltz
“An empty coffin?”
“And you want to know the worst part? You still have to pay the same price as if there was actually a body inside! I guess I assumed it was done on weight, but apparently not.”
I looked at his cheerless face, aghast. He was shaking his head, mourning the loss of his money.
“WHERE THE FUCK’S MY MOTHER?”
Dad explained that she had died in Europe. He wouldn’t say much more about it. He had purchased the burial plot for my benefit, reasoning that a boy has the right to mourn his mother in the appropriate setting. Where else was he going to do it? At the movies?
Over the years, when the topic came up, Dad had told me nothing about her other than that she was dead and the dead can’t make you dinner. What I can’t believe now is how fully I’d repressed my curiosity. I suppose because he didn’t want to talk about it, Dad had convinced me that it was rude to go poking into finished lives. My mother was a topic he put on the high shelf, out of reach of questions. I had accepted this at face value, that under no circumstances did you ask about the destruction of someone who was supposed to be indestructible.
But now, suddenly, with the revelation that all along I’d been grieving over an empty hole, anger mutated into a burning curiosity. In the car on the way home from the cemetery, I told him that if I was old enough to mourn, at nine years old, I was old enough to know something about her.
“She was just this woman I saw for a little while,” Dad said.
“Just this woman? Weren’t you married?”
“Oh God, no. I’ve never even gone near an altar.”
“Well, did you, you know, love her?”
“I don’t know how to answer that question, Jasper. I really don’t know how.”
“Try.”
“No.”
Later that night, I heard the sound of hammering and went into the bathroom to see Dad putting up curtains on the bathroom mirror.
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll thank me for this one day,” he said.
“Dad, just tell me about her. What was she like?”
“Are you still harping on about that?”
“Yes.”
“That oughta do it.”
Dad finished hammering, put up the rod, and pulled the beige curtains across the mirror with a drawstring.
“Why do people need to look at themselves while they brush their teeth? Don’t they know where their teeth are?”
“Dad!”
“What? Christ! What do you want to know, factual information?”
“Was she Australian?”
“No, European.”
“From where, exactly?”
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“How can you not know?”
“Why are you so interested in your mother all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I guess I’m just sentimental.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said, showing me a familiar sight: his back.
Over the following months, I pushed and pressed and squeezed and, in dribs and drabs, managed to extract the following scant information: my mother was beautiful from certain angles, she was widely traveled, and she disliked having her photograph taken as much as most people dislike having their money taken. She spoke many languages fluently, was somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-five when she died, and though she had been called Astrid, it was probably not her real name.
“Oh, and she absolutely hated Eddie,” he said one day.
“She knew Eddie?”
“I met Eddie more or less at the same time.”
“In Paris?”
“Just out of Paris.”
“What were you doing just out of Paris?”
“You know. The usual. Walking around.”
Eddie, Dad’s best friend, was a thin Thai man with a sleazy mustache who always seemed to be smack bang in the middle of the prime of life and not a day over. When he stood next to my pale father, they looked less like friends and more like doctor and patient. It was clear now that I was going to have to interrogate Eddie about my mother. Finding him was the trouble. He made frequent and unexplained overseas trips, and I had no idea whether he went for business, pleasure, restlessness, genocide, or on a dare. Eddie had a way of being categorically unspecific—he would never go so far as to tell you, for example, that he was visiting relatives in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand, but if you pressed, he might admit that he had been “in Asia.”
I waited six months for Eddie to resurface. During that time I prepared a list of questions, running and rerunning the interview with him in my head, including his answers. I anticipated—wrongly, as it turned out—a lurid love story wherein my saintly mother martyred herself in a Romeo and Juliet–type scenario: I imagined that the doomed lovers had made a tragically romantic double suicide pact but Dad had pulled out at the last minute.
Finally one morning I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth with the curtains drawn when I heard Eddie’s syrupy voice calling out. “Marty! You here? Am I talking to an empty apartment?”
I ran into the living room.
“Here he is,” Eddie said, and as usual, before I could say “Please don’t,” he lifted the Nikon dangling from his neck and took my photo.
Eddie was a photography nut and couldn’t go five minutes without taking my photograph. He was a great multitasker: with one eye on the lens of his Nikon, he could smoke a cigarette, photograph us, and smooth down his hair at the same time. Although he said I photographed well, I couldn’t disprove him—he never showed us the results. I didn’t know if he ever developed the photos or not, or even if he had film in his camera. It was just another example of Eddie’s pathological mysteriousness. He never talked about himself. Never told you how things were in his day. You didn’t even know if he had a day. He was, body and soul, aloof.
“How’s your dad? Still around, is he?”
“Eddie, did you know my mother?”
“Astrid? Sure, I knew her. Shame about her, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me about her.”
“All right.”
Eddie plopped himself on the couch and patted the cushion next to him. I leapt on it excitedly, unaware of how intensely unsatisfying our conversation would be: in all my anticipating, I had completely forgotten that Eddie was the world’s worst storyteller.
“I met her in Paris, with your father,” he began. “I think it was autumn, because the leaves were brown. I think the American name for autumn, ‘fall,’ is really beautiful. Personally, I like fall, or the fall, as they say, and also spring. Summer I can only tolerate for the first three days and after that I’m looking for a meat freezer to hide in.”
“Eddie…”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I got sidetracked, didn’t I? I forgot to tell you how I feel about winter.”
“My mother.”
“Right. Your mother. She was a beautiful woman. I don’t think she was French, but she had the same physique. French women are small and thin with quite small breasts. If you want big breasts, you have to cross the border into Switzerland.”
“Dad said you met my mother in Paris.”
“That’s right. It was in Paris. I miss Paris. Did you know that in France they have a different word when something disgusts you? You can’t say ‘Yuck!’ No one will know what you mean. You have to say ‘Berk!’ It’s weird. The same goes when you hurt yourself. It’s ‘Aie!’ not ‘Ow!’”
“What was my dad doing in Paris?”
“He was doing nothing in those days, the same kind of nothing he does now, except then he was doing it in French. Well, actually he didn’t do nothing. He was always scribbling in his little green notebook.”
“All of Dad’s notebooks are black. He always uses the same kind.”
“No, this one was definitely green. I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s a shame you can’t see the pictures I’ve got showing in my mind’s e
ye right now. They’re so damn vivid. I wish we could project all the mind’s eyes onto a screen and sell tickets. I think how much you could expect the public to pay would really determine your self-worth.”
I eased myself off the couch, telling Eddie to go on without me, walked to my father’s bedroom, and stood at the open door, staring stupidly at the vast chaos and disorder that may or may not have been hiding the secret story of my mother in a green notebook. Normally I don’t enter my father’s bedroom, for the same reason you don’t walk in and chat with a man when he’s on the toilet, but this was important enough to force me to break my own rule. I stepped into my father’s open bowels, his howling sandstorm; that he slept in here was an achievement in itself.
I set about my task. First I had to navigate my way through a yellowing archive of newspapers that would rival those stored in the public library. They were stacked up and pushed into the dark corners of the room, the stacks so numerous they carpeted the floor all the way to the bed. I stepped on the newspapers and over things I could only imagine he’d pulled out of garbage bins and those I imagined he’d dragged out of people’s mouths. On the way I found things I had long considered missing: the tomato sauce, the mustard, all the teaspoons, the soup spoons, and the big plates. I opened up one of his wardrobes, and under a heap of clothes I found the first pile of notebooks—there must have been a hundred of them. They were all black. Black, black, black. In the second wardrobe I found another hundred, again, disappointingly, all black. I stepped inside the wardrobe—it was very deep. There I found a pile of magazines but tried not to linger on them. From all the photographs inside, Dad had cut out the eyes. I tried not to dwell on this. A man can read a magazine and might be inclined to remove the eyes if he feels they are staring at him insolently, can’t he? I ignored them, and moved deeper inside the wardrobe (it really was a deep wardrobe). Yet another box revealed yet another pile of notebooks, as well as all the cut-out eyes from the magazines. They watched me pitilessly as I rummaged through the notebooks, and seemed to widen with mine at the sight of, wedged under the cardboard flap at the bottom of the box, a green one.
I took it and got the hell out of his suffocating room. I could hear Eddie in the living room, still talking to himself. I went to my own room to examine the green notebook.
The edges of it were worn. I opened it to see that the ink had run in parts, but not so the writing was illegible. The handwriting went from small and neat to large and loopy, and in later passages, when it ran diagonally down the page, it was as though it had been written while on the back of a camel or the bow of a ship tossed around in bad weather. Some of the pages were barely hanging on by a staple, and when the notebook was closed, the corners stuck out like bookmarks.
There was a title page, in French: Petites misèries de la vie humaine.
This doesn’t mean little miseries either, as I first thought, but translates, more or less, to “Minor irritations of human life.” It gave me a sick feeling, although it served well to brace me for the story of how I came to be, the story that was located in the following journal, which I reprint here for you to read.
Petites misères de la vie humaine
11 May
Paris—perfect city to be lonely & miserable in. London too grim to be a sad sack with any dignity. O London! You grisly town! You cold gray cloud! You lowlying layer of mist & fog! You dense moan! You drizzling forlorn sigh! You shallow gene pool! You career town! You brittle town! You fallen empire! You page-three town! Lesson from London—hell isn’t red-hot but cold & gray.
And Rome? Full of sexual predators who live with their mothers.
Venice? Too many tourists as dumb as believers feed Italian pigeons, whereas in their own cities they snub them.
Athens? Everywhere mounted policemen ride by, pausing only so their horses can shit on cobblestone streets—horse shit lying in such mammoth piles you think there must be no better laxative in the world than bales of hay.
Spain? Streets smell like socks fried in urine—too many Catholics baptized in piss. Tho the real problem with Spain is you’re constantly frustrated by fireworks—sexual stink of exploding fiestas salt in wound of loneliness.
But Paris—beautiful poor ugly opulent vast complex gray rainy & French. You see unbelievable women, umbrellas, beggars, tree-lined streets, bicycles, church spires, Africans, gloomy domes, balconies, broken flowerpots, rudeness that will ring through eternity, aimless pedestrians, majestic gardens, black trees, bad teeth, ritzy stores, socialists moving their hands up the thighs of intellectuals, protesting artists, bad drivers, pay toilets, visible cheese smells, witty scarves, shadows of body odors in the metro, fashionable cemeteries, tasteful transvestites, filtered light, slums, grime, desire, artistic lampposts, multicolored phlegm of passive chimney smokers, demented cobblestone faces in terrace cafés, high collars, hot chocolates, flashy gargoyles, velvet berets, emaciated cats, pickpockets running away with glittering entrails of rich German tourists, & great phallic monuments in the squares & the sex shops.
It’s no rumor: prancing arrogant Parisians sit cross-legged in cafés & philosophize uninvited—but why is it that when I hear someone make a great philosophical argument I get the same feeling as when I see someone has put clothes on his dog?
With me is Caroline’s last postcard. Typical Caroline. “I’m in Paris” & an address, some grimy suburb just out of the city. I’ll go there & tell her my brother’s dead, the man she loved, and then…But NOT YET—clumsy love declarations are a high heart risk. Should I see her? Should I wait? The problem with most people is they’ve NEVER been torn in half, not really not right down the middle like I have, NEVER ripped themselves to shreds NEVER listened to the warring factions BOTH make their case so convincing AND so right & they don’t know what it is to have your brain & your body want TWO things each that’s FOUR compelling ideas all at once.
I wonder if I’m reaching out for Caroline in particular or just for someone who knew me before five minutes ago.
4 June
This morning woke to sound of children laughing—that shit me. Even worse—found decision had taken place in my head overnight—Today Martin Dean will go to Caroline Potts & declare undying love & devotion. I lay in bed stuffing stomach w/butterflies. Thought how all my life-altering decisions are command decisions made from the highest peak of hierarchy of self—when orders boom from commander in chief what can you do? I showered shaved drank stale wine & dressed. In head 2 fragmented Caroline memories 1. her smile, tho not her smiling face, just the smile like a suspended pair of dentures 2. her handstands—plaid skirt hanging down to her armpits—jesus how that innocent childlike act made me want to pounce on her in brutal tho heartfelt manner.
Went into bowels of city then suffocating metro ride out of Paris. Saw four horse-faced people. 14-year-old toughie tried to pick my pocket making me realize I don’t know French word for Hey!
Finally sat on low stone wall opposite small many-windowed building, all shutters closed as if forever. Hard to believe this dirty apartment building housed the woman I love. Commander sensing I was about to linger screeched in my ear so I marched to front door & pounded. Bit my lower lip too tho commander hadn’t ordered it.
Door handle turned slowly & insensitively to prolong immaculate agony. Finally opened to reveal short, stout woman as wide as she was long—in other words, a perfect square.
—Oui?
—Caroline Potts, she is here? I said in perfect English translation of grammatically correct French. The woman blabbered away in her tongue & shook head. Caroline was no longer there.
—And Monsieur Potts? The blind man?
She looked at me blankly.
—Blind. No eyes. No eyes, I repeated idiotically, thinking Well, can I come in & smell her pillow?
—Hello! a voice called out from the upstairs window. An Asian face was hanging there looking for a body to match. Wait there! the face said & ran down breathlessly.
—You are looking for the
girl & the blind man?
—Yes!
—I’m Eddie.
—So?
—So nothing. The girl left a month ago, after the blind man died.
—Died? Are you sure?
—Of course I’m sure. I was at the funeral. What’s your name?
—Martin. How did he die?
—I used to watch them from my window. Every day she walked him to the shops so he would know where the holes were in the street, but this one day he went alone. He must have got disoriented because he walked right into the middle of the road and just stood there.
—He was hit by a car?
—No, he had a heart attack. He’s buried up at the local cemetery. You want to see his grave? I could take you. Come on, he said buttoning up his coat, but I hesitated. Something in his manner was unsettling: his hands made delicate gestures & in his voice a conciliatory tone as if we’d argued & he wanted to make it up to me.
—Shall we go and see your dead friend? he asked sweetly & I thought I don’t like this man not that I had any real reason for disliking him but so what? I’ve been disliked by people who couldn’t even pick me out of a police lineup.
Under gray sky we walked up the same color road in dead silence to the top of the hill. The cemetery was only 100 meters away—convenient place to die. The grave had only his name & lifespan & nothing else no little witticisms nothing. I wondered if Lionel died instantly or w/final breath made a banal plan like Must buy milk. Then I thought about all the deaths I knew—how Harry chose his & how Terry was probably shocked by his & how my parents’ deaths must have come to them as a disagreeable surprise like a bill in the mail they thought they’d already paid.
Eddie invited me in for hot wine. His small sparsely furnished room smelled like a combination of burned orange peel & old woman’s cheek you’re forced to kiss at a family reunion. Carpet covered in big oily stains, the room spoke eloquently of spills of the clumsy fuckers who’d once lived there.
We had sandwiches & hot wine. Eddie was one of those people adept at summing up their lives in less than a minute. Born in Thailand. Studied medicine—never practiced. Traveled widely. Now trying Paris.
