Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

Tricky.

  For medicinal purposes I try to sleep with one woman a fortnight. This never feels excessive when one takes into consideration the other thirteen nights alone in bed—that’s three hundred and thirty-nine lonely nights a year—but frankly, it adds up, and in the years since Stella left me I’ve found, to my own surprise, that I’ve slept with nearly ninety-eight women, at least a third of whom are furious at me for not having been “The One.”

  On the night in question, did you find someone?

  Usually I fear that my character flaws are diagnosable at first sight. From the way I cut up the dance floor, I sometimes wonder, can you tell that I’m resistant to change? This time maybe the stench of death was mingled in with my usual odor of desperation and violent sorrow.

  So no luck.

  Just one last measly fuck before gravetime! That’s all I wanted. Is it too much to ask? But I failed to excrete irresistibility. I swaggered unbuttoned from one sweaty drunken lady to another but none sustained eye contact. I felt myself without a human face. I kicked the speaker for its general lack of magic. Then I spotted on the dance floor a large-bottomed woman, pale as a cow’s stomach lining, shaky on her feet. I lingered on her periphery until we locked eyes and I gyrated toward her and we kissed, but when she pulled away I suddenly thought that I’d rather die painfully than have another verbal exchange that did not cut a straight path to the heart of human truth, so when she asked my name I said, “No names,” and she said, “I’m Tracy,” and so I said, “Oh, forget it then,” and stormed outside into the cold quiet and stamped my feet on the empty street. Nobody was around. The moon looked so low and close you could reach out and stick your finger in its eye. Then it hit me: Who gives a shit about her name? I went back inside. She was in the arms of someone swifter who knew well enough to eat what was on his plate. I’d blown it, and I was tired, tired of moving, tired of the body’s needs. It was late. I was hungry. Almost everything would be shut. That’s what counts for a last meal in the valley of the shadow of death. A fucking kebab.

  So after that you went and waited at the hospital?

  No. This is only one thirty a.m. I went to the Yellow Pages attached to the bar’s old payphone and flicked through and found The Enigma Variations.

  The brothel that services the Railway Hotel.

  The ad featured a photograph of a scantily clad bosomy blonde lying on her side. I thought: That’s the one. When I get to the place, I’ll ask for the girl in the photo. I don’t want any surprises. After all, I already know what she looks like lying on her side.

  Seems logical.

  Thank God for brothels. Otherwise I don’t like to think what I’d do.

  What would you do?

  If I didn’t find consent such a turn-on.

  What?

  On the subject of prostitution, if a man acts like a man, who are you to moralize or demoralize him? Who are you to judge a species for its inherent characteristics? Do you hate the cat for licking its paws? Do you hate the dog for licking its balls, and then your face? Deep down you know that to personalize these things is low and just ignorant, and if you want sex and you’re not getting it elsewhere, and you’re not in a relationship and not betraying anyone, and if we agree you can’t exploit anyone who charges you two hundred bucks an hour, then where’s the harm? It isn’t dangerous—sex with a prostitute is the safest sex you’ll ever have—people grow careless with new girlfriends and one-night stands but who the hell’s going to be careless with a prostitute? Who’s going to say, we got caught up in the heat of passion and forgot to wear protection? No one, that’s who. Sex with people you like, or are infatuated with, or love, average citizens, that’s where the real danger is.

  Nobody’s judging you!

  The Enigma Variations wasn’t hidden in some dark alley or side street, but was boldly sitting on a main road between a newsstand and a barbershop as if it belonged in the heart of the community and not in its groin. Through the open doorway you could see into a pink, softly lit lounge room: potted plants and faded couches and a woman’s legs with torn stockings. And that was just from the street. Inside, clients snorted and sniffed their way in and out of seedy rooms with unfortunate acoustics while the Korean madam directed impassive women to parade by, one by one—I guessed that you were supposed to imagine their sleek, bony hands on your body, their harrowed lips and well-traveled tongues all over you. That was taxing, mentally. The women were all ageless in that they looked as if they’d been fucking for an eternity; they had dirty-blond hair and mean faces, not the kind of faces you’d think to go to for pleasure, and arms bruised at the elbow joints, purple splotches at the bend. They were all thin, like wire coat hangers, wearing white lingerie that was a grotesque caricature of male fantasy. None of these was the girl in the picture, and probably not the girl in any picture. These creatures were unphotographable. But there was one brunette, older than the others, with large, heavy-lidded eyes, tongue slithering professionally over her lower lip, and sure, her hands were shaking and she had an ugly nose that was too big for her face, but, I thought, what does that matter? You don’t fuck a nose. At least, I’d never heard of it.

  Aldo is this—

  She led me up a narrow staircase and I trundled after her down a cold, poky hallway at the end of which was a padlocked door—what valuable possessions were they protecting? Guns? Drugs? Sex toys?—and she ushered me into an austere bedroom with a sad, saggy bed. The lack of knickknacks was dispiriting—I’d have liked to put on the stereo or peruse framed photographs of family members. Against the barred window that looked out on a drainpipe running up a brick wall was a desk and a lamp. I laughed at the thought of a person using a desk in a brothel. She closed the door behind her and I thought how I’d like to have unprotected sex but even in the face of imminent death the idea of genital-to-genital transmission of sores was still a turnoff.

  “So darling,” she said, in a raspy voice, as she crossed the room and sat down on the bed next to me. Her skin was like crepe paper. She asked my name. I said, “Simon Simonson.” She drummed her fingers on my left leg and said her name was Gretel. “That’s your fantasy prostitute name? Gretel?” I stared at her in a confused fit and curled my hands into tight bony balls in my lap. “Relax, honey, tell me what you want,” she said, as she removed her bra and placed her large veiny breasts in my hands. She grabbed a bottle of baby oil from the bedside table and asked, “Do you want to lie back?” I said, “That’s what my doctor always says. In that exact voice.” From the next room, the sound of groaning. I said, “Ever consider soundproofing these walls? You can do it with egg cartons.” She unzipped my pants and removed them in a way that denoted time immemorial. I asked, “Can I borrow a piece of paper?” She said, “What for?” I said, “I’ve just had an idea.” I leaped off the bed and sat at the desk and turned on the lamp and snapped my fingers. “Pen!” She brought me a pen. I wrote, Honestly, I never thought I had it in me. I’ve lived my entire life as if in a theater, always gazing glumly at the exit. I hope I didn’t suffer! Gretel was reading over my shoulder and asked fearfully, “You’re not going to do it here, are you?” I promised I wouldn’t. She led me back to the bed and climbed on top and persevered through my tears with the decency not to comment on them. It was when the transaction was completed, and Gretel had put back on her bra and panties and stockings, that it happened. A nothing of an incident, but significant.

  What happened?

  A commotion, a woman’s terrorized scream in the hallway and male voices shouting. Gretel said, “Wait here.” She stepped out into the hall half-undressed and I said, “Put something on,” automatically, in the same way I’d shout at Stella who always stood at the window at night or would run to the mailbox in her underwear. Gretel leaned quizzically against the doorway before giving me a tender smile. I’ll never forget that wonderful look, and as I walked out of the brothel I felt, for a long moment, unalone.

  A man has missed something if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling l
ike throwing himself into the river out of sheer disgust with life.

  Who said that?

  Flaubert.

  Well, I walked with a light spring in my step and a backlog of primitive joy until morning, when I made my way to the Women’s Hospital, to the row of public telephones; I knew Stella was psychologically incapable of letting a phone ring and had used that information against her in the past. She answered, “Hello?” I asked, “How is he?” Stella said, “He has all his fingers and toes.” I said, “God, I hope no one ever describes me like that.” She hung up on me, and I stood in the hospital reception area in a sort of trance, behind enemy lines, surrounded on all sides by, I assumed, sad bastards with multiple organ failure and their next of kin, when the ground shifted below me and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on the red and blue swirly carpet, and sweaty superbacteria-incubating hands were touching my face. I’d fainted. Everybody nattered above me in dull whispers. I got to my feet and phoned her again. I said, “What room you in?” She said, “Don’t even think about it.” I said, “I’m coming up.” She said, “I’ll come down,” and a few minutes later, she emerged from the elevator walking tenderly—she’d just had major abdominal surgery, after all—not harried but not smiling either, and I suddenly was struck by the thought that we were too intimate for a handshake, too estranged for a hug, too cynical for a high-five, so we nodded at each other and said, “Hey.” “Just tell me the truth,” I said, “would he or would he not look out of place on the tower of a gothic cathedral?” She said, “He’s beautiful.” In her eyes, sad embarrassment. Life had moved expertly on without me; this baby was the proof. “I’m very tired,” she said, “I’m on a lot of painkillers.” “When you get back to your room, ask for the strongest slow-release, then twenty minutes later, scream for a fast-relief one. You won’t regret it,” I said, and gave her a smile that she returned with a look of remoteness laced with bursts of warmth rationed out to placate me. “Well,” I said, “I suppose we’d better go upstairs and see that golem of yours.” Stella smiled joylessly. “Maybe another day.” Her face turned white and sour. “But I’m here now.” “No,” she said resolutely, “you’re not.” The suppressed anger in her voice frightened me. “All right, Stella,” I said, “I’ll go. “Thank you,” she said with obvious relief.

  But you didn’t go.

  I said good-bye and walked away, then doubled back and caught the elevator up to the third floor, into the low-ceilinged morgue. Just past the gurneys with immaculate white sheets I found the drawer where I intended to put my body after overdosing. A modern catacomb, I thought. I’d stayed in worse. In the brushed stainless steel my face was like a blurred photograph. I checked my seven packets of sleeping pills—I’d told Doc Castle I was going overseas and needed a six-month supply—and counted out a hundred and sixty-eight ten-millligram tablets, the mere sight of which made my blood flow slither to a crawl. As I made my way to Stella’s room, I imagined the premature aftertaste of me in Death’s mouth and I think, but I’m not sure, I couldn’t hear my footsteps already.

  Aldo, in the coming years, when I ask why I’m passed over for promotion time and time again, my superiors will simply play me a recording of this interview.

  That’s why you’re having so many problems as a writer. You’ve always been a stickler for reality. Anyway, there was a yeasty, antiseptic, fecal smell in Stella’s room that mingled with the pitiful bunches of service-station flowers, and the stink wafted unpleasantly toward me as I cautiously entered, removing my shoes. A shaft of brassy sunlight inclined through the narrow window. Stella was fast asleep emitting the softest snore you ever heard. On the windowsill, plastic plates and serrated white knives and sporks. The baby was asleep in a clear plastic bassinet on wheels in the curtained alcove on the far side of the bed. There he was, in the cold yellow light, tiny and shrunken, pointy headed, blotchy faced, with a wispy fuzz of fine black hair. Asleep, no different from my own baby when dead. I was afraid he was dead, he was so still—until I clocked the rise and fall of his little chest. Alive then. Time to put up or shut up.

  You took out the pills.

  Looking at the sign about mandatory hand washing affixed above the basin, I washed the pills down and stood for a moment staring at Stella, her sleeping body an almost panoramic vista, her long limbs half-sheeted, and her gown blood-yellow where her bandages had soaked through; all this in a low steady light reminiscent of the Railway Hotel, that was, it only occurred to me now, nowhere near a train station. That would be my dying epiphany—oh well! The sleeping pills hit fast. It was not darkness that came, but fog. I was dying. A glimpse of death I felt secretly proud of, as if I were an amateur astronomer who gets to name a star. Now that free will was behind me, I might finally relax. It was time to go to the morgue, but my feet wouldn’t move. Maybe for some their whole life flashes, but I only got a single jolting memory from childhood of someone hitting me repeatedly on the back of the head with a tennis ball in a sock. Who wielded the weapon? I couldn’t remember. Maybe the same person who told me to “take a sleeping pill, wait half an hour, then smoke in bed.” Now I have a hazy recollection of picking up the little baby and nestling him next to Stella on the bed, under her arm. Miraculously he made no sound. I silently moved the cushioned chair closer and put my head on the mattress edge. I wanted to christen this baby without parental consent, but I couldn’t think of any good names. I remember wondering what teething felt like. A hush threaded its way through my bloodstream, through the arteries, and I felt the slow quiet of my heart, and the woolly darkness descend. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness was the baby opening his eyes and grabbing my finger and me weeping and thinking this was going to be the best death ever.

  You don’t know how you wound up lying on the bed next to Stella and on top of the baby?

  I must have climbed up onto the bed to snuggle. I just don’t remember.

  Zolpidem causes memory loss.

  That’s what I used to like about it.

  Aldo, you cock, that baby could have died.

  I know.

  If Stella hadn’t woken up at that very moment—

  I KNOW! I KNOW! Jesus, Liam. You don’t think I know that? If I wanted to die before, how do you think I feel now?

  Interview concluded at 4.30 p.m. EST.

  II

  Stella walked gingerly into the station a few hours later, heels clicking on the hardwood floor, her new-mother’s face gleaming darkly in the spectral light she always carried with her. Everyone in the station turned to look. She hugged me hello with a tepid formality, like we were ambassadors of warring nations who had once shared a roll of toilet paper in the UN restroom.

  “This incident must have been very frightening, but Aldo didn’t try to kill your baby,” I said plainly. She stared fiercely at me. “This was not a murder or attempted murder, it was just a clumsy suicide attempt and a total fuckup and you know it, Stella, you fucking know it.”

  “Constable!”

  Senior Detective Doyle glared at me with all the sullen power of his rank. Stella seemed shocked at my vehemence and locked me in a straightforward gaze.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  There was, now that I come to think of it, always an uncertainty to her; as if she wasn’t sure of a single one of her life choices and was always on the lookout for a second opinion.

  “Come with me,” I said, and grabbing a file led her outside where Stella held her body as if she feared I was going to reach out and touch it.

  “This is what you’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to say you’re not pressing charges and then you’re going to write a statement saying that this incident was entirely accidental, and you’re even going to say you were so out of it on painkillers it might actually have been you on top of your baby, and not Aldo.”

  A suspicious frown gave way to a wan curiosity. She let out a full-body exhale and slid her hands into her pockets.

  “All right,
Liam. But he needs to stay away from us for good.”

  “Absolutely.”

  We stood awkwardly beside a row of police cars, and I don’t know why but I suddenly thought about her career, how music had been her life and she’d completely abandoned it. I felt an almost dizzying wave of empathy. The times I had given up writing had been a devastating exercise in soul shrinking. I didn’t have an inkling how she disconnected the reflex to pick up a guitar, how a lifelong marriage to music could be so abruptly annulled. And as a songwriter, how did she withstand the pull of a melody or lyric that came to her in the night? I reflected how she’d given up not after but exactly in the middle of the death of their baby. “All right,” she said again, sighed, snatched the paper and clipboard out of my hand, and wrote a brief statement to the effect that Aldo hadn’t intended to harm her child, that she had picked up Clive herself and taken him into the bed without realizing that Aldo was already passed out beside her. Her statement made no sense, but almost nobody was going to read it.

  She handed me the clipboard. “Did he have to have his stomach pumped again?”

  “Sure.”

  “How is he?” Before I could answer she asked, in a sort of breezy despair, “Why hasn’t he moved on?”

  A brightness in her eyes betrayed that this was some kind of triumph. Who wouldn’t want to be a man’s greatest regret? I torpedoed her with my silence and dead eyes and turned away. Across the street, a muscular individual with close-cropped hair wearing a white undershirt and tight jeans was staring directly at us, and whenever a passer-by blocked his view, he’d crane his neck or go up on tiptoes to keep us in his field of vision.

  “Craig, I presume?”

  “He’s waiting for Aldo to come out so he can beat the shit out of him. He’s furious at him for trying to die by my side.”

  “It was a bit cheeky.”

  We had relaxed now, though we had nothing further to say to each other, and I became itchy to leave. A few somber seconds passed, and I said I had to get back; I kissed her on the cheek, taking in her soft spring-rain scent, and wished her and her baby well. The fact is, I didn’t really understand why Aldo’s love for Stella was so robust. It was a nuisance for everybody. When I reached the station doors, I turned back to see her unmoved under the streetlight, still watching me. From that angle, I got a glimpse of Aldo’s recurring dream. I saw what he saw: the artist, the singer/songwriter, the frantic mother, the highly intelligent, no-nonsense, no-bullshit, and weirdly increasingly youthful incarnation of some dangerous, angry beauty. For a brief moment I got to feel what he felt, and the contrast to my own tepid emotional tumult with Tess made me realize that in the world of love I was a straggler, a craven magpie, a lousy poet who, like Aldo said, was a stickler for reality and all the poorer for it.