by Steve Toltz
—What is he, a rodeo clown?
—No. A wonderful street performer. Endearing singer. Terrific juggler. So-so fire twirler. Unexceptional unicyclist and humdrum contortionist, but more than adequate trapeze artist and just a downright fabulous stilt walker. Most of all, an outstanding performance artist and an inspiring director of physical theater.
—Jesus help us all.
—Do you want to hear his voice?
—I could live without it.
Mimi rang a number and put her phone to my ear.
—Hi, the voice said, this is Elliot. I’m not here right now but if you leave your name and number I’ll get back to you in three to five years.
—Sad.
—Manslaughter, possession of narcotics, resisting arrest, she said, as though those salient facts spoke for themselves. She backtracked. Elliot was carrying thirty-one Ecstasy tablets en route to a fundraiser for his latest production. He ran a red light and when a police siren started up, he fled, killing a pedestrian. The sadness of the tale was how quickly the whole saga could be synopsized. Until his imprisonment they’d not spent a single night apart. I thought, I’m a bed warmer, nothing more. She backtracked further. When she was about thirty, she took an acting workshop. He was directing physical theater in wife-beaters. They fell in love, lived together in a camper van, sloshed around mud festivals in Andalucía and Avignon; she became his official photographer. Other than adding scars and gashes and assorted physical impairments to famous artworks—his ultimate aspiration: To paint a nosebleed on the Mona Lisa—one of Elliot’s “performances” was to place ads in industry magazines for actors to perform in a lavish outdoor theatrical production of Triumph of the Will, and then film whoever turned up, she said. Another “performance” was held in small villages across Eastern Europe; Elliot would go into a village and start rumors that his sister was possessed by the devil, and let the word spread until some overfed shaggy priest with ancient stinks and gristle on his face made the journey to whatever fly-ridden room they were holed up in and carried out the exorcism, which was captured on film by the crew. Mimi was exorcised six times in total.
—You were actually exorcised?
—Sure.
I silently diagnosed Elliot as having a clear narcissistic personality disorder.
He was the one who brought her to the residence, she explained, weeping for her precious, sensitive performance artist whose natural domain was long grass on an embankment by a river. She said his ponytail was removed for the pre-trial hearing, then opened an abridged copy of The Brothers Karamazov and pulled out the ponytail. I had a frisson of pleasure listening to her story but I was none too pleased to fondle this acrobat’s ponytail. Then in a quiet yet hysterical voice she returned to that fateful night. Why did he try to outrun the police? I asked. He had an uncompromising moment and poorly negotiated a sudden bend in the pitch-black night. Maybe he capitulated to an impulse he’d seen on television, a narrative impulse to run. She backtracked again. The story changed as she was telling it; she added more details now, circling closer to the truth.
—It was me.
—It was you what?
—I yelled, Go! Quick!
Why had she yelled? And why had he thoughtlessly obeyed? She didn’t know.
—And now he’s in prison and he’s going crazy, she said in a whisper that seemed to come through her chest wall from her heart itself. He’s getting pushed around. He’s getting, you know.
I knew.
—I mean, it’s taken its toll. He’s not the same. It’s changing him. He’s getting beaten! He’s getting, you know!
I knew.
Mimi clasped one hand over her mouth as if to stop toxic levels of distress from leaking out. I didn’t know how to react; the panicky obsession I’d always had with prison clouded my thought processes. It was also clear she admired and loved Elliot intensely, loved them intensely, as a couple. My role in all this? To love her for five years. Three for good behavior. But why was I worried? The elephant in the room was behind bars! Yet he was the proprietor of her heart. I was the tenant. And the rent kept going up. I thought: My cock is being used as a placeholder for his. I thought: Who wants to mess about with a devotion like that? Yet I knew I was going to squeeze out an incautious remark. I took her hand.
—I love you.
ALL RIGHT, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is now we get to the prosecutor’s pet word: motive. The crux of his flimsy case. The prosecutor can’t seem to go on about it enough. I killed her in a jealous rage. That was my motive. Jealousy. Well, I can’t deny the sad fact of it: I was jealous.
—I love you too, she said, yet when I undressed her moments later, it was like peeling bark off a rotten tree. I nibbled a piece here, a piece there, licked the sweat that glistened on her throat, searched for a remote part of her, any uncharted territory, but overall sex with Mimi that night was like strutting into a condemned building at the moment of demolition.
—I’m glad I don’t have to hide this from you anymore, she said afterward.
—Hide what?
From underneath the bed, she dragged a couple dozen white sheets of paper and sat on the floor cross-legged, applying lipstick and covering the paper in kisses—twenty or thirty pages of kisses—and when she was done, placed them in a manila envelope addressed to Elliot Grass c/o Silverwater Correctional Complex.
—Oh Jesus, Mimi. You really know how to break my heart.
The strange thing was, though, I didn’t feel anything when I said that. It was only afterward, when I stepped out onto the balcony into the wet night and stormed down the slippery wooden staircase to the damp cold sand, that I found I was genuinely devastated. Elliot, I realized, was background noise to her every movement on earth. She could only excrete love and I could only suck up those excretions; ours was an insect love. The silence became thick and hurt my ears. Black waves folded into black sand. I collapsed and remained on the beach until the dissipating morning mist unveiled the horizon and, as always when you’re sitting on a shoreline feeling suicidal, the tsunamis don’t come. They don’t come and they don’t come.
XVI
Two days later, Mimi was switching outfits before the mirror.
—Where are you going?
—Nowhere.
—How do you normally get there?
—By bus.
—I’ll drive you.
Endless rows of telephone poles against wide gray skies en route to the prison. We drove in Lynne Bishop’s Hyundai in untenable silence through nondescript suburbs down a tree-lined highway divided by pointless grassy parkland. The tension was a storm to be weathered. We began lane-swapping skirmishes with clusters of silver sedans and trucks the lengths of city blocks, passed houses with blue tarps flapping in southerly gusts, redbrick churches with white crosses, pensioners in knee-high socks standing forlornly at mailboxes. I was faking calm in a tropical sweat. Why had I driven her here? It was an avuncular move on my part. As we approached the prison, I felt a loud pounding in my ears. Here it was. Prison! The place where brute realities look you in the face.
Prohibited items were everything except the clothes on one’s back. Mimi left her bag and walked inside, leaving me to stare at the oppressive, sprawling mass of Silverwater Prison and the people going in and out: guards long past peak fitness; teary, terrified visitors with sleeplessness gouged into their faces, perhaps burdened by guilt—in contrast, I thought, you’d scarcely find one hospital visitor even indirectly implicated in a patient’s kidney failure. Outside the walls and barbed-wired gates, cars flowed obliviously; it never occurred to me you could be lying in your cell listening to traffic! The colorless afternoon sky was beginning to darken. Birds circled in maddening patterns. I felt dizzy, migrainous. I closed my eyes and thought of shiv-wielding sodomites in a tobacco economy where the death of an old man’s pet mouse precipitates his suicide. It teemed down, lending plausibility to the mawkish scene I imagined taking place inside: Mimi sobbing through plexigl
ass or on the telephone, or hand-holding on a wooden table. Maybe he would take her face in his hands and kiss her tear-stained lips.
An hour later, Mimi staggered back to the car and collapsed in convulsive sobs.
—He’s been badly beaten. His eyes were swollen shut!
—We should go overseas together, to one of those countries where men dye their hair black but leave their mustaches white.
—He’s lost teeth.
—South America, maybe. You know, and you go into a restaurant and the waiter’s older than your great-grandfather but he can still beat you in a fight.
Mimi’s eyes were clotted with tears. Her cheeks at risk of moisture damage.
—Or to France or Germany, I said, where a sexual darkness in one’s soul is a given.
By the time her sleeping pills knocked her unconscious that night, she hadn’t said another word. I sat on a wicker chair and gazed at the dark purple storm clouds drifting over the inexhaustible tides until morning. Mimi awoke with cold clear eyes.
—I think I need to be alone today. Do you mind going home?
Your Honor, for the next two days I sat in my grim apartment with its warmth of a parking garage, waiting for the sound of a rattling engine, the sight of her fuzzy head craning out a car window, but I knew she wouldn’t come. The law of unintended consequences applies to confidences. Now that she had divulged her secret to me, she could no longer hide her misery from me. Her jovial facade was reserved for strangers, acquaintances, one-night stands. I left message after message at the residence to no avail.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if only I’d left it there. Here was my clean exit. Why didn’t I take the sense memory of oral sex as a parting gift and get on with my own private predicament? Why didn’t I leave her alone? Why couldn’t I be alone? I was incapable, that’s why. I was love dependent and desperate. And I was selfish; without Stella, I needed Mimi, and while I knew I was unable to supplant her love for Elliot, I wanted her to need me too. But how? How to make someone need what they don’t need? How to reverse the polarity of dwindling physical attraction?
My friend Liam swung by and we both sat on the damp cement balcony and dangled our legs through the iron gratings and passed a bottle between us and made an inventory of my positive traits—we only got as far as never had a filling. Nothing useful. Dark clouds threatened the brisk walkers on the street below. Liam had been to the residence and seen Mimi with his own bare eyes, and understood my desperation to win back this voluptuous graying saddult of the female persuasion. He himself had recently separated from his wife, Tess, and exuded disturbing levels of desperation on my behalf. He said he’d been dating and a person should do anything they can to avoid having to mate with the forlorn masses. He thrust his finger in my face with unexpected vehemence, and said that second-time-around love is rare and an exceptional stroke of luck. I said, How am I going to get Mimi back? He said, Men win women over with kindness, with cruelty, with flowers, with cold hard cash. I said, They also attract them by radiating confidence. He said, None of that’s going to work for you. He took out a notebook and scribbled in it. That made me fear he was going to turn my love affair into one of his failed novels. I said, What are you writing? He read, That Mimi, the object of Aldo’s desire, has two working eyes and free will counts against him. I said, Fuck you. At three in the morning, Liam passed out and I dragged him to the couch and it was then it hit me, the ruinous idea that doomed us all. Not to say Mimi would still be alive—because I didn’t fucking kill her—but I wouldn’t be soiling myself in my greens manacled to this lousy wheelchair. In fact, I wouldn’t even be in a wheelchair. There are no greater regrets than the poor decisions you agonized over to make.
XVII
Mimi was lying in the hammock, in the sun and the cold sea air.
—When the sky is bright and clear I suspect God of an ulterior motive, don’t you?
—I’m glad you came.
She led me into her bedroom and undressed quickly, less with desire for me, I suspected, and more with a blind desire to lose herself, but when she pressed her naked body hard against mine I pushed her away. Penetrate her heart in one clean thrust was my plan, and as I sat fully dressed on the bed and she stood naked with uncertainty, shivering, I felt cruel and ridiculous. Nevertheless.
—Elliot, I said.
—What about him?
—I’ve made some arrangements, I said casually, examining my thumbnail.
—What the fuck are you talking about?
—I can have him protected.
Her eyes lingered on mine; she was trying to catch me out in a lie. If she was afraid of the power I had just taken for myself, she didn’t show it.
—Protected? Are you fucking with me? Explain yourself!
Problem was, my plan was really only three-quarters of a plan; I thought the rest would come together of its own accord. I told her that I knew people who could protect her husband. I knew the people to be paid, palms to be greased, guards to be bribed, gangs to be placated, etc. As I said this I was afraid I’d shown her my secret face, my evil face, and she could detect pleasure on it, but she didn’t seem to notice. I explained that I knew a shocking number of people in prison, just as I knew a shocking number in hospitals with fatal diseases; I knew a fair number of prison guards just as I knew a fair number of nurses and hospital administrators. I got lost on this thread a while. Just as I am familiar with the inner workings of hospitals, I explained, I am familiar with the inner workings of prisons.
—Shut up a minute. Are you serious?
Pure gratitude blazed in her eyes. This was sexual good news.
—There’s just a little matter of sixty thousand dollars, I said.
Mimi broke into a horrified gawp. I made a vague gesture but it didn’t mean anything. Overconfident in my grand gesture, I had already agreed to pay sixty thousand for six months in a contract as airtight as a gym membership.
Over the next few days, Mimi set about on humbling outings, groveling apoplectically, trying to borrow from her gambler father—an imposing man with a to-scale Easter Island head on his shoulders—from friends, old boyfriends, old bosses, acquaintances, successful artist friends, but either they were fiscally down on their luck or unwilling to make the loan. For my part, no matter how desperate I was I could not do for her what I could not do for myself, the one thing I could never do, had almost died not doing, the superhuman feat that so many subhumans and subpar humans excel at: making money. I had spent my life trying to materialize it for Stella, for the baby, for my mother, for myself, and now, as if achieving even lower self-esteem were my ultimate goal, I was failing again.
By the end of the week, still nothing. Mimi rested her head on a mountain of soft cushions and I lay beside her, brainstorming. Outside, clouds like cement blocks set the moody grayness of the afternoon. We had naught to liquidate, nada to move. We couldn’t get high-paying salaries. Neither of us had any skills. We had nobody to borrow from, and begging drew in too little. There were no legitimate possibilities.
—We find an individual, she said, follow him home, force him at knifepoint to give us money.
—I’ve been robbed at knifepoint, I said. I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Besides, two losers with negligible street smarts should pursue only victimless crimes.
—So what then? Fraud? Mail fraud? Insurance fraud?
I slid off the bed and looked out the window at the heavy clouds sweeping across a sky full of pinks and purples and oranges, an embarrassment of colors. I was besieged by dumb ideas, one after the other—obscure hoaxes, elaborate cons. The early evening stars strode into view. In truth, I was afraid. In a perversely unjust universe, four decades without breaking a law means severe punishment awaits your first infringement. Mimi dried her eyes. I hadn’t even noticed she was crying; it was the quietest sob I’d ever seen.
—I have it! Maybe!
In saying this, I realize my dilemma, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. In order to present you wi
th perhaps the single most likely of all of Mimi’s potential murderers, I have to admit to a wee crime.
Blackmail.
—Do we have any dirt on anybody? I asked.
—Not that I can think of.
—Think harder.
The darkness moved in but neither of us put on the light; the moon shone into the room and I could see us from its perspective—minuscule, alone.
—Wait. Didn’t you fuck Mr. Morrell?
—How do you know that?
—Rumors.
We fell into silence. The wooden balcony railing glistened in the steady drizzle.
—I don’t want to blackmail Morrell. Not him.
—OK. I liked him too. We won’t, then. Let’s think of something else.
A couple of minutes went by, then fifty more. I remembered that his wife had died of ovarian cancer, his lifelong failure to pursue his career in painting, how my friend Liam was obsessed with his bombastic diatribe on art. By midnight the creeping dread had settled in that I’d have to personally blackmail one of the nicest and saddest men either of us had ever known.
XVIII
Pressing the doorbell generated a baby’s piercing cry followed by a man’s voice shouting, “Shut up!” Morrell opened the door of his Waterloo-brick, two-bedroom terrace wearing a paisley shirt and rolled-up army pants; as usual, his skin looked carbonized and veiny, like a fried onion, making his whitened teeth even whiter.
—When I woke from a troubled sleep that Sunday morning, Morrell said, Aldo Francis Benjamin was standing on my doorstep with a curious expression on his face. Hope the doorbell didn’t disturb you. One of my students made it as part of a sound installation for her final-year project.
Morrell’s smile revealed abnormal affection for me in his eyes. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Why shouldn’t he? I did.
