Quicksand (33 page)

—What the hell happened to you?

—Oh, this and that.

She ran her fingers over the faded scars, the scratches that had never healed, and the stretchy burns where I had failed to incinerate.

—Seriously, what did you do, fuck a cat-o'-nine-tails?

—Is this going to be a problem?

She undressed, and there they were—her famous nipples, her famous birthmark! She nimbly unbuckled my belt but fumbled with the buttons on my fly. I think she was used to zippers. Members of the press, going to bed with a new woman is like having to learn a whole new operating system on the first day of work with the boss breathing down your neck. You can quote me on that.

All morning we talked, about my fears of immortality, about her sad upbringing—what an interesting woman! The deceased, I learned, was born into the type of family who wore headphones at the dinner table, who lived in navy-blue jogging pants, who never had a golden age. Her alcoholic mother had four children by three different fathers; hers was a gambler who'd blow inconceivable sums on horses and online casinos. She had a bipolar brother and a sister who got hooked on dirty methamphetamines, an ice monster who became something to scare the children with. Mimi's childhood was played out in poker-machine enclaves, racetrack bars, and heroin-injecting rooms. They lived in Randwick, almost directly across from the Prince of Wales Hospital (the proximity of which encouraged them to fall apart: more than once Mimi would plop her mother in a shopping cart they kept in the yard and wheel her over to emergency to get her stomach pumped). They took lunch in the hospital cafeteria, and got takeout coffee from the machine at reception. On birthdays they bought flowers from the hospital gift shop, and regularly purchased toiletries from the hospital pharmacy. The soundtrack of her childhood was an ambulance siren. God took unprovoked swings at them too. They dealt with high blood pressure, pacemakers, epilepsy, type 2 diabetes, and borderline personality disorders. There were accidents, brain injuries, bad-luck diseases; a severely autistic cousin lived with them for several years. And Mimi had to take care of them all. Clean. Shop. Wash. Dress. Cook. Feed. Toilet. Iron. Shave. Bathe. Change bandages. Run all over town. Lie to cops. Take orders from doctors. Appease social workers. Calm autistic cousin. Restrain bipolar brother. Sit through cold-turkey vigils with sister. Endure mother's night terrors. Negotiate with father over finances. Tolerate her name called in impatient or solicitous voices. Hide booze. Hide smokes. Hide weed. Check oxygen tank. Lie to debt collectors. Manage welfare payments. Yell at doctor. Distribute antipsychotic medications. Accompany brother to court. Drag father home from racetrack. Drag brother out of pub brawls. Honor father's forged checks. Pick up body of collapsed mother. Retrieve stolen items from pawnshop. Perjure herself in court. Physically lift uncle. Administer intravenous medication. Fill exhaustive shopping lists. Weather age-inappropriate cleansing of opposite-gender genitalia. Endure her name being called in choked voices. In frustrated voices. In vehement, theatrical voices. Withstand sister's aggravated assaults. Mourn mother both alive and dead. Her family didn't mind inconveniencing her—this
was the arrangement. Life as permanent errand! That explained, she said, her ability to draw a chair close to a bed without making a noise, apply a bandage in the dark, disinfect a wound, administer a morphine drip, spot a precancerous lesion. Just as I had learned amateur psychology, she had learned amateur nursing. Where I had read the
APA Dictionary of Clinical Psychology
and the
Handbook of Psychological Assessment,
she had read the
Fundamentals of Nursing
and the
Nursing Diagnosis Handbook
. She knew how to take blood pressure. How to collect a urine sample from an unwilling donor. Dispense medication to an indisposed mouth. Maintain a patent airway during a seizure. Palpate firmly the upper right quadrant of the abdomen below the costovertebral angle.

OK, Your Honor. Etcetera. Happy?

The point being, near midday, after having fucked and talked for six straight hours we had still not slept. The sun was shining directly through her windows, so brightly we had to put on sunglasses.

—How do you feel? she asked.

—Like I've been shot out of a cannon into the side of a mountain.

Mimi asked me to rub suntan lotion on her back, and that was erotic enough to get us going again until sunset. When I made a move to go, her hand clutched my arm.

—Stay, she whispered.

What else could I do, Your Honor? I stayed.

Two glorious months! Two months of sweaty siestas on creaky daybeds, waking up to the sound of thunderstorms, of dreaming about sleeping beside the very woman I was sleeping beside. Two months without praying for the opposite of clemency, without worrying about my incalculable, inescapable tomorrows, without thinking: My kingdom for a terminus!

Sure, bailiffs, we had our petty domestic differences: The deceased liked all the windows open and I liked them closed; she put every food product in the pantry whereas I prefer the entire kitchen to be one giant refrigerator. Sure, I discovered that compliments went down badly. A comment on her beautiful eyes, for instance, revealed to her a deafening silence on the subject of her nose. And
she often worked into conversation the phrase
I don't suffer fools gladly
whereas I don't generally suffer gladly the fools who say that. One thing she could not tolerate was lying in bed and not sleeping. She wanted to fall asleep at an insane speed; anything longer than instantaneous was an unacceptable torment. She took sleeping pills I'd never heard of—Lunesta, Trazodone, Ativan, Sonata, Rozerem—she combined, she alternated, but she always took something, and didn't like it being pointed out. She was impatient, highly sensitive to criticism, intropunitive, self-critical, and had epigastric complaints she never took anything for. One particularly instructive day, she went out to the pharmacy
specifically
to purchase a scar-healing cream that she ministered to each of my disfigurements, perhaps to exert early control over me. Certainly her facial flushing and sweaty palms when she applied the cream was curious. I should also mention she was not just caring, but intuitive; she knew what to do if I was stricken by a headache or a fake headache or a panic attack or the fear of a panic attack.

Mornings she would attempt, despite my protestations, to tell me her dream,
and
she didn't like to be looked at either; any type of gaze—human eyes, animal eyes, camera lenses—seemed to rile her DNA, which was ironic because Mimi was a starer herself and the type of person who thought it acceptable to photograph the homeless as long as it was in black and white. She had sharp hip bones and an inexhaustible amount to say on the considerable deficiencies of Sydney men, as if they were a universal experience from which one could derive universal truths, and seemed to have an endless array of past boyfriends and lovers whom she'd reminisce about postcoitally. Her interpersonal issues were unclear. With a core group of artists, she had a hot–cold relationship that was both snuggly and standoffish. I might as well do the Crown the service of naming the chief suspects.

I allege the abstract painter, Frank Rubinstein! I allege the pointillist, Nick Whiticker! I allege the sculptor, Dan Wethercot!

It was from these people, incidentally, that I learned what it really means to be an artist. Their lives made a deep impression on me, and not only because a failed entrepreneur is a loser whereas a failed artist is always an artist
no matter what
. Their self-esteem is high! With their paint-splattered shirts and flabby guts and joints stuck to their lower lips, they walk around like captains of industry. They smoke like they have inoperable cancers. They keep their studios like teenagers' bedrooms, their bedrooms like crime scenes,
their sinks like toxic hazards, and their kitchen walls, after cooking, like Jackson Pollocks. They gossip and offend each other and are easily offended and all their facades are in perfect working order—they have decided exactly who they are going to pretend to be and never look back. They fuck like one-man shows. They hammer, screw, nail-gun, saw, ravage canvases and each other. They drag in furniture that has been tossed onto the streets—broken-legged chairs multiply in the night. They are a frugal, crusty, sweary lot, who spurn corporate monoculture and seek corporate sponsorship. They trudge past you without a nod or smile, and swing between rivalries and factions, wondering aloud how to be controversial. Their developmental delays seem to have done their careers nothing but good. Their brains are all pleasure centers with no circumference. Pygmalionism is rife. The currency is flattery. They tell each other's anecdotes in the first person. They spread marijuana butter on toast and brew their own beer and act twenty-two, regardless of chronological age. They work hard and they self-aggrandize hard. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, why
wouldn't
you be an artist? The sleep-ins are mandatory, the work days are orgies of creative playtime, the conversations stimulating, the sexual revolutions permanent. Every night, mirthless poets and arrogant painters couple on the balcony under a moon that burns coldly in the dark sky. Every night parties bound along until the wee hours of the predawn. Nobody who does next to nothing with their lives, I learned, goes to bed before three.

It took a long time for the deceased to show me her art. One night we were in bed, the sun had just set and a large communion wafer of a moon was already wailing on the burnished horizon. Mimi pulled out a black folder from under the bed and hesitantly presented it to me. Photographs of a man's face before and after she slapped it; a vaguely comic series of people in trees; darkrooms and old cameras; nibbled foodstuffs in display cases; charred dolls on barbecue hot plates; winged insects drowned in toothpaste; closeups of elderly throats; miscellaneous hands and paws; blurry cityscapes; an erect penis in soft focus; an anus smoking a pipe; a vagina on a bed of lettuce. There were hundreds, all stylistically different. She had never made a single dollar out of them, supplementing her income with unskilled minimum-wage jobs, just as I had done in between disappointing business ventures and begging. In fact, as it turned out, we could track how, over the past two decades, we'd been practically chasing
each other around the sewer end of the job market. (The year Mimi was telemarketing, I was washing dishes; when I was telemarketing, she was cleaning toilets, etc.) Now she was determined to make photography her profession by building her portfolio. The problem was this: she thought these photos were casualties of her intentions, unsalvageable shit that felt utterly unrepresentative of her.

—I start each new series with fresh hope, and I'm always disappointed, she said with disgust. Every approach I try, the results always let me down. What I think I see through the lens has no bearing on the printed image. What I try to capture I don't, and sometimes it's like I don't have a single optical nerve connected to my brain!

As she was talking I realized: Oh, she's leading up to something. Behind her eyes there was unmistakably an ulterior motive to this speech; her pace was slowing, and when it got down to a certain speed I knew she would ask me the question she was leading up to. Her deviousness was adorable.

—I'm not blocked, I'm gridlocked. I have been since this last series, she said, pointing to several photographs of nudes draped over water pipes.

A thousand possible subjects and none quite right. Mimi peered at me with sly eyes. She said her photos didn't feel unique, inspired, organic or revelatory in any way; rather, they felt parodic, vulgar, flat, self-conscious, trite. Clearly more preoccupied with what she was about to say than what she was saying, it was at that moment she dragged her finger languorously across my thigh, climbed on top of me, and pressed her sharp hip bones against mine.

—Aldo. You might be just the subject I've been looking for.

At Mimi's insistence, I took her on what she called a tour of
my
Sydney, and let her photograph me in front of the two-story homestead at the Benjamin compound I grew up in, presently occupied by an unwelcoming Chinese family not averse to shooing away former tenants; beside the ugly redbrick building where Henry had kept a secret apartment; at the leafy marketplace where I paid a fortune-teller double to read her own palms; in the empty swimming pool where I once almost drowned; at the police station where I was held for wasting police time; on the rooftop where Stella was married and I drank myself
into a coma; in the hospital where I had my first three kidney stones removed; at Luna Park where I'd been stabbed; in the lobby of the Railway Hotel where I'd found a man hanging; outside Liam's house where I was accused of raping Natasha Hunt; in the motel room where Stella and I hid from vigilantes; in the park where I was beaten with a tennis ball in a sock; in the bushland where I'd shot a zombie film; at the bar where Stella played her first gig; leaning against my abandoned car that had no registration and a dozen tickets and which I still planned to reclaim—basically, she photographed me at the locations of my catastrophes, where none of my gambles had paid off. Wherever we went, I was recognized by furious creditors with long memories, who forced us to make detours through cold streets and alleyways. Mimi photographed these confrontations, capturing the shiver of horror running through me as my enemies with their stockpiled grievances greeted me with humorless shouts: “Your phone's cut off! You don't answer your emails!” The deceased didn't mind making me look foolish. And neither did I, that was the truth.

—You've had a bad go of it, Mimi sympathized, one day after we'd stopped for lunch and I had tried unsuccessfully to order off the kids' menu—the waitress wasn't having it—and the angriest son of my angriest creditor sitting at the next table marched over and punched me hard in the breastbone. It was true. I had had a bad go of it. The sorrows knew when to waken, like vampires in their coffins. Mimi said she understood that the women in my life—Leila and Veronica and Stella and little baby Ruby—were the inextinguishable cold-fires in the black hole of my sadness, but that Stella was roaring the loudest. She asked me when I knew it was over. I used to believe it was the moment I realized I was no longer Stella's muse, but another time occurred to me: One night, a few months after Ruby's death, we could both feel the relationship slipping away irrevocably; around bedtime she gave me a rare open-mouthed kiss and asked if there was a sexual fantasy I'd never fulfilled. Off the top of my head, I said I'd always wanted to tear clothes violently from a female body. She put on her favorite dress, a black full-length evening gown, and said, “Go ahead.” I tore it with both hands, almost surgically down the middle, and we fucked on a chest of drawers. Afterward Stella gave me two options: take the dress to a professional or stitch it myself—she needed it by the weekend. The following morning I went to the dressmaker. End of week, eighty dollars, the dressmaker said. I thought: Eighty dollars! The price of passion. The only problem was I had to borrow the money
from Stella to retrieve the dress. She was in the kitchen baking banana bread when I asked her for it, and the face she made was so repulsed and repulsive, I felt some core piece of myself leave my body—my immortal soul wanted no part of that scene—and I knew it was over. I have not felt the same since that day; I've had some fundamental instability I can only relate to that morning in the kitchen.