Quicksand (37 page)

—We have a new artist staying with us, Adrian Oldenburg said. Come say hi.

Yes, bailiffs, you guessed it. Standing there, in the corner of the room, was Mr. Morrell, smiling without using his mouth. Mimi let out a small cry of distress.

—Hello, you two. I think we may have met, he cackled.

Every muscle in my face and body tightened and I stood rooted to the spot; I thought of
The Fussy Corpse
, and how it was to be dissatisfied with every conceivable outcome, and paralyzed by that dissatisfaction, to do nothing while the storm of indecision and impotence raged inside you.

—That's it! Good-bye Zetland High! Forever! They gave me a touching farewell, I wish you had been there. Forty-two years on the job. It was a bit emotional. Well, of course it was. I was like a stepfather to those sexting rascals. Now I've done it! All my life I've been saying to students:
Esse quam videri
. To be and not to seem. And I never took my own advice! But this time, when the dark allure of the paintbrush beckoned, at long last I heeded its call!

He was like a bereaved man in the first stage of grief—hysteria. Cheerfully bounding from one side of the room to the other, he was almost delirious while
giving me strange, complicated looks, as if I were a disinherited son who'd come to borrow his car.

—I just booked a space at this lovely artists' residence. I'm giving myself six months, which I believe should be plenty of time to prepare.

He grabbed me and Mimi by the hands, greeting us like his liberators.

—What month's a good time for an exhibition? What if it rains? You know the people of Sydney won't step outside their homes if they're in danger of being struck by a raindrop. In any case, it should be a medium-sized space. Perfect for twelve or fourteen works. Not too many. Scarcity is value.

Mimi had gone pale. It wasn't difficult to understand what had happened. We'd given him the transformative experience needed to spur his liberation, to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a painter.

—Yes, I want to do something like that, he said, looking at one of Maria Hamilton's collages.

He might have been a former teacher-cum-blackmailee who had turned the tables on his tormentors, but he was also a struggling artist anxiously preparing his first solo exhibition. And he was totally exhilarated, pacing and weaving through the room, touching every fixture.

—This place is wonderful! So bohemian! Aldo! Mimi! You should come down and see my rooms! I've already had significant interest from several galleries—well, former students now running galleries.

Oh God, I thought. Is there anything more dangerous than a time-poor unappreciated man with a whiff of glory? Mimi and I must have both looked pretty silly, with our stillness and gaping jaws. Was he really going to live here? With his woolen vest and sinusitis? I found it difficult to orient myself all of a sudden. I looked out the glass doors at the steel-gray sky. A thick gust of wind sent the weather vane spinning. Beside me, in the face of Morrell's uncoiled mayhem, Mimi had grown cold, her breathing unnatural, labored. He picked up a paint-splattered red bandanna from the floor and tied it around his head; he smiled vigorously at everyone, as if granting them permission to continue about their life choices. He pointed to Frank Rubinstein's semi-abstract painting of a slice of toast.

—We need to believe that you mastered a technique and decided not to use it, not that you never had it.

He bounced from one artwork to another, almost stumbling over canvases to
pick them up, holding etchings to the light, gesturing at photographs, scrutinizing sculptures. He examined Lynne Bishop's pastel drawings of rotund babies.

—Either aim your dream at the higher end of within reason, or isolate the greatest achievement of a second-rate peer and strive for that.

I thought: Being a teacher really permeates one's being; a fireman isn't a fireman at dinner, whereas a teacher is a teacher at a molecular level. Still, I detected the tone of stored-up resentment from witnessing generation after generation of artists celebrated younger and younger.

Morrell was gazing at a bronze sculpture of a giant hand.

—I like this one. I feel positively menaced by it. But why are you trying so hard to be contemporary? You are alive in the present. It doesn't matter what you do. You
are
contemporary.

He praised and castigated in the same breath; he knew how to humiliate and excite.

—This one. No, I am not seduced.

That's right.
I am not seduced
was Morrell's most repeated line. It had a catchphrase quality to it and we loved to hear him say it.

—I can't believe I ever gave these up, he said, lighting another cigarette. Now he stood at the glass doors on tiptoes, as if trying to make out the semi-naked women who were no more than blurs on flat sand.

—What do you think about this self-portrait? Louise Bozowic asked, holding up a square acrylic painting.

—Either learn to paint hair or learn to paint hats.

Louise wrote that down. The swiftness with which the artists took to Morrell was crazy. They lined up to show him their woodcuts and slide projects and reverse-glass paintings and graph-paper sketches. Maybe it was their sensitivity to criticism and their greater sensitivity to praise that made them feel so flattered; he critiqued in one breath and asked
their
advice on his upcoming show in the next; he was both mentor and student. He linked arms with whomever he was talking to. Forty years of never being able to touch the people he taught; now he touched everybody, while seemingly determined to expel those four decades of acquired wisdom in a single night.

—Stop trying to stop being derivative.

—Don't let your palette tell you what to do.

—If you can't
be great, be vague. If they don't know what you're trying to achieve, they can't see that you haven't succeeded in achieving it.

Morrell shouted across the room at me.

—Hey, I sold my home! You've been there, Benjamin, it was no sort of place at all. That pathetic container I lived in for thirty-six years, that I bought for sixty-five thousand in 1977, I sold for one point three million. Bam! Just like that! My neighbor had wanted me to sell for years so he could extend his hideous compound!

Morrell's energized, meth-like high had no foreseeable comedown.

—Aldo, Mimi whispered, what are we going to do? She wasn't crying, but her voice was full of tears. Morrell bounded over and leaned between us.

—Don't look so frightened, girl. I will still pay your ten thousand a month.

—In return for what? I asked.

—Don't mumble, Benjamin.

I learned from Dee Franklin that he had rented two of the interconnecting rooms down below, that he'd come in with a handful of cash and bargained Casey Huntington for the biggest space in the residency, adjacent to the other biggest space in the residency in which he intended to stretch his 2-meter x 2-meter canvases.

—This way, girl.

I whipped my head around to see Morrell coaxing Mimi downstairs for a private tour of his new paintbrushes. I made a move to follow, but Mimi shot me a sharp look that made me feel like I had confessed to a crime too late, after an innocent man had already been executed.

Through a crack in the door, I could see Morrell on his knees undoing Mimi's shoelaces and talking about the “impersonal yet melancholy” photographs in
The Fussy Corpse
. I went back to Mimi's bedroom and tried to draw a permanent veil over my heart. Morrell had made the whole residence feel like a sleazy motel, and she was acquiescing in some kind of trance, as if he was pressing on an old injury from which she'd never recovered, or more likely, yes, instead of our silence—our initial offer—her actual body was now the goods demanded by Morrell in exchange for his ten thousand a month. Blackmailed by the blackmailee!
Talk about a backfire! I threw a pillow across the room and gazed out the window. The moon looked wan and weak from not having lately been worshipped.

Around midnight her phone vibrated on the nightstand.

—I'm not in the mood tonight, I said.

—What are we going to do about her old high school teacher?

—How do you know about that?

I heard Elliot stub out a cigarette on something that crackled, and for a split second I entertained the notion it was human skin. My head started to hurt. On the other end of the phone, there was shouting, a chanting of deep powerful voices, the sound of footsteps, a scuffle, and several emphatic no's. Then a long silence. And in that silence, more silence.

—You don't know anything about Mimi, do you?

—No, I suppose I don't.

—Did you know she has a tilted uterus?

—So?

—I was there when her mother died. She took photos of the burial.

—That's not so strange.

—She made her father hold the reflector board throughout the service.

—She's an artist.

—She ran away from home at ten. You know that? At eleven. At fifteen. Almost every year she packed a bag. Hurried out. Came back. Bid those needy shits an au revoir. Ran away. Buggered off. Came back. Mother passed out. Cousin banging something sharp against something hollow. Hello! Fuck off! Adios! Hello! Taking care of them even when she started taking drugs. And found boyfriends. Older ones. Much older ones. Homeless ones. Imagine. Those rosebud lips. At that age. Can't stand to think about it. One day: took every dollar out of her father's wallet. Shredded them. Tossed the cunt-thin strips of paper. Here, Daddy, saved you a trip to the track. From then on, she rescued them from drowning in their own vomit. Then pierced their ears as they dribbled in narcotic stupors. Yeah. She yielded to their needs, all right. Then emptied their bank accounts. Followed their crappy orders, then pawned their shit. Pushback. Payback . . .

I was relieved when Elliot stopped speaking. Not only did he make me uncomfortable, I felt downright spooked by him. His voice was a huge eraser and every time he spoke a part of me was wiped clean.

—How did
you know about Morrell?

—How? How? Let me ask
you
something. Have you noticed? That you're not perceptible? You know. By all the senses at the same time? That some people—they can't smell you? And to others you emit no sound? None whatsoever?

That was it. Elliot had drifted off on some incomprehensible tangent and confirmed for me what I already suspected: He was not a narcissist or antisocial but a plain old meat-and-potatoes psychopath.

By dawn Mimi still hadn't returned to her bedroom and I went down to the beach and saw Morrell emerge from the surf and pick up his towel where the retreating waves left crescents of foam in the wet sand. The bastard was inexcusably fit for his age and as he bounded over toward me, I found evidence of his intention to make love to Mimi in his gait. While I'll admit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not unusual for a man to feel a modicum of grudging respect for the cheeky bugger who has bedded his intended, this was way out of order.

—Listen, Mr. Morrell.

—The less you think, the more you talk, Montesquieu said, but go on, what were you saying?

—Why don't you leave us alone?

—Mimi told me that you're suicidal.

—So?

—Mimi also said you're having trouble dying.

—So?

—Mimi also said that it was due to some kind of condition of immortality?

Morrell turned his head upward as if to appraise the azure, featureless sky and nodded, apparently approving of God's use of negative space.

—The infinite is synonymous with the perfection of form. Do you feel like someone who is slowly perfecting?

I had to admit that I didn't.

—You think your will is more stubborn than anybody else's? You, Aldo Francis Benjamin, who has no unusual passion for living?

Again, I shook my head. He stroked an imaginary beard. There was nothing indecisive about his gestures.

—You have
horror infiniti
. Or perhaps, as Leopardi suggested, you have confused the infinite with the indefinite. You are perishable, Aldo. Like I always used to tell my more hopeless students, you just need to follow your heart,
get out of your comfort zone. Your problem is that you lack inspiration and the passion to achieve your goal. That's what all your nonsensical justifications and frankly incredible rationalizations are about. Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art—Camus. Empty your mind, be yourself, Aldo. This immortality thing. That's just suicide's block.

With his back to the shrieking blast of sea Morrell spoke to me as neither teacher nor artist, but as Mimi's lover.

—I can't persuade you to live but I can persuade you, however, to leave.

When I got back inside, Mimi's face gave me the news that I was a fast depreciating currency.

—You should go, Aldo, right now, and don't come back.

—I'm a realist with a background in evolutionary psychology! I know my market worth and I demand to be left for someone better. Stella's new man is handsomer, richer, more virile, and physically robust. Evolutionarily beyond reproach. But
Morrell
!

Mimi didn't respond. She took some tightly framed photos of me gathering my things into green garbage bags, closeups of the look in my rejected eyes as she was rejecting me, a panoramic in the bathroom as I shoveled her clutter of sleeping pills into my pockets. Then I kissed her moist, downcast eyes good-bye.

—I'll miss your cold sort of love and your breast-wielding sashays to the bathroom framed by the sea.

—Please, Aldo. Just go.

There was no point arguing—I'd been beaten. Out in the main room nobody gathered to watch me pathetically drag the plastic garbage bags behind me. The same no one offered me comfort. I shouted good-bye to the few who were lying on the sofas. They had their mental fly swatters out. Not being an artist myself, I didn't warrant a grand adieu. I was merely another artist's fuckthing. A recreation, like the Ping-Pong table.