Quicksand (6 page)

“I don't know much. I only met him once. He's lived in Italy and so went on and on about how lateness is culturally superior to being on time.”

“What a cock.”

He pinched the cigarette butt so tight it became a flat wedge he had to suck hard on
to get any smoke through. The air grew heavy with the smell of impending thunderstorms and Aldo told me how, the week before, he'd followed them to Bronte, down to the beach where he saw Craig take his shirt off to reveal swimmer's abs lodged in a soldier's torso, and how Aldo had stood there behind some family's beach umbrella feeling a slow liquidation of his emotional assets. He let out a dry, glum laugh, bent down to pick up a fifty-cent coin and winced; I could see through the open shirt that his torso was wrapped in white gauze.

“And guess what else? She's asked me to be part of the wedding.”

“No she didn't.”

“She still considers me her best friend.”

“Ex-husbands aren't best friends!”

“No shit.”

We slid into the car. Aldo shifted the sideview mirror to steer clear of his reflection. We moved off into the three-lane highway and were quickly embroiled in heavy traffic.

“Part of the wedding,” I said. “As what?”

“An usher.”

“
An usher?”

“That's how I said it.
An usher? An usher?
So I tear the tickets in half and with a flashlight show the patrons to their seats? Something like that, Stella said, laughing, thinking that my being lighthearted was proof of her good decision. But I begged her to reconsider. I mean, first of all, I almost
choked
when she told me the wedding is on a rooftop. I said, It's
outside
? Her whole life she's dreamed of getting married the traditional way that we never did, with the dress and the cake and the whole extended family, and then she goes and organizes an
outside
wedding? I mean, thirty-six years in the planning and
it can't rain
?”

He was breathing heavily and staring into the copper light that glinted off the skyscrapers from the setting sun.

“If I'm to be entirely honest,” I said, just to stir the pot, “I never understood what you saw in her.”

Aldo snapped to attention. “For one, she's naturally beautiful. I don't know if you realize this, but the whole time we were together, she never once wore makeup.”

“That's
like describing me by saying—He doesn't wear a hat. So fucking what?”

“So shut up and put on the siren.”

“Grow up.”

A long stretch of gridlocked traffic, and I had to actively resist the homicidal urge to plow through it or open the door as motorcycles weaved past. As usual, civilians who pulled up beside me looked straight ahead with fixed postures, or slouched down in order to hide their texting, or rolled up their windows gradually, or all of a sudden, to contain the smell of pot. Ten minutes later, we'd only moved two blocks. Aldo eased back into the seat and put his bare feet on the dashboard. I knocked them off.

If you wait long enough in life, your jealousies will eventually make no sense. Stella's devotion to Aldo had always nested a special envy in my heart. She
adored
him, beyond all bearable limits. She wrote
songs
about him, for Christ's sake, songs that she performed in public spaces in front of strangers. In that era, I had a few times made the tactical error of going out as a foursome; they behaved as if their love took place at a cellular level and whatever Tess and I had going on seemed—
was
—paltry in comparison. And now—poof!—that love was gone.

“How's your novel?” he asked.

“I'm taking a hiatus.”

“You shouldn't let failure go to your head.”

“You don't understand. When I write about a character, it's like getting a tattoo of them on my arm, and when it doesn't work out I carry the failure of the relationship around with me forever, like some celebrity—”

“Loser.”

“The man just arrested for wasting police time is not calling me a loser.”

“That's not how it went down.”

“What happened?”

As we stuttered along in the peak-hour nightmare, Aldo told me the whole story.

Earlier in the day, he'd convinced Stella to return to Luna Park with him in the hope of rekindling their romance, a dud idea that misfired almost as soon as they got through the turnstiles. He had blurted out the whole spiel about them giving it one more shot. “She said, ‘Face it, Aldo, the marriage was
a failure.' I said, ‘The relationship isn't a failure merely because one of us didn't die, and despite it being the gold standard for our whole stupid civilization, my death or your death is actually a ghoulish barometer for marital success.' Then we talked about the state of our union in those final months. She said it was rusted, leprous, and there was no wind left to harness. She said, ‘A love drawn taut snaps eventually.' She said, ‘Maybe our youths ended at different times, did you ever think of that?' I said, ‘Let's lay all our cards on the table,' and I proceeded to tell her that somewhere affairs were had, by me, just two minor indiscretions that any competent marriage counselor would have
recommended
to couples staring down a commitment that stretches interminably into the future. Get it out of your system, I imagined the marriage counselor advising.”

“The imagined marriage counselor?”

“Hey, my conscience is clean: I change it every week.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

Aldo laughed loudly, then bit his lip as if he'd revealed something he had set out to conceal. “Anyway, I told her how deeply and permanently and profoundly hurt I was by the way she left me.”

This I knew. One night Stella had pretended to talk in her sleep in order to confess to Aldo that she was in love with another man. “Aldo, Aldo, I've met someone,” she murmured. She had hoped, he supposed, that he would feel as though she had left herself ajar and he could peek in when her mind was turned. She murmured, “Slept with him.” And, “Leaving you.”

At Luna Park Aldo ceremoniously forgave her, but it was irrelevant. Stella dropped the bombshell about her upcoming nuptials to Craig. This hit him hard. They stood like two mutes; he felt like a removed tumor that was trying to graft itself back on. He yelled into her eyes and nose—fuck you, you fucking fuck—and stormed off and wound up between the pavilion wall and the back of the Rotor, a narrow corridor that smelled of popcorn and urinary tract infections, where he stood sobbing, for just a couple of minutes, he said, when two lean, muscular teenagers, one in oversized sunglasses, or maybe safety goggles, put him in a headlock and escorted him at knifepoint to an ATM where they forced him to withdraw, in their words, “the maximum daily amount.”

I laughed at the cold precision of that term. “What then?”

Stepping up to the bank machine, Aldo whispered to himself not to forget his PIN,
and promptly forgot his PIN. The teenagers' eyelids twitched erratically and their pupils were dilated; their brownish teeth and broken skin suggested methamphetamines, Aldo noted, and they looked to be no strangers to violence, nor to fault-finding parents, low grades, truancy, nil self-esteem, and a dissociative loss of control, and Aldo thought about how stabbing was extremely high on his list of fears—to be
slashed
, while dangerous to muscle, would be bearable, a wound he imagined to be hot and biting yet survivable—but
stabbing
! That conjured up fatal thrust wounds and vascular organ damage and unimaginably nightmarish punctured-lung/asphyxiation scenarios, even less pleasant than a bullet in the stomach. (“How many movie villains have told me how long it takes to die from a gut wound?” he asked me.) “Put in your fucking PIN,” the shorter teenager shouted, and in reaction to his mind's utter blankness Aldo was now wearing a smile that may have been misconstrued as sardonic or mocking. There was a tense silence, and other than stare into the unappeasable drug-fucked faces of youth and say he had a low tolerance for foreign metals, what else could he do? (“Besides, I think sluggishly on my feet,” Aldo admitted.) At this point, he recalled, the teenager raised his knife hand in a tight arc and brought it down at a diagonal rush, and Aldo thought: Slashed it is! with actual relief as he went down on his knees and felt weirdly vindicated that he had accurately deduced the (hot, biting) sensation before falling face-first onto the hard concrete, which, on his cheek, was sun-warmed and gravelly. A thirteen-year-old couple who had to take out retainers to kiss spotted him and called for help, and he was tended to by the skeleton staff of Luna Park's First Aid Station, interviewed by security personnel, and driven to the police station where he was offered instant coffee and seated opposite a sketch artist, a uniformed man so rigid and stony, Aldo said, he looked like “he would have to be loved intravenously.”

“That would be Constable Weir,” I said.

It was then, Aldo continued, that it occurred to him, possibly out of an overwhelming sense of the futility of the exercise, or the simple unlikelihood of justice, how amusing it might be to describe his own face.

“You did what?”

There followed an intense marathon as Aldo recalled his precise features, based on photographs and countless hours staring unhappily into mirrors, and described himself with narcissistic intensity and an almost hallucinatory
level of concentrated precision (lightly copper complexion, slightly acned with multiple crosswise scars; clenched, rounded jaw; chestnut-brown hair thinning to a single vertical dagger; narrow facial shape with high forehead and horizontal wrinkles; bushy eyebrows and blue deep-set eyes with small irises; off-white teeth, medium-sized chiseled nose with pronounced nasal wings; low cheekbones; large earlobes; downturned lips, with tendency to lower-lip pout and a pouching of the skin below the lip corners, etc.). Constable Weir drew and Aldo examined and corrected and Constable Weir—despite the silently dawning realization of the farce—adjusted and redrew and grew weary of their collaboration but on the whole was patient, exact, determined not to fail him. After two and three-quarter industrious hours and now with barely restrained fury, Constable Weir printed and slid the image across the desk. Aldo looked at it impassively; he felt like the exact sum of his parts, no more, no less.

Is this him? Constable Weir asked.

Yes, Aldo said. That's the bastard.

•  •  •

An hour later we were in the Hollywood Hotel on Foster Street, talking about
violent horror movies, the housing market, and our sex obsessions—torture porn, real estate porn, and porn porn—before Aldo began to ask me questions about Tess and our marital state; he was doing his amateur psychologist bit that he'd first developed to soften potential investors. I'd seen it a bazillion times. Using tactics gained from years of compulsively reading psychology, and wielding concepts that I'm not entirely certain he had a complete or even rudimentary grasp of, he would lean into someone's face and gently tug with his hypnotic, sibilant voice; he screwed up his eyes as if trying to see them through the fog of their complicated insecurities, which makes a person, I've noticed, strain to be clearer. Then he would lean back as if to give the subject space to knock down their own fortifications. He was pretty good at conferring the illusion of long-term friendship on a stranger, the way his gaze fixed on their pupils with such intensity. He even did this with me; I couldn't help feeling flattered by both his focus and what his focus illuminated: the subtle complexity of my own psyche.

“This isn't the life I planned for myself, but maybe that's what I like about it,” I lied. But something about Aldo's single follow-up question, asked in a
steady, uninflected voice (“How does Tess feel about your inability to complete a single work of writing?”), had me tearily confessing how her body used to be a standing invitation but now she had stopped allowing me to touch her breasts, which basically made them like fake pockets on a designer jacket, and how sometimes when she looked at me I felt I was being frowned upon by a tribe of elders, and how this marriage had become a bad trip I was going to have to ride out if I wanted to continue living with my daughter.

The problem perhaps was that Tess had undergone an unexpected blossoming of mind and spirit; the failed actress, ex-bartending punk, and occasional shoplifter that I married had now earned a social science degree and found a job with the office of the Public Guardian—essentially as a substitute decision-maker for people deemed to have insufficient cognitive capacity to make their own. All her clients had some kind of disability—acquired brain injury, drug- or alcohol-related memory impairment, intellectual dysfunction—and she made daily decisions about where they were to live, shifting dementia patients out of squalor into aged-care facilities, even deciding what medical treatment they should receive, most recently giving consent to an amputation for a retired bus driver who had refused it. Her passion for social work grew in direct proportion to my ambivalence for policing. In her presence I felt my deficiencies throb. Especially in the wake of that last, disastrous novel, my fizzled writing career was the elephant in every room of the house. Sure, I still had promise, but less of it, and more dribbled away each year. It seemed obvious that I should be doing the heavy lifting of Sonja rearing while Tess was allowed to flourish at her career, but I hadn't given in to her on that issue, and now we fought all the time, about whose parents were better grandparents to Sonja, about how best to discipline this fierce little wind of a girl, about who deserved the night out when babysitters were scarce, about anything. Tess was gnawing at the ties that bound us, and in terms of love, I felt like I was campaigning for my re-election, on the verge of being voted out by my single constituent, voted out of her heart by her head.