The Beguiling
Fiction by Zsuzsi Gartner
My cousin Zoltan [not his real name] never had much luck with girls. I found this odd, as he was a pretty good-looking guy when not in one of his dough-boy phases, had a university degree, an actual job, and was creative without being pretentious or flaky. We used to hang out together in Calgary before my aunt and uncle moved to the West Coast in pursuit of real estate and weather. Even then Zoltan was crazy about movies. He called them “the pictures,” as if he was an olde timey Hollywood producer rather than a junior high school kid. He saw The Bourne Identity nine times before it was even out on DVD. He wrote an essay on the meaning of disaster planning in Donnie Darko and The Royal Tenenbaums for Grade 9 English. He was that kid. But mostly he liked the old stuff.
Zoltan made movies in the alley behind his house using an old RCA camcorder. I was cast as the femme fatale, offing his nerdy friends with a plastic handgun, poison (“They drank the Kool-Aid!” I improv’d, not knowing what it actually meant), an abandoned Safeway cart, a dented garbage can lid, or just a killing look. At the end of each shoot he let me do my Gene Simmons imitation. I’d become obsessed with kiss during their 1996 Alive/Worldwide/Reunion Tour. Every credit roll scrolled down my over-extended tongue. I was the one who should’ve had trouble getting a date, not my Zoltan.
I did look for the tapes in his apartment afterwards, he would certainly have kept them, but my aunt and uncle had already committed a full purge of anything film-related. In some oblique way they blamed the movies. They still do.
After Zoltan and his parents moved away we saw each other sporadically at family get-togethers before I went off to J-school in Ottawa and then to work in tv news in Toronto and didn’t make it out west anymore. [Quite deliberately. But that had nothing to do with my cousin.] When I did show up at a wedding several years ago, I finally figured out why a nice guy like Zoltan was so alarmingly single. Because he was too nice. He’d turned into that guy. The friend guy, the guy you went for coffee with at two am after the accordion player in the klezmer punk band dumped you, the guy who told you you didn’t look stupid and/or fat in the faux fur Talula jacket you spent too much on at the Aritzia warehouse sale. All women need a Zoltan. If he’d lived in Toronto he would’ve been my Zoltan, although I’m not sure if cousins count.
Meanwhile Zoltan yearned. What I never appreciated was just how deeply he yearned. I don’t think he told anyone else what had really happened to his hands. Maybe he confessed to me as I sat beside his hospital bed at St. Paul’s because he thought it would make a good movie someday. I was in film by then, not in front of the camera anymore, not behind it either. The Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC).
I was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and the public sector maternity benefits were excellent.
Zoltan couldn’t understand this Yvonne, this boney thing who sat in front of him picking the offending prawns out of her pad Thai and dropping them into a crack in the sidewalk beside their café table, her ankle bracelets clanking like a janitor’s key rings every time she moved. The bindi on her forehead glittered red, then gold, in the afternoon sun. From her belly button, hidden below the edge of the café table and no doubt pooled with sweat, if Zoltan’s was anything to go by, dangled a hand of Fatima on a thin platinum hoop.
“Now that I’m getting older, I’m learning to adorn myself more,” she said, looking off across Commerical Drive where the protest of the day was getting started in Grandview Park. To Zoltan she looked like someone who in the right light would still be asked for id. And were the bindi and Fatima even from the same religion? Did it matter these days?
“There’s this thing?” [“Thing?” I asked him. “Just wait, Lucy” Zoltan said.]
She mentioned it in the same way she’d invited him to the café, an invitation that maybe wasn’t an invitation unless you chose to see it that way. And Zoltan chose. He’d been leaning against the counter at a Xerox place waiting for a copy key when this girl fanned out a sheaf of coloured paper and asked him which he thought would be most effective for a Laughing Yoga brochure. Zoltan had no idea what she was talking about, but tugged out a page in Blue Beluga, displacing all the other loosely held sheets in her hand, sending them wafting to the floor and the girl diving, not even remotely gracefully, after them. Spread-eagled at his feet, one hand on Rain Forest Green, the other on Spawning Sockeye [“Vancouver,” I snorted. “Vancouver,” Zoltan agreed], she’d looked up and said, “There’s this café?”
Zoltan, who knew from all those screenwriting workshops he’d taken and all the manuals he’d committed to memory—the Syd Field, the Richard Walter, the Robert McKee, the Linda Seeger—that this was called “meet cute” and that it was something that happened in movies (Bringing up Baby, Roman Holiday, Out of Sight, and his all-time favourite, The Apartment, which he could relate to as he was more a Jack Lemmon kind of guy than a Cary Grant, Gregory Peck or even a Clooney) and not generally in real life, and that if he demurred and walked away he’d always wonder what might’ve happened if he’d tagged along with her, even though he didn’t find her particularly attractive (those skeletal fingers, now slicked with pad Thai sauce, the elongated thumbs working away at her phone, that longish, but not long, hair, the tips tinged the colour of oxidized copper, the dragonfly barrettes in her bangs looking forced, not effortless as they did on the girls at The Sugar Factory who made his gut bust with longing), so he said, “Oh, yeah?” raising one eyebrow the way he imagined Philip Seymour Hoffman might. Or used to. [“Creepy tragic waste,” I said. Zoltan didn’t answer.]
So when Yvonne drained her beet juice, chasing the last few drops around the bottom of her glass with the straw, and said, “There’s this thing?” Zoltan raised one eyebrow again and said, “Oh, yeah?” [“The Thing!” I yelled in my best haunted-house voice, scrabbling my fingers in front of his face like claws. “Shhh.” He motioned with a bandaged stump to the figure in the bed on the other side of the hospital room.]
Later he wondered if it had all been as random, as unscripted, as he’d imagined.
As Zoltan’s eyes adjusted to the diffused light of the heavily curtained warehouse space, he saw that it was filled with the type of girls, women, he’d always adored from a distance. They were everywhere: cross-legged on overturned plastic milk crates, perched on the backs of overstuffed and aged upholstered furniture (one of them straddled a kitchen chair backwards—skirt hiked to her waist, stockinged-toes en pointe—Liza Minelli in Cabaret, minus the bowler hat), lounging on the floor, rubbing each other’s backs, lining the walls like so many bright tchotchkes at a flea market. The air swished with feminine voices, like taxis whizzing by him at top speed in a downpour, Zoltan with his hand up, futilely trying to flag one down. A miniature French bulldog waddled in and out of the tangle of glistening limbs, its furrowed beige brow a mess of overlapping lipstick prints.
Yvonne had insisted he needed to be blindfolded for the last few blocks after they got off the #20 bus, and because no woman, not even an odd and slightly unappealing one like Yvonne, had ever insisted on blindfolding Zoltan, he found himself game.
As soon as they’d arrived, Yvonne disappeared, but every so often he heard her shriek coming from another sector of the vast space. [“Laughing yogic shriek,” I said, and leaned over to offer Zoltan a sip of his Ensure through a bendy straw.]
“Zed,” Zoltan said, extending a hand to a tall South Asian woman dressed in a men’s tuxedo shirt.
[“Zed?!” “Zed is cool, Lucy.” “You sound like Dr. Who: ‘Bow ties are cool!’” “Bow ties aren’t cool?” I feel a twinge now, like a small electrical current to the temple, when I remember Zoltan’s perplexed geeky smile as he said this.]
He’d had several shots of bourbon and a small green bead of a thing he’d fished from the pharmaceutical candy jar that sat on a table amidst piles of nuts and dried fruit. It had buzzed and crackled on his tongue like Pop Rocks before giving him a few seconds’ worth of the cruelest brain freeze ever.
Instead of shaking his hand, the woman cradled it in her palms and worried her thumbs over his lifeline. She was the first person there who had acknowledged his presence even though he’d spent over an hour wandering around the—what? Was it a party? [“The thing!” I yelped. I’m still sludgy with guilt at how hilarious I found his story at the time.] The reinforced toes on the stockings of the Sally Bowles clone were distracting. They put him in mind simultaneously of his Aunt Ildiko’s thick toes and foot sweat and the craziest sex you could imagine. [“My mother, Zoltan, please.”]
“Mr. Zed,” the palm reader said, “try to stay with me here.”
She told him she saw a vast nothingness, which brought me back to something I hadn’t thought about for a long time. This was well before I’d gotten together with the man who became my husband and later my ex-husband. I met the guy at The Horseshoe and there was a sexy repulsiveness to the fact that he wore mirrored aviator shades that he never took off until we got out of the cab and inside the door to his place. The fucking was good, not earth-shaking, but good enough that I wanted more. I’d leaned up over him and that’s when he said it.
“Your throat is like death.”
“My breath?” I fanned at my mouth.
“No, looking down your throat is like looking at Death.”
This should’ve been scary, but I hung my head over the side of the bed until I could see the dust bunnies cavorting around the rowing machine stowed underneath and laughed silently while he patted my back, mistaken that I was quietly sobbing out my disappointment.
As the palm reader slid away, Zoltan leaned against a wall trying to gain some perspective. No one could predict the future, he knew that. But when you’re in an alien space redolent with estrogen, and buzzing on hard liquor and unidentified chemicals, it’s difficult not to believe someone could be a seer, especially a female someone a full foot taller than you, wearing nothing but an unbuttoned tuxedo shirt. [“She had this regal accent, I thought she was some kind of queen,” Zoltan said after taking another sip through the straw and wiping at his dribbling mouth with one of his bandaged stumps.]
At some point after it was revealed to Zoltan that he had no discernible future, a pale redhead walked up to him and licked his face. He couldn’t think of what else to do, so he licked her back, whatever was on his tongue leaving a verdigris streak. “Perv,” she snapped, backing away. Around them other women took up the call, “Perv, perv, perv!” [“It was like kids in a schoolyard yelling “Fight, fight, fight!” Zoltan told me, “And you’re thinking, Run, run, run!”] What he couldn’t figure out was whether or not they wanted him to be a pervert (to perv up?) and if yes, he wasn’t sure he was equal to the task.
Like Mastroianni’s character in Fellini’s City of Women, minus the suave suit, Zoltan ran.
While I sat with him in the hospital Zoltan also told me things unrelated to that night.
He quoted John Sayles talking about Hollywood producers: “‘They always want the little dog to live.’”
“Who’s the little dog?”
“We’re all the little dog. You, me, beastie in there,” he said, gesturing to my third-trimester mound.
I thought this was the painkillers talking but it turned out Sayles did say this. He meant the North American penchant for happy endings. Fairy tales. But in the original fairy tales we all know the most diabolical things happen, eyes are pecked out by birds, there’s cannibalism and decapitation, and the little mermaid doesn’t marry the prince but dissolves into sad foam on the sea. (Later, the spirits of the air take pity on her and she rises to join them. But that wouldn’t do in the movies—the pictures—where the dead aren’t content to fondly gaze down on the living—they’re seldom even content to stay dead.)
Zoltan hid in a massive walk-in closet that doubled as a laundry room and a fitness space, judging by the one mirrored wall and the mini trampoline. From not too far away came a shriek. Yvonne? The bulldog was there. It turned its unfortunate face towards him and Zoltan could swear it winked. The dog was dressed in a disposable diaper with a halter top tied around its face like a bonnet. A beautiful girl—her strawberry dreads in such a matty snarl that if he hadn’t been so panicked at that moment he might’ve felt the urge to take her home and give her a good shampooing—was hunched in the corner sniffing a Bounce sheet. Or something. When she rose up, towering over him, he wondered, could she really be that tall? [“One side will make you taller, and the other side will make you smaller.” I couldn’t help myself, although even I was getting sick of me by then. But Zoltan had drifted off to uneasy dreams.]
“Zoltan, we’re so glad you’re here. We need to ask a big favour of you.” It was the Amazon, now in a full tuxedo suit, complete with tails, her eyes so made up they looked like bruises receding into her face. The rest of the women were gathered around a long, deep wooden box, holding up goblets of red wine. One of them was singing in a deep, cracked voice, something dirge-like with a Celtic undertow. They raised their goblets and chanted, “To Alice, to tender young Alice!” while the tuxedoed mystic held Zoltan by his upper arms and propelled him forward. He was naked, a nubbly peach towel wrapped around his waist, woefully aware of his man breasts. He’d woken up in the laundry room to find his clothes missing, only his socks on his feet. The faces in the crowd were no longer beautiful; whereas earlier they had all blended into one enormous twinkling Rube Goldberg-contraption of female pulchritude (a word that somehow evoked not beauty but rotting flesh and vomit), now he could distinguish varying looks of pity, disdain, boredom, even hatred on individual faces, some of which had small piggy eyes or flat noses with enlarged nostrils, chapped, peeling lips, overplucked eyebrows, chipmunk cheeks, and the kind of vague mustaches seen on women from southern climates.
In the box, which Zoltan could now clearly see was a coffin—a plain one like something hammered together by a travelling prairie preacher’s assistant—was a young woman, disfigured by what appeared to be burns, rather old burns, across two-thirds of her face and up across her hairline. She looked like a hand puppet turned inside out, with the seams showing, lipless, shiny and mottled. He recognized her as the woman who sold limp and browning bouquets from a wheelchair in front of Fet’s Whisky Kitchen on the Drive. He always looked busily at the daily specials board when walking by so as not to have to look at her but not appear as if he were deliberately not looking at her either.
“She died a virgin,” the woman with the deep singing voice said. There were times and places in human history when such a thing had been a cause for celebration, even beatification, but Vancouver in 2015 was evidently not one of those times and places.
In the end, it didn’t matter that they were women. Zoltan bit and punched, and savagely clawed and kicked and howled, and was, in some compartment of his mind that was still taking stock of things, rather pleased that it took so many of them—eight? ten? a dozen?—to wedge him into the coffin, and when they lowered the lid and hammered it down, the dead disfigured virgin beneath him, he took a moment to consider that she most likely didn’t deserve what had happened to her, the burns, the destitution, the early death, the despised virginity, but Zoltan certainly didn’t deserve what was happening to him either. Deserve, though, had nothing to do with anything unless you were a person of faith who searched for answers in books like Why Bad Things Happen to Good People—or a scriptwriter.
I like to think Zoltan kissed her, that believing he might die he wanted to do so in a state of grace, although this isn’t something he told me and I didn’t ask.
It was only when he came to in the hospital a few days later with no hands to speak of that Zoltan recalled what movie the whole incident was reminiscent of. But in The Beguiled, the bizarre 1970s Civil War gothic, Clint Eastwood’s horndog Yankee soldier got what he deserved, the Valkyrie-like wrath of a woman scorned.
The little dog must live, it seems, unless the little dog deserves to die—or his death makes the world a better place.
He was found in an alley in the Downtown East-side, initially believed to be an addict felled in a brawl, his hands bloodied, broken, gouged with splinters, most of his fingers beyond repair. He was naked save for one sock.
Zoltan was supposed to get better. I was still on maternity leave when Aunt Ildi called with the news. “Zoli’s not with us anymore!”
She was wailing and I thought she meant he’d moved away from Vancouver and was, physically at least, finally beyond her reach. She was histrionic that way. But he would have told me if he was moving—we emailed each other frequently during his months-long convalescence. He typed with a chop-stick clenched between his teeth and meticulously corrected his typos before clicking send. Never once did he allude again to what I’d taken to thinking of as The Beguiling. He was decidedly upbeat. It was all, Have you seen Super 8? Go now! and What fresh hell—Why would anyone remake Foot-loose??!! He thought Charlotte, my baby girl, was a dead-ringer for Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Thanks, I typed. In a good way :)!, he typed back, Those wise eyes—the further evolution of the species. That was the last communication I had from him. I hate emoticons and had always made a point of telling him so, but he was irrepressibly an emoticon kind of person. I tell myself I’m more tolerant about them now in vague tribute to Zoltan, but really I’m not more tolerant about anything.
A virulent infection set in after Zoltan was finally fitted with his prosthetics. (Leave them on for only half an hour at a time, the technician evidently told him. Try to use the toilet, make a phone call, pour a glass of water. Then get some air and try not to think about the mechanics too much. These are state-of-the-art micro carbons, the hands have sensors that can feel pressure, but it will be quite a process getting used to them.)
It wasn’t my aunt who told me his scrotum had been ravaged until it hung like the derelict flag of a forgotten nation. I was at the gravesite watching the pallbearers lower the coffin into the muddied ground when a woman beside me asked, “Did you know him?” “Not really,” I said, my pinky finger in my baby daughter’s mouth to stop her from fussing, the soother somewhere . . . If I’d said he was my only cousin, or, he was like a brother to me, or, we made movies together, I’m sure she wouldn’t have gone on with her dark, plum-hued sphincter pursed to signify horror while her eyes dimpled in gossipy delight. I’d already told a well-meaning older man who remarked that I shared Zoltan’s eyes and colouring, “No relation,” and answered, “Just distantly related by marriage,” with a dismissive wave of the hand to a question from one of the funeral home staff. Somewhere a cock crowed three times.
During breakfast the next morning at the Sylvia Hotel, the man who was then my husband tapped his water glass with a spoon like you do at weddings to get the bride and groom to kiss, or when you have something important to announce. Our daughter was asleep in her carrier beside the table, wise eyes scrunched tight. “Hard cheese on old Zoltan,” he said, as if he were in a Monty Python sketch or a minor character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. To be fair, Julian was, still is, I suppose, British. But I reached across the table and pressed my hands against the sides of his face, my elbows propped in my platter of waffles and puddling syrup, and squeezed and squeezed as hard as I could. I wanted his handsome head to pop, I really did.
The funding agency job didn’t work out. I was never really sold on the financial security idea, that was Julian’s thing (thing!). When I tally up my wins and losses, I usually come up dead even. But there are days when I feel that I’m just treading water. Then I remember Zoltan and think there are worse things in the world, much worse.
I’m trying my hand at writing now. But what am I supposed to do with a story like this, I ask you? »