The first night Anouk came in to cook and clean, her confusion was hilarious; she was expecting a wealthy man’s spacious house, only to step into our small and disgusting apartment, which was rotting like the bottom of an old boat. After she cooked us dinner she asked, “How can you live like this? You’re pigs. I’m working for pigs,” and Dad said, “Is that why you cooked us this slop?” She was furious, but for reasons that I’ve never completely understood (there are other jobs), she came back week after week, returning to us always with tireless and aggressive disapproval and a face that looked like it had just sucked a basket of lemons. She came in, opening curtains and dumping light into our hole in the wall, and as she stepped over Dad’s overdue library books, which carpeted the floor, she looked searchingly at me, as if I were a captive she was considering freeing.
At first Anouk came in for a few hours on Mondays and Fridays, though gradually the routine fell apart and she just started turning up whenever she felt like it, not only to cook and clean but often to eat and make a mess. She ate with us regularly, argued with us constantly, and introduced me to a breed I’d never encountered before: a left-wing, art-loving, self-proclaimed “spiritual person” who chose to convey her gentle ideas about peace and love and nature by screaming at you.
“You know what your problem is, Martin?” she asked Dad one night after dinner. “You’re choosing books over life. I don’t think books are supposed to be a substitute for life, you know. They’re more of a complement.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I know when I see someone who doesn’t know how to live.”
“And you do?”
“I’ve got some ideas.”
In her view, Dad and I were problems waiting to be solved, and she began by trying to turn us into vegetarians, parading pictures of howling mutilated animals in front of us while we were in the middle of tucking into a juicy steak. When that failed, she sneaked meat substitutes onto our plates. And it wasn’t just food; Anouk dished out all forms of spirituality like a Hun: art therapy, rebirthing, therapeutic massage, strange-smelling oils. She recommended we go and get our auras massaged. She dragged us to criminally obscure plays, including one where the actors performed with their backs to the audience during the entire production. It was as if a lunatic were holding the key to our brains, stuffing things inside like crystals and wind chimes and pamphlets advertising lectures by one mystical left-wing levitating Gucci guru after another. That’s when she started with escalating urgency to critically assess our way of life.
Every week she inspected a new corner of our airless lives and gave us a review. It was never a rave. We never got a thumbs-up. The thumbs were always pointing to the sewer. After she discovered that Dad was managing a strip club, the reviews became savage, starting on the outside and working in. She critiqued our habit of impersonating each other on the phone, and the way, whenever there was a knock on the door, we both froze in terror as if we lived in a totalitarian regime and were running an underground newspaper. She pointed out that living like art students while Dad had an expensive sports car was borderline insane; she shot down Dad’s habit of kissing books and not me, as well as the way he’d go weeks without acknowledging my existence, then weeks when he wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace. She picked apart everything, from the way Dad slouched in his chair, to how he’d spend an hour weighing the advantages and disadvantages of having a shower, to his sociopathic manner of dressing (it was Anouk who first spotted that Dad was wearing his pajamas underneath his suit), to his lazy way of shaving, so he left tufts of hair sprouting in random patches on his face.
Maybe it was her arctic, belittling tone of voice, but he’d just stare sullenly into his coffee as she unveiled her latest damning report from the front lines. Her most unsettling and damaging form of reproach, though, was when she critiqued Dad’s criticism; that sent him reeling. You see, he’d spent nearly his whole life honing his contempt for others and had nearly perfected his “guilty” verdict on the world when Anouk came in and leveled it. “You know what your problem is?” she’d say (that’s how she always began). “You hate yourself and so you hate others. It’s just sour grapes. You’re too busy reading and thinking about big things. You don’t care about the little things in your own life, and that means you’re contemptuous of anyone who does. You’ve never struggled like they have, because you’ve never cared like they do. You don’t really know what people go through.” Often as she dished it out Dad would be strangely quiet, and he rarely rose to his own defense.
“You know what your problem is?” she asked after Dad told her his life story one afternoon. “You’re rehashing your old thoughts. Do you realize that? You’re quoting yourself, your only friend is a sleazy sycophant”- Eddie-“who agrees with everything you say, and you never air your ideas in a forum where they might be challenged, you just say them to yourself and then congratulate yourself when you agree with what you said.”
She went on and on like this, and over the following months, as I squeezed uncomfortably into adolescence and my relationship with Dad weakened daily, as if it had osteoporosis, Anouk didn’t just pour acid all over his ideas, hopes, and self-esteem, she took aim at me too. She was the one who told me I was only good-looking enough to attract about 22 percent of the female population. I thought that was a dismal figure, really abominable. It wasn’t until I was able to spot the loneliness in the faces of men that I realized that being attractive to 22 percent of women is a whopping success story. There are legions of ugly, wretchedly lonely, hopelessly inept sociopaths out there who fall in the 0-2 percent category- armies of them- and every one would kill for my 22 percent.
Oh, and she also berated me for neglecting the second batch of fish.
You see, Dad’s bank balance was swelling again, and undaunted by the previous episode of fish homicide (suicide?), he bought three more fish, this time simple goldfish, as if he thought that the ownership of fish went through degrees of difficulty depending on the species and the previous disaster had been caused by the fact that he had bought me fish that were simply too hard for my level. To him, goldfish were fish with training wheels: immortal, impossible to kill.
He was wrong. In the end I disposed of those fish quite easily too, though this time from underfeeding. They starved to death. But we argued right up to and including the day Dad died on the issue of whose fault it was. I went away for a week to stay at my friend Charlie’s house, and I swear to God, as I was leaving the apartment I said to Dad, “Don’t forget to feed the fish.” Dad remembers it very differently, and in his version, when leaving the apartment I had actually said, “OK, bye.” Whatever the case, sometime during my weeklong absence the fish came down with a bad case of starvation and, unlike humans in the same fix, did not think to resort to cannibalism. They just let themselves waste away.
Anouk took Dad’s side on this one, and I noticed that the only time Dad enjoyed the benefits of a ceasefire was when he could team up with Anouk against me. I have to admit, their relationship perplexed me. They were an improbable pairing, as if a rabbi and a man who raised pit bulls were marooned together on a desert island; incompatible strangers thrown together during a time of crisis, only Dad and Anouk’s was a nameless crisis without beginning or end.
A year into her employment with us, Dad received an unexpected phone call.
“You’re kidding,” he said. “Jesus Christ, no. Absolutely not. Not if you raped and tortured me. How much is a lot? Well, all right, then. Yes, yes, I said yes, didn’t I? When do I start?”
It was good news! An American film production company had heard of the Terry Dean story and wanted to make it into a Hollywood blockbuster. They wanted Dad’s help to make sure they got it right, even though they were setting it in America as the story of a dead baseball player who comes back from hell to take revenge on his teammates who battered him to death.