by Janel Comeau
Jacob Marble had done everything right.
He’d said ‘no’ to drugs and ‘yes’ to eight gruelling semesters of mathematics and accounting classes. He’d married a sweet, pleasant girl who was remarkably adept at concealing her profound psychological problems, and he’d moved her into a sweet, pleasant home in a neighbourhood with very few stabbings. He had a mortgage that would outlast him and an SUV that would help to turn the Earth into an uninhabitable wasteland before his descendants finished paying back the bank. He’d even managed to father a son, who played some sort of sport, and a daughter, who played some sort of instrument. His taxes were done on time and, with luck, his retirement would come a little early. Everything was as it should be.
Yes, at forty-three years old, Jacob Marble had found himself with absolutely nothing to complain about. And so, naturally, he was unhappy.
And for a very long time, unhappiness was all it was. Jacob grumbled into nine-dollar coffees and sighed in front of his twelve-hundred-dollar television set, wracking his upper-middle-class brain for something to be unhappy about. He needn’t have worried. Misery–true misery–would find its own way to him. In fact, it showed up in his mailbox on a Wednesday morning, marked with a return address from the closest thing the Western world has to hell.
“Bill, junk, bill, junk, junk, junk, bill,” mumbled Mrs. Marble as she trudged into the kitchen, leafing through that morning’s mail. She paused, and held out an unassuming white envelope to her husband as he crunched his morning cereal, “For you. From your old high school.”
Their fingers brushed as the envelope changed hands. Perhaps there was hope for their sex life after all.
Jacob tore into the paper like a hungry lion tearing into his kill, and extracted a single folded page from the carnage. He settled back in his chair to read.
Dear Class of Whatever Year We Graduated In,
As you’ve all doubtlessly forgotten, this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of our high school graduation. Luckily for you ingrates, I’m not weighed down by one of those precious ‘careers’ or ‘families’ you’re always going on about, and I’ve taken it upon myself to organize the celebrations. Again.
The reunion will take place at 7:00 p.m. on the 25th of this month, in the first-floor ballroom of the Garden Plaza Hotel. It was originally going to be held in a much nicer ballroom upstairs, but I threw my back out carrying five dozen folding chairs, and I’m not going to endure any more suffering for you people.
The event is open bar. God knows, I need it.
You’re welcome,
Hillary Swill
P.S. I’m on the 21st page of the yearbook, third row, second from the right. I’d like to think that most of you know what I look like by now, since we did go to school together, and I host these events every five years, but I know half of you have a hard time recognizing your own children. I hope you know they’re going to grow up with some kind of complex. Shame on you.
Jacob was proud to say that he could confidently pick his children out of a mid-sized crowd, but Hillary was right about one thing; he had absolutely no recollection of who she was. Since she’d been kind enough to provide directions, there was only one thing for it. He would have to dust off the old yearbook.
It turned out to be more dust than book, and his fingers fought with flimsy pages that hadn’t been turned in nearly twenty years. There were all his old teachers, staring at him with the same vacant, unblinking expressions they’d used in the classroom. There were his old classmates, neatly arranged in long rows of dated hairstyles and tacky glasses. His eyes skimmed across fading notes from good friends, wishing him a pleasant summer, and notes from best friends, accusing him of committing unspeakable acts with barnyard animals. Page nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.
There she was.
She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t quite ugly enough to send men screaming from the room, either. Even through the grainy black-and-white photo, Jacob could see that a shower and a little makeup would have done wonders for her. He carefully scrutinized her plain, pale face, but try as he might, he could bring back absolutely no memories of bitter Miss Swill. Perhaps her brief biographical information would shed some light. A caption beneath the photo read ‘Hillary Swill. Most Likely to Deteriorate into a Cat Hoarder.’
What an awfully specific title. Now that he thought about it, Jacob couldn’t remember what sort of silly little honour his classmates had bestowed upon him at graduation. He recalled acting in some sort of school production in high school; perhaps they’d foreseen fame and superstardom in his future. He flipped back through the pages, scanning surnames.
There he was.
He was much younger, and there was a great deal less of him, but the boy smirking from beneath the sheen of the old photo paper was unmistakably Jacob Marble. The caption beneath him confirmed as much and underneath that laid the little sentence that would cause Jacob so much misery.
Most Likely to Gain Forty Pounds and Settle Down in the Suburbs.
He was shocked. Offended, even. How had he forgotten such a slight? He made a quick trip to the bathroom scale and was relieved to discover that he’d gained only a scant 37lbs since tossing his mortarboard into the air. Oh, how wrong they had been.
Or had they? Jacob was willing to pretend that three pounds was a significant amount of weight, but even he wasn’t willing to pretend that the picket-fenced, neatly mowed, and abundantly neurotic neighborhood he occupied wasn’t a suburb. Maybe he really had been predictable. Maybe, even back then, he’d been destined for a life of nine-to-five drudgery, with absolutely no reward save for the comforts of a middle-class lifestyle. Even then, they’d known he was capable of nothing more than dying in obscurity. At an age of boundless potential, he had already been hopeless.
There are five stages of grief, but Jacob Marble counted only three stages of learning that your entire life was a hollow, materialistic sham. At first, he panicked. He’d thrown away most of his mortal life on a meaningless daily rat race. His youth was squandered. His talents unused. His potential gone to waste. Twenty-five precious years had slipped through his grasp before he’d even thought to try to catch them.
When, finally, his aging, buttery heart had had quite enough of panic, he slumped over in depression. It was futile. He was a useless old man, and there was nothing that anyone could do to change that now. He would have to fashion a crude paper-bag mask for himself to wear in public, so as to avoid embarrassing his children and jeopardizing their own futures. He might as well quit attending marriage counselling. The sooner he could commence the process of dying alone amid piles of filth, the better.
Even mindless depression goes stale after a time, and Jacob eventually found himself mired in a much more interesting stage of grieving for his cookie-cutter life: empty resolutions. Yes, he was going to change. He’d change today, in fact. Right now, if he could. He would re-invent himself, and when he was reunited with his old classmates, they’d be beside themselves with awe and envy. They’d regret underestimating him, and they’d throw themselves at his feet, begging forgiveness. He could almost feel their lips on the toes of his boots. He could really do this.
He just had to figure out where to start.
Making a major change to the only life you’ve ever known and the only person you’ve ever been was tricky, Jacob soon discovered. He needed a goal–something specific, and something impressive. His troubles had all begun with his yearbook; perhaps his yearbook would be the thing to lift him out of his slump. He started to read each little printed caption, hungrily hunting for his answer.
Most Likely to Succeed. Too vague.
Most Likely to Win a Nobel Prize. Too lofty.
Most Likely to Moonlight in the Sex Trade. Who wrote these things?
Then Jacob caught sight of another prestigious prediction, nestled at the bottom of the page. Most Likely to Become a Notorious Art Thief. Admittedly, it wasn’t a morally upstanding achievement, nor was it the slightest bit legal. But it was glamorous. Daring. Thrilling, even. He’d spent enough time playing by the rules. Losers coloured inside the lines. Visionaries had to take risks.
Jacob studied the picture above the art-thief caption. It was Roy Fitchell–a dark-haired, scowling young man who had captured the attention of girls and faculty alike, though for entirely different reasons. The scourge of the school had gone on to become the scourge of the streets, and just last year, Jacob had heard Roy’s name on the news, when he was arrested for attempting to murder a prostitute with half of a shoelace and an old cottage cheese container. He’d be occupying a federal cell for the next ten years, without so much as a piece of art in sight.
Surely, he wouldn’t mind if Jacob borrowed his destiny.
There are lots of details to consider when plunging into a life of crime for the first time at the age of forty-three, but at that time, none was quite as pressing as the question of which piece of art he should steal. Going on a grand larceny spree was out of the question; he simply didn’t have that kind of time. No, he had to choose one masterpiece and make it count.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Time was of the essence in this sort of scheme, and he checked the date on the invitation. The 25th. He checked the date on the calendar. The 22nd. Damn it. Three days was hardly enough time to steal a piece of children’s artwork off the wall of the public library, let alone make off with a culturally and historically significant magnum opus of art. If he was going to pull this off, he realized, he would need to use another tactic entirely.
And that’s when the Marvellous Mr. Marble was born.
All at once, he rose out of the seas of Jacob’s consciousness, clutching a spruced-up biography and an excessive sense of bravado. In many ways, the Marvellous Mr. Marble was just like Jacob. He was a corporate tax accountant, just like Jacob. He had a wife and a son and a daughter, just like Jacob. He even looked a little bit like Jacob. But he wasn’t Jacob at all. The Marvellous Mr. Marble had the courage to do something extraordinary with his life, and he was bursting to talk about it. It wasn’t a lie, precisely, Jacob decided, because to the Marvellous Mr. Marble, it was true. He had lived and done those things, even if Jacob had not.
Tell us the story, his former classmates would beg. The Marvellous Mr. Marble would slowly, deliberately, draw up a chair and a drink, scanning the faces of his eager audience. His voice would be just the right combination of wistful and earnest to tell the story properly, and he would start with, Well, I was probably twenty-three or twenty-four at the time, and I was living in Paris on a work visa.
Did tax accountants ever live abroad on work visas? Jacob wasn’t so sure, but the Marvellous Mr. Marble was convinced that they did.
I’d moved there to get away. My relationships back home were rocky, and I’d decided that the best thing for them at the time was to put myself on the other end of a long-distance phone call. France was the first country to grant me a visa, and off I went.
Paris wasn’t at all what I’d expected. The only research I had done on the place was in movies, and when I arrived, I saw a lot fewer cafés and a lot more garbage than I’d been expecting. I’d tried to learn French, but five minutes after I stepped out of the airplane terminal, I realized my accent was too thick to get me anywhere. I was stranded, grasping at the English-speakers I’d met like they were life buoys. But I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I was on my first real adventure, and I intended to make the most of it.
I was smart enough to secure myself a place to live before I ever set foot on Parisian soil, and I had plenty of money. I decided to play tourist in my new home for a while. I saw it all–the Eiffel tower, Arc de Triomphe, even Disneyland Paris. I’d only been there for two weeks, in fact, when I saw her for the first time. It was love at first sight.
Saw who? Who is she? his classmates would ask, heads cocked like inquisitive puppies.
The Mona Lisa. Then he would set down his drink and stare pensively into the distance, until the silence become so incredibly uncomfortable that someone finally plucked up the nerve to ask if he was crazy.
Crazy about her, he would quip back, as Jacob inwardly groaned. I’m not an art lover, but I knew I couldn’t live in Paris without visiting the Louvre. But she was so much more than art. I started to come back daily, just to stand at the railing and watch her. Admirers surrounded her at almost all hours of the day and night, but I was content to stand among the crowd if it meant getting a glimpse of her. Sometimes, if I stood just right, our eyes would meet, and I could pretend that little smile was just for me. I lived for the rare moments I could get her to myself. She may have been over 500 years old, and she may not have any eyebrows, but to me, she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.
The story was coming out much more effortlessly than Jacob had anticipated, and he was beginning to wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t take a break from telling it to rummage around in the bathroom cupboard for a few of his wife’s spare pills. Curiosity kept him rooted to the spot.
Then one day, the Marvellous Mr. Marble paused to take a long swig from his glass, purposely heightening the tension. I decided I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just had to have her. And I know she felt the same.
She’s a painting, Jacob pointed out to himself.
It doesn’t matter what she was. I wanted her. But we came from different worlds–hers was so full of delicate beauty, and mine was full of unwashed tourists and their sticky offspring. I wasn’t content to share her anymore. There was only one thing for it; I would have to steal away with her in the dead of night.
How? The eager imaginary onlookers gripped the sides of their chairs in anticipation.
Oh, you should have seen it. It was like something right out of a movie. I knew a fellow in the city who knew a guy whose brother knew a guy who could sell me a poison-tipped tranquilizing blow dart, and I bought one. Just one, mind you–what fun would the heist be if I gave myself more than one chance to pull it off? Then I tracked down the young mademoiselle who’d recently been awarded the job of switching on the alarms at the Louvre each night. I managed to seduce her within the hour; gripped in the throes of passion, she agreed to shut off the alarms for me the following night. I’m not proud of myself for doing it.
The Marvellous Mr. Marble grinned around the lip of his glass, looking, in fact, incredibly proud. By morning, she begged me to stay with her forever, but of course, my heart already belonged to another. Several months later, I heard she’d given birth to a child, but I was too afraid to go and face my mistakes. Without her father around for guidance and support, the young girl I’d created channeled her hurt and anger into learning to how to spin on a pole.
You have a stripper for a daughter? Jacob did not look impressed.
Don’t be ridiculous. She’s an Olympic gymnast, one of the finest France has ever seen. But I digress. The Marvellous Mr. Marble drained the last dredges of his drink and held out the empty tumbler to Jacob. Be a good man and fill this for me, would you? Now, as I was saying, when the night of the heist finally arrived, the alarms were shut off. I loitered next to an unsuspecting window until the stroke of midnight and pried the pane out with a letter opener and a wad of chewed gum. Worked like a charm. There was a little less of me in those days, and it was easy to hoist myself up and over the windowsill. I took off running down the hall towards my darling. I actually thought I might have pulled off the perfect crime, when I came around the corner and came face to face with a guard.
The crowd gasped. One woman actually pulled out an antique fan and frantically fluttered it at her face.
I thought it was all over. Luckily, I remembered that little dart I bought, and I got it up to my lips before the man could even finish asking me what I thought I was doing. I aimed right between his eyes, which on hindsight was a terrible choice of target, took a deep breath, and blew as hard as I could. But unfortunately, wooden straws are much more difficult to aim than I’d expected, and the thought of being so close to my beloved Mona Lisa had me trembling from top to bottom. The dart whizzed past the young guard’s head and lodged itself in a painting behind him.
The fanning woman lifted a hand to her forehead and theatrically fainted away. No one paid her the least bit of attention.
That one little mistake could have robbed me of everything: my love, my dreams, and my future. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet spent enough time in France to learn how to properly surrender. I wasn’t about to come this far and fail. My leg came up in a kick that would have put any elderly Japanese martial arts guru to shame; when my foot connected with his face, it struck him hard enough to put dimples in his descent’s chins. As soon as he hit the ground, I took off. Didn’t even wait to see if he got up again.
Then the Marvellous Mr. Marble’s voice softened. I nearly wept when I saw her. She was wearing her favourite green dress, like she always did, and her eyes seemed to sparkle in the moonlight. The glass protecting her may have been bulletproof, but it wasn’t infatuation-proof, and I wrenched it from the wall with my bare hands. Finally, she was all mine. I lowered her from the wall and strapped her to my back, barely noticing the weight of her. I took an alternate route back to the open window, so as to avoid the lifelong torment of seeing that I had caused someone a debilitating brain injury, and I stole away into the night with my prize.
I see. So why aren’t you in jail? You can’t just take the Mona Lisa and get away with it. Jacob frowned. This was the crucial part of the story that would make or break his reputation, perhaps for years to come.
I’m getting to that. I took her home to my apartment with me that night and hung her up in a place of honour on the wall. It was a very nice little apartment, and I’d prepared the finest stretch of wall in the place just for her, but something wasn’t right. She didn’t look quite as happy in my living room as she had in the museum. When I’d first spied her, I could have sworn she was smiling; back home with me, it looked more like a grimace.
The Marvellous Mr. Marble lowered his face into his hands and let a long, low sigh escape. Then he was back to his grandiose self again so quickly that Jacob wondered if he had really seen the momentary loss of composure.
By morning, I’d realized that she wasn’t mine to possess. My heart ached to have her, but she was never meant to belong to me. I returned to the Louvre in the morning disguised as a painter, with the Mona Lisa safely tucked under my smock. I returned her to her rightful home and took one last look at her before I walked away. It pained me so to set her free, but I can go through the rest of my life knowing that, even for a short time, she and I were together.
The Marvellous Mr. Marble faded to black and Jacob was on his feet, clapping. It was perfect–romantic, tragic, heroic, and daring. Was it plausible? No, not at all, but that was what the open bar was for. He might be fat, boring, and gradually withdrawing from a family unit that was coming apart at the seams, but he’d once stolen the Mona Lisa, and that was what mattered. And why stop at a tryst with a renaissance painting? There was no telling what sort of life his new doppelgänger could build for him.
A tuxedo. That’s what was missing now. The Marvellous Mr. Marble needed a fine tux, and Jacob happened to own one. It’d had been purchased sometime during his transition from a young, lean athlete to an overworked father who ate leftover pizza for breakfast, but he could always suck in his gut. Who really needed to breathe, anyway?
The tuxedo was exactly where he’d left it, crumpled at the bottom of the guestroom closet. He’d tossed in in there after returning home from a wedding five years ago, and like Jacob, it had gained a few wrinkles in the interim. A dishevelled tux would not do. He located the ironing board.
“Going somewhere special?”
Jacob looked up to see Mrs. Marble leaning on the doorframe, her left eyebrow steadily rising into the creases of her forehead.
“High school reunion.”
She snorted, “How long has it been?”
“Twenty-five years.”
“That’s an awfully long time.”
They went silent. Jacob glided a hot iron across his shirt while Mrs. Marble picked at the ragged edge of a broken fingernail. Under normal circumstances, Jacob would have left it at that, but the Marvellous Mr. Marble wanted to forge on. He spoke up, in Jacob’s voice.
“Twenty-five years isn’t such a long time. We’ve been together for nearly twenty of them.” Did she just wince?
“I guess so.”
“The time with you has flown by, my dear.”
She rolled her eyes and learned farther into the wall, “Feels more like fifty years.”
“Not quite yet,” he chuckled, “but we’ll get there someday.”
She didn’t say anything, but she gave him the sort of look that told him more than he wanted to know. The Marvellous Mr. Marble saw his cue to exit, and suddenly he was Jacob again, just Jacob, all alone. Slowly, he lifted his head and met the eyes of the Mona Lisa he had been too selfish to return.
Yes, Jacob Marble had done everything right.
Except for the things he’d done wrong.
Janel Comeau received her BA in Psychology from the University of Alberta in 2015. She resides in Edmonton, where she works with homeless youth by day and edits her first novel by night. So far, her writing has appeared on Cracked.com, her personal blog, and her proud mother’s refrigerator.