“What about you, kid, you want to help us out?”

“My name’s Jasper.”

“You want to lick some envelopes, Jasper?”

“Not really, but OK.”

The three of us sat on the porch stuffing envelopes with deftness and precision. It was impossible to articulate what exactly was happening here; it was as if we were all actors improvising in a student play, and every so often we’d all look at each other with barely concealed amusement.

“How much do you get paid for doing this?” Dad asked.

“Five bucks for every one hundred envelopes.”

“That’s not so good.”

“No, it’s not.”

As she said this, I noticed how her serious, severe face had become serene and gentle.

I asked, “Why do you hate rich people so much?”

She narrowed her green eyes and said, “Because they get all the breaks. Because poor people are struggling while the rich complain about the temperature of their pools. Because when ordinary people get into trouble, the law fucks them over, and when the rich get into trouble, they get an easy ride.”

“Maybe I’m not rich,” Dad said. “Maybe I have a red sports car but it’s the only thing of value I own.”

“Who cares about you?”

“My son does.”

“Is that true?” she asked me.

“I suppose.”

There was something about this conversation that wasn’t working. It was as if language were failing us when we needed it most.

“We need a housekeeper,” Dad said suddenly. Green Eyes’s tongue froze mid-lick.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. It’s so.”

Green Eyes put down the envelopes and her face hardened again. “I don’t know if I want to work for some rich bastard.”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate you.”

“So?”

“So it’ll be hypocrisy.”

“No, it won’t.”

“It won’t?”

“No, it’ll be irony.”

Green Eyes thought about that awhile, and her lips started moving soundlessly, to let us know that she was thinking it over. “I have a boyfriend, you know.”

“Does that prevent you from cleaning?”

“Plus you’re much too old and much too ugly for me. I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“Listen. I’m just looking for someone to clean our apartment and cook for Jasper and me occasionally. Jasper’s mother is dead. I work all the time. I don’t have time to cook. Also, for the record, I’m not interested in you sexually. Your shaved head makes you look sort of mannish. Plus your face is oval. I only like round faces. Oval turns me off. Ask anyone.”

“Maybe I will.”

“So you want the job?”

“All right.”

“Why did you scratch my car?”

“I didn’t scratch your car.”

“You’re a liar.”

“You’re a weirdo.”

“You’re hired.”

“Fine.”

I looked at Dad who had a strange look on his face, as if we had trekked all night to arrive at a secret waterfall and this was it. We kept on with the envelopes as the dawn became morning.

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.”