My Present Age Page 2

  “There’s something wrong with your steering linkage,” he informed me, unperturbed.

  “There’s something wrong with your steering linkage! Yours. Upstairs. Understand?” Picture this: I was actually jabbing myself in the temple with a stiff forefinger. “Get out and look! Look!”

  He obliged me. McMurtry carefully eased himself out from behind the wheel, tottered around the car, and peered at the gleaming strip of exposed metal.

  “I’ll never get a paint match,” I said. “Never. I’ll have to repaint the entire car.”

  “You ask me,” said McMurtry, “I done you a favour. That yellow there you got looks like dog piss on snow.”

  In a saner moment I would have had to agree with him. The yellow had been Victoria’s choice. Victoria, my estranged wife. She had read in Consumer Reports that yellow was a highly visible colour and for reasons of safety was an excellent choice for a car. That’s why yellow was replacing red on fire engines. She had insisted on yellow.

  “Dog piss on snow! Dog piss on snow! That’s my car you’re referring to, you superannuated Hun!”

  “That ain’t a car,” he said, glancing up at me from under his duck-bill cap, “that’s a sewing machine with tires.”

  I let that pass. “What did I ever do to you?” I asked, trying to get a grip on myself. “What? For God’s sake, tell me!”

  McMurtry pointed to my automobile. “Dinky Toy,” he said. He made a contemptuous putt-putt noise with his dry old lips.

  Something snapped in my head. I lunged at his New Yorker. The terrible crack of cold metal breaking was succeeded by a silence wide and vast enough for me to realize what I’d done. I had a radio antenna in my mittened hand.

  McMurtry’s eyes narrowed. “I’m calling the cops,” he said, creaked round on his heel, and began to shuffle for the apartment building as fast as his decrepit pins would carry him.

  Cops. I saw immediately this was big trouble. You can’t wrench the radio antenna off a senior citizen’s mode of transportation without having society turn on you like a mad dog. And there’s no point in pleading provocation. I was hip deep in shit on this one.

  It took a half an hour of abject pleading and spectacular self-abasement outside his apartment door to get him to accept thirty dollars’ damages. Thirty goddamn dollars! He never did bother to get the antenna replaced, either. He just wound a wire clothes-hanger around the stump.

  Now McMurtry had the effrontery to go public with his vendetta. Mouth crammed with Cocoa Puffs, spoon suspended in mid-air, I had heard him tattle on Ed to The Beast.

  “I mean, Tom,” McMurtry said, “what can be done about these bums? I mean to say, is there somewhere I could call to have this here character looked into?”

  “Far be it for me to suggest anybody report anybody else to the proper authorities,” said The Beast. “But doggone it, the fact remains there’s just too many freeloaders in this so-called country of ours. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. There are just too many unemployment benefits and welfare rip-off artists getting away with blue murder. Anybody that tunes in to my program knows that Tom Rollins isn’t afraid to use plain language. My motto is, call a spade a spade. I want to give a name to what your young friend is doing. Let’s call it fraud. Fraud pure and simple. And fraud’s just a highfalutin name for stealing. Stealing hard-earned money out of your pocket, sir, out of my pocket, out of our neighbour’s pocket, out of poor old John Doe Taxpayer’s pocket.

  “Now the last thing I want to say on this matter is this. If we saw some guy ripping off our neighbour, stealing his colour TV, say, what do you think we’d do?”

  “I know what I’d do. I’d call the cops.” He certainly would. The merest hint of the illicit had his dialling finger poised and quivering. I could testify to that. The old fart was just crazy keen to call the cops.

  “And so would any other John Q. Decent Citizen,” said The Beast stoutly. “But please, sir, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. It isn’t my job to tell you what to do. My role is that of communicator. Tom Rollins’s program exists only to facilitate an exchange of ideas. Which reminds me, by the by,” he said, “all my lines are lit up. You wouldn’t want me to deny an equal chance to all those folks out there to exercise their God-given democratic right to speak their minds on the issues of the day, would you? So …”

  “So maybe I ought to call the Unemployment?”

  “Far be it for me to tell you what to do, sir. We got to run now. But be sure to give us a call and let us know what the bureaucrats who hand out our money have to say for themselves on this one.” Click. “This is Tom Rollins here for ‘Brickbats and Bouquets.’ Speak now or forever hold your–”

  I get hit with an anxiety attack whenever I think of those two. Right now I’m having a humdinger, a real Ed special. I’m sweating, my breathing is rapid and shallow, my heart is bumping my breastbone. I heave the covers off in one convulsive movement.

  Calm down, Ed. Calm down. I roll on my back, stare down the expanses of my ample, pale body. Eyes trained between the little hillocks that are my breasts, I survey a white swell of belly; a little coppice of hairs rises in the vicinity of my navel. In the beyond, hidden below all this, lie legs and feet and orangish, ridged toenails.

  God, The Beast is slowly, day by day, week by week, driving me crazy. He has sat in judgment on me and pronounced me guilty. There is no appeal from his terrible court. Just ask me how that loser, K, felt in The Trial.

  Victoria used to tell me it was a symptom of my immaturity that I can’t let things like this go. The inability to make distinctions of value, she called it. But it isn’t that. Very well, I know there are greater injustices being borne than the ones I bear, there is injustice in the very air we breathe. Infants are scalded by hapless and drunken mothers, concert pianists contract multiple sclerosis, Martin Luther King is assassinated, and Idi Amin is granted political asylum. In the scheme of things what has happened to me is nothing, less than nothing. I know that. For God’s sake, nobody even knows who McMurtry and The Beast are talking about, and if they did, no one would care except my father. He would be ashamed.

  Pop sends me snapshots from Brownsville and on the back of them he writes things such as “Old Ralphy Madigan took this one. He admires your mother’s legs,” or “Photo courtesy of Shirley Phillipotts,” as if I knew these people. They are his world now, these new friends from Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Michigan, and Saskatchewan whose life journey has been a pilgrimage to a shrine distant from the snows.

  In these photographs he and my mother sit under a striped canvas awning tacked to their junky trailer and held up by spindly aluminum poles spiked in the dusty earth. I barely recognize them. In the freer air of the great Republic to the south, mother has dyed her hair chocolate and taken to wearing red rubber sandals and one-piece swimming suits. Pop is a stranger in a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, Bermuda shorts, and mirror sunglasses. I never saw him in shorts before in my life. Never.

  I could have believed he was born in his khaki work pants. I could have believed his first words were: “It isn’t right. Fair’s fair.” For it’s from Pop that I absorbed my bittersweet understanding of injustice. We’re very much alike, although he can’t recognize it.

  You see, Pop was a small-potatoes building contractor and big-league idealist. He never understood business. What drove him to despair was that he couldn’t land the larger jobs. “I was low tender,” he’d say to my mother, “what the Christ is going on there?”

  Whenever I look at the Polaroids he mails me I wonder if, behind the mirror sunglasses and the white smile in the dark face, he isn’t still asking that bewildered question: “I was low bidder all those years, wasn’t I? What in Christ was going on? How come I never got it?”

  Not that he didn’t inquire. My father doesn’t have much formal education but he used to write eloquently stilted letters to boards and committees requesting explanations. Of course, he never got satisfaction and their evasions
only made him melancholy. “I was low,” he’d mutter. “I’m always low. I pare my costs to the bone. No fat. There’s practically nothing left for me. Don’t they trust me?” he’d ask, turning to my mother.

  And then he’d write another letter asking, Didn’t they trust him to do quality work? Because he could guarantee quality work.

  They almost never deigned to answer the second time. Pop was such an innocent.

  No, nobody knows who The Beast is talking about, so who cares?

  I know. I care. I have phoned the open-line show to explain to him that I receive neither unemployment insurance nor welfare, but live on the capital I raised from cashing in my life insurance policy. What an act of blind faith that is, my throwing myself on The Beast’s mercy in hope of redress. I barely begin to make my case when the line goes dead, and then in the background The Beast speaks from my radio. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s him again. This high wind we’re having today must be shaking the nuts out of the trees.”

  I have written him letters begging him not to encourage McMurtry in his persecution of me. I flatter The Beast and remind him that with great power comes great responsibility. It does no good.

  I have never set eyes on The Beast, but in my fantasies I see him seated behind a microphone in a deserted radio station. He is forty-five years old or thereabouts. His rich brown hair has been permed into a profusion of pubic-looking curls. His shirt, undone to the third button, exposes a baby-pink, hairless bosom, on which rosy expanse dangles one of the last great bronze medallions to grace a chest west of Warsaw.

  From his voice alone I have extrapolated this, I have invented his biography. I can see him. I know The Beast. He is the kind of man who cups and conspicuously hitches his genitals before taking a seat. He went to a radio arts academy in Oklahoma. He orders his wife to lose weight. He has turned his son into a bed-wetter and his daughter into a drum majorette. I would be willing to wager dollars to doughnuts that this monster of iniquity has decreed one night a week Family Night and on that hallowed eve his children, denied television, are compelled to talk to him.

  My fantasies lean toward strangulation. I have broken into The Beast’s studio. He is alone.

  He springs to his feet, upsetting his chair in terror. It makes an ominous sound toppling over in the studio. “You!” he exclaims.

  “Yes,” I intone solemnly, calmly advancing. “It is Ed. It is he whom you have wronged.”

  “No! No!”

  We grapple. My righteous thumbs embed themselves in his Adam’s apple.

  “Aarrgh! Aarrgh!” cries The Beast, tearing at my swelling forearms with his fingernails. Homo horribilis is being strangled on air, live. Ten thousand watts of power are pumping out his death agony across the province, into thousands of households.

  And then the bloody phone rings. Rings and rings and rings. Just when I had the son of a bitch where I wanted him.

  2

  A phone call, a surprising, startling phone call, loosened my death grip on The Beast’s throat. It was my wife. A curious development, because not only have Victoria and I not met face to face for over a year, but she has resolutely refused to speak to me during our separation except through her lawyer, her mouthpiece, Benny Ferguson. Our last conversation occurred on the summer evening that I inveigled a tenant in her apartment building into unlocking the lobby door to me. He fell for a convincing dumb-show search of pockets for keys I didn’t have.

  Mine was not a successful re-wooing. I succeeded in insinuating myself into her suite by some childish yet compelling tactics, but one thing led to another, the result being that I locked myself in her bathroom and refused to come out.

  The day I barricaded myself in her bathroom is the day from which I date our present impasse. Our happiness together I date from that day in June of 1973 when I arrived at the door of Victoria’s flat bearing three madras plaid shirts on hangers and a pair of blue jeans with the cuffs tied shut and the legs stuffed with underwear and socks. Although we had been seeing each other for over six months, Victoria clung tenaciously to her privacy and independence; she never permitted me to stay with her for longer than a single night, and she made it clear that she did not want a roommate, male or female. She was determined to be free, an attitude I found unacceptable. So that day in June I explained to Victoria that my roomie Benny had received a shitload of dope from a guy in Vancouver and was intending to deal it out of our apartment. I told her I was terrified of being busted while he conducted business, and asked if I could temporarily move in until trafficking was suspended. My lie got me in the door. Later, Victoria had trouble persuading me I should leave. Throughout the summer I continued to widen the breach in her defences and to infiltrate the citadel, bit by bit smuggling in my worldly possessions, quietly establishing squatter’s rights. Despite herself Victoria got used to me, even though she kept up a kind of weak resistance until September, when university classes resumed and distracted her. Victoria was a conscientious student.

  I have wonderful memories of that July and August. I remember her as already a remarkable woman at twenty-two, full of courage, passionate, opinionated beyond the appeal of reason. When we drank beer and argued, her face would flush so red with conviction that I was sure I could feel it radiate heat across the width of the table. Perhaps she did not believe in the things she defended as much as she believed in herself and in her inability to ever be wrong. That may account for why she struggled to save me for so long.

  The only thing she seemed to have a doubt about was her nose. It was large, had a high bridge and flaring nostrils, and saved her face from being merely beautiful. That summer she wore her hair in a shag cut, probably because the crinkled hair and big nose taken together made her look exotic, vaguely Assyrian. The rest of Victoria was an approximation of middle-class ideals of perfection: a translucently fine complexion; strong, even teeth; a slim, leggy, full-breasted body that always smelled faintly and pleasantly of soap, toothpaste, and baby powder.

  To sum up, she was everything I wasn’t: assured, idealistic, ungrubby. She had had success stamped early in her heart as I had had failure stamped early in mine. She had been vice-president of her high school’s student government, a member of the honour roll, editor of the yearbook, popular. I also learned, in time, that when Victoria was seventeen, a high school senior dating a university man named Max, she had been deftly deflowered and had awakened to the knowledge that she enjoyed sex a good deal.

  In contrast, I was a long-term social pariah who had never had a date in high school until my graduation, when my mother scared up a girl for me through her vast network of friends and relatives, a girl horrible and desperate enough to grace my arm while I waddled through the grand march of graduates. In anticipation of my first real encounter with the fair sex, I spent a lot of time studying “The Playboy Adviser,” French-kissing my left biceps, and practising unhooking a bra of my mother’s I had stolen out of the laundry hamper.

  It was this high level of sexual expertise (barely supplemented by three wild, roguish years of university life) that I brought to bear on my seduction of Victoria. Add to this the fact that I was corpulent and considered by some to be verging on sociopathic and one is confronted by one of those baffling conundrums of the heart: What was Victoria doing with me? I had no answer then, but later, after I had been introduced to her family, I thought I could see why she was drawn to me. Maybe it was because I was as different from her father as a man could be, and that what Victoria at first valued in me was eccentricity, unpredictability, and an emotional range that she equated with depth of feeling rather than a lack of restraint. Certainly the first time I wept in front of her she was stunned.

  Oh yes, that was a fine summer. Victoria was working as a secretary, earning money against her return to university in the fall, and I was preparing for grad studies by teaching myself the French I hadn’t troubled to learn in high school. When I wasn’t conjugating verbs, I was refurbishing Victoria’s tiny apartment on the third stor
ey of a rickety old revenue house. One day she would return from work to find the kitchen painted canary yellow, another to discover the bedroom was painted blue and there were carnations in a bowl on the dresser. I was happy. I stripped the old, yellowing wax off the living-room floor and polished and repolished the linoleum until the reflection of my face beamed back at me. I washed windows and revarnished window frames and baseboards until the place was redolent with vinegar and varnish.

  By five-thirty, when Victoria arrived home from work, the flat, which was directly under the roof, would be sizzling hot, but I would serve her chilled lemonade and one of my famed cold collations: devilled eggs, salami, French bread, pickles, bean salad, Jell-O chocolate pudding. After eating and changing, we would walk downtown to escape the oppressive heat. Sometimes we sat through the same movie twice for the pleasure of the air-conditioning, sometimes we met friends to drink beer and talk politics, talk books, talk films, talk the meaning of life, talk anything. We were testing our wings; none of us talked for truth but for victory. I talked for her. I performed, I ranted, I gesticulated, I demonstrated, I impugned, I drunkenly soared in a flight of rhetoric. I had somebody. I talked for Victoria.

  It was always late before we started for home, strolling along in the lush, warm darkness. On a week night the streets would be deserted except for the occasional carload of drunks tooling around in a Camaro, Firebird, Cobra, or Mustang. Victoria, braless in a T-shirt and jaunty in safari shorts, often attracted attention and remarks.

  One night in August one of these muscle cars crawled over to the curb, engine rumbling throatily, and a number of beery Visigoths hung out the windows to give vent to their admiration. I, with a long and woe-filled experience of being subjected to the unwelcome attentions of extra-chromosome types, turned catatonic with terror. Victoria did not. When I counselled silence and circumspection I was not heeded.