My Present Age Read online

  “Ignore him, Victoria. Do not even look at him.”

  “Hey, baby!”

  “Forgive them, Victoria, for they know not what they do,” I said, picking up the pace.

  Loud, suggestive sucking noises.

  “Hey, baby, lose jumbo and come for a ride!”

  “What a treat. A ride in the fartmobile. Just what every girl wants,” Victoria said. She has a talent for invective if roused.

  “Oh Jesus. Don’t get them mad, Victoria.”

  “Hey, I got something to show you, baby. Wanna see a one-eyed pant snake?”

  “Go have a wet dream, greaseball.”

  “For God’s sake, Victoria,” I said between clenched teeth, “do you know what you’re talking to? This is the kind of person who collects Nazi regalia, for chrissakes.”

  “It’s made to measure, baby, I guarantee. Check out the fit.”

  “Fit it in your hand, algae. From the looks of your complexion that’s where it usually goes.”

  Quite naturally he turned his attention to me, favouring weaker prey. “Hey, Fatso, what you got to say for yourself? You as mouthy as the broad?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you, Georgie Jell-O!”

  Victoria said, “Leave him alone, creep.”

  “So you talk for both of you, eh? So what’s Tubby got I don’t got?”

  “Me, for one thing.”

  How my heart leapt, even in that moment of imminent peril. Me! Me! Me!

  “Some prize,” he said.

  “Get lost, pustule.”

  “Fuck you, bitch!”

  The driver revved the engine, popped the clutch. Tires squealed and smoked. When the tail lights had swept around a corner, I said, “They don’t know how lucky they are. I was on the point of freaking out. It could have been a mean scene for them.”

  “Come on, Ed,” said Victoria, “let’s get going before they decide to come back. Let’s go home.”

  Off we went, hand in hand, my legs and heart pumping in time to the refrain ringing in my head. Me! Me! Me!

  It was several months after this declaration that the seed of the idea of going to Greece was planted. Victoria had assembled our portable desk (a door laid across two sawhorses) in front of the living-room window to reap the benefit of the October light. I lay on the sofa attempting to persuade her to join me there. At the time I was mournfully singing “I’m Mr. Lonely” at the top of my lungs.

  “Ed, shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” She was laughing, though.

  “Bobby Vinton appeals with his plaintive mating call. Dare you resist his blandishments?”

  “I’m trying to finish a paper.”

  “What paper can possibly be more important than the duty to reach out and touch another human being in his hour of need?”

  “A paper on Greek mythology due tomorrow.”

  “A paper on Greek mythology could only be enriched by a fuller understanding of the Dionysian revel. Let us disport ourselves with Attic enthusiasm.”

  “Ed, give me a break.”

  “Okay, okay. Offer yourself to me body and soul and I promise to type the paper for you tonight. Greek’s honour.”

  “I thought you’re supposed to read a book for Schwingler’s seminar.”

  “When the Greek’s blood is heated with the madness of Dionysian revel,” I declared, smiting my breast, “he thinks not of the paltry pedagogue Schwingler!”

  “You aren’t going to give up until you get your way, are you?”

  “That is an approximation of the truth, yes.”

  “You just better type this paper then. I mean it,” she warned me, before entering freely into the spirit of the thing.

  By December the “Greek afternoon” or the “Greek evening” had become a household phrase. By degrees we developed a festival of wine, song, and feasting to dispel the cold and darkness which crept into the soul during a Canadian winter. Whenever I saw Victoria’s spirits flag I would begin secretly to gather the ingredients necessary for a “Greek evening.” From the delicatessen across town I would buy spinach pies and Greek pastries. A store of metaxa and retsina would be laid in, albums of Greek folk music would be obtained from the public library, and a roast of lamb hidden in the freezer of the tenant who lived below us. Then one day when Victoria stumbled in out of a January blizzard, bundled, scarved, mittened, snow flakes frozen in her eyelashes, she would be welcomed by the scent of roasting meat, music on the stereo, me proffering a glass of retsina, and the cry: “Everybodies get heppy! We got a Greek night!”

  So it would go. We had some good times. We ate and roared toasts and splashed metaxa down our throats as the stereo blasted out the sound track of Zorba the Greek.

  I would propose: “Death to the Colonels!”

  “Long live Melina Mercouri!” Victoria would rejoin.

  “More sex, please! I am Greek!” I would yell.

  In one of these moments of craziness I offered, “Next year in Crete!” and Victoria took me up on it. It was an idea easy to fasten on to in the black months of January and February. She began by collecting travel brochures and books. From that she progressed to explaining to me that cheap living in Greece would allow me to write. Writing was a thing I sometimes talked about doing, not very seriously of course, but in the way young men who study literature often do. I said her idea made sense. The next thing I knew, Victoria had taken a part-time job as a checkout clerk at Safeway and was making me set aside something each month from the salary I received as a teaching assistant at the university. This money was to finance a stay in Greece.

  Nothing brought us closer than our talk of Greece, than the minutiae of budgeting and planning, than the book of traveller’s Greek we traded phrases back and forth from. I felt free to feed the fire because I believed that a hard-headed, practical girl such as Victoria would draw back at some point. After all, what the hell did the two of us want in Greece?

  Finally, in the slush of March, we came to a decision that if we were going to live in conservative, reactionary Greece our stay would be made pleasanter and smoother if we were married. Not only that, if we had a wedding we could sell the wedding gifts to raise money to finance the trip.

  It was agreed we would marry in June and then work until some time in November. The day the first snow flew we would begin preparations for our final departure. The symbolism of that appealed to Victoria. I never looked beyond June and the wedding.

  But that is all in the past, and now, riding a city transit bus that shakes along snowy streets, I must consider more pressing things such as Victoria’s phone call and, with it, her perplexing invitation to lunch. She wasn’t unfriendly, merely curt and formal, exactly what one might expect given the circumstances. But why have I been summoned to a meeting? It can only be trouble of some kind. Perhaps the question of custody of Balzac. I can’t understand why she has chosen to stand firm on that issue. Not that I mind. If he is the last feeble link between us as man and wife, so be it. Victoria, after all, is the one who wishes our marriage ended as quickly, cleanly, and finally as possible. I, on the other hand, have not been prepared to relinquish my spouse with any semblance of dignity and good order.

  This, I know, given the standards of the present age, is viewed as a grievous fault of character. I have seen a number of men of my age and acquaintance bow out nobly and back into the wings to allow the understudy to assume the role of male lead. However, Ed is jealous, Ed is possessive, Ed is selfish. I understand that contemporary couples ought to dissolve relationships harmoniously, with all the alacrity of a single-cell amoeba dividing itself in the interests of new life. Some generous souls speak well of the perfidious wife-snatcher in public and meet him for the occasional drink after work. Not this cookie. My petty antics are legendary in the circle of Victoria’s friends. They have enjoyed the spectacle of me in hot pursuit of the woman I love, travelling after her just as fast as my hands and knees will carry me.

  The bus groans and shud
ders along icy, rutted streets. The city is in the second week of a severe cold snap. For twelve consecutive days the temperature has dropped below −35°C. Brisk, penetrating breezes drive needles of cold through pant legs, lodge aches in septums, gums, and teeth, burn faces with dazzling pain. Pedestrians weep and snuffle and wince from building to building.

  Scratching a patch of clear glass out of the frost on my window I stare out at the frozen world while the bus grinds over the bridge. I can see the river’s crust of ice and snow, which has heaved and buckled where the current runs strongest in midchannel. A ribbon of water twists amid this shattered ice, steaming like a flow of ashy lava. On the river bank the tawny spire of St. John’s Cathedral raises a cross against a white sky.

  I’m apprehensive about seeing Victoria again. For years I camouflaged love with acrimony, seeing our marriage as a series of bargains that had to be negotiated from a position of strength. I thought that to admit how much I needed Victoria was bad strategy. Of the two of us there was no doubt I was the weaker – and for that reason the least able to yield. At one time Victoria loved me. But she never needed me. I understood that from the beginning and hated what I understood. Now we have little but what I made us heir to: the dreary formulae of recrimination, elaborated by a genuine wish on her part to break free from me and my lover’s heart.

  The bus drops me in front of the public library. From there it is a short, numbing walk to the Café Nice, where I have been ordered to report for lunch. Once inside the Café I shed my parka and lurk behind a large fern in the vestibule, scouting the premises. Good intelligence is an important function of all successful counter-insurgency operations. Know your enemy and the disposition of her forces.

  I gingerly part the fronds and swing my eyes over the lunch-hour throng. At this time of day the diners are a rather conventional crew, younger professionals and businessmen and businesswomen, a spattering of well-dressed and well-heeled ladies savouring their second martini before tucking into the tourtière. In the evening the Café is given over to the city’s cognoscenti and artsy-fartsy set. Just the kind of place that attracts Victoria and her pals the way jam attracts wasps.

  As the name Café Nice suggests, the restaurateur is a Gallomaniac with a particular passion for Provence, although anything French passes muster. There are travel posters displaying delectable French views, there are French cinema advertisements, there are notices of art exhibitions in Paris, and there are reproductions of impressionist masterpieces hung on the walls.

  But the Riviera ambience is predominant. The tables have fake marble tops in which are stuck red-and-white sun parasols. The Mediterranean theme is embellished by a large wooden trough abutting a window overlooking the street. In this the proprietor of the Café Nice has dumped several yards of fine white sand, upon which are strewn gaily coloured beach balls suggestive of wave-lapped and sun-kissed shores.

  It is by this window that Victoria sits smoking a cigarette and watching condensation dribble down the windowpane. She hasn’t changed much. Her hair is longer than when I saw her last and lies in a fat, loosely plaited braid across her collarbone. She is wearing crisp, starchy-looking blue jeans and one of those tweed jackets I always disliked because they emphasize her shoulders and de-emphasize her breasts. This is her tough, no-nonsense ensemble, so I can expect a serious conversation. That bodes ill for me. However, on the other hand I’m glad to see she doesn’t look particularly ornery, merely abstracted and perhaps a little tired.

  The question now is how to cover gracefully the intervening distance under the scrutiny of a baleful, wifely eye. I shift from foot to foot and wring damp hands. I’m pretty sure I’m here to be called up on the carpet; demands are going to be made and the law is going to be laid down. All this is made worse because Victoria turned thirty-three in December.

  I have a theory about the early thirties. Of course, Victoria says I have a theory about most things. The early thirties are a dangerous time because people get unpredictable. Roughly the age Jesus downed tools and walked out of the carpentry shop.

  I turn over in my mind what she might want. Maybe the car. She paid for it and I haven’t had it repaired since the “accident.” Rust is already spotting the door panel that that old fart McMurtry scraped. Victoria will give me hell for that. She always hated my careless attitude towards property. Whenever I was given a lecture for neglecting or abusing something, the price tag took centre stage in the harangue. When I forgot to clean my electric razor for three months and the heads seized while she was doing her legs, Victoria demanded to know, while frenziedly scrubbing its innards with a toothbrush: “Ed, is this any way to treat a seventy-two-dollar razor?”

  Better lose the car than Balzac. Our last confrontation was over the set of the Comédie humaine she bought at a garage sale shortly before we split up. When Victoria left she demanded the books. I pointed out to her when I refused to surrender them that she had obviously bought them for me. As support for this reasonable contention, I cited my upcoming birthday and the fact Victoria can’t read French. Voilà!

  She’s not getting Balzac. For one thing, I’m not even through a third of the musty, foxed volumes of the Scènes de la vie privée. Ah yes, old Honoré surely knew the human heart. He’d held his ear to that intricate mechanism and heard the little cogs of malice, duplicity, greed, and lust creaking away, making their sinful music. So far the book about the marriage settlement is my favourite. Oh God, please don’t let her start in about the Balzac again.

  Peering through the lacy maze of crinkled greenery I feel my apprehension at meeting Victoria growing. It has been a long time and I’m not sure I can trust myself to act decently. After I locked myself in Victoria’s bathroom last summer I promised myself she wouldn’t catch me grovelling again. But I have never been particularly good at holding to resolutions or improving my rather lamentable character. Not like my father. Pop, there was a man for resolutions, a Bismarckian gentleman of blood and iron. He used to tape Reader’s Digest’s “Increase Your Word Power” above the bathroom mirror so he could study it while shaving. “If you use a word three times,” he used to say, “you make it yours for life.”

  It doesn’t seem that much else is for life, but Pop was going to get whatever could be had for the duration. Increasing his word power added colour and force to his letters to the boards and committees which had slighted him, but that wasn’t his motive for studying. He believed in being “well rounded.” It’s one of his great sorrows that I’m not.

  Now or never, Ed. Death before dishonour. I hitch my shoulders back and strike boldly out into a field of carpet-daisies. As it turns out, Victoria is so lost in her thoughts she does not take her eyes from the rivulets streaking the window until she hears me struggling with the wicker chair. She glances up sharply, startled. Her face looks small and dark in the shade of the parasol; winter has chapped her lips and scored little lines in the pale, bitten flesh. She smiles at me in a wary but unhostile manner. This half-welcome surprises me.

  “Ed,” she says, extending her hand.

  I can’t take it because in my nervousness I’ve sat down too abruptly. Now I’m fumbling with a squeaking wicker chair that refuses to be shifted to the table without a struggle. While I wrestle with the arms, bounce my bottom, and heel the carpet, it keeps snagging the nap and tipping precipitously forward. A typical Ed entrance. I realize I’m mumbling to myself.

  “You look very well,” Victoria says. Lady Gracious.

  “I don’t. I’ve put weight on again. Goddamn it.” I lurch forward in stages to the edge of the table, accompanied by high-pitched squeals from the flimsy chair.

  “You know why that is.” Victoria can’t help herself. I’m supposed to confess gluttony. She actually appears to be glad to see me fallen off the weight-watcher’s wagon and prime stock for the fat farm. I stare back, grim and tight-lipped.

  “It’s not as if you’re ignorant about what you should eat. It’s just that you won’t eat anything that’s good fo
r you.” This is a familiar refrain from our days of marital bliss.

  “Yeah, yeah. Fruits, vegetables, cereals. White meats. Fish. Nuts. Complex carbohydrates,” I mutter, reviewing lessons learned.

  “How’s your blood pressure? Are you going for your regular blood-pressure checks?”

  “Jesus Christ, is this why I was called in? For the annual company physical?”

  “A simple inquiry after your health.”

  “No. A simple inquiry after my health would be: ‘How you doing, Ed?’ And then I could chirp back: ‘Fine. And yourself?’ ”

  “You may not realize it, but not even I want to see you dead. You ought to take care of yourself better,” she says.

  The waitress arrives at our table. I can’t believe it. The girl is got up in the uniform of a French sailor, right down to the pompom on her hat. My mind runs to the Battle of Trafalgar and Lord One-Eye Nelson. “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Sometimes I catch myself saying what I only meant to think.

  “Pardon?” says the girl.

  “Sorry. Don’t mind me. Too much sun.” I reach up and tickle the tassels on our parasol. The girl passes out the menus and gives me a sceptical look. I ought to pull myself together.

  Victoria studies the menu. She is used to me and isn’t easily ruffled.

  “What are you having, Ed?”

  “I thought a complex carbohydrate would be nice.”

  “Sir?”

  “Ignore him,” says Victoria, not even troubling to look up. “Two spinach salads with house dressing, two mushroom omelettes, and a half-litre of dry white wine, please.”

  “Make that a litre,” I say.

  “Ma’am?”

  “A litre then.”

  The waitress gathers up the menus and bustles off to the kitchen.

  Victoria busies herself lighting a cigarette. “You made her uncomfortable. That wasn’t necessary. Behave yourself.”

  Victoria, as usual, is right. “I didn’t make her uncomfortable. You made her uncomfortable. They expect the man to order.”