Man Descending (25 page)

This novel about the groves of Academe came along quite briskly for some four or five pages and then I started to worry about a title. What was I going to call this masterwork? My first choice (because it has a nice hollow sound) was
The Lost Generation
. But that was Gertrude Stein’s line, and the bunch from the twenties, Ernest, Scotty, etc., had earned their right to it by a lot of self-destructive behaviour. It just wasn’t fair of me to pinch it.

But mulling over the word “lost” got me reminiscing about my grade one teacher, Mrs. Edwards, who wouldn’t countenance the word. Unless any object, be it eraser, jumbo pencil, or crayon, was indisputably proved to have been irrevocably blasted into a time-space warp, in Mrs. Edwards’ mind that object held out hope of being recovered. Hence, it was not lost but
misplaced
. All Mrs. Edwards’ charges were firmly taught to blithely chirp, “Teacher, my pencil is
misplaced.”

So I began to wonder, if my generation couldn’t be lost, might it be misplaced?
The Misplaced Generation
. And somehow, having once thought that, I couldn’t return to my novel with the same serious, sober heartiness I had shown before, and so I abandoned it.

I then began my second Big Book, the story of the seduction of a Washington-based Canadian diplomat by an American anchorwoman, a little tale that was to be a parable of Canadian innocence pitted against American worldliness and savvy. But the longer I sat at my kitchen table with the chipped Arborite top, the soles of my stockinged feet being concussed by my downstairs neighbour’s stereo, the more utterly at sea I found myself. No matter how hard I tried to skilfully manoeuvre my characters, they just wouldn’t steer. Nothing my diplomat insisted on saying sounded diplomatic or persuasive, and my anchorwoman kept wanting to unhook her bra and cast off her panties at the drop of a hat, which didn’t jibe with my attempt to portray a metaphorical view of the relations of our two nations. That is, unless I could work in a scene of enforced coitus interruptus. That Big Book died too.

I note with some dissatisfaction and envy that Victoria’s apartment building is obviously newer and better-maintained than my own. From where I sit in my parked car I am also able to see that it has a security door and one of those buzzer panels that force you to ring the occupant to get the door sprung. That might cause me some problems.

I get out of the car and begin to nonchalantly cruise the sidewalk in front of the building with my hands stuffed carelessly in my pockets, and an eye cocked on the entrance. When I finally spot a couple standing in the vestibule waiting for a taxi, I go up to the door and hopelessly fumble in my pockets as if looking for my keys. No one knows anyone else in these buildings and after twenty seconds of watching me rummage in my pants the man obligingly opens the door. I smile and shake my head ruefully and jangle a set of keys at him.

“You always find ’em after somebody takes the trouble,” I say in a fair imitation of bemusement at the world’s wondrous workings.

He nods and smiles in agreement.

I locate Victoria’s apartment on the second floor. I know she is in because I hear the stereo playing Cleo Laine. My heart melts a little. My wife is nuts about Cleo Laine. I knock on the door.

Victoria doesn’t take the chain off the door when she answers it. This is untypical. Perhaps living alone has made her more cautious. At one time, to my worry, she was too trustful, a petter of stray dogs, distempered cats and their human counterparts.

I let her see clearly who it is.

“What do you want?” she inquires sourly.

“Please let me in.”

“No.”

I dart my hand through the gap and grab the chain. This is a desperate measure. It isn’t going to get me in, but it prevents her closing the door in my face. Of course, she could break my wrist by banging the door on it, but I’m willing to risk agony for love.

Victoria doesn’t slam the door but she does bite my thumb. Right on the nail, hard. I almost faint, the way I did when I was a boy being vaccinated at school. There is something about me and pain. But I grimly hang on, issue an exquisitely pitiful moan and think of Sam Waters and all he suffered. Speaking comparatively, this is nothing.

The pain suddenly subsides and Victoria is gone. She comes back and shows me a claw hammer. An Iroquois squaw displaying the instrument of torture to Père Brébeuf.

“You let go of this chain, Ed, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Tear my heart out and feed it to the dogs,” I declare dramatically. “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

“I’ll smack you, Ed,” she says, beginning to cry.

“Please. Please let me talk to you.”

“Damn it,” she says, quietly snuffling, apparently resigned to my entry, “let go of the chain so I can unhook it.”

“No tricks? Promise?” I say doubtfully.

“Let go of the damn chain!” she shouts in frustration.

I do and she opens up. I go immediately to the kitchen sink and begin to run cold water on my thumb.

I am a little disappointed to see that the skin isn’t broken or the nail discoloured. I won’t be able to play this for much.

“They say a human bite is far more dangerous than a dog’s,” I comment matter-of-factly. “The bacteria in the saliva are more dangerous. Maybe it has to do with the carbohydrates in our diet. Maybe they provide a richer culture.”

No answer.

I poke my head around the corner and peer cautiously into the living-room. Victoria has flung herself in a resentful attitude across the chesterfield.

“You have a very nice apartment,” I say. “You should see the place I’m in. The tile’s lifting off the kitchen floor and the walls are so thin I can hear my neighbour’s bum squeaking and rubbing on the bottom of his bathtub.”

“So move.”

I take a deep, contrite breath. “I know I had no business butting in today,” I say. “But I was worried about you. You looked so goddamn awful.”

“Check out a mirror. Worry about yourself. How long have you been sleeping in those clothes?”

She’s right. I should have, at the very least, changed my clothes and showered before coming by. To be perfectly frank, a trip to a barber might have been in order too.

“Excuse my appearance,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve been so busy –”

“Ha!” An explosion of bitter disbelief and contempt. “Busy doing what? Just what in hell has occupied so much of your time you can’t wash your clothes or comb your hair? Tell me, Ed. That’s one I want to hear.”

“The novel,” I say uneasily, beginning to shift my weight from foot to foot nervously like a small boy called up on the carpet, “I’ve been working hard on the novel.”

“Excuse my scepticism,” she says tartly as she gets up and flicks on the television.

“Turn that off!” I shout. I’m angry now. I
am
working on a novel. I have nearly seventy pages written and I can hardly sleep some nights for the notions that pop into my head.

Victoria ignores my request and fixes her pretty, long-lashed peepers on the TV. Two pitiful clowns on the screen are gambolling around a grey, wrinkled elephant in artificial gaiety, trying to make an audience of children laugh. Cleo is still belting it out on the stereo. I can hardly hear myself think in this bedlam.

“I repeat,
I am working on a novel.”

“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she says.

“Take that back!” I shout.

“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she repeats calmly, enunciating each syllable slowly and distinctly.

“This coming from a person who considers running around in thirty-degree weather an activity worthy of a rational being. Talk about misdirected, wasted effort,” I say acidly.

“You just aren’t capable of understanding, are you, Ed?” Victoria coolly asks. She begins to lecture in her professional voice. Victoria is a social worker and doesn’t often forget it. “You won’t allow yourself to understand because you intuitively sense that what’s behind it all is self-discipline. And self-discipline is something you don’t have and never will have.”

“Judge not lest you be judged.”

“To hell with you, Ed.
You
wrecked our marriage. I kept giving and giving –”

“To anyone who asked,” I interrupt.

“No, to you. And you kept taking and taking. Well, I’m through giving, and I’m through holding my breath watching you drift, hoping something will happen and that you’ll take your life in hand.” She pauses and says somewhat sadly, “You’re just like one of those goddamn jellyfish, Ed. You just drift along with the tide and when anyone gets within range of your tentacles you sting them. All you know how to do is float and sting.”

“Old Ed and the great Muhammad Ali,” I say sarcastically, miffed by this unflattering comparison, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

“I rest my case.”

I walk to the window and look out at the patchwork of roofs. I am near the end of my tether but I won’t let go. “I don’t like the way I’m living now,” I manage to say in a voice that is all counterfeit normalcy. “I want us to live together again. I don’t sleep very well. I’ve gained twenty-three pounds.”

“Ed,” says Victoria, not unkindly, “I’m sorry. But I
do
sleep well. I’ve
lost
five pounds. I can make friends without worrying about what you will eventually do or say to them. I haven’t gone to pieces and I won’t go to pieces. You look after yourself now. I’m through begging you to watch your weight and be nice to people. You can eat fudgy-wudgies until you can’t get through the door. You can insult nuns on the street for all I care. Do what you wish. But I’m not going to be there typing your résumés or pressing your suits so that you appear presentable at interviews for jobs you don’t make the slightest effort to land. You’re a big boy, Ed. Sink or swim. I always believed you could make something of yourself. I’m not so sure any more. I don’t think you have the guts it takes.”

Her tone is not really callous but I am alarmed. Things have come to a dreadful pass. How my wife has changed! And I am in part responsible for what she has become. I feel a great sadness. How I have disappointed her. I remember how, when first married, we lay in one another’s arms and talked about what the rest of our life would be. Sun, shellfish and wine in Spain. The click-clack of my typewriter as I wrote the Big Novel. The click of her camera shutter as she photographed the sober, dignified peasant faces of Spain.

My throat hurts terribly. Something, maybe my heart, is swelling ominously in my chest.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I ask abruptly, afraid that I might shame myself by beginning to sob in her bright, modern and airy living-room.

Victoria directs me.

I discover she has turned the bathroom into a hothouse, surrendering to the female impulse to demurely disguise its basic function. The place is a veritable hanging garden of Babylon. Potted plants suspended from the ceiling, potted plants on the toilet tank, potted plants on the vanity. All are signs that the
ancien régime
is eclipsed. I would never have tolerated any of this had I been resident.

My hairy face stares palely and uneasily back at me from the mirror. This tropical atmosphere, this humidity, this rank foliage, awaken in me some primal jungle fear. I am overcome with stark anxiety; I feel watched and hunted. It is all I can do to prevent myself from casting about in search of two yellow cat-eyes blazing behind a fern frond, or prevent myself from surveying the floor for sign of fresh leopard scat.

I run some cold water into the basin and splash my face. Momentarily and profusely I give way to tears. In a moment it is finished. Perhaps I am more aggrieved than sad. Certainly I am troubled and uneasy. My wife is no longer the woman I had remembered. Or perhaps more correctly, living in isolation from me has made her more of what she was. Independent, collected, realistic.

A person could give way to paranoia. The two people with whom I once lived, Benny and Victoria, are in league against me. I feel betrayed by the fact that they have changed while I remain faithful to the past and old loyalties. Benny is not the person I once knew, and neither, apparently, is Victoria. They have entered the long, dark tunnel of personal histories from which I am excluded. I feel left behind. A man standing on a tarmac watching my holiday plane lifting off for a brighter, sunnier, more welcoming place.

And because these people change, because they are in a state of flux, they seem unreal to me. Sam Waters is much more real. I put my faith in him. I think of his example before I go to sleep and when I wake.

Sam Waters made his appearance in that sad time after the failure of the second Big Book, and like Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the forehead of Zeus, he arrived on the scene unaccompanied by the normal pangs of artistic birth. Perhaps it was automatic handwriting. Or, put more poetically, the Muse in her beneficence gave me a sentence. In any case, I don’t know where it came from. There I was, sitting at my kitchen table on a bleak, lonely Sunday afternoon, doodling dispiritedly – mostly hanged men – when I heard this sentence. Actually
heard
it.

“Sam Waters had been a plainsman, a buffalo-hunter, a wind-drinker, a free man before he became the sheriff of Constitution.”

I wrote that down and looked at it very hard. There it was. Yes, I said, nodding to myself, sure he had. And?

“And because of the long vistas he had looked steadily into and the clean rain he had tasted, he didn’t care much for towns. Sam Waters was too big a man to feel easy in towns. They made him feel pinched and cramped and restless. And worst thing about them was that their smells made it difficult for him to breathe, and no town smelled worse than Constitution, because Constitution stank with the worst smell of all – hypocrisy.”

I edged forward in my chair and began to scribble in a white heat of composition. No more Flaubertian search for the
bon mot
. It flew fast and furiously. I was tapping some strange vein in my psyche, and pressing on for the mother lode.

“The good, honest citizens of Constitution had wanted Sam Waters as sheriff because of his hard fists and big heart and quick draw. They wanted a man tough enough to have undergone the Blackfoot manhood trial, twirling crazily around a lodge pole suspended on bones skewering the muscles of his chest, arms and legs. They wanted a man wily and cunning enough to have stolen ponies from the best horse thieves of all the Plains Indian tribes, the Pawnee. And they wanted a man cool enough to have faced down Doc Holliday in Abilene, relying only on a poker face and a Colt Peacemaker with six empty chambers to make a coldblooded killer who was wasting away with consumption and so didn’t have much to lose anyway, quail when he looked into a certain pair of cold, blue eyes.