My Present Age (11 page)

There they are: the inevitable television scripts for
Three’s Company, Dallas, Dynasty
, or
Taxi;
a short story or two; and the latest instalment of Dr. Mandelstam’s bewildering novel about a
dog who acquires, through surgery, the disgusting habits of
homo sapiens
. Dr. Vlady volunteered to me the provenance of this work. “You knowit Mikhail Bulgakov boog?” he demanded. “Wall, this boog is ironic rewerse!” To which I nodded sagely, even though I had not the slightest understanding of what he was talking about.

Only Stanley Rubacek never hands in material, secure in the knowledge of his own genius. And mine possibly, too. He tells me there is nothing doing until we reach an agreement. So I have no idea of what he is writing. Not that I care.

Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday finds Stanley barricaded behind his stack of smudged and bleary foolscap. It is my custom, when desperation overtakes me and I am at a loss what to do next, to call upon a member of
COCWE
to read from his manuscript. Discussion then follows. Stanley has always politely but firmly refused to read. He fears plagiarism.

Stanley spends his time in class brooding over his pile of manuscript, bulging shoulders hunched protectively, forearm shielding its southern approaches from prying eyes. Occasionally he plies a vigorous pencil when visited by the divine afflatus. Rubacek writing sounds like someone wire-brushing old paint off house siding. It has entered my mind that he may be dangerous.

A kind of general dread coalesces into a heavy lump in the pit of my stomach whenever I think of Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday. In my mind’s eye I can see the long corridor which leads me to room 31, and the reflected light lying in waxy puddles down its length of polished tile. If I walk this corridor with energy and business-like purpose my heels ring out like a doomed man’s. Also my students hear me coming. So Every Second Tuesday I walk soft-footed the first five yards, creep-slide the next ten, and steal on tiptoe the final five. Then I hover indecisively outside the door of the classroom, trying to compose myself and rehearsing my opening remarks, while one distracted ear fills with the hum of voices filtering through the door of room 31.

Opening remarks are crucial. I always mean to begin critically, yet end encouragingly. That, I believe, is the formula. Still, it never fails that the moment I enter that room, whatever I meant to say flies clear out of my head. All I can think of is confession. Public confession. I feel an overwhelming need to make a clean breast of it and lift from my stooping shoulders their trust, their admiration, their dreams. I want to tell them I never sold scripts to
Magnum P.I
. or “took a meeting with Tom Selleck in a cabana at a Hollywood poolside.” And, I want to say, neither will any of you.

But that would be terrible all the way round. So I have stood for long minutes before their uplifted faces trying to recover those lost words, turning over manuscripts, fumbling aimlessly in my briefcase, buying time as I ransack a vacant mind.

Confess, I think.

My long silences always produce terrifying doubts in their minds. They take them as a sign of displeasure at their efforts. The room fills with the nervous musk of schoolrooms and courtrooms, of places where people are called upon to defend themselves before the powerful and capricious. The pale girl at the back of the room, incapable of blanching whiter, seems to yellow. The overhead lights glitter in Dr. Mandelstam’s wire-framed spectacles and his gold tooth glimmers wanly in a fixed and artificial smile. The fat ladies stare at their broken, scuffed shoes or examine, against columnar thighs, fingers that look like Vienna sausages.

You have to say something
, I remind myself, growing more and more anxious.

Only Stanley Rubacek sits massively self-confident behind his life’s work, scratching his scalp through thinning hair, showing as he does a floral tattoo on the back of his left hand. He can’t be more than five years older than I, but there are deep lines cut in his cheeks and he has lost his teeth; I sometimes catch his upper plate slipping. His gaze is always direct.
Come on, let’s strike a deal
, his expression seems to say to me.

I cannot find a path between confession, the truth, and lies. And so I hear myself saying, “These are wonderful. A source of inspiration I will carry with me to my own typewriter. Well done, one and all.”

Suddenly, Dr. Mandelstam’s gold tooth blazes forth like the sun, nearly blinding me.

H
ideous Marsha’s father has installed her in one of those trendy condominiums which in the past few years have risen near the river. They replaced the old three-storey houses which decayed in lock-step with the elderly widows who lacked the means to maintain them. At first these houses were chopped into tiny suites, warrens for university students and welfare recipients, but the widows finally died and their heirs loosed the developers’ bulldozers for the coup de grâce. With the houses went the elms and mountain ashes which mingled their leaves in high Gothic vaults that turned the narrow streets of July into long naves of shadow streaked by sunlight rich and yellow-white as cream. Victoria and I inhabited one of those dying houses when we were first married. On summer evenings we strolled those streets while unseen sparrows chorused above in the breeze-swung branches. I miss those quiet, green stretches.

It was during our walks down our lovely street that I attempted to stonewall the trip to Greece. The argument ran on for weeks.

“Ed, what do you mean we don’t have enough money? We have the cash we got as wedding presents, and we have the money we’ve saved. It’s enough.”

“I don’t want to get halfway into my book and have to come back. I want to see it right through to the end, without interruptions.”

“You will, Ed. Just relax.”

“Next year. We’ll go next fall.”

“We’ll go this fall.”

“Half of that money is mine, Victoria. I have some say.”

“Nowhere near half of the money is yours. I’m the one who punched the keys at the checkout all last winter, remember?”

“Why can’t you be reasonable about this? What’s the rush?”

“I want to
live
, Ed!” She said that so vehemently and with such a rush of colour to her face that I almost surrendered before her desire for experience, for life. But I succeeded in steadying myself. I was not going to risk everything. I had no intention of jeopardizing what I had: Victoria, the trees lining the street, the elegant old houses that wrenched my heart. In the end I wore her down. We would work another year; the extra money would allow us to live like kings in Greece. I think she believed we were still going even three years later. It was only when she suggested we have a baby that I knew she had given up on the idea of Greece.

It is a different street now. The condos which supplanted the trees and houses come in two styles. They are what I like to call Babylonian ziggurat, an industrial hymn to concrete, and the more homely Zuni-pueblo preferred by the under-forties. The pueblo is, of course, where Marsha is to be found. Sitting in my car looking at those huge, jumbled cubes and their glowing windows I feel more keenly the cold and my exhaustion. The Encounter went badly tonight. Or to put it another way, it went so splendidly that I am wrung by remorse.

At six o’clock tonight, an hour before the curtain went up on
COCWE
, I suddenly recalled with panic that two weeks ago I had promised the class, at their insistence, to read to them this Tuesday from my work in progress. Since no such work exists, this was a foolish promise. Earlier I had got around their questions as to
why they couldn’t find my first novel in libraries or bookstores by bemoaning my publisher’s small press run and explaining that the company had quickly let the book lapse out of print. But I had also spoken casually about a work in progress. This was my undoing. As the weeks passed, the class importuned me to treat them to a selection. Of course, I could have dodged the issue somehow. Upon reflecting, however, I have surmised I may have unconsciously made that promise to entrap myself, to furnish myself with the opportunity for an oblique confession. My commitment to read would force me to write something, and reading what I wrote would reveal me for the fraud I am. I would be eased.

That was only the first step. The second followed inevitably from my nature. I forced this onrushing unpleasantness out of my mind, delayed, dawdled, forgot. So tonight I had nothing to read, nothing except
Cool, Clear Waters
. But when the crisis was upon me I knew I couldn’t read that. Sam Waters was too private, too cherished, a figure to run the risk of having him exposed to sniggers.

There was nothing else to do but cheat. I hammered out at my typewriter a passage from a book I thought it unlikely anyone in the class had read, an historical novel by Alfred Duggan. Tonight, when I was done reading and I glanced up at those exalted faces, I knew, with a rending sensation, that they had loved it. All but Stanley, that is. The fat ladies expressed awe at my erudition (destrier, hauberk, etc.), while Dr. Vlady judged my battle scene surpassed only by Stendhal’s account of Waterloo in
The Charterhouse of Parma
. I was a hit with nary a tip of the old topper to Mr. Duggan.

So here I am, out of the frying pan and into the freezer. Cold and difficulties. The story of my winter. Racing and roaring the engine, I can raise no more than a ghostly, tepid breath from the heater. The side window is slowly frosting over; white fog creeps inward from the perimeter of the glass, congealing in a scum of ice. I fear that if I don’t move soon I’ll be frozen in place like a ship stalled in arctic
seas. There is no sense in putting it off any longer. Up there where the windows burn, the Witch of Endor waits.

Marsha swings her door open to me, smiles. “Hello, Ed,” she says, popping up on tiptoe to swipe a welcoming kiss on the corner of my mouth. This kiss of peace exchanged and no mention made of last evening’s contretemps, Marsha offers to take my coat. While she stows it in a closet I saunter into the living room. It is evident that Marsha lives better now than she did when she was Bill’s wife. He, like many liberal-arts types, ended up a teacher, and a teacher’s salary puts no one in a riverside condo. Marsha’s present living quarters are her father’s doing. The old gentleman is big in fast-food franchises and down on Bill, so when Marsha gave Bill the heave-ho there was no heart gladder in the land than Daddy’s, and evidence of his gladness is everywhere to be seen. I sink ankle deep in pile. Far off, in the distance, several folding Chinese screens stand in splendid isolation. There is an ornate divan upon which I imagine Marsha reclines in the character of odalisque when entertaining gentlemen callers. There are small tables scattered with expensive-looking knick-knacks and numerous low-slung chairs. I make a mental note not to sit in one. A husky fellow such as I mightn’t be able to hoist himself out of one of these; the laws of physics militate against it. No, it appears my bottom is best suited to a basket chair hanging from the ceiling on a massive chain, a chair that could pass for a cage for a giant condor or for a prisoner of the Mongol hordes. I am regarding it with a calculating eye when Marsha comes up behind me. “Would you like a drink, Ed?”

“Please.”

There is a liquor cabinet hidden behind one of the Chinese screens. “This is right – Scotch – isn’t it?” she asks, handing me the tumbler.

“Yes, you got it right.” I salute her with lifted glass. “How did you remember?”

“It would be hard to forget. You stood out like a sore thumb at those parties in our university days. Everybody else doing dope and you wandering around, toting a twenty-six of Islay Mist.”

“An affectation on my part.” Which is not true. I never went for that heightened-awareness crap. I was looking for anesthesia.

Marsha makes for the divan. She is wearing a white caftan with billowing sleeves. It sets off her Arizona tan very forcefully. Marsha is one of those women for whom age and a little more flesh have done wonders. In her early twenties she looked winsome and scrawny, but now she comes equipped with standard features: breasts, a noticeable surge of buttock under the caftan. She wears her hair short; studs wink in the lobes of neat, well-formed ears. Her face is long, thin-lipped, large-toothed.

Marsha settles herself on the divan, crosses her legs and arranges her arms in a flurry of skirts and sleeves, while I hop onto my perch. The basket makes a half-revolution to the left; the links in the chain tighten with a groan, spin me slowly back again. The process repeats itself. I stab at the floor with the toe of my shoe to counteract this lazy to-ing and fro-ing. The chair is hung too high. Not only am I looking down on Marsha and her divan, I have to strain to touch the floor with both feet.

“And it turns out that you were right,” says Marsha, resuming talk of who ingested what. “The way the story went then, booze was bad and grass harmless. Now they tell us the evil weed damages your genes, gives you lung cancer. You can’t win. I don’t know. I still smoke on special occasions. It’s relaxing. A joint now and then, what’s it hurt?”