My Present Age (13 page)

So there it is. Marsha isn’t giving anything away without exacting a price. I take a deep breath. “I hope you don’t find me forward,” I say, “but I’d be charmed to escort you to your brother’s wedding, Marsha.”

“All right, Ed. Do you own a decent suit?”

“Of course I own a suit.”

“I said a
decent
suit. I know you, Ed. Don’t you dare show up wearing a Nehru jacket or some other god-awful thing. If you don’t have a decent suit I’ll buy you one. I’m not substituting one embarrassment for another.”

I bristle. “Piss off, Marsha.”

“Okay, okay. But don’t forget to have it dry-cleaned. And keep February 26 open. Unless,” she qualifies, “you know – maybe I’ll have a friend by then. I’ll call.”

Marsha is a classy broad. “Fine,” I say. “Great. Now, what about Victoria?”

Victoria, I learn from Marsha, has fallen in love again. It is an indication of her perennially blooming optimism that she keeps surrendering her heart in this careless and carefree way. This time it has been given to the man whom until now I knew only as Anthony. I
learn that he is young and, according to Marsha, the consummate renaissance man. Anthony Peters is a sometime contributor to art magazines, a sometime poet, a sometime film reviewer, and an academic who is presently engaged in writing
Fantasies and Fasces: A Study of the Ideology of Popular Fiction in the Modern Age
.

It was Hideous Marsha who introduced Victoria and Peters at a Film Society rerun of
The Two Husbands of Dona Flor
.

To hear Hideous tell it, the chemistry was so perfect that they practically fell panting into each other’s arms while the film was still flip-flopping on the take-up reel. Since that fateful, steamy night they have been a number. However, it is only recently that Victoria let her apartment go and moved in with Professor Peters. It seems that Anthony requires stability, that it was too trying, their disorderly domestic life, socks at Victoria’s,
Oxford Dictionary
at Anthony’s. His work was suffering. This would never do, because
Fantasies and Fasces
is going to catapult him out of this provincial backwater and back home to Ontario. He’s even thinking of the possibility of graduating out of Canada, going Ivy League maybe.

Marsha gives this brass idol one more vigorous rub so that he gleams even more painfully in my dazzled eyes.

Not only has she taken pains to hint that Peters is some kind of sensualist par excellence, she also wants it clearly understood that he is absolutely
brilliant
.

“He’s remarkable,” says Marsha. “Everybody is agreed:
Fantasies and Fasces
is going to be a seminal work.”

“Who’s everybody?”

Marsha gives me a drop-dead look.

“Could everybody be the author of
Fantasies and Fasces?”

“We’re displaying hostility. Don’t let envy overcome, Ed.”

“Okay, if everything is so wonderful with this paragon, why’s my wife come bawling to me after a year of silence?”

“Because she wants to have her cake and eat it too. And because they’ve had a lovers’ quarrel.” Marsha pauses significantly. She wants to be asked.

“All right, what about?”

Her smile is luminous. “She didn’t want to talk about it at all, but finally it came out. Victoria’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” I almost laugh in her face. Victoria doesn’t get pregnant. I should know, we tried for years. The least of her problems is a tipped womb.

“It’s just about the worst possible time for Anthony. He’s just getting established, he needs quiet for his work. It’s not that he’s unsympathetic to her feelings, but he thinks that it would be better if they waited two or three years. His book would be finished then.” I hear Victoria’s reasoning in Marsha’s explanation, her attempt to put the best possible face on the one she loves. She did that for me, too.

It strikes me that what Marsha is saying is true. “Jesus Christ, pregnant,” I say. “That was it. Pregnant.”

Victoria always wanted a child. At first she argued it would hold us together, and then the notion of a child was sufficient in itself. Pop thought a baby would be good for us too. On my twenty-fifth birthday he collected me after work and took me out for a drink. We went to a cocktail lounge for happy hour. He ordered a grasshopper. Pop never went to cocktail lounges and seldom drank, so he didn’t know a grasshopper was a lady’s drink.

“They’ve got beer,” I pointed out to him.

“I thought I’d experiment,” he said. “It’s very refreshing.”

I was never much at ease with Pop, but that has to be the worst happy hour I’ve ever logged. He talked about the joys of family life. He told me that I couldn’t begin to imagine what my arrival had meant to my mother and him. “You changed my life, son. When I saw you for the first time I made up my mind to put forth 110 per cent effort in everything I undertook. At last I had somebody to work for,” he confided.

“Didn’t you have yourself to work for before me?”

“Believe me, Ed. At a certain stage in a fellow’s life he wants to start building for his posterity.”

It was like Pop to express our relationship in such grandiose terms. Momentarily he saw himself in the role of patriarch, Ben Cartwright perhaps, explaining to a quizzical Hoss the larger meaning of the Ponderosa. Pop had loved
Bonanza;
for him, Sunday nights were sacred. What he could bequeath to posterity. Jesus.

I feel terrible. A dull ache is settling in over my kidneys. Sometimes when I am very nervous, very tense, I get muscle spasms in my lower back.

I hear Marsha saying, “Of course, Victoria has this now-or-never feeling. I don’t think she’s being entirely reasonable. Sure she’s thirty-three, but they’d still have time. Why she wants to have a baby anyway is beyond me. I can’t see it myself.”

“How was she, Marsha?”

“Not bad. Not good. She’ll be all right. Tomorrow she’s going to take some time off work, move into a motel and take a few days to think things over. Though what she’s got to think over I can’t imagine. You ask me, she’s only got one choice.”

“What motel?”

“Who knows?” Marsha leans toward me. “Take my advice, Ed. This is private. Keep your nose out.”

My back is tightening. If I don’t get off the floor soon I mightn’t be able to. I lurch to my feet, in stages, like a camel rising under a load.

“What’s the matter?” says Marsha, alarmed. There must be something showing in my face.

“Where’s your bathroom?”

She points. “Down the hall. First door on the left. Are you ill?”

Without answering I hobble off, bent-backed. The bathroom gleams with tile, frosted glass, a huge mirror with bulbs all around its perimeter. I see myself reproduced in these surfaces, a ghostly Ed in frosted glass, a misshapen Ed in the tile, a pale Ed staring back at me out of the mirror over the sink.

It’s the only room in most apartments with a lock.

A
fter spending twenty-five minutes mastering my feelings in Marsha’s bathroom while listening to her threaten to call the police, the fire department, or both, to get me out, I returned home to sleep the sleep of the dead. This was possible because before dropping off I decided what course of action to pursue. I’m going to find her. Victoria wanted to talk to me.

So, beginning at nine o’clock this morning I phoned all the motels and hotels listed in the Yellow Pages. First of all I inquired after her under her married name, then her maiden name. Finally, I requested Victoria Peters. Most of the desk clerks hung up before I got a chance to ask whether they had a guest registered under the name of Victoria Laine. Cleo is her favourite singer. A shot in the dark.

So there I sat, a little depressed. I was slipping the telephone book into a desk drawer when I saw the stationery, stationery I had stolen from Benny Ferguson’s office months ago. Stationery emblazoned with the letterhead of the legal firm he works for. I decided I ought to cheer myself up.

Life plays one the strangest tricks. Because we had been roommates at university for three years, I had assumed Benny and I were
some kind of friends, but Benny must have nurtured a grudge against me I’d never detected. Why else would he agree to represent Victoria in the divorce action? In a little less than a year his unarticulated grievance has swollen to bilious hatred. Can’t he understand I have to defend myself with whatever poor tools come to hand? The stationery is one of these tools.

I fed it into my typewriter and began a letter to The Beast. Killing two birds with one stone.

Legal stationery is so useful. A letterhead liberally peppered with B.A.s, LL.D.s, and Q.C.s is a welcome addition to anyone’s arsenal.

The Beast’s guest that day had been the noted sexologist and world-renowned authority on sexual dysfunction, Dr. Norman Gullickson, of New York, New York. His first questioner was, quite predictably, McMurtry. The old gentleman desired to know a sure-fire way to spot homosexuals.

As soon as I heard what he wanted, I knew what was behind it. A week before, McMurtry had stumbled on me in our apartment building’s laundry room drying a load of women’s slips. McMurtry’s lizardy old eyes slitted with disgust as he watched a gay gale of flimsy garments, a fuchsia, cerise, green, temptress black, and virginal white maelstrom, swirling behind the glass of the dryer. He knew I lived without benefit of female company. What conclusion would he draw?

The slips were artifacts of the late regime, left behind in an
unrifled drawer when Victoria had departed in haste. For the longest time I had held them against her return, but it was, at last, plain to me that this was a vain hope. I had decided to launder them and donate them to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. McMurtry had discovered me going about my depraved business.

A week later he was to beg guidance through the modern sexual labyrinth from the world-renowned and noted sexologist Dr. Gullickson.

“Tom? Is that sex expert there?”

“Yes I am,” said Dr. Gullickson. He had the breezy, professional manner of a person frequently interviewed, of a man at ease on the airwaves. If I remember correctly he has his own radio program in New York on which he dispenses advice to the sexually unfortunate.

“What I want to know is,” said McMurtry, “is there any way you can tell them hummasexuals from us normals?”

“I’m not sure what he means,” said Dr. Gullickson to Tom.

“He’s an old gentleman. A regular,” apologized The Beast, one pro to another.

“What?”
complained McMurtry. “
I didn’t get that
!”

“How do you mean?” shouted Rollins. “How do you mean, sir?”

“Well, we got one in the building where I live, and for the longest time I never thought, you know? And then I find out he wears women’s underclothes.”

“Ah,” said the Dr. “A transvestite. He must be talking about a transvestite. They’re not the same thing at all – a transvestite and a homosexual.” He turned his attention to McMurtry, raising his voice to a piercing pitch. “Do you mean a transvestite, sir?”

“I don’t care what you call them. We had a word for them in my day. What I want to know is how you spot them. I mean if they aren’t dressed up.”

“I think, sir,” said Dr. Gullickson, “you’re operating under a misconception. The traditional stereotypes of homosexuals that have plagued Western societies just don’t bear up under examination.”

McMurtry wasn’t listening. “Like, do they have a sign they give each other?”

“A sign?”

“Yeah, a sign. Maybe like the sign the Jews give one another. Or the Masons. With them it’s the ring. It’s how all these people stick together without us knowing it.”

“Let’s just stop this thing right here,” broke in The Beast. “I think I ought to make a comment on what we’ve just heard here, friends. Now I know for some of us, old opinions and old prejudices die hard. But I say –
let ’em die!
I also want to make it clear I’ve got many good friends and even acquaintances who adhere to the Hebrew faith, and I want to protest on behalf of them, on behalf of the entire Jewish community, what has just been inferred here today. Without thinking twice why I’d go anywhere, any place, any time to testify to what the fine Jewish people of Canada have contributed to this country.

“Likewise, everyone out there knows the good work the Shriners do for children’s hospitals, and many of us have enjoyed their world-famous circuses.” The Beast paused to marshal his professional outrage. “The name of my show is ‘A Piece of Your Mind.’ Well, we’ve had a piece of yours, mister, and let me say this:
It stunk!”