My Present Age (14 page)

Writing that made me feel cheerier. There is no better antidote for the terrible feeling of powerlessness which clutches modern man by the throat than a vigorous exercise of the imagination. It is the allurements of the imagination which have allowed all those ragtag guerrilla movements of the last three decades to succeed, that and the will to endure for the sake of the future. It is only the lack of the latter that has prevented me from accomplishing great things in my own right.

I think Benny knows that it is me that has been using his stationery. That’s why he doesn’t bother me any more, no new steps have been taken to effect the divorce, and I’ve heard not a word about the set of Balzac for months. Perhaps, though, Ferguson is merely taking a long breather before once again entering the fray, head bloodied but unbowed. However, I like to believe the silence about the twenty-six volumes may be because Victoria has reconsidered her position. Time heals all wounds and she, after all, has no real, intrinsic interest in them.

It was during an argument over
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at a property settlement meeting that I filched the ten sheets of legal stationery off the stack on Benny’s desk while he was ferociously rummaging in a drawer, looking for cigarettes. Sucking on a butt was one of the ways he used to overcome the strong feeling our discussions about
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aroused in him.

I miss our little get-togethers, the cut, parry, and thrust of negotiations. Whenever time hangs heavy on my hands I wish I could stroll down to Benny’s office and reawaken the slumbering
monster. Our debate never really ended and it is hard now to remember when it began. All I know is that it lasted long enough that Benny and I came to refer to
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simply as Balzac, as if it were a person.

Of course, it was beyond the powers of Benny’s feeble, essentially forensic imagination to understand what the custody battle for the set of Balzac was all about. Victoria had bought and paid for them it was true, but it was equally true her intention was to make a present of them to me. In the end the books came to symbolize love, the giving of it and the withholding of it. That was why Victoria was determined to have them returned, and why I refused to surrender them.

Long and wearing negotiations were undertaken to settle this question. Benny represented Victoria and I acted in my own interest. That I dared to do so enraged Benny, who thought it beneath his dignity to bandy words with a layman. On many occasions he made it clear that he felt I ought to seek legal counsel.

Fat chance. I had no intention of giving up my advantage, that advantage being a thorough understanding of the workings of Benny’s mind. In the three years we had roomed together at university I had never once been bested by Benny in one of our frequent disputes. This was because I had studied his psychology and learned that Benny has no bottom, no staying power. He falters in the last furlong. The secret to grinding him to dust is to make Benny feel that there will never be any end to the business at hand. (In my mind I refer to this as the Viet Cong approach.) One must invest every argument with a spacious sense of infinity. Instead of the light at the end of the tunnel growing stronger and brighter, it must seem to recede, grow dimmer, flicker, tremble on the brink of failing entirely.

I thought that this approach produced splendid results in our meetings vis-à-vis the set of Balzac. It took him three conferences to get me even to admit the books were in my possession. After that we went on to the question of ownership. Two more meetings
and I agreed Victoria had paid for the books, but only after Benny flourished a cancelled cheque under my nose.

Made overconfident by this minor victory in what I regarded as a kind of Hundred Years War, Benny strutted over the vanquished, berating me, demanding I sign the property division he had drawn up, an agreement which returned
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to Victoria. Whereupon I flounced indignantly out of his office, warning him never to use that tone with me again. It took him a week of coaxing to lure me back. At that point I was satisfied that things were going well; Benny was clearly displaying signs of great mental strain whenever in my vicinity. They were the same symptoms I had showed when employed in Eaton’s china department: haggardness, testiness, elaborate and false politeness.

We began where we had broken off a week before.

“All right, Ed,” he said, showing me a clammy slice of teeth and gums that he tried to pass off as a smile, “let’s review the situation. You agree Victoria paid for the books?”

“Certainly.” I said this with great conviction, to raise his hopes.

Benny took a tape recorder out of his desk and set it on his blotter. “Would you mind if I taped this conversation? For the sake of accuracy?”

“Not at all.”

“Would you mind stating that when the recorder is on? That you agree to be recorded?”

“Not at all.”

No one could accuse Benny of subtlety. When he had depressed the record button I put on my best Russian accent and said: “I confess to counter-revolutionary sabotage at the Krupskaya Tractor Works. Also to having uncomradely thoughts about Comrade Stalin. I throw myself on the mercy of Soviet justice.”

“Fucking asshole.”

I pointed out to Benny that the machine was still running. He shut it off.

“You always were a fucking asshole,” said Benny. “You always will be.”

“Benny, Benny, don’t you remember how you used to preach the perfectibility of man?”

“What?”

Of course he didn’t, because that was the past. Benny lives only in the present. There he sat, slumped behind his desk, barely recognizable to me. How many years ago was it that he had urged freedom on me, on everyone? What a noble savage he was, in revolt against the suburban decorum in which he had been raised. Benny was a Rousseauian primitive who hardily ate his meals out of an open fridge, who satisfied his poignantly urgent sexual drives with clamorous gusto, poor Ed often stumbling upon copulations that seemed to occur in every room of our rented flat except the one traditionally reserved for recreations of that sort.

He called himself a radical but he was one only in the sense that he had bewitched a small following with his graphic, hopeful vision of the demise of bourgeoisiedom. His frizzy-haired disciples were enchanted by his scenarios of the coming desolation: the rusting barbecues; untended, rank suburban lawns; the casual couplings amid the ruins. Out of all this he promised that a new clear-eyed, hairy race would arise, free of the hateful legacies of civilized memory, suckled on mother’s milk, strengthened by goat’s cheese.

Carried away by his own prophecies, in 1972 he led a small band out of the city to form the ill-starred Darien Commune. (It was I who helped him pick the name. “Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific – and all his men / Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”)

But the goats went unmilked, firewood unchopped, vegetables unharvested. Eight months later Benny was in law school on a generous stipend granted by the father of a communard he had impregnated and then married on the strength of great expectations. The girl had been fleeing her past. Her father was a lawyer, a constituency
vice-president of the Liberal Party, an avid five-handicap golfer, and a notorious trifler with women. Ferguson led the girl firmly back to the bad old life, albeit in easy stages, where she discovered somewhat to her chagrin that she was perfectly happy.

Benny’s transmogrification was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. He explained to his friends that he was entering the system to gnaw it from within, vowing that he was going to become a legal-aid lawyer, the comforter of widows and the fearsome scourge of slum landlords.

I knew instinctively he was a lost man.

And there he sat before me, what I took to be the end result of ten years of compromises, a gentleman who plays squash at The Courtyard, whose ranting fervour has cooled to mere
brio
, a sensitive type who writes a cheque in support of the symphony because it’s the thing to do. Although he never goes.

Unlike me, Benny has never really been out of step in his life, will always be the very picture of fashion. Man of the moment then, man of the moment now. While I, no matter how hard I try, will be caught with my hair long when it ought to be short, my trouser bottoms cuffed when they ought not to be cuffed. I will never speak the current lingo like a native.

On impulse I asked, “Do you like your life, Benny?”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m serious, Benny. Do you like your life?” I
was
serious. I wanted to know. I have a strong interest in discovering and questioning happy people. The most surprising types are.

“Sign the goddamn paper, Ed, and let’s go home.” He tossed the document across the desk. I looked at it lying there, one of its crisp pages turned back on itself, and I felt one of those inexplicable moments of sadness that fly across the consciousness the way a handful of cloud flies across a blue summer sky, driven by winds high above us.

With perfect sincerity I said, “Jesus, whatever happened to us, Benny? Look at the two of us, for chrissakes.”

Benny couldn’t even guess what I was talking about. “Look, Ed, I’ve been patient with you for old times’ sake. You were always a fucking goof. When I was twenty-one I thought it was funny. Shit, I thought everything was a joke. But I don’t think it’s funny now and I think you’re pathetic. I’m not the same guy I was. You can’t treat me like you used to. You’ve got no right to laugh at me or belittle my work.
I
made something of myself – which is more than you can claim. And another thing. I can’t afford to piss around with you any more, being polite. I’ve got a backlog of cases and my father-in-law is crawling up my back to get this cleared away. I haven’t got time to talk about life with you and its meaning and the rest of that crap. Pardon me, but I’ve got other things to do besides entertain you.”

“Whatever gave you the idea you were entertaining?”

“Sign the fucking paper.”

I tried to explain why I wouldn’t. “I can’t sign that, Benny. It’s not really the books that matter. I want Victoria to admit to me that she wanted to please me, that she was thinking kindly of me right up until the last minute. I want her to admit that she thought enough of me to buy me a goddamn two-hundred-dollar birthday present. Bought it only one week before she walked out on me. That means something to me, Benjamin.”

“Maybe it’s time you learned that nobody is interested in your little fucking private fantasies and what they mean, or don’t mean, to you. There is one set of rules for everybody. I’m interested in seeing my client’s property is returned. That’s all. Legally those books are hers.”

“But morally mine.”

“Can’t you get it through your head?” he asked. “We’re talking legally. We’re not talking morally.”

“I’d like to hear you make that statement before a jury, twelve good men and true. Justice will out.”

Benny’s face darkened, his hand leapt to his tie knot. It made an expensive sound when he loosened it. “Okay,” he said, “gloves off.
You can drag your feet and whine and
kvetch
all you want. But I’m tightening the screws. I’ll have Balzac seized by court order. If it takes a year, if it takes two years, I’ll have Balzac returned to Victoria.”

“She cares nothing for Balzac!” I shouted. “I, on the other hand,
love
Balzac!”

“No matter how long it takes, you slimy motherfucker, we’ll get him back.”

“Now we get to the crux of the matter,” I declared, leaning across the table, rubbing my thumb and fingers together in the time-honoured manner. “Moolah. The big shekels. I’m sure you’d be only too glad to drag this sordid business out. But we’ll see how Victoria feels about being impoverished so that you can persecute an innocent man at her expense. Because this is personal with you, isn’t it? You always resented me, didn’t you?”

“No, I resented your fucking supercilious attitude, that’s what I resented!” cried Benny flushing, rising from his chair, looming above me, confronting my eyes with a vast expanse of blue pinstripe. “Who the hell were you to judge us?”

It is a common misconception that those who don’t get involved with others’ causes must inevitably be either judging or disapproving. That has seldom been the case with me.

“Benny, if you only knew how I wished I could have believed,” I said in a subdued voice. It is the truth.

“Believe this, Ed. If you think you’ll wear Victoria down with legal costs you have another think coming. No fucking way. Because from this moment on she’s going to be treated as a hardship case, charged with office expenses only. I’m not taking a fee. My time’s gratis. We’ll see who breaks who, you fat tub of shit!”

That last remark of Benny’s was very foolish. Didn’t he know me well enough to realize that rude references to my physique would turn my mind to vengeance? It was shortly after this pungent remark that I skimmed the legal stationery off the top of his desk while he banged drawers in a furious search for a pack of cigarettes. I hid the paper inside my jacket.

We continued our exchange until Benny lost patience and ordered me out of his office. I refused to go and asked him whether he’d care to attempt to remove me. Benny is a physical as well as a moral coward, so he called security, who dispatched a much-decayed specimen of the corps of commissionaires. Because of my respect for his age and his service to king and country I allowed myself to be taken by the elbow and directed through the offices of Fitch, Carstairs, Levine, and Lemieux, all the while chanting at the top of my lungs, “Free Balzac! Free Balzac!” It is a sign of the present age that no one joined in, even when he got me out on the sidewalk and a sizeable crowd had gathered to watch me chant “Free Balzac!” and make encouraging motions with my arms, urging them to participate in my demonstration against establishment justice.

Fourteen years ago someone would have.