My Present Age (15 page)

A
few minutes ago I mailed my letter to The Beast, and that made me feel like a take-charge kind of guy, decisive. I no longer have any doubts that I’ll find Victoria. The important thing, I tell myself, is to have a plan, to organize.

Organization, I must admit, isn’t one of my strong points. Nevertheless, fired with zeal, I take a map of the city and divide it into quadrants with ruler and red pen. These quadrants I number 1, 2, 3, 4, ranking them according to what I calculate would be the likelihood of Victoria’s choosing a motel or hotel within their boundaries. Pausing to admire the map I feel a stirring of confidence; this disciplined, logical approach to the solution of a marital conundrum is entirely un-Ed-like. It is a new, somewhat invigorating experience. I gnaw my pen and consider. On the whole this is proving to be a success. I forge ahead.

Next, I mark the approximate location of all hotels and motels on my map with tiny pencilled o’s, using the addresses given in the Yellow Pages as references. This afternoon I’ll drive to these places and scout their parking lots for Victoria’s battered blue Volkswagen. If I fail to find it, the corresponding zero on the map will be inked red, thereby eliminating it. It’s strange how closely
linked fastidiousness is to a sense of control, even power. This exercise is making me feel better, without a doubt.

The careful plotting of hotels and motels takes me until one o’clock. It’s amazing how many of them there are to be found in even a moderately sized city of 150,000. When I’m finished I beam down at my neat and tidy handiwork.

There is, however, no time to rest on one’s laurels, because the car has to be loaded with supplies for an extended patrol of wintry streets. God only knows how long it will take to unearth Victoria. I set to packing a cardboard box. Items: a thermos of black coffee laced with brown sugar and dark rum, to keep the cold from creeping into my bones; a carton of Player’s Plain; a family-size bag of Dad’s Chocolate-Coated Oatmeal Cookies. And last of all, a two-quart red rubber hot-water bottle into which I’ll void my bladder if I become car-bound on an extended stake-out. (I remember this as an article employed by a hard-bitten gumshoe in a detective novel.) Thus equipped, and nothing left to chance, I climb into my little yellow Fiat and drive off in search of my wayward wife.

Eighth Street runs through the heart of Quadrant 1. It is one of the city’s chief arteries of entry and exit and therefore is bordered with fast-food franchises, service stations, shopping malls, family restaurants, chain stores, and plenty of motels. Prime hunting ground.

Moving in a westward, spasmodic flow of traffic that lurches through intersections and bucks along in the ruts worn in the road ice, I cast cautious glances to my right, eyes peeled for motels. It is mid-afternoon, the lowering sun strains behind a fine, crystalline snow which fuzzes the outlines of the signs that picket the roadside. Some of these signs wink and blink with violet or orange neon; others solemnly revolve in the grease-stiffening cold. The majority, however, are megaliths that loom against an ashen sky, pharaonic testaments to hamburger empires. The golden arches of the House of McDonald are prominent, as is the boast “4.6 billion
burgers sold.” (A tyrant’s brag, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”) The Family Size Bucket of the colonel from Kentucky squats impaled on a sixty-foot concrete pole, sullenly vying for attention with the intaglio of A & W, a mahogany-and-orange blandishment against a pale winter sky. Nearby the huge sombrero and yucca cactus of a burrito palace are rimed with gritty snow and old ice.

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer’s wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery.

Here amid the Ponderosas, Bonanzas, Gulf Services, Consumers Distributings, Speedy Mufflers, Firestones, Smitty’s Pancakes, Dog ‘n Suds, Canadian Tires, Essos, Burger Kings, and Sambos, I spot the Sleepy Hollow Motel nestled in an urban thicket of sign poles. I touch the brakes, wrench the wheels out of the tire tracks that ladder the pavement, and with the sound of a car horn blasting outrage behind me slither into Sleepy Hollow’s driveway.

Parking lot succeeds parking lot and that of The Palisades offers nothing more than did those of the Sleepy Hollow, Slumber Land, The Rest Eezy, or The Motorola, all of which I have subjected to a thorough inspection undertaken on foot.

Bundled against the cold, my parka hood tightened until the drawstring is lost in my jowls and my chubby features are scrunched, I gloomily tramp about in search of Victoria’s crumpled and dented car. Since four o’clock the wind has been rising and
now it is unbearable, running over exposed flesh like a flame and licking tears into my eyes. Fingers and toes have turned brittle in mitts and snow boots, and my lips feel like leather. Having completed my circuit of the premises of The Palisades, I crawl with a grateful whimper into the comparatively milder climate of my car, light a cigarette, munch a cookie and drink a lot of rum and coffee.

I’m going to be arrested. It would be just my luck. I see myself, a suspicious figure lumbering through the six-o’clock darkness of a winter’s evening. Ed tripping over shards of caked snow broken up and scraped into ridges by a snow-removing machine. Ed skirting the long, harsh patterns of light thrown by the windows of occupied rooms, weaving between parked cars, hugging the barracks-like building, daring to hope that a peep through parted curtains might reveal my lovely Victoria, and having my feverish hopes chilled as snow spills over the eaves and cascades into my eyes, icing my hot, expectant face.

And then, from behind, the strong hand gripping my collar.

I sip from my thermos, stamp my feet on the floorboards. Perhaps it is too late to continue my search. In the night, at a distance, the cars look the same, all wear skullcaps of fresh snow.

The L-shaped courtyard of the motel carves the stinging wind into eddies. Waste paper suddenly darts out of the darkness of the parking lot to rise into the bright, streaming snow lit by the one remaining functional floodlight set on the fake log ramparts that give The Palisades its name. There they fly erratically like hunting bats; or flap languorous wings like rays moving in a strange, sunlit sea, before swooning and tumbling back into blackness.

I am not at all surprised that Victoria has chosen to hole up in a motel while she tries to reach a decision as to what to do about this unexpected pregnancy. She has always shown a preference for rented rooms as the setting for the momentous decisions of her life; crappy little rooms where nothing familiar, nothing invested with awkward memories, can influence her. It was in just such a room (framed reproductions of a Portuguese fishing port, television
chained to its stand, worn and snagged carpet) that a number of years ago she decided we should have a child. That was in Toronto in an “economy hotel” where I had been reluctantly taken to relieve a lingering depression.

What was the cause of my melancholy? I cannot say exactly. Some of it was that I did not like my job. I was a lowly library assistant, which meant I shelved books for eight hours a day. More of it was that I had the feeling Victoria was drifting away from me. I had always assumed that she saw the world much as I did, but an offhand remark of hers one day contradicted this notion. We were talking about the past and she said, “You know it’s strange, but hearing other people talk, I’m always surprised by how little of the past I remember. I seem to live pretty much in the present.”

I didn’t believe her; I told her she remembered as well as anyone. It was just that she remembered different things. I would prove it to her. “Tell me something about the first year of our married life,” I said.

She mentioned a few things, but seemed vague.

I urged her to be more specific.

“I remember you organized the big laundry party and all of our friends took their dirty clothes to the laundromat and drank wine out of a wineskin until the manager threw us out because you kept yelling that there ought to be a prize given to the owner of the biggest pair of boxer shorts.”

“That was the second year of our marriage.”

“Was it? Maybe it was. So what?”

I began to question her more closely. “Name two movies we saw the summer I moved in with you.”

“Ed, give me a break. Who remembers the movies they saw any given summer?”

“I do. We went practically every night for the air-conditioning. Two movies. Come on, name them.”

“I can’t. End of discussion, okay?”

“Two measly movies, Victoria. Out of dozens.”

“This is ridiculous, Ed.”

It seemed that what she claimed was true. She did not remember the way I did, did not have the same feelings of loyalty to our shared past. I was frightened that she thought so little of the past, because if the past cannot be called in to redress the provisional present, to speak as an advocate to the heart and plead the claims of steadfastness, how could I expect to hold her? To me it seemed that whatever I offered in the fleeting present wasn’t enough; I needed, too, the weight of the past. I began to try to help her recall. This led to fights.

“When did I grow a moustache?”

“You started in on that yesterday and I told you then to shut up. I don’t care when you grew a moustache.”

“I’ll give you a hint.”

“I don’t want a hint.”

“I grew a moustache to look older. Why did I want to look older?”

“Ed, please.”

“You remember, Victoria.”

“Honest to God, Ed, one more word and I walk out of the apartment, I swear.”

“Think!”

She walked out. “Because I was going to be a teaching assistant!” I yelled after her. “I wanted to look older than my students, remember?”

I slowly came apart that summer and autumn.

Pop thought he knew what was the matter with me. He said to Victoria: “It’s that job he has. A monkey could do his job. It gets to Ed. His mind needs stretching. He needs a challenge.”

He didn’t want to believe what had happened to me. Years afterward, in the middle of a fight about my father, Victoria said that he had only come to visit me in the hospital once and all the time we sat in the visitors’ lounge he complained that the place smelled. She said he kept telling me it was no place to think things
through. I had to think things through, he said he understood that, but I ought to do it someplace peaceful, like a cottage on a lake. He’d rent me one if I wanted.

Victoria said she even caught him asking me if I were being held against my will. He turned to her and said, “It’s been known to happen, a person kept in a place like this against his will.” He didn’t come back to see me, nor did he allow my mother to visit me.

Of course, I don’t remember any of that. It was all reported to me by Victoria. A session of shock therapy obliterated whole reaches of my memory, electricity making a simple erasure of hours, days, I suspect even weeks. Yet certain stretches of memory are entire, wholly intact, perhaps their clarity even heightened by the absence of context. For example, I remember distinctly the library, the river bank, the sleepless nights, and
Dr. Friggenstein’s Finishing School for Wayward Misses
. Shock therapy didn’t wipe any of that away.

God, how could I forget the library? The job stacking books at the University Library was the only one I could find after graduating, or at least the only one I could bring myself to take. I thought a library would be a nice place for me to work because I like books. In any case, Victoria said the job was only temporary, just a few months of employment before we left for Greece.

I ended up working there for three years, pinned by inertia. Victoria’s job mobility was not hampered in any such way. When she realized Greece was retreating into the future, she quit her menial job and got hired as a social worker at a salary approximately double mine.

I carried on well enough to get by for two and a half years. After that I began to dread going into the ranges; I sometimes panicked at the idea I might not find my way out from among the books. I hated the hot, oppressive silence of the narrow aisles between the shelves, the walls of books that my shoulders brushed as I shuffled along pushing a loaded truck. The radiators ticked emphatically, someone coughed harshly and persistently, a pair
of shoes creaked, alerting me that my floor supervisor, Mrs. Muchison, was stealthily observing my work habits. The book in my hands sounded like a small fire crackling when I ruffled its sere pages with my thumb.

I wandered for hours in this maze, fingers fumbling with cracked book spines, shifting misplaced volumes, mumbling PR6045.A91B8; PR6045.A91Z498, head aching, watching my fingers burnished a sickly yellow by the fluorescent lights as they clawed and scrabbled, smarting with paper cuts, in among the books.

As my condition worsened, I began frequently to lose my way in this labyrinth. Heart thundering, I heard my shoes clattering with panic in the stifling aisles as I sweated and groped, searching for the proper range on the wrong floor of six. I was reprimanded for slowness, sloppiness, inattention to detail. I was trying, but the canyons of books lengthened, the library’s walls grew taller and steeper, the light feebler. Call numbers and letters dwindled, faded. I put a magnifying glass in my pocket.

At night I couldn’t sleep. I ran the tub full of cold water and sat chilled and numb for hours on end. I smoked and paced in my bathrobe through the silent hours of early morning, windows thrown open to admit the shushing, wet sound of tires on hot pavement, walked and smoked until my legs tightened and I collapsed on to the sofa and sank into the dreamless sleep that I was granted between 5 and 7 a.m., only to awake to return, mouth parched, to the weight of all those books pressing in on me.