My Present Age (16 page)

Victoria, concerned, urged me to find a hobby. I bought an old Audubon Society bird guide in a second-hand bookstore, a fat, compact book badly damaged by frequent drenchings on field trips. The pages were crinkled, the covers warped, and the coloured plates of the birds marred. The cardinal’s scarlet had bled in the rain and stained many of the dowdy birds – sparrows, thrushes, and wrens – pink. I couldn’t have cared less. The book was just a prop, a justification for my haunting the river bank.

On the east side of the river the carefully groomed park has not
yet swallowed up the entire distance between the two bridges. A part of the river bank, more rugged and cut by ravines, is still covered in original growth. The native bush turns this stretch of land still and thick with green light, and through the poplar and willow a narrow path beaten by joggers threads its way.

In that disturbed time I often found myself walking that path on a summer’s evening. I would walk quickly along until a bend hid me from the sight of anyone who might be following and then I would plunge off into the woods that crawled up the bluff overlooking the river. Several yards into the tangle of brush and deadfalls the land began to rise abruptly and the undergrowth thinned. Breathing heavily I scrambled up, feet slipping in leaf mould, face switched by willows, hands ripped by wild-rose thorns.

As I climbed I would cast about me for some small clearing where I could crouch unseen; one unlittered with broken wine bottles, charred wiener sticks, blackened logs, withered and bedraggled condoms; one high enough up on the river bank that I could watch, through the slim trunks of the poplars, the river running in the setting sun with the placid dignity of molten bronze. Overhead the light glittered wistfully in the leaves shivering above me, birds I did not trouble to identify in my Audubon guide darted among the trees, and I could hear small animals thrashing in fallen leaves.

When I found a spot, I would sink down sweating on the damp compost which carpeted the ground, hug my knees, and stare. On the trail below me joggers pounded heavily on, their breath harsh and sibilant in the quiet. One evening a teenage couple stole upwards hand in hand towards me, whispering and twisting among the trees to a place no more than twenty feet from where I was hidden. There they proceeded to couple urgently and furtively, their white bodies shimmering in the broken light.

How did I feel hunkering there in the thicket? I recall wishing never to leave its green solace, wishing never to be found. Every evening that passed I sat a little longer chained in its peace,
watched the light die a little more, felt the chill of coming autumn stipple my skin and creep deeper into my flesh.

Sometimes I thought of Huck Finn on Jackson’s Island, the part of the novel in which his friends search the river for Huck’s dead body and he, hidden in the bushes, watches Judge Thatcher and Becky and Tom and Joe Harper and Aunt Polly crowd the rail of the ferryboat to peer down into the muddy waters for his corpse, the cannon booming loud enough to raise the dead. And all the while Huck crouches mere yards off their gunwales on the island, screened from their sight, and behind him, miles further back in a wilderness of trees, the black man Jim crouches too, an unknown continent, waiting to be claimed by Huck.

During my last visit to the river bank I could not bring myself to leave. The cool grey of twilight became a prison, the shadows bars. Night fell. The yellow windows of the hotels and office towers on the opposite bank shone on the moving waters of the black river, the glow of the city rose into the sky and washed out the stars that swung low on the horizon. I sat on. Cold crept out of the ground and into my flanks, a breeze combed the crowns of the poplars and rattled their leaves.

Much later I heard my name called. It came to me from a distance, very faint. At intervals of some minutes it grew clearer, closer. At last I saw a flashlight tossing in the night like a light on a boat.

“Ed!” she called. “Ed!”

I wanted to let her pass without a sign, to stay hidden. I wanted to hear her voice fade as Huck had heard the booming cannon fade. I wanted to be left alone, to pity myself.

And then I thought of the desolateness of this urban wood and was afraid for her. I shambled down the slope, crying her name, thinking of rapists.

Victoria led me home. One of my hands was closed on hers, the other dangled the bird book, my attempt at achieving balance.

Toronto, where I found myself two weeks later, was enduring a September of wind and flying grit that made my eyes run with cold and ground dirt between my teeth. I was there because Victoria had decided on the culture cure to heal a broken spirit. I was to be regularly dosed with art galleries, museums, bookstores, the theatre, the symphony. Scraps are all that are left to me of that time. The brassy glint of a soundless trumpet at Massey Hall, players blowing and bowing and plucking to the dim roar of blood in my ears. The galleries were only footfalls and whispers, the restaurants a clatter of dishes, water splashing in glasses, waiters’ shirt cuffs and dextrous hands. Walking the streets I caught glimpses of myself in shop windows that brought me up short. Rooted to the sidewalk I stared at a dishevelled stranger, his dull eyes mounted in a setting of puffy, darkened flesh; a cigarette smoking between the fingers of a limp hand dangling at his side, a vee of belly bursting where the bottom button of his shirt had popped. I grinned and he grinned back.

I stopped going out and kept to my hotel room. That was how I developed my interest in
Dr. Friggenstein’s Finishing School for Wayward Misses –
or, to speak more precisely, grew to admire one of the misses of that film, Maria. In all, I saw the movie three times. It played regularly on the “adult channel” provided for hotel guests.

Victoria spoiled my first viewing of
Finishing School
by lying in bed, flipping through the pages of
Toronto Life
, and making tart comments about the supposedly salacious hi-jinks taking place on-screen. She could not be convinced my interest was anthropological and not lecherous. The next two times I plotted to be alone in order to enjoy undisturbed a conventional fantasy apparently so unremarkable that it had found its way on to the bill of fare of an economy family hotel. While Victoria was off at the Eaton Centre Cineplex admiring the latest offerings of the masters of European film, I was staring at democratic erotica, seeking a way out of my dilemma.

What is
Dr. Friggenstein’s Finishing School for Wayward Misses
(special X) all about, that it should have so completely captivated
my attention? The travails of a headmaster in a girls’ finishing school. Not just any finishing school, but a Swiss finishing school. Great pains are taken to establish the location of the doctor’s academy in Switzerland, presumably because that country adds a sophisticated, international tone to the goings-on. So between frequent bouts of bum-paddling, simulated heterosexual intercourse, and outbreaks of sapphism in the student body, there are interludes of majestic alpine scenery pirated from travelogues shot many, many years ago during the garish birthpangs of Technicolor. Our convictions about Dr. Friggenstein’s nationality are further reinforced by having him dressed in national costume. He is also apt to remark, without provocation, “The Swiss air is so stimulating!” and leer.

The moral of the film is apparently spare the rod and spoil the miss. Dr. Friggenstein is always turning one of his female pupils over his knees and paddling her bare behind because she is naughty. These spankings always excite warm feelings in both parties and produce predictable results. And so it goes for the first fifteen minutes, a dreary succession of ghastly moans and groans and grunts of unearthly pleasure, a sad parade of abused flesh.

But then an interesting twist. Dr. Friggenstein is indeed a firm disciplinarian, but all his strenuous efforts cannot stamp out the most serious breach of school rules: nude roller derby. No sooner does Dr. Friggenstein lay his weary head on his pillow than his cultivated young ladies creep from their beds for a little roller-skating,
au naturel
. It is never made clear why his charges are so intent on this form of recreation but intent they are. He cannot eradicate it.

Their unspeakable crime is nightly enacted in a dingy hall that looks suspiciously unlike a Swiss chalet and a good deal like the sort of fraternal hall one finds in small towns all over North America. There are even lighter-coloured, plaque-shaped spots evident on the dirty imitation-pine panelling of the walls that suggest awards hastily removed before the cameras rolled.

Round and round the women unsteadily go, wheels clattering
gloomily in the empty hall. The naked daughters of Philadelphia socialites, Roman marchesas, and British earls are shaky on their skates. Anxiety at falling and being hurt strips their faces of the last illusion of youthfulness, as the removal of school uniforms destroyed the last poor deception they were nymphets. Legs straddled far apart to maintain an uncertain balance, their vulnerable-looking pudenda are paraded past the camera. Breasts droop and bobble, and several women display the kind of stretch marks associated with childbearing. There is a good deal of timorous flailing about at one another, a burlesque of violence that does little to enliven this sad and creaky carousel of ersatz savagery. Everyone is plainly scared of upsetting herself and getting a nasty knock, scrape, or floor burn.

My eyes are always riveted on Maria.

I first noticed her earlier in the film because of the indifferent manner in which she counterfeited sexual ecstasy while simulating coitus with Dr. Friggenstein. The other women were eager, if bad, actresses. They bucked their hips and shuddered and gasped and ran their tongues voraciously around their lips and thrashed about spastically, all the while uttering cries of encouragement and utter abandon. Maria, however, at the supposed critical moment, allowed a look to pass over her face that suggested a twinge of neuralgia rather than unutterable delight. This cheered me. A guerrilla fighter in Gomorrah? I wondered how she had managed to carry off this remarkable, listless insubordination in the face of the tyranny of common taste. Why had this rebel been allowed in the film at all?

At that point I knew. Because she was the only one who could roller-skate. Beautifully. How easily she whirled through the naked herd with a graceful carelessness that provoked in my mind pictures of an innocent past: roller-skate keys and shaded sidewalks in happy subdivisions, lemonade and scraped knees.

Here, I felt, was a kindred spirit. I felt compelled to view the film again to search for further impertinences. When I studied her
performance I found them. How had I missed on a first viewing the contemptuous lassitude with which she bared her buttocks for paddling? Or the barely perceptible wink of the left eye that followed her profession of abject terror at the outrageous size of Herr Doktor’s manhood? And always, in every species of sexual encounter, she offered the voyeur nothing more than a mild furrowing of the brow, a curl of the upper lip, and a lazy roll of the eyes to register her orgasm, .01 on the Richter scale. It was a performance that lifted my spirits as nothing else had in months.

Two days before we left Toronto, Victoria told me she wanted to become pregnant. She had thought about the matter long and hard. We had agreed before we married that we wanted children. What did I think? Was now the time?

I said: “What about Greece?”

She said: “You don’t want anything to do with Greece.”

I realized that at that moment our marriage had entered a new stage. I was drinking Scotch out of the toothbrush glass. I took a swallow and then said I thought a baby was a fine idea.

Victoria told me that she believed my state owed something to the way we lived, in the pitch and toss of freedom. A child might be an anchor to keep us off the rocks.

I said: “Don’t we do anything for love any more?”

I flick on the interior light of the Fiat and colour the dot which signifies The Palisades on the map. Red dots appear at intervals along the length of 8th Street, like beads on a necklace. Scarlet for absence. She isn’t here either.

M
y car wouldn’t start this morning. I thought it needed a boost but the pimply thug dispatched by the towing company to galvanize the frozen corpse back to life rendered a dissenting diagnosis. “Sounds to me like your starter. Nothing I can do,” he said, unclipping the jumper cables. “This baby’s tits up. You want her pulled somewheres?”

I can’t find Victoria without a car. I need wheels.

Naturally I thought of Benny. His is a three-car family: BMW, Land Rover, Pinto. And I knew where I could find him at lunchtime because Benny is a creature of habit. When he and I were locked in mortal combat over custody of Balzac, we always disengaged at twelve o’clock sharp so Benny could lunch at The Beef Dip.

The Beef Dip, contrary to the associations the name evokes in my mind, is not a Texas cow-wallow but a restaurant that specializes in roast beef sandwiches which “beg to be dunked in a one-of-a-kind gravy dip that smacks of all the goodness in the great outdoors.” Lining up there at lunch-time to wait for a table, I found its rustic interior leading me into a reverie. There were kerosene lanterns dangling from rough-hewn rafters, swinging doors leading to the kitchens, and plenty of cute signs in evidence
enjoining gentlemen to remove spurs and shooting irons at the door. I was hitching up my pants and running a cool eye over the crowd tying on the feed-bag in hopes of spotting my old trail boss, Sam Waters, when a little filly sashayed up and asked: “Table for one, sir?”