My Present Age (29 page)

“Spasms my ass.”

“You didn’t have no heart attack, Ed.”

“Who are you to say? Are you a doctor? Answer me that? Are you a goddamn doctor?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.”

“Are you a doctor neither? No, you ain’t. Don’t tell me to shut up.”

“I’ll tell you whatever I want to tell you. Don’t presume to give me orders in my own home. Shut up, Rubacek.”

“You ain’t a doctor. That’s one thing you ain’t.”

“No, I’m not a doctor. And here’s another thing I’m not. I’m not a thief.” A dangerous sally perhaps. But my mouth has a habit of running away on me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just a reference to what I presumed to be your professional capacity. Since we were discussing occupations.”

“A man never escapes his past does he? Society won’t let him forget what he was. They always throw it up in his face. Well, I paid my debt, Ed. I’m a straight arrow now.”

“Excuse me. Let me correct myself. Another thing I’m not is an
ex-thief.”

Stanley looked highly uncomfortable. “I wasn’t no thief.”

“What then? An arsonist?”

“Get serious.”

“A pimp?”

“They’re scum.”

“Not a wienie-wagger?”

“You watch it, Ed.”

“Dear me, I appear to have exhausted my meagre store of underworld lore. Why don’t you tell me your specialization, Stanley? I wait with bated breath.”

Stanley cast his eyes desperately around the room.

“Come on, Rubacek.”

“Bank robber,” blurted out Stanley with a guilty hunch to his shoulders, averting his eyes. He was lying, that much was clear.

“Like Jesse James.”

He was oblivious to the irony in my voice. He brightened. “Right,” he said with conviction, “or John Dillinger.” And he added, “You better be careful when you insult me, Ed. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”

But as to Marsha’s question who Rubacek is, the simple answer must suffice. I break off humming and say, “He’s in my writing class. An aspiring author.”

“Is he living here now?”

“Overnight guest.” I try whistling.

“He’s not a little worked up over your mental state. He told me you were acting very strange last night, very difficult. Just now he
asked me if I’d stay with you while he slipped out to get some clean clothes. He doesn’t think you should be left alone.”

This news makes me break stride. “What?”

“Foxtrot,” orders Marsha.

I begin to trot. A salacious dance. It is producing a lazy, wobbly tumescence. I wonder if she is aware of it gently butting her pelvis. Marsha is fragrant with eau de cologne.

“He’s worried about you getting depressed. He thinks you ought to be kept occupied.”

“What’s this? Did you two have a summit conference?”

“Just bits and pieces on the phone the other day when I tried to get hold of you. A short chat in the living room when I came just now. Stan believes you should be writing. It would keep you from becoming depressed.”

“Not that I have anything to be depressed about.”

“You didn’t have a heart attack. They wouldn’t let you out of the hospital this soon if you had. The doctors would be liable, or culpable, or whatever the word is. Anyway, people your age don’t have heart attacks.”

“Jim Morrison did.”

“That was drugs.”

“I don’t take care of myself either.”

“You don’t take drugs.”

“But I don’t live right,” I say, struggling to make my point. As the soles of my feet dry, I am able to embellish my performance with some fancy footwork. Marsha does not respond to my lead. She steers like one of those rogue shopping carts with one wheel askew. I relent and go back to the meat-and-potatoes stuff.

“So what? Nobody lives right,” says Marsha. “Waltz.” And the band strikes up, or rather Marsha strikes up, an appropriate tune in my ear. We dance on in the fading gimcrack light of a winter’s afternoon.

S
ome men might have settled for less. I set my heart on a coal-black tux, as glossy and satiny-looking as a long-playing record. A blue suit may be classy in an understated way, but the man who squires Marsha ought to part the shabby sea of festive hoi polloi like Moses. Not that I put her to the expense of made-to-measure evening dress – after all, one ought not to forget who one is or who is footing the bill – but I did lay hands on a slightly used rental item, the last occupant of which had been built along similar lines to me. Peering at myself in Kramer’s mirror, clad in the habiliments of Hollywood, I thought I detected a marked resemblance to the youthful Orson Welles and was sold on the spot. A tuck here, the stitching eased there, and Kramer assured me it would fit like a glove. All alterations guaranteed to be completed in two days.

However, this morning’s journey to the tailor’s proved to be unexpectedly dangerous. I’ll remember to avoid buses in future. Rubacek ought to have driven me but didn’t. He had to keep to the apartment to prepare his surprise – a place for me to work, to write. Naturally I thought he was refusing because he was unwilling to interrupt the transports of composition. For the past two
days he has kept hard at his ratty manuscript for as long as eighteen hours at a stretch, scrawling page after page with concentrated fury before lapsing into a recuperative trance in which he bemusedly produces telegraphic noises by clicking his pen against his front teeth. Waking in the middle of the night I discover light leaking into my bedroom through the seams of my badly hung door and know that Rubacek is at his station, tapping out his cryptic code. An SOS to the Muse: Rubacek at work.

Now I am supposedly at work too, seated here at this unsteady table, Venus Velvet
HB
in hand and a few creased sheets of yellow scrap paper spread out before me. I suppose I ought not to have dug these pages out of the jewellery box where they have lain untroubled and untroubling all this time. I had a feeling of vague apprehension when I sorted them out from the diplomas, degrees, and confirmation and baptismal certificates. But I thought it would be easier to show these to Rubacek than to fill pages at his command. Stanley expects to see something at the end of the day, and these stark black sentences are capable of persuading him I’m writing, keeping the fell lion of depression at bay by brandishing words as if they were a whip, a chair.

I haven’t yet brought myself to read any of it. I remind myself that I was crazy when I wrote these pages, that it was these pages I held in my hand when I came out of the dark room and said to Victoria, “I’ve failed him. I’m afraid. I want a doctor.”

Maybe it’s the difficulties with my heart that have sapped my will to resist Rubacek. Maybe I want to be looked after. This afternoon I hurried home from the bus stop, frightened, hoping only that I would find him at home so I would not be alone. He was here. He’d made everything ready for me. This card table was in place in the living room, chair facing the window. He had borrowed it from McMurtry, with whom he is apparently on good terms, even though Stanley inhabits the enemy’s camp. On the table were sharpened pencils and pads of paper, yellow and white. He’d even scraped the ice from the window so I would have an
unimpeded view of the snow-burdened boughs of the spruces and the sparrows scattered among the green needles.

“She’s all set, Ed,” he said.

So here I sit on a collapsible chair, unable to write, or even to read what is in front of me. I know, however, that it is the epigraph of my crazy manuscript printed in huge, spidery, insane-looking letters that can’t be ignored: The concluding words of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.

So far that’s as much as I’ve been able to bring myself to read. I just sit here patiently, because doing so keeps Stanley from harassing me. From here I can see him sprawled all over the kitchen table. It took me a while to place where I’d seen that odd, contorted posture before, that gawky attitude he assumes when writing. And then I remembered. Elementary school. Memories of row upon row of little kids, cheeks almost touching notebooks, eyes cast in a sidelong squint that follows bunched, crabbed fingers driving a pencil between pale-blue lines. That’s the way Rubacek writes, like a child. One shoulder thrust up, legs nervously jigging under table.

I only wish I’d had as much time to study Bill Sadler as I’ve had to study Rubacek. I find Sadler more interesting. But this morning all I was granted was a glimpse or two from a bus window. I spotted him when the driver parked at the stop in front of the Army
&
Navy to wait for transfers. I had impatiently cast a glance over my shoulder to see if buses number seven and number nine were rolling up behind us when Bill caught my eye as he placidly plodded through a confused crowd of people scuttling about on the sidewalk, hurrying to catch buses.

Unlike the old days, he wasn’t toting a placard but wearing a sandwich board of thick plywood over the kind of dark car-coat immigrants prefer as winter wear. The wind was gusting and the board, which hung to his knees, acted as a sail. Every few moments he locked his knees and jittered along, leaning back against the blast. The board blanketing his chest had a Bible text painted in red: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”: I Peter 5:8.

Above the board his face was a little thinner than I remembered it, the cheeks a trifle hollowed, mouth pinched, and skin mottled pink and blue by the terrible cold. He walked on through the crowds with a kind of hopeless doggedness, walked unseeing past the store windows filled with bankruptcy trash and impossible, failed fashions.

I gave up my seat to get a look at whatever was written on the plank on his back. The crowd on the sidewalk had thrust Sadler over to the curb and so close to the bus that from my angle, from where I was standing, I could only see the top of his head bobbing along, hair neatly trimmed, the teeth marks of a wet comb frozen in his hair.

I decided to get off the bus, to speak to him. I groped forward against the current of boarding passengers, muttering as I did, “Excuse me. Please. Excuse me.” I popped up on tiptoes to follow the bobbing head, shoved ruthlessly past those who showed no inclination to give way.

All passengers boarded, the bus suddenly started with a jerk. I snatched the overhead bar to keep from crashing backward. At precisely the moment I threw up my arm two things happened. Bill Sadler swerved away from the curb, and I felt a mild pinch of pain in my chest. The sign on his back said: “And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” Revelations 13:4.

There was a strange tickling all down the inside of my arm and a sense of fullness, of mild discomfort, in my chest. I cast my eyes over the bus for an unoccupied seat. There were none. I decided on the spot that there would be no more bus rides for Ed. I’m not about to die lying in melted snow and gum wrappers in the aisle of a bus, supine at the feet of strangers.

I wonder what Bill would think if he knew I’d read his counsel, seen his message? I believe he is only warning us all out of a sense of duty, not out of love. He expects nothing to come of it. That’s obvious in the way he joylessly trudges.

What would it be like to carry in one’s head Bill Sadler’s particular visions? Visions of scarlet priapic devils, of dragons with green leathern scales and curled, cumbersome claws. But maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe for Bill the dragon is simply sin. I don’t know. Still, I think he senses the ether pregnant with blood and blazing brimstone ready to rain down on our heads. What would it be like to be under conviction, to be slain by the spirit, to be sober and vigilant, to leave messages?

Bill and I leaving messages. Because I’m sure that in these pages I wrote in the bad time, in that dusky room, there was some kind of message, either to myself, or to Victoria, or to both of us. It’s just that I don’t remember what it was. But it is here, before me, ready to witness if I allow it.

I begin at the beginning with a surprise, the name of an old friend.