My Present Age (6 page)

“God, this is typical. It’s so like you to defend him out of perversity because any other reasonable and sane human being wouldn’t.”

I’m offended. Victoria doesn’t understand scientific objectivity. “I’m not defending him. And I’m not saying he isn’t nuts. I’m explaining him to you. When Sadler reached his early thirties he
became what he was always deep in his heart, a wild-eyed prophet. We’re all becoming what we really are. Time and circumstances are like sunlight and earth and water to all of us little acorns yearning to be oaks.”

“Ed, you’re still the only man I’ve ever met who makes me want to literally scream. Fifteen minutes with you and I can feel the pressure building here.” Victoria touches the region of her diaphragm. “And the horrible thing is I know you won’t be stopped, can’t be stopped, until everything you want to say gets said.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Victoria.”

She rests her head in her hands, a model of weary resignation. “Finish your speech,” she says.

“It isn’t a speech.”

“Goddamn it, just get it over with!”

“You have to help.”

“Don’t needle me, Ed.”

“I need a push. I forget where I was.”

“Where you were,” she says, “was on the topic of acorns and oaks.”

“Aristotle,” I say, “sort of.”

“Let’s not review the intervening two thousand years between Aristotle and Ed,” Victoria says. “I’m on my lunch hour.”

“Ha ha.”

“Ha ha yourself.”

“What I was trying to say, Victoria,” I resume, “is that we’re all approaching the time of life when the oak-tree potential in the acorn becomes manifest. In Sadler’s case we end up with John the Baptist. Haven’t you noticed that everybody we know is coming out of the closet, so to speak?”

“Example,” says Victoria, listlessly, right on cue. Her cooperation indicates she is eager to get this over with.

“Example – well, Benny’s a good example of Sadler’s opposite. He’s a complicator.”

“And just what’s the difference between Benny and Sadler?” Victoria is showing signs of impatience. “Aside from the fact one is nuts and the other isn’t?”

“Easy. The simplifiers want less, the complicators want more.”

This only increases Victoria’s annoyance. “Less what? More what?” She angrily lights a cigarette.

“Everything.”
I ought to stop myself but can’t. I’ve been musing on life lately and have the intrepid explorer’s eagerness to pass on his discoveries. “Let me explain. A complicator finds safety in numbers, people, things. It doesn’t matter. He takes pleasure in possessions. Here’s what I mean. Suppose a guy wakes up one morning and realizes he can’t stand his wife. If by nature he’s a true simplifier he’ll just up and walk out on her. If he’s a true complicator he finds himself a girlfriend.”

“And this is how you’ve been spending your time, dreaming up crap like this?”

“Listen to me and you’ll see. It isn’t crap. Think of Benny’s house. Have you ever really looked at it? Magazines everywhere. For chrissakes there’s a
World Almanac
in the bathroom on the toilet tank. He reads the
World Almanac
. Benny believes in being ‘informed.’ He believes that facts are truth. He displays all the characteristic features of the complicator.” I’m on a roll now. “Let me enumerate.” I hold up one hand and begin counting off fingers. “First we have Benny’s fascination with facts, with information. Typical of the legal profession – of which he imagines himself a leading light – a shabby coven of complicators and obfuscators without parallel. Second, unlike the simplifier, Benny places his faith in the flesh. Look at his sexual habits. Women, women, women. Only one of whom, let me remind you, is he married to. The thing is, Benny believes in data and sensation. He believes that his perplexity is a result of not having enough information, and his lust the result of too few women. Hence his belief in one more feature-length article in
Time
or one more bimbo.”

Victoria is growing angrier. There are ruddy spots of colour on
her cheeks and this prompts me to hurry to finish. “Sadler on the other hand, rumour has it, is chaste and ascetic. He has no interest in facts. All he wants is contained in the covers of The Book. The last five hundred years of discoveries in astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, and psychology weigh less than nothing on his metaphysical scales. I’m trying to achieve such purity of viewpoint myself. Of course, I’m travelling in a slightly different direction, but I can’t deny he’s been an inspiration to me. Mind over matter.”

“I can imagine the direction you’re travelling,” says Victoria. She seems to be growing more and more agitated. She is glancing nervously at her watch and twisting the expansion bracelet.

“That’s the wonderful thing about one’s thirties,” I comment. “Almost anything can surface. Old radical friends – and you and I can think of a number – emigrate to the suburbs, build two-car attached garages, take their daughters for lessons in bourgeois dance, and coach competitive sport. On the other hand we find the individual who decides he doesn’t care what Granny or Aunt Edna thinks. He says to himself, ‘There it is. I’m queer, queer as the day is long. I’m going to prance and wear satin pants until I’m eighty. I don’t
care.’
Admirable.”

“You always put things in the nicest ways, Ed. You’re so understanding of others.”

“Oh-oh. Here we go with ‘If you show me your sensitivity I’ll show you mine.’ Knock it off, Victoria.”

“In my experience you have little to show. I wouldn’t hold my breath at the unveiling.”

“Say what’s on your mind, Victoria.”

“How can I with you saying what’s on yours?”

“I suppose your outrage is occasioned by unkind references to your old buddies? Well then, let me say something nice about same. I am pleased by the sudden crop of babies. Of course, as I’ve said before, time is marching on. The spectre of infertility looms. The dirty deed must be quickly done, but I concede that the result, the product, is nice.”

“Shut up, you boor.” Victoria is furious.

It is clear we are going to fight, so I decide to get my licks in quickly. This is advisable with Victoria, since in seconds you may be pummelled senseless and incapable of retaliation. A charge of calculated disloyalty is often wounding. “On the other hand, we do see marriages dissolving, don’t we? Quite a substantial number. Perhaps once again a case of biology being a hard taskmaster. It’s a tough decision deciding whether to stick with what you’ve got or look for something better, isn’t it, Victoria? If you want better, dump the spouse now while you’ve still got a few good miles in you. What you’ve got to market – as a man or a woman, no sexism, please – is fading fast. The bloom will soon be off the rose. The semi-soft hard-on, bum droop, and saggy tits are just around the corner.
Tempus fugit.”

The muscles of Victoria’s face and throat go rigid, as if she has been slapped. Fasces of tendons spring along her throat.

“You son of a bitch.” These words are uttered from a depth of sadness and bitterness I hadn’t imagined. Something is very wrong. There is a bright gathering of tears in her eyes, I quickly glance away, partly from shame, partly because if I don’t Victoria will break down. Strange. In seven years of marriage she cried only twice in my presence. But, Christ, when it came. Always against her will, torn out of her. It was worse that way: snot bubbles, face twisted and red, stray hairs plastered in the spit at the corner of her mouth. Just wouldn’t stop. Choking and stuttering on the effort of trying to quit.

People are passing on the sidewalk beneath us. The exhaust of cars waiting at the intersection for the light to turn green runs in billows against the side of the Café Nice, then spins up to writhe briefly on the warm window glass. The muffled pedestrians, some in stiff nylon snowmobile or ski suits, shuffle through these white clouds like space voyagers on a planet of visible, deadly gases.

“I ought to have my head examined,” Victoria is saying, “coming to you at a time like this. How did you know exactly what
to say to stop me dead in my tracks? What is this sixth sense of yours, Ed?”

I keep my eyes off her face. The white wine in my glass is gold. “Pardon?” This is a polite, surprised, and diffident request for an explanation. I cannot follow this sudden turn to our conversation.

“I don’t know what got into me,” she says. I hear her voice growing reedier by the second. “Perhaps I felt you owed me some advice after all these years I carried you draped over my shoulders; maybe I thought that, if nothing else, after nine years of living together you would know me better than anybody else.”

I feel the old familiar neurotic stab of apprehension. I lift my eyes to her face. “For God’s sake, Victoria, what the hell is the matter?”

“It never fails,” she says, blundering along, “that anything I have to say gets turned back on me by you, so that I look foolish and pathetic. You never cared if you looked either, but I have my pride. I won’t feel that way.”

“Victoria, what is it? Please.”

She knows she will cry now; it can’t be avoided. She begins to gather her things from the table. Head down, she says: “I didn’t think it possible but you didn’t even ask me how I was. How many months? Not even that.”

“For Christ’s sake, how are you? How are you, Victoria?”

Her face is dark and bitter with choler. “Guess. Take a hard look and guess, asshole.” Then before I can react, can hoist my bulk out of the unsteady chair, she walks swiftly towards the exit.

By the time the bill has been calculated and I have paid, Victoria has disappeared. The exhaust pipes of idling cars churn out banks of dense white smoke, the packed snow squeaks under the boots of passersby, the entire street rests stiff, dumb, obscure. My heart pounds and pounds.

V
ictoria’s disappearance outside the Café Nice seems ominous, a forbidding sign. It is nearly midnight and I still haven’t managed to reach her. Her old phone number is no longer in service and information has no new listing for her. This leads me to believe that Marsha Sadler was speaking the truth when she phoned me a month ago to drop a ponderous hint that Victoria had given up her apartment and moved in with her new boyfriend, co-vivant, or whatever such people are presently called.

Although Marsha frequently sees Victoria because they are members of a foreign film society, when she phoned I was inclined to discount the credibility of her information. As a source, Marsha Sadler is not particularly trustworthy. Bill Sadler’s flight from her sinewy arms to the comforting embrace of the Independent Pre-Millennial Church of God’s First Chosen appears to have unhinged the woman. She now resents anyone who is married, happily or otherwise. With dogged determination Marsha seeks the hairline fractures that can be found in any marriage, and into such cracks she scrabbles her witchy fingernails and, tugging with spiteful vigour, does her best to make them gape as wide as the jaws of hell.

The peculiar thing is that when we meet she carries on as if a
strong bond of sympathy exists between us because we have this in common:
we were deserted by our mates
. During our chance encounters Marsha grips my arm with her painted talons and confides that, although Victoria is her friend, she relates to my “life situation.”

Marsha resembles a veteran airline stewardess. She displays the hard-bitten confidence, professional grooming, caramel tan, and jingling jewellery of such gals. Of course she isn’t a stewardess. The caramel tan and the jewellery are courtesy of her father, who sends her to Arizona every January to lollygag in the sun. He owns a condominium in Phoenix. The hard-bitten confidence is innate.

The only woman whom I fear more than Victoria is Hideous Marsha; yet Hideous is my last hope of reliable information. Since six o’clock I’ve been making phone calls to anyone who might know where Victoria is living. At the moment the total stands at eight. No one would tell me anything of any significance; almost to a woman they feigned ignorance. No, they didn’t have Victoria’s phone number. Had I thought to call information? Really? No listing? Living with another man? They hadn’t heard.

They were all lying through their teeth because of things I’d done to Victoria’s paramours in the past. Not that I ever did anything truly evil. Just light harassment. Telephone impersonations of collection agencies, that sort of thing. Although I did put one gentleman caller’s phone number and vital statistics in the personal column of a homophile tabloid.

The only scrap of information I managed to turn up was a Christian name: Anthony. I got this out of Miriam, an older woman with whom Victoria works. She is neither as wily nor as militant as some of the others I phoned; nevertheless, she knew she’d done a bad thing letting it slip. Nothing more was forthcoming. Anthony. It isn’t much more than a toehold but I’ll see what I can parlay the name into with Hideous Marsha.

It just isn’t working. Galloping pell-mell from room to room of my apartment hasn’t eased my apprehension. Elbows crooked and carried high like a racewalker’s, forearms sawing back and forth at my waist, I wriggle down the hallway, veer around the planter spilling plastic ivy, streak across the kitchen, and churn back upstream toward the bedroom like a 240-pound spawning salmon. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve thundered round the circuit, breaking stride only for pit stops to void my bladder in nervous, parsimonious spurts and dribbles, or to change the album on the stereo. Right now Creedence Clearwater Revival is belting out “Proud Mary.”