My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Save your breath. I’m not getting drawn into one of those interminable and invariably childish arguments that you concoct to cover your tracks.”

  I’d forgotten how wise in the ways of Ed she is. “Well,” I say, trying to look injured, “don’t accuse me of things I didn’t do.”

  “Same old Ed.” Victoria sighs, breathes smoke. “I guess you can’t expect a leopard to change its spots.”

  “Or a skunk to change its stripes.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth, Ed. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to pick scabs on old wounds. Let’s try and keep it pleasant. I haven’t much fight in me at the moment.” The skin around her eyes looks smudged, grey. When she smiles, her lips part with visible effort; there is strain in the corners of her mouth, her fingers pick nervously at a loose thread in the weave of the tablecloth.

  “I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t ask to be dragged away from my warm radiator all the way to the Côte d’Azur. Just remember that.”

  “You’re always so goddamn indirect, aren’t you? You don’t like the restaurant? Is that it, Ed? Could it be that you find it pretentious? Too affected for an honest soul like you? Well, you aren’t particularly honest – just rude. I’m buying this lunch, so we’ll eat where I want to eat. And if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. Don’t start sniping.”

  “Sniping at a tank. A poor little peashooter taking pot shots at Panzer Wictoria. Would I dare?”

  “I wonder what a psychoanalyst would make of that? Talk about a peashooter and a tank,” says Victoria. She’s very good. In six years of marriage I seldom did better than a draw. Victoria comes from a long line of Scottish Presbyterian fanatics. The kind who hid in caves and ate heather or whatever, rather than admit God wasn’t their first cousin.

  “Don’t pull that Psychology 101 crap on me, honey. Don’t forget I’m the expert on those guys.”

  “You’ll never forgive me for talking you into seeking help, will you?” says Victoria. By help she means a certain Dr. Brandt I saw weekly just when my imagination began to fail. I had trouble adjusting to the new perspective.

  The spinach and the wine arrive. Victoria and I munch in silence. Chewing winter spinach, I discover, produces an odd sensation. Maybe it’s thinking of all that dough Brandt ate up, but I’m beginning to imagine I’m chewing dirty, tattered, gritty dollar bills. Money must taste like this, bitter. I think of creased and folded bills, think of the greasy wallets they have ridden in, the lint-laden pockets they have lain in, the sweaty décolletages they’ve been crammed down. That’s it, that’s enough. I push the bowl away.

  Victoria breaks the silence. “I dropped by the china department in Eaton’s last week to see if you were free for coffee.”

  Although I’m curious as to why Victoria has suddenly taken to seeking my company, I make no comment. The pause grows to an uncomfortable length while she waits for me to respond. Finally she says, “The woman there said you quit months ago.”

  True. Two months ago to be specific. The money I realized from cashing in my life insurance policy will soon be gone.… I don’t like this talk about work. It makes me nervous. It makes me think of my shrinking bank balance.

  “Can we drop this subject?”

  “Don’t be so touchy. I’m just curious to know how you’re managing.”

  “You asked me to lunch after all these months of separation to ask me how I’m managing? Get serious. What do you want, Victoria?”

  “I didn’t say that’s why I asked you to lunch. But now that the subject has come up – how are you managing? Are you getting unemployment insurance?”

  “No!” I protest, much more loudly than I intended. “No goddamn unemployment insurance!” McMurtry, I realize, has made me sore on that subject.

  “Keep it down, Ed. People are looking.”

  So they are. I lower my voice, crane my neck around the parasol pole, and hiss, “Not unemployment insurance. Life insurance. I cashed in my policy. So I could live on my capital like a nineteenth-century Russian landowner. I’m an incorrigible romantic.”

  Victoria lays her fork down. “What life insurance?” she demands. “I didn’t know you had any life insurance.”

  Neither did I until three months ago. That’s when my steady ways in the Eaton’s china department finally convinced Pop his son had stabilized and was showing signs of maturity. As a sign of confidence in me, he handed over to me a life insurance policy he had been paying premiums on since the day after I was born.

  Nothing reveals my father’s mind as clearly as that. It ought to be graven on his tombstone: Loving husband, father, and policyholder. The man insured everything, a symptom of a profoundly superstitious mind. As long as he was laying out hard-earned money for coverage, nothing would happen. Why? Because it was just his luck to pay for protection he didn’t need. He used to gripe, “Twenty years now I’ve paid insurance premiums and has anything happened? Have I got a penny back from those leeches? No way. Isn’t that typical?” The implication being that if he stopped paying, something dreadful would happen.

  All that was near and dear to him was insured: house, car, business, Mom. Insured to the maximum, to the hilt. We were insurance-poor. The bigger the premium, the more potent the spell. When I was eight he showed me where he kept the key to the safety deposit box and explained that if he and Mom were to “pass on unexpectedly, God forbid,” I was to give the key to my Uncle Bert. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Pop said. “There’s a hundred thousand on your mom alone.”

  Of course, I did worry. I worried he’d forget to pay the goddamn premiums and bring disaster to us all. I’d caught superstition from him the way I might have caught the flu. My mother always said: “Eddie’s got a case of Daddy’s nerves.” Any wonder?

  I can’t imagine what I’d have felt if I’d known he had a policy on me. I get a mite antsy even now when I recall I’ve cashed it. For the first time in over thirty years I’m not covered.

  Our waitress delivers the omelettes. “I didn’t know I had life insurance until last year,” I inform Victoria under the smooth bare arm settling the plates on the table. “It was a policy Pop took out on me when I was a kid.”

  Victoria is incredulous. She has never completely adjusted herself to my father’s weird and wondrous Weltanschauung. “Earl took a policy out on you? Whatever for?”

  “To help defray the cost of a university education.” That was the ostensible reason; however, I’m sure it was bought as a prophylactic against those polio epidemics so frequent in the early fifties. Pop’s white magic. “The idea was to cash it when I was eighteen. But when the time rolled around he didn’t need the bucks, so he just held on to it. The policy was a present, a reward for exemplary service in the crockery wars.”

  “And you bailed out. Earl ought to have known better than to put temptation your way.”

  “Go on, stick together. Pop and you always conspired against me. I remember you two huddled in a corner at Thanksgiving four years ago, whispering. You were going to commit me to law school that time. Wasn’t that the plan? You can confess now, I’ve been jettisoned.”

  “Thirty-two years old,” Victoria says, shaking her head, “Thirty-two years old.”

  “Not until April. Don’t age me any more than you already have.”

  “Ed, when is all this going to stop? What are you going to do with your life?”

  It’s a question I’ve been pondering myself for some time now. So the answer comes easily and promptly. “Simplify it.”

  “Simplify it. God, I don’t believe it. What is that supposed to mean?”

  I’ve got a quick answer for that one too. “Nothing much is wrong with me except my age. Being thirty is what’s the matter.” I recite Frost. “ ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood.’ ” A woman at a neighbouring table smiles indulgently, mistaking me for a lover declaiming verse to his beloved. I am merely making a tactical
point.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Well, have you taken a good long look at any of our friends lately? That’s what they’re all doing.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “They are.”

  “Here we go,” Victoria says. “It was always your worst habit, reading into others’ actions your own motives. Nobody is doing any such thing.”

  “They all are, and Frost was talking particularly,” I ballast the word with leaden emphasis, “about people like you and me, or Benny, or Sadler.” A strange image is forming in my mind. I can see Frost, or rather McMurtry masquerading as Frost, in a plaid, billed cap with huge ear lugs. I blink hard and he dissolves.

  “You’re a loon,” Victoria says.

  “I’m not. Think about it. We’ve lived just long enough to make out the paths in all those trees. Big-decision time. No more fooling around. Don’t you feel that? I certainly do.”

  “This is interesting coming from you,” says Victoria, looking edgy as she stubs out her cigarette; “you never showed any signs that you saw anything passing you by.”

  “There they are, two roads” – I lift a forefinger – “one choice. We can choose to simplify our lives, or we can choose to complicate them.”

  “And you have chosen to simplify yours,” says Victoria with an acidic smile.

  “In a way,” I say. My theory and its ramifications are subtler than this. I ransack my mind for illustrations. “Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that the inclination for one path or the other is in us all. Our tendencies just become more evident as time runs out on us. And, of course, each individual’s path can take a wide and interesting number of variations from the two basic forms. Take what Sadler did. He chose what I’d call religious simplicity. Not uncommon.”

  “Sadler is crazy. You can’t make an argument on the basis of what a crazy person does.”

  “He was always crazy. It’s just that now his craziness expresses itself in a way unacceptable in your circles. Back when we were going to university and Sadler was a big-time campus radical urging Luddite atrocities on the computer centre, none of your friends thought he was particularly nuts – which he evidently was. But now it’s a different story because he’s chosen an unpopular lunacy. Some television preacher offers him salvation one morning and Sadler falls on his knees on the living-room carpet. Suddenly everyone claims Sadler is nuts. Looks like the same Sadler to me.”

  “You make it sound like it was a revelation or something. He didn’t just fall on his knees. You always exaggerate for effect. Marsha said he was depressed for weeks. All he did was watch early-morning TV. That Christian talk-show host got him at his lowest ebb. The conversion business was a direct result of mental illness. Sadler is nuts.”

  “Not any more than he ever was.”

  Victoria does not buy my argument. She has the atheist’s illiberalism. She begins to argue anecdotally. “Try and tell that story to Marsha. Did you hear why she finally left him?” I barely have time to nod. “Because he had an operation to have his vasectomy reversed after he joined that church of screwballs. Can you believe it? They’re Protestants but they’re against birth control.”

  “Not exactly,” I qualify, “they’re not against birth control. They’re in favour of abstinence. You see, there is a distinction—”

  Victoria interrupts. “Marsha gave him fair warning. She told him if he went ahead with it she was leaving. Although what the point of the reversal was I don’t know – it hardly ever works anyway. But you tell me that isn’t nuts – reversing a vasectomy.”

  “Any man who had a spark of sanity would undergo any number of vasectomy reversals to induce Marsha to leave him. But that isn’t the point. The point is Sadler’s fundamental nature. What you fail to understand is that he’s the ultimate simplifier. The very antithesis of your bet-hedging, quibbling complicator. Sadler wants Truth with a capital T. He always did. And when he signed on with the Independent Pre-Millennial Church of God’s First Chosen, or whatever they call themselves, he didn’t go making his membership contingent on a bunch of mental reservations. No sir. He understood that being one of God’s First Chosen isn’t easy. He swallowed it whole. I kind of admire that.”

  “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.”