My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  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.

  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 tra
il 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 careles
sness 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.

  8

  My 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?”