My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Benny is a poor winner and an obscene gloater. I thought for a time, taking rapid, peckish sips of my Scotch. “Let me make sure I understand you completely,” I said. “Your overheated imagination has cooked up a scenario in which I scribble, then fire off nasty notes which embarrass, confound, and otherwise make your existence miserable. Is that correct so far?”

  “You got it.”

  “And you are convinced you have proof? This proof being a signature on a letter, said signature on said letter to be analysed presumably by a handwriting expert and pronounced my very own, bearing the characteristic and unmistakable penmanship of Ed?”

  “Right again.”

  “Let us hypothesize, Benny,” I invited. “Let us deduce the character from the deed. Let me ask you this: Would the unprincipled creature who would descend to such low, mean, cunning tricks be likely to incriminate himself by signing such a letter?”

  Benny squinted, an involuntary reaction to the birth of painful thoughts. “What’re you getting at?”

  “Or would he be more likely,” I proposed, “to prowl the beer parlours of 20th Street and find there some drunken destitute with broken shoes and a dewdrop hung upon the end of his nose who would gladly sign his own death warrant for a five-spot? Let alone sign Benjamin R. Ferguson with a flourish at the bottom of an empty page.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Of course I didn’t. That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”

  But I smiled as if I had.

  “That’s your handwriting.”

  “Let me assure you that it isn’t.”

  “You fucking creep.”

  “And I’m quite satisfied, Benny, that you won’t risk discovering whether it is my handwriting or not.”

  All I’d have had to do was stick Benny in a sleigh, redden his nose a bit, and I’d have had the very picture of Bonaparte hightailing it out of the suburbs of burning Moscow. Defeat writ large.

  “So,” I said, “with these little misunderstandings cleared away I think we can proceed to a happier topic. How would you like to lend me your car?”

  “You’re insane.”

  I explained to him that I wouldn’t have dared ask for such a favour except in the most extraordinary circumstances. I did my best to make clear to him why I felt I had to find Victoria and how I intended to do it. I also pointed out that public transportation and taxis were obviously unsuited to my purpose.

  Benny sat with a glacial air throughout my speech.

  “As you can see, I’ve got to get my hands on a car right away and find her. So naturally I thought of you.”

  “Goddamn it, doesn’t anybody who ever crossed your path get a moment’s peace? Who the hell do you think you are, coming to me and asking for a car? After what you did?”

  “It’s not who I am, it’s who you are. You’re a man with three vehicles.”

  “Rent a car, asshole. Talk to Avis, not me.”

  “I can’t rent one. I forgot to renew my driver’s licence. They won’t rent me a car.”

  “Jesus, isn’t that typical. No driver’s licence.”

  “Victoria used to do all those sorts of things. I lost the habit. It slipped my mind. So hang me. I’m guilty.”

  “You expect me to loan you my BMW, which you will probably promptly total, and I’ll find myself with no insurance because the prick driving my car had no licence? Dream on, dreamer. No fucking way.”

  “I’m not asking for the BMW. Give me Janice’s Pinto. Or your Land Rover.”

  “No.”

  “I need a car, Benny.”

  “No way.”

  “I’ll leave you alone for the rest of my life. I swear.”

  “Do everybody a favour. Leave us all alone. Or at least leave poor Victoria alone for a start.”

  “Don’t you listen? I told you she wanted to talk to me.”

  “Note the past tense. Wanted. She’s doing a lot to attract your attention now, isn’t she?”

  “I let her down. I didn’t listen.”

  “So what’s new? I’ve watched you operate for years. It’s the story of your life.”

  “Listen to me, Benny, I’ve only got so much patience.”

  He interrupted me, leaned abruptly across the table, pushed his face into mine. “No, you listen to me,” he said harshly, “because I’ve only got so much time and you’ve had all of it you’re ever going to get. You’ve just run out of my time, Ed. We’re finished. I don’t want to ever see you again. Understand?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “But I’ve got some parting words of wisdom,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, you son of a bitch, that you don’t seem to be able to figure out for yourself. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like shit. I’ll bet you aren’t eating and I’ll bet you aren’t sleeping.”

  He happened to be right on both those counts.

  “You’re running all over goddamn town like a chicken with its head cut off looking for somebody who doesn’t want to be found. You’re going down a bad road, man. You get yourself physically run down you’ve got no resistance to these emotional upsets. You blow things out of proportion at the best of times. Anybody has dealings with you knows that much. You better stop it right now or it’ll be last time all over again. My advice to you is stay out of everybody else’s life and take care of your own. Get some sleep. Eat something.”

  “What do you mean, last time?”

  “You know what I mean. Fifth floor, University Hospital.”

  “You don’t know anything about last time. What do you know about last time?”

  “I know enough to know you were in a bad way, man.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I went to visit you.”

  “Like hell you did.”

  “I saw you, Ed. Sitting in the day room like an old man in this plaid housecoat and a pair of carpet slippers two sizes too big. Don’t tell me what I saw.”

  “You never saw anything.”

  “Jesus Christ, they had you so doped you didn’t know who you were, or where you were. You were a fucking mess, man. Staring at this TV screen, lighting one cigarette off another, your pyjama flies open and your dork hanging out. You didn’t even know you were hanging a rat. I had to cover you up. That’s where you were at. I didn’t think you were coming back to the land of the living.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Don’t let that happen again, Ed. Take care of yourself.”

  “You fucking prick. Give me a goddamn car.”

  “Ed, nobody but nobody in their right mind is going to give you a car.”

  He stood up and put some money on the table. “If you’re crying,” he said, “you better get a hold of yourself. The waitress is coming to clear the table.” Then he went out.

  The more I think about it, the more I see that Benny’s position is essentially correct. None of those people I know, those people I marched with, for whose children Victoria and I bought silver christening mugs, whose furniture I helped move into successively larger and more gracious homes, will lend me a car. In the last ten years I’ve proved myself a bad risk, a man on the margin, a doubtful character.

  On the other hand I have a carrot to dangle before Rubacek’s nose. He wants something from me. Nobody else does.

  I find his telephone number on the class list. We exchange pleasantries. I ask if he has a car. He does. A ’71 Grand Prix, he tells me.

  “I think we can make a deal,” I say.

  9

  Rubacek hurried right over. He was here by three o’clock, almost ready to do my bidding. However, he drew the line at loaning me his car outright. Instead, he offered to chauffeur me wherever I wanted to go. Nobody, it seems, touches his purple Grand Prix but Stanley. In the end his persistence paid off on all counts. He drove the car and I agreed to help him with his book.

  From the beginning Rubacek had been only looking for a collaborator. When the first session of COCWE was concluded, he had stridden up to me at th
e front of the classroom and said: “I’m in the market for a writing pro. Maybe you’re interested? I mean, you’re the only reason I signed up for this bullshit – that is so’s I could make contact with a writing pro. You could help with like the grammar, you know? That’s all. I don’t want the style changed. Keep how I think about feelings and life just how I wrote her down here.” An authoritative, spatulate forefinger emphatically tapped the bundle of dirty paper trussed up in cord.

  Stanley takes neither a polite nor an impolite no for an answer. In the weeks following he proved practically impossible to dodge. Fleeing down hallways in the Extension Division I could hear the steel clickers on Rubacek’s shoe heels ringing in pursuit, his voice pitched high in entreaty. “Perfessor! Perfessor! Wait up!”

  Too often overtaken, I tried to vary my escape routes. One week I beat him around a turn in the stairs and, momentarily out of his ken, ducked into a washroom. There I waited a decent interval, seated in a stall, pants hung around my ankles. I was not discovered. After the next class I hid again, admiring my guile and my fat white shins blazing in the light of the overhead fluorescent tubing. Foreshortened by my perspective they looked like Ionian pillars.

  But Rubacek, losing sight of his prey, had doubled back. The door of the washroom banged open, eased itself shut with a pneumatic sigh; familiar-sounding heels rang on the floor. He entered the neighboring stall.

  “I recognized your shoes,” he said, striking up a conversation. “I trained myself to be like observant. It’s the only way to survive some places.”

  “Who is this?” I said, attempting to alter my voice.

  “Stanley, perfessor.”

  It was hopeless. “Don’t call me that. I’m not a professor.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  The gravid feeling I had nursed through two hours of class had withered in my bowels due to his neighbourly proximity, making me petulant. “What do you want, Rubacek?” I asked sharply. I felt self-conscious, too, throwing my voice over a cubicle partition. The tiles, the mirrors, the porcelain emptiness magnified our voices eerily.

  “I was wondering, maybe you give some more consideration to my proposition what I made last week?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t ask me to go better’n sixty-forty.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything, Stanley.”

  “After all, sixty-forty is fair. It’s only fair I should get extra for, what you call, the trouble I put in it. Heart and soul is what I mean. All you got to do is grammar, spelling, and like punctuation.”

  “I don’t have time. I have other commitments.”

  “What’s this commitments? Don’t have time? You don’t want a piece of action might go Book-of-the-Month Club? Get serious.”

  “I am serious. I’m a very serious person.”

  A pause. “You got paper on your side?”

  “What?”

  “Over there. You got paper? The thing is empty here.”

  I passed the necessary under the partition.

  “Thanks. Take my word. You can’t lose. Let’s say sixty-forty and ten per cent of – what you call – subsidiary rights. Outside of movie and TV. I got to have artistic control over stuff in that respect because of … well, you know, personal type of thing, image questions. And your name goes on the book cover, too. Right under mine and in a little smaller type, so it’ll be Stanley Rubacek with – and then your name, see?”

  The peculiar thing is that all that time Rubacek was hounding me I never once inquired what his book was about. I suppose the explanation is that I just wasn’t interested. He had never dropped any hints in class about it; in fact, Stanley had insulted the other members of COCWE mightily by a blunt refusal to read from his manuscript. “No offence to nobody in particular, or general,” he had said, “but I feel maybe I got a top seller here and I don’t want my best concepts lifted.”

  I had a vague notion it might be a work of science fiction. I say this because I think I recall Rubacek toting a paperback copy of Dune to class which he read with no apparent attempt at concealment when Dr. Vlady favoured us with an instalment from his novel. Not very strong evidence certainly, but somehow, over time, it grew to the status of a conviction. A conviction which, of course, was erroneous.

  Actually I should have known better. For one thing Stanley doesn’t resemble a bit any of the aficionados of S-F I’ve known. I mean, there’s no battery of coloured pens clipped in his shirt pocket. Nor is he weird in the other acceptable way. All S-F types who’ve crossed my path have fallen into two categories. They look either like astronauts or like Frank Zappa.

  Rubacek, on the other hand, is the boy who occupied a seat at the back of your grade ten classroom with monumental indifference, met twenty years later. The baby-face voted cutest at the pyjama parties of 1964-65 has, with time and the acquisition of a poorly fitting upper plate, taken on the mildly ugly look of a chow. His hair is thinning, too, and to compensate, Stanley has swept a mousy-blond wing of hair from the left side of his head up and over the dome of his skull. Pink scalp shows between its strands.

  His body, however, shows no middle-aged sag, no flabby thickening. It is energetic, hard, heavily muscled. It has been cared for. He looks a little odd, as if time had attacked him only from the shoulders up.

  Stanley Rubacek produces the impression of a man who has never recovered from early vanity. Which is all to the good, since his self-absorption keeps him from inquiring too closely into my affairs. After I had explained that we were undertaking a search for my wife, and that she might be registered in a hotel under an assumed name, he only asked: “Is she shacked up with some guy?” When I told him no, he didn’t ask anything more. That apparently satisfied his curiosity.

  By four o’clock we’d completed the details of our bargain, shifted my box of survival gear from the moribund Fiat to the Grand Prix, and were tooling through Quadrant 1 in search of my wife. Stanley drove with special care. His mouth prim, he navigated the length of 8th Street, weaving the car from lane to lane. We headed east this time. The car was filled with the artificial scent of pine forest. Once he firmly reprimanded me for dropping ashes from my cigarette on the floor.

  I sat huddled in my parka against the door. It had been a long time since I’d been chauffeured, been a passenger, not since the second year of our marriage when Victoria’s father gave us a 1965 Ford Galaxie. I hadn’t wanted to accept the car but Victoria had prevailed. She said her father couldn’t understand how a married couple could ride bicycles.

  As a matter of principle I refused to drive the car. Still, on hot summer evenings it used to carry us out of the sweltering city and into the country. Victoria loved the twilight fields, loved them in that hour when the sky goes slaty and the new grain suddenly looks greener, luminously greener, than ever it does in the sun, and rolls in the evening breeze like a jade sea. We drove with the windows down, a tepid roar of wind keeping us silent, snapping my shirt collar, whipping our hair, filling the car with the nostalgic smell of possible rain.

  I watched the darkness concentrate first in the land, then in the sky. When it was truly night, Victoria would switch the headlights on and drive a little farther, then reluctantly turn the car around in the middle of a deserted road, where we’d discover a great yellow July moon risen at our backs.

  What do I want to say to her, after all? To tell her to choose happiness? Victoria always believed in it above all else. Yes, for her there should be no more compromises. I want to tell her that.

  Suddenly Rubacek said: “Society’s Revenge: The Stanley Rubacek Story. How’s that for a title?”

  “What?”

  I was taken aback. This was entirely unexpected. “Don’t tell me this book is your goddamn memoirs?”

  “The story of my life. It has an uplift angle. Quite upbeat. How a man came back from hell.”

  I was suddenly worried. “Just what kind of hell are we talking about, Stanley?”

  “Incarceration.”

&n
bsp; “Prison? You mean prison?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well.”

  “I knew you’d understand,” said Rubacek, “being a writer, being educated. Most wouldn’t. Some don’t understand society’s responsibility for a case like me. I mean, I see this book as my way of getting back some of what society took from me, you know? Not that money could ever repay me. But look at that Norman Mailer character. What’d he make on that book about Gilmore? Same topic basically as my book. What’d he make, I ask you?”

  I declined to volunteer a guesstimate of Mailer’s gross on Gilmore.

  “Did you read that?” asked Stanley. “How’d he know Gilmore was thinking that and then he was thinking this? He don’t know that. I thought that was some kind of nerve. The guy is dead and Mailer says Gilmore thought about pussy, pardon my French. But Gilmore can’t argue back for himself, can he? He can’t say, pussy my eye!”

  “Good point.”

  Rubacek was just getting warmed up on the topic of authorial outrages. “Yeah, well, Mailer’s book was shit but that one by the Frenchman with the butterfly tattoos was worst. What a bunch of bullshit. And they went and made a movie about him. Steve McQueen and that scrawny guy was in it, what’s his name.”

  “Dustin Hoffman?”

  “Yeah him. Was he blown off the screen or was he blown off the screen by big Steve? I guess he was.” Rubacek allowed himself a mournful pause in his monologue. “There was a loss to the industry. I loved that man in Bullitt. And in The Great Escape? Simply outstanding. That was a movie. Steve and Charlie Bronson in the same picture. They ought to have charged double price.” He shook his head. “That Bronson has a physique. Unreal. How old is he now? He’s got to be fifty. Fifty and a physique like that. Shows what you can do, eh?”

  I nodded agreement. What had Stanley been in for? How did one go about raising the question of what he had been in for?

  Meanwhile Rubacek was free-associating. The question came out of the blue. “If you was to get some actor to portray your life in like a drama or movie or television special, whatever, who’d you pick?”