Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Same old Ed,” he says uncertainly, jollying the madman.

  “No,” I say, “it’s not the same old Ed. Ed doesn’t sleep too well any more. He’s getting fat and cranky and he’s verging on vicious, Benny. This is a new Ed and he’s not going to be fucked over any more. Personal, shit.”

  “You know what I mean by personal. We’ve gone over this again and again,” Benny says impatiently. “I mean that you should get yourself a lawyer, a professional. You need someone to conduct your affairs in a civilized, businesslike way. We could put an end to this rancour and bad feeling if you’d just get a lawyer.”

  “I don’t need a goddamn lawyer to tell you and my wife that I don’t want a divorce. No divorce. That’s it. As they say in your business, Benny, that’s the bottom line. No divorce.”

  “What you want and what Victoria wants are two different things, Ed.”

  There is an awkward pause. I jump in with both feet. “I get the feeling Victoria is being told what she ought to want by somebody else.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Benny is beginning to sound irascible, dear boy.

  “Excuse me if I say his name begins with a B and I wink in your direction.”

  “Oh Christ. Now I’ve heard everything.”

  “Then quit acting like a goddamn harem eunuch guarding the sultan’s favourite honey-pot. Give me Victoria’s address.”

  “No.”

  “I ran into her today. She told me that you told her not to talk to me. Is that right?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Where the hell do you get off telling her not to talk to me? I thought a divorce lawyer had the responsibility to aid in a reconciliation. How the hell can we be reconciled if you keep standing in our way? It’s your duty to give me her address, for chrissake.”

  “My duty is to my client. To protect Victoria and her interests. Right now that means keeping her away from you. You have this talent for making people feel guilty. How, I can’t imagine.” This seems to genuinely bewilder him. Victoria’s sympathy for me seems as bizarre to him as mourning a dead rat.

  “Victoria has a conscience, what can I say?” My heart leaps at the news of her… regrets? “I wish the same could be said of you.”

  “I can’t afford one. I work for a living. I don’t live your sanctified existence.”

  “Benny, you have cut me to the quick.” I pause ominously. “I am a man in love, Benny. I can’t afford the luxury of a conscience either.”

  I sense Benny’s ears prick up at that. “Ed?”

  “Yes.” I try to sound as dangerous as ever I can.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Give me Victoria’s address. I’m finished being a nice guy.”

  “Are you threatening me, Ed? You better not be threatening me.”

  “We lived together for a long time, Benny. You know old Ed. Hell hath no fury like a roomie scorned.”

  “Out with it. Just what the hell are you trying to say?”

  “I have a lot of free time on my hands, Benny. I could learn to be a real nuisance. You know how I get when I’m thwarted.” The word sounded positively hell-like on my tongue. “How would you like me trailing you around town, keeping tab on your extra-curricular activities? Rumour has it you’re still a ladies’ man. I could keep track on who you’re shagging, Benny. Just like a big-league scout. With reports to the manager, Mrs. Benny, and perhaps even your owner, the father-in-law.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “It’s a possibility, Benny. Don’t push me too far, I’m near the end of my tether. God knows what might pop into my head next. You always claimed I was erratic, remember?”

  None of this makes me feel as rotten as I should. But all is fair in love and war and this is a bit of both. Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It’s a malady of the modern age. Since Victoria left me there has been entirely too much drift in my life. Sam Waters is the only firm point, but he can’t replace a wife.

  “I suppose I have no choice, do I?”

  “None.”

  “Victoria has moved to 719 Tenth Street East. She’s in Apartment 23.” Benny clears his throat. “Ed,” he says sinisterly, “let me tell you how much I’m looking forward to seeing you in court.”

  “Benny, Benny, nothing personal.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “One other thing, Benny. Is there anything else I should know?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, for instance,” I inquire with feigned merriment, “does Victoria have anything large, jealous and dangerous lounging around the house? Something sporting two hairy balls? A live-in friend?”

  “You’re a goddamn degenerate. You make me sick.”

  “We all grow up in our own surprising ways, Benny. Look at you, a BMW socialist. We make our way in the world however we can, don’t we?”

  “Victoria has told me stuff about you, Ed, that I didn’t believe until now. And I’m going to make you admit to every humiliating detail in court. Every one of your pathetic tricks. Dressing up in a suit and tie every morning, walking out of the door and pretending to go to work for two months after you’d been fired. A moral coward,” he says disgustedly.

  “Okay!” I shout. “You try it! Get me on the stand! If I can’t handle a two-bit shyster lawyer whose term papers I used to write, then I resign from the human race!”

  “Proofread!” he yells. “Proofread!” That got to him. Benny is very touchy about his intellectual abilities because deep down he suspects, quite correctly, that they are extremely limited. “It isn’t as easy as you think, smart-ass. You’ll find out.”

  When I get Benny going I can drive him absolutely berserk. Get it in and really twist it, Ed. “Oh yeah,” I say. “That really tough lawyer stuff. Habeas corpus, juris dictionae fundandae causa, caveat emptor, annus mirabilis, hocus pocus.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” says Benny. “But before I do, I have one question for you.”

  “What?”

  “When might we expect your novel?”

  Click.

  I’m not sure any more that I want to face Benny in court. He appears to have mapped my soft underbelly and knows just where to slip the thin blade into my cuts.

  The novel. Driving through the dusty haze of a soft summer evening to Victoria’s apartment building I reflect on my metamorphosis into an author.

  I still regard the idea of the book as a master stroke. Not, mind you, the idea for the book, but the idea of the book. After being unemployed for a full twelve months I had to invent a plausible occupation. People were always asking me what I did. I didn’t do anything. I was simply unemployed, which doesn’t qualify as an activity but is, rather more accurately, a state of being. In the animal kingdom it has its metaphorical equivalent in the hibernation of the bear or the woodchuck, or in the pupal stage of various insects. Or so most people seem to think. Particularly employers who never want to hire anyone who isn’t already working for someone else.

  So one day, in answer to the inevitable question as to what I did, I replied that I was a writer. It just popped into my head. I noted a cessation of embarrassing questions. The news circulated among Victoria’s friends and my acquaintances. Nobody questioned my sincerity. It appears they regarded this profession as socially unproductive enough to appeal to me.

  The strangest thing was that this public confession got me writing. Sort of. I admit I have spent more time thinking about writing than actually writing, and even more time talking about writing than actually writing. But still, if one announces one’s membership in that illustrious company of joyous spirits, living and dead, who have judged the pen mightier than the sword, one had better evince loyalty to the side and scribble.

  However, from experience I can testify that authorship is a trying, taxing business. It is particularly so in my case because I can’t seem to get interested in writing about what I ought to be writing about. I mean, after all, I was once a seriously considered candidate for a Ca
nada Council grant, a genuine, copper-bottomed A-student with a double major in English Literature and Philosophy. I was going to ship out for England and write a dissertation.

  Consequently, I am capable of bandying around the names of some pretty thoughtful people: Blaise Pascal, Soloviev, Ellul and even Simone Weil. I was even forced to read some of their books. In fact, at one time I had a very strong affection for Soren Kierkegaard, who, at least in the flesh, seemed to have much the same effect on people that I have. Like me, the gnarled little Dane didn’t mix well at parties, was inclined to goad people into a frenzy, and made too much of a love affair.

  Because of my exposure to great thoughts I feel a vague obligation not to reflect too badly on my education. I feel I ought to at least take a shot at a Big Book. Somehow I can’t seem to manage it.

  My first Big Book was to be about my generation, a revealing tale about what it was like being a Canadian university student during the Vietnam war. Let me tell you it wasn’t easy having to vicariously share the guilt and agony of their war like some poor cousin.

  There was, of course, the question of Canadian complicity. But we lacked the necessary stage properties to put on a really top-notch performance. We had no draft cards to burn and there was the lingering suspicion that if we desecrated the new flag we might be taken as friends of the Canadian Legion. Back then, twelve or thirteen years ago, we didn’t even have our own black problem, though we did have plenty of relatively unmilitant and unfashionable Indians. So we imported Black Panthers from Detroit to address rallies and harangue us as motherfuckers. Somehow the home-grown product, cats like Lincoln Alexander, didn’t seem capable of that.

  This novel about the groves of Academe came along quite briskly for some four or five pages and then I started to worry about a title. What was I going to call this masterwork? My first choice (because it has a nice hollow sound) was The Lost Generation. But that was Gertrude Stein’s line, and the bunch from the twenties, Ernest, Scotty, etc., had earned their right to it by a lot of self-destructive behaviour. It just wasn’t fair of me to pinch it.

  But mulling over the word “lost” got me reminiscing about my grade one teacher, Mrs. Edwards, who wouldn’t countenance the word. Unless any object, be it eraser, jumbo pencil, or crayon, was indisputably proved to have been irrevocably blasted into a time-space warp, in Mrs. Edwards’ mind that object held out hope of being recovered. Hence, it was not lost but misplaced. All Mrs. Edwards’ charges were firmly taught to blithely chirp, “Teacher, my pencil is misplaced.”

  So I began to wonder, if my generation couldn’t be lost, might it be misplaced? The Misplaced Generation. And somehow, having once thought that, I couldn’t return to my novel with the same serious, sober heartiness I had shown before, and so I abandoned it.

  I then began my second Big Book, the story of the seduction of a Washington-based Canadian diplomat by an American anchorwoman, a little tale that was to be a parable of Canadian innocence pitted against American worldliness and savvy. But the longer I sat at my kitchen table with the chipped Arborite top, the soles of my stockinged feet being concussed by my downstairs neighbour’s stereo, the more utterly at sea I found myself. No matter how hard I tried to skilfully manoeuvre my characters, they just wouldn’t steer. Nothing my diplomat insisted on saying sounded diplomatic or persuasive, and my anchorwoman kept wanting to unhook her bra and cast off her panties at the drop of a hat, which didn’t jibe with my attempt to portray a metaphorical view of the relations of our two nations. That is, unless I could work in a scene of enforced coitus interruptus. That Big Book died too.

  I note with some dissatisfaction and envy that Victoria’s apartment building is obviously newer and better-maintained than my own. From where I sit in my parked car I am also able to see that it has a security door and one of those buzzer panels that force you to ring the occupant to get the door sprung. That might cause me some problems.

  I get out of the car and begin to nonchalantly cruise the sidewalk in front of the building with my hands stuffed carelessly in my pockets, and an eye cocked on the entrance. When I finally spot a couple standing in the vestibule waiting for a taxi, I go up to the door and hopelessly fumble in my pockets as if looking for my keys. No one knows anyone else in these buildings and after twenty seconds of watching me rummage in my pants the man obligingly opens the door. I smile and shake my head ruefully and jangle a set of keys at him.

  “You always find ’em after somebody takes the trouble,” I say in a fair imitation of bemusement at the world’s wondrous workings.

  He nods and smiles in agreement.

  I locate Victoria’s apartment on the second floor. I know she is in because I hear the stereo playing Cleo Laine. My heart melts a little. My wife is nuts about Cleo Laine. I knock on the door.

  Victoria doesn’t take the chain off the door when she answers it. This is untypical. Perhaps living alone has made her more cautious. At one time, to my worry, she was too trustful, a petter of stray dogs, distempered cats and their human counterparts.

  I let her see clearly who it is.

  “What do you want?” she inquires sourly.

  “Please let me in.”

  “No.”

  I dart my hand through the gap and grab the chain. This is a desperate measure. It isn’t going to get me in, but it prevents her closing the door in my face. Of course, she could break my wrist by banging the door on it, but I’m willing to risk agony for love.

  Victoria doesn’t slam the door but she does bite my thumb. Right on the nail, hard. I almost faint, the way I did when I was a boy being vaccinated at school. There is something about me and pain. But I grimly hang on, issue an exquisitely pitiful moan and think of Sam Waters and all he suffered. Speaking comparatively, this is nothing.

  The pain suddenly subsides and Victoria is gone. She comes back and shows me a claw hammer. An Iroquois squaw displaying the instrument of torture to Père Brébeuf.

  “You let go of this chain, Ed, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Tear my heart out and feed it to the dogs,” I declare dramatically. “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

  “I’ll smack you, Ed,” she says, beginning to cry.

  “Please. Please let me talk to you.”

  “Damn it,” she says, quietly snuffling, apparently resigned to my entry, “let go of the chain so I can unhook it.”

  “No tricks? Promise?” I say doubtfully.

  “Let go of the damn chain!” she shouts in frustration.

  I do and she opens up. I go immediately to the kitchen sink and begin to run cold water on my thumb.

  I am a little disappointed to see that the skin isn’t broken or the nail discoloured. I won’t be able to play this for much.

  “They say a human bite is far more dangerous than a dog’s,” I comment matter-of-factly. “The bacteria in the saliva are more dangerous. Maybe it has to do with the carbohydrates in our diet. Maybe they provide a richer culture.”

  No answer.

  I poke my head around the corner and peer cautiously into the living-room. Victoria has flung herself in a resentful attitude across the chesterfield.

  “You have a very nice apartment,” I say. “You should see the place I’m in. The tile’s lifting off the kitchen floor and the walls are so thin I can hear my neighbour’s bum squeaking and rubbing on the bottom of his bathtub.”

  “So move.”

  I take a deep, contrite breath. “I know I had no business butting in today,” I say. “But I was worried about you. You looked so goddamn awful.”

  “Check out a mirror. Worry about yourself. How long have you been sleeping in those clothes?”

  She’s right. I should have, at the very least, changed my clothes and showered before coming by. To be perfectly frank, a trip to a barber might have been in order too.

  “Excuse my appearance,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve been so busy -”

  “Ha!” An explosion of bitter disbelief and contempt. “Busy doing what?
Just what in hell has occupied so much of your time you can’t wash your clothes or comb your hair? Tell me, Ed. That’s one I want to hear.”

  “The novel,” I say uneasily, beginning to shift my weight from foot to foot nervously like a small boy called up on the carpet, “I’ve been working hard on the novel.”

  “Excuse my scepticism,” she says tartly as she gets up and flicks on the television.

  “Turn that off!” I shout. I’m angry now. I am working on a novel. I have nearly seventy pages written and I can hardly sleep some nights for the notions that pop into my head.

  Victoria ignores my request and fixes her pretty, long-lashed peepers on the TV. Two pitiful clowns on the screen are gambolling around a grey, wrinkled elephant in artificial gaiety, trying to make an audience of children laugh. Cleo is still belting it out on the stereo. I can hardly hear myself think in this bedlam.

  “I repeat, I am working on a novel.”

  “Misdirected, wasted effort,” she says.

  “Take that back!” I shout.

  “Misdirected, wasted effort,” she repeats calmly, enunciating each syllable slowly and distinctly.

  “This coming from a person who considers running around in thirty-degree weather an activity worthy of a rational being. Talk about misdirected, wasted effort,” I say acidly.

  “You just aren’t capable of understanding, are you, Ed?” Victoria coolly asks. She begins to lecture in her professional voice. Victoria is a social worker and doesn’t often forget it. “You won’t allow yourself to understand because you intuitively sense that what’s behind it all is self-discipline. And self-discipline is something you don’t have and never will have.”

  “Judge not lest you be judged.”