My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  This morning when I woke I remembered the eight manuscripts I have to read and the class I have to conduct later this evening. If today weren’t Tuesday I could be out tracking down Victoria. As it is, I’ll have to dismiss my eager scriveners early to get to Hideous Marsha’s apartment by nine-thirty. I’ll tell them my agent is in town. They’ll understand.

  No, maybe I better not mention an agent. It’s bad enough facing them as it is; I don’t need another lie on my conscience. How did I let myself in for this? I could say I believed I’d be found out and sent packing, which is certainly true. I did believe that. I thought I might carry on the hoax for a while, scrape through two months at most. An easy five hundred bucks. How was I to know I’d be shepherding such a batch of innocents? Fat ladies in scruffy shoes with the backs trodden flat, one of them covered in suspicious-looking bruises; a thin girl who sometimes soundlessly weeps at the back of the room for what reason I don’t know; Dr. Vlady Mandelstam, the Russian-Jewish émigré who has hopes of repeating Nabokov’s succès d’estime in a second language. Dr. Vlady, who haltingly communicated to me in nearly unintelligible English his love for Jack London and the language of “nobble Shaksper.” And Rubacek, who believes every mendacious word I feed him, takes notes while I speak, and doggedly pursues my friendship.

  Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday I ask myself why I did this terrible thing. The answer is that I needed the money. But that is the excuse of a criminal. I’m not just taking money under false pretences. No, I am sinning against the dreams of other men and women.

  Yet my claim to be a successful writer was only meant to encourage them and I modelled my impersonation on their dreams of success, not my own. After all, at one time I wanted a different kind of literary fame than the sale of a package of six scripts to Magnum P.I. That lie was uttered to breathe hope into the bruised lady, the thin girl. In private I confided to the aesthete, Dr. Vlady, that I only did script-writing to buy time for serious intellectual work, for an “art novel.”

  Exactly what Rubacek wants to hear I haven’t figured out yet.

  The trouble I find myself in puts Eaton’s china department in a new and slightly more favourable light. Of course, if I hadn’t quit I’d have been fired, wouldn’t I? So what’s the point of regrets? Perhaps, however, I might have hung on by my fingernails for a few more months if Pop hadn’t dropped that insurance policy in my lap. I saw it as a chance to pursue the simple life. The Chinese sage said it all: “Beware of your desires, for ye shall certainly attain them.”

  The fact remains, I was never meant to sell china. Only truly saintly men are cut out for that; the sort of men who trudge the roads to Benares, or reside on icy hilltops speculating on infinity. It takes more faith than I can summon.

  The china company representatives, men invariably short, bald, and moist of palm, had this faith. How I wished I could, like them, colour my voice with awe when I said the words “diplomat line” or “basic foundation for the royal service.” They possessed an unvarying confidence and belief in china. I didn’t have it. I didn’t believe in china.

  Mr. Brown did. I will not mention his firm, ancient and respected as it is. For Mr. Brown, porcelain was the last, thin, fragile line between civilization and savagery.

  “Remember Melmac?” he’d say. He had a bee in his bonnet about Melmac. “Used to come in soap,” he’d say contemptuously. “Gone the way of the buffalo. But we’re still here. Two hundred and forty-seven years of gracious dining and British craftsmanship. Tell your customers that, Ed.”

  I didn’t want to tell my customers anything. I didn’t want to talk to my customers. I was getting so bad in the last months of my employment that if I was the only unoccupied clerk on the floor and a customer made for me, I broke for the washroom.

  Customers, I learned, come in all temperaments, shapes, and sizes. All of them horrible. The middle-aged were intent on value, Mother Courage types who could gallop a wagon through the midst of the Thirty Years War without turning a hair. The elderly fell into two categories. The sweet and doddering were worst. I have spent hours smiling and snapping pencil stubs in my trouser pockets while they meandered slowly down memory lane with me in tow. But only a cad and a swine would vent his frustration on them. No relief to be had. The prescription was to suffer and grin as if one were in one’s right mind.

  The hard-eyed biddies swathed in muskrat and possessed of all their faculties were a different story; these I considered fair game, like McMurtry. Many of them were regular and valued customers of the department, old battleships whom I christened in my mind with the venerable names of fighting ships of the line: H.M.S. Courageous, H.M.S. Royal Oak, and H.M.S. Victory were among the tougher. When I saw these old broads swing their barnacle-encrusted hulls hard about to unleash a broadside of vituperation at Ed’s waterline, I felt the obsequious smile I’d learned to fasten on my mug unravel. I heard myself giving sharp answers in a phony English accent I unaccountably adopted on such occasions.

  “Madam, I shall repeat what I told you scant days ago. We do not have a gravy boat in the particular pattern you require. That pattern, I should hazard to say, was discontinued approximately the time General Gordon was slain at Khartoum. Surely you recall that tragedy? It was in all the papers, I believe. No? Strange. In any case, as I have already intimated to you several times, we don’t have it in stock. We never, ever, ever shall have it in stock. I suggest you consult a reputable antique dealer, madam.”

  There were complaints laid against the “the rude, fat Englishman.” Understand, I’m not complaining but explaining. With every day that passed, my position at Eaton’s grew more insecure. I had two warnings from my superior before the cavalry arrived in the guise of an insurance policy and I was rescued from the certain ignominy of dismissal with cause.

  This unhappy train of events has led me here, to Tuesday, once again unprepared to orchestrate another Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter. I hate reading those manuscripts, postpone it as long as possible. It is like holding up a mirror to my face and gazing at the distortions of the imagination. For you see, my Huck Finn bedtime episode of last night is not in the least unusual. As long as I can remember, I have been carelessly casting myself uninvited into novels where no self-respecting novelist would have me. This literary gate-crashing of mine must be a sign of a wretched thirsting after immortality.

  When I was a child my preference for Classics Illustrated comic books made me a subject of derision for contemporaries whose tastes ran to Wonder Woman, Superman, and even Little Lulu. I did not bear up well to mockery, never have. For a time I shamelessly accepted the critical orthodoxy and made voluble professions of admiration for the antics of Sluggo and Dennis the Menace. I was motivated by a desire to be liked, an impulse that invariably leads me into no good. But one day I broke, as I always do, under the strain of deception, and during the interminable recounting of a Sgt. Rock anecdote by adenoidal Julius Kreuger, who kept interrupting his thin tale to say: “Wait, wait, I forgot before he done what I just told you – you’ll like this, this is something, really – before he chucks this grenade –” I heard myself shrieking that Sgt. Rock was a slobbering moron and likely a slobbering moron sissy besides, and that Cyrano de Bergerac could whip his ass any day of the week!

  Julius demurred and after he had sat on my face for twenty minutes I allowed that I might be in error. Never cross the Establishment.

  Being a ten-year-old middlebrow had its perils, yet the happiest memories of my childhood are of bread and jam and a new Classics Illustrated balanced on my pudgy, dimpled knees. It was all shot and powder for the imagination – The Red Badge of Courage, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, Ivanhoe, King Solomon’s Mines – and once primed and charged I went off in surprising ways. I was known to emerge (say after the fourth close reading of The Last of the Mohicans) into the sunshine of my backyard transformed from portly little Ed into the fearsome Chingachgook. There I stalked the hereditary h
unting grounds in a breechclout cobbled up from bathing trunks and facecloths, my face and naked chest emblazoned with zigzags and wriggles of Mom’s lipstick. From the back of my head the pheasant feather I had expropriated from her Sunday hat rose like an exclamation mark, held quivering in place by a rubber band that slowly squeezed off the blood supply to my scalp.

  As Chingachgook capered recklessly about the suburban grass, whooping, howling, and dispatching shaven-skulled Mingos to the Happy Hunting Grounds with his tomahawk, neighbour ladies watched slack-jawed with amazement and thanked God for what they had been spared. In the aftermath of such performances my father would order my mother to prevent these public costume dramas. Angry voices would rise to my upstairs room.

  “I can’t watch him all the time.”

  “For chrissakes you’re his mother! If you don’t watch him, who will?”

  “It’s a stage.”

  “All right. It’s a goddamn stage, and I give him thirty seconds to get over it. Thirty seconds. You know what Prokopchuk asks me the other day? When am I taking him to Hollywood? Then he winks. I got to put up with that kind of crap?”

  “Well, that means a lot coming from Bill Prokopchuk, doesn’t it? His boy is seven years old and can’t ride a bike yet.”

  “Jesus, what do I care? You think I care? He isn’t my kid. We’re talking about my kid. Do something with the one I got, for chrissakes.” At the very least Pop wanted me kept inside the house and out of sight. If I could not be made to forgo the pleasure of impersonating Fagin, Natty Bumppo, or the Melancholy Dane, he argued I ought not to inflict my performance on innocent bystanders.

  I was an embarrassment to him. I knew it even then. It would not be hard to portray him as an insensitive villain, but it would be neither fair nor true. Pop may have worried that I made him look ridiculous and absurd, but he also worried about me. He wished to spare me pain. He wanted to encourage me to be “well rounded.”

  This was part of his own larger struggle to fit in, something he never quite managed to do. Not that he didn’t work hard at it. Every Saturday afternoon in the dog days of summer found him in front of the TV set watching the Game of the Week. He would stare at the screen intently, the picture of a man concentrating all his resources of will. Sometimes his lips moved breathlessly, repeating what the colour commentator had just said, committing his words to memory. He looked like a man preparing himself for a Monday morning quiz on the weekend’s action – which was how he looked at it. Pop didn’t really like baseball, but he believed that for business reasons it was necessary to talk baseball. Still, he was hopeless. Stan Musial, he claimed, was his idol; but do you think he could remember Stan the Man’s number?

  I, on the other hand, adored baseball – on TV, that is. But Pop insisted on me actually playing the game. He undertook heroic measures in an attempt to fashion me into a passable athlete. The same pig-headed, hopeful persistence that kept him writing letter after letter of inquiry to boards and committees also kept him pegging baseballs to a sullen, flinching fat boy.

  For forty-five minutes every night after he came home from work we played catch, or I took batting practice. The shadows lay purple in the rich green summer grass and the smoke of barbecuing meat rose blue beyond our hedges while I, sweaty and resentful, hacked away with my pint-sized bat.

  “Keep your eye on the ball.”

  “I am!”

  “Ed, you’re not.”

  “I am, too!”

  “Don’t cry, Eddy.”

  “I’m not. It’s dirt in my eye!”

  “It’ll come, son. Don’t get frustrated. Just listen to Pop.”

  I see him standing in Sad Sack khaki pants and work boots, the sun in his eyes. Nat King Cole was singing on a radio in the next yard. He was wrong. It didn’t come.

  Most times he was practically out on his feet, so tired he wavered a little stooping to pick the ball from the grass. There was always sweat on his face and hair falling in his eyes. Before we were done, his lips had tightened into a bloodless cut in his face. He had back trouble, something to do with a disc. It wasn’t hard to see from whom I inherited my panther-like grace and stunning hand-eye co-ordination. The old man threw off his front foot like a girl, with a girl’s buggy-whip arm motion. Did he think he was fooling me with his stories?

  “We’ll make you into a top-notch first baseman yet,” he’d call to me across the lawn. “I played first base. You don’t need a lot of speed at first base.”

  In my humiliation and rage I wanted to yell back at him: With who? Who’d you play first base with? The Hooterville Handicaps, you spastic you?

  I didn’t yell at him, though. That came later when I was sixteen and in high school. Pop had given up on baseball by then in favour of me putting the shot. As implausible, as insane as it sounds, my father actually bought me a shot as a present.

  “All right,” I said, hefting it from hand to hand, “where’s the cannon?” I thought it was a joke.

  “You, Ed,” said Pop, “are the cannon.”

  It took some time for me to comprehend that he actually wanted me to throw that thing in an upcoming high school track-and-field meet. I refused.

  “It makes sense,” he argued, “you’ve got the size.”

  “No.”

  “Ed, you’ve got to put your mind to doing things you find hard. It builds character and prepares you for life.”

  “No.”

  “Look here. Look at this book. I bought you a book. It shows you how. It’s all laid out with photographs.”

  “No!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Ed, that’s no answer. You’ve got to take part in school activities.”

  “Why do I have to take part in school activities?”

  “To make you well rounded. And it’s a preparation for the world of business. You lay the foundations for success now, Ed.”

  He had pushed me near tears. “Then maybe you’re the one ought to heave the old shot around! If it’s so good for christly business! Because you’re such a terrific goddamn success story, right!”

  It was only then he finally realized I knew. I’ve never forgotten the look that passed over his face.

  A week later, driven by guilt, I began to practise putting the shot in the backyard, following the principles outlined in the manual Pop had bought. The lawn was soon pocked with tiny craters. I was asking forgiveness, but he did not encourage my perseverance as he earlier would have. He refused to acknowledge, even in an off-hand dinner-table remark, that I was conforming to his wishes. Once I caught a glimpse of him watching me from his bedroom window behind a discreetly parted curtain. After two weeks my mother said to me, “Your father says there are holes all over the back lawn. He wants to know if you know anything about it.”

  I moved my practices down the block to the park.

  When I was younger, the purpose of sport had not been to build character but to seduce me from my fantasies. It was no more successful then than it was to be later. The final straw for Pop was coming home and finding me wandering around the property got up as Vercingetorix, the unfortunate warrior chieftain who raised all the tribes of Gaul in rebellion against their Roman occupiers. The sight of his son shuffling around with his wife’s Persian lamb jacket buttoned at his throat like a cloak, a two-foot-long moustache of yellow wool yarn Scotch-taped under his nose, and a colander stuck on his head, was just too much the poor man. He confiscated my comics and announced they’d stay locked up until I was old enough that they wouldn’t have that kind of effect on me.

  He’d missed the point. If what I read didn’t have exactly that kind of effect on me, what was the point in reading it? I never outgrew my reliance on fantasy. My personal aesthetic is a simple, sensual one. I wish to taste the faint tang of urine in the kidneys with Mr. Bloom, and to savour the tea-soaked petite madeleine which evoked a delicious shudder of memory in M. Proust. I wish to escape my blunted senses, my time. For me there is one pertinen
t question: Am I, having read this or that book, inclined to clap the metaphorical colander on the old noggin?

  Pop was not then and never has been interested in such questions. That summer he was exercised by a more practical matter: how was his son’s time to be occupied? His answer was lessons, and a stretch of hard time in Little League baseball with my skinny contemporaries. Hardy little ruffians who joyously chanted, “Ed, Ed, the donkey’s dead! Died with a potato on his head!” as I writhed in the dust after being beaned with a hard, rising fastball. Summer stretched before me as an arid waste of boredom, relieved only by the discomfort of bruises, blisters, and taunts.

  Until I realized that while my father could place my tattered treasures under lock he couldn’t shut down the public library. That was where the originals were kept. My summer suddenly became cool, lazy, and inviting. While my parents thought I was sensibly occupied with a variety of lessons (tennis and swimming) and frequent Little League baseball practices, I was sequestered among the library bookshelves gorging myself on contraband chocolate bars and salted peanuts as I splintered lances with Ivanhoe, pursued the renegade Simon Girty, cackled a capella with Mr. Hyde, and hauled iron with Shane. I missed the colourful illustrations of the comics and found the language of many of the books puzzling, but reading was pure heaven when I thought of the alternative – bruised shins and scraped elbows. It was also that memorable summer I made the acquaintance of Huck and Tom and Jim, and fell utterly in love with the ravishing Miss Becky Thatcher.

  The other consequence of this abandoned summer of forbidden pleasures was a weight gain of seven pounds that left my mother perplexed and worried. (“I can’t understand it, Doctor. He’s been so active this summer, yet he keeps gaining weight. Could it be his glands?”) The long-term consequence has been a pathetic reverence before the altar of literature.

  It was this reverence, coupled with penury, which hastened my present problems. After the first rosy flush of liberation from Eaton’s, the cold dawn of calculation shed its grey light on the obvious: the tidy sum my life insurance policy had yielded could not possibly last me the year’s sabbatical that I felt entitled to after my stint of grinding labour. This realization led to a mild depression that lifted only when I got the phone call from the University Extension Officer offering me – no, to speak accurately, pleading with me to accept – the job as instructor of the Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter. Literature, I told myself then, does not spurn her unworthy suitors who stand season after season through hail and sleet and snow, singing beneath her bright window.