My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “I don’t have the faintest idea, Stanley.”

  “Come on, think.”

  As five o’clock approached, the traffic had grown heavier. It crawled or halted in sluggish response to the change in the signals. The light was almost gone, the snow turned to pewter.

  “Well?” demanded Rubacek.

  “Charles Laughton.”

  I don’t believe he caught the name. In any case the question was posed merely to provide himself with an opportunity. He continued to ramble.

  “My all-time five to represent me would be like: Numero uno, Charlie Bronson. A close second, Steve McQueen. Then Clint Eastwood. Number four, Burt Reynolds. Fifth, Elvis. Surprised?”

  “Should I be?”

  “You didn’t notice nothing funny about the list?”

  I didn’t reply.

  Rubacek smiled. “Can’t guess, eh? Well, they’re in reverse order of handsomest. Like you’d figure I’d want the handsomest guy to play me. Like Elvis was the best-looking and then Burt, but they’re number five and number four. But I figure I’ve got to play rugged, so I go with Charlie Bronson.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Of course, McQueen was blond, like me.”

  “Makes sense, too.”

  “Anyway, I don’t see how Society’s Revenge: The Stanley Rubacek Story can miss,” he said. “It’s a very popular subject, crime.”

  “True.”

  “No offence to you, perfessor, but the guy I’d really like to have helped me on The Stanley Rubacek Story is the little jam tart used to be on Merv Griffin all the time years ago. The guy with a voice like Porky Pig without the stutter.”

  “Truman Capote?”

  “Right. That’s him.”

  “He could be difficult to persuade. You wouldn’t get Mr. Capote for a couple of rides in a ’71 purple Grand Prix.”

  “Well, yeah, didn’t I guess. I like the one he done, Cold Blood. They made a movie out of that starring Robert Blake of Baretta fame. That’s a guy with a good bod, that Robert Blake. And as I said, the book was no slouch either. It was pretty good how it went into the criminal mind and explains how a bad home life and a lack of a structured environment and all that can lead to crime. A structured environment is so important. What do you think?”

  “I suppose it is. If your parole officer says so.”

  “A lot of my problems,” Stanley said, “stemmed from having a lack of a structured environment in my formative years.”

  “Ah.”

  “So that’s why I write every day. To build dedication. The way I look at it, it’s like a muscle. You build dedication up like a muscle – by exercising it. What do you think of that one?”

  “Very good.”

  “I put that one in The Stanley Rubacek Story, although I thought maybe I should send it to Reader’s Digest for ‘Quotable Quotes.’ What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Stanley.”

  “Jesus, I get a kick out of ‘Q.Q.’ When I was incarcerated I thought up hundreds of sayings like that, and I sent a lot to R.D. But they never took any.”

  I unscrewed the cap of my thermos. “Your return address may have influenced editorial decisions.” I took a drink of cold, bitter coffee and rum, then offered it to Stanley.

  “What’s that?”

  “Rum and coffee.”

  “Not when I’m driving.”

  “Sound policy.”

  I drank again. We drove on.

  At last it was truly night. The sky was a shiny, bituminous black. On the other side of the boulevard the cars advanced towards the river, metallic skins glittering, headlight beams skating on their sleek surfaces. Everyone in full flight for home. I was gripped by conventional nostalgia.

  “I think you and me are hitting it off,” observed Stanley. “Myself, I like a high grade of company.” He reflected a moment. “I put that down to my intelligent quotient. They tested it, you know. They said I got no …” – he hesitated, recalling the phrase – “ ‘impediment to success’.”

  “Great. Glad to hear it.”

  “You know what your intelligent quotient is?”

  “No.”

  “They told me what mine is. Wanna guess?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t care to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I guess too low you’ll be insulted. If I guess too high you’ll be embarrassed to say it’s lower. That’s why.”

  “Not me. Go on, guess.”

  “Fuck off, Stanley.”

  “Okay, you win. It’s 125.” He enunciated the numerals very carefully, one, two, five. Like Mission Control, Houston. “But they said they could be off ten points. Like on a good day I might have scored higher. Which means I could be 135.” One, three, five.

  He waited for comment. I offered none. Finally he said: “Any idea what genius is?”

  “The infinite capacity for taking pains?”

  “No, I mean like how many points.”

  “No idea.”

  “140.” One, four, zero. Another pause to allow me to voice the obvious inference. I didn’t.

  “I’m only five points short,” he said at last.

  “It must be discouraging, missing by so little.”

  “I don’t think about it,” said Stanley.

  “Still,” I said.

  “If you want to know,” he said, “I got in a lot of trouble in jail became of my intelligent quotient. I found it hard to relate to a lot of the guys in there. We weren’t wired for one another. Not like you and me. We get along because our intelligent quotients resemble each other. I’d guess you were about 135 too,” he said judiciously.

  “Stanley, you’re making me blush.”

  “No, I mean it. I been studying you. You’re at least 135 – maybe higher. That ain’t nothing to sneeze at.”

  “Well, Stanley, you’ve got a nice intelligence quotient yourself.”

  “I don’t think about it. Really, what’s a high intelligent quotient.”

  I pointed. “Next right. Up there. The Travelinn.”

  “Believe me,” said Stanley, beginning to wrestle the wheel, “The Stanley Rubacek Story got to be a success. On account of compatibility. Ours I mean.”

  “Not to mention a combined I.Q. of two, seven, zero,” I said, bouncing on my seat as Rubacek took the Travelinn speed bump a little too impetuously.

  Rubacek is asleep in my bed. And I sit at the kitchen table, an insomniac. It’s three o’clock in the morning. I’ll give him another three hours of oblivion and then roust him out. After all, it was his idea to sleep here to ensure an early start in the morning, not mine. I’ve got to watch that bastard or he’ll take me over.

  One thing is certain. I’m not going to get any shut-eye tonight. That’s a forlorn hope.

  This happens whenever I get worried. I inherited insomnia from my old man. I wonder if he is still sitting up half the night fretting about his angina. It was his angina pectoris that scared him out of his business and led him to retire at fifty-nine. The doctor gave him a whole list of do’s and don’ts. Don’t walk in the wind, he told him. “Ed,” Pop said to me, “how do you not walk in the wind in this part of the world?” So he packed up and left for Texas after a winter of sitting up nights at the kitchen table drinking mugs of cocoa and eating buttered soda crackers.

  That winter my mother was always phoning me in tears. “He’s not himself, Eddy. All he talks about is regrets. ‘Why didn’t I take more holidays?’ he asks me. ‘What’d I knock myself out for? For this thing in my chest, doesn’t let me sleep?’ ”

  Yet now that he’s retired he seems happy enough. Is he? I think so. He sends me snapshots every several months, plays whist at the Snowbirds’ Socials, eats potato salad and cold cuts every day. “It’s like a picnic,” he wrote in one of his letters. “Every day a picnic.”

  I feel like shit. Too much booze and too little sleep. It’s the same every time. After a couple of hours’ hard d
rinking my body revolts and the booze starts sweating out of me. My shirt’s soaked through. I ought to put the Scotch back in the cupboard so I don’t finish off the bottle. I won’t, though. Put it back, that is.

  I cool my burning face by laying one cheek, then the other, on the Arborite top of my kitchen table. A childhood stratagem remembered from the hottest summer days. Then there’s the notorious all-body cool. I used to get a slap when my mother caught me clasping our Frigidaire in an embrace, pudgy body pressed to the cool, smooth surface, marring it with sweat.

  It’s so quiet I can hear the fridge making its trickling sounds, like a stream running under ice.

  How long can a person go completely without sleep? When I was getting sick, I went for weeks on just a few hours a night. But I did sleep. Some.

  Three or four days without sleep? Could a person last that long? Sleep deprivation is the preferred method of secret police all over the world. Keep the prisoner awake around the clock. Make him stand with his arms extended at shoulder height.

  I stand up and try it. Time passes. It begins to hurt, high in the sockets of the shoulders, deep beneath the blades of the back. Now the sweat pops. I watch the second hand crawling around the face of the clock on the wall. Arms vibrating with effort, I tell myself I’ll hold the position until 3:30 a.m., exactly. Like Stanley says, you build dedication up like a muscle, by exercising it.

  10

  On my map Quadrant 2 is a rectangle cast in red ink, a rectangle that bites an elbow out of the river and boxes the downtown. Now at seven-thirty in the morning I see it risen in relief like a bar graph plotted against a black sky, see it with the hallucinatory lucidity produced by sleeplessness. The high-rises, brightly striated with electric light, stand shoulder to shoulder and shimmer.

  The bridge Rubacek and I are crossing is tilted like a man in bed, one end resting slightly higher than the other, head pillowed on the river bluffs of the western bank, the bluffs I haunted in my illness. Down this gentle incline Stanley’s Grand Prix smoothly slips. At the bottom of the grade his foot stutters on the brake; he deftly switches lanes and merges his car with the traffic rushing into an underpass below the bridge. The inside of the car fills with the noise of engines echoing under the concrete arches and grey concave belly above, then the reverberations suddenly die behind us. To our left the white skin of the river flashes through gaps in a parapet of snow pushed up by snow ploughs and glazed blue by street lights. As the car accelerates into the long curve that climbs the river bank a new angle of vision shows me a cloud of stars. The road suddenly levels, the stars and their furious white light disappear as quickly as they sprang into view.

  The car comes to a halt at a stop sign. Ahead of us there is the long canyon of a city street. Traffic lights blink green, amber, red, and the infrequent pedestrian fractures the beams of car headlights with scissoring legs as he hurries across an intersection.

  “You ought to eat breakfast,” says Rubacek reproachfully. “It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  He has been harping on this theme since six-thirty. I don’t answer him. I’m learning that a man who has come back from hell, a man trying to build a successful life, is a righteous pain in the ass.

  Rubacek starts the car away from the stop sign. “And that cereal you got,” he continues, “that Cocoa Puffs, that stuff is like eating sugar. Why’nt you buy some eggs and have a nice slice of whole wheat and a little orange juice instead of them Cocoa Puffs?”

  “You don’t want to eat my Cocoa Puffs, don’t eat my Cocoa Puffs.”

  “There wasn’t nothing else, was there? I didn’t see nothing else to eat.”

  “There was a can of Mini Raviolis. Why didn’t you eat that, Rubacek?”

  “That’s as bad as Cocoa Puffs. Maybe worst.”

  Car exhaust lies knee-deep at the intersections. It creeps uncertainly this way and that, nuzzling the ground, fraying at the edges.

  “Look,” I say, “if you eat anything with a glass of milk it’s nutritious. You could eat the goddamn cardboard box the Cocoa Puffs came in and a pint of milk would make it a nutritious meal. You had milk, didn’t you?”

  “You need fibre. There’s no fibre to speak of in Cocoa Puffs or Mini Raviolis.”

  “I don’t suffer that complaint myself. I don’t need fibre. I’m regular as regular can be. You could set your watch by me.”

  Rubacek deftly switches subjects. “I bet you don’t get no exercise neither,” he accuses.

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t want any either, thank you very much. Especially if by exercise you mean that gruesome display I was treated to this morning. What in hell were you doing, Rubacek?”

  “Five-BX. It’s scientific.”

  “You tell that to old McMurtry downstairs. You tell him it’s scientific when he complains about your heavy-hoofed prancing shaking the plaster loose from his ceiling. It’s an old building and he’s an old man. My intention is peaceful co-existence with my neighbours, Rubacek. Try and keep that in mind.”

  “You’re getting to a stage in life when you might be thinking about tuning up the bod. An ounce of prevention is like a pound of cure. Right?”

  “I’m also getting to a stage in this conversation when I might be thinking about homicide.” Oops. Bad word, homicide, given present company.

  Rubacek continues unperturbed. “Stress and overweight. Double threat. All the magazines say so.”

  “All right, I didn’t eat breakfast because I’m dieting. Now if you’d shut up we’d take care of the stress business and both of us could be gladdened by my vastly improved prospects for longevity.”

  “We could do calisthenics together in the morning. It makes it easier for the beginner to get started, having a friend encourage him. Gets to be a routine. You want to do it?”

  “You won’t be around long enough for it to become habit-forming, you and I capering in unison. Forget it.”

  “There’s lot of programs on the TV could keep you active and trim after I go.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t understand how an intelligent person—”

  “Probable quotient, 135.”

  “How an intelligent person who knows all about heart disease and like that wants to kill himself.”

  “You’re a smoker, Rubacek. You aren’t lily pure.”

  “I’m stopping first day of March. I wrote a promise to my diary. No more foreign substances in my body. I done enough of that in my time. It leads to nothing but trouble.”

  Promise to his diary. Who writes promises to their diaries? And why does my path have always to run across these types?

  “I like that. No more foreign substances. What’s that supposed to mean? What’s a foreign substance, Stanley? No more Brie? No more Camembert, Vienna sausages, Perrier?”

  “Jesus, look who didn’t get no sleep. Look who got out the wrong side of the bed. You know what I mean. Like drugs and alcohol. What you call – foreign substances.”

  “I didn’t get out of the wrong side of the bed because couldn’t. Somebody was in it.”

  “You offered.”

  “And another thing, Rubacek, if you want to be a writer strive for precision of expression. Avoid clichés.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like ‘foreign substances’ or, ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Isn’t it the most important meal of the day?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Rubacek.”

  A block further down the street I can see the King Edward Hotel, all dirty-red-brick charm and tea-cosy respectability. Its lounge was the favourite after-work watering hole of Victoria and her girlfriends. Earlier this morning, when Rubacek and I divided between us the downtown hotels we would scout, I made certain that it was on my list. I am hopeful that familiarity may have drawn Victoria to the premises. On the other hand she may have steered clear of any place where she might bump into friends. />
  I spot an empty parking space across the street from the King Edward and direct Stanley to it. He swings the car to the curb and cuts the engine in front of a delicatessen with mahogany-coloured sausage coils hung in the window. The sight makes me regret my uneaten breakfast. The cooling motor ticks in the cold and I feel a recurrence of the anomie that often accompanies exhaustion. This great heaviness of body and spirit, this piercing sense of dissociation, has been alternating with peaks of restlessness and irritability since four o’clock this morning. I dry-scrub my face with my hands, roll the muscles of my neck under the balls of my thumbs, light a cigarette.

  “We’re looking for a blue Volkswagen with a busted fender,” says Stanley. I glance at him as I shake a match out. He isn’t asking a question but rather preparing the ground for something else.

  “Yes,” I say. Rubacek is staring straight ahead through the windshield. My eyes follow his. What’s caught his attention? I see nothing particularly arresting. Two women hurry down the sidewalk. Hips swinging under bulky coats, they occasionally punctuate their long-striding march by a skip and a hop that indicate the cold has stung them into a desperate trot. One of them has a rugby scarf pinned to the lower half of her face with a mittened hand. Canadian purdah.

  I turn back to Rubacek and realize his attention is not being held by this scene. He’s merely avoiding looking me in the face. “I was thinking last night that I could be getting myself into bad trouble helping you,” he observes.

  “You were, were you?”

  “I don’t ask you why you want to find her or nothing like that,” continues Rubacek in apologetic tones, “but I’d appreciate some idea of what you’re going to do with her when you get her.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at, Rubacek. I told you before, I want to talk to her.”

  “Begging my pardon all to hell,” he says, “but that’s what my old man used to tell my old lady from the doorstep when she locked him out – all he wanted to do was talk to her. Lots of guys say that. It’s mostly a different story if they get inside. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re going to one hell of a lot of trouble for a little conversation.”