My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Yeah, well …”

  Marsha stands. “I don’t want to talk about Bill any more,” she says. “I don’t like marching over old ground. Let’s go upstairs and have a drink to the realists.”

  There it is, that peculiar tension, awkwardness, that can surprise two people who had never intended such a thing to happen.

  I run my hands down my pants creases. “I won’t bother you any longer.”

  “Come along,” she says, “I’ll take a quick shower and you can make us some drinks. I’ve got those powdered mixes. You can have whatever you like.”

  “No, I’d better go.”

  “You can have whatever you like, Ed.”

  “No.”

  That’s the end of it. Her face displays neither anger nor disappointment. I have, with a twist of perspective, become once again a fat man of limited qualities. “Suit yourself,” she says.

  I show the taxi driver the money and the map with its numbered quadrants, o’s, red lines. “I’ve got thirty-five dollars,” I explain. My finger runs up 22nd Street on the map. “I want you to pull into every motel along here until the meter hits thirty-five bucks. When it hits thirty-five bucks, stop the cab and let me out. Okay?”

  “Just let you out wherever?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t know where you’re going?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You mind if I ask for the money first?”

  Returning to my apartment exhausted, I find all the lights are burning but the place has an air of vacancy. While hanging up my parka I call out to Stanley and get no answer. I walk through empty rooms that have been cleaned, tidied. The dishes have been done. My bed is made. My dirty clothes have been picked off the floor and stowed in the laundry hamper.

  In the living room I spy a stale package of cigarettes I’d left on the top of the TV days ago. Lighting one, I break another of my recent resolutions to preserve the tenuous health of my heart.

  I sit down and close my eyes. The tobacco, very dry and strongly flavoured by the plastic-tasting heat of the TV, snaps and sizzles faintly. The cigarette burns between my lips like a fuse. I think of the afternoon spent looking for Victoria. Images twitch behind my eyelids. Lamp standards jerk by, snow drifts, men in neutral-coloured clothing stand in the windows of motel offices, hands in their pants pockets, shoulders rounded. Thirty-five dollars spent and a bus ride home. Another resolution broken.

  I wonder where Stanley’s gone. I have a feeling he mightn’t be back. That would explain his putting the place right. The lights would have been left on as a welcome. He knows how I hate an empty, dark apartment.

  If Rubacek had moved in with anything more than the shirt on his back I could confirm my suspicions by checking to see if anything is missing, by checking to see what he’s taken with him, but he came with nothing.

  I remember the manuscript of Society’s Revenge: The Stanley Rubacek Story. Surely he wouldn’t leave that behind.

  It isn’t on the kitchen table where he worked. The table has been cleared and cleaned. I can make out the wipe marks that have dried in dull, soapy streaks on its Arborite top. I search all the rooms, even going so far as to rummage in a linen closet, to go down on my hands and knees to peer under a bed. No manuscript. Stanley is definitely gone. What if I have another heart attack? I could die alone here and nobody would know.

  It’s in the fridge. With a bottle of ketchup resting on it like a paperweight. There’s a note.

  “I knew you couldn’t miss it here!!! But seriously Ed don’t leave this on ice to long, okay??!! I’m dying to hear the verdict. (Bet you never expected to hear that one from an excon. Ha. Ha.).”

  Cold has made the pages feel slippery and damp to the touch. He is coming back. I set the manuscript on the table, pour myself a drink, read the first page, reread it.

  I finished the book in six hours. It is clear from this creaky melodrama that Stanley has never been a convict, likely never even committed a crime. However, it is equally clear that he has read a good many books about crime and criminals.

  Yet he is not simply a liar. I once knew a girl like Stanley. She attended my junior high school. When she was twelve she suddenly announced she was Adolf Hitler’s daughter, smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war. Her parents, her teachers, nobody could dissuade her from making her bizarre claims. She suffered for them. Teasing made her life hell; she lost her one friend, a girl almost as strange as herself. Unclever, plain, nearly ugly, she was still somebody, the daughter of modern Europe’s greatest madman. She was Adolf Hitler’s daughter. Even when somebody pointed out in 1962 that she was too young to have been born in 1945 she merely said, “I’m not thirteen, I’m seventeen.”

  She was taken to a psychiatrist. From that moment on she ceased saying she was Adolf Hitler’s daughter. She began to say, very calmly, “My name is Eva Hitler.” She began to sign test papers, essays, and letters with that name. When tormented past endurance she would cry: “I’m not responsible for what my father did! I was only a baby!”

  After two years of this her family moved away. A report reached us in a couple of months that in her new home Eva Hitler was once more Doris Wright.

  And so with Stanley, I suspect.

  17

  “What the hell time is it?”

  “Seven,” says Rubacek, stepping into the apartment. He is pale and his eyes, which are bright with excitement, seem all the brighter because the flesh beneath them is darkened with fatigue.

  “You could learn to ring the doorbell instead of hammering away like that. I’ve got trouble enough with my neighbours. What did you want to do, wake the whole goddamn building?”

  “I found her,” he says. “I found your wife.”

  Across the road lies the Skyways Motel. The airport is half a mile away. A descending jet fills the car with noise so that Rubacek has to raise his voice. He is explaining how he tracked down Victoria. “All night,” he says, “I drove every place. You know? All around looking. And then I thought of the airport. The fucking airport. Airport equals hotels. Right? I seen it there, must’ve been 6 a.m. of the morning. A Volkswagen, I says to myself. Busted up? Blue? I even wrote down the licence number.” He twists in the seat and fishes a slip of paper out of the change pocket of his jeans. “JRS 257,” he reads – “That it?”

  I’m very nervous and that makes me snappish. Rubacek wants to be praised. “I told you before, I don’t know her goddamn licence number.” Nevertheless, it is Victoria’s car parked there in front of room 37, beginning to show its blue paint in the winter morning light.

  Last night Rubacek had to strike a match to be sure. He has told me that several times.

  “What time is it?”

  “Nearly nine,” says Stanley. I’ve kept us waiting here nearly forty minutes and Rubacek is growing a little impatient. “If she isn’t up by now she ought to be.”

  “She likes to sleep late every chance she gets.”

  “Well, how long we got to sit here? Are you going over there or what?”

  “You want to start the car and get some heat in here? I’m getting cold.”

  “I ain’t got much gas. You ain’t cold, you’re just nervous. Lots of people feel cold when they’re only nervous.”

  “I said I’m cold.”

  “Bite my fucking head off.” He turns the key, the motor whines into life.

  A strong breeze is blowing, unusual for so early in the morning, and serpents of driven snow writhe on the black pavement. The wind has cleared the steadily brightening sky of cloud. The day will be sunny and cold. The spreading light gives me a sense of distance from all those things of the past few days. Victoria is close at hand now. A short walk across the road and I am in the thick of possibility, of opportunity.

  Rubacek, however, has been steadily diminishing in this light, has shrunk to the size of an anecdote. Is this because we have come to an obvious parting of the ways and now return, each to our separate solitudes? I had bet
ter speak.

  “I read our book,” I say. His reaction is not what I thought it might be. I see he is, at the crux, afraid of discovery. “When? Last night?” he asks quickly, avoiding my eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you should think that’s it. You know? I ain’t sure. I don’t think I’ve got it just right. It don’t feel right to me.”

  “It’s an interesting book, Stanley.”

  “I don’t want that. I don’t want an interesting book. I want a fucking monster book. I want” – he seems to lose the train of his thought – “I want – you know, my story to be told.”

  “I see.”

  “But if you think I got it …”

  “You know best, Stanley. Your sense of what you want is better than mine.”

  “Maybe if I put the love interest in. I left it out.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “She was beautiful,” says Stanley, “she lived only for me. But her family wouldn’t let her associate with a known felon. If we’d been allowed to marry I might have reversed my life around.”

  I turn away and watch the snow creeping over the pavement. After a bit Stanley says, “Go on, Ed. Go on over there.”

  “Not just yet. She mightn’t be up.”

  “Go on. I’ll wait.”

  “No, I’ll find my way home. You can leave.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll talk about the book some more?”

  “Sure,” I say, opening the door. “We’ll talk about the book some more, Stanley.”

  Trotting across the road, hunched sideways to keep my face averted from the wind, I’m nervous as a bridegroom. I’d have delayed this if I could. Suddenly I don’t feel ready to face her.

  I think, What pose should I assume confronting her? What mental attitude? Something Philip Marlowe-ish seems appropriate for a hard-bitten character who has tracked a wayward woman to a cheap motel on the edge of beyond, just short of nowhere. A place where some guy called Burt or Art or Frank discounts the price of an uneasy sleep if you intend to stay a week or more.

  Rapping briskly on the door of room 37 makes my knuckles smart because they’re cold. I’m sucking them peevishly when I realize there’s a peephole in the door through which Victoria can peruse sex-slayers requesting admittance. Knuckle-sucking is not hard-boiled. Has she seen me?

  Inside there are dim rustlings, silence. She is probably in bed. I strike the door sharply with the palm of my hand. “Victoria. It’s me. It’s all right.”

  “Who?” Evidently she isn’t using the peephole. Her voice is muffled, flannel-mouthed.

  “Me. It’s me.”

  “Anthony?”

  She sounds hopeful. It is an awful moment. Anthony. Loathsome, acorn-gobbling swine in the groves of academe. I steady myself against the doorframe. “Me, yes!” I shout. Not exactly a lie.

  The bolt shoots back with a click, the chain rattles, and when the door opens I lurch in before Victoria can swing it shut again.

  A small cry.

  “It’s Ed. It’s me-Ed.”

  In the hiatus that marks my announcement I experience a piercing sensation, a feeling that on entering this room I have entered my past. Not déjà vu but a perception more definite, exact. The room smells of cigarette smoke and dirty underwear. None of the lights are turned on.

  Our images in the large mirror on the dresser catch my eye. We move in it, vague shapes. The hood of my parka still drawn up, I am an awkward, dropsical monk of the Middle Ages, one of the fearful ones, burdened under his habit by chain mail. Victoria glimmers in the glass, skin-toned panties and bra dark against her dead-white winter flesh.

  “Liar,” she says vehemently. “Liar.”

  I walk past her to the bedside lamp and switch it on. In the brazen light she looks ill, jaundiced. Her hair hangs lank, greasy. She hugs her breasts as if trying to cage pain. “Fucking liar.” I’ve never seen her like this.

  The room is a mess. This isn’t like Victoria. Half-empty Cokes standing on the dresser float shredding cigarette butts and burnt matches. A towel that has been used to sop up a spill of some kind lies sodden and twisted at the foot of the bed. In the middle of the room her suitcase lies split open like an overripe pod, bursting with rumpled, soiled clothing.

  Suddenly I feel very afraid.

  “Have you been eating, Victoria?” I ask, taking off my parka, trying to keep my voice level.

  “Liar,” she says dully, not bothering to look at me.

  “I didn’t say I was him.” The room makes me edgy. I sat in such a place, in the half-light of drawn curtains, closed doors, in used air.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? And then I open the door and it isn’t him. It’s the fucking liar at the door.” Her face has lost its yellowish cast; it’s gone blindingly white. The contrast reveals traces of old lipstick on her mouth.

  “Have you been out of this room at all, Victoria? Have you seen anybody?”

  “I don’t want to see you. Why don’t you just get out?”

  I try to explain. “You don’t know how hard I’ve been looking for you. Everywhere. I want to make up for what I did in the restaurant. I’ve been sick with worry. I drove for days, looking. I—”

  “Don’t give me any of your crap,” she says. “I know why you’re here. Marsha sent you. He wouldn’t come, so Marsha sent you.”

  “What do you mean, Marsha sent me? Marsha doesn’t know you’re here.”

  “Marsha sent you,” Victoria says, “because he wouldn’t come. And I told her not to tell you anything.”

  I take a moment to absorb this. “No,” I say, “Marsha didn’t tell me anything. I found you myself.”

  “The dirty liar is lying again.” She covers her ears with her hands. “I’m not listening to any more lies.”

  “Stop it,” I say, catching at her arms, trying to pull her hands down. “Listen to me, Victoria.”

  Speechless struggle, a rubbery twisting of arms. She wrenches loose from my grip. I see my finger marks livid as burns on her white skin. We stare at each other, breath ragged. Her face is a furious mask, eyes flat and black.

  “Liar,” she whispers hoarsely.

  “Listen to me, Victoria.”

  This time she covers her ears and squeezes shut her eyes too.

  In a hot rage I pull at her elbows. Flailing arms, hoarse breath that smells faintly of ether, tangled legs. We sway in a dance of contention. Her forehead burrowing and knocking against my breastbone is a dull pain.

  Suddenly I remember the baby and break the circle of my arms, releasing her before she harms herself. “All right, enough!” I shout.

  She’s caught a fistful of hair at the side of my head. Hangs on it. All in a rush I feel like a man seized by a drowning swimmer. Her weight is suffocating.

  “Stop it!” My palm twists and slides against her temple as I try to push the hard, obstinate skull away, try to break her hold. Reeling in a stumbling shuffle, off-balance, locked against one another, I slam into the bathroom door. The knob punches into the pad of yielding flesh over a kidney. I hang transfixed by a bright pain that daubs little blurred circles in my eyes. All I can manage to say is, “Please. Please let me go.”

  “Bastards,” sobs Victoria.

  I lurch off the door, really panicked now, trying to run away. Grunting under my burden I stagger across the floor. Two blows. Something sharp, hard, bites into the cartilage of my ear. The moonstone. She must be wearing her moonstone. My ear roars with sea noises. I wag my head madly, trying to shake her fist out of my hair. I can’t breathe.

  Wall to wall, corner to corner on trembling legs. Plunging against furniture. A chair topples, a Coke spills and rolls off the dresser to the floor.

  Nails rake the skin under my eyes, scratching furrows of heat, tracks of smarting wetness. I snatch her wrist. “Victoria!”

  “Sons of bitches. Sons of bitches.”

  Christ, she’s trying to knee me. I twist my pelvi
s. She batters my hip. A hand grabs my collar, my shirt front spits buttons as cloth rips.

  I’ve got both her hands. They flutter and flap as I squeeze her wrists. “Now,” I say, “stop it!”

  My right leg scoots out crazily, a muscle gives way in my groin with a wrench. Pitched sideways my head bounds off a corner of the dresser with a crack. I tumble to the carpet. A yard from my face the Coke bottle I stepped on is still spinning like a deranged compass needle. I’m afraid the pain will make me vomit.

  There is always plenty of blood from a scalp wound; already I can feel it creeping out of my hairline and when I sit up it spills down my face.

  The sight sobers and chastens Victoria. She sits down abruptly on the bed as if she’s been slapped in the face. One of her bra straps has fallen in a loop down her arm and wisps of hair are plastered in the tears and sweat on her face, or tangled in saliva at the corners of her mouth. She brushes at them with a shaking hand.

  I get to my feet and hobble to the bathroom, where I run cold water on the back of my neck and gently probe the lips of my wound with a finger. It’s not very long or wide. In any case, the flow of blood has eased to a slow, steady seepage. I wad toilet paper onto the ache and stickiness and limp back to Victoria. She is stretched full length on the bed, a forearm thrown across her eyes.

  “You all right?” she asks, hearing me. She doesn’t move.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought I’d killed you.”

  “It wasn’t for dint of trying,” I say, and add, “I’ve hurt my leg.” I move to the edge of the bed and sit down beside her to take the weight off it. Feeling the mattress sag, she removes her arm from her face. “Maybe you better lie down,” she says, edging away, making room. “You don’t look so hot. You’re pale.”

  When I lower my head on the pillow I feel dizzy. The bed slowly wheels as it does when I’m drunk. The fit passes and I find myself concentrating on the comfortable closeness of another person’s body, her breathing. How long has it been since I companionably shared a bed? A year and a half? Our silence lengthens. I hear water coursing in pipes, a car engine starting in the cold with a mechanical squeal of protest.