My Present Age (19 page)

“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.”

“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?”

“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.