My Present Age (20 page)

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 drinking 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.

O
n 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.”

“Meaning what, Stanley?”

“Meaning I don’t want no part of, what you call, a domestic dispute. If you’re going to talk to her by hand I don’t want no part of it. I can’t afford to get mixed up in that kind of thing. Even if my book was to suffer,” he adds weightily.

“For Christ’s sake, Rubacek,” I exclaim, aghast, “are you suggesting I’m going to beat her up? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

For the first time Rubacek turns his shallow, pale eyes on me. “I’m not suggesting diddly squat, perfessor. I’m asking.”

“I don’t strike women, Stanley. You’re talking to a civilized man.”

Claims to civilization don’t appear to cut any ice with Rubacek. “Excuse me for mentioning it, perfessor, but you don’t look real civilized. In fact, you kind of put me in mind of Alley Oop or like that. You got the look of a guy might take a lady for a drag by the hair and so on.”

I lean forward and crook my neck at the rear-view mirror. He’s right. Two piggish inflamed eyes squint out of pouches of flesh, a dirty, raspish stubble makes my jaws heavy and brutal. I barely have time to take in this dark, sinister image when it begins to dissolve in the warm mist of my breath; blotches of vapour spread like a blight and consume my face. I fall back against the seat and say the one thing I suspect will convince him. “My wife’s pregnant, Stanley. I’m not going to start knocking her around when she’s pregnant. Do you think I want to hurt my kid?”

The King Edward Parkade is stacked beside the hotel in four levels. Climbing the stairs to the second of these allows me to experience what exercise in these temperatures can do. Breathing through my mouth makes my teeth ache and fills my lungs with a parching
coldness. My heart jolts under my parka. I stop to cough. Too many cigarettes, too fat.

I cling to the railing, collecting my breath. There is frost on the steel and the cold creeps into the fingers of my glove like a stain. The entire stairway is exposed to the wind and is treacherous with ice. A floor below I slipped and damn near broke my neck on a patch of glassy, yellow ice left by a pissing drunk. Now a biting, twisting wind is burning my face and moulding my trousers to my legs.