My Present Age (32 page)

“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 pelvis. 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.

“Don’t think it was you, Ed,” she says at last. “It was things in general, coming to a head. Things have been too much lately. It wasn’t really you.”

“Oh, I suppose it was,” I say. “More than you imagine.”

“No.” Victoria hesitates. “Marsha probably told you everything, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Then you know. I asked her not to.”

“Well, if you ask Marsha not to, she does. If you ask her to, she doesn’t. It’s the nature of the beast.”

“I didn’t have anybody else to talk to. She’s got more heart than you give her credit for.”

“Actually Marsha and I have grown to be friends, quite affectionate really. She bought me a tuxedo. I’m escorting her to her brother’s wedding.”

“Which brother? The skinny one? Danny?”

“I don’t know
which
brother. A brother. There was a whole litter of them, wasn’t there?”

“Yes. I think so.” She rattles off names. “Kenneth, Danny, Paul. Robert?”

I shrug.

Victoria remains silent for a time. Her face in profile is stony, the lips compressed. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve thought and thought. But there doesn’t seem to be any answer. I’ve just sat here and watched
TV
and smoked those goddamn cigarettes and bawled.”

“If it’s any use to you, I’m not going to give you any more trouble over the divorce. I’ve given up on that. You want to marry this guy, or whatever, marry him.”

“The only thing I ever wanted,” says Victoria, “was to feel that things could get better. I need to feel things getting better.”

I could say we’re old enough now not to count on much; our experience teaches us the contrary, but I don’t. I’m turning into a diplomat. I don’t say anything.

“He’s got his good points. But he’s selfish.”

Nor do I question her as to what these alleged good points are. What I do say is, “You can’t stay here forever. You have to make up your mind. And arrangements have to be made either way.”

“I know all that.”

“Then act on what you know. It’s all you can do.”

Victoria turns on her side. Her face looms near mine. The bones are more severe than I remember them. “What would you do, Ed? If you were in my place, what would you do?”

“Christ, Victoria, you know me. Who the hell knows what I’d do? I can only say what seems to make sense. Forget about, you know … That’s a complication you don’t need right now. If you want to make things start to work for you, maybe that’s the only way to do it. In a year he could change his mind about a kid. But that’s not for me to say, you know him better than I do. But be calculating for once. Neither you nor I were ever very calculating and look where it got us.”

Victoria fumbles at the bedside table, locates a package of cigarettes and lights one. “Sometimes I think of myself at fifty,” she says, expelling smoke. “I’ve never done very well making choices. It seems I can’t trust myself – anyway the evidence suggests I can’t. When I’m fifty the kid would still be with me – in some way. I don’t want to be alone at fifty. Somehow I don’t expect Anthony will be around when I’m fifty, I have that feeling now. He didn’t come for me.”

“Then come back to me. I’ll be there at fifty. And so would the child. You can have us both.”

“Ed,” she asks, “why do you insist on this?”

I suppose there is no explanation that makes any abiding sense. But I try to offer one. “Because we made a stab at growing up together. We married too young and lived in such a way at the beginning that a part of me didn’t develop, it withered like an unused limb. Responsibility, whatever word you want to call it. Anyway you supplied a crutch, Victoria, and I grew up the way I am. Without you all I can manage is to get by.”

“And that’s what I was? A crutch?”

I see I’ve made a mistake, explaining. “No, not just a crutch. The thing was you never showed any fear of life. You expected happiness. You were my courage.”

“But not always enough.” Victoria is thinking of my breakdown.

“No, not always enough. But as much – more – than anyone could be expected to give.”

“When you went into that room and didn’t come out I thought at first it was a trick. One of your games.”

“Maybe it started that way.”

“Marsha told me about this heart attack business. Are you looking for sympathy, or do you believe it?”

Do I? At one point I did. I’m not certain any more. “There’s something wrong with me,” I say.