My Present Age (33 page)

“It’s all in your imagination, Ed. You know that. And you know where your head can lead you.”

“Do you mind if I turn this light off?” I ask. “My head is pounding and the light in my eyes makes it worse.”

“Go ahead.”

I pull the chain.

“I’m afraid, Ed,” she says. “I’m afraid to live with regrets. I honestly don’t know what to do.”

“Yes,” I say.

We lie in a queer, artificial dusk, side by side, untouching, like effigies of a medieval couple carved on a cathedral tomb. Thinking this, I cross one leg over the other. A knight depicted on his tomb with crossed legs, someone once told me, is a sign he had been on a crusade.

“I’m
tired,”
Victoria suddenly exclaims.

I don’t say anything in reply.

“You have no idea what this is like,” she says. “How can I decide? I love him, Ed.”

“Yes.”

She says no more but cries quietly for a bit. Then her breathing grows regular, measured. She’s fallen asleep.

When she wakes I feign sleep, listening to her careful, discreet movements as she gathers up her clothes and packs. When the door closes and I hear the Volkswagen start, I uncross my legs, which have begun to cramp.

W
hen Marsha picked me up for the wedding tonight, Stanley waved goodbye to us from my apartment door and shouted a request for me to bring him home a piece of wedding cake. He is staying on at my place to work on revisions to
The Stanley Rubacek Story
and gives no indication that he ever intends to leave.

I am wearing the tux this evening, but not even being dapper can lift my spirits. Ever since Victoria stole away from me in the motel four days ago, I’ve gone into a kind of slide. I keep mulling over all the mistakes I’ve made in the past, terrible, wounding mistakes. I am bitten again and again by regret.

It must be evident how I feel because earlier this evening Marsha chided me for looking glum. “Show a little enthusiasm, why don’t you,” she said. “You’re at a wedding, not an autopsy.”

So I’ve tried to lighten my mood for the dancing that is to come later. After all, that’s why I’m here, for the dancing. But even drinking all those cocktails before dinner and nearly a bottle of wine with the meal hasn’t seemed to work. I still feel awfully low.

There were a lot of speeches and toasts before, during, and after dinner, a veritable banquet of oratory. They’re still going at it while the busboys clear the tables. It has all reminded me of my own
wedding and has started me thinking of Victoria once more. So here I sit, trying my best to get happy and to convince myself that all will be for the best.

The more I drink, the more moving I find the speeches. On several occasions I have been brought to the point of tears and had to dab at my eyes with a napkin. Marsha took note of this and when the waiter came around with the brandy she put her hand over the mouth of my snifter and gave me a look that wasn’t hard to interpret.

But at a wedding the love and good feeling present are contagious. I decided that Marsha ought to know I hold no ill feeling towards her whatsoever. So I said: “Marsha, I know you lied to me all along about not knowing where Victoria was, right up to the last, but I forgive you. What’s past is past.”

She said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ed, but you better straighten yourself up before the dancing starts.”

It was then that I excused myself, ostensibly to visit the little boys’ room. However, I went nowhere near any lavatory. Instead, I went downstairs to the hotel bar, quickly downed two doubles, and then hot-footed it back here. I’ve arrived just in time to catch one of the grizzled uncles making a speech full of advice for the newlyweds.

Right at the moment he is emphasizing that they should never go to bed angry with one another. That’s worse than poison, he says. As he rambles on, bride and groom gaze up at him, necks twisted and patient smiles pasted on their faces.

As I listen to him speak I find myself growing agitated. What he is telling them is all very well, but surely he is failing to raise issues central to the survival of modern married life. This young man and woman ought to be warned!

As he finishes I find myself getting to my feet, ablaze with a sense of mission.

At first there is difficulty in getting the master of ceremonies to acknowledge me, and Marsha, tugging at my trouser leg, almost
topples me over, but by exerting a considerable effort on both counts I manage to gain and hold the floor.

I begin in the customary way by extending my heartiest congratulations to Robert and his bride, whose name for the moment escapes me. Then I go on to say that I wish to offer a few cautionary notes to bride and groom as they embark on their voyage through life. I urge them to listen carefully to what I have to say because there is no teacher like failure. For the first time this evening I feel a little better because I can help these people, I can be useful. And for five or six minutes everything seems to me to go very well. There is absolute silence as I sketch the course of my own unhappy career in marriage and the various pitfalls into which Victoria and I tumbled. Yet somehow I feel my points will be lost on them if I fail to generalize. So I strike on another illustration. “Of course, Robert,” I say, addressing the groom, “you already know something of the similar difficulties your sister Marsha found herself in, in respect to troubles of the kind I have been outlining.”

“Who is that man?” says someone very loudly and rudely.

Another person calls out, “Sit down and shut up!”

I ignore these interruptions because of the importance of my message. I say that I know Marsha won’t mind my touching upon certain aspects of her marriage because she knows that in the great experiment of life we are all workers in the same laboratory, and that whatever one researcher discovers he is honour-bound to share with his fellows.

By the time I complete my review of Marsha’s marriage there is a good deal of noise in the room and I am forced to hasten to a conclusion. Once more I am on the brink of tears. Turning to the bride and groom I throw open my arms and cry, “Embrace one another with courage. Search each other’s hearts for hidden suffering and never flee what you discover! That’s the ticket!”

I am a little surprised there is no applause when I take my seat. I thought that last bit might have moved them as much as it moved
me, bringing tears to my eyes. There is no accounting for people’s reactions.

Then two of Marsha’s lubberly brothers latch on to my arms and begin to drag me towards the door. I appeal to Marsha but she averts her eyes. In the hotel corridor an altercation ensues; I receive a split lip and my lovely tuxedo gets ripped.

Now it’s four in the morning and I’m sitting in a twenty-four-hour doughnut and coffee shop, eating bismarcks. When the bank opens this morning I’m withdrawing all the money I have left in my account. I’m not even going back to the apartment for my clothes and the rest of my things. Stanley can have it all. Or the landlord.

I’m running away.

T
oday was a stifling hot day, much hotter than a day in May ought to be. Now it’s raining. I’ve flung wide all the windows of my basement suite and let my rooms fill with the nostalgic scent of wet grass and the sound of water running in the eaves.

The old woman upstairs must have gone to bed; I don’t hear her moving around up there. She’s a widow. I rent these rooms from her and give her a little something extra to do my shopping. I don’t go out much because I’m pretty sure Victoria is looking for me. I feel that I should at least be in when she comes. She’s probably terribly worried.

The old woman upstairs is a good cook. Last month, April, I paid her to bake me a dark-chocolate birthday cake. Last month I was thirty-two. We had a simple, quiet celebration. I went upstairs in the afternoon and we sat and ate cake and watched the soaps on
TV
.

I needed a clean break with the past. Things got out of hand. That’s why I never went back to the apartment, just walked away from it all and let Stanley have it.

I disappeared. Goodbye to Benny, Marsha, Peters,
COCWE
, Victoria. A new, simpler life.

There are only two people from the past I’ve been in touch with, Mr. McMurtry and Tom. Courtesy of the radio, that is.

Lately I’ve thought Mr. McMurtry sounds enfeebled. I suppose it’s because of Tom. He isn’t as patient with him as he once was and Mr. McMurtry feels his displeasure, I can tell from his voice. It’s not as robust as I remembered it; he’s lost confidence. I thought I’d try and cheer him up, so I had the old woman buy a greeting card, but in the end I didn’t send it. A disappeared man doesn’t send greetings.

Tom, however, is doing wonderfully well. His star is rising. In just the last two months the station has given him another program in addition to his morning open-line show. It’s a nightly five-minute spot that is a lead-in to the eleven o’clock news, editorials on questions of the day. Or, as Tom styles them, “Rollins Radiotorials.” I never miss his show. It makes a welcome break in the long evenings. You see, I’m having trouble sleeping again.

Tonight Tom is discussing evolution. There’s been another dust-up in the city school system and light needs to be shed on this delicate topic.

There are those of you who will disagree with me on this one
, he says,
but I see Evolution as here to stay. You can’t make Progress go away
.

I’ve always liked that soft, gentle sound, the sound of rain dropping mildly out of the sky. This rain will continue for hours.

Maybe the problem is that she’s leaving it up to the others. I don’t suppose any of them would be out tonight looking in a downpour. Well, maybe Stanley might. But not Benny. Or Marsha. And Victoria certainly shouldn’t be, not when she’s pregnant. And anyway, is there one of them who is capable of organizing a search on the scale I did? I mean a search with a map, and quadrants, and red circles, and all of that? It’ll take them more than a few months to find me. I covered my tracks.

I should turn my radio up. Tom’s voice seems to be fading in and out in the rain.

Several centuries ago, the famous British Prime Minister Disraeli – that’s D-i-s-r-a-e-l-i, if you want to look it up – said in regard to the then controversial topic of evolution, “If it’s a choice between the apes and the angels, then I’m on the side of the angels.” I think he had a point. I’d like to agree with that great British statesman
.

Of course, angels. When I was little, and afraid to go to sleep, my father used to say, “There’s no need to worry, Ed. Your angel watches over you. God made the angels so they never need to sleep. He did that so you and me can.”

It’s not really that I’m afraid to sleep. It’s this business of closing my eyes. When I do I see the strangest things.

Pop. He’ll be getting his letters returned because I left no forwarding address. I haven’t told him where I am because he might tell Victoria. I think she should work as hard finding me as I worked finding her.

So all those envelopes of Polaroids are being sent back to him. Sometimes when I close my eyes I see him sitting in his lawn chair under his striped awning. All the returned letters have blown in drifts around his knees. He looks as if he’s sitting in a snowbank and I feel as if I’m watching him through a zoom lens. As I focus in on him, less and less of him fills more and more of the camera until there’s only a big baseball cap, huge sunglasses, a plain of white face. And then I see frost on his lips and know that he’s been frozen solid in my blizzard of returned letters.

The world is billions of years old and getting older by the minute. Now here’s a thought I had. Maybe Evolution, or whatever, is slowly turning Mr. Disraeli’s apes into angels, but it’s all being done so gradual we don’t realize it. Wouldn’t that be something quite unique? Stranger things have happened. Look at the platypus
.

This is Tom Rollins, this May 23, asking all you good people to keep thinking about it
.

I’m tired. Waiting is tiring. And then because I don’t want to see things I have to keep my eyes open. The rain makes this hard. It
can lull you. I wonder how long it will keep up. It’s a fine thing this smell of drenched, yielding earth. If I could only close my eyes without seeing things I could sleep. And if I could sleep I know I’d soon be as right as rain. Right, right as rain.