My Present Age (18 page)

“You’re so fucking cute I could just puke. And wipe that shit-eating grin off your face. Have you any idea the grief, let alone the bread, that little practical joke of yours cost me? No, I bet you don’t. My father-in-law’s partners wanted my balls for bookends after I had to tell them some maniac had the firm’s stationery. By some quirk of logic they held
me
responsible.”

“It’s the unsavoury company you keep, Benny. Chartered accountants, real estate agents, stockbrokers, politicians in embryo. Your betters quite naturally doubt your character.”

Benny forged on with his litany of sorrows, unheeding. “Those old sons of bitches made me pay fifteen hundred bucks of the pledge out of my own pocket. Janice’s dad kicked in the difference and agreed to pay for the printing of new stationery to get Fitch and Levine off my back. They were particularly pissed, those two, Fitch and Levine.”

A harrowed look came over his face. He took a long swallow of Scotch. “You singlehandedly wiped out my skiing holiday to Banff, you jerk. But that wasn’t the worst. Fitch made me phone every goddamn hostile, irate lawyer in town to try and explain the public challenge to match or better our firm’s contribution.
And
the fucking judges. They were spitting blood, standing on their dignity. Old Monkman, who it seems I have to appear before every second week now, didn’t believe me. I know he didn’t. He hasn’t ruled in my favour in months now. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with
him. Kept calling me a buffoon with no regard for the credibility of the profession, or respect for his office.”

If I had a short memory I might have felt sorry for Benny at that moment. But that bastard had screwed me more than once in the past. The summer of 1968, unknown to me, he stashed a half-kilo of grass in my suitcase when we returned from a weekend spent in Minneapolis/St. Paul catching a Twins’ home stand. In 1968 a person could go to jail for a very long time for a half-ki. Benny always maintained there had been nothing to worry about – that I looked 4-H enough not to be bothered at the border. The son of a bitch.

I splayed my fingers across my chest. “And you believe that I, Ed, am the author of your misfortunes?” I often talk like this to Benny. That is, I adopt a declamatory style with a whiff about it of the nineteenth century and the Old Bailey. Lawyers today lack the elegance and eloquence which were once their chief distinction and ornament. Lo, the glory has departed.

“You’re fucking right, asshole. But better you put it this way: I
know
you are. I’ve got the goddamn proof. That’s why ever since the mail was delivered this morning it’s suddenly in your interest to start paying me back the fifteen hundred bucks you owe me, prick.”

“I see. So that’s how it is.”

“That’s how it is.” Benny was enormously pleased with himself. He tickled and teased his ice cubes with his swizzle stick. “The shoe pinches now it’s on the other foot, doesn’t it?”

Benny is a poor winner and an obscene gloater. I thought for a time, taking rapid, peckish sips of my Scotch. “Let me make sure I understand you completely,” I said. “Your overheated imagination has cooked up a scenario in which I scribble, then fire off nasty notes which embarrass, confound, and otherwise make your existence miserable. Is that correct so far?”

“You got it.”

“And you are convinced you have proof? This proof being a
signature on a letter, said signature on said letter to be analysed presumably by a handwriting expert and pronounced my very own, bearing the characteristic and unmistakable penmanship of Ed?”

“Right again.”

“Let us hypothesize, Benny,” I invited. “Let us deduce the character from the deed. Let me ask you this: Would the unprincipled creature who would descend to such low, mean, cunning tricks be likely to incriminate himself by signing such a letter?”

Benny squinted, an involuntary reaction to the birth of painful thoughts. “What’re you getting at?”

“Or would he be more likely,” I proposed, “to prowl the beer parlours of 20th Street and find there some drunken destitute with broken shoes and a dewdrop hung upon the end of his nose who would gladly sign his own death warrant for a five-spot? Let alone sign Benjamin R. Ferguson with a flourish at the bottom of an empty page.”

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I didn’t. That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”

But I smiled as if I had.

“That’s your handwriting.”

“Let me assure you that it isn’t.”

“You fucking creep.”

“And I’m quite satisfied, Benny, that you won’t risk discovering whether it is my handwriting or not.”

All I’d have had to do was stick Benny in a sleigh, redden his nose a bit, and I’d have had the very picture of Bonaparte hightailing it out of the suburbs of burning Moscow. Defeat writ large.

“So,” I said, “with these little misunderstandings cleared away I think we can proceed to a happier topic. How would you like to lend me your car?”

“You’re insane.”

I explained to him that I wouldn’t have dared ask for such a favour except in the most extraordinary circumstances. I did my best to make clear to him why I felt I had to find Victoria and how
I intended to do it. I also pointed out that public transportation and taxis were obviously unsuited to my purpose.

Benny sat with a glacial air throughout my speech.

“As you can see, I’ve got to get my hands on a car right away and find her. So naturally I thought of you.”

“Goddamn it, doesn’t anybody who ever crossed your path get a moment’s peace? Who the hell do you think you are, coming to me and asking for a car? After what you did?”

“It’s not who I am, it’s who you are. You’re a man with three vehicles.”

“Rent a car, asshole. Talk to Avis, not me.”

“I can’t rent one. I forgot to renew my driver’s licence. They won’t rent me a car.”

“Jesus, isn’t that typical. No driver’s licence.”

“Victoria used to do all those sorts of things. I lost the habit. It slipped my mind. So hang me. I’m guilty.”

“You expect me to loan you my BMW, which you will probably promptly total, and I’ll find myself with no insurance because the prick driving my car had no licence? Dream on, dreamer. No fucking way.”

“I’m not asking for the BMW. Give me Janice’s Pinto. Or your Land Rover.”

“No.”

“I need a car, Benny.”

“No way.”

“I’ll leave you alone for the rest of my life. I swear.”

“Do everybody a favour. Leave us all alone. Or at least leave poor Victoria alone for a start.”

“Don’t you listen? I told you she wanted to talk to me.”

“Note the past tense.
Wanted
. She’s doing a lot to attract your attention now, isn’t she?”

“I let her down. I didn’t listen.”

“So what’s new? I’ve watched you operate for years. It’s the story of your life.”

“Listen to me, Benny, I’ve only got so much patience.”

He interrupted me, leaned abruptly across the table, pushed his face into mine. “No, you listen to me,” he said harshly, “because I’ve only got so much time and you’ve had all of it you’re ever going to get. You’ve just run out of my time, Ed. We’re finished. I don’t want to ever see you again. Understand?”

I didn’t answer.

“But I’ve got some parting words of wisdom,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, you son of a bitch, that you don’t seem to be able to figure out for yourself. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like shit. I’ll bet you aren’t eating and I’ll bet you aren’t sleeping.”

He happened to be right on both those counts.

“You’re running all over goddamn town like a chicken with its head cut off looking for somebody who doesn’t want to be found. You’re going down a bad road, man. You get yourself physically run down you’ve got no resistance to these emotional upsets. You blow things out of proportion at the best of times. Anybody has dealings with you knows that much. You better stop it right now or it’ll be last time all over again. My advice to you is stay out of everybody else’s life and take care of your own. Get some sleep. Eat something.”

“What do you mean, last time?”

“You know what I mean. Fifth floor, University Hospital.”

“You don’t know anything about last time. What do you know about last time?”

“I know enough to know you were in a bad way, man.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I went to visit you.”

“Like hell you did.”

“I
saw
you, Ed. Sitting in the day room like an old man in this plaid housecoat and a pair of carpet slippers two sizes too big. Don’t tell me what I saw.”

“You never saw anything.”

“Jesus Christ, they had you so doped you didn’t know who you were, or where you were. You were a fucking mess, man. Staring at this
TV
screen, lighting one cigarette off another, your pyjama flies open and your dork hanging out. You didn’t even know you were hanging a rat. I had to cover you up. That’s where you were at. I didn’t think you were coming back to the land of the living.”

“Shut up.”

“Don’t let that happen again, Ed. Take care of yourself.”

“You fucking prick. Give me a goddamn car.”

“Ed, nobody but nobody in their right mind is going to give you a car.”

He stood up and put some money on the table. “If you’re crying,” he said, “you better get a hold of yourself. The waitress is coming to clear the table.” Then he went out.

The more I think about it, the more I see that Benny’s position is essentially correct. None of those people I know, those people I marched with, for whose children Victoria and I bought silver christening mugs, whose furniture I helped move into successively larger and more gracious homes, will lend me a car. In the last ten years I’ve proved myself a bad risk, a man on the margin, a doubtful character.

On the other hand I have a carrot to dangle before Rubacek’s nose. He wants something from me. Nobody else does.

I find his telephone number on the class list. We exchange pleasantries. I ask if he has a car. He does. A ’71 Grand Prix, he tells me.

“I think we can make a deal,” I say.

R
ubacek hurried right over. He was here by three o’clock, almost ready to do my bidding. However, he drew the line at loaning me his car outright. Instead, he offered to chauffeur me wherever I wanted to go. Nobody, it seems, touches his purple Grand Prix but Stanley. In the end his persistence paid off on all counts. He drove the car and I agreed to help him with his book.

From the beginning Rubacek had been only looking for a collaborator. When the first session of
COCWE
was concluded, he had stridden up to me at the front of the classroom and said: “I’m in the market for a writing pro. Maybe you’re interested? I mean, you’re the only reason I signed up for this bullshit – that is so’s I could make contact with a writing pro. You could help with like the grammar, you know? That’s all. I don’t want the style changed. Keep how I think about feelings and life just how I wrote her down here.” An authoritative, spatulate forefinger emphatically tapped the bundle of dirty paper trussed up in cord.

Stanley takes neither a polite nor an impolite no for an answer. In the weeks following he proved practically impossible to dodge. Fleeing down hallways in the Extension Division I could hear the
steel clickers on Rubacek’s shoe heels ringing in pursuit, his voice pitched high in entreaty. “Perfessor! Perfessor! Wait up!”

Too often overtaken, I tried to vary my escape routes. One week I beat him around a turn in the stairs and, momentarily out of his ken, ducked into a washroom. There I waited a decent interval, seated in a stall, pants hung around my ankles. I was not discovered. After the next class I hid again, admiring my guile and my fat white shins blazing in the light of the overhead fluorescent tubing. Foreshortened by my perspective they looked like Ionian pillars.

But Rubacek, losing sight of his prey, had doubled back. The door of the washroom banged open, eased itself shut with a pneumatic sigh; familiar-sounding heels rang on the floor. He entered the neighboring stall.

“I recognized your shoes,” he said, striking up a conversation. “I trained myself to be like observant. It’s the only way to survive some places.”

“Who is this?” I said, attempting to alter my voice.

“Stanley, perfessor.”

It was hopeless. “Don’t call me that. I’m not a professor.”

“You’re the boss.”

The gravid feeling I had nursed through two hours of class had withered in my bowels due to his neighbourly proximity, making me petulant. “What do you want, Rubacek?” I asked sharply. I felt self-conscious, too, throwing my voice over a cubicle partition. The tiles, the mirrors, the porcelain emptiness magnified our voices eerily.

“I was wondering, maybe you give some more consideration to my proposition what I made last week?”

“No.”

“You can’t ask me to go better’n sixty-forty.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything, Stanley.”

“After all, sixty-forty is fair. It’s only fair I should get extra for, what you call, the trouble I put in it. Heart and soul is what I mean. All you got to do is grammar, spelling, and like punctuation.”