My Present Age (31 page)

“And you, did you behave with any kind of dignity, any kind of sense? No way. When she was running around with Harold you spied on them. And what’re you doing now? Running around spying on her again. Phoning people. Hassling Anthony, hassling me. Why do you do this? Because you’re lonely? Because you want a woman? Go find yourself a woman. They’re out there. Haven’t you heard? There’s a selection. You’re allowed more than one a lifetime.”

I sit down beside her. She gives off a mingled scent of baby oil, fabric softener, sweat. It is very pleasant. “What do you call this thing?”

“A bench press.”

We sit silent for a time. The old man is still pedalling. The bicycle tire whines against the resistance roller.

“I don’t want another woman,” I say.

Marsha shakes her head as if she can’t believe what she’s hearing.

“You know where she is, don’t you?” I ask.

“Christ.” Marsha props her elbow on her knee, forehead in her palm. “What is it? What is it you miss so much? She ought to bottle and sell it.”

“Could it be that we were both misfits? Is that how we got together? It’s the only explanation I can see.” This is a genuine question. Such an idea had never occurred to me before. Is Victoria a misfit too?

“I never thought of her that way,” says Marsha. “No, I don’t think so.”

“She must have been a misfit in some way nobody recognized,” I say, unwilling to abandon the notion. “The reason I say this is I’ve never had any success with women. Absolutely none. Then Victoria comes along. I just wouldn’t give up. Finally she went out with me. To hear Dick Gregory.”

“A real fairy-tale,” says Marsha.

“I’ve never really understood my complete lack of success with women. I mean
complete
. There are guys as fat as me that women like, and guys as opinionated, and guys as neurotic. Granted I’m all three, but the overwhelming abhorrence with which the opposite sex regards me is a bit of a puzzle. It’s not entirely fair. I mean, Benny charms them out of the trees and it’s obvious he’s a moral idiot and sexual criminal. I was a virgin when I got married. Well, not exactly a virgin when I got married, what I mean to say is I was a virgin until I met Victoria.”

“Ed,” whispers Marsha, nudging me, “he’s eavesdropping.”

He is too, the old coot. I stare at him until he guiltily resumes pedalling.

“Wouldn’t you say that was rather remarkable?” I continue. “Finding a male virgin of my advanced age? I mean, when free love was the orthodoxy?”

“Maybe you were fastidious.”

“Wendy offered. Remember her? One of Benny’s. But that was revenge. He’d dumped her. I considered it seriously before refusing.”

“I get a queer feeling when you talk about what happened back then,” says Marsha. “It’s like listening to a documentary or something. It’s as if it never really involved you. It’s as if you Rip Van Winkled out, woke up ten years later, and got all your information from old newspapers. Where the hell were you?”

I shrug.

This seems, unaccountably, to make Marsha angry. “Nobody felt comfortable around you, everybody felt you were judging them, even poor Victoria, who was so patiently and pathetically waiting for you to join the human race. Do you have any idea how good the rest of us felt believing we weren’t going to end up like the walking dead all around us? Do you? And then this messy shlub, this twenty-two-year-old zombie, would shuffle into the room and piss on our parade. Do you know what I remember best
about you? There were six of us sitting around talking about Gandhi and passive resistance and all that crap and you piped up and said that Gandhi had advocated, in his early days, that the Hindus slaughter the sacred cows and begin to eat beef. He believed that beef-eating was the source of British strength. That to beat the English you had to out-eat the English. It had nothing to do with what we were talking about.”

“A little-known fact.”

“It had nothing to do with the man he became.”

“Do you have any idea what
you
all sounded like? You weren’t really talking about Gandhi. You didn’t give a shit what Gandhi thought. You wanted to convince yourself that if he were alive he’d have been sitting in that circle, passing the roach and being self-righteous.”

“Bill had you pegged. Terminal narcissism. He said you’d book yourself into Carnegie Hall some day and buy an audience for your final rant.”

“I’d have had to get in line for a booking behind him.”

“He was an idealist, Ed. Not a cheap cynic.”

“He was the goddamn Ayatollah Khomeini then and he’s the goddamn Ayatollah Khomeini now.”

“He was an idealist, Ed.”

I don’t answer. She can have that much. After a bit she offers, “What he is now I can’t say.”

I can see Bill Sadler walking down 3rd Avenue, clasping the sheet of plywood tightly to his chest. He should look crazy. The disturbing thing is that he looks perfectly sane and probably is. Clinically speaking.

“Yeah, well …”

Marsha stands. “I don’t want to talk about Bill any more,” she says. “I don’t like marching over old ground. Let’s go upstairs and have a drink to the realists.”

There it is, that peculiar tension, awkwardness, that can surprise two people who had never intended such a thing to happen.

I run my hands down my pants creases. “I won’t bother you any longer.”

“Come along,” she says, “I’ll take a quick shower and you can make us some drinks. I’ve got those powdered mixes. You can have whatever you like.”

“No, I’d better go.”

“You can have whatever you like, Ed.”

“No.”

That’s the end of it. Her face displays neither anger nor disappointment. I have, with a twist of perspective, become once again a fat man of limited qualities. “Suit yourself,” she says.

I show the taxi driver the money and the map with its numbered quadrants, o’s, red lines. “I’ve got thirty-five dollars,” I explain. My finger runs up 22nd Street on the map. “I want you to pull into every motel along here until the meter hits thirty-five bucks. When it hits thirty-five bucks, stop the cab and let me out. Okay?”

“Just let you out wherever?”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t know where you’re going?”

“That’s right.”

“You mind if I ask for the money first?”

Returning to my apartment exhausted, I find all the lights are burning but the place has an air of vacancy. While hanging up my parka I call out to Stanley and get no answer. I walk through empty rooms that have been cleaned, tidied. The dishes have been done. My bed is made. My dirty clothes have been picked off the floor and stowed in the laundry hamper.

In the living room I spy a stale package of cigarettes I’d left on the top of the
TV
days ago. Lighting one, I break another of my recent resolutions to preserve the tenuous health of my heart.

I sit down and close my eyes. The tobacco, very dry and strongly flavoured by the plastic-tasting heat of the
TV
, snaps and sizzles faintly. The cigarette burns between my lips like a fuse. I think of the afternoon spent looking for Victoria. Images twitch behind my eyelids. Lamp standards jerk by, snow drifts, men in neutral-coloured clothing stand in the windows of motel offices, hands in their pants pockets, shoulders rounded. Thirty-five dollars spent and a bus ride home. Another resolution broken.

I wonder where Stanley’s gone. I have a feeling he mightn’t be back. That would explain his putting the place right. The lights would have been left on as a welcome. He knows how I hate an empty, dark apartment.

If Rubacek had moved in with anything more than the shirt on his back I could confirm my suspicions by checking to see if anything is missing, by checking to see what he’s taken with him, but he came with nothing.

I remember the manuscript of
Society’s Revenge: The Stanley Rubacek Story
. Surely he wouldn’t leave that behind.

It isn’t on the kitchen table where he worked. The table has been cleared and cleaned. I can make out the wipe marks that have dried in dull, soapy streaks on its Arborite top. I search all the rooms, even going so far as to rummage in a linen closet, to go down on my hands and knees to peer under a bed. No manuscript. Stanley is definitely gone. What if I have another heart attack? I could die alone here and nobody would know.

It’s in the fridge. With a bottle of ketchup resting on it like a paperweight. There’s a note.

“I knew you couldn’t miss it here!!! But seriously Ed don’t leave this on
ice
to long, okay??!! I’m dying to hear the
verdict
. (Bet you never expected to hear that one from an excon. Ha. Ha.).”

Cold has made the pages feel slippery and damp to the touch.
He is coming back. I set the manuscript on the table, pour myself a drink, read the first page, reread it.

I finished the book in six hours. It is clear from this creaky melodrama that Stanley has never been a convict, likely never even committed a crime. However, it is equally clear that he has read a good many books about crime and criminals.

Yet he is not simply a liar. I once knew a girl like Stanley. She attended my junior high school. When she was twelve she suddenly announced she was Adolf Hitler’s daughter, smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war. Her parents, her teachers, nobody could dissuade her from making her bizarre claims. She suffered for them. Teasing made her life hell; she lost her one friend, a girl almost as strange as herself. Unclever, plain, nearly ugly, she was still somebody, the daughter of modern Europe’s greatest madman. She was Adolf Hitler’s daughter. Even when somebody pointed out in 1962 that she was too young to have been born in 1945 she merely said, “I’m not thirteen, I’m seventeen.”

She was taken to a psychiatrist. From that moment on she ceased saying she was Adolf Hitler’s daughter. She began to say, very calmly, “My name is Eva Hitler.” She began to sign test papers, essays, and letters with that name. When tormented past endurance she would cry: “I’m not responsible for what my father did! I was only a baby!”

After two years of this her family moved away. A report reached us in a couple of months that in her new home Eva Hitler was once more Doris Wright.

And so with Stanley, I suspect.

“W
hat the hell time is it?”

“Seven,” says Rubacek, stepping into the apartment. He is pale and his eyes, which are bright with excitement, seem all the brighter because the flesh beneath them is darkened with fatigue.

“You could learn to ring the doorbell instead of hammering away like that. I’ve got trouble enough with my neighbours. What did you want to do, wake the whole goddamn building?”

“I found her,” he says. “I found your wife.”

Across the road lies the Skyways Motel. The airport is half a mile away. A descending jet fills the car with noise so that Rubacek has to raise his voice. He is explaining how he tracked down Victoria. “All night,” he says, “I drove every place. You know? All around looking. And then I thought of the airport. The fucking airport. Airport equals hotels. Right? I seen it there, must’ve been 6 a.m. of the morning. A Volkswagen, I says to myself. Busted up? Blue? I even wrote down the licence number.” He twists in the seat and fishes a slip of paper out of the change pocket of his jeans. “JRS 257,” he reads – “That it?”

I’m very nervous and that makes me snappish. Rubacek wants
to be praised. “I told you before, I don’t know her goddamn licence number.” Nevertheless, it is Victoria’s car parked there in front of room 37, beginning to show its blue paint in the winter morning light.

Last night Rubacek had to strike a match to be sure. He has told me that several times.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly nine,” says Stanley. I’ve kept us waiting here nearly forty minutes and Rubacek is growing a little impatient. “If she isn’t up by now she ought to be.”

“She likes to sleep late every chance she gets.”

“Well, how long we got to sit here? Are you going over there or what?”

“You want to start the car and get some heat in here? I’m getting cold.”

“I ain’t got much gas. You ain’t cold, you’re just nervous. Lots of people feel cold when they’re only nervous.”

“I said I’m
cold.”

“Bite my fucking head off.” He turns the key, the motor whines into life.

A strong breeze is blowing, unusual for so early in the morning, and serpents of driven snow writhe on the black pavement. The wind has cleared the steadily brightening sky of cloud. The day will be sunny and cold. The spreading light gives me a sense of distance from all those things of the past few days. Victoria is close at hand now. A short walk across the road and I am in the thick of possibility, of opportunity.

Rubacek, however, has been steadily diminishing in this light, has shrunk to the size of an anecdote. Is this because we have come to an obvious parting of the ways and now return, each to our separate solitudes? I had better speak.

“I read our book,” I say. His reaction is not what I thought it might be. I see he is, at the crux, afraid of discovery. “When? Last night?” he asks quickly, avoiding my eyes.

“Yes.”