My Present Age (7 page)

Trust Hideous. Trust Hideous Marsha Goddamn Sadler to make a bad day worse. The phone must have rung a dozen times before she deigned to answer it in that cool, distant way she has.

“Hello, Marsha Sadler speaking. I hope you know what time it is.”

“Marsha, it’s Ed.”

There was a slight hesitation while she decided whether to be civil. The possible interest of the call apparently outweighed the inconvenience of the hour. “Ed! How are you? So good to hear your voice again. It’s been ages, hasn’t it? But then I spent the Christmas holidays in Phoenix. You should see me. I’ve got the most glorious all-over suntan.” Said with a giggle. “But you’ll have to hurry, it’s fading fast. Drop by and have a drink some evening.”

As conversations go with Marsha, this one began sanely and sensibly enough. There is in Marsha Sadler a bedrock of self-importance and self-interest that makes her reasonably predictable. However, having said that, I have to qualify it by adding that Marsha wishes to be appreciated as a “serious person capable of growth.” Her growing pains are often a trial to those around her. This year she is adding inches to her stature by attending a graduate class in English literature.

In the past her interest was confined largely to pop psychological treatises available in paperback at the corner drugstore. They
pointed out to her many a straight and narrow path down which she sauntered only to discover they opened into Californian box canyons. None of these books altered Marsha’s personality, but they lent her darker machinations and meddlings in other people’s business the appearance of sincerity and genuine concern.

“What a life you lead, Marsha,” I said jocularly, “grilling your lovely limbs in Arizona.”

“Ed, you make me sound decadent,” declared Marsha, full of hope. One of her fondest desires is to be thought just that. She revels in sexual innuendo the way a cat rolls in catnip. “Surely you wouldn’t deny me the
natural
pleasures of life.”

Taking a firm grip on my gorge, I replied, “Or even the unnatural, Marsha.”

She tittered. I tittered.

“Ed, you’re incorrigible!”

“Marsha, you’re insatiable!”

Another round of adult chortles. I was beginning to sweat with shame. God only knew how long this would have to go on.

“Ed, I’d forgotten how quick you are.”

“Sadly, that’s what all the girls say!”

A squeal of delight. That’s it; I don’t have much self-respect left to squander. I decided to change the subject, so I cleared my throat. “But, seriously, Marsha, how was Arizona?”

The adverb was a signal to Marsha. It gave her the opportunity to prove she’s not just a bundle of sexual tensions. “Ed, it’s always an experience. You wouldn’t believe the light.”

“The light?”

“The light,” she repeated. “The desert light. I don’t know. It’s kind of spiritual. Anyway, it was great. Then I went on to Palm Springs for a week before coming back.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, imagining hecatombs of depleted tennis pros littering the sandy wastes, marking Marsha’s passage.

“It is wonderful, isn’t it? It’s like I always say – you know what I always say about marriage and Arizona, don’t you?”

“No. Regrettably, I don’t.”

“I always say there’s no way I would have married Bill in Arizona. The light there is too revealing, too pitiless. Anyway, shit smells in the sun. He’d have stunk to high heaven.”

I attempted to head off trouble. Hideous Marsha was getting ready to start in on Bill. I wasn’t going to be sidetracked. “Speaking of light,” I broke in hastily, “I wonder if you could shed a little of it on a matter for me, Marsha. I’ve just about succeeded in demolishing my apartment looking for Anthony’s phone number. Victoria gave it to me and I put it away some place and now I’m damned if I can find it.”

Marsha didn’t appreciate being interrupted. “Anthony?”

I took a deep breath. It’s all a venture, isn’t it? “Yes. You know Anthony.
Victoria’s
Anthony.”

Her reply confirmed I was correct in my supposition of a connection. At least she didn’t contradict my wife’s claim to him. “Victoria gave
you
Anthony’s phone number?” she said, making clear she viewed this contention with scepticism.

“Uh-huh.”

She paused. “If you’ve lost his phone number, why don’t you look it up in the phone book?”

This was hardly the time for Marsha to suddenly turn vicious and logical. “Because I thought it was unlisted,” I said, not particularly convincingly. “That’s why I thought Victoria
gave
it to me – because it was unlisted.”

“No,” said Marsha in a guarded voice, “he’s in the phone book.”

On reflection I realize I ought to have given her plenty of time to rubber-hose poor Bill in that startling, revealing Arizona light while I looked on and applauded. Then she would have been more kindly disposed to me.

“Ah,” I said, casting around in my mind, wondering what to do next. A long, painful wait for her to volunteer information wasn’t a success. “This is really embarrassing,” I confessed at last, “but I
can’t recall Anthony’s last name. It’s slipped clean out of my mind. Imagine forgetting the name of your wife’s lover,” I said with a bark of wry laughter. “There must be something psychologically revealing about that.” I was offering bait which the old Marsha, the student of the human mind and human interactions, would have risen to, mouth gaping.

“Yep,” she said.

There I was with a phone humming in my ear. Yep, that was it. In my confusion I faltered, lost my grip, and made another appeal to last season’s Marsha. That is, to warm, wise Counsellor Marsha. I worked tremolo into my voice. “It’s so hard,” I said. “I’m finding the adjustment so damn hard.”

This ploy was not much more successful. “We all carry scars, Ed. You’ve got to learn to live with rejection like everybody else,” she said.

What was I to do? My situation was that of a desperately unfunny comedian performing his stale patter before a bored, even hostile audience. But if it’s your only routine you have to carry on despite a cool reception. Carry on with rills of nervous perspiration trickling down my sides and the idiocy of what I was saying clamouring louder and louder in my ears. I nattered on breathlessly. I said that just by listening Marsha was helping me get in touch with my feelings. I said feelings were important, it was important to say how you felt. I paused. Marsha said she
supposed
that was true. I said I felt worried, really worried. Why? she asked with a touch of interest. And having got that far, I gabbled the story of all that had transpired in the Café Nice from the time the first bread stick was crunched until Victoria had fled, weeping. “So you see, Marsha,” I concluded, “Victoria did want to talk to me. Something’s the matter. I’m really worried. Please give me her number.”

“Let me think,” replied Marsha. “What we’ve got to do in this situation isn’t entirely clear.”

“We?” I didn’t relish her use of the plural pronoun.

“I think it would be best if I get hold of Victoria tomorrow – arrange a lunch or something. Leave it to me. I’ll find out what’s going on. Then you can drop by here tomorrow night and I’ll fill you in. In the meantime just relax, get a good night’s sleep, and don’t worry. Marsha’ll take care of everything.”

This took me so aback I lost my hold on my tongue. “I don’t want a go-between, Marsha. I want a number.”

“Trust me, Ed. There’s no way Victoria will want to talk to you right now, not after what happened. You must admit you were a bit insensitive.”

“I don’t have to admit anything.”

“It seems obvious you were. Otherwise, why did she run away?”

“Nothing under heaven and earth is obvious. That’s my goddamn point. I want the situation cleared up and I find you running interference. Butt out, Marsha.”

“Ed, learn to rely on others. There are none of us so strong that we don’t need help at some point in our lives. It isn’t wrong to lean on somebody else.”

“Come on, Marsha, cut the crap. Give me the fucking phone number.”

“Not until I’ve talked to Victoria. I’ve got to trust my own judgment. I don’t think this is the proper time for you two to talk – not when you’re both so upset.”

“Who’s fucking upset?”

“You obviously are, Ed. And stop using that word. There’s no doubt you’re upset. In the last few minutes – when we started discussing Victoria you’ll note – your voice has gone all high and funny and squeaky.”

My ears started to ring. The old blood-pressure thing. “What is it? Do you want me to crawl? Is that it? Beg? Well, I am. I’m begging.” I actually dropped on my knees beside the phone stand. “You can’t see me, Marsha, but I’m in your favourite position – male submissive. I’m on my knees. Picture it, Marsha.”

“Ed, get hold of yourself.”

“Not low enough? Lower? You got it!” I flopped on my belly and the smell of dirty feet rose out of the carpet and assailed my nostrils. “This is Ed reporting. I’m on my belly. I’m grovelling, Marsha. I’m prostrate.”
Why do I do these things?
“Merciful Marsha, I implore you, give me my wife’s phone number!”

Marsha neglected to respond. I lay on the floor, panting. How soon our passions are spent. The phone droned in my ear. Finally Marsha spoke with her customary icy authority, customary when addressing me. “Ed, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you really on the floor?”

“Yes.”

“Then get up.”

I did.

“Are you sure you’re quite finished?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll see you tomorrow. About nine-thirty.”

“I’m warning you,” I said half-heartedly, knowing I was beat, “if you don’t give me Victoria’s number I’ll keep phoning all night.”

“Then I’ll just have to leave my receiver off the hook, won’t I? Goodnight, Ed.” Click.

She did it, too. Left it off the hook, that is. I’m such a stupid jerk. Never warn anybody. Just do it.

So now I’m pacing, which is what I always do to keep hysteria at bay. If Victoria hadn’t behaved so completely out of character, I wouldn’t be this strung-out. And because I can’t be with her, can’t reach her, my apprehension is augmented. I expect the worst.

The engaging Dr. Brandt, the psychiatrist I visited when Victoria and I were newly married, barely had me inside his office door when he decided to roll up his clinical sleeves and go to work on
this neurosis of mine. This didn’t please me because at the time what I saw as my problem was a temporary loss of imagination. That is, I was panicky because I could not construct a scenario of success in my future. I didn’t regard the apprehension I experienced when I was away from Victoria as a particularly thorny difficulty. At that point I had resolved I wouldn’t let her out of my sight aside from the eight hours a day we spent apart at work. That solved my problem.

Dr. Brandt, however, chose to label my attitude towards Victoria as unhealthy and described it as “infantile separation anxiety.” According to him, whenever circumstances prevent me from being with Victoria, my perception of the world reverts to that of a child. My emotional ties to Victoria, Brandt said, are not the mature ones of a husband to a wife, but those of a child to his mother. Therefore, when I am prevented from being with Victoria, I experience the separation anxiety of a young child, an anxiety compounded by an adult’s ability to imagine dreadful contingencies: rape, murder, automobile accidents, etc. Furthermore, he went on to say that in his clinical experience he has seldom encountered a “socially functioning individual” who perceived his environment to be as threatening and consistently hostile as I apparently did. If my world-view was not significantly modified by therapy I could expect to experience a breakdown in the future. At best I was sure to suffer some severe dysfunction. He thought I already displayed symptoms of burgeoning agoraphobia.

Yet I believe that after only seven sessions with Dr. Brandt I was coming close to convincing him my portrait of the world was more accurate than his own. But perhaps I flatter myself. Still, he asked me to find another therapist. Instead, I went home and announced to Victoria that Dr. Brandt had pronounced me cured. Victoria never did tell me what he said when she phoned him, seeking corroboration of the miracle.

On reflection, what I find interesting is that Dr. Brandt, a man of science, steadfastly refused to test my claims about the world
against the evidence. It’s not that I deny the practicality of his approach. If a patient expresses displeasure about how the world is constituted, one had better change the patient, since one cannot change the world. The only other possible alternative is for the patient to re-invent the world, and that is a capability given to only a very few.

For the time being I struggle with my dreadful intuitions. When my phone rings at two o’clock in the morning I never assume it is a drunk with a wrong number. No, it is always news of a death in the family. “Eddie, Daddy’s gone. A coronary.”

Two rings and I scatter the blankets, heave my bulk upward, and pound out to the phone, where, throat parched with horror, I plaintively croak into the mouthpiece: “Yes! Yes! For God’s sake, tell me!” Only to be reviled by a drunken gourmand demanding egg rolls and chow mein, or a lonely Lothario with coarse, mumbled offers to sniff my panties.

And now I whirl from room to room, fearful for Victoria. Cancer?

I’ve been afraid of Victoria getting cancer for years now, even though I know that to harbour such fears is to submit to superstition. The old woman, Victoria’s great-aunt, is responsible for lodging that black apprehension in my mind. It was she who raised the subject at the tea party held in the week before Victoria’s and my wedding took place.

Victoria was in the habit of describing her family as utterly boring and conventional. Her mother, she said, had constructed an entire ethical system around the notion of “niceness,” and living with her father, she said, was like living with a clock. However, neither of her parents struck me as being either boring or conventional; I always had the feeling that both of them had loose boards in their attics.

For example, I found her mother’s idea of hosting a tea party to allow the groom to meet the female relatives and friends a little odd. It wasn’t arranged with an eye to making me uncomfortable,
but that was the result. There I was, the only male in the company of twenty-three women sipping tea and eating sandwiches the size of postage stamps. No, I tell a lie. I wasn’t the only man there; my father-in-law, Jack, was in attendance also. He had come home early from the office to lend me “moral support.” Evidently Jack’s desertion of his post was unusual enough to make news in family circles, because whenever another lady arrived at the tea party, Victoria’s mother would tell her, with an air of sharing a great confidence, “Jack took the day off to lend Ed moral support.”