A PUBLIC park on a weekday is a sobering place. From Monday to Friday, before they are lost in an anonymous surge of weekend pleasure-seekers, the truly representative figures of Western decadence are revealed. On the placid green expanses of lawn these humans jut up, sinister as icebergs, indicators (I am moved to think) of the mass of gluttony, lechery, sloth and violence which lurks below the surface of society.
I don’t, of course, presume to except myself from that company. I’ve been a regular here throughout this muggy summer. Most afternoons I can be found planted on one of the bright-blue benches whose inconveniently spaced slats pinch my fat ass. Unemployed for longer than I care to remember, I come here to spend the day in as pleasant a manner as possible. That means eyeing the nymphets who scoot by, jiggling provocatively in the pursuit of frisbees.
And eating. At the moment I am gnawing a chicken leg embalmed in the Colonel’s twenty-seven secret herbs and spices, and swigging a Coke. When that’s finished I’ll top off with two Oh Henrys which have dissolved in their wrappers from the heat.
I’m not the only degenerate dotting the landscape either, although the park almost always empties by four-thirty. Fifty yards away a teen-age couple – he no more than fifteen, she barely having crossed into puberty – lie in a spot of shade rubbing their fevered groins together, lost in the sensations of an open-mouthed, tongue-entangled, gullet-probing kiss. Even at this considerable distance I can hear the rasp of stiff denim on stiff denim and their zippers metallically zinging in unison. In a way I wish them good luck in their striving. It is hard to accept that such effort and persistence could go unrewarded.
The guy by the drinking-fountain is, however, another story and not an object for benevolent glances. On him I’ve kept a wary eye. For the past hour, shirtless and barefooted, he has practised some arcane martial art. He has slashed, punched, stabbed and kicked the air, crushing imaginary windpipes, rupturing imaginary spleens, squashing imaginary testicles, and deviating imaginary septums. An extra-Y-chromosome type if I ever saw one, and tattooed for good measure. A powder keg capable of exploding at anything an overweight, sparsely bearded man with weak eyesight like me might say or do, however amiable and unprovoking.
If that character had the courtesy to get lost I might be able to completely relax and enjoy my afternoon. Behind me I sense the silken movement of the river as I smell its effluvium, a piquant mix of algae and industrial waste. Its counterpart in movement is the traffic on Spadina Crescent which winds in front of me. Fragmented by shrubs and elms it is a pattern of hot light, flickering chrome and flashing glass. Paradoxically peaceful, I find. My preferences run to urban jungles.
I check the time. It is a quarter to five and the runners from the YWCA are late. I never miss them if I can help it.
Now please don’t get me wrong. My interest in these ladies is not lascivious. How could it be? The women are deadly serious about this business of running and make no concessions to spectators. They make their appearance attired in baggy grey pants stained with unsightly blotches of sweat, or in unflattering cotton shorts and shoes pounded shapeless and grimy from many hard miles on the asphalt. Unlike the sweet young things that wiggle voluptuously down the via dolorosa to health and beauty in satiny track suits that cling erotically to their nubile frames, these women clip along with a choppy, economical stride that efficiently devours distance. They are training for the city’s annual twelve-and-a-half-mile run along the river bank.
I recognize the strength of the dedication and the determination that propels them mile after boring mile. Good God, I admire it. With a chicken leg in one hand and a Coke in the other, I salute them even in their absence. Hail to thee Marys full of grace.
And right on cue they appear. Suddenly, through the screen of trees I spot the leader of the pack, the she-wolf herself. As always, it is the tough little breastless redhead with stringy thighs who labours first up the grade from under the Broadway Bridge. Another runner appears and then another. As they top the rise their faces go momentarily slack with relief, thankful that this terrible straining against gravity has at last subsided. Seeing their faces dissolve with the release of tension makes me associate all this sweaty effort with sex. But that is not really accurate or correct. Perhaps it is merely bewildered and lost they look, like dazed survivors of some catastrophic wreck. It is, however, only a matter of seconds before my heroines recover their composure and stride, and press formidably on.
The solitary front runners and high achievers fly past and the field is claimed by knots of women who shuffle along huddled together in groups of five or six for mutual encouragement and support. They straggle by, gaping mouths a mute plea for oxygen, wisps of hair plastered to flushed cheeks, arms shining with a patina of honest sweat. Brave girls!
And last of all come the stragglers, the beginners, the fatties, the pigeon-toed camp followers of that other regiment of women. These are the ones I really wait for, to see safely on their way. I do worry about these women. I sometimes imagine them reeling, lurching from sunstroke, and finally crashing to the pavement without anyone to spring to their aid. The old girls with blue rinses, knobby knees and a visible circuitry of veins in relief on their calves; the stenographers with secretary’s spread; the overweight teen-age girls blooming with acne who run to fashion their bodies into objects worthy of the witless adoration of future Prince Charmings – these are the sheep which comprise my fold and I am their shepherd. If not as good-looking or athletic as one of those young blond studs who man ski patrols, I am, I believe, as dedicated.
My eyes study these tail-enders, alert for signs of danger or imminent collapse, and in doing so come to rest on one woman. About her there is something troublingly familiar, although this shouldn’t be, because I am convinced she is a novice runner, a new addition to the daily procession. In any case, I don’t recognize the running garb – white tennis shorts and a cheerful yellow T-shirt.
This woman gives every indication of being in rough shape. Having just finished the climb from under the bridge, she is trying to walk the tightness out of her calves. As she limps along, one hand on her hip, one working on her rib cage trying to squeeze out a stitch, her head hangs down so that a fall of hair obscures her face. But there is something about her – the strong body, the generous, ungirlish proportions – that strikes a resonance of familiarity in me.
She throws her head back and begins to run again, her arms pumping awkwardly at her sides, her legs moving jerkily. It is Victoria. My wife. Or rather, more correctly, my estranged wife. The woman whom I haven’t set eyes on in four months. The woman who hangs up when I call. The woman who wants a divorce right now and no more funny business.
And does she look awful! Her face has curdled to an alarming hue, the grape-purple of strangulation victims – except where she has gone ashy white about the eyes and mouth. In this thirty-degree-plus heat, my wife’s brains must be frying in her obstinate head. My duty is clear. I slip off the bench, drumstick in hand, and hustle out to intercept her before she does herself irreparable damage.
Victoria obviously doesn’t recognize her hubby. The man whom she once kept so spruce and neat is clad in wrinkles and food stains. I’ve laid on a few more pounds of lard and grown a scruffy fringe of hair on my hoggish jowls since last we acrimoniously parted. When Victoria finally realizes that this stranger is bearing down on her with obvious intent, she veers away sharply to avoid attack or an obscene proposition. Consequently, I’m forced to break into a ridiculous trot to pursue her.
“Victoria,” I call cheerfully, identifying myself as a friendly, “it’s me. It’s Ed, dear.”
Victoria is so exhausted her face is incapable of registering surprise, or even dismay at my condition. Apparently even the usages of common civility are beyond her wasted powers. This from a woman with whom I shared bed and board for six years: “Ed? Get the hell away from me. What the hell are you doing following me, spying on me? Get lost.”
“Victoria,” I cajole her, refusing to answer her preposterous accusations. “Darling. If you could only see yourself. Stop this nonsense. You’re risking heat stroke.”
How the hell does she do it in these temperatures? Twenty yards and already my pores are leaking buckets of water and quantities of vital salts and minerals.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Go away,” she gasps, plodding puritanically along. Rule the flesh.
“I’m not being ridiculous. Every year there’s a rash of high-school football players dropping dead all over Dixie from heat stroke. It’s a fact.”
“Benny,” she says, her breath catching raggedly, “told me not to talk to you. So I’m not.”
“The body has to be trained for this,” I explain. “You have to build your tolerance for this stuff.” Tangentially I add, “And tell that shyster Benny to jam a statute book up his ass the next time you see him.”
“Only a mile further,” she grunts to herself, studiously ignoring me. She lowers her head bullishly and ploughs forward.
“All right,” I say sternly, all bristly authority. “If you won’t stop this, I’ll have to stop you for your own good.”
A desperate, harrowed look crosses her face. “I’m finishing,” she announces through clenched teeth. “Unlike some people I know, I don’t quit on things.”
“I suppose that remark is supposed to reduce me to jelly?” I comment acidly. An unfortunate choice of words. I note that I do tend to quiver when in full, precipitous flight as I am now.
“Take that remark however you wish. I’m not in charge of your limited conscience any longer. Thank God.”
Lulled by her righteousness, Victoria seems to slow slightly. I speed up and make a grab for her arm. But she is an elusive girl; she weaves trickily, steps on the gas and spunkily spurts a few steps out of my reach.
“Touch me,” she warns hoarsely, “and I’ll scream. I’ll yell rape, you son of a bitch.”
So that’s it. Marital brinkmanship. As so often with us, this has become a test of wills. But she doesn’t frighten me off. Victoria was never one (unlike me) who wished to call attention to herself. She could never, in all our long married life, tolerate public scenes. Still, she is a worthy opponent, a tough cookie. Centuries of flinty Scottish feistiness are distilled in her being. She is industrious, self-reliant and persevering. A proper helpmate on the stony road of life.
This escapade is taking its toll. I puff as I pursue her. She squeaks a barely audible, definitely feeble “Rape!” that is not meant to be heard by anyone. It is merely to serve me as a warning.
Throwing all caution to the winds I lunge and catch hold of her wrist.
“Help!” she fairly bellows. So much for theory and past experience. This is not the Victoria I knew. She struggles and tugs ferociously on the end of my arm. I find myself forced to shuffle along with an apologetic, schoolboyish grin pasted on my mug, striving to achieve the right effect – the quintessence of harmlessness.
“Help me! Help somebody!”
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake. Jesus.” I nod encouragingly to a passing motorist whose face darkens suspiciously behind the windshield. “What the hell are you doing? Do you want to be arrested for public mischief?” I mutter to my wife.
Then she does it. “Rape!”
I am seriously considering letting the silly bitch go when I sense his presence. It is as if he dropped out of the sky, although he must have watched the entire farce from the wings, only awaiting his cue. I manage a half-turn to face him, and then Mr. Kung Fu from the park hits the arm to which Victoria is attached with one of those tricky Oriental chops. Just the kind of snappy blow that makes the arm go dead and lodges a locus of electric pain in the neck.
Victoria is released. She sprints away without a backward glance, leaving me to face the belligerent music. This is not like the woman I recall. Surely she has an obligation to explain?
Meanwhile my attacker has squared off and assumed an appropriately menacing stance from which to launch a devastating offensive. His hands revolve slowly in front of his body.
How do you handle a character like this? A man who has spent interminable hours in some seedy, smelly gymnasium devoting his time to preparing for just such a moment as this, when, without fear of judicial reprisal, and in good conscience, he can cripple another human being for life.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” I say lamely.
He doesn’t answer me.
“You better not hit me again,” I tactfully warn him, “unless you want to get slapped with a lawsuit that’ll bleed you white.” This sort of approach sometimes works with the cretinous types.
He takes a step towards me. I find myself thinking very hard. The inevitable question arises. What would Sam Waters do in such a situation? I have a good idea what Sam would do, but I know equally well that I am incapable of imitation.
My one arm is still relatively useless, although the numbness is being replaced with pins and needles of breathtaking pain. I extend my good arm to fend off my assailant, only to discover that I am pointing my forgotten drumstick, dagger-like, at his black heart.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you, jerk-off artist?” he demands. “How come you were bothering the lady?”
Perhaps it is an indication of the incorrigibility of human nature. Even in such disastrous circumstances ol’ Adam rears his cynical, ugly head. The unregenerate, childish Ed cannot help himself. “That was no lady, mister,” I blurt out. “That was my wife!” Old dogs cannot be taught new tricks, and old jokes, I find, are still the best.
I brace my porcine pan for a two-knuckle punch when … lo and behold, a police cruiser creeps to the curb to investigate this contretemps. At the sight of the long arm of the law manifestly before him, my friend grows suddenly pacific. It appears that they are on a first-name basis. Evidently he will do no snitching; this gorilla wants nothing whatsoever to do with the boys in blue. When I am asked whether he is bothering me, I give him a long, hard look, long and hard enough to make him squirm, before I sarcastically pronounce him “one of nature’s noblemen.”
So our business concludes, though not quite satisfactorily. I cannot help thinking that Sam Waters would have handled it in a more efficient, more masculine manner.
It is only when I am safely at home knocking together my supper (peanut butter, banana and corn syrup sandwiches) on a kitchen counter frustratingly littered with dirty dishes that Benny’s treachery really begins to eat away at me. How dare he counsel my wife not to talk to me!
Benny and I go some way back. As university students we shared quarters in a derelict old house on 14th Street. Now, however, we are barely on speaking terms. This is because the disloyal bastard agreed to represent my disloyal wife in divorce proceedings.
That is not to suggest that Benjamin and I saw eye to eye on everything even back then. But I can say I liked him a hell of a lot better in 1968 than I do today. Tempus fugit.
During the late sixties and early seventies Benny was a priapic, hairy activist who kept the bedsprings squealing and squeaking upstairs and the kitchen table circled by people full of dope arguing how to remodel the world so that there would be a chicken in every pot and a stereo in every living-room.
In those days Benny was a great nay-sayer and boycotter. When he bought groceries Benny packed two lists. One enumerated necessities. The other listed brands or articles that were verboten: Kraft products; grapes and lettuce picked by non-unionized workers; Angolan coffee, lifeblood of Portuguese imperialism; South African wine – all were comestibles which never passed his lips.
Benny walked around with a millennial light in his eyes. He intended to dedicate his life to eternal servitude in a legal-aid clinic. For my uncommitted ways he had nothing but contempt. My flesh was weak. I remember his discovering my contraband peanut butter, a proscribed brand, and righteously dashing it to the floor in a Calvinistic fury. God, I loved him for it. He was a kind of moral standard.
But that evangelistic Benny is no more. He’s dead. Affluence did him in. The hirsute, wild-eyed Benny is transmogrified. He is razor-cut and linen-suited. His ass cupped lovingly in the contoured leather seats of his BMW, he tools around town on the prowl for extra-marital snarf. You see, Benny knocked up money and then, in a rare interlude of common sense, married it.
The longer I think about Benny, the more I am bugged. He ought to be treated to a piece of my mind. It’s only a quarter to six; I may still catch him at the office if I phone now. In any case, I need to get Victoria’s new address from him. I’ve been after him for two weeks to reveal all, but he hasn’t budged. He’s not telling.
I phone. His secretary informs me it is impossible to speak with Mr. Kramer. He is with a client.
“Please tell him it’s his father-in-law,” I say, “and inform him it’s important.” I know this will beat him out of the bushes. Benny’s Daddy Warbucks bought him his partnership in this firm of shysters. The old man, I am convinced, still has his proprietary talons sunk deep in old Benny’s carcass. Benny will talk to Papa.
There is a fussy delay, lots of hum on the line and background thumps.
“Daddy? Benny here. What’s up?”
Daddy? Daddy?
“It’s Captain Ed calling Corporal Benny. Captain Ed calling Corporal Benny. Come in, Corporal Benny.”
There is a moment of hesitation at the other end of the line. Then Benny speaks to me in a tone usually reserved for converse with dolls and children.
“Now that you’ve finished with the collegiate humour, Ed, what can I do for you? I happen to be very busy right now. I think my secretary may have just mentioned that to you.” You’d think I’d just piddled on the carpet or something.
I ignore him. Squirm, you bastard. “I want to talk about this divorce, Benny. I don’t like what’s been happening. It is turning into a dirty, nasty business.”
“Only because you insist on regarding it as personal,” Benjamin replies smugly. That piece of idiocy is the just measure of the legal mind.
“You know,” I say, attempting to adopt a fey and whimsical tone, “if there were any real justice in God’s universe, he would have provided a cosmic hammer, preferably silver like Maxwell’s, to bang people on the head when they make idiotic statements. ‘I’m not getting any younger.’ Bong! ‘There is no such word as can’t.’ Bong! ‘Don’t take this personally.’ Bong! You’d be a foot shorter right this minute, Benny. The point is, it is my divorce! Victoria is my wife! Jesus Christ, of course I take it personally, you ass-hole.”
“Same old Ed,” he says uncertainly, jollying the madman.
“No,” I say, “it’s not the same old Ed. Ed doesn’t sleep too well any more. He’s getting fat and cranky and he’s verging on vicious, Benny. This is a new Ed and he’s not going to be fucked over any more. Personal, shit.”
“You know what I mean by personal. We’ve gone over this again and again,” Benny says impatiently. “I mean that you should get yourself a lawyer, a professional. You need someone to conduct your affairs in a civilized, businesslike way. We could put an end to this rancour and bad feeling if you’d just get a lawyer.”
“I don’t need a goddamn lawyer to tell you and my wife that I don’t want a divorce. No divorce. That’s it. As they say in your business, Benny, that’s the bottom line. No divorce.”
“What you want and what Victoria wants are two different things, Ed.”
There is an awkward pause. I jump in with both feet. “I get the feeling Victoria is being told what she ought to want by somebody else.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Benny is beginning to sound irascible, dear boy.
“Excuse me if I say his name begins with a B and I wink in your direction.”
“Oh Christ. Now I’ve heard everything.”
“Then quit acting like a goddamn harem eunuch guarding the sultan’s favourite honey-pot. Give me Victoria’s address.”
“I ran into her today. She told me that you told her not to talk to me. Is that right?”
“Not quite.”
“Where the hell do you get off telling her not to talk to me? I thought a divorce lawyer had the responsibility to aid in a reconciliation. How the hell can we be reconciled if you keep standing in our way? It’s your duty to give me her address, for chrissake.”
“My duty is to my client. To protect Victoria and her interests. Right now that means keeping her away from you. You have this talent for making people feel guilty. How, I can’t imagine.” This seems to genuinely bewilder him. Victoria’s sympathy for me seems as bizarre to him as mourning a dead rat.
“Victoria has a conscience, what can I say?” My heart leaps at the news of her … regrets? “I wish the same could be said of you.”
“I can’t afford one. I work for a living. I don’t live your sanctified existence.”
“Benny, you have cut me to the quick.” I pause ominously. “I am a man in love, Benny. I can’t afford the luxury of a conscience either.”
I sense Benny’s ears prick up at that. “Ed?”
“Yes.” I try to sound as dangerous as ever I can.
“What does that mean?”
“Give me Victoria’s address. I’m finished being a nice guy.”
“Are you threatening me, Ed? You better not be threatening me.”
“We lived together for a long time, Benny. You know old Ed. Hell hath no fury like a roomie scorned.”
“Out with it. Just what the hell are you trying to say?”
“I have a lot of free time on my hands, Benny. I could learn to be a real nuisance. You know how I get when I’m thwarted.” The word sounded positively hell-like on my tongue. “How would you like me trailing you around town, keeping tab on your extra-curricular activities? Rumour has it you’re still a ladies’ man. I could keep track on who you’re shagging, Benny. Just like a big-league scout. With reports to the manager, Mrs. Benny, and perhaps even your owner, the father-in-law.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“It’s a possibility, Benny. Don’t push me too far, I’m near the end of my tether. God knows what might pop into my head next. You always claimed I was erratic, remember?”
None of this makes me feel as rotten as I should. But all is fair in love and war and this is a bit of both. Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It’s a malady of the modern age. Since Victoria left me there has been entirely too much drift in my life. Sam Waters is the only firm point, but he can’t replace a wife.
“I suppose I have no choice, do I?”
“None.”
“Victoria has moved to 719 Tenth Street East. She’s in Apartment 23.” Benny clears his throat. “Ed,” he says sinisterly, “let me tell you how much I’m looking forward to seeing you in court.”
“Benny, Benny, nothing personal.”
“Fuck you.”
“One other thing, Benny. Is there anything else I should know?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, for instance,” I inquire with feigned merriment, “does Victoria have anything large, jealous and dangerous lounging around the house? Something sporting two hairy balls? A live-in friend?”
“You’re a goddamn degenerate. You make me sick.”
“We all grow up in our own surprising ways, Benny. Look at you, a BMW socialist. We make our way in the world however we can, don’t we?”
“Victoria has told me stuff about you, Ed, that I didn’t believe until now. And I’m going to make you admit to every humiliating detail in court. Every one of your pathetic tricks. Dressing up in a suit and tie every morning, walking out of the door and pretending to go to work for two months after you’d been fired. A moral coward,” he says disgustedly.
“Okay!” I shout. “You try it! Get me on the stand! If I can’t handle a two-bit shyster lawyer whose term papers I used to write, then I resign from the human race!”
“Proofread!” he yells. “Proofread!” That got to him. Benny is very touchy about his intellectual abilities because deep down he suspects, quite correctly, that they are extremely limited. “It isn’t as easy as you think, smart-ass. You’ll find out.”
When I get Benny going I can drive him absolutely berserk. Get it in and really twist it, Ed. “Oh yeah,” I say. “That really tough lawyer stuff. Habeas corpus, juris dictionae fundandae causa, caveat emptor, annus mirabilis, hocus pocus.”
“I’m hanging up now,” says Benny. “But before I do, I have one question for you.”
“What?”
“When might we expect your novel?”
Click.
I’m not sure any more that I want to face Benny in court. He appears to have mapped my soft underbelly and knows just where to slip the thin blade into my cuts.
The novel. Driving through the dusty haze of a soft summer evening to Victoria’s apartment building I reflect on my metamorphosis into an author.
I still regard the idea of the book as a master stroke. Not, mind you, the idea for the book, but the idea of the book. After being unemployed for a full twelve months I had to invent a plausible occupation. People were always asking me what I did. I didn’t do anything. I was simply unemployed, which doesn’t qualify as an activity but is, rather more accurately, a state of being. In the animal kingdom it has its metaphorical equivalent in the hibernation of the bear or the woodchuck, or in the pupal stage of various insects. Or so most people seem to think. Particularly employers who never want to hire anyone who isn’t already working for someone else.
So one day, in answer to the inevitable question as to what I did, I replied that I was a writer. It just popped into my head. I noted a cessation of embarrassing questions. The news circulated among Victoria’s friends and my acquaintances. Nobody questioned my sincerity. It appears they regarded this profession as socially unproductive enough to appeal to me.
The strangest thing was that this public confession got me writing. Sort of. I admit I have spent more time thinking about writing than actually writing, and even more time talking about writing than actually writing. But still, if one announces one’s membership in that illustrious company of joyous spirits, living and dead, who have judged the pen mightier than the sword, one had better evince loyalty to the side and scribble.
However, from experience I can testify that authorship is a trying, taxing business. It is particularly so in my case because I can’t seem to get interested in writing about what I ought to be writing about. I mean, after all, I was once a seriously considered candidate for a Canada Council grant, a genuine, copper-bottomed A-student with a double major in English Literature and Philosophy. I was going to ship out for England and write a dissertation.
Consequently, I am capable of bandying around the names of some pretty thoughtful people: Blaise Pascal, Soloviev, Ellul and even Simone Weil. I was even forced to read some of their books. In fact, at one time I had a very strong affection for Soren Kierkegaard, who, at least in the flesh, seemed to have much the same effect on people that I have. Like me, the gnarled little Dane didn’t mix well at parties, was inclined to goad people into a frenzy, and made too much of a love affair.
Because of my exposure to great thoughts I feel a vague obligation not to reflect too badly on my education. I feel I ought to at least take a shot at a Big Book. Somehow I can’t seem to manage it.
My first Big Book was to be about my generation, a revealing tale about what it was like being a Canadian university student during the Vietnam war. Let me tell you it wasn’t easy having to vicariously share the guilt and agony of their war like some poor cousin.
There was, of course, the question of Canadian complicity. But we lacked the necessary stage properties to put on a really top-notch performance. We had no draft cards to burn and there was the lingering suspicion that if we desecrated the new flag we might be taken as friends of the Canadian Legion. Back then, twelve or thirteen years ago, we didn’t even have our own black problem, though we did have plenty of relatively unmilitant and unfashionable Indians. So we imported Black Panthers from Detroit to address rallies and harangue us as motherfuckers. Somehow the home-grown product, cats like Lincoln Alexander, didn’t seem capable of that.
This novel about the groves of Academe came along quite briskly for some four or five pages and then I started to worry about a title. What was I going to call this masterwork? My first choice (because it has a nice hollow sound) was The Lost Generation. But that was Gertrude Stein’s line, and the bunch from the twenties, Ernest, Scotty, etc., had earned their right to it by a lot of self-destructive behaviour. It just wasn’t fair of me to pinch it.
But mulling over the word “lost” got me reminiscing about my grade one teacher, Mrs. Edwards, who wouldn’t countenance the word. Unless any object, be it eraser, jumbo pencil, or crayon, was indisputably proved to have been irrevocably blasted into a time-space warp, in Mrs. Edwards’ mind that object held out hope of being recovered. Hence, it was not lost but misplaced. All Mrs. Edwards’ charges were firmly taught to blithely chirp, “Teacher, my pencil is misplaced.”
So I began to wonder, if my generation couldn’t be lost, might it be misplaced? The Misplaced Generation. And somehow, having once thought that, I couldn’t return to my novel with the same serious, sober heartiness I had shown before, and so I abandoned it.
I then began my second Big Book, the story of the seduction of a Washington-based Canadian diplomat by an American anchorwoman, a little tale that was to be a parable of Canadian innocence pitted against American worldliness and savvy. But the longer I sat at my kitchen table with the chipped Arborite top, the soles of my stockinged feet being concussed by my downstairs neighbour’s stereo, the more utterly at sea I found myself. No matter how hard I tried to skilfully manoeuvre my characters, they just wouldn’t steer. Nothing my diplomat insisted on saying sounded diplomatic or persuasive, and my anchorwoman kept wanting to unhook her bra and cast off her panties at the drop of a hat, which didn’t jibe with my attempt to portray a metaphorical view of the relations of our two nations. That is, unless I could work in a scene of enforced coitus interruptus. That Big Book died too.
I note with some dissatisfaction and envy that Victoria’s apartment building is obviously newer and better-maintained than my own. From where I sit in my parked car I am also able to see that it has a security door and one of those buzzer panels that force you to ring the occupant to get the door sprung. That might cause me some problems.
I get out of the car and begin to nonchalantly cruise the sidewalk in front of the building with my hands stuffed carelessly in my pockets, and an eye cocked on the entrance. When I finally spot a couple standing in the vestibule waiting for a taxi, I go up to the door and hopelessly fumble in my pockets as if looking for my keys. No one knows anyone else in these buildings and after twenty seconds of watching me rummage in my pants the man obligingly opens the door. I smile and shake my head ruefully and jangle a set of keys at him.
“You always find ’em after somebody takes the trouble,” I say in a fair imitation of bemusement at the world’s wondrous workings.
He nods and smiles in agreement.
I locate Victoria’s apartment on the second floor. I know she is in because I hear the stereo playing Cleo Laine. My heart melts a little. My wife is nuts about Cleo Laine. I knock on the door.
Victoria doesn’t take the chain off the door when she answers it. This is untypical. Perhaps living alone has made her more cautious. At one time, to my worry, she was too trustful, a petter of stray dogs, distempered cats and their human counterparts.
I let her see clearly who it is.
“What do you want?” she inquires sourly.
“Please let me in.”
“No.”
I dart my hand through the gap and grab the chain. This is a desperate measure. It isn’t going to get me in, but it prevents her closing the door in my face. Of course, she could break my wrist by banging the door on it, but I’m willing to risk agony for love.
Victoria doesn’t slam the door but she does bite my thumb. Right on the nail, hard. I almost faint, the way I did when I was a boy being vaccinated at school. There is something about me and pain. But I grimly hang on, issue an exquisitely pitiful moan and think of Sam Waters and all he suffered. Speaking comparatively, this is nothing.
The pain suddenly subsides and Victoria is gone. She comes back and shows me a claw hammer. An Iroquois squaw displaying the instrument of torture to Père Brébeuf.
“You let go of this chain, Ed, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Tear my heart out and feed it to the dogs,” I declare dramatically. “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
“I’ll smack you, Ed,” she says, beginning to cry.
“Please. Please let me talk to you.”
“Damn it,” she says, quietly snuffling, apparently resigned to my entry, “let go of the chain so I can unhook it.”
“No tricks? Promise?” I say doubtfully.
“Let go of the damn chain!” she shouts in frustration.
I do and she opens up. I go immediately to the kitchen sink and begin to run cold water on my thumb.
I am a little disappointed to see that the skin isn’t broken or the nail discoloured. I won’t be able to play this for much.
“They say a human bite is far more dangerous than a dog’s,” I comment matter-of-factly. “The bacteria in the saliva are more dangerous. Maybe it has to do with the carbohydrates in our diet. Maybe they provide a richer culture.”
No answer.
I poke my head around the corner and peer cautiously into the living-room. Victoria has flung herself in a resentful attitude across the chesterfield.
“You have a very nice apartment,” I say. “You should see the place I’m in. The tile’s lifting off the kitchen floor and the walls are so thin I can hear my neighbour’s bum squeaking and rubbing on the bottom of his bathtub.”
“So move.”
I take a deep, contrite breath. “I know I had no business butting in today,” I say. “But I was worried about you. You looked so goddamn awful.”
“Check out a mirror. Worry about yourself. How long have you been sleeping in those clothes?”
She’s right. I should have, at the very least, changed my clothes and showered before coming by. To be perfectly frank, a trip to a barber might have been in order too.
“Excuse my appearance,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve been so busy –”
“Ha!” An explosion of bitter disbelief and contempt. “Busy doing what? Just what in hell has occupied so much of your time you can’t wash your clothes or comb your hair? Tell me, Ed. That’s one I want to hear.”
“The novel,” I say uneasily, beginning to shift my weight from foot to foot nervously like a small boy called up on the carpet, “I’ve been working hard on the novel.”
“Excuse my scepticism,” she says tartly as she gets up and flicks on the television.
“Turn that off!” I shout. I’m angry now. I am working on a novel. I have nearly seventy pages written and I can hardly sleep some nights for the notions that pop into my head.
Victoria ignores my request and fixes her pretty, long-lashed peepers on the TV. Two pitiful clowns on the screen are gambolling around a grey, wrinkled elephant in artificial gaiety, trying to make an audience of children laugh. Cleo is still belting it out on the stereo. I can hardly hear myself think in this bedlam.
“I repeat, I am working on a novel.”
“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she says.
“Take that back!” I shout.
“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she repeats calmly, enunciating each syllable slowly and distinctly.
“This coming from a person who considers running around in thirty-degree weather an activity worthy of a rational being. Talk about misdirected, wasted effort,” I say acidly.
“You just aren’t capable of understanding, are you, Ed?” Victoria coolly asks. She begins to lecture in her professional voice. Victoria is a social worker and doesn’t often forget it. “You won’t allow yourself to understand because you intuitively sense that what’s behind it all is self-discipline. And self-discipline is something you don’t have and never will have.”
“Judge not lest you be judged.”
“To hell with you, Ed. You wrecked our marriage. I kept giving and giving –”
“To anyone who asked,” I interrupt.
“No, to you. And you kept taking and taking. Well, I’m through giving, and I’m through holding my breath watching you drift, hoping something will happen and that you’ll take your life in hand.” She pauses and says somewhat sadly, “You’re just like one of those goddamn jellyfish, Ed. You just drift along with the tide and when anyone gets within range of your tentacles you sting them. All you know how to do is float and sting.”
“Old Ed and the great Muhammad Ali,” I say sarcastically, miffed by this unflattering comparison, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
“I rest my case.”
I walk to the window and look out at the patchwork of roofs. I am near the end of my tether but I won’t let go. “I don’t like the way I’m living now,” I manage to say in a voice that is all counterfeit normalcy. “I want us to live together again. I don’t sleep very well. I’ve gained twenty-three pounds.”
“Ed,” says Victoria, not unkindly, “I’m sorry. But I do sleep well. I’ve lost five pounds. I can make friends without worrying about what you will eventually do or say to them. I haven’t gone to pieces and I won’t go to pieces. You look after yourself now. I’m through begging you to watch your weight and be nice to people. You can eat fudgy-wudgies until you can’t get through the door. You can insult nuns on the street for all I care. Do what you wish. But I’m not going to be there typing your résumés or pressing your suits so that you appear presentable at interviews for jobs you don’t make the slightest effort to land. You’re a big boy, Ed. Sink or swim. I always believed you could make something of yourself. I’m not so sure any more. I don’t think you have the guts it takes.”
Her tone is not really callous but I am alarmed. Things have come to a dreadful pass. How my wife has changed! And I am in part responsible for what she has become. I feel a great sadness. How I have disappointed her. I remember how, when first married, we lay in one another’s arms and talked about what the rest of our life would be. Sun, shellfish and wine in Spain. The click-clack of my typewriter as I wrote the Big Novel. The click of her camera shutter as she photographed the sober, dignified peasant faces of Spain.
My throat hurts terribly. Something, maybe my heart, is swelling ominously in my chest.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I ask abruptly, afraid that I might shame myself by beginning to sob in her bright, modern and airy living-room.
Victoria directs me.
I discover she has turned the bathroom into a hothouse, surrendering to the female impulse to demurely disguise its basic function. The place is a veritable hanging garden of Babylon. Potted plants suspended from the ceiling, potted plants on the toilet tank, potted plants on the vanity. All are signs that the ancien régime is eclipsed. I would never have tolerated any of this had I been resident.
My hairy face stares palely and uneasily back at me from the mirror. This tropical atmosphere, this humidity, this rank foliage, awaken in me some primal jungle fear. I am overcome with stark anxiety; I feel watched and hunted. It is all I can do to prevent myself from casting about in search of two yellow cat-eyes blazing behind a fern frond, or prevent myself from surveying the floor for sign of fresh leopard scat.
I run some cold water into the basin and splash my face. Momentarily and profusely I give way to tears. In a moment it is finished. Perhaps I am more aggrieved than sad. Certainly I am troubled and uneasy. My wife is no longer the woman I had remembered. Or perhaps more correctly, living in isolation from me has made her more of what she was. Independent, collected, realistic.
A person could give way to paranoia. The two people with whom I once lived, Benny and Victoria, are in league against me. I feel betrayed by the fact that they have changed while I remain faithful to the past and old loyalties. Benny is not the person I once knew, and neither, apparently, is Victoria. They have entered the long, dark tunnel of personal histories from which I am excluded. I feel left behind. A man standing on a tarmac watching my holiday plane lifting off for a brighter, sunnier, more welcoming place.
And because these people change, because they are in a state of flux, they seem unreal to me. Sam Waters is much more real. I put my faith in him. I think of his example before I go to sleep and when I wake.
Sam Waters made his appearance in that sad time after the failure of the second Big Book, and like Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the forehead of Zeus, he arrived on the scene unaccompanied by the normal pangs of artistic birth. Perhaps it was automatic handwriting. Or, put more poetically, the Muse in her beneficence gave me a sentence. In any case, I don’t know where it came from. There I was, sitting at my kitchen table on a bleak, lonely Sunday afternoon, doodling dispiritedly – mostly hanged men – when I heard this sentence. Actually heard it.
“Sam Waters had been a plainsman, a buffalo-hunter, a wind-drinker, a free man before he became the sheriff of Constitution.”
I wrote that down and looked at it very hard. There it was. Yes, I said, nodding to myself, sure he had. And?
“And because of the long vistas he had looked steadily into and the clean rain he had tasted, he didn’t care much for towns. Sam Waters was too big a man to feel easy in towns. They made him feel pinched and cramped and restless. And worst thing about them was that their smells made it difficult for him to breathe, and no town smelled worse than Constitution, because Constitution stank with the worst smell of all – hypocrisy.”
I edged forward in my chair and began to scribble in a white heat of composition. No more Flaubertian search for the bon mot. It flew fast and furiously. I was tapping some strange vein in my psyche, and pressing on for the mother lode.
“The good, honest citizens of Constitution had wanted Sam Waters as sheriff because of his hard fists and big heart and quick draw. They wanted a man tough enough to have undergone the Blackfoot manhood trial, twirling crazily around a lodge pole suspended on bones skewering the muscles of his chest, arms and legs. They wanted a man wily and cunning enough to have stolen ponies from the best horse thieves of all the Plains Indian tribes, the Pawnee. And they wanted a man cool enough to have faced down Doc Holliday in Abilene, relying only on a poker face and a Colt Peacemaker with six empty chambers to make a coldblooded killer who was wasting away with consumption and so didn’t have much to lose anyway, quail when he looked into a certain pair of cold, blue eyes.
“Such a man, the good, honest citizens of Constitution felt, would be a match for the whiskey-crazed Texan drovers who tore apart Constitution each year when they reached the railhead with their herds and tried to forget all the hard miles with rotgut, Madame Louise’s fancy ladies and general, unbuttoned hell-raising.
“But at the moment the people of Constitution looked on their sheriff as a liability and a danger. Men stepped aside and looked at the toes of their boots when they met him making his rounds, and women pursed their lips in disapproval when he touched the brim of his Stetson to them. They didn’t want anything to do with him ever since that fateful day when he had eliminated three perils to public safety and content in the space of six short hours.
“They had applauded the first. On a hot August afternoon, while everyone watched from the safety of their homes and stores, Sam Waters had stepped into the dust of mainstreet toting his Sharps breechloader and drilled a slavering, rabid dog who had lurched toward him, jaws snapping. That had made him a hero. The Mayor had insisted on having his picture taken shaking Sam’s hand beside the carcass of the poor dead brute.
“But later that evening Sam had been foolish enough to do away with two other mad dogs, far more dangerous than the first. Their names were Rafe and Lucas McMurchy, and Sam, in trying to arrest them, had met with resistance. When the two brothers had hauled iron on him in Madame Louise’s knocking shop, Sam had been forced to cut them down.
“The problem was that the boys had gotten a bit too frisky with one of the upstairs girls. She had crashed naked out of a third-storey window and fell screaming into the street below. She had died several hours later, and nobody was about to thank Sam Waters for avenging a common whore. And certainly not when she had met her fate at the hands of Rafe and Lucas McMurchy, sons of Chas McMurchy, a man who owned five thousand head of cattle and every soul in Constitution. Every soul save one, and that soul Chas McMurchy had sworn he’d see in hell if he had to take apart Constitution brick by brick and board by board to do it.”
And that’s where I stopped, although my pen was primed and I knew, as sure as ever I knew anything, that there was plenty more where that came from. And I wasn’t wrong either. In the last month, in odd moments, I’ve written, without effort or reflection, sixty more pages of Sam Waters’ story. Not that I’ve admitted this to anyone else. My goodness no. If the news got around that old Ed was writing a Western, what rejoicing there would be in the camps of the Moabites! How Benny would snigger. Victoria might even brave a comment about the essential banality of my mind. And I must admit, my infatuation with leathery old Sam says something unflattering about his admirer.
You see, Sam has assumed an awesome substantiality in my mind. He has become a yardstick against which I measure my conduct. Good old Sam. Unchanging and solid as the proverbial rock of Gibraltar. Always there when I need him, as I need him now. His figure looms up before me, rangy and slackjointed. His hands are brown, of course, and also sure, strong, and above all, capable. His eyes are blue, a faded blue, washed clean by wind and sun. Sam’s speech is slow and deliberate and his voice never cracks or falters in a tight situation, just as his bowels never loosen nor his hands sweat. The thing about Sam is that he generally knows what the hell is going on. He has no phobias, doesn’t suffer from anxiety attacks, doesn’t suspect he is hypoglycemic, or entertain suspicions of his latent homosexuality.
Victoria taps softly on the bathroom door. “Ed, are you all right?”
I don’t want her in here just now so I lock the door. It seems that I have spent a good deal of my time hiding from Victoria behind locked doors.
She hears the sharp click of the lock turning. She questions me uneasily. “What are you doing in there, Ed?”
“Thinking.”
“Ed, don’t do anything crazy. Come out of the bathroom.” Because of some stupid answers I gave to a silly test Dr. Brandt gave me once, Victoria thinks I am capable of doing myself in when depressed. Little chance of that. An exhibitionist, the only way I could go out would be like Yukio Mishima, slicing through my guts with a Samurai sword. But I don’t have that kind of jam or pizzazz.
“Go away.”
“Ed, please come out.”
I ask myself at this juncture in our dialogue, what would Sam Waters do in a situation like this? Why, it is as plain as the nose on your face. He would open the door and, cloaked in the dignity of one of nature’s noblemen, walk away from the woman who could no longer love him. But Ed, well, he presses whatever advantage he has.
“I want to make a deal,” I say.
“What deal? What are you talking about?”
“I’ll come out of here on one condition.”
“What condition?”
“The condition that you give me a chance to prove to you that I can change. That I can reform myself.”
“You’re not moving in here, Ed. That’s final. I’m not taking you back.”
“Did I say anything about moving in?” I ask indignantly.
“No.”
“Well then, just listen. Just listen to me for a minute.” I continue, growing grandiloquent, carried away by my idea. “Like a knight giving proof of his valour to his lady love, I want to face the scaly green dragon of Sloth and the basilisk of Irresponsibility, and, armed only with trusty Self-Discipline, massacre the sons of bitches.”
“Ed, come out of there.”
“Listen, Victoria,” I say more earnestly, dropping my oratorical tone, “I’m only asking that if I prove to you that I can carry through with something really difficult – if I prove I can stick to something – that you’ll take me back for a trial period … say six weeks. No strings attached. But if I fall on my face you can have your divorce – uncontested.”
“Your mind is positively medieval. That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. Come out of the bathroom.”
“What have you got to lose?” I wheedle.
“My toe-hold on sanity, that’s what.”
“A test. Any test. You set it, darling.”
“Fine. Jump off my balcony. That ought to do it.”
“Victoria,” I say, “I am serious.”
“This is stupid and childish, Ed. I don’t want any part of it. It is just another one of your games. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Victoria, don’t you see,” I say seductively, “this is your way out? The easy way to get me out of your life?”
“I can change, Victoria. I can.”
“You want a test, do you?” she asks, and there is a touch of both malice and glee in her voice.
“Yes.”
“You had your laugh for the past six years, Ed. But he who laughs last laughs best. Okay. I want you to finish the River Run, Ed. All twelve and a half miles.”
“Good God, Victoria, you don’t want to test me. You want to kill me. What does that have to do with love and fidelity and things like that?”
“Take it or leave it.”
I have no choice. Faint hope stirs in my chivalric breast. An ordeal. I fling open the door and attempt to embrace her. I am repulsed.
“You goddamn madman,” she says, turning on her heel. “I need a drink.”
“Don’t bother pouring me one,” I call after her. “From this moment henceforward I am in training.”
Two days later and at last I am determined to sally forth on my adventure. I debated this for a long time. On Tuesday I thought I was coming down with one of those horrible summer colds. Wednesday I devoted to mental preparation. But this morning a zealous Ed awoke.
I energetically yank on a pair of cutoffs, lace up my dirty sneakers and amble out to be greeted by birdsong from the fine old elm on the boulevard. I begin to run. For two blocks I plod along feeling heavy, ponderous, doughy. I stop and walk for a bit to recover my wind. In a short time I realize that I’m not going to begin to run again. It is a stupid way to prove a point. Twelve and a half miles? She has misunderstood me. That wasn’t what I was talking about. It was love I was speaking of, and in a moment of poetic rhapsody she bound me with mundane specificities. Love is never having to run twelve and a half miles. Love is offering to. But only a piker accepts.
I sit down on the curb and watch the traffic flow by for half an hour. Victoria’s unfairness angers me. I brood. It feels like it may rain, so I go back to the apartment.
The minute I step inside the door it hits me. There are dirty dishes crusted with old goop littering the table and kitchen counter. The bedroom smells stale and the bed looks like a rat’s nest. There are long hairs in the bathroom sink and a ring in the tub so substantial that honesty compels me to describe it as a ledge.
This is my mess. The visible excreta of the life I have led in the last few months. The door to the medicine cabinet hangs carelessly open on its hinges, the way I had left it the night before. I punch it, shatter the mirror and cut my knuckles. Trailing droplets of blood, I go back to the kitchen.
“Fuck it,” I say. “Fuck this life. Fuck these plates.” Three of which I smash in the sink, shards dancing up to patter on the wall and floor.
I sit down on a kitchen chair and feel my hand throb and stiffen. It can’t be escaped any more. For months I have held Victoria responsible for the way I live. I have held her responsible because it didn’t take me long to discover that I didn’t manage well on my own.
But there is no avoiding it. It may seem an obvious point – but those dirty dishes are mine. It is my filth in the bathroom. And I am living this crazy goddamn life stuck in neutral. All this is my mess, not Victoria’s.
And I admit to myself that I am scared because I realized I must sink or swim. I am afraid because Victoria isn’t here to prod and cajole me over the rough spots any longer. This is my rough spot.
And suddenly, for whatever reason, I think at this minute of my old humpbacked cigar-puffing Dane. Perhaps because my first memories of him are associated with feelings of aggrievement and persecution. My introduction to him was by way of a philosophy professor who was a demanding, half-crazed German who belonged in nineteenth-century Heidelberg rather than a North American university of the sixties. Whenever we malingered or bitched about the work load, he would repeat to us one of Kierkegaard’s entries from his journal.
“There is nothing everyone is so afraid of as being told how vastly much he is capable of. You are capable of – do you want to know? – you are capable of living in poverty; you are capable of standing almost any kind of maltreatment, abuse, etc. But you do not wish to know about it, isn’t that so? You would be furious with him who told you so, and only call that person your friend who bolsters you in saying: ‘No, this I cannot bear, this is beyond my strength, etc.’ ”
He would announce this sternly to us and then add with Teutonic glumness, “I refuze to be a valze vriend. I will stretch you.”
I have one of my rare charitable thoughts. Perhaps Victoria has done me the favour of telling me I can stand alone. Perhaps she has done me the favour of making me bear the stink of my own loneliness.
And so I get to my feet and go back down into the street. I think of Soren taunted and jeered at in the streets of Copenhagen. I take heart from his observation that “one is tempted to ask whether there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly.” And Sam too. I don’t forget Sam and what he suffered and how he overcame the odds.
I begin to shuffle down the street, muttering through my teeth, telling myself the story.
“After they struck him with coup sticks and quirts they stripped off every bit of his clothing and took away his boots. The old scars on his body, the puckered, ridged hole on his shoulder from a bullet he had caught at Antietam, the sabre scar on his belly, turned blue in the cold April wind.
“Looking Glass indicated he could begin to walk. The young bucks expectantly fingered their lances and edged forward, impatient at the restraints imposed by their chief. But Looking Glass had set the trial and conditions. They dared not defy him. Sam Waters would be unarmed and naked, but he would be given a hundred-yard head start before the braves were loosed in pursuit.
“Twenty yards out Sam spat grimly. What the hell? he thought. He paused and waggled his bare ass derisively at his captors. There was a howl of rage. ‘Huh sutkis weepa hupka, kaksakis nuhka!’ he taunted them in their own tongue. Let’s play dog. You sniff my ass and I’ll growl.
“On he walked, hardly aware of the bedlam he had created. He didn’t feel the cold. He was preoccupied only with making the river three long miles away. He marshalled his strength. In a moment, he would be running for his life. Running barefooted across sharp rocks that would slash his feet, and cacti that would lodge their wicked needles in his flesh. He would have to disregard the pain and press on. And when he reached the icy river, running fast with snow melt and whirling with ice cakes, he would have to plunge in and allow the current to sweep his exhausted body downriver either to his death or to salvation.”
I scrape along past the neighbourhood Texaco station where I buy my gas. Ernie the pump jockey waves to me.
“When Sam heard the whoops behind him he sped away. He didn’t look behind. He didn’t need to. Sam knew the lithe, ochre-streaked bodies were hot on his heels, closing fast, trying to get into range for a spear cast that would bring down the great Bull Head, the white warrior.”
Past the shopping mall. A young matron pauses from loading her grocery bags in the trunk to watch me go by. Does she imagine that I am pursued by Brass Pot, Trader Bell and Wakshee, and does she know they are gaining on me? I pick up the pace.
“A spent lance skittered off the rocks by his legs. Sam’s energy was flagging. His lungs burned, his chest heaved, sweat coursed down his brow into his eyes. He glanced down at his feet. A bloody pulp.
“A coulee. He staggered down one slope, branches whipping his face, ploughed through a spring drift spraying the snow with specks of blood, scrabbled up the opposite bank, fingers tearing at the earth.”
Easy does it! Make Cameron Crescent, swing back on 14th Street and coast home.
“Sam could see the cold grey river flecked with ice floes as it snaked along. But the cries of the braves behind him were more distinct and had a triumphant note. One final effort. He began to sprint. A lance whistled past his head. He began to zigzag, darting and twisting to elude his pursuers.”
A car horn blasts sharply behind me and a guy in a grey Buick forces me up on the sidewalk. I hadn’t realized it, but in sympathy with Sam I had been weaving from side to side down the road, dodging Shoshone missiles.
I press on for home, a public spectacle. A couple of kids even go so far as to follow me on their bicycles, giggling and chanting, “Go man, go!” like onlookers urging on a ledge jumper. Maybe it is their intent to rifle my pockets for change when I collapse. But I disappoint them. In fact, at the very moment Sam is clawing his way out of the river shivering, retching and coughing, miles upstream and safe from his howling captors, I am fitting my key in my lock; coughing and retching. I have gone a considerable way my first time out. Perhaps as far as a mile.
I showed up at the River Run. But only to watch Victoria run. She did a lovely job, and I was proud of her although I didn’t tell her so. There was a man waiting for her at the finish with a thermos and a sponge.
I am not trying to fool myself or anyone else when I say that I could have completed the run if I had chosen to enter. By September 14 I was running six miles a day and had dropped seventeen pounds through hard work and fervent fasting. I am quite sincere and honest in saying that I could have – no, would have – finished it if I had ever toed the starting-line. It was that knowledge which gave me the strength to refrain from making a point that would have meant nothing.
I’ve changed in some ways. They are difficult to describe fairly and accurately. For instance, my domestic habits haven’t improved much. My dishes are seldom done punctually. I don’t barge in on Victoria or even phone her any more. But I still sometimes sit outside her apartment in my car, plotting extravagant schemes to regain her love. Even though I don’t believe in their efficacy any more.
But then again I’ve found myself a job. They can’t keep a good man down forever. I’m a salesman in the chinaware department in Eaton’s. I’d be lying if I claimed I liked my work, but I can bear it. It sure the hell beats working in a community college as I did before.
In a month and a half I’ve learned all the patterns, never been late for work, or obviously insulted a customer. Mrs. McCuish, my supervisor, is quite taken with the way I handle the old biddies. I have discovered a latent and surprising talent for the jollification and pacification of the blue-haired hags who stalk our aisles searching out that special piece for that “set” which has been growing like a cancer in their china cabinets since their marriages forty-five years ago. As Kierkegaard suggested, I find myself constantly amazed by my capacity to absorb abuse.
Speaking of Kierkegaard, he is slowly supplanting Sam Waters as my guide through life’s pitfalls. I’ve discovered that his approach is much more relevant to life in a department store than Sam’s. Sam is dying a slow death as I continue to transfer his story to paper. He has lost some of the importance he had when he resided principally in my imagination.
No, it’s Soren whom I contemplate as I fondle a piece of Doulton and make ecstatic faces across the counter at some dame who is starting a daughter-in-law off as a collector. Continuing the family tradition.
It is Soren I think of when I ask myself why I gave up Victoria. As he forsook Regine, did I forsake Victoria? No. I merely understood that I would only embitter her by surprising her at this late date. She needed to be done with me. And my completing the River Run would only anger her by confusing the picture of me that she had built up over our years together.
That’s not to say that I intend to leave it at that. I am going to show her I can finish something. The something is my Western, my story of Sam and his tribulations. Victoria will get a xerox copy of the manuscript in the mail. If she shows it to her friends or even Benny I won’t care. They’ll laugh, of course, and perhaps even doubt my sanity, or ponder the pass I’ve come to – selling plates and writing dusters.
I’ve already chosen an epigraph to my book, from Kierkegaard’s Journals. It’s my apology to Victoria and my admission that she was right all along. A kind of absolution that may surprise her, and, I hope, touch her. You see, she always expected more of me.
Soren wrote: “What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being.”