A phone call, a surprising, startling phone call, loosened my death grip on The Beast’s throat. It was my wife. A curious development, because not only have Victoria and I not met face to face for over a year, but she has resolutely refused to speak to me during our separation except through her lawyer, her mouthpiece, Benny Ferguson. Our last conversation occurred on the summer evening that I inveigled a tenant in her apartment building into unlocking the lobby door to me. He fell for a convincing dumb-show search of pockets for keys I didn’t have.
Mine was not a successful re-wooing. I succeeded in insinuating myself into her suite by some childish yet compelling tactics, but one thing led to another, the result being that I locked myself in her bathroom and refused to come out.
The day I barricaded myself in her bathroom is the day from which I date our present impasse. Our happiness together I date from that day in June of 1973 when I arrived at the door of Victoria’s flat bearing three madras plaid shirts on hangers and a pair of blue jeans with the cuffs tied shut and the legs stuffed with underwear and socks. Although we had been seeing each other for over six months, Victoria clung tenaciously to her privacy and independence; she never permitted me to stay with her for longer than a single night, and she made it clear that she did not want a roommate, male or female. She was determined to be free, an attitude I found unacceptable. So that day in June I explained to Victoria that my roomie Benny had received a shitload of dope from a guy in Vancouver and was intending to deal it out of our apartment. I told her I was terrified of being busted while he conducted business, and asked if I could temporarily move in until trafficking was suspended. My lie got me in the door. Later, Victoria had trouble persuading me I should leave. Throughout the summer I continued to widen the breach in her defences and to infiltrate the citadel, bit by bit smuggling in my worldly possessions, quietly establishing squatter’s rights. Despite herself Victoria got used to me, even though she kept up a kind of weak resistance until September, when university classes resumed and distracted her. Victoria was a conscientious student.
I have wonderful memories of that July and August. I remember her as already a remarkable woman at twenty-two, full of courage, passionate, opinionated beyond the appeal of reason. When we drank beer and argued, her face would flush so red with conviction that I was sure I could feel it radiate heat across the width of the table. Perhaps she did not believe in the things she defended as much as she believed in herself and in her inability to ever be wrong. That may account for why she struggled to save me for so long.
The only thing she seemed to have a doubt about was her nose. It was large, had a high bridge and flaring nostrils, and saved her face from being merely beautiful. That summer she wore her hair in a shag cut, probably because the crinkled hair and big nose taken together made her look exotic, vaguely Assyrian. The rest of Victoria was an approximation of middle-class ideals of perfection: a translucently fine complexion; strong, even teeth; a slim, leggy, full-breasted body that always smelled faintly and pleasantly of soap, toothpaste, and baby powder.
To sum up, she was everything I wasn’t: assured, idealistic, ungrubby. She had had success stamped early in her heart as I had had failure stamped early in mine. She had been vice-president of her high school’s student government, a member of the honour roll, editor of the yearbook, popular. I also learned, in time, that when Victoria was seventeen, a high school senior dating a university man named Max, she had been deftly deflowered and had awakened to the knowledge that she enjoyed sex a good deal.
In contrast, I was a long-term social pariah who had never had a date in high school until my graduation, when my mother scared up a girl for me through her vast network of friends and relatives, a girl horrible and desperate enough to grace my arm while I waddled through the grand march of graduates. In anticipation of my first real encounter with the fair sex, I spent a lot of time studying “The Playboy Adviser,” French-kissing my left biceps, and practising unhooking a bra of my mother’s I had stolen out of the laundry hamper.
It was this high level of sexual expertise (barely supplemented by three wild, roguish years of university life) that I brought to bear on my seduction of Victoria. Add to this the fact that I was corpulent and considered by some to be verging on sociopathic and one is confronted by one of those baffling conundrums of the heart: What was Victoria doing with me? I had no answer then, but later, after I had been introduced to her family, I thought I could see why she was drawn to me. Maybe it was because I was as different from her father as a man could be, and that what Victoria at first valued in me was eccentricity, unpredictability, and an emotional range that she equated with depth of feeling rather than a lack of restraint. Certainly the first time I wept in front of her she was stunned.
Oh yes, that was a fine summer. Victoria was working as a secretary, earning money against her return to university in the fall, and I was preparing for grad studies by teaching myself the French I hadn’t troubled to learn in high school. When I wasn’t conjugating verbs, I was refurbishing Victoria’s tiny apartment on the third storey of a rickety old revenue house. One day she would return from work to find the kitchen painted canary yellow, another to discover the bedroom was painted blue and there were carnations in a bowl on the dresser. I was happy. I stripped the old, yellowing wax off the living-room floor and polished and repolished the linoleum until the reflection of my face beamed back at me. I washed windows and revarnished window frames and baseboards until the place was redolent with vinegar and varnish.
By five-thirty, when Victoria arrived home from work, the flat, which was directly under the roof, would be sizzling hot, but I would serve her chilled lemonade and one of my famed cold collations: devilled eggs, salami, French bread, pickles, bean salad, Jell-O chocolate pudding. After eating and changing, we would walk downtown to escape the oppressive heat. Sometimes we sat through the same movie twice for the pleasure of the air-conditioning, sometimes we met friends to drink beer and talk politics, talk books, talk films, talk the meaning of life, talk anything. We were testing our wings; none of us talked for truth but for victory. I talked for her. I performed, I ranted, I gesticulated, I demonstrated, I impugned, I drunkenly soared in a flight of rhetoric. I had somebody. I talked for Victoria.
It was always late before we started for home, strolling along in the lush, warm darkness. On a week night the streets would be deserted except for the occasional carload of drunks tooling around in a Camaro, Firebird, Cobra, or Mustang. Victoria, braless in a T-shirt and jaunty in safari shorts, often attracted attention and remarks.
One night in August one of these muscle cars crawled over to the curb, engine rumbling throatily, and a number of beery Visigoths hung out the windows to give vent to their admiration. I, with a long and woe-filled experience of being subjected to the unwelcome attentions of extra-chromosome types, turned catatonic with terror. Victoria did not. When I counselled silence and circumspection I was not heeded.
“Ignore him, Victoria. Do not even look at him.”
“Hey, baby!”
“Forgive them, Victoria, for they know not what they do,” I said, picking up the pace.
Loud, suggestive sucking noises.
“Hey, baby, lose jumbo and come for a ride!”
“What a treat. A ride in the fartmobile. Just what every girl wants,” Victoria said. She has a talent for invective if roused.
“Oh Jesus. Don’t get them mad, Victoria.”
“Hey, I got something to show you, baby. Wanna see a one-eyed pant snake?”
“Go have a wet dream, greaseball.”
“For God’s sake, Victoria,” I said between clenched teeth, “do you know what you’re talking to? This is the kind of person who collects Nazi regalia, for chrissakes.”
“It’s made to measure, baby, I guarantee. Check out the fit.”
“Fit it in your hand, algae. From the looks of your complexion that’s where it usually goes.”
Quite naturally he turned his attention to me, favouring weaker prey. “Hey, Fatso, what you got to say for yourself? You as mouthy as the broad?”
I didn’t answer.
“Hey, I’m talking to you, Georgie Jell-O!”
Victoria said, “Leave him alone, creep.”
“So you talk for both of you, eh? So what’s Tubby got I don’t got?”
“Me, for one thing.”
How my heart leapt, even in that moment of imminent peril. Me! Me! Me!
“Some prize,” he said.
“Get lost, pustule.”
“Fuck you, bitch!”
The driver revved the engine, popped the clutch. Tires squealed and smoked. When the tail lights had swept around a corner, I said, “They don’t know how lucky they are. I was on the point of freaking out. It could have been a mean scene for them.”
“Come on, Ed,” said Victoria, “let’s get going before they decide to come back. Let’s go home.”
Off we went, hand in hand, my legs and heart pumping in time to the refrain ringing in my head. Me! Me! Me!
It was several months after this declaration that the seed of the idea of going to Greece was planted. Victoria had assembled our portable desk (a door laid across two sawhorses) in front of the living-room window to reap the benefit of the October light. I lay on the sofa attempting to persuade her to join me there. At the time I was mournfully singing “I’m Mr. Lonely” at the top of my lungs.
“Ed, shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” She was laughing, though.
“Bobby Vinton appeals with his plaintive mating call. Dare you resist his blandishments?”
“I’m trying to finish a paper.”
“What paper can possibly be more important than the duty to reach out and touch another human being in his hour of need?”
“A paper on Greek mythology due tomorrow.”
“A paper on Greek mythology could only be enriched by a fuller understanding of the Dionysian revel. Let us disport ourselves with Attic enthusiasm.”
“Ed, give me a break.”
“Okay, okay. Offer yourself to me body and soul and I promise to type the paper for you tonight. Greek’s honour.”
“I thought you’re supposed to read a book for Schwingler’s seminar.”
“When the Greek’s blood is heated with the madness of Dionysian revel,” I declared, smiting my breast, “he thinks not of the paltry pedagogue Schwingler!”
“You aren’t going to give up until you get your way, are you?”
“That is an approximation of the truth, yes.”
“You just better type this paper then. I mean it,” she warned me, before entering freely into the spirit of the thing.
By December the “Greek afternoon” or the “Greek evening” had become a household phrase. By degrees we developed a festival of wine, song, and feasting to dispel the cold and darkness which crept into the soul during a Canadian winter. Whenever I saw Victoria’s spirits flag I would begin secretly to gather the ingredients necessary for a “Greek evening.” From the delicatessen across town I would buy spinach pies and Greek pastries. A store of metaxa and retsina would be laid in, albums of Greek folk music would be obtained from the public library, and a roast of lamb hidden in the freezer of the tenant who lived below us. Then one day when Victoria stumbled in out of a January blizzard, bundled, scarved, mittened, snow flakes frozen in her eyelashes, she would be welcomed by the scent of roasting meat, music on the stereo, me proffering a glass of retsina, and the cry: “Everybodies get heppy! We got a Greek night!”
So it would go. We had some good times. We ate and roared toasts and splashed metaxa down our throats as the stereo blasted out the sound track of Zorba the Greek.
I would propose: “Death to the Colonels!”
“Long live Melina Mercouri!” Victoria would rejoin.
“More sex, please! I am Greek!” I would yell.
In one of these moments of craziness I offered, “Next year in Crete!” and Victoria took me up on it. It was an idea easy to fasten on to in the black months of January and February. She began by collecting travel brochures and books. From that she progressed to explaining to me that cheap living in Greece would allow me to write. Writing was a thing I sometimes talked about doing, not very seriously of course, but in the way young men who study literature often do. I said her idea made sense. The next thing I knew, Victoria had taken a part-time job as a checkout clerk at Safeway and was making me set aside something each month from the salary I received as a teaching assistant at the university. This money was to finance a stay in Greece.
Nothing brought us closer than our talk of Greece, than the minutiae of budgeting and planning, than the book of traveller’s Greek we traded phrases back and forth from. I felt free to feed the fire because I believed that a hard-headed, practical girl such as Victoria would draw back at some point. After all, what the hell did the two of us want in Greece?
Finally, in the slush of March, we came to a decision that if we were going to live in conservative, reactionary Greece our stay would be made pleasanter and smoother if we were married. Not only that, if we had a wedding we could sell the wedding gifts to raise money to finance the trip.
It was agreed we would marry in June and then work until some time in November. The day the first snow flew we would begin preparations for our final departure. The symbolism of that appealed to Victoria. I never looked beyond June and the wedding.
But that is all in the past, and now, riding a city transit bus that shakes along snowy streets, I must consider more pressing things such as Victoria’s phone call and, with it, her perplexing invitation to lunch. She wasn’t unfriendly, merely curt and formal, exactly what one might expect given the circumstances. But why have I been summoned to a meeting? It can only be trouble of some kind. Perhaps the question of custody of Balzac. I can’t understand why she has chosen to stand firm on that issue. Not that I mind. If he is the last feeble link between us as man and wife, so be it. Victoria, after all, is the one who wishes our marriage ended as quickly, cleanly, and finally as possible. I, on the other hand, have not been prepared to relinquish my spouse with any semblance of dignity and good order.
This, I know, given the standards of the present age, is viewed as a grievous fault of character. I have seen a number of men of my age and acquaintance bow out nobly and back into the wings to allow the understudy to assume the role of male lead. However, Ed is jealous, Ed is possessive, Ed is selfish. I understand that contemporary couples ought to dissolve relationships harmoniously, with all the alacrity of a single-cell amoeba dividing itself in the interests of new life. Some generous souls speak well of the perfidious wife-snatcher in public and meet him for the occasional drink after work. Not this cookie. My petty antics are legendary in the circle of Victoria’s friends. They have enjoyed the spectacle of me in hot pursuit of the woman I love, travelling after her just as fast as my hands and knees will carry me.
The bus groans and shudders along icy, rutted streets. The city is in the second week of a severe cold snap. For twelve consecutive days the temperature has dropped below −35°C. Brisk, penetrating breezes drive needles of cold through pant legs, lodge aches in septums, gums, and teeth, burn faces with dazzling pain. Pedestrians weep and snuffle and wince from building to building.
Scratching a patch of clear glass out of the frost on my window I stare out at the frozen world while the bus grinds over the bridge. I can see the river’s crust of ice and snow, which has heaved and buckled where the current runs strongest in midchannel. A ribbon of water twists amid this shattered ice, steaming like a flow of ashy lava. On the river bank the tawny spire of St. John’s Cathedral raises a cross against a white sky.
I’m apprehensive about seeing Victoria again. For years I camouflaged love with acrimony, seeing our marriage as a series of bargains that had to be negotiated from a position of strength. I thought that to admit how much I needed Victoria was bad strategy. Of the two of us there was no doubt I was the weaker – and for that reason the least able to yield. At one time Victoria loved me. But she never needed me. I understood that from the beginning and hated what I understood. Now we have little but what I made us heir to: the dreary formulae of recrimination, elaborated by a genuine wish on her part to break free from me and my lover’s heart.
The bus drops me in front of the public library. From there it is a short, numbing walk to the Café Nice, where I have been ordered to report for lunch. Once inside the Café I shed my parka and lurk behind a large fern in the vestibule, scouting the premises. Good intelligence is an important function of all successful counter-insurgency operations. Know your enemy and the disposition of her forces.
I gingerly part the fronds and swing my eyes over the lunch-hour throng. At this time of day the diners are a rather conventional crew, younger professionals and businessmen and businesswomen, a spattering of well-dressed and well-heeled ladies savouring their second martini before tucking into the tourtière. In the evening the Café is given over to the city’s cognoscenti and artsy-fartsy set. Just the kind of place that attracts Victoria and her pals the way jam attracts wasps.
As the name Café Nice suggests, the restaurateur is a Gallomaniac with a particular passion for Provence, although anything French passes muster. There are travel posters displaying delectable French views, there are French cinema advertisements, there are notices of art exhibitions in Paris, and there are reproductions of impressionist masterpieces hung on the walls.
But the Riviera ambience is predominant. The tables have fake marble tops in which are stuck red-and-white sun parasols. The Mediterranean theme is embellished by a large wooden trough abutting a window overlooking the street. In this the proprietor of the Café Nice has dumped several yards of fine white sand, upon which are strewn gaily coloured beach balls suggestive of wave-lapped and sun-kissed shores.
It is by this window that Victoria sits smoking a cigarette and watching condensation dribble down the windowpane. She hasn’t changed much. Her hair is longer than when I saw her last and lies in a fat, loosely plaited braid across her collarbone. She is wearing crisp, starchy-looking blue jeans and one of those tweed jackets I always disliked because they emphasize her shoulders and de-emphasize her breasts. This is her tough, no-nonsense ensemble, so I can expect a serious conversation. That bodes ill for me. However, on the other hand I’m glad to see she doesn’t look particularly ornery, merely abstracted and perhaps a little tired.
The question now is how to cover gracefully the intervening distance under the scrutiny of a baleful, wifely eye. I shift from foot to foot and wring damp hands. I’m pretty sure I’m here to be called up on the carpet; demands are going to be made and the law is going to be laid down. All this is made worse because Victoria turned thirty-three in December.
I have a theory about the early thirties. Of course, Victoria says I have a theory about most things. The early thirties are a dangerous time because people get unpredictable. Roughly the age Jesus downed tools and walked out of the carpentry shop.
I turn over in my mind what she might want. Maybe the car. She paid for it and I haven’t had it repaired since the “accident.” Rust is already spotting the door panel that that old fart McMurtry scraped. Victoria will give me hell for that. She always hated my careless attitude towards property. Whenever I was given a lecture for neglecting or abusing something, the price tag took centre stage in the harangue. When I forgot to clean my electric razor for three months and the heads seized while she was doing her legs, Victoria demanded to know, while frenziedly scrubbing its innards with a toothbrush: “Ed, is this any way to treat a seventy-two-dollar razor?”
Better lose the car than Balzac. Our last confrontation was over the set of the Comédie humaine she bought at a garage sale shortly before we split up. When Victoria left she demanded the books. I pointed out to her when I refused to surrender them that she had obviously bought them for me. As support for this reasonable contention, I cited my upcoming birthday and the fact Victoria can’t read French. Voilà!
She’s not getting Balzac. For one thing, I’m not even through a third of the musty, foxed volumes of the Scènes de la vie privée. Ah yes, old Honoré surely knew the human heart. He’d held his ear to that intricate mechanism and heard the little cogs of malice, duplicity, greed, and lust creaking away, making their sinful music. So far the book about the marriage settlement is my favourite. Oh God, please don’t let her start in about the Balzac again.
Peering through the lacy maze of crinkled greenery I feel my apprehension at meeting Victoria growing. It has been a long time and I’m not sure I can trust myself to act decently. After I locked myself in Victoria’s bathroom last summer I promised myself she wouldn’t catch me grovelling again. But I have never been particularly good at holding to resolutions or improving my rather lamentable character. Not like my father. Pop, there was a man for resolutions, a Bismarckian gentleman of blood and iron. He used to tape Reader’s Digest’s “Increase Your Word Power” above the bathroom mirror so he could study it while shaving. “If you use a word three times,” he used to say, “you make it yours for life.”
It doesn’t seem that much else is for life, but Pop was going to get whatever could be had for the duration. Increasing his word power added colour and force to his letters to the boards and committees which had slighted him, but that wasn’t his motive for studying. He believed in being “well rounded.” It’s one of his great sorrows that I’m not.
Now or never, Ed. Death before dishonour. I hitch my shoulders back and strike boldly out into a field of carpet-daisies. As it turns out, Victoria is so lost in her thoughts she does not take her eyes from the rivulets streaking the window until she hears me struggling with the wicker chair. She glances up sharply, startled. Her face looks small and dark in the shade of the parasol; winter has chapped her lips and scored little lines in the pale, bitten flesh. She smiles at me in a wary but unhostile manner. This half-welcome surprises me.
“Ed,” she says, extending her hand.
I can’t take it because in my nervousness I’ve sat down too abruptly. Now I’m fumbling with a squeaking wicker chair that refuses to be shifted to the table without a struggle. While I wrestle with the arms, bounce my bottom, and heel the carpet, it keeps snagging the nap and tipping precipitously forward. A typical Ed entrance. I realize I’m mumbling to myself.
“You look very well,” Victoria says. Lady Gracious.
“I don’t. I’ve put weight on again. Goddamn it.” I lurch forward in stages to the edge of the table, accompanied by high-pitched squeals from the flimsy chair.
“You know why that is.” Victoria can’t help herself. I’m supposed to confess gluttony. She actually appears to be glad to see me fallen off the weight-watcher’s wagon and prime stock for the fat farm. I stare back, grim and tight-lipped.
“It’s not as if you’re ignorant about what you should eat. It’s just that you won’t eat anything that’s good for you.” This is a familiar refrain from our days of marital bliss.
“Yeah, yeah. Fruits, vegetables, cereals. White meats. Fish. Nuts. Complex carbohydrates,” I mutter, reviewing lessons learned.
“How’s your blood pressure? Are you going for your regular blood-pressure checks?”
“Jesus Christ, is this why I was called in? For the annual company physical?”
“A simple inquiry after your health.”
“No. A simple inquiry after my health would be: ‘How you doing, Ed?’ And then I could chirp back: ‘Fine. And yourself?’ ”
“You may not realize it, but not even I want to see you dead. You ought to take care of yourself better,” she says.
The waitress arrives at our table. I can’t believe it. The girl is got up in the uniform of a French sailor, right down to the pompom on her hat. My mind runs to the Battle of Trafalgar and Lord One-Eye Nelson. “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Sometimes I catch myself saying what I only meant to think.
“Pardon?” says the girl.
“Sorry. Don’t mind me. Too much sun.” I reach up and tickle the tassels on our parasol. The girl passes out the menus and gives me a sceptical look. I ought to pull myself together.
Victoria studies the menu. She is used to me and isn’t easily ruffled.
“What are you having, Ed?”
“I thought a complex carbohydrate would be nice.”
“Sir?”
“Ignore him,” says Victoria, not even troubling to look up. “Two spinach salads with house dressing, two mushroom omelettes, and a half-litre of dry white wine, please.”
“Make that a litre,” I say.
“Ma’am?”
“A litre then.”
The waitress gathers up the menus and bustles off to the kitchen.
Victoria busies herself lighting a cigarette. “You made her uncomfortable. That wasn’t necessary. Behave yourself.”
Victoria, as usual, is right. “I didn’t make her uncomfortable. You made her uncomfortable. They expect the man to order.”
“Save your breath. I’m not getting drawn into one of those interminable and invariably childish arguments that you concoct to cover your tracks.”
I’d forgotten how wise in the ways of Ed she is. “Well,” I say, trying to look injured, “don’t accuse me of things I didn’t do.”
“Same old Ed.” Victoria sighs, breathes smoke. “I guess you can’t expect a leopard to change its spots.”
“Or a skunk to change its stripes.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Ed. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to pick scabs on old wounds. Let’s try and keep it pleasant. I haven’t much fight in me at the moment.” The skin around her eyes looks smudged, grey. When she smiles, her lips part with visible effort; there is strain in the corners of her mouth, her fingers pick nervously at a loose thread in the weave of the tablecloth.
“I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t ask to be dragged away from my warm radiator all the way to the Côte d’Azur. Just remember that.”
“You’re always so goddamn indirect, aren’t you? You don’t like the restaurant? Is that it, Ed? Could it be that you find it pretentious? Too affected for an honest soul like you? Well, you aren’t particularly honest – just rude. I’m buying this lunch, so we’ll eat where I want to eat. And if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. Don’t start sniping.”
“Sniping at a tank. A poor little peashooter taking pot shots at Panzer Wictoria. Would I dare?”
“I wonder what a psychoanalyst would make of that? Talk about a peashooter and a tank,” says Victoria. She’s very good. In six years of marriage I seldom did better than a draw. Victoria comes from a long line of Scottish Presbyterian fanatics. The kind who hid in caves and ate heather or whatever, rather than admit God wasn’t their first cousin.
“Don’t pull that Psychology 101 crap on me, honey. Don’t forget I’m the expert on those guys.”
“You’ll never forgive me for talking you into seeking help, will you?” says Victoria. By help she means a certain Dr. Brandt I saw weekly just when my imagination began to fail. I had trouble adjusting to the new perspective.
The spinach and the wine arrive. Victoria and I munch in silence. Chewing winter spinach, I discover, produces an odd sensation. Maybe it’s thinking of all that dough Brandt ate up, but I’m beginning to imagine I’m chewing dirty, tattered, gritty dollar bills. Money must taste like this, bitter. I think of creased and folded bills, think of the greasy wallets they have ridden in, the lint-laden pockets they have lain in, the sweaty décolletages they’ve been crammed down. That’s it, that’s enough. I push the bowl away.
Victoria breaks the silence. “I dropped by the china department in Eaton’s last week to see if you were free for coffee.”
Although I’m curious as to why Victoria has suddenly taken to seeking my company, I make no comment. The pause grows to an uncomfortable length while she waits for me to respond. Finally she says, “The woman there said you quit months ago.”
True. Two months ago to be specific. The money I realized from cashing in my life insurance policy will soon be gone.… I don’t like this talk about work. It makes me nervous. It makes me think of my shrinking bank balance.
“Can we drop this subject?”
“Don’t be so touchy. I’m just curious to know how you’re managing.”
“You asked me to lunch after all these months of separation to ask me how I’m managing? Get serious. What do you want, Victoria?”
“I didn’t say that’s why I asked you to lunch. But now that the subject has come up – how are you managing? Are you getting unemployment insurance?”
“No!” I protest, much more loudly than I intended. “No goddamn unemployment insurance!” McMurtry, I realize, has made me sore on that subject.
“Keep it down, Ed. People are looking.”
So they are. I lower my voice, crane my neck around the parasol pole, and hiss, “Not unemployment insurance. Life insurance. I cashed in my policy. So I could live on my capital like a nineteenth-century Russian landowner. I’m an incorrigible romantic.”
Victoria lays her fork down. “What life insurance?” she demands. “I didn’t know you had any life insurance.”
Neither did I until three months ago. That’s when my steady ways in the Eaton’s china department finally convinced Pop his son had stabilized and was showing signs of maturity. As a sign of confidence in me, he handed over to me a life insurance policy he had been paying premiums on since the day after I was born.
Nothing reveals my father’s mind as clearly as that. It ought to be graven on his tombstone: Loving husband, father, and policyholder. The man insured everything, a symptom of a profoundly superstitious mind. As long as he was laying out hard-earned money for coverage, nothing would happen. Why? Because it was just his luck to pay for protection he didn’t need. He used to gripe, “Twenty years now I’ve paid insurance premiums and has anything happened? Have I got a penny back from those leeches? No way. Isn’t that typical?” The implication being that if he stopped paying, something dreadful would happen.
All that was near and dear to him was insured: house, car, business, Mom. Insured to the maximum, to the hilt. We were insurance-poor. The bigger the premium, the more potent the spell. When I was eight he showed me where he kept the key to the safety deposit box and explained that if he and Mom were to “pass on unexpectedly, God forbid,” I was to give the key to my Uncle Bert. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Pop said. “There’s a hundred thousand on your mom alone.”
Of course, I did worry. I worried he’d forget to pay the goddamn premiums and bring disaster to us all. I’d caught superstition from him the way I might have caught the flu. My mother always said: “Eddie’s got a case of Daddy’s nerves.” Any wonder?
I can’t imagine what I’d have felt if I’d known he had a policy on me. I get a mite antsy even now when I recall I’ve cashed it. For the first time in over thirty years I’m not covered.
Our waitress delivers the omelettes. “I didn’t know I had life insurance until last year,” I inform Victoria under the smooth bare arm settling the plates on the table. “It was a policy Pop took out on me when I was a kid.”
Victoria is incredulous. She has never completely adjusted herself to my father’s weird and wondrous Weltanschauung. “Earl took a policy out on you? Whatever for?”
“To help defray the cost of a university education.” That was the ostensible reason; however, I’m sure it was bought as a prophylactic against those polio epidemics so frequent in the early fifties. Pop’s white magic. “The idea was to cash it when I was eighteen. But when the time rolled around he didn’t need the bucks, so he just held on to it. The policy was a present, a reward for exemplary service in the crockery wars.”
“And you bailed out. Earl ought to have known better than to put temptation your way.”
“Go on, stick together. Pop and you always conspired against me. I remember you two huddled in a corner at Thanksgiving four years ago, whispering. You were going to commit me to law school that time. Wasn’t that the plan? You can confess now, I’ve been jettisoned.”
“Thirty-two years old,” Victoria says, shaking her head, “Thirty-two years old.”
“Not until April. Don’t age me any more than you already have.”
“Ed, when is all this going to stop? What are you going to do with your life?”
It’s a question I’ve been pondering myself for some time now. So the answer comes easily and promptly. “Simplify it.”
“Simplify it. God, I don’t believe it. What is that supposed to mean?”
I’ve got a quick answer for that one too. “Nothing much is wrong with me except my age. Being thirty is what’s the matter.” I recite Frost. “ ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood.’ ” A woman at a neighbouring table smiles indulgently, mistaking me for a lover declaiming verse to his beloved. I am merely making a tactical point.
“Oh, Christ.”
“Well, have you taken a good long look at any of our friends lately? That’s what they’re all doing.”
“No they’re not.”
“They are.”
“Here we go,” Victoria says. “It was always your worst habit, reading into others’ actions your own motives. Nobody is doing any such thing.”
“They all are, and Frost was talking particularly,” I ballast the word with leaden emphasis, “about people like you and me, or Benny, or Sadler.” A strange image is forming in my mind. I can see Frost, or rather McMurtry masquerading as Frost, in a plaid, billed cap with huge ear lugs. I blink hard and he dissolves.
“You’re a loon,” Victoria says.
“I’m not. Think about it. We’ve lived just long enough to make out the paths in all those trees. Big-decision time. No more fooling around. Don’t you feel that? I certainly do.”
“This is interesting coming from you,” says Victoria, looking edgy as she stubs out her cigarette; “you never showed any signs that you saw anything passing you by.”
“There they are, two roads” – I lift a forefinger – “one choice. We can choose to simplify our lives, or we can choose to complicate them.”
“And you have chosen to simplify yours,” says Victoria with an acidic smile.
“In a way,” I say. My theory and its ramifications are subtler than this. I ransack my mind for illustrations. “Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that the inclination for one path or the other is in us all. Our tendencies just become more evident as time runs out on us. And, of course, each individual’s path can take a wide and interesting number of variations from the two basic forms. Take what Sadler did. He chose what I’d call religious simplicity. Not uncommon.”
“Sadler is crazy. You can’t make an argument on the basis of what a crazy person does.”
“He was always crazy. It’s just that now his craziness expresses itself in a way unacceptable in your circles. Back when we were going to university and Sadler was a big-time campus radical urging Luddite atrocities on the computer centre, none of your friends thought he was particularly nuts – which he evidently was. But now it’s a different story because he’s chosen an unpopular lunacy. Some television preacher offers him salvation one morning and Sadler falls on his knees on the living-room carpet. Suddenly everyone claims Sadler is nuts. Looks like the same Sadler to me.”
“You make it sound like it was a revelation or something. He didn’t just fall on his knees. You always exaggerate for effect. Marsha said he was depressed for weeks. All he did was watch early-morning TV. That Christian talk-show host got him at his lowest ebb. The conversion business was a direct result of mental illness. Sadler is nuts.”
“Not any more than he ever was.”
Victoria does not buy my argument. She has the atheist’s illiberalism. She begins to argue anecdotally. “Try and tell that story to Marsha. Did you hear why she finally left him?” I barely have time to nod. “Because he had an operation to have his vasectomy reversed after he joined that church of screwballs. Can you believe it? They’re Protestants but they’re against birth control.”
“Not exactly,” I qualify, “they’re not against birth control. They’re in favour of abstinence. You see, there is a distinction—”
Victoria interrupts. “Marsha gave him fair warning. She told him if he went ahead with it she was leaving. Although what the point of the reversal was I don’t know – it hardly ever works anyway. But you tell me that isn’t nuts – reversing a vasectomy.”
“Any man who had a spark of sanity would undergo any number of vasectomy reversals to induce Marsha to leave him. But that isn’t the point. The point is Sadler’s fundamental nature. What you fail to understand is that he’s the ultimate simplifier. The very antithesis of your bet-hedging, quibbling complicator. Sadler wants Truth with a capital T. He always did. And when he signed on with the Independent Pre-Millennial Church of God’s First Chosen, or whatever they call themselves, he didn’t go making his membership contingent on a bunch of mental reservations. No sir. He understood that being one of God’s First Chosen isn’t easy. He swallowed it whole. I kind of admire that.”
“God, this is typical. It’s so like you to defend him out of perversity because any other reasonable and sane human being wouldn’t.”
I’m offended. Victoria doesn’t understand scientific objectivity. “I’m not defending him. And I’m not saying he isn’t nuts. I’m explaining him to you. When Sadler reached his early thirties he became what he was always deep in his heart, a wild-eyed prophet. We’re all becoming what we really are. Time and circumstances are like sunlight and earth and water to all of us little acorns yearning to be oaks.”
“Ed, you’re still the only man I’ve ever met who makes me want to literally scream. Fifteen minutes with you and I can feel the pressure building here.” Victoria touches the region of her diaphragm. “And the horrible thing is I know you won’t be stopped, can’t be stopped, until everything you want to say gets said.”
“Don’t be melodramatic, Victoria.”
She rests her head in her hands, a model of weary resignation. “Finish your speech,” she says.
“It isn’t a speech.”
“Goddamn it, just get it over with!”
“You have to help.”
“Don’t needle me, Ed.”
“I need a push. I forget where I was.”
“Where you were,” she says, “was on the topic of acorns and oaks.”
“Aristotle,” I say, “sort of.”
“Let’s not review the intervening two thousand years between Aristotle and Ed,” Victoria says. “I’m on my lunch hour.”
“Ha ha.”
“Ha ha yourself.”
“What I was trying to say, Victoria,” I resume, “is that we’re all approaching the time of life when the oak-tree potential in the acorn becomes manifest. In Sadler’s case we end up with John the Baptist. Haven’t you noticed that everybody we know is coming out of the closet, so to speak?”
“Example,” says Victoria, listlessly, right on cue. Her cooperation indicates she is eager to get this over with.
“Example – well, Benny’s a good example of Sadler’s opposite. He’s a complicator.”
“And just what’s the difference between Benny and Sadler?” Victoria is showing signs of impatience. “Aside from the fact one is nuts and the other isn’t?”
“Easy. The simplifiers want less, the complicators want more.”
This only increases Victoria’s annoyance. “Less what? More what?” She angrily lights a cigarette.
“Everything.” I ought to stop myself but can’t. I’ve been musing on life lately and have the intrepid explorer’s eagerness to pass on his discoveries. “Let me explain. A complicator finds safety in numbers, people, things. It doesn’t matter. He takes pleasure in possessions. Here’s what I mean. Suppose a guy wakes up one morning and realizes he can’t stand his wife. If by nature he’s a true simplifier he’ll just up and walk out on her. If he’s a true complicator he finds himself a girlfriend.”
“And this is how you’ve been spending your time, dreaming up crap like this?”
“Listen to me and you’ll see. It isn’t crap. Think of Benny’s house. Have you ever really looked at it? Magazines everywhere. For chrissakes there’s a World Almanac in the bathroom on the toilet tank. He reads the World Almanac. Benny believes in being ‘informed.’ He believes that facts are truth. He displays all the characteristic features of the complicator.” I’m on a roll now. “Let me enumerate.” I hold up one hand and begin counting off fingers. “First we have Benny’s fascination with facts, with information. Typical of the legal profession – of which he imagines himself a leading light – a shabby coven of complicators and obfuscators without parallel. Second, unlike the simplifier, Benny places his faith in the flesh. Look at his sexual habits. Women, women, women. Only one of whom, let me remind you, is he married to. The thing is, Benny believes in data and sensation. He believes that his perplexity is a result of not having enough information, and his lust the result of too few women. Hence his belief in one more feature-length article in Time or one more bimbo.”
Victoria is growing angrier. There are ruddy spots of colour on her cheeks and this prompts me to hurry to finish. “Sadler on the other hand, rumour has it, is chaste and ascetic. He has no interest in facts. All he wants is contained in the covers of The Book. The last five hundred years of discoveries in astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, and psychology weigh less than nothing on his metaphysical scales. I’m trying to achieve such purity of viewpoint myself. Of course, I’m travelling in a slightly different direction, but I can’t deny he’s been an inspiration to me. Mind over matter.”
“I can imagine the direction you’re travelling,” says Victoria. She seems to be growing more and more agitated. She is glancing nervously at her watch and twisting the expansion bracelet.
“That’s the wonderful thing about one’s thirties,” I comment. “Almost anything can surface. Old radical friends – and you and I can think of a number – emigrate to the suburbs, build two-car attached garages, take their daughters for lessons in bourgeois dance, and coach competitive sport. On the other hand we find the individual who decides he doesn’t care what Granny or Aunt Edna thinks. He says to himself, ‘There it is. I’m queer, queer as the day is long. I’m going to prance and wear satin pants until I’m eighty. I don’t care.’ Admirable.”
“You always put things in the nicest ways, Ed. You’re so understanding of others.”
“Oh-oh. Here we go with ‘If you show me your sensitivity I’ll show you mine.’ Knock it off, Victoria.”
“In my experience you have little to show. I wouldn’t hold my breath at the unveiling.”
“Say what’s on your mind, Victoria.”
“How can I with you saying what’s on yours?”
“I suppose your outrage is occasioned by unkind references to your old buddies? Well then, let me say something nice about same. I am pleased by the sudden crop of babies. Of course, as I’ve said before, time is marching on. The spectre of infertility looms. The dirty deed must be quickly done, but I concede that the result, the product, is nice.”
“Shut up, you boor.” Victoria is furious.
It is clear we are going to fight, so I decide to get my licks in quickly. This is advisable with Victoria, since in seconds you may be pummelled senseless and incapable of retaliation. A charge of calculated disloyalty is often wounding. “On the other hand, we do see marriages dissolving, don’t we? Quite a substantial number. Perhaps once again a case of biology being a hard taskmaster. It’s a tough decision deciding whether to stick with what you’ve got or look for something better, isn’t it, Victoria? If you want better, dump the spouse now while you’ve still got a few good miles in you. What you’ve got to market – as a man or a woman, no sexism, please – is fading fast. The bloom will soon be off the rose. The semi-soft hard-on, bum droop, and saggy tits are just around the corner. Tempus fugit.”
The muscles of Victoria’s face and throat go rigid, as if she has been slapped. Fasces of tendons spring along her throat.
“You son of a bitch.” These words are uttered from a depth of sadness and bitterness I hadn’t imagined. Something is very wrong. There is a bright gathering of tears in her eyes, I quickly glance away, partly from shame, partly because if I don’t Victoria will break down. Strange. In seven years of marriage she cried only twice in my presence. But, Christ, when it came. Always against her will, torn out of her. It was worse that way: snot bubbles, face twisted and red, stray hairs plastered in the spit at the corner of her mouth. Just wouldn’t stop. Choking and stuttering on the effort of trying to quit.
People are passing on the sidewalk beneath us. The exhaust of cars waiting at the intersection for the light to turn green runs in billows against the side of the Café Nice, then spins up to writhe briefly on the warm window glass. The muffled pedestrians, some in stiff nylon snowmobile or ski suits, shuffle through these white clouds like space voyagers on a planet of visible, deadly gases.
“I ought to have my head examined,” Victoria is saying, “coming to you at a time like this. How did you know exactly what to say to stop me dead in my tracks? What is this sixth sense of yours, Ed?”
I keep my eyes off her face. The white wine in my glass is gold. “Pardon?” This is a polite, surprised, and diffident request for an explanation. I cannot follow this sudden turn to our conversation.
“I don’t know what got into me,” she says. I hear her voice growing reedier by the second. “Perhaps I felt you owed me some advice after all these years I carried you draped over my shoulders; maybe I thought that, if nothing else, after nine years of living together you would know me better than anybody else.”
I feel the old familiar neurotic stab of apprehension. I lift my eyes to her face. “For God’s sake, Victoria, what the hell is the matter?”
“It never fails,” she says, blundering along, “that anything I have to say gets turned back on me by you, so that I look foolish and pathetic. You never cared if you looked either, but I have my pride. I won’t feel that way.”
“Victoria, what is it? Please.”
She knows she will cry now; it can’t be avoided. She begins to gather her things from the table. Head down, she says: “I didn’t think it possible but you didn’t even ask me how I was. How many months? Not even that.”
“For Christ’s sake, how are you? How are you, Victoria?”
Her face is dark and bitter with choler. “Guess. Take a hard look and guess, asshole.” Then before I can react, can hoist my bulk out of the unsteady chair, she walks swiftly towards the exit.
By the time the bill has been calculated and I have paid, Victoria has disappeared. The exhaust pipes of idling cars churn out banks of dense white smoke, the packed snow squeaks under the boots of passersby, the entire street rests stiff, dumb, obscure. My heart pounds and pounds.