My Present Age (10 page)

“No.”

“Look here. Look at this book. I bought you a book. It shows you how. It’s all laid out with photographs.”

“No!”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Ed, that’s no answer. You’ve got to take part in school activities.”

“Why do I have to take part in school activities?”

“To make you well rounded. And it’s a preparation for the world of business. You lay the foundations for success now, Ed.”

He had pushed me near tears. “Then maybe you’re the one ought to heave the old shot around! If it’s so good for christly business!
Because you’re such a terrific goddamn success story, right!”

It was only then he finally realized I knew. I’ve never forgotten the look that passed over his face.

A week later, driven by guilt, I began to practise putting the shot in the backyard, following the principles outlined in the manual Pop had bought. The lawn was soon pocked with tiny craters. I was asking forgiveness, but he did not encourage my perseverance as he earlier would have. He refused to acknowledge, even in an off-hand dinner-table remark, that I was conforming to his wishes. Once I caught a glimpse of him watching me from his bedroom window behind a discreetly parted curtain. After two weeks my mother said to me, “Your father says there are holes all over the back lawn. He wants to know if you know anything about it.”

I moved my practices down the block to the park.

When I was younger, the purpose of sport had not been to build character but to seduce me from my fantasies. It was no more successful then than it was to be later. The final straw for Pop was coming home and finding me wandering around the property got up as Vercingetorix, the unfortunate warrior chieftain who raised all the tribes of Gaul in rebellion against their Roman occupiers. The sight of his son shuffling around with his wife’s Persian lamb jacket buttoned at his throat like a cloak, a two-foot-long moustache of yellow wool yarn Scotch-taped under his nose, and a colander stuck on his head, was just too much the poor man. He confiscated my comics and announced they’d stay locked up until I was old enough that they wouldn’t have that kind of effect on me.

He’d missed the point. If what I read didn’t have exactly that kind of effect on me, what was the point in reading it? I never outgrew my reliance on fantasy. My personal aesthetic is a simple, sensual one. I wish to taste the faint tang of urine in the kidneys with Mr. Bloom, and to savour the tea-soaked
petite madeleine
which evoked a delicious shudder of memory in M. Proust. I wish to escape my blunted senses, my time. For me there is one pertinent question: Am I, having read this or that book, inclined to clap the metaphorical colander on the old noggin?

Pop was not then and never has been interested in such questions. That summer he was exercised by a more practical matter: how was his son’s time to be occupied? His answer was lessons, and a stretch of hard time in Little League baseball with my skinny contemporaries. Hardy little ruffians who joyously chanted, “Ed, Ed, the donkey’s dead! Died with a potato on his head!” as I writhed in the dust after being beaned with a hard, rising fastball. Summer stretched before me as an arid waste of boredom, relieved only by the discomfort of bruises, blisters, and taunts.

Until I realized that while my father could place my tattered treasures under lock he couldn’t shut down the public library. That was where the originals were kept. My summer suddenly became cool, lazy, and inviting. While my parents thought I was sensibly occupied with a variety of lessons (tennis and swimming) and frequent Little League baseball practices, I was sequestered among the library bookshelves gorging myself on contraband chocolate bars and salted peanuts as I splintered lances with Ivanhoe, pursued the renegade Simon Girty, cackled a capella with Mr. Hyde, and hauled iron with Shane. I missed the colourful illustrations of the comics and found the language of many of the books puzzling, but reading was pure heaven when I thought of the alternative – bruised shins and scraped elbows. It was also that memorable summer I made the acquaintance of Huck and Tom and Jim, and fell utterly in love with the ravishing Miss Becky Thatcher.

The other consequence of this abandoned summer of forbidden
pleasures was a weight gain of seven pounds that left my mother perplexed and worried. (“I can’t understand it, Doctor. He’s been so active this summer, yet he keeps gaining weight. Could it be his glands?”) The long-term consequence has been a pathetic reverence before the altar of literature.

It was this reverence, coupled with penury, which hastened my present problems. After the first rosy flush of liberation from Eaton’s, the cold dawn of calculation shed its grey light on the obvious: the tidy sum my life insurance policy had yielded could not possibly last me the year’s sabbatical that I felt entitled to after my stint of grinding labour. This realization led to a mild depression that lifted only when I got the phone call from the University Extension Officer offering me – no, to speak accurately,
pleading
with me to accept – the job as instructor of the Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter. Literature, I told myself then, does not spurn her unworthy suitors who stand season after season through hail and sleet and snow, singing beneath her bright window.

Still, it was only through a number of mishaps and misunderstandings that the offer ever came to be made to me. The first and decisive one being a coronary thrombosis which hospitalized the instructor hired to conduct the Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter, or
COCWE
, as those of us in adult continuing education like to think of it. Under such unforeseen and pressing circumstances, any warm body that was reasonably punctual and could plausibly imitate semi-literacy would do.

Initially, however, I was very suspicious of the offer. I naturally presumed that the whole thing was a tasteless joke cooked up by a cadre of Victoria’s vindictive little chums. Such offers are made to people like me only in jest. But the longer I played along with the woman on the other end of the line, the clearer things became, and the greater my horror grew with the realization that she was serious. Apparently I had met her at one of those benefits for Central American freedom fighters at which Victoria used to demand my attendance. Not only had she remembered my name,
she had also remembered my spurious and likely drunken claim to be a man of letters.

It was a claim I was driven to make in those long-ago days when my wife supported me in indolent ease. Pasha Ed was how my jealous male acquaintances used to refer to me. Others were less kind. My embarrassment at being unemployed prompted the idea of passing myself off as a writer. Also, by then I knew the idea of going to Greece was beyond reviving. Posing as a writer wouldn’t encourage Victoria to make me prove I was one.

At the time the whole world seemed intensely interested in what I was up to. Election enumerators quizzed me on my occupation; sales clerks inquired after my place of business when I tried to write a cheque for a purchase. People I was introduced to at parties turned vocational counsellor when they learned I was unemployed. My doctor, while thumping my sternum, absent-mindedly asked me how I like my job.
What do you do?
I seemed to get that question every time I turned around. The truth was I didn’t
do
anything.

But, I asked myself, if you
could
do something what would you do? Unhesitatingly I answered,
write
.

There it was. The esteem in which I had always held authors and the pleasure their books had given me only confirmed my decision. To make such a claim, in France, say, would have been base, despicable. Masquerading there as an
écrivain
entails little risk or hardship for an impostor. France names streets and avenues after its authors. It is a country where the public raised a furor over Rodin’s statue of Balzac, incensed that the great man had not been done justice in bronze. In Canada, however, writing, like soldiering, is an occupation for those young men for whom all hope has been abandoned.

So I decided to impersonate a writer. An act of defiance like my stubbornly persisting in launching the shot in the teeth of the laws of gravity and my own nature during those sweltering afternoons in a deserted suburban park. For anyone who cared to listen I was a writer. When asked where I published my short stories (I was, I
said, a short-story writer at work on a novel), I told them
The Paris Review
. The name didn’t mean anything to Victoria’s friends but it made me feel I’d arrived. My policy, if asked how to find one of my stories, was to cite a reference at least two years back. And seem vague. “I think,” I’d say, “it was Vol. 9, No. 7. Or was it Vol. 7, No. 9? Anyway, if you do a little digging it won’t be hard to find. It’s called ‘Les Arbres de Stockholm’.” There was no risk. Nobody could care less. Nobody ever bothers.

But obviously I had made some impression on that woman, at least to the extent that in a moment of crisis she found herself offering me two hundred and fifty dollars a month to take a group of tyro scribblers under my wing Every Second Bloody Fucking Tuesday. Two hundred and fifty dollars a month is what I pay in rent for this miserable hole I am squatting in.

A restless conscience almost led me to confess my charlatanry, and I almost refused the job. I almost said: “Look, lady, I am not now and never have been a writer. I am sorry for the inconvenience the delusions I was suffering under at that time of my life have caused you now. I am very sorry.”

But wait a minute, Ed, clamoured the voice of reason. How can you say you’re not a writer? When Victoria abandoned ship, didn’t you produce a 75,000-word western about Sam Waters, buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and quick-fisted marshal? Of course you did. And he who writes a novel, is he not a novelist? Just so. And should the sweat and labour and grief and tears of a novelist go unrewarded?
Not if there’s any justice in this world they shouldn’t
. For the moment this ingenious line of argument sufficed. I accepted the position as leader of the Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter.

Of course, when examined, my attempts to justify accepting the job didn’t hold water. The 75,000 words I had scrawled didn’t amount to a book. There was more justice in describing my process of creation as a case of automatic handwriting than its product as a novel. What I wrote in that desperate time after
Victoria had announced she had had enough of me was patterned on the childhood fantasies that had sustained me through the misery and indignity of being fat, awkward, and a mouth-breather. Translated by imagination into Chingachgook, or D’Artagnan, or Vercingetorix, or Huck, I had been able to forget the taunts and heavy-minded impertinences of the neighbourhood morons who followed me gleefully while I waddled along crimson-faced with self-loathing and murderous anger.

So leathery Sam Waters, with his laconic speech, his deliberating, cold eyes, his stunning, lightning-quick fists, was the sort of fantastically potent icon that cuckold Ed’s vulgar, wounded ego would create. A tough
hombre
who could gentle a mustang or a cantina spitfire; a grave, slouching,
lean
figure to be found propped against doorposts and fence-rails, Stetson tipped over his eyes as he coolly waited for the drover to walk out of the orange ball of sun burning at the end of an empty street. A man whose courage was so serene and incorruptible that the calculation of odds never entered into his decisions to uphold and protect the good, the true, the beautiful. The Sam Waters I had struck from the base metals of my mind would have bellied up to the bar with Socrates and asked for a shot of that there hemlock too, pardner.

Despite my fervid admiration for this cowpoke there was something about Sam that troubled me, like a face one knows but cannot place. He came to the page too easily, fully formed. Sitting there in my dingy apartment, the bass of a neighbour’s stereo thudding distantly like a voodoo drum, the first paragraph of
Cool, Clear Waters
had come to me all in a rush.

I will not comment on the deficiencies of this passage. I will only say I wrote these words with a sense of exhilarating release, as if an aching tooth had been torn from a tender, swollen gum. But even then I felt a prickly uneasiness linger. I could not shake the feeling that I knew this man. I believed we shared a history.

My attachment to Sam, however, could not compensate for the ludicrousness of my calling myself a writer. Of course, I skated over all such thin spots with extreme care during my chat with he extension officer. When I said my book hadn’t had a wide readership I wasn’t being modest. I was leading her to infer that a small but nevertheless select audience had savoured my prose with much appreciative smacking of lips.

The truth was, the book had never been published, hadn’t even been submitted to a publishing house. As far as I knew, its readership consisted of myself, and possibly, just possibly, Victoria. For on completing my sagebrush
magnum opus
, I had mailed my absent wife a photostat copy of the manuscript, a palpable refutation of her charge that I was incapable of completing anything I began. But I doubt Victoria read it. She was full of hard feelings at the time.

Which puts me in mind of the eight unread student manuscripts stowed under my bed. There will be no more flinching from duty, Ed. I patter off on bare feet to my bedroom, drop on all fours, and peer under the bed. My breathing becomes stertorous and sets long, serpentine boas of slut’s wool to eddying along the floor. I ought to vacuum.