My Present Age (22 page)

“I couldn’t do it better.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t exude unction the way Cooper does. The balm that heals all wounds.”

“I wish you wouldn’t run away from a challenge.”

“So said Lady Macbeth to her hubby.”

“I can’t stand to see you so aimless.”

“I’m not aimless.”

I didn’t consider myself aimless. I was reading the journals of Kierkegaard at work and Thomas Carlyle’s
History of Frederick the Great
at home. Such books, like the prospect of death, concentrated the mind wonderfully.

Soon we were also at odds over the parties.

“Why can’t we spend a little time alone?”

“By alone you mean that I should sit and watch you drink Scotch and read volume five of the life of some German despot.”

“What the hell do you see in those people, Victoria?”

“I see my friends, Ed.”

“God forbid that your husband should object to working his fingers to the bone feeding them.”

“Don’t start that. It’s the
only
thing you do around here. You don’t do laundry, you don’t push a vacuum, you do nothing else.”

“I’ll do laundry.”

“You’ll do some hot hors d’oeuvres for Friday night after work. We’re meeting here for drinks and then we’re going out for dinner.”

“Lawd be praise’! This ole house nigra doan have to serve Missy’s dinner!”

“I’ll be late. Give them drinks and hors d’oeuvres, Ed.
Hot
hors d’oeuvres.”

They got hot hors d’oeuvres. Of course, they considered it a great joke and good, clean fun, but when Victoria came in and saw me she went pale with fury and then started to cry. I was moving among the crowd with a tray, wearing the cardboard bunny ears I’d made at work that afternoon. I was also naked except for the bathing trunks I’d pasted the cotton balls on to make a rabbit tail.

“Don’t you have any pride!” she shouted. “You humiliate me and you humiliate yourself! In front of my friends!”

I’d gone too far again. The parties at our apartment stopped after that; Victoria met her friends elsewhere. I stayed home and read. We began to talk to each other as from a great distance. At times, though, we could still be surprised by happiness. I remember an afternoon I persuaded her to play hooky from work and we went to the racetrack, ate hot dogs, and made two-dollar bets. She was entranced by the gaiety and medieval splendour of the drivers’ silks, the masked and blinkered horses and the flashing precision of their gaits. But even as I sat beside her and looked at her face lit with pleasure I remembered rumours of another man. Later that same year I joined her for ballroom-dancing lessons and we momentarily drew close in a staid, Viennese bourgeois intimacy that felt something like the beginning of a friendship.

But such pastimes could not heal our division. Success had returned to Victoria after an interval of some years. She had said to me once that she could not live without a sense of purpose and a sense of possibility. She had that sense of purpose in her work; now she was waiting on possibility.

Better not to think of that. Better to turn my attention to the radio, The Beast, and the clairvoyant from California who is finishing her explanation of how she determines a psychological profile from an object owned, or even merely touched, by the “subject of investigation.”

“Amazing,” says Tom when she has concluded. “As my listeners
know, Madame Sosostris, I’m nothing more than a country boy, and country boys are by nature a suspicious lot. But who’s to say? Stranger things have certainly happened and I wouldn’t want to discredit anyone’s claim to anything. We’ve got the Bermuda Triangle and all that craziness going on down there, and the evidence seems to point to spacemen having a hand in erecting the pyramids, and Uri Geller has been on
Merv Griffin
bending spoons with his mind. It seems to me that we have no idea of the ultimate potential of the human brain. All I say is: Who knows?”

Who knows indeed. And, as to bending spoons, Tom Rollins has bent one or two with his mind. Listening to him in the morning over Cocoa Puffs I’ve found that a number of tableware items have inexplicably contorted and twisted in my hands.

“What was it the great Bard said, Tom? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horace, than philosophy ever thought of,” adds Madame.

“And that’s likely true,” says Tom, “but getting back to energy waves and personality and psychological analysis and so I on. That really intrigues me. I wonder if you could give us an on-the-air demonstration? The other day I received a letter in the mail and I was wondering if you could profile the character of the man who sent it by immersing yourself in the energy waves of the envelope. And I say envelope because I don’t want the contents of that letter to give you any clues.”

Vague rustling of paper. “Well, Tom,” says Madame Sosostris, “envelopes are particularly difficult because the sorting machines in post offices tend to rub off the energy waves.”

“But could you try, Madame Sosostris?”

“Yes, Tom, I could. But without any guarantees as to complete, infallible, irrevocable accuracy.”

“I understand, Madame. Nobody is asking you to do the impossible. Just let me pass the envelope over to you.”

“Thank you, Tom.”

An interval of expectant silence.

“Madame, are you getting anything?”

“Tom, the waves are very faint. I believe the postal machines have practically erased them. It’s very difficult.” Hesitation. “Maybe this is a friend of yours?”

“No,” laughs The Beast, who finds the suggestion hilarious, “I’d hardly say that.”

“Just as I thought. I had a sense of hostile emanations but they were quite feeble. They seem to be getting stronger now. Yes, I feel hostility coming off this envelope. Very definitely.”

“Anything else?”

“A lot of hostility and …”

“Yes?”

“I’m not entirely one hundred per cent sure. Perhaps revenge?”

“I’ve got to admit it was that kind of letter.”

“We’re speaking about a very dark soul. The emanations are very, very black. This is a very vengeful person. Maybe even sick. Oh goodness, it’s becoming overpowering! I feel like I’m choking!” A moment to recover, then, conversationally, “There’s sure a lot of hate on this envelope.”

“Male or female?”

“Could be either. Sex gender can’t be determined from emanations.”

“Oh.”

“But I can say definitely that this human being’s profile is sick and vengeful.”

“Dangerous?”

“Could be if provoked. You can’t be absolutely certain with this type of sick and vengeful person.”

“Well, well,” says The Beast, “this has all been very interesting and informative. As to the accuracy of Madame Sosostris’s profile – why, I’ll leave that up to the judgment of our listening audience. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, to you. Because the letter comes from an old friend of ours, the gentleman who regularly calls in to give yours truly, Tom Rollins, what for. How do I know it’s him, you
say? Well, Tom Rollins has his sources – sources which for the present shall have to remain confidential.” The Beast decides to let Madame in on the private joke about the local maniac. “Maybe I ought to explain to Madame Sosostris. You see, Madame, I’m plagued by a man who imagines I’ve done him some wrong, or insulted him, or cast some kind of slur on his good name, or something of that kind. He regularly phones ‘A Piece of Your Mind’ – no matter what the day’s topic is – and begins haranguing and harassing—”

“If I could just interrupt,” says Madame Sosostris, “when I called this unfortunate individual sick, I should have been more specific and used the correct medical term. What I meant to say was that he is paranoid. There are very pronounced paranoid emanations coming from that envelope, believe you me. That guy is paranoid sick. A severe case.”

“You don’t have to sell me on that diagnosis, Madame. Paranoid is right. You wonder where these types get their strange notions. Over the past several months I don’t know how many of my programs he’s disrupted with his accusations and complaints. A real pain in the you-know-where. And now he’s taken to writing letters to me. Very disturbing letters.”

“It comes as no surprise to Madame Sosostris. Those are just about the darkest emanations I’ve felt in my entire clinical experience.”

“Well, my experience with this individual has made me reflect. So it hasn’t been altogether a write-off. In fact, I’ve found it quite thought-provoking. So much so I jotted down a few observations. That’s why – right now – I’d like to take a moment to read an open letter addressed to this gentleman – and I use the word loosely. I sure hope he’s listening.”

The Beast cleared his throat. “Dear Aggrieved,” he read, “this letter to you is about democratic rights. As you know, my little program, ‘APiece of Your Mind,’ only exists because we in Canada enjoy Freedom of Speech. To me, Freedom of Speech, along with a
number of other Freedoms, is our most precious possession, more precious even than the clean air we breathe and the clean water we drink. In Canada we’re free to criticize our government in the coffee shop, or state our opinion about last night’s controversial
TV
show, or discuss the book that’s made it to number one on the bestseller list without fear of reprisal from the Thought Police. It’s this kind of freedom that’s made our nation healthy and I, for one, would be willing to die to defend your right to speak up for what you believe in.

“But freedom, Dear Aggrieved, isn’t the same thing as licence. In Canada licence is curbed by rules called laws. Now I’m not saying you aren’t free to criticize Tom Rollins or his program as strongly as you please. I’ve been in the public eye for a long time and I’ve come to learn to expect criticism. There’s an old saying: The tallest tree in the forest catches the most wind. And you can bet I’ve caught plenty of wind in my day. If you remember, a while back I came out strongly for seat-belt legislation at a time when it was pretty darn unpopular to do so, and I made enemies by going against the grain. And I’d do it again because I believe that the life of one child saved is worth any number of enemies.

“But, Dear Aggrieved, remember this. The word Freedom infers fair play and fair play is just another way of saying rules and rules are laws and we have them in Canada, don’t forget. Now you break those laws when you threaten me and forge another man’s name to a document. That isn’t Freedom of Speech. It’s something else. It’s licence.

“I know who you are, sir. Be assured I know who you are. And be assured that if I receive another letter like the one I received the other day I’ll make it warm for you. Like you, I’m a citizen, and, like you, I have rights. I have the right to live without fear of threats. I can’t bend to your will or allow myself to be pushed around. As an electronic journalist I have the duty to promote a free exchange of ideas and opinions. I like to think of myself as an ideas broker and I like to think of ideas as the fuel, the gas, of
democracy. I can’t allow myself to be muzzled, because if I did, one voice of our democracy would be stilled. And one voice stilled is one voice too many.

“I think it’s clear to my listeners what I stand for, what I’ve always stood for. What you might stand for nobody knows. So I’m appealing to you, Dear Aggrieved, to join the majority. Try to do something positive like the rest of us poor slobs. Don’t brood on imagined wrongs and imagined insults. Help make this a better world. Don’t retribute,
contribute!
Yours respectfully, Tom Rollins.”

There is a dramatic pause to allow this all to gel in our minds. Madame Sosostris breaks the spell. “Beautiful. Just beautiful. And so constructive.”

“I don’t know,” says The Beast, “maybe I’m way out of line here but I felt it needed saying.”

In the next fifty minutes The Beast was treated to a multitude of calls of congratulation and numerous requests for a copy of “Dear Aggrieved.” It had struck a chord in the greater public. A grade seven social studies teacher informed The Beast she often required her class to listen to “A Piece of Your Mind” because it was “contemporary issues oriented.” She also wondered if he could supply her with a hundred copies of “Dear Aggrieved” for distribution to her pupils. Cynicism, she said, was rampant in the eighties.

The market for Rollins’s epistle to Ed was so bullish that towards the end of his program The Beast confessed himself delighted to announce that the owner of station CKKX had made an unprecedented management decision to print “Dear Aggrieved” as a community service and provide copies at “less than cost to any listener who so desired them.”

All the heady applause given The Beast’s excursion into
belles lettres
unhappily tended to cast Madame Sosostris and her considerable talents in the shade. From the sound of her voice I was pretty sure The Beast had another Dear Aggrieved on his hands. But Madame bravely soldiered on and the last words were hers as she shouted into the microphone her mailing address in Anaheim,
California, and the information that “Madame Sosostris is available for psychological profile constructions at an entirely nominal fee via the U.S. Mail for those who cannot attend my seminar at the Holiday Inn, 2:30 p.m., Saturday afternoon, registration fee twenty dollars only!”

Now I wonder if I haven’t hallucinated all of this. I must have, because this very minute, through the windshield of Rubacek’s Grand Prix, I am watching myself, yes me, Ed, waddling up the walk of 918. What a queer sensation it is, too. A little like knowing the dream you are dreaming is a dream. I hold on to that sensation, savouring it, before I realize I ought to be made afraid by what I’m seeing. After all, this isn’t a dream, is it?

Christ, what a morning. I press my forehead against the cold plastic of the steering wheel, trying to force the image clear out the back of my head. It resists eviction. I still see myself, huffing up the walk, glistening snow hip-deep to either side of me.

I open my eyes wide and there I am again, mounting the steps of the house. Ed, or my
doppelgänger
, is panting steam which flies over my shoulder like rags of cheesecloth. A tan duffel coat is stretched taut over my backside.