My Present Age by Guy Vanderhaeghe Read Free Book Online Page B

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 whatto 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.

3

    V ictoria’s disappearance outside the Café Nice seems ominous, a forbidding sign. It is nearly midnight and I still haven’t managed to reach her. Her old phone number is no longer in service and information has no new listing for her. This leads me to believe that Marsha Sadler was speaking the truth when she phoned me a month ago to drop a ponderous hint that Victoria had given up her apartment and moved in with her new boyfriend, co-vivant, or whatever such people are presently called.
    Although Marsha frequently sees Victoria because they are members of a foreign film society, when she phoned I was inclined to discount the