Free My Present Age by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page B

is foul. Snow fell until nine o’clock this morning with a stupefying persistence, strangling side streets and burying sidewalks in the old white and crisp and even. I predict at least a two-heart-attack afternoon when the shovels come out. Minimum. Jesus, it’s even several degrees colder than it was yesterday, despite the fact a storm usually brings milder temperatures. But when the snow ceased falling, the mercury started. Even now, at noon, the sun hasn’t managed to burn a patch of blue out of the zinc sky. It stares down, a blurred eye of milky, diffused light.
    I have a headache. It isn’t enough that yesterday’s rendezvous with Victoria has driven me bonkers with worry and that I have to wait nine more hours before I get any news about her from Marsha. No, that isn’t enough. Today has to be Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday.
    This morning when I woke I remembered the eight manuscripts I have to read and the class I have to conduct later this evening. If today weren’t Tuesday I could be out tracking down Victoria. As it is, I’ll have to dismiss my eager scriveners early to get to HideousMarsha’s apartment by nine-thirty. I’ll tell them my agent is in town. They’ll understand.
    No, maybe I better not mention an agent. It’s bad enough facing them as it is; I don’t need another lie on my conscience. How did I let myself in for this? I could say I believed I’d be found out and sent packing, which is certainly true. I did believe that. I thought I might carry on the hoax for a while, scrape through two months at most. An easy five hundred bucks. How was I to know I’d be shepherding such a batch of innocents? Fat ladies in scruffy shoes with the backs trodden flat, one of them covered in suspicious-looking bruises; a thin girl who sometimes soundlessly weeps at the back of the room for what reason I don’t know; Dr. Vlady Mandelstam, the Russian-Jewish émigré who has hopes of repeating Nabokov’s
succès d’estime
in a second language. Dr. Vlady, who haltingly communicated to me in nearly unintelligible English his love for Jack London and the language of “nobble Shaksper.” And Rubacek, who believes every mendacious word I feed him, takes notes while I speak, and doggedly pursues my friendship.
    Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday I ask myself why I did this terrible thing. The answer is that I needed the money. But that is the excuse of a criminal. I’m not just taking money under false pretences. No, I am sinning against the dreams of other men and women.
    Yet my claim to be a successful writer was only meant to encourage them and I modelled my impersonation on their dreams of success, not my own. After all, at one time I wanted a different kind of literary fame than the sale of a package of six scripts to
Magnum P.I
. That lie was uttered to breathe hope into the bruised lady, the thin girl. In private I confided to the aesthete, Dr. Vlady, that I only did script-writing to buy time for serious intellectual work, for an “art novel.”
    Exactly what Rubacek wants to hear I haven’t figured out yet.
    The trouble I find myself in puts Eaton’s china department in a new and slightly more favourable light. Of course, if I hadn’t quitI’d have been fired, wouldn’t I? So what’s the point of regrets? Perhaps, however, I might have hung on by my fingernails for a few more months if Pop hadn’t dropped that insurance policy in my lap. I saw it as a chance to pursue the simple life. The Chinese sage said it all: “Beware of your desires, for ye shall certainly attain them.”
    The fact remains, I was never meant to sell china. Only truly saintly men are cut out for that; the sort of men who trudge the roads to Benares, or reside on icy hilltops speculating on infinity. It takes more faith than I can summon.
    The china company representatives, men invariably short, bald, and moist of palm, had this faith. How I wished I could, like them, colour my voice with awe when I said the words