Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“Had enough?” Howie asks. The rooster crowing on the dunghill.

I hear Victoria. “Of course he’s had enough. What’s the matter with you? He’s drunk. Do you want to kill him?”

“The thought had entered my mind.”

“Just you let me get my arm loose, you son of a bitch,” I say. “We’ll see who kills who.” I have had enough, but of course I can’t admit it.

“Be my guest.”

Somehow I tear off my coat. Howard is standing waiting, bouncing up on his toes, weaving his head. I feel slightly dizzy trying to focus on his frenetic motion. “Come on,” Howard urges me. “Come on.”

I lower my head and charge at his midriff. A punch on the back of the neck pops my tongue out of my mouth like a released spring. I pitch head first into the snow. A knee digs into my back, pinning me, and punches begin to rain down on the back of my head. The best I can hope for in a moment of lucidity is that Howard will break a hand on my skull.

My wife saves me. I hear her screaming and, resourceful girl that she is, she hauls Howie off my back by the hair. He curses her; she shouts; they argue. I lie on the snow and pant.

I hear the front door open, and I see my host silhouetted in the door-frame.

“Jesus Christ,” Everett yells, “what’s going on out here?”

I roll on my back in time to see Howard beating a retreat to his car. My tigress has put him on the run. He is definitely piqued. The car roars into life and swerves into the street. I get to my feet and yell insults at his tail-lights.

“Victoria, is that you?” Everett asks uncertainly.

She sobs a yes.

“Come on in. You’re upset.”

She shakes her head no.

“Do you want to talk to Helen?”

“No.”

Everett goes back into the house nonplussed. It strikes me what a remarkable couple we are.

“Thank you,” I say, trying to shake the snow off my sweater. “In five years of marriage you’ve never done anything nicer. I appreciate it.”

“Shut up.”

“Have you seen my coat?” I begin to stumble around searching for my traitorous garment.

“Here.” She helps me into it. I check my pockets. “I suspect I’ve lost the car keys,” I say.

“I’m not surprised.” Victoria has calmed down and is drying her eyes on her coat sleeves. “A good thing too, you’re too drunk to drive. We’ll walk to Albert Street. They run buses late on New Year’s Eve for drunks like you.”

I fall into step with her. I’m shivering with cold but I know better than to complain. I light a cigarette and wince when the smoke sears a cut on the inside of my mouth. I gingerly test a loosened tooth with my tongue.

“You were very brave,” I say. I am so touched by her act of loyalty, I take her hand. She does not refuse it.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It seems to me you made some kind of decision back there.”

“A perfect stranger might have done the same.”

I allow that this is true.

“I don’t regret anything,” Victoria says. “I don’t regret what happened between Howard and me; I don’t regret helping you.”

“Tibetan women often have two husbands,” I say.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asks, stopping under a street-light.

“I won’t interfere any more.”

“I don’t think you understand,” she says, resuming walking. We enter a deserted street, silent and white. No cars have passed here in hours, the snow is untracked.

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” I say hopefully, “a night for resolutions.”

“You can’t change, Ed.” Her loss of faith in me shocks me.

I recover my balance. “I could,” I maintain. “I feel ready now. I think I’ve learned something. Honestly.”

“Ed,” she says, shaking her head.

“I resolve,” I say solemnly, “to find a job.”

“Ed, no.”

“I resolve to tell the truth.”

Victoria actually reaches up and attempts to stifle my words with her mittened hands. I struggle. I realize that, unaccountably, I am crying. “I resolve to treat you differently,” I manage to say. But as I say it, I know that I am not capable of any of this. I am a man descending and I should not make promises that I cannot keep, not to her – of all people.

“Ed,” she says firmly, “I think that’s enough. There’s no point any more.”

She is right. We walk on silently. Injuries so old could likely not be healed. Not by me. The snow seems to fall faster and faster.

A PUBLIC park on a weekday is a sobering place. From Monday to Friday, before they are lost in an anonymous surge of weekend pleasure-seekers, the truly representative figures of Western decadence are revealed. On the placid green expanses of lawn these humans jut up, sinister as icebergs, indicators (I am moved to think) of the mass of gluttony, lechery, sloth and violence which lurks below the surface of society.

I don’t, of course, presume to except myself from that company. I’ve been a regular here throughout this muggy summer. Most afternoons I can be found planted on one of the bright-blue benches whose inconveniently spaced slats pinch my fat ass. Unemployed for longer than I care to remember, I come here to spend the day in as pleasant a manner as possible. That means eyeing the nymphets who scoot by, jiggling provocatively in the pursuit of frisbees.

And eating. At the moment I am gnawing a chicken leg embalmed in the Colonel’s twenty-seven secret herbs and spices, and swigging a Coke. When that’s finished I’ll top off with two Oh Henrys which have dissolved in their wrappers from the heat.

I’m not the only degenerate dotting the landscape either, although the park almost always empties by four-thirty. Fifty yards away a teen-age couple – he no more than fifteen, she barely having crossed into puberty – lie in a spot of shade rubbing their fevered groins together, lost in the sensations of an open-mouthed, tongue-entangled, gullet-probing kiss. Even at this considerable distance I can hear the rasp of stiff denim on stiff denim and their zippers metallically zinging in unison. In a way I wish them good luck in their striving. It is hard to accept that such effort and persistence could go unrewarded.

The guy by the drinking-fountain is, however, another story and not an object for benevolent glances. On him I’ve kept a wary eye. For the past hour, shirtless and barefooted, he has practised some arcane martial art. He has slashed, punched, stabbed and kicked the air, crushing imaginary windpipes, rupturing imaginary spleens, squashing imaginary testicles, and deviating imaginary septums. An extra-Y-chromosome type if I ever saw one, and tattooed for good measure. A powder keg capable of exploding at anything an overweight, sparsely bearded man with weak eyesight like me might say or do, however amiable and unprovoking.

If that character had the courtesy to get lost I might be able to completely relax and enjoy my afternoon. Behind me I sense the silken movement of the river as I smell its effluvium, a piquant mix of algae and industrial waste. Its counterpart in movement is the traffic on Spadina Crescent which winds in front of me. Fragmented by shrubs and elms it is a pattern of hot light, flickering chrome and flashing glass. Paradoxically peaceful, I find. My preferences run to urban jungles.

I check the time. It is a quarter to five and the runners from the YWCA are late. I never miss them if I can help it.

Now please don’t get me wrong. My interest in these ladies is not lascivious. How could it be? The women are deadly serious about this business of running and make no concessions to spectators. They make their appearance attired in baggy grey pants stained with unsightly blotches of sweat, or in unflattering cotton shorts and shoes pounded shapeless and grimy from many hard miles on the asphalt. Unlike the sweet young things that wiggle voluptuously down the via dolorosa to health and beauty in satiny track suits that cling erotically to their nubile frames, these women clip along with a choppy, economical stride that efficiently devours distance. They are training for the city’s annual twelve-and-a-half-mile run along the river bank.