Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“So move.”

I take a deep, contrite breath. “I know I had no business butting in today,” I say. “But I was worried about you. You looked so goddamn awful.”

“Check out a mirror. Worry about yourself. How long have you been sleeping in those clothes?”

She’s right. I should have, at the very least, changed my clothes and showered before coming by. To be perfectly frank, a trip to a barber might have been in order too.

“Excuse my appearance,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve been so busy -”

“Ha!” An explosion of bitter disbelief and contempt. “Busy doing what? Just what in hell has occupied so much of your time you can’t wash your clothes or comb your hair? Tell me, Ed. That’s one I want to hear.”

“The novel,” I say uneasily, beginning to shift my weight from foot to foot nervously like a small boy called up on the carpet, “I’ve been working hard on the novel.”

“Excuse my scepticism,” she says tartly as she gets up and flicks on the television.

“Turn that off!” I shout. I’m angry now. I am working on a novel. I have nearly seventy pages written and I can hardly sleep some nights for the notions that pop into my head.

Victoria ignores my request and fixes her pretty, long-lashed peepers on the TV. Two pitiful clowns on the screen are gambolling around a grey, wrinkled elephant in artificial gaiety, trying to make an audience of children laugh. Cleo is still belting it out on the stereo. I can hardly hear myself think in this bedlam.

“I repeat, I am working on a novel.”

“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she says.

“Take that back!” I shout.

“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she repeats calmly, enunciating each syllable slowly and distinctly.

“This coming from a person who considers running around in thirty-degree weather an activity worthy of a rational being. Talk about misdirected, wasted effort,” I say acidly.

“You just aren’t capable of understanding, are you, Ed?” Victoria coolly asks. She begins to lecture in her professional voice. Victoria is a social worker and doesn’t often forget it. “You won’t allow yourself to understand because you intuitively sense that what’s behind it all is self-discipline. And self-discipline is something you don’t have and never will have.”

“Judge not lest you be judged.”

“To hell with you, Ed. You wrecked our marriage. I kept giving and giving -”

“To anyone who asked,” I interrupt.

“No, to you. And you kept taking and taking. Well, I’m through giving, and I’m through holding my breath watching you drift, hoping something will happen and that you’ll take your life in hand.” She pauses and says somewhat sadly, “You’re just like one of those goddamn jellyfish, Ed. You just drift along with the tide and when anyone gets within range of your tentacles you sting them. All you know how to do is float and sting.”

“Old Ed and the great Muhammad Ali,” I say sarcastically, miffed by this unflattering comparison, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

“I rest my case.”

I walk to the window and look out at the patchwork of roofs. I am near the end of my tether but I won’t let go. “I don’t like the way I’m living now,” I manage to say in a voice that is all counterfeit normalcy. “I want us to live together again. I don’t sleep very well. I’ve gained twenty-three pounds.”

“Ed,” says Victoria, not unkindly, “I’m sorry. But I do sleep well. I’ve lost five pounds. I can make friends without worrying about what you will eventually do or say to them. I haven’t gone to pieces and I won’t go to pieces. You look after yourself now. I’m through begging you to watch your weight and be nice to people. You can eat fudgy-wudgies until you can’t get through the door. You can insult nuns on the street for all I care. Do what you wish. But I’m not going to be there typing your résumés or pressing your suits so that you appear presentable at interviews for jobs you don’t make the slightest effort to land. You’re a big boy, Ed. Sink or swim. I always believed you could make something of yourself. I’m not so sure any more. I don’t think you have the guts it takes.”

Her tone is not really callous but I am alarmed. Things have come to a dreadful pass. How my wife has changed! And I am in part responsible for what she has become. I feel a great sadness. How I have disappointed her. I remember how, when first married, we lay in one another’s arms and talked about what the rest of our life would be. Sun, shellfish and wine in Spain. The click-clack of my typewriter as I wrote the Big Novel. The click of her camera shutter as she photographed the sober, dignified peasant faces of Spain.

My throat hurts terribly. Something, maybe my heart, is swelling ominously in my chest.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I ask abruptly, afraid that I might shame myself by beginning to sob in her bright, modern and airy living-room.

Victoria directs me.

I discover she has turned the bathroom into a hothouse, surrendering to the female impulse to demurely disguise its basic function. The place is a veritable hanging garden of Babylon. Potted plants suspended from the ceiling, potted plants on the toilet tank, potted plants on the vanity. All are signs that the ancien régime is eclipsed. I would never have tolerated any of this had I been resident.

My hairy face stares palely and uneasily back at me from the mirror. This tropical atmosphere, this humidity, this rank foliage, awaken in me some primal jungle fear. I am overcome with stark anxiety; I feel watched and hunted. It is all I can do to prevent myself from casting about in search of two yellow cat-eyes blazing behind a fern frond, or prevent myself from surveying the floor for sign of fresh leopard scat.

I run some cold water into the basin and splash my face. Momentarily and profusely I give way to tears. In a moment it is finished. Perhaps I am more aggrieved than sad. Certainly I am troubled and uneasy. My wife is no longer the woman I had remembered. Or perhaps more correctly, living in isolation from me has made her more of what she was. Independent, collected, realistic.

A person could give way to paranoia. The two people with whom I once lived, Benny and Victoria, are in league against me. I feel betrayed by the fact that they have changed while I remain faithful to the past and old loyalties. Benny is not the person I once knew, and neither, apparently, is Victoria. They have entered the long, dark tunnel of personal histories from which I am excluded. I feel left behind. A man standing on a tarmac watching my holiday plane lifting off for a brighter, sunnier, more welcoming place.

And because these people change, because they are in a state of flux, they seem unreal to me. Sam Waters is much more real. I put my faith in him. I think of his example before I go to sleep and when I wake.

Sam Waters made his appearance in that sad time after the failure of the second Big Book, and like Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the forehead of Zeus, he arrived on the scene unaccompanied by the normal pangs of artistic birth. Perhaps it was automatic handwriting. Or, put more poetically, the Muse in her beneficence gave me a sentence. In any case, I don’t know where it came from. There I was, sitting at my kitchen table on a bleak, lonely Sunday afternoon, doodling dispiritedly – mostly hanged men – when I heard this sentence. Actually heard it.

“Sam Waters had been a plainsman, a buffalo-hunter, a wind-drinker, a free man before he became the sheriff of Constitution.”

I wrote that down and looked at it very hard. There it was. Yes, I said, nodding to myself, sure he had. And?