Guy Vanderhaeghe - My Present Age

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
My Present Age

My Present Age is black comedy at its intimate and subversive best.

Douglas Barbour, Canadian Literature

Very nearly unique among present-day novels of any sort: like Philip Roth and almost no one else, Vanderhaeghe has the ability to make you root for the protagonist without setting up straw men or women for the protagonist.

Greil Marcus, Express, Berkeley (U.S.)

A fast, fluent and very funny novel. This is a hilarious, bleakly realistic comedy about modern lifes conformists and casualties. Or more precisely, about what can happen when its finally time to grow up and you cant.

Image Magazine (U.K.)

[A] wonderful first novel. Brilliantly funny and very sad.

San Jose Mercury News

Compassionate, humorous, and thematically important.

Bloomsbury Review (U.S.)

A deftly done novel. [My Present Age is] astonishing in conception and execution.

San Diego Magazine

An irresistible first novel. An achievement.

Spectator (U.K.)

A beautifully sustained performance.

USA Today

BOOKS BY GUY VANDERHAEGHE

NOVELS
My Present Age (1984)
Homesick (1989)
The Englishmans Boy (1996)

SHORT STORIES
Man Descending (1982)
The Trouble With Heroes (1983)
Things As They Are? (1992)

PLAYS
I Had a Job I Liked. Once. (1992)
Dancocks Dance (1996)

Copyright 1984 by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Cloth edition published by Macmillan of Canada 1984
This trade paperback edition published 2000

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Vanderhaeghe, Guy, 1951
My present age

eISBN: 978-1-55199-569-4

I. Title.

PS8593.A5386M9 2000 c813.54 C99-933053-5
PR9199.3.V384M9 2000

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem

v3.1

T he Beast destroyed my brief peace. Before him I could live without guilt, unwatched; for the first time in my life I found myself in the unfamiliar situation of having no one to disappoint. My wife, Victoria, had walked out on me months before, and although I wished she hadnt, her departure meant I could do more or less as I liked. My father, recently retired, had removed himself and my mother to a mobile-home park near Brownsville, Texas, a sprawling anthill of pensioned worker ants, thousands of miles away. That meant Pop no longer had his eye on me. There was no one left to offend, no one to despair of me and my misdemeanours. After a fashion, I was free.

Free to do what? To give up selling china in a department store and to spend luxurious mornings in bed, rereading The Last of the Mohicans, Shane, Kidnapped, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My father, if hed known what I was up to, would have disapproved most severely of the former, my wife of the latter. Not that they would have cared for either. Its merely a question of emphasis. Pops preference is for successful and dutiful; Victorias for the successful and intellectual.

Which is why Ive been such a thorough disappointment to both, and why I resent so much The Beast calling public attention to my failings. I suppose I ought to forgive him by reminding myself it isnt his fault that he lacks the imagination to see what he is doing. But I cant. Particularly when I look back on those glorious, innocent mornings, that paradis perdu, before the Great Persecution began.

Now, lying on my side, comforter tucked securely under my chin, I struggle to dampen my rage while the February morning sunshine leaks into my bedroom. The thick glaze of ice and frost on the windowpane filters this winter light of all warmth and colour. The scarred dresser with one jammed drawer, the cardboard wardrobe with Allied Van Lines stencilled on its side, the shoulder-high smudges on the wall plaster, the books heaped in the corners of the room or cracked open on the floor so that they rise in wedges, spines lifted to the ceiling, all look discoloured and neglected in this spent, tired sunshine. It is difficult to read the titles of the books from my horizontal position. Cheek pressed into the mattress, one eye narrowed in a squint, I can decipher only one. The Heart of Midlothian.

The sound of The Beasts voice has given me a headache. Downstairs, in the apartment directly below mine, old McMurtry has his radio tuned to the local open-line show. I can imagine McMurtry seated beside the set, his angular old shoulders raised in a buzzards hunch, hairy ear cocked to capture every wrathful syllable spurting from The Beasts lips. The old mans devotion to the homo horribilis who hosts this Roman circus of the airwaves is fervent, complete. I am regularly treated to a tinny harangue rising up through my floorboards, the words fantastically distorted by the demands McMurtrys deafness places on the speaker of his cheap transistor.

Between the two of them, The Beast and McMurtry, I have almost been driven from my apartment. I would have been gone long ago if this building werent old enough to fall under rent controls. There is nowhere else I could find to live as cheaply, and given my circumstances, living cheaply is necessary.

So, one might ask, why not make the best of it? Why should I desire to deny a gentleman in his declining years the grisly pleasure of feasting on the carrion The Beast serves up to his audience as Food For Thought? I have never considered myself a particularly illiberal man, a man who would wish to dim the joy of a fellow adrift in the sunset days of a long and blissfully cantankerous life.

Because The Beast and McMurtry talk about me on the radio. Thats why.

Its an old joke. The madman is informed by the psychiatrist that he is paranoid. That may be, he replies, but that doesnt stop people from plotting against me. My point exactly.

I have heard them. To be specific, on six occasions in the last two months. They started slandering me some time after I quit my job as a salesman in the china department of Eatons. No, not delusions. I heard them.

The first time was at breakfast. There I was, hung over but still manfully shovelling home the Cocoa Puffs, my radio blaring away keeping me company, when the intro music for The Beasts program began. Even at that early date I had a pronounced loathing for The Beast and all his works, a loathing so strong that the mere sound of those gruesome strains would have ordinarily sent me clattering and clawing my way to the radio to switch stations before The Beast began to bay. But that morning I was so dolefully and deeply sunk in the post-alcoholic whim-whams that I just kept mechanically spooning home my sodden puffies while the dirge played on.