My Present Age Read Online Free

trouble persuading me I should leave. Throughout the summer I continued to widen the breach in her defences and to infiltrate the citadel, bit by bit smuggling in my worldly possessions, quietly establishing squatter’s rights. Despite herself Victoria got used to me, even though she kept up a kind of weak resistance until September, when university classes resumed and distracted her. Victoria was a conscientious student.
    I have wonderful memories of that July and August. I remember her as already a remarkable woman at twenty-two, full of courage, passionate, opinionated beyond the appeal of reason. When we drank beer and argued, her face would flush so red with conviction that I was sure I could feel it radiate heat across the width of the table. Perhaps she did not believe in the things she defended as much as she believed in herself and in her inability to ever be wrong. That may account for why she struggled to save me for so long.
    The only thing she seemed to have a doubt about was her nose. It was large, had a high bridge and flaring nostrils, and saved her face from being merely beautiful. That summer she wore her hair in a shag cut, probably because the crinkled hair and big nose taken together made her look exotic, vaguely Assyrian. The rest of Victoria was an approximation of middle-class ideals of perfection: a translucently fine complexion; strong, even teeth; a slim, leggy, full-breasted body that always smelled faintly and pleasantly of soap, toothpaste, and baby powder.
    To sum up, she was everything I wasn’t: assured, idealistic, ungrubby. She had had success stamped early in her heart as I had had failure stamped early in mine. She had been vice-president of her high school’s student government, a member of the honour roll, editor of the yearbook, popular. I also learned, in time, that when Victoria was seventeen, a high school senior dating a university man named Max, she had been deftly deflowered and had awakened to the knowledge that she enjoyed sex a good deal.
    In contrast, I was a long-term social pariah who had never had a date in high school until my graduation, when my mother scared up a girl for me through her vast network of friends and relatives, a girl horrible and desperate enough to grace my arm while I waddled through the grand march of graduates. In anticipation of my first real encounter with the fair sex, I spent a lot of time studying “The
Playboy
Adviser,” French-kissing my left biceps, and practising unhooking a bra of my mother’s I had stolen out of the laundry hamper.
    It was this high level of sexual expertise (barely supplemented by three wild, roguish years of university life) that I brought to bear on my seduction of Victoria. Add to this the fact that I was corpulent and considered by some to be verging on sociopathic and one is confronted by one of those baffling conundrums of the heart: What was Victoria doing with me? I had no answer then, but later, after I had been introduced to her family, I thought I could see why she was drawn to me. Maybe it was because I was as different from her father as a man could be, and that what Victoria at first valued in me was eccentricity, unpredictability, and an emotional range that she equated with depth of feeling rather than a lack of restraint. Certainly the first time I wept in front of her she was stunned.
    Oh yes, that was a fine summer. Victoria was working as a secretary, earning money against her return to university in the fall, and I was preparing for grad studies by teaching myself the French I hadn’t troubled to learn in high school. When I wasn’t conjugating verbs, I was refurbishing Victoria’s tiny apartment on the thirdstorey of a rickety old revenue house. One day she would return from work to find the kitchen painted canary yellow, another to discover the bedroom was painted blue and there were carnations in a bowl on the dresser. I was happy. I stripped the old, yellowing wax off the living-room floor