My Present Age Read Online Free Page A

and polished and repolished the linoleum until the reflection of my face beamed back at me. I washed windows and revarnished window frames and baseboards until the place was redolent with vinegar and varnish.
    By five-thirty, when Victoria arrived home from work, the flat, which was directly under the roof, would be sizzling hot, but I would serve her chilled lemonade and one of my famed cold collations: devilled eggs, salami, French bread, pickles, bean salad, Jell-O chocolate pudding. After eating and changing, we would walk downtown to escape the oppressive heat. Sometimes we sat through the same movie twice for the pleasure of the air-conditioning, sometimes we met friends to drink beer and talk politics, talk books, talk films, talk the meaning of life, talk anything. We were testing our wings; none of us talked for truth but for victory. I talked for her. I performed, I ranted, I gesticulated, I demonstrated, I impugned, I drunkenly soared in a flight of rhetoric. I had somebody. I talked for Victoria.
    It was always late before we started for home, strolling along in the lush, warm darkness. On a week night the streets would be deserted except for the occasional carload of drunks tooling around in a Camaro, Firebird, Cobra, or Mustang. Victoria, braless in a T-shirt and jaunty in safari shorts, often attracted attention and remarks.
    One night in August one of these muscle cars crawled over to the curb, engine rumbling throatily, and a number of beery Visigoths hung out the windows to give vent to their admiration. I, with a long and woe-filled experience of being subjected to the unwelcome attentions of extra-chromosome types, turned catatonic with terror. Victoria did not. When I counselled silence and circumspection I was not heeded.
    “Ignore him, Victoria. Do not even look at him.”
    “Hey, baby!”
    “Forgive them, Victoria, for they know not what they do,” I said, picking up the pace.
    Loud, suggestive sucking noises.
    “Hey, baby, lose jumbo and come for a ride!”
    “What a treat. A ride in the fartmobile. Just what every girl wants,” Victoria said. She has a talent for invective if roused.
    “Oh Jesus. Don’t get them mad, Victoria.”
    “Hey, I got something to show you, baby. Wanna see a one-eyed pant snake?”
    “Go have a wet dream, greaseball.”
    “For God’s sake, Victoria,” I said between clenched teeth, “do you know what you’re talking to? This is the kind of person who collects Nazi regalia, for chrissakes.”
    “It’s made to measure, baby, I guarantee. Check out the fit.”
    “Fit it in your hand, algae. From the looks of your complexion that’s where it usually goes.”
    Quite naturally he turned his attention to me, favouring weaker prey. “Hey, Fatso, what you got to say for yourself? You as mouthy as the broad?”
    I didn’t answer.
    “Hey, I’m talking to you, Georgie Jell-O!”
    Victoria said, “Leave him alone, creep.”
    “So you talk for both of you, eh? So what’s Tubby got I don’t got?”
    “Me
, for one thing.”
    How my heart leapt, even in that moment of imminent peril.
Me! Me! Me!
    “Some prize,” he said.
    “Get lost, pustule.”
    “Fuck you, bitch!”
    The driver revved the engine, popped the clutch. Tires squealed and smoked. When the tail lights had swept around a corner, Isaid, “They don’t know how lucky they are. I was on the point of freaking out. It could have been a mean scene for them.”
    “Come on, Ed,” said Victoria, “let’s get going before they decide to come back. Let’s go home.”
    Off we went, hand in hand, my legs and heart pumping in time to the refrain ringing in my head.
Me! Me! Me!
    It was several months after this declaration that the seed of the idea of going to Greece was planted. Victoria had assembled our portable desk (a door laid across two sawhorses) in front of the living-room window to reap the benefit of the October light. I lay on the sofa attempting to persuade her to join me there. At the time I