My Present Age Read Online Free Page B

was mournfully singing “I’m Mr. Lonely” at the top of my lungs.
    “Ed, shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” She was laughing, though.
    “Bobby Vinton appeals with his plaintive mating call. Dare you resist his blandishments?”
    “I’m trying to finish a paper.”
    “What paper can possibly be more important than the duty to reach out and touch another human being in his hour of need?”
    “A paper on Greek mythology due tomorrow.”
    “A paper on Greek mythology could only be enriched by a fuller understanding of the Dionysian revel. Let us disport ourselves with Attic enthusiasm.”
    “Ed, give me a break.”
    “Okay, okay. Offer yourself to me body and soul and I promise to type the paper for you tonight. Greek’s honour.”
    “I thought you’re supposed to read a book for Schwingler’s seminar.”
    “When the Greek’s blood is heated with the madness of Dionysian revel,” I declared, smiting my breast, “he thinks not of the paltry pedagogue Schwingler!”
    “You aren’t going to give up until you get your way, are you?”
    “That is an approximation of the truth, yes.”
    “You just better type this paper then. I mean it,” she warned me, before entering freely into the spirit of the thing.
    By December the “Greek afternoon” or the “Greek evening” had become a household phrase. By degrees we developed a festival of wine, song, and feasting to dispel the cold and darkness which crept into the soul during a Canadian winter. Whenever I saw Victoria’s spirits flag I would begin secretly to gather the ingredients necessary for a “Greek evening.” From the delicatessen across town I would buy spinach pies and Greek pastries. A store of metaxa and retsina would be laid in, albums of Greek folk music would be obtained from the public library, and a roast of lamb hidden in the freezer of the tenant who lived below us. Then one day when Victoria stumbled in out of a January blizzard, bundled, scarved, mittened, snow flakes frozen in her eyelashes, she would be welcomed by the scent of roasting meat, music on the stereo, me proffering a glass of retsina, and the cry: “Everybodies get heppy! We got a Greek night!”
    So it would go. We had some good times. We ate and roared toasts and splashed metaxa down our throats as the stereo blasted out the sound track of
Zorba the Greek
.
    I would propose: “Death to the Colonels!”
    “Long live Melina Mercouri!” Victoria would rejoin.
    “More sex, please! I am Greek!” I would yell.
    In one of these moments of craziness I offered, “Next year in Crete!” and Victoria took me up on it. It was an idea easy to fasten on to in the black months of January and February. She began by collecting travel brochures and books. From that she progressed to explaining to me that cheap living in Greece would allow me to write. Writing was a thing I sometimes talked about doing, not very seriously of course, but in the way young men who study literature often do. I said her idea made sense. The next thing I knew, Victoria had taken a part-time job as a checkout clerk at Safeway and was making me set aside something each month from thesalary I received as a teaching assistant at the university. This money was to finance a stay in Greece.
    Nothing brought us closer than our talk of Greece, than the minutiae of budgeting and planning, than the book of traveller’s Greek we traded phrases back and forth from. I felt free to feed the fire because I believed that a hard-headed, practical girl such as Victoria would draw back at some point. After all, what the hell did the two of us want in Greece?
    Finally, in the slush of March, we came to a decision that if we were going to live in conservative, reactionary Greece our stay would be made pleasanter and smoother if we were married. Not only that, if we had a wedding we could sell the wedding gifts to raise money to finance the trip.
    It was agreed we would marry in June and then work until some time in