My Present Age Read Online Free PDF

martini before tucking into the tourtière. In the evening the Café is given over to the city’s cognoscenti and artsy-fartsy set. Just the kind of place that attracts Victoria and her pals the way jam attracts wasps.
    As the name Café Nice suggests, the restaurateur is a Gallomaniac with a particular passion for Provence, although anything French passes muster. There are travel posters displaying delectable French views, there are French cinema advertisements, there are notices of art exhibitions in Paris, and there are reproductions of impressionist masterpieces hung on the walls.
    But the Riviera ambience is predominant. The tables have fake marble tops in which are stuck red-and-white sun parasols. The Mediterranean theme is embellished by a large wooden trough abutting a window overlooking the street. In this the proprietor of the Café Nice has dumped several yards of fine white sand, upon which are strewn gaily coloured beach balls suggestive of wave-lapped and sun-kissed shores.
    It is by this window that Victoria sits smoking a cigarette and watching condensation dribble down the windowpane. She hasn’t changed much. Her hair is longer than when I saw her last and lies in a fat, loosely plaited braid across her collarbone. She is wearing crisp, starchy-looking blue jeans and one of those tweed jackets I always disliked because they emphasize her shoulders and de-emphasize her breasts. This is her tough, no-nonsense ensemble, so I can expect a serious conversation. That bodes ill for me.However, on the other hand I’m glad to see she doesn’t look particularly ornery, merely abstracted and perhaps a little tired.
    The question now is how to cover gracefully the intervening distance under the scrutiny of a baleful, wifely eye. I shift from foot to foot and wring damp hands. I’m pretty sure I’m here to be called up on the carpet; demands are going to be made and the law is going to be laid down. All this is made worse because Victoria turned thirty-three in December.
    I have a theory about the early thirties. Of course, Victoria says I have a theory about most things. The early thirties are a dangerous time because people get unpredictable. Roughly the age Jesus downed tools and walked out of the carpentry shop.
    I turn over in my mind what she might want. Maybe the car. She paid for it and I haven’t had it repaired since the “accident.” Rust is already spotting the door panel that that old fart McMurtry scraped. Victoria will give me hell for that. She always hated my careless attitude towards property. Whenever I was given a lecture for neglecting or abusing something, the price tag took centre stage in the harangue. When I forgot to clean my electric razor for three months and the heads seized while she was doing her legs, Victoria demanded to know, while frenziedly scrubbing its innards with a toothbrush: “Ed, is this any way to treat a seventy-two-dollar razor?”
    Better lose the car than Balzac. Our last confrontation was over the set of the
Comédie humaine
she bought at a garage sale shortly before we split up. When Victoria left she demanded the books. I pointed out to her when I refused to surrender them that she had obviously bought them for me. As support for this reasonable contention, I cited my upcoming birthday and the fact Victoria can’t read French.
Voilà!
    She’s not getting Balzac. For one thing, I’m not even through a third of the musty, foxed volumes of the
Scènes de la vie privée
. Ah yes, old Honoré surely knew the human heart. He’d held his ear to that intricate mechanism and heard the little cogs of malice,duplicity, greed, and lust creaking away, making their sinful music. So far the book about the marriage settlement is my favourite. Oh God, please don’t let her start in about the Balzac again.
    Peering through the lacy maze of crinkled greenery I feel my apprehension at meeting Victoria growing. It has been a long time and I’m not sure I can trust myself to