What she did best for Jesse, she did by example, imparting a democratic kindness, a giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt that his father, occasionally too hasty with a condemning turn of phrase, did not.
In a word, she sweetened his soul.
“Your mother means well,” I said, “but she’s wrong there.”
“You figure I’m addicted to Rebecca?” he said.
“Not literally.”
“What if I never find anyone I’m that attracted to?”
I thought again of Paula Moors and her fat-burning exit; she was a brunette with vaguely crooked teeth, the kind of flaw that can give a woman an eerie sex appeal. God how I missed her. Yearned for her. Suffered grotesque imaginings that made me change my T-shirt in the middle of the night.
I said, “You remember Paula? You were ten when she left.”
“She used to read to me.”
“I thought I’d be haunted by her for the rest of my life, no matter who I was with. That there would always be a Yes, but she’s not Paula.”
“And?”
I chose my words carefully, not wanting things to get locker-roomy. “It wasn’t the first woman or the second or the third woman. But when it happened, when the chemistry was right and things worked out, I never gave Paula another thought.”
“You were kind of a mess for a while there.”
“You remember that?” I said.
“Yep.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember you falling asleep on the couch after dinner.”
I said, “I was taking sleeping pills. Big mistake.” Pause. “You had to put yourself to bed a few times, didn’t you?”
I thought of that awful spring, the sunlight too bright, me walking through the park like a skeleton, Jesse darting timid glances up at me. He said once, taking my hand, “You’re starting to feel better, aren’t you, Dad?” This little ten-year-old boy looking after his father. Jesus.
“I’m like that guy in Last Tango in Paris,” Jesse said. “Wondering if his wife did the same things with the guy in the dressing gown downstairs that she did with him.” I could feel him looking at me uncertainly, unsure whether to go on. “Do you think that’s true?” he asked.
I knew what he was thinking about. “I don’t think there’s any point in thinking about that stuff,” I said.
But he needed more. His eyes searched over my face as if he was looking for a very small dot. I remembered nights lying in bed and forcing myself to visualize the most pornographic images imaginable, Paula doing this, Paula doing that. I did it to blunt my nerve endings, to hurry to the finish line, to that point where I wouldn’t give a shit what she did with her fingers or what she put in her mouth. Etc., etc.
“Getting over a woman has its own timetable, Jesse. It’s like growing your fingernails. You can do anything you want, pills, other girls, go to the gym, don’t go to the gym, drink, don’t drink, it doesn’t seem to matter. You don’t get to the other side one second faster.”
He looked across the street; our Chinese neighbours were working in the garden, calling out to each other. “I should have waited until I had another girlfriend,” he said.
“She might have canned you first. Think about that.”
He stared ahead for a moment, his long elbows on his knees, picturing God knows what. “What do you think about me phoning her?”
I opened my mouth to reply. I remembered waking up early one grey February morning after Paula was gone, wet snow sliding down the window, and thinking I’d go mad from the endlessness of the day ahead of me. This is delicate flesh you are dealing with. Tread softly.
“You know what she’ll do, don’t you?” I said.
“What?”
“Punish you. She’ll reel you in and in and in and just when you think you’re home free, she’ll bring down the curtain.”
“You figure?”
“She’s not stupid, Jesse. She’ll know exactly what it is you want. And she won’t give it to you.”
“I just want to hear her voice.”
“I doubt that,” I said, but then I looked over at his unhappy features, at the flatness that seemed to have overtaken his whole body. Softly, I said, “I think you’ll be sorry if you start up with her again. You’re almost at the finish line.”
“What finish line?”
“Getting over her.”
“No, I’m not. I’m not even nearly there.”
“You’re farther along than you think.”
“How do you know that? I don’t mean to be rude, Dad, but how do you know that?”
“Because I’ve done it about three million times, that’s how I know,” I said sharply.
“I’m never going to get over her,” he said, abandoning himself to despair. I could feel prickles of irritation, almost like sweat, on my skin—not because he was questioning me—but because he was unhappy and I couldn’t do anything, nothing, to relieve him of it. It made me angry at him, like wanting to strike a child who falls down and hurts himself. He shot a glance at me, one of those I remembered from years ago, a worried look that said, Uh-oh, he’s getting mad at me.
I said, “It’s like the guy who gives up cigarettes. A month goes by, he gets drunk, he figures, What the hell? Halfway through the second cigarette he remembers why he gave it up. But now he’s smoking again. So he has about ten thousand more cigarettes before he arrives back at precisely the same place he was at before he lit up.”
Jesse put his hand awkwardly, tenderly, on my shoulder and said, “I can’t give up cigarettes either, Dad.”
10
No more than a few days later, I had dinner with Maggie. I’d ridden my bicycle over to her house in Greektown earlier in the evening but after dinner, after the wine, I had no desire to risk a wobbly drive back across the bridge into town. So I clambered aboard the subway with the bike in tow.
It wasn’t a long trip home, ten or fifteen minutes, but I’d done it so many times it seemed intolerably sluggish and I was sorry not to have brought a book to read. I gazed at my reflection in the window, at the passengers coming and going, the tunnels whizzing by, when whom should I see but Paula Moors? She was sitting opposite me, five or six rows down the subway car. I don’t know how long she’d been there, or where she got on. I stared at her profile for a moment, the sharp nose, the pointed jaw. (I’d heard she got her teeth straightened.) Her hair was longer now, but she looked unchanged, very much as she had delivering those terrible words. “I’m leaning toward not being in love with you—” What a sentence! What a choice of words!
For six months, maybe a year, I’ve forgotten, I had felt her absence with the acuity of a toothache. We had committed such middle-of-the-night intimacies, she and I, private things said, private things done, and now the two of us sat unspeaking on the same subway train. Which would have struck me as tragic when I was younger but now seemed, I don’t know, rather ruefully true to life. Not fantastic or sad or obscene or hilarious, just sort of business-as-usual, the mystery of someone coming and going in your life not so mysterious after all. (They have to go somewhere.)
And how, I wondered (an East Indian woman getting off at the Broadview station), how could I make Jesse understand this, how could I rush him through the next months, even year, to that delicious end point where you wake up one day and instead of feeling her loss (that toothache), you find yourself yawning, putting your hands behind your head and thinking, “I must get a copy made of my house key today. I’m playing a rather dangerous game here, having only one key.” Gorgeously banal, liberating thoughts (Did I lock the downstairs window?), the heat having passed from the burn, the memory of its pain so remote that you can’t quite put your finger on why it went on so long or what the fuss was about, or who did what with her body (but look, the neighbours are planting a new birch tree).
As if the chain on an anchor has snapped (you can’t quite remember where you were or what you were doing), you notice suddenly that your thoughts are your own possess
ion again; your bed no longer empty but simply yours, yours in which to read the newspaper or sleep or . . . dear me, what was it I was supposed to do today? Ah, the front-door key! Yes.
How to get Jesse there?
And looking around the subway car (a young woman eating a bag of potato chips gets on), I noticed that Paula had gone. Had gotten off at an earlier stop. I had, I realized with mild surprise, forgotten that she was there, the two of us whistling through darkened tunnels, the two of us so engaged elsewhere that we—I was sure this applied to her as well—had gotten used to and then indifferent to the presence of the other, all in a matter of five minutes. How—what? Odd. I suppose that’s the word. But even that thought was immediately replaced. As I walked my bike along the platform, the train moving away from me, I noticed that the girl with the potato chips had braces on her teeth. She ate with her mouth open.
Jesse got up before noon one day, an event which I celebrated by showing him Dr. No (1962). It was the first James Bond film. I tried to explain to him the excitement those Bond movies caused when they first appeared in the mid ’60s. They seemed so urbanely scented, so naughty. There’s a certain effect films have on you when you’re very young, I explained; they give you an imaginative experience in a way that is hard to recapture when you’re older. You “buy it” like you can’t really later.
When I go to a movie now, I seem to be aware of so many more things, the man talking to his wife a few rows over, someone finishing their popcorn and throwing the bag into the aisle; I’m aware of editing and bad dialogue and second-rate actors: sometimes I watch a scene with a lot of extras and I wonder, Are they real actors, are they enjoying being extras or are they unhappy not to be in the spotlight? There’s a young girl, for example, in the communications centre at the beginning of Dr. No. She has one or two lines but I never saw her on the screen again. I wondered out loud what happened to all those people in those crowd shots, those party shots: how did their lives turn out? Did they give up acting and go into other professions?
All these things interfere with the experience of a movie; in the old days you could have fired off a pistol beside my head and it wouldn’t have interrupted my concentration, my participation in the movie that was unfolding on the screen in front of me. I return to old movies not just to watch them again but in the hope that I’ll feel the way I did when I first saw them. (Not just about movies either but about everything.)
Jesse looked shaky when he came outside onto the porch. It was November again, a few days till his eighteenth birthday. How was that possible? It seemed like his birthday came every four months now, as if time was indeed giving me the bum’s rush to the grave.
I asked him about his evening; yes, all fine, nothing special, though. Dropped over to see a friend. Huh-huh. Which friend? Pause.
“Dean.”
“I don’t know Dean, do I?”
“Just a fellow.”
Fellow? (You hear language that out of character, you want to call the police.) He could tell I was looking at him.
“What did you do then?”
“Not much; watched some television; it was all a bit boring.” There was in his answers the feeling of somebody trying to stay off the radar screen, of somebody not wanting the conversation to catch like a shirt on a nail. A woman with a prematurely aged face passed by on the sidewalk.
“She should dye her hair,” Jesse said.
“You seem a bit fragile today,” I said. “What were you drinking last night?”
“Just beer.”
“No hard liquor?”
“A bit, yes.”
“What kind?”
“Tequila.”
I said, “Tequila leaves a very bad hangover.”
“It sure does.”
Another silence. It was a strangely motionless day. The sky white as a board.
I said, “Were there any drugs involved during this tequila evening?”
“No,” he said offhandedly. Then: “Yes, there were.”
“What kind of drugs, Jesse?”
“I don’t want to lie to you, okay?”
“Okay.”
Pause. The windup. Then the pitch. “Cocaine.”
The woman with the old face came back this way carrying a little plastic bag of groceries.
“I feel so terrible,” he said. For an instant I thought he was going to burst into tears.
“Cocaine can leave you feeling very sordid,” I said softly and rested my hand on his thin shoulder.
He sat up quickly as if responding to his name being called out at roll call. “That’s it, that’s exactly it. I feel so sordid.”
“This was where, at Dean’s?”
“His name’s not Dean.” Pause. “It’s Choo-choo.”
What the hell kind of a name is that? “What does this Choo-choo do for a living?” I said.
“He’s a white rapper.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
“He’s a working musician?”
“Not exactly.”
“So he’s a coke dealer?”
Another pause. Another rallying of troops that had long since decamped. “I went back to his house last night. He just kept bringing it out.”
“And you kept doing it?”
He nodded, gazing numbly down the street.
“Have you been to Choo-choo’s house before?”
“I don’t really want to talk about this now,” he said.
“I don’t give a shit if you want to talk about it now or not. Have you been to Choo-choo’s house before?”
“No. Honest.”
“Ever done coke before?”
“Not like this.”
“Not like this?”
“No.”
I said, after a moment, “Didn’t we have a talk about this stuff?”
“About coke?”
I said, “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, we did.”
“That if I caught you doing drugs, the deal’s off. Rent, pocket money, all of it, over. You remember that?”
“Yep.”
“Did you think I was kidding?”
“No, but one thing, Dad. You didn’t catch me. I told you.”
I didn’t have an immediate answer for that one. After a while I said, “Did you phone anybody?”
He looked surprised. “How did you know?”
“That’s what people do when they’re on coke. They get on the phone. And they’re always sorry. Who’d you call? Did you call Rebecca?”
“No.”
“Jesse?”
“I tried to. She wasn’t in.” He slumped forward in his chair. “How long is this going to go on?”
“How much did you do?”
“All night. He just kept bringing it out.”
I went into the house and got a sleeping pill from my sock drawer and brought it back outside with a glass of water. I said, “This is a one-shot number, okay. You do this again, you’re going to have to suffer through it.” I gave him the pill, told him to swallow.
“What is it?” he said.
“Doesn’t matter.” I waited till he swallowed and I had his attention. I said, “We’re not going to talk about this right now. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yep.”
I kept him company until he got drowsy from the sleeping pill. It made him a little loose-tongued.
“Do you remember that speech in the Under the Volcano documentary?” he asked. “Where the consul is going on about his hangover, about hearing people coming and going outside the window, repeating his name scornfully?”
I said I did, yes.
He said, “That happened to me this morning. Just when I was waking up. Do you think I’m going to end up like that guy?”
“No. But this isn’t the time to talk about it.”
Then he went upstairs. I tucked him in. I said, “You’re going to be a bit depressed when you wake up.”
“Are you mad at me?”
I hung around the house that afternoon. He came downstairs sometime after dark. He was famished. We ordered Swiss Chalet. When it was done, wiping the grease from his lips, from his fingers, he lay back on the couch. “I said some pretty stupid things last night,” he said. Then he went on, as if he needed to torture himself. “I thought I was some kind of a rock star there for a while.” He groaned. “You ever do something like that?”
I didn’t answer him. He wanted, I could tell, to lure me into some kind of complicity. But I wasn’t playing.
He said, “It was just getting light when I left Choo-choo’s. And there were all these pizza boxes lying all over the place, this really shitty apartment, excuse my language, a real dump. I saw myself in the mirror. You know what I was wearing? Some kind of bandana around my head.”
He pondered it all a moment longer. “Don’t tell my mother, all right?”
“I’m not going to keep secrets from your mother, Jesse. You tell me something, I’m going to tell her.”
He took it calmly. Slightly nodding his head. No surprise, no resistance. I don’t know what he was thinking; remembering something that got said the night before, some grotesque posturing, some unattractive vanity one is always prudent to keep private. But I wanted to sweeten his soul, to banish the image of pizza boxes and crappy apartments and all the ugly things he must have thought about himself coming home on the subway at the crack of dawn, everybody else around him fresh and awake to a new day. I wanted to turn him inside out and hose down his insides with warm water.
But how sunny is he inside there? I wondered. This boy with the jaunty walk. Do I have any idea what the rooms in that mansion really look like? I fancy I do but sometimes, listening to him on the phone downstairs, I hear a foreignness in his voice, a harshness, even sometimes a coarseness and I ask myself, Is that him? Or is that a posture? Or is the face he turns to me a posture? Who was that kid on coke in the crappy apartment, coming on like a bullying rock star? Do I ever see that guy?
The Film Club Page 11