“What if she does it again?” he asked.
“Meaning?”
“Goes off with another guy.”
I had by this point learned not to make wild, trust-me-on-this-one predictions (I certainly never saw Morgan coming).
“You know what Tolstoy says?” I said.
“No.”
“He says that a woman can never wound you the same way twice.”
A car drove the wrong way up our one-way street; we both watched it. “Do you think that’s true?” he said.
I gave it serious consideration. (He remembers everything. Be careful what you promise.) I did a speed-tour through my personal list of departed lovers (surprisingly long). It was true, yes, that no woman had wounded me as much the second time she left as the first. But what I also realized was that for the most part, if not entirely, I had never had the chance to be wounded twice by the same woman. When my unhappy lovers headed for the hills, they tended to stay away for good.
“Yes,” I said after a bit. “I think it is.”
A few nights later, Christmas only a few days away now, I was tinkering with the tree, the lights flashing off and on, some working, some not, an unsolvable puzzle of physics only my wife could fix, when I heard the customary crashing down the stairs; a smell of vigorous deodorant (applied with a bicycle pump) filtered into the room, and the young prince set off into the cold air to discover his fate.
He didn’t come home that night; there was a masculine, adult-sounding message on the service the next morning; a floor of fresh snow lay on the lawn, the sun already working its way in the sky. Sometime later that afternoon he returned, the details of his evening mercifully brief but telling. He had indeed gone to the party; had made his entrance late with a number of the lads, a phalanx of baseball hats and oversized T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts; and there she was, in the smoke-crowded living room, the music deafening. They had spoken for only moments when she whispered, “If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to have to kiss you.” (My God, where do they learn this stuff? Are they all at home reading Tolstoy before these parties?)
After that he was vague (which is how it should be). They had stayed at the party; suddenly there was no hurry, not for either of them; odd but true, as if the last few months had been vaguely unreal, had never really happened. (But they did and there would be plenty to be said about that later.) For now though, it was like gently coasting down a hill on a brakeless bicycle; you couldn’t stop the momentum even if you tried.
When I think about the film club, I can see now that that was the night when it started to end. It set in motion a new kind of time, a fresh chapter in Jesse’s life. You wouldn’t have thought so at the time; at the time, it looked like business as usual, as if, Well, now that’s out of the way, we can get back to the film club. Uhn-uhn.
Yet even in writing these words, I’m cautious. I remember my last interview with David Cronenberg during which I made the rather lugubrious observation that raising children was a series of goodbyes, one after the other, to diapers and then snowsuits and then finally to the child himself. “They spend their young lives leaving you,” I observed when Cronenberg, who has adult children himself, interrupted. “Yes, but do they ever really leave?”
A few nights later, the unthinkable happened. Jesse invited me to watch him perform. He was playing at that club around the corner where the Rolling Stones had once played, where the ex-wife of our prime minister had gone home with one of the guitar players, I believe. The place Jesse had kicked me out of a year earlier. It was, in a word, chock full of history.
I was told to arrive a few minutes before one in the morning at the front door and to behave myself, by which he meant no awkward demonstrations of affection, nothing that might diminish his aura of danger and heterosexual, hard-bitten “street cred.” To which I readily agreed. Tina was not invited; two adoring, misty-eyed adults— that was too much. She also agreed happily. She is a slim woman with little fat on her bones and the idea of stepping into the freezing air, of possibly waiting in a line for forty-five minutes in the early hours of the morning while icy blasts from Lake Ontario whipped and gusted up the street, relieved her of even the most urgent curiosity.
So at twelve-thirty that night I ventured out onto the icy sidewalk and slipped across the park. I made my way down a deserted street in Chinatown, cats nibbling at unspeakable things in the shadows. Turned the corner, the wind goosing me from behind, until I arrived at the front doors of the El Mocambo. The same group, it seemed, of young men waited there as before, smoking cigarettes, swearing, laughing, gusts of frozen breath hanging like cartoon bubbles just before their faces. Jesse hurried over to me.
“You can’t come in, Dad,” he said. He looked panic-stricken. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t look very good in there.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I said.
“There’s not that many people; they let the act before us go too long; we lost some of the audience—”
That was enough for me. I said, “You got me out of a warm bed on a freezing night; I got into my clothes and huffed my way over here; it’s one o’clock in the morning, I’ve been looking forward to this for days and now you’re telling me I can’t come in?”
A few minutes later he led me up the stairs, past the pay phone where he’d once caught me. (How fast time is passing.) I went into a small, low-ceilinged hall, very dark with a small square stage at the end. A few skinny girls sat in chairs to the side of the stage. Kicking their legs and smoking cigarettes.
He needn’t have worried; over the next ten minutes the doorway darkened with stocky black kids in hairnets and long-framed girls in black eyeliner (they looked like haunted raccoons). And Chloë. Chloë with her diamond nose ring and her big blond hair. (He was right, she did look like a movie star.) She greeted me with the cheerful good manners of a private-school girl encountering her principal in the summer holidays.
I sat in the far corner among giant, black cubes (I never found out what they were, discarded speakers, packing cases, who knows). It was a zone so black I could barely make out the features of the two girls beside me. Although I could smell their perfume and hear their mirthful, obscenity-littered exchanges.
Jesse left me there with the admonition, unspoken, to stay put. He had “some business” to take care of, he said, before he went on.
Sitting in the darkness, my heart thumping with almost unendurable anxiety, I waited. And waited. More kids arrived; the room heated up; finally a young man stepped onto the stage (Was that where Mick Jagger had stood?) and enjoined the audience, amidst a barrage of hoots, to get their “fucking shit” together and “give it up” for Corrupted Nostalgia!
Corrupted Nostalgia no less. And out they came, two lanky boys, Jesse and Jack; the beat for “Angels” started, Jesse put the microphone to his lips and out came those damning lyrics, the howl of Troilus against Criseyde, Chloë standing with her back to me (no Morgan in sight), a range of hands reaching toward the stage.
And there he was: my beloved son, detached from me, nothing to do with me, pacing the stage with natural command. This was a different son; this one I’d never seen before.
On and on went the lyrics, bitter, demeaning, Chloë standing in the middle of the swaying crowd, her head turned slightly to the side, as if to avert the violent onrush; the assault, the arms of the audience stretching like tree branches toward the stage, waving up and down . . .
For Jesse and me, all manner of things lay ahead: a few months down the road, he made a video of “Angels”; Chloë played “the girl” (the actress who’d been hired for the part went on a coke binge and didn’t turn up). There were more dinners at Le Paradis, more cigarettes on the porch with Tina (I can hear the conspiratorial rise and fall of their voices even as I write this), more movies, but in theatres now, the two of us sitting on the left-hand side of the aisle, nine or ten rows up, “our spot.” There were tiffs with Chloë Stanton-McCabe, brinksmanship and operatic
makings-up; there were hangovers and patches of sloppy behaviour, a sudden affection for culinary writing, a prickly apprenticeship with a Japanese chef and a humbling “invasion” of the British music scene (“They have their own rappers over there, Dad!”).
There was also a suspicious birthday greeting from, who else, Rebecca Ng, currently in her second year of law school.
Then one day—it seemed to come out of the blue— Jesse said, “I want to go back to school.” He signed up for a punishing three-month crash course, math, science, history, all the horrors that had defeated him years before. I didn’t think he stood a chance, all those hours and hours and hours of sitting on his bum in a classroom. All that homework. But I was wrong, again.
His mother, the former high-school teacher from the prairies, tutored him in her house in Greektown. It didn’t all go smoothly, especially the math. Sometimes he rose from the kitchen table shaking with rage and frustration and stormed around the block like a madman. But he always came back.
He started to sleep there—it made things easier in the morning, he explained, “to get right to it.” Then he quit coming back to my house altogether.
The night before his final exam he phoned me. “No matter how this turns out,” he said, “I want you to know I really tried.”
A few weeks later, a white envelope landed in my mailbox; I could barely watch as he climbed the porch stairs, pulled out the letter and opened it, his hands shaking, his head going back and forth as he read down the lines.
“I made it,” he shouted, without looking up, “I made it!”
He never came back to live at my house. He stayed on at his mother’s and then got an apartment with a friend he’d met at school. There was a problem about a girl, I think, but they worked it out. Or they didn’t. I can’t remember.
We never got around to watching the Great Writing unit. We just ran out of time. It didn’t really matter, I suppose; there would always be something we didn’t get around to seeing.
He outgrew the film club and, in a certain way, he outgrew me, outgrew being a child to his father. You could feel it coming for years, in stages, but then suddenly, there it was. It can loosen your teeth if you let it.
Some nights I walk by his bedroom on the third floor; I go in and sit down on the edge of the bed; it seems unreal that he’s gone and for the first few months it haunted me going by there. He’s left, I notice, Chungking Express in his bedside table; he has no use for it anymore; has gotten what he needed from it and left it behind like a snake its skin.
Sitting on that bed I realize that he will never come back in the same form again. A visitor from now on. But what a strange, miraculous, unexpected gift, those three years in the life of a young man at a time when normally he begins to shut the door on his parents.
And how lucky I was (although it certainly didn’t seem so then) not to have a job, to have had so much empty time on my hands. Days and evenings and afternoons. Time.
I still daydream about an Overrated Films unit; how I’m dying to talk about The Searchers (1956) and the bewildering praise and nerdy analysis it has spawned; or Gene Kelly’s malignant phoniness in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). We will have time again, Jesse and I, but not that kind of time, not that rather bland, sometimes dull time which is the real signature of living with someone, time which you think will go on forever; and then one day, simply doesn’t.
Many, many other things lay ahead, his first days in university, his inexpressible delight at a student card with his name and face on it, his first assignment (“The Role of Multiple Narrators in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”), his first after-class beer with a university pal. But for the moment there was just a tall boy on a stage with a microphone in his hand. Sitting there in the darkness with those raccoon-eyed girls in ski jackets, I confess I had a small, private weep. I’m not sure why I was weeping—at him, I suppose, at the fact of him, at the unrecapturable nature of time; and all the while those words from True Romance repeated themselves over and over in my head, “You’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool!”
Acknowledgements
Writing a book about family members, particularly if you adore them, is a harrowing experience and not one I’m likely to repeat any time soon. To that end my first thanks must go to my son, Jesse, for entrusting me with his portrait and for allowing its publication sight unseen. I can only hope I have done him and his story the justice they deserve. Thanks also to his mother, Maggie Huculak, for more things than I can enumerate here. I want to also acknowledge the fact that while my daughter, Maggie Gilmour (all grown up now and living in California), does not figure in this particular story, she figures enormously and irreplaceably in my life. I owe her mother, Anne Mackenzie, thanks—and probably money—dating back nearly forty years.
I have dedicated this book to my editor and publisher, Patrick Crean, for salvaging my literary life; thanks also to my agent, Sam Hiyate, for displaying interest and enthusiasm at a time when my phone, apparently, was disconnected. Thanks to Jonathan Carp at Twelve; to Marni Jackson for the Tolstoy assignment; and to the boys and girls at Queen Video for their tireless extemporizing about even the most indifferent overnight rental. As always I must thank the waiters at Le Paradis restaurant where portions of this book were written.
And of course, without my wife Tina Gladstone’s love and insistent reassurance, I don’t know what would have become of this book—or of me, for that matter.
Index
Absolute Power, ♣
Aguirre, the Wrath of God, ♣
Alien, ♣
American Graffiti, ♣–♠
Annie Hall, ♣, ♠
Another Woman, ♣
Apocalypse Now, ♣
Around the World in ♣Days, ♠
Basic Instinct, ♣–♠
Beetlejuice, ♣
Bicycle Thief, The, ♣–♠, ♥
Big Sleep, The, ♣
Birds, The, ♣
Blue Velvet, ♣
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, ♣–♠
Bullitt, ♣–♠, ♥
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, ♣
Casablanca, ♣, ♠
Chinatown, ♣, ♠
Chungking Express, ♣, ♠, ♥, ♠, †
Citizen Kane, ♣, ♠
Crimes and Misdemeanors , ♣–28, ♠
Dead Ringers, ♣
Dead Zone, ♣
Dirty Harry, ♣, ♠
Dr. No, ♣–♠
Dr. Strangelove, ♣
La Dolce Vita, ♣
Duel, ♣–♠
81/2, ♣
Exorcist, The, ♣, ♠, ♥
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, ♣
La Femme Nikita, ♣
52 Pick Up, ♣
Fistful of Dollars, A, ♣, ♠–♥
Un Flic, ♣
400 Blows, The, ♠– ♥, ♠, †, ‡, Δ
French Connection, The, ♣, ♠
Friends of Eddie Coyle, The, ♣
Full Metal Jacket
Get Shorty, ♣–♠
Giant, ♣–♠, ♥
Glengarry Glen Ross, ♣
Godfather, The, ♣, ♠, ♥, ♠
Godfather: Part II, The, ♣
Great Gatsby, The, ♣, ♠
Hannah and Her Sisters, ♣
Hard Day’s Night, A, ♣–♠
High Noon, ♣–♠, ♥
Hombre, ♣
Internal Affairs, ♣–♠
Ishtar, ♣, ♠, ♥
It’s aWonderful Life, ♣, ♠
Jackie Brown, ♣
Jaws, ♣
Jungle Fever, ♣
Klute, ♣–96
Last Detail, The, ♣–♠
Last Tango in Paris, ♣, ♠, ♥, ♠
Late Show, The, ♣–♠
Lolita, ♣, ♠
Magnum Force, ♣
Manhattan, ♣
Mean Streets, ♣–♠, ♥
Miami Vice (television series), ♣–♠
Mr. Majestyk, ♣
Mommie Dearest, ♣
Murmur of the Heart, ♣–♠
Night Moves, ♣–♠
Night of the Hunter, ♣
Night of the Iguana, ♣
North by Northwest, ♣
Notorious, ♣–♠, ♥
On the Waterfront, ♣–♠, ♥, ♠
Onibaba, ♣–♠
Out of Sight, ♣–♠
Pickup on South Street, ♣
Plan ♣from Outer Space, ♠
Plenty, ♣
Pretty Woman, ♣
Professional, The, ♣
Psycho, ♣–♠, ♥
Pulp Fiction, ♣
Quiz Show, ♣–♠
Ran, ♣, ♠, ♥
Reservoir Dogs, ♣
Riding the Rap, ♣
Robocop, ♣
Rocky III, ♣
Roman Holiday, ♣
Rosemary’s Baby, ♣–♠
Samurai, The, ♣
Scanners, ♣
Scarface, ♣
Searchers, The, ♣
Sexy Beast, ♣
Shining, The, ♣–♠, ♥
Shivers, ♣
Showgirls, ♣, ♠–♥
Singin’ in the Rain, ♣
Some Like It Hot, ♣
Stardust Memories, ♣
Stepfather, The, ♣–♠
Stick, ♣
Streetcar Named Desire, A,
80–♣, ♠
Swimming with Sharks, ♣
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, ♣
Thief, ♣
Third Man, The, ♣♠Steps, The, ♥
To Have and Have Not, ♣–♠
Tootsie, ♣
True Romance, ♣–♠
2001, ♣
Under Siege, ♣
Unforgiven, ♣
Vanya on 42nd Street, ♣, ♠
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry, 28–♣, ♣
Waltons, The (television series), ♠
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, ♣
The Film Club Page 17