Scene 2: Interior, Church – Day
(The church is empty, to Gad’s great relief. He will be able to pray alone. He walks up to the altar, takes out his gun and places it on the altar. On the verge of tears, he calls on the Holy Father, his head lowered, hands together, beseeching Him.)
GAD
(Voice-over)
I asked the Lord to help me. I asked Him to become my new boss. He told me, “Go far from here, bring your family, share the story of your conversion, spread the Gospel.” I thanked Him, “Thank you, Lord. I shall see to it, Lord.” And I left Him enough so that he could live in style, at least for a while.
(Gad replaces the gun on the altar with a stack of cash, then leaves.)
We were excited by the project. Ann was sure we would be able to sell it. I gave a defeatist laugh, and she seemed surprised. Attentive and empathetic, she listened to me as I told her how, in twenty years of relentless work, I had never managed to sell a single script. I had worked for others, had written for Aaron Spelling, but my own creations had only met with rejection. I wrote dark comedies that Dick characterized, with utmost seriousness, as subversive and anti-American. She laughed. Ann was an optimist. She was absolutely convinced that the large networks would be eclipsed, over time, by young cable outfits. “You’ll see, their potential is enormous.” Over the next few weeks, we developed In Gad’s characters — Gad Paradise moved to a small midwestern city, where he built his own church, created his own television show, and swindled his followers. In the La Brea studio, we were amazed by the brilliantly conceived sets that were centred around the gun displayed in Gad’s anti-glare Plexiglas case, a symbol of his newfound conversion. Special effects, mechanized platforms, exuberant music. Amazing work done by the technical staff. Each episode started with the same scene — a close-up of the Paradise family members counting the money they had swindled from the believers the previous night. Meanwhile, we followed Gad, whose mafioso habits were hard to break; Mrs. Paradise, bored to death, slowly succumbing to alcoholism; their daughter Chastity, obsessed with being thin, whiling away her days with fashion magazines, getting one abortion after the other because “the pill makes you fat”; and Dylan, young Dylan, trying to cope with the tumult of puberty, searching for his sexual identity. But no matter, as long as the money keeps rolling in. Gad promises to return to New York as soon as they get rich, something that would never happen. And so everyone agrees to play their part in the great comedy of God.
Ms. Brenan was about to start recording again when Ann knocked on the door. She was leaving to take her mother to the doctor’s for a routine check-up. She shook hands with Christie Brenan and the photographer. The photographer wanted to take a picture of the two of us together, but Ann protested gently. She didn’t like to be in the limelight. Often, with indulgent gaiety, she would say she was a theoretician, not a celebrity, “While you, honey, interviews and all the rest, you just seem made for it.”
Me? Certainly not. But it was an obligatory ritual of success, one I would have been glad to avoid.
Ann left, and Ms. Brenan offered a tight smile. While she gave new instructions to the photographer, I thought of Dana whom I’d seen in action countless times when I accompanied her for the promotion of The Next War. That admirable talent she had for answering questions with a triumphant, almost cheeky smile on her face — she could be so funny! Everyone was always charmed by her. “More than anything else,” she explained once, before an interview, “don’t say too much; limit yourself to short, catchy answers — reporters love it — and don’t forget to be funny. People like you when you make them laugh, they just want to give you a hug. Add a dash of sedition, not too much, just enough to create ambiguity — is she being serious? Is she joking? Do you understand, Romain?” I nodded, astounded by her poise and intelligence.
In the midst of my reminiscing, Ms. Brenan asked her last question, the gotcha question, a challenging tone in her voice. “Do I believe in God? No. But as a child I did. Because of the endless death threats.”
She raised her eyebrows, “Death threats?”
I smiled, proud of the effect. “When you keep telling a child he’ll burn in hell, that’s a death threat, isn’t it?”
She looked me over with her carefully made-up eyes, encouraging me to continue.
“I stopped believing in God when I started thinking for myself.”
She smiled with satisfaction — the interview had gone according to her plan. Her voice revealed the pleasure she felt, “You might call that a rather pretentious attitude.”
“To fight against lies is pretentious? No, I don’t think so. Pretentiousness is making up a God to give yourself a convenient alibi. When you think about it, God is the best excuse man ever gave himself for war, domination, and greed. You know as well as I do, the worst atrocities are committed in the name of God.”
This time, Ms. Brenan gave me her warmest smile, and I felt a shiver of triumph. I had just given her the phrase she’d been looking for, the one the L.A. Times would print on the front page of its culture section a few days later — In Gad We Trust — God: Man’s Best Excuse to Do Wrong. A subversive headline for a flattering article (and a flattering picture):
With his incisive pen, Roman Carr holds a mirror to our moment in time. Seeking redemption at any cost, for a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand dollars.… American society shouldn’t be surprised that it has made religion into a lucrative, hard-nosed industry. In Gad We Trust, a brilliant reference to our national currency, shows us that religion and money, in this country, are inseparable.…
A more than welcome article only days before the start of the second season. Josh didn’t like the headline, though he was relieved by the content. Ann was overjoyed — “You see? That’s a nice change after all the complaints.”
I was awaited on another front now, and rather apprehensive about it. Only three days before the second season was scheduled to start, I was expected in Calgary. “Everything is going to go well,” Ann reassured me. “He’s your son, Romain. Len is your son. He’s been waiting for this moment for a long time.”
2
He arrived fifteen minutes early. He too was visibly nervous. About my height, maybe a little bit taller; he was at least twice my weight, a giant. His jacket wet with snow open on his wide chest, his face flushed, he was trying to catch his breath, as if he had walked too quickly out of fear of being late.
I could have gotten up and waved to him with the eagerness of an old friend; I decided instead to observe him, realizing with unease that nothing in this big man, his features, his way of holding himself and moving, connected me to him. He moved gingerly among the tables of the Westin Hotel bar, where he had told me we could meet. The place was packed on a late afternoon during a snowstorm, minus eighteen Celsius outside the pilot had announced, almost amused, as we were landing in Calgary.
He froze when he saw me, and emotion overcame me. My son? Is it possible? To make my discomfort worse, he had something of Gail’s father in him, without me knowing exactly what; I hadn’t noticed it in Montreal when Gail, in her hospital bed, had introduced us to each other, her voice so weak we could barely hear her. I retained a hazy memory of an obese young man, stressed out and awkward, who, once the secret of our filiation had been revealed, mumbled a few inaudible words and offered a moist hand, disagreeable to the touch, the same one he was offering now in this Calgary hotel bar, filled with businessmen and a few women dressed to attract attention, like those two blondes at the table next to ours who’d glanced at me a few times already, perhaps hoping I’d join them. While Len was taking his coat off, I wondered whether they might be checking out both the father and the son, an idea that would have amused any father, but I was far too tense for that.
“Hello. Have you been waiting long?”
“Only a few minutes.”
He laughed nervously, and so did I. Then he looked embarrassed when he
saw the copy of the Calgary Herald I had bought at the airport and read through in the taxi, hoping to find an article written by him. I found one in the business pages about the tar sands in northern Alberta; it was well written and contained just enough commentary to communicate his knowledge. I was surprised to feel pride like a normal father would; it both troubled and reassured me.
Gail had died almost three months ago. His business card had spent those three months lying in my desk drawer — Len Albiston, Reporter, Economic Affairs, the Calgary Herald, with his home phone number written down by hand. How many times had I picked it up, then put it back in the drawer, thinking, What are you going to do with this thirty-two-year-old son? What does he expect from you? What if you can’t love him?
“You don’t have the right to stop your son from knowing his real father,” Ann had told me.
And Dick had given me a lecture, “He’s your flesh, your genes. You can’t pretend that’s worth nothing. If I discovered I had a son, you can be sure I would want to get to know him.”
Irritated, I answered, “You? You’re always saying that you got snipped to make sure you wouldn’t have any!”
He made a face. “Whatever. If it happened, I’d be a great father.”
I laughed. “Oh yeah? And what if he was a homosexual with pierced nipples who voted for Ralph Nader?”
Instead of getting mad at me, he looked me straight in the eyes, dead serious. “I’d kick his goddamned ass and make a man out of him. I’d help him, like you can help Len.”
And Ann agreed, hoping that with Len I might discover a paternal instinct. After all, she’d been talking about children for a while now, despite our agreement at the beginning of our relationship, “A child, Romain, why not?” Each time she talked about it — seriously, but not too much, so she wouldn’t alarm me, since we’d seen couples break up over the same issue — I could see the young, determined woman who had charmed me years before say, “I don’t have that narcissistic ambition to reproduce, if that’s what you want to know.” But she’d been only twenty-eight at the time; she was thirty-six now. The maternal drive was like an animal impulse; there was nothing rational about it. She wanted to convince me, but wanted the decision to come from me. Except that I wouldn’t change my mind. Not at my age. Not with In Gad, which left us not a single minute to spare. And now that Len had suddenly appeared in my life, I could see her eyes burning with envy, almost like an accusation, You have a son. I don’t have anything.
Len sat down in front of me, smiling. A big guy covered in sweat despite the cold weather. He had hurried between his car and the hotel. He said, hesitating, “I’m happy you’re here.… Happy you called.… I was starting to lose hope, in all honesty.” He laughed to make sure it didn’t sound like an accusation. “Thank you.”
To overcome our embarrassment, we talked about the weather, the snow, the cold. Len warmed to the subject, explaining that the chinook, the warm wind blowing over the Rockies with a constant whistling sound, melted the snow at a dizzying pace, creating differences in temperature of up to twenty-five degrees in a manner of minutes. I listened, or tried to, trying to figure out where the similarity with Robert Egan came from, perhaps the same reddish brown hair, or his eyes, an iris encircled in white that gave him a permanently angry, surprised look. Len steered the subject of conversation. He talked about his work at the Calgary Herald, the article he had to write for the next day, a major acquisition in the petroleum industry, as if that’s all there was in Alberta, oil. He glanced at my empty glass, the beer I had finished too quickly before he arrived. He offered me a drink, it was a surprise, he said, looking for a waiter. The bar was full of workers, one more drink before going home, their voices loud, excited by the snowstorm raging outside. “So what’s the surprise? Nothing too strong, I hope?”
“You’ll see,” Len said. “It’s something rather special, for us. A source of pride.”
“A Canadian Pride?” I said, looking for the name of the cocktail on the menu. I must have looked so confused that he burst out laughing — a deep laugh, straight from the belly that rang out in the packed bar. The two girls next to us, now accompanied by two guys, turned their heads unexpectedly, as if they had heard a gunshot. “What’s with them looking at us?” I asked Len, and he only laughed harder. There was something special happening between us, and it delighted me.
What followed was even more incredible. The waiter, his tray heavy with glasses, placed two drinks before us. Nothing extraordinary at first glance — two Bloody Caesars with their celery sticks like flagpoles. Len got excited all of sudden, telling me how this drink, drunk the world over, had been created in this very bar, in 1969, housed in the very same hotel, though called by a different name back then, the Calgary Inn. I felt overcome with weakness, thinking it must be a joke. His eyes widened when I told him about my mother at the St. Regis in New York in October 1968. The mother and son enjoying a Bloody Mary, the specialty of the house at the King Cole bar, the famous drink invented by one of the establishment’s barmen in the 1930s. Two hotels, three thousand kilometres and twenty-eight years apart. As if, in our family, there were powerful rituals to be repeated, without our knowledge. The striking coincidence was too extraordinary to be true, a prodigious roll of the dice, a sign we couldn’t ignore.
Moved, I raised my glass. “To the Bloody Caesar, to the Bloody Mary!” And Len added, his voice cracking with emotion, “Like the blood that runs in our veins!”
Yes, the father and the son.
3
After two Bloody Caesars, Len began telling me about his childhood in Lethbridge, in southern Alberta. An only child, protected and pampered by his parents who were much older than those of his friends, a bit over forty when they adopted him. A childhood that was neither sad nor happy but terribly boring, so much so that his acceptance at the University of Calgary had been a liberation, far from his parents, in an apartment they paid for despite their modest means. “They made sacrifices for me, and I felt relieved when I left their home. It was a strange feeling. I felt like I was betraying them. They were hoping I’d visit them in Lethbridge on weekends, but I never went. And they never dared visit me in Calgary, because I never invited them. The perfectly ungrateful son, in other words.” An expression of remorse on his face. “They’re still there, in the same house. They’re old now, and barely ever go out.” He fell silent for a moment, then continued, a guilty smile on his face. “I’m a better son now; I visit them from time to time.”
The bar was raucous with laughter. I understood his interest in his biological parents: raised by people who could have been his grandparents, a generation earlier, a father probably too old to take him to the baseball diamond or the football field, and a mother who might not have known how to react to this large boy living through the pangs of adolescence. I imagined a sad and gloomy home, smelling of old rugs and disinfectant.
He enrolled in economics, and quickly became intrigued by what he called the geopolitics of oil. He said, suddenly energetic, “Alberta was humiliated by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The arrogance of centralization.” He barked a rough laugh. “He forced us to sell our oil below market price so the eastern provinces like Quebec might have an advantage. The resource is ours, it’s Albertan. What did Quebeckers do to thank us? They held two referendums, in October 1980 and now last year. Each time, the whole country quakes in its boots.” He shook his head. “Spoiled children. You must know all this already.”
Surprised by his vehemence, I said, smiling, “Oh, it’s been such a long time. To be honest, I’m don’t know much about Canadian politics.”
He blushed. “I’m sorry. We’re barely getting to know each other, and I’m boring you with my stories.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can tell you’re a passionate young man.”
He turned even redder; my remark pleased him.
I thought of Moïse. His long letters filled with savoury and enlightening
anecdotes, thanks to which I was able, in the seventies, to follow the rise of the Parti Québécois and its yearning for independence, which Moïse and Louise supported. “Quebec has nothing to do with the rest of North America,” Moïse would say. “It has its own culture, man, awfully courageous.” Even though he returned to New York in 1977, Moïse liked to give me lessons about my own country, which he knew far better than me, I had to admit.
What of it was left in me? Childhood memories? Impressions? As for the rest, politics, social issues, the national question, as it was called, well, I didn’t know much about it.
Len took a picture out of his wallet and showed it to me with pride. “My family.” Next to him, a plain woman, rather chubby, and in front of them two red-haired children, as speckled as trout — a boy with a timid face and a girl with an impish smile in a mouth filled with holes left by her missing baby teeth.
“Cody is nine, Julia is seven.”
“They seem adorable.”
“Oh, yes, indeed, they are! I’d do anything for them. Do you remember Garp, the father obsessed with the security of his children? Well I’m his twin.” He looked at the picture, his face softening with emotion. “When I had them, I felt the need to connect with Gail.”
Gail. The way he said her name, a mixture of respect and affection. I thought, he was close to her, closer than I ever was.
“You know, I learned early on that I was adopted. My parents never hid it from me. My mother kept the adoption papers, in case I ever wanted to find out more. After Julia’s birth I asked to see them. I’ll always remember it. She smiled like she’d been waiting for that moment for the longest time. She got up, very dignified, disappeared into her room and came back with a large envelope that she gave me. She said, ‘This is yours, my son. It’s your story.’”
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