Come Back (18 page)

DAILY PLANNER
1984:
Telephone Page

DAILY PLANNER
1985:
January Tuesday 1

January Thursday 10

January Monday 28–Tuesday 29

February Wednesday 13

February Friday 15–Sunday 17

February Monday 18

Going insane. The impossible letter. WUSS: both “wimp” and “pussy”? Drink: 50 …

The light beyond Hal’s barred basement window was almost gone. Much too late for him to make the call to little Emma in Toronto; her school-day story would not be heard today. He could be there, walk hand in hand with her across the street and into the park, watch her climb, slide, push her higher and higher on the swing, her curved little body yearning upwards. Was the gorgeous catalpa tree now in blossom there in deepest Ontario?

Never yet without Yo.

The buried pasts: diaries, notebook pages, loose and random scribbles surround him wherever his glance falls. The body language of a blue ballpoint groping across paper: like a residual cancer, a spiritual gangrene gnawing its repetitions out through Gabriel’s fingertips. An entire page labelled “March 17/85” lies open as a column, and on every line

repeated top to bottom, twenty-two times, ending with

Paper suddenly so toxic it burns Hal’s hand; he drops it. For the love of God, Gabe, DO SOMETHING WITH YOURSELF!

And recognition slams him: Gabriel’s “dream job” at the National Film Theatre, “the study and appreciation of
cinema,” was the worst work he could have found in 1985. Far worse than tiring body labour, worse than a course which would have had some instructor direction: here he was paid (minimally but enough) to evaluate and advise on movies to be shown in repertory theatre—his job was simply to sit and watch any and all movies. And he did: twenty-two theatre movies listed in January, twenty-one theatre movies in brief February, PLUS TWENTY-NINE MORE at a
Fifty-Hour Movie Marathon
. Gabe organized it; it ran without a break from Friday evening to Sunday night, living hell! Hal unfolds the NFT poster like a trap:

Hal cannot remember how much he sponsored Gabe—he must have, a lot—hour after relentless hour to stare at a screen; he does not want to think of it, he shudders to remember. That lean 6-foot-3-inch body, 165 pounds doubled for fifty hours in a chair—no matter how “amazingly comfortable!” the brochure bragged it would be—fifty hours after having already been up for twelve hours, since six Friday morning, moving “a comfortable lounge full of comfortable armchairs” into place with “large-screen video projectors.” And such superb, psychologically shredding films lurking everywhere throughout the
program:
Psycho—Cat People—Dr. Strangelove
, and especially
La femme de l’hôtel
:

And, O blasted thought, John Huston’s new
Under the Volcano
at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning, Malcolm Lowry’s drunken meditation on the Sermon on the Mount—what a Sunday worship—that drove Gabriel to his only marathon comment:

With scribbled sidebar:

Gabriel, no wonder you scrawled “going insane” over and over again. No wonder two days later—day after day you kept on punishing yourself with these pitiless movies, bending your long body inert while virtual violent worlds reeled through your total attention, you need do or decide nothing, you were totally controlled by a fiendishly skilled camera—two days after the marathon you submit yourself to what you name “the brutish lyricism” of Sam Peckinpah, twice in a row! and confess:

Gabe! Where was your work community? The convivial, witty, artistic, stubbornly opinionated people with whom you ate lunch, had drinks—too many?—talked Oilers, ideas, winter weather, politics … were you locked into shame at what you felt? With them especially?

All the Marathon Program could note was: “Special thanks to Gabriel and Ross for putting together … managing …” Ugh.

And Fred? By then he must have had, however unaware, more than a Europe Karen whiff of your “obsession.” Did you simply, wordlessly, shift past each other in the narrow aisle kitchen of your apartment?

Did you ever talk
with
anyone?

DAILY PLANNER
1985:
March Wednesday 13

Beth. Beth, in the Vancouver Airport, that Beth. Hal remembered her like a splash of frozen memory: cropped hair, tall, dark blond, it must have been the mid-nineties, 1994, ’95 and he bought her a latte … she was a volunteer driver at the Vancouver Writers Festival. She had picked him up at the hotel in lots of time to catch his flight back to Edmonton and said she had time for coffee, Joy Kogawa’s plane from Toronto wouldn’t be in for an hour.

Hal told her, “Joy was in Grade Seven with me, my school.”

“Really!”

“Taber, Alberta, and kids and sugar beets, that irrigation slogging, her first novel,
Obasan
, it’s superb at describing that mind-breaking labour.”

“Did you do it too, hoe beets?”

“All Japanese and Mennonite kids did, that was South Alberta after the war.”

“Why didn’t they ask you to have a conversation with her too, here at the festival? Not just Clark Blaise?”

“Hey, that’s a great idea—World War Two: the Vancouver expropriation and prairie exile of Japanese
Canadians—let’s pick up Joy and go back and tell them!” But then, abruptly, she stopped laughing with him. He looked up; she was staring beyond him, her grey eyes fixed as if something was there, coming. She said, deliberately,

“I used to live in Edmonton. I knew your son.”

She had picked him up at the airport two days before, and he had noticed her in the festival hotel, checking tickets at the door for some events. Then she was in the audience, front row, for his “A Conversation with Clark Blaise” and in the van returning to the airport she had talked about nothing but that: “I liked the way you pushed him about ‘beginnings,’ that was so strong, his ‘beginnings’ comments.”

“You really feel I pushed him?”

“You were very good, evocative, when he said, ‘To begin, to begin, the first paragraph of a story is an act of faith,’ and you pushed him and he’s so quick: ‘It’s in the nature of story, story seeks its beginning like the drop of the baton seeks the first chord in the symphony—’ ”

“You knew him, Gabriel?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Working at National Film Theatre.”

“You weren’t at the funeral.”

“No …”

“Half a dozen NFTers came, they signed the …”

“I couldn’t come.”

“You just got drunk.”

“How do you know that?”

“Guess … easy oblivion.”

“Yes. Gabriel never was—he drank but he was never really drunk.”

“You sure?”

“Not that I saw, not the eight months I knew him, not …”

What could Hal remember? Surrounded in his basement by notebooks and paper, holding in his hands the 1985 diary with those suddenly pale blue words rolled across the last line of March Wednesday 13:

A class restaurant, a neurotic Polanski film. Hal clutched his head: my memory, my memory’s so overloaded it’s … that latte, those airport lattes … I drank them then, all the time, but this … the old Vancouver Airport … my memory is inventing …

Gabriel wrote all his ’85 diary in black, why this single line return to blue? Hal tried to calm himself, to organize his thinking into discrete areas, complete one single thought, follow it through—how often does Gabe name Beth? In the diary, he must look through all the NFT days again, and also after he was laid off, was there any Beth after, when was it, May, when he turned in—Yes! May Friday 17:

In blue pen. But also two guys. Was it inside Vancouver Airport she confessed she knew Gabriel? At a coffee table,
where surely they sat face to face? Didn’t she say it driving, where the traffic would allow him no more than her profile? Her handsome face—not beautiful but character handsome, certainly older than Gabe, early forties by ‘94, such a face chiselled from marble—and the same stab of sudden rage, he knew that! hit him: why didn’t she seduce Gabe? Her body, her powerful character could surely have overrun that fixation on an avoiding child, soak him in pleasure, let your body roll and stop torturing yourself, stop fumbling around that confused kid you never see anyway except in some crowd, embrace this, now, and whenever that girl grows mature enough to respond—accept or reject or play, whatever—well then that will be—Beth, why didn’t you!