The Film Club (19 page)

As we watched these films though, I sometimes had the feeling that Jesse's presence was somehow more dutiful than before. Thirty minutes into Woody Allen's
Stardust
Memories
(1980), I could tell by his physical posture, the telltale leaning on his elbow, that the film bored him, and I began to have the suspicion that he was watching it for my sake, to keep me company.

“Guess who the cameraman on
Stardust
was,” I said.

“Who?” he said.

“The Prince of Darkness.”

“Gordon Willis?”

“Same guy who shot
The Godfather
.”

“Same guy who shot
Klute
,” he rimed in absently.

After a diplomatic pause, I said gently, “I don't think he shot
Klute
.”

“Same guy.”

I said, “I'll bet you five bucks that Gordon Willis did
not
shoot
Klute
.”

He was a graceful winner, no gloating, when he lifted his bum off the couch to slip the money into his back pocket, his eyes not meeting mine. “I always thought Michael Ballhaus shot
Klute
,” I said milkily.

“I can see that,” he said. “Maybe you're thinking of those early Fassbinder flicks. They're kind of grainy.”

I stared at him until he looked up. “What?” he said. Knowing perfectly well “what.”

13

Fall. 2005. Chinatown. Chloë, having changed her major to Business Administration, went back to school in Kingston, Ontario. Shortly thereafter Jesse announced he wanted to quit his restaurant job and go up north to write music for a month with a friend of his, a guitar player I barely knew. The guy's father was an entertainment lawyer and had a big house on Lake Couchiching. A boat, too. They could stay there, rent free. Get jobs as dishwashers in a local restaurant. What did I think? It wasn't really a question, we both knew that. I said, sure.

And then, like that, he was gone. I thought, Well, he's nineteen, that's the way it goes. At least he knows that Michael Curtiz shot two endings for
Casablanca
in case the sad one didn't work out. That's bound to help him out there in the world. Can't ever be said now that I sent forth my son defenceless.

For the first time, the blue room on the third floor in Chinatown was empty. It was as if someone had sucked all the life out of the house. But then, by around the second week, I started to like it. No mess in the kitchen, no sticky finger stains on the fridge handle, nobody crashing up the stairs at three in the morning.

Occasionally he phoned home, mildly dutiful calls, the trees were bare, the lake was cold but the job was fine; everything else was pretty good. They were writing lots of songs. Lying in the boat at night, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the stars, his friend strumming a guitar. Maybe he and Joel (that was the guitar player's name) were going to get an apartment when they got back to town. Chloë was coming up one of these weekends.

Then one day (people on bicycles with gloves again), the phone rang and I heard Jesse's voice. Shaky, like a man who can't find himself in the present, like ice sliding out from under your feet.

“I just got canned,” he said.

“From your job?”

“No. Chloë. She just canned me.”

They'd been bickering on the phone (his directionless life, his loser friends; “waiters and airport personnel” she called them). Somebody crashed the phone down on somebody. Usually she called back. (This had happened before.) But not this time.

A few days passed. On the third morning, a bright, copper-leafed day in the country, he woke up certain, as certain as if he had seen it in a movie, that she'd found another boyfriend.

“So I called her cellphone,” he said. “She didn't answer. It was eight o'clock in the morning.” Not a good development, I thought, but said nothing.

He phoned her during the day from the restaurant kitchen; left several messages. Please call. Will pay long-distance charges. All the while this conviction, this
certainty
growing like an ink stain throughout his body that something very serious was happening, that he was standing on ground he had never stood on before.

Finally near ten o'clock that night, she called him back. He could hear noise in the background. Music, muffled voices. Where was she? In a bar.

“She called you back from a bar?” I said.

He asked her if there was anything wrong; he could barely find his voice. Like talking to a stranger. “We have some things to talk about,” she said. Indistinguishable words. It sounded, he wasn't sure, as if she'd put her hand over the mouthpiece and ordered a martini from the bartender.

He didn't waste time (he's always impressed me that way), and went straight to it. He said, “Are you breaking up with me?”

“Yes,” she said.

Then he made a mistake. He hung up on her. Hung up and waited for her to call back in tears. He paced back and forth in the living room of this cottage up north, staring at the phone. Talking out loud to her. But no ring. He called her back. He said, “What's going on here?”

Then she did her part. She'd been thinking about it, she said, they weren't right for each other; she was young, she was going to university, she was on the cusp of “an exciting future in the workforce.” One cliché after another, all delivered in this new, girl-on-the-go voice; he'd heard traces of it before, but now it didn't make him want to strangle her, it made him frightened of her.

He said, “You're going to regret this, Chloë.”

“Maybe,” she said breezily.

He said, “That's it then, I am out of your life.”

“And you know what she said then, Dad? She said, ‘Bye-bye, Jesse.' She said my name, real softly. It just broke my heart hearing her say my name like that, ‘Bye-bye, Jesse.'”

His friend, Joel, came in later that night after his shift in the kitchen. Jesse told him the story.

“Really?” Joel said. He listened for about ten minutes, threading new strings onto his acoustic guitar, and then, or so it seemed, lost interest and wanted to talk about something else.

“Did you get any sleep?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, sounding surprised by the question. I could tell he wanted something from me but at the same time knew there was nothing I could give him, except a direction in which to blow the poison that had been collecting in his body over the last forty-eight hours.

Finally I said (uselessly), “I wish I could help you.”

Then he started to talk. I can't remember what he said, it's not important, it was just talk and talk and talk.

“Maybe you should come home,” I said.

“I don't know.”

I said, “Can I give you some advice?”

“Sure.”

“Don't go on a drug or drinking binge. Have a few beers, I know you feel terrible, but if you go on a binge, you're going to wake up in the morning and you'll think you're in hell.”

“I already do,” he said with a rueful laugh.

“Trust me,” I said, “it can get a whole lot worse.”

“I hope you still love me.”

“Of course I do.”

Pause. “Do you think she's got a new boyfriend?”

“I have no idea, honey. I don't think so, though.”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come you think she doesn't have a new boyfriend?”

“It'd just be rather fast, that's all.”

“Guys hit on her
all the time
.”

“That's not the same thing as her going home with them.” I regretted the choice of words as soon as I said them. They opened the curtain on a fresh screen of images. But he had already moved on to the next thought.

“You know what I'm afraid of?” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

“No,” he said, “
really
afraid of.”

“What?”

“I'm afraid she's going to sleep with Morgan.”

“I don't think that's going to happen,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It sounds like she's finished with him.”

“It wouldn't bother me so much if it was someone else.”

I didn't say anything.

“But I'd feel really terrible if it was Morgan.”

There was a long pause. I could see him in that country house, the lake deserted, the trees bare, a crow cawing in the forest.

“Maybe you should come home.”

Another long, thoughtful pause in which I could feel him imagining horrible things. He said, “Can we talk a little longer?”

“Sure,” I said. “I got all day.”

Sometimes when the phone rang late at night, I hesitated for a second. I wondered if I was up to it, to be in the presence of his unfixable agony. Sometimes I thought, I won't answer. I'll do it tomorrow. But then I remembered Paula Moors and those scary winter mornings when I woke up too early, the whole terrible day yawning in my face.

“Do you remember saying that Chloë bored you sometimes?” I said to him one night on the phone.

“Did I say that?”

“You said you were afraid to travel with her because she might bore you on the plane. You told me you used to hold the phone away from your ear because you couldn't listen to her careerist prattle any longer.”

“I can't remember ever feeling like that.”

“You did. That was the truth of it.”

Long pause. “Do you think it's childish that I'm talking to my father about this? I can't talk to my friends. They say stupid things, they don't mean to, but I'm afraid they're going to say something that's really going to hurt me. You know what I mean?”

“I surely do.”

A slight change of tone, like a man finally confessing to a crime. “I called her,” he said.

“You did?”

“I asked her.”

“That was courageous of you.”

“She said no.”

“No to what?”

“No, she wasn't sleeping with anyone but it was none of my business if she did.”

I said, “That's a shitty thing to say.”

“
None of my business
? A few days ago we were together and now it's none of my business.”

“What did you—?” I stopped myself. “What does she
think
you did to make her so mad?”

“Morgan treated her like shit. Cheated on her all over the place.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“But what did
you
do, Jesse?”

“Do you think I'm ever going to get a girlfriend as good-looking as her again?”

On it went. I had other concerns in my life that fall, my wife, a big magazine piece on Flaubert, tiles falling from the third-floor roof, another film review for “that newspaper,” a tenant in the basement who couldn't pay her rent on time, a molar in the side of my mouth that required a crown (Tina's insurance covering only half), but there was something about Jesse's sexual horror I could not put out of my mind.

People said, “He'll be fine. That's life, it happens to us all,” but I
knew
those movies you run in your head in the middle of the night, I knew they can make you almost insane with pain.

And it was odd too that just when I was getting used to him being gone, to him having been pulled out into the world by the force of advancing life itself, now, in a way, I had him back. And I didn't want it this way. I would have been much happier to be the guy at the bottom of the social list, the father you have dinner with when all your friends are busy.

14

He came home a few weeks later, a cold time when the wind blew up and then down our street like a mugger; it waited for you to go outdoors and then when you were too far from home, it grabbed you by the collar and gave you a smack. I remember those first days very clearly: Jesse in a wicker chair outside staring off into space, moving the same threadbare furniture around inside his head, trying to find a pattern to make it less awful, a way out of the unacceptable now.

I sat out there with him. The sky cement grey as if it were an extension of the street, as if the two met somewhere way off on the horizon. I told him every horror story that had ever happened to me: Daphne in grade eight (first girl who ever made me cry), Barbara in high school (dumped me on a Ferris wheel), Raissa in university (“I loved you, baby, I really did!”)—a half-dozen stabbings at close range.

I told him these stories with relish and zeal, the point being, I had survived them all. Survived them to the point that it was fun to talk about them, the horror of them, the “hopelessness of the moment.”

I told him these stories because—and this I tried to hammer into his bean—I wanted him to understand that not one of these dollies with an ice pick, these girls and women who had made me weep and writhe like a worm under a magnifying glass, was
someone I should still be with
. “They were right, Jesse. In the end, they were right to leave me. I wasn't the right guy for them.”

“Do you think Chloë was right to leave me, Dad?”

Mistake. I hadn't counted on the car turning in to that driveway.

Sometimes he listened like a man under water breathing through a reed; as if his very survival counted on hearing the story, the oxygen it gave him. Other times— and I had to be careful—it could spark terrible fantasies.

It was like he had a piece of broken glass in his foot; he couldn't think about anything else. “I'm sorry to keep talking about this,” he'd say and then talk about it some more.

What I didn't tell him was that in all probability it was going to get worse, much worse before it got better, before he landed in that ice-cream zone of the present, when you wake up thinking, Hmm, I think I have a blister on my heel. Let me see now. Why yes! I do. What a paradise to find yourself in! Who ever would have believed it?

I had to be careful with the movies I picked. But even then, even when I picked something that had nothing to do with sex or betrayal (not many of those around, I'm afraid), I could see that he was using the screen as a sort of trampoline for his unhappy reveries, that by resting his eyes in that direction, he could fool me into thinking he was engaged, while in truth he was moving around the inside of his head like a burglar in a mansion. Sometimes I heard him groan with pain from what he'd found.