The Perfect Order of Things (20 page)

As winter faded into spring, dark patches appeared here and there in the ice below my window and no one came to skate there anymore.

Going through the laundry cupboard one night, I was looking for a fresh pillow slip, I came across—it almost burned my fingers—an old birthday card from Molly, a yellow card with a big happy face on it. Finding a love letter from a woman who once loved you and doesn’t anymore is a special kind of agony. I opened it up: “How I adore you,” she wrote. “How lucky I am to have met you . . .” It was unendurable to read the words, the glow they gave off. And to then remember that she no longer felt that way, that I hadn’t seen her for months, that she was in another man’s bed now, or having breakfast with him or listening to the radio in the morning while she and he got ready to go to work. She, who had so loved you, was gone forever.

Another Sunday. Having exhausted my sleeping pills and tranquilizers and painkillers for fabricated toothaches, I awoke, again, at a brutal hour, the bright yellow sunlight stabbing at me through the curtains. I threw back the covers, rumbled through the unused clothes drawer, found a pair of sweatpants (a brief nod to Molly’s fitness regimen), put them on and, without even brushing my teeth, fled my apartment as though evacuating an earthquake. I went jogging—jogging of all things!—over to Queen’s Park near the Parliament buildings. Around and around I ran, the sun getting brighter, the park deserted except for the lunatic and the homeless and the heartbroken, when I heard, I swear to God I heard, the sound of large feet clomping behind me, getting closer and closer and closer. I looked over my shoulder—it was him! The musician, out for a morning run, and running, I might add, with a younger, more ferocious, happier stride than mine. He passed me on the left without looking me in the eye and charged ahead. Sorry for me, perhaps. Showing off. Exhilarated after another night of sexually ravaging my Molly. Who knows? But watching him pull ahead, Jesus, talk about a metaphor, talk about God giving you a kick in the groin just when you’re trying to stumble to your feet.

There was no escaping. I saw him all day: his bony elbows, sleeves rolled up, casual, artful; his long musician’s fingers. Ugh. When I left the television studio, I hurried through the spring half-light, the air fresh, couples everywhere, toward a bar on Queen Street. I had an hour or so, a reprieve. They’re having dinner now, I’d think. They’re having dinner with friends: frivolous laughter.
Ha-ha-ha,
ha-ha-ha.
Foolish jokes. Jokes that she wouldn’t have made or laughed at in my presence. (Part of the problem, perhaps.)
Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha.

Morons.

But then, as midnight approached, gong, gong, gong, I had a sensation of a worn leather belt tightening around my chest until I could barely breathe. They’re going home now; they’re climbing the stairs to his apartment, they’re going in the door; he goes to the bathroom, clank, she goes to the bedroom, she stands there for a second, thinking about something (what is she thinking? is she thinking about me?), and unbuttons her shirt, thoughtfully (she is thinking about work tomorrow, not me at all), and drops it on the chair; absent-mindedly unhooks her bra, her jeans drop to the floor; she picks them up, folds them and crawls into bed as the bathroom door opens and he comes into the room . . .

Was this, I wondered again, what lay at the heart of those Sparrow Nights on Sanibel Island, the anticipation of some unknown pain in store for me? The alligator under the bridge eyeing me expressionlessly as I crossed over for my morning swim?

Somewhere near two in the morning, sitting on the edge of my bed, staring into the park below, I turned my eyes toward the glowing clock on my bedside table. “They’re asleep,” I thought. And for a few moments I felt relief. Almost as if I’d gotten over her.

On it went.

And then one day I woke up thinking about something other than Molly. And that, as we all know, is the beginning of the end. You wake up thinking about a letter that needs mailing, a bill that should be paid, a toenail that needs clipping, and that is the beginning of the end of her. Time speeds up again; and after a while there are other people in your bed, other voices on the phone. And when you see people in the park under your window, they aren’t an accusation of
anything
; they are, again, just people in the park. On it goes.

Eleven or twelve years went by, and one spring evening my wife, Rachel, and I and our young daughter were driving home from somewhere when we passed the park, the one right under the window of my former apartment. It was Victoria Day, the grass teemed with parents and children. Dogs chased each other through the darkness. We pulled over and got out. Fireworks erupted, people cried out and clapped; our daughter, a thoughtful baby finger in her mouth, fastened her huge blue eyes onto the spectacle. A Roman candle sparkled and hissed and shot forth a cascade of blue and green and orange exploding balls; and as they reached their apex and began a slow descent to earth, in their light, I saw Molly; she was at the far edge of the park just under my old window; and on each side of her, at shoulder level, stood a boy—they were her twin sons. One of them turned his head up to her ear and whispered something and she smiled and wrapped her arms around him and hugged him. And I tried to remember that winter and that awful spring, sitting on the end of my bed, looking down at the very spot where she now stood with her children; and instead of feeling nothing, which I expected, I felt the most extraordinary sadness, a truly deep grief, not from wanting her back, but for how much I had loved her and how sad I’d been, and how, even though we shared a bed for six years, we had never spoken again.

And then another burst of vermilion exploded above their heads and she started across the grass with her sons; they passed in front of us, not ten yards away, my wife, my daughter staring at the sky, clapping, Molly walking by, over to the far side of the park, when she reached her hand behind her back; her small hand hung there for a moment and then I swear she wriggled her fingers. It was barely a wave, if that’s what it was at all. Perhaps she was scratching her back. But I don’t think so. I think it was a little wave that said . . . I don’t know what it said, hello maybe, goodbye maybe, or simply, yes, yes.

Then she was gone, and that night, for the first time in years, I had a happy dream about her. I don’t remember what it was, but when I woke up, it seemed as though we had just spoken and it had gone well.

10

The Big Circle

H
ollywood, 2008. We are walking along Sunset Boulevard, my twenty-two-year-old son, Nick, and I. It’s early evening, the sky an eggshell blue; traffic is picking up steam; it’s Friday night. We are in town, the two of us, on a book tour, the book in question being an account of how, with my permission, Nick dropped out of school at sixteen and spent the following three years watching movies in the living room with me. It’s a strangely popular book, more popular, in fact, than anything I’ve published in twenty-five years, probably because it’s not about me, but about how much I adore my son. No one can resist a great love story.

We’ve been on the road for three weeks now, in and out of New York a couple of times, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Santa Monica, San Jose and now Hollywood. This is our last stop before we go home and return to our separate lives. For my part, I’ll be sorry when the tour ends, not that I need to be interviewed anymore but because I’ll miss his company. We travel well together. It’ll be a long time before I go through airport security without thinking of him in his stocking feet, the agent waving a metal detector up and down his tall body. It’s peculiar the things one’s memory grasps onto.

I am telling Nick about that awful summer almost forty years ago, how I washed up here in Hollywood after Raissa Shestatsky dumped me. Back then I believed you could get over a woman by leaving town, and I hitchhiked three thousand miles to find out that the contrary is true. What can I say? I was twenty-two years old.

Nick loves these stories, not because he’s a sadist, but because it makes him feel less alone to know that someone else has suffered from love and survived. He’s quite the ladies’ man, and like all ladies’ men he has taken some harsh and surprising knocks along the way. “Nothing is free,” I tell him, “especially sex.”

When he was younger, he used to roll his eyes when I said things like that. I’d say, “I tell you these things, Nick, because I want to spare you some of the horrors that I have visited upon myself.” He’d put on his listening face—he was a nice kid—but didn’t buy it. Nowadays he listens more soberly, less sure of himself. Which, when it comes to suffering, is a good thing.

“Every time you sleep with a woman,” I say, “an invisible rope flies between your ship and hers. And you never realize it
until you try to break away
.”

I point out a small grassy park off to the right. During the summer of 1969, on the run from Raissa’s ghost, I slept there almost every night for three months. I was rousted by the police only once, the night after Charles Manson’s satanic little playmates issued forth from a desert ranch to butcher Sharon Tate, her unborn baby and three companions. It happened not far from here, I tell Nick, right up there in those glittering hills. He finds this intriguing, that his father was alive for such a historic event. “I was around your age,” I say, and you can see him ponder that. How, he is wondering, could it be that my father was
ever
my age?

He wants to hear more about Raissa: was she beautiful, yes, did she ever come back to me, no, did she have a happy life. She became an elementary school teacher, I say. I can feel his dark eyes scanning my face for condescension.

“You can be happy
and
be an elementary school teacher,” he says. Nick, in that moment, is not his father’s son. He is, by disposition, sweeter than I am; he likes things to work out for people, for their stories to come to a happy end. It must be from his mother that he inherited this goodwill. From his father he has inherited . . . other things.

We sit down on the park’s only bench, cars pounding by on Sunset Strip. A warm, twinkly evening. The sky pink now.

Looking around the tiny park, Nick says, “I bet you never imagined this—being on a book tour with your son—when you were sleeping here forty years ago.”

To which I reply, “I believed that fate was going to give me everything
except
the one thing I wanted. Which was to be a writer.”

“I feel that way sometimes,” he says, “but not about writing.” A pretty girl walks by the edge of the park; he watches her walk away until she crosses Sunset and turns down a leafy street.

“Did you think you’d ever get over Raissa?” he asks.

“I thought about her every morning for two years.”

“Every
morning
?”

“That’s how you know you’re over someone. When you catch yourself thinking about something
else
first thing in the morning.”

He ponders that. “Two years is a long time,” he says in a voice that says, that’ll never happen to me.

“Not in terms of a lifetime, it isn’t,” I say. “In the terms of a lifetime, it’s barely a chapter. Well, maybe a bit more than that. But you don’t really get over a woman until you find someone you
desire
as much as you did her. And then it doesn’t seem to matter how long it took.”

“Because you’re so relieved?”

“It just doesn’t matter anymore. And it’s hard to remember why it did.”

I can feel him sliding into a dark mood. He’s thinking about that girl again.

I direct his attention back to the Hollywood Hills rising up in a bank of lights and darkness. “You see those hills over there?” I say. “One night, some shirtless kid with little jug ears came by this park; I was sitting right over there on the grass. I think he was from Oklahoma. He had a tiny vial of LSD and, using a dropper, just like an ophthalmologist, he gave everyone in the park a little drop of acid right in the centre of their eye. He said it worked faster that way. Everybody did it. So did I, but not first. I waited to see what was going to happen.

“It was very pure, very strong LSD, and I ended up wandering shoeless along Sunset Boulevard, alone—you should never take acid alone—and I had a ‘vision.’ Corny as it sounds, I saw Raissa’s face up in those hills, a huge, weeping Madonna-like Raissa. I thought I was going to fall down, right there on the sidewalk, and die. Just from the agony of it.”

“From the
loneliness
of it.” He’s seeing himself in the story now. “You and her and now
this
.”

“Exactly.”

He leaves his eyes on my face while the rest of the film unspools in his imagination. “But you got over her eventually?”

“Yes.”

“And had a good life?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

For a while, neither of us says anything. The traffic passing by dreamily. I find my thoughts drifting to other places: an island in the Mediterranean, a brick boarding house, a hospitality suite, a high-windowed apartment, a dance in a winter hotel, a patch of grass in Los Angeles, places where I’d been knocked flat. Places where, if only I could have seen down the road—to this night, this bench, this park in Hollywood—then . . . then what? An irrelevant question, perhaps.

But what is this sensation I’m feeling? It is another thought intervening. It occurs to me that this revisiting of my past has something of the salmon swimming upstream to it. All along I’ve been thinking I was writing a book about a guy who goes back to places and people and music where he has suffered and sees them from a fresh perspective. But sitting here on Sunset Boulevard with my grown son, it occurs to me that that’s not what I’m doing at all; that what I’m doing is getting ready to die. Putting my psychic and emotional affairs in order. The goal of all philosophy, Montaigne says, is to learn how to die properly. And that, I realize, is what I’m doing. It’s not a morbid thought. I’m not talking about next week or next year. I’m simply saying that I can feel the wind has changed and that my boat is gradually turning toward harbour.