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  The Perfect Order of Things

  ALSO BY DAVID GILMOUR

  Back on Tuesday

  How Boys See Girls

  An Affair with the Moon

  Lost Between Houses

  Sparrow Nights

  A Perfect Night to Go to China

  The Film Club

  DAVID GILMOUR

  The Perfect

  Order

  of Things

  A Novel

  THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS

  TORONTO

  Copyright © 2011 by David Gilmour

  Certain portions of this book have appeared in a different form in other publications.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gilmour, David, 1949–

  The perfect order of things / David Gilmour.

  ISBN 978-0-88762-807-8

  I. Title.

  PS8563.I56P48 2011 C813'.54 C2011-903231-7

  Editor: Patrick Crean

  Jacket design and front jacket photo: Michel Vrána

  Back jacket photo: pixhook / istockphoto.com

  Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

  a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

  390 Steelcase Road East,

  Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada

  www.thomasallen.ca

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of

  The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1

  Text printed on a 100% PCW recycled stock

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For Sam Hiyate

  Agent par excellence

  Nowhere do so many flowers grow as in a cemetery.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  The Perfect Order of Things

  Contents

  1 What Else Did I Miss?

  2 Everything Frightened Him

  3 “You don’t know me, Mr. De Niro, but . . .”

  4 The House with the Broken Spine

  5 My Life with Tolstoy

  6 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beatles!

  7 Another Day in Paradise; or, How Many OxyContins Do I Have Left?

  8 The Pigeon

  9 The Alligator under the Bridge

  10 The Big Circle

  1

  What Else Did I Miss?

  A few years ago I found myself in the south of France. It was early winter and I was writing a travel piece for one of those glossy magazines you read on airplanes when you’re stuck on the tarmac or trying to terminate a conversation with a chatty neighbour. On the way back to Paris and the plane home, my train stopped in Toulouse. On the spur of the moment I yanked my bag off the rack and jumped down. Storing my things in a luggage locker, I started up the rue Bayard, past the American Express where, almost forty years earlier, I had gone daily hoping for a letter from Raissa Shes-tatsky. Sometimes yes, but mostly no.

  I drifted through the narrow red-brick streets until I arrived at the Père Léon, the café where I went to read her letters or, when there weren’t any, to think about her and to wonder if I’d ever make love to her again. I was about to go in—for some absurd reason I expected the same waiters to be there—but instead I kept walking. During those unhappy months so many years earlier, it had seemed as though I were fixed to a miniature railway track that ran from my apartment on rue Victor Dequé to a table in the window of the Café Père Léon. But I had never seen what was on the other side of the café. I had no curiosity; like a car locked in a single gear, I felt only the absence of Raissa and her slender limbs from my bed.

  So this time I walked further on; and there, not fifty yards away, like the opening chords of a Beethoven symphony, a wide, beautiful river, a half mile across, opened up in front of me. I swear I’d never seen it before, never even suspected it was there. A cargo boat drifted dreamily downstream; on the far bank, a tiny red light flickered off and on.

  How could I have missed it, this green jewel that seemed wider than the Mississippi? For six months I’d lived in Toulouse and I’d seen nothing except the furious wallpaper inside my head: its drastic scenarios, its pornographic reruns. What else had my misery blinded me to?

  So over the next few months (it was quite gradual, I remember) I decided, almost in the spirit of settling a personal debt, a debt to oneself, to go back to other places where I’d suffered, this time with my eyes open and, more important, pointed outwards. Go back and see what’s what.

  But where to start. Something old or something new? Which old mansion of horror should I visit first? A boarding school, a Ferris wheel spinning backwards into the night, a park in Los Angeles, a busy office at a film festival, a country house with a broken spine. . . ?

  Happily, the decision was made for me. One day, leafing through the newspaper at my ex-wife’s house—M. was making dinner for me and our daughter, who was home from university that weekend—I happened across the picture of a barracuda-faced woman emerging from a limousine. Below, a caption read, OPERA HOUSE FUNDRAISER CHARGED WITH MISAPPROPRIATION. There was something familiar about the face, the exaggerated cheekbones, the sleek, brushed-back hair, but I couldn’t recall what it was. I moved on to the next item. But the face called me back. “Misappropriation of funds.” I took another look: it was Clarissa Bentley. And apparently up to her old tricks again. Beneath those ample breasts beat the heart of a woman so unpleasant even the Borgias would have hesitated to have lunch with her.

  A few days later, Clarissa on my mind, I wandered up to my old high school. I passed through a set of regal blue doors, the school crest embedded in the floor like a giant Roman coin, and stepped into the interior courtyard. Just across from me was a squat, three-storey brick building. I was an unhappy boarder there for a brief period in 1966, the year the Beatles came to Toronto. I say brief because I ran away that October after only a few weeks. I ran away, let me say it simply, because a young girl went up the Ferris wheel with me as my girlfriend and when she came back down, she was someone else’s. It was the first romantic betrayal of my life.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me go back to that summer cottage in Grassmere when I was fifteen. Dew-damp mornings, pretty girls in canoes, dances in town. And those sounds! I have never forgotten those sounds. Stones crackling under the tires of the family car as we made our way down the driveway, tree branches brushing the sides. At night you could hear everything across the water: people talking on their docks, a screen door banging shut. A fish slapping the water. These nights remain haunting for me with their whispers of “You are missing something, you are missing something.”

  Nodding my head to the satisfying clank-clank of Ringo’s cowbell in “I Call Your Name,” I was lying on my mother’s bed at the far end of the house when I heard her calling me from the kitchen. A phone call. Long-distance, hurry, hurry.

  It was a girl I barely knew, Clarissa Bentley. Her father was a “big shot” in the movie business.

 
; “I just broke up with my boyfriend,” she said.

  Even at that age I recognized the moment when a fresh moon might be rising in the sky. Looking out the picture window, at the yellow Van Gogh fields descending to the forest, I said, “That’s too bad.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said, and inhaled sharply.

  “Are you smoking?” I asked.

  “Everybody smokes.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “My father lets me smoke in the house. He knows what’d happen if he didn’t.”

  I pondered that for a moment. The lake glimmering like broken glass behind the trees.

  “So are you coming down to the city or what?” she said.

  My mother, her bright red shirt tied at the waist like a Caribbean chanteuse, was making a tomato sandwich in the kitchen.

  “Who was that?” she said.

  I liked my mother; I liked talking to her. “A girl I hardly know,” I said. “She just broke up with her boyfriend.” “Ah,” she replied, keeping her gaze deliberately on the chopping board.

  My father was sick that summer and sometimes my mother would fold her long brown legs into our Chevrolet and drive for two hours south to the hospital in Toronto to see him. Which meant that my older brother, Dean, and I had the house to ourselves for the weekend. We played the stereo at full blast, drove old golf balls into the ravine, fired hunting rifles into the garbage dump, talked about girls, and once took a drive along a lonely country back road in my father’s little blue Morris. That night, the night my mother left for Toronto, we went to the Saturday night dance at Hidden Valley in the boat.

  “Remember,” Dean said, “if I give you the signal, find another way to get home.”

  But the girl didn’t show up or showed up with another boy and he didn’t give me the signal that night. The two of us puttered home under the stars, the lake motionless and warm as soup. We tied up at the dock, cut through the spooky forest, broke out into a field beneath the moonlight, and climbed through the wet grass to our house, which gleamed like a jewel at the top of the hill.

  I was only there a few minutes when the phone rang. I was downstairs, lying on the couch, staring at the knotholes in the ceiling. Dean was upstairs listening to an American baseball game on his bedside maroon radio. A lonely sound.

  I picked up the phone expecting my mother, but when I heard the voice, again that feeling, the sensation of a bright moon rising in the sky, filled my head.

  “What are you doing?” Clarissa Bentley asked. Her voice was as clear as if she were in the next room.

  “I was at a dance.”

  “Did you meet anybody?”

  “No, actually, I didn’t.” Then I thought, no, that was the wrong thing to say; that created entirely the wrong impression, and I flashed on those boys at the dance, a cluster of them by the railing, local kids, one of them finally tearing himself away, crossing the floor and asking a city girl to dance, only to make the same excruciating walk, droop-tailed, back across the floor to his friends. Refused.

  “That’s probably pretty unusual for you,” Clarissa said. “You strike me as a real playboy.”

  The moon rose still higher.

  She said, “I know a girl who knows you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She thinks you’re going to be really good-looking when you grow up.”

  It was a curious compliment, like a razor blade tucked in a candy bar. First you felt good but then you wondered. Realizing it, or hearing what, in fact, she’d just said, Clarissa went on, “I like how you say actually. It’s sort of English.”

  I could hear the baseball game upstairs. Someone had just hit the ball.

  “Why don’t you come down here?” Clarissa said. The air fizzed around the radio announcer’s voice. The sound of life happening elsewhere.

  “Down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Tonight?”

  “You could hitchhike.” She was smoking a cigarette. “We could sleep in my parents’ bed.”

  A few minutes later, I went up the stairs and walked down the dark hall to Dean’s room. I was older now, more mature than I had been only fifteen minutes before. He lay on his blue bed, his arm behind his head. In the announcer’s American voice, in the ghostly sound of thousands of people behind it, you could see the brightly lit field, the players trotting in their white uniforms.

  “Was that that chick?” Dean said. He turned his face toward me. He must have been eating chocolate again because his skin had broken out afresh.

  I said, “I think I’m going to hitchhike to Toronto.”

  Then he said something cruel about my ears. I looked at him speechlessly.

  “I’m going to get in shit for this,” he said, as if we’d been talking about it for weeks. But that’s not what he was angry about. It was inconceivable to me then that, being two years older, he could be unhappy. I started down the stairs. I could hear him get off the bed. I took the last few steps two at a time. I tore through the kitchen, through the living room and out the front door, the screen door banging behind me, and started up the driveway. I got to the first bend and glanced over my shoulder. Dean was standing in the doorway in his underwear, the living room lit up behind him. Then I plunged into the darkness, the trees overhead, the stones under my feet, until I reached the main road that led to town and beyond.

  I arrived at Clarissa’s address just as it was getting light. It was a big white apartment building on the edge of Forest Hill. A brightly lit lobby; black leather couches, abstract paintings. I pressed her number. A car drove by outside in the street. I pressed the number again. The lock on the door clicked once, then twice.

  “Clarissa?” I said, bending over the speaker. No answer. I tried the door; it opened. And then I went inside.

  She had done it before. You could tell. The way she took her clothes off and got into bed. But you could also tell that she was acting a bit. Then she talked about her boarding school in Switzerland, about having dinner once with Alfred Hitchcock; then she lit a cigarette and sat in a chair with no clothes on and told me a movie star had a crush on her, that he’d invited her to his cabin in New Mexico but her mother had found out and phoned the movie star and ruined everything. During these stories I had the feeling I was being lied to, that something like these stories had happened, only in a smaller, less spectacular way. But of course that’s true for almost everything you think about other people’s lives. Always smaller, always lonelier than you imagine.

  I waited for her to bring up her ex-boyfriend, and I suspected that would be a lie too, whatever she told me. A particular lie with a particular slant. All her lies had the same slant, away from her, always toward someone else.

  And I wished she would put some clothes on.

  I knew her ex-boyfriend. Bill Cardelle was a party boy with a dash of red colouring in each cheek as if life or nature had given him an extra dose of vitality. He was a boy I’d never be like, a boy you saw in the halls at school and thought, “I’d be happy if I looked like that.” But my hair was too curly for a proper Beatles haircut, my jackets always rose up at the back (“Don’t slouch, dear!”) and I couldn’t dance like Bill Cardelle. At parties, even the boys watched him dance, not directly but with quick furtive glances between sips on a straw. In his white chinos and Oxford shirts and oxblood shoes, he had it all. Except for one thing: he wasn’t very bright. I adored him because he was gorgeous; he admired me because I was smarter than he was; and for a time, while I tutored him in Latin, we were friends.

  I telephoned Dean long-distance at Grassmere the next morning and I noticed in his voice a slightly different tone and it took me many months to understand what that tone was—an almost unwilling approbation that would be the beginning of a whole new kind of problem between us. He was eating an apple, sounding matter-of-fact, but what caught my ear, what mattered to me, was that I could hear him trying to sound matter-o
f-fact.

  “So you guys stayed up really late?” which was his way of asking me if I’d fucked her. And when I said yes, pretty late, and felt a flush of pleasure (vanity), I could also tell that he had hoped that wasn’t going to be the answer.

  “So when are you coming home?” he asked. And in this too, things were different. Because normally he would have just ordered me around, told me to get back now.

  I said that I’d get there for sure before Mother got home.

  “Let’s hope you don’t run into her down there,” and for the first time ever it was like we were talking shop as equals.

  I said, “Yeah, that’d be something.” We both had a good laugh over that one, longer than it deserved.

  Then he said, “Don’t fuck me on this, okay?” and I said, “You’re a great guy, Kiv.” That was his pet name; only my mother and I called him that, and only when he was being soft enough to let us.

  And then I put the phone down and went back into the living room. Clarissa was standing by the window; below you could see the ravine and on the other side of the ravine, the Jewish quarter with their big houses and wonderful deep backyards. She said, “Let’s go steal something.”

  It must have been a week or so later that I came down to the city with my brown suitcase to stay with my uncle, Laddie. He was the family disgrace, plastered by noon every day. He had squandered his intelligence, his dark good looks, even a career as a hockey player. (I heard more than once, always in shaming tones, that he’d been invited to try out as a goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs.) But his late wife, Ellen, was a kindly soul and had died before she could come to despise him, leaving behind a monthly, untouchable stipend, enough for Laddie to tipple himself to death more or less un-interfered with. And like many charming drunks, he’d quickly found a simple, decent woman to look after him, who saw, behind his puffy features and coarse humour, the classy educated gentleman he had once been and, in the grips of a ferocious hangover, could still be. A man who could quote Horace with his head in the toilet bowl.