The Film Club Read online

  Just in time I caught myself starting to sound like a dandruffy high-school teacher. So I put on the movie. We went all the way to the end, that long scene where Antoine runs away from reform school; he runs through fields, past farmhouses, through apple groves until he arrives at the dazzling ocean. It’s as if he’s never seen it before. Such immensity! It seems to stretch out forever. He goes down a bank of wooden steps; he advances across the sand and there, just where the waves start in, he pulls back slightly and looks into the camera; the film freezes; the movie’s over.

  After a few moments, I said, “What did you think?”

  “A bit boring.”

  I recouped. “Do you see any parallels between Antoine’s situation and yours?”

  He thought about that for a second. “No.”

  I said, “Why do you think he has that funny expression on his face at the end of the movie, the last shot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How does he look?”

  “He looks worried,” Jesse said.

  “What could he be worried about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I said, “Look at his situation. He’s run away from reform school and from his family; he’s free.”

  “Maybe he’s worried about what he’s going to do now.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe he’s saying, ‘Okay, I’ve made it this far. But what’s next?’”

  “Okay, let me ask you again,” I said. “Do you see anything in common between his situation and yours?”

  He grinned. “You mean what am I going to do now that I don’t have to go to school?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why the kid looks worried. He doesn’t know either,” I said.

  After a moment he said, “When I was in school, I worried about getting bad marks and getting in trouble. Now that I’m not in school, I worry that maybe I’ve ruined my life.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “How is it good?”

  “It means you’re not going to relax into a bad life.”

  “I wish I could stop worrying though. Do you worry?”

  I found myself taking an involuntary breath. “Yes.”

  “So it never stops, no matter how well you do?”

  “It’s about the quality of the worry,” I said. “I have happier worries now than I used to.”

  He stared out the window. “This is all making me feel like having a cigarette. Then I can worry about getting lung cancer.”

  For dessert I gave him Basic Instinct (1992) with Sharon Stone the next day. Again, I offered up a little intro to the film, nothing fancy. Simple rule of thumb: Keep it bare bones. If he wants to know more, he’ll ask.

  I said, “Paul Verhoeven. Dutch director; came to Hollywood after a few hits in Europe. Great visual attack; exquisite lighting. Made a couple of excellent films, ultra-violent but watchable. Robocop is the best of the bunch.” (I was starting to sound like a Morse code machine but I didn’t want to lose him.)

  I went on, “He also made one of the worst films ever, a camp classic called Showgirls.”

  We started in, a tawny-skinned blond butchering a man with an ice pick while engaged in sexual intercourse with him. Nice opening volley. After fifteen minutes it’s difficult not to make the assumption that Basic Instinct is not just about sleazy people, it’s by sleazy people. There’s a dirty-eared, schoolboy’s fascination with cocaine and lesbian “decadence.” But it’s a marvellously watchable film, you have to say that. It evokes a kind of agreeable dread. Something important or nasty always seems to be happening, even when it isn’t.

  And then there’s the dialogue. I mention to Jesse that the writer Joe Esterhas, a former journalist, was paid three million dollars for this kind of stuff:

  Detective: How long were you dating him?

  Sharon Stone: I wasn’t dating him. I was fucking him.

  Detective: Are you sorry he’s dead?

  Sharon Stone: Yes. I liked fucking him.

  Jesse couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. He may have appreciated The 400 Blows but this was something else.

  “Can we pause it for a moment?” he said and raced to the toilet for a pee; from the couch I heard the clank of the toilet seat, then a gush, as if a horse was standing in there. “Close the door, Jesse, for Pete’s sake!” (We were learning all sorts of things today.) Bang, door closed. Then he hurried back, stocking feet thumping the floor; holding his pants by the waist, he vaulted back onto the couch. “You have to admit it, Dad, this is a great film.”

  2

  One day he brought a girl home. Her name was Rebecca Ng, a Vietnamese knockout. “Nice to meet you, David,” she said, holding my eye.

  David?

  “How’s your day going?”

  “How’s my day going?” I repeated idiotically. “So far, so good.”

  Did I enjoy living in the neighbourhood? Why, yes, thank you.

  “I have an aunt who lives a few streets over,” she said. “She’s very nice. Old country but very nice.”

  Old country?

  Rebecca Ng (pronounced Ning) was dressed to the nines, spotless white jeans, maroon, long-collared blouse, leather jacket, Beatle boots. You had the feeling she’d paid for these clothes herself, an after-school job in a Yorkville boutique, Saturdays serving drinks to ring-removing executives in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel (when she wasn’t polishing off an early credit in calculus). As she turned her head to speak to Jesse, I caught a whiff of perfume. Delicate, expensive.

  “So here we are,” she said.

  Then he took her downstairs to his bedroom. I opened my mouth to protest. It was a pit down there. There were no windows, no natural light. Just a bed with a ratty green blanket, clothes on the floor, CDs splashed around the room, a computer facing the wall, a “library” consisting of an autographed Elmore Leonard (unread), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (a hopeful gift from his mother), plus a collection of hip-hop magazines with scowling black men on the cover. A collection of water glasses squatted on the night table. They cracked like a pistol shot when you pried them loose. There was also the occasional “adult” magazine (1-800-Slut) peeking from the space between his mattress and box spring. “I don’t have a problem with pornography,” he told me matter-of-factly.

  “Well, I do,” I said. “So keep it hidden.”

  Next door in the laundry room, half the towels in the house fermented on the cement floor. But I kept quiet. I sensed that now was not the time to treat him like a child: “Why don’t you kids have some milk and cookies while I get back to mowing that darn front yard!”

  Soon the whump of a bass guitar rose up through the floor. You could hear Rebecca’s voice floating above the music; then Jesse’s voice, deeper, confident. Then bright bursts of laughter. Good, I thought, she’s discovered how amusing he is.

  “How old is that girl?” I asked when he returned from walking her to the subway.

  “Sixteen,” he said. “She’s got a boyfriend, though.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He smiled uncertainly. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  He looked worried.

  I said, “I suppose I mean that if she’s got a boyfriend, why is she over at your house?”

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  “She certainly is. She knows it too.”

  “Everybody likes Rebecca. They all pretend they want to be her friend. She lets them drive her around.”

  “How old’s her boyfriend?”

  “Her age. He’s kind of a nerd, though.”

  “That speaks well for her,” I said primly.

  “How so?”

  “It makes her more interesting,” I said.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the kitchen sink. Turning his head slightly to the side, he sucked in his cheeks, pursed his lips and frowned gravely. This was hi
s “mirror face.” A way he never looked otherwise. You almost expected his hair, which was thick like a raccoon’s, to stand up on end.

  “But the guy before him was twenty-five,” he said. (He wanted to talk about her.) Pulling his eyes with some difficulty from his reflection, his face returned to its normal cast.

  “Twenty-five?”

  “She’s got guys all over her, Dad. Like flies.”

  In that instant he seemed wiser than I was at his age. Less delusionally vain. (Hardly an accomplishment.) But the whole thing with Rebecca Ng made me nervous. It was like watching him get into a very expensive car. You could smell the new leather from here.

  “I didn’t look like I was coming on to her or anything, did I?” he asked.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Not nervous or anything?”

  “No. Were you?”

  “Just when I look closely at her. The rest of the time I’m fine.”

  “You seemed pretty on top of things to me.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” And again you could see a kind of lightness come into his limbs, a holiday in a minor key from that blur of worry and second-guessing to which, as if pulled by gravity, he would return. How little I can give him, I thought, just these little apple slices of reassurance, like feeding a rare animal at the zoo.

  Through the wall, you could hear our neighbour, Eleanor. She was rattling about in her kitchen, making tea, listening to the radio. A lonely sound. Half listening to her, half thinking about my own worries, I found myself fitfully recalling Jesse’s first “date.” He was ten, maybe eleven. I supervised his preparations; watched with crossed arms while he brushed his teeth, tapped his tiny underarms with my deodorant, put on a red T-shirt, brushed his hair and set off. I followed him, ducking behind bushes and trees, staying out of sight. (How beautiful he looked in the sunlight, this little stick figure with purple hair.)

  He appeared in the driveway of a towering Victorian house a few moments later with a little girl beside him. She was slightly taller than him. I followed them to Bloor Street where they turned in to a Coffee Time and then broke off my surveillance.

  “You don’t think Rebecca’s out of my league, do you, Dad?” Jesse asked, catching sight of himself in the mirror, his face distorting.

  “Nobody’s out of your league,” I said. But my heart fluttered when I said it.

  I had a lot of time on my hands that winter. I was hosting a little documentary show that no one watched, but my contract was coming to an end and the executive producer had ceased returning my mildly hyperventilating e-mails. I had the uncomfortable sensation that the bottom was falling out of my television career.

  “You may have to go out and look for a job just like everyone else,” my wife said. That scared me. Going around hat in hand asking for work at age fifty.

  “I don’t think people see it like that,” she said. “It’s just a guy looking for work. Everybody does it.”

  I called a few colleagues from the old days, people who had admired (I thought) my work. But they had moved on to other shows, wives, new babies. You could sense their friendliness and at the same time your irrelevance.

  I had lunch with people I hadn’t seen for years. Old friends from high school, from university, from racy times in the Caribbean. Twenty minutes in, I’d look over my fork and think, I must not do this again. (I’m sure they were thinking the same thing.) How exactly, I wondered privately, am I going to live out the rest of my life? Add five or ten years onto my present situation, it didn’t look so good. My easy confidence that things were going to “sort of work out” and “end well” evaporated.

  I drew up a grim little chart. Assuming no one hired me ever again, I had enough money to live for two years. Longer if I stopped going out to dinner. (Even longer if I died.) But then what? Substitute teaching? Something I hadn’t done for twenty-five years. The thought made my stomach plunge. The phone ringing at six-thirty in the morning, me leaping out of bed with a racing heart and a foul taste in my mouth; into my shirt, tie, and mothbally sports jacket; the sickening subway ride to some brick school in a neighbourhood I didn’t know, the too-bright hallways, the vice-principal’s office. “Aren’t you the guy who used to be on television?” Thoughts that made you want to pour a stiff drink at eleven in the morning. Which I did a few times, followed, of course, by a Malcolm Lowry–like hangover. You have mismanaged your life.

  Waking too early one morning, I wandered into an unfamiliar restaurant. When the bill came, it was absurdly low; obviously a mistake had been made and I didn’t want it taken from the waitress’s tips. I signalled her over. “This seems a little on the inexpensive side,” I said.

  She looked at the bill. “No, no,” she replied sunnily, “that’s the Senior’s Special.”

  The Senior’s Special—for the sixty-five-and-up crowd. Even more pathetic, I experienced a wave of mild gratitude. I had, after all, saved almost two dollars and fifty cents on the Ham’Eggs Early Bird.

  Outside, the gloom gathered. It started to snow; soggy flakes slid down the windowpanes. The little parking lot across the street disappeared in the mist. You could see a pair of red tail lights moving around, somebody backing into place. Just then Jesse’s mother, Maggie Huculak (pronounced Hoo-shoo-lack), phoned. She had just poured herself a glass of red wine in my loft and wanted company. The street lights came on; the mist glowed magically around the lamps. Suddenly it was a cozy, perfect evening for two parents to talk about an adored child—his diet (poor), exercise (none), his smoking (distressing), Rebecca Ng (trouble), drugs (none that we knew of), reading (nil), movies (Hitchcock’s North by Northwest [1959] today), drinking (at parties), the nature of his soul (dreamy).

  And while we spoke I was again struck by the fact that we loved each other. Not in a carnal or romantic way, that was behind us, but something more profound. (As a young man I didn’t believe that anything more profound could exist.) We took such pleasure in each other’s company, in the reassuring sound of each other’s voice. Besides which, I had learned the hard way that there was no one else on earth except her with whom I could talk about my son in the lavish detail I wanted to—what he said this morning, how clever it was, how handsome he looked in his new rugby shirt. (“You’re exactly right! He’s very suited to dark colours!”)

  No one else could endure listening to this stuff for more than thirty seconds without leaping out the window. How sad, I thought, what a waste for those parents whose loathing for each other had so hardened that it deprived them of this kind of delicious exchange.

  “Do you have a boyfriend these days?” I asked.

  “No,” Maggie said. “No cute guys.”

  “You’ll get one. I know you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Somebody told me a few days ago that it was more likely for a woman my age to get killed in a terrorist attack than to get remarried.”

  “That’s a nice thing to tell you. Who said that?” I asked.

  She mentioned a duck-faced actress she was rehearsing Hedda Gabler with.

  “We did a read-through of the play and at the end, the director, this guy I’ve known for years, said, ‘Maggie, you are like single malt scotch.’”

  “Yeah?”

  “And you know what she said?”

  “What?”

  “She said, ‘That’s the cheap kind, isn’t it?’”

  After a moment, I said, “You’re a better actor than she is, Maggie; she’ll never forgive you for it.”

  “You always say such nice things to me,” she said. Her voice wobbled. She cried easily.

  I can’t remember exactly. It may have been the same foggy night or maybe a few nights later that Rebecca Ng telephoned near four in the morning. The ring insinuated itself so perfectly into my dream (summer cottage, my mother making me a tomato sandwich in the kitchen, all of it long gone) that I didn’t wake up at first. Then it rang and rang again and I picked up. It was so late, so weird for a girl her age to be up, much less calling around.
“It’s too late for all this, Rebecca; way too late,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said in a not-very-sorry voice. “I thought Jesse had his own phone.”

  “Even if he did—” I began, but my tongue wouldn’t work. I sounded like a stroke victim.

  You don’t attack a teenager first thing in the morning, you wait till he’s brushed his teeth, washed his face, come upstairs, sat down and eaten his scrambled eggs. Then you do it. Then you say, “What the hell was that all about last night?”

  “She had a dream about me.” He tried to tone down his excitement but he had the glow of a man who has just won a big hand at poker.

  “She told you that?”

  “She told him that.”

  “Who?”

  “Her boyfriend.”

  “She told her boyfriend she had a dream about you?”

  “Yes.” (This was beginning to sound like a Harold Pinter play.)

  “Jesus.”

  “What?” he said, alarmed.

  “Jesse, when a woman tells you she’s had a dream about you, you know what’s going on, don’t you?”

  “What?” He knew the answer. He just wanted to hear it.

  “It means she likes you. It’s her way of telling you that you’re on her mind. Really on her mind.”

  “It’s true. I think she likes me.”

  “I have no doubt about that. I like you too—” I stopped, out of words.

  “But what?”

  I said, “It’s sneaky, that’s all. And cruel. How would you like it if your girlfriend told you she had a dream about another guy?”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “You mean if she were with you, she’d never dream about another guy?”

  “Yes,” he said, not entirely convinced.

  I went on. “The point I’m trying to make, Jesse, is the way a girl treats her former boyfriend is the way she’ll treat you.”

  “You figure?”

  “I don’t figure. I know. Look at your mom; she’s always been kind and generous about her old boyfriends. That’s why she didn’t poison your ear or drag me through court.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “That’s precisely the point I’m making. If she wouldn’t do it to another guy, she wouldn’t do it to me. That’s why I had you with her, not with somebody else.”