The Film Club (14 page)

There were other, worse jobs around and before long he found one. Another telemarketing gig, this one selling credit cards to poor families in the Deep South, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi. I wasn't invited around to meet the boss this time. Some nights when he returned home, his voice ravaged from talking and smoking, I'd quiz him. I'd say, “Explain to me why MasterCard would entrust a bunch of young guys in baseball hats to sell credit cards. I don't get it.”

“Neither do I, Dad,” he said, “but it works.”

Meanwhile there was not a hint of Rebecca; not a sighting in a club, on the street, no phone calls, nothing. It was as if she had developed a kind of radar that warned her when Jesse was nearby and she simply vanished. When she said, “You will never see me again,” she had been true to her word.

I awoke one night for no particular reason. My wife was asleep beside me with an expression on her face as if she was trying to solve a math problem in her head. Wide awake and mildly anxious, I looked out the window. There was a circle of mist around the moon. I put on my dressing gown and went down the stairs. An open DVD box lay on the chesterfield. Jesse must have come in late and watched a movie after we went to bed. I went over to the machine to see what it was but as I drew closer I experienced a kind of foreboding, as if I was crossing a line into a dangerous zone, that I was going to find something I wouldn't like. A gruesomely pornographic movie maybe, something to shore up my confidence in the effectiveness of my child rearing.

But perversity, annoyance, a sense of supervisory impatience, I don't know what, overcame my caution, and I popped open the tray. And what came out? Not what I expected. It was a small Hong Kong film,
Chungking
Express
(1994), which I'd shown Jesse months before. Images of a celery-stick Asian girl dancing alone in a stranger's apartment. What was the song? Oh yes, “California Dreamin',” the Mamas and the Papas hit, sounding fresh and
big
in a way it never did in the '60s.

I felt a peculiar alertness, a tugging at my sleeve, as if I was staring at something but couldn't recognize what it was. Like the priceless stamps in Hitchcock's
39
Steps
(1935). What
was
it?

Somewhere in the house, I could hear something very faint, a clicking. I went up the stairs; it got louder; then up to the third floor. I was going to knock on his door—you don't go into a young man's bedroom in the middle of the night unannounced—when I saw him through a crack in the door.

“Jesse?” I whispered.

No answer. The room was washed in a green light, Jesse at the computer, his back to me. The sound of insects coming from the headphones on his ears. He was writing somebody. A private moment, click-click, click, click-click, but such a lonely one, four o'clock in the morning, writing to some other kid thousands of miles away; talking about what? Rap, sex, suicide? And again I saw him standing at the bottom of a glistening well, mortar and brick all the way around, no way to climb up (too slippery), no way to break through (too hard), just an eternity of waiting for something to appear overhead, a cloud, a face, a rope dangled down.

And I understood suddenly why the movie had caught my attention, why that particular movie,
Chungking Express
. Because the beautiful girl in it reminded him of Rebecca; and watching the movie was a little bit like being with her.

I went back downstairs and went to sleep. Terrible dreams. A boy in a damp well, waiting.

He didn't get up until my third call the next afternoon. I went upstairs and gave his shoulder a gentle shake. He was sleeping too deeply. It took him twenty minutes to make it downstairs. Petals fell from the trees in the late afternoon sunlight. Almost a marine look, as if, with the bright golds and greens, we were underwater. A pair of running shoes (a prank) hung from a power line overhead. Down the street were more. A boy in a red T-shirt cycled by, swooping in and out of the little piles of leaves. Jesse seemed listless.

I was going to say but didn't, “I think you should start going to the gym.”

He pulled out a cigarette.

“Please, not before breakfast.”

He sat forward, rocking his head slightly back and forth. “Do you think I should call Rebecca?” he said.

“Is she still on your mind?” (Stupid question.)

“Every second of every day. I think I made a big mistake.”

After a moment I said, “I think Rebecca was big trouble and you got out before the house burned down.”

I could see he wanted a cigarette, that he wasn't going to concentrate till he had one. I said, “Light up if you want to. You know it makes me ill.”

Calmer once the smoke filled his lungs (his complexion even greyer it seemed), he said, “Is this going to go on forever?”

“What?”

“Missing Rebecca.”

I thought of Paula Moors, an old heartbreak of my own; I lost twenty pounds in two weeks over her. “It's going to go on until you find someone you like as much as her,” I said.

“Not just another girlfriend?”

“No.”

“What if she's just a nice person? That's what my mom says.”

That remark—with its attendant implications that a “nice” girl would make Jesse forget his sexual longing for Rebecca—captured a side of Maggie that was both endearing and maddening. Here was a woman who had taught high school in a small Saskatchewan farming community, who, at the age of twenty-five, decided she wanted to be an actress; quit her job, bid her family a tearful, train-station goodbye, and came to Toronto—two thousand miles away—to do it.

When I met her she was appearing, with green hair, in a punk musical. But somehow when she talked to our son about his life, especially his “future,” she forgot all that and became instead spouter of breathtakingly simpleminded counsel. (“Maybe you should go to math camp this summer.”) Her worry, her concern for his welfare novacained her intelligence, which was normally intuitive and considerable.

What she did best for Jesse, she did by example, imparting a democratic kindness, a giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt that his father, occasionally too hasty with a condemning turn of phrase, did not.

In a word, she sweetened his soul.

“Your mother means well,” I said, “but she's wrong there.”

“You figure I'm addicted to Rebecca?” he said.

“Not literally.”

“What if I never find anyone I'm that attracted to?”

I thought again of Paula Moors and her fat-burning exit; she was a brunette with vaguely crooked teeth, the kind of flaw that can give a woman an eerie sex appeal. God how I missed her. Yearned for her. Suffered grotesque imaginings that made me change my T-shirt in the middle of the night.

I said, “You remember Paula? You were ten when she left.”

“She used to read to me.”

“I thought I'd be haunted by her for the rest of my life, no matter who I was with. That there would always be a
Yes, but she's not Paula
.”

“And?”

I chose my words carefully, not wanting things to get locker-roomy. “It wasn't the first woman or the second or the third woman. But when it happened, when the chemistry was right and things worked out, I never gave Paula another thought.”

“You were kind of a mess for a while there.”

“You remember that?” I said.

“Yep.”

“What do you remember?”

“I remember you falling asleep on the couch after dinner.”

I said, “I was taking sleeping pills. Big mistake.” Pause. “You had to put yourself to bed a few times, didn't you?”

I thought of that awful spring, the sunlight too bright, me walking through the park like a skeleton, Jesse darting timid glances up at me. He said once, taking my hand, “You're starting to feel better, aren't you, Dad?” This little ten-year-old boy looking after his father. Jesus.

“I'm like that guy in
Last Tango in Paris
,” Jesse said. “Wondering if his wife did the same things with the guy in the dressing gown downstairs that she did with him.” I could feel him looking at me uncertainly, unsure whether to go on. “Do you think that's true?” he asked.

I knew what he was thinking about. “I don't think there's any point in thinking about that stuff,” I said.

But he needed more. His eyes searched over my face as if he was looking for a very small dot. I remembered nights lying in bed and forcing myself to visualize the most pornographic images imaginable, Paula doing this, Paula doing that. I did it to blunt my nerve endings, to hurry to the finish line, to that point where I wouldn't give a shit what she did with her fingers or what she put in her mouth. Etc., etc.

“Getting over a woman has its own timetable, Jesse. It's like growing your fingernails. You can do anything you want, pills, other girls, go to the gym, don't go to the gym, drink, don't drink, it doesn't seem to matter. You don't get to the other side
one second faster
.”

He looked across the street; our Chinese neighbours were working in the garden, calling out to each other. “I should have waited until I had another girlfriend,” he said.

“She might have canned you first. Think about that.”

He stared ahead for a moment, his long elbows on his knees, picturing God knows what. “What do you think about me phoning her?”

I opened my mouth to reply. I remembered waking up early one grey February morning after Paula was gone, wet snow sliding down the window, and thinking I'd go mad from the endlessness of the day ahead of me.
This is
delicate flesh you are dealing with. Tread softly.

“You know what she'll do, don't you?” I said.

“What?”

“Punish you. She'll reel you in and in and in and just when you think you're home free, she'll bring down the curtain.”

“You figure?”

“She's not stupid, Jesse. She'll know exactly what it is you want. And she won't give it to you.”

“I just want to hear her voice.”

“I doubt that,” I said, but then I looked over at his unhappy features, at the flatness that seemed to have overtaken his whole body. Softly, I said, “I think you'll be sorry if you start up with her again. You're almost at the finish line.”

“What finish line?”

“Getting over her.”

“No, I'm not. I'm not even
nearly
there.”

“You're farther along than you think.”

“How do you know that? I don't mean to be rude, Dad, but how do you know that?”

“Because I've done it about three million times, that's how I know,” I said sharply.

“I'm never going to get over her,” he said, abandoning himself to despair. I could feel prickles of irritation, almost like sweat, on my skin—not because he was questioning me—but because he was unhappy and I couldn't do anything, nothing, to relieve him of it. It made me angry at him, like wanting to strike a child who falls down and hurts himself. He shot a glance at me, one of those I remembered from years ago, a worried look that said, Uh-oh, he's getting mad at me.

I said, “It's like the guy who gives up cigarettes. A month goes by, he gets drunk, he figures, What the hell? Halfway through the second cigarette he remembers why he gave it up. But now he's smoking again. So he has about ten thousand more cigarettes before he arrives back at precisely the same place he was at before he lit up.”

Jesse put his hand awkwardly, tenderly, on my shoulder and said, “I can't give up cigarettes either, Dad.”

10

No more than a few days later, I had dinner with Maggie. I'd ridden my bicycle over to her house in Greektown earlier in the evening but after dinner, after the wine, I had no desire to risk a wobbly drive back across the bridge into town. So I clambered aboard the subway with the bike in tow.

It wasn't a long trip home, ten or fifteen minutes, but I'd done it so many times it seemed intolerably sluggish and I was sorry not to have brought a book to read. I gazed at my reflection in the window, at the passengers coming and going, the tunnels whizzing by, when whom should I see but Paula Moors? She was sitting opposite me, five or six rows down the subway car. I don't know how long she'd been there, or where she got on. I stared at her profile for a moment, the sharp nose, the pointed jaw. (I'd heard she got her teeth straightened.) Her hair was longer now, but she looked unchanged, very much as she had delivering those terrible words. “I'm leaning toward not being in love with you—” What a sentence! What a choice of words!

For six months, maybe a year, I've forgotten, I had felt her absence with the acuity of a toothache. We had committed such middle-of-the-night intimacies, she and I, private things said, private things done, and now the two of us sat unspeaking on the same subway train. Which would have struck me as tragic when I was younger but now seemed, I don't know, rather ruefully true to life. Not fantastic or sad or obscene or hilarious, just sort of business-as-usual, the mystery of someone coming and going in your life not so mysterious after all. (They have to go somewhere.)

And how, I wondered (an East Indian woman getting off at the Broadview station), how could I make Jesse understand this, how could I rush him through the next months, even year, to that delicious end point where you wake up one day and instead of feeling her loss (that toothache), you find yourself yawning, putting your hands behind your head and thinking, “I must get a copy made of my house key today. I'm playing a rather dangerous game here, having only one key.” Gorgeously banal, liberating thoughts (Did I lock the downstairs window?), the heat having passed from the burn, the memory of its pain so remote that you can't quite put your finger on why it went on so long or what the fuss was about, or who did what with her body (but look, the neighbours are planting a new birch tree).