The Perfect Order of Things (7 page)

And there it was again, this feeling of being slowly poisoned, of being excluded from something; that the centre of life was elsewhere, up on that stage, and that I, along with all the other anonymous people in the audience, was stuck in the marshes, the shallows.

But how, I wondered, could you be distressed to be on the margins of something that you were no longer interested in being on the inside of? I began to see myself as a sort of comic figure, a collection of uncontrollable nervous twitches and responses over which I, their ostensible owner, had almost no control. And what did that imply? That there were some experiences simply too big to wipe out, to neutralize? But we’re not talking about a madhouse or a prison or a torture chamber. We’re talking about a fucking film festival.

All night long I wandered about in a toxic fog. I took a taxi to the post-gala screening down at the waterfront, hundreds of beautiful young men and women dressed to the nines, all talking, all thrilled to be there. I drifted among them like a ghost and then, when I got to the end of the room, I turned around and started back through the crowd again. I knew lots of people. I shook hands, I joked, but I had the feeling that they were keeping me from something, that there was some other place in the room I should be, some other conversation I should be having.

And all night long, it seemed, I was circling the hospitality suite on the twenty-sixth floor of the Hyatt Plaza. Knowing what was going to happen there (more of the same), I still felt compelled to go, like rubbing your tongue against a chipped tooth. But it infuriated me: to be at the mercy of such irrational, unpleasant feelings after so many years, after a decent life and lovely children, to be returned here, to this hungry, diminished state.

I saw Weiner in a clutch of local politicians and arts bureaucrats. Weiner, an older Joseph Goebbels now, thin as a rake. (Someone told me he’d taken up long-distance running, the final domain of the sexless life.) He was with his flunky, Billy, still standing too close to people. (Johnny had died in the interim of testicular cancer.)

I went over; they were talking about an actor’s performance, how “over the top” it was. They both laughed, stealing glances at each other and laughing some more. They caught sight of me. Their faces hardened with politeness. We talked for a moment; wrong word; you don’t
talk
to guys like that, you banter. We bantered for a moment, but was it just my imagination or did Weiner turn away from my conversation before its point of logical extinction? Did he turn away a hair too quickly (this man whom I didn’t even like) to address an observation to Billy that the script for Tuesday afternoon’s film was a “hair-over-the-bald-spot script”? An observation with which Billy chuckled his agreement with a shake of the head that said, “It’s all so
transparent
!”

And then they were gone and I stood in the gathering late-night crowd, the lights lowered, the volume of voices rising, the illuminated city on display outside the picture window where once, I remembered, it had rained.

Then I saw my daughter. How beautiful she looked in her party dress with her three best friends. They blew into the room with such freshness, you could hear their laughter from where I stood. And just
seeing
her triggered something in me. An instinct for survival. I don’t belong here, I thought, and then I realized that it didn’t matter
why
I didn’t belong, that it was not something to fix but rather something to act on. When the backs of these beautiful young women were turned to order drinks from the bar, amidst shrieks of surprise and youth, I stole out the door I came in. I hurried along the hall in case she’d seen me. And for the second time that day I could feel the stranglehold of my past, of my body’s response to it, loosen around my chest. I hurried through the lobby. I saw M. standing by the elevator. She was with Catherine, my son’s mother. My two ex-wives going for a drink together in the hospitality suite. In a world where such a gorgeous, civilized thing could happen, there was, again, only one conclusion to be drawn: The ugliness was in me. Not at the film festival.

And as I broke out onto the street, the fresh September air hitting me in the face, as I sped along the sidewalk, I felt things dropping away from me, you could almost hear them, like an old car shedding its unnecessary parts. Your past really is a country where you used to live. You can’t not have been there, but you can sure as hell not go back for a visit. And as I moved further away from the throbbing jewel on the twenty-sixth floor of the Hyatt Plaza (“She’s married to
you
?”), breaking through a wave of late-night partiers coming from the opposite direction, I began to feel better and lighter. Because I had, at last, actually
learned
something, a small strategy that, this time, might even stick. So simple, too: if a place makes you feel bad, don’t keep going back.

So here’s how the story ends. I left a message on my daughter’s voice mail when I got home. I said I had a bunch of party passes and film tickets for her. Exactly a year later, festival time again, I was driving my eleven-year-old stepdaughter home from a birthday party (there were boys this year). I took my usual route along Bloor Street. We passed a movie theatre; there was a crowd gathering on the sidewalk. A camera crew interviewing a bearded young man. A young man on top of the world in a way he may never be again; people were reaching over the red ropes calling his name, and it’s true, I still felt that slightly sickening pull; I always will. But I didn’t look away. I rolled down the window, I let my gaze rest on the people, on their excited faces, on their hands reaching over the ropes; and then the traffic light changed, the intersection cleared, and the car ahead of me moved forward into the evening.

4

The House with the Broken Spine

W
hen I think about myself as a young man, I picture a large, dishevelled bird, the kind that flies into the house, knocks over lamps, disturbs people at their meal and then, after a few destructive spins around the room, shoots back out the window. Of course, that’s not how I appeared to me
then
. Then I entertained (and not always privately) the idea that my life was a novel, that “people” watched my trajectory with head-shaking admiration.
What’s he up to
next?
It makes me blush to say all this because the truth, as we all know, is that, apart from my arrivals and exits, no one thought about me very much at all.

Oddly enough, as the years have gone by, it seems that life
itself
, not I, has come to resemble a novel. Characters appear and disappear, resurfacing later in the story in a way that often beats the pants off fiction. When
War and
Peace
appeared in 1862, Tolstoy’s sisters were outraged to find verbatim transcripts of their dinner-table conversation. His response: a shrug. If you don’t want to read about yourself, don’t have dinner with a writer.

Speaking of
War and Peace
, do you remember Justin Strawbridge, the boy who took me to the Place Pigalle the day of my execution at the hands of Clarissa Bentley? You do? Well, this’ll surprise you. It sure surprised the hell out of me.

Almost a year after the visit to my old boarding school dormitory, my wife, Rachel, and I, having spent a bickerish week or two, decided to take a holiday together. And this holiday, it turned out, provided me with a chance, however unwitting, for another “return.”

We didn’t plan on going too far away. Just enough of a habit breaker to clear off the barnacles that grow on any married couple if they don’t pay attention. So we booked a splashy, overpriced room at a country inn an hour north of the city. We couldn’t really afford it—it had been an expensive summer (new roof, broken water pipe, unemployed children)—but we couldn’t afford new spouses, either. So it was an easy decision. And it worked. We went for walks in a dark forest, rented a canoe for the afternoon, played pool in the guest room, ate a fabulous dinner, drank a second bottle of wine back in the room, fooled around in our jammies, and then, with the river rushing below our window, slept like logs. By the end of three days we remembered why we’d liked each other in the first place. Coming back to town, even after so short a time, covered the city in a spanking-new coat of paint.

But I see that I’m getting ahead of myself again. On our way out of town, as we left the city behind and moved into the green countryside, I noticed certain things—a red barn, a deserted crossroads, a silo, a descending field—that seemed familiar, albeit distantly. Passing a road sign— Sweet Cherry Lane—I realized I had, in fact, been there before.

You never quite make friends again the way you do in your youth. And later in life, when, for one reason or another, those friendships chip and fade away, they are like a missing tooth. You never replace them. The great friendship of my life—and my life’s greatest disappointment— was Justin Strawbridge.

You can’t explain why you love someone, why a best friend is a best friend. It always sounds oversold, never quite convincing. Better take the route of the sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Talking about the death of his closest friend, he said in one simple, heartbreaking sentence:
“Si l’on me presse de dire
pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne peut s’exprimer qu’en
répondant: parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.”
(“If you were to press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was I.”)

In our early twenties, Justin and I had a tiff over a Polish girl (sexy in a consumptive way). She played us both for fools, and we didn’t see each other for many wasted years. And then one night more than a decade later, I found myself nostalgically tipsy in a bar and I called him. It took only several seconds to dial the numbers and even as the phone rang, it seemed odd that so simple, so brief a gesture—dialing a number—had kept old friends apart for a decade.

We met a few days later in a dark, sordid strip club downtown. (His idea.) The years had hardened him physically. He looked thin and greasy, hunched over the Formica table, shovelling some kind of salad into his mouth with a too-small plastic fork. He had a room upstairs, over the bar, he told me. Two men passed the table wearing three-quarter-length brown leather jackets. Small-time thugs. He nodded at them. They sat over in the corner and looked at us. One of them said something and the other laughed and I had the uncomfortable feeling they were talking about me, about what a wimp I was. The waitress came over, dollar bills spread between her red-tipped fingers. I ordered a beer; Justin shot the waitress a look, as if just the act of my ordering bothered him.

“Bobby?” she said. She was talking to him. To Justin.

“I’m good,” he said. The waitress went over and stood by the bar.

“Bobby?”
I said.

“That’s what they call me down here. Bobby Blue.” He said it with a dusting of mildly aggressive pride, as if being called a tough-guy name, however absurd, was, for a rich kid slumming it “down here,” some kind of
accomplishment
. Notwithstanding the fact that it makes me nervous when people change their names: there’s almost always something wrong with them, a mine shaft right through the middle of their personality. But I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want any of that today.

We chatted about this and that, but Justin seemed stiff, rather formal. It was as though, after my phone call, a videotape of the “incident” with the Polish girl (a drunken, late-night visit) had started up in his imagination and his thoughts had taken an unforgiving turn. After a while (me nodding, finishing his sentences, laughing a touch too heartily), I noticed a man standing by the bar, looking this way. I’d seen him on the way in. A weightlifter’s body in a black turtleneck sweater and beret.

Justin put down his too-small fork and reached for his coat on the chair behind him.

“Are you
going
?” I said.

It was disgracefully rude, he knew it, and for a second he lost his resolve. “I’m meeting my mother.” There it was again, the phony, parent-pleasing frown that I had distrusted even as a child. (It always signalled a betrayal at hand.) Except now he was thirty-five. From the corner of my eye I saw him join the man at the bar. Then Justin Strawbridge, wearing a long-tailed cowboy coat, disappeared into the bright light of the doorway, the ape in the beret following.

What an absurd coat, I thought. What
could
he be playing at?

But sometimes it’s simply too much trouble to stay mad at an old friend, and I suppose that’s what happened with us. Again memory fails me, who contacted whom, I don’t recall, although I have a feeling it was Justin who phoned. Why, I’m not sure, perhaps a last grasp for a life raft.

Six months later, it was spring now, I found myself riding a motorcycle along a country road, the same Sweet Cherry Lane that I would later notice from the car with my wife. You could smell the warm grass; farms dotted the horizon; the whole world, it seemed, swam in a lush green wind. In my overnight bag was a bottle of Scotch and a well-worn, brick-sized paperback of
War and Peace
(the divine Constance Garnett translation). I wanted to give my old friend a taste of the greatest novel ever written but also a glimpse of what I was like, what pleased me, moved me, delighted me these days. In anticipation, I’d even highlighted certain passages. I imagined a late night, boozy reading: perhaps an excerpt from Nicholas Rostov’s flight in the rush of French troops; or Princess Marya Bolkonsky’s monologue about love never coming her way—a section so heartbreaking that I’d never read it aloud for fear my throat would tighten and my voice take an embarrassing wobble.

Turning onto a gravel road, I caught sight of Justin Strawbridge waiting in the distance. Behind him, a house with a crooked spine. Crows sat on power lines overhead. Black butterflies flickered among the dandelions. He waved once and then quickly went inside. That was how it began.

We had a great deal of fun that night, those rituals that old friends do when they haven’t seen each other for years. You retell stories you both know, and know you both know, revisit old hangovers and old lovers and old disgraceful moments, all in extreme colours now, all agreeably weightless; we touched on “the incident” with the Polish girl and apart from his eyes lingering a moment longer than they should have on my features, the evening moved on. We played songs for each other from albums that no one listened to anymore.