“You are being defensive,” he said in heavily accented English. (Forty years in Toronto and still sounding like Charles de Gaulle.) I insisted I wasn’t and then grew more so. Explained things that didn’t require explaining, defended myself against criticisms which had not been levelled.
“There is a period for learning. After that it is too late,” said Bouissac with the intolerable finality of the French intellectual.
Too late? Does he mean, I wondered, that learning is like the mastery of a language, you have to “get” the accent before a certain age (twelve or thirteen) or you never get it right? Distressing thought. Should we have sent him to a military school?
Losing interest (and showing it) in my startled reply, Bouissac wandered off in search of a pair of new oven mitts. He was hosting a dinner party for a clutch of international semioticians that very night, the smug little prick. The encounter left me surprisingly jarred. I felt as though I’d betrayed something; had sold myself short. Was I being defensive about Jesse or about myself? Was I boasting like a ten-year-old in the schoolyard? Was it that transparent? Perhaps so. But I didn’t want anyone to think I was doing Jesse a bad turn. (I couldn’t shake that image of him piloting a marijuana-clouded cab.)
Three teenage girls swished by, smelling of gum and cold air. Perhaps, I thought, the influence we have over our children is an overrated thing. How exactly do you force a six-foot-four teenager to do homework assignments? No, we had already lost that one, his mother and I.
A dislike for Bouissac, like a sudden, unexpected gust of wind, passed over me and I had a feeling that down the road this curious student-like behaviour of mine, this habitual deference, was going to undergo a rather nasty metamorphosis.
Right there at the table, I got out a pen and made a list on a napkin of all the young men I’d gone to university with who hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans. There was B., who drank himself to death in Mexico; G., my boyhood best friend who shot a man in the face with a shotgun in a drugged stupor; M., a whiz kid at math, at sports, at everything, whose days were now spent masturbating in front of his computer while his wife worked in a downtown law firm. It was a comforting, dramatic list. There was even my brother, my sad, sad brother; track star, frat king in university, who now lived in the corner room of a boarding house, still railing, even after all these years, about the iniquities of his education.
But what if I’m wrong? What if Jesse didn’t come charging out of the basement one of these days and “grab the world by the lapels”? What if I’d allowed him to fuck up his entire life under some misinformed theory that might just be laziness with a smart-ass spin on it? Again, I saw a taxi driving slowly down University Avenue on a rain-slicked night. The graveyard shift. Jesse, a guy they know in the all-night donut store. “Hey, Jess. The usual? That should do her.”
Had he learnt anything over the last year under my “tutelage.” Was any of it worth knowing? Let’s see. He knows about Elia Kazan and the House Un-American thing, but does he know what communists are? He knows that Vittorio Storaro lit the apartment in Last Tango in Paris by putting the lights on the outside of the windows rather than inside on the set, but does he know where Paris is? He knows that you leave your fork face down until your meal is over; that French Cabernets tend to be slightly more sour than California Cabs. (Important stuff.) What else? To eat with your mouth closed (patchy), to brush your tongue as well as your teeth in the morning (catching hold). To rinse the tuna juice from the side of the sink when you’re finished making your sandwich (almost).
Oh, but listen. He loves Gary Oldman’s psychotic charge down the hall with a shotgun in The Professional (1981). He loves Marlon Brando sweeping the dishes off the dining room table in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). “My place is cleared. You want me to clear your places?” He loves Swimming with Sharks (1994), not the early moments, “That’s just shtick,” but the end part. “That,” he says, “is where it gets quite profound!” He loves Al Pacino in Scarface (1983). He loves that movie like I love the parties in The Great Gatsby. You know they’re naughty and shallow but you want to go to them anyway. He watches Annie Hall (1977) over and over. I find the empty DVD case on the couch in the morning. He knows it almost line by line, can quote from it. Ditto with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). He was knocked cold by Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997). He wants it for Christmas. Are these things I should feel happy about?
Yes, in fact.
But then one day, snow falling outside the living room window, we’re watching a replay of Scarface, the scene where Al arrives in Miami, when Jesse turns and asks me where Florida is.
“Huh?”
He says, “From here. How do you get to it from here?”
After a judicious pause (is he joking?), I say, “You go south.”
“Toward Eglinton or toward King Street?”
“King Street.”
“Yeah?”
I proceed carefully but respectfully in the tones of one who might at any second be ambushed by a practical joke. But this is no joke. “You go down to King Street and you keep going till you get to the lake; you cross over the lake and that’s the beginning of the States.” I wait for him to stop me.
“The United States are right across the lake?” he says.
“Uh-huh.” Pause. “You keep going down through the States, maybe fifteen hundred miles, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia (still waiting for him to stop me) until you get to a finger-shaped state that sticks out into the water. That’s Florida.”
“Oh.” Pause. “What’s after that?”
“After Florida?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s see. You go right to the bottom of the finger until you hit another patch of water; you keep going another hundred miles, you hit Cuba. Remember Cuba? That’s where we had that long conversation about Rebecca.”
“That was a great conversation.”
“Stay with me,” I say. “You go past Cuba, a long way past until you get to South America.”
“Is that a country?”
Pause. “No, that’s a continent. You keep on going, thousands and thousands of miles, jungles and cities, jungles and cities, all the way down to the end of Argentina.”
He stares into space. He is seeing something very vivid in his imagination, but God knows what it is.
“Is that the end of the world?” he asks.
“Pretty much.”
Am I doing the right thing here?
It was spring now on Maggie’s street. The trees, budding at their very tips like fingernails, appeared to be extending their branches toward the sun. It was in the course of showing one of these highfalutin art movies that something very odd happened, a perfect illustration of the very lesson the movie was trying to teach. It started when I heard the house next door was for sale. Not our through-the-wall neighbour, Eleanor—the only way she was leaving her place was feet first with a Union Jack clamped to her forehead—but the couple on the other side, the snake-slim woman in the sunglasses and her bald husband.
Entirely by coincidence I picked that week to show Jesse the Italian classic The Bicycle Thief (1948). Just the saddest story ever. An unemployed guy needs a bike for a job, gets one with great difficulty; his whole demeanour changes, his sexual confidence returns. But the bike gets stolen the next day. He’s in agony. The actor, Lamberto Maggiorani, has the face of an inarticulate, devastated child. What’s he to do? No bike, no job. It’s almost too upsetting to watch as he runs all over town with his son looking for the lost vehicle. Then he spots an unguarded bicycle and steals it. In other words, he chooses to inflict the same agony on somebody else that has been visited upon him. It’s for his family’s welfare, he rationalizes, it’s not like the other guy, the point being, I explain, that we sometimes calibrate our moral positions, what’s right, what’s wrong, depending on what we need at that particular moment. Jesse nods; the idea engages him. You can see him rumbling about in the incidents of his own life, stopping here and there, looking
for a parallel.
But the bicycle thief gets caught; and caught publicly. It’s as if the whole neighbourhood turns out to see him hauled away. Including his son, on whose face is an expression none of us ever wants to see on our children’s faces.
The day after the screening, maybe a few days later, I can’t recall, there were comings and goings next door; I saw a skinny, rat-faced fellow nosing around in the lane-way among my new garbage cans. Then one morning, the city looking grey in a sort of fortified way, puddles and litter in the streets as if the tide had gone out (you almost expected to see a dying fish flapping in the gutters), a For Sale sign appeared.
I found myself wondering, idly at first, then with increasing momentum, if I should sell my bachelor loft in the candy factory (it had appreciated wildly), and move in next door to my son and my beloved ex-wife. Provided they wanted me, of course. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. The more urgent it seemed. In a matter of days, the question assumed almost life-saving significance. I might even, I concluded, have a little living money left over from the down payment. This wasn’t how I thought my life would go but I’d had worse ideas. Maybe it would change my luck, just living near the two of them. So late one afternoon, my sexy neighbour in sunglasses pulled to the corner in her small, utilitarian car and hurried up the steps, briefcase in hand.
“I hear you’re selling your house,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said, not missing a beat, slipping the key into the lock.
“Any chance I could have an advance peek?”
You could see that the rat-faced real estate agent had warned her against doing exactly this. But she was a decent soul and said, sure.
It was a little man’s house, a Frenchman’s house, but clean and welcoming, even in the recesses of the basement (unlike Maggie’s basement where, just past the washing machine, one feared a crocodile attack). Narrow hallways, narrow stairs, meticulously painted bedrooms, detailed border work and a bathroom medicine cabinet that prompted curiosity—although given her clear complexion, her aura of constant and purposeful motion, she didn’t seem the kind to have any pills worth pinching.
“How much?” I asked.
She named a figure. It was absurdly high, naturally, but then so was the recent appraisal of my candy factory loft which had, so I was told, “come into fashion” with a whole species of obnoxious young success stories (cellphones, three-day beard). A place for winners, for swingers. For assholes, in a word.
I explained my situation: I passionately wanted to live near my teenage son and my ex-wife. That took her aback. Could she let me have first crack at buying the house? Yes, she said. She’d talk to her husband.
There was quite the flurry of activity at our house. Calls to the bank, to Maggie at the loft (a delighted green light accompanied by moist eyes), another chat with Slim next door. Everything looking good.
But then, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, Slim and her egg-head husband decided not to offer us first anything. There would be two showings, he informed me stiffly one evening, after which we were welcome to make a bid. Along with everyone else. Not good news. Greektown was coming into vogue as well; the prices were terrifying. Houses were getting two hundred thousand dollars more than the asking price.
A day or two before “show day” I took Jesse aside. I asked him to round up a bunch of his buddies for an afternoon on the porch. Beer and cigarettes on me. Starting time, exactly 2:00 p.m.
You can imagine the spectacle. As potential buyers fluttered up the stairs next door, they passed a half-dozen drinking, smoking, toque-wearing “louts” in sunglasses and pale complexions on the adjacent porch. Their new “neighbours,” three feet away. Some cars stopped, paused for an inspection, two moons frozen in the passenger window, and then moved away.
After an hour or so, the rat-faced real estate agent emerged and asked the lads if the owner was home. I was cringing in the living room, trying to watch television, my entrails shuddering as if a car alarm was going off inside me. (Guilty conscience.)
“No, no,” I whispered to Jesse, “tell him I’m not here.”
At four o’clock the showing ended. Twenty minutes later, as I was stealing down the front stairs to get a drink at the local Greek restaurant, my nerves shot, the agent appeared. He had a small, bony face as if unpleasant judgments had shrunk the skin and given it an off-putting shine. The “gentlemen on the porch,” he said, were posing “quite the problem.” I tried to change the subject; in jolly tones I asked him about the real estate business, about the neighbourhood, maybe I’d use him myself, I was going to buy a house. Ha, ha, ha, my pirate’s laugh. He was not put off. Unsmiling, he said they’d frightened off a number of buyers with their swearing. Never! I said, as if defending my queen.
There was a showing the following day, Sunday. A fine rain fell, the sky a soft grey, seagulls flying low over the park, some walking with their heads back, their beaks open as if they were gargling. In spite of profound misgivings, I persisted in my strategy. More beer, more cigarettes, more hunched-over louts glaring into the middle distance. I didn’t have the stomach to stick around and beetled off across the bridge on my bicycle to take care of some imaginary business. I didn’t come back until after four. The rain had let up. I was just passing the Greek restaurant where we often ate when I saw Jesse walking along the sidewalk toward me. He was smiling but there was something cautious, almost protective about it.
“We had a little problem,” he said. A few minutes into the showing, the bald man had stormed across the lawn— this time he was wearing the sunglasses—and knocked on the door with both fists. With the louts looking on, he demanded to see me.
Me?
“He’s not here,” Jesse told him.
“I know what he’s doing,” Baldy roared. “He’s trying to assassinate the sale.”
Assassinate the sale? Tough words. Especially since they were true. I felt a sudden, sickening wave of shame; even worse, I had the adolescent sensation, like flames licking at the inside of a house, that I was in “big trouble.” That I’d taken out my dad’s car without a licence and cracked it up. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that Jesse knew I was in the wrong, had known it all along. Not to mention the fact that I’d implicated him in it. A sterling example of parental guidance. How to handle a crisis. How to get what you want. Put him in my hands, Maggie, I’ll make sure he straightens up and flies right.
“I got everybody inside,” he said.
“Is it safe to go back?”
“I’d wait awhile. He’s pretty pissed off.”
A few days later, I asked a friend of mine to “beard” for me, pretend he was the purchaser and put in a bid on the house. But they must have seen clear through it; they hardly gave him the time of day. It had all been for nothing, my machinations, my involving a bunch of kids in a stupid, unethical scheme. A gay couple with a flower shop got the house for nearly half a million dollars.
Was this episode, I wondered, going to be one of those things that Jesse remembered for the rest of his life? (You never know when the window is open. And when it is, you don’t want to throw a dead dog through it.) I took him aside the next day. “That was a king-size mistake I made,” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live next door to your family,” he said. But I stopped him.
I said, “If some guy did that to me when I was trying to sell my place, I’d go over there with a machine gun.”
“I still think you did the right thing,” he insisted.
It was hard to make him see things differently. I said, “I’m just like that guy in The Bicycle Thief. I make something the right thing to do just because I need it done.”
“What if it was the right thing to do?” he came back.
Later, when we went outside for a post-film cigarette, I found myself looking furtively this way and that to make sure Baldy or his wife weren’t around.
“You see the consequences?” I said. “Now I have to l
ook out for this guy every time I go on the porch. That’s the price. That’s the real price.”
7
I designed a Stillness Unit for us to watch. This was about how to steal a scene from all the actors around you by not moving. I started, of course, with High Noon (1952). There are happy accidents in the movies where everything seems to just click into place. Right script, right director, right cast. Casablanca (1942) is one, The Godfather (1972) is another; and so is High Noon. A sheriff, Gary Cooper, is on his way out of town with a new bride when he hears that a very bad guy has just got out of jail and, along with three friends, is headed this way to “get” the man who put him away. They’re coming on the noon train. Cooper runs here and there all over town trying to get help; everyone’s got a good reason to say no. In the end, it’s just him, an empty street and four men with guns.
The film was made at a time when westerns were usually in colour and for the most part featured a kind of granite-chinned, high-minded hero, more of a cartoon than a human being. Suddenly along came High Noon, shot in stark black and white; no pretty sunsets and gorgeous mountain ranges; what we got instead was a small, rather mean-looking town. At the centre of the story was something else unusual: a man who was afraid of getting hurt and showed it.
I remind Jesse that the film was shot in the early ’50s, that you can see a parallel with the witch hunts that were going on at the same time in Hollywood. People suspected of leftist sympathies found themselves deserted by their friends overnight.
It’s hardly believable now but when High Noon came out, it was picketed by all sorts of people. They knocked it for being anti-American. Here, they complained, was a story about a so-called hero who, at the story’s end, gives up on the townsfolk and leaves. The film’s writer, Carl Foreman, was exiled to England; he’d been stamped a “fellow traveller”; no one would hire him. Lloyd Bridges, who plays the cowardly young hothead, didn’t work again for two years; “un-American” was the verdict.
The Film Club Page 7
