We kept the guilty pleasures momentum going with Under Siege (1992), a yummy bit of nonsense that boasted two villains, Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones, both superb actors, both gnawing on the material. A pair of real jambons. You just know that between takes they were on their knees weak with laughter. I asked Jesse to be on the lookout for the scene where Busey, accused of drowning his own shipmates, replies, “They never liked me anyway.”
To wrap up, we rented a few early episodes of the television program The Waltons (1972–81). I wanted Jesse to hear those monologues which come at the end of each show, the narrator wrapping things up, memoir style, from an adult perspective. Why are they so effective? I asked him.
“Huh?”
“How do they succeed in making you nostalgic for a life you never had?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.”
It made me nervous, Jesse and three of his pals driving to Montreal for a rap show. I gave him a hundred dollars, told him I loved him and watched him crash excitedly out the front door. I called out to him as he got to the sidewalk, the three boys sitting soberly in somebody’s dad’s car.
I don’t know what I said to him but it brought him back across the frozen yard. I just wanted a delay, fifteen, twenty seconds, so that if he had been on a rail to death, he would miss it—by yards, by seconds—but miss it because of those few moments.
He came home late the following Monday night with a strange tale. He looked terrible, his skin on the verge of erupting. He said, “One of the guys that came with us was a friend of Jack’s. A fat black guy. I’d never met him before. I was sitting beside him in the car and when we got about a hundred miles outside Toronto, his cellphone rang. You know who it was? Rebecca. It was Rebecca Ng. She lives in Montreal now; goes to university there.”
“Jesus.”
“The black guy starts talking to her, right beside me. I tried to read or look out the window, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think straight. I thought I was going to have a heart attack or my head was going to explode, just like that guy in the movie . . .”
“Scanners.”
“Then he says into the phone, ‘Jesse Gilmour is here. Do you want to talk to him?’ and he passes me the phone. There she is. I haven’t seen her for a year, nothing, but there she is. Rebecca. My Rebecca.”
“So what did she say?”
“She’s making jokes and flirting and, you know, being Rebecca. She says, ‘Wow, this is such a surprise. Like totally unexpected.’ So she asks me where I’m going to stay in Montreal, I said, a hotel, and she said, ‘What are you doing tonight? Not just hanging around the hotel, I hope.’
“And I said, ‘I don’t know. Depends on the guys.’ And she says, ‘Well, I’m going to be at this club, why don’t you come there?’
“It took about six or seven hours to get to Montreal. Maybe longer, it was snowing. We get there and check into the hotel; it’s a beat-up place, like a second-rate Holiday Inn but it’s right downtown in the student ghetto.”
“So you went out and bought a whole ton of beer—”
“We went out and bought a whole ton of beer and brought it back to the hotel; we were all in the same room, a cot for the black guy who knew Rebecca. Around ten or eleven o’clock that night—”
“All of you pretty lit.”
“All of us pretty lit, we head out for the bar. This club Rebecca mentioned. Down on St. Catherine Street somewhere. Students all over the place. I should have understood what that meant. But I didn’t. We go into the place and this great big guy with a moustache cards us. He asks for ID. Which I don’t have. The other guys do. And they all go in. But the guy won’t let me past. I even told him my ex-girlfriend was in there, I hadn’t seen her for a long time. I said all kinds of stuff. None of it worked. So there I was out, stuck on the sidewalk, all my friends inside, Rebecca inside, and I’m thinking this is the cruellest thing that’s ever happened to me.
“But then Rebecca comes to the front door; she’s looking the best I’ve ever seen her, just—sickeningly good. She talks to the doorman, you know, Rebecca talk, standing close to him, looking up, batting her eyes. Really laying it on. And the guy, the bouncer, gets this kind of embarrassed smile on his face and, without looking at me or at her, lifts up the cord and lets me go in.”
“Wow.” (What else can one say?)
He went on. “I sat on a stool at the bar beside Rebecca and drank a lot really fast—”
“Did she drink a lot?”
“No, but she was drinking. It doesn’t take much with Rebecca.”
“And?”
“And I got really drunk. Really, really drunk. And we got into an argument. We were shouting at each other. The bartender cut me off; then the bouncer came over and told us both to leave. So we’re out on the sidewalk, it’s stopped snowing now but cold, Montreal cold, you can see your breath and we were still having this fight. And I asked her if she still loved me. She said, ‘I can’t have this conversation with you, Jesse. I just can’t. I’m living with somebody.’ She flags down a cab and gets in.”
“Did you see her again?”
“More stuff happened, don’t worry—” He stopped and stared off across the street as if he had remembered something, like suddenly recognizing somebody right in front of you.
“What?” I said, alarmed, sounding cross.
“Do you think I came off like a wimp asking her that? Asking if she still loved me?”
“No. But you know—” I thought about it for a second, how to phrase it.
“Know what?” he asked quickly, as if I had a knife under my jacket.
“It’s just what I’ve been saying for the last year or so. Which is that important conversations are never best conducted when you’ve been drinking.” (Jesus, listen to me, I thought.)
“But that’s the only time you really want to have them,” he said.
“Yes, that’s the problem. Anyway, go on.”
He did. “We went back to the hotel, us four guys. Somebody had a bottle of tequila.”
“Jesus.”
“I woke up in the hotel room the next morning with a terrible hangover. Beer bottles everywhere, still in my clothes, all my money spent. I kept remembering asking Rebecca if she still loved me and her saying, ‘I can’t have this conversation,’ and getting into a cab.”
“Terrible.”
“Trying to get back to sleep.”
“Right.”
“I must have planned a million times what I was going to say to her when I ran into her and then this happens.”
He stared at the house across the street. “Have you ever done anything like that?” he asked.
“What happened next?” I said.
“We went out for breakfast, I must have been still drunk, because when I got back to the hotel, I threw it all up.”
“What did you pay for it with?”
“I borrowed some money from Jack. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
He paused and lit a cigarette. Blew the smoke away. “I don’t remember what we did the next day; went to Mount Royal, I think, but it was too cold. I didn’t bring the right jacket and I didn’t have any gloves. We hung around there for a while, there was some kind of student rally, we thought it might be a good place to meet girls, but the wind was just whistling around the hill, blowing my pant legs.
“We went to the rap show that night, which was pretty good except I kept looking around for Rebecca. I could feel her in the concert hall, I knew she was there, but I couldn’t see her. Next morning, the fat black guy said he had to go over to Rebecca’s to get something, a package.”
“Did you go?”
“I wanted to see her. So why pretend?” (He’s more courageous than I am, I thought.)
“We went over to her place. Where she lives with her boyfriend. And when we went up the elevator, I said to myself, This is the elevator she takes every day; and this is the hall she walks along every day; and this is her door . . .”
/>
“Jesus, Jesse.”
“She wasn’t there; neither was her boyfriend, just a roommate, some girl let us in. But I went over and took a peek in her bedroom. I couldn’t help myself. I thought, That’s where she sleeps, that’s where she gets dressed in the morning. And then she turns up. Rebecca. Looking like she’s spent an hour in front of the mirror, picking her clothes.”
“She probably had.”
“I sat there in the corner watching her talk to the guys. Being Rebecca. Chatting and joking and talking to everybody but me.”
“And then?”
“Then I got up and left and we came home.”
“That must have been a long ride.”
He nodded absently. He was already back with Rebecca on the freezing street, asking her if she still loved him.
12
And then the sun came out. It was right after a Kurosawa film. It must have been Ran. Jesse seemed more than usually engaged, loved the war scenes, loved the beheading of the treacherous mistress; the final scene where the blind Fool stumbles his way to the edge of the cliff left him dizzy.
Over the past few days Jesse’s demeanour had changed. He had the peculiar keenness of a young man with something to look forward to. Something rather close at hand. I wondered if it was the weather, beautiful spring days, yellow days, the smell of damp earth, the retreating grimness of winter that had given him so transparent a lift. I sensed that whatever it was, it was private; yet at the same time he was dying to talk about it. A direct question, I knew, would spook him, drive him underground so I had to play it passively; wait for the moment when just a look from me might catch his eye and pull the story out of him like a hook.
We sat on the porch, the fumes from Ran slowly dispersing; the birds chirping, our Chinese neighbour working in her garden, putting in the poles for her vines and mysterious fruits; she was in her late seventies and wore beautiful silk jackets. Overhead the round sun blazed down in this unnatural season.
“The thing about March,” I said, in as dull a voice as possible, “is that you think winter’s over. Doesn’t matter how many years you’ve lived here, you still make the same mistake.” I could see Jesse was barely listening so I plodded on. “You say, well, that’s it, we’ve broken the spine of winter. And no sooner, Jesse, no sooner are those words out of your mouth than you know what happens?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ll tell you what happens. It starts to snow. And snow and snow and snow.”
“I’ve got a new girlfriend,” he said.
“Spring’s a tricky time,” I said. (I was boring even myself.)
He said, “You remember that story you told me about Arthur Cramner, your old friend. The guy who took one of your girlfriends.”
I cleared my throat. “Not that it matters, son, it was many years ago, but he didn’t exactly take her away. I gave her away before I was ready to, that’s all.”
“I know, I know,” he said. (Was he hiding a smile?) “But sort of the same thing has happened to me.” He asked if I remembered his friend Morgan.
“Your friend from work.”
“The guy in the baseball hat.”
“Oh yeah, that one.”
“He had this girlfriend, Chloë Stanton-McCabe; they’ve been together since high school. He was pretty casual about her. I used to say to him, ‘You should be careful about her, Morgan, she’s really beautiful.’ And he’d go (here he mimicked a dullard’s voice), ‘Yeah, whatever.’”
I nodded.
“She goes to university in Kingston. Takes economics.”
“And she’s with Morgan?”
“Morgan’s a cool guy,” he said quickly (and bewilderingly). “Anyway, about a year ago, they broke up. A few days afterwards, Jack, the guy in my band—”
“Another guy in a baseball hat.”
“No, that’s Morgan.”
“I’m joking.”
“Jack’s the guy with red cheeks.”
“I know, I know. Go on.”
“Jack phoned me one night and he said he’d met this girl in the bar, Chloë Stanton-McCabe, and she’d gone on and on about me, what a cute guy I was, how funny I was. Just everything.”
“Yeah?”
“And the strange thing is, Dad, when I went to bed that night I lay in the dark wondering what it would be like to be with her, to be married to her. I hardly knew her. I’d seen her at parties and in a few bars but nothing special and never by herself.”
“That must have been a nice phone call to get out of the blue.”
“It was. Definitely. But a week later, she and Morgan got back together. Which was a bit disappointing. But not too. I had other girlfriends. But yeah, it was disappointing. Quite, actually.”
He stared across the street; bedsheets, a small child’s shorts, hung from an improvised clothesline on the second floor. You could smell the warm breeze coming up the street.
He went on. “And one day Morgan said to me, it was after work, he was a bit drunk, he said, ‘My girlfriend had a crush on you for, like, a week,’ and laughed, like the whole thing was a joke. I laughed too.
“I saw Chloë a few times after that; she was pretty flirty but she was still with Morgan. I’d be standing at the bar and I’d feel a hand on my behind and I’d turn around and I’d see this blond-haired girl walking away from me. I asked Morgan once, I asked him how he’d feel about me asking her out and he said, ‘Fine, I don’t care. I just like sleeping with her, that’s all.’ Except that’s not the word he used.”
“I bet.”
“But I was super careful never to come on to her. I didn’t want Morgan laughing at me, saying, ‘I don’t even want her and you can’t get her.’”
“Nice.”
“So.” He looked across the street as if to gather himself, to get the footing necessary to do justice to this new instalment. “Last weekend I went to a bar down on Queen Street. It was like that scene in Mean Streets. I’d just had a shower and washed my hair and I had all new clothes on and I felt really good. And I went into the bar and there was this song playing I really like and I felt like I could just get anything I wanted in the whole world. And there was Chloë; she’d come back for the weekend. She was sitting at a table with her friends and they all went, ‘Ooooo, Chloë, look who’s here!’
“So I went over and kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘Hi, Chloë.’ I didn’t stick around, though. I went to the end of the bar and had a drink by myself. In a little while she came over; she said, ‘Come outside and have a cigarette with me.’
“We went outside; we sat on the railing in front of the bar and I said it, just like that, I said, ‘I’d really like to kiss you.’
“And she said, ‘Really?’
“I said, ‘Yeah.’
“And then she said, ‘What about Morgan?’
“‘I’ll take care of Morgan,’ I said.”
“So did he find out?”
“I told him the next day. He said (Jesse lowering his voice an octave), ‘Whatever, I don’t care.’ But that night we went out for a beer after work and he got really drunk, really fast, and said, ‘You think you’re so bad ’cause you’re with Chloë now, don’t you?’
“But he called me the next morning; it was sort of sad, sort of courageous too, and said, ‘Look, man, I’m just feeling a bit weird about you being with her.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, me too.’”
He lit a cigarette, holding it on the other side of the chair from me.
“That’s a hell of a story,” I said (the laundry stirring in the soft breeze). He sat back, staring straight ahead, imagining God knows what, Lamaze classes with Chloë, touring with Eminem.
“Do you figure that Morgan and I will survive this? I mean our friendship. You and Arthur Cramner survived.”
“I have to be honest with you, Jesse. Women can be a bit of a blood sport.”
“How so?” he said. He wanted to talk about Chloë Stanton-McCabe some more. The story had been too q
uick in the telling.
It was a good summer for both of us. I got work here and there (it seemed to be gathering momentum), a few television guest shots, a trip to Halifax for a radio book show, another interview with David Cronenberg, a piece for a men’s magazine that got me to Manhattan . I wasn’t breaking even, more money was going out than coming in, but I no longer had the feeling that I was leaking money, that something sad, even tragic awaited me five years down the road.
And then something happened that felt like the period at the end of a sentence. It made me feel that my bad luck had run its course. To the eyes of an outsider, it was no big deal. I was invited to write a film review for a national newspaper. The pay was low, it was a one-shot gig, but—how to explain this—it was something I had always wanted to do. Sometimes these things have a lure well beyond their actual value, like an academic wanting to give a lecture at the Sorbonne or an actor being in a movie with Marlon Brando. (Maybe it’s a terrible movie. Doesn’t really matter.)
Jesse was working the evening shift. He was still a prep man, washing and cutting up vegetables, cleaning squid, but sometimes they let him work the grill, which had the same slightly disproportionate lure that my film review did. These things are dismayingly arbitrary.
Grill guys are tough, very macho; they like to sweat and swear and drink and work impossible hours and talk about “pussy” and “welfare bums.” Now Jesse was one of them. He liked sitting around in his whites after his shift—it was his favourite time—smoking cigarettes and rehashing the night, how they got slammed just after nine (a load of customers arriving all at once), how they’d put a waitress in “the penalty box” (delayed her orders). It doesn’t pay to fool with the boys in white.
There was a kind of strange, pseudo-gay banter in the kitchen—all kitchens, he said—guys calling each other fags, who takes it up the ass, etc., etc. The one thing you couldn’t call someone was an “asshole.” That was serious, that was a real insult.
He liked it when Chloë picked him up after work, this Marilyn Monroe with a diamond stud in her nose. All the guys sitting around, noticing.
The Film Club Page 13
