“Why is that good?”
“Because it lets the audience know something bad is going to happen.”
“And what’s that called?”
“Suspense,” he said. “Like Hitchcock building a second staircase in Notorious.” He rimed it off; the blasé certainty pleasing him. For an instant I had a feeling he was daydreaming that Chloë was hearing all this, a third person in the room.
“Who was Bergman’s favourite cameraman?”
“That’s easy. Sven Nykvist.”
“What Woody Allen film did Nykvist shoot?”
“Actually, he shot two. Crimes and Misdemeanors and Another Woman.”
“What did Howard Hawks say constituted a good film?”
“Three good scenes and no bad ones.”
“In Citizen Kane, a man describes something he saw on a dock in New Jersey fifty years before. What was it?”
“A woman with a parasol.”
“Last question. Get it right and you get another free dinner out. Name three directors from the New Hollywood movement.”
He extended an index finger: “Francis Coppola (pause), Martin Scorsese (longer pause), Brian De Palma.”
After a moment I said, “See what I mean?”
It must have put a little fizz in the air because later that night he slipped a CD-ROM into my computer. “It’s rough,” he said by way of an introduction. It was a song he’d written up north on one of those nights when the wind sucked at the windowpanes, when Chloë was gone and never coming back. It started with a violin playing the same petite phrase over and over; then the beat came in, bass and drums, then his voice.
Most of us, I know, think our kids are wizards even when they’re not (we stick their smudgy little paintings up on the fridge like Picassos), but this song, “Angels,” I listened to it just the other day, long after all this nonsense about Chloë had come and gone, and I can say this: there was something remarkable in this message to a faithless young woman. You could hear a confidence of delivery that seemed to come from someone other than the boy presently sharing a couch with me, his lips mouthing the lyrics.
But that wasn’t what struck me most forcefully. The big change was in the lyrics. They excoriated one moment, implored the next. They were harsh, meant to wound, obscene, as if the writer had turned himself inside out like a cucumber fish. But they were also, for the first time, true; no more bullshit about growing up in the ghetto or corporate greed or threading his way through the needles and the condoms in his childhood backyard. “Angels” was the real deal—as if someone had torn off a layer of his skin and recorded the howl.
Listening to the song, I realized—with relief oddly enough, not discomfort—that he had more talent than I did. Natural talent. It was the agony over Chloë that had uncovered it. She had burned the baby fat from his writing.
As the voice on the CD faded, as the plangent violin faded (it was like a saw going back and forth, a wound being prodded and probed), he said, “What do you think?”
Slowly, thoughtfully, so he could savour it, I said, “I think you’ve got talent to burn.”
He leapt to his feet exactly as he had done that time I asked him if he wanted to quit school. “It’s not bad, is it?” he said excitedly. I thought, Ah, this may be the way out of Chloë.
I came home late that evening; the porch was dark; I didn’t see him at first until I was almost on top of him. “Jesus,” I said. “You scared me.” Behind him through the window I could see Tina moving around in the brightly lit kitchen and I went in to her.
Normally, Jesse, hungry for conversation, would have followed me into the house, yakking about this and that. Sometimes he’d even plant himself outside the toilet, talking through the door. I exchanged the day’s pleasant news with my wife (here a job, there a job, everywhere a job, job) and drifted back outside. I turned on the light. Jesse craned his neck around to see me, a tight smile drawn on his lips.
I sat myself quietly beside him. “You know that thing I was afraid of happening?” he said.
“Yes.”
“It happened.”
A friend had called, given him the news over the phone.
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“How do you know it’s Morgan?”
“Because he told my friend.”
“Who told you?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, why would he do that?”
“Because he still likes her.”
“I mean why would your friend tell you?”
“Because he’s a friend of mine.”
The Chinese woman across the street came out with a broom and began vigorously sweeping her steps. I barely dared look over at him.
“I think she’s making a terrible mistake,” I said impotently.
Sweep, sweep went the broom, the small woman jerking her small head around like a bird.
“I’ll never take her back now,” he said. “Never.”
He slid off the chair and started down the porch steps, and as he did I noticed his ears. They were red, as if he had been sitting forward in his chair and rubbing them. There was something about his red ears and the way he walked away—as if there was nowhere to go, that all tasks, all human action, except her, was futile, an empty parking lot extending all the way to the horizon—that clutched at my heart and made me want to call out after him.
I was just about to show him a Jean-Pierre Melville film, Un Flic (1947), but he wanted to watch Chungking Express instead. He fetched it from his room upstairs. “Do you mind?” he said. “I want to watch something from before Chloë.” But halfway through the film, “California Dream-in’” soaring off the screen, the reed-thin girl twirling and dancing in the apartment, he took it off. “It’s not working,” he said. “I thought it might inspire me.”
“How would it do that?”
“You know—I got over Rebecca; now I’ll get over Chloë.”
“Yes?”
“But I can’t get back there. I can’t remember what it was like to like Rebecca. It only makes me think about Chloë. It’s too romantic. It’s making my hands sweat.”
He didn’t come home the next night, leaving instead a rather tense, rather solemn message on the answering service to the effect that he was staying the night at the “studio.” I’d never seen this place, but I knew it was small, “not enough room to swing a cat.” Which meant where exactly would Jesse be sleeping? And then there was the tone of voice, its inappropriate gravitas. The voice of a young man confessing to stealing a car.
I slept uneasily that night. Near eight in the morning, still bugged, I called Jesse’s cellphone; left a message; said I hoped he was well; could he call his father when he got a chance. And then, apropos of nothing, I added that I knew he was feeling terrible, but that drugs of any kind, cocaine in particular, would probably land him in the hospital. Maybe kill him.
“There’s no ducking this one,” I said, pacing back and forth in my empty living room, the sun speckling the porch outside. “There are no shortcuts.” I sounded pompous and utterly unconvincing. But when I put the phone down, I felt calmer; tweedish as I’d come across, at least I’d said it.
Twenty minutes later, he called back. Odd for him to be up so early. Still, there he was, sounding a little deep-chested, a little careful, as if someone was holding a gun on him or watching him very closely as he spoke to me.
“Is everything okay?” I said.
“Yes, yes, it really is.”
“You don’t sound so good.”
This provoked a peevish snort. “I’m going through something pretty unpleasant here.”
“I know you are, Jesse,” I said. Pause. He didn’t jump in. “So we’ll see you tonight.”
“We might be rehearsing,” he said.
“Yes, well, I’d like to see you afterwards. Have a glass of wine with Tina.”
“I’ll do what I can,” he said.
Do what I can. (I’m not asking for a voluntary deposit at
the blood bank here, sonny.)
I had a very strong feeling not to push him, that he was far, far out on a leash and that the leash had grown mysteriously thin. Eminently snappable. I said goodbye.
It was a strangely beautiful day, blindingly sunny, the trees bare, the clouds marching briskly across the sky. An unreal day.
Early afternoon. The phone rang again. Dull voice. Bereft of inflection. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. Pause. “I did take drugs last night. I’m in the hospital now. I thought I was having a heart attack; my left hand went numb; so I called an ambulance.”
“For fuck’s sake,” was all I could manage.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Where are you?”
He named the hospital.
“And where the hell’s that?”
I heard him cover the phone. He came back on and gave me the address.
“Are you in the waiting room now?” I said.
“No. I’m here with the nurses. In bed.”
“Stay where you are.”
Moments later while I was dressing, his mother called; she was rehearsing a play down the street; could she come over for lunch?
I picked Maggie up in Tina’s car and we drove through that bright afternoon to the hospital; parked the car; walked three miles through hallways; talked to someone at the emergency reception desk; doors slid open; past a knot of joking nurses and everyday doctors and blue-uniformed paramedics, turned left, then right, to bed number 24. There he was. Whiter than death. His eyes like marbles; his lips blackened and crusted; his fingernails filthy. A heart monitor beeped over his head.
His mother kissed him tenderly on the forehead. I stared down at him coldly. I looked at the heart monitor. I said, “What did the doctors say?” I couldn’t touch him.
“They said my heart was going really fast but that it wasn’t a heart attack.”
“They said it wasn’t a heart attack?”
“They don’t think so.”
“They don’t think so or they know so?”
His mother shot me a reproachful look. I put my hand on his leg. I said, “That was good you called an ambulance.” I almost said (but stopped myself), I hope I don’t have to pay for it.
Then he started to cry; he looked up at the white ceiling over his head, the tears streamed down his cheeks. “She won,” he said.
“Who?”
“Chloë. She won. She’s out with her old boyfriend having a great time and I’m here in the fucking hospital. She won.”
I felt my heart being pulled as if by a pair of strong fingers. I thought I might faint. I sat down. “Life is very long, Jesse. You don’t know who’s going to win this round.”
“How did this happen?” he sobbed. “How did this happen?”
I could feel my chest starting to shake. I thought, God, please don’t make him cry anymore.
“She called up this guy and she fucked him,” he said, looking at me with such pain I had to look away.
I said, “I know things look a little desolate.”
“They do,” he cried, “they look so desolate. I can’t stand to go to sleep or to close my eyes. I can’t get any of these pictures out of my head.”
I thought, he’s going to die of this.
I said, “Much of the way things look is because of the cocaine, honey. It strips away all your defences. It makes these things seem even worse than they are.” Such useless words, such contemptibly, loathsomely ineffective words. Like flower petals in the path of a bulldozer.
“Really?” he said and the curious tone, like a man reaching for a life jacket, pushed me forward. I talked for fifteen minutes; his mother’s eyes never left his face; I talked and talked and talked, anything I could say; I felt as if I was feeling around in a dark room, my fingers seeking here and there, in this pocket, in that drawer, under this piece of cloth, over there by that lamp, looking by touch for the right combination of words that might respark that “really” and the momentary relief that came with it.
I said, “You can get over this girl, but you can’t get over her with cocaine.”
“I know,” he said.
They’d just arrived at the studio to rehearse, he began. All day long he’d had a feeling that Jack knew something; that he was keeping it from him. Maybe Chloë had been cheating on him all along; maybe Morgan was the world’s best . . . whatever.
So he said, “Do you know something you’re not telling me?”
And Jack, whose girlfriend vaguely knew Chloë, said no; Jesse pushed him a little harder. No, there was nothing new, just what he’d already told him five times: that she’d called up Morgan, he’d gotten on a bus and gone to Kingston; they’d spent the evening in the apartment listening to some “really cool” music. And then she fucked him. That was the story, honest, that was all he knew.
And then somebody brought the cocaine out. And then it was seven hours later, everybody asleep, Jesse on his knees looking through the carpet threads for any coke that might have fallen off the table. Then his arm went to sleep; he went outside into the dazzling sunshine, the sunlight gleaming off the cars, and found a bar that was open; said he needed to call an ambulance; the bartender said, “We don’t do that here.”
So he went to a phone booth, it was nearly noon now, everything rushing by, very frightening, and called 911. Sat down on the curb and waited; the ambulance arrived; they put him in the back. He looked out the back window as they drove him to the hospital; he could see the sunny streets falling away behind him; a nurse asked him what he’d taken; asked him for his parents’ phone number; he said no.
“And then I just gave up,” he said. “I gave up and told them everything.”
For a moment no one said anything; we just sat there looking at our pale son, his hand over his face.
“It was the one thing I asked her not to do,” he said. “The one thing. Why did she do that one thing?” You could see it playing out on his pale, childlike features: She does this to him, he does that to her.
“A shitty thing to do,” I said.
The doctor came in; young Italian guy, goatee and moustache; very solid; I said to Jesse, “Can you be candid with the doctor if we’re here?”
“That’s important,” the doctor said as if someone had just made a clever joke, “being candid.”
Jesse said yes. The doctor asked some questions; listened to his heart and his back. “Your body doesn’t like the coke,” he said with a smile. “Doesn’t seem to like the cigarettes either.” He straightened up.
“You haven’t had a heart attack,” he said. He explained something I couldn’t follow, making a fist with his hand to show a heart stopping. “But let me tell you this. Whenever anyone your age does come here with a heart attack, it’s always because of coke. Always.”
Then the doctor left; three hours later we left too; dropped his mother off at the subway. I took Jesse back to my house. Just as we pulled into the driveway, he broke into sobs again. “I miss that girl so much,” he said. “So much.”
Then I started crying too. I said, “I’d do anything to help you, anything.”
We sat there, both of us sobbing.
15
And then a miracle occurred (but not a surprise). Chloë, the upwardly spiralling careerist, appeared to be having second thoughts. Morgan, rumour had it, had been dispatched. Feelers were put out. Her best friend “ran into” Jesse at a party, told him that Chloë “really, really missed him.”
The colour, it seemed to me, returned to his features; there was even a difference in the way he walked, a bounce which he was unsuccessful in hiding. He played me another song; then another; Corrupted Nostalgia appeared to be, as they say in show business, on a hot streak. They performed in a bar down on Queen Street. I remained exiled.
Sensing that his interest was cooling for our Buried Treasures program, I looked further afield. Something to do with writing since he seemed to be leaning in that direction now. And there it was, as obvious as the proverbial
nose on my face: we’d do a program of movies that were inordinately well written. We’d do Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) again. Take another look at Pulp Fiction (1994), making clear, though, the distinction between fun writing and true writing. Pulp Fiction, immensely entertaining as it is, spiffy and glittery as the dialogue is, doesn’t have a real human moment in it. I reminded myself to tell him that story about Chekhov watching Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House in a Moscow theatre, during the course of which he turned to a friend and whispered, “But life isn’t like that at all.”
So why not show him Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)? He’s too young for Chekhov, it might bore him, yes, but my guess was that he’d love Wally Shawn’s whining, complaining, romantically smitten Vanya, particularly when he’s ranting about Professor Serybryakov. “We can’t all be speaking and writing and spewing forth work like some farmmachine!”
Yes, Jesse would like Vanya. “Excellent weather for suicide.”
Then for a sort of dessert, I’d show him To Have and Have Not (1944). What credentials: based on the novel by Hemingway (loony by then, swilling martinis and popping pills and writing nonsense at four o’clock in the morning); screenplay by the Lolita-loving William Faulkner; with that great Bogart/Bacall scene upstairs in the seacoast hotel where she offers herself to him with this speech: “You don’t have to do anything or say anything; or maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Show-off writing of the best kind.
Speaking of which, show him David Mamet’s (now there’s a show-off) Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). An office of third-rate real estate salesmen, losers to a man, take a verbal whipping at the hands of a “motivator.” “Put that coffee down,” Alec Baldwin says to a stunned Jack Lem-mon. “The coffee is for closers.”
This was what I planned. And then maybe we’d do some more film noir, Pickup on South Street (1953). . . . It was all ahead of us.
Then came the Christmas holidays; nighttime, Jesse and me outside, snow lightly falling. Searchlights bouncing around the winter sky looking for God knows what, celebrating God knows what. He hadn’t seen or talked to Chloë Stanton-McCabe, no phone calls, no e-mail, but she was due to return any day now to spend a week with her parents. There was going to be a party. He would see her there.
The Film Club Page 16
