At that moment a luminous, beautifully dressed older woman with red hair and a pale face stepped into the living room. Hers was a stronger Irish accent.
“Did you offer him a sherry, Gerald?” she said.
“I don’t think I dare,” I said. No one found this odd.
Leading the way, they took me up the wooden stairs and along the narrow hall. Looking into my brother’s bedroom, I saw that it too had been transformed into bright colours and warm furniture. The bed was stacked with wrapped presents. “We have a son who lives in Edinburgh and he’s coming for a visit with his children,” Mrs. Keveney said.
And then we were in my bedroom. The cowboys on the wallpaper were gone. “Lift up the window,” Mr. Keveney said.
As my fingers touched the heavy brass latches, I experienced a sensation of absolute familiarity and a strange light-headedness. I looked over at him, puzzled. “Those are the same latches that were there when you were a boy,” he said. “We never changed them.” I looked down at the latches, at my fingers still under them. So that’s what Proust meant when he stumbled on the uneven paving stones in Paris and found himself abruptly transported back to Venice where, as a younger man, he had stumbled on a similar set of stairs. That’s what he meant by being “beyond time,” that you’re neither here (in the present in my old country home) nor there (myself as a child lifting a window) but instead in some delicious limbo in between. How odd: to come back here to investigate and probe an old wound and, life being life, to come away with something entirely unexpected; in this case, to have finally, after years of missing the point, understood Proust.
“Did that storm window used to rattle in the wind?”
“It did.”
“Would you like to see your parents’ bedroom now?”
We passed through the kitchen in silence. There was a rectangular pine table pressed against the near wall. It was set for two, one at the end facing the bay window, the other beside it. I looked at the pine table for a long moment, then at the colourful tiles on the floor where the blood had trickled from my father’s temple.
And then Mrs. Keveney did the most extraordinary thing. She stepped forward quickly and hugged me, a lovely-smelling, delicately perfumed mother’s embrace.
“But where are you staying?” she asked.
“In town.”
“No,” she said firmly. “You must stay here. Tomorrow you can catch a ride back to town.” Outside you could hear the ping of tiny grains of hail hitting the windows. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
“Perhaps I could have that sherry now,” I said.
I stayed downstairs near the fire and talked until my eyes were closing. Then I mounted the stairs and went down the dark hall to my bedroom. I didn’t read, I slept immediately. In the night there was a bang in the hallway. I recognized that bang. My mother thought it was poltergeists, but if they were, they were soothing poltergeists and I sank back down into sleep.
I awoke to a glorious morning, the sun pouring down, the lake white and gleaming in the distance. We ate breakfast in the kitchen, toast and scrambled eggs. Delicious. I hadn’t eaten for a day.
“You must come back whenever you want. Bring your wife, too. It’s a little out of the way up here. We love guests.”
And then I started up the driveway, the sun bright overhead. I paused at the post and took a last look. The images of my brother listening to baseball on his radio, Mother dancing in the kitchen with her shirt knotted at the waist, my father with that funny hat, all these images flickered through my memory, so clear, almost touchable. And I suspected that because I could now return to the house whenever I wanted to—I never would. This place inhabited now by such warmth, such friendly souls.
I walked for a few miles through the colourless countryside and then I’d had enough. There wasn’t anything more to think about. An empty ice truck drove me the rest of the way to town.
3
“You don’t know me,
Mr. De Niro, but . . .”
The best thing about being successful,” a friend once told me, “is that you get to tell everybody to fuck off.” He told me this at a low “ point in his acting career, shortly before he gave up the business entirely and married a rich woman. We don’t see each other anymore (these things happen), but I have often remembered those words and for a while, quite a long while, I believed them: that one of life’s great pleasures lies in giving the bird to people and places where you were once a flop. Fuck you, Mary-Lou, and so on.
But with the greying of my hair I have discovered that it’s a little more complicated than that. For example, it’s not a question of convincing “those people” that they were wrong about you, it’s a question, really, of convincing yourself, of convincing, to be more precise, your body. Your body remembers failures more easily than success. I don’t know why that is, but it does. And when you put it—your body—back in the same physical places where it once wilted, where it once suffered blows to the heart and blows to the vanity, sometimes, most of the time actually, your body forgets all the things that have happened in the interim and thinks the bad old days are still here.
Which can make going back to arenas of early unhappiness more of a minefield than you might suspect.
When I was twenty-two years old, my mother died during a dinner party in Mexico City. She was making a toast and tumbled off her chair onto the carpet. Someone stole a pearl necklace from around her neck before the ambulance arrived, but apart from that, I’m told the company that evening was pretty good. A few days later I went down to the offices of Nathan and Nathan and, in the company of my brother, Dean, signed some papers.
Thus began my short life as a rich boy. I’m not sure, looking back on the years that followed, how things could have taken a worse, a more destructive turn than that inheritance. It allowed me—or so I thought—to not do the one thing that would have made me happy. To work. To get my head out of my rear end and do something. But I didn’t know that then and I blamed my unhappiness on other things: the search for love, unpublished poetry, the silence of God, cigarettes, cruelty to animals, ugly people, the way my street looked when the sun went behind a cloud.
While friends were going to law school or taking acting classes or apprenticing as journalists or practising the violin or studying for a masters in volcanology, I drifted around an inherited farmhouse in a dressing gown, sleeping till five in the afternoon and occasionally trying to strangle my girlfriend, a German princess with a lisp, the victim of a parent murder-suicide. Between us, three out of our four parents had died by bullets. How could we fail as a couple?
Once, en route to Frankfurt, a few Bloody Marys and two or three sleeping pills convinced me to present myself to my fellow passengers as a professional pool player touring the world. Somewhere over the dark Atlantic, I fell into someone’s seat and the plane’s steward put me under house arrest at the back of the plane, strapping me like a mummy into the emergency seat. Is there anything more destructive for a young man than unearned income? I think not.
Then, when I was twenty-eight, the year 1978, I married M., a college friend, and a few months later we had an exquisite daughter. M. worked at the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF to insiders) and I used to drop around her office in the afternoons, everyone young and busy. For a while I liked being the boss’s “interesting” (read useless) husband. But you can only be “interesting” for so long; after a while, a smell of putrefaction follows you around like a plume. You are out of rhythm with the world. It’s a cruel observation, but if you can’t do something for people, they don’t have much time for you. And I had only time.
Little by little it seemed that even the secretaries in M.’s office came to see me as something of a buffoon; so I stopped going around. The light in the office, the noise of busy people, the rattle of typewriters, the excited telephone voices—“I’ve got Werner Herzog on the line,” “Harvey Keitel won’t come if that other guy is coming too!” “Can we get some coke for R
obbie Robertson?”— set off in my body a sensation of sickening irrelevance. There are few sensations more unpleasant.
When I turned off the light at night, I was aware of something lying on top of me. Failure.
For ten nights in September, the film festival throbbed and dazzled in the heart of Toronto. There were afternoon receptions and industry cocktail parties. Trays of fat shrimp and chilled sauces were ferried through rooms by gorgeous, unemployed actresses. Limousines shuttled back and forth from the airport. Movie stars appeared in local restaurants. There were private dinners for John Cassavetes, Gérard Dépardieu, Wim Wenders (for whom I was mistaken on an irritating number of occasions), Richard Gere, Kevin Kline, Agnès Varda, Michael Caine, Jean-Luc Godard, Pauline Kael, Robert Duvall, Jean-Jacques Beineix, a young Nastassja Kinski (Jesus!), Peter O’Toole, Dennis Hopper, Klaus Maria Brandauer . . . No Woody Allen. Ever. (He knew better.)
There were standing-room-only press conferences at ten in the morning. Translators, agents, producers and the foreign press jostled for seats. Celebrities held forth. They aired their political sensitivities, chortled at each other’s jokes, bathed in the false largesse of a man who has just won a prize. Flashbulbs flashed.
There were movies, too, but often they felt merely like a kind of trampoline for puffery and cheek kissing.
People checked into and checked out of the hotels. The lobbies teemed with autograph seekers, photographers, groupies and inconvenienced travelling salesmen. Bacteria accumulated. Print journalists conducted interviews beside the rubber tree in the split-level foyer. Short men in Armani suits and clunky, portable phones hurried along thickly carpeted corridors; sometimes, in the company of an anorexic young woman, they made long-distance calls to Los Angeles and demanded that a script be couriered immediately.
Television actors got the smaller rooms. Failed European directors gave seminars so a whole new generation of Canadian directors could learn to fail too.
In front of the cinema houses, the red carpets rolled out, the spotlights whirled, the sidewalks overflowed, television cameras whirred, movie stars exploded from limousines into a blast of light and then were gone inside and everyone left outside felt slightly queasy, slightly depressed. But for a few seconds there, you were so close you could almost have touched it.
Sometimes I saw M. in the lobby of a movie theatre with W.C., the festival director. With his bulging forehead and rimless glasses, he was a dead ringer for Joseph Goebbels. Beside him, lanky and hollow-chested, his chief flunky, Billy. Laughing and smoking cigarettes (he had only one lung), he stood too close to people and talked on the “inside.” Filling out the trio was a big, carrot-headed lug. He didn’t work in the “business,” but they gave him hanging-around privileges because he had the curious effect of making everyone feel as though they were doing slightly better with their lives than he was doing with his. Johnny was like Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya that way. You may have wanted to be a novelist and ended up writing copy for a children’s snowsuit catalogue, you may have seen Bertolucci staring back at you one morning when you looked into the mirror but you’re still making industrials on suppository factories, you may have wanted to be a movie star but you’re taxiing film cans from the censor to the theatres . . . but no matter your disappointments, you were still doing better—better intellectually, sexually, creatively, aesthetically—than Johnny. That’s why everyone liked him.
And what, I wondered, was with those cutesy-pie nicknames, Billy, Johnny and, don’t forget, “Weiner” (W.C.’s nickname)? Grown men! Am I being too harsh? Not by a half. It’s funny how much I loathed them then and, even in recalling them thirty years later, how vivid my dislike remains.
Sometimes I’d see Billy dancing at a gala ball. He fancied himself light on his feet, a real Motown man. He had all the moves. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to me, standing very close, very confident, his face only inches away; but not for long; he had important places to be. With a flourish, he’d be gone. Hotfooting it across the room to talk to so-and-so. More laughter. More inside stuff. Ho-ho-ho. Ha-ha-ha. I seethed with hatred and wanted them all dead. Just going near the film festival during those ten days made me want to murder people—it was misery about my own professional life, of course, a life that now seemed stillborn—but I couldn’t stay away.
There were minor scandals. A Hollywood director ordered eight magnums of Veuve Clicquot and charged them to the festival. A French actor overdosed on cocaine (but not before he’d bored everyone to death); somebody screwed somebody’s girlfriend in the bathroom of the hospitality suite. Film prints got lost, turned up at the wrong theatre. A Chinese art film played the midnight horror festival with no subtitles. No one seemed to notice.
During those ten days in Toronto, nerdy men—film critics mostly—came into fashion. Badly dressed, overweight social cripples ambled through cinema lobbies, often in twos and threes, quiet in their superiority, their “knowing” better than anyone else, so subtle in their condemnation that it made your heart hammer to tell them you liked something. They didn’t tell you you were wrong; they just dropped you into a Rolodex of inferior creatures and returned their attention to each other.
In the midst of all this was my wife, M. Dispatching drivers, issuing directives, making snap decisions, juggling screenings, switching suites to rooms for lesser stars and rooms to suites for bigger stars, scolding theatre managers, placating actors, booking boardrooms, firing the recalcitrant, stroking the exhausted, she was a sun at the centre of the universe. Or so it seemed to me, standing on the fringes of that dreadful, light-swept film festival office (“the bunker,” they called it). I had, during those ten days, all the vanity of a successful writer but none of the work to substantiate it. Like the young André Gide, I was furious that the world would not credit me for the work I assumed I would eventually produce.
Sometimes I saw M. on the street in a buzzing hive of people, always at the side of a star (“It’s Dustin Hoffman!”) or inside a ring of directors and producers and publicists and writers (the writers trying to maintain their writerly dignity, their above-itness, but just as heart-poundingly excited as a child on Christmas Day).
“Dusty! Dusty! Over here! Over here!”
You couldn’t resist it, you could not not be affected, you couldn’t not feel that somehow you were to the side of life. I suspect now that even the people in “the bunker” felt at the margins of life, that this thing, this “it” was an entity where, even if you spent your life near it, around it, you could still never arrive at its centre, never grab it, hold it, make it yours. Because “it” didn’t exist; it wasn’t a thing or a place. It was a non-place, and you could only be on the outside of it.
Sometimes I went to the evening gala screenings, but, to be honest, the excitement, the focus on other people, made me sick. So I knocked around my apartment, gave my daughter, Franny, dinner, bathed her, put her in her pyjamas, read her a story and then . . . and then: it was as if there were a huge suction in the city, it sucked and sucked and sucked, and, like shavings to a magnet, it seemed to draw everyone to it, me included.
Wriggling with discomfort and spurts of aggression and ill will, I opened the door for the babysitter and hurried like a junkie to the festival hospitality suite. It was misty, there was an aura of mystery to the streets. Perhaps tonight was the night. The night that my life began. That things started. What things? “We’ve had our eye on you, mister, and we think we have a proposition here that just might interest a man of your skills.”
How did it happen to me? How did I get there? Poor character? Maybe. Immaturity? Certainly. On those mornings when I woke up, the sun a cold pearl outside my window, my daughter pulling at my blankets, Get up, Daddy, get up, I wondered how, with such a promising start, decent looks, decent brains, a private-school education, free university, okay parents (not enlightened but not sadists, either), I had managed to come up with so little.
That evening, I remember, I got to the hospitality suite a bit early. The gala fi
lm was just getting out down by the lakeshore. A bolt of lightning cracked over the lake; fat raindrops spattered against the bay windows. I was at the bar talking to the bartender when M. and an entourage of French producers swept in. She gave me a frosty hello, looked at my half-empty beer glass, asked me one or two questions, hesitated just long enough to let me know, without saying anything, that I’d been drinking and she could hear it in my voice. And then, as I began to explain myself, as I began to make an observation (I was just being friendly) about Éric Rohmer’s films (more precisely written than you’d guess), she turned her back and walked away. She did it on purpose, of course, and it left me diminished and reeling. By then we both hated each other.
By two o’clock in the morning, the hospitality suite was noisy and full; a bank of cigarette smoke hung over the room; the talk got louder and louder; even the doorman had a drink in his hand. People waited in the corridor; the door opened, you saw faces of all shapes, hopeful, straining, smiling, irritated, all trying to get inside, trying to get close to something that, they were sure, was just on the other side of the door. A television interviewer with the pushed-in face of a monkey arrived dressed as though he were in a Noël Coward play. He was famous for knowing all the details of a star’s life, what he said to his grade six teacher, what the director of a summer-stock play whispered to him between act one and act two all those years ago; he fancied, did Monkey-Man, that it made him the most professional of interviewers; to me it made him a shameless, zipper-licking flunky. With him was a white-haired film critic, Toronto’s least persuasive heterosexual, in spite of the three children and the nice wife. (They had an understanding, no doubt.)
They were ushered in; the door closed again. I saw a television actor at the bar; a movie star moved in beside him; they exchanged greetings; you could see the movie star was pretending to take an interest in the television actor’s work, but everybody knew, especially the monkey-faced talk-show host who was watching them, transfixed, who was the boss, who was the king. And it was the movie star, his drink served, who moved away first, laughing shrilly and nodding, delighted to get away but not wanting to make an enemy. I stood there a few minutes longer, talking to the television actor. Fifteen years earlier he’d been the biggest star on television, the action hero of an absurd futuristic series where he played half man, half cyborg. Now he was doing a small independent film, surprisingly well written, which he’d produced and starred in. He’d had his day, though, everyone said it, but talking to him at the bar (he talked in an easy Texan accent) I found myself liking him, feeling strangely protective; saying nice things about his acting, how looking effortless was acting’s great challenge, which made him offer to buy me a drink (they were free).
The Perfect Order of Things Page 4
