And then he was gone, absorbed into the pollen of a young woman who had stood shamelessly at his elbow for our entire conversation. I noticed across the room, like two pistols pointing at me, the small, angry eyes of my wife, M. She’d been drinking; some switch had clicked in her head, and not a good one, either. It had turned the whole room, or rather—and this is the unattractive part— the people she didn’t need in the room, into a swarm of irritating mosquitoes.
She was giving me “the look.” Everyone knew that look by now. The bartender got it if she saw him having a beer; a festival underling got it for interrupting a conversation with Bertolucci’s producer (a projectionist had not turned up for the Howard Hawks retrospective). The programmer for the midnight horror festival got it when he inquired if he could take an extra case of beer for his overworked staff. And now me. I’m not sure what the infraction was, but I remember thinking that it wasn’t the face of the young girl I had so adored in university, her brown hair falling to each side of her sculpted face. How awful for us to have arrived here.
To avoid her, I went to the far end of the hospitality suite. There was a washroom back there. Standing just to the side of it, his arms folded like a steel turtle who has found himself outside his shell, was Robert De Niro. I’d forgotten he was coming this year. He was slighter than I expected, jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, but nevertheless I recognized the aura around him: it said simply, “Don’t.” Don’t tell me you loved my little joie-de-vivre dance in Mean Streets (the exploding mailbox); don’t ask me why Martin Scorsese prefers me to Harvey Keitel (that’s an easy one; just meet Keitel and you’ll know why).
I had almost grasped the doorknob when he moved his wiry, tense frame a few inches over so it was now directly between me and the door. It was subtle, but it was there.
“There’s someone in there right now,” he said. We exchanged looks. He was in a difficult position. He had begun a conversation that, by habit, he had no desire to continue.
Standing side by side, our arms crossed at the elbows, staring straight ahead, neither of us said anything as the room hummed before us. Billy, W.C.’s lieutenant, popped his head around the corner. He had been chortling it up with a lanky American actor but was taking a short break to confirm that there wasn’t somebody more important in the room. When he saw whom I was standing beside (he assumed we were talking), his features, how he felt about me, underwent a dramatic transformation that produced two back-to-back sensations in my body: one, a kind of glowing pleasure, glory by proxy, followed immediately by disgust with myself, a strange hollowing sensation as if I hadn’t eaten that day. So it’s come to this, I thought. Your life achievement: standing beside a movie star and people mistaking you for his friend. And I again had that sensation of having missed an important train. A train that, when you’re young, feels as though it only comes once.
Turning slightly, I said, “Excuse me, Mr. De Niro, you don’t know me, but I believe you know my wife, M.?”
“M.?” he said, frowning. (I knew that frown; I’d seen it in Taxi Driver.) “M. as in M. here? In Toronto?”
“Yes,” I said.
He recrossed his arms and shifted his weight, looking straight ahead. A sign the conversation was over.
“She’s my wife,” I said.
Pause. Then: “M. is your wife?” he said. And in that curiosity I heard what I had sometimes suspected those mornings when my eyes opened and I realized sleep, at least for that day, was a subway car I could not get back on. “M.,” it implied, “is married to a loser like you?”
I felt the floor open under me. Nobody likes me, I thought.
The bathroom door opened and a beefy figure stepped by me, brushing my shoulder, no excuse-me, not anything, just Harvey Keitel pushing into the shadowy room in body language that said, So? A few moments later a doe-like young woman with big tits and a tiny brain—she was a festival regular—came out looking as she always did, stupid and desirable.
“Be seeing you,” De Niro said, not, of course, because we’d be seeing each other but because, like many movie stars, he didn’t want to leave a smouldering campfire behind him. You don’t want someone showing up at your office in SoHo with a long memory and a Magnum .357.
I went home with a waitress that night—she had a speech impairment from a failed suicide attempt—and the debacle was complete.
Then, life being life, I won a few hands that I needed to win. It makes me vaguely woozy when I think how much luck had to do with it. I got a job on television talking about movies; it was “bar chat,” of course, with the intellectual rigour of a guy with a martini in his hand— except that here the guy with the martini in his hand, so to speak, was on television; and being on television imparts, even to a cretin, a strange legitimacy. I was aware of the fraudulence but of insufficient character to not be delighted by it.
I wrote a few books, none of which sold many copies, but just the fact of them, the fact that they existed in the world, even in small numbers and never at the front of the store, made me feel that I had had a decent life, that I hadn’t ended up like that “other” guy.
Many years went by.
And then one September night last year, the film festival raging like a forest fire throughout the city, I was in the back of a taxi going to meet friends for dinner. We slowed down in front of a movie theatre. It was a gala night, spotlights swirling on the sidewalk, movie stars descending from limos, and I remembered how awful it all used to make me feel. It struck me with a flush of almost physical excitement that if there was ever a place that called out for a revisit, it was the Toronto Film Festival. What fun to bask in old scars and slights and the knowledge that I had survived them.
I dropped around the festival office the next day. “Weiner,” Billy, my ex-wife, M., were all long gone, but I knew the new director, Peter Jensen, a pleasant man with a sourceless English accent. I told Peter that I was writing a novel about the early days of the film festival, would it be okay if I hung around a bit: went to some films, some press conferences, a few parties, just to “get the feel” again. He said yes, of course. His assistant, a little troll whose head was so infected with glamour by proxy that she didn’t even bother trying to be nice (successful men are often piloted by these creatures), asked a few frowning questions; but I’ve dealt with assholes before and the meeting ended on a co-operative note and a handful of passes and party invitations.
Remember the light-swept office? All those busy young people, typewriters clacking, phones humming, Martin Scorsese on hold? The typewriters were gone, but everything else was the same. I recognized a frizzy-haired woman from a small northern town (grey-haired and shawled now) and went over to her desk. We chatted for a bit, but after only a few minutes I began to feel an odd sensation, as if I was boring her or keeping her from something, and I thought, this is how I used to feel in this office. A sensation of irrelevance. But that had been almost twenty-five years ago. I looked closely at the woman’s face. She didn’t seem bored; no, the problem was me, was in me, as if some old poison, locked away now for years in a special film festival bottle, were slowly leaking into my body from a crack in the cork.
I found myself trotting out a rather shopworn anecdote about interviewing George Harrison in London, and with each theatrical pause I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper. And again I asked myself, why are you feeling this? And why are you behaving like this, currying the favour of a woman you barely know and never gave a shit about in the first place? And yet I could not talk out the sensation. The lights, the busy chatter, the ringing of telephones had set it off. It was as if inside their zone I was a kind of prisoner.
I didn’t stay long, and as the elevator sank downwards, as I passed through the lobby and out into the soft September sunshine, as I began to make my way down a narrow side street, I felt the grasp of these awful feelings lessen its grip, like a belt being slowly loosened around my chest. What, I wondered, was that all about? But I knew what it was about, and the notion that it had even
happened felt like a defeat, as if this violent response was a personal shortcoming, the proof of a shortcoming.
I went back again that night. I went to the world premiere of a new American film. The director, writer, producers and actors all paraded on stage. A glittering audience applauded with a wave of almost holy excitement as the star, a baby-faced actor in a white suit, told a story about the last time he was in Toronto, about a customs official who’d said, “I’m a big fan!” and then asked him for ID. Waves of sympathetic laughter. What a dunce! Asking for ID, can you believe it?
There was a brief question-and-answer. What drew you to the material, tell us something funny that happened on set, do Oscar nominations really matter?
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
When 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 affor
d 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.
The Perfect Order of Things Page 5
