The Perfect Order of Things

by David Gilmour

  I am telling Nick about that awful summer almost forty years ago, how I washed up here in Hollywood after Raissa Shestatsky dumped me. Back then I believed you could get over a woman by leaving town, and I hitchhiked three thousand miles to find out that the contrary is true. What can I say? I was twenty-two years old.

  Nick loves these stories, not because he’s a sadist, but because it makes him feel less alone to know that someone else has suffered from love and survived. He’s quite the ladies’ man, and like all ladies’ men he has taken some harsh and surprising knocks along the way. “Nothing is free,” I tell him, “especially sex.”

  When he was younger, he used to roll his eyes when I said things like that. I’d say, “I tell you these things, Nick, because I want to spare you some of the horrors that I have visited upon myself.” He’d put on his listening face—he was a nice kid—but didn’t buy it. Nowadays he listens more soberly, less sure of himself. Which, when it comes to suffering, is a good thing.

  “Every time you sleep with a woman,” I say, “an invisible rope flies between your ship and hers. And you never realize it until you try to break away.”

  I point out a small grassy park off to the right. During the summer of 1969, on the run from Raissa’s ghost, I slept there almost every night for three months. I was rousted by the police only once, the night after Charles Manson’s satanic little playmates issued forth from a desert ranch to butcher Sharon Tate, her unborn baby and three companions. It happened not far from here, I tell Nick, right up there in those glittering hills. He finds this intriguing, that his father was alive for such a historic event. “I was around your age,” I say, and you can see him ponder that. How, he is wondering, could it be that my father was ever my age?

  He wants to hear more about Raissa: was she beautiful, yes, did she ever come back to me, no, did she have a happy life. She became an elementary school teacher, I say. I can feel his dark eyes scanning my face for condescension.

  “You can be happy and be an elementary school teacher,” he says. Nick, in that moment, is not his father’s son. He is, by disposition, sweeter than I am; he likes things to work out for people, for their stories to come to a happy end. It must be from his mother that he inherited this goodwill. From his father he has inherited . . . other things.

  We sit down on the park’s only bench, cars pounding by on Sunset Strip. A warm, twinkly evening. The sky pink now.

  Looking around the tiny park, Nick says, “I bet you never imagined this—being on a book tour with your son—when you were sleeping here forty years ago.”

  To which I reply, “I believed that fate was going to give me everything except the one thing I wanted. Which was to be a writer.”

  “I feel that way sometimes,” he says, “but not about writing.” A pretty girl walks by the edge of the park; he watches her walk away until she crosses Sunset and turns down a leafy street.

  “Did you think you’d ever get over Raissa?” he asks.

  “I thought about her every morning for two years.”

  “Every morning?”

  “That’s how you know you’re over someone. When you catch yourself thinking about something else first thing in the morning.”

  He ponders that. “Two years is a long time,” he says in a voice that says, that’ll never happen to me.

  “Not in terms of a lifetime, it isn’t,” I say. “In the terms of a lifetime, it’s barely a chapter. Well, maybe a bit more than that. But you don’t really get over a woman until you find someone you desire as much as you did her. And then it doesn’t seem to matter how long it took.”

  “Because you’re so relieved?”

  “It just doesn’t matter anymore. And it’s hard to remember why it did.”

  I can feel him sliding into a dark mood. He’s thinking about that girl again.

  I direct his attention back to the Hollywood Hills rising up in a bank of lights and darkness. “You see those hills over there?” I say. “One night, some shirtless kid with little jug ears came by this park; I was sitting right over there on the grass. I think he was from Oklahoma. He had a tiny vial of LSD and, using a dropper, just like an ophthalmologist, he gave everyone in the park a little drop of acid right in the centre of their eye. He said it worked faster that way. Everybody did it. So did I, but not first. I waited to see what was going to happen.

  “It was very pure, very strong LSD, and I ended up wandering shoeless along Sunset Boulevard, alone—you should never take acid alone—and I had a ‘vision.’ Corny as it sounds, I saw Raissa’s face up in those hills, a huge, weeping Madonna-like Raissa. I thought I was going to fall down, right there on the sidewalk, and die. Just from the agony of it.”

  “From the loneliness of it.” He’s seeing himself in the story now. “You and her and now this.”

  “Exactly.”

  He leaves his eyes on my face while the rest of the film unspools in his imagination. “But you got over her eventually?”

  “Yes.”

  “And had a good life?”

  “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  For a while, neither of us says anything. The traffic passing by dreamily. I find my thoughts drifting to other places: an island in the Mediterranean, a brick boarding house, a hospitality suite, a high-windowed apartment, a dance in a winter hotel, a patch of grass in Los Angeles, places where I’d been knocked flat. Places where, if only I could have seen down the road—to this night, this bench, this park in Hollywood—then . . . then what? An irrelevant question, perhaps.

  But what is this sensation I’m feeling? It is another thought intervening. It occurs to me that this revisiting of my past has something of the salmon swimming upstream to it. All along I’ve been thinking I was writing a book about a guy who goes back to places and people and music where he has suffered and sees them from a fresh perspective. But sitting here on Sunset Boulevard with my grown son, it occurs to me that that’s not what I’m doing at all; that what I’m doing is getting ready to die. Putting my psychic and emotional affairs in order. The goal of all philosophy, Montaigne says, is to learn how to die properly. And that, I realize, is what I’m doing. It’s not a morbid thought. I’m not talking about next week or next year. I’m simply saying that I can feel the wind has changed and that my boat is gradually turning toward harbour.

  I don’t believe in an afterlife. Well, I do and I don’t. There is an afterlife, but not in the religious sense: it’s just that you don’t die all at once. It’s more like a light bulb cooling off after you click off the power: things just slowly fade until they match their surroundings: no God, no other plane of existence, just a slight delay in the drop into oblivion. So here we are.

  Nick has lit a cigarette but, knowing that I hate him smoking, holds it discreetly by his side, out of my sight. He, too, is lost in thought. I wonder what about. We imagine we know our children, but they too are a vast, dark continent, in which the glow of city lights here and there lets us know that we are over land, but little else. Is he thinking about a blond girl with a silver stud in her nose (they say she’s in law school now)? A Vietnamese beauty who used to wake him up in the morning? On warm summer nights you remember those girls. He takes a deep puff from his cigarette as if he’s intuited my thoughts.

  “How did you live?” he asks. “When you were here, in the park?” A deflective question. He has gone somewhere private and doesn’t want to be asked about it.

  “Doing that,” I say, pointing at a skinny kid who is walking between the cars up and down the centre of Sunset Strip with a batch of newspapers under his arm. The L.A. Free Press. “You made ten cents a paper, plus tips.”

  “I bet you were good at it.”

  “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  And we retreat again into private silence. I find myself thinking about Clarissa Bentley, the girl on the Ferris wheel. Just thinking about her makes me smile. A bad apple, that one, my Clarissa. I don’t know if she went to trial for that opera house scam, I wasn’t interested
enough to find out. But executive swindlers are out of fashion these days. So who knows, maybe she got hers. We all do, sooner or later.

  Bill Cardelle, the handsome boy she left me for? Not so long ago I was invited to a Christmas party at the house of a woman I used to work in television with. And guess who turned up with a plump wife? Bill Cardelle. And as the night wore on, the butlers serving martinis and champagne and hors d’oeuvres, one of the hostess’s teenage children put some music on, too loud of course, but before the damage was stopped, I saw old Bill start to move, just the chin, then the shoulders and then he broke into a little two-step, it was over in seconds, his hand perched on his wife’s shoulder, his tummy hanging over his belt, a pair of tasselled crocodile shoes moving light as a feather beneath him. Damned if he didn’t still have the moves. He could still do it.

  I’m thinking about Dean now, my older brother. Not such a happy story. He has joined a religious cult and lives in a boarding house somewhere in the Annex. I haven’t talked to him for many years, but sometimes I see him, white-haired, walking along the sidewalk with a kind of aggressive nonchalance. Always alone, no woman, no friend with whom to share a casual dinner. I am his only living relative now, and sometimes when I see him I can feel my heart contract in anguish and I long to approach him, to put my arms around him, to remind him of those years when we shared the second floor of that white house in the country, me at the end of the hall in the room with the cowboy wallpaper, him in the middle with his maroon radio from which issued the echoes of a ghostly baseball game. But I have done that before, and it has always come to a bad end. So I don’t anymore.

  My thoughts move to M., my first ex-wife. And I feel myself on the verge of shaking my head, partly with admiration, partly with exasperation. She still sours after her third glass of Chardonnay. More and more things set her off: Republicans, the police, anti-smokers, Catholics, our present prime minister, talkative taxi drivers, corporate lawyers, anyone who finds fault with our daughter. Talking with her after that third drink is a bit like trying to land a fully armed fighter jet on the deck of a heaving aircraft carrier. But for all her prickly eccentricities, she is wildly popular. Rich women give her their fancy, wornonce dresses; lawyers don’t charge for their services (or at least don’t expect to be paid). She continues to be invited everywhere. You’ll see her at the gala party every night of our city’s film festival (where by the end of the evening everyone annoys her). I don’t know how she does it, but she appears to have the capacity to be eternally forgiven. Unlike her ex-husband.

  And look, here’s Catherine, the beloved mother of the young man beside me. She is performing in a play right now, I remember, but I forget the title. Ibsen, I think, whom I don’t especially care for. It seems that as she gets older, Catherine grows more beautiful. In fact only the other day I was in a restaurant having dinner and I saw a woman, stately, elegant, rise from a table on the far side of the room. And I thought to myself, My God, who is that beautiful woman? She looks like the queen of a small European country. And it was Catherine. She’d been there all along.

  Justin Strawbridge, my childhood soulmate, wanders out of the Los Angeles fog and stands, it seems, right in front of me. I didn’t see him for many years after he got out of jail for the shotgun killing of Duane Hickok. But then one day, not so long ago, I did. He was coming out of a copy shop in Toronto. He had a thick pile of manuscripts in his hands. Poetry, I imagine, reams and reams of poetry. He has grey hair now, tied at the back in a long ponytail. He fancies himself, I think, an outlaw, and given that he’s killed someone, I suppose he is.

  Strangely enough, I saw an email from him posted on my website not ten months ago. The first communication in twenty years. It was a sad, meandering note, full of nostalgia and a description of his life that only someone who has accomplished little—and suspects it—would write. He wanted to know if we could get back together, play some music like in the old days, maybe even head off to Jamaica, “have a blast.” He wrote a few more times, but I never responded. Some great love for him died that day in the dandelion field.

  And after him, God knows why, comes Pete Best, the man who got kicked out of the Beatles. He’s doing just fine. (As a subscriber to his website, I keep up on these things.) I read a little while ago that his band was on tour in Brazil, and recently I saw his handsome, healthy face in a CNN quiz. Married to the same woman for forty years. A sturdy lot, those Liverpudlians.

  And now we’re back at the beginning again, back to Raissa Shestatsky, the memory of whom, it would seem, began this slow swim back up the river. I did see her one more time. Well, not exactly her. I was walking toward the library at Victoria University in Toronto, where I’m teaching these days (a lucky break), when I saw a beautiful young girl sitting on a bench with a friend; dark coat, dark hair, dark eyes. It was a fall day, leaves on the ground, squirrels running here and there, and as I approached her, I felt almost embarrassed by her extraordinary beauty. I went up the stairs and through the glass doors into the library, and as a clutch of students pushed by me, I turned around for a last look. It was not a look of longing or desire or even curiosity, but something else; it felt as if I was on the verge of remembering something. But what was it? It was Raissa she reminded me of. Raissa, my long-lost beauty. Raissa, my love.

  “What a privilege it is to be alive,” I say to Nick. We are still in the park.

  “What makes you say that?” he asks.

  “More and more things these days.”

  It’s time for us to get back to the hotel. We have a long day tomorrow, a live breakfast television show then lunch with someone and then some print media. I’m pooped. Besides which, tomorrow is my birthday; I want to be in good form. Nick wants to hang around in the lobby for a while, maybe have a drink in the bar. See what time the girl at the desk gets off work, who knows? I want my bed. At my age, beds have become something mostly for sleep. I say good night to him, good night to Sunset Strip, good night to the little park where I once suffered but to which I have now happily returned. Just thinking about all this, how long life is, how much happens, puts my head quickly on the pillow, and after only a few moments, the sound of a car horn, a voice in the hallway, I am asleep.