Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  Am I by any chance making this picture out of pure regressiveness? I might be. Is that bad?

  Maybe all movies are made that way. Grierson used to say “never let your memory get into the picture, stick to actualities, otherwise you’ve got both feet in literature” and how he hated literature. It was the Scotch in him, or that puritanical reformer’s streak, he was an original-sin man if ever there was one. I’m not an original-sin man, I’m an Eden man, we never really left home. A Walk Home from School.

  When we get to the corner of St. Clair and Yonge, we’ll have a big brilliant ball, we’ll peek inside the bank and wonder what they do in there, we’ll look behind the stagings where they’re putting a new Vitrolite storefront on the Osgoode Grill, we’ll stand on the corner waiting for the light to change watching the maze of streetcars. There are no streetcars on Yonge anymore but they still run along St. Clair. We’ll look up the street to see what’s playing at the Kent and the Hollywood, then we cross, east then north, I always walked on the north side of St. Clair, and in a minute we’re out of the shopping district past Loblaws and halfway home.

  In the distance we see the red dome of Our Lady of Perpetual Help away down the street across the St. Clair bridge. Now here’s where the motion has to write the script for us. Kitcheff was quite right, we can’t tell the audience in so many words that it’s the church of our mother of perpetual help. Is there any way to communicate the feeling visually? In any case I never walked that far, unless I was going to see Philly Daniels, I turned away before I got that far, what I’m heading for now is the bridge, ah, divine bridge, this is where we open out the picture, we come to the bridge and we show them the length and span of it, the few afternoon cars wheeling idly across, we get that sense of open space and sunny air and distance. Then.

  We don’t cross the bridge. We climb over the rail at the near end as the ground slopes away down underneath the ravine, and we give them the luxuriance of the ravine, foliage, the brook at the bottom, the sound of streetcars rumbling overhead, mud on my shoes, stepping stones in the brook, a boy’s whole world, we pan up the bridge-supports, massive concrete grey inhuman ghostly, then we follow the brook north by winding paths through shady groves and we climb back up to Heath Street on the other side.

  I want that sunny space and air and then the dark ravine, the foliage, the brook, and to hell with psychoanalysis, I just want it for the picture. I hope. We have a little coda as we climb out of the ravine, walk up Heath Street past kids on their bikes, turn onto Cornish Road, we’ll shoot the house, the veranda, the screen door, and that’ll be the end of it. I wonder who lives there now, and whether they’ll let me inside, or even onto the veranda. It’s supper time when we get home. Supper time!

  He looked at his watch, seven-ten, my God, where did it go? Time for Margery and dinner. As he rose and went into the bathroom to wash his face and hands and straighten his tie, he thought suddenly, maybe I can’t get it, maybe I’ll never get it, maybe John was right and nobody can get it. I can’t put streetcars on a street where they’ve torn up the tracks. I can’t put vanished Packards into Volkswagen showrooms.

  He began to whistle softly, a thing he always did when badly worried; then he left the bathroom, put on his jacket, checked to be sure that he had some money, and went to keep his date.

  She was not there, naturally, but she had phoned to say that she would be delayed. That they didn’t give him the message when he first appeared in the foyer puzzled and at last faintly annoyed him. He had to poke around into all the little rooms, nooks, niches, in which the famous old house abounded, a tiny place, a hole in the wall on Mackay Street and the fons et origo of the higher cuisine of Montreal; there were diners who held that Cafe Martin surpassed the little place in the excellence of its wine list, and particularly in the virtuoso treatment of veal. Anyone could make a great dish of beefsteak, but the test of cookery was the cook’s approach to the problem of veal.

  Sanderson thought Cafe Martin overrated, the magnificence of its sommelier, the glow of its chandeliers, its Aubusson, false reinforcements for a middling-to-good table. He wasn’t a gourmet, thinking the pastime trivial and even pagan, but he was by trade a metteur-en-scène and a shrewd critic of other peoples’ decors. He had always preferred Chez Stien for its sly and understated humility, its air of astonishment at its own perfection, its continual ability to surprise its clientele. Since the Film Board had moved to Montreal, Sanderson had become a devotee of the little place. He had always come here, of course, from his first callow times in Montreal when he was young and hopeful, fresh out of college, and afterwards when he’d settled into film production and begun to make a great name, and later still when he was married to Margery and his pictures were winning at Cannes and Venice, and these days, with his marriage six or seven years behind him and his work growing progressively more sure and obscure. Why didn’t they simply hand him his messages as he came in, instead of requiring him to pursue his quest through all the purlieus of the labyrinthine old house? He put his head into the owner’s rooms, walked past the kitchens, idled in the foyer and finally demanded of the maître d’hôtel whether anything had been heard from Margery.

  “A message from Miss Endicott for Mister Sanderson?” he asked diffidently. He wasn’t a name dropper, least of all of his own name.

  “I will see, sir,” said the grand personage, courteously enough. His name was Gilles. He had been here for years and certainly must know Sanderson by sight if not by name; but he gave no sign, perhaps pursuing a policy of the house and tactfully ignoring the celebrity of the celebrities who came here. It was a place where you could be inconspicuous, if that’s what you wanted. In a moment he came back with a slip of paper in his hand.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, handing it to Sanderson, “this came an hour ago.”

  Sanderson examined the note; she would come at eight-fifteen. “Will you keep my table free, please? For two, Mr. Sanderson, and we’ll go in about eight-thirty.”

  Gilles scanned his reservations anxiously. “That will be arranged, Mr. Sanderson. We are rather busy tonight, as you see, but there will be a table.”

  Sanderson gave him money; he was awkward at such things, having an oppressive sense of the other man as a fellow human being, not caring to treat him as anything less than free. But Gilles put the bill away with a fine ease, turning from him to greet a Toronto writer and his wife who came in on the crest of an expense-account weekend. Some magazine will pay for that, thought Sanderson critically as he eyed the writer, whom he knew slightly and didn’t like, as the couple were bowed to a table. My table, he guessed, and they’d damned well better be finished by eight-thirty. He wandered off disconsolately to the downstairs bar to kill forty-five minutes.

  He wasn’t a heavy drinker, but he liked to drink and decided that there would be time for two slow-to-slowish nibbles before she came. He ordered his first and stationed himself in a corner on an uncomfortable stool. When his drink came he drank half of it on the instant, a Manhattan because he loved cherries, surprising himself with his unaccustomed haste. He let the second half stand for a moment.

  She’ll have some joke to make about that, he thought, she’ll say “you’re way ahead of me” or “I’ll have to catch up” or something like that. It was not drink that had led to their divorce but work, an innocent enough pastime, they had supposed, although nowadays one was beginning to see in the papers and magazines pieces about “workoholics” who did with their jobs what others accomplish through drugs or drink. He was no workoholic and neither was she, though they had traded accusations to that effect before the term had been invented. He could hear her now.

  “I’m so damned tired, Phil, I just can’t respond,” and he would stand there, desiring her and knowing that he mightn’t in charity insist on his rights. When she got finedrawn like that from overwork she was so fatally provocative, at least to him. Some like them plump, but he had adored her fragile shoulder
-blades, the huge eyes in the perfect cheekbones, that Picasso line to her jaw. And her other parts were so sweetly harmonious. Her buttocks, he remembered with his dazzling visual imagination, had been those of a child, no bigger than the outspread palm of his hand, and though she was mainly a composition in angles, in that place she was wonderfully curved in a curve without grossness.

  “Damn you,” she used to say towards the end of it, “you love only my composition, you’re always photographing me with your eyes. It’s just that you work too hard and I’m not an abstraction.”

  “If you lose any more weight you will be,” he said. “Who works too hard? Who is it that’s too tired all the time?” She began to weep quietly.

  “We’re both too nervous; other men don’t make me feel like this, but I love you, Phil, believe me, I love you.”

  “And I love you,” he had murmured sadly, “but perhaps you’re right. I don’t mean to drive you to exhaustion.”

  She sat up angrily on their bed. “Do you want to be rid of me?”

  “I only want what’s right for both of us.”

  “No, you just want to love everybody by way of the movies. I warn you, Phil, you can’t do it. One real woman is better than a strip of celluloid, even if it plays every house in the world, and what you want, you can’t get on film. Don’t be a power-lover, darling, you’re not Nehru.”

  He laid his cheek against her buttocks and held it there. Whose skin was feverish, his or hers? You could not put this on film; there were lots of things that wouldn’t go. He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and swallowed the other half of his drink, signalling for the second as he swallowed.

  He had timed her perfectly, so well had he remembered her inclinations — they might almost have been his own, they were at least mysteriously inside him, dictating the shape and tone of his conduct towards her. As he finished the second glass, he probed the crystal cup to the bottom with his toothpick, pricking and fixing the cherry and finally swallowing it with pleasure, and after that he rose, paid the bar check and went upstairs to find her standing at the door, her coat melting mysteriously from her shoulders — she never took things off, they simply melted invisibly away, and one didn’t notice the attendants who cared for them.

  “Yes,” she said, “well, I said I’d be late.”

  “It’s worth the wait. I’m very glad to see you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I think … no, let’s go in.” They were ushered to their table and Sanderson was relieved to note that the Toronto writer was still sitting on the other side of the room. At least they were not following that crabbed act. After some low comedy in French they succeeded in making their wishes known and first drinks, and then a series of dishes, began to arrive in a broadening and deepening flow. There were side-tables everywhere, and four attendants, and in an instant, plainly, the chef would epiphanize from the kitchen. They had identified Margery which was odd because she appeared very rarely on the French network.

  “What is all this?” he said crossly.

  “I did a commercial for Comet Cleanser and Huguette Lamarche dubbed the voice, they’ve been using it for years on CBFT.”

  He had internationally fifty times his wife’s — he checked himself because she was no longer his wife — fifty times Margery Endicott’s reputation. He had been coming here for twenty years and they had not caught his name. In the Montreal Film Festival last summer his Sonata da Chiesa had been ecstatically received, and even lauded.

  Who gives a damn about it, who cares? But it was a part of his gripe, he was aware, the want of overt recognition. He couldn’t have been an actor, and wouldn’t if he could. She was laughing at him.

  “What’s the matter, Phil, do you want my autograph? Don’t be afraid to speak up.”

  He had to laugh with her. “The CBC has a ‘no star-system’ policy. You’d better be careful with your autographs.”

  “They’ve changed all that since they’ve been losing everybody to the States. I’ve got a billing clause now, and if they don’t meet it, I don’t do the show. People seem to want to see Margery Endicott.”

  “It’s unfair,” he said, knowing that he sounded like a small boy; she had always been able to force him into this corner.

  “Oh, stop horsing around, you know you don’t care.”

  He was glad to see that she was eating, and sorry to see how thin and overtired she seemed, and of course she was seeing him after some lapse of time, and would be thinking about his looks.

  “I haven’t gained an ounce,” he said.

  “No, I’ve shrunk.” She put her hand across the table, palm upwards, and he took it gently and pressed it. “Dear Phil,” she smiled with her lovely kindness, “my good man.”

  He was gruff. “I’m in a mess as you’d expect.”

  “Socialism, or theory of film?”

  “I haven’t been a Socialist since before we were married, I’ve dropped all that stuff, ideology is no good for me.”

  “Would you mind very much not using words like ‘ideology’?”

  He remembered young Kitcheff and blushed. “I’m just an old comedian,” he said, kidding himself, “just an old clown who’s been around and who knows all the tricks, just faking my way through.”

  “And I’m a clean young girl from Swift Current in a starched gingham check.”

  “Once you were,” he said seriously.

  “Yes, I was. God, that was awful.” Then they both had another drink. “What’s the matter?”

  “You act,” he said, “and you’re a good actress, for what it’s worth, and when you’re older you’ll be better because you’re going to hang on to your looks, the bones are there.…”

  “Never mind about my bones.”

  “… they’re what you live on. Listen, what I want to know is, can you tell how you’re getting better. I watch your shows, and I see you do things you wouldn’t have dreamed of trying when we were married, and yet, you don’t really think about it at all, do you?”

  “No. My head is for hats to go into. I can’t think at all.”

  “But you get better. How do you do it?”

  “Practice. It was always there, now I know how to use it.” She was suddenly grave. “I started to know after we broke up.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “We love each other, we’re a mutual admiration society. You know, dear, I see your things, I’ve never missed one, and you are so good. You are getting so good.” Her eyes were wet.

  “Don’t do that, Margery,” he said.

  “You fool,” she said, “you’re a great man.” That hurt him very much. “You’re a great man and I’m a cute girl on a regional television network.”

  Of course he was not a great man and would never be a great man.

  “What it is,” he said, “is that I can’t do it, I don’t believe. I can’t get it. I cannot get what I want.”

  “Why you’ve been getting it right along. I wish you’d use me.”

  “Can’t use actors in documentary.”

  “Actors are people.”

  “You can only use them when they aren’t looking, in documentaries about actors.”

  “So make a picture about my métier! Show me rinsing out a sweaty bra and pants in the ladies’ room at the studio, all my hard life and times. Artists have lives.”

  “I’m sick of making paradoxes about art and life. It all falls into place.” And he quoted:

  Till that which suits a part infects the whole,

  And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

  “What is it, Phil, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m fifty,” he said soberly, “and I’ve been on the wrong track. What I’ve wanted to do can’t be done on film.”

  She was resisting the understandable temptation to say “I told you so.” Instead she said, “Let’s get married again,�
� and it was the nicest gift anybody had ever offered him; but life is not composed of gifts, though it is itself gratuitous, and though it hurt him to smile he did so, saying, “I really do love you, you know, and I wouldn’t put you through that again for the world.” They both knew that there was nothing to it and taking their time over a bottle of wine they smiled at each other and in the end decided to catch the late showing of L’Année Dernière à Marienbad at the Elysée.

  “Resnais is very good,” said Sanderson magisterially.

  “Not as good as you are.”

  “It’s true.”

  They found the film pellucid, crystalline, because they knew how it had been put together, and on what good grounds.

  In the middle of the following afternoon, having risen very late, having gotten to bed very very late indeed, Sanderson came slinking into the Film Board building like a cat who has breakfasted on goldfish. He was determined to avoid Kitcheff and Vasko if at all possible, he didn’t want to face their cross-questionings today, and he had arranged another showing of “the mile of the century” without telling them.

  He glanced into the coffee shop to see if they were there, but they weren’t, not they, and they certainly wouldn’t be in the office, so he figured he was home free and he went directly to the projection room where the projectionist was waiting for him, glancing at his watch. Sanderson was not normally a hard man to deal with but today he harassed the poor technician continually. He made him show fifty feet, stop, run it again, another fifty feet, stop, re-wind, run it again, stop there please, until the poor man was ready to tell him to go to hell. He had never seen Sanderson act like that.

  “All right,” said Sanderson after some time, with an odd air of triumph, “now I want to see the end of it, the last minute, keep running it over and over, please.” He trotted back and forth between the seats and the booth like a distracted man. “Just show me the end of it, that’s all I want to see.” The projectionist felt an obscure fright, but as he began to run the footage he saw Sanderson settle into a seat and begin to smoke idly, alone in the dark.