The Perfect Order of Things (6 page)

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 film 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).

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?